Ramon Recuero ~ #Buidling the Infrastructure for Adoption - Zeppelin

Transcript

foreign [Music] my name is ramon i work for zeppelin from zeppelin solutions and open zeppelin and today we're going to talk about developer infrastructure so to get us started i think the best way is to you can talk a little bit about yourself and then say what you're working on and why it's important hi i'm george ombo the cto at climatics i'm working on a project called the utility settlement coin which is a project to tokenize cash assets held at

a central bank neil blei vp of product of mainframe we just launched our first public release of mainframe os like many many at this conference were part of the extended family who want to change how people build dapps and how users think about dapsona discover dapps i'm yaniv project lead at the graph we're a query protocol for getting data off blockchains and storage networks so we index data from ethereum and ipfs right now and make it available over graphql hello my name is igor i'm from poe pio is a company which is focused on building scalability and interoperability solutions

we are known for poi network xdy which is a powered echo system today for for payments on this event and we making tools for developers we have open source blockchain explorer block scout and the interoperability solution token bridge which is used to create uh xdi chain and other bridges awesome let's get right to it and everyone here is building tools for developers but as you know right now there are really few users so the question is why why are we missing users because the usual the usual answer is like that infrastructure is missing

but what parts of the infrastructure are missing um i guess i'd start with the onboarding so like if you want to use a dap you have to get some heat you have to install metamask you have to go to find an exchange maybe buy a hardware wallet so like initially that experience just probably turns people off and yeah one of what he said as well as discoverability we want to create a home for the users to come to be able to discover all these amazing depths that everyone wants to build so we want to provide a one-click installation that sets up a wallet sets up an identity sets up contacts and kind of sets that stage to be able to find a place to consume these dabs

yeah um i agree that ux is probably like the first big thing obviously scalability um but users don't come for infrastructure right they're going to come for the applications and it's just too difficult to build good user experiences good you know fully decentralized apps today so um you know there's a lot of kind of missing protocols i think uh where right now people are building these hybrids and you kind of have to build a hybrid um basically what we should assume is that nobody's going to use an app that's worse than the centralized equivalent and so that's the bar's already been set unfortunately the previous stack had you know at least 20 years to mature and so it's just a lot easier to build apps that are really easy to use for web too and and so we

kind of have some catch up so when we get to the point where it takes a similar amount of time to build an app for web3 and that app is just as easy to use as a web 2 app then you know it's up to the entrepreneurs to just build good applications that use all of these new capabilities that we have to just build compelling experiences i'd like to quote microsoft co-founder he said developers developers developers right so in our space it's uh the most the most expensive most important asset for for any blockchain projects is community and community of developers is very important right so also i think also i'd like to quote that um

you can you can make anything but you cannot make everything right like when we think about tools for developers you know like each project is focusing on something for example for me it makes no sense to make uh uh a library for smart contrast like opens up a line right because uh you know why should i compete i i'll i'll better contribute to it right but when we built our tools we figure out that there is a missing piece of open source blockchain explorer and we started to build it right and uh and now we see that community is coming to this project and contribute to it and it makes no sense to to start the same thing and the other projects can focus on you know on on

different part of tools for developers and that's a great thing about ethereum ecosystem that we have so many different uh companies which are building tools for different parts and if you look at the ecosystem as a whole you can see that you know you can build a lot of stuff right but you cannot build everything alone so that's a good thing about collaboration between all of us yeah i really like what you said that in the end it's all about providing a greater product for the users it doesn't matter that it's decentralized most users are not going to use something just because it is decentralized we need to provide something that is 10 times faster better or let them do something that they couldn't do before so

regarding our users i'm curious how do you inform your product decisions in the midst of this uncertainty and immaturity of the whole ecosystem i guess maybe i can give a bit of perspective from an enterprise perspective so i think the for our use case the technology has been improved it can handle the use case that we need and we're now moving out to integrations and there i think the tooling is is still pretty bad so like libraries for integrating traditional systems maybe some of the more uh the older languages that are used in in financial institutions so also i think the tooling for building smart contracts is pretty good it's not far away from like the

rails experience it's quite easy to deploy i still think there needs to be more tooling and infrastructure for for business use and business context our users are basically developers i think there's probably at least 50 like well-funded teams building like dapps with smart contracts and that's already like a pretty good set to you know start working with for user research and making sure that we're like solving real problems for them and then i think there's this like much larger segment of just like individual developers and i don't know what the exact stats

are i think the numbers kind of float widely but i would feel comfortable assuming that it's at least in the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of like active ethereum developers uh and so you know maybe they're not doing it for their full-time job yet but they're hacking on weekends or coming to hackathons like this and so i think just getting in front of as many of them as we we can you know come into hackathons working actually with the developers when they get stuck they can like come to us and we're like right there kind of coding together i think those type feedback loops make a really big difference and so already i think there's enough usage to be able to like build infrastructure that solves real problems uh yeah

in our scenario because uh we're building side chains uh and side chains usually need all parts of uh uh ethereum ecosystem to operate um when we decided what to build uh it was like do we have like some missing pieces which are not available for example um either scan right it's closed source not available for developers to hack on it um sometimes it censors some data not friendly to suggestions and so forth right so it was a missing piece and we decided to take this part and the same problems there with you know infuria metamask and then some other parts of ethereum okay system unfortunately now it's getting better also interesting last year i was on the

same panel uh the same room uh but it was more about uh interoperability and we just discovered that uh like it's possible to transfer assets between networks right like one year after this at this panel we have these two projects with production ready interoperability solutions uh which are like not compete with each other but can be used with different security models for different users and they have different uh developer developers who can contribute to these projects right and um and it's great to see that uh our ecosystem is is growing and we are feeling these missing pieces um and i think now we should look uh outside of the ecosystem

like what's interesting in tron which we can adopt in the theory mega system right and uh sometimes we think yeah like not not shown as uh how it alex said whatever but they have very engaged users who are very interested in playing apps right so they they have less developers but they have very engaged user base and uh and that's why their developers are more focused on b2c and ethereum we're more focused on b2b right at the end of the day we're all sellers here and well we all sell to developers and to each other but you know we don't we not not many applications beat us here unfortunately right and in our and other

ecosystem we can see that they're in a very different way and we can uh get this into into what we're into ethereum ecosystem let's yeah i i do agree so uh you know something something i've been kind of thinking about uh possibly the difference between a pioneer and an explorer i think i think this this conference is full of pioneers and i also think it's full of explorers and one of the ways i i think i i would articulate the difference is explorers don't have maps explorers go out there they figure out a map and then they let the pioneers continue to follow and one of the things that doesn't have a map yet is the user experience and how to get the customers how to find this audience so in some ways

we at mainframe we're painting this picture of the future we believe in we want decentralization pure decentralization and we know we're not ready and i think there are many people here who share that same story but there are plenty of spaces that we do this part correctly and this is this 20 this 40 percent and we see amazing other 20 and 30 we were talking earlier about that concept that uh together as we uh what would you like out of tron what do we like at a zeppelin and as we we look at these spaces we can combine it we can create this map and then we go back and say hey we're going to tackle this area we're going to tackle that area and you know all tides rise rising tide raises all

ships i'm just going to say in response to eagle um you know i think we've been going through a lot of designing and creating protocols and you know interoperability protocols ethereum protocol but it's real world use cases that people are interested in so like you know the the buffy die is proof that you can use the protocol and it does work and people can understand it because it's in their hand and they can buy a pizza and like i think until we have more things like that um we're still going to be on panels talking about this so i'm actually happy that we're not spending too much time trying to get new users yet because i feel like if we you

know expanded a huge marketing budget reputation budget trying to get new users i think you know they could get burned for a long time and so it's it's kind of this exercise in patience and um maybe even vision that we have that we're like you know what i'm okay investing years of my life on something where i won't know the results potentially for a few years the truth is there's just so much infrastructure to build that there's going to be certain applications what and certainly there are already some today that you could already build a really compelling experience for users but it's it's like a much smaller segment of apps and so you know maybe right now it's like one percent of applications um you could

build compellingly on web3 and um and so i'm personally okay with that okay so we touch briefly on the problems that are preventing us to reach mass adoptions like usability and scalability so let's say i'm adapt developer like many people here in the room what could be your recommendation for them at the time of choosing tools and how to how they can position their adapts to reach mass adoption what are what are your what is your advice um well i guess for me the the tooling is pretty much in place i think you know truffle um metamask and fuhrer you can you can get started really quickly you can

deploy an app do an ico if you want um but now it's i'm thinking more traditionally uh you know what what do people actually want uh understanding the use case doing some marketing so i think you mentioned you have a marketing team and i think we really need to be more mindful we're selling things to human beings who don't care about protocols or or things like this so yeah i'd say thinking beyond the technology and the tooling to to to more a business mindset yeah i i'd also like to challenge uh everyone here and myself that maybe we don't borrow every metaphor from web 2.

and so part of being able to just say what do we want the future to look like so before we just go down this path where we're just building component after component on top of web 2. maybe we're all actually frustrated with the things of web 2. do we really want five years to be plug-ins on top of browsers on top of other plugins and so this idea that we can we can we have a chance to kind of reset what we want this to be and we have a chance to have privacy first we have a chance to have the user to have a reasonable expectation from a non-technical user of what security means to them and it probably doesn't mean much and so being able to to go that far in the future and then kind of work backwards so i think i think a lot

of us in this space are working backwards because there's so many people working forward and then we meet in a magical middle i think the most important thing is just to make sure people are solving real plot problems and so you know just like with traditional startups if you're building something that people don't want they're not going to use it and so there's kind of this you know formula where you look at what's the motivation to perform this action and then what's the friction towards actually accomplishing that task and you know if my motivation is larger than the friction then maybe i'll perform the task and i think people just need to really like balance that and think about how much additional friction

am i forcing on them and how much do they want this thing how much value are they getting out of it and you know if you can make that equation work then go after it i remember one more good quote you know simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible right that that's very important and um speaking of buffy day you know and i think most people who who got food here had this experience of you know seamless payment um electronic peer-to-peer cash system uh working you know fast and um and um the um the important thing about uh buffy that is uh that it's um uh that we have

synergy right and uh if you think about um uh underlying parts for example uh xdi chain which is like the first ever stable usd chain uh and uh which is powered by dai which is a um i think the the most important um uh stable currency nowadays and um and the other parts like interoperability which enable this type of inside chain and the um genius burner award right and this experience and uh thinking out of the box that users should not uh you know immediately after launching their back up their keys remember seed phrase and make all these checks um you know all these parts uh uh all together create

synergy right like one plus one plus one it equals uh uh great experience for everyone um and um that's what we should think about uh when we think about user adoption because i remember when we started poe the question was about scalability can we help existing dapps run on a minimal viable decentralized network as i call it uh with uh uh some security assumptions which are well decentralized and secure uh until someone can prove uh otherwise and uh they're like audited and uh and launched an insecure way um and uh when we when we launched the poi network we figure out that you know

many depths they don't want to migrate they just want to wait when a foundation will make scalability solution for them and this scalability problem i think will hit many uh projects which launched to solve this problem right they have perfect fast transactions per second they have you know fast block time and enormous black size for example one chain which i uh very like because uh they made some something very important it's called go chain they launched a public evm chain with 200 uh 136 million gas per block so it's huge blocks and you can put

600 700 transactions per second into their chain and uh well the question is like who needs that right like if you have if you sold scalability problem it will not bring you know developers users only if you have this thing but we can see that collaboration of multiple projects within ecosystem can bring solutions like buffet eye which is you know fast scalable and super exciting from ux perspective so um you're bringing up an interesting point which is to build some of this infrastructure you could say right it might take a long time it could take a few years and so you kind of have this tension between do we wait for it to be done right or do we do you know kind of stop gap or try to launch something out that we can get out today and one way that i think would be helpful to

kind of think about it is for sure having like a preference for shipping you know as soon as possible and validating things and and building today is really important so we should do that but then you have this kind of churn that you're potentially putting on the developers right if every year we have to rebuild everything you're going to burn developers out and so i think as much as possible if we can figure out what are the right apis for these different kind of like protocols and then maybe you know you start with something where it's running on like you know a side chain today but then you don't have to completely like rewrite your application on top once it kind of migrates over that would be a really good way to solve that

awesome we all have here a privilege point of view because we all built for developers so we cannot see what's coming so i would like you to comment a bit of the nuances of the different verticals that you see are getting interaction both in the enterprise and consumer side yeah i guess what we see in enterprise is probably similar to to the public space people just want it to work they don't want to have to spend a day in installing stuff and they they come from a different mindset they've got stuff to do they're busy um they don't have time to do massive research projects so they want the tools to be provided for them and it actually hinders adoption when they're not there so you know we're making some good

strides with with some some libraries but uh their motivation is getting stuff done yeah i also think a motivation of enterprise is revenue and so a lot of the conversations we have here is oh did you do an ico are you are you going up for another round of investment uh or do you have a revenue model if you have a revenue model in this current ecosystem i'm very interested in hearing about it because that gets at the heart of discoverability that gets become something attractive to the enterprise if they say we have an audience prepared it's really hard to tackle in that enterprise and i think a lot of the enterprise space right now is consulting advice and consulting solutions and it is not necessarily that these

enterprises are actually making that much traction into this space for usability and adoption um i think open finance is kind of like the obvious answer to that question for right now just because um there's so much value to kind of be had if you can make money um you know it's better and also you're kind of willing to put up with a little bit more friction if there's a high value kind of transaction at play and banks suck so you know compared to the alternative um i think we could build some pretty compelling experiences already and we're seeing i think the other you know one other interesting kind of vertical is governance and i think i mean you could definitely say that you

know compared to the alternative we can also build some really interesting things um and i think you know we're still in this kind of uh phase where it's still kind of a toy and so you're going to get a lot of like you know the the missionaries and the believers that are here out of passion and so if you're thinking about like how can i really make the world a better place and let's start experimenting with different kind of like governance systems uh i think there's already a pretty good market for that right i don't know how many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of you know ethereum developers related you know people would participate in those types of experiments um but you know between protocols like uh aragon and dow stack and et cetera i think you're already starting to see

dows getting built you know moloch you know is in the process of launching um so really cool experimentation where it's still kind of early adopters but i think there's cool things being done there already uh i i i agree with ideas around dawa and when we think about let's say bafda and the underlying technology uh xdi chain is controlled by tao like four companies um validate state but none of them can at the removal data without other companies they have on-chain governance enforceable by the protocol bridge which transferred diet to ex-die anxiety to die is also controlled by dao

and the dao are everywhere sometimes we don't call them though but like multisig which can control some parameters and there are some known parties who can um uh modify these parameters is now so thou are everywhere and it's very important to build uh dapps and decentralized finance apps they just not possible without dao right like you cannot build bridge without dao you cannot build uh many consensus models without dao right um also what we figure out with uh with ex-die new vertical called dap's chain emerging it's a specific side chain well chart

parachain whatever for specific tasks when we think about these specifics we understand that shards will be different right so they will have different parameters they will have different you know native tokens a different everything and it's important to think about these dapp genes as a diverse platforms right but we need some common security models uh i don't think it will be um relay chains uh because relations brings too many centralization uh and um that that's emerging thing uh xdi is a you know very small site chain nine thousand dollars market cup one of the smallest public cryptocurrency ever right um but it's it's used for for

transactions and that's specific for programmable money right if you build something like privacy preserving uh sidechain you might modify uh opcodes to make you know less expensive some i don't know cryptographic primitives running on this chain right and it will be a different setting and it can be different specific side chain so that's an emerging thing some people were excited about xdi and launched their sidechain based on the same idea where erc20 token can be bridged into a native token of a side chain let's say israeli project colu launched their own side chain based on the same idea and they bridged their token

and what i can see here that like most of these projects they're very interested in autonomy they want to be autonomous from uh from like uh pooled security of other chain but they're very interesting interested in in being in ecosystem right when they can move tokens back and forth get advantages of interconnected chains but they still want to have autonomy within uh their own side chain right that's that's a big vertical of um depth specific side chains on shard power chains side chains but specific to use cases given that we are talking already about side chains i would like to get the opinion of everyone about

interoperability what's the demand that you are sensing from developers and why should they care about it yes i think we see a huge demand and um so we have ion an open source interoperability framework um we've got ethereum to ethereum also hyperledger fabric to ethereum but in the enterprise space what's happening is people are experimenting with lots of different systems and uh coins even jp morgan issued a coin the other day but it's the same problem as the public space like moving value around this ecosystem is is hard um so i think uh you know we're seeing huge demand from from our uh sector and we're seeing

the enterprise actually taking this quite seriously now yeah i think interoperability is a survival mechanism even more than just a good idea i think if we have a long road ahead of us to achieve this future of decentralization or the hybrid and whatev whatever we decide as a society works best wherever blockchain ends up fitting interoperability is going to be the way it gets there because tomorrow someone's going to come out with a new sidechain tomorrow someone's going to come out with a new framework and it's going to be better and it's going to be exciting and the more we're just used to swapping out and upgrading pieces of the system then again we just keep improving the system piece by piece so interoperability frenemies working with each other is actually i think the way

to survive in this space and to push it forward yeah i think it's really likely that it's going to be a multi-block chain feature i think we're already seeing that um i think you know whether it's shards on ethereum or you know more of a heterogeneous mix of different types of blockchains um you know i think it's going to be all of the above i think there's a lot of value you know value that ethereum can provide is kind of the the first kind of main chain if you will and whether that's as like a settlement layer and whether you know what whether it's that it's going to have like them the highest security or whether it's just like this like master clock that everybody else is just a slave to that it's more of a a clock than anything

else um there's a lot of interesting uh you know architectures that you could build but but i think um definitely there are going to be a lot of different um you know blockchains connecting together and uh we're just gonna have to see you know what what the right kind of architecture for that is i'd like to say interoperability is hard so it's it's very hard to build solutions and we operate two protocols in production uh one on poi network where native token can be wrapped on ethereum and we built this um because we thought that on site chains it's quite hard to get access to liquidity uh of uh centralized exchanges well actually when centralized exchange connects side chains it's a form of

interoperability protocol right between one network and another network uh and uh we wrapped our native token and moved it to uh mainnet uh and uh you know after almost a year of uh of uh working with this breach in production we see that it's it's usable it's all some problems and um of getting listed on more exchanges but it's hard right and also it's a new attack surface and networks are different and uh some theoretical problems of uh interrupt are not solved yet right for example oracle problem is not solved right finality of change you know all chains most chains are they have a probabilistic finality only private and

enterprise chains have instant finality we will see some you know like some change with instant finality based on profile stake but uh uh we we never never seen interrupt protocols between these chains uh and also uh one one topic that many people um don't think about in this space is a legal part of the of the interrupt because um when you think about interrupt uh between two chains basically it's uh it's a it's an exchange for let's say one token pair right and uh it's it's quite easy to to not comply with uh regulation especially with the us regulation and it's that it's also stopping from um from from many uh types of protocol for

example if alice can send funds to bob cross chain most likely it will require kyc on both sides otherwise how um the protocol will differentiate uh u.s taxpayers and non-u.s taxpayers which is very important right so that's why uh we designed our protocols to make uh to be self transfers right so ls can send funds uh only to alice and the last thing i want to add when you think about interrupt developers and users will think about may think about something else one example one game called everdragons migrated from ethereum to poe because on poi they have faster transactions and cheaper execution and after they they they they understood

that there are not many users on this network right and they thought yeah let's make one more breach to drawn right because on toronto you have many users and they built one more bridge and this game has two bridges one ethereum to poa and one poa to tron and you can move your dragon from any of this network and you can trade them you can play uh on different networks and that's what built by developers because they had demand for it right we we think about yeah we need to add more liquidity we need to make tokens transferable but game developers need oh we just need players right and players exist on other chains let's just bring this bridge to another chain and let's allow people to to play on other other

games so that's i think games are the future of of interrupt sorry wrong if you may have just uh yeah but agree that interop is really hard so we've hyperledger fabric but you know to do that interoperability leg you really have to understand the security properties the validation mechanism uh a range of other stuff but i guess one thing i'm worried about in interoperability is we're sort of building these layers at layer two um so we're building quite cludgy interoperability mechanisms and i just wonder whether we need to go down a level uh to a lower level protocol so i know there's like the interledger protocol there's a number of

you know our protocol your protocol but um actually standardizing this and having a seamless way to transact is very very hard because consensus is different security properties are different and i just wonder whether we can have achieved that i think one of the biggest architectural decisions that you have to make is like what dependencies right you're going to take on and i think you're you're exactly right that like right now each kind of layer one protocol lives as an island you know to itself and i think it's just because we're so early in building this infrastructure that it's a huge risk to take a dependency on anybody else but you could imagine that in in some number of years you know when protocols really kind of prove themselves then maybe

taking a dependency is a reasonable choice uh yeah i think we have to be willing to to take that risk right i i think going in the best way to take risk is to allow ourselves to be open to the criticism to be able to understandably mainframe we've we're open source we have we have it out there everybody can sit there and analyze which part of our system is the best part and not the best part and help us kind of crowdsource the risk as well i i don't pretend that i'm going to be able to come up with all the best ideas for the best protocol every day i learned some kind of new thing that i could integrate the system and i've learned a million of them in the last 48 hours of of being here so i think

it is risky and uh to take that risk is open yourself up to criticism and be able to understand how to make the most of it awesome we are right on time so thanks everyone for listening and thank for being here