Rob Dawson: PegaSys – Enterprise-Grade Ethereum Protocol Engineering (#294)

Transcript

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running in less than 30 minutes learn more at aka OMS ever Center hi welcome to epicenter my name is Sibylle Cuchillo and today my guest is Rob Dawson rob is product lead at Pegasus and Pegasus is the protocol engineering spoke at consensus what they're building is an enterprise-grade a theorem client called Pantheon and it's enterprise-grade for a couple of reasons one it's built on Java which is preferred language for many enterprise companies out there and also it offers a number of performance improvements over

some of the other theorem clients which Enterprise are obviously interested in and so Pantheon has built a has built a number of features that are interesting for consortium networks so on the permissions side so Pantheon has a whole stack of technologies that allows for consortium networks to build permissions into the network on privacy as well for doing shielded transactions and also on the consensus side by implementing idft which is a consensus algorithm that works best in permission networks and Pantheon is also main net compatible so

works perfectly well on main net in fact I think there's a couple of Pantheon nodes operating on main net so the idea here is really to bridge the gap between the permissioned blockchain space where Enterprise are mostly focusing at the moment and you know slowly bringing those companies closer and closer to onboarding maintenance so it's fascinating discussion and we got to talk - I got to talk Rob out the client but also some of the work that they're doing on the protocol engineering side and the work towards a theorem 2.0 so with that here's my interview with Rob Dawson hi so I'm here with Rob Dawson Rob is head of product at Pegasus and

Pegasus is the protocol engineering group within consensus and their role is to build the protocol and so they're building an a theorem client within consensus and the theorem client that's actually targeted to enterprise hi Rob thanks for joining me hey it's a pleasure so let's start off by looking a bit of your background and how you got involved in the space - sure so I guess I've been building software since last millennium using probably a mix of Java Ruby JavaScript building enterprise software and then also working with startups I also took a bit of a bit of a time out for a while doing a research master's into information security and

so looking at secure protocols and and that kind of stuff and how to had have had a real interest in that sort of security side of things and crypto to me I'm old-school enough that crypto doesn't actually mean crypto currencies of domains cryptography and and real crypto and so I guess I've been sort of doing that mix of building software and being interested in information security encrypted over a number of years and so more recently God had someone that I'd worked with before joined the the good ship Pegasus in consensus they reached out to me that was kind of early in the the formation of Pegasus and talked to

me about it I had not been drinking too deeply from the firehose of crypto currencies at that point in time and so really dope deep and you know wrapped my head around how local trees were working and although all this sort of foundational stuff between behind blockchain and and yet got excited for the potential of what the technology can do and joined and have been loving it so you're saying that cryptocurrencies are not real equipped oh no they crypto but real crypto is cryptography which is you know that's what you should be talking about we talk about Krypton sure of course you know obviously cryptocurrencies use cryptography I

think that's why people call them cryptic but jokes aside we look at looking at it from a security perspective you know when you came into this space after I believe you have a background working in enterprise and building enterprise software what are some of the things that may be pleasantly surprise to you about how the community was building software and or were the things where you just kind of set facepalms and like what's going on here how are people what are people working yes so it's you know a the open source sort of nature of everything was was really really great to see and I think that's probably the the first part the the fact that when you look at

aetherium in particular the the core devs that are there which you know it's not like a secret society it's a pretty open kordell's network where you can reach out and be a part of this community and be able to contribute so easily as is pretty amazing on the flip side some of the face parney sort of stuff might be sometimes it feels a little bit like the Wild West still in terms of building robust robust software I think there's there's been projects which there there see I sort of being red has been something that you know failing COA

for me as an enterprise dev and just as a product focus dev feels like as soon as you see a bill being read that's that's like warning bells go change it fix it make sure that it's passing its tests make sure that it's working right and whereas I've seen clients and and software that that has been in at that sort of red state for months at a time okay sorry what's CI continuous integration oh okay so some of the the things and basic things that you as a software dev and experienced Enterprise dev if you expect there to be there so making sure that there's a good automated test suite that's making sure that the code does what it's meant to do if someone changes something and behavior in it and it's going to break

things you actually get told and I find out so I think elements of that are there but it's not as not as robust as it would make me really excited okay why do you think that that's not there I mean if those are sort of like you know already established things that people build into their their software building process I think parts of it the the ecosystem being driven by research and being like people that are excited about the possibilities of technology and so moving quickly from a proof of concept to it's actually being used and so it's it's I think some of us just the I guess the maturity of the ecosystem okay yeah

makes sense how did you get involved at consensus it's definitely just a it was a referral so I need someone who'd who'd worked who was working here and they they said come along and took a bit of a took a bit of a look I really was not looking to change what I was doing but I'm glad I did okay and so a cup a couple months ago we had Joe Lubin on and this was I guess in in the middle of this moment where a lot of companies were downsizing and consensus was also downsizing you know have you guys felt that within your spoke and sort of broadly in the organization how do you how do you see the organization changing over the last few months yep so I guess

in terms of our scope we were fortunate I guess that we weren't directly impacted I know I have known a number of people that are no longer at consensus and it's a shame that they they aren't but I think overall for consensus has been been a good move I think it's sort of allowed to be the corporate corporate background of me says tightening of belts and and all those sorts of those sorts of glib statements but it needs a little bit of that and so I think helping to focus on on being a almost a bit more of a grown up company while while still keeping that a lot of the great experiments that the Joe's always

had had there so the the decentralization of the organization is still feels that roots very strongly moving now to Pegasus what's the high level goal of this the spoke if there's a vision and mission which really boils down to the idea of making sure that we remove the friction in in having transactions happen and so the way you're going to do that in etherium and that's being a part of pegasus that's being a part of consensus that's where our natural sort of effort is is going to be focused is around etherium is making sure that you've got a really top class aetherium client and so that's making sure that it's available to be

used by everyone giving it an open-source license so we're a apache2 licensed piece of software so making sure that that's easy for enterprises and anyone to be able to use making sure that it's really high quality enterprise grade software and so it's got that the continuous integration sort of backing ed it's got the the tests that are happening to help give us the confidence that the protocol that the client is is of the right standard and of the right quality and then adding in some of the enterprise features that are important for the consortium's and for those private kind of networks to be able to use while also giving them the path to using main net because I think the

etherion maintenance be it the current authoring and main note or a 3m 2.0 main net that's that's the future and so I think we see Bill bring out the capabilities for our clients and our software to work well in both that enterprise context and then the domain that context as well okay yeah well we'll get to that as the show progresses but staying on Pegasus a little bit what is your role sort of in the broader consensus community and also in the theorem space what are your interactions with other teams and other client teams and protocols and hearing teens out there yep so we in terms of the consensus context we work closely

with a bunch of the the other spokes to make sure that we're both building the the client and then any enterprise features that we're building that they fit in with the rest of their consensus kind of tool chain and so places groups like Alessio in führer we work really closely with we are working with Collider as well for that sort of enterprise hosted hosted version we sort of have done done work with truffle to make sure that we work well with truffle as well and so it's kind of working in partnering with the the rest of the parts to consensus to make sure that we're delivering the best client possible with the community there's a few different spots where we we really see it sort of flesh out and so we're

part of the core dev schools and so we've got I don't personally get to go to many of them because they're in the middle of the night for me but we've got one of our guys Donna is is regularly on the the core devs calls hoping to to work together with the the other core developers to ensure that we're taking the ethereal clients forward in a sort of consolidated fashion so making sure that we keep the beautiful decentralized parts of aetherium really strong while also helping to push forward and ensure that the the protocol does grow to be the the great protocol it wants to be okay and then the last part then on the community is getting involved with the

etherium research and we've got a very active team working with the actually two active teams working with the etherium 2.0 sort of research efforts so one of the teams is is very much on the sort of more sort of future theoretical kind aside and then another team is actually building out some of the early proof a set concept clients to help make sure that we're actually delivering on our theorem to point out that it doesn't just become a a more academic exercise with the that is actually shipping real working software that that people are able to use would you say that within consensus there is this push to get the the quality of all the different software

coming out of all the different spokes at at this this enterprise grade quality and and is Pegasus pushing that is is it coming from Pegasus or is it coming sort of coming top-down and being brought unto every spoke that's a good question I think there are quite a number of sports that are really really pushing hard so it sort of depends on where spokes out units in its life cycle I guess so there's a number of spokes that are at that spot where they're getting that that product market fit and I seen that the product market is actually very much in that enterprise space and so for

those spokes actually really focusing on the quality is is really important there's other spokes where being able to innovate really rapidly is the key thing for them at the moment and so for then maybe sometimes there's that that trade-off between let's write another test versus let's try out this new idea they might lean more towards trying out the new idea and then with regards to your interaction with other teams and so for example like the guest client team or the the parody client team you know coming from this background of enterprise and also working with enterprise building this client how have your interactions been with their with those other teams do you do you see that there's a high level of desire also on

their part to you'll build a more robust client like build tools that are Enterprise ready or are you seeing that they're more you know looking at it from the research side and maybe not building in this consent continuous integration that you mentioned how would you describe the interactions with the other teams on this front it's been really great working with the Geth imparity teams they're a bunch of really smart people and it's been really amazing being able to see the ideas that they're trying and be able to work alongside them to help work things out on the main net front they still very much are the leaders in that space and where we're working our

hardest to catch up and it's it's hard because they've actually done a bunch of really interesting things to make sure that they can make their clients go really fast and change for the main net world and so in a maintenance space where we're working hard and I think we're catching up but they are really smart people and it's great to work with them let's talk about security you know the apps are pretty unique because unlike other types of software they can hold astronomical amounts of value that's why getting systems audited creating robust security processes and fostering a culture of security in your organization is so important and to do this you should only trust experts with

real security expertise there are a lot of security firms in the blockchain space but few have the experience and track record of trail fits and they've been in business since 2012 long before things like the Dow hack were even imaginable trail of bits works with your team to audit every aspect of your project and smart contract code is just the beginning they'll help you implement best practices around things like DevOps key storage and user facing applications and once your software has been rigorously tested and reviewed by trail of bits they'll provide the tools you need to make sure that your code remains safe over every new commit they can even put a software security expert at your team's disposal will give you advice and answer your questions when you need them it's like having your own security engineer on staff but don't take my word

for it go to their publications repo on github to read their papers presentations and security reviews it's no wonder teams like parody status new cipher and organizations like Facebook and DARPA trust Trello bits for those security audits to learn more go to trail space comm and if you decide to reach out make sure you let them know you heard about them on APIs we'd like to thank chillip it's for their support let's move on into Pegasus the main product is being built by Pantheon why did you decide to build another theorem client why why not just use Gath and parity or maybe branch off Gethin parity or was the desire here it's really important for the pegasus to build Pantheon because it really gives

us control over the the client we'd looked at some other efforts that have been made to produce more Enterprise focused clients that were branching off get and parity and saw a lot of the the pain that ended up happening in having to maintain that fork being able to maintain a fork of any open source project is is non-trivial and to be able to add in some of the enterprise features in particular privacy requires enough deep changes to the the client that maintaining that fork is is non-trivial so that's one of the one of the aspects the other is being able to offer enterprises a a client with an

enterprise friendly license is really important and so the LGPL and GPL still raise flags for a lot of enterprises and so we've got an Apache 2 license decline and that that really makes a difference can you talk about why this license is problematic for enterprise and why Apache because I know that also hyper ledger built everything on the pachi for that exact reason so it's I'm not an open-source guru so probably not the best person to answer that you should have a conversation at some time with Jim jag jag aus key so he's he's at consensus as well and was was formerly at the Apache foundation and so he's got

a really clear ways of being able to articulate why why Apache T matters essentially it's the comes down to the the fears around the viral nature of the the GPL sort of license and so once you've have something that's using GPL license code the your code then also needs to be GPL licensed and so it's organization as being afraid of afraid of that whether or not those fears are valid and whether whether or not how that really plays out it hasn't been tested in the legal system and I'm not a lawyer and I don't know how it would pan out but it's just one of those things where if you do have the

choice between for a lot of organizations if you have the choice between and particularly I guess for developers in an organization if you have the choice between saying that's Apache too and you can just use versus saying that's LGPL or GPL and you have to go through the legal team of your organization to get approval to use it you're going to go to the Apache - it's just going to be so much easier and so given that we wanted to have a client that was easy for enterprises to pick up with having that Apache - was was one of the parts of that decision-making okay that makes sense so in the GPL license these these open-source licenses I guess force users of those software to also open source the things that they built

with it whereas Apache you can use this oh you can use this open source software but it can be closed source within your organization you know you don't have to go and open source it yourself so it protects I guess companies and enterprise and protects their IP and so their business because that software doesn't itself need to be open source right well-put okay so what why is it that enterprise predominantly work in Java so I think it's it's a lot of its historical reasons and so you've got the the DevOps the sysadmin teams are going to want to maintain systems that they're familiar with with that they're comfortable with

that they know here's the way that I make it go fast his layers that I need to think about the the maintenance of the systems here's how our our suite of systems all work and so having that consistent infrastructure I think really helps those those sorts of groups and within the Java sort of world it's often actually the JVM is sort of the thing that's there and so whether you use Java Scala Kotlin whatever kind of cool language you want to use it's it's all compiling to that JVM sort of bytecode and and it works in a consistent way so if you've got a company that's using Java how do you get them to start using aetherium yep so I think it's starting

with the idea of the distributed ledger and so you've got this immutable data structure that you can use and I actually led a bunch of workshops just a couple of weeks ago in San Francisco getting people to help think about it and it sort of started through we would go through and teach people a little bit about blockchain a little bit about what some of the the properties of a blockchain are and then think about how how this is going to be working with maybe the consortiums with the companies and other people that they work with starts to give that here's why blockchain matters and then you can talk about aetherium because it's the program blockchain it's got the the solidity is kind of there there's this community

around oh there's all the tools that are there to help make it work then you can talk about Pantheon being a part of that and being able to run that in your Java sort of world and make that fit in really well with you there and so this is kind of nice sort of Ark that fits in well for a good Enterprise there okay and in my experience in the that I spent working with enterprise and tried to convince big companies to start using blockchain etc so in 2016 to 28th 2017 2018 the companies were not at all or very little at least thinking about being you know using magnetic chains a lot of companies we're looking at implementing permission chains and

building consortium of this what seems very complicated now I think back on it why do you think that companies should be on main net and is that a push is that something that you guys are pushing towards I think the main net is definitely a piece of the picture for people and so I think if you if you look at and so there's a personal consensus a visionary and great great speaker John walpert and he has a few different great ways of being able to think about why maintenance is important and I think there's if you sort of look at the the two security properties of I guess secrecy and the immutability blockchain

and Manor in particular is awesome for maintenance for immutability and so being able to pin your data to two main that I think the organization's is really the the gold standard that's that's there they're being able to prove that you've got some sort of merkel proof backing whatever hash you've written to the main net is is gold and so i think that is really where organizations need to be moving towards and then potentially there might be sort of private databases private consortium networks that they're using on to sort of get to that that result that they want to pin back to the main net but I think that there's definitely this main net first sort of world that we need to get to and how we get there I'm not sure

I think there's probably some of those convoluted consortiums and private networks are part of the path that is still sort of sitting there for a lot of organizations but I think getting to that main net sort of first is is is really important the way that I see this increasingly now that like now that cosmos is out and that we've got kind of a roadmap for a theorem 2.0 and we're starting to piece together how these blockchain networks will will look like sort of in their infrastructure the way I see this is you know what we'll have shards or sidechains or whatever you want to call them zones backed by a main chain and before if we thought ok they'll be these

consortiums and these consortiums will operate independently and there might be some interaction with a public chain but it wasn't quite clear how that was going to play out now that we have these sharded chains or at least they're they're coming into existence the idea that you could have a consortium running on a shard of a main chain or as a side chain and then that consortium just yeah like you said it it pegs back to the main chain at some point to establish the wrap the veracity of a transaction or or a state and then I think that extends to other consortiums so you

might have like a company or a consortium on shard and then another company or another consortium on another shard and then yeah they can use the main chain to transact and interact with each other is this the future that you also envision with regards to enterprise or is this something that we're missing here I think I think that's pretty close to it I think that enterprises will definitely have multiple different chains and multiple different they have multiple different chains that they're communicating with having a client that helps make it easy to communicate to different chains is going to be absolutely essential I think the spot at which the cross chain communication happens is going to

be an interesting interesting place for research and development over the months and years and so how that communication across side-chains or across shards so that happens I think we will be an interesting interesting topic how much of that is at layer one how much of its at layer two and how things progressed from maybe you start with a layer two solution and then and then evolve out a layer one solution will be will be the the interesting place one of the interesting places for research to be happening have you guys given any thought to how enterprise might also become stakeholders of of the main chain so in a theory I'm like the

beacon chain you do you envision a future where large companies or sets of companies working with etherium you know implementing side chains or shards are also stakeholders of a future if you improve the stake network or are they just sort of tagging along for the ride and you're using this shared security without without any specific stake I'd love to see them a part of it I don't have a strong opinion on how that how that happens but I think it makes sense so if I would imagine that if the if staking is is as profitable as it's meant to be it's probably going to be a good place for

some of these larger enterprises to to keep some of their funds and and have as one of their investment strategies and given that and they're using it it's also then giving them that sort of safety and reliability of the network and so I can see them sort of wanting to do it for the you know just the straight financial reasons but then also because it's protecting their their investments and their their assets as well but also in terms of governance I mean you know if they if they have stake in the network they would also be able to vote on you know I'm not really sure how the future a theorem governance is meant to look like but you're presumably there's some governance mechanism in there that allows stakeholders to vote on proposals and this sort of thing

do you think this is something that companies are going to want to interact with in the future yes I'm not sure what the governance model looks like in you know the theory and world I'm not sure that stakeholders are directly going to be tied to getting voting rights on on changes to the network but I do imagine that organizations are going to want to be able to influence the direction of the protocol this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Microsoft and the azure blockchain workbench getting your block team from the white board to production can be a big undertaking and something as simple as connecting your blockchain to IOT devices or existing ERP systems is a project in itself well the folks at Microsoft had you covered

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transform and act on the data to learn more and to build your first application in less than 30 minutes visit a kms / epicenter and be sure to follow them on twitter at MSFT blockchain we'd like to thank Microsoft and Azure for their support of epicenter so let's move on to Pantheon tell us whether some of the interesting features that Pantheon offers yep so you're I just start with it's a main net first client and so I think our initial release of of Pantheon was to have it running on main net to have it syncing with with the network and and processing the latest blocks and that's our our first

commitment is to to working on maintenance but then on top of that we also think about the enterprise etherium and so I think we might talk a little bit later about the enterprise etherium Alliance and so enterprise etherium is something that we take really seriously and it talks about three P's when it's kind of really two peas in a sea so the three P's our privacy permissioning and consensus mechanisms or performance and so we we offer I think really good answers to all three of those sorts of requirements so we we have a really good system in place for permissioning and

being able to control who can join the network and who can submit transactions so that's our permissioning sort of story we've got some good tools to help think about privacy and so being able to have a mix of sort of off chain privacy and so the only thing that gets written to the chain in an off chain sort of privacy sense is a hash of a transaction that's happened between some subgroup of parties so got that sort of support and then we also sort of have tools and partnerships with some of the zero-knowledge kind of tools so there's the Aztek so the group have produced a really good sorcerer knowledge solution and so

there's a blog post which we can share probably in show notes which talks about about how that works and then in terms of consensus mechanisms we've got a new consensus mechanism that we've produced that that works really well as well for a consortium type varmint okay so let's let's dive into these three P's starting with permissioning so just to preface for the moment at least privacy this privacy aspect is permissioning aspect and also the like being able to switch out consensus mechanism only works if you're deploying aetherium as a consortium

chain these things don't work with the maintain that's right at the moment so our privacy solution we've designed to be able to work on the main chain if all of the people involved all the parties involved in the private transaction are running Pantheon so that that quality is not quite there yet but that's what the solutions been designed for that's intro yeah as we as we sort of improve that we'll we will be working towards that so at the moment within that the the challenge that we need to solve for is what happens in the case of chain reorg and and how to handle that is is where the kind of the challenge in that it's interesting are

you saying that then a consortium of companies could deploy a smart contract to aetherium and if they're all using Pantheon maybe if the smart contract only authorizes certain keys to send it transactions I don't know if that's possible but then you could have sort of a little permissioned private chain or private smart contract happening on the theory of main chain so I think that's so the vision is close to that but slightly different and so within that that privacy sort of world it would be you would be able to deploy a smart contract to the the main chain the only

thing that the rest of the world would be able to see is a hash that there was a transaction that was sent to a precompiled smart contract and then the other Pantheon clients would be able to interact with that pre-compiled smart contract they'd be running the precompiled smart contract would then be able to look up the trans using the hash if there are a party to the transaction there will be the able to then executed and and be able to participate in private transactions against that state and so your first transaction would be deploying a smart contract and then future transactions would be interacting with that smart contract and so only participants in that privacy group is what we sort of call it would be able to see anything

more than a hash of the transaction okay are any companies doing this right now on the mainland not in the mainland okay so that's the that's the privacy sides this is something you've implemented on Pegasus and presumably works very well if you're you know if you're on a consortium chain and you know but perhaps you can also use it on the main chain how does permissioning work yep so the permissioning we we think about it in there's probably three different levels so we have some permissioning around json-rpc api's so being able to control which accounts are able to interact with which json-rpc api's but that's that's very much around a

specific node that's an ethereal client that's been deployed then we have sort of our our node level commissioning so the node level permissioning is being able to have a whitelist of which he nodes are able to connect to the network and so that's managed by a smart contract and so you're able to restrict the which which nodes are able to join the network and sorry you you the peer-to-peer network is not broadcasting out to everyone in the world you can't just have anyone join you have to be on that whitelist of AV nodes to be able to join the network and then the third level that we've got use account level

commissioning and so this is I guess kind of a the the most real in terms of the network and so the account level permissioning is restricting which accounts can I guess having again a whitelist of accounts that are able to submit transactions that are able to do different types of transactions whether is an East transfer or a smart contract message that's being sent or deploy any contract those sorts of levels of granularity you know account level reasoning okay yeah they'll make a lot of sense in in a consortium setting you know obviously you only want the members of the consortium be able to

access this the blockchain and then you might have other permission considerations for the types of API calls that each of the nodes can send to the network and then also like accounts and things like that I can see there's a lot of use cases around that exactly and that that system that we've we've built and designed is a smart contract based approach and so we've worked with the enterprise etherium Alliance to sort of take what we've done and work with the other organizations to make sure that it makes sense to having a standard and set it up to be standardized which then is done in such a way to give a real strong split between the enforcement of these

permissions which is really well defined you know well-defined interface smart contract interface and then the the actual sort of management piece we've sort of kept us sort of separation there of concerns which gives that ability to use a different governance model for your consortium Network or swap out what what sort of governance model makes sense for your of your network so moving on now to the third P or C the consensus algorithm so you guys are working on this idft algorithm can you talk about that and describe maybe what types of use cases it's best suited for yep so the the RBF team protocol it's in the so it has

three bits of Heritage to it and so it's very much in the pbft family of consensus mechanisms but then on aetherium it also has a bit of a clique kind of POA kind of feel to it as well and so if you kind of merge those two together you end up with the the idft family and so there's a really sort of active research community around around the consensus mechanisms at the moment and doing a lot of security research into the where some of the failure modes might be from a computer science perspective which often then get proven out with sort of real-world failures as well and so our research and development

team have helped us to produce the the IBF t2 algorithm that that we've produced and it's it's really ideal for that kind of consortium or private kind of aetherium network it's probably not going to be the the algorithm that's used for for the the future proof of state kind of world but it is going to be the the thing that we're using for those kind of private consortium networks and it's sort of the idea there is it works great for some sort of range from four to 230 sort of validator nodes in your network is the sort of golden sweet spot for that algorithm so how is idft different from say ten Dermot BFT

where ten me if ten might be ft can scale to more like 100 to 150 validators I think yep so I think it's it's very much around the the recovery when there is a Byzantine fault and so the the idft algorithm the time to recovery when there is a fault is is smaller and and I think that's the the key sort of win that's there there's also some other potential optimizations which are available to the idft family in terms of decreasing the number of phases that are needed in the happy kind of path and those that that sort of optimization is

not available for the attentive and family okay so you mentioned that I BFT he probably won't be the algorithm that would be used for the future if here iam proved a state network because obviously like 30 validators are probably too little but it is conceivable that idft would be used on side chains and then that I VFD side chain would then sort of commit to the main chain is that correct right okay are you seeing any specific types of applications in your dealings with enterprise that are particularly well suited for idft yes so it's the the standard kind of I guess financial deep

fire sort of use cases are really sort of strong ones there so the one of the the key properties with with IV FTE is the transaction finality and so we can see that sort of consortiums which are doing anything that's kind of financially based being able to know that a transaction is fine or when it's written to the chain is is pretty important right because idft has finality yeah that's right yep so the banks are a bit uncomfortable with the idea of the probabilistic finality of that their proof of work offers so moving back to Pantheon what types of notes do you support like to you for like rival nodes uh full sync nodes yep

so at the moment we're a full archive node you know our recent sort of release that we had we we've added in fasting and so fast sync is something that it takes a long time to implement and funnily enough and so I saw how fast sync is is there the bit of work that's currently underway is adding in pruning and so that will sort of move you from being that sort of full archive no to just being that sort of full node and then I think the more sort of light client sort of configurations haha are in our future but we're not there yet so you mentioned standardization and the

work that you're doing with the theorem Enterprise Alliance can you expand on that and let me give a status update on the EEA yep so I think it's been a really busy probably 18 months for the EE they went from not having a client specification at all - there at version 3 was either has just been released I think is the the status of it and then they're they're targeting DEFCON DEFCON 5 for her version for release and so they're really iterating very fast on I'm making sure that there is a top quality client specification

there and that's that's the main place where I work work with them they also have another of a number of other sort of working groups that are there so there's a group that's working on building out a test network which is then going to perform the the basis of a compliance sort of testing suite so the initial version of that test network is going to sort of help flush out some of the interoperability issues that there might be between some of the enterprise ethereal clients and then once they've got that sort of up and running that's going to then form the basis of a certification program and so the the EEA is going working really really hard as an organization and the client members to ensure that it's adding value and

making sure that we are producing standards and specifications of etherion that work well for enterprise so how important are these standards to enterprise and how do you reconcile excitement you guys are building a client that's both main that compatible but also consortium chain compatible how do you reconcile the needs of permissionless aetherium world and the needs of a highly secured permission consortium chain it's a good question so I think it's one that I think I've seen other clients have different approaches to what we've got

so I mentioned early on that we're we're main net first and we take that as as our priority and so whenever we do something that is enterprise our first goal is to try and do something that works well with maintenance it is compatible with the the standard etherium big there can be features which that that doesn't fit in and so that that does happen from time to time so when you look at the permissioned sort of network maybe there might be a spot where an e node URL moves from being straight IP address base to being dns-based because that's going to maybe work better for an enterprise context

now that's going to be a change which breaks by running your through your client in that mode you're no longer the maintenance and that's going to be a change which makes me uncomfortable but we would probably probably make and so I think it's that making sure that anytime we're doing something that makes our client have a mode which is non main it compatible makes us feel uncomfortable but it might be the right thing to do still it's kind of the way that we play that that challenge there in terms of the applications that companies are building and that enterprises in interested in building have you seen any any shift in the last couple of years

towards some of the applications being built on main net or are companies still very interested in you know building their a supply chain and and like building out their internal processes and certifying their intuitive processes on on aetherium which is something I think that a lot of enterprise for interested a couple of years ago what what what's the what's the state of the way Enterprise are thinking about aetherium and the applications that they can build there I think it's in the sport we were a couple years ago people were interested in building the the private networks but not doing anything because I was still just interested I think right now we're seeing some there

were seeing some uptake in some of the consortium networks but there's a lot of interest in doing main there and so it's kind of they're not quieted in the spot where okay yep wait we're going to commit to main net what they are really interested in it and really thinking about okay how is my neck enough it into our strategy how are we going to do it so it's that sort of tipping point where I think in you know a year's time in two years time people really will be using main net you know in a serious way and how would they be using me in there like what kind of applications would they be using name that for there's a lot of this stuff happening on main net a lot of defy and I think a lot of the infrastructure there is sort of

supporting I would say like speculation around aetherium and token transfers and decentralize exchanges and this sort of thing what's what are the interests of enterprise for using main net so I think the defy kind of use case is pretty strong storm and then I think it's it's also then the using it as a certification spot for their private kind of consortium networks or their side chains pinning stake back to two main that probably the two spots were where there seems to be the most interest at the moment so but I think in aetherium the the sweet spot for a theorem right now is kind of the that defy the tokenization of things is

tokenize all the things I think is is sort of where we're at for for aetherium not just where we're at but I think it's where we're we're going to be for the that sort of short to medium and perhaps even sort of longer sort of future that that defy use-cases is pretty strong can you talk about some of the specific things that maybe some of the companies that you're worked with or consensus has worked with or are doing I start to stretch so my my sweet spot is more on the the actual protocol side itself and and help me making sure that we're building the right things to support people are we are definitely seen though some of the interesting use

cases are out there so there's Congo is a project that is using using a theorem and built on top of a built in partnership with consensus very closely and so it's a commodities trading platform and a consortium based network in the in in Europe and so that's that's sort of one of our our very successful projects that that's there I'm definitely seeing a lot of interest for again a lot of the the financial use cases so I won't name names or name projects but the the interbank settlement sort of space is quite interested in using etherium to help

make that work well that anywhere where there's multiple sort of large organizations that don't quite trust each other to trust any one person to be the the centralization point is is where we're definitely seeing a large sort of interest for for Pantheon and and quasi theorem do you think that if the areum really does have the potential to scale at a point where it can support something as a transaction volume intensive as interbank settlements or do you think that companies and banks will continue to use sidechains to do this so I think the etherium 2.0

with the the sort of shouting that that's there on that roadmap is going to have that sort of scaling that you know a thousand decks on top of on top of what you are doing on the current sort of a theory and plus and and that's just by the straight charting plus the the smart things that you can do for for changing how you process transactions and and do things there I think really does give that that space to provide the scale the the main aetherium as it is now does not does not provide it but moving forward to that aetherium Thibodaux future i think there is a world where that works well so youth you see a future where permission chains continue to exist or like what is the point of other permissions chain if

they Orion scales to some you know close to infinite level I don't think banks want to be making the details of the interbank settlement very visible and so I think that it's it's more for the I guess the privacy side then the the scaling side is is probably the the spot where you're gonna see the the side chains the consortiums the the non main net kind of change out there okay cool so before you wrap up here I do want to spend a little bit of time talking about a theorem 2.0 or serenity whatever we're calling it now can you give us a bit of an update on

where things stand at the moment with regards to a theorem 2.0 and what is some of the work that you guys are doing on that front so I can speak more to where we're at it's hard to hard to know exactly where where a 3mt point o is because it's hard to keep up but the the bits that I could definitely see is the is the the three phases phase zero sort of starting off the beacon chain phase one sort of introducing the the sharding and then phase two with the the execution environment I think phase one phase zero is getting into a very good spot and so there's a number prove of test networks that are out

there at the moment there's sort of plans in place to work on how to get those interrupting with each other and getting the sort of clients talking to each other and working together really well there's a recent sort of announcement about trying to get a stake in contract out for the Devcon and then looking to get this sort of released in early next year and getting like really a beacon chain running in a production environment early next year and I think that some of those timelines are aggressive I think that there are great stakes in the ground that aren't just going to slide and seen I think that they may be maybe the date moves from like an early January to like a February

but it's not going to be like we're not going to be sitting here at this time next year and saying I was happening with our beacon chain I would be absolutely shocked if we didn't have a beacon chain running like very well by this time next year yeah that's really encouraging to hear because the last time we talked about this on podcast I think I mean of course big change is one part of it but you know there was this expectation that if your room 2.0 could take you know two to five years until it's ready maybe maybe that's still the case with all the other layers that need to be added I'm gonna ask you the same thing I think I think I asked us to do Lubin you said is right if you theorem the 2.0 does take so long to to bring

into production I think the estimates are somewhere around like two to four years or something like that until we're like ready ready for production a theorem 2.0 Network there are other block chains out there that are doing similar things to what if your room 2.0 wants to achieve so cosmos launched a couple of months ago and there was just this this big like the first cosmos event polka-dot will presumably launch before that as well what are your thoughts on aetherium x' dominance as the predominant DAP platform and how that product like how a theorem could

lose some of that predominance if if it takes too long to to move into production and these other chains already and people can build on them I think it's a real risk full aetherium and one no we need to take seriously I think that that said I think that there is so that that that weight of the community already in aetherium I think that that's why as well Pegasus is taking a really strong two-faced sort of approach of really pushing hard into that enterprise sort of space and so by going out into the enterprise and reaching out particularly with our Java client being able to reach out to the Java community like most of them have

hardly heard of blockchain maybe maybe within the the new work of face our friends at Facebook everyone's going to know about blockchain now but I think that I I think that it's more about growing the community and so within that Enterprise kind of context there's no sort of issues with scaling there's the well-known well-established tool chains that are there for for doing the smart contract development you know you know theorem that I think a really good story for us to be able to communicate with that enterprise community and I think that so that's that's one direction that the Pegasus is working in and then also working very hard on that aetherium 2.0

research but also making sure that we asked should being software with the theorem to queneau and so I think making sure that we are building stuff that that proves that the research is either either right or wrong rather than keeping it as as theoretical so I think that those those two things are the best things that we can be doing to make sure that both aetherium works well now and that the the future of aetherium - or serenity as that it comes in the the right sort of timeliness and are you guys working with the folks working on etherium one point X are you also interacting with that team yep that's right yep so sort of we had a

number of people going along to to some of the workshops and trying to to help bring that bring that forward to have that sort of I guess bridging between you know that a three in one point one point other making sure that it used to scale for long enough to to keep the the main net running well until their EMT point out gums and can you give us an update on the progress there are you aware of what's going on on that front so I think there's a bunch of really good proposals that are being worked through which I don't think too many of them have made it into the form of eeap's yet but that's sort of you know the the way forward is to go from from those sort of working through what is

possible to producing the the apes which can then be reviewed and and implemented so it's still in that sort of earlier phases of that but I think it's probably going to be the things that we will see in the the hard folks that have a next year on the the main net three in clients or main data theorem Network okay cool so tell us where can people learn more about Pegasus and Pantheon and anything you want to plug at this point so I think the the best two places and the the website is Pegasus tech and having a good look there and then for probably an even even better spot is our github so the the github.com slash

Pegasus Inge and Pegasus ange slash Pantheon and so we'll put URLs in ways that are easier to pass they're listening to me sit spell them out but those those would be the two places to go and then if you're really kind of keen and interested in what's happening in the beacon chain the Pegasus Inge / Artemis on on github is the place to go there and are you guys hiring yeah I think if is people that are blockchain engineers people that write Java and Lecter to interested in contributing to the enterprise etherium client definitely would love to have have a conversation all right Rob thanks for joining me today and looking forward to seeing the

developments on Pantheon thank you it's been a pleasure we release new episodes of epicenter every week click here to subscribe for hundreds of insightful interviews with some of the leading minds in blockchain and crypto you can also listen to the audio version of the podcast on iTunes Spotify stitcher and other podcast apps click here for a full list of places where you can listen thanks for watching at the center and we hope you'll join us for our next episode