DApps and Incentive models in a post AWS world

Transcript

so all right good afternoon everybody thanks for attending my talk i know it's 30 degrees outside and so it's very hot so it's it takes some effort to to come over here so so thanks for that um in this talk i'm gonna give a little status update on what we are doing at the avado projects and talk a little bit about our incentive models um with regards to that so first a few words about myself so my name is stefan i'm the co-founder of avado and also the cto i've been into the crypto space since

2015 mostly involved with all kinds of ethereum projects my first main project on ethereum was the swarm city project which started in 2016. and then from 2018 onwards i'm involved in in alpharado my skills on these projects are the programming aspect and everything that's software related um so to understand where we are coming from with avado i'm just going to give you a little um background on different computing models and how these evolved um so first is just to get an understanding where we are and why are we doing this uh so when we look at the beginning and it's not actually the first

uh the very first beginning but like the 50s and the 60s we had these mainframes which allowed new types of applications to appear in this case it were bulk data processing of data then if we fast forward another 10 to 15 years you had the personal computer that arose with desktop applications which was then like the new thing then again fast forward another 10 years we had the internet with email search and other applications and then we saw the democratization of the exchange of information so that's all of a sudden that became accessible to anybody and then shortly thereafter we had the emergence of the smartphone and with all these sensors it also enabled another new class of

applications like services like uber navigation apps and social media apps with cameras etc so we see a trend that each 10 to 15 years there's like a whole new computing model that emerge emerges that allows new classes of applications to be to be created and they build on these unique strengths of the platform so if we correlate that to our own community we see that in again fast forward another 10 years around 2010 the emergence of blockchain with as unique value proposition the direct exchange in store of value or the democratization of exchange of value and if we fast forward another

approximately ten years so it's more like five to ten years uh we see a whole new explosion of depths and layer two like taxes side chains uh bridges uh decentralized finance with the open finance concepts and staking there's also a lot of new peer-to-peer protocols emerging like swarm ipfs hopper is also one that we support tornado cache and others which bring new incentives to this space now the question that a lot of people have is how can i participate in those how can i contribute also how can i benefit from these things and that sort of inspired us to build this platform so avado

and we started in 2018 we are creating and selling these boxes so i took one here just to give you an idea what it is and it's a very like convenient way to participate in this blockchain protocol so this is just a a regular computer so it just has a regular cpu ram and ssd storage in it so it's really plug and play so it comes pre-installed if you if you buy it you just plug it into your router it starts working it has a wi-fi access point you can also remotely dial into it to a vpn and when you are connected to the wi-fi then you can access the dap store so this is a curated list of

dabs that you can run on the platform so this is something that we create and offer to our users and we have this no cli approach so we think that it should be possible for anybody to participate without even touching the command line so if you're if you you don't need these technical skills to do that uh let me first since we're doing this for two and two and a half years uh give you a couple of insights or learnings and observations that we had after doing that so some of these might be obvious for you guys and some or even like interesting for us to see so the first observations that are kind of users they don't want to spend the

time in looking and investigating the the right hardware to use so that's why we created our own hardware so one of the features so it has a fanless design so it's completely silent so it conveniently fits your house like on your desk or wherever you want to put it it has this recognizable branding and it comes in different flavors we have like different ssd memory configurations um at a different price point second observation is that users don't want to read manuals so if you look at a lot of blockchain projects um they first have like a home page and then they almost immediately direct you to a documentation site where you have like all the developer documentation sdks

what not but most people don't are not per se interested in that kind of thing they just want to see how can i run it how can i participate how can i get started so that's why we created more easy to consume contents we have a youtube channel that has all kinds of explainers so almost each package that we support has its own video there we also have like unboxing videos how to get started and so forth so whole walk throughs through all these applications which makes life easier for people and another thing which amazed us a bit is that in practice people don't really care about decentralization either they more care about the convenience and so

decentralization is not a goal as such it is a means to an end so that's why we say okay we are going to have what we call a trust minimized technology stack so even though we distribute our adapts over ipfs so that part is decentralized the curation of our store currently is centralized because we support it and we curate this so we have all these these categories which makes it easy to find if like featured depths for example you have categories for smart mining so things that that return you some coins for running it blockchain nodes themselves and so forth another thing is that users they are you

they are scared of the command line interface so what we are doing with that is that we are creating onboarding wizards so for each of these packages that would normally involve downloading software on your computer and running running something on the cli we are wrapping those in a web ui and integrating them into the avado user interface so for none of the tabs that you want to run do you need any command line tools also the dependencies are already considered and taken care of so for example if you want to stake on e2 then not only do you need to run the validator client but you also need to run the beacon chain and to run the beacon chain you also need to run a known ethereum node so if you just install the validator

client it automatically knows that you also need these other two dependencies and they're automatically installed as you can see here on the screenshots there's also a backup and restore of the crucial app data within the ui so one of the things that we did for example for ethereum 2 is that we created a key generation package so i don't know if you already are involved into staking on e2 normally you need to go to the to the launchpad website then you need to download a specific piece of software to generate your keys and so forth we wrapped all that in a package so you don't have to actually go ahead and do that and as you can see so here and there in my presentation i added some tweets

from from users that really confirmed that that they like this approach um and one other thing is that we we see that it's very important for users sort of to hold their hands so they want to have confirmation because even if you're staking eats no matter how rich you are i think dirty to eat is still a significant amount of money for everybody so if you're if you want to start doing that you only do this one time but it involves a lot of money so either you want to have some confirmation from somebody else that you're doing the right thing or you just want to to have somebody to hold your hand for you to just guide you through the process and make sure you don't make any mistakes in the process and that's why we have

sort of an always-on support through different channels and i will talk more about that we also are very proud to have a very welcoming community from alvaro now my talk is supposed to be about incentive models not about the avado in general so let's talk a little bit about those so in the evado in general we have four ways that people can benefit from from the avado and actually earn something back so the first one is sharing your resources since you've purchased a device like a computer that sits in your house next to your router you have devices 24 that's 24 7 on so that means you have like cpu you have disk

space available and you have bandwidth at your disposal so there are different applications that take use of that and if you just donate bandwidth if you donate disk space or do some calculations for it then you gain some tokens uh sync it is taking which is obvious sharing your avatar native resources and also providing user supports so let's talk a little bit about those four aspects so if you want to participate in peer-to-peer protocols currently we have these options which earn you tokens for running a dap so for example the mysterium network allows you to to turn your avado into an endpoint for vpn traffic so they all have a whitelisting policy and so forth

to make sure you're doing nothing illegal on your uh your avado but this is a way so here you donate your bandwidth in exchange for tokens the hopper network is also a privacy messaging protocol and then swarm probably doesn't need any introduction also communication file storage platform and then tornado cache is also privacy solution for for ethereum and you can participate with your avado by running a relayer and i will also explain it in more detail further on second possibility is to stake so we currently support two different chains um first is the ethereum two so you can

you can run an e2 validator on your avado and we also support the avalanche network now the big difference between staking with your own hardware and staking through a provider like an exchange for example is that with the avado you will have 100 of the rewards for yourself it's also a non-custodial solution so you're running everything yourself so you're not depending on anybody else to uh to run software for you and also um yeah so it's the way it's supposed to be and so the whole idea of blockchain is that people will participate in this and run this software at home and this is what we are

what we are enabling we also doing the same thing for the avalanche network so both of these of course they require stakes which is different to the other type of uh of incentives that we had the other ones they don't require a state they just pay you for sharing your resources the the third possibility is to share your avado native resources so there you can earn tokens by sharing this is something we are still setting up some of these are already live and some of these things are in development so as you can see here so it's we dubbed it to rio cloud rio is for run your own uh where all the resources that are on your avatars all the software that is running which has

the potential to share it with somebody else you can just like flick a switch and then it's you start sharing them with other people so you can share your ipfs nodes also your ethereum nodes and in a later stage also your beacon chain for example so that other people can can use that to run their validator this is a dashboard that we have for the for the different pools so here on the left side you see our tornado cache relayer pool so the way that it works is that if you enable your the sharing of your tornado cache relayer we will pull it together in this list and we'll create a load balancer that just has one end point that you see there on the top

and it is also listed on the ui of of tornado cache so if people use a relayer it might be that they bump into one of these currently 27 active backend nodes and we do the same thing for for ethereum rpc and so forth so i think you get you get the idea and then the last part i want to talk about is the the democratization of our support uh so we are trying to create some sort of a flywheel of uh support and it works very well and that's why i also want to uh to explain a little bit how we do it so what we do for each avalo that we sell we put a certain percentage of the of our gains into a support budget so which is just a

die account that we use and then we need to have certain people give support remember that i said it's important for people to hold their hands so somebody has to do that now there are two questions like who are you going to ask to give the supports and how are you going to organize the distribution of the support budget to these people um the way that we did it is so we have all uh different telegram groups with like one generic uh telegram group and then each dap has its own telegram group and we introduced a bot uh the avenue bot which allows people uh to give to say thank you if somebody else

helps them so it means that if you have purchased your avalo uh at the beginning you come to this channel you say i have some questions uh maybe they have a problem setting up their their upnp settings in their router or maybe they have they need assistance setting up their validator and so forth somebody helps them and then later on you can thank them for that and these bots will track all these all this activity and then at the end of of the month we do the accounting and we send the support budget to these people and it's a very interesting concept so we do it in a super transparent approach so we have like a public leader board so everybody who receives praise

gets it gets to see it and this encourages other people to also participate in this in this support and also because it's the bot is only active in the channels that we support there is a certain so let's say social coherence that prevents abuse from that so we don't need any specific smart contracts for that or anything so it's just this this group that keeps it together and it keeps it in place so further down on that page of the um um so the of the praises that are given you can also see why they are giving it um and you can see that also the people involved in this in this group they are very um they're very happy about it and

these are also the best people that we can imagine that would give support because they have a device themselves they've also enjoyed already receiving support from somebody else so they are not only are they happy to share their knowledge with other people but they also get paid for it so that's very interesting uh so to conclude uh it is our hope with uh with avado uh to make uh using blockchain applications more attractive for a larger audience so not only for developers but also people that just want to benefit and profit from these protocols and that we can sort of contribute a bit to more adoption of usability and diversity in this whole ecosystem

so that's what i wanted to talk to you about thank you very much maybe time for a few questions yes i'm curious about the uh i guess two parts the the operating system on the actual hardware itself and then how that how you think about attack surfaces that come from that uh what was the second part of this how do you think about attack surfaces that come from that obviously if you're running you know eth2 node or some sort of node you have key material on the machine yeah how's that being handled yeah so um first of all so can you repeat your first question as well

uh the operating system yeah so the base operating system here is just a linux linux machine and the the overlay on that is is based on docker so that means that you have all kinds so all these packages are wrapped in a docker container and luckily for us docker is sort of the industry standards so a lot of projects already support docker systems and so the system on that is just like managing these docker systems next to each other on your second question so the like the key generation for example these packages the the purpose of these packages is that you remove them so there's no like direct link to first generate the key and then immediately import it so we force people to download a copy of these keys and then remove the package

and only then install the like the validator clients and so you only have to upload the key for your staking so you have also other keys like the withdrawal keys and so forth and they never touch the device itself so that's maybe one part of the of the of the answer maybe second part is that um the machine also sits behind to your firewall so it's basically your internal network so you have the protection of your router and so normally all let's say ports towards the devices are closed by default and only those boards that are necessary to run the app so these peer-to-peer ports and so forth they are opened through upnp so that's another layer of protection that you have against

like malicious use awesome thank you okay any other questions if not thank you for your attention again so