ZKPodcast: Kusama, the Chaos Canary Network

Transcript

welcome to zero knowledge a podcast where we explore the latest in blockchain technology and the decentralized web the show is hosted by me Anna and me Fredrik this week we sit down with Nicole Chu from Paraty technologies to chat about the canary chaos Network they call Kusama before we start I have a quick favor to ask in order to make this show as good as it can be it would help us to

get some feedback from you or listeners I've added a link in the show notes to a short questionnaire if you are a long-standing listener or if you're pretty new to the show we'd really like to hear from you the forum is anonymous so feel free to share what you like and what you don't like about the podcast of course you can also always keep in touch with us on telegram and Twitter subscribe where you get your podcasts we share a new episode every week so looking forward to hearing from you and now here's our conversation about Kusama so in today's episode I'm going to be exploring this kind of special network called Kusama and to do

this I have a really great guest Nicole Chu welcome to the show thank you for having me and in this kind of special episode I'm also gonna have Frederik but a little bit like les as the co-host and more as a guest because Frederick and Nicole actually worked together at Paradis so hi Fredrik hello so I think our audience already knows Frederick pretty well I don't think Frederick needs any intro but Nicole I don't know you that well so I'd like to hear a little bit about how you kind of came to parity and what you do at Paradis and what your role is in the launcher I don't know management of this Kusama thing sounds good hello so I joined parity earlier this

year and as a dev and as a part of that evolution I was able to help the team launch who thought my network prior to joining paradigm I actually lived in Southeast Asia for about three years I used to head up a fraud and anti-money laundering department for a billion dollar fin tech and ride-sharing company for the past I think two and a half years ran a team fighting fraud and and I think in an ecosystem where certain infrastructure for example identity infrastructure and the government census was somewhat lacking

citing fraud is sort of like trying to stop a bullet with a piece of paper so in that ecosystem I mean a lot of things worked really well but it was very specific endemic things like you could get a sim card anywhere for fifty cents which for any kind of startup means you can sign up for an account and take advantage of all of the promos and things and you could also I think on the gray market purchased a passport for five dollars and used that to sign up for an account so individuals credit scores and also weren't really reliable so long story short I think during that process and researching what better

alternative infrastructure was out there I came upon Gaviota fred the team at parity and the web 3 vision which is hey let's move from won't do evil right and to can't do evil and so I saw this wonderful team that was building potentially the infrastructure that was going to power financial institutions identity entities of the future and that really felt like a idealistic pursuit so I was able to join the team earlier this year and slowly work towards that wow what a switch that's wild I want to hear so what is your role exactly when it comes to kasama are you building

Kusama are you working on it in a different way and curious to hear how you interact with Kusama in terms of the code contributions very minimal if everything according to the stack is a continuous challenge I'll be at a very great one for the Kusama launch itself I got to help out on that I think just three months into my time here so for that I played the role of a glue person so trying to provide everyone working towards this and it was a team effort it took probably the work of hundred people over the course of two years to really launch this with javis vision and so I was able to kind of go in between things and ensure that the

messaging came across the branding came across and folks knew what was happening cool so what is kasama then sort of this mysterious it's almost a test net but not quite a testament type thing before polka dot comes out what is Kazama it's a great question Kusama I think in short is a earlier release of polka dot network it's meant to be wholly experimental it's unaudited and it tries to achieve two things one is to help educate the market like most test nets when they're launched most most

protocols are launched with very bleeding-edge concepts very bleeding edge technology and we want to make sure that it works that it's secure that our assumptions are correct and as the complementary part to that also educate the community the many developers we're hoping can come on to the ecosystem and figure out their integrations and in other ways of interacting with our protocol so that was the first motivation from the team from gas on why we wanted to launch a earlier network I think the second motivation for Kusama and here's where well here is why we call it a canary or experimental network rather than just a test net here's where

it kind of kicks it up a notch is that when we set out to speck how the network how Kusama network will be launched we wanted it to resemble as much of the economic and market conditions of main net of poccadot network as possible and historically that's been very difficult to get with test nuts because it comes out as a test net you can use that the utility but the risk the reward the consequences and thus the incentive structures weren't there so it was a very interesting challenge for the team to work through of okay how do I get people to come into the network try to break things without introducing very contrived arbitrary bounties into this

network because research perspective any tiny manufactured incentive you put into this test net that fundamentally changes your assumption if you say hey everyone come in here and do collusion that's not something you're going to do in the actual maintenance no yeah thinking through you know how can we do that through accurate token allocations giving the same people Kusama token allocations as we give as whoever owns dots for the maintenance and other things like trying to make this as community-owned as possible not having a kill switch not trying to direct how this network evolves in the future why

not just do a regular game of stakes I mean this is this is the so far this is sort of the example of like how to launch a POS system and you see cosmos did it and then there's all these other networks that are running their own no game of stakes this seems to have become sort of standard yeah like what's wrong with game mistakes nothing is wrong with the game of stakes for what they wanted to do game of stakes was awesome it educated the market and that benefits all of us together a game of stakes I believe was structured to attract as many validators to the ecosystem as possible and by putting out bounty rewards it did it exactly that so from observing that from observing many other protocols and their test nuts we learned

that well how to be able to test this utility and the team has a lot of previous experience launching test nets we still wanted to do something a little bit different for Kusama and that we wanted to actually as closely as possible test the crypto economics and for blockchain technology that's the hardest thing to do but also the most important thing to do because the economics is completely tethered in to the technology and into the code you can't test one without the other so in that sense we refuse to call it a test net and we try to put in as much specs in stimulation as naturally as possible so for Kusama people are acting from a

general kind of incentive to accrue as many tokens as possible or to accrue as much power as possible and to lose as little as possible cool so I guess comparing and contrasting to past test net efforts if you look at something like rinkeby or like the etherium proof of work test nets there isn't necessarily a kill switch either but it starts with a blank slate right where you just say here's a completely new network it has the same no disa theorem but it's just starting from scratch if you look at the parodies theorem Testament then we had control over the valid it was a py network so we had control over the validators and

could just shut down then I worked if we wanted to now we've migrated it to external community volunteers but yeah it's still usually how test nets rotten rightness like start from scratch just test that node software itself but really like to Nicole's point it doesn't really test the game theoretics of it so it's an interesting challenge to see how how you can if you can test game theoretic said alright what we've just kind of covered is like the difference between Kusama and the test nets out there in the in the world I think what I'd be curious to hear is you kind of mentioned like you want things to break but like what do you want to break a guy I don't exactly

understand what pieces like could I mean in some ways you could have things like the software could like could the node software still break is that also something that is like desired to break sure I mean that we've had it break a couple of times already although not through external efforts which is unfortunate is just our own right I mean would you want something like validator collusion are these things yeah for sure because if they collude they lose their tokens like in theory right that's the game theoretic properties that we want to test so the network should to some extent like you know to whatever extent possible be collusion resistance because if if validators can

collude to like double spend on Kusama the theory it it's not it necessarily one-to-one because not all dot holders have claimed their KSM and the engagement in the network is not necessarily that of the maintenance so it's still not a perfect environment and like the perfect you know production environment for a reproducible test case but if they can do it on Kusama probably they can do it on polka dot so yeah if they can do it on consumer then we want to know about that and change the protocols so that because again the token allocation is the same so the same investors who hold a percentage of tokens in polka dot me nut are currently reflected in Kusama

and because token supply is restricted and somewhat friction to get there on Kusama networks still fully incentivized to collude and get as many chasms as possible so there they are incentivized to collude on the testament correct if they colluded they'd be slashed on the test on on Kusama correct but they would be hopefully ok we've designed our smashing but then are they rewarded by the web 3 foundation for finding this awesome thing so that's where i think the game mechanics for Kusama is a little bit different okay so for Kusama network we didn't design specific bounties because when we introduced bounties into a test net we're not going to do that for the main net once we

launch maenette we're not going to say hey everyone come together with your friends and break our network so naturally by introducing a bounty into the test net we also break some fundamental human driven incentive structures and so for Kusama again going back to having the allocations match one to one and letting the network eventually evolve to take a mind of its own and having the community being able to take it in whichever direction bridging it into main net potentially tethering or having some kind of experimental utility value inkay SMS that is what fundamentally motivates the users of the network to still accrue as many KSM tokens as possible to your points of

collusion if they colluded and got slashed they wouldn't they shouldn't get rewarded because they didn't break anything right everything behaved less effective if they collude and don't get slashed they get rewarded by having having you know cheated the network out of some KSM yeah so that's the only case where they actually break something right where they don't get slashed okay what else do you want to test what else should break we want to test our design of governance so the exciting thing about polka-dot is that the on chain logic is upgradeable and it's upgradeable through this notion of a on chain governance

all right so every wiry controversial topic by the way quick context on that the way that the team has designed it is that it's a try camera'll governance structure where the public gets a vote there is a central council at the moment of 13 members who essentially get more of a weighted vote and now Gavin on Team have introduced this concept of a technical committee so if you've contributed any code to Kusama substrate polka-dot in the past you also get a vote so when all of those dynamics and the politics of that come together we are working with a lot of inherent assumptions what actually happens when you give these three governing bodies

the ability and completely kind of unstoppable because all of this logic is on chain to be able to drive the future direction of the chain so one of the things and the chaotic things that we're hoping to see happen on Kusama network is that people come on people play politics people try to run for office people tried to join the council and we want to see those dynamics play out joining the council right now and someone was actually pretty easy last time I checked you don't really need much KSM at all to get elected into the council but this is like one of the interesting things to test right is I mean I we also believe like if baccarat fails like the most likely thing to fail is

the government system and it is it is controversial for a reason and you know how do you test a governance system like it's insanely hard you're never gonna get the same participation as you would on a maintenance so how relevant is this test I don't know but like at the end of the day it's it's the best we can do I think and if it so I'd say if it fails on Kusama it wouldn't necessarily fail on polkadot but if it succeeds on Kusama it's pretty damn likely to succeed on coconut as well how many seats how many of these council seats are in the public I think for the first version of caselma that was released there were seven seats

and to Fred's point really anyone could come on campaign for themselves get enough votes to get onto a seat at the moment I believe it's 13 and odd numbers so that might increase to a couple more seats as we release new versions is there a limit the idea is that there's a limit do you know where that limit is I'm just curious like what this public group would be like it's like twenty one is it like fifty fifty is it a hundred is it like there's a political limit like you can't have a council of infinite science like it doesn't make sense but there's a technical limit as well because we're running this fragments algorithm to assign the the seats and it's relatively complicated to run like couldn't run this for however

many members like I don't actually know what the performance is and like what's a reasonable size for that it's probably larger than we'd actually want anyway one one last thing I did want to mention that does make Kusama timeline-wise a bit more chaotic than polka dot may not is that the time sequence of everything so for example when it comes to electing your members how fast they actually take their seats and going back to the whole validator activities how long your tokens are potentially bonded for before they are slashed all of that timeframe is reduced to a quarter of what we'll see on may not so this network is essentially running 4x

faster yeah and so through a lot of interaction and activity we can see a lot of these dynamics play out as if it's on speed that's cool so you're actually seeing like the crashes happening faster or the no crashes I think our developer community has been very happy about performance CPU usage has been good memory is running at 30% I think we talked to a couple of validator members earlier this week and they came back to us and they said performance wise Kusama network has been boring but that's a good thing that's what you want for your infrastructure when you're driving a car over a bridge this infrastructure you don't want it to be exciting sigh we've heard about

cryptographers cryptography is supposed to be boring that's what Joseph Furno said recently episode was one of those smart guys that we had on at some point yeah I think the most like the speed-up is more most interesting for the governance stuff again like because you can put in a proposal you can get everything elected and you can like get things through so much faster it's kind of you know had governance in a real-world setting you want to be slow like intentionally you want it to like there should be time to think about

things and whatever else like you need members of the public to come in and have time to see things so like things necessarily have to move slowly but if you just want to try out so then you don't really want to put all that burden on the process the thing is I don't I don't know part of me doesn't know how much time we should spend on this governance thing but I do have another question on this so you mentioned these three bodies and the governance this is sort of the governance of poccadot this isn't Kusama specific it was the public it was a technical council and then there was like a council of experts or what was that called that there's a general council so when we're talking about people who are getting voted into these

seats of by the public that's the general council okay the way that folks get into the technical council is in the past if they've contributed to either substrate or polka-dot repos then they have an additional weight as well maybe we can talk like a little bit more about that Technical Committee then because so the public the public votes in these council members that are on the council mm-hmm and the public is any token holder the Technical Committee is the is this group of people who've actually worked on the network so but how are they actually like there's lots of people who've worked do they also go through a voting process that has been I think so far automatically assigned and then in the

future they will go through a voting process I believe from reading the specs the council will have the ability to vote additional people in and out of the Technical Committee I see but the technical committee as it stands is it like parody employees right now or is it like mostly like if it's contributors I just picture like most of the people who've contributed so far it's community contributors okay and for the council itself remember the 13 seats that were talking about it's not actually on parity or foundation employees at the moment I think five of the 13 seats belong to community projects folks that are in some way shape or form working towards web 3/5 of the seats belong to

individual developers and researchers who've been able to rally some support from random token holders behind them um two of the seats I haven't been able to figure out who they are I think it's great that they're anonymous cool yeah and there's one left in that get great greatness though one lastly seed at the moment I think is gasps okay he still has a pseudo key during this transition period where Kusama network you can think of it like it's still being in staging once we get everything stable and calm then gavel flip a switch he will relinquish control of the pseudo key and then the network will truly belong to the public at that point in time the public any token holders could

gradually replay existing people who are seated on the council seats actually so what you've just spoken about you just sort of mention this like how you're releasing this thing so I kind of want to take a step backwards and look kind of at the beginning of this project to now like we're meeting today and kasama is live and there are validators but let's go back three months four months what was the beginning of this idea and how did you actually launch something like this because this is like launching a blockchain general if it's going to be live and it's not only it's not a test net it's not something that's gonna be changed in the future so how did that

happen how was the rollout so Kusama is a early release of so from a feasibility perspective all of the code and the functionality the team already had it was really a launch that the team had been gearing up to from the last two years of implementation and hard work so the initial release of Kusama Network I believe came out on August 23rd and it came out with a suite of the protocol node tools and it had a natively built governance that was proof of authority and along with that a lot of the very exciting features that the team had been

working on our hybrid consensus mechanism grandpa and babe the whole kind of upgradeable run run time upgradeable on chain blockchain logic promise was also a part of that release the initial notions of a nominated proof of stake validator a selection was also launched and some initial Inklings of pair chain implementations so for context in the polka dot ecosystem if you want to connect to the network of other block chains one of the ways you can do so has become a pair of chain and that was a much li anticipated feature so initial parts of those implementations were all released at the same time by kevin at him on August 23rd

cool and so but it wasn't fully it wasn't really all usable or there like person that were like I just remember it coming out but then being like but you can't do anything yet correct you can it's live but don't do anything you get yeah it was like yeah it's what we would call a soft launch right and it's the same as soft launches in most other networks usually other networks - soft launches for their maintenance but we did it for this and for some context like we had Testaments before this as well so there was Alexander test and we'll have for future tests as well but a test note yeah we already talked about the

downsides but it's also just like mostly ourselves running the infrastructure so the soft launch it still just us running this the infrastructure and then it's we can talk more about like where to go from there and how we get in external validators etc but it's still like you're putting it out there in a different way you like in a different environment and we did see different behaviors in nodes and network behavior and we tried to distribute the notes a little bit better and like we experimented on the technical side of like how we actually run this just in in soft launch mode so in soft launch mode the only thing you're testing basically

it's networking in consensus and once you're comfortable that they work and you know you know it'll stand up to actually adding external validators who suddenly very rationally and have shady networking and everything else then you know we were more comfortable making that switch so how long was that period so it sounds like like that was how you launched it was kind of coming off of this test net model it was still a POA Network how long did that stay the case I think if we applied milestones to how Kusama has evolved there just three main milestones to pay attention to one was

the initial release like I just talked about the second release came I think a few weeks after August 23rd and that one introduced a few new features that the team had been working on and then and that release was interesting because we were able to upgrade the blockchain without having all of the nodes go down and we deliver it on the upgradable one-time promise cool was that what else happened in that in that moment in that like upgrade we introduced more components of the governance mechanism so more features with the three different parties that we just talked about we enabled staking so up until the second milestone validators

or folks who had tokens weren't able to indicate their intent to help to secure the network so after that release people were able to be validators and start accepting rewards so that's currently happening on the network I think as a part of the validating there's another feature on the network called nominating so not all of us are going to invest in the time the money and the resources to set up our own nodes it's such a technically intense process so there's a notion of if you have tokens you can pick your favorite validators and put your money behind them or put your utility tokens behind them through a process of nominating so that was also turned on I believe in the last release

so now if you have any Kusama tokens you can actually select your top 16 most favorite validators and say any additional tokens they earn by securing the network I would get a portion of that as well and conversely if they get slashed and punished for bad behavior then I get a little bit of my stake taken away as well okay I mean the cut this is delegation in other networks I think correct most of our listeners I imagine are pretty comfortable with that what is kind of neat and this is sort of neat in the polka dot context and I guess in kasama too is this idea of having within the nominating process this decision to nominate to a bunch of different validators right and then

their sins and there's some sort of proportionate delegation or nomination right it's like correct how does that how is that working right like I know kind of how it was planned for polka dot I don't know if we ever covered it on the podcast but I feel like I've seen at least but how is it working in Kazama the way that we help people choose their validators is through something called fragments method I believe you can select up to 16 validators and then the function automatically distributes the amount of tokens between all of the different validators and some of the lovers and some of the math behind it has to do with you don't want to put everything behind the biggest validators because if they make a mistake you will get

disproportionally slashed more than if a smaller validator that you backed made a mistake conversely the amount of tokens that you would earn from backing a big validator versus a small one is actually equivalent so in the team's design of validation rewards and and punishments it pushes us towards a more equal incentive structure that pushes for as many small guys to be validators as possible and I think that's the fun quirky design motivation behind fragments how many validators are there now I think we've capped the network to 100

okay I'm very soon the team might up that to 150 some speaking with researchers I'm in don't quote me on this I think we can scale up to a thousand validators without any concerns or issues and of course for truly to centralize network the goal is to get much higher than that at the moment its cap to 100 we have 40 I think waiting in the pool mm-hmm and that's I mean I know that like if you look at the cosmos Network and I think if you look at a lot of the other POS systems hundred seems like it's a it's a nice place to be in for a period of time especially I think during testing and wanting to see some of behaviors leave what is that what's the challenge with going bigger like why

don't those networks that have been live for longer why aren't they bigger do you know yeah it has to do with well I can speak about one of the constraints on polka-dot network one of the biggest value propositions for becoming a pair of chain or use Pera threads and the network is that you benefit from pooled shared security if you join the network you get to share the same validators that are randomly allocated every cycle or so as the other chains so when you're a newcomer to the network this means that you can actually trust all the messages and transactions and the proof of truth that the other

chains are claiming conversely I think from a performance perspective and Fred can definitely get more detailed on this is that for every additional validator you introduce into the network you're exponentially scaling the amount of messages each validator would have to relay you are having to have each of the validators store more data because they're eventually going to be randomly assigned to every to every block chain at one line not exponentially but quadratically at least quadratically but yeah like if you're running a classical pbft tender mint style consensus then the network overhead is such they can't

really run much more than 100 and so you need to like get creative and how you solve the networking problems and like introduce other things and that's why like the etherion consensus is this super complicated BLS aggregation of signatures to them they're kind their goal is still I have like four million validators on day one or something I don't think it's like that many but yeah something like that anyone with 32 eathe that's what I heard yeah so I mean on our sides like Nicole said there's not that much limitation in the protocol we think we can go pretty high implementation wise we want to do some changes to networking before we really crank it up thousand plus but we

haven't really benchmarked it like I wonder if we've cut around 1,000 right now we might be able to that's I mean this this issue of networking we've talked about a bunch of times on the podcast before is this I mean is this something that the Kusama testing is also doing like is this something that you're trying to break with kasama to see like is the networking that is in place gonna manage more validators or yeah is the furnace the chaos Network project sort of related to this to some degree so we're working on a test suite that we hopefully open source as well to basically on a nightly basis like on any build of the particular node spawn up a

thousand nodes and 100 of them are validating and then he introduced a bunch of chaos in the network like networked chaos like dropping packets or disconnecting notes even you know in in the future hopefully introducing nodes behaving with Byzantine faults like double signing or withholding information or whatever we can think of and it runs this whole mess out test suite on a nightly basis so it's not directly like to address just networking or like saying can we run a thousand because that's a relatively easy benchmark to make like as a once-off but then there's so much other stuff that

goes into this so if we're also thinking about like why is the validator set what it is well it's in part how many validators in the world are there there are competent enough to run that like a validating service if we had a thousand right now could we track the thousand good validators probably not especially not on Kusama maybe we can on or hopefully we can on polka-dot otherwise we've probably failed but on caselma like there's naturally just less interest so how many good validators can there really be but yeah there there's a lot of considerations and so like what you tested how far you go in these things I would hope that like in the future because Alma sticks around and it is a

place where we can do more crazy like I mean it ventually it won't be up to us right like it'll be a community managed network so we will have to make a governor's proposal to say hey let's increase the validators that's a 1500 and save things break but I hope we can do some more crazy experiments with Kusama what other kind of like so I think I think I'm still trying to get I'm trying to get my mind around what an experiment is on kasama so we've mentioned a few it's like governance experiments it's like maybe seeing how many validators although it sounds like there's some other product there's some other kind of project focused on experimenting on that front but what else could you do what else

could break I think the most interesting experiments come with reward and consequences so once the network enters into the third milestone which is when all of the features will be fully unlocked and as a part of that I think the democracy module as well as the ability for accounts to transfer tokens to each other will be enabled and I think the Treasury will also be enabled and that's where I think the experiments could get very interesting the idea of the Treasury is that it's a big pot of tokens the network has a natural inflation and for every era a certain percentage of the tokens that happens as a part of inflation gets paid to

validators and then the remaining goes into this big pot of tokens and so as a community member or anybody who holds even one Kusama token you can make a proposal for how you want to use the tokens in that Treasury and so we've had some ideas come through so there's a there's going to be a Kusama art competition we're kind of leaning on Kusama whole imagery of being very chaotic glitchy hot pink everywhere who's going to be a monthly art competition and the winner of that competition could potentially get 4,000 kazama's which is more than enough I

think to apply for a validator slot if their art piece wins it's almost like I mean is that the tote the Treasury then is a bit of a founders reward or something like this this is the topic we constantly bring up here this is sort of like the Treasury is this just on kasam Mars it's already built into polkadot as well it's built into poke it on as well but I guess like what will kazama's dealings with that show you like kind of what are you looking for I mean one thing to obviously look for is will people just exploit it I mean especially as its handed over if there's so many theories and if we talked about vote-buying and like all of the writings of Phil Diane

and like the the major are like opponents of unchain governance they all say like no other system can't work because there will be like outside the blockchain systems that will corrupt everything and I'll off all the parts so if you have a Treasury with a lot of money in it you know according to their theory there should be some outside vote-buying or whatever to basically say just take all the money into this Treasury hmm there are a lot of ways to take advantage of this big pot of tokens ideally what we love to validate and the original I think intent behind something like the Treasury is that the community will use it to fund their projects that contribute as a part of the ecosystem

for a long time and I think for those of us who do contribute to open source we do it in our spare time we don't get paid for it and it's really something that we do in addition to making a living in this vision of web 3 the team has that shouldn't be the case you should be rewarded for your contributions and ideally through governance and everyone being able to get a vote we will trend towards the more optimistic end of the spectrum rather than abusing the Treasury though for all intents and purposes in Kusama network if either happens we'll be very glad to see it because it teaches us something new yeah that's a real best this is super interesting to see this

particular case in action because this is something that like we've we've talked about a lot people have theorized about we've seen a few founder reward type things in practice but those were usually controlled by a small group of like very you know very community-oriented people who've like you know seemingly acted in very benevolent ways but like replace those people with non benevolent people or malicious folks as people and then you don't know how it works so this is gonna be totally interesting will the Treasury like who decides on the Treasury is it the public voting is it the council voting is that the technical council is that anything to do with that with those two groups that you mentioned in the just before I

might be wrong here but I believe at the moment it goes through the same voting process as any upgrade correct oh wow but that would be really intense if you're talking about like all these like this is almost like you'd have grant proposals and then it yeah like if it's gonna be give me 10 bucks for making this PR then it's probably a bit much something else yeah if we're talking about grant proposals like larger you know give me 10 K to build this thing or 100k or something then I think it might hopefully it would still be reasonable I wonder like has has the team been looking closely like what's what Aragon and like that because they they do that

like for every single grant for even like the team's building I argon itself like the marketing team like every element of a company in their assist in their network has to apply for these I don't want mean not really grants but like for funding and then it's all voted on in this very very kind of on chain way so like if the vote comes through that you know the marketing department gets their funds then they get their funds and it's really I mean it's interesting to see but I'm wondering if do you consider the Treasury Adele do you consider the Treasury allocations Dow activity some way this yeah depends on what how you define the tile is it an organization mm-hmm I mean forthright or D all right I guess

it's like really similar to the original like vision of that out that crashed and that was the same thing right try to collect a bunch of money and fund projects with them and just vote on what gets funded I will kind of want to go back to the public and maybe define the different levels like of actors so we you said the public is everyone who has token even one token correct so that's like every polka-dotted dress basically are there other actors like you have the token holders you have the node operator you have the validator you have the councilmember on the public council you

have a technical council member are there any other roles I guess you have the NAM well the nominators would be public anyone with a address can delegate or can nominate are there other actors in the kasama Network as the final upgrade or not the final one but the next upgrade for Kusama comes out and again once the transfers are activated really anyone in the public can go to our somewhat frictions faucet but be able to get a Kusama so I think the public ownership of parts of the Kusama network will grow like there I'm just trying to

imagine like what roles can people expect to you to have in the future if they're participating in this like yes you can be a developer building things on top of it you could be a trader sending things between but are there like sort of sub organizations or like I'm trying I'm just I don't know how like are there gonna be pools are there gonna be I guess that's sort of part of what we're trying to find out as well and you described all the obvious ones and I think those are all there but yeah what like subgroups or sub organisations will form I'm not sure one thing I'm particularly curious about is once you can deploy a pair of chain

we have this sort of notion of there's a startup and they're building a blockchain and they're just gonna build that as a person to deploy that I think that's how the vast majority of pairings will happen but it's not a super exciting way to build a pair chain it's not that far from the traditional VC model of building a startup what would be a lot more exciting if there was like a grin like community that just came together and like got some funding crowd funding to buy a slot or something and did something cool with it and like there's like this anonymous set of people who managed to get a pair of chain and you know fulfill some vision

that would be that would be nice but you know will this happen that's also part of what we hope to see out of kasama and like there's also like in less than in if this is something that we want to happen what can we do to encourage this behavior and like try to make it easier to crowdfund or whatever else so in parts we're also trying to look for things that we might want to add to poke it off these players that were just listed how do they like where are they actually interacting like are there forums is there a chat like what is it all on github where is this happening so far it's been pretty decentralized okay

have a lot of community teams that are building great forums great UI to foster a lot of this interactivity at the moment I think categorizing it by the most amount of interaction it's been on Twitter Riot reddit yeah it's been quite distributed although I think geographically it's clustered so we see the beginnings of kind of back and forth between validators clustered in North America versus here in Europe and for some of the validator is running they're set up out of China they definitely go towards more of a pooled validator consortium model because depending on the regions the investment is set up

that type of infrastructure takes a lot of upfront effort hmm yeah that was actually my next question was like who are the validators like you've sort of mapped them out in a way there are some groupings but are they mostly so far like professionals are they teams that you know are validated on other networks already or what do they look like it's a so far it's been a very even spread of experts consortiums that have dedicated Talent researching these things and never getting slashed and potentially signing agreement with larger holders to ensure that that doesn't happen for us going back to our

previous point of that fundamentally the rewards and slashing mechanisms on polka-dot network encourages the smaller players to come out anybody can set up a note as long as you figure out the setup so that you don't get sloshed all the time and get an equal amount of delegated or nomination votes so we also see a very large longtail of people we don't know all around the world we just saw this world map infographic and it is really evenly spread all around the world with one node operating out of Cape Town another one mysteriously in the middle of the Pacific Ocean but very wide distributed cool are there but like so this this idea this is actually I

mean I think we talked about this I heard about this distributed validator breakdown and how you'd like delegate across the spread but like then are there like how do you have a big validator then because it sort of sounds like there are no big it sort of sounds like an evening force where I like it I mean that's what it's trying to do but what a big validator actually means is that you run for multiple validator slots oh I see you're kind of saying like I'm a big player and I've over subscribed this validator slot I'm gonna start a new one like I'm both this guy and this guy so vote for both of us would because they're both me cuz I see so you could take over things that way

but the danger is that people do that without saying it and just like pretend to be multiple people but they're actually the same but the hope is that people will either see through that or there will be some analysis tools in the future to see that how tokens transfer or whatever else but and this is this is one of the things that we want to see you know the behavior of in an actual economic environment correct and I think to further prevent that eventual clustering because human incentives wise we all want to put our money with a most reliable infrastructure there are more punitive details that go into how slashing works

I believe in in terms of like the most egregious punishments at the top it's definitely if you're a double finding something at the very bottom of the spectrum its if you go offline in the middle I think somewhere in the middle is if to Fred's point the multiple slots that you've occupied they all behave similarly meaning you the the specific footprints and the traces that you leave in terms of how you validate and behave on the network and like what your downtime is correct yeah yeah when those things are aligned and it's similar the slashing will be a bit higher than normal what are you yeah so this is like pollution resistance slashing basically

if one person goes offline one time it's fine they're you know they're not gonna lose much or anything and but if like close to a third to go offline at the same time then it's you know a potential disaster for the network and they will get slashed close to 100% I mean this this could be problematic for any of the groups that are using like some specific cloud provider correct server location that if that goes offline and every validator that happens to be holding their validation know the time we encourage people to not host everything in the same place and punish them if they do what do you make I mean I'm curious to hear what kazama's engagement

is with those validator services that are emerging do you want them to participate on the network or do you not I think when there are resources going into setting up a team getting the right infrastructure investing enough research and time into making your infrastructure truly robust it ultimately adds towards securing the network so it's all about having an evening effect having a proportion of validators that are highly specialized and one of the interesting in the Effects of this and this come came from some user interviews with how certain

dynamics are already starting to happen around Kusama Network some of these very professional validator services actually promised the token holders who delegate their tokens to them in the event of slashing they will sort of take on that responsibility so the indirect effect of that is wealth number one the network is more secure but number two more people are attracted to this ecosystem because the services you are getting for owning a stake in this protocol is much better and it's a better experience and if you're a big well investor or if you're just an individual who holds one or two tokens you want that experience so

ultimately I think having those entities is great but not having them dominate the network through some of the incentive structures we put in place is good because we've also learned from observing other protocols where all of the power and all of the stake ultimately aggregated towards these validator consortiums yeah I mean I've been in a room with four entities that controlled basically all of the existing proof of stake networks not as super pretty seen if you believe in decentralization but I think this is a larger problem that goes back to like token distribution as well and like a lot of other things like that how do you get better at stokin distribution like

how do you like this is a core problem of proof of stake and why there are still people who prefer proof of work because it allows anyone to like come in at ground level or as proof mistake it is necessary to buy in so you need to have money in the first place what I want to hear now is a little bit about this last phase we sort of you like you mentioned that there's this phase coming but like when is that phase what's the plan for that phase because like right right now what what can we do right now we can validate nominate claim your dots blame your crew Selma's claim Kusama run for Council okay yeah that's that's mostly it but

then there's all sorts of things that we can't do yet like we can't even you can't transfer Kusama correct I think what I understand from the team is that's kind of major release is coming up soon for the past 14 15 days I think there's been daily releases so if you pay attention to our github you'll see every day there are new things coming out but I think if we had to put a stake marker in the ground for this large milestone for when Kusama turns from something that is somewhat still pseudo controlled into fully decentralized fully owned by the community and I think that release might be coming soon and what you'll get with that is

complete access to all of the modules like you mentioned the ability to transfer the public Fossett will be open so anyone interested in participating on the network will be able to get some snake folks will be officially able to take advantage of the Treasury like we talked about previously and I think a lot of the on chain politics will start happening in full force so ideally we'll help folks from the community submit proposals to upgrade the code on chain there's also some community ideas to do a Kusama treasure hunt so every month in a very ready player one way kind of

different challenges go up and really I think when all of the features get released you'll be able to do anything because you'll be able to vote on decisions and then you'll be able to payout based on those decisions so given that recipe you could really do anything cool looking back over this experience maybe looking for what do you think is the biggest challenge of releasing a new network into the world yeah I think there's definitely technical challenges but but we're lucky to have a really maybe maybe single challenge there's a hard question maybe just some challenges that may be an unconventional challenge I think there was a bit of a branding challenge because we wanted to release this early experimental chaotic thing

and set expectations that we want to break it together but at the same time also have some can reward that's not contrived so we didn't want to put concrete bounties into this program I mean ultimately we came upon this very chaotic again hot pink super experimental expect things to break narrative and we weren't sure if that was going to resonate with folks and but once we launched it so far in the past three months it's it almost feels like Kusama has developed a little bit of a cult following that's kind of what you'd want from something like a chaos Network yeah that messaging really resonated with hackers all around the world and there are very many quirky

things that come as a result of that for example this past Halloween there was a trending hashtag called hashtag bleeding edge where people just made these quirky Kusama gifs and memes and to talk about the network and they all shared it on social media there's a campaign going around for people to get caselma tattoos to get the Hat canary tattooed on themselves yeah so so very interesting behaviors have come around this branding and I think that was a very nice surprise for the team cool all right well thank you so much for being on the podcast and sort of helping to get

inside this mysterious chaos canary network called Kusama thank you for having us and to our listeners thanks for listening thanks for listening