Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Devcon4 Recap – From HODL to BUIDL

Episode Date: November 6, 2018

It’s that time of year again, Devcon time! Just as the conference was wrapping up, we sat down at the Prague Congress Center for a Devcon4 recap. Join Brian, Friederike, Sebastien, and a surprise guest host as we share our thoughts on the event, and how the Ethereum ecosystem has evolved since we last met in Cancun. Topics covered in this episode: Devcon4 compared to Devcon3 Changes to the Ethereum Foundation management Serenity (Ethereum 2.0) roadmap The shift from HODL to BUIDL The apparent departure of ICOs from the landscape The growth of grant programs Brian’s talk at the Generalized Mining panel This year’s emphasis on security Web3 Summit in Berlin the previous week Episode links: Devcon4 website Devcon3 recap episode from Cancun Thank you to our sponsors for their support: Simplify your hiring process & access the best blockchain talent . Get a $1,000 credit on your first hire at toptal.com/epicenter. Deploy enterprise-ready consortium blockchain networks that scale in just a few clicks. More at aka.ms/epicenter. This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/260

This episode of Epicenter is brought you by TopTal. Experience a new way of hiring as TopTal delivers only the top 3% of applicants, including highly skilled blockchain engineers. If you're looking to scale your team with the very best talent, visit TopTal.com slash Epicenter. And by Microsoft Azure. Configure and deploy a consortium blockchain network in just a few clicks with pre-built configurations and enterprise-grade infrastructure.

Spend less time on blockchain scaffolding and more time building your application. To learn more, visit aka.ms. slash epicenter. Hi, welcome the epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and startups driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution.

My name is Sibbaisankwitou. My name is Brian. I'm Kiddali Kahnst. I'm Ackholt. So, if you can't tell, we're here in the beautiful city of Prague. The sun's coming down, so we get a couple of minutes of this scenery.

But yeah, So we're here at DefCon, just on the last day, actually, they're about the closest place that we hope they're not going to kick us up while we're reporting this. And so Brian, Federica, and myself from the episode team, we're here. And fellow podcaster Arthur Falls was roaming around.

And so we got them to hop on board with us. It's an absolute pleasure. Happy to have you here with us today. Yeah, so people are making noise over here. we'll ignore them. Hopefully we cut them out. But yeah, so we wanted to give you sort of a, you know, a hands-on podcast episode about DevCon. It's really fresh in our minds since we're still here.

Some of us have attended talks, others less. But, yeah, so hopefully you'll get a good overview of how the event went and how things are sort of evolving since last year when we were in Cancun. So I guess the first things we've mentioned is we had our first meetup here in Prague, right down the hill in a tiny little bar. And yeah, it was great. What did you think? Yeah, it was lots of fun finally, you know, meetings.

Well, I mean, we're often meeting listeners all the time, right? People say, oh, love the podcast, but then doing actually a meetup and getting people coming together and turning up exactly for that. It's great. You know, one guy was very grateful because he said his lawn is perfectly well mowed and without us it wouldn't be you know since you always listen to it and moving his lawn and uh with lots of really great people so yeah it was fun and we should do this more often yeah yeah i i i feel like every time we meet listeners i'm like we have the best

listeners like they're just just nice and humble and they're super appreciative of what we do very human yes they're all human listeners yeah how things work in new zealand do you have it's uh yeah it's a It's a very different seat. It's a lot of sheep, maybe? Actually, that was the 90s we've moved into dairy. Okay. So I'm milk solids now, it's cows. The sheep thing.

Yeah, so, I mean, I think we'll likely be doing more meetups when we're traveling to events and stuff, so I look forward for those. And the other thing that is on everyone's mind here is the parties. You know, what did you think of the? parties. I mean that's like one of people coming here, right? They've been actually really good. It was really weird the Casper one because there was this

separate like VIP section. It was a bit weird. But the Casper one was pretty cool. That was last night. Rewened myself there. And then the, um, the, and what was it before that? RaveCon. Yeah. Which was awesome. The music was pretty intense. Actually, the whole scene was really intense. That was real cool too. Super grungy, like, you know, underground, weird, like, like, disused warehouse or concrete and exposed wires. It was cool. Yeah. I felt like,

I mean, I didn't attend many parties because I was feeling a little sick and tired from, from Web 3 the week before. But I felt like it was a lot less VIP-ish. Like, it was much more inclusive than, like, last year in Cancun,

which is, like, you really felt like there were these little islands of people going off and doing their own thing, whereas here it was kind of like, you know, much more... Yeah. Kankoon was weird. I mean this is this gets into the difference between between the two different events right DivCon 3 and DevCon 4 you know DevCon 3 we're in the middle of the hype cycle and there's all this money getting thrown around there's DevCon 4 has been a little bit humbler an event

definitely and um yeah it's that uh that the example of um of how there's how Biddle has become this new thing where Hoddle was the meme of the event at DevCon 3. So yeah, I think it's been amazing. And I suppose the parties were way more inclusive. It was weird to actually notice that there was a party with a VIP section, right? Whereas I think in Cancun, that was probably more the norm. Yeah. Yeah, I agree that last year we were sort of in the hype.

I mean, one significant difference I think here is that we haven't seen a single sort of project going around promoting their ICO, which was pretty present last year. I mean, although it was kind of like, I think, coming towards the end of the hype, so there was like a lot less than like the months leading up to it. But like here, it's been really like you say, it's all about biddle. It's all biddling. And yes, we'll get into that. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I don't think ICO, I didn't see it mentioned anywhere. There was only one thing, it's sort of, you know, very much reminded me of last year. So if you went around Prague, there's these posters everywhere, and it's like blockchains.com,

and it's something like, I don't know, the future is ours or something. We're done waiting. We're done waiting. We're done waiting. Yeah. It's finally here. If you look at the website, it's all. like, you know, the future must be more democratized, you know, blockchain's changing the world,

and it's completely like, you know, vague and nebulous. It doesn't talk about, you know, which blockchain where, with what, how, you know, no. What's changing? Yeah. But I, yeah, so that, that feels like a little bit, this, you know, sort of remainder of people who somehow, you know, got a huge amount of money and you know although they're apparently trying to build some kind of city in the desert in Nevada using blockchain yeah yeah obviously so maybe I'm wrong and it's going to turn into a wonderful place I feel like I want to go on vacation there what do you think like compared to last year I actually liked that there were a lot of technical deep dives this year so I've had like last year there were a lot of projects who gave an overview of what they were going to do

And this year, a lot of projects actually went into way more depth and were very specific about what they had already done and what they had already built and where they were at. I really enjoyed that. It's been a good death fun. And I think you and I are probably the ones on this panel that I have seen the most talks. What were your favorite talks? I really enjoyed Josh Stark's talk. He gave a high-level overview on Level 2 scaling solutions. Yeah, that's a level 2.

It's great. You saw it too? So basically it was perfect for technical and non-technical people. So there was something for everyone, and I think it was recorded, and you can actually watch it after the fact. And I would recommend it to anyone who was interested in level 2 at home. Yeah, it was a good introduction to level 2 for anyone who sort of like,

Here is this kind of nebulous term level two and also like compares it to other solutions like off-chain solutions that aren't necessarily level two and like really kind of frames the thing and I thought it was really nice too One of my favorite talks I really like this this parasitic labs talk Prismatic labs Prysmatic labs Phrismatic labs talk Just a few Close to know.

It starts in a piece. Yeah, yeah. This afternoon. And so they're working on an Ethereum 2.0 client. And apparently I've received a grant from the Ethereum Foundation. Yeah. And our building's really impressive client. So that's been one of the major topics, I think, this year is Serenity.

Yeah. We're not calling it East 2.0. It's Serenity. And so Vitalik sort of laid out the vision. for Serenity at the very top of the conference. And so we saw a lot of that coming in this year. I think like last year, last year, you know, we saw the like sort of beginnings of Casper.

There were, I felt last year that, like, I was sort of seeing a lot of dev tools starting to emerge. So you could, like, you know, build your DAP with, like, if you were, So like taking all these different dev tools and putting them together in a stack, you kind of could configure your stack to start building a app, but it was still required quite a bit of work. I felt that this year we started seeing things kind of like mature come together. Like the Ethereum roadmap is now pretty set.

But then also those like other stacks that are starting to become mature, like the Cosmos SDK will be really soon. you know, substrate, which demonstrated last week at Web3, also here. So, like, things are kind of like coming together, maturing. And I think what I'm looking forward to next year is now, like, seeing what people will be building with these stocks. Yeah. And that's sort of my takeaway. Yeah.

I mean, following if you're, you know, sometimes more closely, sometimes less closely. you know, a few months ago, maybe it was six months ago or something like that, maybe a little a little bit less, right? They did this big announcement of, you know, kind of reshuffle completely their, you know, roadmap. And so I think there's been a perception a lot that there's, you know, really a lack of clarity or direction in Ethereum and they keep changing their plans. But then I do have the impression and they have to impression. For example, in this Prismatic Labs talk too, that, you know, there's a,

it seems to be more clarity now, and there really are a lot of teams working on it. So, yeah, I think it feels like they're moving pretty quickly towards having, you know, finally some kind of scalable

Ethereum, which I guess had been working on for many years, but now it seems like it might actually come closer. But I guess we'll see, you know. But pretty quickly is, I mean, it's not that quickly, right? I mean, basically, they're not even saying it's going to happen next year anymore. It's going to happen 2020 for sure.

Yeah, yeah. And actually, I'm a little bit shocked that it's taken this long so far. No, but because they've been saying 2020 and then I was like, it's probably 2022. And now I'm watching this. Maybe it will be 2020, 2021. But is that good enough? I mean, do you think that's good enough, Brian? You know, I have no idea.

I don't think it's very good. I think they should, yeah, it's problematic, right? Like, there was a time when this got pitched as an application platform, and people started making business decisions around using Ethereum as an application platform. And they have not actually received the fundamental infrastructure piece they needed to make those businesses a success. that was a scalable blockchain platform. And this is what's led to all these other projects spouting up, right? And I don't mean to shell anything I'm involved with,

but things like Neo and China and EOS and Tesos, all of these different protocols emerging because there's been a frustration with the pace of development and people have made business decisions around a decentralized future and people just haven't been confident in the Ethereum roadmap. I mean, the Ethereum Foundation for someone who's meant to be building basic infrastructure is very decentralized. And a fairly decentralized organization is not always the best at churning out good results quickly. And I think we're seeing that. Yeah.

I mean, I think we will see, I mean, I agree with you. I think we'll see in the next year probably a lot. I mean, I guess we'll maybe. So I think Cosmos is probably going to launch in, you know, maybe January, February. So that's definitely close. Now, okay, first the Cosmos Hub launches. So that's not yet a replacement for Ethereum, right? So until they have then, like, Etherment launch.

It's probably also going to be like middle of next year until that's there. And then substrate or polka dot there, you know, maybe end of next year, definitive some point. So, I mean, I suspect actually probably by the end of next year, maybe there will be more clarity, right? Maybe we'll have some of the first platforms that, you know, are viable alternatives to Ethereum. And, you know, Ethereum probably also will have a better idea about, you know,

how far away they are from actually delivering, you know, Ethereum 2.0. Although, that being said, I've had the impression that maybe one of you can correct me, if I'm wrong, that plasma chains seem more feasible and that maybe that will see

already before. So sort of kind of scalable Ethereum side chains. Maybe. The thing about plasma chains is you've got this challenge period, right? And so you need to come up with a decentralized mechanism. It doesn't actually have to be decentralized, but you have to have some

mechanism for you have to be able to fit that challenge period into your ux right if you want to take tokens or whatever off a plasma chain and so that's an interesting ux hurdle that hasn't really been tackled that's like an exotic challenge so that's something i'm a little bit interested to understand about placement chains we'll see how that gets off did you go to kalfler's talk i didn't You didn't. So he actually gave a really succinct description of all the different plasma versions. I don't know whether you can keep track because I confuse them all the time like plasma cash, PLasma MVP, debit, prime, whatever. So basically he explained what the exact differences are between all of them and which challenges they face. And it was a super good talk.

So I think that was also recruited. So it seems I'm the recommender today. Recommender of recorded talks. So Carl Flesh, go watch it. Hiring is stressful. Let's face it, it's a long process of sifting through resumes and interviewing candidates without any guarantee of quality. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Companies all over the place are experiencing a new way of hiring with TopTal. If you go to their trust pilot page, you'll see that of the hundreds of people that have left reviews over 98% were four or five-star ratings, including one guy who wants to give his developer a bear hug. That says a lot. TopTal gets all this great feedback because they focus on their clients

and their top priority is quality. They only accept the top 3% of applicants, including highly skilled blockchain engineers. One of these engineers is Roddek Ostrowski. Roddak has experience as a lead software engineer and data scientists for Sony and Expedia. Then he discovered blockchain and he became totally consumed with Ethereum.

He worked as a consultant for the firm Start On Chain and his time-locked app won the Top-quarter consensus U-Port and Identity blockchain hackathon. Then he expanded his reach through TopTal. He worked with a bunch of clients on projects such as smart contract development and a POC that leverages blockchain. If you want to hire engineers like Roddock for your team, go to TopTal.com slash epicenter for a no-risk trial. A TopTile director of engineering will deliver your next hire in as fast as 48 hours,

and you'll get $1,000 credit when you decide. to hire. We'd like to thank TopTal for their supportive epicenter. Coming back to the foundation a little bit, so this was the first time that we saw Ayah Miyaguchi speak in front of DefCon as the new managing director of the foundation. And at the beginning of the conference, she sort of laid out what the vision was for the foundation moving forward and that vision appeared to be one of

sort of like more mindfulness in the way the foundation grows and the way that the foundation invests resources whether that be through grants or like hiring people on the foundation what were your thoughts on sort of like this new direction

I love it I think I think I is amazing like you know she's she's just super confident manager I mean, the foundation did need, like, strong leadership. And, yeah, I mean, it's, well, you can see it just in the fact that we've got stuff happening now, I think. Like, you know, the fact that we're seeing, like, we have a sense of forward progress rather than this kind of weird stasis that it's felt like we've been in for so long.

Yeah, so I'm stoked. I think she's awesome. I also think Aya is great. but to me it seems so basically she had this tagline beauty and subtraction so basically it seems like she wants to shrink the foundation into basically I think I think that's that's it's I think that in principle is a cool thing so basically saying the ecosystem has to stand on its own and we want to get the ecosystem to a point where it doesn't really need the foundation for all that many things I think

that's great I'm just not sure whether we're at that point yet So I think at this point, I think we still need a strong foundation to actually get stuff built. I 100% agree. I think that I don't get it. I feel like the time for that talk would be after Serenity. So I think it's weird, but at the same time, stuff is getting done. So, you know. Yeah, I don't have an opinion on that.

Except that, you know, for many years, the criticism of the foundation was, no, it is not doing, nearly enough. Because there's a huge amount of resources and you know Ethereum obviously wasn't you know performing in the way that people expected there was promised at the same time, you know, the Ethereum Foundation wasn't really funding stuff. Even a project like the second layer projects can get funding for like lightning or you know can rain in that kind of stuff from the foundation you could have had funding there and now that's changing right and I think you do perceive that there's much more momentum now. I mean, one thing that I think sort of addresses these concerns is that this approach that she has,

like, Kaisen, like continuous improvement. So whatever the case may be, I feel like it's sort of built into the foundation now that, you know, there needs to be this continuous improvement and this continuous like putting, putting everything back into question while at the same time being mindful of like where the foundation investment resources. I want to address maybe this point further, like sort of the ecosystem not needing the foundation necessarily to grow. And I think, like, really we're starting to see this in the form of all the grants programs that are, that we saw sort of appear here. So obviously the Ethereum Foundation has its grant program, like they said, I think $20 million, that they've now granted the 70 programs.

projects, consensus has its grant program, Genesis has its grant program, status, the Ethereum Community Fund. So there's a lot of money flowing into all these projects in the ecosystem. Maybe the ecosystem is becoming more decentralized in this way with like these sort of pillars that are funding all this innovation and all this development.

Wouldn't you agree? 100%. Yeah. Oh no, actually. No, I retract that. Consensus is 1,200 people now. I think that's like a bit concerning. I think that's like a major point of centralization.

Apart from that, though, yeah. And it does seem that all of this amazing work in Ethereum is actually being done outside the foundation rather than inside it, which, I mean, that's, which was always the dream. It was always to have the foundation go away. Yeah, that's it. The foundation should become a tiny smart contract.

Yeah. Yeah, they just dispenses money. I mean, one, yeah, so speaking of consensus, I saw, did anyone see Joe Loomond's talk earlier today? No, no. I mean, it was, it was an interesting talk. I think it may have been the first time it actually seemed to speak, not like on a panel. But yeah, so he came out and it was like a, I mean, he sort of read his talk, he had very much prepared it. But yeah, so he praised.

the ecosystem for continuously improving itself, like praise obviously all these consensus spokes that are building so many things, like Truffled celebrating its millionth download. And sort of like many people, I think, around sort of the observers of the ecosystem may criticize it for not having produced the killer app yet.

And, you know, his vision was that the killer app is, like, I think Vitalik said this, like, Death by a Thousand Cuts, right? So it's not like one killer app, it's like many small little killer apps that, like, together, you know, sort of like take down and centralized hierarchies and centralized systems. How many apps work? How many apps actually work? Death by a thousand cuts, too, fun fairs, one. But we have five cuts already. So, you know, like, 995 more to come. Right.

Yeah, that sounds sort of like a euphemistic way of like, of like watching over that there actually aren't any applications that have like large-scale usage interaction. Interesting choice of metaphor as well. Obviously, this thing's take time. But now we get to live, so, you know, it's okay. Yeah, yeah. Obviously, this thing is take time and like we're sort of starting to see now.

Okay, five apps is like better than. none I think. It is, and that comes in with the whole Biddle thing, I think. I think there's a very different vibe here of building rather than speculating, which was like, it was very cancunty. But I do think that

like, even like, well, consensus has done a huge amount of positive stuff in the space, it is concerning the sheer size of that organisation and influence, right? And I think that gets glossed over a lot in discussions about about the Ethereum community, just the sheer size of consensus.

It seems to be such a disorganized, decentralized, you know, organization, does it really have this, I mean, you know, if it was really 1,200 people, like, highly organized structure, you know, really have a tremendous impact or like kind of political influence, but that's not really my impression of, No, neither is in one.

It's just... It's a lot of people. It's a lot of people under a single banner, you know? And I also think the weight of consensus, as opposed to all the other projects combined, has gone down. So I think consensus was super early to this ecosystem, and they ballooned up really fast. But if you now look at all the other projects

that actually have very decent-sized teams, I don't think it's any longer the... Like the lion's share of, yeah, yeah, see what you're saying. Yeah, so another thing I wanted to speak out of your face. So it's actually exactly a year ago, or no, it was like the week after DefCon that Meher and I decided to start working on, you know, course one. So basically company building like validators and proof of stake infrastructure. And at the time, we didn't see anyone working on this.

Maybe there was like the one protocol guys, you know, later became best that had also started. and then on i mean very recently we had the podcast now with with jake from coin fund like a few weeks ago and then they organized together with like some other fun called cambill ventures this event on tuesday nights i was also speaking on a panel at that event about like you know generalized mining and that was very interesting to see just how that had become in like such a short time such a you know vibrant and it feels like its own little hyped subspace. So yeah, there was a panel where, you know, I was on there and then Axel from West, and then someone from Rocket Pool and then Adrian from Cryptium.

And afterwards, I said a panel with investors and they're all like, oh, what does this mean for us? How do we deal with this? I was just going to change. And then there was some different protocols for speaking like Life Pier and New Cypher. and it was completely packed. It was also interesting just how this has in such a short time becomes so much attention on this and so much activity around it.

Yeah, I mean, so I think also we sort of saw this here where like proof of stake has really become the way moving forward for network validation. And no one's really talking about like ways, that we can optimize, like, proof of work or anything like that. I mean, like, it's just not even being discussed anywhere. So, yeah, I mean, like, that seems to be, like, where things are going, and it's actually quite encouraging.

Yeah, well, proof of work was always a bit weird, right? Just the notion of just burning, putting all that effort into just pushing a rock up a hill. It was, yeah, it was bizarre. It was funny. I had a panel with, um, um, um, um, and Gensaira on it and he made the comment that like proof of work it's like incredible like it's this amazing idea it's really awesome it's it's got us to this point but we really need to develop new more efficient systems going

forward rather than something that consumes um half a percent of the world's like electricity production like you're joking it's like not a good it's not a like something to design in the direction of you know yeah yeah carbon cost and all that but But when I say something like that, I get attacked by like all the big, you know, Bitcoin Max makes you say it's helping drive the world towards sustainable energy. What? I don't understand the argument yet. Although last time I made an argument like that, I got bombarded by like, you know, 40 different things.

Read this, read this, read this, read this, they all disproved you. And they all proved that Bitcoin is actually good for, you know, making the planet more green and sustainable. So since I haven't read all of those things yet, I have to. Well, they're out there, right? Somewhere. Yeah. Staking tokens, they're also gaining from the other side, right? So basically a year ago, there were a lot of token economics that we as an ecosystem hadn't quite figured out.

And there were a lot of utility tokens. And I feel people are moving more and more away from utility tokens towards staking models. So I think this is also an area where staking is gaining ground. Yeah, you mean utility token as in sort of these application payment tokens. Exactly. Yeah. Maybe you want to talk more about, so during your panel, there was some discussion with regards to sort of like crypto funds and how they should in fact, like, I think like on the Coin Fund episode was discussed as well,

how they should in fact be, have a skin in the game in the networks that they're investing in. and like the role the validators play in that. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a bunch of things, right? So first of all, it's just that when you create these networks and you want to have certain behaviors in these networks, it kind of makes sense, right, that you compensate for these behaviors by giving tokens.

You say, okay, we give away new tokens for things that make the network better and function actually the way it's supposed to function. But of course, once you have that, and then as an investor now, all of us say, oh, but all of these new tokens are given away for performing these network functions. So even if they can buy

some percentage of the initial supply, they're like, oh, if we don't also engage in that, then we get deluded and all of these other have these upsides. So I think from that side, there's this sort of, you know, realization, okay, we have to engage in that. And we can't just like initially

put some money in and then we own a fixed percentage and then we kind of set and we haul it until the golden, the golden rainfall comes. So there's that and then I think another thing is that investors increasingly try to sort of position themselves as having, you know, providing extra value in that, right? They say, oh, we, you know, we don't just invest in the projects, but then we

also engage with the network and we're going to run notes and, you know, trying to sort differentiate as investors. So I think that that's a second thing. A second thing that's happening. I think another benefit, although I haven't heard that so much as a reason from investors, it's just that I think it will give you a much deeper understanding of these protocols when you actually engage with them in a way that you now have to run some infrastructure. And that probably helps you make much better investment decisions as well. So yeah, I think it's becoming some kind of trend. Now, personally, I'm still quite skeptical that most funds will do much in that direction. I think they'll maybe do some things, but I think the most part, it's just

not their expertise. They don't have really like developers or maybe they have like one or two people on staff. So some funds are obviously building out more of a, you know, development team and infrastructure team and maybe they'll do it to some extent, but I think many of them will end up having to, you know, rely on services provided by others. So this is the role that, you know, companies like course one, I guess, can play in that ecosystem. What do you think the future looks like of like synergies between validator, validating services, service providers and funds and like when do those maybe start to merge? Yeah, I mean, they certainly are merging to some extent, right?

So I think there's various validating companies to say, oh, we're also going to have a fund or then funds that say, oh, we're also going to run validators. And then there's some like us to, like, you know, we don't have any aspirations to run the fund. Because you can always kind of see the verticalization already where you have like a fund that would invest in a validator and the validator sort of like also sort of runs the validation for those for that fund, right? Like, yeah.

I mean there's certainly synergies and you know how exactly organizationally that will work whether you know there's some partnerships or it's just a service that's provided or whether they do both. I think all of those combinations will exist. I mean generalized mining is also a way of, as you're a lot of. said, a way of putting people off pure speculation. But then if it's a service that you can easily outsource to someone else, in a way you enable speculation again. So I think it's probably going to move into a direction where you can only contribute a very small part. So basically you will

actually have to contribute something else other than holding something or staking something, something that requires more input and more forethought. or more work in some way because otherwise you can now, in this model, you can then buy still a large part of the asset that you're talking about. You can just give it to someone else to do the generalized mining for you and they will stake it for you or do whatever you actually have to do to not be diluted.

But I think it's going to move in a way where you will actually have to do much more in order to not be diluted because otherwise you will close. of the system to newcomers, you will discourage newcomers from actually joining the system, and in any system that you actually want to grow, I don't think you can do that. You can't afford to do that. Yeah, I mean, I think in terms of like, okay, how much do you have to do from these services, I think that there will be huge variance between networks.

So, okay, there's staking, and staking may be, you know, it's not as trivial, but again, that's also going to vary between networks. But then if you have these some other things like maybe you have these token created registries or some some projects, you know, let's say with Ocean, there's some kind of AI type thing or off-chain computation. So I think there's a, you know, or let's say life here down the line when there's people, you know, significant people using it for transcoding. Then maybe you have this GPU farm operation for transcoding. So I think there's going to be a lot of different things that. But in the end, they just have to get. get performed for the network. I mean, that's really the goal. Who does it? Doesn't really matter, right? Provided it's a distributed number. It's provided the provision is distributed.

Yeah. Well, even that probably depends on the use case, right? So let's say in like, for example, like live here, does it matter that there's many different, that the transcoding services distributed? Maybe not really. In the case, it's like a large, proof of stake system and that's the consensus and kind of governance well then certainly it matters so it's just a minute and for instance if you look at curation services then it does matter that there's a high number of people who are actually partaking in this because otherwise you'll just have a very biased curation yeah yeah or you have something like you know I guess

prediction markets right if you have prediction markets doesn't matter that there's like that many parties betting on prediction markets It's not really, right? Because even if you have, like, just a bunch, the idea is if the predictions off, then anyone can come in and arbitrage it out, right? So you could even have a small number of players and still have, you know, kind of efficient outcomes. Yeah, I think that works for many systems, but I think for some system, it's crucial that you actually have a large number of participants.

Sure, totally, yeah. If you've listened to previous episodes with Marley Gray and Matt Kerner, You know that Microsoft is committed to providing enterprise-grade tools and infrastructure for blockchain developers. Well, the Azure Blockchain Workbench is perfect for organizations building consortium networks. Take the Ethereum Proof-F Authority template, for example. It's ideal for permission networks where consensus participants are known and reputable. Ethereum on Azure has on-chain network governance that leverages Parody's extensible proof-of-a-a-thority client. Each consortium member has the power to govern the network or delegate their consensus participants to a trusted operator.

And Paradis, WebAssembly support allows developers to write smart contracts in familiar languages like C, C++, and Rust. Azure Blockchain Workbench was created on the same principles that drive all production services in Azure, so you know you're relying on secure, redundant infrastructure that can scale. And with built-in services like authenticated APIs, off-chain databases, and secure key management services, you can scaffold your infrastructure in just a few hours. To learn more about Azure Blockchain Workbench and how Microsoft is advancing blockchain usability

and Enterprise, check out AKA.ms slash Epicenter and start building today. We'd like to thank Microsoft Azure for their support of Epicenter. Something else that's interesting. I was reading, and this is not immediately DevCon related, but it comes back to this, to the different culture or the different vibe here that has been like really building and less, less hypey. And that is Union Square Ventures, or maybe actually is a commentary on this whole conversation, published this blog post where they said infrastructure follows applications.

Total opposite of the FAP Protocol Thesis, which they coined, right? And there's a sense in which, and I don't know, I don't want to like speak for too many people, but it felt like they just needed something to tell their investors, right? When they started making crypto investments in the FAP Protocol thesis seemed to make sense. But it always seemed a bit weird. and now to see them completely flip-flop on it. And also to notice that we really don't have the infrastructure yet, but we are seeing these applications begin to emerge.

And maybe that is the actual model. Maybe the FAT protocol thesis is always kind of off. Maybe it was always going to be maybe a more application-centric focus on both investment and production. It was always the lighter. So what are these applications that you see emerging? Funfair, Maker, the dye, Dharma, Spank Chain had a crack at it. I'm blanking now all of a sudden.

You had at least two more. Yeah, I think status, they even, I think they ceremoniously closed their slack today and all of status is now on status, communicating, let's see how that goes. All good, too. I mean, I... Have you tried to use it? I have. I have tried to use it.

And have you succeeded? No, I haven't. I mean, it's there, right? Yeah, yeah. So we did the Tazels episode, right, a while ago with Arthur and Kathleen. And we talked about that too, right? So, hey, what about scale build? You know, Tazos doesn't scale very well.

Like, so how is it going to handle, you know, all the taps? And he sort of was more of the opinion that actually scalability isn't that, and I don't necessarily agree with him, but he was with the opinion, oh, scalability isn't really the ballneck. It's just people haven't actually really designed applications, like kind of blockchain applications that people really want to use. And I think, I'm not convinced that, you know, if we had a massive amount of scalability, that really the applications would be here at the moment. especially the user experience would be here so that you would actually get mass usage. Yeah. I think the price is a big factor. So I think basically if you look at building applications and you completely disregard gas costs,

it gets a lot easier. And I think people who have been having a really hard time actually building applications that don't bankrupt you. So I think if that were a thing that was not necessary anymore, I think we would see a lot more applications live today. Speaking of applications, I don't bankrupt you. I think maybe, I don't know if you guys have anything to say about this, but I thought that I saw a couple of panels and talks related to security. And my impression was that we're starting to see a lot more serious,

more sort of traditional IT security, cryptocurrency, application security people come into this space. So Zeppelin did an audit of Solidity 015, which was sponsored by the foundation and Onger, I think. And so it's been formally verified. And so in this audit, and so it seems to be like a lot more securities coming into solidity. And we're now seeing a lot more firms like Chilipitz and also Zeppelin.

others working to improve security and like building like these massive security teams. So maybe you guys have something to do to comment on that. How do you feel that we're doing on the security front? Well, I mean, you know, it's banal to bring up the Dow right. But it's always been if we're going to have these open systems, we have to have, they have to be totally foolproof right. Like Spankchain, you know, they publish their contract. immediately gets hacked.

It's like, what the hell, man? Yeah. Well, actually, they mentioned that in one of the panels. And I guess, like, their answer was, well, there was less money in this contract than what it would have cost to get audited. I think that's, that's, that's, which is, I mean. Which is a commentary on the cost of security, right? Sure.

Getting things audited is enormously expensive and there aren't actually all that many people who can do this and find the bugs. But I do think actually moving funds into these systems slowly and kind of increasing the bounty, the real-life bounty, slowly is kind of a valid way. I did feel that it was a little bit rationalization after the fact. But in this case, but I really do see that security is a problem and we're not yet good enough at it. I think formal verification is going to be one block that is actually. actually adding to this. So basically first contracts are starting to be formally verified by companies like runtime verification and that's a super cool thing. And you guys

had your contracts formally verified? We have a wallet that knows is safe. It's downloadable now and it's the smart contract based wallet and it's the only wallet that's fully formally verified at this point in time. So Yeah, that was a great talk actually. So maybe, yeah, you can maybe tell us a bit more about Gnosia Safe? Gnosa Safe. Okay, so basically, it has a couple of features that so far no wallet has had. So basically, in principle, you can batch transactions together,

which makes interaction with debts a lot easier. In the future, you will be able to pay gas costs in any token you actually have in your wallet, so you won't actually need ether, so you can pay in the token that you have via ReD-A service. And it's a personal multi-sig, so it's safer than most of the wallets or all of the wallets that are out there because you have a number of keys for this wallet and you can, by default, you actually have to sign twice. One's in your browser extension, one's in your mobile wallet. It's like a 2FA for your... Exactly, it's a 2FA and when you lose a key, you...

you can add in another key and we're working on social recovery mechanisms where you can have one address that is five of your friends. And if four of the five of your friends agree that this is really you and you lost your key, you get to nominate one more key into the wallet. So basically it's a way of making using crypto funds more user-friendly and more fail-proof. Yeah, I thought it was a terrific talk and I'm I was actually looking forward to as a little disappointed that Stefan didn't go into more of the social recovery stuff. I think that that's probably one of the most interesting things. So like off of like if we're

not talking about like technical aspects of crypto like this whole idea of social recovery and like how we can engineer these systems that allow us to like without central authorities or without some kind of like surveys or company being able to recover our keys. Yeah, there's super interesting ideas in this space. So basically even if you say, for instance, if you claim this is my wallet and I lost my key and then you actually have to put up 10% of what's in that wallet. And if no one else contests that within a month's time or two months' time by using that key in order to actually move the funds, you can have a mechanism that actually said,

okay, this is probably Sebastian's wallet because he put up 10% of the funds. And if the funds had been moved in this time, the 10% would be slashed. So I think there are ways of engineering trustless recovery. But it's a UX challenge. And I think a lot of people are working on this. Yeah. I actually had a funny experience. I tried to reactivate my Wii chat account from quite a while ago.

I lost my phone. And so I lost my phone. I still have the same phone number though. And I forgot the questions, right? The security questions. And so they said, okay, then go to the social recovery thing. But I only ever used it in China. And the only person I could actually recognize was Dominic Williams.

It was the only person that I actually knew on my Wii chat phone. And so I needed two. And I just couldn't find another person. I just tried to create a WeChat account. That was social recovery. totally wrong. I don't know 40 people or I don't know.

I was trying to create a a Wichat account in Singapore, I think. And I think like to create the account like I needed to be, you needed like someone to vet you. And so like the only thing I could do

is I was in a hostel I was just like look around like who might have a Wichat account here. Well Chinese tourists. So someone was nice enough to like let me into the weed chat system. Yeah. It is interesting, eh?

We chat's like a really interesting. That's a really interesting platform. Except for the fact that everything is read by the Chinese government. It doesn't make it any less interesting. It actually makes it even more interesting. You know? But anyway, that's a... Divergental divergence from...

through social recovery. So I mean, I think maybe we could perhaps mention, last week's Web 3 Summit, we were all there as well, in Berlin. in Berlin and it sort of like led up to Devcon. It was good, it was a good like, you know, mis-en-bush for Def-Con. What's a mise-on-bush? Misen-Bush. Literally translated, it means to put in one's mouth, but it means sort of like to prepare your palate, you know. Yeah, so it was a good palette preparation for DevCon. It was also nice.

That was my favorite conference I'd been to, like, crypto or blockchain-oriented conference, I think ever. That was really cool. What did you like so much about it? Great vibe. Lots and lots of diverse projects. Everyone was doing good stuff. No sponsorships. You know, very little shilling.

I feel it was awesome. And because DevCon is so huge and so Ethereum-focused, we need an alternative that gives other projects and quite. platforms are placed to kind of interact and kind of show their wares. And I think, yeah, I think that's hopefully what the Web3 Summit will evolve into. Yeah, it was terrific. Obviously, like, the venue was just amazing. It was this place called Funk House in Berlin. It's like the former radio.

You can probably explain this better. It's the GDR radio broadcasting station. Yeah. So it's like these big studios where, you know, I guess now have like music events and things like that. So like the acoustics are just wonderful and the place is really beautiful. I mean, it's sort of outside really. But getting there was worth the trip. But yeah, there was no shilling.

Everybody there was just really interested in the tech. There were like some breakout sessions and workshops, no sponsors. So I really like this type of event. In the same sort of vein, the dot-con event that you guys had a few months ago in Berlin was also a great venue. I feel like all the conferences I go to in Berlin are just always amazing. But yeah, one thing that I think we can say is that the cold virus that it seems to be very present here has a very good proliferation strategy. I started at DevCon, or at Web3, and now it's here, everybody has a cold, and now it will spread to all of the other places where these people are going to afterwards. Oh, that'll be a death of us all by cold.

That's one lucky code. It's, yeah, I mean, it's got a really, like, good forking strategy. Who was Haitian Zero? I don't know, I don't know. Maybe it started in San Francisco. Um, but I mean, it'll be interesting to see... What's that supposed to mean? I mean, because of San Francisco blockchain a week before.

But it'll be interesting to see how that event evolves. Maybe in four years it'll be as big as this, right? And we'll have like Web 3 in Cancun. Who knows? Please don't. But I hope so. I think that was amazing. That was really exciting.

And just also like substrate is really exciting. I mean, I have to confess that I've met, I've always been a little bit skeptical of the polka dot, like the parody model with like, you know, the notion of substrate as this like, um, system for building a bunch of, um, a bunch of kind of chains that can pull security and then Pocod is something that can connect those chains and then connect with the rest of the ecosystem. Something about that, I just hasn't, it jelled with me on a deep level, but at the same time, it sounds pretty good. It sounds really plausible. The notion of, um, the notion of application

specific hardware, I think, um, kind of as a good, parallel with application-specific rock chains. And so, yeah, I think, and to see how, like, also, like, the parody is such an amazing engineering team. I'm really interested to see how that evolves. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and of course, yeah, just our Gavin episode came out. So we spoke with him for like an hour and a half about this.

Oh, you did. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Yeah, you should watch it. Yeah. It was really great.

And yeah, the substrate demo was, you know, demo is always whiskey, right? But that one was definitely well done. Yeah, and there were some moments there. We weren't sure they were going to pull it off. You know, some guy had to come with like a, you know, Wi-Fi hot spot to get the internet to work, everything. Yeah, you pulled it off.

Yeah, so check out that episode. I haven't actually listened to it yet. It just came out yesterday when we were recording this. But, yeah, definitely check out. It's last week's episode. Yeah, it's been how long are we recording here? 55 minutes. Yeah, I think we can safely call this

a successful DefCon wrap-up episode. What are you guys up to now? What's next? I'm going to go to a Binance dinner. And then I'm going to go to Italy, Ukraine, Slovenia, then back to London for some more events. You're plowing through the end of the year.

Yeah, I'm still going. And then, oh, my brother had a kid, so then after that I'm going to I'm going to Maine. I'm going to see the family. Oh, nice. Yep. When will you be in Maine? When will you be in Maine?

That'll be maybe the 20th, I'll probably go there. I'll be right next to you then. Really? Whereabouts? I'll be in New Brunslee. Oh, no, right. Yeah, maybe we'll see each other there. Yeah, right.

Let's meet in Bengal. You're like to plow through the snow. Yeah, I'm looking forward to not doing any more blockchain conferences this year, except for the HyperLedge conference in December, which I'm looking forward to. But until then, nothing, and after that, nothing. Yeah, so I'm looking forward to, yeah, just doing something else than mingling. I saw Brian Bellandolph walking around today, actually. I have not seen him. I've been warned to see it. I've not seen him. And anything

exciting coming up for you? Nothing at all. I just need to get back to work to Berlin. But I think that's a lot of us. I think we all need to get back to work. And Brian? Yeah, same thing. I also look forward to no more blockchain conferences this year. And yeah, otherwise getting back to work. Yeah.

All right. Well, with that, get back to work. So thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next week. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast.

Go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. And while you're there, be sure to sign up for the newsletter, so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released. If you want to interact with us, the guest or other podcast listeners, you can follow us on Twitter. And please leave us a review on iTunes. It helps people find the show, and we're always happy to read them. So thanks so much, and we look forward to being back next week.