Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Dillon Chen: Edgeware – Coordinating Distributed Communities With On-Chain Governance

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

Governance within any community has been a work in progress for humanity's history. The blockchain ecosystem continues to develop and offer an alternative to today's centralized powers. With this, distributed projects and technologies will need to enact clear governance to ensure viable competition with the streamlined decision-making processes present in today's institutions. The absence of codified governance in Bitcoin may be one of its most significant traits, signaling to the world its predictability due to its inability to change drastically. New projects like Edgeware, however, hope to encode the rules of governance on-chain and ensure a transparent process for stakeholders wishing to participate. Edgeware is a smart contract platform built on Polkadot's Substrate. Focused on developing community-owned governance tools, Edgeware is a distributed project where participants use the tools themselves to vote, delegate, and fund each other to upgrade the network. While initially developed by Commonwealth Labs, Edgeware at launch will be entirely managed by the community, which holds 90% of the tokens and resulting influence.Topics covered in this episode:What attracted Dillon to crypto and why he co-founded Commonwealth LabsMulti-chain governanceHow Edgeware is uniqueBuilding Edgeware on Polkadot’s SubstrateRetrospection from the soft-launch of EdgewareWhat a “lockdrop” is, and why Edgeware had oneThe issues and controversy around the Edgeware launch and lockdropThe zero-day fork of Edgeware, StraightedgeThe future of EdgewareEpisode links: Edgeware HomepageCommonwealth HomepageRelaunch: A Clean Genesis for EdgewareEdgeware White PaperEdgeware blockchain launch gets hijacked by rival fork - DecryptEdgeware Participation StatisticsStraightedgeHey Straightedge - Conspiratus episodeEdgeware on TwitterEdgeware on DiscordEdgeware White PaperSponsors: Pepo: Meet the people shaping the crypto movement - https://pepo.com/epicenterThis episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/322

Hi and welcome to Epicenter. My name is Sebastian Kudu. Today our guest is Dylan Chen. Dylan is the founder of Commonwealth Labs. They're building decentralized governance tools for blockchain networks. And they're also the creators of Edgeware. It's a smart contract platform, a blockchain protocol built on parity substrate. And it leverages Wazim as a smart contract language and it has built in on-chain governance. Now, I'm sure many of you will remember that Edgeware launched it September, and it did cause some controversy. To sum it up, Edgeware introduced a novel token distribution mechanism called a lock drop. In a lock drop, essentially, it allows people to lock eth in a smart contract for a set

period of time in exchange for tokens, and the tokens you receive are proportional to the amount of ether you lock up. So let's say there's a ratio of one to a thousand, so you lock up. So you lock up, up one eth and you get a thousand tokens in exchange for that commitment. And the way that edgeware that this lock drop is they also introduced a weighting ratio proportional to the duration of time that you would lock up your eth. So if you lock it up for three months, the weight is one. If you lock it up for six months, it's 1.3. And if you lock it up for 12 months, it's 2.2. So you're incentivized to lock up your eth for as long as possible. So if you're just sitting on ether and you don't know what to do with it, the idea is that, well, you might as well lock it up here

because at the end of that period, you're going to get the ether back, and you're also going to get these tokens. People could also signal their intent to participate in edgeware by simply providing an address holding eth. So signaling is kind of a way of saying, I want to participate in the edgeware network without moving or locking ether. Signallers would also receive edgeware tokens, but in a much lower proportion to those who locked ETH. In the case of Edgeware, it's something around 20%. Now, the lock drop is a really innovative and novel way to distribute tokens. And I thought it was kind of cool, but there were some people who took issue with it,

and particularly because smart contracts holding ETH could also signal on behalf of all the funds held within that contract. So let's take, for example, the wrapped ether smart contract. Currently, there's something around 2.7 million eath locked up in that contract. Well, whoever deployed that contract could signal for 2.7 million eth in the edgeware smart contract and receive edgeware for all those people that are locking up their ether in the wrapped ether contract. Now, this raised some questions and a bit of a conspiracy, particularly because of Commonwealth's

proximity to parody team, you know, there were some theories that they were pressured to do this so that parity could signal the locked ETH in the parity multi-sig, which as a result of a bug, can probably never be spent. In addition to that, there were some technical issues when the network went live, which prompted the team to downgrade the network to a test net and postpone the actual launch until much later. What's also interesting is that in response to Edgeware, there's a group of people who decide to fork the code and launch a sister network called Straight Edge. Now, this other network is essentially the same. In fact, it even uses the same Genesis file for token distribution, except for one important distinction. Smart contracts do not have the ability

to signal on behalf of the ether held within them. One of the people behind Straight Edge was sunny, and so it was natural that we did this interview together. So this all happened in September. Why on Earth are we doing this now? Well, we wanted to give Edgeware. and Dylan, the benefit of hindsight. And I think it was well worth the wait. The lock drop was a really interesting token distribution mechanism. We really wanted to do an episode about this, but had we done this in the middle of the launch, in the middle of all this chaos, I think we would have been clouded and we wouldn't have been able to get to some of the important lessons learned here. Dylan was extremely open and very forthcoming and shared all of his thinking and the lessons that

he learned through this process, and I think it made for a much better conversation as a result, one that I'm sure you'll appreciate. Before we go to the interview, I'd like to tell you about our sponsor for today's episode, PEPO. You know, I've said this before. PEPO is like a mix between Twitter, TikTok, and Steam It. Twitter, because the content is mostly focused around crypto and entrepreneurship. TikTok because on PEPO, you share short 30-second video clips,

and Steam it because of the incentive mechanisms and the way that it leverages is crypto. So when you want to show your love for content on pepo, you tip people by smashing that pepo button and sharing pepo coins. And when you like something and you want to reply and take part in a conversation, you show your interest by putting up pepo coins as well. I've been using pepo for a little while now, and I really like it. I like the community of people that is starting to grow there. And I've been sharing some exclusive content over on pepo with my followers. So for instance, we recently did an interview with Yaya Funnusi, who is a former CIA analyst. an expert in AML, KYC, and counterterrorism.

It was great interview. And before we recorded the podcast, I went to my pepo followers and I said, hey, we're going to be interviewing this guy in a little bit. What kind of things should we be asking him? What's on your mind? How can we make this interview better? And so in the future, I'll be doing this more and more. Whenever we schedule an interview, I'll first go to my peppa followers and say,

hey, like, what kind of things should we be asking this person? And what are you interested in that would help us make this interview better? So to download Peppo, go to Peppa. dot com slash epicenter that lets them know we sent you. And there you can download the app for iOS and Android. And you can find me there. My username is Seb 2.0. That's Seb 2, P-O-I-N-T-0. Yeah, come talk to me on Pepo. I'd be happy to see you there. We'd like to thank Pepo for their supportive epicenter. And with that, here is our interview with Dylan Chen. We're here with Dylan Chen, who's the co-founder of Commonwealth Labs. Dylan, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me on. It's been a long

time coming. Yeah, it certainly has. I think we started this conversation about six months ago or something like that, you know, well before. Six months, I think so. Yeah, right around when the lock drop first started to actually kick off. And so it's been a wild ride since. Yeah, and a lot has happened since then. It has been a wild ride indeed. So before we get into the heart of the matter, which is edgeware and everything related to it, let's get a bit of background. How did you, getting involved in crypto? Yeah, it's an interesting for me, I was a, I'm born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and so, like, didn't really have too much exposure to, like, general tech stuff, wasn't born

in, you know, Silicon Valley or anything. But I actually read, I think, the Wired article on Silk Road and was kind of just really interested in how Bitcoin or, like, this type of technology, like, was something that anyone could tap into, obviously for different use cases. and then got an internship in the Valley, ended up being paid in Bitcoin, or I requested to be paid in Bitcoin. I wasn't like a big gamer in high school,

and so like really couldn't mind. And that was kind of the rabbit hole moment for me. So through college, did some network research, looking at different addresses and things like that through a lab at Penn. Started another company with co-founder here, Drew. We built a company called Source.

That was Airbnb for Wi-Fi. So sharing bandwidth. We wanted to use an ERC20 token. And then also helped invest at Rough Draft into, like, you know, crypto companies. And this was like during 2017, essentially. So kind of been all around. But yeah, that's the kind of story for me. And what is it about crypto that you found attractive and one that made you want to dedicate more time and build a company and a product?

I was attracted basically to the coordination and allowing like different actors who might not know each other to like acting like. trust minimized settings. And so I think the use cases that were really interesting to me were less on the financial side, but like, you know, creating some type of research coin to like help basically produce more public goods. So that kind of angle for me. And I think that's kind of naturally led into the work we do at Commonwealth. So creating a new system like edgeware or creating an interface or tools that help like other people coordinate around things. One thing that we'd really like to do is, yeah, just continue that stuff forward. Yeah, cool.

And so, you know, then you withdrew, you, you guys co-founded the Commonwealth company together. So what's sort of the vision of the Commonwealth company then? Commonwealth, the tagline we're using now is basically we use Commonwealth to organize your community. You know, that kind of encompasses governance. So what is like community organizing? It's distributing a token or just like aligning all your stakeholders, actually getting people to discuss issues or topics, and then funding different things. So covering that whole gamut

and building out a product and protocol suite that actually helps with any protocol to help them make their community work better. Hopefully we can extend outside of crypto or as crypto eats the world, everything kind of will be organized through commonwealth. And so what does the team look like today? So I know you and Drew are still working together, but since then the team has expanded. So how much? How many people are there working on these projects and sort of what are the different projects that are being built right now? Yeah, so I guess the two questions. So what's the team look like now?

And then I can get to the second part of what projects that we're working on. For the first answer, we have another co-founder, Raymond Zong. He was formerly at Princeton, also at Angelus and a few other places and got his crypto exposure, I guess, through those venues. We've been longtime friends. And so we kind of came together with multiple perspectives. Drew's had an academic research background. And so he actually recently left his Ph.D. at Hebrew U to be at Commonwealth full-time. So that's the founding team.

We're team of eight now. So mostly engineering heavy with a little bit of products sprinkled in. So based here in New York to a certain extent, but we're also distributed. And hiring. So if you are an engineer and listening to this, please reach out to me. I don't know if that's a shameless plug. But in terms of the projects that we're working on, I think the bulk of our work now is still focused on edgeware.

So I know we'll kind of talk about what that is. But the one sentence for edgeware is it's a Pocodot Smart Country platform. We think the first use cases basically will be like spinning up different DAOs and funding those DAOs with the Edgeware Treasury. Beyond that, we have a multi-chain governance interface, commonwealth.commonoth.cominoth. dot i am and so uh we basically hooked into near protocol cosmos uh poca dot kusama edgeware straight edge uh soon to be and basically we'll continue to uh expand outwards from there um so those are the kind of the two main initiatives right now it's been a it's been an interesting

ride but you know as for commonwealth we you know will work with any protocol essentially out there that has like governance needs and uh yeah work with them on that through that so what exactly is a multi-chain governance interface and what kind of work do you do specifically with chains to help them on governance? It's a really great question. Governance is a really large topic. So there's the gamut from just talking on what the governance structure should be. So I know Sonny, even we were talking about who the token holder should be for a type of like stable coin or a collateralized stable coin. That would be like one thing that we might talk with protocols on. But the But in terms of products and the things that we actually built on the day-to-day basis,

it's basically a discourse-like forum where you can actually just talk with threaded conversation. We basically, I guess it's we call it like governance coverage. So any on-chain governance action that they might have, so whether it's like singling polls, treasury and slash like fund distribution, allocating certain permissions to council members or things like that will help build an interface. Essentially that covers that whole thing. and then also allow you to talk about those specific issues, and then put that all into Commonwealth.

So what commonwealth kind of looks like is basically, it kind of looks like there's a bunch of subredits, and they all have different activities that you can do. You can talk about things, you can discuss issues, and you can fund different projects. So for instance, the Cosmos community has a bunch of different forms that they leverage to talk about governance, proposals and things that will eventually make it into governance. How does that differ from what the

individual projects and communities are already maintaining in terms of forums and things like that? There's a lot of projects out there that still don't have a forum. We've seen a lot of projects use telegram, discord, and haven't really spun up like a place where kind of like real work or proposals can kind of get done. The other thing I would say is we basically want to make sure that's everything is decentralized. And the future for us is making sure that we're still like an interface and we can run like a centralized opinion service. But like the conversation should still be the thread should be able in any type of interface. So for example, for if we're talking about like the Cosmos Forum, ideally it's not run on discourse or it's run on this like decentralized backend.

And commonwealth is one place where you can come and see it. You can still see the same stuff in the existing forum. And that's the feature we're building towards. I think we're still a few months away from productizing like the full decentralization front. We're still working on a lot of things that are directly related to the user experience. And on the leg of user experience, another thing we found is it's still tough, I guess, within a community to know what everyone is thinking, especially as these communities get larger. And so having the ability to like on signaling poles on either like a token holder basis is something that we've heard time and time again. And so that stuff is built right into the forum itself.

Yeah, so continuing to make sure that, like, in addition to any forum that's out there, we can kind of like continue to build on top of that. So you announced Edgeware at the Web3 Summit in 2018, and I remember seeing that talk. It was like right before lunch. It was like kind of this short little talk before everybody went out. And a few of the takeaways that I took from that talk was one that you said that edgeware was a test net for active governance. Can you describe what you meant by that?

I think we've kind of maintained that division throughout 2018, 2019, and hopefully for the whole lifetime of Edgeware. So I think everyone in the space still feels like we haven't found the exact right governance mechanism for creating a protocol and making it sure it runs well. It's a few nested governance experiments that we're running. So one, Edgeware itself has like a pretty robust governance mechanism. And I'm sure Sonny will have things to say about that. But we have a council.

There's a treasury. And you can disperse funds from that treasury through on-chain votes in the same manner as Cosmos as well. There's democracy. So anyone can submit a proposal and have it be voted on. But on top of that, basically it's again a smart contract platform. And the thing that we'd hope as the kind of like guiding. light for projects to help build on edgeware would be that, okay, a Dow should be able to experiment or use some of the features that we've kind of already built for the chain itself to

run their own type of governance experiments. And so beyond like the core governance experiments, like we'd like to see Dow's that run with a quadratic voting implementation or do things on a one person, one vote type of basis using the Edgeware identity module that we've built, where people can link a Twitter address, a GitHub handle, and then use that as the basis for running these Dow's. That's kind of what we mean by running these kind of active governance experiments in a decentralized manner. Could you talk a little bit about some details of what's special in the edgeware governance process? Like how does it compare to the one in Tesos, for example,

or in Pocod or in Cosmos? So we inherit. a lot from building on subterates. So we're built on substrate. So that's Pocodot's, or I guess like the parity slash Pocodot ecosystem standard for building blockchains. There's a bunch of modules. So for any listeners that, you know, do blockchain development, obviously, you can basically swap in and out these different modules. The module we've chosen are closely related to the Poconov governance. And so that is continuously being iterated on. And there's a wealth of information out there that, you know, I can also point listeners to afterwards. But for Edgeworth specifically, we have a treasury. And so those are token weighted votes that kind of allocate

funds from that. There's a council with elected council members. Each council member is elected on a rolling basis. Right now, the parameter that is set in the Genesis spec is 13 council members. And then with seven kind of in waiting, those are voted in on like a token holder. basis, so one token, one vote. But other things that are kind of like hidden in there are the notion of like time lock slash stakeholder voting. So the longer you lock for, even if you're a smaller token holder, you can kind of amplify your voice. And so it's not just on like a on a stake basis. Another kind of feature, again, inherited by using polka dot governance is the ability is like a cool off period. So in the same way that someone can kind of like rage quit and

in Mochdale, there's a waiting period for a proposal to actually, like, have a binding change through on-chain governance. And so, you know, people can think through like, okay, we voted this in. Does this really make sense? I could go on and on. There's other experiments that we'd like to continue to run, but that's kind of the base layer of what the network is launching with. And so what kind of functionality does Edgeware provide that, like, makes it more enticing as a place to do governance experimentation? So let's say I walk. wanted to build a new Dow. What kind of features are an edgeware that I couldn't find on Ethereum, for example? I'm personally most interested in, and the thing that we've heard a lot

of great feedback on is, one, the Treasury itself and to the identity module. So just directly linking Twitter address or XYZ, like Web2 identity to an address allows you to experiment hopefully easily with different identity standards and like voting schemes. But for the first part, we've heard a lot of teams basically want to run. Here's an example. So a team out West right now wants to build donor advice funds. So those are legally linked or a donor advice fund is I donate to this fund itself. I get the tax right off, but I can still advise like where I want those funds to be allocated. They have to be allocated to a 501c3. So one thing that we've talked, about is basically having them pull from the Android Treasury. So the

Azure Treasury, I think, is probably the key feature here, allowing different people to like have their Dow B-C it pretty easily. And we've seen a lot of traction related to that. Can you talk a little bit about how the identity linking works? I haven't thought about these things. You know, we've been so geared up for launch recently. But yeah, specifically with respect to identity. So you can have just an arbitrary string string that gets stored as an attestation. And then it's a few-step process. So I can submit, hey, so like this is a Twitter type of attestation, and then this is my handle. And then I'll say, and then I have to post a proof on the analog. I have to sign a message. And then I post the hash

of that message. And then a verifier. Right now, it's just like a single address, comes in and looks at both those things and checks if it actually is valid. Hopefully that the role of verifier should be decentralized as time goes on. So it could be, it could go to, you know, an M of N type of voting scheme or, you know, it could have like a some token holder basis for creating or verifying some of these claims. But hopefully it's pretty modular and any type of claim can kind of fit in this scheme. Is this something that's built into to substrate or is this something you guys built? This is something that we've built. But I definitely should highlight that there is really interesting work going on in the, I guess, like the substrate repo specifically.

So the team at Parity is also working on similar identity stuff. And, I mean, in general, like the ecosystem, I think has done a really great job and has spent a lot of time focusing on identity. So Kilton, another great team that's also working on things. Yeah. But there's a whole act of a bunch of developer teams that are focusing on identity. And, you know, we are one of them. that's a really cool idea. I never thought about this particular way of doing identity verification for a blockchain. Is there any work being done on maybe automating that? I feel like you could maybe use something like, maybe I'm wrong here, but something like TLS Notary to verify, let's say, like a Twitter page, which would have a signed message.

And so basically nodes could just verify like a URL, crawl it, look for a sign message, know that it's coming from Twitter, and then use that information. Is that kind of like maybe thinking further ahead, things that you think would be possible? Similar to what chain link does, right? Yeah. Oh, I didn't know chain link. Yeah. So something similar to that.

Yeah. So I mean, I guess like if we want to call like identity schemes like a subset of oracles, I guess like it, you know, it can be similar to that. I think there's, well, there's two things that I think are really interesting. So we're actually working on like a zero knowledge variant of this. So you can have like a zero knowledge at a station. So I'm included in this group and I have probably more than X number of followers. And then using that to potentially create like a, you know, as like a voting scheme. So only allow individuals who have larger than 10K followers to participate in this Dow or some governance scheme.

And then the second thing I think is it's just like a super recent development. I don't know if you all. all saw today on Twitter, Jack Dorsey talked about how they want to decentralize Twitter. And so that was really interesting. And so having some type of notary service or directly pulling from like the API or whatever type of decentralized like backend, so to speak that they build, I think it are like would be like future things that we can want to continue exploring and working on. But I mean, you know, even within the, I guess like ETH sphere, like there's humanity doubt. All these experiments are like closely related.

So I'm still attesting to like a Twitter handle or something like that. And then some set of, I guess, verifiers are kind of making sure that it's valid. So I don't think we're the only ones doing it. But I think it's interesting. I think we feel like the porting of like a Web 2 identity to like the Web 3 sphere is probably the easiest way to onboard people instead of going to like the KYC route of like onboarding like driver's licenses or, you know, social security numbers and things like that. And I guess that would be my overall thoughts on that. on identity in general. So how did you get introduced to the Pocodot team and why did you just decide to build

edgeware on substrate? Yeah, so I think it comes down to the right place, right time. So we were lucky enough to be, we also won. So we incorporated the company in, called like mid to late 2018 and had been like thinking through different governance experiments that we had wanted to run. we always knew we had wanted to build the governance interface, but felt like we needed a community that we could actually either directly help with. And so through talking with folks at Web3 and Parity, we kind of like came up with an idea that had been floating around the ecosystem. And so that was this idea of edgeware.

And there was a few pieces that basically came together in the series of conversations. We talked about how we should, okay, if we have a blank slate to start with for some type of smart contract platform, how should we distribute tokens? How should like votes be allocated? And are there any other things that we kind of want to do with it? And so basically through 2018 and then basically up until Web3 Summit, there were kind of like these water cooler jam sessions that we talked about these things. And so that was kind of how the lock drop came to be,

which I know we'll talk about. That's how we decided on this treasury framework and talked about linking identities to that. I hope I gave a quick TLDR on the history of how. edgeware came to be. Yeah. And so a lot of the tech in edgeware is based off a lot, you know, importing a lot of the tooling from substrate. Can you like give us an idea of like which pieces of the substrate of the edgeware stack are from substrate and which are like the novel pieces of edgeware stack? Yeah. So we've done most of the experimentation around the edges. So I think, I mean, to think through substrate, so there's the, the, the,

networking layer, we don't touch that. So it uses lip B2B and stuff like that. There's the consensus layer, different implementations for waiting stake. We don't touch that either. We use modules for the treasury, slashing, all this stuff is included in substrate. The things that we've built are basically for modules. So it's identity. They're signaling essentially, so actually running like a carbon vote like scheme weighted by like a token balance with like different types of poll. So binary, yes, no, rank choice as well. And then I guess one module we've built is basically allocating tokens directly to the treasury and things like that. So the, I guess, like the biggest experiment that we ran was basically building the lock drop itself. So that was like, you know,

sets of Ethereum contracts and then the associated UI to help make this process run pretty smoothly. So again, still more around like the coordination and UI stuff. Sure. And so with the WebAssembly smart contracts, from my understanding, you mostly import those from substrate. What's the current status or usability of this? Because it's been a lot, a while since I've tried playing around with it. But when I tried playing around with it about four or five months ago, it still seemed like heavily a work in progress where you couldn't really do sort of like cross contract calls and such. So could you tell us about a bit of the status of what the developer, UX would be if I wanted to build a work in progress where you couldn't really do sort of like cross contract calls and such. So could you tell us about a bit of the status of what the developer, UX would be if I wanted to build. start writing smart contracts on edgeware? Yeah, I would say, so you can definitely still experiment around with these things. I don't think it's been a focus either at parity or at commonwealth either. So the stack right now is, well, just a TLDR. So you can write, yeah, as Sunny mentioned, Walsam Smart Contracts.

So there's one specific module for that. On top of that, there's the ability to like write in a language of your choosing, anything that compiles down. to pause them. And right now, the parity's built, I guess, like a library parody ink. And so you can write essentially Rust smart contracts, everything without like the standard live. And with that, work still needs to be done on the first layer, the smart contract module to, as, as Sonny mentioned, create cross contract calls, create calls from other modules into the contract module and like having them work across like one specific chain. But there are tutorials out there that do exist. and like people have been experimenting,

I would definitely point folks to like the riot chats that are specifically related to like smart contract, wasn't smart country development in the Pocodak ecosystem to like learn more, essentially. What are some of the interesting contracts or projects that have been built so far or are in process of being built? Yeah. I mean, the things that we,

so basically post-launch, the things that we would like to build are like mullocked out on to, within this framework. So pulling from the treasury to allocate funds to this place, again, I think the projects that are still in flight, talking to Garrett at East Node based out in Japan, he's also thinking about things like this. And then what I alluded to before, running these different DAFs, donor advised funds on Edgeware would be like another example of a project within, I guess, the Edgeware sphere. It's really tough to keep track of other interesting projects that are happening in the wider Kocodosphere. But I know that,

there's always experimentation going on. There's too much going on for me to keep track. So the Edgeware launch was an interesting one. So let's talk a little bit about what happened. And I mean, for context, I think that a lot of people were excited about seeing Edgeware launch. I mean, I was certainly following it and seeing what would happen post-launch. But I think it's safe to say that things have not go as expected. So can you walk us through, you know, the time leading up to the launch and what was going on sort of within the team and in the ecosystem?

One, I just thought the segue was funny. And so I want to say that. So, yeah, I think we had always kept this September 15th date and we wanted to always do something around that date, whether it was like the Maynet launch or some other type of like road to Maynet launch. So like something like that. And so, you know, we wanted to make sure like something came out at that time. And I guess the things that we had done, we had run several test nets throughout the spring and summer with specific known issues. And basically the thought process for us and it seems like the community was or was to be able to iterate fast from that. So launch something and then change things on the fly using like the built-in polka governance framework.

and or the pseudo key. And so one issue I think that Sunny even brought up was the fact that there was like slashing events going on. Specifically, people have to submit like an I'm online heartbeat during a specific session. And if a new valider had joined, they might be slashed incorrectly, essentially. So we were continuing to work with different folks,

parity, you know, Web3 Foundation, all these other teams to kind of like pinpoint that. So the fix specifically that we had decided to go with was turning off slashing and then turning it on once those was fixed had been fixed and we could run a governance upgrade to make sure that those things were turned off. Yes, and we released a blog post detailing basically these expectations. And I think maybe we overpromised a little bit on what it was. We had called it like a soft launch.

And I think since folks had within the community had still thought that we were doing like a mainnet type of launch, that there were a lot of. lot of confusion and miscommunication happened there. That's the, that's the experience from, I think, the Commonwealth side. But I'd be very curious to hear from Sunny specifically on how, you know, as like a running a validator, like the view from outside. One of the solutions that was brought up was to fix the, to turn off slashing. But for my experience, what happened, what ended up actually happening was one of the parameters was set to zero. percent, but it actually wasn't the slashing parameter. It was a parameter that has to do with

when, if I report a fault that someone else has done, so let's say someone double sign and I'm the one who reports it, that was traditionally set to 5 percent that I would get 5 percent of their slashing amount as a reward for reporting. But that was set to 0 percent. And that seems like something where it's just sort of in the fly of the moment where like such a mad rush towards launch could have been like, you know, if things were taking a bit more slowly, it could have maybe worked out, you know, we could have caught these tiny things. So in retrospect, do you think that was the right approach to take of like getting it out the door and like having to stick to that September 15th date, especially when there were so many voices in the community who were trying

to bring up a lot of these problems? Yeah, you know, hindsight is always 2020. I think always like making sure that everyone's bought into something is something that, you know, the community like will definitely take into account going forward. And hopefully we can use the signaling tools, the informal and formal channels that we have to like discuss these things going forward. And I would definitely agree, like keeping to a deadline or making sure that things are working, it's, it's always, it's always really tough, especially in this kind of distributed setting where changes and like hot fixes are pretty tough to apply or at least like take like maybe a week or two to plan. I would basically definitely agree with you there. I think, I mean,

it's interesting just because there's like multiple parameters. There's on the node level, essentially. So, and then on the substrate side and the code base is continuously evolving on the substrate side. And so within the modules, like, you know, they're basically like, yeah, calls that like, or extrinsics basically that like have to be turned on and off specifically there. And I think we didn't change those there. But yeah, hopefully going forward, The new test net is up and it is running pretty smoothly. So spin up your validators and nodes and jump into a conversation to talk about, like, potentially launching the network.

It's very much ready from a technical standpoint now. So whether it's December or January, I think, hopefully the community can come to consensus on when it's like an appropriate time. One of the other issues that I also brought up a few weeks prior to the launch was that the allocation that was the result of running the lock drop scripts was different than the one that was shown on the Commonwealth web page. And it turns out that that had to do something with how the multipliers are being calculated. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, definitely. So, so what Sunny is alluding to, so when the lock drop was one run, well, TLDR lock drop,

so you can lock tokens for, you know, three, six or 12 months. And so we had this process going on for three months. And if you had locked for a shorter or short amount of time, three months or a longer amount of time, you got a corresponding bonus. In addition to that, there's this notion of like an early participation bonus. So the earlier you participated during this open enrollment period, a person would get more tokens essentially. And so the schedule that we had put out was basically 50 percent, you know, and then falling pretty smoothly down to like zero percent, essentially at like the final date of the open lock drop period. And when the calculation on applying the early participation bonus to the like the whole

lock schedule, I think we basically underspecified what was actually happening there. So was the question, you know, in different community channels, I think people had talked about was it multiplicative or was it additive? and I think we made a few comments on those and then had the script in a separate repository for open inspection and there's that kind of like miscommunication from that perspective as well.

I would say that I mean just the TLD are kind of like what those things are. And so that was something that we've, I mean, fixed now, but certainly we hoped more community eyes on these types of open source projects is always helpful just to make sure that we do get everything right that all the parameters are checked. And I would say, again, everything's up there now. And so hopefully people can do another once over or twice over to make sure that everything is actually

sound from that perspective. But one of the things was I did bring up this problem before the launch, but it wasn't really addressed. So what do you think is like the best way for? And you know, this actually happens in Cosmos as well, where, you know, they're in the Cosmos hub to launch. The prior upgrade that from Cosmos Hub 2 to Cosmos Hub 3 back about a month ago, that also got messed up. And it turns out there were people who were bringing up like concerns, saying like, wait, we haven't tested this piece yet. And then when we asked to get to the upgrade, it turns out it didn't work out, which we actually did do the upgrade successfully just this morning.

But how do you think is the best way for community members to communicate with development teams when they see problems and make sure that these concerns are like taken properly. I think it comes down to like tooling. And so, you know, even sunny, even even on this call, like, it's, it's tough for me to remember specifically. Like if like I definitely remember like concerns around slashing being brought up in like, you know, so we have several channels that we use like Discord specifically was and we have a validator channel there. And so a lot of discussion was going on specifically related to that issue. But as you, as like we all know, like, there's so many messages, especially like being passed around in different channels that a lot of things just get lost in the fray.

And so I think flagging a message, whether it's like a community admin or things like that to actually surface those concerns and having like a better process to run that is like sorely needed. So from the tooling side, from a process side, those are two ways to like potentially address this. So on the tooling side, like honestly, we we'd hope that commonwealth is like a place for like surfacing these concerns and making sure that. they get addressed or talked about in like a community call. Yeah, I was going to say is, is it a little bit peculiar that Commonwealth is building? Yeah, it's. And then, and then it's the process thing as well. And so, like, if, you know, if a community member sees something, they should be able to,

like, boost it, you know, and link to it on, like, the store of record on Commonwealth. It's really tough. I think for us, like, the things that we wanted to, like, also do and, like, our plan and, like, the product suite is, is, like, building bots to allow people to, like, flag these things and then actually have them be talked about in a community call. So if Sonny had mentioned that, you know, he should add like a bot in Discord and then we would be able to like automatically add that to like some community call that happened or like have it be shown on on Commonwealth and like have that be like a proposal where we should talk about

that thing. But it's always tough doing a bunch of things at once and it's certainly a humbling experience. But you know, it's yeah, it's interesting. I mean, different projects. Yeah. So early on after the launch in September, a decision was made through a blog post to essentially take this network that you had just launched and make it into basically a test net. Talk about the decision process that went into making that decision. What was the reaction from the community? There's a period of time basically post-network launch where in the... Telegram channels and say like Discord specifically where people were talking about like different solutions for this. So applying direct hot fixes to the network through like a pseudo key or or basically

like rolling the network back essentially to a certain extent. And we should actually talk about straightage with the perspective of this in two seconds. But so basically informally, the everyone kind of, it seems like came to consensus that we should okay, like take a step back and just like, you know, try to like downgrade this network specifically. So we released the broad post talking about that. And then the reaction to that was I actually feel like pretty positive. It wasn't an easy decision for anyone to make. But I'm actually really grateful for like the community that's come together through the lock drop process through, you know, the open validating on these test networks.

It seems like everyone's like in it and like wants to succeed like with the right foundation set. And so I don't know if there was like much backlash. I think people are still like hope, you know, I think the things that we've heard from the community is like, okay, let's take things slow and like make sure we get everything right. And also it's basically that, but it hasn't been too bad. But yeah, I mean, on the, it's interesting because straight edge was like a network that was launched and Sunny should definitely, I'll let Sunny talk about that. But there's interesting to see like a new or like side to by side approach is taken essentially. So when Straight Edge launched, we, we, we, launched with the same balance concerns slashing as well. And it's like a decision was made to, to launch a new network pretty soonly after that. And so it's just interesting to see how different communities, even with the same set

of token holders, can like change an outcome. But yeah, maybe somebody, Sonny wants to comment a little more on that. Yeah, yeah. So on the straight edge network, which we'll get into in a little bit. But yeah, we essentially noticed the balance's issue and we did do a hard fork within like about two or three hours

to fix that. We still ended up having the slashing issue. And so that's, so we also downgraded straight edge to a test net as well. Yeah. So let's kind of get, let's kind of get into the lock drop because personally, that was the piece of edgeware that I, when I learned about that, I was like, oh, this is super interesting. This is something new. So could you describe to us what is a lock drop? Yeah. A lock drop is basically locking your token, I guess, like, in this specific case. and like creating or minting like a new token, essentially. So for us, you can lock your Ethereum for three, six or 12 months. And we allowed individuals to lock for during a three month period of time.

So like if they heard about it like early on, they wouldn't be like penalized. And for participating early or locking earlier on, they could get a bonus. And for locking for a longer amount of time, they could also get a bonus as well. And in addition to that, we added a like a feature called. signaling. And so all you had to do was sign a message or, you know, and then like an event gets popped pushed out. And so any, any address could participate in this process. So can you tell us a bit about, so why did you want to do a lock drop instead of a traditional token sale or even an air drop, which is also a commonly used technique? What was the benefit of a lock

drop? Yeah. So it's, I think it's basically incentivizing a certain segment of the community. So, TLDR, like, 2017, ICO craze, token sale craze potentially attracts like those individuals who are looking for like more financial return or potentially attracts like professional investors. And there's also concerns around like regulation, just to be around that. Air drops seems like they can kind of attract like certainly a wider distribution of folks who are interested in the network, but like probably don't incentivize the right crowd. anyone might participate just because they get a chance to like grab some free tokens.

And so adding a little bit of skin in the game in terms of locking and giving up your opportunity cost felt like the right middle ground between a token sale and just an air drop. But I guess the meta point, I think like for a network going forward, there's been proposals for Edgeware on Commonwealth to do like multi-chain lock drops and like get allocating tokens to different communities. I know Sunny's talked about doing a gas drop and I think going forward, to incentivize or bring on different community participants. Like networks will use not just one, but like many of these things,

especially through the lifecycle of the network to like incentive or yeah, bring on different people. So let's talk about why this lock drop was particularly contentious in the community and it kind of backlash that, I mean, I don't know if backlash is the right word, but it did, I think, cause some people to be concerned, you know, what came out of that and specifically like straight edge. I think we need to explain like what straight edge is in this context. Yeah.

So the signaling feature that I alluded to, we allowed individuals, developers to signal on behalf of contracts. And so that was the specific, I think, point of contention. And certainly Sonny can bring his perspective there. You know,

I think, I thought it was very interesting discussion that was generated from it. So we obviously, we had like a lot of individuals participate in lockjob and we felt like it, it went great. You know, I feel like it was. if we're not like pushing experimentation forward, like crypto is like so early in the space that

if we're not like, you know, having some features that like people actually disagree with, then like we're doing a disservice because we certainly don't know like what the best practices are. And so I think it basically comes down to that specific thing. And then a sister network straight edge was kind of like birth where contract signers would not be able to participate. Is that correct, Sonny? I actually can't remember at this point. Yeah. So I mean, I guess I could go a little bit and explain a little bit. bit of what the specific concern that I had was, was it to me, it just didn't seem right that the premise of smart contracts is that the original deployer of a smart contract

doesn't have any particular ownership over that contract. And so by allowing the, let's say the deployer of the wrapped ether contract, it's someone at the Maker Foundation team, they can suddenly signal on behalf of all of the wrapped ether in all the ether in the wrapped ether contracts. And this seemed wrong to me. And so, you know, there's two big contracts that got signaled from. One was the Dow contract, actually, by Nick Johnson. And then the other is the parody stuck funds from the, well, the Web3 Foundation stuck funds in the parody multi-sig wallet. And that seemed odd to me. And then there's, in the design of the lock drop, there's also this feature called the generalized lock.

policy, which basically said if a contract that's signaled from acts like a lock, as an it can't send money out, it gets counted as a full lock rather than just a signal. And to me, at that point, it was very clear that this functionality was added, not maybe not only because, but in every part to allow the Web3 Foundation to be able to signal on behalf of their stuck funds. And to me, this just seemed like a some level of favoritism that I just didn't appreciate it being snuck in like this. If like it was decided like, hey, on the edgeware initial distribution, we'll give 10% of the tokens to the Web3 Foundation for all their work in supporting parity substrate and an edgeware and whatnot, I think I would have been completely

fine. But it just the way that it was like kind of sneakily hidden in there kind of disturbed me. I don't know if I can give any type of official response, but I totally agree in terms of we could always do like a better job of communicating and handling these things. And I think I I guess that's like a whole lesson for any of these space coordinating around any type of like new launch, expectations around that overcommunicated is like always the name of the game. And I think we've definitely through 2019, like especially with respect to the edge or project, like learning the lesson there. So, Sonny, you and some other people launched the sister network, straight edge.

Can you just explain sort of in this context what was different about straight edge and how it responded to these concerns you had? Yeah. So primarily the main difference was that we basically took the lock drop contracts and at the end, we modified the edgeware, their script that they had to pull the data and to create a Genesis file. And we modified it so we don't take into account people who signaled on behalf of contract. So essentially everyone else who properly locked or signaled from an actual user account, their share of the network got increased. and people who, because, for example, I actually am, I know of people who, for example, run professional custodian services, and they did signal on behalf of some of their clients, which, you know,

which was kind of the exact concern that I had. And so we kind of went ahead and zeroed out those balances and redistributed those tokens to the rest of the network. And we launched a straight edge network with the new balances, essentially. And the future of the state of the network is also, you know, still in progress because similar to Edgeware our September launch is also a little bit botched because of issues with the software. Well, sorry, I guess like the point on custodians signaling on behalf of clients. I mean, in general, like any token distribution process, like is, I guess you can say there's

winners and losers. And so I guess it still comes down to like the specific spirit of the community. So like, when Nick Johnson, like, signaled on behalf of. of the Dow, like the withdrawal doubt funds, I decided like to give up ownership of that. And I think that's like it always comes down to like who's participating. Because certainly there's like, I guess like Ethereum whales out there that like could have participated in this whole process and just like dramatically skewed the distribution or things like that.

And so it always comes down to like who is actually involved with these things versus like any overall process. I think any process is like always always to a certain extent capable. And like we have to always be aware of that. But custodian signaling on behalf of their clients, I think that's an interesting case just because it's, you know, if we want those like end users to like actually participate in the network, like that was something that was like something that I think is like pretty okay, you know, because if we think they're going to be like good stakeholders within the network, then again, that was like one edge case of allowing like contract with signallers to participate. Like I think it's it's kind of in the gray area and it's, you know, really up to anyone again like to they could create like a new network on. from the edgeware distribution and I would totally welcome that. I think it's all for more experimentation.

I think it's all really cool. Yeah, I mean, I think that I remember around that time like speaking to people and meeting people and talking about edgeware and like around the time of the Web 3 conference, people's impressions were that

at least some people that I talked to. I think the concern that people had was that somehow like parody had influence on this and that, you know, this was in some form, I wouldn't say like a retribution, but a way for parody to like gain influence in this network having like all these locked funds and like the parity smart contract. And I think like whether or not like that's true. Like I don't think that's necessarily true, but you know, it kind of added, you know, if there was this communication

issue like that, the connection to parity also created a little bit of maybe some like some theories about why this was in there. I don't know if you guys want to talk about that or do you think that makes sense. Commonwealth Labs is an independent entity and like we definitely get like technical support from like Webthrough Foundation Parity. I think it's a great ecosystem and like I don't

know if we get any special treatment. But parity can certainly be a contentious issue especially within the Ethereum community. So I'm I think even when we announced like it was already like things were popping up even even in 2018. So it's just interesting to hear the, I guess, like, conspiracy theories develop. You know, we could go on about this topic for ages. On my, I have, like, you know, my little side podcast called Conspiratus. You can actually listen to a debate between myself and Ryan and,

you know, Dylan shows up for a little bit. So if you want to learn more about that debate, you can, you can go check that out. But so could you tell, like, do you think that lock drops, were they like a one-time novelty thing where it was this like cool, new, like, oh, this is a quirky idea. Let's all, and everyone got excited about it. Or do you think this is like a reasonable method of doing token distributions like going forward? To answer your question, yes, I think it's like a viable thing moving forward. But like it's always like as a general concept, the exact like distribution mechanism three months, six months, 12 months might not be an actual thing. But like, you know, different permutations of it.

So, but like the general concept of allocating decision making rights or tokens to a certain person who had hold some token, I think is like very interesting. So actually, I actually saw like on Hacker News like Kong bucks, like I guess they're doing a lock drop, which is really cool. So I don't know if that was like some inspired by us or else. I like the general concept of like allocating tokens to someone who has like done good work or like had hold some so some token basically. So, you know, the lock drop could be generalized to like an NFT. So like if I held CryptoKitties and I wanted to like launch like a new gods unchained like V2 and I wanted to like target like the certain subset, they wouldn't have to like purchase a new token like in and like or through like a token sale. But like I could lock my like crypto kitty mint, you know, this new token. This new kind of like game based NFT.

You know, even using like other sources of like on chain data. So like and this is something that Sunny's brought up as well as like if I participate. in a certain network. Or, for example, like, if I've participated in compound and any of those markets, I could be minted, like, a new token. And that token could be, like, for a new stable coin type of thing or it could be things there. So, like, this general notion of, like, yeah, giving tokens to, like, other people,

I think is going to be a powerful thing kind of moving forward, whether it's launching a new token or even, like, enhancing, like, the governance system of, like, you know, edgeware specifically, like, you know, allocating a certain extra voting. right to someone based on past participation, Mike is like an experiment that I would be happy to run. So what's the future of Edgeware? And I think like one important thing here maybe to, you know, how do you see Edgeware evolving in the Pocod ecosystem?

Like will it become a parochane? And how is it complementary to sort of like the Pocodot network in general? And also what happens to Edge tokens? Are they meant to be staking tokens or? We think it'll be a parochain. But that is, it is, again, up to, like, all the token herbals to vote there. So Commonwealth Labs only holds, you know, 4.5% of the network. So the vast majority has already been allocated, I think.

And so I guess that there's a few questions. So on the, so we think it'll be a parochain. So we still have to get, the community would still have to acquire dots to essentially stake as a pair chain. in general, like a parochain still has to have its own token for like spam prevention, governance rights, things like that. But it's not used so much as a staking token rather. But I think the most interesting thing is basically it's going to be interesting just in general,

like how these like communities work together in the future or any parochain kind of comes together just because it's basically like a crypto merger essentially. And Naraj and I wrote a blog post back in like 2017 on crypto-merger. And this is, you know, edgeware becoming a pair chain, a network that potentially already has, like, an engaged community and has, like, overlap with Pocodot as well, how they'll kind of interact. How will the network fork if, like, validators don't like the kind of like economic scenario, hopefully not, you know, hopefully everything can resolve with all-chain governance. But again, that's what kind of like forking is for.

But yeah, it's, you know, the economic scenario, like things like playing out, that all has to be discussed. And then the last question that you asked, like, what's the hope for Edgeware and like, what do we kind of wanted to? So yeah, in 2020, we, we basically just want to get as many Dow's participating and building on Edgeware as possible. So whether or not it's like in the crypto ecosystem, we've talked to Web 2 or like real world companies, so to speak, and co-ops to like create a Dow to like run, you know, coffee shop down. And that's like something that we're really excited to see like these like experiments start to leak out, not just within the industry itself, but into the broader world.

And hopefully into this whole decade, like we can continue to see the distribution and usage. And where should people go if they want to learn more and find out when Edgeware is launching? They should go to commonwealth.im, actually. So activities being posted there, the team is posting on a daily weekly basis. And it links out to, you know,

Edgeware homepage as well as all the other kind of like chat-based channels as well. So if you search like commonwealth edgeware, I think, you know, it should be like the first result and then click in and come in and explore the water. Great. Thanks for your time, Dylan. Thanks for coming on. Thank you guys so much. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week.

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