Orchestrate all the Things - IOTA is bringing smart contracts with zero fees, Ethereum interoperability and compatibility for next generation distributed applications. Featuring IOTA Foundation co-founder and CEO Dominik Schiener

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

IOTA is unveiling its smart contracts, with a clear onboarding path and many interesting features for developers. We discuss this release, as well as progress made since moving to the new network and other new features in the works with IOTA Foundation co-founder and CEO Dominik Schiener. Article published on ZDNet

Welcome to the Orchestrate All the Things podcast. I'm George Amadiotis and we'll be connecting the dots together. IOTA is unveiling its smart contracts with a clear onboarding path and many interesting features for developers. We discuss this release as well as progress made since moving to the new network and other new features in the works with IOTA Foundation co-founder and CEO Dominik Siner. I hope you will enjoy the podcast. If you like my work, you can follow Link Data Orchestration

on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. All right, so since, as you mentioned, it's been a while since we last caught up, I thought it would be a good idea to start with a little bit of a refresher, let's say, in an update on the Chrysalis rollout so yeah just a brief recap of how things are going there basically yeah I think from our side Chrysalis was really a huge success and I think when we last spoke

it got live at the end of April what i remember right and if you remember the complexity of crystallis was the following we have a complete new protocol right a complete new implementation complete new cryptography so it's like a complete new version of iota but all the token holders were on the old network right and they with the old cryptography and so we actually had to develop a sort of interoperability solution how do you transfer your tokens from one network to another network and you probably know about this concept right it's called like bridges and basically a way to enable interoperability between different networks and so far more than 75 percent of the total iota supply has bridged from the old network the legacy network to the chrysalis network

so i think at today's calculation that's over three billion dollars worth of tokens that have been bridged that have been migrated so to say and for us that's that's definitely a big success because we we were always um like i would say out of any anything this would have been the the most tricky that like it was the most difficult one to develop i was also the one that had the biggest security implications right because it's not easy to bridge assets from one network to another network. And so this was a big success, first of all. And obviously $3 billion is a lot of money. Yeah, obviously.

Yeah. And other than that, the network has been running very stable. Transactions are confirming in less than 10 seconds. The Firefly wallet has also been a big success where the community really lost its simplicity. And yeah, the exchanges have also finally upgraded. So yeah, like from our side, Chrysalis has achieved everything that we wanted it to achieve. And now we are entering this next phase where we're actually extending the functionality of this Chrysalis network by introducing digital assets, tokenization and smart contracts. Yeah, and of course, this is the main topic today.

But yeah, I thought it would be good to start with a little bit of review, let's say. So you mentioned like 75% of token holders have transitioned to the new network. And that's in about, well, under six months, actually, about six months since April. So do you have a goal or an estimate of transitioning the rest to the new network as well? How long do you think it's going to take? Yeah, you know, this is a very interesting question because a network, a currency like IOTA is actually deflationary, if you think about it, because users might lose access to their keys, right? Or they might lose access to the tokens through another way by sending it to the wrong addresses.

And so I would personally say, and this is just my personal opinion, that at least 10 to 15% of the total IOTA supply will not be migrated to the network. So that means that there is sort of these unplanned tokens, which the community can then decide what they will do. And so what we will be doing is that we actually allow the community to vote whether these tokens should be contributed to a DAO,

the Decentralized Aut decentralized autonomous organization, which the community controls, or whether these tokens should be burned from the supply. So I personally think it's going to be between 80 to 85 percent that will be migrated. Do you have any idea or any plan when you're going to make that decision? I mean, what to do with the remaining tokens? Yeah, actually, we already are doing the boat on the previously unclamped tokens, right? Because we had network upgrades before where about 5% of the total supply, or I think around 3% of the total supply was not migrated. So those unclamped tokens are from the 2016-2017 period and the community will actually be voting on that this year. So this year the community will already be doing the first governance vote on the Yoda which

is also quite special I must say. Yeah indeed. What is the mechanism through which you are going to do that decision? Yeah, that's very exciting, right? Because IOTA is FILAS. And so what we can do actually is we can do these governance votes with tokens. So the way that we're going to do this is that one token, one vote, basically. So it's like a full democracy, so to say. And we are right now implementing this voting mechanism into the wallet. So before the end of the year, if you have a FiveFly wallet,

you will then be able to vote. Obviously, we will announce all of this and so on and so forth. But you will then be able to vote whether you want to burn the on-prem tokens or whether you want to set up a community DAO with those tokens. But it will all be done with the Firefly wallet and with your tokens, basically. Okay, interesting. Interesting choice. And I think a good one to actually integrate this functionality in people's wallets

because, well, it's an obvious place, they use it for sure. Right, exactly. And I think it's also the most fair way to do it because anything else can be gamified. For example, trying to do digital identities and stuff like that is not there yet. And so token voting is simply the most secure one right now. Indeed. Okay. So there's also a little bit of details that we mentioned the previous time. And I wanted to more like technical details, actually, that I wanted to ask you about. So we spoke about the Cordy side.

And well, I wonder how that went, actually. Yeah. Cordicide and well I wonder how that went actually. Yeah so we launched a beta, oh no not the beta version, but we launched a DefNet so it's like a development network so it's like an early version of what we would call a fully functioning node software for the for IO2.0 so every time you hear Cordicide, Cordide is like the event when we remove the coordinator, and IOTA 2.0 is the protocol that enables the Cordycide, basically. And with the launch of the DevNet, we got some interesting insights that basically pushed us in the direction of simplifying some of the code, removing some of the modules,

and improving some of them. So that was theifying some of the code, removing some of the modules, and improving some of them, right? So that was the whole purpose of that network, because it was the first time where all of these modules sort of came together, right? The consensus, the congestion control, and all of that came together in the Node software, and it gave us these insights on how to improve the Node software. And we've been working on that right now. And so hopefully before the end of the year, we will be able to present that path to the community

so that they are able to see what this path looks like. For example, we updated the consensus to simplify it to something that we call untangled voting. And so we are implementing that. And then once we have that implemented, we will launch an incentivized testnet, right? Where we basically give out incentives to participate in this IOTA 2.0 network.

And once we've reached sort of confidence in the solution to have done enough testing we will be able to do the cordicide on the main net but but there's no timeline on that right now but we are writing a lot of papers on that also together with our academic partners and and it's looking good but as you can probably guess things always take longer than you expect them to do. Of course. Yeah, especially in this very complicated DLT space. And so, yeah, we will release an updated version and then basically go from there. Okay.

I had an add-on question, which I think you may have answered through the course of your answer, which was you talked about insights that you were able to gain by releasing this testnet. And I was wondering whether you had some kind of, I don't know, bug bounty program or something, or it was just observations that you made by seeing how the network worked.

But I think it was probably the former since you actually talked about an incentive program that you are going to release. Yeah, actually for this, for the DevNet, we didn't have a bug bounty program yet simply because it was like an early version. And we got actually enough insights just from the community testing.

We have a very large community. And I think like 5,000 to 10,000 digital assets were created on this 2.0 DevNet. And there was quite some activity that allowed us to get these insights. And obviously, our team is also experimenting on the network, doing double spends, right, and trying to do attacks. So it was not with a bug bounty program yet. I think that will be the next phase then. Okay.

Yeah, that's what I figured. Okay. Another point that I wanted to follow up with you on was the rate control for transactions. You already mentioned previously that you're getting very good results in terms of time it takes to execute transactions. But you also mentioned the previous time that you have like a special token for that called MANA. So I wonder how its use is going

and how people are using it and so on. Yeah, so MANA is basically our, as you already mentioned, is our rate control system. And what we are trying to answer there is the question of how do we fairly distribute access to the network, right? Because it's a very difficult problem actually and the way that it's being resolved in in ethereum or in bitcoin today is through transaction fees right that's why we have these observed fee markets and iota aims to be feel us and so our rate control system from a theoretical standpoint is very uh like solid defined i think from an implementation perspective, we're still working on optimizing it

because we saw some early implementation problems that we had. And this is actually where our team is right now working on improving that solution as well. But it's been working with generating mana, so basically you generate mana with your iota tokens and it's part of the solution it's like like if you spin up in a node today on the iota 2.0 defnet and you hold iota tokens you would basically be generating mana and with that money then like controls your your access your throughput in the network.

So I think in that regard, it went very well. But as the whole solution is being improved, it just takes time for it to be fully functional, I would say. Okay. So it's still under active development, which is going to go. Yeah, exactly. By the way, we're doing that. Our rate control was developed together with the Imperial University

which is really one of the leading experts also on this rate control systems. Okay. So I guess you're also going to be publishing about it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

I'm trying to find if we published a paper since then because then I could send it to you. I'll look into that after our call. Okay, no worries. If you have, it will be interesting to have a look. And okay, last one from my list on following up was oracles because you also touched upon oracles the last time we spoke and you said it was in your in your plan so just wanted to check back on that and see how yeah um so oracles i would say there's two different streams of development and one of them is called project albarium and this is what we're doing together with Dell, Intel, and some other organizations,

which I would, like we would define that as a sort of industrial oracle. And the very exciting part there is that it's now officially accepted as a Linux foundation project. So Project Alvarium is now officially developed

under the Linux foundation. And we hope to really establish it as an industry standard and i think lauren correct me if i'm wrong but that was just like a few days ago that it was announced from what i remember yeah exactly not so long ago yeah so it was just a few days ago and um so that's going well and that's being developed with those industry partners. And the other solution is actually relying on digital identity. Right. And by the way, Project Albarum is already being used by corporates.

Yeah. I knew that. I knew that much. So, yes, this was already in use. So I guess the new aspect in there is what you mentioned about it being onboarded in the Linux foundation now. Yeah, exactly. And the other solution that we're developing is basically based on digital identity, where we are releasing a one-point-all release, so like a production-ready release by the end of the year.

So Oracle is definitely a super important avenue for us, and we're tackling it primarily through Project Elbarium, I would say. Okay. Anything more you could share about the second project that you mentioned, which is about to be G8? Oh, you mean the digital identity? Yeah. Yeah.

So we are preparing a 1.0 release so 1.0 um for digital identity so it's self-sovereign identities where you are able to you're able to create your identity and secure it through the iota tangle and so that you get these verifiable credentials and we we've built up the whole framework. It's all open source and anybody can basically build on it. And with this release by the end of the year, we actually really want to go into the market and also offer our identity solution to the crypto market.

Because one of the big problems today is, for example, if you do digital entity on Ethereum, you have to pay transaction fees, right? And you logging into a website or you logging into some kind of web service shouldn't cost you money, right? So we have quite some big hopes for our identity solution, for example, solving KYC for exchanges

so that you have one identity, one KYC verification instead of having 10 different KYC verifications for every identity service that you utilize. And so, yeah, digital identity is definitely something we're going into the market with a lot more focus. Yeah, I think it's kind of an obvious use case to address for you. I mean, for the reasons you already mentioned. So if you manage to get it right, I think it's going to provide quite a boost for you.

Totally, totally. Okay, great. So let's go into the main course, let's say for today, after having caught up with all the loose ends in a way, which is that you're about to release the beta version of your smart contacts, which is quite a big deal. I went through the features and these are what make it, well, actually, it would be a big deal anyway, but I think the features that you're supporting are quite, you know, they look quite impressive, basically. So I'll just let you do an intro on your own, and then I have some point-to-point questions and we can go deeper in the topic. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's kind of obvious that iota is late to the smart contracts uh market right um ethereum has been around since 2015 polkadot also started in

2015 and we've been really focused on making the base layer right which is the iota ledger and as efficient and as optimally defined as possible including making it feel us and for the last two years actually we've been we've been working on this new approach to doing smart contracts on top of iota and because so far everybody realized that doing smart contracts with the deck as a blockchain as a distributed ledger, simply doesn't work, right? Because you need to have the transaction ordering right. And there's some other complexities there with timestamps and so on. So doing smart contracts with blockchains is the most feasible way right now.

And so what we are actually doing with our smart contract solution is we are launching blockchain networks on top of IOTA. So IOTA is this DAG, this directed acyclic graph, where we now have blockchain networks on top that are being utilized

to execute smart contracts. And they are actually leveraging the base layer, which iota and for security right you can think about every smart contract being secured into this base layer being anchored into the base layer so it becomes immutable and and very exciting actually is this interoperability because we can use the iOTA layer as this communication mechanism so that one smart contract is able to communicate with another smart contract by, for example,

transferring assets from one blockchain network to another blockchain network. So the way that you can think about this is that it's really a fully interoperable and sharded smart contract network. And that's what makes this solution so exciting because whereas Ethereum is this sort of monolithic network where we have one Ethereum blockchain where transaction settlement data and smart contracts

is being executed in one. With IOTA and now with IOTA smart contracts, we already have these sharded smart contracts that are running on top and that are fully interoperable and are fully composable with each other. And it's sort of like the high-level summary

of what we're doing with smart contracts. So let me see if I got it right. You're saying that basically for each new smart contract, a new blockchain network is going to be spinned out and then use the underlying IOTA network as an interoperability layer so they can talk to each other?

Yeah, exactly. It's not for each smart contract, by the way. There can be many smart contracts in one blockchain network. But basically, everybody is free to launch their own blockchain network on top of IOTA. So the way that you can think about this is that there will be different types of blockchain networks. So there will be, for example, one main open network where anybody can easily deploy their smart contracts but what you would want to do then as a developer if your um an application gets more popular you want to have your own sort of um blockchain network because you're no longer limited by the other uh smart contracts but by the throughput limits um of that particular

blockchain network right so you will launch your own own blockchain network so that you are able to maximize the throughput and are also able to fine tune the smart contract. So I would say our claim to fame with IOTA smart contracts will be for, first of all, this sort of building smart contracts tailored to your needs, right? So you're able to define what your smart contract environment should look like.

You're even able to define the transaction piece, right? That's something that's not possible anywhere else. And so with IOTA smart contracts, you can define how much you want to charge for transactions, potentially even making it feel less by providing the right incentives. So that's the first thing, right? This flexibility. The second thing is the scalability. Because we already have a sharded network, we are able to scale much, much better than

anybody else in this market right now. And the third thing that I think is very exciting is really this trustless interoperability because one problem that for example Polkadot and Cosmos and the Ethereum 2.0 have is how do you actually for example share the security but also share the transactions right have this interoperability between different smart contract networks. And it's actually a difficult problem to solve. And so we solved that by actually leveraging the IOTA Tango as this interoperability layer.

So I think those four, three features are really our highlights. And the last one that I would want to mention is that we are fully EVM compatible. So that means that you can actually launch Solidity smart contracts and use all the existing Ethereum tooling and platforms like MetaMask and with IOTA smart contracts. So we are actually able to boost the adoption like that.

Yeah, that was also something that caught my eye in addition to the choice in terms of what programming language people can use. So if I'm not mistaken, it's the first one that I see, at least, that goes beyond Solidity. So people can also use Go and Rust. Yeah, yeah, we're definitely one of them. I wouldn't say that we are the first. I think we're one of the first because I think Polkadot also uses WebAssembly, just so you know. And they are using their own smart contract language though.

But I would say we are the first ones that really offer both, right? That you can choose between the Ethereum virtual machine and you can choose between Go and Rust. And I always like to think about IOTA smart contracts as this very diverse ecosystem that runs on top of IOTA now, that leverages IOTA, and where people can deploy smart contracts according to their needs, right, instead of being imposed by the restrictions of the network. Yeah, and yeah, the sharding, as you pointed out,

it's the sharding features that makes this kind of approach possible. It also makes me wonder about a number of things, to be honest. So the first thing would be like, okay, fine. So suppose that I develop a smart contract and then I want to deploy it on somebody else's blockchain, somebody else's built on top of IOTA, somebody else's shard. If my contract is fee-less, then what's going to happen is that network that the contract is going to be deployed on is going to be spending resources to serve my contract while not getting anything in terms of fees.

So how is that going to play out? Yeah. So this is exactly where we want to leave it up to the market to define these incentives. And ultimately, the best way to build a market is through competition, right? And to make it, to actually enable this competition. What is happening with some of these networks today, like for example,

in Cardano or also Polkadot is that there's validators that are securing the smart contracts, but the validators aren't really incentivized enough to compete with each other. And the smart contract developers cannot clearly define the incentives for the validators. And what we want to do with IOTA smart contracts is actually that you as a smart contract developer, you can define the incentives that you will give to a validator. So for example, I'm launching my own decentralized exchange. I have a token with that decentralized exchange. And I will tell the

validators, hey, if you secure my smart contracts over the next five years, you will get 10% of the supply of my smart contract token, right? Of my DEX token. And the requirement for that would be then that you actually secure the transactions. you secure the smart contract by not requiring any transaction fees for certain users, right? This type of dynamic will be possible with IOTA smart contracts because we can define the fees and we can define the incentives, which is what makes it so exciting. And our big focus, which is new architecture architecture is to tailor to the needs of smart contract developers so that they can reach mainstream adoption because quite frankly you know i i was in in in zurich a few months ago and i received some um stable coins usdc and then i realized that i had no eth tokens to send out that USDC, right?

Because you need to pay the gas fees in the Ethereum tokens. And that just made it so painful to use because then I had to find a way to get now Ether tokens. And that just really limits the user experience. And I think with IOTA smart contracts, we want to make it possible for the developers to define the fee structures and potentially even go fee-less

Okay, I see so it's going to be part of the specification I guess and also part of the programming of the APIs that people can actually specify also the what the validators are going to get out of securing the content.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, that's an interesting approach. It's basically a market. The other thing that I was wondering about spinning different blockchain networks on top of IOTA is how, well, first of all, I wonder, well, how many, let's say, users will actually need to do that or want to do that. And then how easy, let's say, it's going to be for them to do that. And what I mean by that is that, well, by now people are, I guess,

mostly used to, instead of using, like, I don't know, physical machines or virtual machines or anything, they're just more used to just spinning more instances in some cloud. So are you going to offer that option to people? Yeah, absolutely. So our objective with this is to make it as simple as possible i don't think that everybody will have to deploy their own smart contract uh chain and because they're probably not certain yeah exactly so most likely there will be one

public network uh that most people will build on. So think about it like launching the Ethereum network on top of IOTA. But the more popular dApps that are also more experienced in their development will want to deploy their own smart contract chain. And those are going to be the very highly utilized networks, right? But overall, yeah, our objective is to make it as simple as possible. We're still, just so you know, right now you can think about IOTA smart contracts as a sort of framework, right?

That defines how to deploy smart contract networks on top of IOTA. And that defines the cryptography and all of that. The missing piece here is actually how to do this in a permissionless way, right? How to do the validator selection in a fully open market. And this is where we will be publishing more information over the coming weeks on how to do that.

Because that will also answer the questions about the economic incentives and the costs and stuff like that. But let's leave it as a cliffhanger for now. Okay, okay, fair enough. Yeah. And the other thing I was wondering is, well, okay,

obviously you haven't launched it officially yet. It's going to be announced next week. But I wonder if internally, let's say in the current alpha stage, whether people are developing any kind of applications and if you have any ideas as to what they're geared towards. Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's really geared towards gaming. Somebody already developed a fair roulette game.

And so IOTA smart contracts will launch with that fair roulette game. So you can basically play against other people and play roulette. And if you win, you get the pot right. And it's fully running on smart contracts and it's fully running on IOTA. And some other stuff that is currently being worked on is a decentralized exchange, an NFT marketplace. And there's also development for a play to earn game, right?

So you basically play the game and you can earn money by playing the game right so nfts basically so all of that is currently being developed and then there's some smaller projects that will launch as well right just just for trying out smart contracts but those are like the bigger projects that are being developed right now and i think in general we have very great ambitions for smart contracts And we do want to be one of the main player in this market next to Ethereum, next to Polkadot and others. So now with this beta launch, we are actually able to start reaching out to teams. And we are actually able to start to invest more money into the community and into the ecosystem to accelerate the development. So I think now the ecosystem

building will start with the beta launch. So the applications that you mentioned are being built internally by the IOTA team? No, those are built by the community. Which is very nice, right? Yeah, If they're already doing those applications in alpha, then yes, I think when you go to beta, then you're probably going to see more and more development in the existing ones. Yeah. Totally. Totally. I think that would be very nice. Yeah. Actually, I had something specific in mind

when I was asking you that question. I was wondering mostly about whether people are experimenting with tokenization and tokenizing various assets and trying maybe DeFi concepts and so on. Because to me, that would be, especially if you have the chance for fee-less transactions, that would be kind of the most obvious one. Totally. So DeFi is high on the priority list and that's why we have, I think there's two or three decentralized exchanges

being developed right now by the community. One of them we know is going to launch together with the beta release. And the NFT marketplace is also being upgraded right now to smart contracts. But tokenization and all of that is definitely a big focus of ours. So we are actually going to also use tokenization to sort of incentivize the community by doing NFTs and stuff like that.

But I think the most exciting part about being in a community like IOTA is open source. Anybody can contribute. So I most likely don't know all the stuff that is being developed right now. So I think with the release, we'll know more about what's being built and so on. Okay. more about what's being built and so on. Another interesting feature that you mentioned was compatibility with the Ethereum virtual machine. And I wonder how, well, up to what degree, let's say, this compatibility goes and how it works exactly. So if somebody has built an existing smart contract that runs on Ethereum and I come along and build my own smart contract that runs on top of IOTA, are those two able to interact?

Or does the compatibility mean that I'm able to execute that exact Ethereum smart contract as it is on IOTA? Yeah, so compatibility means exactly that, that you're actually able to take the code, right, the smart contract that you deployed on Ethereum and you're able to deploy it on the IOTA smart contracts as well. And the interoperability would then be enabled through some kind of bridge but we we're not going to launch with the bridge yet i think that will be developed for later okay yeah right but it also means it it also means that all the tooling that is currently available for ethereum can be utilized on iota as well well. For example, MetaMask and all the libraries

that were developed over the years. That was one of the main requirements that we had because it would have taken us way too much money and way too much time to catch up with the Ethereum ecosystem. Now we're actually able to benefit from it and also benefit them through that.

Yeah, okay. It makes sense. So at this point, if people have, let's say, legacy or existing smart contract code, they can import it as is on IOTA and just keep developing on that. Probably, I guess, they won't be able to mix and match. So if they bring in a Solidity smart contract,

if they want to extend, build on that, they're going to have to keep building in Solidity. They can't go and use Rust or Go or something else. Yeah, they would have to rewrite it basically. But very important is that the Ethereum

our focus is really on interoperability. So one smart contract written in Rust can also communicate with a smart contract written in Solidity. As long as they're both deployed on IOTA, right? I mean, you can't have your contract written in Go or Rust or whatever running in IOTA called another contract that's running on Ethereum. You have to import, running in IOTA, call another contract that's running on Ethereum,

you have to import that contract in IOTA as well. Yeah, exactly. For that, we would then need to have a bridge to the Ethereum network. Okay. And you said this is something you are considering or not? Yeah, it's definitely something that we're considering. It just takes more time to develop that as well.

So right now, we're just focused on ourselves. But later on, we'll like interoperability and this multi-chain future is a core focus to us. And maybe something that I also want to mention here

is that we don't see ourselves as an Ethereum killer, right? And Ethereum is here to stay and it's definitely sort definitely taking up a majority of the market simply because of its dominance. We rather see ourselves as a way to complement Ethereum and actually help to alleviate some of the stress that is being put on the network. The way that we intend to do that is by enabling that interoperability with the

Ethereum network so that people similarly to Polygon and Matic are able to deploy their smart contracts on IOTA and still interoperate with the Ethereum network by being able to transfer assets between each other.

And so we don't see ourselves as a competitor or as an enemy to Ethereum, but rather we want to complement them. And our big vision with all of this year is to really help the entire crypto space reach mainstream. Because that is what gets us all excited. Yeah, I think it's a pragmatic approach and a good one to maintain this interoperability

yeah yeah totally okay so yeah thanks actually I find it hard I had one last question but I find it hard to ask it now because you already kind of gave the big vision so the question seems to pale

in comparison now but I'm going to ask it anyway so another feature that I noticed which I find is quite interesting even though at first look it may sound a bit boring is the generated boilerplate code and actually in a way it's precisely because you do this otherwise boring thing that I think it's interesting. Yeah. I mean, the most important stakeholders, you know, every time you launch a new product, you always try to define who is your target group, right? And with something like IOTA, smart contracts, you could say our target group is speculators, it's enthusiasts. But quite honestly, our most important target group is builders. And we want to enable use cases that are not able to be deployed on other networks because the transaction fees are too high and because the infrastructure is not there and so on and so forth.

So the builders, the developers are really our most important target group. And that's why we are developing tooling around IOTA smart contracts to make this sort of developer experience as good as possible on the IOTA network. And the boilerplate is actually one of those, right? So that you can easily define your smart contract

and with that start building more quickly. And we're actually thinking about developing a GUI around it, right? So you can think about it like building blocks that you can put together to deploy a smart contract. And you can expect a lot more educational tooling, but also educational content from us for smart contracts. Okay.

So, all right. So that's a good segue to add another thing that kind of caught my eye. So in the pre-release for the announcement, I saw something that I couldn't actually interpret. So it said fully updated ISCP documentation. You know, it's probably something that means something to you, but not to me. So I'm just curious what it is. Yeah, it's basically just that everybody is ready to build on.

Right. That is all documented. It's easy to understand and that people can participate and build and deploy. OK, that's just what it means. Yeah. OK, yeah. Okay, cool. All right. Okay, so I think that's all from my side. And yeah, we covered lots of ground from the updates since the last time that we talked,

which are quite a few actually, considering it's only been six months. So you made good progress, it seems. And also the point-to-point features of the smart contracts. And you seem to be actually making good progress on that as well. And especially judging by the fact that you have a number of applications in active development already in alpha. And you said specifically for one of them uh the one of the distributed exchanges that it's probably going to go live at the same time that you go live with the beta right

yeah like like multiple projects will go live um i like i wouldn't give a hard commitment on that yet if you want to include it in the article and if you want to i can give you the exact dates when it will launch as well so that we can include it if that's better okay okay yeah we can think uh around that with uh with lauren yeah no no yeah no that's perfect okay yeah and maybe maybe one final comment from my side you know i think the good part because we are late to the game as well is that we are able to take the concepts that have proven themselves in the market like for example the ethereum virtual machine has created proven itself so for us it would be really stupid to develop a new smart contract language at this

point and the benefit that we now have is we are able to catch up with the rest by using by implementing the best concepts that have proven themselves in the market and also really use that to our advantage to accelerate the adoption of IOTA smart contracts. So that's definitely one of our focuses. Yeah, it kind of shows that this is the pragmatic approach that I talked about earlier. So I think it's a good strategy. And it seems to be working out.

I mean, considering the stage that you're at and it remains to be seen how well it's going to be working out after you go live with the beta as well. Probably it will. Yeah, I mean, that will be the next exciting discussion and to see how far we are with the ecosystem and all that.

Right. Okay. Great. No, thanks a lot, George. Thank you as well. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. If you like my work, you can follow Link Data Orchestration on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.