The Pomp Podcast - Preston Van Loon, Co-Founder of Prysmatic Labs: The Plan to Scale Ethereum

Episode Date: May 17, 2019

Preston Van Loon is an Ethereum Protocol Developer and Co-Founder of Prysmatic Labs. In this conversation, we discuss testing frameworks, working at Google, blcokchain scalability, Ethereum 2.0, sharding, Ethereum Foundation Grants and what Preston and his team are building at Prysmatic Labs. ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Preston Van Loon is an Ethereum protocol developer and co-founder of Prismatic Labs. In this conversation, we discuss testing frameworks, working at Google, blockchain scalability, Ethereum 2.0, sharding, Ethereum foundation grants, and what Preston and his team are building at Prismatic Labs. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do as well. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek

Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm here with Preston. I feel like I'm going to learn a ton today because frankly, he's got a bunch of experience and working on things that I don't really understand. So thank you so much for taking the time to come over from Brooklyn and do this conversation. Yeah, thanks for having me. Absolutely. All right. Let's start with your background, kind of pre-crypto.

what uh what were you doing sure so um let's start with um university so i went to middle tennessee state university i originally went there for aerospace okay um and the whole time i've been you know interested in computers like messing around uh come from like playing a lot of video games and like i want to run my own server and add mods and stuff um so i got as far as i got my pilot's license uh single engine pilot's license and then i decided i wanted to switch over to computer science because it's just more interesting to me so some people would compare like you wanted to go to the moon aerospace and then like crypto going to the moon as well right yeah that that might be it you know i i just wanted to have a really big like positive impact

on the world and i think that uh i can maybe have a better chance to do that in computer science so okay so I switched over but I hate school so I eventually dropped out and then I just started working on like random stuff so I was working on e-commerce company and they were selling things on eBay and they need to automate a lot of stuff and then I hopped over to another company that was doing like some like financing in the trucking industry and they had all their software in-house and then I was working on like a point-of-sale company and then Google plucked me out of there and I moved to New York so I worked at Google for a

few years so you were doing all of pre Google you were in Tennessee so doing all this I was in Texas in Texas I say so I went from Tennessee Texas I'm from Texas I got families all there so I moved back back home and just started working got it okay and then you end up in New York working at Google that's right yeah and what was the draw to go to to Google yeah Google so it was really interesting company to work at it's a lot of opportunity a lot of things to do. Uh, and New York was a place where I'd always been like kind of interested in going there. I probably never would have moved here if it wasn't for, for Google though. But I thought,

um, Google has a lot of, they're solving a lot of hard problems and that's interesting to me. And I, I I'm drawn to that. I want to, to solve the hardest problem I can and hopefully make a big impact there. Yep. And it feels like to me, you know, I worked at Facebook, you worked at Google, a lot of these companies, there's a natural draw to them because you kind of know that hey you're gonna work on hard problems you're gonna work on them at scale right and you're gonna have a good chance of working with really smart people alongside you on those hard problems and so it's kind of you almost don't even need to know what you're gonna work on yet right there's already an allure to those companies and then once you get in you can kind of figure out what you

want to do is that accurate that is totally accurate and the google hiring process is that you're you're hired as a software engineer and you don't know like what at that point you don't know what team you're going to be on but you're just so pumped because anything you're going to land on, it's going to be amazing. Yeah. It's funny. Facebook's product manager track is very similar. You know, you're going to be a product manager, but you don't necessarily know what team you're going to work on. And then during the onboarding, you basically figure out what team you're going to be on. Yeah. It's pretty cool. All right. So what, uh, what'd you work on at Google? I worked in the ad space on a product called double click. Uh, it's recently renamed

to display video 360 as part of their advertising suite, but it's for more like, uh, ad agencies or big big ad companies so it's bigger than you know adwords is probably something that you and i might use because we have low spend but if if i want to spend a million dollars on a campaign i probably would want the support from a system like this so i was software engineer on that platform mostly doing on the advertiser side doing web development for for their web application mostly and our team was pretty small so we managed everything from deployments to our own site reliability keeping things online so I kind of got a really well-rounded set of experience there because we were doing everything on our team yeah it is

pretty funny how whether it's Facebook Google Amazon you know eat Twitter etc a lot of these companies although they are large and number of employees the individual teams are pretty small, right? And they really don't use an incredible amount of resources to accomplish things. And it feels like that's part of the magic sauce, if you will, right? Is even though you have the ability to work at scale, you still might only have 10 or less people working on the project, right? And so you get the backing and the resources of this large organization, but the actual core team, it's like a startup almost, right? Yeah. So DoubleClick is is a pretty big product there's probably 100 people working on it but they divide it into

smaller pieces so each team um it maybe is eight or so people and say oh you own the front end of the application or part of the front end so that was kind of what our team did got it yeah and like it's pretty incredible to think of double click which is probably you know billions of dollars a year going through it 100 people is actually not is nothing compared to the you know tens of thousands that work at Google. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, uh, they said, you know, keeps the lights on, right. Keep the lights on at Google. Yeah, absolutely. And it empowers everything else. Yeah. Right. Um, all right, cool. And so one of the things that you've talked a lot about in the past, uh, that I find fascinating is this idea of just like testing, right. And experimentation,

maybe talk a little bit about kind of where your fascination or, or, you know, focus on testing and experimentation comes from yeah so uh we'll start with the testing part is that when i'm building something i don't trust that uh just like clicking the button that it does the thing it's going to work at like maybe it worked then but if it if i don't have good testing infrastructure in place i don't i'm not assured that i'm not going to that i'm going to break it later so uh on our team we really advocate and push for and require that everyone's writing really good tests so that's starting with like the the smallest level you can go which are unit tests so if i have something that multiplies two numbers i'm going to write a suite of tests this

is these inputs give me this output and anytime someone new comes along they're editing it they're changing it up if they accidentally break it we'll know before they even check the code in so that's that's super important uh going a step higher we want to ensure that things in the actual system don't break so doing like integration testing um which is to actually extend up um the whole cluster and run things and then check the in-state or you know various checkpoints of the state and just see that oh it's still advancing so in our case we're building a blockchain we want to see that does uh rolling out this new release will it sync with other peers or will it uh will it break entirely so that's really important to me for testing because these kind of things like

you can't especially once it goes to mainnet you can't uh it's really hard to do upgrades and to roll it out to the entire network so you have to get it right the first time pretty much so we're we're really really big on providing this testing infrastructure and making sure that things are done right the first time before they're for the sent out there and so when you you look at the testing piece, you know, one of the frameworks that I took from working at these large technology companies was this idea that first you have to design the correct test, right? The test has to actually be accurate. And what we mean by that is you're trying to solve a problem and there's multiple solutions. You come up with some sort of framework or test that you're going

to put a hypothesis through. And then the second piece is you have to execute the test perfectly, right and the idea is if you don't have perfect execution and the test doesn't work you're then left wondering well was it because we executed poorly or was it because the test was invalid right but if you always execute perfectly then you can very quickly tell either the test failed or it didn't because you never have to worry about that execution how do you think about that in a world where uh you're talking about testing in kind of the code is continuously checked every time there's changes made exactly right and and another thing to think about is uh what are you testing so if you if you're just testing like basically what the method says i mean that's

great but what you really want to test are behaviors so behavior might be ensuring that a user can log in not just like that their password has passed all these validity checks but but really that it goes all the way through the system and that the behavior we're testing behaviors and not just methods so that's that's really important to me and keeping it uh in continuous integration and automated uh that's another important thing because when we're doing code reviews and things the most annoying thing is to be to get feedback that hey i ran your test and they fail if we can automate that a robot tells you it's faster feedback cycle we can get things done faster yeah i've um i forget the name of the company but i recently saw recently maybe like last six

months, there was a company that basically creates some sort of technology that can identify all the potential vulnerabilities and basically tries to penetrate software, right? Not just blockchain related, but just in general. And it's almost like this automated testing program can drastically reduce the number of vulnerabilities, you know, on day one. And then also it can help identify the most critical areas that the team should go back and try to shore up. Is that happening in the blockchain space as well or is that more outside of blockchain right now um i i'm not too familiar with uh it inside of blockchain i know that's a really popular outside like automated tooling for security testing is huge another thing for security testing is having the test like really

help for audits so they can actually see how the code is supposed to be used in this isolated scope so they can look at this look at the big picture but the big picture might be a hundred thousand lines of code and they if they they can't don't have time to read all of it and to understand one method they look at the test so that's that's super important in terms of like blockchain um it's it's uh i think things like smart contracts are kind of hard to test right now um but there are like frameworks coming out that that that do help you do that and that's getting a lot more mature so i'm pretty happy to see that got it and so let's switch gears to talk about ethereum right obviously um you're uh you're quite bullish and think highly of uh of the platform maybe just

give us a kind of an understanding of you know how do you view it today where are we what's going well what's not going well what do you think the challenges are uh yeah so the most loaded question in the history of this podcast i know yeah that's that's a pretty loaded question so i'm gonna i'm gonna go with uh with my bias answer is that that i want to talk about scalability so ethereum has had this great success where they've they've hit the peak of what the blockchain can do so they've already like maxed out if you want to call transactions per second being the scalable measurement of a blockchain they did max that out already at the hype of 2017 and other other points in

time so that's a great that's kind of a great problem to have you have this blockchain is so successful that it's really hit the capacity so now we're wondering okay well how do we take it to the next level and so the research team uh our team prismatic labs and a lot of other developers are building on it uh ethereum 2.0 which is just an entirely new rewrite of of the the whole ecosystem so so things that aren't going well are that the blockchain doesn't scale and uh we know that so if if if we're about to enter another um run like we saw in 2017 well there's lots of excitement we're getting lots of users on board kind of getting closer to that global adoption that we're all

striving for we're gonna hit this peak again where the blockchain starts to struggle we're getting all the blocks are full of people you know paying high gas fees or waiting on time for their transactions so so that's still a problem it's the biggest problem in my mind the second biggest problem is usability ux and uh just general like knowledge of how things work so one great thing that the ethereum community has been doing is they launched the new ethereum.org which is um a new redesign that has some controversial feedback some people like it some people don't but the point is the content is better it's hard to argue that this is more substance to it than it did before so i think

that's a huge improvement and that it's on github so anybody can suggest changes yep or file a bug or whatever so that's this was much more controversial than i think i understood right like like it's actually people are what are the detractors point right the people who don't like it what are they complaining about the look of it really okay it not not anything else that i know they just say wow this looks terrible and they're just complaining some some people have been helpful where they'll say i hate this and then they'll put their explicit feedback on the site and some people even submit pull requests say i hate this this is what you need to do to fix it and i've done it for you just accept it so so that's actually like way better and it's a step

in the right direction so maybe the i mean they even claim that it's a work in progress like it's they nobody said this is the final thing so i'm super happy that they're that they're doing it all because the site before was from i don't know 2014 and no one's touched it since then so big improvement i think yeah yeah absolutely and so let's get to uh prismatic labs right and maybe talk a little bit about what you're actually building and why you're doing it uh okay so prismatic labs we're a team independent team of blockchain developers who are interested in scaling ethereum so what that means is we're we're developing an ethereum 2.0 client ethereum 2.0 is the sharding and proof of stake rewrite of ethereum so everything is completely different

it's a huge uh undertaking and so what you're essentially doing right and you correct me if i'm wrong so this is the part where you're going to do some teaching to me okay is uh there's a Ethereum, we'll call it Ethereum 1.0, which is this smart contract platform that has a lot of advantages. It had a lot of breakthroughs in terms of how people thought about using a blockchain and some of the applications it could have, but it runs into the scaling issue. What you guys essentially are saying is let's change to proof of stake and let's make some other improvements to the Ethereum model. And you label that Ethereum 2.0 and that's what you're building. Exactly. So it's a new blockchain that is fundamentally still Ethereum, but for some amount of time there will be two chains running in parallel.

They'll be connected. Ethereum 1 and 2 will have a one-way bridge so you can migrate over early. If you want to be a staker, if you're just ready to move over, that mechanism will be there. And then I think the eventual goal is that we'll break that separation and then the Ethereum 1 chain will live on in some form. But the main Ethereum lives on is Ethereum 2.0 and this new proof of stake and sharded blockchain. Got it. And so let's come back to proof of work versus proof of stake in a second. But explain what sharding is and why that's important. Okay.

So sharding in the traditional database model is we have basically one computer, right? And maybe this computer has one terabyte of disk. But once we start to fill up data on that disk, it's getting full. We only have one slot in, maybe only have one slot in our computer. We get another computer and then split the data between the two. So now we've effectively doubled our capacity. Now there's a little bit of overhead because these nice computers have to talk to each other. But we think that it's so infrequent and the tradeoff is worth it because we just doubled our capacity maybe for this small overhead of doing things.

So really, it's just sharding is a big word for being able to break up large pieces of data into multiple parts. And you can put those multiple parts in a more efficient manner, right, in terms of storage of the data. Yeah. So it's a horizontally scaling model. So instead of having like a better computer, we just added more computers. And that's what this is. Instead of having like a faster, better blockchain, we're just cloning the Ethereum one chain and we'll have a thousand chains which can talk to each other and split up. So we have a thousand times more data storage capacity throughput because we can run things in parallel. So it's a big improvement.

Got it. And so in this sharding model where you're essentially just adding more blockchains kind of parallel to the initial one, you obviously get or at least the theory right or even in practice you're getting added capacity or performance what the people who disagree with a sharding approach what is their complaint I guess the biggest complaint is that there's the additional overhead of these shards so if what we're envisioning is that in order to take the most advantage of sharding is that you'll localize your applications so if you're a smart contract developer you'll you'll deploy you have five contracts that talk to each other put them all on the same shard got it because that's that's where

the optimization comes that's the most efficient place the way to actually do this yeah but the argument is that uh given a random distribution of users they're going to be randomly split over all the shards they're going to be talking to each other and it's not a real improvement but we think that you know the behavior is going to be that people will localize and that layer two will take advantage of handling the cross sharding stuff that's what i think is that yeah there's going to be some overhead but we can put some more of the work onto the take some work off the chain and put it on layer two to facilitate these quick you know getting between shards if you need to do that and keeping it infrequent got it okay so that's sharding yes and then let's go back

to proof of stake proof of work um i think we've talked uh quite a bit on the podcast about proof of work. Sure. Explain what your view of the advantages of proof of stake, right? So rather than having the machines actually doing the validation, this proof of stake concept, what's the benefits there? Right. So for the listeners to recall, the proof of work is the consensus model where miners will produce a block by guessing this random number that we know takes a long time, it's difficult to do. So we can verify it quickly and know that they spent the work to do it this is proof of work proof of stake is a different model where you don't have to spend a lot of resources to do it in terms of computing you put up some collateral

to hold yourself accountable right and and then you do your work where you're you're producing blocks or attesting to data to ensure that it's there and available and correct and if you the mechanism to keep people from acting maliciously is that if if they're proposing blocks that have invalid state transitions so maybe they're printing money for themselves or just making junk trying to attack people or harm the system well you can enforce that within the base layer chain the beacon chain and actually penalize them by taking their deposit away and either burning it or probably the person who was able to prove it gets some percentage of it, something to incentivize people to hold other people accountable.

But the main benefit there is that you can do it on consumer hardware. You don't need to have a server farm with ASIC rigs and all this spinning tons of energy. You actually just need to be online and be listening for the data. And when your time comes, you just sign the correct thing and then broadcast it to the network. And it's really cheap in terms of computing. Got it. And so the thought process here is that what you're building is essentially a proof of stake based sharding blockchain. And the belief, if I understand this correctly, is Ethereum 1, good idea, hits scalability issues by going proof of stake with sharding.

you're actually able to still have the quote-unquote ethereum dream built but in a scalable way yeah that's okay what do the what i'll call hardcore ethereum developers and that whole community are they on board with this are they open to the idea do they hate you i guess what's what's kind of your relationship with what i think of as like the the you know i'll call it the core developers without meaning anything other than just a name sure yeah i i in general think people like what we're doing i don't i don't hear that people hate us i'm sure someone out there thinks negatively of the somebody else for sure someone's upset about it but in general at least in the ethereum community in our little bubble everyone is super supportive so okay um

that that's actually like a really great question because um like maybe something we can talk about is like how are we funding this yep um so like prismatic labs doesn't have a revenue model like we're building this open source client where anybody can use it for free and we're not going to sell it to you like it's open you can download it and use it whatever and so we started this last year in January and how it came about is that in December I was on you know the chat rooms like asking developers like hey is anybody working on sharding because I see that Vitalik and others have like this paper written up and it's looking pretty complete. And, you know, why is nobody working on it? Uh, and then Raul Jordan was in the same rooms as me, basically asking the same

questions within the same week or so. So we linked up on, on there and he said, Hey, you know, I'm, I'm actually going to be in New York city, uh, next week. Um, maybe we shouldn't have a coffee and talk about it so so we met up we went over everything and said like okay let's this seems like a good idea let's put a team together and just start start building it because no one's working on it we're suffering from scaling let's let's do it so we got a team of uh five or so people um put a name on it prismatic labs um raul actually thought of it on the way over to meet me i didn't know that until like six months later he's like oh by the way that's when i thought of it was like i was walking from the train so i love that that's pretty cool so we started working

on it started building and then the ethereum foundation announced they wanted to give out grants for for this particular type of work and we said wow you know like the stars are aligning here let's apply for this grant and see what happens and we actually ended up getting uh in the first wave of grants a hundred thousand dollars so that was super cool we were we didn't think that this was gonna go even that far we just wanted to work on this because it was interesting uh no one else was doing it yet and it was just like something we were passionate about um and then it started getting you know we we just started working we flew to taiwan to hang out with the research team and there was like a 2.0 workshop um for a couple days that was super

awesome. We came back having to start over almost the work we've done so far. And then in June of last year, there was another sort of Ethereum 2 workshop where we decided to take Casper, which was the proof of state model that was going to go to Ethereum. And it was pretty close to being ready. We said, let's just merge these two ideas because some of the research for proof of stake can be reused so we merged that and basically had to start over again in between that time we had received more grants from from Aragon which is a governance DAO framework and we got from District 0x, Spankchain, Wanchain, Ethereum Community Fund and then in October we got a big grant from the Ethereum Foundation again and then

we were working on things and we had you know some pretty good capital uh but we we we were still all working our full-time jobs because it it wasn't quite enough for us to you know leave google and our other places we were working at and so vitalik uh does the yolo grant if you've seen on twitter where he just um the guy who never gives away ether suddenly gives out a thousand ether at a time so he gave us a thousand ether which is super cool he gave it to chainsafe another another ethereum 2 team uh and yeah so that was like super super super cool so at that point we said okay you know in january of 2019 we're gonna go full everyone's gonna go full time and we're just gonna heads down build it we have at least a year's worth of runway at for five

people and we want to see this ethereum 2.0 thing done so we started doing it and then today this morning um we've launched our phase zero test network so super exciting huge milestone it's taken us basically two months of debugging like it's it's been uh actually running for two months but it just wasn't ready for for the masses yet but but this morning it's out there so super exciting absolutely well first of all congratulations so it's it's exciting to be talking to you today when you get that out yeah uh maybe talk a little bit about uh what some for the last two months as you guys have been testing like what some of the bugs are because i don't think a lot of people understand from the developer's perspective how hard this stuff is yeah right like it's not just

like hey i woke up i wrote some code and i ship it and you know hey i changed the world like you spent two months debugging just debugging for months yeah yeah oh we worked on it for a year and debugged it for two months and part of the problem was that the we have the specification right that that we're all agreeing on um and that's like what the behavior that should happen and this is a constantly moving target so in in the entire year that we were building this thing that that specification had been rewritten from the ground up three times and then on the last you know iteration it had been changing a lot and it's still changing until june the end of june um the mq2 that's when they're going to freeze it finally and that's going to be phase zero so

a lot of bugs come come around because when we've been updating to the changes in the specification maybe we updated one part but forgot another or there's like an off by one error so people are just not behaving correctly and it's all like things that you can't just unit test like this is one of those things we test with the whole system and another is like you have to test it at a scale so one thing we found out yesterday is that our test network didn't work with more than 30 people so that's not good it's not good at all and and we were we wanted to launch it yesterday and we someone said you know hey we should maybe we should um you know just deploy a bunch of clients out out in the cloud and see like what the traffic looks like and it was just

miserable like we were we had something where for every message that was received it was going out twice and this is like a exponential effect so when you receive it you give it to your peer who sends it to everybody and you also did the same thing twice so when you sent it out you're going to get it back twice from everybody else so it was just this was one of those like oversights where oh when i'm running with my two computers in my house it works fine or when i run on like with my friends or on the team it's like working just fine so i don't know that was that was pretty crazy um and like part of fixing that we actually we've been running the chain for for one week we got to a thousand slots right the slots are the new time interval for block times right

it's huge about a hundred thousand slots a huge milestone for us uh and when we were testing out some issues with syncing we accidentally knocked all the nodes offline so if this is the the world war three disaster scenario where if every node in the world went offline you have nobody to talk to to get the latest data so we basically had killed the chain entirely we couldn't get it back online but we managed to recover one of the disks and then hacked hacked one node together to say just just take the disk data and and and this is the latest data it's sort of like a social consensus here we're like we'll accept what this guy says because we have no choice so we did that revive the chain it's still going it's been going eight days now um we're able to

launch that test network and hopefully we can get a lot of people trying it out today because we we i mean we want to see a break because if it breaks now that's amazing now we have a new bug we can fix and that's gonna like make it better when it finally goes to to main net yeah well part of it is just like if it's gonna break let's break it day eight not yeah you know day 847 when there's billions of dollars on right yeah exactly so the the timeline for this is that we're the community we're hoping to launch to mainnet at the end of the year so maybe like seven eight months so to continue on the testnet that's yeah that's what i'm thinking so the spec as i just said is that it will be frozen at the end of q2 which means we have we in two quarters we can get

everything we're hoping we can get everything together where we're working clients can different clients can talk to each other so our prism client from prismatic labs it only talks to other prism clients right now just for this first iteration but that's not very useful because we want it to be multi-client so that'll be a big hurdle uh and then trying to get things to work on a on a really big scale so running at 100 clients is is great and all but the system i think the minimum amount to start is 16 000 validators so we're going to need to run a test net with a lot more resources and it makes sense and then so as you move forward what are the challenges or things that you're worried about right is it that it actually does break or are there other things that that

you're worried about yeah um i guess i'm not too worried because i think we're we're in a pretty good spot um things are coming along really nicely there's a lot of work on the research side they it does like in terms of the process between getting new ideas in from from someone's mind into paper so we can all work on it the process and the review has been getting a lot better um i think that what maybe what we're missing is um some velocity i think we'd all like to go a little bit faster on on prismatic labs we want to grow the team out to to 10 or so people so we're really hoping that in the next six months we can you know get more resources to build out the client and also the support infrastructure to help like keep it healthy

and alive and bugs you know out um so that's kind of in my mind it's just how are we gonna how are we going to get there and how fast can we get there got it yeah that makes sense and then walk me through the scenario let's say that uh you are successful right and you build this ethereum 2.0 uh proof of stake with sharding and and it works right and kind of ethereum is ready to scale to the masses if you will what happens to like the ethereum 1.0 and kind of what are the ramifications of your success in that scenario uh right so the the the migration strategy so so in my mind i think that the ethereum 1.0 chain is is not going to be very useful going forward okay i think i don't think it's going to go away um entirely some people might want to use it it

might live on in some form but but i think the majority of people i think that the dap developers the major applications are going to move to ethereum 2 and okay in uh does that make ethereum one like ethereum classic today kind of where like it still exists it's just not used by anybody really or you know am i thinking about that incorrectly uh i it's a good analogy where it's it'll still live there and as long as people are mining it and and blocks are advancing it's still a blockchain that you can interface with so i don't know if it'll have any value i don't i can't really speculate on that but but the but that's what i think is going to happen i don't think we're going to shut it down like we obviously we can't we have no power of that the powers and the

miners if the miners are still mining it still goes we can't just say it's stop using it right So that's the beauty of blockchain, right? We don't control it. It's awesome. So the strategy is that we, maybe this is one idea anyway, is we take a snapshot of, let's say, a block 10 million. This is hypothetical. Block 10 million, we're going to snapshot what the Ethereum one chain looked like, break the connection between the two, and then spin up a new shard with that state data. so if you hadn't migrated already you're just going to be copied over in that sense so that's

the one way that it can come come over and and and sort of transition from one to two got it yeah and when that migration happens are there negative side effects to this like is there anything that you foresee where you're like look we think that a negative you know aspect of this is a and we're okay with that but we do identify it or is there really none that pop out um some of the negative feedback that i've heard is that there will be two ethereum tokens at one or yeah two ethereum coins at the same time oh interesting because because it's a one-way migration there's not this um backwards liquidity or whatever you want to call it but i think that problem is solved in in arbitrage because if you really wanted to get your tokens back on that chain somebody out there

is going to be willing to to do that for some small fee like maybe let's say two percent like if if if i wanted to go to ethereum 2.0 and i can get two percent more tokens by just trading with this person yeah they're not someone's going to want to do that so i'm not somebody will figure something out yeah if there's an arbitrage opportunity it's going to happen i'm not too worried about it the benefit here is that we keep the system simple having a one-way bridge is significantly simpler than a two-way bridge so that's why that's why we're doing it that way but that's some of the feedback that i've heard are people concerned that that ethereum one and ethereum two are going to trade at completely different prices which is a valid thought but

but uh i don't think it's going to be that it's gonna be weird if there's like eth one and eth two on exchanges right yeah yeah that's that's the other thing so yeah i don't know it's something to think about and we're thinking about it but i don't think it's going to be like dramatically different, maybe just like a little bit. Yeah. And would it be fair to get, I'm thinking about this out loud here, but I guess as long as the technology works and it gets to a scalable situation, the idea that there are different tokens on exchange, like all of that is almost on the periphery of the blockchain itself works and people can then build on the platform. Right. Right. It's like, that's almost like it would appear to me without thinking about it too much.

That's the most important thing. Right. And then everything else is kind of second order effects of if technology works then we got a shot yeah right yeah we're yeah we're not building this with uh like the trading part in mind like that's important part of the system like if this has to have value for it to work but we're designing something that's supposed to be scalable and trying to keep it simple scalable and usable and then the rest will come come with that i think it makes sense yeah um before i wrap up i usually go a rapid fire questions uh what do you think is the most important company in crypto uh most important company in crypto um that's a hard question that's first rapid fire one i don't know i think i think um i'll go with

consensus on this because they have just done a lot of a lot of work they're trying experimenting in all areas uh having some success and failures but overall like having a big impact in the community so that's i really respect the all the efforts they're doing everybody over there is doing a great job yep okay what uh what's the one regulation that you would change or improve if you could anything that sticks out um yeah i i hear that it's hard for people to invest in stuff in the u.s i think the regulation on like kyc know your customer and anti-money money laundering laws are difficult so at least compared to the rest of the world uh i would like to see that different you know because like people this is not like i'm not like buying into someone's uh

you know crazy company these are like small amounts and and crypto that that's going to have couldn't have a big impact so i'd like to see that to be more accessible to people because the ultimate goal is global adoption and if you have to have already a million dollars in your pocket to to get in it's not going to benefit everybody right so got it yeah what um what do you think your most controversial thought in crypto is like what do you believe where you think a lot of other people disagree with you on i don't know i try to stay away from those so i don't know well it doesn't necessarily be a controversial thought in the sense of uh it is toxic right but but just in the sense like is there something that you think will work that a lot of other people don't think

will work or maybe you think that everyone's really bullish on something and you're not um most of my thoughts are on technical design so the group of people that disagree with me is kind of small just because it's a small sample set right but yeah but in terms of like our um interop architecture between the clients we're building so the clients are two pieces it's a beacon chain node which is like the the the piece that handles proof of stake assignments and managing everything and then you have the validator client which is actually doing the signing and the way these talk to each other the technologies we're using is a sort of controversial debate everybody wants to do it a different way i'm pushing more for this schema-based

framework called protocol buffers but other people want to do json which is like web technology and it's not like that controversial so maybe this is like a disappointing answer but it's the best i got you know if it's important yeah people disagree it could be controversial you know i'm a pretty agreeable guy so so this is the best i can do that's all right yeah what uh what's the most important book you've ever read i um it's a good question so i read uh i guess like in my career wise i was doing a lot of javascript stuff and there was a series called you don't know js you don't know js yeah or don't know js something like that and it was it was huge for me because like a lot of people do javascript

and they're like they know how to do like get buttons to do things and just animate and do stuff but like to actually understand like scoping and how things work on the internal layer uh stuff they don't really teach you in school especially me when dropping out like that was really huge huge for me so it kind of opened the doorway for me to like get i i actually it was like the first time i got interested in how things work under the hood so i was like always interested in building things but like how does it actually work that's when i started getting getting really into it in terms of my computer science career that's awesome yeah um i uh i probably will not read it just because i feel like i will it'll go over my head too quickly but but it's uh it's fascinating to

hear uh not only is it an important book you read it at the right time right right so the timing is almost as important as the information uh which is pretty cool uh all right so to finish up no might let you ask me one question but first we talk about aliens uh believer non-believer think they're real um i think they're real i okay i i i it's hard in in this uh vast universe to think that we're the only only people out there that's uh intelligent species so i'm i'm going to believe they're aliens so i i'm with you i think that just from a probability standpoint it's unlikely that we are the only species and as many people on the podcast have said it would be selfish of us to think that yeah uh there is a group of people who are now trying um very hard to convince

me that the aliens are already here right and that maybe we just don't know where they are or all of that so it's been it's been fascinating to hear uh people's perspectives on uh how deep their alien beliefs go yeah right what uh what one question you have for me to finish up um are you going going to be an ethereum 2.0 staker oh interesting you're going to validate for us um i don't know is the short answer sure uh i think that um something you know my partners and i have uh we start out with very kind of rigid thesis right which is um bitcoin has a higher probability of being the global reserve currency than people give it credit for right so not necessarily even saying that it's a huge number it's just it's a higher percentage probability than people think

right so like that's one piece two is that um a lot of what is happening right now is about automation and this idea that every stock bond currency and commodity so everything of value is going to be digital in the future right most likely cryptographically secure most likely on a blockchain all that but doesn't necessarily have to be right so just can we use software to automate a lot of processes etc obviously with the smart contract platform um that's a huge component of it um we cut our teeth mining right so actually mining bitcoin and ethereum and going through you know the gpu's burning out right and dealing with asics and all stuff um and so we we've dabbled uh personally in some of the staking stuff um we find it fascinating i think that uh what i

what i am personally looking for is uh where is it working at scale right and so i think uh ethereum too is a great opportunity for that to happen so so if the technology works and um you see this i don't see why we wouldn't be open to doing it right at the same time part of this also is um the idea of staking is very um new to uh pretty much anyone in the financial world right this idea of like hey you're going to make an economic investment and then you are going to put that at risk in order to be part of running this net like that's not a thing that they're used to thinking about um and so we've joked around about like does that mean it's like the new fixed income type investment or you know how do you basically describe it to our institutional investors that

um they're not technical right uh frankly they think of bitcoin and then they think of blockchain right they don't even think of ethereum and all this other stuff so like we're still kind of um you know educating and kind of trying to chip away at this idea that there's other things other than just uh bitcoin um and so i think that you know it's a thing where uh maybe at the end of this year i can make this promise you come back we'll do this again and then uh maybe we can even if it's up and running then uh maybe we'll uh we'll stake some stuff uh kind of live and and see how it goes cool that's that would be great that'd be awesome yeah look yeah it's uh it's pretty cool to uh to kind of hear how how is this going and i think you know just our conversation today um

there's aspects of this like ethereum too that i think a lot of people don't understand and then two part of what to me is so personally uh intriguing about this is like the amount of support that you're getting from different stakeholders in the ethereum community right it's not just you guys saying hey we're gonna go do this and like i don't care if anybody likes it you're actually having people who are saying look i'll provide resources you know financially i want be a part of this i want to see this be successful um and i think that is uh that's really unique and and uh hopefully ends up uh you know accelerating your guys success yeah it's huge and one thing i forgot to mention is a lot of the the contributors to our funding are actual just individuals so

we've had people five dollars a month it's awesome it's it's been huge through gitcoin we've received i don't know ten thousand dollars from from the community so that was super cool that that is uh absolutely cool. And crypto is a wild place, right? You can never say never in crypto. And then I'm always blown away by just the generosity of people with their time, with their resources, et cetera. So it's cool to hear that you guys are benefiting from that as well. Awesome, man. Well, listen, I really appreciate you doing this. It's been very informative for me. Hopefully people listening got a lot of benefit out of this. And then end of the year, you come back and let's see where things are. Sounds good. Thanks for having me.

All right. Thanks. Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you like this episode of Off The Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off The Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off The Chain. Thank you.