Unchained - Can Gavin Wood's Polkadot 'Make Blockchain Great Again'? - Ep.202

Episode Date: December 8, 2020

Gavin Wood, founder of Polkadot, Kusama, and Parity, discusses what he calls the "meta-protocol," Polkadot. In this episode, he talks about: his vision for Polkadot and the problems he set out to solve when conceiving it why he considers Polkadot a meta-protocol the implementation of parachains and parathreads, how they are defined and how they differ parachain auctions and candle auctions how DDoS attacks can be prevented on parachains initial parachain offerings and how they differ from initial coin offerings and avoid the regulatory problems that were so common with ICOs on-chain governance on Polkadot and how it works how immediate implementation of proposals that pass consensus will prevent forks his answer to those who point to Parity's history with security lapses as cause for concern about Polkadot's security how he sees Polkadot co-existing with Ethereum whether Polkadot is working toward composability how the Web3 Foundation and Parity plan to use their collective stake of DOTs within the network how he plans to address the possibility that DOT could be labeled a security how he imagines Polkadot will serve the enterprise world and how Polkadot will benefit enterprise blockchains   Thank you to our sponsors!  1inch: https://1inch.exchange Crypto.com: https://www.crypto.com   Episode links:  Gavin Wood: https://twitter.com/gavofyork Polkadot: https://polkadot.network Kusama: https://kusama.network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, welcome to Unchained. I'm your host, Laura Shin. This week on the show, I have a fireside chat I conducted with Parody and Pocodot founder, Gavin Wood, at the Pocodot decoded conference last week. Gavin answered my questions while sipping whiskey, which those of you watching the video will see. In this episode, we discussed what his vision was in creating Pocodot, what kinds of parochains he expects will be created there, and how he believes Pocodot can coexist with Ethereum. We also discuss whether defy-like composability will ever be possible on Pocod, whether Dots are security, and Paradis history with security lapses, and how that could affect Pocodot since all paracchains share security provided by the base layer. It was a fun and fascinating conversation, and I hope you enjoy it. Crypto.com, the crypto super app that lets you buy, earn, and spend crypto, all in one place. Earn up to 8.5% per year on your BTC and more than 20 other goals. Download the crypto.com app now to find out how much you could be earning.

One Inch Exchange is Defi's leading Dex aggregator that discovers the best trade practices across all dexes. One Inch was launched in May 2019 by two White Hat hackers at ETH Global's Eith New York Hackathon. One Inch has reached almost $7 billion in overall volume in just over a year. Hi, Gavin. Hi, Laura. Nice to see you again. Likewise. All right. So let's have a discussion about all things, Pocod. Let's start with a really basic question. What is your vision for Pocod? When you conceived of it, what problems were you trying to solve?

Well, there are many sort of answers to this question. It's, yeah, it's an interesting one. In many respects, it was a very abstract thing that I wanted to do when I started Pocod. It was a really just a push to become more abstract, more general. over what it was that we were solving, what it was that we were producing. So it's like, you know, Bitcoin started off with a very basic scripting language, Ethereum, sort of introduced this much more complete means of scripting financial transactions. And really with Pocod, it was trying to create something

that produced like an even more general model for how it can be extended, how things can be added, And then on top of that, it was really also trying to address this, you know, fundamental problem of scalability. Like, how do we try and push through more transactions? How do we take advantage of the fact that there's an awful lot of workers out there on the network? But it's so wasteful to have them all working on the same thing. So it was these twin sort of topics, this generality and scalability.

And really, the vision was just to sort of make blockchain. great again. It's like can we take blockchain to its, you know, a step further? Can we actually address some of these really important issues that we've always known have existed? You know, you can go really

quite far back five, ten years and see that people are already thinking, well, we really need to like, you know, process different transactions on different nodes. We really need to be more general. And it was, yeah, it was really just kind of, can we

can we bring this forward? Can we be more general? Can we process more transactions on different notes? And when you say the words general and abstract, I'm not really sure what you mean. You've also talked about how Pocodot is a meta protocol. Are those concepts related? And can you explain what you mean by that? Yes, they are. They are. So a meta protocol is like a meta means sort of after or beyond. And it's generally used to mean like the next sort of step down past this concept. So it's like, you know, a meta-proticle is a protocol that governs another protocol, a protocol on which you can place another protocol. It's like a protocol of a protocol, or protocol of protocols. And what I mean by metaproticle in this sense, really, is that it's an

underlying, kind of much more basic, much simpler protocol on which we build what we would normally consider to be the protocol. So to take an example, the protocol of Bitcoin is, well, we send blocks around and these blocks when you execute them, when you interpret the blocks or the transactions in them, there are, you know, transactions with like some script, but basically most of the time, it means send these bitcoins to these addresses. And that's a protocol. We under, like the nodes of the Bitcoin network, understand how to interpret these blocks, right? It's language, basically. But it's very difficult. Once you've set that language, it's kind of set in stone. It's very difficult to alter it, to change it, to introduce additional features, to fix bugs. And, you know,

it's like, it's, it's very rigid. A meta protocol would sit underneath that protocol and define that protocol. And the nice thing is that because it's defined in terms of this meta protocol, then you can change it quite easily. You just have to obey the rules of the meta protocol, and then the main protocol can adapt and evolve and iterate over time. So then the question is, well, why is that, you know, what if you need to adapt, evolve and iterate on the meta protocol? And the idea with that is that we make it as simple and as abstract as possible. We take a pre-existing technology, something that has already kind of been iterated through, something that very clever people from many different sort of stakeholders have already argued about and sort of come

to the decision that this is probably the best thing that does this kind of meta-protocolistic stuff. And what we did was, well, we chose basically WebAssembly, because WebAssembly is like an industry standard. It's been iterated on. It's actually the already two separate technologies, one built by Mozilla, one built by Google, has sort of been splunged together into this thing, web assembly. So it's already got a lot of ideas. It's already had a lot of iterations. It's unlikely that we're ever really going to need to change it. And therefore, it's really good foundation to build our stuff on, this meta-proticle. And then we just have to define everything else in terms of that. And that's where the protocol

comes in. So the real Pocodot protocol, paracains and governance and balances and dot protocol and staking, all of this stuff is the Pocodot protocol. And that stuff changes over time. But it's defined in terms of the meta protocol that doesn't really change over time. And that's the stuff that we make sure that we've got this like tried and tested very sort of well understood, well-known technology in like WebAssembly. So, yeah, it is a lot about being flexible and abstract because this top level, the Pocodot protocol, is not very abstract. I mean, parochains are pretty good,

but there's still a very specific way of having different sort of shards. There are a specific way of scaling. There are a specific way of having a market mechanism to claim them. So it's still like opinionated, as we would say. There's still a lot of opinions involved in it. Whereas the Web Assembly isn't very opinionated all. It's not even our opinion. It's someone else.

It's Googles and Mozilla's and Microsofts and all of their opinions, really. We just said, right, well, you guys have had time to argue about whose opinion is best. We'll take the answer and use it because we don't want to argue. We just want to have something that's stable. And that's sort of, because of that, it's a more abstract. level that we can build things on. So there is this like these dual levels. The meta protocol, very abstract, very general, doesn't change very much. And the protocol much more opinionated, more specific changes a lot because we don't, you know, our opinions are always wrong. In the

fullness of time, opinions are always on. They always need changing. Design always needs changing. It iterates over time. And we want to allow ourselves to evolve. And that's why having these two separate protocols, the meta protocol on the bottom, the protocol building on top of it, is how we achieve that. And it's the same with, it's the same how we get from Bitcoin to Ethereum to Pocod. There is this idea of like, well, with Bitcoin, it wasn't really programmable, with Ethereum, it was kind of programmable, but you had this very limited computation model with gas and dynamic gas pricing and dynamic counting of resources and limited memory and storage and it was all very expensive.

And that changes with the computation model in Pocod because we have parac chains, which are much more abstract, much more general, in that they're not just a smart contract, an easy little bit of code that sort of keeps some records of maybe people's balances, but rather an entire blockchain that can basically kind of do more or less anything that you can imagine a blockchain to do. And that's a much more abstract thing. And I'll give you a concrete reason why that's an abstract thing.

You could easily implement a smart contract inside of a blockchain that already are blockchains that do it. Edgeware, Moon, Beam, a few others. You can't do it the other way round. You can't implement a blockchain inside of a smart contract because there's just not enough computational power. It's like, you know, it'd be like trying to shove... a shoe inside of a foot, you know, it doesn't, there's, there's no, you know, it's, one can contain the other, the other can't contain the one. And, and that's, uh, that's why, you know, it's, we can say, well, look, you know, Pocod and the parochane model is, is,

is more general than the smart contract model. Now, it doesn't mean it's better for all use cases in all circumstances, but it does mean that anything that you can do in a smart contract, you can do in a parochane, but not the other way around. There's a lot of things that you can do in a parochane that you really can't, or at least, at the very least, would be extremely difficult to do in a smart contract. And you also have parathreads. Can you define those and differentiate them from the parachines? Yeah, so parachains, as a term, it's evolved a little bit over time.

But broadly speaking, parachains are these slots. They're like, there's some number of them. And they're a little bit like computer cores. So your computer has a bunch of cores. I mean, this one that I'm on, I think, has four, but some of them these days have six or eight or even more. And the cause can process a particular application at once. So if you've got a bunch of windows open,

then it might be that one of the cores is doing the video playing in one window and another core is helping your web browser render the email in another window, and another core is playing your music in the background or whatever. So they can do different workloads. Well, basically, parachains are like this, but for a blockchain. So they do different workloads. One of them might be processing smart contract transactions, another might be processing like balance transfers,

like kind of Bitcoin transfer transactions. Another one might be doing governance. another one might be calculating what the optimum staking situation is. So it can do each of these cores, each of these parochains can do different things at any given time. And we measure time in terms of blocks. So it's like this particular block, block number, 1,470,293 is doing this. It's got a staking parochain. It's got a governance parochains.

It's got a two or three smart contract parochains. and so on. Now, parathreads are when we say, right, well, this application doesn't need to be processing transactions literally every block. Maybe it only needs to process transactions every 10th block, right? So instead of it happening every six seconds, it's every minute. Now that's perfectly reasonable. Bitcoin doesn't process transactions, you know, some of the time. It takes an hour before the transactions go through, you know, on average should be about 10 minutes. So it's not unreasonable to expect that probably one block in every 10 is sufficient for quite a lot of use cases. So then we say, right, well, rather than having this application just constantly always taking up one of these processing slots,

even when maybe it doesn't have that many transactions to process. Instead, what we do is we say, right, well, you don't get any, like, by default, but when you're you, you're ready to process some transactions, when you've got a bunch in your queue and you've, I don't know, they're important enough or they've been waiting long enough or whatever, then you pay a bit of money, but only a little bit, and they get processed. You sort of just push them bulk onto the, onto the Pocodot sort of network, and you get a block. It's like you get in one of these Pocodot blocks. You get your block being processed. You get your blocker transactions through.

And you gave an example of how Bitcoin only has a block every 10 minutes, but what types of projects do you see as wanting to be on a pair of threat as opposed to a parochain? Can you give some examples? Yeah, there's a few. So one of them would be an Oracle. So you can imagine there will be some Oracle situations. They're feeding in data from the external world. Now feeding in a load of data every six seconds seems overkill for a lot of a lot. I mean, you know, if you're talking about weather data, you don't need to update the weather every six seconds, right? maybe once an hour, I don't know, once a day. But yeah, definitely not every six seconds. You know, 500 raindrops have fallen. 493 more raindrops are fall. No. So, you know, we can imagine that actually,

with weather, it's like, you know, maybe once an hour, months every half hour of tops. And maybe it doesn't matter whether it's, you know, literally 30 minutes to the dot after the last update. Maybe it's okay for it to be like 31 minutes after the last update. You know, there's no huge time deadline. And that would be a really good one for parathreads because, you know, they would just basically have some amount of money, of tokens or whatever,

that they want to pay in order to get their new block of weather information, their update in, and then they just, you know, wait until the block, the chain of Pocodot is sufficiently unused, underutilized, and then their block will go in. A little bit like how transactions work in Bitcoin and Ethereum right now. So, you know, you've got your transaction fee, and maybe it sticks around for a block or two or three until a miner picks it up because there aren't enough other transactions that are paying more. So very similar in that regard, basically just an adaptive market.

another use case would be regional applications. So it could be that there's like a US-centric or a China-centric insurance app. And it's like, look, people don't claim their insurance, mostly at 4 a.m., right? Mostly, any shit that's going down happens at 4 a.m. perhaps. But the insurance comes a day or two later in daylight hours. And so realistically, for these kinds of regional daylight hour use cases, they're going to have like eight, ten hours where people are going to use it. There's going to be transactions.

But the rest of the day, the rest of the 24-hour period, there won't be very much going on. And it doesn't make sense, therefore, to have a constantly scheduled parochain slot if, you know, 60% of the time it's not being used, no transactions going through. And what about parachains? What are the types of parochains that you're envisioning will exist? Well, I mean, it's going to be an ecosystem. So there's going to be a lot of different things all kind of helping each other to get to like the end use cases. Something that seems pretty clear is that we can't jump past this stage.

The magic of blockchain isn't really in delivering a specific use case. really well. We've had a lot of time to do that and nothing's really come through. One or two minor exceptions, but more or less. Where we have seen hugely promising developments is in the emergent effects of being able to combine multiple use cases that, well, multiple applications, let's say, multiple solutions, in an environment where they can form symbiotic, relationships build on top of each other and provide a composite solution that no one ever really designed, but that nonetheless, you know, fulfills some goals. So, you know, you've got the flash

loans, you've got like the paycheck loans, you've seen the bit of the defy thing happening at the moment. That's, that's kind of where I think, where blockchain is able to provide like a good step forward in providing these trustless environments where people can be very experimental and deploy interesting use cases, the implicit applications, interesting bits of code that build upon and that form symbiotic relationships with pre-existing bits of code and that allow others to build upon them. So this is what we call composition, it's what we call emergent effects. And I think that's really where things are going to go. What kind of parochains?

I mean, you know, there's going to be parochains that want to specialize in smart contracts, for sure, just because they're an easier way of developing and deploying stuff than a full-blown blockchain. Though, interestingly enough, not that much easier. I think we're going to see different blockchains that come with kind of niche applications that they provide, plus a smart contract component that allows people to sort of extend those applications. So at the moment we have in chains like Ethereum, we have a lot of smart contracts deployed into them, each one fulfilling a particular niche. But none of them are particularly performant, none of them scale well,

none of them are really utilizing the computational power of the machines. What I think we're going to end up with is having the smart contract environment, primarily used for extension, like extending the functionality of things, but where the blockchain itself provides the sort of really bread and butter logic for doing flash loans, for doing decentralized exchanges, for transferring funds, for governance voting functions. This is, this I think is going to migrate, to a more fixed part of the blockchain,

like basically what substrate provides to you. And, yeah, the smart contracts, the sort of fastest iteration on the smart contracts where people can develop and deploy very quickly will be for more experimental, extensible stuff. So I think we're going to have a lot of different flavor smart contract chains doing things, you know, super diverse stuff.

we're going to have Oracle change, like you're going to be chains that are very specialized to just have data pumped into them. There'll be chains that actuate stuff, I think. So, you know, Slocut, I don't know, they're not really doing much anymore, but as far as I know, sorry if you are, guys. They were acquired by Blockchains LLC.

Right, yeah. So, you know, but a good example of an actuator where they're actually, you know, the transactions on a blockchain, are having effects in the physical world, I think we will see these kinds of things growing, you know, whether it's, I mean, maybe it's home automation. Maybe there's a blockchain that, you know,

its transactions are like, turn my light on, turn my light off. And the advantage of using a blockchain is you get like an indelible ledger of who told your lights to turn on and off, making it sort of more secure, making it, you know. But regardless, you know, actuation blockchains may well become a thing. I mean, obviously there's things like consortium blockchains, blockchains that are parochains that bring together other sets of blockchains. We're going to have bridge chains that allow blockchains to connect.

Well, Pocodot and it's parochains to connect to other networks. Yeah, I mean, there's going to be a lot. Okay. Well, one other thing that I was wondering about parochains is when I was doing the research for this, I was kind of interested to see that they have expiration dates, unless they're extended. And if they do expire, they go through this retirement period and those who contributed to the crowdfunding, get their dots back.

But I just wondered, so what happens to the smart contracts and other apps on that parachain? Because, like, you know, on Ethereum, these programs are usually unstoppable. So, for instance, an Oracle on Ethereum will always have a price. So in the case of these parachines, would people simply not build things on Pocodot such as oracles or any other functions that they would expect to exist beyond? that time horizon of, you know, like six months or two years or whatever it is? Yeah, well, okay, so the retirement is an interesting thing.

So back, I don't know, two, three years ago, didn't really have a great answer to this question. It was sort of like, well, if they're useful, then they'll just have to pay, you know. But yeah, about a year and a half ago, came up with parathreads. I think it was a year and a half ago. Maybe it was only a year ago. Yeah, it's 2020, yeah, the year and a half ago. And para threads, as I mentioned, are these like pay as you go block, pay as you go power chains, right?

So it's like they don't do much unless you sort of fund them, but you only pay for one block at a time. So you only need a few transactions that are willing to, you know, are paying enough that the rest of the Pocod network doesn't desperately want to use all of the parathread slots. and to give some, like, I would expect there will probably be out 50 free slots for parathreads every six seconds. So I think when the calculations are done, it's like for each parathread to get one block in every, I don't know, 10 minutes, then it's like you can have the 3,000 or 10,000 or something parathreads that are kind of mostly active. So they're going to be reasonably cheap. Now the idea is that when your parochane, if your parochain is sufficiently unuseful that you can't collect together the funds for renewing your slot. And it's not that this happens overnight, right?

You get 18 months. In principle, you get an 18 month grace period. So you've got one and a half years to convince people to make your token worth enough that you can swap enough of it for dots to pay for your parochains slot, to lease out your power chain slot. And you get 18 months to actually secure that next six month period.

So you'll know very much ahead of time if this is coming. But that said, suppose for some reason you just can't scrape together the dots, then you don't just disappear in a puff of smoke with all of your Oracle data or anything. your chain stays active like it sticks around it's there an oracle would tend to use passive data transfer

which basically means you look at the relay chain to see what the last block was for that particular chain and then you get one of the collators one of the people who has the blockchain and its information to give you a proof that you know hey what was the gold price most recently and they'll come back with a proof that we'll use the data on the poker dot relay chain plus some extra witness, some extra data that fits alongside that and you plug them together and you can now be sure that the price of gold, according to this para chain was such and such. Now, this will still work. So an Oracle chain wouldn't actually stop working.

Now, it just means that their updates wouldn't necessarily be every six seconds. It would be as often as it's willing to pay for its updates. And that's basically how it works. It's like, you know, when you've had a mobile phone contract, and it's like, you know, you're paying per month, and you're paying like $50 a month, and it's like, yeah, at the beginning it's okay. But then it kind of drags on, it drags on,

and you're thinking, I'm not actually using this $50 a month subscription that much. It's not that useful to me. So you tell them, look, I want to cancel my subscription. They're like, oh, well, if we can't persuade you not to keep your subscription, then I'll tell you what, you can keep the number, but you'll go on like the pay as you go, tariff, right? So basically, just make sure you put a, you know, $20 on every six months and you'll, you know, you'll be fine. We'll keep your number active. You can still receive calls and all that.

Basically, it's exactly the same with Pocod. If once your subscription ends, if it ends, then you just go directly onto the pay-as-you-go version tariff and you can still keep your chain going. You just have to pay per block. Okay. And do you get finality with each block? Yeah, it's the same, it's exactly the same technology, like 100%. Okay. So one other thing that I wanted to ask about a lot of people, I solicited questions on Twitter and people were curious to know how the parochain auctions will be run and when you'll have them. Well, interesting question, yeah. It's really difficult to say because our, the auctions for parochains, I don't really want to start the auctions for parachains until

pretty solidly sure that we know when the parochains are going to start. Because as soon as you start the auctions, you're taking, you know, people are locking up their dots. And it's like, well, yeah, it might be next week. It might be next year. That's not a great, like, you know, thing to be locking up your dots on, right? So, um, parochane auctions are going to start once we, um, once we basically have tested parachains on whichever network they're on. So, you know, got Casama and Pocodot. We roll them out to Kusama first because

at Pocodot, we don't push code on that isn't audited externally by our security company. So Kusama will get the unordited code that we're still reasonably sure is okay, but, you know, unawitted. Right, and just for listeners who aren't sure what Kassama is, becauseama is basically the test network, but there's actual real value being staked on it. and the token, the KSM token, has real value.

So the incentives are all there, and it's like a kind of a true test environment where you can actually see how the incentives will affect the ecosystem. Well, so before you get into all that, do you want to also talk about the candle auctions because I think people would be curious to know about those? Sure. Well, now, basically, the way that these auctions work is that we didn't want to,

so blockchains necessarily are these like super open and transparent things. Everyone can see what's going on all the time. And what we didn't want was to have, you know, this game, this sort of auction game where, I don't know if you ever used eBay. I mean, you know, I don't know. used these days or is everyone just using Amazon? I mean, I haven't used it in years, but like back in the, you know, the early days of Web 2, I was, I was an avid eBayer,

like, you know, sort of 2005-ish, 2007, that sort of thing. And what inevitably happened was the last 60 seconds, you know, the price would be, you know, $5, slowly climbing up from $3, $3, $4, $4,000. $3, $4, $4, $4,000. and it gets to like $5 and then the last 60 seconds it'd be like 10, 15, 50, 500.

It's like, okay, right. So it was a 10-day auction but actually all of the important bids happened in the last minute. Now that's a pretty standard kind of game theoretic thing to do. You basically hold your best bid for the very last point in the auction.

And it's kind of rubbish to do that for a blockchain because it means that you it's not great price discovery. People, if you hold it for the last minute, then it's like, you might not get it in. Miners, validators can kind of keep them back, you know,

and if a few bad validators happen to have the last few blocks, then, you know, maybe a good price will, we'll get chuked for a bad one. It's sort of fraught with problems. What, so what we wanted to do, was find a solution for this. It turns out there was already a solution. Hurrah! History has provided as one. So there were these auctions called candle auctions. They're named so because they,

basically the auctioneer had a candle next to them. And the candle was lit at the beginning of the auction. People could put bids in. It was an open auction. So anyone can bid anything at any time, as long as it's higher than the previous highest bid. But when the candle goes out, then regardless of whether anyone's got any more bids to add, that last bid is the bid that wins. So it's a really good way of making sure that auctions don't go on forever and that there isn't like a group of people, like a cabal of people with much higher bids

that are just waiting and waiting and waiting until everyone else has done their thing. Now the problem with candle auctions is that you can't put a candle on a blockchain. You can't even put like an abstract representation of a candle on a blockchain. because you can't end something randomly very, very easily. Basically, to end something randomly, someone has to know when it's going to end because someone has to model the candle, someone has to like be the generator for the candle, is the flame gone out yet?

And if someone's the generator, it means they've got an advantage. So what instead we do is we do this clever thing where we have a retroactive ending. So the auction ends at the end of the end. of some hour, right? Time is broken up into hours. And at the end of some hour, we say the auction's ended. But it doesn't literally end at that hour. Instead, it ends at some point in the previous hour. So we know it's ended sometime in the last hour, but we don't know when yet. And then we choose a point randomly in that last hour. And that point is when the auction ended, which means there have been possibly other higher bids that have come in since that point,

because at the end of the hour, right? But we discard them. And what this means is that even things like smart contracts that you can very easily predict the behaviour of can still have a good chance of getting a slot, because even though I might instantly see the smart contract bid and then bid one higher in the next block. It might be that, well, then the smart contract maybe bids up in the block after that, and I bid. So I might be in a bidding war with a smart contract, but it still means that every other block the smart contract will be the winning one at that point.

And then it's like a 50-50 chance, whether it's the smart contract or me, because it's a block chosen at random in the last hour. So it might be one where the smart contract was winning, but it might be one where I'm winning. Now, normally you wouldn't be able to do that because, I would just always be checking the smart contract, bidding one up, and by the time it ended, I would be bidding one beyond the smart contract. But because we end at a random time, we can avoid that problem. The scorebed app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news.

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auction. And as far as I understand, there isn't payment for gas metering. So then how do you prevent DDoS attacks on a specific parochain? Yeah. It's basically we leave it as a problem for the parochain. It's, we don't want to force parochains into a particular model for how they measure or charge for their transactions. What we instead do is say, well, look, enough validators must agree that your block, your paracchain block, is verifiable, validatable, executable, basically can be run in a particular period, two seconds, I think, at the moment. So it's like a third of the six second block time.

And as long as that's the case, then we don't care how you manage your transactions, how you manage your users, how you manage any of your blockchain logic, to make it sure it fits in the two seconds. If for some reason it doesn't, then the block isn't going to get in and maybe your next block it will get in.

Maybe some other collator, some other block producer, will come up with a block that takes less than two seconds. But the point is that we want to be more abstract, more general. So a more general way of the counting gas, which is a very specific way of working out how to make sure that blocks don't take too long, that you don't get deduced.

A more general way is just to say, well, we don't care. As long as it happens in two seconds, we don't care how you manage it. So alternative ways of managing it would just be to have voting for, example, or to not have transactions, or to have transactions but have a very simple way of measuring, not gas, just saying, well, there's only one kind of transaction, transfer transactions. So it might be like a plasma kind of chain where it's just, you know, super transfer oriented. And we don't, we know that every transfer only takes, however many, point one of a millisecond or something.

And we just make sure that you can't have more than 20, 35, or like, or, or, or, or, or, or, 10,000, 20,000, 20 million, 20,000, 20,000 of them in a, yeah, that's right, in a block. And, you know, then you don't need gas counting. You don't need dynamic resource measurement. Now, of course, for smart contracts, if you want to have smart contracts be very general and very deterministic, then you probably still want this. But the point is that you don't need it in every circumstance. And there are lots of use cases where, you know, you.

you know, more simple than the smart contract use case, where you really don't need that level of complexity and the performance hit that you take from it. So by pushing, by allowing blockchain, parachains to decide their own way of keeping this two-second enforcement, we allow them to, we allow them all sorts of more flexibility and potentially performance benefit. Okay.

You've come up with a concept called initial parochane offerings. How do these differ from initial coin offerings? And also in particular, how do these avoid the regulatory problems that ICOs had in the US? Well, you know, we don't really, we haven't done much legal research on, I mean, I think we're trying to,

I think they're now PL, PLOs or something, Parachain lease offerings. But anyway. Oh, okay. You know, because IPO is kind of already a bit. It's like trying to not sound like an IPO, but anyway.

Okay. Well, why don't you describe what they are? But yeah. So the thing about parochain leases is we call it like crowd loaning. So it's like crowdfunding. But instead of just handing over your hard-earned cash

and getting, I don't know, something back, maybe a product or a token or whatever. It's only a loan. So you lock up your dots or your Kusama, same on Kusama, for some period of time. And you can choose, like, well, you know ahead of time how long it is

so that you don't choose yourself, rather the team chooses. They might say, well, we only need it for six months. After six months, we'll have launched our token, We'll have users. We'll be very clearly a good use case. And we will then work out other funding mechanisms, probably selling our own tokens into whatever market it is for dots,

and then using those dots. That would be a pretty obvious way of doing it, I'd say. But that initial six months, you probably may well need to go to others, go to dot holders and say, look, you know, loaners the dots for a lease, would you? these. And that's what this is for. So it's crowd loan. You're asking dot holders to put their dots in for a fixed period of time. Now this loan, this crowd loan, is kind of a bit like staking. It's handled entirely by the Pocodocirley chain and then probably over time that will migrate into a parochane because we don't really want all of this complex stuff on the relay chain. But you don't have to trust

the team with it. That's the main thing. You're loaning the dots. into Pocodot, the relay chain. And they just get kind of reserved. They don't even really leave your account. They're still kind of on your account. And they're certainly still on the chain. And you can always check the logic of the chain to see, yes, they're very much associated with the account.

You have three and a half months to go. Then they'll be back spendable by you from your account. And it's, yeah, it's a bit like using the staking system. The only difference is they're not producing any return. like they do with the staking system. But presumably the team that has asked you to loan these dots for their initial parochane or their parochane lease are planning to reward your contribution, your loan with, well, I don't know, something on their chain.

Perhaps one might imagine some of their own tokens, but I mean, I don't want to straight jacket these guys. Maybe they've got some other thing going on. Maybe it's a, I don't know, an NFT chain and they're giving you a free tickets to a gig. I don't know. Who knows? It could be all sorts of things. So, yeah, main takeaway is there is no transfer of value in this, right?

They're not, no, the team isn't getting anything from the crowd, right? The crowd are just kind of locking up their tokens with a guarantee, guaranteed by the protocol, that these tokens are coming back in a particular time period. Now, again, we haven't consulted any one of any note, illegal or otherwise, on this, and how it might be different. But, you know, in my layman opinion, I would think that having just it literally be locking up some tokens for some period that you definitely get back later with zero risk or zero additional risk isn't really kind of anything.

You know, it's like staking and that's not really a thing, right? It's just the rewarding is a thing perhaps and might have some knock on effect, but locking something up, you know, it's not a thing. as opposed to value transfer into some other entity, which very much is a thing. That's a definite thing. So I think by moving away from the value transfer into a guaranteed kind of lockup situation

with a guaranteed return unlockup date, I think that may well move it into a, to be viewed by various organisations as a as a non-event, basically. Okay, well, there are people who work at the SEC who listen to my show, so we may find out. Let's see. So Pocod has on-chain governance.

Can you do a brief description of how that works? One thing that I find interesting about it is that proposals that pass get automatically executed and your theory is that this will prevent forks, which I find fascinating. So maybe you can also talk about that. Sure. Well, okay, so let's move this from the meta protocols.

I mentioned earlier, you got this meta protocol, right? Web assembly, this like low-level language, basically. It's a machine language. On which we can describe and define the Pocodot protocol and the Kossama protocol and the EdgeWet protocol, the Moombie protocol, and the Centrofuge protocol, a Carla protocol, all these protocols, right? And they're all built on this meta protocol, this web assembly-based meta-proticle. Now, you've got a problem.

The problem is, how do you know when to change your protocol? Like, what governs that? What decides that? So you can say, wow, you know, there's a team and they've got a CEO and the CEO's a key, and they can just change the protocol with a key. But, you know, it's not really in the spirit of decentralized blockchain kind of scene, is it? It's not a very good answer. And of course, it has its big problems, which is, well, what if the CEO loses their key?

What if the CEO goes mad? So we need a better way. And normally we decentralise this decision-making criteria. So we have multisignatures. We have voting. We try and bring it out, pluralize the mechanism. That's all well and good. But then how do you make sure that this mechanism?

is respected. Like if it's more than just literally a single key that is trivial to sort of respect, you can build it into the software, for example, then how do we ensure that everyone is on the same page? We have this consensus problem. So this is where, this is another reason why we have a meta protocol. The meta protocol allows for us to alter the protocol according to the rules of the protocol. And that's where we have this, the governance, sure, but also the enactment of the decision coming from the governance. I mean, you know, we have like, we have this situation in the, in the US at the moment with, you know, a lack of consensus on the one side, which is most of the news outlets, I don't know, 74% 80% or whatever of the population. and I don't know, every, a lot of people on Twitter all saying, well, obviously Joe Biden won the election. And then on the other side, you've got the president himself and a lot of voices behind him saying, well, actually, no, he didn't.

Trump won the election. We have a lack of consensus over the governance process itself. and this obviously is problematic. And kind of problematic, kind of one of the ways, because the reason it's problematic is because it's not clear, people are asking, well, what exactly governs the transition process? How do we know when, like, who should be the next? If there isn't consensus, who makes sure that the government is indeed the government

that was elected, if we can't decide who was elected. And there isn't, like, you know, is it just, well, whoever's in the White House governs? Well, that doesn't seem like, what if the current occupier doesn't want to leave the White House? Then what happens? We have this constitutional crisis. And this is why we need to, this is why it's important to have absolute enactment. Like, this is why it's important to tie the enactment. the enactment of the decision to the decision-making process itself

and make the decision-making process a sort of the enforcer, as it were, or at least part of the enforcement. Now, there isn't like an independent election commission that has the power to put to both, you know, manage the election and put in the new president. that doesn't exist, right? It's sort of the, well, the old president, it just should get out of the way. Like, it wasn't really answered by the people who drew up the constitution. It's like, of course the old president should just get out of the way.

Let's focus on Pocodon. I understand the analogy, but just, yeah. So, anyway, the tying together, the governance, the decision-making process, and the means by which the decision of that, that comes from that process should be enacted, is really critical in any system, whether it's Pocodot or anything else. And that's what we do. And the reason that we can do it is because we have this meta protocol layer. The meta protocol doesn't change, but it does govern and execute the decision-making process.

So it's like the meta-proticle is the thing that sort of runs the governance system so people can vote on what they think the next iteration of Pocodot should be or should do or how it should change, whether books should be fixed, whether there should be, I don't know, rescues or any kind of, whatever, remunerations, compensations, out-of-order transfers, whatever it is. But that meta-protacle layer also governs what the protocol is, which means it can enact any of those decisions.

I mean, any is maybe, I don't want to tie myself up with words, but like most, the vast, vast, vast majority of protocol changes that we can ever envisage the need to do. This meta-protocol layer can allow for them to happen. And that means that we never come out of consensus. Now, just to compare that to other blockchain systems, you've got like forks. So you've got hard forks. So that's how we change the means of consensus. That's how we change the protocol, right? Now, the problem is that what if we can't decide on it?

What if, I don't know, 55% votes to go this way, 45% votes to go that way, well, does it mean we should go with the 55%? Well, theoretically, I mean, yeah, I guess. I mean, depends. What's the governance mechanism? What's the decision-making criterion? If there isn't one, if it's like,

weak consensus, then there's no way of deciding. You're in this kind of grey zone where, yeah, there's a majority, there's a majority, but there isn't like a way of actually deciding because no one's actually agreed on how we decide. And that's, you know, famously happened with Heath Classic. Well, with Ethereum at the time. There was no East Classic. And 90% of the voters at least wanted to, you know, do the rescue thing and 10% didn't. And the 10% who didn't carried on regardless.

And hence Heath Classic was born. And it's these schisms, I mean, you can argue, you can argue schisms are a good thing. I mean, I think it's a very, very questionable position to be in. For sure, schisms are not a indefinitely good thing. because you schism, you schism into a thousand bazillion fragments, then none of them are going to be very, you know, none of them are going to have any users. So obviously, yeah, maybe some things do get sufficiently big that, you know, and there's so many differing points of view or maybe two very large camps

that are sufficiently different in their outlook that you kind of do need to, do need to fragment a little. But schisms cannot solve everything and if indeed they solve anything. And this is a, the way that we avoid schisms is by allowing people to come together, to have a forum where opinions can be aired. And then to have a decision-making mechanism that everybody buys into and everyone is behind the eventual outcome of. And that's why democracies are not, you know, schizmed and schisend and schisomed over the centuries that we've had them. It's because we have, you know, we have elections.

And people accept that, you know, in an election, you have your vote, you have the time to, you have a forum, you have the time to air your opinion. You have the time to listen to others' opinions. But at the end of the day, you vote, and then there's an outcome. And if the outcome isn't the same way that you voted, it's like, maybe next time. But you still remain part of the system. Let's also now talk about security. Parity has a history of well-known security lapses, namely the hacks of the parity multisig wallet,

the first of which resulted in the siphoning of funds for some major ICOs, and the second of which froze half a million ETH. Now the security for Pocodot will be managed by the base layer chain. So if something goes wrong there, then the security for all the parochains will be at risk. What do you say to people who are concerned

about the security of Pocodot? As a company and as a team, we have altered quite a lot since way back when we were doing the Parity Wallet. I mean, most of that code was done in 2016-ish. And Parity at that point really had no... We were just, you know, giving out free software. It was like, yep, we're coding this stuff under the G. EPL, no warranty, you know. We didn't have the resources to be doing, you know, huge amounts of auditing.

We didn't have the resources to be paying very expensive, I would add, external teams, external experts at security to be looking at this stuff. So really it was like a quid pro quo. It's like, look, the code's here, but you've got to kind of look at it. Now, with Pocodot, that's obviously changed a little. we have had some not insubstantial income from the crowd sale, or private actually sale that we've been doing. And so it's with this we actually have the resources to do sort of proper both internal audits,

which I actually think are really very important. and often will show, because people internally have usually a deeper understanding of the technologies involved, often show like some of the more tricky books. But also external audits. The Pocodot codebase itself went through, I think, four separate external audits from four top tier security auditors, including one, which was a red audit. So it's like basically this top level attack team who are just there. they're attacking a, I think they were attacking Kusama, actually.

You know, they were actually trying to, I don't know if they were going to black hat take it down. I don't think they were, but they were attempting to find holes in it, right? And, you know, ultimately the delivery of software comes down to confidence. How confident are you that what you're delivering is reasonably book free? and you know you can never be 100% confident it's too complicated it's like

I mean Sepocod in particular is really quite complicated more so than Ethereum but regardless it's still even even Ethereum even like relatively constrained pieces of software

contain books because they're built by people and people make mistakes and people make mistakes when they're looking at other people's stuff and teams of people make mistakes. You can queue up 100 coders and ask them to find bugs in a particular piece of software, but there will probably be bugs left after all 100 have had a look at them.

If you are on utterly like mission critical systems programming, then you'll probably have multiple teams each independently implementing stuff. And you'll have some way of combining all of their implementations such that any individual bug doesn't actually result in the problem manifesting itself. Now, and that's also an avenue that we've gone down. We have two external teams, so not parity, completely other teams, chain safe and soramitsu, that are implementing Pocodot independently from us. So we're going down that route as well.

we've got like huge amounts of external audits uh we have a continuous external audit process um so we actually have um a uh a company um one of our um basically the security company that were one of the four that we had um audit protocol dot in the first place constantly auditing the polka dot code base constantly looking out for bugs checking new code we have a rule that basically no new runtime code gets into polka dot unless it's been audited. The only exception to that is if it's like really trivial, like basically, you know, a number changed or some variable was renamed. But basically, all code, all significant changes that go into Pocodot first have to get audited. Nothing goes on the chain until it's been audited. So, I mean,

you know, while I can't say, well, you know, Pocod's bug-free, because it's a huge piece of software made by humans. it's we are now taking every precaution that we reasonably can in order to make sure that that that doesn't happen. Now on top of that, we also have governance, which means that in principle, if we can agree that this was a book and that it really ought to be, you know, it has very clear, a very clear manifestation. for example, someone's funds get locked indefinitely and you know, you can't unlock them directly, but it's very clear that it's their funds.

It's very clear that there's one key and only one key that controls these funds. Then it's, and you can, you know, and the governance of Pocodot, so the assembled stakeholders, whether it's through a referendum or via the council, in Pocodot's governance case, it's like both, it has to go via the council. into a referendum, then everyone gets a chance to vote on it. If the assembled stakeholders decide that actually, yeah, we should fix this, we should, you know, whatever, unlock these funds or transfer it back, or whatever it is, then it will happen. And that can't happen on chains without governance.

Yeah, it sounds like this was born out of your experience with the frozen funds on the Ethereum. I mean, we all, yeah, we all have our drivers. Yeah, so speaking of Ethereum, Ethereum, obviously, is the leader. at the moment in a kind of, you know, not maybe exactly the same space that Pocodon aims to compete in, but a very similar space. How do you view Pocodon as coexisting with Ethereum? I mean, this depends a lot on the driving factors behind Ethereum.

I said very early on in Pocodot's, I think it was like 2018. I think it was the dev, the dot-con. Pocodot's a bet against, or the bet, against blockchain maximalism. Like, really with Pocodot, I wanted to make a network of networks. I don't want to, like, be, I don't want to try and, like, solve all of the problems with one chain. I think Ethereum, that certainly some of the narrative surrounding Ethereum is, there should only ever be one blockchain, there only ever needs to be one blockchain. That's Ethereum.

Ethereum can host everything. That's not a narrative. that I ever really bought into. And I don't think it's a, I don't think it's like a super, like sensible narrative. I think, I think if, you know,

Ethereum ends up becoming a chain that is sort of bridgeable. And I think, I think that there's a very good chance that Pocod and Ethereum will, will just kind of happily sort of coexist with logic and value flowing between the two very easily. Now, looking at some of, you know, we're already looking at ETH-2's sort of specifications, consensus mechanism, and how it might eventually pan out, because of course, ETH2 only has its beacon chain at the moment.

So there's no state transitioning really on it. There's certainly no shards or anything happening in that regard. So we've still got a long way to go before we can be sure precisely what if ETH II's eventual technical architecture will be. But my hope is that it will become something that we can very easily interface with. And then from in that way have the two, you know, sort of cooperate and form a sort of much bigger ecosystem. Well, yeah, I mean, Pocodot is already, I feel kind of rolling out the red carpet for builders and users currently on Ethereum because Moonbeam has these unified accounts, which let people use their Ethereum addresses on Pocod. They also have the same tooling as Ethereum does. And substrate, of course, makes it possible to use the exact same code that ADAP has on Ethereum, but on Pocod. And yet, as you pointed out, there is this strain of tribalism or even maximalism, maybe you might say in Ethereum. So what do you plan to do to woo Ethereum users and builders to Pocodon

and overcome that tribalism? I mean, you know, one of the big pushes of Pocodot was Bridges. And I mean, this predates Pocodot. Parity, you know, did the parity bridge like a while before. It was early 2016. We started work on that, if I remember rightly. So connectivity, trying to bring together different chains, disparate systems into sort of one functional economy, has always really been something that I've been interested, something that parity, that we at parity have wanted to do.

And, you know, I really want to, that's really one of the key sort of features, if you like, of Pokemon. one of the things that it was designed around. Although Pocodop really isn't fundamentally a sort of bridge, a bridging thing. It is something that bridges can very easily be developed on for, and something that we're already doing ourselves. So, yeah, I mean, I hope that bridging and compatibility will be very key factors in basically creating a more, it's not, you know,

it's not about drawing people over necessarily, but creating a more, let's say, fluid ecosystem, creating a very fluid meta ecosystem of blockchain. So, you know, people can deploy an application on one chain, but not be constrained to that chain, to then maybe deploy a sort of secondary application in another chain and become a multi-chain app, kind of like a multinational company. You know, the more that we can do to ensure that applications

that teams are not bad, into just the single blockchain, the better. And that's obviously very important for Pocod as we are coming at this as a relay chain whose main reason of existence is to connect all of these little para chains

and also external chains. And would you ever do anything like, I don't know, liquidity mining or any kind of incentive to attract people to Pocodot? Maybe. We'll see. At the end of the day, Poca Dot can only exist if it's useful.

For it's become useful, it needs teams. And so it's not that I don't want to like, I don't want to pretend that, you know, it's, PocaDot's the sort of Buddhist monk of the ecosystem that's sort of just going to take a beating and keep on smiling. Not really.

But nonetheless, I think there is a, I think there is, you know, sort of middle ground that is very, let's say, a mutually enlightened self-interest position that allows us to, that allows basically all of the chains

to sort of come together and cooperate, coordinate, open their ecosystems and allow, kind of like free trade, you know, allow people the opportunity to move around, allow teams, the good teams to deploy across chain, across power chains, across ecosystems. So I don't want to say that we're not going to compete, of course, countries within the European Union compete in many respects with each other. But, you know, there are still really valid reasons for the European Union to exist.

And I think the same is true for, you know, different, for an ecosystem to be built, a multi-chain ecosystem to be built. So there's also a trend toward transactions that are composable, at least in the defy world. And by that, we mean that one transaction can include multiple contract calls within a single block. But as far as I understand, in Pocodot, when you send messages between paratrochains, they can't happen. The transactions can't happen in the same block. So there can't be these instantaneous contract calls across shards. And that, of course, then breaks composability.

and so, you know, there are a lot of things like, you know, flash loans or atomic swaps wouldn't really work cross-chain. Is composability something that Pocodot is working toward? Yeah, so there's two main things. So that on the face of it is right, but there's a couple of sort of mitigating factors to this. One of them is that composability is likely to be mostly a thing within a single chain's ecosystem. So the tightly bound smart contracts that do things like flash loans are likely to be within the same defy ecosystem, whether it's moonbeam or a carlo or whatever it is. That's one of the reasons why you would want things to be constrained within a single parochain.

Now, the other mitigating factor is that ultimately what we want to do is have asynchronous contract calling. Now, what this would allow basically is for in the programming model, in the execution model, it would appear as though when you send a transaction off, it comes back instantaneously. When you send a message off to make a flash loan or whatever it is, it comes back instantaneously. but in reality it gets the sort of executing context, the thing that's like taking the flash loan actually is halted, is paused for a little, a short period of time, while the message goes away onto perhaps another chain, it gets executed, the flash loan comes through,

it goes back again, carries on executing, and so on. Now this requires some interesting, and not entirely trivial alterations to the computational model. And wait, just be clear, so then that takes three blocks and so it's like an 18 second transaction? Yeah.

Okay. I mean, it may take, I mean, it depends whether it's going all the way into another parochain or whether it's staying within the parochain. But the, and it may take one block, it may take two, it may take three. It depends on a few factors, but it may

be as much as three. Yeah. Now, this The flash, like, you know, it's not clear precisely what the use cases will be. If it's an Ethereum style flash loan, then yeah, maybe you do want to have it on a single chain. Now, it's worth pointing out, of course, that all multi-shard architectures will have this issue. Like, all multi-shard architectures that expect to be able to call across shards as easily as they call into their own shard, will have to deal with the fact that going across a shard introduces latency, it can't be handled within the same block.

So it's not clear how other multi-shard architectures like ETH2 are going to handle this either. Heath 1 gave everyone a free pass because it's not scalable. Yeah? Right. So if you constrain everything into the same blockchain like ETH1 does, then problem solved. which is the position that Moonbeam and Akala and Edgeware are already in on Pocod. If you want to spread things out between chains that operate in parallel to each other and therefore get scalability, then you will have to deal with the fact that things don't get processed as a whole in one block.

And that's just a fundamental issue with computer science, with logic, with maths. You can't get around it by some clever programming trick. But if you introduce things like asynchronous calls to it, then you can kind of massage the situation a bit, mitigate some of the issues that you might face if a component that you want to compose with is on the chain. Now, the only other thing I'd add to that is that composability doesn't just... Composability isn't about being in the same execution environment.

There are all sorts of ways of composing things that don't require that. Example, when you want to do an insurance contract, you need an Oracle for whatever physical phenomena is you're insuring against. That Oracle doesn't need to be on the same chain as the insurance contract. It's enough just to provide a proof from another chain that that Oracle said that the weather was really, but there was a huge storm. Houses got knocked down in your area. That can be done as a proof.

You feed it onto the chain that is providing the financial whatever compensation. And it's enough, right? There's no need for them to be on the same chain. It's only this specific Ethereum sort of defy where they've made use of the fact that it's all on the same chain and therefore you can do this stuff that all has to be done within a single block very easily. That's not a limit. That's not a fundamental limit. Composability can happen even if it doesn't all happen in the same block. The Web3 Foundation has 30% of all dots.

And I'm not sure what amount parity has. Maybe you can fill us in on that. How do the Web3 Foundation and Parity plan to use their collective stake within the network? Will you participate in parot chain auctions, for instance? No, I don't think so. No. We don't have, we don't have, yeah, we have less than that. I don't have the numbers to hand, but it's not, it's not 33.

Well, yeah, I mean, according to Masari, that's where I got the third. 30% from the Web 3 Foundation. It was like 29.7% or something. Okay. Well, we, we, a lot of that has been, like, so that 30% figure from the original, the original document has been eaten into it. No, no, no, no. I calculated it according to the current supply.

I did the math on my phone. Okay. The current supply? Yeah. Okay. I'm not sure what your math is, but. Okay. But it's substantially less than 30%

because some of that went to companies that are doing that are building Pokemon, like parity. Some of that, but also like, you know, chain safe and Tsoramitsu. Some of it went through to grant companies. Some of it went through to auditors, SLA, various other SLAs that we have. SLAs are the software agreements.

So, and then of course there's employee buy-in schemes and all that stuff. So that all comes out of that chunk of dot. But anyway, aside from that, we don't plan on putting para chains, purchasing like parochane leases with it. That's not really what we're in for. That dot that the foundation is keeping is really just a lot. long-term alignment mechanism. So the foundation, like, has benefit if Tokodot does well and is able, therefore, to do more.

And the main thing, it's going into grants. It's going into keeping the foundation running, which means, you know, managing various ongoing legal and regulatory affairs, continuing to, you know, manage things like adoption and outreach and like kind of stuff. As well as research. So the foundation runs its research outfit. That's the main thing. It does do staking,

but actually relatively little these days. It's most of that dot, most of the staking of that dot, the vast majority will end up going to the Pocodot, the 1,000 validator program of Pocodot. So basically trying to get as many validators in as possible, build a really good validation ecosystem, which is, will soon be, if it isn't announced,

yeah, it will soon be announced, it's right on the cusp. And the Cussama, very similar to Casama. So the foundation's KSM stash is also much of it engaged in the Cossama's 1000 validator program. Yeah, and it's really, we try not, we don't tend to vote either. If a vote is down to the wire, then we'll probably take up a tiebreaking position. But we try and keep our dot out of the, and Kossama out of the sort of general sort of governance. Okay, so we're basically at time, but I'm going to just ask you two more questions.

And we'll try to keep the answers brief. In June before Pocodot's main net launch, a preliminary draft by the Crypto ratings council gave Dots a higher risk of being labeled securities of 4.75 on a scale of five, with five, meaning the asset has, quote, many characteristics strongly consistent with treatment as a security.

Again, this was preliminary. There hasn't actually been a formal reading that's been issued. What do you plan to do to address the possibility that Dots could be deemed a security? It's our position that dots are absolutely not a security. And, you know, dots are very clearly a utility. Like you use them to get parochains.

Parachines have a very clear utility. So we, you know, there is no way that we could imagine a world where dots were labeled as a security. The, you know, these guys take into account. lots of factors. One of which was that the dot network was not live at the point that they published this pre-publication, non-opinion. And that may well have contributed significantly to this not quite score. I would expect that any later reason of, reason of appraisal, particularly once parachines are launched, will be quite different. Pocodon enables public and private parochains to interact with each other.

And China's blockchain-based service network recently adopted Pocod, how do you imagine Pocod will serve the enterprise world and how will being on Pocod, which has this ability to communicate with public parac chains, benefit enterprise blockchains? I think connectivity is super important for enterprise blockchains. Now, I think I might be at all at ends with a lot of enterprise people, but I'll tell you why. Enterprise blockchains are great. They're like the intranets of the early 90s. They have a very clear value proposition for enterprises in this world right now, in this sort of traditional mindset.

it's like, yeah, you know, you can track what all of your internal transactions are. You can make sure no one is cheating on their audits. You can very easily audit everything that's going on within a company. And that level of transparency is very, can be very sort of persuasive, especially when you're someone at the top who has to make decisions. and it's kind of difficult to see below one level of management below you. That will work initially in the same way that the old intranet allowed office memos to go back and forth much more easily

than farting around with bits of paper. But what really made intranets be useful is the fact that the intranet was eventually connected to an internet that allowed offices of different companies to send memos to each other way email. and then they start to be able to advertise to each other via the World Wide Web. They start to be able to interact with consumers via the World Wide Web and HDPS. This was a super important progression,

and we wouldn't have had the later stages without that first stage. So I can imagine that enterprises are super keen on building the blockchain for their company. Maybe they're multinational, lots of different sort of arms. Maybe they're conglomerate. Maybe it's actually different companies, but the same overall align. incentives, maybe the overall owner is the same. Maybe it's between a consortium. So no real aligned consensives, but a general assumption that you're kind of working in the same space and probably do want to sort of communicate with each other a lot. But when we eventually get to the

point that companies are offering their services through a very minimal cost, extremely agile transaction-based network that doesn't need any certificates or kind of middle men or any additional like visa fees or anything like this when it's literally just business to business doing micro transactions with each other. Maybe it's for data, maybe it's for permissions to use some particular online system. Who knows? It doesn't really matter. But when we get to this point, that connectivity will be priceless because,

it will allow composition of solutions. And as we saw with defy, composition of solutions is really where the gold is to be mind. All right. Great. Well, this has been such a fabulous discussion, and I hope people really enjoy it. I did see a few questions about Kusama. And when there just was so much to cover, we didn't get into everything quickly. But I did say it's like the test network, and there is actual live value with their own tokens. So I, you know, hopefully people can read more about it. It is very interesting that Pocodot has both of these networks live. Gavin, thank you again so much, and I look forward to seeing what happens on Pocod. Thanks, Laura. It was interesting.