#260 : Devcon4 Recap – From HODL to BUIDL

Transcript

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learn more visit akms slash epicenter [Music] hi welcome the epicenter the show which talks about the technologies projects and startups driving decentralization and the goal blockchain revolution my name is Steve I think with you my name is Frank Wright so if you can't tell we're here in the beautiful city of Prague the sun's coming down so get a couple of minutes of this scenery but yeah so we're here at Def Con just on the last day actually these are booked the closest place so we hope they're not gonna kick us out while we're reporting this and so Brian and myself from the episode team were here

and fellow like Esther are the false was roaming around and so we gotta hop on board of this that's an absolute pleasure happy to have you here with us today yeah so people are making noise over here we'll ignore them cut them out but yeah so we want to give you sort of a you know it hands-on a podcast episode about DEFCON it's really fresh in our minds since we're still here some of us have attendance talks others less but yeah so hopefully you'll get a good a good overview of how the event went and

how things are sort of evolving since last year when we were in Cancun so I guess the first thing to mention is we had our first meetup here in Prague right down the hill in a tiny little bar and yeah it was great what would you think yeah I know it's lots of fun finally you know meeting some well I mean you're often meeting listeners all the time right people's that all love to podcast but then doing actually meet up and getting people coming together and you know turning off exactly for that it's great you know one guy was very grateful because he said his lawn is perfectly well more than I thought it wouldn't be you know since you always listens it removing is long and with

lots of really great people so yeah I was fun and you should do this more often yeah I feel like every time we meet listeners I'm like we have the best listeners like they're just just nice and humble and they're super appreciative very human yes they're all human you have human lessness yeah how things work in New Zealand yeah yes actually that was the 90s we've moved in to do the shake thing yeah so I mean I think we'll likely be doing more meetups you know when we're traveling to events and stuff so I look forward for those and the other thing that is on

everyone's mind here is the the parties you know what did you think of the parties I mean that's like why people come here right they've been actually really good it was really weird the caspere one because there was the separate like VIP section it was a bit weird but the cast one was pretty cool it was last night ruined myself there and then the the what was it before that rave con yeah which was awesome the music was pretty intense actually the whole scene was really intense that was real cool too super grungy like you know underground weird like disused warehouse or concrete and exposed wires was good yeah I felt like

I mean I didn't attend many parties because I was feeling a little sick and tired from from web 3 the week before but I felt like it was a lot less VIP ish like he was much more inclusive than like last year in in Cancun which I think that you really felt like there were these little islands of people going off and doing their own thing less here it was kind of like you know much more yeah Cancun was weird I mean this is this gets into the difference between between the two different events right if con 3 and they've come for you know DEFCON 3 we're in the middle of the hype cycle hype cycle it's money getting thrown around there's DEFCON 4 has been a little bit humbler and a bit deafening and yeah

it's that are that the example of firm of how there's how Biddle has become this new thing where model was the was the mean of the of the event 3 so yeah I think it's been amazing and I supposed to parties were way more inclusive there was that yeah that was weird to actually notice that there was was a party where the VIP section right whereas I thinking Cancun that was probably more than on yeah yeah I agree that like last year we were sort of in the hive I mean one one significant difference I think here is that like we haven't seen a single sort project going around promoting their ICO which was pretty present last year I

mean although it was kind of like I think coming towards the end of the hype so there was like a lot less than like the months leading up to it but like here it's been really like like you say it's all about Biddle it's a little bit leaner and yes we'll get into that yeah yeah no absolutely I mean I don't think I see oh I didn't see mention anywhere there was only one thing we sort of you know very much reminded me of last year so if you if you meant around Prague there's these posters everywhere and it's like blockchains calm and it's something like I don't know the future is ours or some something yeah we're done waiting we don't waiting and done waiting yeah it's finally here if you

look at it website it's all like you know future must more democratized snow blockchain changing the world and it's completely like you know vague and nebulous it doesn't talk about you know which blockchain where with what how you know no it's just changing yeah but I yeah so that that feels like a little bit this you know sort of remainder of people who somehow you know got a huge amount of money and you know all the day apparently trying to build some kind of city in the desert in using blockchain yes Lee no obviously zero so maybe I'm wrong and it's gonna turn into a wonderful place I feel like I want to go

in the case of what do you think I compared to last year um I actually like that there were a lot of technical deep dives this year so I felt like last year there were a lot of projects who gave an overview of what they were going to do yeah and this year a lot of projects actually went into way more depth and we're very specific about what they had already done and what they had already build and where they were at um I really enjoyed that it's been a good Def Con and I think you and I are probably the ones on this panel that I've seen the most talks what were your favorite talks I really

enjoyed Josh stocks talk he gave a high-level overview on level 2 skating solutions yeah that's right yes I do so basically it was and it was perfect for technical and non-technical people so there was something for everyone and I think it was recorded and you can actually watch it after the fact and then what I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in never - oh yeah it was like um it was a good introduction to level 2 for anyone who sort of like here is this kind of nebulous term level 2 and also like compares it to other solutions like off chain solutions that necessarily level 2 and like really cannot frames of things I thought it was

really nice to one of my favorite talks I really like this parasitic Labs yeah this afternoon and so they're working on the etherium 2.0 client and apparently I've got to receive the grant from the theorem foundation yeah and our buildings really impressive client so that that's been one of the major topics I think this year is serenity

yeah we're not calling it used to point oh it's serenity and and so vitalic sort of late laid out the vision for serenity at the very top of the conference and and so we saw a lot of that coming in this year I think like last year last year you know we saw the likes or the beginnings of caspere they were I felt last year that like I was sort of seeing a lot of deaf tools starting to emerge so you know you could like you know build your DAP with like if you were you know so like taking all these different dev tools and putting

them together in a stack you kind of could configure your stack to start building at that but it was still required quite a bit of work I felt that this year we started seeing things kind of like mature come together like the theorem roadmap is snow pretty set but then also there's like other stacks that are starting to become mature like the cosmos SDK will be really soon you know substrate was demonstrated last year last week at at web 3 and also here so like things are kind of like it's coming together maturing and I think what I'm looking forward to next year is now like seeing what people will be building with these stars and that's it's sort of my take away yeah I mean following if you

know sometimes more closely sometimes less closely you know a few few months ago maybe was six months ago something like that maybe a little bit less like this big announcement to you know kind of reshuffle completely there you know roadmap and so I think there's been a perception a lot that there's really lack of clarity or direction in each area and they keep changing their plans but then I I do have to impression and they'd have compression air for example in this prismatic labs talk to that you know there's a seems to be more clarity now and they really are a lot of teams working on it

so I think it feels like they're moving pretty quickly towards having you know finally some kind of scalable theorem which I guess if it were not for many years but now it seems seems like but I guess we'll see you know I mean it's not that picky right I mean basically they're not even saying it's going to happen next year anymore it's going to happen 2024 yeah and actually I'm a little bit shocked that it's taken this long so far I know because they've been saying Kenny 20 and then I was like it's probably 20 20 to 21 you know I have no idea

I think they should yeah it's uh it's it's problematic right like there was a time when this got pitched as an application platform and people started making business decisions around using a theorem as an implication platform and we they have not actually received the fundamental infrastructure piece they needed to make those businesses a success that was a scalable watch-chain platform and and this is what's led to all these other other projects spouting up right and I don't need to show anything that I'm involved with but like things like neo and in China and mighty arson and Tesla's all of these all of these different protocols are emerging

because there's there's been a frustration with the pace of development and people have made business decisions around a decentralized future and people just have been conflicts in the etherium roadmap I mean if you're in foundation for it was for someone who's meant to be building basic infrastructure it's very decentralized and fairly decentralized organization is not always the best at chatting out good results quickly and I think we're seeing that yeah I mean I think we will see I mean I agree with you and I think we see in the next year probably a lot I mean I guess well maybe by surfing cosmos is probably gonna launch in you know make

January February so that's definitely close now okay first cosmos hop launches so that's not yet a replacement for it here right so until they have been like ether main launch it's probably also gonna be like middle of next year until that's there all right and then substrate or pop it out there you know maybe in your next year definitely some point so I mean I suspect actually probably by the end of next year maybe they'll be more clarity if I may be little have some of the first platforms that you know are a viable turn the etherium and you know if you're them probably also will have the better idea about you know how far away they are from from actually delivering you know

you came to pondo although that being said I've had the impression that maybe one of you can correct me if I'm wrong that you know plasma chain seemed like more feasible and that maybe that will see already before so sort of kind of scalable if you're in side chains maybe but maybe but think about plasma chances you've got this challenge period right and so you need to come up with a decent price mechanism it doesn't actually have to be decentralized but you have have to have some mechanism for you have to be able to set that challenge period into your Ewings right if you want to take tokens we're gonna have some class my chain and so that's an interesting new external that has really been tackled

that's like an exotic so that's something I'm a little bit interested to understand about placement jackets we'll see how that gets off no Josh talk I didn't you didn't so he actually gave the really succinct description of all the different plasma versions I don't know whether you can keep track because I I confuse them all at the time like plasma cash cash classic MVP debit prime whatever so basically he explained what the exact differences are between all of them and which challenges they face and it was it wasn't super good job so I think that

was also recruited so I'm it seems I'm I'm the recommender today recommend recorded talks so Kyle flash go watching hiring is stressful let's face it it's a long process of sifting through resumes and interviewing candidates without any guarantee of quality but it doesn't have to be this way companies all over the place are experiencing a new way of hiring with top down if you go to their trust pilot page you'll see that of the hundreds of people that have left reviews over ninety eight percent were four or five star ratings including one guy who wants to give his developer a bear hug that says a lot top dog gets all this great feedback because they focus on their clients and their top priority is quality they only accept the top three percent of

applicants including highly skilled blocks and engineers one of these engineers is Radek astrouski Roddick has experience as a lead software engineer and data scientists for Sony and Expedia then he discovered blockchain and he became totally consumed with aetherium he worked as a consultant for the firm start on chain and his time-locked app when the top quarter consensus you port and identity blockchain hackathon then he expanded his reach through top tile he worked with a bunch of clients on projects such as smart contract development and a POC the leverages blockchain if you want to hire engineers like Roddick for your team go to top tile comm slash epicenter for a Norris trial a top tile director of engineering will deliver your next hire in as fast

as 48 hours and you'll get $1,000 credit when you decide to hire we'd like to thank top towel for their support of epicenter coming back to the foundation a little bit so this was the first time that we saw I me a Gucci you know speak in front of it's not Def Con as the new Managing Director of the foundation and at the beginning of the conference she sort of you know laid out what the vision was for the foundation moving forward and that vision appeared to be one of sort of like mine more more mindfulness in the way the foundation grows in the way that they should invest its resources

whether that be through grants or like you know hiring people in the foundation or your thoughts on like this new direction I think I think I see like you know she's she's super confident manager I mean the foundation did need like stronger leadership and and yeah I mean it's smoke you can see it just in the faith we've got stuff happening now I think in fact we're seeing like we have a sense of forward progress rather than this kind of weird stasis that it's felt like when we've been in for so long yes I'm one stoked I think she's also I also think is great but to me it seems

so basically she had this tagline beauty and substance of traction yeah yeah so basically it seems like she wants to shrink the foundation into basically I think I think that's that's it's I think that in principle is a cool thing so basically he is saying the ecosystem has to stand on its own and we want to get the ecosystem to a point where it doesn't mean you need the foundation for are that many things I think that's great I'm just not sure whether we're at that point yet although I think at this point I think we still need a strong foundation to actually get stuff built I hundreds in agree I think it's I think that I I don't I don't get it I feel like that the time for that talk will be after exam serenity right so I think

it's weird but at the same time stuff is getting done so yeah I don't have an opinion on that except that you know for many years the criticism of the foundation was no it is not doing nearly enough as good as the huge amount of resources and you know if you're obviously wasn't you know performing in the way that people expected they was promised at the same time you know the human foundation was really funding stuff even a project like the second layer purchasing get funding for like lightning or you know can raining that kind of stuff from the foundation you could have had funding there and now that's changing right and I think you do perceive that there's

more much more momentum now I mean I want one thing that I think sort of addresses these concerns is that this approach that she has like Kaizen like continuous improvement so whatever the case may be I feel like it's sort of built into the foundation now that you know there needs to be this continuous improvement and this continuous like putting putting everything back into question while while at the same time being mindful of like where are the foundation investment resources I want to address maybe this point further like so the ecosystem not not needing the foundation necessarily to grow and I think like really we're starting to see this in the form of all the grants

programs that are that we saw so here here so obviously the theorem foundation has its grant program like they said I think 20 million dollars that they've rented to 70 program projects consensus has its grant program notices has a program status hearing we need funds there's a lot of monies are flowing in all these projects in the ecosystem maybe this maybe maybe the the ecosystem is becoming more decentralized in this way with like these sort of pillars that are funding all this innovation and all this development don't you agree hundred

percent yeah oh no actually and since this is 1,200 people now I think that's like a bit concerning I think that's a kind of a major point of synchronization apart from that no yeah and it does seem that all of this amazing work in etherion is actually being done outside the foundation rather than inside which yeah I mean it's which is always the dream that was always to have the foundation go I said yeah the foundation should become as tiny smart contract yeah I mean one uh yes speaking of consensus I didn't even see Joe Whitman's talk earlier today no I mean it was it was an interesting talk think

it may have been the first time it actually seems zoom speak not like on a panel yeah so he came out and it was like I mean he's read his talk he had very much prepared it but yeah so he praised you know the the ecosystem for sort of continuously improving itself like phrase obviously love all these consensus spokes and of building so many things like truffled celebrating its million download and sort of like many people I think around that sort of the observers of the ecosystem may criticize it for not having produced like the

killer app yet and you know his vision was that the killer app is like I think we tell like I said this like death by a thousand cuts right so it's not like one killer app it's like many small little killer apps that like together like take down a centralized hierarchy use and supply systems that sounds like a euphemistic way of like of like watching over the they are actually aren't any applications that have like large-scale usage interaction interesting choice of

metaphor as well obviously the same time and like we're starting to see now okay five five apps is like better than none I think it is and that comes in but the whole Biddle thing I think I think is very different like vibe here of building rather than speculating which was like Missouri came to me hmm but I do anything I do think that like even like well consensus has done a huge amount of positive stuff in the space it is concerning the sheer size of that organization and influence right and I think that gets glossed over a lot and

discussions about about the etherion community just the sheer size of citizens meant well it seems to be such a disorganized decentralized you know organization that does it really have this I mean you know if it was really twelve hundred people like highly organized this tremendous impact or like kind of political influence but that's not really my impression of consensus and not neither is mine it's just just a lot of people it's a lot of people under a single banner you know and I also think the weight of consensus as opposed

to all the other projects combined has gone down so I think consensus was super early to this ecosystem and they ballooned up really fast but if you now look at all the other projects that actually have very decent sized teams I don't think if it's any longer they're like the lion's share yeah yeah see me sing yeah yeah so another thing I want to just see a replay so it's actually exactly a year ago or know it was like the week after Def Con that Mayor night aside working on you know course one it's a basic company building like validators improving state infrastructure and at the time we didn't see anyone working on this maybe there was sector one protocol

guys you know lady PMS that that had also started and then on I mean very recently we had the podcast network with Jacob Cohen from like a few weeks ago and then they organized together with like some other phone called cambio ventures this event on Tuesday nights I was also speaking on a panel at that event about like generalized mining and that was very interesting to see just how that had become in like such a short time such a you know vibrant then it feels like its own little hype subspace so the other was a panel where you know I was on end then axel from West and then someone rocket pool and then Adrian

from Krypton and after I said the panel with with investors and they're all like oh what does this mean for us how do we deal of this I was going to change and then it was some some different protocols for speaking like life here a new cipher and it was you know completely pack it was also interesting just how this is in such a short time becomes such a so much attention on this and so much activity around it yeah I mean so III think also we sort of saw this here where like proof of stake has really become the way moving forward for for Network validation and no one's really talking about like ways

that we can optimize like proof-of-work or anything like that I mean like it's it's just not even being discussed anywhere so yeah I mean like that that seems to be like where things are going and it's actually quite an earnings but yeah work was always a bit weird right just the notion of just Burning Spear putting all that effort into just pushing her up rock up a hill it was yeah it was bizarre um it was funny I was like I had a panel with them immigrants IRA on it and he made the comment that like proof-of-work it's like incredible I get this amazing idea it's really awesome it's got us to this point but we really need to develop new more efficient systems going forward

rather than something that consumes half a percent of the world's like electricity production no joking it's like not a good it's not our like something to design in the direction of yeah carbon cost and all that but then I say something like that I get attacked by like all the big you know maker max makes me say it's helping drive the world for sustainable energy although last time I made you know like that I got bombarded by like you know 40 different thing reduce reduce reduce reduce they all disproved you and they all proof that bitcoin is actually good

for you know making the planet more green and sustainable so since that since I haven't read all of those things yet I have to well they're out there yeah staking tokens there also gaining from the other side right so basically a year go there were a lot of token economics that we as an ecosystem hadn't quite figured out and there were a lot of utility tokens and I feel people are moving more and more away from utility tokens towards staking models so I think this is also in the area we're staking this gaming throat yeah you mean utility talking us in sort of these application payment

tokens exactly yeah maybe you want to talk more about during your panel there was some discussion with regards to soar like crypto funds and how they should in fact like I think like on the content up so it was discussed well they shouldn't be have a skin in the game in the networks that they're that they're investing in and like the role the validators play in that yeah I mean I think there's a there's a bunch of things right so first of all it's just that when you when you create these networks and you wanna have certain behaviors in these networks it kind of makes sense right that you compensate for these behaviors by giving tokens you say okay we give away a new tokens for things that make the network better and function actually the way it's supposed to function but of course

once you have that and then as an investor now all of us know but all of these new tokens are giving away for performing these network functions so even if they can buy you know some percentage of the initial supply they're like oh if we don't also engage in that then we get diluted and all of these other have these upside so they I think from that side there's this sort of you know realization okay we have to engage in that and we have we can't just like initially put some money in and then we own a fixed percentage and then we kind of set and we bottle it until the golden golden rainfall comes so there's that and then I think another thing is that investors increasingly try to sort of

position themselves as having you know providing extra value in that right to say oh we we know that we don't just invest in the projects but then we also engage if the network and we're gonna run notes and and and you know trying to sort of differentiate as investors something that that's the second thing second thing that's happening I think another benefit although I haven't heard that so much as a reason from investors it's just that I think it will give you a much deeper understand of these protocols when you actually engage with them in a way that you now have to run some infrastructure and that probably helps you image much much better investment decisions as well yeah I think it's it's a becoming some kind

of trend now personally I'm still quite skeptical that most funds will do much in that direction I think they'll maybe do some things but I think the most part it's just not their expertise they don't have really like developers or maybe have like one or two people on staff so some funds are obviously building out more of a you know development team and infrastructure team and and maybe they'll do it to some extent but I think many of them will end up having to you know rely on services provided by others so this is the role that you know companies like Horace wanted I guess can play in an ecosystem what do you think are like what the future looks like like synergies between validator

validating services service providers and and funds and like when do those maybe start to merge yeah I mean I mean they they certainly are merging to some extent right so I think there's various validated companies to say oh we're also gonna have a fund or then one says they are we're also gonna run validators and then you know some of us feel like you know we don't have any aspirations to run a phone you can always you can almost kind of see the vertical ization already where you have like a fund that would invest in a validator and the validator sort of like also sort of runs the validation for this for that fun like Curia I mean there's certainly synergies and you know how exactly organizationally that won't work whether you know this in partnership so it's

just a service that's provided or whether they do both I think all of those combinations will exist I mean generalized my name is also way off as as you said a way of putting people of pure speculation but then if it's if it's a service that you can easily outsource to someone else in a way you're you enable speculation again so I think it's probably going to move into a direction where you can only contribute a very small part so basically you will actually have to contribute something else other than holding something or taking something something that requires more input and more forethought or more work in some way because otherwise you can you can

now in this model you can then by still have you know a large part of the asset that you're talking about you can just give it to someone else to UM to do the generalized mining for you and they will take it for you or do whatever you actually have to do to not be diluted but I think it's going to move in a way where you will actually have to do much more in order to not be diluted because otherwise otherwise he will close off the system to newcomers you will discourage new newcomers from actually joining the system and in any system that you actually want to grow I don't think you can do that you can't afford to do that yeah I mean I I think in terms of like okay how much do you have to use it from

any services I think that there will be huge variance between networks and that's all okay there's staking and then staking maybe you know it's not as trivial but again that's also gonna vary between networks but then if you have these some other things like maybe you have to open credit registries or some some projects you know let's say with ocean there's some kind of AI type thing or off train computation so I think does it you know or you know it's a life here down the line when when there's people you know significant people using it for transcoding then maybe you have this cheap you farm operation for transcoding so I think there's gonna be a lot a lot of different things that but in the end they just have to get performed for the

network I mean that that's really the goal who does it doesn't really matter right provided it's a distributed number it's a provided the provisioners distributed yeah even that probably depends on on the use case right so let's say in in like for example like life here this didn't matter that there's many different the transcoding services distributed maybe not really in the case it's like a large proof of stake system and that's the consensus and kind of governance well then certainly matter submitted and for instance if you look at curation services then it does matter that there's a higher number of people

who actually partaking in this because otherwise you are just them have a very biased curation yeah or you have something like you know I guess prediction market so if you have prediction mark doesn't matter that there's like that many parties spending on prediction markets not really right because even if you have like just a bunch the idea is if the predictions off then anyone can come in and arbitrage it out right so you could even have a small number of players and still have you know kind of efficient outcomes yeah I think that works for many for many systems but I think was for some system it's crucial that you actually have a large number of participants sure Julie yeah if you've listened to previous

episodes with Merlin Grey and Matt Turner you know that Microsoft is committed to providing enterprise grade tools and infrastructure for blockchain developers well the azure blockchain workbench is perfect for organizations building consortium networks take the etherium proof of authority template for example it's ideal for permission networks where consensus participants are known and reputable if the area manager has on chain network governance that leverages parodies extensible proof Authority client each consortium member has the power to govern the network or delegate their consensus participants to a trusted operator and parodies webassembly support allows developers to write smart contracts in familiar languages like C C++ and rust Azure blockchain workbench was created on the same principles that drive all

production services in Azure so you know you're relying on secure redundant infrastructure that can scale and with built-in services like authenticating api's off chain databases and secure key management services you can scaffold your infrastructure in just a few hours to learn more about Azure blockchain workbench and how Microsoft is advancing blockchain usability and enterprise check out akms slash epicenter and start building today we'd like to thank Microsoft Azure for their support of epicenter something else that's interesting I was reading and this is not immediately difficult later but it comes back to this to this to the different culture or the different vibe here that has been like really building and this this high P and that is Union Square Ventures or

maybe actually in common is a country in this whole conversation publishers blog post where they said infrastructure follows applications total opposite of the fad protocol thesis which they coined right hmm and there's a sense in which and I don't know I don't want to like speak for too many people but it felt like they were just theirs needed something to tell to say tell their investors right when they when I started making crypto investments and the fact protocol thesis single make sense but it always seemed a bit weird and now to see them completely flip flop on it and also to notice that you know we really don't have the infrastructure yet but we are seeing these applications begin to emerge and maybe that is the actual

model may be the fact protocol thesis is always kind of off maybe it was always going to be maybe a more application centric focus on like both investment and production was always convinced so what are these applications that you see emerging funfair maker dharma make it down here the dye dharma spank chain had a crack at it I'm blanking now all of a sudden you had you had at least you know yeah I think status and if they even I think they ceremoniously closed their snacks today and just although status is now on status communicating let's see how that goes okay oh good to you I mean I have

you try to do that I have I have tried you know I have it [Laughter] so we did the tasers episode why the a while ago with Arthur and in kathleen and you know arthur and we talked about that too right so hey what about scalable you know hazel doesn't scale very well i like so how is it gonna handle you know all the taps and he and he sort of was more of the opinion that actually scalability isn't that and i don't necessarily give him but you know he was a champion you know scale really isn't really the bottleneck it's just people haven't actually really designed applications i kind of locked in

applications that people really want to use right and i think i'm not convinced that you know if we had on massive amount of scalability that really the applications would be here at the moment and especially the user experience would be here so that you would actually get mass usage yeah i think the price is a big factor so i think basically if you if you look at building applications and you completely disregard gas costs it gets a lot easier and i think people who have been having a really hard time actually building applications that don't bankrupt you so i think if that was if that were a thing that was not necessary anymore i think we would see a

lot more applications life today speaking of applications I don't bankrupt you I think maybe I don't know if you guys have anything to say about this but I thought that I saw a couple of panels and and and talks related to security and my impressions that we're starting to see a lot more some serious more sort of traditional IT security crypto security application security people come into this space so the Zeppelin did an audit of Scilly 0.5 which was sponsored by the foundation and auger I think and so it's been formally verified and so in this in this

audit and so it seems to be like a lot more securities coming into into solidity and we're now seeing like a lot more firms like Joe Fitz and also Zeppelin and others working to improve security and like building like these massive security teams so maybe you guys want something to do to comment on that how do you feel that we're doing on the security front well I mean you know it's the now let's bring up the dowel right but it's always been if we're going to have these open systems we have to have they have to be totally foolproof right like spank chain you know they published

their contract immediately gets hacked so what the helmet yeah but I think they mentioned that one of the in one of the the panel's I think it's like their answer was well there's less money in this contract than what it would have cost to get hot I did which is a commentary on the cost of security right sure getting things audited that's enormously expensive and there aren't actually all that many people who can do this and find the bugs but I do it I do think actually moving funds into these systems slowly and kind of increasing the bounty the real-life bounty slowly is kind of a valid way I did hear that it was a little bit after you know

rationalization after the fact but in this case but I I really do see that that security is a problem and we're not yet good enough edit I think for my verification is going to be one block that is actually adding to this so basically first contracts are starting to be formally verified by companies like run time verification then that's a super cool thing and you guys have your contracts yeah we had we have a wallet the notes are safe its downloadable now and it's the it's my contract based on it and it I only want it that's fully formally verified at this point in time so yeah

yeah that was a great talk actually so maybe yeah you don't need to tell us a bit more about no say no say um okay so basically um it it has a couple of features that so far no wallet has has had so basically in principle you can batch transactions together which makes interaction with depths a lot easier and in the in the future you will be able to pay gas costs in any token you actually have in your wallet so you won't actually need ether so you can pay in the token that you have via read a service and it's it's it's a person might be sick so it's safer than most of the wallets all of the wallets that out

there and because you have a number of keys for this wallet and you can if you by default you actually have to sign twice once in your browser extension once in your mobile to FA exactly to it it's a and when you lose a key you can you can add in another key and we're working on we're working on social recovery mechanisms where you can have one address there there's five of your friends and if this form of the five of your friends agree that this is really you and you lost your key you get to nominate one more key into the wallet so basically it's it's it's a way of making making using crypto funds more user

friendly and more fail-proof yeah that was a terrific talk and I'm I was actually looking for just a little disappointed that Stefan didn't go into more of the social recovery stuff I think like that that's probably one of the most interesting things so like off of like if we're not talking about like technical aspects of crypto like this whole idea of social recovery and like how we can engineer these systems that allow us yeah without central authorities or like without some kind of like surveys your company and being able to recover accuses yeah there's super interesting ideas in this face so

basically even if you say acquaintance if you claim this is my wallet and I lost my key and then you actually have to put up ten percent of what's in that wallet and if no one else contests that within a month's time or two months time by using that key in order to actually move the funds you know you could have a mechanism that actually said okay this is probably the bus Jon's wallet because he put up ten percent of the funds and if the funds had been moved in this time the ten percent would be slashed so I think their ways of engineering trustless recovery but it's it's it's a UX challenge and I think a lot of people are working on this yeah I share the funny experience and tried to reactivate my WeChat account from quite a while ago I lost my phone mm-hmm

and so I lost my phone I you know I still had the same phone number though and I I forgot the questions right the security questions and said I said I can't then go to social recovery thing but I don't even used it in China and I like the only person I could actually recognize was Dominic Williams was the only person I once tried to create a reach at accounts tried to reach at account in Singapore I think and I think

like to create the account like I needed to be eased like someone to met you and so like the only thing I could do is I was in hostel it's just like look around like who might have a chat account here Wow Chinese tourists so someone was nice enough to like let me into the weed chat system yeah it's interesting eight-way chats like a really interesting that's a really interesting place except for the fact that everything is read by change government and I doesn't make it any less interesting yeah actually makes it even more [Laughter] yeah anyway that's that's a diverge diverge tangental the edges from side three social recovery bit yeah so I mean I think maybe we could perhaps mention

you know last week's wet three summit yeah there as well in Berlin and it sort of like led up to DEFCON it was good it was a good like you know miso moosh for DEFCON news on Boosh literally translated means to put it in one's mouth but it means sir like to prepare your palate you know yeah so it was a good palate preparation it was also nice that was that was my favorite that was my favorite conference I've been to like crap don't like blockchain oriented

conference I think ever now that's really cool what is like so much about it right vibe lots and lots of diverse projects everyone was doing good stuff no sponsorships you know very little shelling I thought it's awesome and because never con is so huge and so theory and focus we need an alternative that gives other projects and platforms a place to kind of interact and kind of show their wares and I think yeah I think that's hopefully what the web through summit will evolve into yeah it was terrific I obviously think this venue was just amazing there's a this place called Punk house in Berlin it's like the former you can explain this better radio

broadcasting station yeah so it's it's like this big studios whether you know I guess now I'd like music events and things like that's like acoustics are just wonderful and the places really beautiful and I mean it's outside really but getting there was worth the trip well yeah it there was no shelling everybody there which is really interested in attack there were like some breakout sessions and workshops no sponsors so I really like this type of event in the same sort of vein like at that pawn event that you guys had a few months ago in Berlin is also a great also a great venue I feel

like all the conference's I go to in Berlin around just always amazing but yeah like one thing that I think we can't say is that the the cold virus that it seems to be very present here has a very good like proliferation strategy you start at DEFCON that web 3 and now it's here everybody has a cold and now it will spread to all of the other places where these people are going to afterwards oh that was all like it's yeah I mean it's got a really good working strategy there was relations maybe it started in San Francisco but I mean it'll be interesting to see but

it'll be it'll be interesting to see how that event evolves now maybe in four years it'll be like as big as this right and we'll have like Wed three in Cancun no please don't that was really exciting and just also like substrate is really exciting is I mean I I have to confess that I've met I've always been a little bit skeptical of the polka dot like the parity model with like you know did the notion of substrate as this like system for building a bunch of a bunch of kind of chains that can pull security and then polka dot as something that can continue those chains mmm and then connect with the rest of the ecosystem

something about that I just hasn't it gelled with me on a deep level but at the same time it sounds pretty good it sounds really plausible the notion of the notion of application-specific hardware I think kind of as a good parallel with flat application-specific walk chains and so yeah I think and to see how also like the parody is such an amazing engineering team I'm really interested to see how that evolves yeah absolutely I mean and of course yeah just our Gavin episode came out so came for like an hour and a half about this oh yeah yeah you should watch it yeah it

was really great and yet the substrate demo was you know demos always risky I put that that one was definitely well done yeah there were some moments there were you know some guy have to come with like a you know Wi-Fi hotspot to get the internet to work everything okay yeah so check out that episode I haven't actually listened to it yet you just came out yesterday I'm recording this but yeah that doesn't check out it's last week's episode yeah it's been how long are we recording here 55 minutes yeah I think we can safely call this a successful Def Con wrap up episode what are you guys up to now what's next I'm here to a finance dinner and then

I'm gonna go to Italy Ukraine Slovenia and then back to back to London for some more events and then I went through the layout of the year I'm still going my brother had a kids in there after that I'm going to I'm going to faint see the family oh nice yep but when will you be in Maine that'll be maybe the 20th so probably good yeah I'll be right next to you then ready I'll be in New Brunswick yeah right angle I can fly through the snow yeah I'm looking forward to not doing

anymore blockchain conferences this year except for the hyper ledger conference until then nothing and after that nothing yes looking forward to yeah just doing something else than mingling I have not seen him yeah and any anything exciting coming up for you nothing good what I just need to get back to active Ellen but I think that's a lot of us I need to get back to work I'm Ryan yeah the same thing I also look forward to no more blogging Gomes is here and yeah otherwise getting back to work yeah yeah all right well with that

get back to work so thanks for joining us and we'll see you next week thank you for joining us on this week's episode we release new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast go to epicenter TV slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen while you're there be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released if you want to interact with us the guest or other podcast listeners you can follow us on twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes it helps me to find the show and we're always happy

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