Alex Skidanov & Illia Polosukhin: NEAR Protocol – Scaling Blockchain to a Billion Users #431

Transcript

welcome to app center the show which talks about the technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution i'm brian crane today we're speaking with ilya and alex here the co-founders of near protocol uh i've met these guys a long time ago in san francisco and they was kind of starting out and now since then near has evolved into one of the leading smart contract ecosystems they are uh you know kind of have also been among the leaders around sharding and creating a shorted proof-of-stake blockchains and you know it's become really vibrant vibrant ecosystem with like lots of people building on it so super excited to to dive into that

now before we go to that review and alex uh just a few words about our sponsors so first of all we have tally so tally is a new wallet for web3 and d5 and that sees the wallet as a public good so it's a bit like a community community-owned metamask alternative there's all the features of metamask but it's fully open source and it's 100 user owned so profits go into community not a corporation so the launch of tally is coming this year uh but there's an early version community edition that's out and you know if you want to get involved uh go join a discord or check it out at tally.cash

and our second sponsor is gnosis safe so the gnosis safe is a smart wallet that enables you to control digital asset with much more granular permissions so you can use multiple private keys a subset of which uh you know to require for executing transactions and then you can store the keys on different devices hardware or software uh and even share them among multiple people so it's basically knows to save us you know best security and personalization and customization among kind of web three asset management uh wallets and because so it's become uh really massive as a solution for individual schemes and dolls and storing

over 100 billion dollars worth of assets on there and also gnosis safe is now live on aurora which we can uh we can touch on in in this episode which is the evm that's running on on near network so even new users can start using the gnosis safe so yeah go ah check out the gnosis safe and with that let's go to our episode uh thanks so much for joining me today it's it it's great to finally have you on this is this has been like for a long time like we got to do in europe so we have the new new episode so like i'm i'm happy it's finally happening yeah thanks brian for inviting us

excited to be here okay so let's let's start a little bit at the beginning tell us like how did you end up deciding to start uh building new and build a you know layer one smart contract platform our origin story starts with us actually working on ai um hence near ai the idea that ai is near and singularity is coming which is a separate topic we should probably have another episode on but we were working on kind of teaching machines to program and to do that we actually worked with a lot of people around the world to

collect data and kind of the data we needed was pretty specific we wanted people to describe code to write code for problems we had which means we needed kind of a wide range like wide cast of people across the world who are able to do that and mostly it was students of universities kind of in places like china russia ukraine and and kind of other countries and we being a us company just had trouble paying them like sending money to all those countries is has some problem plus not all the students actually have a bank account or at least a bank account that can

receive foreign transfers and uh we started looking at blockchain as a kind of solution to the problem we had ourselves right and kind of as we dive in it obviously evolved into well how do we build a kind of crowdsourcing as a service platform on blockchain and then kind of diving in realizing the limitations of the kind of blockchain technologies right um at that point you know bitcoin ethereum obviously were the two main ones there are a few others who already launched but none of them would they be able to handle kind of microtransactions and um like level of usage that we would

expect right at the cost which is reasonable if you're paying [Music] 15 cents yeah yeah we were paying like well not 15 cents but couple bucks per person so you need transaction fees which are adequate for the use case so so back then it was it was not possible right so crypto was unusable for the use case and and here we see well this is a problem uh that's a problem we have so if we have some someone else probably does does as well right uh and then our uniquely position to solve it we are pretty well positioned to solve it right i was building databases before elia was working on tensorflow which is also pretty low level uh stuff uh and we happen to have plenty of people around us who were also with the databases background or

systems background covering between things right so they either just left their their work their job at google or also in mexico where i'm from or facebook to look for something fun and cool or they were still working somewhere but they were extremely unhappy constantly sharing this and happiness with us so so we were able to very quickly identify in our internal network how many like six other people around six people here who were immediately available to join so we grew from three people building ai to nine people building a blockchain on a night from sunday to monday uh and so that's how near started i think you guys were part of y combinator as well so was that with the the ai basically near ai

and then it evolved into this blockchain or near is not a wasted company yc company was a different one so so i started the company with another person uh it was it was in reverse we started the company for the second starting company and then we're like we'll figure out what to build uh that's like exact opposite of the textbook approach uh and as we were building it we went through yc that's when we met ilya so elia joined us while we were in yc and then at the end of the yc there was certain founder uh we did not quite agree on the future direction right so ilie and i we separated and reincorporated into near uh so elaine i wanted to build program synthesis the third co-founder did not like the idea of program synthesis so

near is not a wasted company uh uh but we all met sort of during that time well me and ilya and uh you guys have been through like a long journey together how has it been to to work with each other as co-founders it's a healthy relationship [Laughter] yeah i mean it's you know it's it's a it's a journey of ups and downs like any startup is journey of ups and downs but it's good to have kind of a partner who you can you know work with and share with us and and know that you're able to kind of continuously push through any challenges yes yes we've been we've been through more downs than ever i've been in my marriage

so i remember actually when i was speaking with you guys in maybe it's 2018 or 2019 but you know at the time there was already this like eve two road map and you know this idea of this like charlotte eve too and i remember i think even when speaking with you guys you're basically saying look this is kind of like pretty much the same as if two you know in terms of like the architecture but you know we're just gonna be better at executing it and like uh you know we're gonna do a better job of building it i'm now i think now since then a lot has changed right like i think neo has probably developed

a lot also ethereum has you know gone through many uh you know many iterations in their uh philosophy i'm wondering like how has how has like the near vision and the near idea like changed since the start i would say actually so kind of when you know when we started there were like one thing that was clear right is that you know if if you want people to use the blockchain technology which you know we wanted to you need to make it kind of dirt cheap which also like naturally means it should be scalable and ability to accept any user that comes to and the only way to do that right is

charting and to be clear at that point we did not know about these two um [Music] we quickly learned but yeah like when we started we're like hey sharding is needed we looked at all the stuff at the like we looked at dfinity we looked at kind of eos and like all of the you know iota all the folks who were at that point uh kind of super hyped dfinity was not charted yet that was later yeah and and so we're like none of them are actually solving or or planning to solve the like in the roadmap planning to solve the problems we're seeing in the way we see fit right and then we did go to like east san francisco i think and learned more about youth uh well there are different charting designs in in the existence one

of them alex ended up implementing it is san francisco uh but uh yeah i think the kind of the realization was also pretty quickly is that beyond just charting beyond just kind of the scaling capability it's about usability right and actually scalability becomes just a piece of it because as a user i should not need to worry about that some cryptokitties are running wild or you know somebody runs some trading bots and kind of willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on fees like i just want to use the stuff and have a predictable experience and on the flip side as a developer i also just want to sit down and you know

write some code ship it and get users really quickly so so i think kind of the way we now frame this is that you know the experience should be simple secure and scalable right the block change should be as hidden as possible while delivering on the promise the security should be there right to you know provide your economic security as well as actually fit back into the user space you know things like you know is this contract may require you you know how to make sure that if seat phrases are accidentally leaked that this transaction's not passed like all the security systems that should be built kind of in middleware and then and like we built some tools on the back end in a protocol to enable

that and then the scalability is yes it should you know scale to billions of users otherwise like this technology is not going to get adopted right and we can end up in a black mirror episode i also wanted to touch a little on what you mentioned about uh us believing in the past that we can execute better than ethereum right so so when we were talking three years ago like we did we didn't know anything obviously we needed we needed some something to say but uh yeah so what happened was that we started designing sharding and if you when you start thinking like if you if you read the papers from all the blockchains like the early papers the first papers they've had they're all very similar

because once you start thinking there's a particular direction you take and so we all took that direction we all like diverged a little bit right so ethereum and us and polka dots we all believed in a slightly higher level of security where you don't trust uh like small validator sets which are sampled from a big set like some other chains did trust etc but there wasn't much different differentiation at the beginning but then what were what what was on our side was that we were uh we were a group of people in a single room right with a whiteboard while ethereum was significantly more uh widespread decentralized uh system and because of that we were able to quickly iterate and see what doesn't work so what happened was that very early on we

realized that that design that everybody comes up with is uh unusable it's it's unusable it's super complex like it will take a very long time to build it the the interaction uh with with the system will be pretty uh suboptimal and so what happened was that early on we just went ahead and deleted the entire code base we built in the first seven month we just purged it and we started over with a significantly simpler design called nightshade and and eventually what happened was that ethereum also realized that like the original design is too complex but it took them significantly longer because they didn't have this insight which we got very early by building it uh by starting building it right so so the time was on our side because of

this because of us being in the same room with the whiteboard and moving quickly yeah and i think maybe maybe diving in into nightshade kind of how it compares right the basic idea is that instead of sharding blockchains right and having lots of blockchain running in parallel and having all the problems of communication between them and keeping track of them uh which is you know some some of the change who went this way are uh can i continuously need to solve for uh we're actually shouting blocks and so it was in in a way like you know there's this meme of big blocks and so like yes at some point you cannot you know increase the size of block because then

between like executing it and transporting it um it will take significant time and so we actually splitting block into so-called chunks that we that are processed in parallel that are kind of collected in parallel and that allows us to have kind of still one single chain right from a user perspective from developer perspective it's one blockchain they don't need to know about kind of underlying sharding design layout or anything and they are able to kind of communicate with blockchain as if as if it's a single entity but we can actually paralyze processing paralyzed storage paralyzed kind of block collection and propagation network yeah so all of the pieces that are bottlenecks right now in

blockchains are now paralyzed and uh and the most interesting thing which is still in our future roadmap is ability to dynamically kind of reallocate uh kind of increase number of this charts right and so this way we can actually dynamically grow block size um and and state size uh based on the usage of the blockchain right as kind of more users come in we actually can increase capacity which which is a kind of precondition for the blockchains to be able to handle you know lots of users is ability to dynamically scale up right like you never hear from facebook is like oh when you log in it's like wait wait guys you know there's already hun like you know 10 million users you need to wait

for it for a few minutes it's like no they actually just built more data centers underneath and so kind of the eventual goal is to be able to do that in you know permissionless setting that's great like i'm really excited to kind of dive into this like one thing that kind of it reminds me of when you're saying look like this uh splitting the blocks into chunks and you know processing in parallel right in solana they right they basically do something a little bit similar right where they're basically saying like okay you know what are the transactions that like don't touch each other in terms of state and then they're using these gpus to also like

execute them in parallel now they don't have it's still on like a single you know single validate a single machine you have to do something similar here right because i guess you obviously can't have uh transactional contracts that you know affect each other in a single block you know split across different validators so like how do you deal with the kind of interactions between different uh programs and transactions so salana paralyzes processing right so that allows you to utilize well multiple cores or like in the future they talking about gpus there's no gpus today i guess it also allows them to to use the the uh the fact that uh ssds today is are very

good at processing paralogic requests so you can read and write in parallel but they do not take advantage of uh like they don't realize network right every validator still needs to receive the full block with all the transactions not only every validator but also every node that is watching the network so that's a that's a slightly bigger problem so it is it is maybe reasonable to require validators to run very expensive hardware right like let's put this question aside but it's uh uh building a system like that also requires every node in the system to run on expensive hardware right so that is actually damaging in the sense that it costs a lot of money if you just want to ensure that the network is operating correctly right so in charted system what you do is uh you first split the state so the

state the entire state is split into multiple charts uh and then as a node you choose which charts you want to so if you're not validating node you choose which charts you track right and so with a very cheap hardware you can go and validate a single chart right but but as a community like if the community has 10 000 nodes and like assuming that people choose which charts to validate somewhat evenly you have the entire network being validated by a very large number of people with cheap hardware right validators are assigned charts so if you're a validator you're you're told which chart you're validating right and then you only you only have to then load state uh and transactions and chunks only for that chart so it significantly reduces

first of all your requirements for the disk storage right the state explodes in blockchains today but you only need to store one chart worth of state which is its full state divided by number of shards it's significantly smaller and the network requirement is also smaller because you only need to download transactions which are attaching your state that introduces its own challenges specifically transactions do not like to only touch state of a single shard it happens that transactions often do touch state of multiple shares so even a transaction as simple as me sending money to ilya if we do happen to reside in different charts it is a crosshard transaction right so it introduces this challenge that on itself is a pretty interesting problem we can talk about it separately right so it needs to be solved but but but in comparison with the sort of

monolith blockchains which are uh which are paralyzing processing uh they're solving for one bottleneck which is storage so cpu is not a bottleneck cpu is not a bottleneck for any blockchain today but they are solving storage as a bottleneck but not network uh and and not and when that means storage i mean like io io speed so so there are three bottlenecks one is iosp one is how much storage you can actually fit on a single machine right like the state of the blockchain grows and the third one is network so by by parallelizing processing you are solving for uh for a yo for io speed but you're not solving for network and you're not solving for the for the size of the state that you need to store so would it be then okay let's say there's something like a uni swap some

decks and then that's on like you know a particular chart and if i'm i for example i want to run a node i want to know uh what's going on on that dex then i just run the node for that chart and then moreover there's a particular feature which allows you to say hey i care about this account and that will automatically track whichever chart that account resides on right so it's even made very simple for you to have a node which tracks a particular set of accounts yeah let's talk about the i mean is there some kind of cross chart uh like how do cross chart interactions work

so yeah this is where the cost for the scalability comes from right there's no free lunch and so the cost is that pretty much logically every single contract on near is actually lives in its own logical shard so they all live kind of in parallel and if you want to communicate between any of the contracts the model is not kind of what ethereum and any other model blockchains are using but actually a sending message and receiving messages that's a kind of communication protocol and so this is actually way more similar to kind of services like microservices architecture that exists in

you know in regular fintech and in in web where each service kind of lives independently has some piece of state associated to it and they communicate with each other through uh through messages and then the kind of the protocol underneath kind of groups this logical charts right logic like smart contracts into a physical chart in actual chart and and facilitates the communication right so when one contract for example my account uh sends money to unit swap right i create a message saying you know send like and near for example to this other install contract that protocol you know sees this message route it to the right

chart that chart receives it as in like just a message that coming in similar to any other in a way transaction just as a metadata attached process that for the unit small contract and then routes it for example if there's some outgoing funds for example going to another account uh to the next thing and so this in a way um like adds i would say some complexity compared to for example 3d model where everything is synchronous and you have kind of when you're calling another contract you'll get back the result within the same transaction and if anything fails the whole thing kind of falls back here you kind of you if something failed

in uni swap then you will get a callback saying that that failed but then you need to handle kind of what's uh uh what that kind of result or or um failure need to be like the way it needs to be handled for your specific contract and uh it takes a little bit of time right because the messaging is communicating between chunks uh between chunks produced and so it may take like one or two seconds if this is a complex multi multi uh contract transaction but in result you know that's why we have like one second blocks which are you know propagate really quickly and allow us to route these messages really quickly and

uh there is also interesting things like aurora which comes into offset sounds as well so so then this is the case like between any kind of uh smart contract interactions that you basically don't have this you know that you have this uh i guess it reminds me a little bit of that sort of the the cosmos ibc model in a way yeah i mean it is that's what i'm saying like in a way logically you can think that every contract on near is its own chain it's on cosmos zone yeah it's almost it's on cosmos zone and we just have a really you know fast idc that is under

the same security assumptions and that and that's the main thing is actually security assumptions are exactly the same and so as a contract developers user you don't need to think about like oh is that zone gonna blow up is this messages are coming right like users don't need to think about that at all and developers either like they think of it as a model system that kind of runs all the services uh and communication between them but underneath you know because of this we can actually rearrange where the contracts live physically right we can actually move them between shards dynamically and that's kind of like what's always been on our roadmap it we can you know if for example one of the contracts becomes really popular we can actually

move it out into its own chart and now it has way more capacity right it has full capacity of the full shard uh which is you know as much as one computer can process and importantly if you if you were on the same chart you're not affected anymore when it's moved out so so you don't suffer because uh someone deployed something very popular yeah which happened to be on the same chart as you and and by not suffer meaning like as well the networking is not broken because right now what we've seen so far right is every time some contract becomes popular it's not given that the likes you know processing gets i mean obviously things get expensive as there's a price auction but the network gets flooded with the messages because like somebody runs bots or whatever and

so again the point is like you isolate it into separate networking and so all the other processing continues kind of as it is and so aurora is a great example because it actually runs on a separate chart because it is a popular contract on here and we can dive in like what does that actually mean but kind of we already have this in a more i would say governance way where we can allocate kind of uh contracts and charts and split as a state more like through governance versus dynamically but over time the idea is to kind of have that you know reallocation dynamics similar how aws you know can scale your uh like database or scale your uh websites with lot on same type of thing okay that's very very interesting very

cool yeah i guess it also sort of like illustrates i think what you guys are saying is no like we use this term like sharding in in blockchain and i get it this is seems to be a lot of differences in how that's actually understood and how it's implemented well to be clear it's the same in in regular you know systems programming like there's a concept of sharding which means like process stuff in parallel and then how exactly you implement really depends on specific architecture of the database or or you know services you're building so yeah cassandra volte and single store are all sharded but there's no similarities in their architectures so yeah let's talk about it

maybe a bit sort of like the state of it right now i think my understanding is there's four charts is that correct yeah there's four shards right now um with one dedicated for aurora okay so our maybe let's start with aurora so aurora's basically like an evm evm chart right exactly yeah so so this was kind of um [Music] stepping back right we mentioned the developer experience right and so we were kind of optimizing for how to make it really simple to build um applications on near and that means you know using something

that people are familiar with that is people outside of crypto yeah people outside of crypto and and and things that you can pull in existing code that that was also important piece because like if i'm built like you know most of the development usually is just pulling you know five libraries and then stringing them together and so we chose to use webassembly because it's because it gave us kind of the this platform that there's a lot that's a huge community of people for building compilers and kind of instrumentation and tooling for right webassembly runs in every single browser probably while we're recording this somewhere you know webassembly actually runs to render some

of the graphics and so that gave us kind of the fun fundamental pieces um and then this was kind of obviously a detour from how a lot of developers in crypto kind of uh back then were thinking because they were all building solidity for evm and kind of as an idea we always wanted to see how we can bring you know the existing code an existing product to to near and so at some point there was a prototype where we just took part of open ethereum right part part of the client uh of parity client back then and ran it like compiled it to webassembly and ran it right again

because the whole point was that we can take existing code and just execute it and so we actually got the vm to run as a smart contract on here and so that's on its own is super powerful right like it means you can run you know potentially a pretty complex piece of software you can you can run postgres yeah as a smart controller you can run postgres a smart contract potentially on near and not that you should but you could yeah but but uh and there would be one interesting thing coming in in like that we are able to run which enables a lot of new use cases but i'll not spoil it but with zvm what happened is it became clear that we can actually build a

environment right think of it as a we call them containers now where all the avm contracts can live in one kind of near smart control yeah near smart contract near container and they inside can be synchronous because they actually will live on the same shard and communicate with each other and have you know state uh available to them and so that kind of kicked off this idea of aurora which is well actually you can offer this as kind of isolated container that people can just go directly deploy build their apps and you know create a very compatible environment to existing experiences both for developers and users which is also completely transparent to

them so like as aurora user you don't need to understand any of that for all you care there's an evm contract on near and your metamask gladly connects to it and all the tooling works right so underneath it's a it's just a smart contract compiled into wasn't which runs all bpm smart controls but but users users don't need to know about it for users near is just a uh fully functional vm chain which is interoperable with all the and only vm contracts that nir has yeah and so this concept by the way can be extended right you can have you know a single container with other languages and other frameworks including wasm including glass itself yeah so you can actually create a vaseline from a

contract that are synchronous with each other and call it like can call each other synchronously on one of the charts right and so um in a way this is actually back back in the day stadium research was published about execution environments and this is kind of i mean uh like similar to that idea but actually like the specific implementation that also you know hooks in with all the tooling cool interesting i mean it also seems similar in some ways to sort of the polka dot parachain model i mean to a lesser extent because polka dot and and and roll ups on a helium right the way they operate is by having

a separate operator that kind of collects transactions does you know ordering execution state kind of state maintenance and then they use the beacon chain or ethereum main net as a way to settle and secure the states right and so what this means is you need to run separate validators or collaters yeah you need to run uh you know now you are responsible for um like whoever runs that responsible for censorship resistance right which like let's say in roll up cases there's like you know one operator usually which there's so many ways this can go wrong um and then and then you have kind of this

like checking in state the step of your state you need the you know beacon chain to accept it to validate it you know um and so that on top of it creates a complexity because now as a user and developer you're like oh my application is on this power chain or in this roll-up my money are on this other roll-up and i need to first you know transfer things to figure out like how to move is is it removable how long do i need to wait for the settlement all those things like just adding lots of complexity with aurora there's no complexity because literally it's a smart contract you can think you know from a different side it's a it's like a wide urn you know vault where you know you put money for

example and it deploys it into some other things and it's in the same transaction it's in the same network right there's no separate validators there's no separate uh kind of security assumptions or anything so wait what if i want to run my own substrate chain what if it is my use case you can how do i do that it was near yeah well we have octopus network for that i saw that this octopus was like this is this is like interesting no because it sounded like some okay using near and then substrate chains and then ibc so it was like sort of so the way the way being user friendly means is it's not you know ilia or alex

or you know somebody on our team decided that this is a user-friendly part it's actually hearing what developers want and then making sure it's easy for them to do and so aurora is example of like i really don't think people should write in solidity but people want to write solidity there's a lot of market for that and so enabling them to do that on near was you know part of the part of this thing similarly and there are very specific cases when you do want to run separate chain because um you know you need to customize how the communication happens or uh you need to customize like very deeply you know some kind of state formation or zero knowledge integration or or you don't even want to show your state you don't want to show your state you don't you you maybe want to remove

fees completely like and you have a different way to do result resilience and and uh spam protection and so all those three like ways right uh again enabling them to do that in an easy way right and so octopus uh built by by those folks in in kind of i mean globally but original team from china um they kind of came up with this design where you can have a kind of a smart contract on on near mainnet right that facilitates all this and provides you leasing of the security uh from near right and and you can get pretty much validator like collaters who will run your chain when

you like you check in your web assembly of your chain now not a smart contract and and this validators will kind of get picked and and start running it and then there's obviously some sets of you know security assumptions around that uh to kind of facilitate it but that'll like kind of octopus the main benefit that it's reasonably cheap to start this and you can run you know tens of thousands of them because it's just as simple as kind of um from perspective of doing it right it's as simple as just deploying a web assembly as well and kind of you know creating some token economics around validators running it and it's substrate right and it's substrate yeah and i think they also want to extend it to

cosmos sdk but right now it's subject yeah that's cool that's an interesting yeah so now maybe another question on the aurora thing so like now let's say we have aurora and then you know people writing smart contracts in there if they want to like interact or in some way with you know let's say other smart contracts has written in web assembly on like different chart how does that work do you need some kind of bridge for that or like how how can they interoperate yeah so so there's a one missing piece right now on the road map so so to be clear like a web assembly contract

uh let's say you know some kind of a mm or whatever that wants to call into aurora already does that and there's actually examples of you know contracts on here that interact with contracts on inside aurora and because for them this is just a message you know through the regular api just call aurora contract with some arguments and get the results and get the results here and then get callback pretty much after it's finished the way back it requires adding a new pre-compile to evm to our avm that allows the contracts to pretty much call back like call out of the aurora and receive the callbacks later and so that part is on roadmap um this hasn't been kind of yet you know prioritized but uh

but it's there and it's it's not that complex to add that and but right now the folks who want to do this do it the other way so if you for example want to call something from a vm to uh some other web assembly contract you just you know you you do it that way you pull the data from the avm kind of out but moving assets works like if you need to move assets between aurora and near that says it does not even it is not a bridge per se which usually assumes like bridging something with different levels of security but but but our order is just it's just depositing money into aurora contract that's what really happened so it takes one second and it only relies on the security of near

nothing else so you know moving assets between aurora and here that's what i'm saying is more of a like a vault that has you know different strategies in it like mentally for people than a roll-up because roll-ups assume different security and some different uh civil resistance and and uh censorship resistance and here you have like a vault that is a smart contract that you can deposit in withdraw funds and then inside it you can do different stuff with this uh kind of like similarly we have actually refinance for example our exchange as well where you can deposit funds and then you can trade uh without destroying them like it's not it's not like uni swap you know you move funds and then you get them back already on your account here actually deposit

funds trade and then withdraw later uh and so like this kind of pattern is pretty popular and near because uh it allows you to kind of move in everything and then uh transact with something that's uh doesn't require multiple kind of hops across smart contracts it and then the other chart so you know we have a workshop the other three charts are they they're just uh webassembly shards well they're all web assembly charts it's more of a like it's it's a aurora contract is pinned to one of the shards and then the other ones are just all the other things are split kind of evenly yeah if you deploy a wasm contract today you will be assigned randomly to one of the shards uh and there is no benefit

of being collocated with someone so so there is no reason for you to grind and try to get on the chart with with someone else you're not getting any benefit for that okay so so that latency if i if i like want to interact with the decks and i i end up being on the same chart i still have the same kind of yeah still still one one block latency for for the message yeah which also has a lot of interesting like front run prevention things and the more shards we have the less predictable it is actually uh what other things will come from other shards and so like even if you see a transaction coming and you try to front run it first of all

like uh the probably some other stuff from other shards will come in may come in before you so as network grows it actually becomes like more and more like interconnected and harder and predictable yeah unpredictable to do things like front running really i mean more complex maybe right but seems like very possible yeah this is this is not a solution yeah this is just a it's like makes it harder yeah it makes it harder and because like blocks are one second it's like you need to observe the whole network at all times pretty much and be probably a validator of a large like a large percentage of stake that's probably the only way to be like if effectively effective at front

running everybody else are not able to do that pretty much like that that's kind of why i mean obviously like you can still you know do backgrounds and that's what you know all the arbitrage spots are doing but if we're talking about actual front running like plug it in in front of your transaction you need to be kind of a validator and you need to be like in all the shards ideally to to be able to observe it so i mean we have four shards now i mean what's the limit here like how how far like what are kind of the scalability limits to this right so so this takes us uh to this land of security assumptions right uh when you

design sharding uh what happens is that naturally because every validator only validates the subset of shorts then every shard gets fewer validators than than the security of the whole system right uh and and so here you can make one of the two security assumptions security absorption number one says hey if i get a very large set of validators like let's say uh 10 000 uh and they sample from them randomly a thousand of validators and you can say hey if the original set had let's say no more than 30 of bad guys then you can do some math and you can deduce that the sample will also have like no more than forty percent with a probability one minus one over

you know quadrillion quadrillion something like that right so then you say well if if i assume for my bft concentration radio that the whole set has no more than 30 i can i can assume that the sample will be safe right and so there are many charter systems which are live today which rely on this assumption uh the problem so if we were relying on this assumption there would be nothing uh blocking us today from from going to significantly more shards however this assumption has a problem which is you don't need to be a bad guy in advance you can become a bad guy after you were assigned to a shirt right so the idea here being that most of the validators they're not honest people they're reasonable people they're optimizing for the upside right and so if you do need to corrupt the chart if you don't need to do something

bad in the short then you will wait until the validators are assigned and then you will go you will identify them there are fewer of them than the whole set and you will corrupt them retroactively like you will bribe them or some hack into their machines yeah yeah well if you can hack him you can probably hack him to everybody but i mean i guess you could i don't know if you could have some i mean i guess the only way i could imagine some kind of scenario like that being plausible right might be if you're if you if you basically do it via a smart contract right so that you could do put up like a bounty because like identifying contacting hacking into

yes yes yeah like i think two years ago i wrote exactly a blog post which just describes like how the smart contract would look the problem here is that in practice those blog producers they not like they sit in the same groups you know they in the same telegram groups where they discuss like the problems they're facing or like the hardware requirements etc so it's very easy to find them right so frequently it's it's also very easy to like find the mapping between people and pools also because pools many pools validate multiple networks you also kind of know them from other so it's it's easier to find them it's definitely possible to like it doesn't have to be very possible to corrupt them it's enough for it to be generally plausible for you not to want

to build a blockchain which can be broken this way right uh there are many things which look impractical but uh like when enough money is involved uh they become doable right so this concept is called adaptive corruption when you corrupt someone after the fact and uh there are multiple protocols so the one i know is polka dot us and ethereum two with their uh designs uh that they designed with an assumption that the chart can be adapted adaptively corrupted like a very large percentage up to 100 uh of all the validator nodes can be corrupted and then usually the assumption is that there is at least someone in the network who validates the chart who is not corrupted right so if you read the nitrate paper that we have from here we even try to

build it like we have some ideas how to address the situation where nobody voluntarily validates every shot but but that is that becomes like pretty unreasonable you usually expect that in the entire network is at least someone who's validating the chart like if nobody else the exchanges do right indexers exchange indexes yes so so then you need uh what you do usually is you say you do what optimistic products do you say hey uh if something happened like if you if you track a shard and you see that the violators did something stupid go and show it to us so the entire system is built in such a way that any misbehavior can be proven cryptographically with a relatively

small small proof and so if anyone observes something wrong they can immediately send the proof to the network the network will receive it punish people who are to be punished roll back right and so here the idea is that if you track all the shorts you will know in advance something but it's happening you shut down your operation right so like if your hypothetical exchange you will track all the shorts right you have resources for that uh you don't need to rely on challenges because you know that something went wrong you're actually probably going to be the entity sending the challenge uh if you do not have capacity to track all the shards which majority of people will not you only track a subset but also your the way you interact with the network changes right if you if you have a transaction which which transfers a lot of value right for

which it is absolutely crucial for you that it is not rolled back then you wait you wait a little more to make sure the challenges are not coming in for small transactions you don't care like probably not but you will be rolling back the network because you bought like a five dollar nft uh so that is the simple part the hard part is that for you to send the challenge you actually need to see the block like if i if if the shard was corrupted and they did something stupid uh because the shard was corrupted they uh like a very simple way to think about it is because we build sharded system with the understanding that nobody can download all the blocks uh or at least majority of people cannot right so that means that you should be able to validate or like operate the network or

like interact with other shards by not seeing the full blocks the full chunks in our case of the chart right so you you like you're acting like many many parts of the system act as light clients right when they see the headers and the signatures of the block producers and they act opponent right so now if if we are bad guys and we want to do something bad we will send enough information to everybody for them to act on our bad behavior but we will not release more than that we will not release the full block of the full chunk and so the even though there is someone who's tracking the shard they will not be able to download this data because we never published it in order to challenge us so that is one of the hardest problems in designing both uh chartered system and rolex like if

you read uh research on rollups you will see that data availability is always the bigger problem the biggest problem they're trying to solve and the limitations they have today like why optimism or a bit from around 200 or how many of their own transactions per second is not because of the execution or storage or network is because of data availability right and so one of the biggest bottlenecks and the biggest and the biggest components of near is the data availability subcomponent and so that's one of the biggest bottlenecks we resolving to extend to more shards but but also challenges uh they are not challenges are not in the production state yet so the network that operates today does not have challenges enabled and so because of that validator nodes

actually do track all the shards it's called phase zero of nitrate uh so that's the second bottleneck right so before we before we scale so we can probably go to more than four we can probably go to eight maybe even more with this mode but to scale tomorrow to scale to 100 charts we will need obviously both we will need challenges enabled uh but challenges to the easier part data availability is the harder data availability is there data availability was the first thing we've built yeah which is the one of the issues with challenges is that because they don't actually happen in real life right so like normally you know if you're running a test net you you're testing all the behaviors you know you're executing transactions you're running blocks and distributing data availability and so

you you know you find all the issues right away and with challenges we actually had them yes but it never happened this is an implementation yeah and so and so like they're not tested very well and so we actually need to create you know an adversarial environments where people are maliciously like corrupting network to test all that properly and so you know given there's an exploding ecosystem there's a kind of a bunch of other things we are working on uh to solve for actual developers and users before um kind of switching back to finalizing challenges and having that more like a probably another incentivized network where people are incentivized to actually be slashed we're also probably nowhere close to the

to the capacity today right so so you need to solve problem problems as they come we we are very like we are very much facing a problem today that for people it's very hard to interact with blockchains right uh so so there's way more resources with spending on the uh on usability and devex uh capacity it's very clear how to how to scale but we know we're close to hitting it yet yeah yeah i think we did the resharding so the kind of part of this whole point that developers and users don't need to think about the shards is that we can change number of sharks as i said with governance and so we did uh kind of late last year in november

changed from one chart which would be running from launch to four shards um and that was you know actually just like i mean there was a resharding mechanism that was happening for half a day underneath right but there was zero changes to users or developers like how things interacting no tooling needed to be changed no not nothing zero downtime yeah zero time that was there and so kind of the idea is like to continue doing that pretty much ahead of any you know capacity grows that at least right now with governance we can continue adding more shards uh while also like adding some you know obviously testing more for the those important pieces and uh and launching them and so that that's kind of been you know like a big

piece of our philosophy right is being pragmatic and also continue you know continue innovating continue trading to to enable these things kind of ahead of what users and developers want and need well let's talk a bit about uh maybe usability and developer experience i remember that was always one of uh one of the things from the start that you are emphasizing a lot i also remember you guys had this plan i don't know if he ended up doing it but to like focus on like high school students to get them like sort of get them early and get them onto near well we have actually i have this photo

from my high school and uh when i asked who who has near not just familiar with there who has near it was like out of i don't know 40 40 kids i think like 35. um so he's a bit of bias there's a bit of like yeah there's a bit of us because it's my school how did how did that happen we run competitions we're on competition like programming competitions and so we sponsor that from near um and and pretty much prices are near for for the kids but the program competition is not near specific right yeah it's like generic yeah i mean this is like the thing we've been training with uh we're kind of riding those kind of like sponsoring those competitions um across well mostly ukraine right now but

uh we did sponsor the biggest one in the uh at the end of the year on code forces there was like 50 000 people there yeah yeah so so we're definitely kind of working that maybe not as as globally as yet but we actually have a lot of global global initiatives around the world um kind of targeting both like students and and professionals usability usability yes yeah usability yeah so what are yeah what do you think are the most important you know things that other blockchains do wrong and you know what are the most important differences of near in terms of usability uh so there are there are

several things which we've done uh from ver very early on from like the very first versions of near uh that well like effectively it's very easy to find the problems you you just observe people interacting with the blockchain and you see the problems right away right uh and so there's a couple of things that we've done from the very early on which are different so one of the biggest ones is the account model uh on on most of the blockchains today your account is your public key it has multiple problems one of them is that it's very cryptic right you come to a person outside of crypto and say hey this is your account this looks scary the second problem is that your account is attached to your private key like that is a problem right if your

private key is compromised well your account is gone right and at the very best you can what you can do now is you can transfer assets while you still have access to it right but well it assumes that assets are transferable right which is not the case in many cases it also assumes that you don't have some other value in your in your account uh so in near account and the keys are completely separate so your account it's a name it's like alex.near that's my account right uh and uh the the account can have as many keys as you want and those keys have different permissions right so you can have a full access key a full access key which is which means this key can do whatever to the account right you can you can add new keys you

can delete keys you can invoke any contract transfer any money right or you can have a access queue which says hey this access key can only interact with a particular contract with a particular endpoint of the contract and has this spending allowance right and so now if you have an account like if i have my account my private my my my private key with the full access i i have like somewhere in custody uh long hidden right but now if i want to let's consider this uh sort of use case where you have an account that has a lot of money uh it also participates in some dows and also occasionally you play some nft games or whatnot right so now for the full access you wanted to be deep in the bunker in uh

in nebraska which nobody knows where it is right but now if i want to if i want to go and vote in the dao i don't want every time no no no no it's in nebraska well maybe i changed the state anyway you don't want to go to nebraska every time you want to vote on the dow right so you want the key to so so now you can have another key specifically with the permission to the dow but also you do not want to treat that key lightly right like participation that was a responsible thing so that key well that key i will store in the ledger so it is a ledger device next to me i don't trust ledger let's say for my for full money right i don't want someone to come to my place with like a range uh and uh and get my password to the

ledger but that but i might have trusting ledger uh with participation in dao now if i'm playing a game i don't want to use like ledger to sign every transaction every action so then i have another key which is hey this key has access to the game the key is stored in the local storage of the browser so with the game i interact as if it was a web 2 game right given that on on near the block time is two seconds right it's not real time it's not counter strike but but for a very wide variety of games two seconds latency is very acceptable so now if your private key is in the local storage of the browser uh then it's extremely playable it's extremely usable right uh all the while you still have the same account so in ethereum you would or like

on many other blockchains you will literally have to have multiple accounts right so for the game maybe that's acceptable maybe i don't care which account to play the game from but but for the tao if it's not my main account now there's some social protocol where i need to say hey guys you know this is you know this account is me but i don't want to use it for the dao so hey trust me that this account is me i posted it on twitter right well usually it cannot go wrong it's a private chat on telegram where you send another key to people and then you also need to deposit more like money to pay fees on that account so and yeah yeah so so this account model is uh is nice it also has this very nice property on top of that which is

when you onboard new people right so you want to bring a person to the ecosystem you don't want them to understand what ledger is you don't want them to understand the sort of the hygiene of of properly maintaining priorities it's a pretty complex topic so what you can do instead is instead you can have a centralized gate which stores the private key in its own database right uh which can walk away and like pull the rack at any moment but you use the centralized gate to import people to interact with like small transactions you say hey come to near buy the nfts here like like you know play with this ecosystem projects with like a small amount of money just to get the feel of it the key could be in the centralized database of a centralized gateway which is extremely usable now you play with

near and eventually you buy an nft nfc goes in price now you have ten thousand dollar nft on your account you kind of don't want to trust that gateway anymore well nothing can be easier you just trust them one last time to change your key to the key you have on ledger now you actually have an incentive to understand how how to properly uh organize your private keys where to store them how not to lose them right because you have this nft that you don't want to lose right and so you swap the key it's the same account you've been using all this time but now it has full security right so uh it's it's very hard to do with any different account model and it's easy to turn kind of your account into a multisig because you just add multiple keys that then are required to sign on

something to for example perform an operation or set of operations you can you know create like a deadline switch on those account again not changing anything to save so like it's pretty much it's experience that you can build on top right that kind of is very mobile and allows you to kind of continue programming on and so developers then can build new experiences so one of the coolest things we've had from the like from pretty early on is that you can send somebody a link and that link actually contains a private key and so that private key is just to sign one transaction ever that will create account and move money

to your account right so there's a contract on here that hosts kind of tons of public keys to which if you have a private key you can send one transaction and then it will look up how much money that public key like was deposited and give you this money and delete that public key from being active again and so by doing this like it's called link drop right you can actually on board people and we've been doing this with care codes and there's links and there's everything you can just send people you know money nfts whatever like you can send them endow participation like you can send them like a link that is a private key that signs one transaction that is join this down right and so now they create account

they have a little bit of money you know for fees and then they remember without from that right so you can program whatever complex you know experience you want uh kind of and you and this is just like sending them a link via you know text message or telegram uh and obviously you can scale that up and like how do you bring a bunch of users through that as well you can also sell pre pre pre-configured accounts yeah there's a marketplace on here where you can sell accounts like like your account has some a collection of nfts which is unique and you sell it well even more interesting you you can be the author of a bunch of nfts that you sold but you're receiving royalties so one of the things that near has is more kind of sophisticated nft standard because it was designed by all the nft marketplaces

on here and so they embedded royalties into the standard uh which means that like as i create a bunch of nfts i sold them these nfts have encoded that i'm the author and they receive a small fee when they get resolved to all the marketplaces and by i i mean this account and so this account becomes in a way a business that has a revenue stream from the future sales nfts and you can sell this business or turn it into a dao pretty much from from that spot right and again this is like in ethereum you would need to like create bunch of accounts you know deploy contracts do all the stuff ahead of time and if you already done this you will not be able to change that like on here this allows you to kind of really easily

kind of you know turn it into a dow issue token you know now people can receive this revenue stream from this token for example or you can go and sell it as a business like as a quote-unquote business on one of the account marketplaces right right i mean a lot of from what you were describing actually sounds a lot like you know something that gnosis safe does on on ethereum right it's basically this like smart contract wallet that you know but of course here the nice thing being that it being like you know natively like a native thing right in including integrated i guess with something

that's a lot like ens right then you're okay alexander and with just i guess a lot less friction than you have if with something i've noticed yeah we looked at real use cases and we looked at kind of you know things like the acl like normal account management in you know in web 2 and then kind of brought it all together into one model that then people can build on top yeah we have we we have couple applications to the one year which are not targeting crypto audience they targeting normal people well non-crypto i guess [Laughter] uh and uh uh and uh very infrequently do we see people

complaining about something going wrong right so so we have uh we have like a mechanical torque if you know what it is so that's what it started with right eli and i wanted to label data we couldn't we built near so so so there is a labeling platform now on here right so the actual use case was solved uh and people who work on labeling platforms that's people from from all over the world who need money right uh and uh they they come and work but they're not crypto native and usually they generally not very non-tech saving right they do not like for many of them like instagram and internet are synonyms right yeah like factory workers people who work in service industry or people who just do not work because of pandemic right

uh so so they come and work on this portal and uh [Music] very rarely do we see the support channels people complaining that something goes wrong people do lose accounts still right so uh the hygiene of maintaining private keys is still a little complex but that that that like we solved through education through and through better tooling right so so we improve the thing is that our our infrastructure allows to improve on that right but they but they do understand how to create an account they don't understand how to use it to interact with an application right they don't understand how to ultimately move money out uh and uh cash them to to do whatever they need on a daily life and they might sell accounts and they yes they do sell accounts so the idea was that the portal

was launched eventually the uh the the amount of it became extremely popular because people do want to earn money uh and so unfortunately the demand use case the demand what would be supply what would be demand here i guess supplies workers right yeah no demand is workers anyway there was way more workers than work right and so the portal shut down the uh the invites and so now any account that has an invite is suddenly a very very uh valuable thing so those accounts are being sold constantly for for quite a bit of money right and if accounts were not sellable well then you would have a dead weight if you cannot work anymore yeah how how do you do a privacy right so you have like okay alex.near and then

i mean i i guess all of the addresses or accounts associated with that of course would be like link invisible or like would you would you imagine that people then have some sort of anonymous dot near i don't know and and then they keep like alex on here and and you have like i know dark alex down here or like how yeah you don't even have to have a note in your account you can have an account which is a public key though ironically the public key account is still like a full-fledged new account so you can change the private key later so it's still going to be a public account but it will have nothing to do with the corresponding private key but you can have any obscure name if you want to

uh answering the second part of the question which which is implied i guess uh there are i don't know if anyone is live but but there are multiple teams working on like tornadoes caches of the world yeah generally like blockchain right now is a prac it's not a privacy engine it's a transparency engine right and so in a way like it creates transparency and that's how we have you know thousand kind of consensuses and but at the same time there needs to be privacy and so privacy is built kind of on top and so yeah the the goal for sure is to be able to have like uh kind of private transactions even if they're executed smart contracts and that's the whole point that you can run you know another chain worth of

words of logic as a smart contract on here um that your account interacts with and so yes you know turn on of cash z cash style uh things can run on near kind of a smart contract allowing you to uh transact privately as well and and the interesting thing again is that so aurora is kind of doing that right now and so they tweaked it a little bit but they for for a long time they were running with zero fees right so they actually uh hit the fee for paying for the blockchain from the user uh and then covered the kind of the fee that blockchain requires like near themselves and then kind of created an economic model around that

and the kind of the logic there among other things first of all it's way more usable if you do that and you can actually charge you know flat fee like five dollars for example for a service or like you can do all kinds of things on top and like specifically this is this gateway right you don't even trusting it because you're actually signing with your key and the gateway just propagates and pays the fees and so when we're talking about privacy kind of the the goal will be to also have similar model where you're not actually propagating transaction uh directly from from your account you'll start propagating into some of these three layers and you just kind of pay some subscription fee to them such that now you're able to

transact in this like privacy pools without revealing who you are and then still be able to like visibly vote on taos and maybe you know buy your nfts and showcase them to everyone as long as you have the the primitives for uh vls signatures none of that needs to be on the protocol level right so any other systems which rely on zero knowledge proofs or or any similar technologies they can just be built as a consumer cool well let's talk a little bit about maybe like ecosystem and you know what's going on in here uh yeah the near world one thing

uh was mentioned i think one of your team was also like sent a reference to that is this thing called pagoda uh i don't know ilia can you can you talk about that what's what is pagoda for sure yeah so kind of the i would say again starting a little bit from philosophy right so i worked at google and google is a very kind of interesting place when you get in because inside they kind of build this like open source culture where you know all the source code for all the products is you know open in one repository you have all the services that you can latch on and hook in i mean with some pii etc uh permissions obviously and you can also contribute and maybe even participate in other projects and

you can start your own project but it's a permission model at the end and and importantly it also doesn't have internal kind of way to decide which projects are more valuable than others right um it's pretty much like some vp deciding at the end if you know we should shut down this project or start a new one and so kind of philosophically what we're trying to build with new ecosystem is a i called open google right this idea that you have a common platform right which everybody builds on latches on that is decentralized and then everybody can have a kind of their own project team you know uh thing which work together they still you know they

still are kind of one ecosystem that is collaborating and working together but they all have their independent kind of economic models right and so aurora is a great example because it was actually you know part of our team that was working with us that came out as a separate entity as a separate organization uh they had their own fundraise they launched their own token they kind of operating and growing right now themselves and that on its own on its own creates like a huge you know scale because aurora itself is actually like you know a huge ecosystem now uh that has you know whatever like probably like few projects launching every week now like you know nazis launched and acer scan launch and

all kinds of stuff and so similarly we have few other projects of you know similar scale like octopuses obviously another one which has a big ecosystem themselves as kind of independent team uh we have a machina which is like a storage project we have calimera which is a more enterprise private chart uh as well and so kind of as has been happening um like all of these projects still exist and work on the same core right on the same protocol kind of either by using it by building to it by contributing to it by you know pulling people to add more stuff um and so that that's kind of the idea that like uh the ecosystem is continuing you know

growing there's more participants everybody's contributing and so for beautiful families open source this is very similar to something linux where you have a linux project which is kind of the kernel and a lot of like tooling around it which is an open source project it kind of runs independently of any company or foundation right it exists it existed and probably kind of continue exist and this linux foundation which is designed to kind of propagate and you know protect the brand and and you know pull people and create marketing and do all the stuff and then there's companies like red hat canonical you know like intel and google and microsoft who all have teams working on these protocols but then they have business around it that they offer

uh kind of to their clients right or or they run it like asia runs you know tons of linux so they want to contribute to it so similarly you know we have all these teams now who were doing this and so our original company right the company that is all started with uh in a way it's transforming right it's transforming into this new thing which is pagoda and pagoda is a web 3 startup platform it's a place where you can come in and you get all the tooling you need to develop your startup right this is you know all the rpc data all the indexing all the uh you know we like token launch toolkits and you know you have wallet kind of apis and all the stuff and it's this is the biggest contributor

to all the open source like of near protocol of sdks of apis which is all the open source projects but there are other contributors as well and so kind of this creates like an alignment because there's a business model and there's kind of a clear you know desire to improve for the customers that are using this platform while still continue contributing to this kind of open source project that everybody runs and then on parallel i mean i would say like on the flip side you have a ton of stuff that specifically designed to do go to market right and so foundations is in a way this you know i would say like a kind of initial booster of the ecosystem but it's you know it's actually not about foundation it's about now things like proximity labs which is helping all a lot of d5 projects to be successful to

kind of launch to um to build there's things like human guilt which works with i think like 100 founders but like 30 games building there like tons of again of team marketplaces nft projects like a ton of people who are kind of they have a huge community we have things like uh meta web which is eco-fund we have things uh kind of in near you in ukraine which is binary star that are you know hosting and developing a bunch of projects so in a way it's kind of you know ever expanding ecosystem with a lot of participants who are working together for coordinating uh and at the same time having their own kind of incentives and and business models around that and there's a diagram somewhere that make it we can

probably link kind of in a pretty way putting it all together yeah engineering needed to exist for us to launch but now it's just one one of the many participants and so therefore rebranding so for you for you guys what are the biggest you know the biggest things that you feel like okay you know these are you know some really hard problems or like the biggest challenges that are still ahead yeah so i mentioned kind of the security simplicity security and scalability and we made pretty good progress in simplicity and

scalability but security is still a big concern for everyone in blockchain and if we want to get to a billion users which is our kind of nearest you know outstanding like big hairy goal is we need to solve that and so and if one of the one of the efforts of being there is uh contract registry so how do we keep track of uh you know contracts their source code their audits and potentially security advisories right which are indicating that there's something wrong with this contract and and so people should be cautious right so this way when you're in your wallet right transacting with this contract it actually can surface this information directly and being able to provide you the kind of heads up if

something is happening we can also do active you know threat detection and prevention directly in wallets and kind of wall of services pretty much realizing that you know some npm packages were maliciously attacked some you know some some types of accounts and contracts are being compromised right you're transacting with someone like things like am 11 can be done with it within this framework and beyond that you know we're talking about you know seed phrases seed phrases are really easy to lose and and this is like already in web 2 you know we have passwords and you know password has been leaking all the time and obviously like this its own set of problems why is this happening but

to build a lot of tooling to figure out how to detect when this is not you actually going into it right and so we can actually build i call it active custody where uh there's someone else who is analyzing is this like you sign this transaction right and it analyzes if this is you sign the transaction if there's some again npm packages you know getting hacked seat phrases getting you know stolen like can we detect that can we analyze that you're signing you know halfway around the world uh can we detect that this is a very suspicious type of transaction and then have a cosigner that that analyzes that and decides if they want to sign or not and cosigners can be you know your friends for example kind of you know your friend's computer

maybe a bank or some kind of other custodian or potentially validated themselves on the network right who already actually securing this network and so this kind of like expanding really beyond you know seed phrase is like the only way that people like if somebody gets your seat race i mean obviously we've done some of it with just uh kind of permission control but even beyond that how do we how do we create more security around that i think beyond that is education so i think biggest problem is still people don't not know the like how this stuff works and they're scared they're scared because because of security partially and like they see you know rec pools and money stolen and broken and all those

things like developers are scared to launch stuff developers are scared to build things and go into blockchain as well and users are scared to use this because they don't fully understand what's going on and like on one side we should make it easier so they don't need to understand but on the other side we need to educate we need to bring more people in and so we've been running near university but really kind of scaling that up right so right now we you know thought like 5000 people but you know how do we go to a million people from there uh kind of across the world kind of educating bringing people up into into this ecosystem well um thanks so much guys it's been really great to you know hear about nir hear about like the progress it's also been great for from

like sort of us of course want to be able to like you know run nodes participate in in the progress of the network and yeah i think it's really exciting i think you've come a long way and i'm super excited to see you know what what the next years and decades hold for near and and to see whether you can make it to the you know one billion users and beyond exactly just the beginning well thanks so much and thanks so much for listeners as well and we'll see you next week