Dan Reecer : Intro to Polkadot, Parachains, and Parachain Slot Auctions

Transcript

all right um thanks everybody for coming out i know it's getting late in the day so i'm impressed we've got 20-25 people here i think um i'm dan reeser from the akala and karua team our team is mostly based in auckland new zealand we've been building in the polka dot and substrate ecosystem for a couple years now and and kind of waiting to get things rolling on polka dot once parrot chain slot auctions roll out which i'll be explaining today um i'm going to be covering kind of some some introductory kind of basics to polka dot there's a lot to cover so i'm going to move relatively quickly but there's some words that you may hear some jargon that constantly gets thrown out so i think it's good to clear thing clear things up we're going a little bit of a reverse

order we started with some like technical talks with moonbeam um kind of in the middle with with centrifuge and then i'm going to go kind of back to the basics with everything related to polka dot so first i wanted to start with just the existing kind of challenges that have been hindering blockchain over the last five to ten years first blockchains haven't been able to communicate so the the concept of interoperability scalability has obviously been a challenge on many networks the the difficulty in bootstrapping your network with security and finding validators and getting this whole robust set of validators to actually secure your chain is a difficult process and something that the people who built polka dot

didn't believe should be something that developer teams should have to really deal with another another thing that we're working on is the ability to customize at the blockchain layer many existing networks have kind of gone with a one-size-fits-all approach building things like defy and gaming identity all in the same chain polkadot's taking a different approach where we're kind of betting on customization and building chains for specific use cases um governance so off-chain governance or no governance at all has been another issue with with previous networks that polka dots trying to solve with on-chain governance an elected council and a whole voting system and then last but

definitely not least is upgrades um the ability to upgrade your chain without a fork is a pretty massive advantage when you look kind of longer term and what that actually means over time um so that's something that i'll that'll explain a little bit more um in this presentation so as you probably know you probably definitely know if you're here at the ethereum conference um polkadot was started by gavin wood who created solidity built the evm worked with vitalik beck back in the day and then decided to start polka dot with rob and peter here gavin went on to create the web 3 foundation and parody which are kind of the two main organizations behind polka dot and kusama web 3 hosts a lot of the research team

some developer relations teams parity is based in berlin and has a lot of the developers who actually kind of work on the polka dot and kusama networks and substrate itself so what is polka dot at the most basic level polka dot does two things it connects blockchains together and it secures blockchains and it's important to also talk about what is not polka dot polka dot is not a smart contract platform you don't build apps on polka dot and polkadot is not a layer 1 blockchain again where you can build smart contracts or applications polka dot is what we refer to as a layer zero or a meta protocol

so i built this just to kind of show a comparison to other networks that we we all know so polka dot being down here at the layer zero and then you've got all these layer one pair chains as we call them that are plugging into polka dot or will plug into polka dot for security and for interoperability this is a kala moon beam centrifuge all three have just talked in the room um as well as several others these are layer one chains like bitcoin like the current ethereum setup solana near and others and then of course at the top level you've got applications so this is where you actually build applications in the polka dot ecosystem you build on top of parrot chains you don't build on polka dot so current is a fintech company in the us building with akala

sushi's building on moonbeam and of course in the ethereum side you've got everyone in d5 compound ave and the like building on that layer one chain some some more polka dot jargon the team who built polkadot apparently loved creating new words um parachains are what you with east 2 may know as shards so every one of these little gray squares around this relay chain are blockchains individual blockchains customized for a specific use case um and then on the left as i just referred to the relay chain so the relay chain is this kind of the core of polka dot and this is what provides that interoperability and the security between all the para chains connecting

to the network and just to flip that diagram on its side um polka dot here is the layer zero you've got these layer one pair of chains here that are all connecting to polka dot and then all the applications the liquidity are going to be accruing on top of these uh para chains and all are fully interoperable so you will have like cassidy mentioned you'll have centrifuge building with akala maybe there's an integration of the akala dollar stable coin that's being used in centrifuge same with sushi on moonbeam sushi could have a trading pair with the ausd stablecoin from akala flowing over to moonbeam and being used within moonbeam so all fully interoperable i'm not a developer but i wanted to

include just a few technical facts i guess if there's anyone who's more technical in the room so polka dot is the blockchains on polkadot are coded with a blockchain framework called substrate this is built with rust all the pair chains are the code is compiling to wasm so when i mentioned the ability to upgrade without forks wasm is what enables teams to do this and then heterogeneous sharding so every shard or every pair chain on polka dot will be able to have its own unique state transition state transition function um which is enabled by um substrate in the way that polka dot was built so the the security of polka dot it's a proof-of-stake network

currently these are the stats that i pulled a couple nights ago so we've got about 64 of the network currently staked in dot almost 300 active validators and 545 000 active accounts on the network um and also going back to bridges like um cassidy was talking about from the centrifuge talk there's a couple types of bridges that are being built currently in the polka dot ecosystem you've got one which is a polka dot to another network so for example the interla bitcoin bridge or the snow fork eth bridge which will be huge for the collaboration between the ethereum community and polka dot but then you can also actually build bridges directly to one of these individual pair

chains so akala we just got a grant from the compound team to build a what they're calling a star port between compound and akala so we'll be bringing dot and a liquid form of stake dot to compound to be used in the compound gateway which is their kind of multi-chain money market that they're building actually using the substrate framework same with run btc we have a bridge being built directly between akala and ren btc to bring it to bring bitcoin into the akala defy ecosystem so kusama um many of you may have heard of kusama i love kusama worked a lot on it and it's it's confusing to people so i created a

couple slides here just to explain to you this kind of fairly new concept to the to the industry kusama is essentially the exact same thing as polka dot built the same the architecture's the same everything that i mentioned in the previous slides applies to kusama the main differences are that it's built for speed and experimentation so kusama's governance for example is about seven days versus polka dots 28 so it just takes a lot longer to get things through on polka dot if you're a developer that wants to move quickly you can come and just move fast on kusama and just to reiterate that this is kind of the the standard model you have a test net

you test things on testnet and then you move it to mainnet the issue here is that if you build something on testnet you can think all you want that everything is going to be safe and work well once it hits mainnet but you don't really know until it hits main net and then if you have a problem there what do you do what kusama did was introduced a step in the middle between test net and mainnet for this experimental mainnet so we have essentially two main nets in the polka dot ecosystem where you can test on the test net move it to kusama experiment there see how everything works in a real value environment and then you can move to polka dot or you can actually run parallel networks on polka dot and kusama so that over time every every new code or every new product that you have

you ship it to kusama first and then poke it out when you know it's going to be nearly perfect and just as an example so so my team medical we're building two parallel networks and both will run together in parallel so you have akala being built on polka dot you have karua being built on kusama which just launched is launching this week and these will be connected there will be a bridge between polkadot and kusama so value data will flow between both networks and we'll be able to operate both where kurura will essentially be making akala as nearly as perfect as possible so when it really boils down to it these

are kind of the flip side of what i showed in the beginning in terms of the challenges that polka dots going after we covered plenty about these para chains but just to reiterate pair chains are customized for for specific purposes and all connecting into the relay chain the thought is that there will be up to 100 potentially more than 100 pair chains all connected to polka dot when it's fully kind of fully launched substrate so i mentioned this is the framework that you're using to build blockchains on polka dot or on kusama and it's kind of like a music equalizer if you want to think about it that way you can tweak certain things up tweak certain things down to get exactly the blockchain that you need for what you're trying to build on top of it

when it actually comes to how to build with substrate it's kind of like almost like drag and drop blockchain building where you can pick from all the pallets that the team at parity has built as well as other teams in the ecosystem have built like akala has been building some pallets chain link built oracle pallet you can basically go through and pick and choose what you want and what you need for your blockchain and then create that in your in your runtime um when you want to say you build a new palette or you want to add something new this is where the forklist upgrade comes in and you can essentially upgrade your chain overnight without any hiccups and this is what i mean uh with substrate pallets so you've got

the layer zero meta protocol down here polka dot akala at layer one we've built substrate pallets into the block chain itself so this is much different than applications in ethereum where you're building apps on top of ethereum we're actually building our products as pallets in the blockchain itself so the decks our stablecoin oracles and everything are our pallets within the chain and then when you go to the top applications are able to plug into those pallets and leverage the decks or leverage the stablecoin at the blockchain layer instead of at the application layer so this unlocks a lot of composability between applications building on akala so you can build

several applications that are all plugging into the same dex liquidity or the same stable coin because they're building on top of this parachain and because we're here at an ethereum conference i wanted to add this just kind of a zoom in on the akala evm here this is another palette that's built into akala where we're providing an ethereum a very similar ethereum environment probably about 99 similar to what you're used to on ethereum but we're definitely optimizing more for substrate so you're going to be using a different extension called polka.js but you'll still have the same kind of you can still deploy your ethereum apps on a caller but what kind of optimizing for substrate allows us to do

is to add subtle features for for d5 specific use cases so bring your own gas i think is really cool this is a tweak that we were able to make where if you're using the snow fork bridge and you're bridging eth over to a collar to use in the decks for example if you put yourself in the shoes like sitting at your computer you bring eth over it's your first ever transaction on akala you don't have to go find aca the the network token you can pay the first fee in that wrapped eath that you brought over from ethereum which is a huge benefit to users it's much easier you people shouldn't have to worry about going out and finding or buying aca sending it to the wallet

using it to pay the fee scalability so this is what uh the web3 foundation research team had come up with as kind of a theoretical max for scalability of polka dot once all these pair chains are are launched in the same environment pretty significant 166 000 tps when we when we're fully launched we'll see what it actually comes out to when everything is is live on chain governance don't need to spend a whole lot of time on this but we've got on polka dot in on kusama we've got councils that are elected by the token holders um every decision that's made for the network is gone is run through the council it's proposed

discussed on a forum and then enacted when the council actually votes to enable this i mentioned this earlier but this is a huge benefit to teams especially when you're thinking about why build on this network versus this network the the ability to save a developer team the time of actually going out and recruiting hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions of dollars for a validator set is huge if you can just come plug into polka dot focus on building your products focus on code instead of doing all this work with all these network validators and i was i was pretty surprised to see this last night when i was making this

polka dot's done 24 network uh runtime upgrades since launching this is the equivalent of 24 forks that um an existing network that doesn't have uh forklift upgrades would have had to do so we've if you think about just over time the compiling effects that that'll have for not only polka dot but every parachain building on polka dot so akala moonbeam centrifuge we can all upgrade our chain forklessly as well so continuing to improve and improve over time okay i've got five minutes so the last thing that i wanted to touch on which is pretty timely right now is these pair chain slot auctions have just

been going on on kusama it's a fascinating process and definitely worth reading more into um after after this presentation but this is essentially how you launch on on polka dot or launch on kusama it's not it's not like an ico where anyone can just throw up a coin put up a website and raise a bunch of money we as teams we as parent chain teams actually have to work pretty hard to win an auction to earn the right to launch on these networks because of the security that you get and the interoperability that you get from polka dot and kusama these paratrain auctions are essentially a bunch of pair chain teams who are either

they either have a lot of ksm and kusama's case or they're involving their community and doing what we call a crowd loan to source ksm from their community that they can actually use as a bid in an auction against other teams what happens though is if you're a contributor from the community and you contribute ksm in a crowd loan after 48 weeks which is the duration of that slot that you get on polkadot it's like a lease after 48 weeks that ksm is returned to you so the only thing that you're giving up as a contributor is the staking returns that you would have been getting on that ksm had you not contributed it to the crowd loan oh and then one other important point is that the contributions in ksm and

kusama's case or when polka dot auctions start in polkadot's case whatever you raise the ksm or the dot is never touched by the team it's put in an account and kind of locked away as a almost like a stake for that slot that you get on the network so these are the first five teams that that won the first five slots on kusama kura is the akala implementation on kusama we were first moon river from the moon bean team came in then scheiden kala and bifrost bifrost just won the fifth slot like two days ago so we're kind of in a pause right now the first five

are the first five chains are live um at for kura we're starting to launch our our decks actually the liquidity providing for our decks goes live tonight the dex trading goes live friday so this is all kind of happening as we speak and pretty i mean substantial numbers that we saw um in these crowd loans i think everyone in the community was kind of shocked by what happened but these five teams combined when i mentioned these crowd loans where the community is backing those teams bids combined we raised 1.1 million ksm which is yesterday night was the equivalent to 162 million usd so pretty significant numbers to to pay attention to this is just a look

at the um this is apps.carua.network this is where the decks that will go live on friday will be this is our swap product similar to uniswap liquid ksm staking so you can stake ksm and get a liquid version of that and then we'll have a stable coin fully crypto backed multi-collateral stable coin on karua and then all of these things will go live on akala as well once we've kind of won an auction on polka dot and done all of our kind of learning and experimentation through kura and kusama cool so one minute to spare if you have any questions feel free to email me and i'll also stay around and have happy

to answer questions in the room as well if you have them but i appreciate the time thanks to the ecc team for inviting us here like being willing to to have moonbeam to have centrifuge to have akala speak at an ethereum conference it's great to see the willingness to collaborate with other ecosystems in the end we're all kind of building this together so appreciate it to the ecc team for for inviting us thanks guys [Applause] i'm not sure the answer to that like for

one hair change versus like 100. yeah for one pair of chain versus like what it would be with a home that uh that's a good question i can get back to you on the answer um maybe talk to some some parody or web 3 people okay okay i think we're good on time so

if you have any questions i'll be in the back thank you you