Dillon Chen: Edgeware – Coordinating Distributed Communities With On-Chain Governance (#322)

Transcript

[Music] hi and welcome to episode my name is sibbeston Cuchillo today our guest is Dylan Chen Dylan is the founder of Commonwealth labs they're building decentralized governance tools for blockchain networks and they're also the creators of edge where it's a smart contract platform a blockchain protocol built on parity substrate and it leverages wasum as a smart contract language and it has built in on chain governance now I'm sure many of you will remember the edgeware launched its

September and it did cause some controversy to sum it up Edgware introduced a novel token distribution mechanism called a lock drop in a lock drop essentially it allows people to lock eath in a smart contract for a set period of time in exchange for tokens and the tokens you receive are proportional to the amount of ether you lock up so let's say there's a ratio of one to a thousand so you lock up one eath and you get a thousand tokens in exchange for that commitment in the way that Edgware that this lock drop is they also introduced a waiting ratio proportional to the duration of time that you would lock up to eath so if you lock up to three months the weight is 1

if you lock it up for 6 months it's 1.3 and if you lock it up for 12 months it's 2.2 so you're incentivized to lock up your eath for as long as possible so if you're just sitting on ether and you don't know what to do with it the idea is that well you might as well lock it up here because you at the end of that period you're gonna get the ether back and you're also gonna get these tokens people could also signal their intent to participate in Edgware by simply providing an address holding eath so signaling is kind of a way of saying I want to participate in the edgeware Network without moving or locking ether signalers would also receive Edgware tokens but in a much lower proportion to those who locked eath in the case of

Edgware it's something around 20% now the lock drop is a really innovative and novel way to distribute tokens and I thought it was kind of cool but there were some people who took issue with it and particularly because smart contracts holding eath could also signal on behalf of all the funds held within that contract so let's take for example the rapt ether smart contract currently there's something around 2.7 million eath locked up in that contract well whoever deployed that contract could signal for 2.7 million eath in the edgeware smart contract and receive Edgware for you know all those people

that are locking up their ether in the rapp ether contract now this raised some questions and a bit of a conspiracy particularly because of Commonwealth's proximity to parity team you know there were some theories that they were pressured to do this so that parody could signal the locked eath in the in the parody multi-sig which as a result of a bug can probably never be spent in addition to that there were some technical issues when the network went live which prompted the team to downgrade the network to a test net and postpone the actual launch until much later what's also interesting is that in response to Edgware there's a group of people who decide to fork the code and launch a sister network called straightedge now this other network is

essentially the same in fact it even uses the same Genesis file for token distribution except for one important distinction smart contracts do not have the ability to signal on behalf of the ether held within them one of the people behind straight edge was sunny and so it was natural that we did this interview together so this all happened in September why on earth are we doing this now well we wanted to give Edgware and Dylan the benefit of hindsight and I think it was well worth the wait the lock drop was a really interesting token distribution mechanism we really wanted to do an episode about this but had we done this in the middle of the launch in the middle of all this chaos I think we would have been clouded and we wouldn't have been able to get to some of the

important lessons learned here Dylan was extremely open and very forthcoming shared all of you his thinking and the lessons that he learned through this process and I think it made for a much better conversation as a result one that I'm sure you'll appreciate before we go to the interview I'd like to tell you about our sponsor for today's episode Peppo you know I've said this before Peppo is like a mix between Twitter tick-tock and steamin Twitter because the content is mostly focused around crypto and entrepreneurship tick tock because on Peppo you share short 30-second video clips and steam it because of the incentive mechanisms in the way that leverages crypto so when you want to show your love for content

on Peppo you tip people by smashing that Peppo button and sharing Peppo coins and when you like something and you want to reply and take part in a conversation you show you interest by putting up pepto coins as well I've been using pepper for a little while now and I really like it I like the community of people that is starting to grow there and I've been sharing some exclusive content over on Peppo with my followers so for instance we recently did an interview with the if'n new C who is a former CIA analyst and an expert in AML kyc and counterterrorism was great interview and before we recorded the podcast I went to my Pepa followers and I said hey we're gonna be interviewing this guy in a little bit what kind of things should we be asking him what's on your mind how can we make this interview

better and so in the future I'll be doing this more and more whenever we schedule an interview I'll first go to my Pepa followers and say hey like what kind of things should we be asking this person and what are you interested in that you know would help us make this interview better so to download Peppo go to Peppo comm slash epicenter that lets them know we sent you in there you can download the app for ios and android and you can find me there my username is sub 2.0 that's sub 2 pomt 0 yeah come talk to me on Peppo be happy to see you there we'd like to thank Peppo for their support of epicenter and with that here is our interview with Dylan Chen we're here with Dylan Chen who's the co-founder of Commonwealth

labs Dylan thanks for joining us today thanks for having me on it's been a long time coming yeah it certainly has I think we started this conversation about six months ago or something like that you know well before six months I think so yeah right around when the lockup first started to actually kick off and so it's been a wild ride since yeah and lots has happened since then it has been a wild ride indeed so before we get into the heart of the matter which is Edgware and everything related to it let's get up at the background how did you first get involved in crypto yeah it's an interesting for for me I was a born in raised in Cincinnati Ohio and so like

didn't really have too much exposure to like general tech stuff wasn't born in you know Silicon Valley or anything but actually read I think the wired article on Silk Road and was kind of just really interested in how that coin or like this this type of technology like was something that anyone could tap into obviously for different use cases and then got an internship in the valley ended up getting being paid in Bitcoin or requested to be paid in Bitcoin I wasn't like a big gamer in high school and so like really couldn't mine and that was kind of the rabbit-hole moment for me so through college did some network research looking at different addresses and things like that through through a lab at Penn starting another company

with co-founder here drew we built a company called source that was Airbnb for Wi-Fi so sharing bandwidth we wanted to use an e or C 20 token and then also helped invest at rough draft and to like you know crypto companies and this was like during 2017 essentially so kind of been all around but yeah that's that's the kind of story for me and what is it about crypto that you found attractive and one that made you want to dedicate more time and build a company in a product I was attracted basically to the coordination and allowing like different actors who might not know each other - like acting like - trust me - my settings and so I think the use cases that were really interesting to me were

less on the financial side but like you know creating some type of research coin to like help basically produce more public goods so that kind of angle for me and I think that's kind of naturally led into the work we do at Commonwealth so creating a new system like Edgware or creating an interface or tools that help like other people coordinate around things one thing that we really like to do is yeah just continue that stuff forward yeah cool and so you know you then you withdrew you helped you guys co-founded the Commonwealth company together it so was sort of the vision of the Commonwealth company then Commonwealth the the tagline we're using now is basically we use Commonwealth to organize your community you know that

kind of encompasses governance so what is like community organizing its distributing a token or just like aligning all your stakeholders actually getting people to discuss issues or topics and then funding different things so covering that whole gamut and building out a product and protocol suite that actually helps with any protocol to help help them make their community work better hopefully we can extend outside of crypto or as crypto eats the world everything kind of will be organized through Commonwealth and so what does the team look like today like so I know you and drew are still working together but since then the team has expanded so how many people are there working on these projects and sort of what are the different projects

that are being built right now yeah so I guess the the two questions so what's the team looked like now and then I can get to the second part of what projects that were working on for the first answer we have another co-founder Raymond song he was a formerly at Princeton also had AngelList and a few other places and got his crypto exposure I guess through those venues we've been longtime friends and so we kind of came together with multiple perspectives Drew's had a academic research background and so he actually recently left his PhD at Hebrew you to be at Commonwealth full-time so that's the founding team we're team of eight now so mostly engineering heavy with a little bit of product sprinkled in

so based here in New York to a certain extent but we're also distributed so and hiring so if you are an engineer and listening to this please reach out to me I don't know if that that's a shameless plug but in terms of the projects that we're working on I think the bulk of our work now is still focused on the edge work so I know we'll we'll kind of talk about what that is but the one sentence for editors it's a polka dot smart conferred platform we think the first use cases basically will be like spinning up different dowse and funding those days with the edgeware Treasury beyond that we have a multi chain governance interface Commonwealth Commonwealth thought I am and so we basically hooked into near protocol cosmos polkadot Kusama Edgware straight

edge soon to be and basically will continue to expand outwards from there so those are the kind of the the two main initiatives right now it's been a it's been an interesting route right but you know as for Commonwealth we you know will work with any protocol essentially out there that has like governance needs and yeah work with them on that through that so what exactly is a multi-chain governance interface and what kind of work do you do specifically with chains to help them on governance it's a really great question governance is a really large topic so there's the gamut from just talking on what the governance structure should be so I know Sonny you even we were talking about who the token

holder should be for a type of like stable coin or a platter life stable coin that would be like one thing that we might talk with for calls on but the in terms of product and the things that we actually built on the day-to-day basis it's basically a discourse like forum where you can actually just talk with threaded conversation we basically I guess it's we call it like governance covered so any on chain governance action that they might have so whether it's like signaling polls Treasury and slash like fund distribution allocating certain permissions to council members or things like that will help build an interface essentially that covers that whole thing and then also allow you to talk about those specific issues and then put that

all into the Commonwealth so what Commonwealth kind of looks like is basically it kind of looks like there's a bunch of stuff reddit's and they all have like different activities that you can do you can talk about things you can discuss issues and you can fund different projects so for instance the cosmos community has a bunch of different forms that they leverage to talk about governance proposals and things that will eventually make it into governance how does that differ from what the individual projects and communities are also already maintaining in terms of forums and things yeah there's a lot of projects out there that still don't have a forum we've seen a lot of projects use

telegram discord and haven't really spun up like a place where kind of like about real work or proposals can kind of get done the other thing I would say is we basically want to make sure that's everything everything is decentralized and the future for us is making sure that we're still like an interface and we can run like a centralized a pending service but like the conversation should still be the thread should be like viewable in any type of interface so for example for if we're talking about like the cosmos forum ideally it's not run on discourse or it's run on this like decentralized back-end and Commonwealth is one place where you can come and see it you can still see the same stuff in the existing forum and that's the feature we're building towards I think

we're still a few months away from productizing like the full decentralization front we're still working on a lot of things that are directly relates the user experience and on the the leg of user experience another thing we found is it's it's still tough I guess within a community to know what everyone is thinking especially as these communities get larger and so having the ability to like on signaling poles on either like a token holder basis is something that we've heard time and time again and so that stuff is built right into the forum itself yeah so continuing to make sure that like in addition to any forum that's out there we can kind of like continue to build on top of that so you announced edge we're at the wid three

summit in 2018 and I remember seeing that talk it was like right before lunch was like no this short little talk before everybody went out and a few of the takeaways that I took from that talk was one that you said that Edgware was a test net for active governance mm-hmm can you describe what you meant by that I I think we've kind of maintained that to the vision throughout 2018 2019 and hopefully for the whole lifetime of edge work but so we I think everyone in the space still feels like we haven't found the exact right governance mechanism for like creating a protocol and making it sure it runs well it's it's that's a few

nested governance experiments that we're running so one Edgware itself has like a pretty robust governance mechanism and I'm sure Sonny will have things to say about that but we have a council there's a Treasury and you can disburse funds from that Treasury through on chain votes same in the same manner as cosmos as well there's democracy so anyone can submit a proposal and have it be voted on but on top of that basically it's again a smart contract platform and the thing that we hope as the kind of like guiding light for for projects to help build on on Edgware would be that okay a dao should be able to experiment or use some of the features that we've kind of already built for the chain itself to

run their own type of governance experiments and so beyond like the the court governance experiments like we'd like to see dowels that run with a quadratic voting implementation or do things on a one-person one-vote type of basis using the edgeware identity module that we've built where people can link a twitter address at github handle and then use that as the basis for for running these cows that's kind of what we mean by running these kind of active governance experiments in a decentralized manner could you talk a little bit about some details of what's special in the edgeware governance process like how does it compare to the one in tezo's for example or in polkadot

or in cosmos so we we inherit a lot from building on substrate so we're built on substrate so that's polka dots or I guess like the the peri slash polka dot ecosystem standard for building block chains there's a bunch of modules so for any listeners that you know do watching development obviously you can basically swap in and out these different modules the module we've chosen are are closely related to the polka dot governance and so that is continuously being iterated on and there's a wealth of information out there that you know I can also point listeners to afterwards but for edge race specifically we have a Treasury and so those are token weighted votes that kind of allocate funds from that there's

a council with elected council members each council member is elected on a rolling basis right now the grammar to that is set in the Genesis spec is 13 council members and then with seven kind of a in waiting those are voted in on like a token holder basis so one token one vote but other things that are kind of like hidden in there are the the notion of like time lock slash stakeholder voting so the longer you lock for even if you're a smaller token holder you can kind of amplify your voice and so it's not just on like a on a state basis another kind of feature again in Harriett by using polka dot governance is the ability is like a cool-off period

so in the same way that someone can kind of like rage quit and and mark now there's a waiting period for a proposal to actually like have an binding change through on chained governance and so you know people can think through like okay we voted this in does this really make sense I could go on and on there's other experiments that we'd like to continue to run but that's kind of the the base layer of what the network is launching with and so what kind of functionality does Edgware provide that like makes it more enticing as a place to do governance experimentation so let's say I wanted to build a new gow what kind of features does our an edge wear that I couldn't find on aetherium for example I'm personally most interested in and the

thing that we've heard a lot of great feedback on is one the treasury itself and to the identity module so just directly linking Twitter address or XYZ like web to identity to an address allows you to experiment hopefully easily with different identity standards and like voting schemes but for the first part we've heard a lot of teams basically want to run here's an example so a team out west right now wants to build donor advised funds so those are legally linked or a donor advised fund is I donate to this fund itself I get the tax write-off but I can still advise like where I want those funds to be allocated they have to be

allocated to a 501c3 so one thing that we've talked about is basically having them pull from the Android Treasury so yes for Treasury I think is probably the key feature here allowing different people to like have their doubt I see it pretty easily and we've seen a lot of traction related to that can you talk a little bit about how the identity linking works I haven't thought about these things you know we've been so geared up for launch recently but yeah specifically with respect to identity so you can have just an arbitrary string that gets stored as an attestation and then it's a it's a few step process so i can submit hey so like this is a twitter type of attestation and then this is my handle and then i'll

say it and then i have to post a proof on the analog i have to sign a message and then i post the hash of that message and then a verifier right now it's just like a single address comes in and looks at both those things and checks if it actually is valid hopefully that the role of verifier should be decentralized as time goes on so it could be it could go to you know and then mmm event type of voting scheme or you know it can have like some token holder basis for creating or verifying some of these claims but hopefully it's pretty modular and any type of claim can kind of fit in this scheme is this something that's built into two substrate or something you guys build this is something that we've built but I I definitely should

highlight that there is really interesting work going on and the I guess like the substrate repro specifically so the team at parity is also working on similar identity stuff and I mean in general like the the ecosystem I think has done a really great job and has spent a lot of time focusing on identity so kilt another great team that's that's also working on things yeah but there's a whole active don't bunch of developer teams that are focusing on identity and you know we are one of them that's a really cool idea I never thought that about this particular way of doing identity verification for a blockchain is there any work being done on maybe automating that I feel like you could maybe use something like maybe I'm

wrong here but something like TLS notary to verify let's say like a Twitter page which would have a side message and so basically nodes could just verify like a URL crawl it look for a sign message know that it's coming from Twitter use that information is that kind of like maybe thank you further ahead things that you think would be possible similar to a chain link does right yeah sometimes I didn't know chain that yes something something similar to that yeah so I mean I guess like if if we want to call like identity schemes like a subset of Oracle's I guess like it you know it can be similar to that I think there's well there's two things that I think are really interesting so

we're actually working on like a zero knowledge variant of this so you can have like a zero knowledge attestation so I'm included in this group and I have probably more than you know X number of followers and then using that to potentially create like a you know as like a voting teams go so only allow individuals who have larger than 10k followers to participate in this Dow or some governance scheme and then the second thing I think is it's just like a super recent development I don't know if you all saw today on Twitter Jack Dorsey talked about how they want to decentralize Twitter and so that was really interesting and so having some type of notary service or directly pulling from like the API or whatever

type of decentralized like back-end so to speak that they build I think it are like would be like future things that we can't want to continue exploring in and working on but I mean I you know even within the I guess like each sphere like there's humanity doubt all these experiments are like closely related so I'm still attesting to like a Twitter handle or something like that and then some set of I guess Berra fires are kind of making sure that that's that's found so I don't think we're the only ones doing it but I think it's a it's interesting I think we feel like reporting of like a web to identity to like the web 3 sphere is probably the easiest way to onboard people instead of going to like the KYC route of like onboarding like driver's licenses or you know Social Security numbers and things

like that and I guess that would be my overall thoughts on that on identity in general so how did you get introduced to the polka-dot team and why did you just decide to build Edgware on substrate yeah so I think it comes down to the right place right time so we were lucky enough to be with also one so we incorporated the company in cult-like mid to late 2018 and had been had been like thinking through different governance experiments that we have wanted to run we always knew we had wanted to build the government interface but felt like we needed like a community that we could actually either directly help with and so through talking with

folks at web 3 and parody we we kind of like came up with an idea that been floating around the ecosystem and so that was this idea of Edgware and there was a few pieces that basically came together and this years of conversations we talked about how we should okay if we have a blank slate to start with for some type of smart contract platform how should we distribute tokens how should like votes be allocated and are there any other things that we will kind of want to do with it and so basically through 2018 and then basically up until web through summit they were kind of like these water-cooler jam sessions that we talked about these things and so that was kind of how the lock drop came to be which I know we'll talk about that's how we just had it on this

treasury framework and talked about linking identities to that I hope I gave a quick TLDR in the history of of how Edgware came to be yeah and so a lot of the tech in Edgware is based off a lot you know importing a lot of the tooling from substrate can you like give us an idea of like which pieces of the substrate of the edgeware stack or from substrate and which are like the novel pieces of Edgware stack yeah so we've done most of the experimentation around the edges so I think I mean to think through substrate so there's the networking layer we don't touch that so that you know uses lib b2b

and stuff like that there's the consensus layer different implementations for weighting stake we don't touch that either we use modules for the Treasury slashing all this stuff is including substrate the things that we've built are basically four modules so it's identity their signaling essentially so actually running like a carbon vote like scheme weighted by like a token balance with like different types of poles so binary yes/no ranked choice as well and then I guess one module we've built is basically allocating tokens directly to the Treasury and and things like that so the I guess like the biggest experiment that we ran was basically building the block

drop itself so that was like you know assets of etherium contracts and then the Associated UI to help make this process run pretty smoothly so again still more around like the coordination and UI stuff sure and so with the web assembly smart contracts from my understanding you you mostly import those from substrate what's the current status or usability of this because it's been a lot of while since I've tried playing around with it but when I tried playing around with it about four or five months ago it still seemed like heavily a work in progress where you couldn't really do sort of like cross contract calls and such so could you tell us about a bit of the status of what the developer new act would be if I

wanted to start writing smart contracts on edge where yeah I would say so you can definitely still experiment around with these things it definitely I don't think it's been a either at parity or at Commonwealth either so the stack right now is well just the TLDR so you can write yeah as Sonny mentioned was in smart contracts so there's one specific module for that on top of that there there's the ability to like write in a language of your choosing anything that compiles down to awesome and right now the parodies built I guess like a library parody Inc and so you can write rust smart contracts everything without like the standard look and with that

work still needs to be done on the first layer the smart contract module two as Sonny mentioned create cross comp contract calls create calls from other modules into the contract module and like having them work across like one specific chain but there are tutorials out there that do exist and like people have been experimenting I would I would definitely point folks to like the riot chaff that are specifically related to like smart country laws and smart country development and the polka dot ecosystem so like learn more essentially what are some of the interesting contracts or projects have been built so far or are in process of being built yeah I mean those things that we so basically post-launch the things that we would

like to build are like Mallick doubt on to within this framework so pulling from the Treasury to allocate funds to this place again I think the the projects that are at still in flight talking to Garrett at east note based out in Japan he's also thinking about things like this and then what I alluded to before running these different daffs donor advised funds through on edge were would be like another example of a project within I guess the the edge versus fear it's really tough to keep track of other interesting projects that are happening in the wider polka dot sphere but I know there's there's always experimentation going on there's too much going on for me to keep track so the edgeware launch was an interesting one so let's talk a little

bit about what happened and I mean for context I think that a lot of people were excited about seeing Edgware launch I mean I was certainly following it and seeing what would happen like post launch but I think it's safe to say that things does not go as expected so can you walk us through you know the the time leading up to the launch and what was going on sort of within the team and in the ecosystem one I just thought the Segway was funny and so I want to say that so yeah I I think um we'd always kept this September 15th date and we wanted to always do something around that date whether it

was like the the maenette launch or some other type of like road to maenette launch so like something like that and so you know we want to make sure like something came out at that time and I guess the things that we had done we had run several tests nets throughout the spring and summer with specific known issues and basically the thought process for us and it seems like the community was or was to be able to iterate fast from that so launch something and then change things on the fly using like the built-in coconut governance framework or and/or the pseudo key and so one issue I think that sunny even brought up was the

fact that there was like slashing events going on specifically people have to submit like an I'm online heartbeat during a specific session and if a new valid er had joined they might be slashed incorrectly essentially so we were continuing to work with different folks parody you know web 3 foundation all these other teams to kind of like pinpoint that so the fix specifically that we had decided to go with was turning off slashing and then turning it on once this is fixed have been fixed and we could run a governance upgrade to make sure that those things were turned off yes and we released a blog post detailing basically these expectations and I think maybe we over promised a little bit on what it was we had talked

we called it like a soft launch and I think since folks had it within the community had still thought that like we were doing like a am a net type of launch that there was a lot of confusion and miscommunication happened there that's the that's the experience for my I think the the common left side but I be very curious to hear from Sonny specifically on how I kept you know as like a running evaluator like the view from outside one of the solutions that was brought up was to fix the to turn off slashing but for my experience what happened what ended up actually happening was one of the parameters was set to zero percent but it actually wasn't the slashing

parameter it was a parameter that has to do with when some if I report a fault that someone else has done so let's say someone double sign and I'm the one who reports it that was traditionally set to bypass and that I would get five percent of their slashing amount as a reward for reporting but that was set to zero percent and that seems like something where it just sort of in the fly of the moment where like such a mad rush towards launch could have been like you know if it things were taking a bit more slowly it could have maybe worked out you know we could have caught these tiny things so in retrospect do you think that was the right approach to take of like getting it out the door and like having to stick to that September 15th hard date especially when

there were so many voices in the community who are trying to bring up a lot of these problems yeah you know hindsight is always 20/20 I think always like making sure that everyone's bought into something is is something that you know the community like will definitely take into account going forward and hopefully we can use the signaling tools the informal informal channels that that we have to like discuss these things going forward and I would definitely agree like keeping to a deadline or making sure that things are working it's if it all is always really tough especially in this kind of distributed setting where changes and like hot fixes are pretty tough to apply or at least like take like maybe a week or two to plan I would basically definitely agree with you there I think I mean it's

interesting just because there's like multiple parameters there's on the node level essentially so and then on the substrate side and the code base is continuously evolving on the substrate side and so within the modules like you know they're basically like yeah calls that like or extrinsic basically that like have to be turned on and off specifically there and I think we didn't change those there but yeah hopefully going forward the new testament is up and it is running pretty smoothly so spin up your validators and nodes and jump in to a conversation to talk about like essentially launch the network it's very much ready from a technical standpoint now so whether it's December or January I think what hopefully the

community can compasses consensus on ones like an appropriate time one of the other issues that I also brought up a few weeks prior to the launch was that the allocation that was the result of running the lock drop scripts was different than the one that was shown on the Commonwealth web page and it turns out that that had to do something with how the multipliers are being calculated could you tell us a little bit about that yeah definitely I so so what sunny aleut is alluding to so when the Locker was one run the well TLDR lock drop so you can lock tokens for you know three six or twelve months and so we had this process going on for three months and if you have locked for a shorter or short

amount of time three months or a longer amount of time you got a corresponding bonus in addition to that there's this notion of a like an early participation bonus so the earlier you participated during this open enrollment period a person would get more tokens essentially and so the schedules that we had put out was basically 50% you know and then falling pretty smoothly down to like 0% essentially at like the final date of the open lock drop period and when the calculation on applying the early participation bonus to the like the hold lock schedule I think we basically under specified what was actually happening there so was the question you know in different community channels I think

people had talked about was it multiplicative or was it additive and I don't know I think we made a few comments on those and then had the like script in a separate repository for like open inspection and there's that kind of like miscommunication from that perspective as well I would say that I mean just the TLDR kind of like what those things are and so that was something that we've I mean fixed now but certainly we hoped more community eyes on these types of open source projects is always helpful just to make sure that we do get everything right that all the parameters are checked and I would say again everything's up there now and so hopefully people can do another once-over or twice over to make

sure that everything is actually sound from that perspective but one of the things was I did bring up this problem before the launch but it wasn't really addressed so what do you think is like the best way for and you know this actually happens in cosmos as well where you know they're there in the cosmos hub to launch the prior upgrade that from cosmos hub to to cosmos Club three back about a month ago that also got messed up and it turns out there were people who were bringing up like like concerns say like wait we haven't tested this piece yet and then when we asked to get to the upgrade it turns out it didn't work out which we actually did do the operate successfully just this morning but how do you think is the best way for community members to communicate

with development teams when they see problems and make sure that these concerns are like taken properly I think it comes down to the light tool and so you know even something yeah even even on this call like I it's it's tough for me to remember specifically like if like I definitely remembers like concerns around slashing being brought up in like you know art so we have several channels that we use like dis court specifically was and we have a validator channel there and so a lot of discussion was going on specifically related to that issue but as you as like we all know like there's so many messages especially like being passed around in different channels that a lot of things just get lost in the fray and so I think flagging a message whether it's like a community admin or things

like that to actually surface those concerns and having like a better process to run that is like sorely needed so from the tooling side from a process side those are to waste like potentially dresses so on the tooling side like honestly we'd hoped that Commonwealth is like a place for like surfacing these concerns and making sure that they get addressed or talked about in like a community call yeah I was gonna say is a little bit peculiar that Commonwealth is but it's and then and then it's the processed thing as well and so like if you know if a community member sees something they should be able to like boost it you know and link to it on like the store of record on Commonwealth it's really tough I think for us like the the things that we wanted to like also do and like our plant and like the product

suite is is like building BOTS to allow people to like flag these things and then actually have them be talked about nikomina call so if Sonny had mentioned that you know he should act like a bot in discord and then me would be able to like automatically add that to like some community call that happened or like have it be shown on on Commonwealth and like have that be like a proposal where we should talk about that thing but it's always tough doing a bunch of things at once and it's certainly a humbling experience but you know it's yeah it's interesting I mean different projects yeah so early on after the launch in September a decision was made through a blog post to essentially take this network that you had just launched and

make it into a basically a test net talk about the decision process that went through went into making that decision what was the reaction the community there's a period of time basically post Network launch we're in the telegram channels and say like discord specifically where people were talking about like different solutions for this so applying direct top fixes to the org through like a pseudo key or or basically like rolling the network back essentially to a certain extent and we should actually talk about straight edge with effectiveness at two seconds but so basically informally the everyone kind of it seems like came to consensus that

we should okay like take a step back and just like you know try to like downgrade this network specifically so we released the broad post talking about that and then the reaction to that was I actually feel like pretty positive it wasn't an easy decision for anyone to make but I'm actually really grateful for like the the community that's come together through the lock drop process through you know the open validating on these test networks it seems like everyone's like in it and like wants to see it succeed like with the right foundation set and so it there I don't know if there was like much backlash I think people are still like hope you know I think the things that we've heard from the community is like okay let's take things slow and like make sure we get everything right and also it's basically

that but it hasn't been too bad but yeah I mean omelet it's interesting because straightedge was like a network that was launched and sunny should definitely I'll let Andy talk about that but positioning seems to see like a new or like side by side purchase taken especially so when straightedge flaunts we were launched with the same balance concerns slashing as well and like a decision was made to to launch a new network pretty soon Lee after that and so it's just interesting to see how different communities even with the same set of token holders can like change an outcome but yeah maybe somebody Sonny wants to comment a little more on that yeah yeah so are the strategy network we will get into in a little bit but yeah

we essentially noticed the balances issue and we did do a hard fork within like about two or three hours to fix that we still ended up adding the slashing issue and so that's so we also downgraded straight I'd sure test that as well yeah so let's kind of get let's kind of get into the lock drop it is personally that was the piece of Edgware that I what I learned about that I was like oh this is super interesting this is something new so could you describe to us what is a lock drop yes a lock up is basically locking your token I guess like eath in this specific case and like creating or minting like a new token essentially so for us you can lock your theorem for three six or twelve months and we allow

individuals to lock for during a three month period of time so like if they heard about it like early on they wouldn't be like penalized and for participating early or locking earlier on they could get a bonus and for locking for a longer amount of time they could also get a bonus as well and in addition to that we added up like a feature called signalling and so all you had to do was sign a message or you know and then like an event gets pushed out and so any any address could participate in this process so can you tell us a bit about so why did you want to do a lock drop instead of a traditional take poking sale or even an air drop which is also a commonly used technique what was

the benefit of a lock drop yeah so it's I think it's basically incentivizing a certain segment of the community so TLDR like 2017 ICO craze token sale craze potentially attracts like those individuals who are looking for like more financial return or potentially attracts like professional investors and there's also concerns around like regulation this via around that airdrops seems like they can kind of attract like a wider distribution of folks who are interested in the network but like probably don't incentivize the right crowd anyone might participate just because like they get a chance to like grab some free tokens and so adding a little bit of skin in the game in

terms of blocking and giving up your opportunity cost felt like the right middle ground between a token sale and just an inner job but I guess the meta point I think like for a network going forward there's been proposals for Edgware on Commonwealth to do like multi chain lock drops and like get allocating tokens to different communities I know Sony's talked about doing a gas drop and I think going forward to incentivize or bring on different community participants like networks will use not just one but like you know many of these things especially through the lifecycle of the network to like incentive her yeah bring out different people so let's talk about why this lock drop was particularly contentious in the

community and the kind of backlash that I mean I don't know if backlash is the right word but it paid I think caused some people to be concerned you know what came out of that and specifically like straightedge I think we need to explain like what straight edges in this context yeah so the signaling feature that I alluded to we allowed individual developers to signal on behalf of contracts and so that was the specific I think point of contention and certainly sunny can bring his perspective there yeah you know I think it I thought it was very interesting discussion that was generated from it so we have a seat we had like a lot of individuals participate in lockup and we felt like it it went great you know I feel like if we're not like pushing experimentation forward like Kirk goes like so early in

the space that if we're not like you know having some features that like people actually disagree with and like we're veering into service because we certainly know don't like what the best practices are and so I think it comes down to that specific thing and then a sister network straightedge was kind of like birth where contract signalers would not be able to participate is that correct Sonny I actually can't remember at this point yeah so I mean I could go a little bit and explain a little bit of what the specific concern that I had was was it to me it just didn't seem right that the premise of smart contracts is that the original deployer of a smart contract doesn't have any particular ownership over that contract and so by allowing

the deploy let's say the deployer of the rapt ether contracted someone at the maker Foundation team they can suddenly signal on behalf of all of the wrap ether in all the either end of the wrap ether contracts and this seemed wrong to me and so you know two of there's two big contracts that got signaled from one was the Dow contract actually by Nick Johnson and then the other is the parity snuck funds from the law of the web three Foundation stuck funds in the parody multi-sig wallet and that seemed odd to me and then there's in the design of the lock drop there's also this feature called the generalized lock policy which basically said if a

contract that signaled from acts like a lock as in it can't send money out it gets counted as a full lock rather than just a signal and to me at that point it was very clear that this functionality was added not maybe not for only because but in heavy part to allow the web 3 foundation to be able to signal on behalf of their stock funds and to me this just seemed like a some level of favoritism but I just didn't appreciate it being snuck in like this if like it was decided hey on the edge where initial distribution will give 10% of the tokens to the web 3 foundation for all their work in supporting parity substrate and an edge where whatnot I think I would have been completely fine

but it's just the way that it was that kind of sneakily hidden in there kind of disturbed me I don't know if I can do any type of official response but I totally agree in terms of we should always do like a better job of communicating and handling these things and think I guess that's like a whole lesson for any of these based coordinating around any type of like new launch expectations around that over-communicate is like always the name of the game and I think we've definitely through 2019 like especially with respect to the edger project like aligning the lesson there so sunny you and and some other people launch the sister Network straight-edged can you just explain sort of ins context what was different about straightedge and how it responded to these concerns you've had yeah so primarily the main

difference was that we basically we took the lock drop contracts and at the end we modified the edge where their their script that they had to pull the data and to create a Genesis file and we modified it so we don't take into account people who signaled on behalf of contracts so essentially everyone else who properly locked or signaled from an actual user account their their share of the network got increased and people who because for example I actually and I know of people who for example run professional custodian services and they did signal on behalf of some of their clients which you know then which is

kind of the exact concern that I had and so we kind of went ahead in zero doubt those balances and redistributed those tokens to the rest of the network and we launched a straight edge network with the New Balances essentially and the future of the standards network is also you know still in progress because similar to edge where our September launch is also a little bit botched because of issues with the software well sorry I guess like the point on custodians signaling on behalf of clients I mean in general like any token distribution process like is I guess you can say there's winners and losers and so I guess it still comes down to like the specific spirit of the community so like when when Nick Johnson like signal and on behalf of the like the doubt like

the withdrawal Alphonse I decided like to give up ownership of that and I think that's like it always comes down to like who's participating because certainly there's like I guess like aetherium whales out there that like could have participated in this whole process and just like dramatically skewed the distribution or things like that and so it always comes down to like who actually involved with these things versus like any overall process I think any any processes like always always to a certain extent capable and like we have to always be aware of that but custodians signaling on behalf their clients I think that's an interesting case just because it's you know if we want those like end-users to like actually participate in the network like that was something that looks like something that I think it's like pretty ok you know because if we think they're gonna be

like big stakeholders within the network then again that was like one edge case of allowing like contracts with singers to participate like I think it's it's kind of in the gray area and it's you know really up to anyone again like to they could create like a new network on being like from the the edge word distribution and I would totally welcome that I think it's you know offer more experimentation I think it's all really cool yeah I mean I think that I remember around that time like speaking to people and meeting people and talking about Edgware and like around the time of the web 3 conference people's impressions were that at least some people that I talk to you like I think they the concern that people had was that somehow

like parody had influence on this and that you know this was in some form I would say like a retribution but a way for parody to like gain influence in this network having like all these locked funds and like the parody smart contract I think like whether or not like that's true like I don't think that's necessarily true but you know it kind of added you know if there was this communication issue like that the connection to parody also created it a little bit of maybe some like some theories about why this was in there I don't know if you you guys want to talk about that or you think that's expensive Commonwealth labs independent entity and like we'd you know definitely get like technical support from like web through

foundation parity it I think it's a great ecosystem and like I don't I don't know if we get any special treatment so but parity can certainly be a contentious issue especially within the Syrian community so I'm I think even when we announced like it was already like things were popping up even even in 2018 so it's just interesting to to hear the I guess like conspiracy conspiracy theories developed you know we could go on about this topic for for ages on my I have it like you know my little side podcast called Colorado's you can actually listen to a debate between myself and Ryan and you know Dylan shows up for a little bit so if you want to learn more about that debate you can you can go check that out but so could you tell look do you think that lock drops really like a one-time

novelty thing where it was just like cool new like oh this is a quirky idea that's all I ever got excited about it or do you think this is like a reasonable method of doing token distributions like going forward so your question yes I think it's like a viable thing moving forward but like there it's always like as a general concept the exact like distribution mechanism three months six months twelve months might not be an actual thing but like you know different permutations of it so but like the general concept of allocating decision making rights or tokens to a certain person who had pulled some token I think is like very interesting so actually I actually saw like on Hacker News like Kong bucks like I guess they're doing a mock drop which

is really cool so I don't know if that was like some inspired by us or else I'd like the the general concept of like allocating tokens to someone who has like done good work or like hats pulled some so some token basically so you know the lock drop could be generalized to like an NF T so if I held crypto kiddies and I wanted to like launch like a new godson change like b2 and I wanted to like target like the certain subset they wouldn't have to like purchase a new token like in and like or three like a token sale but like I could lock my like Kripa kitty mint you know this new token this new kind of like game base NFT you know even using like other sources of like unchained data so like and then this is something that Sony's brought up

as well is like if I participated in a certain network or for example like if I've participated in compound and any of those markets I could be minted like a new token and that token could be like for a new stable coin type of thing or it could be things there so like this general notion of like yeah giving tokens to like other people I think is gonna be a powerful thing kind of moving forward whether it's launching a new token or even like enhancing like the governance system of like you know Edgware specifically like you know allocating a certain extra voting right to someone based on past participation my is like in an experiment that i would be happy to run so what's the future of edge where and and i think like one one

important thing here may be to you know how do you see edge we're evolving in the polkadot ecosystem like will it become a pair of chain and how is it complimentary to sort of like the polka dot network in general and also what happens to edge tokens are they meant to be staking tokens we think it'll be a pair chain but that is it is again up to like all the token roubles to vote there so Commonwealth Labs only holds you know 4.5 percent of the network so the vast majority has already been allocated I think and so I guess that there's a few questions so on the so we think it'll be a pair of chain so we still have to would have to get the community would still have to

acquire dots to essentially state as a pair chain in general like a pair chain like still has to have its own token for like spam prevention governance rights things like that but it's not used so much as it's taking token rather but I think the the most interesting thing is basically it's gonna be interesting just in general like how how these like communities work together in the future or any pair chain kind of comes together just because it's basically like a prefer merger essentially and I Niraj and I wrote a blog post back in like 2017 on crooked mergers in like this is you know edge we're becoming a pair chain and network that potentially already has like an engaged community and has like overlap with polka dot as

well how about kind of interact how will the network fork if like validators don't like the kind of like economic scenario hopefully not you know hopefully everything can resolve with all Jake governance but again that's that's what kind of like forking is for it but yeah it's you know the economic scenario like things like playing out that all has to be discussed and then the last question that you asked like what's the hope for Edgware and like what are you kind of wanted to so yeah in 2020 we basically just want to get as many doubts participating and building on that or as possible so whether or not it's like a in the crypto ecosystem we've talked to web 2 or like real world companies so to speak in coops to like create a doubt to like run you know

coffee shop down and that's like something that we're really excited to see like he's like experiments start to leaked out not just within the industry itself but into the broader world and hopefully into this whole decade like we can continue see the distribution and usage and where people go if they want to learn more and find out when Edgware is launching they should go to Commonwealth dot I am actually so activities being posted there the team is posting on weekly basis and it links out to you know Edgware homepage as well as all the other kind of like chat based channels as well so yeah if you search like column off edge where I think you know it should be like the first result and then click in and come in and explore

the water great thanks for your time Dylan thanks for coming on thank you guys so much thank you for joining us on this week's episode we released new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast go to epicenter TV slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen while you there be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released if you want to interact with us guests or other podcast listeners you can follow us on Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes it helps me behind the show and we're always happy to read them well thanks so

much and we look forward to being back next week [Music] [Music]