Episode 204: Keeping Up with the Kusama Network

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero knowledge i'm your host anna rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online in this multi-interview episode i dive into the wild world of kusama with my three guests will pankowitz raul ramanuti and bruno schwartz we explore the connection and difference between kusama and polkadot we define some of the key components of

the ecosystem do a check-in on how kusama governance and on-chain decision-making has evolved since its launch and we learn about the secret society kusama's creative chaos culture and more i also chat with bruno about his novel kusama based nft project remark but before we start in i want to let you know about zk hack a multi-round online event with workshops and puzzle solving competitions this is put together by the podcast and the zk validator and is supported by a number of fantastic sponsors it kicked off last week but it runs on a weekly cadence every tuesday we're doing a workshop and a new puzzle is released and this is going on for seven weeks so there's still plenty of time for you to join in if you haven't already so i hope to see you there i've

added the link in the show notes i also want to point you to the zk jobs board there you can find hiring zk and blockchain focus teams so if you're looking for a new opportunity to work in the space be sure to pop over and check it out i would also like to thank this week's sponsor centrifuge a real world defy project centrifuge puts real-world assets on the blockchain allowing issuers to get liquidity on their assets and investors to make a safe stable yield in the volatile crypto world it's built on substrate which you're actually going to hear a little bit about in this episode and it also bridges the ethereum and polkadot worlds centrifuge are currently hiring for a number of positions such as protocol engineer product manager full stack engineer and more check out the link in

the show notes to find out more about these jobs so thank you again centrifuge now here is my episode all about kusama [Music] in today's episode i am exploring the world of kusama and to do this i'm going to be inviting three guests on the show for three separate interviews my first guest is will pankowitz from parody welcome to the show will thank you thank you will you've been at parity for like two years two years tell me a little bit about what you do at parity so i have a funny title called master of validators so uh i haven't seen this elsewhere and this is also kind of a thing that's it's funny enough actually like on my passport nowadays uh it's like for my german visa and stuff

like that it's actually listed as like master of validators in there which every time i go through like customs and borders it's people look at me kind of funny but essentially what this means is i kind of coordinate a lot of people in the ecosystem people that run infrastructure solely well i guess mainly kind of i guess like validators but also just anyone that runs nodes so this includes people like exchanges block explorers wallets anything like that sort of but it's a little bit more kind of general as well i'm pretty interested in just kind of participating in just the ecosystem of people doing things in like governance and people just integrating things in general just like participating and so yeah cool are you doing this on kusama and polka dot or just on kusama both both networks um generally kind of

the process of actually like doing things like releases actually putting out binaries putting out things that people run the process is actually pretty similar and so uh in this sense kind of the communities for both that run things are a bit different but the process of doing things is quite similar and so generally i will kind of coordinate both kind of groups of people i would say and when you talk about the validators you're primarily talking about like the central network in one case would be like the relay chain of kusama or the relay chain of dot because there's like para chains now on kusama as well and you're not necessarily working on that side or are you like what is where does where does the validator set end for you yeah and that's that's i guess why i

kind of say i do just things in the the ecosystem and kind of people that just run infrastructure in general uh the line between like okay where is kusama and where is kind of like polka dot and whereas also the ecosystem is actually kind of a little bit blurry there uh generally it's kind of like people that will run things all these different teams all these different pair chains all these different projects will also have to run infrastructure and whatnot as well and a lot of things that they're kind of building upon and based upon is also kind of built on substrate the same thing that we're using to build out polka dot and kusama and so there's also a bit of kind of coordination effort between a lot of the people that are running things like collaters for repair chains and just nodes in general across

the ecosystem let's define i mean i've done a couple episodes on polka dot in a couple episodes i've done at least one episode on kusama but let's define for folks like what these words mean substrate what is substrate yeah so substrate is kind of this this blockchain building development framework there's been like a lot of lessons that have been learned from kind of parody building out like blockchain clients uh from like the ethereum but also parodies been kind of working on things like like a zcash client a bitcoin client et cetera et cetera um so at some point while we were kind of building polkadot we realized there's kind of a lot of similarities in in just the way that you actually build things out and so we decided to kind of encapsulate a lot of these things as kind of primitives in this module kind

of framework called substrate and so polka and kuzama are built with substrate but also all these kind of teams and ecosystem are also building out substrates substrate is this like blockchain building framework that allows you to be able to just build your kind of like application specific blockchain with a lot of kind of flexibility and modularity cool what is the relationship between polka dot and kusama so kusama is as we call kind of this like canary network it's this very much kind of this experimental kind of thing that we will deploy things first that we kind of will push the limits um generally kind of this idea of like a canary network is actually not really new the idea of kind of canary deployments are actually like a kind of like well defined like software thing if if there's any kind of like big

traditional companies like facebook or google or like anything like that that make kind of like massive applications and whatnot generally kind of like canary deployments is this idea of you want to kind of like have new features these may not be like featured complete these these may kind of be like experimental um things like that and you want to kind of roll this out to users you want to actually roll this out to production and so generally it's kind of you might kind of like segment out the amount of people that actually will be able to experience this and so for example if you're going to like facebook.com or something like that you would segment out it's like okay maybe it's like one uh 100th of the people that actually visit the site will kind of like experience this thing yeah and so generally it's this process of

actually kind of just like how do you deploy new things new features new uh really like anything and so kusama is very much this place that you'll kind of deploy new things you'll maybe have things that are more experimental you would actually kind of test the limits of kind of like what this thing actually kind of is and generally kind of uh compared to polka dot polka is very much more so kind of this place where things might be a little bit more stable uh things might be a little more like predictable things are more kind of like conservative kusama is more of kind of this place where we kind of like push things to the limit we'll try things that we may or may not sure actually kind of like work kind of in general the purpose is actually to break kusama to make sure that polka dot

is actually a place that people will have stable and conservative and really good applications and whatnot so we also use the term relay chain and maybe we should define that in the kusama polka dot world so this idea of the relay chain is mostly to be able to have things kind of like interoperability to be able to have a lot of these different chains actually being able to like talk to each other to be able to share different kinds of like messages and whatnot and security and security and so basically the way that you can have things kind of like interoperability via a lot of like these messages and whatnot is uh all these different pair chains will share this kind of like same security via the the validators in the

valeria set for either polka dot or kusama so this is kind of like where finality is derived uh in the sense of okay once a block gets in kind of polka dot or kusama from all these kind of pair chains it cannot be reverted and so all these different pair of chains will have consensus related to actually doing like block production the thing of like finality and whatnot is kind of like once it goes on to polka dot or kusama that's with this idea of like shared security and the idea of kind of like a relay chain is kind of like where where that comes from i actually really kind of like this this blog post by mustafa from celestia he kind of put out pretty recently where they're talking about kind of like this idea of like clusters and so you can imagine in the idea of kind of this this

cross-chain interoperable world there's kind of like different trust assumptions and different like security assumptions for a lot of these different like chains and these different environments and so you can kind of like group these somewhat by like clusters sort of and so you could have like inter-cluster communication and also like intra-cluster communication and like these clusters will kind of like share similar kinds of like environments for things and so you can imagine maybe like ethereum and all these like layer twos will share kind of like the same kind of um environment of sorts being ethereal miners and and just kind of proof of work and stuff there but something like polkadot for example sure is also kind of this this same similar environment of everything's by kind of like these these relay chain validators and so like this would be like a cluster

in and of itself you could have inter-cluster communication and then intra-cluster communication where it's like okay maybe something from a bitcoin bridge from polkadot to bitcoin it's like that's kind of like just uh one cluster communicating to another cluster and things like that and so i find that actually like a good way of actually framing this in like a paradigm to think about these things by would you then think of kusama as a cluster and then polka dots a different cluster yeah so okay and so and that sounds like all the things on kusama are kind of like they're their own thing sort of and so it's very much the same way that like kusama is to poke about what ethereum is to kind of poke it out where it's it's very much still kind of like separate um there's still kind of

like a bit of separate boundaries there uh there will be kind of bridges and there will be ways to actually like communicate and share things and send things across and whatnot and it might be easier to build because the logic is the same yeah yeah like there's different trust assumptions there's different kind of paradigms of how you would actually transact and stuff like that but kukusama itself in polkadot in and of itself are are different just because they're two different clusters and so uh the way that they actually kind of like communicate with each other and within itself and outside of itself are a little bit kind of separate the funny thing about doing this episode on kusama currently like today is that as we speak polka dot parrot chains are coming online and so the attention has been on kusama up like for

the last i guess six months because pair of chains were live and people could actually participate in crowd loans and and start we start to see the true vision for this like central relay chain and the pair of chains connected but only on kusama but come i guess a month or two we're going to see it on polka dot what do you think happens to kusama if that sort of attention and direction now goes towards polka dot what happens to the projects on kusama is it enough of a network of its own that it would actually survive this or is it kind of like gonna fall more into the realm of like a test net incentivized test net what it maybe initially was yeah so i i mean like we don't really use this term

like that is kind of a dirty word i i suppose but a lot of what i think the the difference will be is uh there's at least kind of rob hadmeyer recently kind of mentioned this in some some talks and like a blog post but the idea of kind of like technical readiness versus kind of like maturity uh in the sense of like okay right now kind of for a lot of pair of chains things are kind of like technically ready for for this this means polka dot yes well like both polka dot and kusama this is the idea that okay things are kind of like feature complete um the code works all that kind of stuff but this isn't actually kind of like as mature as it probably could be in the sense of like okay optimizations actually having things being like kind of

very like bulletproof and kind of um sturdy and just kind of like very robust kind of code base and infrastructure for a lot of these things and i think kusama is very much this place where these things will mature a lot quicker than they will on polka dot uh both kind of like from the perspective of kusama itself like the actual kind of relay chain but also a lot of these pair chain projects uh just because they can come like test things they can iterate things on kind of like their features and their kind of code a lot faster and eventually kind of like it will be mature on kusama and then eventually it will kind of be mature on pokedot there and so in this sense uh people i think will experiment a lot more on kusama and actually like try things and test things

out and test the boundaries of all this and for that reason like a lot of kind of what we'll see on kusama i think will differ just in the sense of like if you think about like assets for example there might be like a little bit more exotic assets there might be a little bit more kind of like interesting use cases things that may or may not actually like make it over to polka dot like maybe things are kind of an application that might be kind of like experimental or something like that and it will fail yeah but it fails on kusama i guess like even if it doesn't necessarily uh not necessarily fail but it just doesn't necessarily like succeed and so in that case like it can exist on kusama and not like succeed but still exist and kind of just be this like existential thing um

but it just doesn't make its way onto polka or something like that and so um just the the amount of things that exist on kusama i think will be a lot more than polkadot but also there's just going to be a lot more like interesting wacky experiments i think and also i mean maybe a note for the listeners when you think of a pair chain project a lot of them a lot of them kind of that are live today actually have two versions of themselves so they have their usual like their brand their name that they've been working under for the last i don't know a couple years which is very much associated with polka dot but then they've created these their own sort of test canary not sorry not testnet sorry sorry to everyone all the kusama fans listening i feel like i've

offended some people sorry but um yeah they have their own incentivized canary networks so like the parrot chains basically have two versions of themselves two iterations and those canary versions are the ones that are using crowd loans to do the parachain auctions to get a slot on kusama so what you're saying is like i think that's maybe important for people to envision like it's not necessarily like the relay chains of polka dot and kusama doing the crazy experiments maybe they are but it's also these parachain canary versions um i guess the most like in the polka dot episode i actually interviewed akala and moon beam and centrifuge all of those networks actually have

recently i think all gotten pair chain slots on kusama and so yeah i guess what you're saying here is like the experimentation that they would need to do could happen there as well it's like it's created an environment not just for kusama developers and parody team to experiment but also these prayer chain teams yeah and i know a lot of these teams will actually have like very almost different strategies for how they'll like launch their kanakusa chain and also kind of like what their polka dot chain will look like i think for example like centrifuge their chain for kusama is called altair and their chain for polka dot is called centrifuge but there are use cases for things i think they're targeting kind of like different kind of markets and different users um for polka dot very much the the idea is that like you want to have real world

assets in like liquidity for a lot of these real-world assets for kusama or at least further like altera chain uh i know a lot of kind of what they're interested in is kind of just like wackier assets to be able to have like liquidity for so things like nfts things like art things that you might kind of just not necessarily think about maybe things to experiment with and so like just because of like a lot of the partners that they work with and stuff like that is a little bit more uh more traditional kind of companies in on the polka dot chain um some of the companies in kind of entities they might work with on kusama might be a little more like out there more interesting use cases for things and so i think a lot of these teams will kind of have just different use cases for

different chains uh maybe they want to like try things out and just like see okay maybe does this market segment work that we want to target and work with and they don't know that they don't necessarily want to test that on polka dot necessarily and so kusama is very much a place to kind of be able to validate kind of like business ideas and be able to come like test and see if things actually kind of uh work and be able to kind of fail quickly and then iterate and then kind of like actually make really cool and awesome innovative products and experiences but i mean i think a sort of a follow-up question or a thought i have here is and i know you can't predict the future but like will there be teams where their main their main sort of polka dot project

just doesn't work that well and then they are only a kusama parrot chain like do you or do you expect projects to only launch on kusama as well like i guess i'm trying to understand like can you really think about this as a truly unique ecosystem where it's so significantly different and has its own players or is it always going to be connected to polka dot yeah i think there's actually a handful of teams that have been interested in kind of a sentiment of only launching on kusama i guess one one in particular that kind of comes to mind is uh zeitgeist which they're kind of interested in this kind of like futarki ideas of prediction markets and whatnot and so far i think their plans are solely to launch on kusama i think in general like just the communities for both are a bit different

the amount of people that will own either kusama or polkadot and just kind of like participating in things is also uh fairly separate uh both from the perspective of like people participating in crowd loans people that are sticking people are running validators and whatnot both actually have divergent communities as of now and so i think in the future a lot of kind of the differences will be the way that these communities actually kind of participate in things the way they kind of like organize themselves the ways that they kind of actually come together to actually be a part of what this ecosystem actually is is um i think i'd like one example of this is the society on kusama which is this very uh interesting thing where people get tattoos to join this you could think of this as kind of like a dao of sorts

and i think this might have also been covered in a previous podcast or something like that i don't know that i talked to i mean we did an episode on kusama but so long ago i don't know if it already existed this was before it launched yeah so do describe what the society is it a secret society it could it could be i don't know or is it an on-chain very public society where everyone knows who's in it yeah i mean people at least know uh who's in it based on their addresses and whatnot and the tattoos that they've gotten with kasama logos yeah yeah it's like the idea is kind of this thing of almost like a human blockchain and so people uh in order to join this society uh this this dow or whatnot you have to get a tattoo of something resembling the kusama

network so it could be like the the canary logo it can be like the genesis hash um it could be kind of like anything uh very abstractly kind of like related to it uh so long as it kind of also contains the head of kind of the previous person that also kind of joined oh and so you could like think of this almost as like a human blockchain sort of it has to reference the previous tattoo or the previous the previous person how would how would you do that with a the tattoo has to or the tattoo has to have like an identifier of the previous person so this is oftentimes um people will use these uh indices which is kind of like a very shortened version of kind of the the public address of that yeah yeah and so yeah in of five numbers yeah

yeah or something yeah yeah and so like in order to join this you need to have kind of uh what's called like proof of ink uh you need to kind of like submit a bid for it and people actually will be able to like get money from this like pot of funds uh for getting a tattoo wow and so it's actually really interesting just because the way that a lot of the the economics of kind of the way that like funds work and stuff like that part of block awards will go to the kusama treasury and the kusama treasury the idea is just spending funds for kind of good projects public infrastructure that kind of thing but there's this kind of spending pressure where if a certain amount of funds aren't spent by some period of time generally they would get burned and this is the case for polka

dot they would get burned but on kusama instead of being burned they get uh distributed to this this pot that's funding this society of sorts and so uh people that get tattoos will get money from kind of this this pot of funds and so right now at least kind of the sole use of of this kind of society treasury thing is kind of solely incentivizing getting new members and whatnot but right now it's kind of at its limit sort of so right now there's i believe like 150 people that are already kind of like in the society who got tattoos yes they all were also not tiny tattoos right like there's a minimum size yeah yeah yeah it's a it's like a pretty pretty like evidence i know at least three people who got these tattoos and a

lot of them got them really early yeah and i feel like what was what was the amount you'd get early on i i think like the most someone got was like a thousand ksm which like as as of today's prices is like hundreds of thousands of dollars which is honestly quite ridiculous at the time it was like not not as much probably like i don't know tens of thousands of like not even wasn't it like a lot of people got like way way less at least at those those days prices they held on to things that might have appreciated nicely but uh yeah it's it's kind of like just incentivizing people to do like interesting and wacky things i think is kind of just the idea there and right now at least kind of the society is a bit constrained just because of the fact that it's literally

on the kusama relay chain itself and so there's not as much kind of flexibility and actually kind of like doing things kusama in polkadot in at least kind of like in substrate there's a lot of primitives for actually doing really cool governance things of like having uh the ways of you actually organizing things and coordinate say spending funds doing like treasury proposals and and things like that there's actually a lot of like really interesting primitives there and so in the near future i would expect this society thing to actually probably become its own like parachain and you can imagine maybe like a lot of the people there are pretty i guess like artsy uh the fact that they kind of tattoos might be a little bit telling like i guess some of the kinds of people that there are but you can imagine maybe it's kind of like a lot of these people

that will come together that are in the society will can come together to kind of like create decisions of like what to do with this pot of funds for example and so you can imagine like this thing that is self-sufficient and actually like funding art and actually like funding uh kind of like making like nfts or something like that uh really like there's a lot of really cool structures there for kind of just making cool things that are not necessary for the purpose of like getting money back in return or something like that it's very much i think kind of this thing of like making art for the sake of art i think which it really is kind of like funding art for the sake of making cool art which can be really cool i think nice so what else do you see coming down the

line for kusama the only thing i think that's kind of like interesting to think about is right now at least when people submit crowd loans they kind of like give up their rights for like voting and staking stuff like that and they kind of give their rights up to these pair of chains and so in the near future this might be this thing where it's like parachains will be able to vote on stuff in and of themselves so it's like the funds that are locked into the auction for that we'll be able to participate in governance of the relay chain oh really i always thought it was like just locked and locked can they stake those can they vote with those as of now no but that's these are things being discussed i think it's like um in the the works for actually being that

i have an implementation of sorts but this would probably happen on kusama first and it would probably be tested out a little bit there yeah that's fascinating thanks so much for the interview will yeah thank you so much for having me and for coming on the show yeah [Music] so next up i'm here with raoul a council member and community manager of kusama welcome to the show raul hi anna nice to see you raul tell us a little bit about your involvement in the kusama network how it started what you're doing now yeah so i sort of work as a community manager for the governance bodies of kusama network so i'm a council member at kusama and

my job or role is to provide all of the information that counselors need to review discuss and vote on motions and also provide this information as well for community members in democracy module which is one of the collectives in democracy in order for them to also discuss and vote on referenda so basically i make sure that everyone has the information they need in order to make an informed decision when it comes to motions referendums or treasury proposals cool actually so in our last interview in the last interview i just did with will we talked very much about like the structure of the polka dot and kusama

ecosystem or relay chain para chains and we did kind of near the end of that touch on community and governance i think with this interview i want to focus a little bit more on that i know you're kind of the perfect person to do that with so how would you describe kusama governance it's now been how long like a year and a half or two years the network is live i think almost two years yes okay so maybe tell us a little bit about like where it started and how it's developed to now is it if it's changed the governance design on both polka dot and kusama are very similar the difference is that on kusama everything is faster everything is forced four times faster so this means that decision making is as well faster and you can

experiment and change the parameters in the network in a very speedy way right this involves decision making and boating by not only council members but also by the community in kusama the governance system is divided into three collectives right one says the democracy module the other one is the council and the third one is a technical committee the democracy module is the most important one and it includes all of the kusama holders so anyone who holds kusama tokens is part of this democracy module and is able to either propose referenda or vote on referendums the console it's also a very important

body because it kind of like initiates proposals and initiates legislation for the democracy module to vote after in general the console cannot really change parameters in the network without the approval of the democracy module without the approval of the community so this is why when we vote for example on runtime upgrades we see that the consult initiates the voting and then this passes to the community to be voted and accepted right with the help of the technical committee and the technical committee is the third body and this this collective doesn't really have the right to to propose legislation but they work very much in

coordination with the council in order to fast-track proposals that need to be fast tracked for emergency reasons for example so if the console would pass a motion to be voted by democracy module let's say the boat would be up for seven days and then you would have seven days enactment but if the technical committee intervenes this can be faster so you can vote on referenda for let's say three hours and then have a delayed only one hour if it's an emergency and we have we've found for example a back on the code that needs to be fixed because we we need to remember that kusama network is a canary network right as we call it so it's very experimental and it allows us to

stress the chain in order for any changes that work to be after deployed on polka dot after audits so it's very important to stress the network in that sense cool you just described these three bodies let's kind of go through them again there's sort of the general democracy module which is everybody there's the technical council and then there's the council council there's a technical committee and then it's the council the council okay yeah so the general you sort of did say that can the general public also submit proposals or is the are the proposals mostly okay so both the council and the general can submit proposals correct so there are two uh funnels so to say to submit proposals one would be one would

be the console only council members can propose motions to the council and the other one will be token holders via democracy module they can propose public proposals submit public proposals that are seconded by others and then they go up for bodis referenda do they need a council member to weigh in for it to go through or it could be any okay you only need others to set to second your proposal and then the most seconded proposal will pass first to be voted in referenda queue very cool i should mention that zero knowledge validator is actually a member of the council as you are as well um tell me a little bit about voting on and off the council members how does that

actually work like is it the general public or other council members who get to decide who's on the council so the council is voted by the general public the council is voted by the community on kusama the council or the set of councillors can change every 24 hours so it's very important that the community votes on their preferred council members or on their favorite council members or the council members that most align with their interests to enter the council and be able to represent them we have to remember that the council represents passive stakeholders right and so all of the community votes on their preferred council members and then the election fragments ballot which is the same palette that collects the active set of

validators chooses the active set of council members from all of the possible sets for the best set only and this changes or is recalculated so to say every 24 hours so if the community changes its vote every 24 hours the console would be changing every 24 hours would you is there a lot of turnover on the council at the moment or would you say it's pretty stable after two years i would say after two years is pretty stable um the changes we see the most are the last two or three seats those are the ones we normally see changing not every 24 hours but i would say every week or every two weeks we have a new console member and we had to make them aware okay so

your candidacy has been accepted and now you're a council member and then i talk to them i have a call with them i explain more or less how the process work i tell them to please join the kusama direction channel which is the public channel where everything is discussed when uh when it comes to the direction of the kusama network i could say right now it's pretty stable and only the last two or last three seats in general change do you see this expanding though because i know it's been expanded once right you've already added a couple more seats twice sorry yeah damn um so is the plan to eventually like the validator set that was expanded from did it start at 198 or something expands now

to 600. so like that expanded quite rapidly and it's quite big do you see the council also expanding or have you kind of settled on like this number for now i would hope so i mean i think a bigger council would be much more representative of what the kosama community is we've been i think at the beginning it was 13 council members then it was 17. okay and now it's 19 council yeah i think we joined when it became 17. that makes sense yeah i would hope i would hope that the council goes up to like something like 23 members or something similar i think would be much more representative of passive stakeholders in the kusama ecosystem the same the

same way as the active set of validator has increased right that said it's important to emphasize that um governance on kusama as it stands right now it's likely to be i wouldn't say problematic but to raise a lot of questions and issues if the regulations that are being discussed at the moment pass as loss like which ones what do you mean like the the financial action task force policy and so we need to and we will try and experiment with new forms and improve the governance to be a bit more fluid more decentralized uh more accessible and more inclusive and then put this up for boat and

discussion by the community so the community can be aware and they can uh give their input to uh new ways of governance interesting i didn't actually think about how like real world regulation intersects but i guess i mean i feel like it's always been on the radar like in the future we're gonna have to think about that but it's crazy that you're actually thinking about it now yeah and i mean i think this was widely discussed at sub zero which happened last week at subsidiary conference and uh it's not something that will happen one week to the other right like the regulations will not happen like that but we have to be prepared and we have to face them and uh it's important that they happen so we need to see how we can

comply or adapt to them as well kusama's para chains have also been live since i'm gonna say like the spring this spring yeah so has this changed the way governance works actually on kusama like it does it in any way affect i mean i in a way some of the supply has now been locked in crowd loans i don't know if that affects voting power what have you but it's like i am very very curious to hear if that has changed the thinking around governance in general i could say that right now teams that are connected aspire chains so projects that are connected asparagus on kusama are much more active when they participate into the in the direction channel or in the decisions that the council or the

community is taking they propose new stuff they propose new things for example the reduction of uh some transaction fees for xcm protocol uh is about to be proposed right now because a lot of pirate chains think or projects think that it's very prohibitive for them so we're gonna we're gonna be discussing it next in general parrot chain teams are much more active when it comes to governance because it's now changes that affect them as well directly totally and and governance can also help them fix issues that they might have since they are connected to the relay chain as well um right now i think we have 12 parachains on kusama and this week we just voted the next batch

of auctions which will happen once a week for eight period leases and the onboarding of the winners of these slots will happen off by one so at the next lease the winners of the of the current will be onboarded and so on and so on cool cool i i think a big question i i mentioned this in the last interview too it's like i'm doing this interview at kind of a funny moment where polka dots pair of chains are about to come online everyone's sort of shifting a lot of focus to dot and i wonder like what is kusama now i know it's been it's been sort of the test ground but when polka dot starts to do this do you think the sort of spirit of the

kusama pair chains could change do you think people will still have the same enthusiasm or do you think there's going to be like a period where people are kind of distracted are you worried about it maybe it doesn't matter but i don't think it really matters i think the community overlaps a lot right the two communities overlap a lot but what kusama has in particular is that validator operators tend to be much bigger in number the active set is bigger so validators are much more diverse which means that nominations are much more diverse and the discussion is much more active um kusama is cheaper which means that projects can experiment easily and they don't need to be as worried as the cost of

experimentation as they as they would be on polka dot for example and this can lead to other new use cases that on polka dot might not happen so for example i think a big uh use case for kusama would be uh web 3 social networks right so we have different projects experimenting with that or identity for example or experimenting with uh with common wood chains that uh in in on polkado we might not see right um so i think uh the community will evolve into different use cases and we will see the differentiation between these two communities in the next year right when we have the first chain some polka dot connected and already 15 or 20 or 25 kusama chains uh

connected to this particular community very cool what do you actually see the spirit of the kusama network being in the future like you sort of mentioned a few use cases that you think could emerge but like in terms of the community and kusama has a unique chain do you ever see it like splitting away in a way from polka dot so the way i see it is both relay chains polka dot and some are part of the same ecosystem you know my hope is that eventually in the future they will be bridged so okay not split away then exactly so not the rogue incentivized canary now i hope i'm not i hope not it depends on governance of course but i'm hoping not and and that some apparent chains will be able to

also interact and enjoy uh the relationship with polkadot paratrains right once the british exist i think in general the spirit of kusama it's very free right and it's no promises and it's very chaotic and it allows us to discuss very um i could say controversial or i would say very borderline topics that could be dangerous for a community to discuss right uh but this is the nice part about kusama like if you enter to the kusama direction channel you'll see very candid discussions right about like why we shouldn't change certain parameters why we shouldn't make the the network cheaper or why we should why this runtime uh doesn't work what

does this ballot means for the entire business logic of the network what does it mean for the stakeholders how does how does this work you know these discussions are in the center of kusama development and consulars uh take them very much into account when uh when they vote for runtime upgrades or for change of parameters so i think in general what kusama allows us to do is to discuss this in a very safe environment so to say kusama has now in a way shown how this governance works how it works kind of on a little bit of a longer scale but do you think that like do you feel like the experiment is

satisfied do you feel like yes you know there's enough proof that this is a system that can maintain a network for a long period of time or do you think there's still like a testing period that we're in basically to understand if some of these like governance systems and like full on chain governance to this level with the sophistication if it works i think we're still on testing grounds i think uh we can say that this works we can say that on-chain governance works and it's a valid mechanism or solution to create consensus in the community and avoid the community ruptures so to say but there's still a lot of things we need to improve right there's still a lot of

things that need to be a change on the governance side of things in order to be optimally working one issue for example is asymmetric information so the community having different type of information different sources of information how they get the real or the truth or how they get the information right from where and by whom and how they vote also right turnouts in general seem to be low for proposals that are not very controversial and this needs to be changed we need the community to be educated and informed we need the community to participate and to join the direction channels and to join

the water coolers and the validator lounges to be able to be part of the discussion on what's the direction of kusama network and i think this has to do a lot with off-chain coordination more than on-chain coordination on the governance side of things right but it's something that's really needed for the construction of consensus to work beyond chain governance mechanisms so people are like will often elect representatives to deal with this minutia i guess the question here is like do you think that there needs to be new levels added to kusama right so i mean yes you are right this is the reason why console was designed right so council represents passive stakeholders and so the governance system on kusama

is a combination right of representation and direct democracy i think new discussions and new designs will bring other levels of direct participation to to the system we will see maybe forms of liquid democracy we will see forms of a speediness of execution of a proposal based on the turnout and the participation of stakeholders so there are different levels and different parameters that will be taken into account when it comes to enactment of proposals but yeah initially the design of kusama was meant to be a combination of representation and direct democracy of course always taking into account that the console can barely execute change of parameters or

change of the business logic without the acceptance of the community do you imagine though also like kind of extra levels created for funding i guess this is like not only the council level but also like even more granularly we were actually talking quite a bit about this bounty curator bounties like kind of creating a second layer of mechanisms to distribute funding and i'm wondering if that's still something that you see in the future do you want to have like the council maybe decide larger funding that then gets distributed down to smaller more granular groups yeah what do you what's your thinking around that yeah so yeah this is something we should mention also for the audience that kusama

has a treasury that is distributed on chain and the treasury is funded via staking inefficiencies transaction fees and slashing events right and the console at the moment is the guardian of this treasury and so there are different ways the console can use in order to spend these funds in general the most used one is the spending proposal mechanisms which basically works as a grant for a team to develop an idea then we have tips which is basically uh recognizing the work of individual people or teams when it comes to add value to the network and it has to do

with tutorial translations uh bug fixes and whatnot right in general it's a one-off and then we have this new type of mechanism which is what you're talking about it's called the bounty mechanism and the bounty mechanism allows the console to delegate the responsibility of spending the treasury or at least a portion of the treasury to an expert on what the bounty is related to and this expert is called a curator so basically this curator that is selected by the console it doesn't need to be part of the console it can be any kusama address has the autonomy to decide how to spend when and in which amount to spend

certain allocation of the treasury for teams that are developing things that add value to the network so these three are the methods that we have right now or that the console has right now to spend the treasury this might change in the future maybe more will be added as well as the categories for sponsoring and for funding are are changing are continually changing based on the development of the network right so at the beginning we have eight categories and then given the development of kusama and parrot chains getting connected to the network and whatnot the console is seeing new funding proposals when it comes to cross-chain applications so for example that's a new category or

the education category is a newly added category as well and so all of this changes continuously right and it depends on what the needs of the network are at the moment we have three mechanisms we hope to have more in the future to be able to spend the treasury more efficiently of course where does this um secret society fit into all of this we talked about that with will too and maybe you can you can just i mean we did just hear about it as like the listeners will have just heard about it but i'm wondering yeah if you can just sort of weigh in on that so kappa sigma mu is not part of the governance oh my god you guys have a kappa sigma is did you say kappa sigma mu yeah that's the name of what i didn't know that it is yeah yeah the

society is not part of the governance design it's just a membership club that was created in order to experiment with unchained decisions and tattoos it does and tattoos yeah because of course you need to have a tattoo to get in it does have a treasury its own treasury right and it is funded by the treasury automatically i think it's like one percent every each period is one percent of the of the potential burn of the treasury each period goes to the to the treachery of the society and from there is where new members are rewarded for bidding to enter the society and successfully submitting proof of inc or

the two but the society is not related to the governance society it doesn't make decisions uh inside or within the governance side uh it's just a membership club for kusama aficionados hardcore it's the community hardcore aficionados yeah are you in that by chance i am yeah yeah yeah yeah i am do you think i mean do you see actually some funding coming out of that though like that's a relatively large percentage one percent of treasury burn like that seems high so is does it now have like a massive treasury it also has to find a way to distribute i mean it has some funds for sure that can be distributed at the moment the only way the palette allows us to spend the funds

is by members bidding and getting the reward for it for a successful bid right but there's a lot of discussion among the members about changing this logic and allowing the existing members to decide kind of like the console while right to decide how to spend these funds and like if some members have ideas about proposals or about things that could add value to the network maybe also a fund these members via the society treasury so these discussions are ongoing in the channel which is also public the the society channel is also public and that's where you can see also the submissions of the pois and the challenges to existing members and new candidates getting information and so on

crazy is there any last thoughts you want to share um i think if you're interested in the direction of polkadot it's always important to see the canary network first so if you're interested in the direction of polkadot pay attention to kusama network as well kosama network is a much more flexible and faster network and it allows us to experiment with the code that the teams are creating join the channels pay attention to the discussions and talk to your counselors and vote very cool okay roll thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing with us the insights into kusama governance a little bit about the society and yeah where you could see it going yeah no

problem thank you so i want to welcome bruno schwartz founder of remark to the show welcome bruno thank you very much thank you for having me in this part of the episode bruno and i are going to be talking a little bit about the remark project an nft project on kusama and then we're going to also talk about kusama so it's a bit of a shift from what we just talked about remark is a kusama first project so bruno maybe you can introduce yourself and share with us what the remark project is all about uh sure i i started out with ethereum in 2015 when i data mined my happiness and figured that javascript was making me miserable so i dropped all of my web

contracts and just transitioned cold turkey i spent the next year just learning then i started educating built some educational websites a magazine where i taught web 2 developers how to transition to web 3. a few hundred posts and a book later i got hired by status to work on ethereum 2.0 and i was their technical writer and then after a year or so of that i got poached by the web tree foundation to work on polka dot and kusama also as a technical educator actually nice and the remark came about when i noticed that the nft craze was ramping up again in august of last year

i had been pretty deeply into kusama by then and i i liked the chain very much and the little cult that grew around it that had this little artsy bend so i figured it would be a real shame if kasama missed out on the nft wave that was coming and i recognized it because i was a big part of the first one on ethereum when when things broke due to cryptokitties but you know kasama being kusama no smart contracts and stuff so needed to to get creative with hacking nfts onto it turned out really great but it was really russian roulette so it could have gone very very wrong tell me a little bit about remark then what is remarkable how do you get nfts on kusama

when i first came up with it with the concept it it just recycled the idea from bitcoin's early days with colored coins where you just basically store custom messages alongside transactions and interpret them in a special way and then you kind of get extra data from it but obviously that never went anywhere on bitcoin because nobody wants to wait for two hours for their nft transfer to confirm but the like the idea is is good especially on kasama because when you issue these transactions and there's like every substrate chain like kusama has this remark utility which is where the protocol got its name and if you issue a remark on the chain that's basically like you graffitiing the chain uh you don't issue you don't

make a state change it doesn't get stored in the database of the chain itself but it gets stored alongside the blocks and so it does get stored on the hard drive of the nodes that are running but not on the chain itself so it doesn't blow to the state and if you compare it to something like blocks in a blockchain being a shipping container that contains transactions and transfers them what we did was we graffitied the outside of that container so that value is still there only we built a special language on how to interpret and read these graffiti to actually get nfts out of this so this this is yeah this is how it started so let's explore what remark you just said remark is like a it's a code it's a it's a call in kusama where does that actually live and is that like the

equivalent of like memo field yeah it is exactly like the memo field only in most chains actually yeah it's exactly like the memo field it lives alongside the block it like so like the remark isn't extrinsic the function is an extrinsic which means it's an external input into the chain and usually extrinsics have some sort of effect like they will make a state change where an account balance will change or you'll you will write a new value to the blockchain's database like i am now nominating this guy or i have just voted for this referendum so those are state changes but remarks are are stateless uh extrinsics meaning that they're just basically you know you shouting into the ether and

they them not having any effect so they don't actually change the chain but all the full nodes of kusama and any substrate chain actually do save these um alongside all of the blocks on their hard drive the follow-up question i have to that then is so what you're doing is you're trying to create an nft like experience but there is no smart contracts so nfts as they're known to most people what is it erc721s or whatever the new erc that's being used to like design an nft that's all reliant on smart contract enablement like you have to be able to deploy a contract in order to mint an nft you don't have contracts

you're using this remark utility you're using the memo field or remark field i guess so like what do you put in there how is it that you could still have an nft that's transferable if you've just written something into a memo field yeah so we use the remark field the remark as an event in an event sourcing database and so you essentially what you essentially get is every single change to the system is a new right into a remark so you will issue in block one you will issue a remark like mint uh this picture of an apple as an nft and then in block two you will issue a remark saying send this picture of an apple from alice to bob and then if in

block 3 you say send this picture of an apple from alice to charlie that remark is now going to be invalid when processed by our tools that are looking at all of these remarks because in block 2 it was already sent to bob and so this is the first problem of the of the remarks system as it is in that in order to think it in order to be able to know the up-to-date state of the nfts and the ecosystem you have to basically sync from scratch and consolidate all of these events uh squash them into one final state that is calculated from the very beginning now we do maintain uh regular uh automatically updated dumps on ipfs of all of this so people can just fetch the latest valid state of the entire remark ecosystem but this is

obviously very inefficient and this is why we are currently rewriting the logic to actually move away from remarks and get into pallet territory and smart contract territory as well okay yeah because the way you describe it there you have almost an external system that's looking at these memo fields and you'd almost have to compile like you're basically watching states change in this separate thing and so what you're saying now though is you're thinking of moving it onto a pallet are you probably going to make a pair of chain then is this like going to be its own network no so it is exactly like that so we run a consolidator service which is also a standalone script that anybody else can run which then fetches all of these remarks and squashes them into this final state that is valid okay now during our fundraise phase we had

buy-in from all of the heavy hitters in the summer ecosystem all of these pair chains where they basically committed to adding our pallets to their runtime when they are available so moving to pallets has always been the plan only because there was no pair chain technology when we were starting remark we had to improvise so they have actually committed to adding our pallets to their runtimes and this in turn means that when the remark palettes are on all of these chains that have committed to this we kind of made the first unofficial system-wide spree in polka dot because all of these chains will share our runtime and you'll be able to seamlessly teleport your non-fungibles from one chain to the other so this is this has always been the plan

and we're also moving to smart contracts because uh fundamentally it's incredibly easy to write this functionality that we have in solidity so we are there's also an ongoing effort to rewrite it at solidity and deploy it on moon river and scheiden um though remark has significantly evolved since its you know nfts and image days in the in august of last year um we we now uh we we went from a hack on kusama to support basic nfts to the most advanced nft system in the world and i i say this like with full objectivity and awareness of how cocky it is um but i can promise you that in like three

to five years every single nft in the world will be based on remark or a copy of remark purely because nothing else will make sense remark is to nfts what ethereum was to blockchains um when it came out whoa these are huge claims but i want to take a really quick step back because you used two terms that our audience may not be familiar with you mentioned a palette palette being kind of like a module in substrate is that fair yeah palette is a plugin for substrate chains which allows you to add in custom functionality cool and we did talk about substrate in an earlier part of this interview so people should be familiar with it you also mentioned spree i have defined that on previous episodes with polka dot people but maybe you should explain what spree actually is

uh yeah so spree as or short for like substrate protected the runtime and execution environment or something like that that's basically like when you have like a programming language you have some libraries that you can reuse across your projects to get some functionality that you already used before somewhere else or that somebody else wrote and spree is very much like that spree is like a common core library for parachains to subscribe to so spree is like a system that parrot chains can declare that they're supporting and for example you can imagine a balances spree where two chains declare that they support the balances spree and now they understand each other uh the problem that that spree are is solving is when you have two para chains that are not

developed by the same team and that may not even know each other these chains can can send each other a message through the cross chain messaging protocol on polka dot but that message doesn't have to be interpreted properly by the other chain because the other chain like if chain a says to chain b send user user bob 100 tokens the other chain might not know what user is what bob is and what tokens are and what 100 is even by having spree in a like a central place like like a relay chain it's kind of like a library in between like an interpreter that both chains can declare all right for any balance changes i'm going to listen to what this spree guy tells me it means and by doing this the chains can intuitively understand each other and

the execution of the message that is that is sent is guaranteed because there's no way that it's that it gets misinterpreted is it sort of a standard almost like a standards channel kind of yeah yeah kind of like that only it's it's a full implementation with its own database on the relay chain or probably going to be a spree parachute or i don't know what what the plan is there because spree isn't really under development yet and this is why i say we're the first like unofficial spree in that if all these chains implement our palettes then there's no need for a central spree of remark and this means that they can actually talk directly between the palettes that they implemented which is kind of cool yeah crazy okay like i need to dig into your claim that it's the most advanced nft like so

you have this you have the nft palettes on all these different chains you've created sort of your own version of a spree like non-official how like is it is it that infrastructure that makes them so advanced oh no not not that it's purely in what it makes possible for nfts in that it allows them to move away from expensive images right now all you have is basically expensive image nfts and this is because on ethereum where basically all the entities are you have two standards erc 721 and unrc 1155 and these support the lowest common denominator which is just a reference to an image somewhere

and this is for good reason because when you're a general purpose computer abstracting away all of that functionality is really hard and all of these marketplaces and incumbents that are already on ethereum have a huge problem implementing new things and so they like to play it safe and the erc 721 makes them a lot of money right now yeah so it's economically rational to reject change there so this is problem number one problem number two is that on ethereum when you're doing any kind of standard development like on ec721 or even erc20 for fungible tokens what you're doing is you're basically just writing a spreadsheet and that spreadsheet has many rows with many columns of data only nft spreadsheets just have more columns um so whereas an erc20 spreadsheet will have just an

address and the balance on erc 721 spreadsheet will have an address and the balance and then also an attribute of that nft and another attribute and so on fundamentally this is inefficient because all of these spreadsheets are abstracted away to the most common data structures which means that you're always storing strings and numbers and storing a lot of strings in these data structures on a public blockchain with high demand is incredibly expensive and this is why transferring a simple nft costs 100 to 200 bucks on a good day on ethereum this can never be efficient now what we've built on a mark with remark 2.0 especially which is live now we have five fundamental nft legos where when you put them together you can compose a system of arbitrary complexity

without smart contracts but also any ui and any app that supports these fundamental primitive legos automatically supports any derivation of them any permutation of them anything that you can put together from them and this is what gives the system its power because in ethereum if you want to build an nft project that has any custom functionality anything more creative than just an image your community is beholden to your ui you they they have to rely on you to build that custom ui for them if you disappear that functionality mainly disappears nobody is going to be interacting directly with the contract to play with your things and if you get an actually advanced nft project out on ethereum it is going to look extremely plain on marketplaces

like wearable like openc and so on because by definition when you customize your nft you've written a custom smart contract and these marketplaces have zero incentive to add ui support for your custom contract but if you have fundamental legos that you can very easily support technically in the in the ui way then you also support any derivation of them and because you can build really rich projects from these legos any ui that supports them will also support them automatically now you can always smarten that up even more with more custom contracts around this but in the vast majority of cases we've abstracted these legos enough to support most of what people want to build and so these

legos are nfts being able to own other nfts uh nfts being able to equip other nfts and change their appearance nfts being able to receive on-chain emotes so reactions from people which is pretty cool in terms of price discovery and social mechanics nft is being able to have multiple resources so that you can have different outputs depending on different contexts so like i can mint on a video game nft that contains code a pdf manual and a high resolution cover image and if you load it into a game compatible marketplace for nfts you will just have it autoplay run but if you load it into a primitive environment like something like openc you will just see the image right and if you load it

into something like our marketplace singular it will open the pdf because we have a pdf reader built in so you can read ebook nft is there as well and so one more lego is conditional rendering where you can have little bits of logic called json logic in the nfts that will trigger based on some on-chain and off-chain information some change basically yeah okay so if i have like something like a mountain that's that's surrounded by by flowers and and birds and everything i can say provided that this nft has an alternative resource that's a snowy mountain i can say to the nft if this nft gets 50 snow emojis switch to display to the snowy snowy mountain and now if you make that equippable into

another nft so that it's a background for example then you now have an evolving composable image that can react to emotes that people send it and the fifth lego is fractionalization of nfts we've actually done i've done a show on fractionalization with andy chorlion we can actually link to that if people want to find out about that idea cool so yeah the fractionalization is is a really cool concept but it's used in ethereum precisely because of the limits in functionality and because of the gas fees only to gamble so all you can do is speculate with these fungible tokens whereas in remark you can use them to democratically govern well plutocratically governed on nft so that if you need to collectively decide that

an in-game avatar needs to equip a piece of equipment you can distribute that avatar's fungible tokens to the community and they will vote for it and now we have like collaborative gaming sessions on twitch where the audience is live modifying the loadout of a character that that the gamer is getting into battle with or stuff like that i mean this is a wild project thank you so much for sharing kind of this insight into it i do want to link us back to the topic of this overall episode and that is kusama you've decided to put remark i mean it started on the kusama network i guess you said like august 2020 was when you were starting it yes yeah so kusama pair chains came live on in april now you know we're getting close to polka dot

pair chains coming live do you you're primarily a kusama project but are you thinking of moving to polka dot is there a reason you're on kusama um the reason is that this was a wild enough hack to deploy on a wild enough network uh kusama seemed friendly to it and i didn't feel like it matches the context of polka dot to put this basically vandalization of blocks onto polka dot it always felt more at home on kusama which is much more artsy much more open to things and which i'm personally a bigger fan of however by the time polkadot is ready for parachain deployments we will also be deployed on some chains with our pallets

so by extension we will not be necessary in the remark format on polka dot and so we will be implicitly available through our partner para chains we will not launch our own power chain but we do not intend to have a separate deployment on polka dot per se especially with the announced bridge between kusama and pokhara i don't think that's necessary got it so you are a kusama first project then yes you just described this kusama ecosystem that is more creative that you were doing basically graffiti on the side of the chain which i love that image but yeah tell me a little bit more about kusama as it stands and maybe how you see it developing now that polka dot is live or going to soon be live in its fullest form i don't actually think we've seen much we've seen as much

testing on kusama as everybody wanted to see and so i don't really consider it the canary network for polka dot haven't considered it for a while i've always considered it its own main net that is growing its own audience and its own projects and um i think it's it stands really well stand alone on its own and i think it can evolve in that direction really really well there are certain problems that need to be resolved like decentralizing the council some more and and just generally fixing some issues with governance in particular but i think kusama is on a really good path to be an incredible powerhouse especially for this experimental nature of projects that that might be seen as weird

like i've always compared polka dot and kusama to like kusama is your your garage band concert where your friends come and you have a few cases of beer and everybody's having fun and somebody spills some beer on a speaker and it doesn't matter because the other one's still working and you shout songs at the band that you want them to play and nobody cares and everybody's happy and everybody has fun things break people fight but at the end of the day this is the story that we tell our children and friends whereas polka dot is like a symphony that is that is rehearsed that requires you know like uh people with bow ties and pinkies out uh to calmly sit in the first row and um when you need to make a change in in the symphony you have to

have buy-in from the conductor the audience the orchestra the singers everybody who's involved has to agree to it and um it'll take a while to make a change so in a way kusama started out as kind of this practicing ground where you kind of practice your instruments for the symphony but in effect it turned into what actually happens and that's that the punky garage band stays a punky garage band and and the symphony guys are just cooled elsewhere i really like this independence of kusama and i think it can go a long way if it decouples even further amazing i really love the image you just presented yeah do you have any last sort of thoughts here this is the last interview of the kusama episode so maybe if you want to send any

encouragement to folks who are listening to this it might be the first time they're actually aware of this network or have seen some insight into how it's how it's running i would say that no matter if you're technical or non-technical if you have any ambition in launching anything just ship don't plan don't think i used to be of the persuasion that a lot of thought needs to be put into things like i would spend four weeks on a domain name and then four more on a basic design and then i would log on to twitter and see that three different people have done the project during my um he who ships wins so ship and win you know tune in and do something mint an nft on singular uh build a

project that hacks the chain or um you know deploy something deploy a new prediction market on a zeitgeist beta version uh go in explore click around there's literally nothing to lose if you're this early so yeah be brave and explore this this crazy ecosystem that's very cool and also you have very much this nft ethos i've been hearing this from other folks in the nft space of just like shipping so fast you just have to do something quickly you can't sit there and plan the same way you maybe even did in web3 especially not the way you would have done in web 2. wild cool well thanks for sharing your journey bruno and thanks for coming on the show sure my pleasure and i want to say a big thank you to the podcast producer tanya the podcast editor henrik and to our listeners thanks for

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