Jacob Arluck: TQ Tezos – Meet the Independent Driving Force Behind the Growth of Tezos (#330)

Transcript

this is epicenter episode 330 with guest jacob arlok hey there sebastian here you know the podcaster lists in a relationship is too unbalanced you know us a lot better than we know you and we want to narrow that gap so please do me a favor and answer our audience survey it takes four minutes and it will help us to continue producing content that informs and inspires you you can find the survey at epicenter dot rocks slash survey and at the end i'll tell you how you can get a free keep key hardware wallet courtesy of shapeshift - thank you for your time so thanks in advance and on with the show hi welcome to epicenter my name is sibbeston Cuchillo today our

guest is Jacob ARLA Jacob is the founder of T cute ASOS their company that works to advance Tasos ecosystem by creating open source software and other public goods for Tasos nowadays this is a project that i've not followed very closely it's been over a year since we last did an episode about Tasos this was when Arthur and Kathleen Brightman were on the podcast it was the October of 2018 and I'm almost embarrassed to admit it but that was really the last time I looked into it so I was really pleased to do this interview with sunny I felt that it provided a really good overview of the Tasos ecosystem at the moment you know when we last did the interview with

Arthur and Kathleen this was right around the launch there wasn't much of an ecosystem yet and so you'll see that a lot has happened since then and you know at some point I think it would make sense for us to also have a conversation with the folks at nomadic labs for instance since they're you know right here in town so anyway here's what you'll learn at the decentralized nature of the Tasos development ecosystem who's funding protocol development the permissionless nature of the Tasos architecture and the governance system how take you is working to make Tasos more accessible the impressive number of development language intake there are at least seven major ones and the kind of issues that creates around things like interoperability and composability mickelson with the stack

based domain-specific language and the shift towards mickelson 2.0 the types of applications being built on Tasos the role of at asel foundation and what the Brightman's are up to today and a look at tasers governments two years in and what we can expect in the future so as I'm recording this ECC just wrapped up in Paris and I spent most of the weekend sleeping it was so exhausting but it was a lot of fun I mentioned here before but we had our own podcast studio which allowed me to pack in a bunch of interviews I used that thing to its full potential I recorded a bunch of long-form content but also some shorter interviews that we'll be putting out in the next couple of weeks so we're

still sorting through all that content but you should see the first bonus episode show up in your podcast feed this week on Thursday if all goes well so this is a panel discussion that Frederic and I did with com2 tshe of aetherium france they are the Association the nonprofit that put on the conference cansado sau of consensus diligence and cassadee daily of centrifuge so we talked about a lot of stuff a lot of current event things that are happening in the dphi ecosystem like the whole flash loan episode that's been happening over the last few weeks and we also talked about the state of aetherium in these uncertain times let's say anyway I can't thank Peppo enough for helping us put this together for being

our partners in this podcast studio experiment it wouldn't have been possible without them and it's something that I definitely plan on doing again in the future although right now it's uncertain if and when any conferences will take place this year so hopefully things will come back to normal sooner than later I also want to thank everybody who came to the meetup on Wednesday one of the things that I love the most about doing this podcast is hanging out with our fans because our listeners are some of the nicest coolest and smartest people in the crypto ecosystem

I don't know how we managed to get all of you to listen to the podcast but somehow you're all here and every time I hang out with you guys and gals I feel like I'm just hanging out with a bunch of friends and it's always so cool and I love it so thanks for coming and I look forward to seeing you at the next one before we go to the interview I'd like to tell you about our sponsor for today's episode the nervous ecosystem Grants Program the nervous block team went live recently and their funding innovative ideas and developments to the protocol so if you're a developer or a project and you're seeking funding for your innovative idea or if you're interested in making a significant contribution to building out the nervous infrastructure you should explore the

nervous grants program because they have a total of 30 million dollars in funding available now you probably heard the interview we did with the founder of nervous Kevin Wang in January but nervous is a proof-of-work blockchain with a unique layered architecture it combines the security and simplicity of Bitcoin with the flexibility of etherium so on layer one you have the common knowledge base which is reserved for security and store value while layer two is used for computation and scalability so to connect with the team and learn more about the Grants Program including how you can apply and the types of grants that are available please go to nervous org slash grants and with that here's our interview with Jacob our luck we're here today with Jacob our luck so

Jacob thanks for joining us today yeah happy to be on lissa bit about your background how you got involved in crypto and how you got involved with Tasos absolutely so so actually used to work in the biotech life sciences space and in 2018 or so I was it really even before that buckin you know it sort of 2016 I've been sort interest was piqued again in in the space actually a lot of people get you know sort of get back got back into the space after the wall of like 2014-2015 because of you know sort of a theory I'm actually for me it was more that I was really interested in things like Z cash actually launching and some of these projects that have been like white papers back in like 2014

it cosmos actually was you know another is extorted these things that were resurfacing you know that there was actually code there was actually there actually people you know working around these projects that sort of thing and then in early 2018 obviously you know there was late 2017 the recycle-izer Strama there was you know sort of a lot of you know sort of you know the project seemed like it was it wasn't um how this was one of these projects as well that basic there was like you know had been following sent you know for obviously a really long time you have always been really interested in like sort of coordination mechanisms personally and really interested in you know sort of decentralized governance and these kinds of questions they give him back to like sort of undergrad and before Tesla was just like actually coming out I sort of

thought it was a more academic approach to it originally like I and I also thought that originally like it wasn't something that you know would actually make practical sense but then when I actually saw in 2016 like with the dow fork and like a few other things that happened in that time then even a rumblings around bitcoin governance and that sort of thing became very very interested again in some of these ideas and so in early 2018 sort of got connected to the folks after the phoenicians mess have been resolved sort of got connected to the project and you sort of got involved around the launch in paris which was you know in you know in june of 2018 but obviously from you know new york and and um basically you

don't want it to spin up an organization that was really the the thing I realized was like there wasn't much focus around building these key public goods to establish an ecosystem when you look at aetherium well the reason it's been is that usually saw so my opinion in addition to like the fact that it's sort of really you know has a script powerful ethos and developer culture and all this kind of stuff and also being the first Lexmark aren't we all you know useful smart contract platform it is also that they just had really invested in like you know robust public goods you know that took many years for them to build get to a state that could actually be used by major companies by any random developer or whatever but the goal that we set out to is like if we're gonna scale up you know Tasos to be you

know something that's you know Global that's widely used etc it's gonna need to be able to you know sort of on board all you know all these folks and there's no need to be sustainability around how public goods are are you know sort of maintained and managed so down the road that led to you know sort of the creation of a lot of other you know a lot of other like sub projects here at TQ but the founding ethos of the company of the project here that we know that we're working on is sort of around you know how do we can create the key necessary building blocks for people to to build you know to feel like it's an ecosystem where they they're comfortable to get started and build a business or build a build an application or you know anything on top of

what do you see as some of the most important public goods in the etherium ecosystem is it like some of the stuff that consensus was building with like truffle and meta mass or is it stuff from the EF like what do you see as the most important ones from the EF it's definitely the EIP process itself I think is like really underrated as a as a driver of Athenian success but also like a lot of the focus on security auditing a lot of the focus on around privacy recently research like a lot of like cutting-edge stuff that a lot of people don't even realize PF is sort of behind and then you have consensus stuff which is like really I think really underrated but people like to bash consensus for being becoming very large and for you know trying to influence everything a lot of things in

the theorem but the thing that they got right I think for sure is there's having things like in furor having things like truffle having things like that I might like those are like with all those things having a long-term sustainable in a sort of funding source because it would be pretty impossible to to to maintain its its lead I think but it's not just that it's that when you go to another ecosystem like if you're even giving up one of these public goods you're like I don't want to go there so the one of things we keep you're constantly it's like where's the tellus Persian dependent mask you know we have things like in fear Iran tell us already we have things like with truffle literally we work with truffle there they're launching on tezo some support in March now the thing is like where's

meadow mask I want to build an application but there's no man you know there's nothing like meadow mask and so basically figuring out how to make sure that we have all those key key public goods that there and then also down the road that the idea is to build decentralized processes and other mechanisms for identifying gaps and funding them and then and also properly managing them and we can get into like sort of how we think about how to tackle all these different you know sort of parallel but connected problems but that's sort of the way we commanded it's like right now let's get up to speed let's catch up to a theory on let's compress the like two years of aetherium things like opens up line all these things it took a while to develop right but it like when you go to the theorem

it's as if like those things have already always been there if we could jump that we could skip the line so to speak and just get a lot of these public goods and I think if you look at other new projects cosmos a great example a lot of the focus is on like what are the other things that you can pull out of the box to compose with your with your custom chain or whatever right so polka dots doing that cosmos is doing that um you know folks like solo or doing that and I think that that's gonna be like what what really drives like adoption or whether that's what's gonna do people talk about like what heats killers look we'll start pulling people through the funnel away from aetherium or off of Atheneum it's gonna be things like that at a minimum that's what you need to

have in order to do so cool well jump into talking about some of the public goods that you guys are kind of working on directly you know in a minute but before we do that Cadell us a little bit about the name of the company TQ tezo's cuz you know when I first learned about the story I was like oh my god this is the perfect name I love this name brother when I first heard it I accidentally miss thought it stood for tezo's quorum which is our conference here which is like our main conference yes yeah which is it says the meaning says this conference series and we obviously you know play a big role in that as well the head of TQ ålesund Majuro she she's actually a political scientist by training we were basically like thinking like what would be quote some cool things to me you know names

for this organization and the original one that we wanted was that we talked about on pot was Voltaire so if all terrorists wanna I was really excited for it then we were like wait we should probably you know these are a bunch of that right guys we should probably go back and make sure that they you know see what some of their positions were and see what they did anything that would like scar a company down the road you know and so I went up with looked up looked up Voltaire he had a lot of views that were not in line with current thinking I'm sure you know talked with de Tocqueville did as well but his were pretty egregious like some really generally think so we're like well let's think of another one they're like what what about Alexis de Tocqueville and we're like well wait you know Tesla Safi

has its origins in finance and now we have you know this entity here in the US well they're not not entirely in the US but you know you know mostly in the US and what if we needed it after the truck fell and were like well that's fine but like when people hear Tocqueville they think of like marijuana or something like you know toking or so that we've literally heard people say like why do you call it that like whatever like so let's come up with an abbreviation that's really catchy and really easy to say and whatever he came with team up with TQ and so then that stock so I've only just refers to us as TQ can you just give a brief an explanation of what Tocqueville did like what was his main body of work oh yeah yeah and that's the other thing right it's like

so as I said like he was like a you know basically what he did was like mostly like precursor to like what people call political science now we should call it political economy back in the day that's what my minor was in oh yeah nice he basically wrote this book called democracy America where he sort of went up close and really analyzed like how the American psyche and American like sort of social norms and things sort of differ from his homeland in France or just Europeans in general and a lot of it is around like the relationship between notions of like how how folks interact with Authority how folks you know sort of think about power and things like that and and those are all topics that we're super interested in and part of the inspiration things like

Agora things like the telescopes process in general like we're really interested in like what are the institutions that internet native institutions that we need to create around you know the Towson because of some you know to to really make sure that it you know sort of fulfills its it's like sort of long term long term goals and mission there's lots of lots of parallels to do that yeah for sure so give us a sense of who the major players are in the tasers ecosystem and how they interact you know if someone was coming at this for the first time and wanted a sort of you know mapping of the Tasos ecosystem what would they see so I think the the place to start it's like you obviously have you know the main architects and creators of tezo's in India most of whom

sit in Paris and nomadic labs and pneumatic labs you know one way to think of it as sort of like parody for polkadot you know or I don't know tender mint team in cosmos or you know wonder where all his father-in cosmos or one of these just sort of founding teams that created the protocol and thus like has an obvious role as to you know in some capacity stewards of the network or feel some responsibility for for you know improving it and whatnot but the nature tells us and we can get into this is just you know obviously it has this multi stage on chain governance mechanism and so in practice there's no canonical court of team there's no canonical group that is the steward of the chain or whatever but you know obviously in practice you know these things tend to fall back

you know a team that no you know given that us was written on a camel there's very few of camel deaths in the world it's not surprising right that these folks are the main stewards of the you know of the core of the shale all these other protocol of the shale etc and then you also have you know other sort of that cord to have teams that are contributing to a lesser extent but obviously still important so you have folks like Tripp team labs in who race in Switzerland they're both a validator as well as a they work on core amendment you're in a core protocol amendment proposals and things like that then you also have folks like lambda which is like a company in a small company in um in Japan that's also um you know part of part of this process you actually have a

couple protocol devs here in New York and including a member of the the merge team and that's someone on our team who contributes to two core development as well so that's sort of how core work shakes out then above that you have different language teams so you have things like LIGO and ego is a language that compiles down to Mickelson which is the tezo's sort of contract yes l then you have like teams like smart pot you have teams like then there's others like archetype in and s camel and and Alber and like there's sort of these teams that are working on so those angles the Niihau folks who are doing is worth like some of the layer 2 projects then there's books like you know there's a couple of them one of them is in in Japan you know called script to economics law I think they

also developed a thing on a theory called plasma chamber they're doing a lot of work around optimistic roll-ups in OBM stuff on tezo's and then you have you know obviously enemies like ours you have enemies like the toast Commons Foundation as well which is like sort of a community organization we collaborate a lot with them particularly on things like toast agora which we can get into later as well as other projects like CollabNet and other those projects that are really focus on fostering an open you know decentralized you know governance process and then you have these sort of these there's all these other entities around the world that are working on Tasos adoption or Tesla's you know projects like so there's teams in Brazil the 15 phone in Brazil is a team in Israel there's a team in crane there's a team in Japan there so those

three others so Southeast Asia there says US China and Hong Kong I mean all of these actually have full-time working on those projects are working for scissors in some way but but all in all yeah they'd say that that's sort of the the basic lay of the land and then of course you have the toes foundation which is you know sort of serving as an endowment you know that basically funds you know some portion of ecosystem activity they're sort of also you know sort of helped you know could be coordination in some capacities you know sort of undertake strategic projects they'll talk to folks who want to build something on tezo so I'll talk to folks who are thinking about like doing equity investments in people you know building something on tezo stuff like that

so a lot of what their role is as more as like a funding source for parts of you know certain parts of the ecosystem you know obviously we work with them pretty closely especially around the public goods around things like such as this conference series even from describing it this way it's probably still a little confusing the basic way that this thing is this on this is is so that like you basically have representation of jezus and all of these key geographies around the world pretty much every continent you know other than maybe Australia and Antarctica probably has some kind of meaningful full-time tesla's presence at this point there's you know basically a lot of effort going forward to figure out how to one of their entities should be spun off what other types of funding vehicles should

we spin up for things like ecosystem public goods and other matters a lot of very decentralized development going on how do you like coordinate this and like other ever any situations where this comes into an issue that's actually at cause most you know we're kind of going through this process right now as we speak of like decentralizing our development so it's like get some learnings from a team that brought to that audio is then that prop has done that there's a few areas actually where I think there's a lot to learn so I think the first one is you know obviously big question around who's funding protocol dev who's capable of doing program what's the barrier to entry those sorts

of things around tezo's the the bear to entry that sort of from the beginning has always been around okay all right and as well as just functional programming in general so functional programmers just kind of think differently than you know traditional developers they write code that has to be maintained probably by other function programmers in Tesla's case a lot of the opportunity for decentralizing protocol dev you know at the protocol core level seems to be the biggest opportunities around trying to you know sort of refactor the code base or build tools and documentation about parts of the code base that are poorly documented so that folks can very easily get started understanding that there's probably this smaller subset of the total devs in the world who can actually ever contribute

to tezo's but at least we can capture a larger share of them and in practice one of the analogies that I always used for blocking broadly is that the people ways talked about how whatsapp sold to Facebook for 19 billion dollars and had something like 15 employees some days a set of block chains could run neato trillions of dollars in global GDP but only be supported by a small number of deficit relative to that right you could have maybe even even a thousand developers who you know basically support software that powers you know trillions and trillions of dollars of value we don't need to get the number up that much we don't need to you know build that you know get that many folks doing core dev it's more so a matter of

just getting it even doubling for example what we have today are the accessibility doubling what we have today would make a huge difference and then you'll get a fitting rail Ursula it's a lot more accessible to get into core development but the road map is so complex so that there's sort of a different kind of barrier to entry which is around you know who can possibly build a sharded you know proof of stake highly scalable you know blockchain infrastructure so that bereit entry is a really big one and there's not a lot of folks who for example know there's a very small number of folks who can even work on your knowledge is a very small number focusing work on doing sharding and cross chain interaction and light clients all this kind of stuff and we're I think it'll all go in the long run sort of stems

from you know basically what are the incentives to improve the core tells us has an cosmos as well I'll have you know sort of on chain funding mechanisms right to incentivize core development it hasn't really been used yet in tezo's you know the way that sort of folks love to talk about so there's a lot of hype and discussion around you know sort of using this concept of the invoice and tezo's which is basically where you can attach a one-time or recurring reward for proposal that you submitted to improve the protocol and this can all be done on chain fully on chain int Essos whereas in other networks you need to maybe there's a Treasury and people need to vote on it and then the development happens you know sort of off proposal happens that the execution of the

amendment proposal happens totally off chain you know I think in cosmas right you guys don't do automatic upgrade you're moving towards doing automatic upgrades on the road but you vote on a proposal and then someone goes and implements it and then it gets you know you hard fork to adopt it right in Tasos it doesn't work that way the architecture is inherently more permissionless that said there's probably more barriers to entry around who can actually work on this thing as well as given the unique skill set that's needed you know getting funding getting up to speed and then also thinking that your amendment even has a chance of making it it's very hard to say right now in any of these networks if I starts you know very smart there's you have a really capable team and they

sort of say we want to submit these changes to the core do they actually have a sense of what they expected chances of success are so that's one of the things that we're really interested in especially where we want to take a gora is basically creating a lot more legibility around what are the needs of the project especially at the core level and then creating an open permissionless prioritization systems like using for example prediction markets or in combined with signalling so if you think of sort of some of the ideas that were put forth by dow stack there's a lot of interesting sort of mechanism design ideas for I think we're basically using that to something like holographic consensus or some derivative of that to prioritize potential

comments and thus justify decentralized funding of those things so that's one of the areas where we definitely are interested in taking it if a project can sort of get to a point where they can do decentralized open source development of one of these core protocols turn a phrase that I use is if you can get teams that hate each other potentially to work around the same coordination mechanism you know you have a good mechanism like that's like a base layer expectation for an institution is whether or not it can coordinate and manage like sort of competing priorities and people who don't like each other one experiment that's really worth making is probably around making the needs of the platform legible in some way even if it's just in a limited area at first then trying to build mechanisms

that can help inform prioritization of those things and this would all be off chain by the way for now any parts of it would be executed you have teams in the tezo's core development community that hate each other I don't think so no I think there's obviously tensions between you know sort of core and there's inherent tensions between the different stakeholders of the ecosystems so you know you have bakers who have one set of incentives you have token holders f17 says you have some our contract developers and enterprises you have core teams and folks who are really interested in functional programming balancing those different priorities is really important in order to do that you need to have a mechanism for making legible concrete needs and then fostering discussions and then enabling

prioritization of those in all politics all institutions you ends up with agenda setting as more important than the actual vote right so in like the US Congress in most parliamentary systems the outcome of most elections and most most decision-making processes is pretty well known well ahead of time and that's because most of the game is not around the actual vote it's around what even gets put up to a vote obviously that's set on based on likes of who has control who has you know the most votes in this thing but where it all in eventually plays out is in is in the agenda-setting component of the process and so that's what we're thinking a lot about now and how to improve that so that you can introduce some of the permission lessness and openness that you have of

the on Shan system off chain to summarize it that way and that way to you know sort of just bring it more into harmony with the expectations of all the stakeholders of the system and then prioritize those expectations accordingly permissionless nature of the architecture so we think of blockchains as like permissionless application platforms right I think it's the first time that I've heard someone use that term to define and characterize the development and the evolution of that blockchain itself and I think like that's one of the things that characterizes Tasos is the permissionless nature of how the protocol evolves through the Unchained governance system that's an interesting thing to think it's like the idea of like building an autonomous internet native infrastructure or institution it's like and there's lots of folks in

in other because like I don't flat or whomever who will get secure you know start shaming you for using this framing but I think that's where the Tesla's really aiming to be is trying to become some kind of I think it already is well on its way but the long-term goal is to try to become a fully autonomous organism or whatever you want to call it that basically can power you know obviously all the sorts of Kryptonian internet native institution use case so they were that's asset settlement whether that's dows internet native organizations those sorts of things our items inside of games in an alternate like you know you can imagine in game economies that are totally autonomous and in terms of the scale at which you can have a you know you can run an MMORPG for example that has yet mediates economic value or something like that

like that's what you hope these kinds of architectures make possible generally we're just trying to introduce a lot of these if you think of the process right now is you know sort of a lot of soft you know in normal human processes also involve get lab and and and whatnot that then lead to this permissionless and hard on chain process imagine that with where we think a lot of this is going to probably go over time is at least in our team you know it's EQ or the foot you know in some of our conversation with other stakeholders is towards widening along that journey like moving the permission lessness a little bit outward and more into the agenda-setting part as well tell us what TQ focuses on specifically then one of the main areas where we focus on 2d is really around smart contract development in standards and as well as

like working with some of the key language part like the new smart contract language projects that you know make tesla's development a lot more accessible as well as working with folks like you know truffle sweet and sort of some of the well-established development platforms for aetherium we also work with companies that are building on tezo's and basically you know so a lot of that is around tokenization and digital securities and there's a host of other use cases that we haven't yet communicated on but a lot of the thinking in our team is how do you build this kind of ecosystem around tezo's given you know sort of its starting point which was sort of with you know it launched it had obviously Mickelson in a very rich ogres a very low gas limit it just wasn't really built for public consumption you know initially you sort of didn't have really

good tooling there was no lack of testing infrastructure there's lack of basically what you lacked was a feedback loop around people who would want to use the platform so basically you have is no users no feedback about the languages and the tools and all these things and thus no users as a result of that - it's like a death spiral of lack of use right and so what's happened since in and this is really a testament to like all these different teams that are working like their butts off to make Tesla more accessible that's why we ended up with so many language projects but where we've come in a lot of times is you know we'll find an area for example and an obvious one is around like say tokens standards and stuff like that where we're thinking well basically you have all these people who want to build stuff

on toes but they don't want to have to build their own you know tokens dinner they don't want to have to build their own JavaScript library like a web 3 doctorate like when they're coming from another ecosystem they have to then worry about whether or not they have these public goods that they had that they would otherwise have in aetherium basically trying to foster the creation all others so we initially created something very similar to ear c20 and that's what we've used you know a lot of uses amuses for obviously its you know different tokenization projects but since then we've been working for many months on thinking about how to build sort of a better token architecture like more treating tokens standard as more of a almost like a platform for people to invent other kinds of token types and token based applications without being

constrained by for example one particular token architecture so you know obviously in the theorem you have the success of your c20 or C 721 and then you know obviously folks have tried to foster some other more if you look at e IP the EAP repos like you know you'll find just so many different failed standards and whatnot and instead our government it's like when you find that your C 721 and your C 20 don't work for you like you don't have to even worry about a lot of the base like transfer semantics or a lot of the base some of the like how you connect to permissioning around your token and instead you can focus on build it creating some kind of prototype or finding some kind of token type that both us it'll already be supporting wallets but you can customize it like a

lot of the behavior of that token those are the kinds of projects that were retained we also work on more meta of all of this with the telus combination we've created this platform for discussions as well as governance visualization and other that's that what initially is is like sort of a governance Explorer plus a discussion forum sort of like that's very similar to e3 search in practice and basically that was created to discuss protocol amendments discuss changes that are coming to the platform as well as you know speculative ideas and trying to be you know sort of foster the community around research and development as well as making easier for folks like beakers and smart contract developers to understand and discuss like some of the

the changes that are coming down the road so we built that that toasted gora platform over last summer and launched it in the fall of last year and it's been really instrumental like you know we think in in fostering discussions around some of the controversial amendment proposals that have emerged in recent memory so there was this this a moment called Babylon for example it was sort of this really big test of the amendment process because there was a bug discovered in we through I always think of the joke that make is that it was a much smaller version of something like the Dow hack and if they're more you just get to this point and now we're like well you know we have to make this decision like there's pros and cons of either one and it's more so about making the decision in a way that has a high degree of

social consensus and moving on rather than about like the exact details of that thing and so Agora was really important in around mediating a discussion of really really high quality shockingly high quality for people on the internet discussion around that particular dilemma that was facing the community that's one area I guess we'll come back to the governance stuff in a second but I'd like to focus start off by one of the first products that you mentioned which is sort of this coordinating of these different language teams one of the jokes I had about Tasos community like ecosystem is that there's more languages being developed than actual applications you know obviously that's maybe a joke there's probably are some applications being built as well every team that's

working on antennas developing their own language and so why is this happening and how does this affect sort of the composability of applications in the tezo's ecosystem it affects it a lot yes so basically it's kind of a joke about functional programmers is that they sort of are into these kinds of projects because they're really into you know sort of programming language theory and that sort of thing it's definitely true in our ecosystem so there's a lot of folks who just have opinionated views about and just enjoy the art of creating or the science of creating programming languages and no programming language on tezo's out of the gate was widely usable enough that it would gain the kind of

network effect that solidity has one quick question here how many languages are there so there's LIGO smart pie archetype there's that all the Haskell flavors so that's like morally Lorentz and indigo so that's considered that one so that's four then you have the Jew Vic's project from Krypton labs and Christopher goes and then you have s camel which is a go Camel compiler to Mickelson and then you also have out there an Albert is like basically a intermediate representation I believe for that basically makes Mickelson a lot more readable but yeah so you're talking let's see two three four five please ten six like seven yeah yeah well there's seven like meaningful ones yeah for sure

there were also some older ones like liquidity and fee which nobody uses anymore but we're obviously in the early days that's what's around in practice we would argue that there's probably three of these that are getting any kind of use so LIGO smart pie and the Haskell ones are the only ones that getting significant use I'm sure there will be some folks who try archetype offers like some form of verification tooling and then you have Albert and also just Mickelson itself which you know also offer a bunch of formal verification tooling where there maybe there will be a few things written in these but there's a lot of languages and that's because of I think it's mostly a cultural thing and the nature of these languages sort of taking a while to become fully useful the way that like

solidity is in aetherium the bigger problem is Interop between all these languages so in a thinner name you have things like the API or you have like you know sort of people are defining contract interactions and sort of an in a harder way this doesn't exist in test us right now and so one of the challenges is that yeah there's Interop requires between some of these languages can require you know people at risk all glue code or whatever you know that basically a dongle between applications written in different languages I don't think this is as big of a problem as people think so in practice probably there will be a power law around two of these and then it's just a matter of probably trying to create some kind of

something akin to an the ABI in etherium and so I've heard on a recent toe stick or a thread there was discussion about basically turning Mickelson into a lingua franca for all of these different languages so creating really clearly defined interaction basically clearly specifying an underlying semantic or whatever by interface by which these different contracts and these different languages can interface with each other so we've mentioned Mickelson a couple of times what is Mickelson so basically it's this stack based language that tezo's contracts compiled it's like a DSL that's interpreted to in camel that basically people can you know write these in theory you can write it your by hand yourself and write a contract in it but the best analogy to give is probably

that's like it's a good very imagine if the EVM was like a bit more readable you had this stack based language that people were you know could basically write contracts in and then basically in practice what it has become is a compilation target for all these different new languages that have come out so LIGO and smart pie and archetype and all these things most of them just compile down to sort of like the evm bytecode like there are some people who will go ahead and handwrite evm bytecode but i'm not sure people want to do that and so it's the same thing with Michelson I've also heard some like discussion around a shift from Michelson to Michelson 2.0 whatever that might be

could you tell me a little bit what that is about so I think that's still shaping out there's basically a desire to definitely move toward something that's better serves as an intermediate representation so that people can basically compile these higher like if all the contracts are going to end up in these higher law languages which we all sort of expect that you want to build something that's just a better intermediate representation and then you can build that compilers you can build for all sorts of good you know better tooling and form of application tools around across these different languages right now there's been a lot of effort expended on this library called me show so it's a representation of Nicholson there's contracts that have been written in Nicholson and then specified in Kok and form you know with people proving properties in of Nicholson

contracts the idea is to make it I think a better target for you know certified compilation as well as generalized form of verification across all these on some of these other languages and then there's also if you're gonna tell Sakura you'll you can find a few articles by a guy named sander spies and he has a no camel implementation of blossom and so there's a lot of discussion there that's probably more speculative and take a while and it won't be I think Watson as you see it in whatever polka dot or just near useful no blossom one of these others some of these other projects that sort of our awesome from the start it'll probably be some kind of subset or some kind of other flavor of Awesome as I understand it so you can read about that on Pell Segura on some of the immediate

features though that people want to add to Mickelson is definitely around readability is definitely bout intermediate representations etc but it's also about adding things like a fence and the things that are really widely used in aetherium that don't exist today in tezo's because the project was sort of launched without some of these very useful features things that people who are doing integrations are tooling or wallets I definitely want to use we talked a bit about the you know languages side of my joke let's talk a little bit about the application side what are some of the sort of applications that are currently being built on tezo's I would break it down into a few categories so you have sort of folks who are doing defi ish things and so you have things like Staker Dao it's a doubt that where folks sort of

hold these biosecurity token and then can manage govern a this basket of tokens initially they're doing one I think that represents a bunch of staking assets and then later they think they're gonna try it basically we explain sacred Alice is kind of like you can think of it like maker Dow but instead of just doing a stable coin they want to do their ideas let's do lots and lots of different defy applications that we govern through this Dao but the governance token from the start of security they're like let's go bigger and also will constrain the set of holders testing that's actually more creating that kind of clarity around onboarding for like institutional type folks I think is actually underrated I think that's that that project really interesting they're using actually a lot of the stuff that we've

built here at TQ and other parts of the ecosystem so they're actually they have a fork of Tesla Sakura that people are gonna imagine if maker Dao government's decisions were mediated in part through something like Tesla Sakura that's basically what they're doing and then they obviously use our you serve reference implementations and and token interfaces and things so that's one interesting project then there's a bunch of other folks doing digital securities offerings or other kinds of digital securities projects on Tesla's and so there's a lot of work with these folks in in Brazil who are like one of this very large investment bank that have been doing they tokenize Brazilian REITs and this is a BT cheap actual and then you have you know so a few other digital securities projects like the elevate Returns project in based out of Thailand

by they're basically also tokenizing some REITs tie REITs there's also this digital securities projects all around the world doing there's folks who I think tokenizing art work in Korea then you also have sort of other flavours of projects you know going back to the defy topic around one idea that's been open sourced evil coin design that Arthur Brightman that one of the founders of Tesla has put forward is is this idea of checker which is like kind of inspired by staple coins in maker Dow and things like this I think has some distinctions and he's really I think more interested in we'll see where that one goes but I think that's definitely something to look out for there's also basically something very similar to unis WAP coming out pretty soon I think that they're sort of

figuring out their last steps and trying to get get us this mark contract audit but that'll be coming out soon enough you have sort of the underpinnings of a defy ecosystem for sure you have sort of you know the couple assets that folks are bringing to market some non as you'll hear about some of these interesting ones soon and then you'll have you know sort of the stable coins that are being considered then you'll have you know also obviously this you know swap style decks after all that you can start to get into things like lending or you know so they think things like compound you know that once you have sort of the basis for on chain activity especially in the d5 space then the base defy primitive sort of for any sort of can extend to some of these other other areas you mentioned digital securities and

that there were quite a few projects building these types of applications on Tazo so give us a sense of why that is why do you think that there are so many of these being built here so I'd actually back up and say why do people want to tokenize securities on blockchains at all so this is like a thing of people a lot of people in the blocking space are like very mystified by that's not sexy that's not you know interesting you know it works fine etc so you know the idea that we're we've been looking at is that actually a lot of the the value prop first aid doing this on watching at all is that you can get a common infrastructure for the way assets are represented both entrusted and you know sort of lower trust

environments that's scales globally so imagine that you could basically take off-the-shelf software that represents you know sort of any kind of asset for any you know asset related use case for anywhere in the world that follows the same standards on the same on a common platform and basically drives the cost of this financial infrastructure down to zero and so even if there's like you know the regulatory restrictions even if there are you know sort of obviously still moves around exchange and things like that in liquidity you've just driven the friction to getting started like it's no longer around the software infrastructure like the software infrastructure now cost zero dollars there's a lot of long-term benefits and innovations that can probably come out

of folks onboarding all these different types of all sorts of assets using common standards all around the world and you can think of for example some kind of more interconnected global markets because all these assets are standardized and even if there's like obviously lots of you know regulatory restrictions that are needed for how you ensure that people are following the appropriate local regulations and things like that yet this is the the foundation for building interconnected global economic you know infrastructure and so if you take that long view then you realize you know and that that's sort of the approach of you know sort of the you know the entities in the Telus ecosystem that's that you realize that's definitely an area where we kind of want to want to participate and so we've

directed a lot of you know effort towards onboarding projects that want to want to basically eventually be on one big common economic infrastructure and then the value prop Fortezza specifically is that it's designed with few of the scary things about existing box chains Tessa's sort of tries to so so for example obviously security of the underlying smart contracts and things like that that's like a core tenant of tezo's and obviously since Tessa's was first introduced there's been a huge amount of focus on form of verification across a lot of other ecosystems especially in response to hacks on aetherium etc but tezo's is really has you know both that security component and then also you know that

focus on trying to have you know smart contracts that are very very correct and very you know correctly you know sort of specified and defined and have properties about them in mathematical you know form you also have the governance aspect where basically if you wanted to tokenize something and you want to it you have this lifecycle over 20 30 years how do you know what platform is going to be around in 20 30 years well the argument is that something like tezo's has this governance mechanism so that it's they you know both maintains a social consensus over you know a very long time horizon and as well as you know the ability to add features to the protocol over time as new patients become available so the idea there is that

imagine you're you know your contract army and secure on this network but you're getting access to this self-improving economic infrastructure that's becoming faster it's becoming more secure it's becoming battle-tested it's becoming it's adding functionality that you know it starts to accumulate all these network effects you know that that are driven fundamentally by the improvement on the underlying infrastructure but while maintaining the security and safety of your assets on that platform and so that's very theoretical but in practice I think like I think it's designed with some of these kinds of like how do you make these kinds of theoretical advantages tangible and that's sort of some of the stuff that we're really interested in working on it's like you know the self improving economic infrastructure that people can tokenize their assets on safely and know

that over 30 years there the infrastructure will continue to improve but that their assets are in there their applications are secured there's sort of a long-term vision here about the longevity of Tasos given the on chain governance given this sort of self amending property of Tasos that is somehow attractive to people who want to build financial infrastructure that will outlast let's say the whims of those developing the project or you know the ecosystem of this sort of thing yeah exactly okay interesting so it's like autonomous baselayer financial infrastructure for everyone in the world that improves and

continues to but but itself improves obviously conservatively because of the way that governance mechanisms are designed but while maintaining the security of the applications in and assets that on top so I wanted to ask you then because you mentioned Arthur and I think he plays a role in the ecosystem in terms of pushing ideas and doing research and what is his role now and I'm more broadly in what is the role the foundations well Kathleen as well because those are sort of two pillars I guess in the Tasos ecosystem that can't be overlooked absolutely so Arthur definitely provides

a lot of I think a lot of inspiration to the folks that are building on tezo stand as well as the core development he so I think it contributes to the types of things that are developed at teams like nomadic labs or evaluate some of these ideas or even write prototypes of different ideas that he has and then hand them off and if they're interesting you know or valuable someone will try to advance them through the process so if you go and tell Sakura again you'll find a lot of his a lot of his blog posts about different ideas that he's considering one of those is like this idea of like contract signatures or you can find him talking about like you know different topics around delegation and staking and how he would improve this as a staking model or I think he was a

contributor to the upgrade of the telus consensus algorithm back in the Babylon upgrade most of his involvement is definitely around some of those areas for sure and then obviously Kathleen she's you know she has a gaming company called coasts Isle building on top of tezo's they you know are doing I think Magic the Gathering on on tezo's really you know folks have a lot of experience in the gaming space and they're you know sort of doing trading card game based on Tesla's and then you have we won't go into the question on the foundation the Foundation's role is you know at least that's it's set out for itself is that it's a member of the community that funds key infrastructure and public good projects it's a different role than actually the etherium I think the etherion foundation plays where you know

the health foundation does not control anything like an EIP process where you know or anything you're not saying that it's your and foundation 100% controls the EIP process either I know I think that's an unfair thing to say but the way that it's set up in theory M is such that core development as well as standards and all these things they kind of do flow through through the firm foundation and there's a very explicit role for both the founder of aetherium and the this information to just kind of stick around for a long time and just sort of guide things quietly the telephone yishun is much more of a sort of a caretaker foundation we're participating but it's not governing or managing the network by any means it's really more Sauve an organization that's

funding key projects and then basically making sure that the money is well is not spent bad activities and so what areas is the Foundation funding at the moment and where some of the key things that the foundation wants to focus on yeah sure so the telephone you should I you know and I'm involved with a few of their communities and a few of their internal decision-making processes and basically you know I what I can say is that essentially if a lot of the focus is on building has to say like a lot of this key infrastructure from bottom to top that enables the you know sort of the vision that I described so the notion of this thing as currency and also as financial infrastructure what are the

things that we need to build so and what are the things that need to get funded so things like wallets things like projects that you know doing you know basically going out and finding folks who want to token I something interesting on on tezo's and getting them to understand the the value prop and then you know providing them also direction towards some of the tools and and other public goods that are that are available for them to to get started a lot of the funding some of these language teams right so a lot of some of these language teams are are obviously funded by the Telus Foundation directly the Foundation doesn't for example sit down with these language teams in P and say things like you need to do the language this way or something like that like that it's instead just here's the funding and then there's a technical

committee that basically checks the progress of these these language projects and says okay well these guys have made progress here here and here you know and then evaluates you know basically should these these language projects be continued or expanded or shrunk or whatever based on the performance now how you set those kinds of priorities and value and evaluate based on those is obviously a age-old political question but all in all you know I think there's going to be a lot more focus on trying to make some of these things more transparent and obvious as to how the foundation thinks about you know the folks at the foundation think about what is important what is a priority etc one other thing I'd say too is a lot of the foundation decision making processes are really sort of the output of external folks

sort of in committees there's a Technical Advisory Committee either's folks who also do you sort of advise other kinds of talkative deployment from the foundation but a lot of the operations I'd say are pretty small so it's a very small organist it's not like the and I think the if they're in foundation it's p-cad you know something like what I don't know 150 people either contracted or employed or whatever Health Foundation is you know ten times smaller than that so it's pretty small but it's basically just trying to make sure that things get there just trying to fund things and make sure that the fund the funding is properly spent so of course another source of funding is the governance system of chain itself yes has anyone actually received funding

from that yet or is that still more like you know in theory people could be but no one has so there was a small a small invoice for Athens the first and my proposal that was about a hundred ted's I think it was just a demonstration Babylon I don't recall actually what it was maybe it was a thousand maybe is there was nothing this current proposal cartage has nothing associated with it cuz it's a very small fix to a few bugs in tezo's this is probably something that's gonna happen over the next one year or so you know in the next year or so and a lot of folks are really interested and you can see this in the recent AMA core development AMA from I think last week or the week before that around how do you do price discovery around these

these invoices in a way that's you know fair and that's where I think so so Gabriel from from the LIGO team he he published on in this AMA he basically said he wants to see the crook you know things like prediction markets that are you know basically evaluating I'm you know you know I mean you can kind of do the rail from if you guys are familiar with the Ralph Merkle mechanism for for example where you could basically it's a prediction market on the satisfaction of people in a year or two years so like that and in theory you can combine things like that with you know other kinds of of mechanisms like Arthur has published on some I think it's a blog post where he talks about if you change taking for example to be based on an

auction mechanism you could like basically run a prediction market I believe it's on like the future of inflation rate rewards that people would want from auctioning off of box like you know block rights and stuff like that trying to build some kind of internal mechanisms around that so that's still a ways away I think that those kinds of price discovery coming up with like a really robust like viable price discovery mechanism for invoices is probably gonna take a long time in the short run and I think it's Olaf Carlson we from poly chain who's made this point before so say for example there's an amendment that you know causes tezo's to you know become significantly adopted and so see that there's a 50%

increase in Tesla's you know so I'm making I'm making up the metric but I'm just using it for c4 as a toy example say if there's a increase in Tesla's smart contract adoption you know where 50% more contracts are deployed over the next year or two years or whatever in theory like you don't have to provide a big relative invoice to the size of the network to fund that cut you know the changes that could lead to such a significant increase in adoption so what I mean by that is actually going back to the point about whatsapp having only 19 employed ever 2016 employees but selling for 19 billion dollars or something like this like you could have an invoice that funded a team of 20 or 10 or let's say let's say have even five people but

maybe we'll use something like zero dollars or something like or sharding or something that we're a team of say five ten people worked on sharding tezo's that increases you know scalability by you know I don't know whatever let's say you know scales by 20 X or something like this you know the absolute amount that this invoice could represent could be very large but the relative amount to the the token holders and the bakers could be quite low so a half of a percent over that's like in a vesting contract over you know say three four years could turn out to be something that scales the network by 20x is probably worth you know sort of a cost like that over for a year you know spread out across four years right and when I say 45% 0.5% half a percent I mean 0.5% of the current tokens now as

it like where you basically when you do the invoice those tokens go immediately put into a vesting contract and that inflation is known it's not like you're minting new tokens or something like that but you know there's lots of ways where you can create this really clever incentive models that are really cheap for all the stakeholders relative to the the market cap or whatever but have really significant benefits in terms of adoption or scalability or some metric that you want to choose beyond just the funding what are some of the other learnings that you guys have learned about the governance experimentation that is tezo's now almost reaching up to about two years in first off what is different about the

current Tasos governance process that was maybe different that was explained in the white paper and then what's also different it has anything changed since the launch of tezo's so basically have a blog post called amending tezo's and that blog post is sort of the output of having actually traveled to the pneumatic offices in Paris sat down with the team and said what is actually in the codebase unless you know let's figure out what actually you know the Tesla's amendment process is how to actually make kick this thing off and start using it right basically you know went there we sat down basically discovered that the way it was implemented was pretty similar to what was in the white paper and so basically what that was right is a you know this is for stage process and then it has

this quorum you know we're at the time where it's basically its mechanism that adjusts based on previous participation in the process so if say it's 80% and then it has an adjustment formula that you know if it was say above 80% that would adjust upward weighting you know recent participation by 20% and then using 80% I think as its basis you know for the rest but it so in practice that when we went the Athens and other actual limit processes cycles this produced dynamic where the the quorum was expanding going up a lot because there was massive participation in terms of stake so it was something like you know eighty eight percent or 87 percent of the stake voted in the four initial you know Athens

you know cycles that led to an increase of the quorum to something like 81 or 82 percent this was a sort of this paradox of the quorum we're basically and this is in the amending tezo's it was predicted in the amending teza article but basically that you would start to increase the quorum significantly above 80 percent and then because that's happening because you're increasing it even though you think that you're like raising the bar for you know the amount of consensus that's needed to pass something in fact you as some threshold you actually start to if it's not capped that you end up giving a lot of power to say someone with a three or four percent stake to basically come in and just basically veto anything and so you can even get through the initial stages of

the process and then someone could come in with three percent of our four percent of the stake and veto you know the execution of one of these amendment proposals so the change that I think crips iam labs row is similar to what we had worked out in in late 2018 was basically to say let's put a cap on the quorum and a floor on the quorum and people are like well you know lowering the corner on that's gonna make it easier to pass things and we also have more say or whatever in practice it actually does the opposite because it means that you know a small cartel of folks or even just one large stakeholder can't just like veto everything having too high of a level of consensus required to make decisions actually centralizes things that's like

sort of the paradox here you know you see it in things like the US Senate you see it in other places too where you just end up basically stasis favors you know sort of a lot of times big big players right and so trying to find that sweet spot is really important and just one more point on that actually that I think you know is worth mentioning is so somebody who actually has done a really deep amount of thought on this topic is Matan field from Dow stock so a lot of the conversation with him I think was really informative in terms of thinking of like long-term is our quorums like viable right and so basically what he argues is that you know you end up with a he sort of has his own very generalized framework for evaluating the quality of governance decisions but

basically what he described was like basically you want to be able to scale your decisions you know be able to handle lots of decisions but you also want to make sure that they're representative of the larger group and what you can end up with is with the quorum that is too high too weak scalable decisions and too low to be representative of global consensus or whatever and so that's one of the things we're gonna have to think about a lot and that's where you start to it starts to become interesting to think about alternative mechanisms as well you know like like things like prediction markets and a few are key and stuff like things like brexit for example brexit like afterwards you know you pull people are like we wish we hadn't done breaks it right in a lot of cases right and finding a way to basically have a check

on these like low participation or this sort of thing is definitely something that's worth exploring you know I think in the future but I have we haven't yet like fully thought out like how you solve that probably maybe I don't know if you guys in cosmos have have thought about like any solutions to I know you guys have a differently designed quorum system than ours I think it's like 51% is that right we just have a fix saying that like you know it's 51% to pass a proposal than 1/3 can veto and there needs to be at least 40% of stake voting for otherwise that gets automatically rejected relating to that point you know what are we doing in cosmos and whatnot is Telus was really you know virtually one of the

main value propositions was it is gonna be like the governance focus like chain but today when we see is almost all the new chains that are launching are usually have some form of strong on chain governance so whether it's Kosmos or polka dot or even some of the newer chains so how does tezo's kind of position itself in the market now in a way you could you could say that tezo succeeded in a way where you kind of convinced the rest of the blockchain ecosystem that hey aren't chain governance is maybe a good idea but now given that what's the future of tezo's what's the new market positioning so actually would push back and say it's

easy to say that you're going to do on chain governance you don't really need on chain governance unless you're trying to do something useful there are certain chains out there and I'm not going to name them that love to talk about governance as the only thing that they do I think those are probably all bound for irrelevance to be frank and I think that you only really need governance when you have something to govern so tells us ultimately regardless of the governance process is aiming to be a currency and and they you know as a project we sort of found it to be a currency in a smart car trucks platform right the governance process is really only useful insofar as it's in service of those kinds of goals and so I feel like the larger question we should be asking is why does tezo's build a really

robust social consensus like why does it build the kind of moat that somebody like in aetherium or Bitcoin has like how does it get to that point realistically if you can make lots of decisions really quickly like you're probably not you know in most cases you're not a really particularly interesting chain probably to begin with because you don't have any you know people using the platform who want to like veto your changes or you don't have any like I'm just saying it's like your ristic you can you can use to think about this and I don't know who do you particularly have in mind because I can say how I would position tezo's versus some of these different projects if your polka dot or cosmos polka dot is sort of so actually I'll use cosmos instead because I think cosmos and Tesla sort of follow the opposite vision so tells us

is like network effects probably accrue to one chain basically we want to figure out how to have the most network effects of any chain and we're gonna do that like a priori like before before thinking of like the practical considerations of does anyone want to build on the thing or whatever and then cosmos this thing is you know sort of more of like there's just certain limitations that as you try to scale socially you just cannot get over and so you might as well have a pretty open architecture in terms of you know allowing people to spin up chains and then we're gonna put all the effort into making all these different sovereign zones talk to each other I mean I'm overtime exaggerating but it depends on what you want to be right when you grow up so if you're a chain that wants to be

to be money and to to be you know sort of require a lot of network effects sort of following the etherium or Bitcoin model then Tesla says I think actually decently positioned to that as sort of the it has you know a lot of social consensus also around that have emerged from people onboarding to do staking so like even those thinking is like we're surprised at how interested everyone is in it you know there's sort of this sense of participation and direct engagement with the network that is accessible to anyone in the world around one chain that you know that kind of resembles you know sort of how a lot of people call us around things like Bitcoin and aetherium and whatnot whereas other chains like cosmos and and poke about are really more about like

sort of running in the background in my opinion so like I think cosmos is like sort of the idea I mean how many people who ever use anything that will be built on cosmos ever like think about are ever gonna have to think about cosmos and hopefully that's true for a lot of you know most things that are built on tezo's as well but in practice sort of think that that's the difference in consciousness around these chains is you know do you want to be a chain that is like populist and like lots of people coalesce around and and like lots of people care about etc or you know and people want to participate in or do you want to be a chain that where people just build things on top of it it runs very much the background and thus you want to focus on having some kind of

architecture that is you know going to on board as many different potentially conflicting folks as possible that's a good note to end on I think is you know what will tails us become as it grows up yeah and so it's definitely an interesting ecosystem and thanks for sharing your thoughts on you know how the tails of the secret system is evolving and we'll definitely keep following it as it continues to grow yeah absolutely thanks for thanks for having me thank you for joining us on this week's episode we release new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have a Google home

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