Off-chain computing for decentralized applications, by Wassim Bendella and Julien Béranger

Transcript

okay so hello everyone and thanks for being here this is Julia biology head of communications at AI exec and I'm with sim Vendela I work as a business developer and today we're both very happy to be here on stage to talk about AI exact a startup that is building a blockchain based decentralized marketplace for cloud resources and uh just to have an idea who in this room has already heard of Isaac if you can just please raise hands all right so so quite a quite a lot and uh for those who haven't well I hope that by the end of this talk you'll find it just as exciting as we do so as you all know the theorem is a is a

blockchain that allows developers to build and deploy decentralized applications and the etherium is so innovative because it made smart contracts possible and this has gathered a big community of developers and nurtured innovation so much that today we came on over 1,000 apps running on atheria the smart contracts of these depths are stored on the ethereum blockchain Andy theorems virtual machine is responsible for their execution virtual machine of course I mean the miners and and validators but why the theorem is virtual machine is is excellent for simple transactions and business logic it struggles quite a lot when it comes to performing heavy computing at a reasonable cost and speed and things will only get worse because there are a lot of projects that made a

nice feel recently but have not yet delivered their products and once these projects are delivering they that their products the computational demand will be so high it's very likely that the etherium will not be able to keep up and that's running intensive apps can cost a fortune and this is why we see I exact as a complimentary brick to aetherium technology why because i exac allows off chain computing and buy off chain computing I mean the apps need to be able to do their heavy computing off chain is so not on the ethereum blockchain but then bring the results back on chain for verification and validation and I exactly love developers to do exactly this and with you know virtual reality artificial intelligence or I would see

all utilizing advanced smart contracts the need for often computing with all increase and become inevitable and in this field so how does I exact make to build how this exact make possible often computing will by building a market network for cloud resources so usually we see businesses as pipes with value flowing in one direction only so from the producer to the end-user if we take the cloud industry for example a company like Amazon Web Services flows in one direction only so from the producer Amazon to the end-user and what is fundamentally different about new businesses like i exac is the way value flows so today in the world of networks there's a whole range of different flows

between different participants and i exac does not control this flow it just enables it and makes it happen so you may view I exact as a matchmaking system it's a market that's trying to have supply meet demand to to create some of the most valuable transactions possible by aggregating more and more participants on their own the supply and demand side exec is able to use data to filter through these sides and then make the right supply meet the right demand so in other words I exist no servers but allow those who own servers and in our network we call them workers to meet those who need computing power and this matchmaking system is orchestrated by exec in a decentralized way so you may

ask why do we even need a decentralized cloud marketplace for for cloud services well today the the cloud industry is very centralized and has many many flaws inherent to a centralized nature for example today the market is dominated by big players like Amazon or Microsoft and since HBC infrastructures are very complex and very expensive the barriers of entering this market are extremely high especially for individuals like like you and I and what I execute us is that it creates a global and universal market that anyone can join and transact in so if you're a gamer for example you have a great machine but you only play video games two hours a day the rest of the time is just sitting there idle we I accept you'll be able to plug your

machine in our network and make profit by monetizing its computing capacity centralized data centers also raise some serious energy problems for example power and cooling in data centers cost more than the IT equipment they support and i exac is more in favor some eco-friendly solutions which has led us to seal some strategic partnerships with cloud providers like steam bhurji Carnot computing or cloud in heats basically what these companies do is that they distribute servers throughout cities at strategic places so these servers are running computations for external applications and this process usually is very intensive and generates a lot of heat that usually just dissipates and in

our case these companies are able to recycle these heats and then use it to building swimming pools or even tap water and finally there are service disruptions so it happened for example as here to to Amazon and has resulted in over 150 million dollars of losses with web sites like Expedia Yahoo or github and available for many hours and due to i execs decentralized nature we have outage tolerant protocols that make sure that the end user will receive its result no matter what so how does blockchain fit into all of this well I exactly is a blockchain based marketplace which gathers many different types of participants we have people providing applications people providing

computing power where it's CPU or GPU and people providing data sets and blockchain is particularly useful here because it allows to store and record all the transactions of value that are happening on the I exec Network and it's also the mechanism used to prove the contribution of different types of participants for example to prove that a worker did execute the computation it was asked to and that the resulted sent is indeed accurate and trustworthy and on the eye exec network our token RLC circulates on all this network and links these different types of participants so just a few words on our token last year in April we exhibit as a token sale and

issued our LC tokens so our LC stands for runs on lots of computers because your computations will indeed be run on a lot of different computers and our C's the unique way to access cloud resources on the exact market so to give you an example if a FinTech application needs to do some intensive computing it will be buying CPU power in RLC and the participant it provided this CPU power will receive RLC in exchange now while traditional platforms like uber or Airbnb take a 15 30 % cutting transactions I exact does not take any fees at all

so there are 0% fees when cloud resources are traded on the I exact market place and even though we're creating a lot of value with our matchmaking algorithms we envision transactions as peer-to-peer without exact intervening in any way by taking account transactions of course as equipped to start up our token is part of our business model our LCD utility token and I exact does hold a reserve of it but we also have in mind other ways of generating revenue for example by providing advanced final services on cloud resources but we will disclose these a bit further on our journey so since Ric oh well we have delivered on time what was outlined on our white paper so last November we released our version 1 thanks to this version of

exact decentralized application now have a simple and practical way to reach off chain computing resources so for now these resources are offered for free by AI exec and are therefore centralized up until our video release and actually today we're only a few months before our video release which is the most awaited component of AI exactly because I example move from centralization to decentralization and the two marks the release of our cloud marketplace where users will be able to launch intensive often computing through a graphical interface or an API and another interesting thing to note about this version is that it will include and introduce a payment scheme so this payment scheme will allow payments from

users to providers so for providers whether it's cloud providers local providers or just individuals like you and I this is the very beginning of doing business by monetizing our resources and finally after v2 there will be three more major releases that will keep us busy until 2021 these releases include advanced features for enterprises reaching true super computing capabilities with GPU and finally tackling some research challenges in the fields of IOT and educating and now I will let my colleague Giulia go into more details about these recent releases okay thanks thanks bye Seema hi everyone so yeah

we're really excited about this upcoming release of the version 2 people will be allowed to bid and ask for option computation and this is something we've never seen before so the release is planned for May this year so let me say a few words about the version 1 this is what we call the dab store where you can see all registered and available applications on the network so the SDK is available for you to try you can find several tutorials on katakana so you have nothing to install it takes 5 minutes to get the idea of how it works

so on this version you can use AI execs private pool of workers for free so that you're comfortable to test things out and I also want to mention that our team is available 24/7 to provide engineering support in case if you need while you're testing the SDK and you will see that it's super easy to deploy an application on an exec and because we want to make things easy for developers I exact now supports docker eyes tabs so right now anyone can use one of those famous open-source applications or tensorflow our blender etc so I exact eye exam

really fits the needs of compute intensive applications as long as they run in a batch mode I mean in a non interactive mode for the moment and there will be many others we're going to launch a programming bounty program where we will list the most wanted apps plugins scripts so that developers can directly contribute so those are sort of in-house applications in the sense that we've deployed them ourselves but one of the most important things to keep in mind is that when a smart contract needs to launch some

octane computation then I executive solution you want to check so now let's have a look at what other developers in the community came up with so 15 new applications are currently developing with our exec we launched what we call the dad challenge to support the development of those apps so we were so we had 40 candidates which is extremely already extremely encouraging from an from an adoption standpoint so the jury selected 15 projects on the basis of innovation impact visibility and background of the team and so now

they're sharing the equivalent of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars we were really impressed by the quality and diversity of projects so we have projects in AI data analysis supply chains gaming voting and so forth so so when so now we're following up with this project mainly helping them deliver their products so I just wanted to quote three of them so cerebrum is a decentralized platform for crowd-sourced machine learning open mul is a computational engine for custom simulation experiments and web sensors are artificial

artificial artificial intelligence based Oracle's for smart contracts so I like those projects because they directly addressing real-life problems so they're really good examples of what you can do with with AI exact and you can do it too so let's see how how to deploy your application on an exec so this is this is exactly what ho squad did during the live coding session we had here in the museum so so you would start with with the template that is directly usable

then when you type this command I exec deploy you have the smart contract part that goes on a period and your binary files go to the workers Network then the this is the third step the the user joins the game he actually pays in RLC when he submits a task that is executed by the workers and finally the user gets the result back so that's the basic workflow for a developer so so let's have a look at the whole infrastructure we built on the on the left you have things happening unchanged so a user

makes a transactions of an interaction with a with a small contract that we will call a work order that that triggers the job submission process on the right you can see you can see the often part after part with one single pool of workers represented on this picture when the version two is out you will have many of them many of fools with one scheduler for each pool and so the scheduler basically dispatches the works to the workers and then the result is pushed on the blockchain through a

set of Oracle contracts that plays the role of the interface between the unchain and off chain world and this is why we need what we call the poco instance for proof of contribution so this is the consensus protocol alien tech uses to act to verify the result of an off chain computation so it relies on a mix between staking and reputation with which itself is based on your computation history it's it's going to be ready you know in a few weeks from now so adriana is here is here so if you

have if you want to know more if you want to know the details on the on the proof contribution you can directly ask other here he already published two articles about it and the third of the series will be published in a few days so it's an important part of the marketplace because it will allow more workers to join the network and until that we're gradually opening the network to to several resource providers like we just did with the steam eg condo computing cloud lean heat with with which we had the very first invoice priced in hurry see so so yeah again we're really excited about this the

release of the marketplace itself because it will allow the network to be fully open and accessible for everyone to participate so some people would start earning some value earning some RLC executing works and and others would start make money with their application accessible on the dev store so I cannot conclude without saying a few words about SGX so so it's a yeah so it's it's it's a very recent technology it was was first

released in 2015 so high exec is one of the most advanced projects in the crypto space on this specific topic and I can tell you that things are moving very fast there will be some major announcements before the end of the month so stay tuned and yes it's part of the fascinating rnd side of the project so so yeah i exac will use sjx enclaves basically to protect the application from malicious workers it creates a bubble in which you can process

sensitive data and offer a strong level of security to all participants of the network so the marketplace and the proof of contribution actually works without SGX but we want to anticipate this trend and they will be proud to be able to share the result of those researches with the community so let's keep in touch the website is ie X dot EC we'll be celebrating the first birthday of the RFC tokens in April and again the version to release is planned for May this year so if you want to know all the details on the consensus protocol you

can ask Adrian who's here of Francois or any of the team were 16 of us here so if you want to if you need more information about SGX you can ask lei who's here who's in charge of this part so just remember that that now there is no limits in the design of decentralized applications thank you [Applause]