ZKV presents Privacy on Polkadot - Moonbeam with Derek Yoo

Transcript

um so hi everyone um just uh to introduce myself i'm derek hugh uh i'm uh the ceo of a company called pure steak uh but um we're most well known for our work on the project uh moonbeam uh which i'm here to tell you a little bit about and maybe give some thoughts on on on privacy on polka dot because i do think polka dot has a unique design space and will create opportunities for new forms for new forms of privacy so just to start things off i wanted to kind of set the stage and get people in the polkadot state of mind and just maybe as a reminder to folks that might already know some of these

things i know there may be some some new folks that are new to polka dot uh that are listening in so really that the core idea for me about polka dot is centered around uh two concepts you know one is specialization so it's definitely the polka dot idea is the antithesis of there's going to be one big block chain or one super fast block chain that rules them all the idea around polka dot is there's going to be many of these things you know there's no single best block chain and to that end there's a substrate development framework that parity has created that allows developers to create specialized blockchains uh really purpose-built blockchains that you know are are optimized for particular use cases uh potentially privacy use cases

and then uh so if you have substrate to create these specialized blockchains uh polkadot is a way that these different specialized blockchains can connect to each other that it provides a kind of a means for these specialized blockchains to communicate with each other under the same security umbrella so that means that they can communicate with each other with um you know with high security and so i really think those are the two really core ideas around around polka dot that you know sometimes i see people um you know not really uh uh quite uh quite understanding and it really is this idea of like let's create this like large design space by allowing developers to have the tools they need to create these specialized

blockchains but you can then rely on other chains to do things that you're not specialized in so you kind of get this hole is greater than some of this parts and so um you know the question is okay so where does moonbeam fit in then into this you know into that into that space and so moonbeam is one of the member blockchains of polkadot so it's a one of these things called the parachain and what we focused on specializing on is creating a and a full ethereum implementation uh in substrate so we've used the substrate development framework we've created you know uh in close collaboration with parity uh all the features you need to have a fully working ethereum like uh environment

uh so that's was really really the core feature set and um you know there that and that's even interesting in its own right there's actually a lot of deployments that have already happened a lot of uh you know this is kind of part of the meta these days right that there are these evm compatible blockchains that different protocols are are expanding to or moving to but you know i think that it deserves to the uh the question deserves to be asked well there's a lot of evm compatible blockchains out there so what is it that's interesting about moonbeam and i really think that the the differentiator for moonbeam or the thing that's interesting about moonbeam is that because we're a para chain on polkadot because we're part of this larger system um you know we can offer uh functionality or support different kinds of use cases that a standalone evm

blockchain can't can't offer so in particular there is these native cross-chain integrations that we can offer that are powered by something called xcm xcm is the kind of integration technology that is unique to polka dot that allows the different pair chains on polka dot to communicate with each other and we'll talk more about that a little bit further on in the presentation and so just uh give some sense of uh who's building on moonbeam uh there is a uh growing ecosystem of projects quite a number of them uh either tools and infrastructure uh d5 games different kinds of community oriented nft projects

there's quite a lot of projects that are already deployed to moonbeam or moonbeam's companion kusama deployment called moon river to give you some sense you the moonbeam network has been fully operational for about six weeks now but there's been really a ton of deployment activity even in that last six weeks um as the ecosystem is really uh coming to life and uh and growing and uh just to talk a little bit about who it is that's deploying to moonbeam um you know really i divide this into a couple different camps for different buckets uh one is uh i would call this kind of the expansionists right so this is something that you see across

different evm blockchains these days uh where i think moonbeam is the logical expansion point for a multi-chain team uh if they're trying to get to polka dot and have an evm code base right so you might have a team such as uh sushi swap right so the sushi team is deployed to many evm blockchains if they want to have a deployment onto polka dot it kind of makes sense for them to work with moonbeam because they already have this evm code base that they can deploy to moonbeam without any changes and that gives them access then to users and assets on polka dot and so there's definitely a number of project teams in that category that are pursuing this you know i call it an evm targeted multi-chain deployment strategy they're trying to

deploy to as many evms as uh as they can uh on the other side there's more of the the kind of the polka dot or moonbeam native teams uh these are teams actually that we're spending more time with these days that are really focused on moonbeam and polkadot as their primary deployment location and uh but you know there are benefits you know that if for a number of reasons it may be that building a para chain is not a good fit for their use case and so deploying to to moonbeam um being able to use the ethereum tech stack and all the tools that come along with it you know that's a better fit for their for their use case then then moonbeam is a logical you know place for deployment there and now you know what we've seen is in particular in the the d5 and the nft

areas um you know these teams want to be you know their benefit to being in the same evm as other teams for composability reasons and for reasons of being you know near where there's going to be a lot of liquidity in assets so that's that's created a little bit of a network effect for us even within uh within moonbeam itself and um so that's just context around what moonbeam is um and and you know some of the the core features that we have but i wanted to step back a little bit now and talk about uh deployment architectures and then you know finally to bring it back around to you know some some privacy concepts and how at least at least i'll pose the questions of you know how some of these

concepts might play out uh within the polka dot uh ecosystem and so just to start here with a kind of a discussion of dap deployment architectures um really i see this as an evolving uh you know situation where almost all dapps that were created um to date even like from you know ethereum's launch to date have been in this you know what i'd call this leftmost bucket like a mono chain deployment and so what do i mean by that what i mean by that is that a developer targets like a specific blockchain they develop a set of smart contracts you know front-end dap code and then they're targeting a deployment to you know say uh ethereum made net right or moonbeam and so really it's it's just a deployment with one

blockchain uh in mind that's most of that development you know that's that's happened to date and i think you know in the context of there being most activity being on ethereum if you know you rewind back a few years that kind of made sense as these new ecosystems are emerging growing it's kind of it's quite clear that they're here to stay now then you get what i'd call this this cross chain we touched on it briefly before where a team might say okay one deployment is not going to be good enough for us now we are going to take like our entire dap all the smart contracts in our dap and deploy it to n number of blockchains so that could be you know ethereum mainnet polygon um you know bsc uh polkadot via moonbeam um you know you could have some list of

deployment destinations and generally the idea is that it's it's almost like you're porting because you're taking the entire dap that you have and just deploying the entire thing you know onto uh different blockchains that's certainly the case if you look at something like a sushi swap like i mentioned before you know the the full dex deployment is you know is repeated on number of blockchains that's a little bit where we are now i would say but where i see things going is into an architecture that i call native multi-chain so what do i mean by native multi-chain this is a a a an architecture where you have different parts of your dap are deployed onto different chains or your you know your dap is basically spanning the

functionality of multiple uh specialized chains and you're creating one experience back to the user and so i do think that this is this is something that um we're at the very beginning of the shift in how dapps are built to take advantage of these kinds of uh native multi-chain architectures and this is this kind of app is something that polka dot is uniquely uh designed to to support you know because of this ability to create specialized chains and because of this ability for those chains to communicate with each other and so i want to go through a few examples of of of this and even though we're early we can already see um you know see this kind of playing out so the first example i wanted to talk

about is something called uh that we call xc20 so xc20 is uh the name of a token standard uh that we have on moonbeam and moon river and the idea around xe20 is that it's kind of like an erc20 it's a it's a token representation but uh by being a substrate-based asset uh it can move uh using this xcm technology on polka dot it can move these tokens can move to any of the power chains that are connected to polka dot uh and uh they can do that with high security since all the power chains are operating under a shared security umbrella but when these assets are on moonbeam uh

they're accessible to the evm that we have on moonbeam so they they kind of appear like they're erc20s uh when they're on uh on moonbeam um so this is uh the first of uh the xcm based features that we've rolled out um uh you know on it's currently uh in production on moon river and soon to be coming to moonbeam and we have a number of different uh integrations uh uh both in place and in flight to add more of these uh interoperable assets these polkadot native interoperable assets to both our moon river and our moonbeam deployments and so this is i think this is a good example of

you know you don't have to worry necessarily about where you started or where where tokens are from they can flow within the entirety of the polka dot ecosystem to where they're needed or where they they can be made useful in our case uh in the case of moonbeam there is a lot of d5 protocols deploying so we expect you know a lot of these tokens to move to be able to be deposited into you know let's say farms or lending and borrowing protocols and so on so that's definitely one of the first use cases that we have around this interoperability and i just wanted to go to a second example that's a little bit more advanced something that just actually launched last week on moon river

as another example of what a native multi-chain deployment could look like so in this case the example is the lido liquid staking protocol so they launched this on moon river to create the uh the st ksm assets so for those that aren't familiar lido is a protocol that allows you to create a kind of a derivative asset that represents a staked uh you know a staked uh asset so on if you have uh ksm on the uh on the kusama relay chain you can stake that ksm to get staking returns so what uh lido does is it allows um

users to hold a single token sdksm that uh kind of grows right it kind of has it's it's a it's a staked version of the asset um but you'd avoid needing to go through the actual staking like um uh you know kind of all the staking steps yourself this is something that they is uh quite popular on ethereum they have uh an st eth asset and lato has been moving uh to other uh prominent um l1 ecosystems or l0 in the case of polka dot ecosystem uh to create these like staking derivatives and so uh we uh they you know we've been collaborating with them for for some time now and um you know their their first deployment just went live and so the thing that's neat about this lido use case is that they built a dap that's

on moon river so they're using the ethereum tech stack smart contracts on moon river ethereum style smart contracts on wood river but they also are using uh staking functionality on the on the kusama relay chain on the main chain that's part of our kusama so that's where the staking is kind of happening of these ksm tokens and so you can see here that this this app that they've created actually is spans multiple blockchains right there's some components that are running on moon river there's some actions and things that are happening on kusama but the end user doesn't realize that right they're just interacting with lido as one app and behind the scenes it's leveraging uh you know functionality from the river and specialized taking

functionality from from kusama i think this this is kind of the way of the of the way of the future and this is how apps are going to evolve in my opinion where the user is not really even understanding that there's multiple blockchains involved you know they're interacting with one app but then behind the scenes you can kind of create or use specialized blockchains to do uh different functions and even in the case of lido there's even stable swaps you know like for example you know there's a curve deployment into our ecosystem right now where you would also leverage other protocols in the edm that are supporting this kind of this kind of default use case so yeah i think this is a great example of of this kind of native multi-chain application that's going to you know

open a lot of design possibilities for for uh for adapt developers and so just to speak about you know what this means in terms of privacy right so what forms are privacy going to take on polka dot um certainly they'll take familiar forms so uh you know tornado cache-like aztec like you know protocols that are designed around evm uh you know those are uh those will be coming to moonbeam we've been in discussion with teams that are building these kinds of protocols and so that's a familiar form right so this within the context of evm you have these privacy layers i think the thing that's potentially more interesting is this possibility of having uh parachain native functionality that

that provides privacy right so imagine that there's a para chain that has you know privacy features uh in it there are uh you know the team at manta i think we'll be hearing from a little bit later today has such a system and then the idea is that you can use xcm to transfer uh uh let's say tokens to deposit them into this privacy power chain you know that the transfers that token then are private um kind of like you would have with a you know a solution like uh uh monero or zcash right you have these like private transactions and then you can withdraw back uh to something like moonbeam um you know afterwards or someone else can withdraw back and so you know the interesting thing for me here is that you know there's

definitely you kind of have um this ability to create a whole chain that emphasizes privacy features that's you know the the problem with that in the past has been that then you're kind of this is island onto yourself you're this like island that can't interact with anything but by doing this in the context of pokedot you know you can interact with the other chains that are there so this is something that i i think is going to be you know a pretty interesting use case as you know more of these xcm channels open and as there's more interaction between between chains and in particular this kind of privacy is a service you know i'm interested in that idea that you can have a chain that's specializing in one thing and is providing it as a service to other chains and so that's that's the kind of thing

that i that i expect to see um i know i'm uh running towards the end of uh my time here so i wanted to tie this back then to just the broader vision that i have and what what i'm kind of most interested in when it comes to when it comes to polka dot um as i mentioned in the beginning it's it's really quite unique uh in in the ability that it provides developers um to customize you know what these member blockchains look like you know the the team at parity have gone to great lengths to provide the tools to basically create you know almost any blockchain that you want using substrate but then allow these different you know very specialized blockchains to talk to each other uh so privacy is is one kind of uh specialized

blockchain that you know we already see there's already teams developing these like on pokemon uh moonbeam more specialized into this like smart contracts use case uh but there's other other kinds of use cases of other useful services for developers so things like storage or identity or oracles or even if para threads are pretty hot on as a way to for uh moonbeam developers to extend um you know the logic of their smart contracts with um you know uh with the kind of logic that uh you can run like as a chain and so the the vision i have is that you know these different services that evolve will really provide this like rich library of things that developers can use so they can you know pick the different services that they want to leverage for their application

combine them in the context of uh you know of polka dot or even in the context of moonbeam but then create one application that's been presented to the user so the user doesn't have to understand that they're interacting with you know all of these different specialized systems on the back end and so that's that's kind of the thing i think will be quite powerful is almost like an aws but composed of these different decentralized services uh that you know provide developers these very like powerful tools for building uh for building apps so um yeah that's uh uh that's pretty much what i wanted to talk to you guys about um i'll just throw some links up here um if people are interested in learning more about moonbeam um our discord is quite active we have uh you know very comprehensive doc site um and uh and

just our website and twitter of course are good ways to follow what's happening in our in our community thank you so much derek and