Relay Chain

Latest Episodes:

Statemine: A Deep Dive Into Kusama’s Asset Hub with Joe Petrowski Aug 05, 2021

Show notes

This week the tables are turned on Relay Chain, with Jorrin Bruns (Support Engineer, Parity Technologies) interviewing co-host Joe Petrowski (Technical Integrations Lead, Web3 Foundation) as a guest representing his contribution to the Statemint/Statemine project. Statemine — Kusama’s version of Polkadot’s Statemint — is a common-good parachain for creating and managing assets and NFTs on-chain. It recently made history as the first live, featureful parachain to be onboarded to Kusama. Now that Statemine has been made permissionless, anyone can use it to create and deploy tokens and NFTs.

The pair discuss computational resources, achieving faster speeds, lower transaction fees and the potential to shell out those fees for assets, while incentivizing validators. Petrowski also shares his insights into conceiving and deploying a parachain within two months, the Substrate build, and the project’s challenges from upgrading a runtime without governance to asynchronous asset management across chains, and what’s next for the project.

Links
Statemint announcement post
Statemine upgrade announcement
Statemint’s GitHub repositary

Highlights
01:17 What is Statemint?
05.40 Taking transactions off the relay chain
10:00 Statemine as the first common-good parachain
16:60 Teleporting assets across multiple chains
20:04 Implementing Statemint governance
23:35 Who is building common-good parachains?
25:49 Incentivizing validators
29:03 How Statemint interacts with other parachains
41:35 Considering asynchronous blockchain execution
44:48 Challenges building Statemint
49:54 Statemint’s runtime upgrade to become permissionless
50:30 What’s next for Statemint/ Statemine

Special Guest: Joe Petrowski.

Prediction Markets and Futarchy with Zeitgeist Jul 23, 2021

Show notes

This week, Jorrin Bruns (Support Engineer, Parity Technologies) is joined by Zeitgeist’s founder Logan Saether, and CIO, David Perry. Zeitgeist is a Substrate-based decentralized network for creating, participating in, and resolving prediction markets, and exploring the potential of futarchy for governance.

They discuss prediction market systems, futarchy for decision making, mitigating market biases, how a prediction market works, and its diverse applications — from improving on-chain governance to choosing political candidates and predicting parachain slot auction winners.

The team also describes the next steps for this project in terms of usability and adoption, such as parachains leveraging futarcy, developing an SDK to speed up prediction market app deployment, and their plans for Zeitgeist to become a Kusama parachain.

Links
Zeitgeist’s website
The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki
Keynesian beauty contest
Futarchy
Kusama Derby Conclusion Results

Highlights
01:05 What is Zeitgeist
08:10 Prediction market systems
10:27 Futarchy for decision making
13:20 Zeitgeist Substrate pallet recipe
18:00 Automated Market Makers
20:15 How a prediction market works
26:14 Prediction market efficiency given subjective information
27.58 Mitigating prediction market biases and incentives
30:02 Prediction markets within politics
34:15 Types of prediction markets
38:20 Building an SDK
41:20 Zeitgeist plans as a parachain

Special Guests: David Perry and Logan Saether.

Querying the World's Data with SubQuery Jul 09, 2021

Show notes

Jorrin Bruns (Support Engineer, Parity Technologies) talks with James Bayly, Head of Business Development for OnFinality, one of the largest infrastructure providers for Polkadot and Substrate, about Subquery, a tool that speeds up querying and extracting Polkadot network data so that anyone can take the data off-chain and create something useful.

They discuss the team's mission to deliver high performance, decentralized services to distribute assets at scale, integrate with blockchain oracles and build tools and infrastructure to advance the Polkadot ecosystem. Bayly provides insights into SubQuery’s network participants, how collaboration and feedback from Polkadot projects in New Zealand influenced several of its value-added features, their long-term plans to become a parachain and the road to 1 billion API (application programming interface) requests.

Links
OnFinality’s website
SubQuery’s website
SubQuery’s white paper
Subvis.io’s website — the SubQuery project Bayly mentioned as an example of the power of Subquery

Highlights
01:18 OnFinality and SubQuery: The mission
15:38 Providing data to blockchains vs. smart contracts
19:16 Web3 grant for open-source tooling
21:20 Decentralized cloud infrastructure
24:00 OnFinality as a distributed cloud provider
26:02 Collaboration with Polkadot teams in New Zealand
29:44 Trigger and notifications from on-chain data
37:06 Integrations with blockchain oracles
39:13 Capabilities and next steps for SubQuery
42:33 Long-term goals to become a parachain
46:10 Open positions to join the SubQuery team

Key Quotes
“There are around 500 million blocks of data on Polkadot, this team makes the tools to take it off-chain to create something useful.”

Special Guest: James Bayly.

Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves on Blockchain Adoption and Internet Regulation Jun 24, 2021

Show notes

In this Relay Chain exclusive, Joe Petrowski (Technical Integrations Lead at Web3 Foundation) and Parity’s Úrsula O'Kuinghttons speak with former President of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves. Uniquely placed as one of few presidents who knows how to code, Ilves was responsible for implementing the digitization of the Estonian government, one of the first countries to adopt blockchain tech, and many other processes in the country from voting to registering a business.

They discuss how Estonia, one of the smallest countries in the world, became one of the most entrepreneurial and tech-savvy, what led Estonia to go ‘digital', declare access to the internet as a basic human right, and mediate data integrity for their digital records via blockchain. Ilves talks about his concerns for the internet given its weaponization and populist exploitation, the problematic state of freedom of expression and accountability online, and governance of online communities beyond nation-states.

Links
Toomas Hendrik Ilves on Twitter
Úrsula 0'Kuinghtton on Twitter
X-Road introduction video
Cybernetica’s website

Highlights
00:00 Intro new co-host, Úrsula 0'Kuinghttons
03:00 Estonia as a global leader in the state adoption of technology
09:04 Digitizing a nation via open-source software and distributed systems
18:55 Access to the internet as a basic human right
25:24 The weaponization of the internet
30:22 Regulating social media
38:46 Defining order and proximity in the digital world
50:20 Governance of online communities
54:56 Social media platforms: responsibilities, and oversight
01:14:30 (e)Residency unbound by offline territorial borders

Key Quotes
"If you are going to have digital records you gotta have something to maintain integrity and the way to do it is blockchain. I mean, I don't understand how all of these companies in the world and governments have digital records and don’t put them on blockchain just for security."

"Question the need to use illiberal methods to preserve liberal democracy."

Special Guest: Toomas Hendrik Ilves.

Creating Your Own Metaverse with Bit.Country Jun 11, 2021

Show notes

This week we’re joined by Bit.Country, a Substrate-based decentralized world with a game-like feel that puts community at the forefront. Bit.Country lets anyone create their own decentralized virtual country and grow their own community.

Jorrin Bruns (Support Engineer, Parity Technologies) talks with members of the Bit.Country team: Shannon Christie, CTO, Justin Pham, CTO, and Ray Lu, CEO about creating customizable experiences in the immersive world of metahuman technology.

Besides tech, they discuss incentivizing users for social good, self-rule, and decentralized governance, designing for interoperability with Substrate, plans to launch as a Polkadot parachain and offering a place for entrepreneurs of all skill sets to create and trade NFTs across blockchains.

Links
Bit.Country’s website
Shannon Christie on Twitter
Justin Pham on Twitter
Ray Lu on Twitter
Industry Connect’s website

Highlights
02:36 What is Bit.Country?
09:51 The Good Neighborhood Protocol
15:20 Interoperability across chains and Bit.Countries
17:37 Choosing Substrate pallets to build Bit.Country
20:25 Two-tier governance on Bit.Country
22:48 Extending the use cases of NFTs
26:44 Bit.Country’s target audience
30:58 First steps to creating your Bit.Country
36:31 Technical stack and skills required to build a Bit.Country
42:05 Community and education programs
45:13 Business opportunities on the platform

Special Guests: Justin Pham, Ray Lu, and Shannon Christie.

Confidential Cloud Computing on Phala Network May 27, 2021

Show notes

Privacy takes center stage in this week’s episode as Jorrin Bruns (Support Engineer, Parity Technologies) talks with Marvin Tong, co-founder and CEO of the Phala Network, a trustless, privacy-preserving cloud computing network based on Substrate. They dive deep into Phala’s tech, exploring how Phala tackles the issue of trust in the computational cloud by shielding user data from centralized organizations like Google, with the same level of computational power as existing cloud services.

Tong details several topics, including node security, Phala’s Substrate-based runtime and bespoke pallets, integrating alternative trusted execution environment (TEE) hardware, and how it tackles consensus. They delve into on-chain data privacy, deploying private smart contract computation for decentralized applications (DApps) and decentralized finance (DeFi) and services on Phala Network including Web3 Analytics and cross-chain interoperability.

Links
Marvin Tong on Twitter
Phala website
pDiem WIKI
Web3 Analytics website

Highlights
01:10 What is Phala Network?
04:40 Privacy in decentralized cloud computation
06:54 Scalability through TEE
09:53 Using multiple TEEs to mitigate trust
15:10 Integrating alternative hardware
17:55 Phala’s Substrate runtime
25:49 Consensus within Phala Network
30:54 Computation on TEE
35:44 Use cases for projects running on Phala
44:41 Bridging Diem (formerly known as Libra) to Polkadot
55:36 Targeting the second parachain slot

Key quotes
“Separating computation from consensus is the key to how Phala can bring the benefits of blockchain while delivering computational power on the scale of a cloud server.”

“We think there are two major types of smart contracts, for now, the first is EVM, and the other is written by ink! or Rust language running in Wasm, WebAssembly. WebAssembly is the type we chose. We want to put WebAssembly inside of TEE so that we can support this kind of security technique grade. We think it will be a major choice for not only Polkadot but the whole industry for Web3.”

“Using Web3 Analytics, all of the analysis code is running as a confidential smart contract. This means that the data is not deployed by a centralized server like Google or any other big platform. Using Google Analytics means that you trust to put your user’s data node to Google so that they can analyze it for you. From this perspective, on Web3 Analytics, the data is not trusted by any centralized server or centralized gatekeeper, it is just encrypted by Phala’s system, and how to encrypt it is in the visitor or users hands.”

“We believe that in the next three years, or five years, the major technology of all computation cloud will be confidential computing cloud. That’s what we can see from what Google, Amazon, and Facebook are doing.”

Special Guest: Marvin Tong.

Plasm: Scalable, Interoperable DApps on Polkadot May 12, 2021

Show notes

This week Jorrin Bruns (Support Engineer, Parity Technologies) speaks with Sota Watanabe, CEO of Stake Technologies and founder of Plasm, a platform designed to help developers deploy fast and secure decentralized applications (DApps) on Polkadot.

They discuss advancing Web3 via cross-chain collaboration, supporting DApp development, and decentralizing the Plasm network. Watanabe walks us through being the first parachain on Rococo, completing the first cross-chain message (together with Acala), bringing Ethereum compatibility and ZK-Rollups to Polkadot, staking and trading DApps, securing a parachain slot, and much more.

Highlights:
0:00 Intro to Stake Technologies and Plasm
03:35 Japan’s version of Web3, the Trusted Web Council
06:35 The value of decentralized organizations
09.48 Connecting blockchains with Substrate
10:32 Support for multiple blockchain technologies
13:05 Plasm’s unique mechanisms; DApp staking and ZKRollups
16:50 Buy and sell Plasm applications
18:15 Stake Technologies Web3 grants
22:10 Schiden and Plasm parachain strategy
24:07 Making blockchain history
26:36 Cross-chain message passing
30:05 NFT capabilities beyond gaming
33:09 Encouraging DApps to build on the Plasm Network

Links:
Sota Watanabe on Twitter
Plasm Network website
Stake Technologies website

Key Quotes:
“When it comes to a smart contract platform, I think a layer 2 solution is needed in the long run so we are making the foundation, the Substrate of Web3, for really normal people. Polkadot itself is a scaling solution, but this is a layer 1 scalability solution. We need vertical scalability which is layer 1, that is why we are working on ZKRollups now. Vertical scalability is much faster, more flexible, and cheaper since layer 2 doesn’t need to be a broken chain”

“What makes Plasm different from other parachains? We innovated two things, one is DApps staking and another one is the scaling solution ZKRollups”

“We are working on an Ethereum bridge, a Secret Network bridge, and also a Binance bridge in the near future”

“We have already connected our Plasm network testnet to Rococo and we have deployed a Web Assembly smart contract and it works on the top of Polkadot’s parachain testnet”

“In the past few months, we have successfully completed the first cross-chain messaging passing with Acala. Our token can be transferred to Acala and you can receive the Acala token on the Plasm network”

“We support Ethereum Virtual Machine on the top of the Polkadot parachain, so the user can actually develop and make applications on top of Polkadot parachain, instead of individual substrate chains. I think this is one of the most important upgrades in the ecosystem”

“On the top of the Plasm network, we can transfer ownership of a smart contract”

“We are making a new M&A solution in the blockchain system”

Special Guest: Sota Watanabe.

Tether - Stablecoin Innovation, Regulation, and Mainstream Potential with Paolo Ardoino Apr 22, 2021

Show notes

This week we dive into Tether, a stablecoin playing an important role in disrupting the legacy financial system, recently announced to be launching on Polkadot.

Joe Petrowski, (Technical Integrations Lead, Web3 Foundation) speaks with Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Bitfinex and Tether. They discuss stablecoin trends, regulation and compliance with central banks, CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies), the likelihood of central banks running on public blockchains such as Polkadot and Ethereum, achieving blockchain interoperability through common goods, and the upcoming launch of Tether on Polkadot.

Highlights:
00:39 - Intro to Ardoino and Tether
06:38 - The issue of crypto arbitrage
08:57 - Stability by matching a dollar to the pace of Bitcoin
11:01 - Boom and innovation in the stablecoin sector
12:20 - The risks of decentralized stablecoins
13:30 - Achieving purchasing power stability
14:49 - The scope for non-US stablecoins
16:15 - Tether Gold, the precious-metal-backed stablecoin
20:34 - Individual assets vs. a managed basket of currencies
22:48 - Regulation and scrutiny from central banks
27:35 - Blockchain for central banks
28:40 - Tether’s criteria to deploy on a blockchain
30:15 - Common goods for blockchain interoperability
35:07 - Resilience through multiple blockchain support
36:49 - Tether to launch on Polkadot and Kusama

Links:
Paolo Ardoino on Twitter
Tether on Twitter
Grenache
Ampleforth website

Ardoino’s reading list:
Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Key Quotes:
“I believe that you can not really understand as a CTO, all the nuances and complexities of your platform, if you stop coding”

“the reason why our team decided to create Tether was to solve one problem I’m sure you are familiar with, that is crypto Arbitrage”

“Why don’t we create a dollar that moves at the same pace as Bitcoin”

“I would stay pure and not allow centralized stablecoins…. Crypto backed stablecoins are a very good value add to the sector, but I would prefer or would have preferred to not have decentralized stablecoins and centralized stablecoins.”

“If you are using technology and the banking network, you have to respect the same standards, there is no other way around. That is why Tether has the function to freeze funds in order to cooperate with law enforcement. We do it quite openly, and we communicate when we do. Also, we did that to help many projects. There was an exchange hacked six months ago and we helped them to freeze thirty million dollars worth of Tether. There were many DEFI projects that were hacked and we worked with law enforcement to freeze those funds. That is what is happening in the banking world if someone steals funds from your bank account, the bank has the right to freeze your funds if you have stolen funds. We had to replicate the same functionalities in our centralized stablecoins. That is something that the decentralized coins don’t have and don’t need because they don’t use the banking system, we do, and we have to respect that.”

“The idea that central banks will issue directly on Ethereum or Omni or Polkadot is quite realistic.”

“You give more freedom to your users, you will gain traction.”

“Supporting multiple blockchains makes the entire infrastructure resilient.”

Special Guest: Paolo Ardoino.

Joe Petrowski on Imagining a Brighter Future with Polkadot and Web3 Apr 08, 2021

Show notes

After a short hiatus, we’re back this week with a new co-host joining the podcast, Jorrin Bruns (Support Engineer, Parity Technologies). In this episode, Jorrin turns the tables and interviews Joe Petrowski (Technical Integrations Lead, Web3 Foundation, and Relay Chain co-host) about the future of the podcast, Joe’s journey from the aerospace industry to professional cycling to Web3, and how blockchain innovation brings together diverse interest groups. They discuss the potential for Polkadot and Web3 to realize a propian future, breaking down surveillance capitalism through decentralized governance, infinitely scalable parachains (so-called hierarchical or nested relay chains), and building a decentralized economy of robots powered by Polkadot.

Links & Resources:
Joe Petrowski on Twitter

Joe’s Blockchain reading list
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff
Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism
The Art of Cruelty, Maggie Nelson
Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O'Neil
Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks

Highlights
0:00 - Intro to new Relay Chain host, Jorrin
02:51 - Joe’s interesting journey in to the blockchain space
08:04 - What attracts different people to blockchain
13.59 - Difference between Parity Technologies and Web3 Foundation
15:47 - The potential for infinitely scalable parachains
17.28 - The future direction of the podcast
21:31 - Big tech’s misuse of data in the age of surveillance capitalism
25.20 - Transparency through Polkadot’s open governance
29.38 - Should governments break up tech monopolies?
33:19 - Literary recommendations for working in blockchain
36:20 - Blockchain’s role in building a better future
38:18 - A look at the Polkadot ecosystem

Special Guest: Joe Petrowski.

Equilibrium and the Global Impact of Blockchain, DeFi, and Web3 Dec 02, 2020

Show notes

In this wide-ranging and eye-opening discussion, Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Lesley Czuma, Head of Business Development at Equilibrium, a cross-chain money market combining pooled lending with synthetic asset generation and trading. They discuss the massive potential of Web3 and DeFi to radically impact global systems of organization and power, to disrupt monopolies, and bring benefits to those marginalized by the current economic paradigm. They also dive into what Equilibrium is building and the role played by Polkadot and Substrate, the blockchain-building framework from Parity Technologies.

Links:
Equilibrium website
Equilibrium on Twitter
Equilibrium on Telegram

Highlights:
02:00 - Web3’s potential effects on global systems of power and monopolies
10:30 - What Web3 can learn from political unions and nation states
16:40 - Web3’s impact beyond infrastructure builders
24:09 - Replacing legacy systems vs integrating with them
28:15 - Equilibrium’s mission
30:50 - Equilibrium’s role in the Polkadot ecosystem
33:35 - Equilibrium’s roadmap

Key Quotes:
“It’s not a coincidence that Web3 is sometimes compared to a borderless global society where people have the same chances.”

“This tech jump that we’re observing right now is catapulting new actors onto the world stage and forcing established monopolies to rethink their business models in order to stay on their toes, and it actually ends up being a little bit like a system of checks and balances”

“If the previously rich and advanced industrialized societies had the say on the world stage, together with some leading brands, I think there’s a clear trend that this new technology with blockchain is actually empowering individuals with no particular means, especially those have been disempowered until now.”

“Some of the large brand names, let’s say in credit cards, are keying into the process and realizing that if they don’t start taking blockchain seriously then they’re going to lose out.”

"As the scope in adoption of blockchain and DeFi grows, it’s automatically going to draw in more people from different walks of life. The mainstreaming is going to happen in the same way that it did with the dotcom revolution. You’re going to have blockchain apps becoming so essential that no one is going to be able to ignore them anymore.”

Special Guest: Lesley Czuma.

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