Relay Chain

Latest Episodes:

Web3 vs. Web2: How to Avoid Repeating the Same Mistakes Apr 09, 2020

Show notes

What can we learn from the failures of Web2 idealism? How do we build systems that continue to reflect Web3 ideals as business models scale into the future?

In this episode, Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity) talks with Shira Frank, co-founder of Maiden, the first global user research lab dedicated to forging a path to mainstream blockchain adoption. They explore the importance of building Web3 systems with proper research into possible downstream risks so as to create true change and offset imbalances of wealth, power, information, and agency.

Links:
https://twitter.com/shirabfrank
https://twitter.com/maidencrypto
https://maiden.global/
https://sub0.parity.io/

Highlights:
01:25 - From Middle-East politics to blockchain
09:45 - How Maiden started
12:00 - Failings of Web2.0 idealism
14:00 - How Web3.0 can avoid the same mistakes
15:55 - Sense making and the role of user data
22:01 - What is a blockchain “user’?
24:00 - The role of education
29:55 - How to make protocol change decisions
34:49 - Importance of diversity in the space

Key Quotes:

“The biggest problem we have to solve, in so many ways, blockchain or not, is how do we make decisions that are collectively intelligent for the whole?”

“I don’t think the general Web2 or tech community actually solved inclusivity or diversity.”

“We know what happens when decentralized protocols scale. So we have no excuse to not include major threat and risk mitigation at the very beginning of choices we’re making about how we are introducing products, what kind of products we’re building, and what kind of business models and incentives we’re putting into those products.”

“We talk in blockchain a lot about autonomy or self-sovereignty. And I’m always curious, can you be sovereign if you’re not even aware of why you’re making the choice you are?”

“Today institutions make money by taking agency away from people. I would imagine we create something where institutions make money by giving people agency over their assets. So what would it look like if people were making money by giving you agency over your money? Giving you agency over your data? If the more agency you were given the more money and scalability there was in this protocol.”

“I think it’s worth thinking about at the protocol level. Just like with the internet, what should have been done early on to protect against the aggregation of power that happened at the application layer and the company level?”

Special Guest: Shira Frank.

Investing in the Future of Web 3.0 Mar 26, 2020

Show notes

How do you place a value on a more open, transparent, and representative web? What will be the true impact of blockchain technology and what motivates VC investments in the space?

In this episode, Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity) talks with Jasmine Zhang of IOSG Ventures, an early-stage venture fund investing in the blockchain space. They discuss the future of web 3.0, the impact that open finance and prediction markets will have on society, the potential impact of Polkadot and Substrate, and the broader blockchain investment scenario.

Links:
IOSG Website
IOSG on Twitter
Jasmine Zhang: Jasmine@iosg.vc

Highlights:
01:25 - Why invest in web3.0?
04:26 - How can web 3.0 fit into web 2.0 business models?
10:00 - How blockchain applications will democratize finance
13:06 - How prediction markets will influence society
24:33 - How do you determine the valuation of a protocol?
29:20 - Value of Substrate
31:11 - Why come from China to Berlin for investment?

Key Quotes:

“[Web 2.0] definitely brings more convenience to our daily life, and you feel like you cannot really live without these applications. On the other hand you also feel like, at the end of the day, they’re all platforms. And platforms create value by connecting the service providers and the end users. But they also try to maximize their profit and can one day expand their commission fees from the two sides. You’re kind of taken advantage of by them in a certain way. They sell at you into every part of your life and then they become super huge, they become like giants—more money, more data, more capital that is generated by us, the end users. And they they can use all of these resources to keep building their monopoly.”

“Web 3 is a new way, more personalized way that you share your data. To be your own boss of your data. So you have ownership of your data. Is going to be more open, more transparent, and more fair.”

“A centralized authority will never beat the efficiency of a decentralized economy. Because knowledge is unevenly dispersed among the whole of humanity. Only if you can combine them can you have a better decision to be made.”

Special Guest: Jasmine Zhang.

Innovating Blockchain-Based Accounting with Totem Mar 12, 2020

Show notes

Why is the “black art” of accounting still stuck in the 20th century, and how can blockchain technology make it more efficient?

In this episode, Joe Petrowski (research analyst, Parity Technologies) speaks with Chris D’Costa and and Toufiqur Chowdhury of Totem Live Accounting, a blockchain-based accounting system. They discuss why today’s accounting practices are so inefficient and how blockchain technology can improve them. Find out how Totem is innovating accounting for the 21st century, how the project fits into the Polkadot ecosystem, and why the team decided to build on the Substrate blockchain framework.

Links:
Totem on Gitlab
Chris D’Costa: chris.dcosta@totemaccounting.com

Highlights:
01:23 - Accounting & accounting software explainer
05:00 - Problem Totem is solving
07:74 - Totem active vs. passive users
13:00 - Dealing with different jurisdictions
15:20 - On- vs off-chain data
19:10 - How Totem fits into Polkadot
20:35 - Why use Substrate to build Totem?
23:15 - Current state of Totem development
24:16 - Totem’s native token
27:00 - Inefficiencies of current accounting practices
31:41 - Similarities between accounting and programming
35:20 - Why blockchain is perfect for accounting
46:20 - What’s ahead for Totem

Key Quotes:

“Generally people think of accounting as being a bit of a black art.”

“Accounting is one of the spaces that doesn’t get much love in the tech world. You don’t see many startups that are doing anything really innovative in accounting.”

“It’s crazy that a lot of this gets done manually when a lot of these accounting rules are formally specified. If you can put it in a formal specification then you can write instructions for a machine to do it.”

“Global corporations are in desperate need of having their own currency. It sounds crazy but it’s true.”

“Trust is one of the issues…but there’s also the issue of things that just get overlooked. This happens not just in small companies but also in big companies as well. Invoices don’t get paid, or they get sent to the wrong department, or somehow they just got missed. And large companies as well as small companies spend a lot of manual effort to put that back together again.”

“In Substrate you can upgrade the runtime, so that helps us with continuous development, upgrading the system, making the changes that are required. If we had a smart contract it would have to be redeployed completely.”

Special Guests: Chris D'Costa and Toufiqur Chowdhury.

Chainlink: Oracles, DeFi, and Social Impact with Sergey Nazarov Feb 27, 2020

Show notes

What are the challenges in integrating off-chain data into blockchain smart contracts with oracle systems, and how might secure, oracle-powered DeFi create meaningful social impact?

In this episode, Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity) talks with Sergey Nazarov from Chainlink, a decentralized oracle system bringing external, real-world data to blockchain-based smart contracts. Oracle systems like Chainlink are a necessary part of decentralized finance (DeFi), for which off-chain data such as market prices are used to trigger smart contract functions. We discuss the inherent challenges in integrating off-chain data with end-to-end security guarantees, the barriers to building smart contracts that go beyond tokenization, Chainlink use cases, the promise of blockchain for social impact, and how Chainlink is planning a Polkadot integration.

Highlights:
01:04 - Chainlink overview
07:20 - Oracle weakest link problem
14:45 - Chainlink use cases
17:40 - How to trust off-chain data
22:53 - Social promise of blockchain
41:00 - Chainlink Polkadot integration

Links:
https://twitter.com/SergeyNazarov
https://chain.link/
https://docs.chain.link/docs
https://twitter.com/chainlink

Key Quotes:

“The thing to remember is, what you’re doing when you’re making DeFi products or smart contract insurance is yes, you’re making a smart contract because you’re using on-chain logic, but you’re also expanding what you define a smart contract as. And that expansion into this off-chain realm of data delivery or randomness, for fraud-proof gaming or any other set of off-chain resources, needs to be equally secure if you expect that contract to hold large amounts of value.”

“The guarantees that society provides around ownership, when compared with Bitcoin guarantees, are laughably weak.”

Special Guest: Sergey Nazarov.

Privacy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism, with Nym's Claudia Diaz Feb 13, 2020

Show notes

What is the role of privacy in the modern age, and how do we go about protecting it? How can new technologies help shield us from the rise of surveillance capitalism?

In this episode, host Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity) speaks with Claudia Diaz, Associate Professor and researcher at K.U. Leuven and Chief Scientist at Nym, an open-source, decentralized, permissionless protocol providing full-stack privacy infrastructure. We discuss the recent history of public perception on privacy, how to balance the trade offs between technology’s benefits and its use for mass surveillance, and how Nym is building infrastructure that protects our privacy rights by default.

Highlights:
01:24 - Claudia’s history
02:19 - 9/11 and the erosion of privacy
06:20 - Snowden’s impact in US vs EU
08:15 - Defining privacy and how to protect it
17:46 - Surveillance capitalism & opaque systems
21:11 - Balancing tech benefits and privacy
22:25 - How privacy technologies can help
24:03 - Transparency & information asymmetry
25:00 - Benefits of blockchain vs other technologies
27:29 - What Nym is building
39:50 - Anonymity vs privacy

Links:
Claudia Diaz @ K.U. Leuven
Nym on Twitter
Nym website
Nym on Telegram

Key Quotes:
“This idea of individual control—my data, I decide—while I understand it is compelling, I think it’s a bit limited. My view is I think we need to build systems in a way that we just don’t have this exposure by default.”

“I believe that information is power”

“I think privacy is very political intrinsically”

“One of the problems when you start talking about all the privacy threats is that you almost want to just disconnect yourself from the internet and throw away your phone….But that’s not the point. I don’t think we should be regressive and go back to some ideal past.”

Special Guest: Claudia Diaz.

Designing Universal Basic Income and Trusted Execution Environments Jan 30, 2020

Show notes

How do you design an effective universal basic income scheme on the blockchain? What are trusted execution environments, and how can they be used to enhance privacy?

In this episode, host Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity) speaks with Alain Brenzikofer of encointer, a blockchain-based universal basic income (UBI) system, and Supercomputing Systems, which is developing the SubstraTEE trusted execution environment (TEE) framework.

With encointer, Brenzikofer came up with a novel way for personhood to be established so that people can’t game the UBI scheme: time-synchronized meetups called ceremonies. Encointer is also potentially the first cryptocurrency project innovating local, geographically-based currencies. With SubstraTEE, Brenzikofer is working to improve the privacy, scalability and interoperability of Substrate-based blockchains by off-loading state updates into TEEs.

Highlights:
00:57 - What is encointer?
04:00 - How to model a UBI system
06:37 - Proportional transaction fees
08:05 - How encointer ceremonies work
10:37 - Innovating local cryptocurrencies
14:50 - Privacy and trusted execution environments
22:52 - SubstraTEE
30:27 - SubstraTEE target user base
38:35 - Current state of SubstraTEE and roadmap

Links:
https://encointer.org/
https://github.com/encointer
https://github.com/brenzi/substraTEE

Key Quotes:
“One thing special about encointer is that I’m not intending to have transaction-based fees. I want to have proportional fees. That means there is no issue with micropayments in developing countries for example. Because if you look at the transaction fees of bitcoin and ether as well, the transaction fees can be as high as a day’s income or even worse.”

Special Guest: Alain Brenzikofer.

Ethereum: Past, Present, and Future with Parity Core-Developer Wei Tang Jan 16, 2020

Show notes

In this episode, hosts Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity) and Phil Lucsok (Product Communications Manager, Parity) speak with Wei Tang (Core Developer, Parity) about his work on several Ethereum- and Substrate-related projects. They discuss Tang’s experience working on Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Substrate, including innovative proposals for account versioning, backwards compatibility, and bridging and merging different Ethereum chains, as well as the future of ETH 2.0 and the broader Ethereum community.

Tang is known amongst his peers as an exceptionally gifted and prolific developer, having built the SputnikVM Rust implementation of Ethereum from scratch just by reading the Ethereum yellow paper (without looking at other clients), and having created the Substrate EVM implementation in just a few days.

Highlights:
00:57 - Why open source and Rust
03:30 - Building an Ethereum VM implementation from scratch
05:53 - SputnikVM and ETC
08:22 - Ethereum account versioning & backwards compatibility
15:10 - EIP 2225: bridging and merging different Ethereum chains
20:00 - Multi-client transaction validation for Ethereum
25:00 - Contentious EIPs and improving governance
26:52 - Shasper and implementing Ethereum 2.0 on Substrate
31:57 - ETH 2.0 challenges and roadblocks
34:07 - Substrate EVM
37:19 - Solri and Kulupu: Substrate meets proof-of-work

Links:
Wei Tang on Twitter
Wei Tang on Github

Key Quotes:

“I really like working for open source because you are essentially building a community.”

On EIP 2225: “Currently it’s really easy to create a chain split…you just disagree on something and it just forks. But if the disagreement disappears, if the community decides to come together again, there’s currently no way to merge those blockchains together again. You can split but you can’t merge. I just think that’s a bad thing.”

“Currently we rely too much on the people factor for governance. Everything is a human procedure….What I always want to propose is that we should add more automated processes into this.”

Special Guest: Wei Tang.

Democratizing Access to Wealth Creation: Tokenized Securities on Polymesh Dec 19, 2019

Show notes

What are the benefits of tokenizing regulated assets, and how might it revolutionize the world of finance?

In this episode, Joe Petrowski (Research, Parity) is joined by Adam Dossa, Head of Blockchain at Polymath, a security token platform currently building a custom blockchain on Substrate called Polymesh. They discuss the world of tokenized securities and the promise this area of decentralized finance holds for democratizing global wealth creation. Dossa also explains Polymath’s reasoning for moving from Ethereum to Substrate, including the unique benefits of the blockchain building framework.

Highlights:
01:35 - Benefits of tokenizing securities
07:51 - How to verify the underlying asset
12:52 - ERC-20 vs Polymath’s ERC-1400 token standard
16:44 - Limitations of Ethereum
18:14 - Polymath’s white label solutions
19:57 - Operating in multiple jurisdictions/Polymath modules
23:39 - Moving from Ethereum to a custom Substrate blockchain
26:48 - Benefits of Substrate’s GRANDPA consensus mechanism
28:55 - Benefits of Substrate’s forkless upgrades
31:00 - Users and use cases Polymesh
42:51 - Interaction between modules and smart contracts
47:00 - Progress status of Polymesh

Links:
Polymath website
Learn more about Polymesh
Polymath on Github
Polymath on Twitter

Key Quotes:

“Financial infrastructure should be transparent and accessible. It should be more like a public good than siloed, private infrastructure.”

“Whilst Ethereum is great, there’s a saying: ‘You can please some of the people all of the time or all of the people some of the time.’ Ethereum is a general purpose blockchain, it’s not optimized for any specific use case. In our particular domain of regulated securities, there are some choices which are not optimal.”

“You have this huge, trillion-dollar regulated securities market globally. If you can bring those assets into DeFi, that’s like DeFi times a hundred. You have all these interesting, varied asset classes and you can start to use those as collateral. Instead of using Ether as collateral, you can take your Apple shares, your Tesla shares, or some basket of shares and use those as collateral.”

Special Guest: Adam Dossa.

Building a Custom Blockchain with Substrate Dec 05, 2019

Show notes

What is it like to develop on the Substrate blockchain building framework, and what resources are available to developers? How different is it from developing Ethereum smart contracts?

In this episode, Joe Petrowski (Research, Parity) is joined by Shawn Tabrizi and Joshy Orndorff from the Developer Experience team at Parity Technologies, where they help developers building or interested in building on Substrate, regardless of experience level.

Highlights:
01:12 - What is Substrate?
02:18 - Substrate Seminar open collaborative learning call
07:08 - Substrate Off-Chain Workers
16:29 - Substrate Developer Hub
17:17 - Developing for Ethereum vs. Substrate
25:15 - Substrate Kitties
27:35 - Substrate maintenance/upgrades
33:13 - Current developer experience

Links:
Substrate Developer Hub
Substrate Seminar
Substrate Technical Riot Chat
Substrate Stack Overflow

Key Quotes:

“If you want to build a blockchain and you don’t want to build every single piece from the ground up… then you can use Substrate and you can take all of the common parts from our standard implementations, and the only thing that you have to code is the part that’s unique to your blockchain.”

“If you’re part of Substrate Seminar, you can actually get access to the latest features right as they come out of the gate.”

“Substrate is an ecosystem.”

“Smart contracts aren’t the only way to get your logic on a blockchain.”

“We want to make Substrate the best platform for blockchain innovators.”

Special Guests: Joshy Orndorff and Shawn Tabrizi.

On-Chain Trust with KILT Protocol Nov 21, 2019

Show notes

How do trust and identity work in decentralized systems, and how can we help ensure our data isn't abused by centralized authorities?

In this episode, Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity Technologies) is joined by Ingo Rübe (Founder and CEO, BOTlabs) and Timo Welde (Product Owner and Technical Lead, KILT Protocol) of KILT Protocol, a built-on-Substrate project providing credentialing and authentication for web 3.0. Learn the difference between identity and attribution, and how KILT is building the future of decentralized trust.

Highlights:
02:35 - Why KILT is bigger than identity
07:50 - Problems with web 2.0 authentication
11:30 - Attack vectors and KILT security
17:00 - KILT developer experience
19:35 - How roles work in KILT
23:00 - Attestation use cases
28:30 - Substrate and the KILT stack
31:40 - Possible Polkadot integration
35:45 - Regulation and the future of KILT

Links:
KILT website
KILT github

Key Quotes:

“Identity should not be solved at the protocol level…. There are many things that you shouldn’t solve at the protocol level.”

“What we wanted to deliver is something so easy to use that a normal web developer could be successful in building applications on top of it.”

“Trust is generated outside the system, it’s just transported into the system.”

“Building your own network of validators is a pain in the ass.”

Special Guests: Ingo Rübe and Timo Welde.