Welcome to epicenter of the show which talks about the
Technologies projects and people driving decentralization.
And the blockchain revolution, I'm set of sync with you all.
Today we're speaking with John, let a co-founder at Chi 5ky.
I've is a protocol that helps developers store retrieve and
Validate data on and off chain. And we're going to be diving
deep into cock. Today are sending how it works.
It's interesting place sort of sitting between Cosmos and our
weave and also use cases and the product roadmap.
Before we get started, I just want to, I just want to shill
nebular Summit here for a second because we did launch the
website and it's really exciting - Summit is happening in Paris
again this year on July 24th and 25th.
Right after ECC websites live, it's nebular.
Builders and early bird tickets are on sale for just $39.
You get access to two days of probably one of the best
interchain Builders conference in the world.
I would argue, you know, going hit going towards that number
one spot for for the best interchanging developer
conference. And we're really excited to have
announced the venue. Which is this really cool
business school in the center of Paris called Albert school.
So be sure to check it out and get your tickets if you plan on
being in Paris this summer again, websites nebular, dot
builders And you guys were both there last year and hoping to
see you guys there. Again, this year, for sure, we
got my spending quite a few team members down this year.
Definitely. Yeah, we really want to make
this a developer conference. I guess what?
I'm trying to say here, and, and we'll have lots of technical
content and workshops, but that's enough of that.
John, tell us a bit about yourself and how you got to be
here, of course. So, yes, that's no.
I'm done. I'm the co-founder and CTO of
chi, I've a good place to start is probably like how it got into
crypto. So, you know, you know, come
from like more like an academic background doing a lot of
research. Doing a lot of research and AI
which like now is like a Hot Topic but I'm quite deep into
crypto now. So you know so like came from
like the academic side of things, Don took do in 2019.
I was doing an internship for a month, a start-up actually kind
of touched on data. They're a little bit because
what we were doing there and again this is when Enterprise
blockchains would like the same thing.
And so basically we were building an Enterprise
blockchain based off of a theory.
Mm that was dealing more real and Sorry, that's some point.
Exactly. So, you know, it's like my first
interaction with smart contracts with etherium with, like data
involved in the mixed arrows. Loads of fun.
Kind of fell out of it though. After that.
So you know, like that was like my first interaction with crypto
but when I really got like heads down to crypto was actually
during the Copa lockdown, it's like 2020 like started it
summertime ish and kind of bite chance fell onto our we've and
just like discovered it And you know, like what fascinated me
about our we've actually it's like right now everyone.
Kind of just assumes that Dave has permanent rights like when
you have photos and whatnot on your phone, you just like assume
that it's permanent, right? But in reality it's actually
not, you know, maybe you have like an iCloud backup or
something like that again. Very work too.
But like in the end, state is not actually permanent.
And so it was kind of a cool realization for me.
I was like actually this is a very Niche problem that they're
solving like like really fell in love with the concept of it.
Of course, you know I'm a huge history nerd as well.
Also that also kind of fascinated.
Me about like permanently storing everything.
So, yeah. So like joined the community.
I was actually one of like, the first, like, you know, Community
developers, like, really just like building lots of random
cool stuff in our. We've, yeah, so fell into our
weave in 2020. Played around with a lot of
different things there. So, if you don't know, there's
like an, ER, C, 20 like token standard on top of, Are We?
And so I created the first-ever decentralized trading platform
for that again, loads of random cool stuff and then, yeah,
throughout all that process of working on projects.
I met my co-founder Fabien. You guys have talked to before
and then through that, you know, we worked on loads of different
sides projects hackathons in different things.
And that's actually kind of how we came across.
The idea for Clive is because polkadot and are we've at the
start of 2021 put together this bounty.
And it was basically like, Hey listen, you know, right now we
have a problem where there's not a lot of full notes in our
Network. And by the way, this isn't just
a problem for polka dots problem for alone of blockchains because
full nodes are actually not incentivized in like poop State
networks, in general. And so polka dot was like, Hey,
listen, like it would be great if you could come of
decentralised access to like a full note, I'm like data that
the full node has and so polka dot, you know, created the Grant
on get coin with our we've and me and fabulous.
All right, we're like, hey that's really cool.
You know, we can like archive all the polka dots data from a
full node onto our. We've so, you know, like one
weekend and a simple script later, you know, we went to Sam
who's the CEO are. We don't like, hey, Sam listen
like we have this and you like, wow, okay, that's really cool.
You know, we talked to polkadot, they were happy with it and then
Sam was Oh by the way, you know when polka dot did this they
weren't actually the only blockchain the wanted to do
that. And so through that we got
connected to, you know, everyone from Avalanche and Solana to
near. And even The Interchange
foundation of the cosmos, we got connected, like everywhere.
And then we kind of saw the need for tool that permanently sorts
like full note information. But then of course, you know we
saw the fundamental like trust problem there.
We're basically it's like, if it's really just like a Script
that we're providing to the foundations of these blockchains
the trust of like the fundamental Trust.
Restrictions are still there basically.
And so we said, okay we can take this one step further, right?
Instead of just permanently storing copies of this full node
and blockchain Ledger information, how about we also
then decentralize it and make it restless.
And so that's kind of when the idea for cock was born and then
like two and a half years later, we've just launched.
Our Cosmos layer 1, which is really cool.
Yeah, I guess there is a lot to dive into their I think
especially maybe we can already start there, but I guess I've
already started out initially on our we've then I think you move
to to Moonbeam, until I finally like launching your own Cosmos
may not. And again, congrats to the
recent launch. I think, you know what would be
very interesting for many people is probably you know like you're
one of the projects that has done this migration and it seems
like a lot of people are Doing this migration either in that
direction or maybe, like, from obtain too smart for her.
I guess I've seen that last but probably more like going for a
smart contract to like a chain. And I guess would be interesting
to hear your reasons of why how you chose to do that and what
what it gets you as a kind of protocol, for sure.
Yes. So I would actually very, very
curious to hear people's reasons for going from a nap chained to
a Smart contract. That's going to be very
interesting reason. So anyways, so yeah, so like you
said we want from a smart contract from are we to
Moonbeam? Which for anyone that doesn't
know that's basically F most on polka-dotted CVM but on
substrate and then. Yeah.
After that, we then migrated over to our own like Cosmos
option. Yeah.
Basically fundamentally the main reasons for that is that smart
contracts degrades, right? Like they, they definitely have
their purpose and like, daps are amazing.
But what we realize is that, we were just Just not scalable
enough. Like they were just not
scalable, not for us. Because like when thinking about
Kai, I've right, we're building a full decentralized Network,
right? And you know, smart contracts
can only go so far. They're great for, you know,
building a MMS and they're great for doing entities and tokens
and whatnot, right? But when you're trying to build
a full scalable network, with actually like a validator set,
It gets a little bit complicated, especially in the
ebm space where you have to like constantly and I mean,
constantly optimized for gas. It was like we were really,
really like having a hard time thinking about.
Okay, this is how we like store validator sets and rewards and
everything like that but then, okay, that's one way of doing
it. And then how do we optimize it
that it doesn't cost a fortune but then even like that the
problem is that you're sharing block space because it's like
and like fundamentally the way that like Like a theory, mm
gasps models work is basically, you know, the more contract
calls and interactions on the network, not just what your
contract, but in general, the more expensive it gets and so
you know we saw it's like in nft launched or something like that.
You know, cost of running a node would go from like a reasonable
price because we optimized it to something like crazy, high and
ridiculous. And so is like those main two
reasons which is just like scalability, and then also just
like cost efficiency and like, sharing block space, we're like
the two Main reasons why we decided to kind of look into AB
chains. So we were, of course, looking
into a few other options kind of Apt in ecosystems, if you also
like, you know, Avalanche has it subnets, you know, a lot of
other options ecosystem. So now kind of Spun up since
we're looking into this but in the end honestly, the smoothest
process was actually just cosmetics and you know, at the
time was called starport and now it's called the night CLI, but
we were actually like the entire Tech team went to East Denver
2022. And, you know, we had done a lot
in Cosmos before that. So we are already very familiar
with it and then we're like, Hey, listen what happens if we
just use ignite just try it out, right?
And so, you know, we're like sitting at youth Denver, like,
in a, we work sometimes, as well.
We just like, okay, let's just do this.
It took us about like, five days in total like of conversion and
whatnot, to get like an internal definite up and running.
So like five days to convert from solidity smart contract,
which we had worked on for, like, a year to like, completely
over 2A. Most obtained.
And it was really cool to see, of course, you know, been taking
Dev next, that you spot up in five days to something a little
bit more concrete. With the validator sets,
definitely took some time, but and lots of learnings, but no,
it was, it was like loads of fun.
And that's kind of the reasons why we switched.
What does the ignite CLI? You know, as a sort of like
non-developer, but, you know, someone who's fairly technical,
I guess what it is about, what is it about, the ignite CLI.
That just makes that process of Of porting over and a theorem
smart contract to essentially an app chain.
Easy, give you talk about your experience in doing that more
specifically about like, of course.
Yeah, so like with the route like the latest release of the
cosmos SDK and with the cosmos SDK Eden release coming up a
year, so I don't actually know the timeline there but like
they're definitely removing a lot of the needed like the
boilerplate code that you need, when A cosmo stop chain.
The problem is that like when we did this year ago there was
still a heavy need to have all that boilerplate code around.
And so, you know, you know, developers just coming into the
ecosystem, they don't fully know their ways like in and outs of
all the different things that you need.
Like fully run the cosmos capturing.
Right. And so what the ignite CLI does
is it basically takes all that boilerplate code that you may or
may not know that you need to have, right?
We as you're just like starting on Cosmos.
It takes all that boilerplate code and generates it for you
and so it's like makes it really easy to say, okay listen, this
is what I want my state of my blockchain to look like it's
going to have these values and then it kind of just generates a
boilerplate for you from their long term, of course, if you
want to like, actually run a chain of production, definitely,
you know, you need to remove a lot of that boilerplate code and
really understand the fundamentals, like what's going
on which is what we did after the fact but like what was
really like, fantastic. Eric and what makes switch so
easy. So that they just handled all
the kind of the cosmos nitty-gritty details for us
without us needing to like fully learn it.
And then that allowed us to really easily then say.
Okay, this is our core logic. Let's just only focus on the
core logic and ignite will handle all the cosmos logic and
then after we focus on our core logic or like, okay, now let's
dive deep into the cosmos and land and see what's up.
So yeah. Cool.
Yeah, I mean that's, that's something that I've also heard
from from other people. I guess like that.
Yeah, okay. The cost of CK, it does have
like a lot of boilerplate code that is necessary to launch a
chain, but that ignites CLI allows you to forego having to
write a lot of that code, I guess a lot of people now are
also may be going like an even simpler route, which is building
things directly and cause them Azam, you're not like You know,
even for growing the cause of the CK, to some extent like with
initiatives like the cause I'm awesome SDK and I think it's
only going to get easier to start up a cosmos, A chain, a
chain in the future as as these tools become more and more.
Yeah, more more mature and and easier to leverage for sure.
Yeah. I mean like using Cosimo's and
smart contracts for a lot of your logic is actually really
smart. I would say, like, Mars is
probably the latest project that has done this.
We're basically they took all All the basically just took a
boilerplate cosmos SDK acting, and then they said, okay, cool.
This is like old stuff that we need and then they just put it
right into a smart contract. Just really nice and like, yeah,
like you said, cause Muslim SDK that Larry from the Mars team is
working on. That's also some really cool
stuff. I think there's actually like a
lot of cool joint stuff that you can do there to kind of optimize
everything. Yeah, so let's maybe just take a
bit of a step back here because we do want to argue about Hive.
And and, but before we do so, since we've never actually done
an episode with Kai Vaughn on on epicenter, although I've
interviewed Fabiano on the interop and Felix does
interviewed you on the chorus one podcast.
I do think the for our listeners, hear it Bears,
remaining people who don't know about kind of what it is and
what problem you're solving. At a high level.
And and then we can dive into some of this other stuff wanted
to talk about which is you know, are we even Cosmos and some of
the use cases I think you know, for listeners who really want to
dive deeper into cos I've probably that won't be the the
sort of arch of this episode. But you should definitely listen
to my episode with Fabien on the interop or Felix's episode with
you. On the course one of bottle
caps, those are both great. Great resources.
You want to sort of like start at the ground level.
But yeah, go ahead. Okay, perfect.
Yes. So just to clarify, you want me
to kind of like talk about like what kind of exactly does?
Yeah. Yeah just thought I'd high
levels of explaining what it is, what problem you're solving and
the different components. And we can, we can talk about
some of the other aspects, one to discuss today. so yeah, you
can really think of chi is building a massive decentralized
data link now that's like a lot of those words but basically
what it means is we've connected to a lot of major L ones and how
to's, you know, kind of like I mentioned, we've been working
since our like very beginning with, you know, a polka dots
Lonna near Cosmos Avalanche like you name it a lot of major L1
and L2 and what we do is we've actually built this proof of
stake Network that can connect to all these different
blockchains and then pars information from them.
So this could be as simple as really just block and
transaction information. It could be Ledger information
like account balances, and whatnot.
Or on the like more complex side.
This could be things like evm Trace is, you know, logs from
Smart, contracts Etc. And what happens is that this
validator set then independently, each one of the
validators goes and connects to the blockchain and then they
fetch information from it. Do some sort of transformation
if needed on top of that data. And then what they do is they
use our consensus layer which is tenorman, comment, B of T,
paste. And then they basically say,
okay, listen like I have this piece of data.
Did you guys also get that same piece of data if they did?
Then what happens is? Then of course, that data is
then validated and then it's an automatically pushed to storage
Network. Like or we've basically what
that allows you to have is then that allows you to have one
single Network, which is Kai. Which has access to a lot of
data from a lot of different networks.
That's automatically completely trustless because it's already
been validated and it's stored forever due to our we that's
really cool because then you can build like a lot of things cross
chain. Also it helps a lot even like in
kind of like the more traditional aspects where
basically, I mean, Felix, we've been kind of talking to you
briefly about like an accounting tool, right?
Or basically, you know, you can use this on chain data that.
Not a lot of Of nodes or our PC. And points might necessarily
have to then really easily fetch, you know, data that you
need on the accounting side of things.
There's a lot of different use cases, which I think will get
into later the a fundamentally we're building a massive
decentralized, a blink. Yeah, I think what's really
interesting there? Right?
Is that you have these sort of two roles like the protocol
layer and like the validator layer I think.
And can you maybe right? You mentioned the storage pools.
Can you sort of walk through a flow of someone?
Maybe like, actually the entire lifecycle, actually, someone
uploading some data and then do they retrieve.
It would kind of again, or do I have to go directly to our?
We've how would I use this? Of course, so we can kind of
start at the base layer so we actually have two layers in our
Network. And this is of course until vote
extensions is the thing and Cosmos, but basically for now we
have two layers so we have kind of the normal tender me.
In Cosmos layer that everyone is kind of familiar with where you
have this validator set, uses delegate approval, steak tender
make kind of managers that all for us, reaches consensus, on
the state of our Network. That's what we call our
consensus layer, the names, pretty obvious, I would say.
And then, what's on top of the consensus layer is actually
something, we like to call the protocol layer.
It's actually a separate validator says.
And this is actually just a kind of keep everything a little bit
more efficient, instead of building everything directly
into the tenement validators themselves, But the protocol
layer really manages data Park. I've so like you mentioned, we
have something that we like to call storage or data pools.
I always like to give the example of action, you can think
of it like liquidity pools almost is for example where each
liquidity pool, manages a pair of tokens?
Very, similarly, a storage pool or data pool ankh.
I've managed has a specific data Stream, So that just keeps it a
lot easier. Because someday streams can be
more computationally expensive or Anything like that.
Just kind of like a separation of interest there.
We're basically, you can have a data pool for Solana data, you
could have a data pool for, you know, swamp, smart, contract
events, anything like that the way, like now kind of zooming in
directly into like a specific storage pool.
The way that it works is, it's a round-robin approach.
Very similar to ten women. Actually, we're a validator gets
randomly selected. We call this validator,
actually, the uploader. So, this is normally Acoustic
networks called like a block proposer.
But in this case, we're not actually proposing a block,
we're uploading data. So that's why we call it the
uploader. The uploaders job is basically
to kind of propose the piece of data that they think is valid.
So they go off, talk to the blockchain.
Let's just say, for example, Salama?
Right. So they go off to Solana.
Say Hey, listen Solana. I want blocks 10 to 100
something like that, right? It's a lot bigger snapshots than
that, of course. And so basically, See what
happens is the uploader fetches a snapshot of blocks from
Solana. And then it proposes it to this
validator set on the protocol layer.
And then, and then I basically they say, Hey listen, I have
blocks, you know, 1 to 100 of Savannah.
Are these blocks? Correct?
And so then each of the other validators that are not the
uploader, in this case, they then go off independently using
their own connections to Solana and validates to make sure that
you know blocks 1 to 100 are actually correct.
They do then, you know, there's a voting process.
Again, very similar to Tender mint, mint proof stake in
general. There's a voting process.
And then if you know more than, you know, 67% of, you know, the
validators voted, yes. Then the piece of data is
actually correct. Once the piece of data is
correct, then of course it's then uploaded and like pushed
off to our we've we're going to be onboarding a lot of other
Storage Solutions soon as well. So it's not just our we've that
we support. We kind of have a Huh.
Cool. Little wrapper around any
storage layer. So you can really easily
integrate ipfs or file coin or storage or, you know, Green
Field, which is like the new by Nancy Vaughan, for example.
Yeah, exactly. That's kind of like the life
cycle of the data being validated.
On the retrieval side, we kind of offer a few retrieve.
The products of course, you know, you independently can just
go directly kind of talk to Kai Vint.
I will say, Hey, listen, if you want this piece of data, it's in
this, are we've translated. Action ID, and then you can then
go and fetch it from our weave and do all that fun stuff
yourself, but we kind of offer two products right now.
One is kind of a more B2B product more Enterprise product.
For basically, we automatically kind of do all that internal
fetching for you. We're basically all you need to
do and it's powered by air by the way, which is actually quite
cool. It's really easy way to kind of
connect a data stream to any web to data infrastructure.
So just be mongodb it could be Something more complex, like a
Kafka queue or snowflake or anything like that.
But basically, it's a service that we provide were basically
you just say, Hey, listen, this is how I want the data and it's
like an ETL Pipeline and then we will automatically give the data
back to you, of course, like a little bit more like on chain B
to C customer product that we're going to be offering soon as
actually our Oracle which would be really cool because it's
powered by IBC. Cool.
Yeah. What?
So what is the leverage IBC here?
And like, I guess I'm yeah, I'd like to maybe transition a
little bit here and to, you know, how are we are.
Sorry, how kind of connects Cosmos to our we've, so, yeah.
How do you leverage our BC and maybe describe Hawkeyes?
I've sort of sits in between Cosmos and are we even in some
way? Yeah, for sure.
I'm so kind of, we kind of set. More like on top of them.
Right? Because you have our, we've met
net. And then you have like of
course, our consensus layer and then our protocol layer kind of
like sits on top of both of them and then connects both of them
individually. Yeah.
So like there's no like we didn't create IVC clients
between our we've and between are even our Cosmos chain.
That's actually incredibly interesting because our we was
proof of work so that would be fundamentally incredibly Going
to create an IBC client between the two of them.
But anyways, that's like four. Maybe five 2.0, or something
crazy like that. Anyway so the way that it works
right now is like I kind of mentioned before that uploader
has the job of you know, not only kind of like pushing the
data to our we've but also reaching consensus on that piece
of data using our tender meant blockchain.
And so it's kind of like a connection between the two of
them where basically the uploader first uploads that
piece of data to our weave and then the validators and reach
Census on that piece of data and then if that data is incorrect
and basically the kind of network will then like store.
Hey, listen, this are we've transaction hash or you know
this ipfs CID is actually validated and is correct and
this is the metadata for it and that's kind of how we connect to
our, we even do that. I like the IVC side of things
that's kind of more going into like our Oracle product which
will leverage IBC to basically be able to.
You just send As a token like for payment, like you just sound
like, I've tokens or any governance enabled, the payment
method, and then you basically just do an IBC transfer and then
utilizing the memo field of that IBC transfer.
You can basically initiate a query for any data that type is
archived. So you could basically say, Hey
listen, I'm going to pay, you know, 15 again.
Not be real numbers here. But like, I'm just going to pay
15, and then I would like to fetch, you know, Solana block.
X 1 to 1000, for example. And then what would then happen
is, that would be sent by IBC and then of course, Skype has
that piece of data. So then using entertain queries
and we just send the response back and then you could now have
completely trustless, so long, the blocks on your Cosmos chain
and then you can do whatever you want with that.
But yeah, that's kind of how we leverage IBC and then also
that's how we kind of connect us to our we as well.
Can you maybe expand a bit in terms of you said, basically the
proposer uploads the data, and then the validators have to sort
of validate if it's correct. Does that mean?
Like all the validators have to download that state of that
chain or that that program, or whatever it is.
So yes, like at the end of the day, it's really up to the
validator to decide how they actually connect to the network
itself, right? Because fundamentally, if they
receive invalid data, then of course, they're going to be
proposing with like invalid data.
And then of course, they're subject to a slashing and like
it's a major recession. And so it's kind of we've left
it up to the validators or basically like we expect certain
RPC and point for certain different Networks.
But fundamentally how the balladeer is actually connected,
so that is up to them, right? So, you know, a lot of the times
and this is what we encourage, of course, is, you know, running
your own node in the network, right?
Just for like Optimum security. But of course you know, if you
want to go for like the more hosted coinbase cloud or block
Damon approach, like that's also okay.
Like we don't like put like a exact architecture requirement
on it but at the end of the day it's really up to the validator
to decide like what risk they're willing to take care.
The like the important thing though is like we make sure to
like double check to make sure like where the data is from.
And so like if everyone just using like infra for example, is
like an RPC endpoint, then of course, that's going to be
problematic. And so we have checks in place
to make sure that it is from many different data sources.
But yeah, of course, like how the validate actually connects
to the network, they can either run their own node.
They can use an RBC provider, something like that.
Could you leverage and you know and I have you thought about
encouraging folks to leverage a decentralized RPC provider like
like lava for instance, I think there's some other ones a
Gateway while they made comment. For example, not pocket.
I mean I'm sorry you have pockets.
I know. I just appreciate it.
No like yeah. I think of course there's
definitely some like cool collaborations to be down there.
Actually like law was definitely very interesting because there
are also Oh, based in Cosmos. So I wonder if they're connected
to really get a little bit more Synergy there because of course,
they're basing Cosmo. So IBC kind of connects us.
All right. So like haven't directly thought
about it. To be honest.
It was just like we just kind of settled on this architecture for
now. We wanted to get main that out
as soon as possible. But of course, going forward.
This is definitely something that we want to look into,
right, because it's like, if we can even decentralize the RPC
side of this, it would be perfect world, right?
And so like, yeah, we've done everything that we can to
decentralize on our side. Of course, definitely further.
Collaborations are definitely more open for that.
Okay, cool. I want to talk about our we've a
little bit like, I have a, I have a close friend who you
might know, who's they're building a chord.
Yeah, of course they and and, you know, he, he shells are
eased me like all the time and I kind of get it but I still like
also kind of don't get it or I don't really get you know how
economically a how it works like with highly cannot it works how
the smart contracts I work and and so yeah, I'd like to, I'd
like you to maybe self once and for all for me, how are we smart
contracts work? Because they're fundamentally
different from another form of smart contract.
And what I've understood is that are we've conquered smart
contracts are executed off chain and settled on chain.
And so I've got about that far but it just sort of breaks my
brain. Yeah.
So are we smart contracts? Definitely something interesting
to wrap around and I to be honest, I don't exactly call
them smart contracts because and we can get into my later.
But let me first kind of touch it.
Briefly on Mike, what are we is and how it works.
So it's a proof-of-work. Blockchain been around since
2018, lots of, you know, project to use it, it's really big and
like the empty space especially because, you know, if you don't
pay your IPS alone, well, sorry. Everything is gone, right?
So there was like a mass of adoption, you know, they
partnered with meta For example, they're also partnered like on
the moron chain side of things with and blinking.
Now just as I was about to say that like the main like Solana
and ft Marketplace stuff like that I met effects.
There we go. And so basically the way that it
works is it's not actually a blockchain.
It's a block weave which is really cool because what happens
is every single piece of data that is mind into our.
We've what happens is that there's basically a Pointer back
to a previous data item that has previously been uploaded to our.
We, so basically, every single block points to a previous
block, which is why it's a block will weave, which is actually
quite cool because that ensures that there's always like some
access to some historical piece of data on our beef, right?
So if you are the current minor of a block in, are we if you
don't have access to the randomly selected?
Of data, then you can produce the block and then it moves on
to the next person, right? So basically encourages the
entire network to have as much of the data as possible.
The way that the incentive model actually works is quite
interesting. So, you know, it's proof of
work, so there's just a fundamental block payout per
block. I don't exactly remember what
that is and something I think that there's a having mechanism
in place Etc. But what's really cool is the
transaction fees or calculated with this really cool Crow
equation, which uses and I quote this This because it's not
really Moore's law, but it's like a similar concept of
Moore's Law. We're basically, it calculates
how much it's going to cost to store this piece of data.
So let's say that your archiving like one gigabyte, right?
So it are we've basically the network calculates how much it's
going to cost for the next 200 years to store 1 GB.
And then basically what happens is that at that 200 year mark
There's like a slow Decay curve that happens.
Which basically shit says overtime SSD and HDD should be
getting better and better and better.
And there should be like a significant cost reduction.
We're basically after 200 years or so give or take.
That data should be fundamentally free to store.
And so basically what happens is on are we if you pay for 200
years of storage up front and that's what your transaction fee
is like transaction cost to store your piece of data and
then what happens is that actually doesn't get paid out to
the validators are starting up validators, the miners in the
network but that actually then gets put into a block reward
pool. I forget the exact name for it,
but what's cool about that is then the basically you have this
like Like almost like a community pool Cosmos, right?
You just have like this treasury of like an insane amount of are
we? That's just like sitting there
locked and what's cool is the network automatically?
Calculates, if the current level of data on the network?
If it's actually like the block pay out?
Like the normal approval work, block pay out if that's not
enough incentives for the miners to automatically cover the cost
of storing all the data. And if it's not covering all the
costs, then it Matically does a distribution of that massive
treasury, which is really cool. Because then over time, you
know, let's say, for example, one year storage costs goes up
by lat then automatically that would then incentivize the
ballot, like the miners still in the network, or if it gets
cheaper than vice versa, right? So, that's kind of like
fundamentally, how are we Works in a nutshell and I can clarify
anything else if that was too complicated.
Okay, smart contracts, though, and I don't know what to call.
All right, so smart reef is like the official name for it.
Like you mentioned, they're not like there's no execution on
chain. So in, you know, in the case of
Solana, you know, cause a malls and even and, you know, the
Solana VM like basically, every single normal smart contracts
platform, the way that it works is you deploy the code on chain
and then you interact with the code with the transaction.
And then, that transaction has a result, the changes, the state
of that, Code and all that happens on.
Chain the way, the smart weave works is fundamentally different
to that. What happens is, you deploy the
code. And so you basically have these
see, no contract eye candy, if you will.
And then what you do is you just interact with it by just sending
transactions. But those transactions are
literally just like normal, are we transactions?
There's nothing special about them except for like the tags in
place. So like you can then tell that
it's a smart, we've transaction But if you ever want to access
the state of the smart contract, it's not stored on chain.
What you? What needs to happen is off
chain. You then need to basically
create this execution environment, where basically,
you fetch the code, and then from Genesis, you need to replay
all the transactions. This is actually one of the
reasons why we switched away from Smart.
We've because of course, you know, having to maintain almost
like a caching layer of chain for your smart.
Tract is actually quite intensive and completely
centralized. There is definitely some things
going on. Now, in our, we get, like, are
trying to solve this problem, making it a little bit more
decentralized. But fundamentally, if you have
off chain computation of States, there's not a whole lot that you
can do there, which is like, kind of the main reason why we
kind of Switched away from that. And then went to the evm based
smart contract again and like that's not like throwing any
shape and That just like explaining how it works, which
is just like off chain execution.
Yeah, I think like fundamentally are we was really great layer 0,
where basically you can just throw any piece of data that you
want to are. We and it handles out really
well. I think smart contracts does
have a little bit of time that it needs to like grow into like
a fully developed ecosystem. Primary sensor you're basically
saying right? Like are we still very useful as
like this data storage layer but essentially with the smart we've
it sort of trying to also compete I guess on a smart
contract level it. But that might like exactly like
yeah. It's like like like like for me
are we going to be trying to do a little bit too much with smart
contracts, right? It's like they've really and I
think they've done a really really, really good job with
dealing with a data scientist, right?
But like, and like, that's why. I said they were great layer 0.
You can really throw whatever data you want at argue.
And it's like a perfect economic model, that's great.
We got like, fundamentally it just like smart contracts on top
of it. Treating it more like a layer 1
layer 2, like model, not quite there yet.
Yeah. When when someone describes sort
of Are We smart contracts to me. It sounds you were talking
earlier about, you know, our previous our previous Enterprise
blockchain building days. It sounds very similar to
something. We're trying to build back then
which which is, you know, this this sort of off chain execution
on chain settlement, but there's not even believe settlement with
smart week. That's Thing.
Yeah. Or like whatever.
I mean, whatever you want to call it, the gone chain
notarization, I guess. Yeah.
And then the other aspect about our we've that I still have a
hard time. Wrapping my head around is like
the economics of, you know, you're talking about this, this
storage. Like this on chain storage.
And yeah, sure. I guess we can assume we should
assume that storage costs go down over time.
I think that's you know a safe assumption to make there is one
thing about are we that I find a little bit weird is like this a
this this inability to delete things like Yeah, I can kind of
Step In My like like fundamentally that was the first
thing that I thought about when I thought of our was like yeah
this is this is great. If there are only good people in
the world, there's also lots of bad people in the world to like
this is obviously something that could go terribly wrong.
So like the thing is is that actually built into each.
Our we've note, there's actually kind of like a blacklist that
you can put in more like a block list.
Now that it's been renamed, there's a block list that you
can put in, we're basically pieces of data or content that,
you know, is like, in fact vulnerable or malicious or, you
know, illegal, treading lightly here, what you can do is you can
then, like inside your Arduino, just Choose not to store that
piece of data and was actually really cool is that if more than
51% of the network has a specific transaction blocked,
then we'll actually dropped from consensus.
Assuming it's not encrypted exactly assuming that it's not
encrypted, right? And so there is a way to delete
data, right? We're basically the majority of
the network does not have the piece of data, right?
But yeah, of course that does imply that it has to be
encrypted. Is sorry, it has to be decrypted
and a lot of things have to apply there.
I think they're actually trying to spin up like a dowel to
manage this a little bit, but yeah, yeah, I was also wondering
like, do you, is it actually clear like, who runs the are we
from Network? Who are like, the can you like,
traceback how, who produced, how many nodes and sort of see how
much control there is from certain entities or something
like that? Like, I guess how you have
voting power in proof of stake, sort of To be honest, I don't
actually know so you can like check who the peers are in like
but, but like that's more like the active peers in the network,
right? So I get the guess I gotta and
maybe this is just like, not a problem, but like definitely
like a design flaw in proof of work or basically there's like
no roads way of like, Who's actually the validator sets
right now, right? So I actually don't know, I
think like so of course you can check, who is the minor of every
single block. Of course, I would take a long
time, but you can and you can kind of go back and see like
what has been like what that has been produced where but yeah
improver work. There is really no way of like
checking who is in the current set if you will which does
actually set up a little bit because I would actually also a
security little bit better to write.
I think it's one of the core kind of benefits of fuglsig,
right? If you have slashing that, you
can go back and like, destroy stake of someone in versus like,
poof world where you can't burn down the server farm.
So, like, I've heard that comparison that's comparing like
Bitcoin. And I guess it also applies to
our way of, to a certain degree here.
But yeah, that's that's a nice Excursion.
I guess we can we can take it back a bit, too.
I mean, you already also mentioned right.
Like, I have Other data storage solution.
So that's I think also like very cool, right?
It's very abstracted there, and I think that's very useful, but
maybe we can also talk about, you know, now you have the I saw
on the website like something on the road map, like KY F version
2. Can you maybe expand a bit?
Like what what else is coming there?
Of course. So I guess like yeah the main
thing involved there's actually the Oracle this like IPC enabled
data query with that, quite a lot of stuff actually comes with
it, unlike the optimization of the protocol layer.
So you know like I mentioned at the very beginning, we have two
layers when to vote extensions are release.
We're definitely going to look into kind of combining those two
layers because right now there is a little bit of a fight
between the two validator That's right because it's like
whichever or valid are set has the biggest apy right like
talking about like just like delegator is for this pure sake
of earning rewards, right? Of course, there's going to be
like a little bit of a steak fight going on there if you
will. And so of course, you know,
we're looking into Solutions, like superfood, staking and
whatnot. But long-term of course,
combining those two values sets is definitely something on the
road map for sure, and that's kind of fundamentally.
What goes along with kind of Another thing, as well as like,
right now, the Oracle is only allowed to like query.
What we store directly on our chain, right?
Which is more like a summary of what stored on are we.
So let's say for example that we you know, done a massive
snapshot like ten thousand blocks of Cosmos, right?
What happens is that all of that data is stored on our we've but
we only store like the headers or the hashes of each block on
our chain, right? And that's just strictly because
like we're not building It's like are we if we can't handle
all the data, right? And so basically what the Oracle
can currently query for right now and this is going to be
released soon is basically just like the headers and whatnot,
the data but like long term, we really want to make sure that
like, what will happen is, you can just do an oracle request.
And then our Network handles, all the going off, talking to
our, we've indexing, the data and giving you a really nice
response. Also, I'm kind of tied into to
Chi 2.0 there. Of course, there's like a lot of
other stuff that I probably can't talk about, but that's
like, what I'm really excited about for sure.
And like, yeah, it's actually mostly tied around kind of like,
bringing the queering process on chain, with the oracle.
Right. Maybe also, I guess we sort of
went into it a bit, but I'm sort of wondering what if there is a
mismatch, I guess between. the data provided or like there's no
consensus and then there is There is a slashing you said, is
there like some dispute mechanism?
If that like sort of was actually the right data or how
do you like sort of settle that? Yeah, so the way that it works
is you have the uploader there, you know, of course, you know,
proposing a chunk of data. If the uploader has okay.
Now, this is now getting into like now, how proof of stake
Works, which is basically each validator, will then say, okay,
is that correct? If more than 51% of the
validators say yes, this is the correct piece of data.
Then that data goes through what happens which is actually quite
interesting as all the validators that didn't Say that,
that data is correct. We basically put them on like a
watch list if you will will. Basically, we give them like a
point and after a certain number of points, they actually do get
slashed. So if those validators that are
actually voting in the minority, if they keep voting in the
minority for a wild and there will be a slashing event there.
But there's not really a dispute mechanism after the fact just
because we want instant finality to go along with tender Mint or
basically a piece of data while it's reaching consensus is still
undecided. But once consensus is reached
it's finalized and that's when you know that the data is valid
or invalid so there's not a dispute mechanism in place but
basically we do have mechanisms where basically the majority.
Is, what is actually happening and like that's what reaches
consensus in the minority. We always keep our eye on the
minority to make sure that that doesn't get out of hand or out
of control. All right, let's go.
So it's sort of like a multi round game that you're playing
seconds. Okay, cool.
So, let's get into use cases here.
I mean, you know, I think there's a lot of use cases and
we already touched a little bit on on some, but yeah, maybe
describe, you know, which are the the ones that you're most
excited about. And maybe also, which are the
least obvious ones that people should be thinking about or, you
know? Yeah, for sure.
Let's do it. So yeah.
So I mean, I've kind of already touched on like, our ETL
pipeline, which is like, The more, you know, Enterprise
focused solution that we provide that this is going to be more
like, you know, indexing partners.
And, you know, accounting tools and whatnot.
People are really want access to like large amounts of historical
formation. Of course, you have the Oracle,
which is like one chain and that, you know, can be, you
know, I mean on chain, Oracle information is like powerful and
like smart contracts down to like the core layer of
blockchains to kind of the unexpected use case because It
kind of ties into the Oracle a little bit is where actually
partnered with say so like say networking Cosmos and it's
actually quite interesting because they want to use us to
fetch like weather information and like sporting information
and okay for people that don't know what to say is it's
basically trying to create a market around anything and so
what we've done at kaiba's we made ourselves so General that
we don't actually need to store like like we don't.
Only need to store plotting data.
We can also store web to data as long as there's a way of
validating it. So basically, meaning it has to
be deterministic data, right? Can't be changing every other
minute. So, for example, like weather is
a good example of like, okay, like a weather not predictable
weather but like you know, historical weather, you know,
and stuff like that. That's of course, you know, we
can handle and what say wants to use us for is basically they
want to fetch information like that kind of a little bit
information. In, you wouldn't have actually
expected and then they want to create a betting market around
that, which is, you know, cool, right.
Like definitely something I wouldn't have expected but you
know it's cool. Not unless of course, you know
like more the expected use cases that I'm quite excited about is
you know we're working with quite a few validators.
Like course one for example. And what we're doing right now
is we're coming up with really like clean way of sinking a
tender moment notice. Not just 10 different notes but
like other notes from all the networks as well, sinking at
Enderman node using types data, which is really cool.
Because right now, if you want to sink a note, improve the
steak you have to either use those trusted snapshot.
And you kind of have to just Trust whoever gave us a snapshot
to you, that it's actually correct or you can sync from
Genesis, which is like a multi-day to multi-week process
depending on how like, old the network is.
And so yeah. So because we have all this data
already stored historically. It's really easy to then just
like connect a tender meat. No directly to Kai.
And then sink directly from there and not just Enderman, but
also like near and other networks as well, that's kind of
use. I'm most excited about because
that's like the initial use case that I started Cog with which is
basically like this exact thing and so kind of seeing it come to
fruition. Now is really exciting.
Yeah. So I wonder if this address is
also another issue, so the state sink, use case, when I talk to
Babylon, they were saying they also kind of blew my mind.
And and and and pointed to the fact that in the a lot of
Cosmos, And there has to be this kind of canonical, you know,
checkpoint where validators have to have to agree on.
Like, what is the most, the, the sort of state that everybody
agrees is valid? And in a lot of, I don't
remember where, but, like, somewhere in some costumes,
documentation, it says, that people should agree on this on
this state, like, on off change channels, like Twitter, or what
sighs it's like so fucking and yeah.
Yeah so this is like social consensus and so with with
Babylon what they what they allow is basically to you know
create a hash of State at some point and then like notarized
that on the Bitcoin blockchain or sort of committed to the
Bitcoin blockchain and the way they describe it is that like it
would eliminate this this social consensus need but also
potentially eliminate the need for long on bonding periods for
steak. And force taking, you know, for
steak basically you know for delegator has to on steak
because we know that there's social consensus around like
State being valid at up until this point does the sky.
I've also address The same problem and could it also reduce
on bonding periods Force? Taking the same way that say,
Bob Babylon is, you know, of trying to to add as a feature.
It's nasty. Yeah.
Because I've like I've talked about Vaughn team many times and
exactly the same thing, you know, social consensus.
This is why you should never ever, ever, ever ever have a
voting period in Cosmos longer than the Unbound.
Ting period because in massive problems happen.
Same thing. Why there should be a like a
clear ratio between IBC trust periods.
And the mm bonding period. Like there's a lot of like
numbers that you should really not play around with that much
and Cosmos and it's yeah, it's hidden somewhere in the
documentation that's like yeah. I'm like worst-case just re
social consensus, right? Which is like cool guys but no
and so it's like yeah I don't actually know.
So like I never really thought about it in that way.
It depends because right? So we are technically anchoring
data of these chains on our, we've but it kind of boils down
to fundamentally the market cap or like security level of the
Anchor Point, right? So kind of Babylons value-add
there is a basically Bitcoin. Well, It's Bitcoin, right?
So like it's the biggest market cap in crypto period, right?
So, although, yes, we are an anchor.
I think fundamentally anchoring on our we are.
We've has a smaller market cap than I like osmosis for example
or something like that. Right?
So like yes, although we could definitely be an anchor.
It's kind of missing that little period there which is just like
You know. The the the actual like the
market cap comparison is done actually quite there.
What could be interesting though is like creating a storage
back-end Fork. I've we're basically we go off
and talk to bitcoin. That could be something cool.
Right? Where basically, you know, like
again, we don't want to make competitors here just to be
click, but just like thinking out loud.
Like, I think that there would actually be way that we could
then, you know, instead of going off and talking to our.
We like I mentioned we can talk to a little bit different
layers. We could then go off and talk to
bitcoin and then we could then be an anchor.
From Bitcoin some of the Babylon.
Interesting use case haven't thought about it yet but very
cool. Right?
I guess the difference also with Babylon, you'll probably only
see if your state is sort of correct, right?
You just check the header if it like matches but you can't
actually get the data from the Bitcoin Network, right?
You would still someone has to send.
Yes you you what we would do is we would first validate the
entire state of the blockchain. We could then push the headers
to bitcoin and still store the To the blockchain, like the rest
of the full data on. Are we, if we could kind of do a
mix doubt, it should be really cool then?
Right? Because you have like the
anchoring and security side of things on bitcoin but then you
can still access the validate the data are we cool right?
We use case, we figured it out here on epicenter perfect and
the any other any other use cases the your you're
particularly interested in Or bullish on or would like to see
people build using Kies. Now, if the top of my head, I'm
sure there are. I'm sure that I'm missing some
for sure. I think I'd like to do use
cases, I mentioned, for sure are, definitely kind of the main
ones that were, you know, really excited about, of course, you
know, we're starting our grants program soon.
So hey, if you have a Claudia Send us a message, go build it.
Yeah, exactly. All right, well, let's talk
about the road map a little bit and, you know, that grants
program, always something. Maybe we can touch on a little
bit, but yeah, what are the plans for Kai few Point O?
And and also, I don't think you guys have a listed token.
Yes, X, right. So, like a more imminent.
Roadmap is right now. Of course, actually, if you go
right now and you look at our Network, we actually only have
the Later life. And we just did this to
basically reach enough like Security on the consensus layer,
making sure that it's actually very stable before then
launching our protocol layer. So right now we're not
validating any data and maintenance of course in both of
our test Nets were actively validating data but on the main
network not validating data just yet.
So like first thing on our roadmap is kind of launching the
protocol layer with our first storage pool.
Can't say which one just yet, but will be very exciting that
should be coming out in the next month, for sure.
So that's like the first thing I'm A roadmap second thing of
course, is also the like the listing on dex's and Sexes.
So that's going to be very exciting.
Yeah, kind of going long like more long term, of course,
definitely getting our Oracle product out.
That's going to be super exciting.
We're definitely hoping to launch an oracle MVP as soon as
possible. Like, you mentioned, then kind
of kind of 2.0 maybe like a little bit of a revamp.
Their like, I talked about earlier with, like, combining
the two layers together, stuff like that, we just kind of to
see where we're at that point. That's kind of like the road map
for nowadays. And then of course you know
alongside all that the grants and the bug Bounty program or
stuff that we're you know actively talking about now
instead of the foundation and so yeah very excited to kind of see
that all come to fruition as soon as possible because yeah
kind of giving back to the community.
Doing a lot of like subbed out initiatives and then also like
seeing the community just kind of build lots of use cases that
we might have never seen before. Yeah, that's the roadmap.
All right, thanks so much John. I think we learned a lot about
kind of, and especially also, are we today?
And I think a very exciting use cases, you're tackling and you
can see already that yeah, many many areas are like actually
touched upon this, like, even in the blockchain data world, but
I'm sure there's like a lot. Like, if you, if you step Beyond
dead like the say, use case, I think it's going to be like,
some really exciting things if this all works the way I think
it does. So, Yeah, super excited.
And maybe before we wrap up, I guess, like a final question, we
could be, like, you know, where where do you people find more
about out more about kife, and like maybe the grants program,
can you share a little bit how people can get in touch with you
and then get involved, of course.
So like for now there's not a lot of stuff around the program
just yet because we're still working out all the internal
details and whatnot. But of course you know easiest
way is just, you know, like our email Psych on our website, you
know, website is kind of network.
You can reach us there by email. Hello.
Graham Discord pretty much everything to be honest, we have
there we're launching The Forum soon actually.
And that's could be like another way that you can reach out to
us. Yeah, sorry nothing on the
roadmap, the form which of course we need.
We're going to be doing a lot of stuff around layer governance
process and stuff like that. That's probably the best way to
reach out to us is just like going to the website and using
your favorite social network to get ahold of us.
Great. Well, thanks so much for coming
on. It's been a fascinating
conversation. Thank you so much.
Thank you for joining us on this week's episode.
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