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. We release new episodes every week.
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