Relay Chain

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

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

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Highlights

Special Guest: Joe Petrowski.

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

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

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

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Highlights

Special Guests: David Perry and Logan Saether.

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

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

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Key Quotes

Special Guest: James Bayly.

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

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

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Key Quotes

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

Special Guest: Toomas Hendrik Ilves.

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

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

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

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Highlights

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

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

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

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Highlights

Key quotes

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

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

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

Special Guest: Marvin Tong.

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

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

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Key Quotes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special Guest: Sota Watanabe.

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

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

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Ardoino’s reading list:

Key Quotes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Supporting multiple blockchains makes the entire infrastructure resilient.”

Special Guest: Paolo Ardoino.

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

Links & Resources:

Joe’s Blockchain reading list

Highlights

Special Guest: Joe Petrowski.

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

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Highlights:

Key Quotes:

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

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

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

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

Special Guest: Lesley Czuma.