Relay Chain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special Guest: Shira Frank.

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

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

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

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

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

Special Guest: Jasmine Zhang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special Guests: Chris D'Costa and Toufiqur Chowdhury.

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

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

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

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

Special Guest: Sergey Nazarov.

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

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

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Key Quotes:

“I believe that information is power”

“I think privacy is very political intrinsically”

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

Special Guest: Claudia Diaz.

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

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

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

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Special Guest: Alain Brenzikofer.

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

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

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Key Quotes:

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

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

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

Special Guest: Wei Tang.

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

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

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

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

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

Special Guest: Adam Dossa.

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

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

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Key Quotes:

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

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

“Substrate is an ecosystem.”

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

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

Special Guests: Joshy Orndorff and Shawn Tabrizi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special Guests: Ingo Rübe and Timo Welde.