Alexander Filatov on TON Labs and the TON blockchain protocol

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media and the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews with alexander philitov the co-founder and ceo of ton labs alexander welcome to the show and thanks so much for taking the time to come on today thank you for having me it's a pleasure likewise i would love to kick off our

0:21discussion by hearing a little bit about your background in finance and blockchain and how that led to you co-founding ton labs sure well my career splits in three phases i was with one of the multinational corporation for nine years i was running a few large industrial companies uh in my second life you know in europe uh and 2015 i kind of got into

0:47the into the silicon valley and did a little bit of stanford and singularity university and got completely carried away with what's called exponential technologies and blockchain was on top of the list it was not yet the most obvious one back then back in 2015 but uh i kind of put it high on my uh priority list co-founded a fund called industry for zero to invest into those exponential

1:11technologies and then in 2017 i completely focused on blockchain and on the whole project specifically that's great and yeah and even since then it's exploded even more exponentially and with that you and your team created ton labs and it's a very interesting project i would love to hear you know just an overview of you know how you came to starting time and just

1:36more about what is timelapse sure absolutely the story of the project is that the project was conceived and originally developed by the telegram team the team which is behind the telegram messenger you know brothers pavilion nikolai dwarf who build a quite you know actually quite as an understatement an extremely successful messaging platform and of course they had an idea to uh

2:01you know to develop their success and develop a backhand uh which is the open network uh project that would be integrated into telegram messenger and the currently 650 million users back then it was a little bit less would you know enjoy direct access to the blockchain platform to the cryptocurrency et cetera et cetera you know it will be some sort of

2:25new evolution of the platform as um at that time we co-founded on labs with the mission to complement that effort and develop operating system on top of the blockchain because if you think of the blockchain it's kind of decentralized computations like decentralized microprocessor and like for real adoption you also need operating system on top of that kind of

2:50think of linux in the blockchain space yeah you know with developer tools with a whole bunch of helpful bindings parsing databases etc etc and that's what we and the idea was a telegram would would introduce dawn and we would simultaneously introduced on oas written on the same code base inspired by the code base but making contribution into the developer and end

3:14user adoption as well and that's what we've done unfortunately on parallel again to telegram development unfortunately telegram was you know they raised 1.7 billion dollars that got a lot of attention by acc and they lost the court and had to disengage from the project at that time there was already a large community of developers in the ecosystem about 1000 developers and our team was

3:39was basically the most prominent one back then and given that we knew the blockchain protocol intimately well because we help with debugging we developed you know more than three million lines of code on top of the of the tone protocol original protocol and again i don't want to go into technical details but it's software development kits bindings compilers

4:04and a lot of other stuff all part of the vertical stack to to work on top of tone so basically what we did is we teamed up with 22 other teams picked up the open source code which was open for everybody and in may last year we launched tom of course we had to make a few interjections into the business model one important one is uh we went for ultimate decentralization and governance

4:32probably ultimate which is an overstatement but i would say serious decentralization of governance and we can talk about this later on just not to go away from the big picture now the second one is we decided not to do talking sale of any form or shape just to be immune to potential regular risks and not take any risks because we did not do any token offering at all

4:54and i can zoom into the details or on our economics you know and how we distribute tokens and we came up with this what i believe is very promising meritocratic token distribution model we can talk about this later on the third one of course when we change the brand name to freetone free means kind of you know there is free software which isn't an alternative to open

5:16source software and free also symbolizes freedom that is free governance open for everybody to join in so um that's you know the magic behind the word freighton and changing the name of crystal oh the name of talking to tom crystal from from graham which was telegram so it's launched by decentralized community which is now quite large you know we have more

5:38folks joining the governance just had eight new teams last week uh and of course you know hundreds of teams uh out there as part of the broader governance but again we can talk about this later on it's been a year and four months you know we finalized what what we just call which we just called the foundational year where we proved that the technology is

5:59working technology is very powerful again happy to talk about this i think we delivered something which is kind of true internet scalable um through internet scale decentralized solution and we're now moving into the growth phase uh kind of working focused on adoption focus on use cases uh and of course continuing to work on the governance as we want to evolve into the

6:21what we call government 2.0 uh governance model that's kind of a short entry into the project anton labs basically became a core developer of the network so we were basically focusing on the core infrastructure uh upgrading the different elements of the vertical stack everything from the protocol itself because you know it you need to stay at the cutting edge all

6:45the time and all the way to the front ends and again can talk about our innovations on the front end as well definitely all great information alexander i i'm excited to dive into those tokenomics and the dows after but you you mentioned there you know about the development ecosystem about adoption and use cases and that's what i want to focus on right now

7:07you know there's a lot of blockchain developers in the ethereum ecosystem and now so many coming in from traditional development looking for blockchain ecosystems to easily develop on what are some of the ways that your community is continuing to grow and bring developers to work on ton as opposed to any of the others or on top of any of the other blockchains that

7:30there are to develop on because there's so many different areas to start developing now sure absolutely that's what i meant by uh by tone operating system a large chunk of that is uh is a set of developer tools kind of think of the live first of all we have two compilers one is for c and c plus plus which are quite popular languages there'll be more coming up we

7:53have a solidity compiler which is quite helpful for you know based developers c plus plus and c is more traditional folks i guess we have a very comprehensive software development kit and we have a whole bunch of bindings you know kafka graphql which helps you to parse the blockchain i i just don't want to go into too many details but it's basically very

8:18comprehensive set of tools which you can think of like thinking about you know thinking about big picture if you remember how firebase helped to simplify development for mobile applications whatever 15 years ago so think of firebase like experience where you actually have to spend much less time on development for the blockchain than it used to be before

8:42it's more like you know developing in traditional i.t segments where you have a lot of developer tools which i simplify in your life so that's the kind of stuff we're talking about and it's all life it's all launched and uh and uh yeah we we're seeing about three thousand teams slash people it's difficult to distinguish in the ecosystem active in the chats

9:06we have um as part of the governance i can talk about our system of contests that we have as opposed to grants in every contest we do even some complex ones like decentralized exchanges we had four submissions nft marketplaces we had six you know quality submissions uh and even for serious stuff like zkp we always have competition uh among the developer teams which indicates that

9:29they find the ecosystem quite quite robust to to build them that's great to hear and with the development ecosystem and using the dapps uh is the ton token required there or what are the main functionalities of where the tongue ecosystem uh is integrated in with the token sure that's a great question we have five billion of tokens uh which are currently deployed to three

9:56multi-city recall there was no there was no initial token sales of any shape which is important because you don't get the type of people who come for you know to make quick money which is sometimes happens in the other networks as we all know let's not pretend um so in our case you have to earn it you cannot there was no token sale so people have to in order to get you know tokens

10:19people have to do something for the ecosystem uh and 10 percent of tokens are allocated specifically for developers for developer adoption which is 500 million tokens um and the large chunk of tokens is allocated for adoption we call it you know for partnerships where let's say existing use cases in the blockchain that for some reason cannot make sense of some of the other

10:42networks high transaction fees or not enough throughput or something else would consider migrating to freighton or folks from from the non-blockchain space would come and um and develop for the blockchain and uh we would have tokens to uh cover integration costs uh if they're significant as well as to power their particular use case with don afriton as a back end or tom

11:07crystal as a token within the loyalty program so the simple ideas is is like this it's looking platform everybody can come and build something everybody can come and suggest the contests and if it finds a critical mass of folks who are supporting this contest you know it would be launched and uh folks will be contr would be rewarded with stone crystal tokens as a result of

11:29contributing to the ecosystem so it's like think of wikipedia the magic of wikipedia is somebody well not somebody with all the founders of course said you know let's just challenge the world to build world's largest library of knowledge you know just a library of knowledge and we have it you know we have the world's largest library of knowledge in our case it's

11:51like how can we build the largest ecosystem going obviously beyond the knowledge going into the real use cases going into the real adoption but it's not for free those who contribute we reward them with tokens in exchange for their contribution and they would all become stakeholders and would be even more passionate contributors and this is like you know a

12:13snowball effect which keeps you know growing and growing and essentially rich network effects when uh when it just becomes a global phenomenon so that's the kind of thinking that we have for the token yeah i like that mindset alexander and you were talking about you know the decentralized nature of the network as well uh is part of the ton token part of

12:35the governance or maybe you can just talk about the governance of the platform and how that works sure sure the network again it's um it's uh the network was launched by 23 independent teams um one year ago and then what we started is we start by by we always mean community i mean i'm i'm joined 0.001 thousand percent of what's happening and maybe even less than that

12:59and anton labs is doing less than 0.1 percent of what happens in the community um we stimulate the phenomenon called daos we actually call it sub governances which is a group of passionate people either united around a certain language slash geography or a certain functional area gets together and creates a mini-free tone like a dao which works on a specific subject or

13:26geography so we now have eight geographical uh slash language sub governances we have korean indian chinese french japanese vietnamese et cetera don't want to lose them all and we have 27 functional ones nft defy esports developer experience devops etc you name it and so groups of people unite get a location developer roadmap get a

13:53location of tokens and then they do um essentially their own thing you know in their specific domain and that's how we can simultaneously grow all different aspects of of uh you know functional areas and then also geographies an important thing is um what what differentiates us from the other networks is typically folks do grumps which is obviously a quick and easy thing you

14:18know i know ashton i know ashton is great and defy so why don't i give him a ground to develop to develop you know uh a new generation decks for free time you know easy quick but what you don't get is you don't get competition uh and typically when folks get grunts they kind of tend to relax a little bit so in our case it's contests always uh and the beauty of the contest is that

14:44you have multiple teams competing typically it's a short deadline uh and what you get is you get a diversity of solutions so for example in nft we got as i mentioned we got like 15 submissions which in six are quality submissions and all six took a different you know stance on before the future of nfts sound focused more on you know programmability of the smart contracts

15:10what we call true ft we can talk about that if time allows some focused more on you know gaming dynamics so we have competing solutions which can you know have higher chances of adoption um there are downsides it takes a little bit longer you know we spend more tokens versus the ground but again i explained the beauties and that's an important element of what we do is is during the

15:32contest and all of that together is what i described is part of what we call meritocratic token distribution model uh which you know rewards people proportionally to their contribution uh we just we're about to release the final version of the white paper it's actually coming i think like thursday uh latest friday and this week and it will it's a quite comprehensive 50 page uh

16:01you know document which describes all the governance innovations that we've done as well as the technical innovations and i know if you want to spend just a couple of minutes on the technical innovation uh because that's quite significant as well definitely yeah i was going to ask alexander you know with these innovations what is the some of the major next steps

16:24for ton labs you know obviously the community is playing a huge part uh but like on the core protocol are there more things that developers and users should expect in the near future sure let me spend a couple of minutes on that one so the largest thing that um you know that the telegram team uh kind of invented and then we brought you to to full production and to fully

16:48functional protocol is scalability it's uh what they call in their white paper and in their documents dynamic charging we call it multi-threading which is a more precise definition token computer language and what it basically means is that the network scales when the when there comes a load of parallel execution of smart contracts not just simple transactions

17:14but you know there can be very complex smart contracts as blockchain starts getting adoption and that's typically what folks don't talk about typically when we talk about you know scalability we talk transactions and the numbers are typically achieved in one single data center but it's not it's not really the central only decentralized internet-based network

17:35so what we have is a network that splits under the load uh you know and we can have a significant number of work chains you know to support that to significant scalability what we achieved last week in real time real life uh internet based tests only decentralized network of 200 developers is speeds of about 50 000 transactions and again we're talking execution of

18:01smart contracts on parallel uh forward square technical will understand that this is a significant milestone uh and then again it was only on a limited number with limited number of validators and charts so architecturally it can it's linear linear scalable it means that by any more validators we can go to half a million transactions million transactions and we think tens of

18:26millions of transactions if needed what it means that it's um it's kind of a proven uh internet scale network which can handle you know you can put twitter in there if you need it you can put you know read it in there if you need it you can put other a lot of you know fintech solutions if needed uh and and you know as which is not you know the reality of today it's just

18:51coming but uh it's it's what we believe it's the first architecture it's the only working architecture for ultimate scalability so that's the most important innovation there are a couple of other ones like we came with this concept of engineering decentralization and delivered a solution which we call debots which is which allows you to open decentralized

19:13applications straight from the browser from the front end with no weapon in between which is which is quite significant you know that's something that web3 folks still have to you know to uh to come up with uh because there's there's always web somewhere uh in there and we have functional you know which is web web free and we're going to promote that concept of web free and

19:37maybe suggesting a dao you know that allows engine decentralization um and there are many more i would probably mention true nft as well because all of the nifties that we see today on the market don't typically accept some you know in some rare cases don't have interface in media is part of the mft it means that media is sitting somewhere else with all the problems like vulnerability

20:03that you don't actually own that media as part of the as part of this smart contract as part of the nft so we're what we're also promoting globally now is this true nifty concept where interface and media is is also part of the nft uh and for that we are we have a special work work chain storage which is optimized to store significant pieces of media

20:23i can continue but i'll probably stop with those three kind of significant innovations definitely that all sounds really great alexander i'm looking forward to seeing that in ton labs and yeah perfect timing we don't have a lot of time left so for the viewers users developers and any other people that are interested in the ecosystem in following along and becoming a part

20:46of ton labs what's the best way for them to learn more sure well done labs io is is the website of us as a core developer and again we are focused on the core core infrastructure and then freetown.org is a large community site which you know it's like a catalog which would send you to the forum to developer resources etc so freetown.org is a place to go

21:11sounds great alexander i will leave those links as well in the description box below all the best to everyone in the community at time moving forward and let's follow up in the near future thank you so much esther it was a real pleasure you