Justin Rice on Stellar Development Foundation’s XLM ecosystem

0:01i'm ashton addison from eventchain for investmentpitch media and fintech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have justin rice the head of ecosystem at the stellar development foundation justin welcome to the show and thanks for being here thanks for having me ashton great well i'd love to start off the interview by getting a little bit of background on

0:19what you and your team are working on at the stellar development foundation and how that ties into the stellar xln blockchain uh sure stellar is an open source open participation blockchain network anyone can spin up a node and anyone can build a product that accesses the network and anyone can issue an asset on the network so it's really set up to make payments easy specifically

0:43cross-border cross-currency payments um the stellar development foundation which is the organic organization that i work for is a non-profit that attempts to support the growth and development of the network itself our goal in doing that is to create equitable access to the world's financial infrastructure but a lot of what we do is basically try to make it so that an

1:03ecosystem of developers and businesses and products can build on the network and use it as a back-end settlement for cross-court cross-border and cross-currency payments so as a foundation a lot of what we do is we steward the code so there is stellar core which is the code that allows the computers on the network to interact and share a ledger and ratify

1:26changes to it as well as horizon which is an api that allows developers to easily access it we uh work on those and try to make them functional and make sure that they improve and they continue to scale um so a lot of what we do is development time and energy and focus on those two things it's like sort of the network level and platform level on top

1:46of it um and then we also work with the ecosystem to educate them to show people how to use stellar the network uh to empower them uh both by like sort of uh connecting them to each other and showing them the possibilities of the technology and by providing support in the form of integration help and uh lumen grants and we also serve as like a speaking partner to the world at

2:09large to regulators and lawmakers very cool justin and the stellar project has been around for quite a while and i've been following it but it's not uh as popular from the people that aren't really in cryptocurrency you know they've heard of ethereum some of them have heard of ripple and stellar is right up there and i'd love to hear you know your take

2:29on why you like the stellar project so much and what makes it unique in this space good question i think that stellar has some really unique features that set it apart from other blockchains and that allow it to serve very specific purposes as i mentioned stellar is really good for cross-border and cross-currency payments and part of the reason that's true is

2:52that it has as a fundamental feature the ability to easily issue any kind of asset so stellar is a sort of supports all different assets any issuer can come and in a few lines of few lines of code issue an asset on a stellar network that can be transferred and traded and bought and sold on the network itself and it's also very easy to connect those digital assets

3:15to external existing financial rails so that they you can very easily create a representation of a real currency that can be redeemed outside of the network for the underlying uh fiat currency that it represents so the sort of features of stellar as this network that supports all different currencies makes it very easy to transmute and transfer and hold them

3:37it's pretty unique and it makes it a really great choice for any kind of payments solution that's really cool and i know that you were actually working on a project within the stellar ecosystem stellar x which is a an exchange can you talk a little bit about you know what was that experience like uh integrating with stellar and you know is the project running right now

3:59uh yes stellar x is an exchange interface that is built as like sort of an access point to the stellar decentralized exchange so one cool thing about stellar is that in addition to allowing people to issue any asset and to hold a balance of any asset to transfer any asset the ledger also stores on the account level um any offers to uh buy or sell the

4:22asset so it has built into it uh order books right so you can offer to exchange any given asset on stellar for another asset and all of those orders are sort of like held um on the ledger until they're closed right so they're just like a sort of centralized i mean it is a but it's decentralized so the at the ledger level these offers allow uh this the creation of a

4:46shared pool decentralized exchange for all assets now um you know stellar is a back-end technology it's really something that developers interact with via api and the first project that i worked on stellar is what you mentioned stellar x and it is essentially a browser right that connects the api to the stellar network and gives users a front-end experience

5:08to interact with the stellar decentralized exchange so you can use it to to like hold assets and trade assets and it shows you like the order books and and trade histories it's a lot like using any other kind of trading interface say e-trade or think or swim or something like that and it's very geared towards traders who want to take advantage of the stellar

5:27decentralized exchange and it was super fun to build on it because stellar is really easy um for developers to integrate a product like it has you don't have to worry about building all the back ends so if you're like a front-end developer or a product builder you can really like envision almost anything that the ledger can do and it's really easy to create the to use the existing

5:48tooling and like hook it up to a cool interface that has a good user experience so like it's just like a really um seamless experience for a developer and so that was definitely how i started working on stellar was designing helping to work on a product and it's just a really good environment for a product building that's very cool and i'm curious on your

6:09take on the future of trading with decentralized exchanges versus centralized exchanges it's been a hot topic transitioning to decentralized exchanges which are supposed to be better but there's a lot of ways in which they're lackluster as well you know do you see that as a transition that's happening right now i think that decentralized exchanges are

6:33challenging to to to kick start right like you need to get the flywheel going and that's not an easy thing to do and the reason why that's true is because for an exchange to work there has to be good liquidity right you have to be able to exchange one asset for another very easily and you want to be able to have a lot of pairs with good liquidity in order to have it be a place where

6:51traders want to come and actually invest the time and energy but um trying to trying to exchange the assets and i think that like as decentralized exchanges get more and more users and sort of the network effect comes into play you will have this moment when there's enough liquidity to sort of make them a more attractive option than a lot of centralized

7:14exchanges um and that's because they're not owned there's not a single point of failure for them um the people who are trading on them they actually own the assets that they're trading rather than trusting in some third party to custody those assets and there it's also possible for decentralized exchanges to have different interfaces that comply with local regulations

7:35um so i think that they can reach further into the world which is part of how a network like stellar access like gives more people access to the world's financial infrastructure definitely it seems like there's that you might need a little bit of extra technical expertise or take an extra step yourself not having that you know full support of the centralized exchange

7:54but it also allows you to maybe take advantage of opportunities that you wouldn't be able to that are you know in more early stage and i think part of that mainstream adoption is having an ecosystem that allows you to cr to create applications that can be accessed very easily by people that are non-technical and you touched on it just a little bit earlier

8:13here about having the necessary building blocks for developers to make it easy to develop on stellar but could you just again reiterate you know is it like system development kits and libraries what kind of tools do you have available for developers to be developing on the ecosystem right now yeah at the sort of fundamental layer stellar is a program called stellar core which

8:36again is what makes the network it's how the nodes communicate with each other and keep track of and ratify the ledger most developers never have to touch that because on top of that layer there's a really easy to use well documented api that gives you access to not only um transact on the ledger but also query the ledger for all the data network data but in addition to that

8:56even on top of that there are stellar sdks and i think 11 languages so whether you're developing in javascript java go python ruby you can um download you know and use this kit that is like sort of in the language of your choice and all of those are also really really well documented so the tools available for developers to interact with the network

9:18are really uh are really diverse and really robust and really well documented but in addition to like the network level of of like sort of supplies and products and tools that people can use there's also tooling that exists uh that to connect the network to existing financial rails and so there's this whole world of specs they're called stellar ecosystem proposals

9:42that explain to developers how to build the apis and tooling that connect to existing banking infrastructure in order to allow facilitate like on and off network on and off ramps and not only are there specs that explain how to do it but there's also a reference implementation called polaris that we have that you can download and like sort of use to spin up the servers or

10:05the clients that you need to facilitate those connections so there's just like a ton of tooling to kickstart development and everything is really set up to be self-serve you don't have to talk to anyone at the stellar development foundation to get building on stellar you really go find our documentation and start today because it will walk you through the process

10:26from from the beginning to the end that's great to hear especially about all the different programming languages and that really opens up the doors for many more developers and i'm curious because there are a lot of developers working on other mainstream blockchains as well do you have any incentivizations or encouragement for developers besides you know having the libraries easy to

10:47use um to make sure that they're developing on stellar rather than on something like ethereum or a similar blockchain yeah i mean first of all i would say that a lot of blockchain developers i think it really behooves them to learn to develop on multiple blockchains i think the future of a great blockchain developer will be someone who isn't limited to

11:08just working in like sort of one ledger one back-end that'll understand them all and i think that's where we're going to start to get great interoperation between chains is when people have a broader understanding however we do have an incentive to get people to build on stellar it's a very direct one so um the sdf the stellar development foundation we have a

11:30we have uh sort of a supply of of lumens which are which is the network currency but it we're it's not ours to keep right we have promised this in a mandate a very public-facing mandate um we have plans to distribute it to very specific reasons like to very specific groups of people in order to foster and encourage development of the network and one of those buckets

11:53in in the mandate is the ecosystem support bucket and a specific part of that is something called the stellar community fund so we have basically it's almost like an ongoing hackathon um four times a year we people can enter into a contest that where they where they sort of make a proposal for something built on stellar or something that just furthers

12:16adoption sellers so it can be content related to but a lot of it is for developers um and they can get they can win a lumen award for their project and those limit awards ultimately how they're uh divvied up is decided by the community by a community vote but it's actually um you know we give away three million lumens uh for a quarter so it's it's ongoing

12:38and it's a fairly uh significant um pool and it's really there to incentivize people to get building on stellar yeah that's great and hackathons are a great way to you know further get the community together and also further the progress so that is great to hear and one thing you touched on there was having developers that can work on different ecosystems

13:00and also because you know there's sort of this movement of the blockchain communities need to work together and there's that notion of interoperability of having different technologies that can work with each other and i'm curious from your perspective at the development foundation you know how much interoperability is included in stellar's know direction

13:20towards helping grow the ecosystem is it really if there is a possibility to have interoperability with other blockchains is that something that stellar has in mind that's a good question i i mean i think fundamentally stellar is set up to play nice with other blockchains um as i mentioned you can issue any asset on stellar and that includes assets that represent um sort of value

13:47on other blockchains so you can actually issue a bitcoin token on stellar that represents bitcoin on the bitcoin network or an ether token on stellar that represents ether on on ethereum and so i feel like in the design in and of itself insofar as it's an asset neutral ledger it really is set up with interoperability in mind and that interoperability extends

14:08not just to fiat currencies and the existing financial institutions and financial rails but also to more modern uh you know distributed ledger technologies and crypto rails i think that the idea of continuing to explore those connections is definitely really interesting to me and i i hope that i'm not the only one who thinks that but that in general out

14:32there in the broader blockchain ecosystem people are thinking about how we can work together uh versus against one another or you know it's the sort of team of rivals ideas yeah like we all we all want to succeed but we i think we can all succeed by working together rather than picturing ourselves as being at odds yeah yeah we're running out of time justin

14:53but i'm curious on what comes next for uh your team at the development foundation do you have any uh major milestones that you're looking to hit throughout the rest of 2020 yeah we the next thing that will happen at the protocol level on for stellar is that we're going to release protocol version 14 and it has a couple of features that really are going to make it a lot easier

15:13to build user-friendly apps on stellar so i think over the next quarter a lot of the sort of things products and changes and features that you'll see we're rolling out or that are getting rolled out on stellar are there to make it so that people can build an app that looks and feels like a payment app not like a crypto payment very cool and if there are developers or

15:33just viewers that are interested in getting involved with the stellar community what's the best way for them to learn more uh they should just go to stellar.org developers and once they're there like they can sort of get rooted to the docs or they can find a list of the different um community uh different uh channels that our community interacts with i think the

15:51biggest one is key base so you know you can find links to the stellar public key base there but you can also find a list of all the other channels so stellar.org developers great thanks so much for the time justin all the best with stellar ecosystem moving forward and let's follow up in the near future awesome thanks ashton