Tommy McKinnon on Helios Protocol’s scalable cryptocurrency platform

0:00I'm Ashlyn Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network today on blockchain interviews we have Tommy McKinnon the founder of Helios protocol Tommy thanks so much for being on the show it's a pleasure to have you today hey Ashton thanks for having me on the show it's good to be here you're very welcome I'm very excited to

0:21learn a little bit about Helios protocol today if you could first of all start off with what is the Helios protocol and how are you solving problems in the blockchain industry okay so the Helios protocol is being developed to solve the current problems with decentralized application platforms that result in just poor user experience on all the apps one of the main causes of this poor

0:42user experience is the reaction time of Lydia to understand this we have to look at the attention span of the average human there are two relevant limits if a computer takes longer than one second to respond it breaks the user the users train of thought if takes longer than 10 seconds it's longer than an attention span of the average human and they just lose

1:01their focus so with with etherium the best-case scenario to get into the next block if you pay like a huge amount of gas just 15 seconds so not only is that longer than the attention span of the user it breaks their train of thought as well in our opinion it makes the apps basically unusable this is actually caused some Diop projects like idec's for example to pretty much centralize

1:24their their the app when you're using the exchange platform you're just interacting with their centralized results I'm not really involved in the blockchain very much so here the knows protocol solves this problem by providing some second transaction latency allowing the app developers to to create the apps that people actually like using on top of that to get rid of

1:45the centralized web server problem every node on the hey Louis protocol has a web server built in so we believe that these features will result in true mass adoption of decentralized applications very interesting the attention span of people is definitely going down so that's good to note and one thing as well that I've noted in the blockchain industry is that the user experience is

2:09lackluster and there's a lot of developer focused gaps that don't have a very good user although they're coded very well so that's definitely a major hurdle to mainstream adoption and as you said about the 15 seconds that it takes to confirm a transaction on aetherium is very slow and that's a huge scalability problem and if we could touch a little bit on the scalability of the Helios

2:32protocol how have you achieved higher scalability and what is the current scalability of the platform yeah definitely well one of the most fundamental bottlenecks that almost all blockchain share is that they put all their transactions under a single block chain and these block chains currently add blocks like every so often and that each block totally off with so many

2:52transactions so that really it sets an upper limit on the transaction throughput and scalability so the main solution to this problem that some new projects are adopting is called shardene what these projects are doing is maybe instead of ending one block checking the left 2 or 3 or just small numbers of block chains so we took this idea even further and on Helios protocol every

3:14wallet address and DF has its own block chain and these block chains are all connected together through a day so this completely eliminates that bottleneck another feature of helix protocol that we're pretty proud of that allows better scaling is that our newly developed consensus mechanism actually gives more rewards to notes that perform better so this incentivizes nodes to be faster

3:36and faster and continuously improving performance and as an aside the last 40 years computers on average have doubled in computational power every 1.5 years so tying the performance of Helios protocol to computer processing power is pretty good it means that by by 2821 the transaction throughput of Helios protocol double it'll be double what it is now and by 2024 it will be almost 10

4:01times faster so all in all this this in our opinion makes khalil protocol scalable better than any other project we know that's great and if you were to run a D app on the Helios protocol today what's the current scalability and how many transactions per second is the network capable of all right now we're focusing on just building out the smart contract support so right now the Helios

4:27product note is just single-threaded but with so if in the future our blindness to actually make it multi-threaded and that will just it will just multiply the transaction throughput right now it's single thread well I guess one other feature healers protocol that I should mention is that the the each each and every node can temporarily shard themselves for like it's like a

4:50second level of starting for approximately 15 minutes and each one each node can take its maximum throughput and then it will all come together and and they will come to consensus again so the transaction throughput is really 100 transactions per second times the number of nodes on the network I would just say you know approximately a thousand transactions

5:12per second but once we yeah once we make it multi-threaded like these days is common to have like a common processor is eight cores 16 threads and I mean these new AMD processors are making mainstream 16 core 32 threads available so I mean we could have 10 to 10 to 20 times the transaction throughput notes start running that that's great and how long has the project been in development

5:41for so far so we started in early 2018 and we've just been going nonstop for for over just just over a year now that's awesome and I saw that the main net launched in June of 2019 could you talk a little bit about how that went and how has the growth been since the main net launch all right yeah we sure did it and it went off without a hitch as well so yeah we're pretty happy about

6:08that so since May never launched we've pretty much doubled the number of users in a period of about 2 months I guess June 30 so it's been about two months we're also in talks with some developers who are building some some exciting applications and they're going to build them on the illios protocol platform they'll be taking advantage of the D I think it incubator fund then we have of

6:32which we've allocated a significant fraction of our points do so we've just finished integrating our platform and new Audemars exchange as well and they'll begin trading on Tuesday August 27th so oh yeah on top of that we're also seeing these random shared master notes pop up like all over the community so the community seems pretty into it and pretty excited so I think yeah adoptions

6:58burn pretty well sounds like you guys are doing well since the main that launched so congratulations on that but I'm sure that the development doesn't end there right and I'm interested to hear a little bit about what comes next on the development roadmap for the Helios protocol specifically in the next six months what is the target yes right now so with the main that launched the first

7:23one on June 30th it didn't have full smart contract support it was kind of just to show all the other features that we promised so right now we're working on adding full spark contract support and it will enable smart contracts programmed in solidity and also the new Viper smart contract language from etherium that they're working on yeah we're planning to launch this

7:45before the end of 2019 so that's our main focus now and then shortly after that we'll be implementing the web servers into all the notes but I mean that's pretty standard it's pretty easy to just web servers are used all over the internet so that shouldn't take long and then something that I haven't really we haven't really announced yet but I guess I'll announce it now because

8:05we're gonna be building a chrome plug-in that allows end users to automatically connect to the decentralized network so so you're gonna have websites hosted on the decentralized network except you have a normal web servers how do they connect so we're gonna build a chrome plug-in and then on top of that we're gonna have a DNS service on the blockchain so that will allow people to

8:25buy domain names and those domain names will link to a spark contractor so somebody can open up their web browser type in a domain name or like ID X dot HL s just for example since we're already talking about them it will take them directly to website post it on the blockchain no centralized servers anywhere it's a in our opinion it's really going to be the beginning of the

8:45true decentralized Internet we're excited about that sure that sounds very exciting and I'm looking forward to seeing the progression on that especially on the DNS side because there's definitely a movement towards this decentralized internet oh yeah exactly interesting so I'm a little curious about the business model and the business of Helios you know is there a

9:08business model built in is it a sustainable business and or is it a foundation and how are you running it yeah we're pretty much a foundation we're a non-profit so far and yeah so there's been a lot of projects out there that have raised 50 million dollars or a hundred million dollars and like started around the same time as us and they they just they're gone they've gone bankrupt

9:32and where Helios Protocol is completely self-funded by the team and the founders and we're still around we're and we're delivering on our roadmap promises and like we're just dedicated to creating the decentralized internet so there's there's nothing that's gonna stop us we're just gonna keep chugging along and and it's fully open source like community driven it's not just our team

9:56anymore there's a whole bunch of developers and and people from the community that are helping out as well it's really starting to take a life of its own so like like I said it's the we're like a non-profit no real business model but we're going to build the descent isn't it exactly like we want that's great sort of like the etherium foundation you're working towards the

10:18goal and you don't need to make profits in the mean time as long as the goal is achieved right oh yeah yeah I mean we really just want we're really passionate about the decentralized internet and and we think it's like a niche market there's that there's a lot of applications that just work better on a decentralized platform than it than they do in like centralized servers and and

10:37in our opinion there isn't really something out there yet that acts as a good platform for them that it really does everything Helios well so so yeah that's that's what drives us and as you continue to grow what challenges do you foresee may come upon the team that will you'll have to overcome in order to achieve your goals just the same kind of challenges that we've been facing

11:01already just like it most importantly ensuring that we can continue to spread the protocol and our project and grow the platform so our main tool for doing so is to bring more and more developers on board we're building like useful applications and we're going to use our d app incubator fund to incentivize them and then as developers build projects on

11:24top of helios those projects will need to market themselves because they're growing they need they need customers and they're they're most likely gonna be there's gonna be a lot of profitable businesses on there as well so as they promote themselves and grow their user base it actually works as marketing for us because because those users have to use

11:43helios protocol to use their d apps right and they have to buy they have to buy Helios 2 to run to pay to run the DI mm-hmm interesting and as you continue to grow are you looking for more strategic partnerships more developers or more team members oh we're just doing everything at once yeah we're looking for partners team members developers designers community managers everything

12:09I mean our team is growing rapidly already we have we have around 30 people at this point but we're always like growth is important for us we're always trying to grow every day definitely and if there are people that are looking at getting involved in the project what's the best way for them to learn more and reach out okay well people can learn more about

12:30our project by checking our website it's Helios protocol uh-oh and we also a discord in telegram we're hanging up up pretty much all day every day you can come join our server if you want to ask the team questions or just talk to us or just join the community and every thing we do is fully open source so if you want to go look at our code and see like

12:51what we're committing and our progress you can check out our github page that's great and open-source is great especially in this decentralized community I'll leave the links to your guys social media and the servers down in the description box below and that's all the time that we have for today Tommy but it's been a pleasure speaking to you about Helios protocol and I'm

13:11looking forward to the progress as you guys grow and let's follow up in the near future sounds good yeah it's been a pleasure for me as well and thanks for having me on the show I appreciate it