Medha Parlikar on CasperLabs’ scaling solutions for blockchain

0:00I'm Ashlyn Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have met up our lekar the CEO of Casper labs Metta it's a pleasure to have you on the show today and thank you for taking the time to be here likewise thank you for taking the time to talk to me you're very welcome let's kick it off by

0:20getting a brief introduction of Casper labs can you please give us a short explanation of what is Casper labs and why you and your team believe that it is the future of decentralization absolutely so we are building a layer one public decentralized block chain that implements Vlad's amperes CBC Casper proof estate consensus system and this completely eliminates proof of work

0:44as a means of securing the network Casper relies on economics incentives and slashing to secure the network and keep participants honest so once you eliminate the hashing exercise from the protocol you get quite a bit of computational efficiency not to mention the inherent throttling mechanism that is associated with proof of work and as you know there's a lot of excitement in

1:06the blockchain space and you know the two leading block chains out there are Bitcoin and aetherium and of course they're fully decentralized right and there's a reason for this is you know the value proposition of blockchain really comes from being completely decentralized and permissionless that's where you get the security and the you know what I like to refer to fault

1:26tolerance around the transactions you know the transactions been validated by all these random knows so what's happening though is they're not very scalable right and it doesn't matter so much for Bitcoin that not be scalable because we don't use gold to transact you know in day to day so layer 2 solutions will work for Bitcoin but with the theory and when you're actually

1:47running computer programs on the blockchain you need more performance right you need to know that your computational request whatever you sent in has been processed within a reasonable amount of time so we see our platform as being able to provide that kind of through food that's necessary for real-world use cases on the blockchain that's a great explanation

2:09and I know it can get very technical a lot of people in traditional finance are still learning about the differences between Bitcoin and aetherium and all the intricacies involved with aetherium and what we can do by integrating these programming languages and well some people that have used it have experienced those scaling issues myself included that you mentioned where it

2:31just doesn't have the capability right now to have the throughput of transactions to support not just everyone in the world but even just in North America it really doesn't have to support businesses doing transactions every day so for the people that do know a little bit about aetherium what is what you're saying is that Casper is really a complimentary service that's going to

2:51upgrade aetherium or is it going to be having its own blockchain in a competitive like manner how does that fit into the theorem ecosystem yeah so you know we see ourselves as being able to do the research and take the risk that etherium cannot because if the RM is supporting they have a lot of users on it there's there's they have you know a lot of capital but has you know been

3:12developed against aetherium and so as the project becomes larger and larger even if no company right you think about let's let's even step outside of the blockchain space and you look at traditional companies the larger a company gets the more market capitalization it has it's pretty natural that it's harder and it's as it should be slower for it to adopt high

3:31risk changes as you're aware there is no CBC Casper protocol in production today and this makes it a very risky proposition and we see ourselves as a young scrappy startup being very well suited to do this kind of research work and take those risks to bring to life Vlad's and fairs CBC protocol and once it's live I fully expect that other block chains out there will want to

3:58adopt the protocol once they see how it works and in they have a running implementation of it that's great Mehta yeah there's been scaling issues in aetherium or at least people have been working on it Vlad's been working on us for many years now I believe was this something that came up right when aetherium said hey we need to start working on scaling how long has the

4:21project's been in incubation for Kaspar Laos was founded in November of 2018 but the team has been working on the CBC protocol for a little over a year so we have a good you know myself and our lead developers we have a really good understanding of what it takes to implement the protocol these things do take time but yeah we've been working on it for quite some time I know Vlad's

4:43been working on for three or four years but we got involved in early 2018 that's great and as you mentioned before because he theorem is you know a multi-billion dollar market cap already to make substantial changes is very risky it's sort of like all of the taps that have already been developed on the current proof-of-work system and then it's going to be moving to this new

5:05consensus algorithm called proof of stake for those people that are just learning about these different consensus algorithms is casper labs integration with etherium is that in line with them moving over to the proof of stake consensus or is that a separate thing altogether right so we are building a separate blockchain right so our goal is to build a decentralized layer one

5:27computational infrastructure that is based on the blocking technology we believe that the research that we are doing and once the implementation is live it'll be very complementary to what a theory was doing our blockchain is different in many ways from the etherium 2.0 project aetherium is taking an iterative approach to implementing proof of stake in principle proof of stake

5:51basically means you put up some token as a validator if you are in minor I want to participate in the network I procure some tokens and I put those in a in a wallet that's locked away as a bond and if I similarly is you talk about bondsman today and you know you put a bond up and if you engage in malfeasance behavior your bond is slashed right there's an economic disincentive to bad

6:17behavior and proof of stake systems follow this follow this same basic principle most of the proof of stakes systems that you see out there today are what we call delegated proof of stake so what that means is that the community votes on who gets to mine and who gets to be included in the protocol that's that's what we call deep Haas Casper is very different in that

6:42validators can come and go from the network as they choose so it is completely permissionless completely decentralized and there are other mechanisms by which the system reaches consensus versus saying you know these you know these X number of validators are inherently trusted and they're all honest for the most part in Casper people can come and go as they need

7:06which we believe is a key tenant to decentralisation that's the key property that both Bitcoin in a theory have that's a very interesting meta yeah and I see what you mean about the the delegated proof of stake it depends on how comfortable people are with the different levels of decentralization and they say that there's always a trade-off between certain level of

7:27decentralization and scalability or so we've seen so far but that may change right that's that is our goal I mean our assertion is that you don't have to sacrifice decentralization for scalability and those are the trade-offs that have been made till date people have been in essence trading off decentralization for scalability because it's hard it's a hard problem to solve

7:50now from my perspective I believe that there are a set of use cases that are really critical to put on a public permission list decentralized blockchain and those use cases don't necessarily need to have a very very high transaction throughput I believe that there are a class of use cases where maybe you don't need as much decentralization and you want to trade

8:11off for a little bit more centralization for speed but our focus is really that the heart of the public permissionless blockchain it the key value proposition is that it's a trustless network and the moment you centralize that you basically put a stake in the heart of like the number one value proposition that blockchain brings to bear that's great so you guys have been working really

8:36hard since November I'm sure on the development of the blockchain what does the development roadmap look like in the next six months and what are the major milestones that are coming up in terms of the test net running are there people able to run nodes and then when does main net go live I'd love to learn a little bit more about that yeah for sure so we will have a public definite that

8:57will be going live this summer this will enabled app developers to connect to the network bond and unbond from the network if they so choose and interact with the network and test their applications against the network today you can go to our github and download our node software and run the node locally and experience writing rust code and deploying smart contracts we do use Waze

9:21and we use webassembly and that gives us the broadest base in terms of you know programming languages that you can write smart contracts on but the software is available today we release software every month we are taking very much a professional production engineering approach to our software we want it to be robust and scalable and easy to maintain and manage from a node operator

9:47perspective and test net we hope will be later this year we have a very aggressive road map and we are on track to achieving that that's great man and for those developers that are looking to get involved what is the long term vision that they should see from your team in you know two years from now what does Casper Labs look like is the main net running it's we see a scalable

10:11aetherium what else would we see as the project comes to fruition yeah definitely we see main net run in two years I'm very optimistic that that will happen and we will see a lot of something very similar to aetherium I think that does provide scale you'll see fantastic developer tools I take user experience very seriously and I believe that the user experience is somewhat

10:37lackluster I hope to see great and broad support for mobile accounts and mobile wallets you know the ability to store private keys on a mobile devices is seminal I think for ad app developer you'll see great tools for middleware both putting putting information on the blockchain but equally importantly getting information out of the blockchain I think that right now you

11:02kind of send your transaction to youth room and they kind of disappear into you know they land on the blockchain by getting any state information out of the out of the global computer is very difficult so we see ourselves as building a fantastic ecosystem for developer tools and app developer tools as well as a growing growing adoption of the blockchain and

11:19and new and great features such as homogeneous sharding and side-chains as well amazing I really appreciate meta that you guys are focusing on user experience and mobile first as well and that's part of the reason why some of the popular exchanges and apps are popular is because there isn't a lot of user experience focus it's very developer focused and there are a lot of barriers

11:44to entry that come with that when you have very technical software to not be able to provide a good experience it really doesn't allow you to grow the project to the mainstream I think that's exactly right you know I I came I kind of grew out of the music revolution so I was one of the senior executives at mp3.com and I remember the day when you had have

12:06these little mp3 players right and you could get content on the mp3 player but it took like about 12 steps to get your content from a CD on to the mp3 player mm-hmm and mp3s and digital music didn't really hit the broad broad base until iTunes and the iPod came out right and what did that actually do all they addressed was user experience and they made it so so easy for anybody to you

12:30know experience the digital music revolution and I think this it actually the same thing applies here right I think to get broad adoption you need to have a really really easy delightful integrated user experience for adapt developers you need to have mobile support for accounts and wallets for end-users and I think if if we can package something up and solve a

12:50scalability problem I think about a winning solution that's a great analogy Metta thank you now one thing that I just saw recently was vitalic beuter in and Vlad Zamfir were speaking at the Stanford blockchain conference about CBC Casper labs what was the general message there to the audience yeah so I think the general message is that they recognize that

13:12scalability is a real issue right and Vitalik laid out his plans for a theory m2 dot oh and how a theorem intends to iterate right from where they are today to a much more performance solution he described in detail what the architecture of aetherium to dot Oh looks like both from the beacon chain he also described the transition plan for the validators and

13:36how they can transition their aetherium from you know being a proof-of-work validator minor to a proof of stake miner and you know Vlad's speech was very much his his talk was very much in alignment with that where he described in detail to cbc sharded consensus protocol right caspere enables itself to be sharded in a homogeneous way and that's slightly different from

13:59side-chains right when you talk about side change you're talking about a whole other blockchain a whole other consensus protocol where is homogeneous sharding really talks about a single single blockchain that is now set me splitting up the computational load across nodes and that's very different from a sidechain very interesting mm-hmm yeah and R is your team right now really just

14:26looking for more developer help or are you expanding the team for people to join how can people help with this initiative gosh the most important thing I would say is I would love to have people building two apps against the system that puts our api's under pressure right we really want to know just how hard it is for add app developer to work with our blockchain

14:48we need that end user feedback that's what's really gonna drive the user experience right so if it takes some seven steps to build into ploy their application I'm going to go back to my team and say okay how can we how can we distill the seven steps down to three steps how can we make it easier how can we provide them better error messages better interaction with the system so

15:09DAP developers and people that that are looking to program and code against a blockchain we would love to hear your feedback that's amazing and are you guys running into any obstacles or challenges as you continue this development is it just more manpower needed or is it managing the user experience along with the development what are your main roadblocks as you continue working

15:33towards the test net yeah I mean you know like I indicated that we're looking for adapt developers that want to work against the platform and you know the space is really saturated with blockchain projects right now right so I think that's that's a big challenge is what's going to draw people into Casper labs I believe that we have amazing technology that we're building on to see

15:53the promise of you know the consensus protocol and we are using a you know best practice like not best practice but widely adopted execution engine with wasum with web assembly and the parity tools so we are trying to cast as wide a net as we can but I think it's a real challenge because there's a lot of options out there for DAF developers today in terms of which blockchain

16:14project they wanted to deploy their application on definitely and if developers are looking to learn more about Casper labs or get involved what is the best way to find out more information and contact the team find us on our website Casper labs IO and check us out on github at Casper labs awesome thank you very much meta parlour car CEO of Casper labs it's been a pleasure

16:37speaking to you I'm looking forward to watching the growth of Casper labs in the coming months and we'll follow up then to see how the project is growing and thank you so much for your time today likewise thanks a bunch – bye bye you