Eden Dhaliwal on Conflux Network’s upcoming mainnet release

0:01i'm ashton addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and fintech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have eden daliwal the global managing director of conflux network eden welcome to the show it's a pleasure to have you here today thanks thanks for having me you're very welcome i'm excited to dive into conflux network so if we could

0:20kick off the interview by getting the viewers up to speed with a little bit of the background on conflux network and what is the purpose and the vision of the project sure so conflux is a high performance layer one blockchain uh and it's led by turing award winner dr andy yao this project was born out of the labs of xinhua university which is sort of the harvard mit of china and

0:47after we made a breakthrough in solving what's known what's known as the blockchain trilemma problem we decided to introduce this technology to the world as a global public network with the purpose of facilitating open commerce and cross-border collaboration and so in 2018 we conducted a regulatory compliant fund raise of 35 million dollars to build out this

1:13infrastructure and since then we've earned the status of being the only state endorsed public permissionless blockchain in china um which puts us in a fantastic position to introduce the benefits of public infrastructure in china and provide a regulatory compliant gateway to the china market for global players wow that's very exciting and congratulations on all

1:40of that so far and there's and still so early on i just want to dive a little bit more into the technology side uh because a lot of people are familiar with you know bitcoin and ethereum uh and this is being a layer one protocol as well can you talk about if there's anything unique specifically to conflicts network and maybe if there are any major differences

1:58between the other smart contracting platforms like ethereum and eos well in traditional blockchain architecture like like bitcoin um what happens is that there's a long longest chain rule that determines the main chain and um what happens is you know um all the forked blocks get discarded and don't affect the longest chain determination and so

2:26um the transaction of these forked blocks are not recorded and therefore miners aren't rewarded so that's a disadvantage and then furthermore uh the computing power invested in the discarded blocks doesn't contribute to the security or the throughput of the system so it kind of makes it sub-optimal in ethereum's case um you know you have an algorithm that

2:53chooses the heaviest sub-tree in selecting how to discard these four blocks so they're able to shorten the block generation time from you know 10 minutes to like under 15 seconds um but it also inefficiently discards a lot more fork blocks and so that's that's sort of the the downside of proof of stake proof of stake is you know more energy

3:21efficient than proof of work uh but you know there's still uh significant technical and security threats and unknowns that that'll still take some time uh to work through um as you know as proof of stake uh gets launched and then even afterwards in conflict with conflicts what we've done is we've combined the benefits of a proof-of-work blockchain

3:48with a directed acyclical graph you know we've combined that to create a high performance what we call tree graph consensus protocol and so the key breakthrough is that conflux is able to optimistically process uh concurrent blocks without discarding any as forks which results in increased scalability increased security and um increased extensibility

4:18mm-hmm okay very interesting and yeah i was reading about how the proof of work blockchain seemed you know it has a lot more history to it uh and they've sort of worked out the kinks and you were mentioning in the beginning about the trilemma having that decentralization scalability and security and you've managed to heighten the security and the scalability with

4:38conflux and as well leading towards commerce and actually having a strong platform that dapps can be built on so that you can actually have business running can you talk a little bit about how you heightened the scalability and the security of the platform and is there one of those uh directions which is most important for conflicts well i think everybody knows scalability

5:01is is still sort of the key challenge for blockchains and to improve it you know consensus algorithms are are the most limiting factor and so you know we increased on-chain transactions by designing this unique uh tree graph consensus mechanism and you know this this consensus mechanism now um you know allows users to maximize the throughput to you know over

5:283 500 transactions per second without sacrificing decentralization um and security and we can also you know with the tree graph consensus protocol optimize confirmation times to around 20 seconds you know which provides the same level of security as you know six blocks in bitcoin 30 blocks in ethereum and i think probably you know as important as anything you

5:55know what this consensus protocol allows uh users um is a reduced transaction fee of less than one percent of that in ethereum wow yeah that's a major difference and that's 3 500 transactions seems to be adequate at least out of the get-go for the main net which you're leading up to and having that fast confirmation to allow you to have the flexibility to make

6:22transactions without having to wait at least 10 minutes with bitcoin you know to buy your coffee is a little bit infeasible so that's a great first step and now i want to talk about conflux moving towards the main net launch the platform's been in the works for a few years now making sure that you get every detail right and it's tough to launch on your own and

6:43get adoption through development and e-commerce and get dapps built on the platform so i'm guessing that you've been working on building partnerships within the industry to allow stronger players to to help you grow can you talk about some of the partnerships you're making with conflicts network sure so um you know i think for us one of the things that we're

7:05focusing on is not just putting transactions on the network but putting transactions with real value on the network and so um we've we've you know strategically what's benefited us what we've been able to leverage through our endorsement with the government is uh this ability to onboard government projects you know which gives us sort of recurring long-term use cases in in

7:34accruing and building value on our network and so you know we've got use government use cases around supply chain management green energy traceability data centers uh construction tracking so as a baseline in building and accruing uh transactions with value this has been our beachhead working through these government projects but beyond that we're very interested

8:02and focused on um you know decentralized finance and uh you know facilitating cross-border commerce and so we've you know been partnering with groups like lissix and definer to kind of help enable liquidity and services uh in the d5 space as well yeah i was just going to touch on that because decentralized finance has become such a hot topic for a lot of blockchain

8:32companies throughout 2020 and it's becoming almost as popular as the you know in 2017 the ico craze and getting a lot of attention from people that haven't been involved in the industry which could be a very good thing how important is the defy aspect for conflux moving forward well it's very important um you know we have this vision of enabling open commerce right and

8:58you know we view we view open commerce or we define open commerce as uh you know providing the ability for for users to acquire financial financial services sort of you know us providing an infrastructure that enables financial inclusivity that enables

9:25liquid markets where assets can move freely across blockchains across borders and so the type of things that we're really interested in are you know stable coins um we're also interested in um uh defy applications in emerging markets we've got a pretty big community in southeast asia we've uh we've got a team in africa uh and so we're looking to kind of uh

9:53build those services in in in those areas and then you know beyond that i mean we're continually sort of um building incentivizing infrastructure the uh working with other d5 ecosystems to sort of facilitate liquidity for the broader sort of crypto markets yeah and working with the community and incentivizations i think will be key because although

10:21the industry is working together to make a name for itself and we really have to do work together there is a lot of developers that are already working on ethereum and the main platforms that have already been working on it for a few years but i i was reading into conflux in terms of your development and building some of these defy applications and supply chain

10:40applications that often there are incentives and it looks like conflux has a grant program and this program you've allocated up to 240 million dollars in conflux which sounds like a huge amount can you talk about what is needed for this grant program are there certain requirements or are you just looking for developers and researchers of all kind to help build

11:04the network right so this is a multi-year grants program designed to kick off the creation of you know essential components of of our of the technology stack um so you know it's it's meant to um you know incentivize uh building blocks um for for other developers and entrepreneurs to build decentralized services on complex that's sort of first and foremost what we're

11:32trying to incentivize with this grants program um this will bring us closer to you know the the developer community um and um support you know a wide variety of innovations i think you know we've only had it uh launched now uh for about a week but we've seen a ton of interest from you know all all like a wide variety of regions um you know stretching from nigeria india colombia

12:02um north america and so you know we're evaluating um these projects right now and um you know we will be you know approving these on a rolling basis and um you know we're looking for everything from uh you know um ideas uh proposals around developer tooling to dapps um you know defy dapps to um you know uh even

12:32um uh proposals around uh community building so we're really excited about it um we've got a ton of inter interest already and uh you know we're we think there's gonna be a lot of exciting stuff coming up um you know over the next you know few years uh around this grants program yeah that does sound very exciting and i was researching into the main net for conflux which seems to

12:57be very near you know relatively they know you've been working on this for a few years can you talk about is there a timeline for when the main net will come out and you know what what are the goals from now until then is it mainly just working through this grants program and getting people to develop on the platform yeah so i mean we're really excited uh

13:19in october um that that that is um you know when we are expecting mainnet to launch um you know we've been working towards it um we've we're in the middle of our our our final phase uh towards mainnet it's which has been oriented around uh decentralizing our mining and you know we're very happy with you know uh

13:47the successful implementation of our pow algorithm and the uh the decentralization of our node operators um so from a technical standpoint you know um we're we're we're we're pretty much there um i think the other priorities for us is community building we um you know we are um we've launched a um a monthly virtual uh global meetup that's sort of bringing

14:17um thought leaders from china from north america all together to kind of create a global conflux community um we're working with developers um uh very closely um to kind of um help um create the the developer tools that'll enable the dapps um you know that that we're looking for that can sort of demonstrate the value um of

14:46of um of decentralized services and um of course you know uh the grants program is gonna enable a lot of these activities and so you know i do think that uh there's going to be a lot of exciting uh partnership uh and grants announcements over the next six months uh particularly after mainnet in october oh great well we're running out of time but if the viewers are interested in

15:12learning more about the grants program uh whether it's for developers or for non-developers and for more information leading up to the mainnet what's the best way to learn more about conflux network and to get involved sure so um to access our grants program you could um you can log on to grants.confluxnetwork.org uh if you're looking for information on

15:38conflux you know conflicts conflictsnetwork.org you'll find us there and then you know we're on twitter uh at conflux underscore network and then everybody's welcome to you know have conversations with us on telegram um we've got a number of channels but i think for this audience at conflux underscore english is probably the best channel great eden i will leave those links in the

16:02description box below thank you so much for your time all the best with the grants program and leading up to the mainnet for conflux network and let's follow up in the near future sounds good thanks you