Greg Meredith on RChain scalability and mathematics

0:00I'm Ashlyn Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have Greg Meredith the founder of the Archean project Greg welcome to the show it's a pleasure to have you here today oh thank you so much for having me it's looking forward to our conversation likewise if you could kick off the

0:19interview by explaining to the people that don't know yet what is the arcane project and what makes the arcane technology different in the blockchain space sure so the big picture for our chain is that we are focused on providing coordination technology to begin to address the issues around climate change governments and industry are moving too slowly and so we're gonna

0:45have to we're gonna have to roll up our sleeves and get it done ourselves and we see blockchain is one of the most important factors for our technology platforms for doing that kind of coordination our chain is different not just in terms of its its focus but also in terms of its technology and its governance our technology is correct by construction so whether you're talking

1:14about rolling and our space which provides correct like instruction smart contracting language and execution mechanism as well it just as a storage and query model or you're talking about the correct by construction Casper proof of state protocol our aim is to provide a technological basis which is gives a completely different level of security

1:46and correctness to the mix also we're since we are focused on climate change one of the things that we believe is fundamentally there are at at the at the very center and core of what we need to do to change things is is our democratic governance model so that's why we're a cooperative we begin with one member one vote and we reckon

2:14is that from that place we might find different kinds of governance model that are going to fit our needs at different moments mm-hmm yeah it's super interesting how our chain is one of the only co-ops that we've talked to and you know and showcased on on the show in the blockchain space it seems like it's a bit of a unique model you know has that had advantages and has it worked in your

2:38in your favor so far for the team growing a project yeah so it definitely has advantages well I had some unexpected advantages in particular the the demand that members you know have real engagement in the coop puts us in a different relationship to the Howey test for example so I I wasn't thinking about that when when when we launched the coop I was thinking about the fact that when

3:07I was at Overland College you know more than a quarter of the student population lived and worked in cooperatives so we made all our own food we made we you know and the Farm co-op grew it grew its own vegetables milled its own wheat and and its really the the one of the biggest advantages the spirit of engagement which keeps the arching going the members understand that you know

3:37it's it's it's us and it's only us that makes this work as opposed to it's them over there they need to get it done mm-hmm well it seems like it's working pretty well so far and your team did launch the main net at the beginning of this year after many years have worked so far so congratulations to that but I know I know that we're late yeah well I know

4:02that you are a visionary and you're always looking 5 to 10 years in the future so could you give a glimpse into how do you foresee our chain working in the real world in the next you know five or 10 years well absolutely so so you know while our goals our climate and coordination technologies for responding to climate change we recognize that you kind of have to

4:29crawl walk run so in the short term what we want to do is look to high transaction volume low risk kinds of applications the entertainment sector is social media sectors those are really really good examples right so if you're if our chain for example is already fast enough and scalable enough to store audio data on chain so we demonstrated not only storing audio and delivering

5:01audio on chain but that you can build some fairly compelling apps around asset and tracking and if you think about the the Internet of the last 10 15 years it's all been about digital asset tracking and management right whether you're talking Instagram or Facebook or Spotify all of those applications are actually digital asset management

5:27applications so in the in the near term our chain starts there and that's the kind of a cap echo system that we imagine will be will take hold but over time as as that scales out you know in much the same way that you know Google started with fairly very low risk applications and gradually expanded to higher and higher risk applications we

5:55can certainly see our chain employed in in logistics kinds of applications and and certainly a social telecommunication applications and then but but if you start to look at you know what it means to scale you know even even something like Facebook out to global scale with you know billions of users each of which has you know hundreds of thousands of

6:22posts in the blushing world each one of those posts becomes a smart contract so you're you're literally talking about hundreds of trillions of smart contracts running concurrently and no blockchain that I know of has has talked about that that kind of scope and scale in a decentralized setting or an architecture that delivers that so our chain has a path to hardware

6:49architecture for the the smart contract execution and a very radical hardware architecture for the consensus so that gives you both the kind of economic ecosystem and technological roadmap or at least a taste of what definitely and it's great to hear that you know you have a plan to be globally scalable because with music data there's just so much information and the Bitcoin and the

7:17theory on block chains right now have you know had a lot of scaling issues so I'm curious you know is there a major differentiator in the way that now our chain is able to scale past those block chains scalability limits and also do you have an idea of how scalable it will be in terms of a transactions per second or so at the optimal performance level

7:40when it gets to its peak yeah so so again we can talk about it in terms of each of the different rollouts so for this rollout you know which is largely just traditional software running running on today's hardware we're and we're in the midst of doing a couple of sort of backlog updates and once those are done so in about let's say two months time from now we'll be

8:09able to unthought all the network right now the network is throttled to just be a chain as opposed to a dag but once we unfair we should see you know like like small hardware we should see you know something on the order of three to ten thousand transactions per second when we get it up to the kinds of backbone nodes that we said we would need yeah you know

8:37as early as 28th summer of 2018 we were sort of specking out the kind of nodes that we would need for the backbone of the chain we should be able to see upwards of about forty thousand transactions per second Wow and yeah so so I'm still fully confident and the differentiator is of course concurrency all right so our platform should scale as you add more resources

9:04that's the that's the basic idea a theory am is sort of anti scaling as you add more resources it slows down so ours should scale in a near linear fashion as you add more resources that's that that's the big differentiator for this instantiation of the architecture when we move outward and replace the the Java VM with with some hardware then we should see a order of magnitude increase

9:31if not two orders of magnitude increase on those transaction speeds and then when we have the the contemplated consensus hardware we should we should see almost no time for the consensus and in which case we're talking three or four orders of magnitude still still a bit of a stretch to get to the kind of global Facebook you know trillions of smart contracts running concurrently but

9:58it's at least within striking distance at that point and you know some engineering innovations at that at that time frame can probably get us the rest of the way definitely and you know 40,000 is around what Visa and MasterCard for at least for financial transactions you know what what they sort of do so that seems like it would be more than adequate at least on the

10:19blockchain side in comparison and you know part of that scalability is it is it because our chain is also based off of the proof of stake consensus or the CBC as opposed to proof of work you know with Bitcoin and aetherium does that bring a major improvement to the scalability but also the security and the other features of the blockchain absolutely yes yes yes soso proof of

10:44stake is is is a big win along a number of different axes one very basic one you'll see this feature and in just a few weeks is that we don't have to go all the way back to the beginning of time we actually have finality and once you have finality you can say okay this is the this is the latest finalized state and so that's the New Genesis so you don't

11:10have to you don't have to go all the way back to the beginning of time which means the validators which are the proof of stake equivalent of miners and could constantly compact their state whereas the proof of work state is ever-growing right so the longer those noes networks run the longer the bigger the storage requirements are but in the case of in

11:36the case of a consensus protocol with finality the state the state the storage requirement doesn't have to be any bigger than the the distance from the tip of the chain to the last final a state never has to get bigger than that so there's a there's a cap on how large the state gets so that's one example and then and then the the biggest other example is is a concurrency right so

12:05we're running a dag which means you know we can actually detect when there are transactions that conflict and we know what to do in that particular case either you impose an order or you let let one of the one of the competitors know that it lost and so a transaction would have to be resubmitted okay so that's a that's a that's a big huge win right because it means that we can have

12:28many many more transactions packed into a block right we don't have two sequential eyes and in the same way that proof of work does yeah that's a huge advantage especially because looking at bitcoins block chance getting into the terabytes of size and nobody can really even download it on their home computers because it's just too big so that final state seems like it's a game changer

12:52so with that staking in the finalized state is that live now or is it going live really soon so the last finalized state has been always a part of the protocol design and we're just now putting the finishing touches on the feature so that people people can access it and people can join join the network over and above the cooperative nodes and there's the handful of other external

13:18nodes but we want to once we have that feature will kind of open the floodgates with a big staking opportunity for other people to join in which I think will be a really you know we should make some make some hay out of it celebrate because then we'll start to have you know much more decentralized rendering of the protocol definitely and with the staking stay

13:42kurz require you know Reve tokens which are on the main net the Archon main net I saw that the Reve tokens were recently listed on MXC and on hot bit which is great so congratulations to that you know is there a further adoption plan for Reve tokens moving forward yes although in general the exchanges don't like us to mention which ones are going win because they want to sort of do all

14:07that kind of management themselves and have a mas and all kinds of events so yes there is further there will be further listings but I can't really speak to that in public and that's that has to be up to the exchanges yeah well that's good to know and if there are viewers that are looking to follow along with our chains updates and get involved with the community or the coop what is

14:30the best way for them to learn more oh thank you thank you so much for asking so I recommend everyone go to the website our chain co-op that's our CH AI NC o o P and that's the beginning and then this developer dot arching that coops or developers who want to get involved and if you really really want to get get in the mix then please join our community debrief that happens on on

14:58zoom' and you can get that link from the website or from our discord server so and that would be another place to sort of jump in and become a part of the discussion awesome thank you so much Greg I will leave those links in the description box below for the viewers all the best on the Archean project moving forward it sounds like you guys are making a lot of great updates so

15:20let's follow up in the near future and all the best with our chain thank you so much and likewise all the best with your podcast this is this is a great resource for the community