Gavin Wood, the founder of Polkadot, introduced the characteristics, development history and planning of Polkadot.
Speech: Gavin Wood, Founder of Polkadot, Parity and Web3 Foundation
On October 29th, the 2020 Web3 Summit opened on the Bund in Shanghai. This is the first time the Web3 Summit has come to China. Gavin Wood, founder of Polkadot, Parity Technology and Web3 Foundation, gave an online speech, introducing the development history of the Polkadot network in the past year and next steps.
The following is the full text of the speech:
Hi everyone, my name is Gavin Wood. I am the founder of Polkadot, Parity Technology and Web3 Foundation and the co-founder of Ethereum. Welcome to the annual Web3 conference, and it is nice to see you here. I am sorry that due to the severe epidemic, I cannot be there in person. I really look forward to coming to China again. I hope that the situation will improve next year and I can come again when the epidemic control is not so strict. Last year’s trip to China was very good. I went to six cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Nanjing. I really look forward to coming to China again and going to Chengdu to eat delicious hot pot. The hot pot is really good. eat. There is also mutton. The mutton in Beijing is also great, I hope to experience it again.
So now that one year has passed, I will talk about what we learned during the launch of Polkadot. Polkadot has been online for a few months, everything is going well, and I haven’t encountered any major problems. I will also talk about the growth of the Polkadot community and of course the next steps.
So, what makes Polkadot unique? I want to talk a little bit about this, I know most of you are already quite familiar with Polkadot. Some of them are still creating based on Polkadot, but I think it is still very important to understand what we do and how it differs from other projects. What I mean is, if you just make a “cottage version” of another project, just iterate a bit, increase transaction throughput, or create a slightly improved language, then it is really easy to understand what you are doing. What is it, but Polkadot is different. We are really breaking the rules, we are really constantly launching new ideas and promoting innovation.
Polkadot shows what is a new abstraction of the fundamental consensus system. Now, many of you should be familiar with this new abstraction. Parallel threads and parachains are different from our original abstractions. Ethereum was created on the basis of Bitcoin. It introduces a more comprehensive abstraction that can establish smart contracts, thereby essentially making money programmable. Ethereum is like this in the final analysis. At the time, it was a breakthrough innovation. This abstraction, this kind of innovation The application can generalize and use the unique ability of the consensus environment, but it also has its own limitations and it is not universal enough.
Now we will say “Ethereum is Turing complete”, but it is not completely Turing complete. Programs running on Ethereum, that is, smart contracts are always constrained by the resources they can consume. If you recently After deploying complex smart contracts on Ethereum, you will realize that these limitations are very obvious. You cannot develop a complex program, and then expect it to run on Ethereum at a relatively reasonable and low price. In addition, the development environment of Ethereum has always been only suitable for pure chain operations. When you write a smart contract, all the code will be loaded onto the chain and executed in the consensus environment of Ethereum, that is, all verification nodes , All miners, all full nodes in the network, this feature makes interaction with off-chain systems, such as oracles, actuators, etc., whether it is to unlock a door or ensure that a certain website is updated, it becomes extremely difficult. There are various glue codes on the server, and the chain is constantly monitored, and it is troublesome to write codes. You have to use different programming languages, and you have to use multiple RPCs and interfaces. It is difficult to test and integrate. With the Polkadot paradigm, everything has changed after this new abstract model. This abstract model is essentially a lower-level abstraction. It means that everything that can be achieved under the original model is a more general abstract model of Ethereum, built on smart contracts and gas fee measurement, all of which can still be implemented on Polkadot.
We did this by implementing Ethereum in a fully compatible way in Polkadot’s development platform Substrate. Now, the implementation of Ethereum is the chain that owns the Ethereum EVM module. It can also have other modules, can implement other functions, can introduce governance, can introduce WebAssmbly smart contract functions, can use the nominated equity proof mechanism, and have Treasury, this chain can do all these things, so we call it a lower-level abstraction, and the key to true abstraction lies in consensus. In essence, everything, as long as the block itself is determined and what the block has to do only needs to be expressed in a very general language WebAssembly. From this perspective, anything above it is universal, what does it mean? In other words, the main difference is that we don’t have account, currency and other settings. If you want to write a blockchain with Substrate, there is not one currency on it, but 5000 currencies of the same level. This is completely It is achievable, and this can be adapted to various usage scenarios, rather than just being tied to the account-based curse of Ethereum. For example, you can have a Substrate chain, no account at all, no currency, just let you use your WeChat, Alipay, Facebook, Twitter, Github account, and use these accounts to pass our another, abstract mechanism “off-chain Work machine” to sign, so as to interact with the chain without holding any currency in the chain. Even this chain can have no currency on the chain at all. We introduced Ether into the Ethereum network just to pay transaction fees. , Just to prevent spam transactions. In the final analysis, this is just an anti-spam mechanism. This is its main purpose and main requirement. If you can solve this demand through some other mechanism, such as connecting to the oracle’s identity system, Then there is no longer a need to set up so many fixed elements, fixed architecture design methods, the blockchain may often involve you in such things, which may be due to conventions or restrictions of the chain itself, which may be due to conventions or The limitation of the chain itself, and the new abstract model allows you to develop the chain you want more, and allows you to develop in a more comfortable environment, without forcing you to make a last resort. You do not agree with it. It is not the optimal decision under the usage scenarios.
To reiterate, Polkadot has indeed passed the era centered on smart contracts. Polkadot is not a smart contract platform, it is a platform of platforms, it is a platform of various platforms, each of which is using high performance, An efficient and optimal way to do what you are good at, without worrying about being charged for gas or allowing their users to pay with the currency of the underlying platform. These platforms will not be bundled and promoted. Anything from Polkadot will improve the customization and flexibility to a higher level. It surpasses those that at least I think are not focused on providing the best possible product to the developer team. . But to ensure that you can capture the platform of the users of the development team, thinking about allowing users of these teams to use or hold the tokens of the underlying platform, let’s imagine some usage scenarios. I think enterprise-level applications are more and more suitable Use Polkadot.
Nowadays, some enterprise-level application scenarios we can see are companies who want to introduce blockchain into their internal systems to promote a larger amount of information sharing in a large multinational company environment, or want to be in a corporate alliance In the “garden” that was originally the property of various companies and built high walls, to promote cooperation, communication, collaboration and data sharing, the blockchain system makes this situation easier than ever. Because every company member, every individual does not need to trust other individuals, they do not need to appoint a centralized third party to maintain these IT systems. In fact, they can completely or partly maintain IT systems so that the district Blockchain can work well. This model works well in the alliance environment. We have seen the deployment of some alliance chains, such as the Energy Web Foundation chain, which has promoted industry-wide applications. We see that blockchain-based application deployment can benefit every participant in the industry, but the next stage is the emergence of cross-consortium chains. Essentially, multiple consortium chains are put together so that they can It can be connected to other alliances, and it can also be connected to the internal chain of the enterprise. These enterprises can be inside the alliance or outside the alliance. It can also be connected to public chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin, and can be connected to applications deployed on the Substrate chain, such as parachains. This will be an important innovation and it will change the way we look at blockchains, especially It will change the way companies look at blockchain.
At present, companies are gradually testing the blockchain. They are beginning to test and even deploy the internal chain of the company or the alliance chain I just mentioned. Once the decision makers of the company are clearly aware of their value proposition, we will see that they are willing to go further. Try, there are more and more blockchain companies and more and more systems deployed. When there are enough facilities to deploy on these systems, someone will soon think that if the two systems are connected, Wouldn’t it be great to allow one system to use the resources of another, or to provide services that span both? This will become the beginning of what we call the “Internet of Blockchain” world, the beginning of connecting the originally enclosed garden into a more globalized market for data, decision-making, and financial and economic services. Our current situation is that Private chains exist in alliances of independent enterprises and companies and the new model, that is, the difference between these chains are all connected together. It will be the same as the difference between the local area network in the early 1990s and the Internet today. It is difficult to predict it. What it will be like in the end, because it is difficult to predict which services between these chains will be useful to everyone. But I guess it will be a combination of financial services, data-driven services, registrars, and various other trust-based services. These services will be mixed and combined until one day we find things like supply chain management, trade finance and others. Interaction of various financial and other things.
Next topic What have we learned from launching Polkadot this year? The first is that Kusama has overfulfilled its role as a canary network. Kusama is a model that allows us to understand the problems that we may experience on Polkadot, and the tools that may need to be developed. It allows us to directly practice in the real environment and can preview crisis situations, especially when we must Kusama overturns the redo situation and can remove a certain block transaction that disrupted the Kusama network. These experiences are priceless and strengthen my idea that Kusama is a very important part of the Polkadot ecosystem. We must continue to maintain and support it. To ensure the continued stability and high performance of Polkadot, we also found that our community is full of enthusiasm and very loyal to our overall goals and projects. Of course, we also found that some of them are more patient than others in this thrilling journey. Of course, it is very frustrating when something looks as if the end is close in front of you, but you find that there is a hurdle before it is completed. But I am very happy that we have already witnessed the launch of the Internet and it has already Soon, it’s the final stage to realize the functions we originally envisioned. The Rococo testnet is undoubtedly a very important milestone we reached. It marks the most primitive parachain, the cross-chain messaging, and the new cross-chain. The chain message format, and allows those teams that have worked hard on Polkadot and Kusama to deploy in a real testnet and interact with each other. I am really happy to see this scene. I hope that we will continue to have your loyalty and patience in the next stages leading to the launch of parachains, parallel threads and XCMP.
So in terms of the community, what are our trends in China? This year we launched the Web3 training camp in Shanghai. I believe many of you have heard that 15 teams graduated successfully this week. This is done with the cooperation of the Web3 Foundation, Parity Technology and Wanxiang Blockchain Lab , Wanxiang Lab provided great support to this project, thank you very much.
Parity Asia launched the Substrate course, taught by native Chinese-speaking engineers. I think everyone here may be interested in participating in this course. All participants will get a free Substrate course. Please join in and make good use of this resource. , And start creating!
We have been cultivating Substrate for a long time, and we are very satisfied with the status of Substrate, and a large number of very exciting features will be launched soon. Here I will list a few, and there are actually more, such as multi-threading and Run in parallel.
We are working on a flat memory module, a new consensus type, a new API, an interface for creating a pallet, and there are many new features to be implemented about Substrate. So I sincerely invite everyone here to learn about our existing things, from off-chain working machines to various new Substrate 2.0 components, such as enumerable mapping, transactional storage and multi-function, and many more . So be sure to come to understand, get started, think of a brilliant idea, and then roll up your sleeves and start working. Now everything is ready, just wait for you to join in and have a big fight!
Thank you for listening, and hope you enjoy the other speeches of the conference. Definitely, must, try Substrate and create on it!
