Can Gavin Wood’s Polkadot ‘Make Blockchain Great Again’?

Gavin Wood, founder of Polkadot, Kusama, and Parity, discusses what he calls the “meta-protocol,” Polkadot. In this episode, he talks about:

• his vision for Polkadot and the problems he set out to solve when conceiving it
• why he considers Polkadot a meta-protocol
• the implementation of parachains and parathreads, how they are defined and how they differ
• parachain auctions and candle auctions
• how DDoS attacks can be prevented on parachains
• initial parachain offerings and how they differ from initial coin offerings and avoid the regulatory problems that were so common with ICOs
• on-chain governance on Polkadot and how it works
• how immediate implementation of proposals that pass consensus will prevent forks
• his answer to those who point to Parity’s history with security lapses as cause for concern about Polkadot’s security
• how he sees Polkadot co-existing with Ethereum
• whether Polkadot is working toward composability
• how the Web3 Foundation and Parity plan to use their collective stake of DOTs within the network
• how he plans to address the possibility that DOT could be labeled a security
• how he imagines Polkadot will serve the enterprise world and how Polkadot will benefit enterprise blockchains

Thank you to our sponsors! 

1inch: https://1inch.exchange Crypto.com: https://www.crypto.com

Episode links: 

Gavin Wood: https://twitter.com/gavofyork

Polkadot: https://polkadot.network

Kusama: https://kusama.network

Transcript:

Laura Shin:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained. I’m your host, Laura Shin. This week on the show I have a fireside chat I conducted with Parity and Polkadot founder, Gavin Wood, at the Polkadot Decoded Conference last week. Gavin answered my questions while sipping whiskey, which those of you watching the video will see. In this episode, we discuss what his vision was in creating Polkadot, what kinds of parachains he expects will be created there, and how he believes Polkadot can coexist with Ethereum. We also discuss whether DeFi-like composability will ever be possible on Polkadot, whether DOTs are a security and Parity’s history with security lapses and how that could affect Polkadot since all parachains share security provided by the base layer. It was a fun and fascinating conversation, and I hope you enjoy it. 

Laura Shin:

Hi, Gavin. 

Gavin Woods:

Hi, Laura. 

Laura Shin:

Nice to see you again. 

Gavin Woods:

Likewise. 

Laura Shin:

All right. So, let’s have a discussion about all things Polkadot. Let’s start with a really basic question. What is your vision for Polkadot? When you conceived of it, what problems were you trying to solve?

Gavin Woods:

Well, there were many sort of answers to this question. It’s an interesting one. In many respects, it was a very abstract thing that I wanted to do when I started Polkadot. It was really just a push to become more abstract, more general over what it was that we were solving, what it was that we were producing. So, it’s like, Bitcoin started off with a very basic scripting language, Ethereum sort of introduced this much more complete means of scripting financial transactions. And really with Polkadot it was trying to create something that produced an even more general model for how it can be extended, how things can be added, and then on top of that, it was really also trying to address this fundamental problem of scalability like how do we try and push through more transactions, how do we take advantage of the fact that there’s an awful lot of workers out there on the network but it’s so wasteful to have them all working on the same thing. 

So it was these twin sort of topics, this generality and scalability and really the vision was just to sort of make blockchain great again. It’s like, can we take blockchain a step further. Can we actually address some of these really important issues that we’ve always known have existed? You can go really quite far back, 5-10 years and see that people are already thinking we really need to process different transactions on different nodes. We really need to be more general, and it was really just can we bring this forward. Can we be more general? Can we process more transactions on different nodes?

Laura Shin:

And when you say the words general and abstract I’m not really sure what you mean. You’ve also talked about how Polkadot is a metaprotocol. Are those concepts related and can you explain what you mean by that?

Gavin Woods:

Yes, they are. So a meta protocol is a…meta means sort of after or beyond and it’s generally used to mean the next sort of step down past this concept. So, it’s like a metaprotocol is a protocol that governs another protocol. A protocol on which you can place another protocol. It’s like a protocol of protocols. And what I mean by metaprotocol in this sense really is that it’s an underlying, kind of much more basic, much simpler protocol on which we build what we would normally consider to be the protocol. So to take an example, the protocol of Bitcoin is we send blocks around and these blocks, when you execute them, when you interpret the blocks or the transactions in them. There are transactions with some script but basically most of the time it means send these bitcoins to these addresses. That’s a protocol. Like the nodes of the Bitcoin network understand how to interpret these blocks. It’s language basically. But it’s very difficult. Once you’ve set that language, it’s kind of set in stone. It’s very difficult to alter it, to change it, to introduce additional features, to fix bugs. It’s very rigid. A metaprotocol would sit underneath that protocol and define that protocol. The nice thing is that because it’s defined in terms of this metaprotocol then you can change it quite easily because you just have to obey the rules of the metaprotocol and then the main protocol can adapt and evolve and iterate over time. 

So, then the question is what if you need to adapt, evolve, and iterate on the metaprotocol. The idea with that is that we make it as simple and as abstract as possible. We take a pre-existing technology, something that has already kind of been iterated through, something that very clever people from many different sort of stakeholders have already argued about and sort of come to the decision that this is probably the best thing that does this kind of metaprotocolistic stuff. What we did was we chose basically web assembly because web assembly is like an industry standard. It’s been iterated on. It’s actually already two separate technologies, one built by Mozilla, one built by Google, have sort of been splunged together into this thing, web assembly. So, it’s already got a lot of ideas. It’s already had a lot of iterations. It’s unlikely that we’re ever really going to need to change it and therefore it’s a really good foundation to build out stuff on, this metaprotocol, and then we just have to define everything else in terms of that and that’s where the protocol comes in. 

So the real Polkadot protocol, parachains and governance and balances, DOTs and staking, all of this stuff is the Polkadot protocol and that stuff changes over time, but it’s defined in terms of the metaprotocol that doesn’t really change over time and that’s the stuff that we make sure that we’ve got that’s tried and tested, very sort of well-understood, well-known technology and web assembly. So, it is a lot about being flexible and abstract because this top level, the Polkadot protocol is not very abstract. I mean parachains are pretty good but they’re still a very specific way of having different sort of shards and a very specific way of scaling, very specific way of having a market mechanism to claim them. 

So, it’s still opinionated, as we would say. There’s still a lot of opinions involved in it, whereas the web assembly isn’t very opinionated at all. It’s not even our opinion. It’s someone else’s, Google’s and Mozilla’s and Microsoft’s and all of their opinions really. We just said, right, you guys have had time to argue about whose opinion is best. We’ll take the answer and use it because we don’t want to argue. We just want to have something that’s stable. Because of that it’s a more abstract level that we can build things on. So, there is these jewel levels, the metaprotocol, very abstract, very general, doesn’t change very much, and the protocol – much more opinionated, more specific changes a lot because we don’t…our opinions are always wrong. In the fullness of time, opinions always need changing. Design always needs changing. It iterates over time and we want to allow ourselves to evolve and that’s why having these two separate protocols, the metaprotocol on the bottom, the protocol building on top of it is how we achieve that. 

It’s the same how we get from Bitcoin to Ethereum to Polkadot. There is this idea of well, with Bitcoin it wasn’t really programmable, with Ethereum it was kind of programmable but you have this very limited computation model with gas and dynamic gas pricing and dynamic counting of resources and limited memory and storage. It was all very expensive and that changes with the computation model in Polkadot because we have parachains, which are much more abstract and much more general in that they’re not just the smart contract, a little bit of code that sort of keeps some records of maybe people’s balances but rather an entire blockchain that can basically kind of do more or less anything that you can imagine a blockchain to do. That’s a much more abstract thing. I’ll give you a concrete reason why that’s an abstract thing. You could easily implement a smart contract inside of a blockchain. There already are blockchains that do it, Edgewear, Moonbeam, a few others. You can’t do it the other way around. You can’t implement a blockchain inside of a smart contract because there’s just not enough computation power. It’d be like trying to shove a shoe inside of a foot. There’s no…one can contain the other, the other can’t contain the one. That’s why we can say Polkadot and the parachain model is more general than the smart contract model. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s better for all use cases in all circumstances, but it does mean that anything that you can do in a smart contract, you can do in a parachain but not the other way around. There’s a lot of things that you can do in a parachain that you really can or at the very least, would be extremely difficult to do in a smart contract. 

Laura Shin:

And you also have parathreads. Can you define those and differentiate them from the parachains?

Gavin Woods:

Yeah. So parachains, as a term it’s evolved a little bit over time but broadly speaking, parachains are these slots. They’re like…there’s some number of them and they’re a little bit like computer cores. So your computer has a bunch of cores. I mean this one that I’m on I think has four but some of them these days have six or eight or even more. And the cores can process a particular application at once. So, if you’ve got a bunch of windows open then it might be that one of the cores is doing the video playing in one window and another core is helping your web browser render the email in another window and another core is playing your music in the background or whatever. So, they can do different workloads but basically parachains are like this but for a blockchain. So they do different workloads. One of them might be processing smart contract transactions, another might be processing balance transfers like kind of Bitcoin transfer transactions. Another one might be doing governance. Another one might be calculating what the optimum staking situation is. So it can do…each of these cores, each of these parachains can do different things at any given time and we measure time in terms of blocks so it’s like this particular block, block number. One million four hundred and seventy thousand two hundred and ninety-three is doing this. It’s got a staking parachain. It’s got a governance parachain. It’s got a two or three smart contract parachains and so on. 

Now, parathreads are when we say, this application doesn’t need to be processing transactions literally every block. Maybe it only needs to process transactions every 10th block. So instead of it happening every six seconds it’s every minute. Now, that’s perfectly reasonable. Bitcoin doesn’t process transactions. Some of the time it takes an hour before the transactions go through. On average, it should be about 10 minutes. So, it’s not unreasonable to expect that probably one block in every 10 is sufficient for quite a lot of use cases. 

So then we say, right. Well, rather than having this application just constantly always taking up one of these processing slots even where maybe it doesn’t have that many transactions to process. Instead, what we do is we say, right, well you don’t get any by default but when you’re ready to process some transactions. When you’ve got a bunch in your queue and they’re important enough or they’ve been waiting long enough or whatever, then you pay a bit of money but only a little bit and they get processed. You sort of just push them bulk on to the Polkadot sort of network, and you get a block. It’s like you get in one of these Polkadot blocks. You get your block being processed. You get your block of transactions through. 

Laura Shin:

You gave an example of how bitcoin only has a block every 10 minutes but what types of projects do you see as wanting to be on a parathread as opposed to a parachain? Can you give some examples? 

Gavin Woods:

Yeah. There’s a few. So one of them would be an Oracle. So you can imagine there will be some Oracle situations, feeding in data from the external world. Now, feeding in a load of data every six seconds seems overkill. I mean if you’re talking about weather data you don’t need to update the weather every six seconds, right. Maybe once an hour, I don’t know. Once a day but definitely not every six seconds. Five hundred raindrops have fallen, 493 more raindrops have fallen. No. So, we can imagine that actually with weather it’s like maybe once an hour, once every half hour, tops, and maybe it doesn’t matter whether it’s literally 30 minutes to the dot after the last update. Maybe it’s okay for it to be 31 minutes after the last update. There’s no huge time deadline. That would be a really good one for parathreads because they would just basically have some amount of money, of tokens or whatever that they want to pay in order to get their new block of weather information, that update in, and then they just wait until the chain of Polkadot is sufficiently unused, underutilized and then their block will go in. A little bit like how transactions work in Bitcoin and Ethereum right now. You’ve got a transaction fee and maybe it sticks around for a block or two or three until a miner picks it up because there aren’t enough other transactions that are paying more. So ,very similar in that regard. Basically just an adaptive market. 

Another use case would be regional applications. So, it could be that there’s a US-centric or a China-centric insurance app, and it’s like people don’t claim their insurance, mostly, at 4 a.m. Mostly, any shit that’s going down happens at 4 a.m. perhaps, but the insurance comes a day or two later in daylight hours. So, realistically, for these kinds of regional daylight hour use cases you’re going to have eight, 10 hours where people are going to use it, there’s going to be transactions but the rest of the day, the rest of the 24 hour period there won’t be very much going on and it doesn’t make sense, therefore, to have a constantly scheduled parachain slot ,if 60 percent of the time it’s not being used and no transaction is going through. 

Laura Shin:

What about parachains? What are the types of parachains that you’re envisioning will exist?

Gavin Woods:

Well, I mean it’s going to be an ecosystem so there’s going to be a lot of different things all kind of helping each other to get to the end use cases. Something that seems pretty clear is that we can’t jump past this stage. The magic of blockchain isn’t really in delivering a specific use case really well. We’ve had a lot of time to do that and nothing has really come through. One or two minor exceptions but more or less. 

Here we have seen hugely promising developments is in the emergent affects of being able to combine multiple use cases. Well, multiple applications, let’s say. Multiple solutions in an environment where they can form symbiotic relationships built on top of each other and provide a composite solution that no one ever really designed but that nonetheless fulfills some goals. So you’ve got the flash loans. You’ve got the paycheck loans. You’ve seen the DeFi thing happening at the moment. That’s kind of where I think where blockchain is able to provide a good step forward in providing these trustless environments where people can be very experimental and deploy interesting use cases, interesting applications, interesting bits of code that build upon, that form symbiotic relationships with preexisting bits of code and that allow others to build upon them. So this is what we call composition. It’s what we call emergent affect, and I think that’s really where things are going to go. 

So, what kind of parachains? I mean there’s going to be parachains that want to specialize in smart contracts for sure, just because they’re an easier way of developing and deploying stuff than a full-blown blockchain. Though interesting enough, not that much easier. I think we’re going to see different blockchains that come with a kind of niche applications that they provide plus a smart contract component that allows people to sort of extend those applications. So at the moment we have in chains like Ethereum we have a lot of smart contracts deployed into them, each one fulfilling a particular niche. But none of them are particularly performant, none of them scale well, none of them are really utilizing the computational power of the machines. What I think we’re going to end up with is having the smart contract environment primarily used for extending the functionality of things but where the blockchain itself provides the sort of really bread and butter logic for doing flash loans, for doing decentralized exchanges, for transferring funds, for governance voting functions. 

This I think is going to migrate to a more fixed part of the blockchain like basically what substrate provides to you. Yeah. The smart contracts, the sort of fast iteration on the smart contracts where people can develop and deploy very quickly will be for more experimental, extensible stuff. So, I think we’re going to have a lot of different flavor smart contract chains doing things, super diverse stuff. We’re going to have Oracle chains. There are going to be chains that are very specialized to just have data pumped into them. There’ll be chains that actuate stuff, I think. So, slock.it, I don’t know. They’re not really doing much anymore, as far as I know. Sorry, if you are, guys. 

Laura Shin:

They were acquired by Blockchains LLC. 

Gavin Woods:

Right. Yeah. But good example of an actuator where the transactions on a blockchain are having affects in the physical world. I think we will see these kinds of things growing. I mean maybe it’s home automation. Maybe there’s a blockchain that these transactions are like turn my light on, turn my light off, and the advantage of using a blockchain is you get an indelible ledger of who told your lights to turn on and off making it sort of more secure, making it…but actuation blockchains may well become a thing. I mean obviously there’s things like consortium blockchains, parachains that bring together sets of blockchains. We’re going to have bridge chains that allow blockchains to connect. Well, Polkadot then its parachains to connect to other networks. Yeah. I mean there’s going to be a lot. 

Laura Shin:

Okay. Well, one other thing that I was wondering about parachains is when I was doing the research for this, I was kind of interested to see that they have expiration dates unless they’re extended, and if they do expire they go through this retirement period and those who contributed to the crowd funding get their DOTs back. I just wondered what happens to the smart contracts and other apps on that parachain because on Ethereum these programs are usually unstoppable. So, for instance, an Oracle on Ethereum will always have a price. So, in the case of these parachains would people simply not build things on Polkadot such as oracles or any other functions that they would expect to exist beyond that time horizon of six months or two years or whatever it is. 

Gavin Woods:

Okay. So the retirement is an interesting thing. So back two, three years ago I didn’t really have a great answer to this question. It was sort of like if they’re useful then they’ll just have to pay. But about a year-and-a-half ago, I came up with parathreads. I think it was a year-and-a-half ago, maybe it was only a year ago. Yeah. It’s 2020, yeah, a year-and-a-half ago. And parathreads, as I mentioned, are these pay as you go parachains. So, they don’t do much unless you sort of fund them but you only pay for one block at a time. So, you only need a few transactions that are paying enough that the rest of the Polkadot network doesn’t desperately want to use all of the parathread slots. To give some…I would expect there will probably be about 53 slots for parathreads every six seconds. So, I think when the calculations are done it’s like for each parathread to get one block in every, I don’t know, 10 minutes then it’s like you can have the three thousand or ten thousand or something parathreads that are kind of mostly active. So they’re going to be reasonably cheap. 

Now, the idea is that when your parachain, if your parachain is sufficiently unuseful, you can’t collect together the funds for renewing your slot and it’s not that this happens overnight, right. You get 18 months, in principle, you get an 18-month grace period. So, you’ve got one-and-a-half years to convince people to make your token worth enough that you can swap enough of it for DOTs to pay for your parachain slot, to lease out your parachain slot, and you get 18 months to actually secure that next six-month period. So, you will know very much ahead of time if this is coming, but that said, suppose for some reason you just can’t scrape together the DOTs, then you don’t just disappear in a puff of smoke with all of your Oracle data or anything. Your chain stays active. It sticks around, it’s there. An Oracle will tend to use passive data transfer, which basically means you look at the relay chain to see what the last block was for that particular chain and then you get one of the people who has the blockchain and its information to give you a proof that…hey, what was the gold price most recently, and they’ll come back with a proof that will use the data on the Polkadot relay chain plus some extra witness, some extra data that fits alongside that and you plug them together and you can now be sure that the price of gold according to this parachain was such and such. 

Now, this will still work. So, an Oracle chain wouldn’t actually stop working. Now, it just means that their updates wouldn’t necessarily be every six seconds. It would be as often as it’s willing to pay for its updates. That’s basically how it works. You know when you’ve had a mobile phone contract and it’s like you’re paying per month and you’re paying 50 dollars a month and in the beginning it’s okay but then it kind of drags on and drags on and you’re thinking I’m not actually using this 50 dollar a month subscription that much. It’s not that useful to me. So you tell them, look, I want to cancel my subscription. They’re like well, if we can’t persuade you not to keep your subscription then I’ll tell you what, you can keep the number but you’ll go on the pay as you go tariff. So, basically just make sure you put 20 dollars on every six months and you’ll be fine. We’ll keep your number active. You can still receive calls and all that. Basically, it’s exactly the same with Polkadot. Once your subscription ends, if it ends, then you just go directly on to the pay as you go version tariff and you can still keep your chain going. You just have to pay per block. 

Laura Shin:

Do you get finality with each block?

Gavin Woods:

Yeah. It’s the same technology, 100 percent. 

Laura Shin:

Okay. So one other thing that I wanted to ask about, a lot of people…I solicited questions on Twitter and people were curious to know how the parachain auctions will be run and when you’ll have them. 

Gavin Woods:

Interesting question. Yeah. It’s really difficult to say because the auctions for parachains, I don’t really want to start the auctions for parachains until pretty solidly sure that we know when the parachains are going to start because as soon as you start the auctions you’re taking…people are locking up their DOTs and it’s like it might be next week, it might be next year. That’s not a great thing to be locking up your DOTs on. So, parachain auctions are going to start once we basically have tested parachains on whichever network they’re on. So, we’ve got Kusama and Polkadot. We roll them out to Kusama first because Polkadot we don’t push code on that isn’t audited externally by our security company. So, Kusama will get the unaudited code that we’re still reasonably sure is okay but unaudited. 

Laura Shin:

Right. Just for listeners who aren’t sure what Kusama is, Kusama is basically the test network but there’s actual real value being staked on it and the KSM token has real value. So the incentives are all there, and it’s kind of a true test environment where you can actually see how the incentives will affect the ecosystem. So before you get into all that, do you want to also talk about the candle auctions because I think people will be curious to know about those. 

Gavin Woods:

Sure. Basically, the way that these auctions work is that we didn’t want to…so blockchains necessarily are these super open and transparent things. Everyone can see what’s going on all the time. What we didn’t want was to have this sort of auction game where, I don’t know if you ever used eBay, is it used these days or is everyone just using Amazon? I mean I haven’t used it in years. Back in the early days of web 2, I was an avid eBayer, sort of 2005ish, 2007, that sort of thing. What inevitably happened was the last 60 seconds…the price will be five dollars, slowly climbing up from three dollars. Three Forty-three dollars, forty-five and it’d get to five dollars and then the last 60 seconds it’d be like 10, 15, 50, 500. It’s like okay, right. So, it was a 10-day auction but actually all of the important bids happened in the last minute. 

That’s a pretty standard kind of game theoretic thing to do. You basically hold your best bid for the very last point in the auction and it’s kind of rubbish to do that for a blockchain because it’s not great price discovery. If you hold it for the last minute, then you might not get it in. Miners, validators can kind of keep them back and if a few bad validators happen to have the last few blocks, then maybe a good price will get chucked for a bad one. It’s sort of fraught with problems. 

So, what we wanted to do was find a solution for this. It turns out there was already a solution, hurrah. History has provided us one. So there are these auctions called candle auctions. They’re named so because basically the auctioneer had a candle next to them. The candle was lit at the beginning of the auction, people could put bids in. It was an open auction so anyone can bid anything at any time as long as it’s higher than the previous highest bid. But when the candle goes out then regardless of whether anyone’s got any more bids to add, that last bid is the bid that wins. 

So, it’s a really good way of making sure that auctions don’t go on forever and that there isn’t a cabal of people with much higher bids that are just waiting and waiting until everyone else has done their thing. Now, the problem with candle auctions is that you can’t put a candle on a blockchain. You can’t even put an abstract representation of a candle on a blockchain because you can’t end something randomly, very easily. Basically, to end something randomly, someone has to know when it’s going to end because someone has to be the generator for the candle. Has the flame gone out yet? And if someone’s the generator it means they’ve got an advantage. So what instead we do is we do this clever thing where we have a retroactive ending. So the auction ends at the end of some hour. Time is broken up into hours and at the end of some hour we say the auction’s ended, but it doesn’t literally end at that hour. Instead it ends at some point in the previous hour. So, we know it’s ended sometime in the last hour but we don’t know when yet. Then we choose a point randomly in that last hour and that point is when the auction ended, which means there have been possibly other higher bids that have come in since that point because we’re at the end of the hour but we discard them. 

What this means is that even things like smart contracts that you can very easily predict the behavior of can still have a good chance of getting a slot because even though I might instantly see the smart contract bid and then bid one higher in the next block it might be that then the smart contract maybe bids up in the block after that and I bid, so I might be in a bidding war with a smart contract but that still means every other block, the smart contract will be the winning one at that point. Then it’s like a 50/50 chance whether it’s the smart contract or me because it’s a block chosen at random in the last hour. So, it might be one where the smart contract was winning but it might be one where I’m winning. Now, normally, you wouldn’t be able to do that because I would just always be checking the smart contract, bidding one up and by the time it ended I would be bidding one beyond the smart contract. But because we end at a random time we can avoid that problem. 

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Laura Shin:

One other thing that I was curious about is that each parachain is paid for via this auction and as far as I understand there isn’t payment for gas metering so then how do you prevent DDOS attacks on a specific parachain? 

Gavin Woods:

Yeah. Basically, we leave it as a problem for the parachain. We don’t want to force parachains into a particular model for how they measure or charge for their transactions. What we instead do is say, enough validators must agree that your parachain block is verifiable, validatable, executable, basically can be run in a particular period, two seconds I think at the moment. So, it’s like a third of the six second block time. As long as that’s the case then we don’t care how you manage your transactions or how you manage your users or how you manage any of your blockchain logic to make sure it fits in the two seconds. If, for some reason, it doesn’t then the block isn’t going to get in and maybe your next block it’ll get in. Maybe some other collator, some other block producer will come up with a block that takes less than two seconds. 

But the point is that we want to be more abstract, more general. So a more general way of them counting gas, which is a very specific way of working out how to make sure that blocks don’t take too long, that you don’t get DDOSed, a more general way is just to say we don’t care. As long as it happens in two seconds, we don’t care how you manage it. So alternative ways of managing it would just be to have voting, for example, or to not have transactions or to have transactions but have a very simple way of measuring. Not gas, just saying there’s only one kind of transaction, transfer transactions so it might be a plasma kind of chain where it’s just super transfer oriented. 

We know that every transfer only takes however many point one of a millisecond or something and we just make sure that you can’t have more than 10 thousand, 20 thousand, 20 million, Twenty thousand of them in a block and then you don’t need gas counting. You don’t need dynamic resource measurement. Now, of course for smart contracts, if you want to have smart contracts be very general and very deterministic then you probably still want this. But the point is that you don’t need it in every circumstance. There are lots of use cases, more simple than the smart contract use case, where you really don’t need that level of complexity and the performance hit that you take from it. So by allowing blockchain parachains to decide their own way of keeping this two second enforcement, we allow them all sorts of more flexibility and potentially performance benefit. 

Laura Shin:

Okay. You’ve come up with a concept called initial parachain offerings. How do these differ from initial coin offerings and also in particular how do these avoid the regulatory problems that ICOs had in the US?

Gavin Woods: 

Well, we don’t really…we haven’t done much legal research. I mean I think they’re now PLOs, or something. Parachain lease offerings but anyway because IPO is kind of already a bit…

Laura Shin:

It’s trying to not sound like an IPO but anyway, why don’t you describe what they are?

Gavin Woods:

The thing about parachain leases is we call it like crowd loaning. So, it’s like crowd funding but instead of just handing over your hard-earned cash and getting something back, maybe a product or a token or whatever, it’s only a loan. So, you lock up your DOTs or your Kusama for some period of time, and you can choose. Well, you know ahead of time how long it is so that you don’t choose yourself. Rather, the team chooses. They might say we only need it for six months. After six months we’ll have launched our token, we’ll have users. We’ll be very clearly a good use case and we will then work out all the funding mechanisms probably selling our own tokens into whatever market it is for DOTs and then using those DOTs. That would be a pretty obvious way of doing it I’d say. 

But that initial six months you may well need to go to others, go to DOT holders and say, look, loan us the DOTs for a lease, would you please? And that’s what this is for. So, it’s crowd loan. You’re asking DOT holders to put their dots in for a fixed period of time. Now, this crowd loan is kind of a bit like staking. It’s handled entirely by the Polkadot relay chain and then probably over time that will migrate into a parachain because we don’t really want all of this complex stuff on the relay chain. 

But you don’t have to trust the team with it, that’s the main thing. You’re loaning the DOTs into Polkadot, the relay chain. They just get kind of reserved. They don’t even really leave your account. They’re still kind of on your account, and they’re certainly still on the chain and you can always check the logic of the chain to see, yes, they’re very much associated with the account. You have three-and-a-half months to go. Then they’ll be back spendable by you from your account. It’s a bit like using the staking system. 

The only difference is they’re not producing any returns like they do with the staking system, but presumably, the team that has asked you to loan these dots for their initial parachain or their parachain lease are planning to reward your contribution, your loan with something on their chain, perhaps one might imagine some of their own tokens. I mean I don’t want to straight jacket these guys. Maybe they’ve got some other thing going on. Maybe it’s an NFT chain and they’re giving you free tickets to a gig, I don’t know. It could be all sorts of things. 

So, main takeaway is there is no transfer of value in this. The team isn’t getting anything from the crowd. The crowd are just kind of locking up their tokens with a guarantee, guarantee by the protocol that these tokens are coming back in a particular time period. Now, again, we haven’t consulted anyone of any note, legal or otherwise on this and how it might be different, but in my layman opinion, I would think that having just it literally be locking up some tokens for some period that you definitely get back later with zero risk or zero additional risk isn’t really kind of anything. It’s like staking and that’s not really a thing. Rewarding is a thing, perhaps, and might have some knock on affect but locking something up it’s not a thing. As opposed to value transfer into some other entity, which very much is a thing. That’s a definite thing. So, I think by moving away from the value transfer into a guaranteed kind of lock-up situation with a guaranteed return unlock-up date, I think that may well move it to be viewed by various organizations as a non-event basically. 

Laura Shin:

Okay. Well, there are people who work at the SEC who listen to my show, so we may find out. So Polkadot has on-chain governance. Can you do a brief description of how that works? One thing that I find interesting about it is that proposals that pass get automatically executed and your theory is that this will prevent forks, which I find fascinating. So maybe you can also talk about that. 

Gavin Woods:

Sure. Well, okay, let’s move this from the metaprotocol. So, I mention earlier you’ve got this metaprotocol, web assembly, this low-level language basically. It’s a machine language on which we can describe and define the Polkadot protocol and the Kusama protocol and the Bedrock protocol and the Move.Me protocol, the centrifuge protocol, Acala protocol, all these protocols, and they’re all built on this web-assembly based metaprotocol. Now, you’ve got a problem. The problem is how do you know when to change a protocol? What governs that? What decides that?

So, you can say there’s a team and they’ve got a CEO and their CEO has a key and they can just change the protocol with a key, but it’s not really in the spirit of decentralized blockchain kind of scene. It’s not a very good answer and of course it has its big problems, which is what if the CEO loses the key? What if the CEO goes mad? So, we need a better way. Normally, we decentralize this decision-making criteria. So we have multi signature. We have voting. We try and bring it out, pluralize the mechanism. 

That’s all well and good but then how do you make sure this mechanism is respected? If it’s more than just literally a single key that is trivial to sort of respect you can build it into the software, for example. Then how do we ensure that everyone is on the same page? We had this consensus problem. So this is another reason why we have a metaprotocol. The metaprotocol allows for us to alter the protocol according to the rules of the protocol. That’s where we have this governance, sure, but also the enactment of the decision coming from the governance. 

We have this situation in the US at the moment with a lack of consensus on the one side, which is most of the news outlets, I don’t know, 74 percent, 80 percent, whatever, of the population and a lot of people on Twitter all saying obviously Joe Biden won the election. Then on the other side, you’ve got the President himself and a lot of voices behind him saying well, actually, no, he didn’t, Trump won the election. We have a lack of consensus over the governance process itself. This obviously is problematic and kind of one of the ways…the reason it’s problematic is because it’s not clear people are asking, what exactly governs the transition process? How do we know who should be the next President? If there isn’t consensus ,who makes sure that the government is indeed the government that was elected if we can’t decide who was elected? Is it just whoever’s in the White House governs? Well, that doesn’t seem like…what if the current occupier doesn’t want to leave the White House? Then what happens? We have this constitutional crisis. This is why we need to…this is why it’s important to have absolute enactment. This is why it’s important to tie the enactment of the decision to the decision-making process itself and make the decision-making process sort of the enforcer, as it were, or at least part of the enforcement. Now, there isn’t an independent election commission that has the power to put to both manage the election and put in the new President. That doesn’t exist, right. The old President should get out of the way. It wasn’t really answered by the people who drew up the constitution. It’s like of course the old President should just get out of the way. 

Laura Shin: 

Let’s focus on Polkadot. I understand the analogy. 

Gavin Woods:

All right. So anyway, tying together the governance, the decision-making process, and the means by which the decision comes from that process should be enacted is really critical in any system, whether it’s Polkadot or anything else. That’s what we do and the reason that we can do it is because we have this metaprotocol layer. The metaprotocol doesn’t change but it does govern and execute the decision-making process. So, it’s like the metaprotocol is the thing that sort of runs the governance system so people can vote on what they think the next iteration of Polkadot should be or should do or how it should change, whether bugs should be fixed, whether it should be rescues or any kind of whatever, remunerations, compensations, out of order transfers, whatever it is, but that metaprotocol layer also governs what the protocol is, which means it can enact any of those decisions. 

I mean any is maybe…I don’t want to tie myself up with words but the vast, vast majority of protocol changes that we can ever envisage the need to do, this metaprotocol layer can allow for them to happen and that means that we never come out of consensus. Now, just to compare that to other blockchain systems, you’ve got forks. So you’ve got hard forks. That’s how we change the means of consensus. That’s how we change the protocol. Now, the problem is that what if we can’t decide on it? What if 55 percent votes to go this way, 45 percent votes to go that way, does it mean we should go with the 55 percent? Theoretically, I mean yeah, I guess. I mean it depends. What’s the governance mechanism? What’s the decision-making criteria? If there isn’t one, if it’s like we consensus, then there’s no way of deciding. Yeah. You’re in this kind of gray zone where, yeah, there’s a strict majority but there isn’t a way of actually deciding because no one’s actually agreed on how we decide and that’s famously happened with ETH Classic, well with Ethereum at the time, there was no ETH Classic and 90 percent of the voters at least wanted to do the rescue thing and 10 percent didn’t, and the 10 percent who didn’t carried on regardless and hence ETH Classic was born. It’s these schisms…I mean you can argue schisms are a good thing. I mean I think it’s a very, very questionable position to be in. For sure schisms are not an indefinitely good thing because your schism, you schism into a thousand zillion fragments then none of them are going to have any users. So obviously maybe something things do get sufficiently big and there’s so many differing points of view or maybe two very large camps that are sufficiently different in their outlook that you kind of do need to fragment a little. But schisms cannot solve everything if indeed they solve anything, and the way that we avoid schisms is by allowing people to come together, to have a forum where opinions can be aired and then to have a decision-making mechanism that everybody buys into and everyone is behind the eventual outcome of. That’s why democracies are not schism to the schism over the centuries that we’ve had them. It’s because we have elections and people accept that in an election you have your vote, you have a forum, you have the time to air your opinion, you have the time to listen to others’ opinions but at the end of the day your vote and then there’s an outcome and if the outcome isn’t the same way that you voted it’s like maybe next time but…

Laura Shin:

Right. You accept the process. Let’s also now talk about security. Parity has a history of well-known security lapses, namely the hacks of the Parity multisig wallet, the first of which resulted in the syphoning of funds for some major ICOs and the second of which froze half a million ETH and now the security for Polkadot will be managed by the base layer chain. So, if something goes wrong there then the security for all the parachains will be at risk. What do you say to people who are concerned about the security of Polkadot?

Gavin Woods:

As a company and as a team, we have altered quite a lot since way back when we were doing the Parity wallet. I mean most of that code was done in 2016-ish, and Parity at that point really had no…we were just giving out free software. It was like we’re coding this stuff under the GPL, no warranty. We didn’t have the resources to be doing huge amounts of auditing. We didn’t have the resources to be paying, very expensive I would add, external teams, external experts at security to be looking at things. So really it was like a quid pro quo. It’s like look, the code’s here but you’ve got to kind of look at it. 

Now, with Polkadot that’s obviously changed a little. We have had some not insubstantial income from the crowd sale…well, private actually sale that we’ve been doing. So, it’s with this we actually have the resources to do sort of proper, both internal audits, which I actually think are really very important and often will show because people internally have a usually deeper understanding of the technologies involved often show some of the more tricky books. But also external audits. The Polkadot code base itself went through I think four separate external audits from four top tier security auditors including one which was a red audit, so it’s like basically this top-level attack team who were just there attacking…I think they were attacking Kusama actually. They were actually trying to…I don’t know if they were going to black hat take it down. I don’t think they were, but they were attempting to find holes in it, right. 

Ultimately, the delivery of software comes down to confidence, how confident are you that what you’re delivering is reasonably bug free. You can never be 100 percent confident. It’s too complicated. I mean Polkadot in particular is really quite complicated, more so than Ethereum, but regardless it’s still even relatively constrained pieces of software contain bugs because they’re built by people and people make mistakes and people make mistakes when they’re looking at other people’s stuff and teams of people make mistakes. You can queue up a 100 coders and ask them to find bugs in a particular piece of software but there will probably be bugs left after all 100 have had a look at them. If you are on utterly like mission critical systems programming, then you’ll probably have multiple teams each independently implementing stuff, and you’ll have some way of combining all of their implementations such that any individual bug doesn’t actually result in the problem manifesting itself. 

Now, that’s also an avenue that we’ve gone then where you have two external teams. So not Parity, completely other teams. ChainSafe and SORAMITSU that are implementing Polkadot independently from us. So, we’re going down that route as well. We’ve got huge amounts of external audits. We have a continuous external audit process, so we actually have a company, basically the security company, one of the four that we had audit Polkadot in the first place, constantly auditing the Polkadot code base, constantly looking out for bugs, checking new code. We have a rule that basically no new run time code gets into Polkadot unless it’s been audited. The only exception to that is if it’s really trivial, basically a number changed or some variable was renamed. But basically all code, all significant changes that go into Polkadot first have to get audited. Nothing goes on the chain until it’s been audited. 

So I mean while I can’t say Polkadot’s bug free, because it’s a huge piece of software made by humans, we are now taking every precaution that we reasonably can in order to make sure that that doesn’t happen. Now, on top of that, we also have governance, which means that in principle, if we can agree that this was a bug and that it really ought to be…it has a very clear manifestation, for example, someone’s funds get locked indefinitely and you can’t unlock them directly but it’s very clear that it’s their funds, it’s very clear that there is one key and only one key that controls these funds, and the governance of Polkadot, so the assembled stakeholders, whether it’s through a referendum or via the council, in Polkadot’s governance case it’s like it has to go via the council into a referendum, then everyone gets a chance to vote on it. If the assembled stakeholders decide that actually, yeah, we should fix this. We should unlock these funds or transfer it back or whatever it is then it will happen and that can’t happen on chains without governance. 

Laura Shin: 

Yeah. It sounds like this was born out of your experience with the frozen fund on Ethereum. 

Gavin Woods:

Yeah. I mean we all have our drivers. 

Laura Shin:

So speaking of Ethereum, Ethereum obviously is the leader at the moment…not maybe exactly the same space that Polkadot aims to compete in but a very similar space. How do you view Polkadot as coexisting with Ethereum? 

Gavin Woods:

I mean this depends a lot on the driving factors behind Ethereum. I said very early on in Polkadot’s…I think 2018, I think it was the DOT Con. Polkadot’s the bet against blockchain maximalism. Really, with Polkadot I wanted to make a network of networks. I didn’t want to try and solve all of the problems with one chain. I think Ethereum, certainly some of the narrative surrounding Ethereum is, there should only ever be one blockchain. There only ever needs to be one blockchain, that’s Ethereum, Ethereum can host everything. That’s not a narrative that I ever really bought into, and I don’t think it’s a super sensible narrative. 

I think if Ethereum ends up becoming a chain that is sort of bridgeable and I think that there’s a very good chance that Polkadot and Ethereum will just kind of happily sort of coexist with logic and value flowing between the two very easily. Now, we’re already looking at ETH 2’s sort of specifications, consensus mechanism, and how it might eventually pan out because of course Eth 2 only has its beacon chain at the moment. So, there’s no state transitioning really on it. There’s certainly no shards or anything happening in that regard. So we’ve still got a long way to go before we can be sure precisely what ETH 2’s eventual technical architecture will be. But my hope is that it will become something that we can very easily interface with and then in that way have the two sort of cooperate and form a sort of much bigger ecosystem of apps. 

Laura Shin:

I mean Polkadot is already, I feel, kind of rolling out the red carpet for builders and users currently on Ethereum because Moonbeam has these unified accounts, which let people use their Ethereum addresses and Polkadot, they also have the same tooling as Ethereum does and Substrate of course makes it possible to use the exact same code that their dapp has on Ethereum but on Polkadot, and yet, as you pointed out, there is this strain of tribalism or even maximalism, maybe you might say, in Ethereum. So what do you plan to do to woo Ethereum users and builders to Polkadot and overcome that tribalism?

Gavin Woods:

I mean one of the big pushes of Polkadot was bridges. I mean this predates Polkadot. Parity did the Parity bridge a while before. This is early-2016 when we started work on that if I remember rightly. So connectivity, tying to bring together different chains, disparate systems into sort of one functional economy, has always really been something that I’ve been interested, something that we at Parity have wanted to do. I really want to…that’s really one of the key sort of features, if you like, of Polkadot. One of the things that it was designed around, although Polkadot really isn’t fundamentally a sort of bridging thing, it is something that bridges can very easily be developed on for, and something that we’re already doing ourselves. 

So, I mean I hope that bridging and compatibility will be very key factors in basically creating a more…it’s not about drawing people over necessarily but creating a more let’s say fluid ecosystem, creating a very fluid meta-ecosystem of blockchain. So people can deploy an application on one chain but not be constrained to that chain to then maybe deploy a sort of secondary application in another chain and become a multi-chain app, kind of like a multinational company. The more that we can do to ensure that applications, that teams are not bound into just the single blockchain, the better and that’s obviously very important for Polkadot as we are coming at this as a relay chain whose main reason of existence is to connect to all of these little parachains and also external chains. 

Laura Shin:

Would you ever do anything like liquidity mining or any kind of incentive to attract people to Polkadot?

Gavin Woods:

I mean I don’t know, maybe. We’ll see. At the end of the day, Polkadot can only exist if it’s useful. For it to become useful it needs teams and so it’s not…I don’t want to pretend that Polkadot’s the sort of Buddhist monk of the ecosystem that’s sort of just going to take a beating and keep on smiling, not really. But nonetheless, I think there is a sort of middle ground that is very…let’s say a mutually enlightened self interest position that allows basically all of the chains to sort of come together and cooperate, coordinate, open their ecosystems and allow…kind of like free trade, allow people the opportunity to move around, allow the good teams to deploy across chains, across parachains, across ecosystems. So, I don’t want to say that we’re not going to compete. Of course, countries within the European Union compete in many respects with each other, but there are still really valid reasons for the European Union to exist, and I think the same is true for a multichain ecosystem to be built. 

Laura Shin:

So, there’s also a trend towards transactions that are composable, at least in the DeFi world and by that we mean that one transaction can include multiple contract calls within a single block but as far as I understand in Polkadot when you send messages between parachains, they can’t happen. The transactions can’t happen in the same block so there can’t be these instantaneous contract calls across shards and that of course then breaks composability and so there are a lot of things like flash loans or atomic swaps wouldn’t really work cross chain. Is composability something that Polkadot is working toward? 

Gavin Woods:

Yeah. So there’s two main things. That, on the face of it, is right but there’s a couple of sort of mitigating factors to this. One of them is that composability is likely to be mostly a thing within a single chain’s ecosystem. So tightly bound smart contracts that do things like flash loans are likely to be within the same DeFi ecosystem, whether it’s Moonbeam or Acala or whatever it is. That’s one of the reasons why you would want things to be constrained within a single parachain. 

Now, the other mitigating factor is that ultimately what we want to do is have asynchronous contract calling. Now, what this would allow, basically is for, in the programming model, in the execution model, it would appear as though when you send a transaction off, it comes back instantaneously when you send a message off to make a flash loan or whatever it is. It comes back instantaneously. But in reality, it gets the sort of executing context, the thing that’s like taking the flash loan actually is halted, is paused for a short period of time while the message goes away on to perhaps another chain. It gets executed, the flash loan comes through, it goes back again, carries on executing and so on. Now, this requires some interesting and not entirely trivial alternations to the computational model. 

Laura Shin:

Wait, just to be clear, so then that takes three blocks so it’s like an 18 second transaction? 

Gavin Woods:

Yeah. I mean it may take…I mean it depends whether it’s going all the way into another parachain or whether it’s staying within the parachain. But it may take one block, it may take two, it may take three. It depends on a few factors, but it may be as much as three. Now, it’s not clear precisely what the use cases will be. If it’s an Ethereum style flash loan, then maybe you do want to have it on the single chain. Now, it’s worth pointing out of course that all multi-shard architectures will have this issue. All multi-shard architectures that expect to be able to call across shards as easily as they call into their own shard will have to deal with the fact that going across a shard introduces latency, it can’t be handled within the same block. 

So, it’s not clear how other multi-shard architectures like ETH 2 are going to handle this either. ETH 1 gave everyone a free pass because it’s not scalable, yeah. So, if you constrain everything into the same blockchain, like ETH 1 does then problem solved, which is the position that Moonbeam and Acala and Edgewear are already in on Polkadot. If you want to spread things out between chains that operate in parallel to each other and therefore forget scalability, then you will have to deal with the fact that things don’t get processed as a whole in one block. That’s a fundamental issue with computer science logic and math. You can’t get around it by some clever programming trick. 

But if you introduce things like asynchronous calls to it, then you can kind of massage the situation a bit, mitigate some of the issues that you might face if a component that you want to compose with is on another chain. Now, the only other thing I’d add to that is that composability doesn’t just…composability isn’t about being in the same execution environment. There are all sorts of ways of composing things that don’t require that. Example, when you want to do an insurance contract you need an oracle for whatever physical phenomenon you’re insuring against. The insurer, that oracle doesn’t need to be on the same chain as the insurance contract. It’s enough just to provide a proof from another chain that that oracle said that there was a huge storm, houses got knocked down in your area. That can be done as a proof. You feed it on to the chain that is providing the financial compensation and it’s enough. There’s no need for them to be on the same chain. It’s only this specific Ethereum sort of DeFi where they’ve made use of the fact that it’s all on the same chain and therefore you can do this stuff that all has to be done within a single block very easily. That’s not a fundamental limit. Composability can happen even if it doesn’t all happen in the same block. 

Laura Shin:

The Web3 Foundation has 30 percent of all DOTs and I’m not sure what amount Parity has so maybe you can fill us in on that. How do the Web3 Foundation and Parity plan to use their collective stake within the network? Will you participate in parachain auctions, for instance?

Gavin Woods:

I don’t think so. No. We don’t have…we have less than that. I don’t have the numbers to hand but it’s not 33. 

Laura Shin:

I mean according to Messari. That’s where I got the 30 percent from the Web3 Foundation. It was like 29.7 percent or something. 

Gavin Woods:

Okay. Well, a lot of that has been…so that 30 percent figure from the original document has been eaten into. 

Laura Shin:

No, I calculated it according to the current supply. I did the math on my phone. 

Gavin Woods:

The current supply?

Laura Shin:

Yeah. 

Gavin Woods:

I’m not sure what your math is. 

Laura Shin:

I’ll check it. 

Gavin Woods:

It’s substantially less than 30 percent because some of that went to companies that are building Polkadot like Parity. Some of that…but also ChainSafe and SORAMITSU and some of it went through to grant companies, some of it went through to auditors, SLA, various other SLAs that we have. SLAs are the software agreements. So, then of course there’s employee buy-in schemes and all of that stuff. So that all comes out of that chunk of DOT. But anyway, aside from that, we don’t plan on putting parachains like purchasing parachain leases with it. That’s not really what we’re in for. That DOT that the foundation is keeping is really just a long-term alignment mechanism so the foundation has benefit if Polkadot does well and is able therefore to do more. 

The main thing, it’s going into grants. It’s going into keeping the foundation running, which means managing various ongoing legal and regulatory affairs, continuing to manage things like adoption and outreach and all that kind of stuff as well as research. So the foundation runs its research outfit. That’s the main thing. It does do staking but actually relatively little these days. It’s most of the staking of that DOT, the vast majority will end up going to the Polkadot, the one thousand validator program of Polkadot. So basically trying to get as many validators in as possible, build a really good validation ecosystem, which will soon be…if it isn’t announced yet it will soon be announced. It’s right on the cusp. Very similar to Kusama. So the foundation’s KSM stash is also much of it engaged in Kusama’s one thousand validator program. Yeah. And we don’t tend to vote either. If a vote is down to the wire, then we’ll probably take up a tie breaking position but we try and keep our DOT and Kusama out of the sort of general governance. 

Laura Shin:

We’re basically at time, but I’m going to just ask you two more questions and we’ll try to keep the answers brief. In June, before Polkadot’s mainnet launch, a preliminary draft by the Crypto Ratings Council gave DOT a higher risk of being labeled securities, a 4.75 on a scale of five, with five meaning the asset has “many characteristics probably consistent with treatment as a security.” Again, this is preliminary. There hasn’t actually been a formal rating that’s been issued. What do you plan to do to address the possibility that DOTs could be deemed a security? 

Gavin Woods:

It’s our position that DOTs are absolutely not a security and DOTs are very clearly a utility. You use them to get parachains. Parachains have a very clear utility. So there is no way that we could imagine a world where DOTs were labeled as a security. These guys take into account lots of factors, one of which was that the DOT network was not live at the point that they published this pre-publication non-opinion. That may well have contributed significantly to this not quite score. I would expect that any later reasonable appraisal, particularly once parachains are launched, will be quite different. 

Laura Shin:

Polkadot enables public and private parachains to interact with each other and China’s blockchain-based service network recently adopted Polkadot. How do you imagine Polkadot will serve the enterprise world and how will being on Polkadot, which has this ability to communicate with public parachains benefit enterprise blockchains? 

Gavin Woods:

I think connectivity is super important for enterprise blockchains. Now, I think I might be at ends with a lot of enterprise people but I’ll tell you why. Enterprise blockchains are great. They’re like the intranets of the early-’90s. They have a very clear value proposition for enterprises in this world right now, in this sort of traditional mindset. It’s like you can track what all of your internal transactions are. You can make sure no one is cheating on their audits. You can very easily audit everything that’s going on within a company, and that level of transparency can be very sort of persuasive, especially when you’re someone at the top who has to make decisions and it’s kind of difficult to see below one level of management below you. 

That will work initially in the same way that the old intranet allowed office memos to go back and forth much more easily than farting around with bits of paper. But what really made intranets be useful is the fact that the intranet was eventually connected to an internet that allowed offices of different companies to send memos to each other, like email. Then they started to be able to advertise to each via the World Wide Web, and they started to be able to interact with consumers via the World Wide Web and https. This was a super important progression, and we wouldn’t have had the later stages without the first stage. So I can imagine that enterprise is super keen on building the blockchain for their company. Maybe they’re multinational, lots of different sort of arms. Maybe they’re a conglomerate. Maybe it’s actually different companies but the same overall aligned incentives. Maybe the overall owner is the same. Maybe it’s between a consortium, so no real aligned consensus but a general assumption that you’re kind of working in the same space and probably do want to sort of communicate with each other a lot. But when we eventually get to the point that companies are offering their services through a very minimal cost, extremely agile, transaction-based network that doesn’t need any certificates or kind of middleman or any additional Visa fees or anything like this when it’s literally just business to business doing microtransactions with each other. Maybe it’s for data, maybe it’s for permissions to use some particular online system. Who knows? It doesn’t really matter. But when we get to this point that connectivity will be priceless because it will allow composition of solutions, and as we saw with DeFi composition of solutions is really where the gold is to be mined. 

Laura Shin:

All right. Great. Well, this has been such a fabulous discussion. I hope people really enjoyed it. I did see a few questions about Kusama. There just was so much to cover. We didn’t get into everything quickly but I did say it’s like the test network and there is actual live value with their own tokens. Hopefully, people can read more about it. It is very interesting that Polkadot has both of these networks live. Yeah. Gavin, thank you, again, so much, and I look forward to seeing what happens on Polkadot. 

Gavin Woods:

Thanks, Laura. It was interesting.