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good morning everyone
I don't know if anybody was at the bar
with us last night but thanks for making
it out so early if you stayed up late I
know our team had a little bit of a hard
time waking up this morning but we're
happy to be here
My name is Matthew Spock I'm the CEO of
a company called new Co we're the team
behind the Aon project we're based in
Toronto there's a lot of us here today
so you know after the talk if you have
any follow-up questions feel free to
reach out to anybody in the tshirt I've
got one of my co-founders our CTO in the
back of the room with us and a bunch of
other guys and girls from the team so
please feel free to kind of ask
questions
we've been working in the blockchain
space for a number of years now I
started kind of down this path in about
2014 looking at the problems in the
enterprise market and figuring out what
was it about distributed technologies
that would potentially change the kind
of underlying infrastructure of
enterprises started a team to focus on
that in 2014 and eventually that turned
into our company today and we came to
this realization that over time we saw
you know two ends of a spectrum
developing we saw everything happening
on the enterprise private chain side of
the spectrum and everything happening on
the public and on the public blockchain
side of the spectrum and in many cases
very different types of requirements
different types of innovations but more
and more starting to see you know
forward-thinking companies like JPMorgan
like the CME Group like a whole bunch of
others realizing that there's real
validity in the use of public block
chains inside mainstream applications
mainstream organizations so we started
asking questions about how do we start
bridging this gap how do we pull
together all these various innovations
into a single solution that could
essentially scale all the applications
all the requirements we have for the
future of mainstream adoption one thing
that we noticed along the way if you
were to rewind a year ago to DEFCON 2
probably would still have been debatable
how many you know long-term lasting
protocols there would be at the end of
all this even you go back farther you
know the original Bitcoin versus
aetherium debate is it gonna be one
chain to rule them all you know we came
to a pretty obvious adoption realization
that there are multiple protocols
developing in parallel
there's people building customized
systems with customized consensus with
you know EVM functionality with fabric
functionality with Korda functionality
with just plain old Bitcoin
functionality and at some point we were
gonna realize that we were running into
a very very new problem and
infrastructure around fragmentation of
all these technologies so we decided to
build a on so we're in the process of
developing this right now there's a lot
more information you can find online but
I'll walk you through the problems that
we don't think we've solved yet as an
industry that we wanted to kind of focus
on and these kind of high-level be
bucketing into four four general
categories
so the first the most obvious one to us
is isolation the fact that we've scaled
and built all of these various
blockchain networks with no real ability
for them to connect to each other
without centralized intermediaries which
is kind of the irony of our ecosystem is
we all rely on these heavy centralized
intermediaries to go from one watching
to another we obviously still encounter
an enormous number of problems on
scalability you know the status ICO is a
great example of that what happened to
the etherium network on that day and
obviously there's a lot of plans and
development being done to solve that
privacy which is mostly a requirement
coming from the enterprise market around
how do you know mainstream financial
institutions and healthcare
organizations and governments eventually
trust this technology enough to manage
you know your personal data to say you
know how are we gonna put financial
transactions and health records and all
of these things onto block chains and
finally although it ties relatively into
scalability is this idea of performance
how many transactions can we pass
through the network so I'm gonna walk
you through our design our thoughts
there's kind of two major components
that we're going to talk about one is
this idea of how do we bridge block
chains together and the other is a new
network that we're developing called a
on one that kind of sits at the root of
this new interconnected blockchain
ecosystem we're building so this is a on
high level architecture and three kind
of talking points that I want to go
through so one is the design of what we
call a on 1 which is kind of our new
public blockchain that we're building
that sits as a little bit of a router
inside this network of block chains also
has some really kind of core features
and functionalities on a on one that I
want to kind of dive into a little bit
secondly is this idea of participating
block chains block chains that will
connect through this routing system to
essentially be able to witness
transactions across each other's
blockchain so you know one of the the
very very simple problems we wanted to
set out to solve was could I write a
decentralized application
pulled input and logic from more than
one block chain without centralizing the
the applications layer essentially so
today if you wanted to tap into you know
the etherium network the Bitcoin network
and like a private hyper ledger network
you'd have to centralize a lot of that
logic onto some sort of web based
application so could you build a
decentralized application that said well
if this happens on blockchain a then
trigger this on blockchain be in like an
autonomous decentralized way so that's
kind of the the crux of our design and
this idea of bridging participating
block chains into a routing system and
finally I'll dive a little bit more into
how does our bridge mechanism work and
what we call ICTs or interchange hands
actions you know what's the incentive
model behind actually creating these
bridges and validating transactions and
data across multiple chains so let's
start with a on one to two major
components that were in the process of
developing and I'll talk a little bit
about where we're at in our development
timeline and roadmap we're having a
pretty major release at the beginning of
2018 where you'll see some of this
implemented in a in a live test Network
but for now you know two major
characteristics of the and when watching
that we that were building one is a
completely new virtual machine focused
on higher performance and scalability
parallel transaction processing inspired
by kind of characteristics of the java
virtual machine to pull in you know some
of this enterprise scale that large
stream large mainstream organizations
have just relied on for a long time so
the idea being that we you know will
still be able to support languages like
solidity we're developing a new smart
contracting language a more creative
name to be determined it won't be called
the Aeon language and obviously
everything would just get executing them
on what we call the AVM so that's that's
one characteristic in the meantime what
we've done while we're researching and
implementing this we've also made some
modifications to the EVM so our first
release is going to have a modified
version of the EVM again optimized for
performance so I'll talk a little bit
more about that in a second probably one
of the longer-term and more ambitious
parts of our project is the new
consensus algorithm we're designing and
if you can follow this this design it's
a little bit tricky to understand but
you can dive into this a little bit more
deeply in our white paper we're building
is a delegated hybrid consensus system
that essentially gives us the
characteristic of instant finality on
this connecting network so when we
realized hey we want it to route
transactions across many block chains
the first problem we
realize we needed to solve was that we
couldn't have at every layer of routing
the need to wait for block confirmations
because then this routing mechanism
would become completely inefficient if
every step along the way I needed to
wait six to ten blocks for a transaction
to be accepted and then transmitted to
the next network so we had to design a
effective incentive mechanism in a
consensus model that was instantly final
so you've seen this in some networks
models like delegated proof of steak
with a novelty here that we're building
called proof of intelligence so if you
follow this diagram with me you'll
notice here this is intended to be a
brain and in a dollar sign so we're
building essentially a consensus
mechanism that has three major actors on
this on this blockchain as participating
in consensus one is the validator
himself who participates in the block
creation in fact kind of good timing
that this follows the Omni presentation
I BFT this would not be too dissimilar
at the core of the network to something
like the IB of T consensus that amy has
been working on and then behind this
validator is the idea that people can
support validators by either staking
tokens into the system or doing
something we call solving running our
proof of intelligence algorithm to
essentially prove computation of the
network
the long-term goal here is to create
deep neural network capabilities on top
of the blockchain so that you know when
we get to the long term potential list
technology we could be running
artificially intelligent applications on
top of blockchain at scale so we're
starting to train these neural network
nodes to essentially prove a problem to
the network as an alternative to staking
tokens so we're gonna have this kind of
three actor three types of validators
that participate in the consensus
process a lot more to dive in on the on
here but I won't go too deep but you
know there's also a mechanism of how do
you become a validator how do you
nominate yourself how do you get removed
from validation if you're seemed to have
been malicious or acting dishonestly in
the network so we've kind of laid this
out we'll be we'll be doing a lot more
kind of diving in and explaining this in
some subsequent papers but you can read
about this online if you follow the
project so this is a on one at the core
of this concept is also the fact that
the main network has another interesting
functionality and it's this idea of
being able to bridge participating block
chains into what we call our connecting
network one high-level philosophy when
we set out was that
we're gonna build a design of a network
that allowed you to connect other block
chains but we also had this philosophy
of all chains being equal inside the
system meaning I could build a
connecting network but that somebody
else could also connect to me and become
a connecting network to somebody else so
instead of this being kind of a
two-tiered system with one network and
others surrounding it we see this kind
of evolving more is like a very complex
spiderweb with everybody becoming
participating networks to other
connectors so that at some point you can
route transactions from one blockchain
to another recognize what's going on and
act on as a result of those transactions
so one of the the pieces of research
that we did going into this was the fact
that you know one blockchain connecting
to another was not all not all that
novel of a problem to solve there's been
a lot of interesting research projects
big BTC relay is a good example of
people that set out to essentially solve
this concept of one-to-one blockchain
connections how do you trigger a
transaction on the etherium network as a
result of the transaction on the Bitcoin
network that's what BTC really set out
to sell so this one this one blockchain
the one blockchain problem essentially
being able to prove that transactions
validly occurred on another blockchain
it was relatively solvable what was not
solvable and our hypothesis is that
we're gonna have tens of thousands maybe
hundreds of thousands of block chains at
some point and then not so distant
future some that are built privately
some that are built publicly some that
are built and backed by governments and
some not and at the end of all this you
know the concept of the next generation
of the Internet is off people like to
refer to this technology is not going to
come from a whole bunch of isolated
networks but of one kind of common
ecosystem connected block chains so
essentially we've got three different
types of or two different types of block
chains that we're looking at connecting
so one obviously is a legacy block
chains block chains that exist today the
first bridge implementation we're
building is to the etherium network I'll
talk a little bit more about how we're
doing that at the token level but also
just a generic bridge about how do you
recognize state across multiple block
chains so this is connecting legacy
block chains we're doing some research
and some experimentation of how do we
connect Bitcoin the most obvious block
chains to connect are the ones that have
like a second layer some our contract
ability to be able to create that logic
and a second layer above the network so
Bitcoin obviously doesn't have that
natively design in the protocol but we
do have some ideas of how we could do
that and then secondly is this idea of a
on compatible block chains so we hear a
lot about new token projects launching
of scaling requirements at each of these
individual projects so if any one of
these projects has enough scale that on
its own could cause you know it could be
too large for any single blockchain to
share with others at the computational
level you know we're starting to design
this concept of building your own
blockchain for your own application so
if you can build your own blockchain for
your own application and you can have
that blockchain tied into an ecosystem
of other block chains you start to just
take on your own scaling requirements
rather than sharing scaling requirements
are there with other applications on the
same network so we'd see this kind of
fragmentation of industry of black
chains connecting as more and more
people launch their own block chains
with kind of pre-built functionality
with pre-built modular components
whether they're coming from hyper ledger
and the fabric protocol whether they're
coming from modular versions of the
etherium protocol or building something
from scratch so the idea is that as as
other people build their own block
chains they all become what we call a
incompatible and they can synchronize
into this this communication protocol
that allows all these block chains to
sync to each other so let me talk about
the bridge for a few minutes
a few things to understand about how
this works there's a there's an economic
model that we're building essentially to
incentivize people to connect block
chains to one another so at the core of
all of this inside the a on one block
chain is a system of registries that we
use to create bridges track bridges and
incentivize participants on these
bridges so these registry contracts are
essentially smart contracts on the
connecting blockchain that act as the
identifier of all these bridges that are
being built inside these contracts
there's essentially two major
functionalities one is the fact that the
bridge needs to be created by a staking
of tokens
after that staking of tokens has been
put into the contract other nodes can
also participate in that or other token
holders can participate in that bridge
by staking into the same contract a set
of rules around the economics of that
bridge would be published as part of
that contract so it's up to the Creator
the bridge to say my bridge is gonna
have this fee structure and it's gonna
be this decentralized and it's you know
that whole mechanism is free market
opportunity for there the the bridge
creator to decide so we we envision that
at some point there's going to be a
competitive landscape of bridges
connecting block chains and there's
gonna be faster bridges and slower
bridges and you know expensive bridges
and cheap bridges that connect
watch ants one to the other inside this
registry contract all of the nodes that
participate in stake they're tokens will
essentially become bridge validators
these bridge validators have the role of
witnessing and validating transactions
that we call interchange transactions so
they sit commonly on both block chains
that they're bridging they can witness
transactions on one lightweight
consensus we're testing honeybadger BFT
on the bridge it'll be a single round
voting mechanism on the bridge to say
hey did we all witness the same thing if
yes then we transmit that message to the
to the connecting network and the
connecting network and then reroute that
to the blockchain and it's intended for
the the other part of the bridge
registry that's kind of critical is the
fact that we use the bridge registry to
keep track of the route hash and the
state of the blockchain it's connecting
so at any point in time independently
somebody receiving a transaction could
go back to the registry contract and
prove through that route hash that the
transaction they're looking at is
actually included in the state of that
blockchain so the the the registry will
keep track of all these route hashes of
all the block chains that connects to
the interchange transaction is the
format of transaction that we're
designing essentially to have a common
language across block chains of what a
transaction format should look like so
very very simply if you think about a
single blockchain today all you really
need to identify is who is it coming
from and who's it going to now we add a
second layer of who's it coming from on
what network is it coming from
and who's it going to and on what
network is it going to so we have to
create this idea of identifying block
chains so we can effectively route these
transactions and the the idea of a ictv
which is the interchange transaction fee
is essentially a layer above the
transaction for you to already pay
inside the blockchain that you're
operating on you pay a second layer fee
to cross bridges throughout the network
so if you needed your transaction to be
witnessed on another blockchain you'd
pay that fee so over time what you'll
see is you'll see transactions being
able to skip from one participating
blockchain through a connecting network
into another participating blockchain
paying fees and crossing bridges along
the way and incentivizing these actors
to essentially act as the validators on
these on these bridges so there well
we're also publishing an economic paper
in the next few months that will dive
into you know the economic model behind
this a little bit more the token we are
building another protocol that we think
will be useful to a lot of projects that
start off with the idea of creating an
ear
c20 token on the on the etherion
blockchain and eventually want to
natively move that token into its own
blockchain coin so the first bridge that
we're gonna be releasing at the
beginning of next year is a token bridge
to essentially allow for a burn and mint
functionality native to the ERC 20
contract so if you can prove to the ERC
20 contract that you've burnt your token
then on the other side of the bridge on
this new native blockchain a coin will
be minted for you and kind of more
interesting than that is the fact that
we want to make this a bi-directional
bridge so that again if I prove to the
protocol that I'm connecting to that
I've burnt a coin then I can actually
ream into the ERC 20 token so we want to
be able to create this fluid concept of
tokens being able to transfer from one
blockchain to another without changing
the underlying supply of that of that
currency so that at some point you can
see token economies that are scaling
across multiple block chains rather than
single block chains so this is something
we're gonna be building and testing for
our own token but as a protocol that we
think will be pretty useful and
available for other people to apply to
their projects as they go from ERC 22
native coin at some point in the
evolution of their technologies so other
kind of potential applications we're
looking at obviously there's a lot of
talk these days about decentralized
exchanges the only ones we've really
seen function to date are ones that
operate on top of a single network so
the ERC 20 exchanges because they all
operate in the same logical environment
of aetherium but these centralized
exchanges across block chains is not
something that we've been able to figure
out yet and that's because we don't have
a decentralized home at the middle of
all these block chains we just have
these centralized intermediaries so
decentralized exchanges across
currencies and tokens but like a real
decentralized exchange it allows us to
connect Bitcoin to like going to ether
to any other blockchain that has a
native currency interesting to you know
our enterprise clients where we started
testing this is this idea of hybrid
public and private blockchain
applications where you can start writing
some of your logic and keeping some of
your data on private chains and if some
of your logic and some of your data
operating on public chains and still be
able to build these into a single
application so a simple example we often
use when we're talking to our enterprise
clients is you can imagine having a
health record managed on a sink on a
private network of hospitals an
insurance policy managed on top of the
etherium blockchain and a payment being
triggered in some sort of banking
Network an application built there would
essentially require that I'd be able to
trigger actions on all three of these
block chains pretty autonomously
you know I go to the hospital my medical
record is updated my insurance policy is
verified and a payment has made all of
this being built in a decentralized app
that sits on the Aon network connecting
to all these block chains so that's kind
of this idea of decentralized
applications across multiple block
chains we also see this as a really
interesting solution to scale aetherium
you know as we see lots of applications
that are running into scaling problems
as they go through something like an IC
o----
we're really all the etherium network
needs to know is the final state so if
you can run all of your transactions on
another blockchain and and just simply
record the final state at the end of
your sale at the end of your your
application back to the etherium network
you can use this as kind of an on ramp
and off ramp for aetherium applications
as you're developing them and then the
dream is Unchained artificial
intelligence this is the idea behind
what we're doing in proof of
intelligence so that you can start to
create you know machine learning
functionalities that can be called by
smart contracts on the chain without
having to take advantage of centralized
AI systems that are being developed
today so roadmap this is our first
release coming up in 2018 what you can
expect to see there as well have a we'll
have a live network operating likely in
January but you know we'll see
engineering roadmaps tend to be a little
flexible modified EVM big change being
moving from 256 bits 228 bits in the ATM
design we've modified the echo hash
mining to essentially increase ASIC
resistance by increasing memory usage
increasing computational complexity this
eventually will get swapped out with
proof of intelligence which is being
developed kind of in parallel but needs
a little bit more time still running as
a proof of work system before we get to
that hybrid consensus we're gonna be
open sourcing our java api which is like
an enterprise api we've used for a lot
of our large-scale enterprise clients
focusing on transaction scale and then
finally we'll be releasing the ERC to a
on bridge protocol and here's a look at
our roadmap over the next kind of year
and a half to two years both on the
research layer what the papers will be
releasing and in the releases of all of
the functionalities we expect everything
on our white paper to be released by
early 2019 but with live iteration so
the network kind of going throughout
that time so that's oh and then just
quick update on progress for those of
you following the project everything's
been is in development right now with
the exception of the
a on virtual machine which is still kind
of in its research phase some of these
things are you know 2 month roadmap some
of these things are a year and a half
long roadmap so we've got kind of pieces
of the team that are working on all
these pieces of the project in parallel
and we're constantly giving updates out
so you know follow us online would be
happy to get you guys involved in
learning more about what we're doing
this is who's here
at Def Con so we've got I think 12 at
Def Con most of them I think they're all
in the room so feel free to come find us
if you have questions and you can follow
us at an entire network thanks a lot
guys
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