okay so I'm going to talk about you know
if two collaboration culture from the
point of view of if two what this
collaboration mean it just means simply
working together so I'm gonna try and
and have celebrates the various
successes that we've had in working
together and try and encourage even more
collaboration because I think
collaboration is one of the most
important and precious things that we
have in this ecosystem
the ecosystem is designed for
collaboration it's puts collaboration as
a as a first-class citizen and I think
we should embrace that more so I'm gonna
talk in first about internal
collaboration and by that I mean
collaboration which is internal to the
affair micro system and I guess that
shouldn't be too surprising that there
is collaboration there because we've
been collaborating on the theorem since
the very beginning so this is just an
extension of our culture the second part
might be a bit more surprising and this
is about collaboration between dock
chains so we've seen this recent
explosion of new ideas of very high
quality teams and how can we make the
most of that in you know win-win
collaborations ok first part
collaboration within a theorem for a
theorem 2.0 so I guess if theorem
actually started at the very early days
Vitalik already in January 2014 and in
the rest of 2014 was already thinking
about scalability and proof of stake
even before
DEFCON 0 even before a firm was launched
and I guess this culture of being open
and transparent kind of is part of what
we do a different foundation and we've
had contributions from other other early
founders in 450 we've had Gavin come in
we've had we've had Vlad and this
eventually led to the the more paper
which was the you know the first attempt
to write some sort of spec
for serenity for if to 2016 and maybe
early 2017 was a bit of a downer in
terms of if to research but in mid 2017
we have if research come in and in
addition to transparency and open sue
being opened we had interactivity so we
had the possibility for researchers to
to comment on on our research but also
to submit their own ideas and this kind
of led to Eve research which is a forum
online to become a very active place
within the blockchain space and in 2018
a lot of the core ideas of if viewer I
born or solidified during that time on
omni's research and you know as a
continuation of research we have
specking and implementation and here as
well we've tried to be as open from day
one partly to enable early teams to come
in and you know this this may have been
a little bit chaotic for the early
implementers because we keep changing
platform every other month and we change
the Specht quite a lot but I think it
all turns out pretty well because this
is a recent picture of the interim
Lockean and we have nine different
implemented teams from all over the
world coming in so you know the costs of
being open you know in terms of
confusion and chaos are definitely
outweighed by by the advantages another
thing that we've done to try to
encourage collaboration in e2 is at the
legal level so there's all sorts of
tools legal tools that the creators of a
blockchain project can use to maintain
some sort of ownership over what they've
created and you know as part of the
philosophy of
you know minimization and simplicity and
making a theorem a real common good
different Foundation has restrained from
using those tools and try to take you
know in extreme that decoupling approach
so for licensing for example all the
work that we do is open by default the
patents we have no patents and if we did
have a tense it would be you know
exclusively for defensive reasons NDA's
only for the you know it's for data
protection within within the foundation
you know not to disclose things like
salaries and trademarks we've we only
have them for defensive purposes and
we've never enforced them and I kind of
want to contrast that with stories
inspired from the the blockchain space
so there's the the there's for
blockchain projects in my mind that have
taken you know the extreme opposite
strategy for for these things so for
example there's a chain that has
licensing which is exclusive to that
chain so if you want to use the
technology in their code you can't it
has to be for this one chain there's
another project which has 30 patients in
their white paper there's yet another
project that every employee is nd8 and
if you ask them what have you been
working on for the last two three years
they say I'm sorry I can you know I'm
not I can't tell you and then there's a
number blocking project where the
trademark for the the blockchain is
owned by a private entity as opposed to
the public foundation and you know did
this opposite strategy even though it
might give you control ultimately I
think it's shooting yourself in the foot
because you know there's this if you
were to enforce these tools they will be
a little and forced centrally and it
kind of goes against the grain of of our
culture so here for the film foundation
we're just less likely to use legal
tools we've never sued anyone and
think we're quite unlikely to sue people
and so just to summarize this this legal
strategy we make we make the code the
ideas the people the brand it's all it's
it's everyone that's a common good it is
not our code and I guess the strategy
has worked out pretty well and for
trademarks so with different foundation
has actually been unable to get
trademarks recently in Singapore and
Korea they were like the patent office
was like hey no a firm is a common good
it's a blockchain the crypto currency
you can't trade markets and this is
brilliant we've reached a point where we
can't even trademark the the the brand
that we've created one of the things
that we you know I guess also good at is
trying to do parallel eyes to try and
have different teams work on different
places at the same time so we have
prototyping teams that work on phase
zero phase one and Phase two all in
parallel we have quilt was an Trinity
and we also have all sorts of different
teams working in parallel for Quality
Assurance so we have two teams working
on form of verification on different
parts of the if two spec we have
security audits cryptographic audits we
have fuzzing we have bug bounties and
actually here's a list of five currently
active bug bounties that you're welcome
to try and tackle and the first one
which is the bounties for the phase zero
consensus today we're doubling them so
all of these bounties should be
available them on challenges that
experien this is this line okay why did
no one tell me
okay so these bounties should all be
kind of combined on a single webpage
challenges dog and bounties is also you
know a great way to extend the
collaboration from a short-term stint to
a more long-term collaboration so here's
an example where you know I submitted at
any bounty on on Twitter to write the
the phase zero spec in a thousand lines
of go code a few days later this bounty
was claimed and then a few days later
the guy proto who actually claimed the
bounty was hired full-time and you know
also in in the context of you know
delegating but also minimizing the the
the the role of the foundation is is
grants so we've given over forty million
dollars in grants we have a dedicated
grants team of eight people and in
addition to a quarterly grant program we
have special grants you know sometimes
going up to five million dollar grants
and again just to give you like an
example of how willing we are to
collaborate I gave a talk recently in
Tel Aviv on e3 quantum security there
was a quantum post quantum signature
expert in the room he came to me he said
I'm interested in working on this
problem that you just presented a few
days later we had a call and then a few
days later after that we had a grant so
if you have if there's a good match we
can really move forward fast on
collaboration ok so this is this was
internal collaboration I guess not too
surprising still extremely dynamic you
know I don't think there's many
blockchain projects out there that have
managed to for example have nine
different implemented teams for the the
one protocol but I guess one thing that
I'm
you know very excited about it cross
chain collaboration and one thing to
note is that cross chain collaboration
is happening de-facto
so these are ideas that we have
essentially borrowed inspired ourselves
from other blockchain projects that are
shipping in phase zero so we have BLS vr
x using signatures VDS tree hashing
these are all things that other
blockchain projects have had photo
before us and we were able to reuse
their work and there's also all sorts of
new ideas that are more recent that are
being experimented with that we are very
excited about key building signatures
snark based like clients you know even
the move VM from from Libra all of these
things we're keeping a keen eye on and
we'll gladly incorporate if these
experiments turn out well one one piece
of great news is that a lot of these
blockchain projects have foundations so
for example cosmos has the interchange
foundation polka dot web 3 foundation
falcone protocol labs etc etc and these
foundations as you can tell from their
names they have a vision a mission which
extends way beyond their own blockchain
so for example interchain if you know
evokes you know an idea of many
blockchains talking to each other
Webster II you know evokes the idea that
you have more components than just a
blockchain you have a whole ecosystem
same for protocol etc and these
foundations have a lot in common we we
share a desire for interoperability for
standardization for common goods and
another kind of point that we have in
common is we we have we have money that
we'd like to to to invest in
in the broader ecosystem certain you
know just to drill into one of these
foundations where I think there's this
very good alignment is protocol abso
protocol labs at the legal layer they
have this really nice open pledge where
they say that the code that they're
shipping is you know dual license and -
under - extremely permissive licenses
and any patents that they have they have
this painted non-aggression pledge
they're also trying very hard to build
modular components that can be reused
and the more modularity that you have I
think the better in terms of reuse and
there's one specific module that the if
- is looking to to reuse and the flip
p2p and it's not just something that
we're looking to use it's also something
for example that cosmos is looking to
use polka dot is you looking to use etc
et-cetera so it's it's becoming a
standard which is fantastic
and they're also you know very generous
in terms of funding common goods and you
know they're very proactive in terms of
finding places where not only can they
benefit themselves but they can benefit
the whole ecosystem so in terms of
standards which is one of the the goals
if we want to try and be really good at
working together I think we're starting
to see the emergence of blockchain
standards
kind of a stack so it started it starts
with sha-256 at the at the bottom at the
bottom layer the vast majority of
existing and future blockchain projects
are built on sha-256 and that prevents a
lot of headaches if we all use the same
thing
PGP I think has a really good shot at
becoming you know the standardized
networking peer-to-peer layer for the
the various blockchain projects we have
BLS and maybe even more specifically BLS
1281 as part of that stack
was them and I think at one of the final
layers we're gonna have Universal snark
so this is a very recent development but
it's very exciting it's the idea that
you can have a snark proving system
which works for everyone which is
circuit agnostic and in particular and
the trusted set up like the Z cache for
example is it's a they pioneered the use
of Zeke of snarks within a block chain
set up but they had this significant
friction of having to do a trusted set
up for their specific application
but now we have new technologies to try
and avoid this barrier to entry and
that's very exciting and one of the
amazing things is that these pieces of
technology the the the people who
actually built them are either directly
from the blocking space or have been
subsumed and incorporated into the
blockchain space so for example plunk
the offer the authors of um Falcone and
aztec marlin one of the offices from a
theorem was am the founder of Ihram has
gone to Definity BLS 1231 literal easy
cash came up with this curved sean barie
and then dl bendlin is that is that the
affinity and the same wavelet PGP I
guess the only exception is a char 256
that came from the NSA but at least the
logo kind of looks like that of a coin
[Laughter]
you know interoperability as well is is
is a great way to collaborate so we have
these these two projects cosmos and and
polka dots you know that that's part of
the whole vision to to be interoperable
with with other block chains and so you
know they've made an effort to take take
modules that are reusable and
and share them to the communities that
we have IBC from cosmos we have
substrate and another interesting trend
that we're seeing is a stock based light
clients because interoperability between
chains is a lot about light clients and
we want them to be as cheap as possible
and we have coda that's working with the
fully recursive snarks M&T for 96 and
then we have seller which is working
with one level of recursion with the
sexy curves all super interesting stuff
and one of the successes I think a
blockchain collaboration has been with
the academics so we have this one group
at Stanford which is basically for
people looking into blockchain specific
stuff and they've they've invented would
you know they've they've pushed forward
you know this very significant chunk of
the crypto which is used today by block
chains and this is the stuff that have
that they have influenced us within if
etherium but there's all sorts of other
pieces of crypto that is being used
within the wider blockchain space and I
guess a large part of this this
influence probably came from the fact
that the there was a thirty million
dollars of funding to the the Stanford
center for blockchain research which
happened in 2018 and so and here you
know we've seen collaboration at the
funding level there's four different
blockchain projects and others that have
funded this and it's been a huge huge
success and the Stanford center for
blockchain research in addition to doing
all this research they're doing all
sorts of other programs that are
providing value to the ecosystem so I
mentioned these Universal snarks and so
the snark ceremonies is one thing that I
think we can collaborate because it's a
shared piece of technology and here
actually in the participation diversity
is key so we want to try and reduce
trust in the system and the more diverse
the participants the better so that's
another area for collaboration and
another kind of interesting trend is is
hardware
can we use hardware to our benefits and
the competition model which worked
really well for proof of work is also I
believe going to work extremely well for
vdf and snack Asics I think at this
point we all want Cece stock Asics as as
the the next piece as one of the piece
of hardware coming up so on that topic
in terms of hardware competitions we
just finished the vdf competition which
was a the first round which led to a 75%
speed-up in performance congratulations
Eric person for that and we're going to
start the second round of the
competition in just a few days and you
know the vdf alliance here is it's an
example of collaboration where we could
not have done it alone it's not just
that where we would be wasting resources
if we if we tried the same thing at the
same time is here the project is so
expensive that we need collaboration and
here I'm excited to announce that tells
us is the fourth funding partner to the
Alliance Cosmosphere and Falcone tells
us I think that's a great team of
founders and you know collaboration
extends beyond the blockchain space we
have collaboration at the tooling level
with AWS synopsis Xilinx and also with
academics because there's some hard
problems to be solved here and you know
the space of collaborations is just it's
just massive and that's only a partial
list so really excited to be working
with our blocking projects this is a
unique opportunity and I think we can
only get to where we want to be you know
through collaboration the the division
is so so ambitious that we have to
collaborate it's not even a choice thank
you