so today I'm gonna kind of talk to you a
little bit differently than how plasma
is constructed or how you build plasma
but I want to actually talk about
applications that we're building and
deploying into production with plasma
and how plasma is actually going to
scale games on the blockchain and I'm
kind of a big fan of games because I
think it's actually what's gonna drive
normal user adoption onto the blockchain
so like we're super passionate even
though we're like researching plasma
we're always kind of passionate about
how can we actually get end-users to
play and use the blockchain right cool
so this talk actually starts about 20
years ago so I used to I used to play
this game called Magic the Gathering
anybody here actually play like Magic
the Gathering or you do or alright
there's a whole bunch of people in a
nerdy crowd so it wasn't a big surprise
so we used to like when we were in high
school we used to play Magic the
Gathering we used to play card games and
yugioh and all this stuff and we loved
it right and you know about a year ago
when we were starting a blockchain
company we said you know what it would
be really amazing if we put magic the
gathering of hearthstone on the
blockchain because you could have real
ownership of cards you could have
provably correct logic you know you
could actually prevent fraud you could
actually have real money
embedding inside the games we said let's
do it so I don't know if you guys were
developing a theory I'm about a year ago
but having a full card game on the
blockchain was just not reasonable right
and that's where we've kind of taken
this journey over the last year about
trying to take a very simple application
and actually scale it and run it on top
of the blockchain so cool so you you're
you're looking at me you're like Matt I
play for tonight I play all these games
why do I need it on the blockchain that
doesn't make any sense the blockchain is
for transferring value it's for you know
running prediction markets and stuff
like this it's not for games so I
actually I actually think that games are
have some really amazing use cases that
actually blow away traditional games so
obviously everybody talks about real
ownership of
right like the items that Ewing own
in-game you can really own them you can
trade them you know there's digital
scarcity if you guys have ever played
like an online game like an MMO or any
other kind of game you know that the
publisher will just flood new items
continually and if you had some valuable
staff of magic it will like overtime
lose its value but it's kind of nice
that we can actually know what the value
of our items are because we actually
know what the scarcity of our items well
it's also kind of cool as Vitalik
actually had this quote where like like
he was really sad when they changed the
rules of StarCraft and he stopped
playing because the one day they like
changed how the game worked and I think
what's kind of cool is if a game runs on
the blockchain we just literally fork it
if we think that like we want to play
Ultima Online with dreadlords or we want
to play the original World of Warcraft
before they nerfed it we could just
literally fork the blockchain and be
able to run our version of the game
right and then the last point we just
made this realization very recently and
I think that this is going to be like
one of the biggest features is because
we have a trustable vm because we have
this the e vm and it's trustable we
could actually have end users upload
code into our game servers and now we
could have anybody that plays our game
could make mods for the game and the
mods are not cheetah below they could
actually be running on the chain and
other people could be introspecting the
mods so we think that there's a ton of
amazing use cases for actually wanting
to run these games on the blockchain and
now you can actually monetize it so like
you could actually build a game we could
actually build like game modes and
actually be able to charge users for
them so gaming on the blockchain has
actually been around for quite a long
time so I don't know if you guys ever
seen Bitcoin actually had the first
blockchain games so about five years ago
there was this group called xcp
and they actually built blockchain games
and but they had like custom miners and
then they would put little bits of
metadata on top of the on top of the
Bitcoin chain so it was kind of the
first start and basically the only thing
they had
asset ownership you could prove that you
own some asset an asset had scarcity and
then aetherium came out right and
obviously we all know last year last
year was when the big jump happened when
crypto kitties came out everybody said
oh my god a theorem actually runs a
pretty cool application and these are
c720 ones came out and everybody was
jumping all over it right
but it was kind of boring right so
anybody here ever play crypto kitties
okay like half the audience it was kind
of just a Ponzi scheme with like a cute
graphic scheme so don't don't get me
wrong I have a couple cats I'm a fan but
it was kind of like okay this is cool
but like this isn't anything that like
mainstream gamers are gonna care about
this isn't gonna come in I'm not gonna
get my electronic gaming monthly and see
crypto kitties in it right it's kind of
still a very boring game but it did
invent the concept of these non fungible
tokens right so now we have like the
first kind of building block for all
this gaming technology right and
obviously we all know like proof-of-work
Chan's like Bitcoin and aetherium have
been really secure and they've been they
but the thing is is that they're still
quite slow so we're never gonna actually
be able to run a full game on a
proof-of-work chain at least I don't
think we will so I think what we're
gonna see is we're gonna see a
combination of other kind of consensus
mechanisms joined with plasma and plasma
will be adding the security from the
from from the proof-of-work chain and
then you're gonna have side chains that
are running on DPOs or proof of stake or
maybe other consensus algorithms as they
come out so we're currently a really big
fan of DPOs
because you can actually deploy
applications today so if you look at a
couple of popular chains like steam it
and yo s and then loom and a few others
they're all a lot of them are kind of
going with this deep us model and it's
it's it's a lot more centralized and
it's good for applications that have
lower value like games I wouldn't want
to run my core block chain on DPOs I
wouldn't run
like the blockchain that holds all the
value on a DPS chain but you can be able
to run pretty interesting blockchain
applications on top of DPOs so we're big
fans of side-chains so these guys
earlier have been talking about plasma
and using plasma for payments and that
there are plasma chains so there's kind
of really three scaling techniques right
now that we're talking about with
blockchain apps we have the state
channels we have plasma and side chains
and I kind of think that it's going to
be a combination I don't think that
you're going to see there's some groups
that say oh you know you can run
everything on plasma I don't believe
that's true you can run everything on a
sidechain sure you could do that but
then you don't have as much security so
I think really combining the plasma with
the side chains is actually what's going
to be what's actually making these
applications run so that was kind of a
very very long-winded way of being able
to show that we can actually have real
card games so this is a game called
zombie battleground where it's actually
like if you guys play hearthstone or
Magic the Gathering it's a real card
game that runs on a side chain and
what's really cool is because we have it
running on a blockchain like I was
saying earlier now we have end users can
upload new game modes so a user could
say I want to write a solidity contract
that gives me a tournament and the term
it says Oh everybody has to put in a
half an eighth and whoever wins the game
gets all the eath right and the owner of
the contract could actually monetize the
contract and they could be reusing all
my game assets my client my chain and
they would be able to extend the
functionality to their end users without
having to build a full game themselves
and we think that like by having lots
and lots of developers be able to extend
other games this is also going to cause
decentralization to the games themselves
so say you're say Matt you know this is
a plasma talk when we gonna get into
plasma I said yeah so
one of the issues we had was originally
when we started this game we had a bunch
of people back the game and we had like
2000 users kind of donate to fund the
game and initially we had to give them
two million cards so I don't know if you
know how much time it would take to give
two million cards across the etherion
blockchain we would have probably eaten
up every single transaction for like
over a week if not two weeks on the
entire chain if we were gonna do this so
obviously it wasn't even feasible on day
one and this was only with two users
with 2,000 users so that's when we
that's when we started to say and these
these are what the cards look like
better they just so you have kind of a
good reference so we were like okay how
can we give them these assets right and
how can we secure them so first we want
to be able to issue assets on side
chains so that way like we can have we
can even have on ramps from like mobile
games so like let's say that you know
you have free-to-play mobile games you
want to unwrap these users right and
maybe a few hours in then you want to
tell them about crypto you want to start
with having them play these games and
then eventually get in and say oh this
oh you mean I can move my assets to
aetherium you mean that I can sell my
assets for ether or I can sell my assets
for Bitcoin or something like this and
then we slowly get adoption through
these people that are just kind of
playing these games and they don't even
really realize that they're doing the
blockchain and then one day we get like
we just unranked them right and this is
where kind of plasma comes in because
plasma is going to be the mechanism that
we're going to actually be able to
exchange these assets to main net so
before we get into plasma just like a
quick 30 seconds about me I'm the
founder of loom Network we build l2
solutions we also build games I'm a big
go developer so if anybody here likes to
talk about go I'd love to geek out about
it and fun fact I wrote a well if
elephant to my wedding and if you get me
drunk
I will speak tied to you so that is it
so what was plaza so about a year ago
when I first heard about plasma
Vitalik had written the white paper and
it read the original white Pei
and I was like wow this is magical it's
like unicorns and sunshine and all this
stuff and I said this is just not
possible I said when when you read the
original paper it's just it's too kind
of out there it's like ten years in the
future kind of thing and I and I said
you know what I'm not gonna I'm not
gonna do plasma I don't believe it's
going to exist I want to build my apps
now right so so now plasma has actually
changed and I think every speaker has
said this but I'm gonna I'm gonna steal
their lines is that plasma cash is now
plasma basically anybody that said
somebody was gonna like dude over there
or something like that but basically
anybody that's talking about plasma or
the original plasma paper has just
totally missed the last six months
because basically everything is moving
the plasma cash plasma cash is a massive
simplification of all the plasma
constructions so that we can actually
use them in real applications today we
even have an open source repo right now
where you can go and download and use
plasma on our test net for free right
now so so it was funny so like about
five or six months ago I'm on reddit and
some guy is like trolling me on reddit
this vbeauté uhrin guy I don't know who
that is and he's like you guys should
really like you guys should like really
do plasma and I said I don't know and
he's like oh I'll hook you up with the
imme say go guys so he hooked me up with
David over here and we had some coffee
in Bangkok and he's like man plasma cash
is the future and after like 30 minutes
I was convinced that it was the future
so about six months ago we started
actually building the first real plasma
cash implementation because I knew that
it was actually something that could go
in to production and be absolutely be
used this year because that's what I
care about you know it's fun to talk
about this stuff in the future and I
know a lot of you guys are building the
next generations of this stuff but I
kind of I kind of just want to ship my
game like that's that's just kind of my
main motivation here and that that's
kind of what I'm trying to get out of
this talk is that you know a lot of
these guys are talking about the
research but
I really just want to build some stuff
so I'm in a bit of a different category
so just a quick background about us so
we built l2 solutions with DD POS and
plasma cash there's a bunch of people
that are doing it I'm a big fan of
plasma cash you don't have to use us a
music goes doing some amazing work on
the plasma cash stuff also whoo somebody
who is jumping in there so you're like
ok cool you've kind of told me you give
me some background about why plasma ydp
us how are these things kind of coming
together and how are they actually
useful today how does this all fit in
what does this actually technically look
like when we look at like a diagram
right so this is like a kind of a big
jumble diagram that I stole from
somebody else but basically the idea is
is that you have a proof of stake
network whether it's deep us a proof of
stake or in some cases the proof of
authority network that is is allowing
users to be able to do plasma
transactions between themselves on this
side chain almost immediately so a lot
of these chains have sub-second commit
times so then if as long as we have
these plasma cash we can actually
transfer or trade value between every
single person that's on that side chain
and if at any point in time we don't
trust that side chain we can pull our
assets back to aetherium
and we don't have to trust the
constructions of the side chain what's
kind of cool is basically what's
happening is that side chain is
periodically just compressing all that
information and dropping Merkle trees
onto a smart contract on main net and
the clients can verify it and there can
even be third party people that can
verify it and slash this contract so if
the sidechain ever tried to cheat you of
value there are other people that could
actually work on your behalf and and
actually penalize the sidechain so I'm
gonna skip this so I kind of want to
show like what it looks like when you're
doing a plasma trash transaction so it's
not going to be particularly different
so like let's say that we have a mobile
app that's like a marketplace right and
we're gonna buy like a specific item
like we could actually go into the
marketplace and we could pick an item
and then what's gonna happen is on
mobile it would link to your wallet so
we link to your theorem what you see
it's it's not obvious but that's
actually trust wallet that's not our app
when you switch so Trust wallet and a
couple other wallets they actually allow
deep linking so if you have a mobile app
like your mobile game you could link
into it the user doesn't really feel
like they're having to go to their
wallet interface they can sign the
transaction and the information signed
from the transaction just jumps back
into your application so we can actually
make these seamless user experiences
even when we're doing complex things
like plasma and to me like that's
actually the exciting stuff I'm sure the
Merkel trees and the sparse Merkel roots
and all this stuff that's super awesome
but like if an end user can use this and
barely even know that they're using
crypto that's even more exciting to me
yeah so just so you can see so this
screen is actually your wallet and it's
just deep linked into your wallet
software so George touched on this a bit
too and I'm gonna talk about this for
just a minute is these things called
liquidity providers and why they're
important so one of the things that both
David and Kelvin and George we're
talking about is that there's these long
exit periods there can be a one-week
two-week exit period for a plasma chain
so for a normal user that's really kind
of really annoying like I deposit Ethan
to this chain and then before I get my
eath back I have to wait like two weeks
like when we use bye Nance and they make
us wait two minutes after we log in
we're already annoyed enough to get our
eath back so what we can do is like
chains like loom can actually operate
things called liquidity providers where
they're watching all the transactions
and they can see that hey these
transactions were actually valid and I'm
going to credit the user for the
transaction in advance and then I'll
take the payment a week later so we can
take the spread and and and allow the
user to exit very quickly because we're
watching the chain and we know that
these transactions are valid and that
nobody else is going to be able to
contest them so we can take that and
that's another mechanism that we
used to like smooth down the user
interface and make it even easier for
people to build these plasma
applications so just kind of getting
started I I know there was somebody in
the crowd that was like asking about how
to get started so anybody here ever used
crypto zombies ok cool like a like a
good half of the audience so we actually
just started crypto zombies season 2
today so we have a whole bunch of stuff
about these custom game modes but we're
actually coming out with a plasma cash
lesson over the next two weeks so
basically what we want to do is we want
to make it
plasma cash as easy to use as a person
learning solidity for the first time so
if there's things you guys want to see
in the upcoming lessons go ahead and hit
me up because we love to get some
feedback but we really just we think
that education for developers is kind of
the next step so if we have a thousand
developers that know how to use plasma
then we're gonna have 10,000 plasma
applications and it's just gonna
snowball on itself and I want to kind of
come back here next Def Con and I want
to see
claps or what was it Flats whoo I want
to see some plops next year and then I'm
then I know that like we actually did a
very good job cool so George mentioned
very briefly our plasma cash
implementation is open source the o me
say go plasma into the implementation is
open source also we also have a tool
called the plasma CLI that allows you to
just have a repple and be able to toy
around with plasma transactions because
we got to the point where we were like
trying to do these things and it was
really confusing and we just built a
very simple repple on how to use plasma
so that way you can like walk through
transactions you can cut you can test
invariance you could test like if you
have a failure condition so that way you
can kind of actually know how the
transaction flow is going to work and if
you're gonna cancel things you can
actually know how to cancel them so cool
cool things to build this wouldn't be a
good talk if I didn't give you some
suggestions liquidity networks I think
are really cool so like if you have big
of tokens and you want to transfer them
like said that you have eath and Bitcoin
and Mesa go and loom tokens and you want
to be able to have pools where you
automatically convert it like that would
be a great use case for plasma I've seen
Dex's I'm obviously a big fan of gaming
and something that not a lot of people
are talking about is you could
potentially be using plasma as a cross
chain communication so let's imagine
that we have three or four different
chains that are communicating with each
other they could actually communicate
with each other without going to theory
main net they could actually use plasma
caste constructions between the
different change just to communicate so
toca weight takeaways so plasma cash is
here you can use it today if you have
questions you can ask the four of us
down here in the front you can use it
for non fungible tokens and you can
scale payment networks with it so I have
a few minutes and I want to answer
questions so we'll open it up for
questions cool I think this gentleman in
the back was the first one you can just
shout it out and I'll repeat it
yeah so that was a great question the
question was you can't run an EVM on a
plaza on plasma so how do you run the
game logic so that's that's where like
we think that different consensus models
are interesting so we have a side chain
that runs deep us so the game logic
actually runs on contracts on the DP us
chain and the DPOs chains has a lot
higher transaction rate when users want
to do things the value they can use
plasma as the mechanism of transference
of value between chains and that's where
we think there's a kind of be a balance
over time until some kind of mechanism
comes that we can actually do EDM on
plasma cool this
that's a great question so truss wallet
does it support plasma it doesn't need
to so it's just an etherium wallet that
allows deep linking by other
applications so I believe some of the
other wallets do but we're friends with
the trust wallet guy so basically all
you're doing is you're sending aetherium
transaction to the wallet just like you
would meta mask and probably the new
meta masked wallet will probably just
work also you're just sending it
transaction it doesn't need to know
about it and the user approves the
transaction in the other wallet yeah I
say so that was a good question what is
our biggest challenge thus far and what
was kind of going forward is their
biggest challenge I think our biggest
challenge has always been trying to
figure out how we can actually get
normal users to get on to these
applications and how do we get adoption
so like everybody else is kind of
talking about the technology and I have
lots of people that work for me that
look at the technology but I'm really
excited about how many users are using
it how easy is it for me to onboard a
user and how many and how much can we
grow kripp there because if I can grow
crypto by 10 or 20 thousand users I've
made it quite a large dent right and if
a couple other developers do this all of
a sudden we have like a very large
community of people that are actually
using crypto kind of going forward I
think the biggest things are going to be
about UX and UI these plasma if you've
played with plasma transactions they're
still very complicated there's you know
there's deposits and withdrawals and
challenges and then mass exits and all
these things and I think there's gonna
be a ton of work involved and trying to
figure out how we explain these to the
user or how we hide these away from the
user without them losing all of their
security that's really what I think is
kind of the challenge going forward I'm
gonna I'll go back to you but this
gentleman the way back there
this is a great question so he was
saying that if you have two million
tokens in a plasma cash that over a year
you could potentially have a petabyte of
storage I don't know if that's the exact
number but basically so a couple of the
I think George was talking about plasma
XT there's a couple there's a couple
proposals for checkpointing so
essentially what's gonna happen is that
you're not gonna be tracking two million
assets over that time or if you are
we're gonna have smaller and smaller
check points because obviously holding
around a petabyte of data is not
something that's reasonable zero or zero
knowledge proof yeah that was a good
question so can we upgrade our plasma
change yeah so like basically with any
blockchain you can upgrade it through
either soft or hard Forks depending on
if the validators of the network accept
the changes so we have smart contracts
on our plasma chain that are upgradeable
also so yeah there's there's no reason
why you can't upgrade the plasma chain
over time cool oh sorry
okay this guy in the back here how big
of a team do we have to build it so loom
is 70 people the team that built the
game is around 30 people so so quite a
sizable team yeah cool yeah so this is a
great question it says while you're in
the game the game is actually
controlling the key could the users
potentially be controlling that key so
we we perfectly we purposely try to do
this thing where we have multiple keys
so we have a private key that is
actually doing your gameplay that has no
real value other than the actions so if
that key is lost the only thing the
person can do is just kind of play the
game as though they're like you and that
we purposely make any of the keys for
values the ownership of the items to be
a different key that's controlled by
your wallet so that way when you're
actually doing actions that would move
or sell or buy items you would use you
would use your primary wallet right
exactly both keys are on your computer
its yep that's correct so so the
question is zombie battleground is a
game that runs on loom and does it use
aetherium for asset management so the
chain itself has asset management and
when you want to move app but you can
move assets back to aetherium so the
idea is is that there's going to be lots
of these side chains and then over time
if you want to move value back to main
net so like say there's a Dex on main
net that you wanted to use you can move
the cards back to main net and trade it
or if you just wanted to store it on
your ledger or your some other Hardware
wallet you can move it back to aetherium
for that
so what the question was how this is the
game use it so so on the sidechain we
use we obviously put the assets we have
the game logic and then we allow end
users to upload new solidity contracts
to modify how the games work on the
chain I think I have time for maybe one
more question this gentleman in the way
way back here how have we been marketing
the game and I have gotten so much grief
from the entire crypto community about
this so we did a Kickstarter not for
money but because we wanted to get a
whole bunch of gamers a bunch of people
that don't know anything about crypto
and basically all of our marketing
efforts have been about the game about
how how fun the game is and we have
purposely not done crypto people because
if I have a thousand pete crypto people
that just want to get in another ponzi
scheme of buying cards for me that's not
exciting to me but if i get 10,000 users
of people that like think my game is
awesome and fun and then they eventually
find aetherium then i have won so that's
it thank you guys
[Applause]
you