Our next poolside chat session is with the indomitable Thilagavathy. He is without a doubt one of the most valuable members of the OMG community. As Barry Gibb described so well, we’ve lost count of how many times he’s broken down technical concepts in a way people with hamster-wheel brains can understand.
You’re widely recognized as one of the most tech-savvy members of the community. What attracted you to OMG in the first place, and what’s made you stick around all these years?
I’m quite fond of the Crypto culture and within crypto, scaling public blockchains is an important problem. OMG took proactive steps towards researching and solving the scaling problem. Globalizing and scaling payments unlocks innovative use cases, but this requires the many silos of value transfer to be coordinated, which is an ambitious undertaking. With OMG’s background in the payments space, I thought OMG was at an advantageous position to solve the problem. OMG was also a part of the Ethereum OG’s. This combo of things, got me quite interested.
As we mostly hear from you on tech, we’d love to get to know the person behind the brains. Can you tell us a bit about yourself, and what you enjoy in life or what you’re passionate about?
I have a lineage related to farming, so maybe as an extension of that, I find farming enjoyable. In the past few years, good food has been a fascination. Being interested in logic, figuring out the basic combinations of taste and food has almost become a hobby. A long term fascination of mine has been about, what is this universe, why it exists and how it works.
I keep spending more and more time in the Cryptoverse. It keeps sucking me in. I’m quietly escaping from movies, from great shows like The Dark, etc. just to know a little more about Crypto. It seems to be the escape velocity from the clutches of the world around and time itself.
As an engineer, what things would you like to see from OMG that would help engage the technical community?
Incentives, a better distribution model and some good coordination by the team. The OMG ecosystem can benefit from better categorization based on the need of the times. Eg. Foundation/DAO, Investors, Core Developers, Researchers, OMG Improvement Proposal Designers, Tools & Staking Pools, Dapp Developers, Ambassadors, Meme Creators, General Community, etc. Then appropriate/attractive incentives and grants can be given to anyone contributing in the categories where progress is required. The OMG team would then need to need coordinate this properly. This imo will engage to grow the community and make the network prosper.
Have you worked on any blockchain / crypto projects before, such as setting up your own ETH node or writing smart contracts?
Sometime back, as a part of OMG Community based development efforts, I contributed,
- An ELI5 of the original Plasma whitepaper, https://link.medium.com/QJb76tVPA8
- In an effort to hard spoon the OMG Network, I provided a sufficiently detailed mechanism to connect the OMG Network to multiple parent/L1 chains(eg. Ethereum, Cosmos, etc.) simultaneously, so as to promote interoperability, reuse liquidity and allow the exchanging of tokens from multiple L1 chains. It was hosted on community.omgnetwork.org , but can’t find it now.
Apart from the above, around a year back, I was quite concerned about the slow withdrawal time of Plasma, difficulties in building liquidity for a fast withdrawal solution, etc. so I contributed an approx non-liquidity based mechanism for fast withdrawals. It can be found in the plasma group forums. The thread was also referred to in the OmiseGO GitHub and considered but deferred for the PoS phase.
https://plasma.build/t/plasma-withdrawal-time-is-a-major-hindrance-to-adoption/66/5
I’m currently experimenting with something related to web3, but will have to wait and see how far it materializes. Currently iterating on the architecture and mechanism design related to it. Though I’ve written helluva lot of code, I’m not a production coder and I have a greater affinity to architecture, mechanism design and mechanism coding.
What are you still missing in mainnet and are you hoping to see soon(TM)?
I’m really looking forward to hearing more about the Proof of Guarantee consensus mechanism, after all, staking rewards are the end goal for me. Further down the line, I’m interested to see the work being done around the O-engine and how a mix of centralized off-chain order matching will complement on-chain settlement — barring no changes to the design.
How involved were you in the ODP? What insight from that experience could you share or explain to your average salamander?
My involvement in the ODP is quite limited, but I’ve followed it to a certain extent. The team responds well, to help those integrating the OMG Network, those running watchers, etc. to solve technical issues and bugs. AFAIK, I’ve not found Minor International and Bitfinex participation in there, so surely there are other private channels of communication.
What advantages or insight does a tech-savvy OMG hodler like yourself have over a non-techy salamander on telegram?
Idk if it is an advantageous position. Surely crypto involves quite a bit of tech and that tech knowledge helps understand the intricacies of the solution developed. Crypto also brings together tech, economics, social, markets, etc, so maybe the tech knowledge can help see how the tech solution, beneficially or adversely impacts UX, user behaviors, market segments, etc. Tech also in an abstract way helps to form the macro and micro structure of the industry and OMG, which one could use to attempt and only attempt at a prediction of future requirements and trends.
Have you ever tried to explain the OMG Network to friends or family? How did they respond?
I mostly am anon, but I did explain it to my father and one or two friends. They seem to gradually get it. The reddit like use cases provide more clarity, the Tether use case and potential similarities, lit a spark, but when the price rises everything seems to be crystal clear, lol.
Do you have any concerns with the technical direction OMG is going, with operators and incentivized watchers on PoA/PoG?
Imo, OMG caters to the semi-decentralized market segment and will be a mass transaction layer in contrast to Ethereum as a settlement layer, so people coming at blockchains from the mainstream, like enterprises, centralized organizations, big games, etc. and even crypto banks would find it agreeable. Running watchers might help these organizations have some semblance of control yet attain a degree of decentralization. These factors might have played into the Bitfinex/Tether partnership. Watcher incentivisation is important for security, UX, etc. and the basics of the PoG design seem to be good, but will have to wait for the details. So, I like the overall direction that OMG is taking but I have concerns regarding the details. Mass exits could play spoilsport, a suitable fast withdrawal solution, fast finality in the order of 2s to 5s, a proper fee/value capture mechanism, a good incentive design for stakers/others, some form of scripting to handle conditional payments and better operator decentralization.
How is COVID-19 impacting your life as a salamander?
A lot of housekeeping and managerial work to do, to keep myself and the people around safe. But it has resulted in much more healthy eating and living. Certain happenings around Covid-19 are motivating me to spend more and more time on Crypto.
When the time comes, would you consider staking?
Currently my mindset is skewed towards safety, so a sufficiently secure network and decent incentives will make me want to stake. But if my mindset crosses over to experimentation, which is quite possible, then I might just jump right in. In both cases a good Staking Pool will be great to have. Good to have OMGpool there, as it is community driven and has OGs.
What’s your favorite steak sauce?
Just those words has my taste buds tingling. I like the cheesy buttery recipes a lot, not only with steak but also with veggies. A meal of steak with a cheesy buttery sauce, some ghee fried spinach/moringa, eggs and chicken broth that sat on the burner for two days, could catalyse the brain and brawn. You would have a Vitalik Popeye combo, ha ha ha.
The most fun question. What’s your favorite OMG meme?
Memes are so much fun. Barry Gibb’s memes are great. I’m also loving the current set of OMG memes that are happening. My favorite I think is, Jun of Ark or that in which an old man with an OMG hat, standing in front of an Ark with tether being on-boarded.
You’re obliged to lock your tokens and can never touch them anymore, but you can pick now one specific date on which they will be sold for you. After today, you can never ever change that date anymore. Which date would you pick? Next week (TM) is not a valid answer.
Most of the community is familiar with Plasma — where can we look to learn more about optimistic rollups?
One can start with Vitalik’s, on-chain scaling to 500 Tx/sec, post in ethresear.ch for the basics. The mediums of Optimism, Loopring, Matter Labs, etc. have quite a few articles that one can learn from. Synthetix’s discord has a Layer2 channel, which has some good discussion of the basics of Optimistic Rollups. The discussion involves guys from Optimism answering questions in there. I’ve also added a simple description of what an OVM is, in there. If you’re checking it out, start from June 10, 2020 for the relevant discussions. Also following the relevant twitter accounts would provide insights.
You may now nominate your favorite salamander to join the next session.
Those were great questions and it kindled a lot of memories. It was quite interesting and fun. Thanks to Barry for nominating me. Kudos to OMGpool and pwolf88 for putting in the effort and engaging the community. Would love to know of the spirit, works and behind the scenes tech of OMG Pool from Kartsims, I think Cosmo has some good knowledge related to payments, Instyle9 has some extreme views that helps to stay balanced, Croweel is like the Sherlock of crumbs, Raum Schiff establishes some interesting connections, with the kumu tree being an interesting methodology and Eddie F985’s penchant for details is amazing. I’m not able to choose amongst them, Can you roll a dice?
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