Cyberutopian future: beyond the blocks with Kusama and Polkadot
The internet has changed the way humans connect to the world. Engineers , scientists, architects, designers this is just a tiny bit of people who are behind the internet of now. Computers changed the reality of humans, using computers as micro computers cyborg enhancing smartphones and accessories has changed the humanity and opened a whole new world to the metaverse. As cyber-humans we now interact with technology as if we were born with it.
Public Blockchain networks are taking the cyberpunk realm to a whole new level: collective consciousness is a shared digital organism, as water, air or the environment — common public good.
We’ve put up these takeaways from each speaker that we hosted during The Cyber future on Parachains sessions. Every talk was recorded and it’s live on YouTube, find main takeaways from the talks below.
Recordings from the Event sessions:
The Cyber Future on Parachains
The Cyber Future on Parachains- NFT, Metadata, Art
The Cyber Future on Parachains
The first session was concentrated around a general overview and education of Polkadot Ecosystem. The recording from this session is on YouTube.
Key highlights and lessons learned from liaisons in the Polkadot Ecosystem:
Joe Petrowski from Web3 Foundation
Joe’s talk was focused on the Polkadot Statemint. Slides are available here
Highlights:
- Parachains allow for specialisation — like layer one blockchains. Like Flow is a chain for NFTs.
- Each parachain defines its own state transition function.
- Relay chain provides security for parachains.
- Statemint is a promise backed parachain dedicated to promise backed assets.
- Statement provides an asset deployment platform and registry for Polkadot.
- Create asset and store transfer them with statemint as first class citizens. This standard interfaces for fungible and non fungible asset.
- Other chains can use Statemint to send assets from statemint into their chain.
Sang Tran Hong from Polka warriors and Illusionist Group
Sang’s talk was focused on an overview of the Polkadot Ecosystem.
Highlights:
- Polkadot has become the number one relay chain
- Polkadot has council that is governed by all stakeholder
- Polkadot is easy to build any customised blockchain without hardfork of the blockchain
- Easy to connect with other substrate-based blockchain
- Polkadot blockchain is secured by the central relay chain
Sam Zou from OnFinality and SubQuery
Sam’s talk was focused on infrastructure providing services, OnFinality as node provider, SubQuery as on-chain data aggregator.
Highlights:
- OnFinality and SubQuery are providing essential Services to Decentralized developers
- Developers should have available data for their dapps. SubQuery provides data for the developers from the blockchain.
- Every developer can pick and modify what kind of node based on his needs.
Ruitao Su from Acala
Ruitao’s talk was focused on Decentralised Finance on the Polkadot network.
Highlights:
- Acala is DeFi hub on Polkadot.
- It has it’s own sUSD stablecoin inspired by MakerDAO.
- Liquid dot staking derivate LDOT staking — everyone can hold DOT, the longer you hold the more you earn.
- Acala is using Acala EVM, the gateway to the Polkadot ecosystem which makes Acala composable with DeFi protocols and cross-chain liquidity. Fees can be payable in any tokens.
- Ruitao did demo of the Acala platform
Daniel Bar from Bitfwd
Daniel’s talk was focused on exploring China’s crypto ecosystem and community.
Highlights:
- Developer movement in the world has grown significantly in 2017 with ICO boom.
- EOS and Tron poped up in 2018–2019 as “Ethereum killers” (not successfully as they’ve not been working on open source ecosystem development in a genuine way).
- EthGlobal and ConsenSys were the main Community Builders back then without any presence of Ethereum teams in China where is 1.4Bilion of people tech driven China.
- The Polkadot ecosystem attracted a lot of Chinese developers and entrepreneurs. Web3 Foundation team developed open source community in China like nobody else: started campaigns there with devs, grants, foots in ground and did events and building up the community and relationship which makes China high caliber of talent and a lot of activity comes from VCs based in China.
Cyber Future on Parachains — NFTs, Metadata, Art
The second session was concentrated around Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Metadata and Art in the Polkadot Ecosystem. The recording from this session is on YouTube.
Key highlights and lessons learned from liaisons in the Polkadot Ecosystem:
Bruno Skvorc from Web3 Foundation, RMRK and Kanaria
Bruno’s talk was focused on RMRK NFT Standard.
Highlights:
- Remark is a graffiti of blockchain, extracting value from image to message. It is like an instruction tutorial of how to read messages that are interpreted in a different format.
- Remark is reproducing and processing the message you shout at blockchain.
- RMRK is fast interaction NFT standard, no need to be tied to other standards.
YangWao from KodaDot and MetaPrime
Yangwao’s talk was focused on KodaDot and introduced Metaprime.
Highlights:
- KodaDot is the first NFT gallery in Kusama. It is using RMRK specification, Textile for in-browser actions, content is stored on IPFS and Arweave. KodaDot has a serverless approach, supporting 3D models, emoji functions and has mobile first design.
- KodaDot is Community Driven, which started with translations, and evolving into creating bounties on issues so anyone can contribute and improve the gallery.
- Metaprime is metaverse-agnostic.
Viki Valastin from KodaDot and JAM from DatDot
Viki and JAM had discussion about NFT development on Polkadot, how pallets on substrate works, the differences between smart contract and pallets.
Highlights:
- NFTs allow us to tokenise anything physical or digital.
- Kusama should do one man job to be just layer between parachains.
- The difference between pallets and smart contract — smart contract is user generated code, pallet may have the user generated & submitted code by the user. Pallets are checked through the governance process & Parity team.
- Pallets are similar to ERC721 contracts without the user generated and contributed code.
- Kusama has no gas but transaction fees which makes it easier to do on-chain operations.
Jessica Angel from ArtProject Decentralised
Jessica is an artist connecting the art with blockchain and creating art installations which are displaying blockchain and components in physical space and digital explorations of blockchain and real world.
- Blockchain is a structural information that is like an organism. The computer used to be an informational element of much of information together that is dragging elements together. Jessica is bringing the digital space of blockchain into physical space.
- Voxel Bridge is an art installation that was made to collaborate blockchain people and artists and XR designers and connect them together for one project.
- Voxel Bridge is presented via 3D tech that people can engage with in real space. Anyone can explore Kusama network via AR integration with floating elements of the real blocks of the blockchain displayed and people can walk around them.
