AMA with Tezos Co-Founder Arthur Breitman
We talked about Tezos’ competition, future and much more 🐰
Last Friday, we had Arthur Breitman join us on Wechat for an Ask-Me-Anything session. We translated the questions and Arthur’s answer below. Enjoy!
<Begin Transcript>
Nour (imToken): Before we share our topic, let’s have our guest Arthur briefly introduce himself.
Hello Arthur.
Arthur: Hi everyone, I’m Arthur Breitman, I’m the co-founder of Tezos. Thank you for coming to this AMA. I’m here to answer your questions. So please feel free…
How is Tezos going to compete with platforms like ETH2, Avalanche, Cardano? What will make Tezos stand out going into 2021 and beyond?
Tezos stands out because it has credible prospects for longevity. Looking at the cryptocurrency space, how many protocols can you say for sure will be running in 50 years? Work on ETH2.0 started in 2014 and is expected in 2023, an 8-year upgrade cycle.
Tezos has upgraded more in the past two years than the rest of the industry combined. While Cardano does interesting academic research, IOHK has been big on promises and short on delivery. Avalanche integrated innovative ideas in its consensus, but Tezos can adopt those ideas. The entire cryptocurrency space is our R&D department.
Outside of these upgrades, are there any works done by the community that you’re excited to see in 2021?
The DirectAuth integration in Kukai. Kukai lets you send/receive Tezos transactions to anyone’s Reddit or Twitter account. It’s not completely non-custodial but it’s still decentralized. Kukai is planning to extend this service to email, phone, and more. This is great for onboarding.
Wallets are often overlooked but they can be tremendously helpful for mass adoption. I’m also excited for the Ethereum bridges bringing more assets on the Tezos platform and NFT minting platforms. Most of all, it’s when all of these things come together.
We’ve talked about Proof of Stake security, self-amending mechanism, and many upgrades on Tezos. Is there anything you’re particularly excited about or envision seeing in terms of what comes next? Is there anything left in the position paper to make good on? What are we thinking about now?
The F proposal being worked on by many teams: Nomadic, Cryptium Labs, DaiLambda, Marigold, and others. This proposal includes: work by Cryptium Labs on baking accounts, performance improvements on encoding conventions, caching contracts. Overall, there are a lot of performance and development improvements in Michelson that I think is exciting. One of the most striking features in this proposal is a concept dubbed “liquidity baking”. The idea is for a small fraction of the block reward to accrue towards a uniswap-like contract between tez and tzBTC.
In terms of future technology, I would love to see better randomness with VDFs. The Ethereum Foundation is doing interesting work producing custom hardware for VDFs, I think it makes sense to wait until these are available. On better consensus — there is research being done with test nets launched using fast finality mechanisms, based on Tendermint algorithm and others. Prediction markets for proposal evaluation would be good.
At the moment, I think the focus in the immediate term is primarily on on-chain scaling for performance rather than sharding, like Eth2. Focusing on zero knowledge proofs -backed scaling could be useful.
How does Tezos today compared to the vision you had for it at the beginning?
In the position paper, Tezos is built on 3 pillars: POS, self-amending governance, safety in smart contract language. It’s pretty true to the vision.
Things we envisioned that are being worked on now: the Edo proposal which has zero-knowledge proofs. Inflating funding has lagged a bit, though we’ve seen experiments with invoices attached to protocols.
In the light of upgrading other public chains to the PoS mechanism, what method will Tezos use to expand its ecosystem reach?
Almost everyone is still underbuilding UX and chasing the same crowd of crypto enthusiasts. I think there are opportunities in breaking out of this mold. Everyone can come up with a nice innovation or improvement. What makes the difference is continued, iterative innovation, year after year.
Self-governance is one of Tezos’ most eye-catching innovations. Why is Tezos a self-amanding blockchain? What are the advantages of Tezos’s self-governance function compared with Polkadot?
Polkadot is first and foremost focused on enabling parachains. The idea being on earning fees from providing consensus and security to these chains. However, if the sharding technology succeeds, there is little scarcity in providing these types of services, making the approach self-defeating in the long run.
From the perspective of DApp developers, what advantages does Tezos have in terms of contract development language, consensus, and block generation compared to other public chains?
Tezos is designed first and foremost as a cryptocurrency. DApps are useful insofar as they enable more uses of the underlying currency, not the other way around. The Tezos smart-contract language has a focus on security and verification. Smart contract bugs can be very costly. For example, the Polkadot team designed Ethereum’s smart contract language Solidity and standard multisignature contracts but a bug in those contracts led them to lose hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money.
In addition to the Delphi upgrade, which reduces the gas cost of smart contracts by 75%, what layout and attempts have Tezos made in the DeFi field? When will the DeFi ecosystem belonging to Tezos appear?
Dexter is a decentralized exchange contract deployed on the chain where liquidity has been steadily increasing. The lowest hanging fruit for DeFi ecosystem to take hold is to bring assets to the chain. This is what Tezex and Bender labs are working on, among other things.
<Begin community questions>
I wanna ask whether Tezos would build own bridge that assets can be transfered from Tezos to Eth@Arthur B.
It’s possible to build bridges to bring Tezos assets to Ethereum, but why would we want to do that? Fees are much lower on Tezos, better to do the opposite, bring Ethereum assets on Tezos.
Can the current development team’s revenue be self-sustaining? Or need continuous financing? THX, Arthur B.
While there is a lot of grant financing available for a very long time, I agree that self-sustainability is very important and that’s why Tezos has a way to fund itself with invoices attached to proposals, onchain treasuries. It’s built for the long term.
Six new trust entities, including XTZ, have been added to grayscale. Is it true? What is the progress of XTZ on compliance?
I saw the same website yesterday, I don’t have any particular reason to doubt it but I don’t know more than you.
Developers think Tezos, what is the biggest flaw at this stage, and how to make up for it?
Developer tooling took a backseat in the first couple years, the development stack really only came together nicely for a smooth experience about 6 months ago.
Can tezos cross chain BTC to tezos and perform defi?
You can use a tzBTC / tez dex today, with dexter
Will Tezos continue to get higher fees like btc or eth?
The more demand for blockspace, the higher the fees, that’s universal. But the technology gets better over time and may outpace demand for a while.
For instance in Delphi gas costs were slashed 4x.
How can tezos update in the future solve the problem of low processing efficiency?
There are low hanging fruits in terms of straight optimization of the existing code base. After that, using parallel processors can give a big boost. Almost every computer today has 4 cores or more. Roll ups and other L2 solutions can help, and of course sharding solutions are becoming a lot more practical today than they were a few years ago.
Will XTZ go online in the future? Will Uniswap’s ETH-XTZ transaction be exchanged
You can exchange ETHtz and XTZ on a uniswap like dex, dexter, today…
What are the ecological characteristics of XTZ and what are the advantages compared with ETH, ONE, TRX and other projects?
Tezos uses proof-of-stake so the energy consumption is just enough for the servers of the different nodes to run, which is negligible compared to the energy consumption of mining.
Any materials about how to be Tezos node and staking things?
Some materials at tezos.com, also check out kiln
How does Tezos prevent cheating and bribery in Chain Governance?
By taking a very conservative approach. Votes take 3 months, there are two confirmations, requiring 80% majority…If 80% are willing to accept a bribe and cheat, you have bigger problems than on-chain governance… But even if the worst happened, there is still the option to fork.
Can you share some information about BNP Paribas’s choice of Tezos to study CBDC? Is the recent successful pilot of the Bank of France CBDC related to Tezos? Thx
I know as much as you do about this. Nomadic Labs is working with some banks and there are confidentiality agreement.
How to solo stake XTZ?
Checkout technical docs at tezos.gitlab.io
I heard that you like the name Little Rabbit. As for the Chinese name of Tezos, right?
Ah, yes Tu Zi :) It’s cute
<End of the AMA>
Thanks again to Arthur for taking the time! 🐰😃
