Multichain Kaisen II Recap
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Happy Saturday!
Are you enjoying the weekend pump or regretting not being exposed enough? Whatever it is, one thing is for sure, the best investment you can make is still learning stuff 😼
That said, I learned a lot during my latest Multichain Kaisen space, and I hope you could take some things as well. If you missed it, this post distills some of the most important things we talked about.
You can also listen to the recording here.
A huge thanks to the teams showing up from Astar Network (Hoon & Ramz), Octopus Network (Sheldon), Decent.land (Benjamim & Chase), Ghost Chain (Patriarch), and NEAR (Guille). You all rock 🌟
Also thanks to Shitzu for being my loyal sponsor.
Overall lot of great stuff is happening in all the ecosystems in the space which are building in Polkadot, Cosmos, NEAR, lots of EVM chains and Arweave.
Favorite Anime and recent binges
- Monster for a slow burn
- Bocchi the Rock
- Spy x Family
- Steins;gate
- Science fell in love
- Madoka Magica
Also, if you need more inspo, ask Hoon from Astar he can give you a list.
USP of chains represented
Astar Network
A smart contract platform that empowers community devs to be independent and sovereign without having to fear being part of a system they can’t control.
Octopus Network
We’re the perfect fit for projects that need their own chain but also are inherently community projects. Social projects are quite interested in it.
NEAR
It’s the perfect platform to onboard web2 developers.
Decentland — Arweave
Arweave is specialized in permanent storage, so it can store pretty much anything. NFT metadata, blockchain state, application UIs.
GHOST
The initial idea was to make a private version of DAI. Now we’re making any token and NFT interoperable in a decentralized fashion.
Multichain Future? EVM or not?
Guille: Many people ask me that question. I think in the future, everything will be fast, and then the question is how will people use it? Even if Ethereum scales but has a tough onboarding process, then maybe devs will still go somewhere else. We’re gonna be multichain, and people can pick what best solves their problems.
Sheldon: Another aspect is security. So if on NEAR you pay the cheapest fee, and NEAR is modularizing its security, then your transactions get finalized, but they might not be the most secure. We might start looking at different security tiers — where basically, you can opt for lower security for the benefit of speed and savings.
Hoon: Blockchains are just tools. Maxi's perspectives don’t really make sense. It’s kind of the ethos behind Polkadot/substrate to enable any chain to focus on its own specific use case and yet give it abilities to communicate with other chains in the ecosystem.
Patriarch (GhostDAO): It’ll be hard to beat Ethereum because it has the network effect. It’s a myth that everyone is using Ethereum. Try going to emerging countries and using stablecoins; they’re not gonna do ERC20 USDT. They’ll use USDT on Tron because it’s the cheapest.
In developed markets, try onboarding to USDC on Avalanche so most liquidity through CEXs flows into Ethereum.
Why did Decent.land pick NEAR?
Benjamin (Decent.land): Yeah, so we actually approached NEAR first before any EVM chains. We’re JavaScript developers at heart, so it made sense. I’d say EVM chains shot themselves in the foot by requiring such an obscure language.
We didn’t really plan to go for NEAR when we considered going multichain, but it turned out to be the best developer experience — and we’ve tried many.
Exciting things that happened in your ecosystem in 2022
Astar Network
XVM feature: Xtra vehicular manslaughter (jokes) — cross-virtual machine. Astar supports both EVM and web assembly smart contracts natively. With XVM these smart contracts can communicate in both directions to break the boundaries between different virtual machines, accounts, and languages.
Octopus Network
Contract update: NFT permissioning of a validator set. The idea is you can have the security of an NFT on an L1 be controlled by a central arbitrer, or a contract, that is capabe of restricting the validator set on octopus network. You can launch Proof-of-Authority chains with Substrate. But now you can reference an NFT’s registry to allow people to validate on-chain.
Pretty excited about the Astar Grant as well.
NEAR
JavaScript SDK release: before we had Rust and Typescript, which people found difficult. JS was huge.
Arweave
L2s: It’s worth noting that Arweave is a traditional PoW chain so things take time and effort. L2s like Bundlr have really made it more web2 like. We now have caching for data and smart contracts. Another tool now available is EXM = execution machine, a l2 for arweave smart contract execution which makes it lightning fast.
GhostDAO
Community Growth: We’ve been focused on building up our community. We also have experimented with DeFi 2.0, which led to the creation of our infrastructure for NFT 2.0.
We also created an on-chain affiliate program where people can use their address similar to affiliate links.
Web assembly’s role in onboarding web2 devs
Hoon: It allows language extensibility, so that in the future it won’t be hard to ad C++ suport. You just need a language that compiles to web assembly binaries. It’ll enable devs to build without having to rethink how blockchain works, or learn solidity.
Web Assembly makes it easier to abstract functions from Polkadot functions, so you can recreate easily from other parachains.
ZK-anything
Benjamin (Decent.land): We kind of propose the complete opposite. One of our protocols allows users to tie their addresses across networks together, so you can prove your reputation wherever you are. It’s opt-in enabling dApps to prove your identity.
From the other side, data is stored on-chain on Arweave, but it can be encrypted. There will be an encrypted messaging protocol to facilitate more privacy.
I think blockchain should be used to propagate the amount of publicly verifiable trusted data.
Patriarch (GhostDAO): We have various layers of privacy. The first layer is synchronization of VMs, the second one is the virtual deposit feature built by substrate, and then we have Astro VM built on ZK technology. We created this 1,5 years before it was hyped. We’re literally just supporting to fourth amendment that it’s no one’s business what I do with my money.
Guille: We’re actually starting a Zero-Knowledge working group.
Hoon: We believe that privacy is important, but we ourselves don’t specialize in it. That’s the beauty of Polkadot, that there are solutions in the ecosystem like Manta Network. Other chains in the Polkadot ecosystem now use Manta as a privacy layer.
Forecasts for 2023
Sheldon: There’s a lot of exciting things happening between chains. IBC is one of the main ways I see to make that happen. Composable also working on bringing IBC to NEAR, and more vocal about it. We’re going to see more attestation and validation across chains — so the idea that we’re associating our NEAR and maybe Ethereum wallet holding all our POAPs — that’ll be more of a cultural phenomen.
Also excited to see what happens with parathreads.
Ramz: I think more multichain is going to be more the norm.
Hoon: It’ll be a big year for Astar because we’re approaching a semi-mature state with lots of features. By the end of 2023, we want to restructure the blockchain to be a normal tech stack any dev can use.
Guille: I hope by the end of the year, everyone can do whatever they want to do without having to worry about writing their own contracts.
Soon there will also be a change to the network that will enable someone to pay gas for others.
Benjamin: I’m seeing technologies that are chain-agnostic allowing users to use whatever infrastructure they like, accepting signatures from different wallets and settling back to the chain of choice.
Patriarch: I think we’ll see more adoption through new DeFi protocols, and NFT protocols and multi-chain communication.
Thoughts on Memecoins
- They are for the culture.
- Many are scams, but the ones that last they are actually very decentralized if you look into it. They are proof that internet communities can do stupid things together, and stupid things can work.
- Now they even have L2s (Shibarium)
Thanks again to everyone joining! See you around next time ✨
And don’t hold back with ideas for themes I should cover next.
