Community Development Call #14
This blog is a transcription of the 14th Community Development Call led by Chief Technology Officer Aaron Craelius. These biweekly calls are open to the public, designed to update our community on the latest Regen Network news.
View slides from the call here.
Gregory: Welcome everybody. I’ve just posted it in the Telegram. Cool. We’ll probably just get rolling here in a moment. I’m going to give it just one more minute and then we’ll get rolling. Will, I have been thinking. I didn’t get to it but if you want to give a one or two minute just brief share about the Demurrage post and design forum. Maybe you could pop into the slideshow and just put a link to that. It might be useful.
Will: Okay.
Gregory: I was going to do it but I was too busy working. Here’s a slideshow for everybody. Cool. Alright everybody, let’s get rolling. Welcome to Regen Network Development’s Community Dev Call for this week. We have a little bit of a quick review. We’re going to do a full post-mortem later, but a quick review of the last Testnet, a little bit of looking forward to the next Testnets, some reviews from the ecosystem service credit registry team, and some information from our new blockchain product manager Cory. He’ll get to introduce himself to the community as well and do a quick update as to what’s been moving, and some updates of upcoming events, and as usual we’ll have a little bit of a moment to chat. People can ask questions and then we’ll be ending at 30 minutes after. Welcome everybody to the call. I’m just going to do my screen share here and present. I wanted to just briefly — especially because we canceled last week’s validator call — just do a real quick set of bullet points. Anil if you’d like to add anything after I go over this, please feel free. Just a description of how the last Testnet went. We had a 90 seconds upgrade, which is pretty phenomenal, from Darien Gap to Papua. Then, immediately after that, we had a successful emergency upgrade after some intentionally malicious code was found by some of our validators. Good job on that. We’ll be officially announcing the results and doing the full post-mortem on next week’s validator call. Anil, do you have anything that you would like to add to this?
Anil: Yes, point [calculation?]. Maybe we’ll share next week. By validator call, we’ll have that ready.
Gregory: Yes, cool. Thank you. Yes, we’ll have the scores and whatnot ready next week. Just a brief looking forward to the next Regen Network Testnet 3000 will be running CosmWASM with Gaia in WASMD. We’re not quite to the point where we’ll be testing Regen Ledger specifically. There’s still some work happening but we will be able to provide a service to the larger Cosmos community, and essentially be running something that is Game of Zones ready as IBC moves towards the Game of Zones. We’ll see how that all comes together. There’s some dependencies there, but we wanted to get in and test CosmWASM with our big validator pool and run it through its paces a little bit. That should be a lot of fun. We’re not announcing the date that that’s going to start yet. There’s going to be some conversation. Maybe we’ll announce that next week. There will be 900 points allocated to this Testnet. Okay. I’ll hand it over to Cory. Cory, if you want to just do a brief introduction before you dive into the details, that would be fantastic I’m sure. I think you know most of people on the call right now, but for the great viewing audience, the millions of people who’ll be watching this on YouTube.
Cory: I will say, at this point, it feels like there’s been, whether it’s the community call or the validator call, I’ve said hello on a number of these. I’ll try to keep it brief for those of you who maybe have seen my face before. This probably is the first time that I’m formally presenting anything, especially as Aaron, our CTO, is unfortunately not able to join today. I joined Regen, I’d say, this is my third week at this point, I think. We’ll be working closely with Aaron and the blockchain development team to help with road mapping, getting our iterations type, and interfacing with our internal product team that works more with our pilot projects, as well as some of the external groups that we’re involved in, in the Open Agriculture space. Specifically, there’s been an initiative called Open Team that Regen is a part of. I’ll be interfacing a lot with them and helping to use inputs in user needs for that larger group of folks, to inform what it is that we’re actually building and developing on the ledger side of things. Keeping it pretty quick for the dev updates today — the Protobuf Migration moving along. We have the Slashing Module in review. The Governance Module that Aaron is working on is still in progress. Nothing super big to update there. On Non-Destructive Upgrades, there is a PR that we’ve had in place for actually quite some time with the Cosmos SDK. This is the one to get for supporting the multi-store upgrades that is in review, but I’m also tagging it as blocked here. From my perspective, there’s been a lot of stuff, as maybe folks in the community have seen, that have been slowing down the internal process at Cosmos, in terms of how we’re reviewing the Cosmos SDK and a bunch of larger organizational activities going on there that we don’t need to get into details of. Needless to say, things have unfortunately been moving a bit slower than expected in terms of us being able to contribute and get PRs merged into the Cosmos SDK. We’re hoping that we can be working towards a solution where that doesn’t have to be happening in the future, but we’re still waiting on folks from that larger Cosmos ecosystem to contribute and get that piece merged. The last piece, we have a Message Authorization Module that, there’s been some good progress on some smaller components of that [ticket?], are being reviewed right now. Hopefully, within the next couple of weeks that can be done as well. A quick note that we’ve been having — I think we’re at the half bullet point here — but the idea is that we’ve been having a lot of conversations with the ICF, the Interchain Foundation, about our longer term relationship with the Cosmos SDK and trying to get that to a place where we’re not blocked as much, where we’ll have a bit more ownership and control over that process in such a way so that things aren’t slowing us down externally. That’s it from the dev side.
Gregory: Cool. Thanks, Cory. Is Daniel on?
Daniel: Yes, I’m here. Good morning Gregory.
Gregory: Awesome. Good morning Daniel. Good to see you.
Daniel: Yes, good to see you too. I’m going to keep my video off this morning because I had a long drive home from LA this morning.
Gregory: Welcome home.
Daniel: Yes, thanks. My name is Daniel. I’m head of design with Regen Network. We’re taking a look here at the screen that just gives a little bit of context at different levels or layers of the work that we’re doing here at Regen Network. At one level, there is the ledger layer which is primarily what Cory was speaking about just now. Welcome, Cory. It’s great to have you on board. What we’ve been doing is building an application, a registry application, for projects where ecological credits can be issued and purchased. It’s a great, what we believe will be a stunning example of an application, the types of applications that we expect to see built on our ledger and on our blockchain. If you just click that image there, Gregory. The last few weeks, we’ve been making a lot of progress both on design and development. This page here is live. These are three of the pilot projects that we’re going to be launching this application with. They’re all in Australia. Our goal here is to allow any buyer of these ecological credits to understand in-depth what this project is about, and then to purchase those credits offline. We’re deferring the online purchase of these credits at this time. All the deal-flow happens within the developers of those projects. People can come online and see that their credits are there on the ledger. If you just click again, Gregory. We’re managing our sprints using a user-centered design process called “story mapping’ that allows us to deliver the user experience on a regular basis. Click one more time. These are some of the designs that are shaping up. Some of the notable updates that we have are — we have a map view that’s in development. That’s a great way to see where the projects are listed and see where your credits are as a buyer. The next week or so, we have the profile pages for organizations and for land stewards. I feel like the application’s really starting to take shape and there is a lot more different routes and pages that are coming together as we continue. The ledger migration is also shaping up. We did some work last week on the information architecture and on the object model. We’ve really identified where these first needs are from an SDK standpoint. What we can expect to see there, as we move forward, is some versions of the SDK to support this application, and reading and writing from the ledger. I’ll stop there. If you have any questions Gregory, I can answer those or I can pass it back to you.
Gregory: That’s great. I’m happy. If anybody on the call has any questions or comments, please feel free to share it. Cool. We’ll keep on talking. Thanks, Daniel.
Daniel: You’re welcome.
Will: Maybe just reload this page, Gregory.
Gregory: Thanks Will. We’ve got a quick update from Will on an active conversation that we’ve been having internally in our team, and also with the larger Cosmos community about optimal token economic design for the great proof-of-stake network. Will is just going to share a really brief update about the thinking going on there and what’s moving.
Will: Yes, I’ll just quickly run down through my bullets here. Proof-of-stake networks rely on high participation in staking, and game-theoretically, the incentive mechanism answer to this is to punish non-stakers. Technically, Cosmos wasn’t able to implement that initially, so they instead implemented an inflation mechanism where people with stake tokens get rewarded. The downside of this is that those with stake tokens are essentially collateral damage in that they pay tax on this mechanism. Even though the idea is to punish people who are not staked, people who are staking are paying tax on that dilution process. It’s just, I guess, problematic. It essentially creates distortion in the incentive signals there in that there are downsides to staking of paying tax on that dilution mechanism. There’s another way to do it — Demurrage. That would be lessening the supply of non-staked tokens. There has been an ongoing conversation on the Cosmos forum for like a year and a half now, so I added some of my thoughts into that thread. It’s something that is an ongoing question both in Regen Network and in Cosmos. I’d love for people’s opinions on it to join the thread and get your voice in there. I think that’s all for now. Thank you.
Gregory: Then, we’ll just conclude with a couple of upcoming events and things happening with Open Team. We’ll be participating in person or remotely perhaps out of the Paicines Ranch, hopefully in person, March 17th through 20th. This is an example in our architecture essentially of a sentinel farm, or that is to say, a high-caliber research farm that’s providing peer-reviewed data about an agroecosystem that can then be used in various verification protocols in the bioregion that it exists. We’re working with our partners there to improve cryptographic security of data collection, and the science and methodologies behind that is what’s going to be happening there. I’m going to be headed to Barbados to do a presentation to the International Development Bank in Barbados. This is an outgrowth of the pilot project that we successfully ran in Barbados at the Walkers Reserve, which is a restoration of sand mine. Then, there’s the Perdue OATS Conference. We’ve partnered with Perdue in a larger ecosystem, again Open Team. This is deep tech, a deep dive into an API superstructure for how the different apps in the Open Team ecosystem are relating. We’ll either be attending in person or remotely, not sure yet. I’m not sure if anybody who [inaudible 00:18:48] feel free to throw that in. With that, we’ll open it up briefly to see if anyone has questions or comments or additions here. If not, we’ll wrap the call.
Christian: Gregory, I’ll have just one more layer of context here, which is — for those of us who haven’t been noticing what’s happening in the corporate world right now in terms of relating to ecosystems services credits and carbon credits, the last three weeks have been absolutely unbelievable. It seems like each corporate entity wants to ten times their opponents. About six months ago, Amazon came out with a 100 million dollar announcement that they’re partnering with the Nature Conservancy to sequester carbon and use natural climate solutions. Then, about three weeks ago, Microsoft came out and announced that they are putting a billion dollars into a fund to offset all of their carbon, going back to the beginning of their company in 1975. Then, Delta Airlines just announced last week that they’re going to become the first carbon-neutral airline, wanting to offset all their carbon starting in March of this year. I don’t think they’ll actually be able to do it in March, but they’re going to start accounting for their carbon starting in March. Then, Bezos just announced, two days ago or three days ago, this Earth fund. That’s a 10-billion-dollar Earth fund. This market that Regen Network is looking to address is absolutely exploding right now, which is not only great for our business opportunities in the future of Regen Ledger, but obviously also great for the planet and our ability to have, our grandkids, to have a very livable planet. Things are good on that front.
Gregory: Fantastic. Thank you, Christian. Really, a lot of exciting [inaudible 00:21:13]in the broader ecosystem. Couldn’t be more [inaudible 00:21:19]
Christian: Yes, and again, we should take this all with a grain of salt because these are corporate promises. Promises are cheap. How the money actually gets deployed is to be seen, but, at least, making public announcements is a great first step at this.
Gregory: Yes, definitely. There’s been an active conversation about this I’ve seen on our Telegram channel, about that very point, which is — is this incremental change of corporations making these pledges in being carbon neutral and whatnot really what’s needed or do we need something more transformational? If people have opinions, jump in and share. I tend to think that it’s sort of both. We need to get geared up with incremental change and meet the corporate where they’re at and make sure that’s in integrity and does good work, and we need to be working on a bigger system’s transformation and create space for that opportunity.
Christian: One piece of that conversation that I think is worth sharing for people to understand is that a lot of people when they hear that we’re working on corporate offsets and things are like, “Yes, that’s great for corporate offsets, but shouldn’t these companies be first not emitting and reducing their carbon footprint in the first place?” The good thing for all of us on this call to understand is that, the way that offsets work when a company builds into their business model that they’re going to buy carbon offsets for all of their carbon, that means that it’s in their P&L. Their chief financial officer realizes that if their company produces a lot of carbon, emits a lot of carbon into the atmosphere, they’re going to be forced to buy carbon credits. What this does is it gets their chief financial officer aligned with their chief sustainability officer, and they are now going to make decisions within their company to reduce their impact, which is a lot cheaper to reduce your impact than to offset your impact. A great example of that is Lift, the car ride company. They offset every single ton of carbon that they produce for every car that drives. Now, they’ve been really incentivized to get their riders to use shared rides rather than individual rides, and to ride scooters and bikes instead of cars. They have a real bottom-line reason to try to get you to use those lighter carbon footprint methods. We need a transformational change here, but carbon credits and carbon offsetting is an important part of getting a company to produce less carbon in the first place.
Gregory: Cool. Thanks, Christian. Does anybody else want to chime in on that before we close the call up?
Cory: Thanks Christian, that’s a great context.
Gregory: Yes, fantastic everybody. Super grateful to see everybody here and looking forward to joining the validator call next week if you’re interested. That last thing I’ll share, I almost forgot. I’m going to be trying to reschedule these Wednesday’s calls likely to an hour later just so everybody’s aware of that, so that our community member Adriana, who also has a conflicting weekly standup call with the Tendermint team, can join us on these calls. She’s stepping in as a core member of our validator community in different ways and she was really hoping to be able to make these calls. I’m going to do a little bit of conversation on Telegram about that before I make the final decision and move the call, but just to let everybody know that I’m going to try to move this call in the coming weeks. Thanks everybody for showing up. Thanks everybody for all your good work in the world and I look forward to seeing everybody in two weeks or maybe on a validator call.
[End of call]
View slides from the February 19th call here.
If you want to keep up with the community development team’s progress, tune in on Wednesday, March 4!
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