Hey welcome everyone. We opened this one a bit earlier just to give people time to join get comfy take a seat in the arena and then we'll go ahead and get started at the top of the hour we still have John
On his way, he is Algorand, CTO. And here we go. My good friend, Acti, has joined on the way.
on the main whale coin talk account to get things started. Let me give you a co-host invite acty so that you can help me on that end.
Nice, we got an Algo DeFi Dejim NFT appreciator in bad taxi here. Welcome, bad taxi. I see you in the audience, man.
Hey, I can't deal with you, sir.
Yep, I'm here. I just got the stream up and running as well. So we'll be ready to go. Awesome.
So you think it's some hype music in here guys, it's a bit quiet. I'm just gonna play a hype music playlist, so it's not your favorite. (upbeat music)
What you know about rolling down in the deep when you're playing over mental frees when these people talk too much, put that shit in slow motion. Yeah, I feel like an astronaut in the ocean. I know about rolling down in the deep when you're running.
She say that I'm cool I'm like yeah, that's true. I believe in the OD don't believe in the H.O.T. She keep me dumb I'm a player of a fun. I don't believe all my mental let me
I'm a kill everything like this
Everything that I do with the electric I'm keepin' and I'm mostin' keepin' movin' like a dead man Put this shit in the frame but I know I don't blame everyday and then I say man I see you dee flay, let me elevate this in the frame Have you walkin' on a plane, la la la la, oh, can't stick together, god let me part with you I've been gon' ride right#
I'm so fine. You could never back my crime. What's known about rolling down?
I'm gonna never tell my soul I can't back that and I really want to know I'm gonna move on
I had to take a win the grain cutting a lot of niggas I have planning I don't pull a hole arm in the grandbreath coffee and an old pub and get a key for the party shot if anything double sees our butt gotta be just looking like a lithium
All righty, I see you there John
Hey, how's it going? Can you hear me okay? Yes sir, I hear you loud and clear and we are at the top of the hour as well so if you're ready we can go ahead and get started.
Yeah, sure. And by the way, please forgive me. I've got a bit of a flu that came on over the weekend. So I have a bit of a blocked up nose. So hopefully I'm clear.
Oh no, you sound great and I hope you feel better. Or if you're not feeling better, I hope you feel better. Yeah, that's not too bad. Cool. Slay, let's kick off. Awesome. Good afternoon. Good morning. Well, coin talk community. I'm here today with John Woods, CTO of Algorand.
and John, my name is Noah, welcome to Whale Point Talk. Before we get started, do you want to give us a quick background of yourself, your career path, and how you found yourself working in the crypto industry today? Yeah, sure. Thanks Noah, and thanks for having me on the show. So, yeah, my name is John Woods, and currently the CTO
of the Agarand Foundation. And my career path really has been relatively, relatively winding, I guess, I did a degree in computer engineering. And then after which I worked for Ericsson, which is a big telco, or rather they build the
the systems and the software that they sell to telcos like AT&T etc. And so I learned a lot there. It was a software that was written in C++ and real-time embedded systems and it was quite a baptism of fire into the software industry. And then afterwards I moved into banking for a while so I worked at
city where I was a far-ex trader. I worked in London on an options derivatives desk trading far-exchange derivatives for about five years. And then started moving back towards kind of applied cryptography, mathematics and software engineering and worked at the Irish Central Bank where I was a senior solution
architect building out systems in the Eurozone. And then my first job in crypto I worked with consensus. And so at that point I'd already built up strength in terms of my knowledge of applied cryptography. So that's like building systems with cryptographic primitives. And so this was directly applicable then to working with Ethereum, right? Because Ethereum has at that point
It was really a system that was, I guess, the hardest parts were understanding how the signatures worked, understanding the cryptographic primitives that were there, understanding how to form transactions and that kind of stuff. And so it was kind of a natural fit, I guess, moving into consensus after my experience
with applied crypto. And then after that, in terms of I had a led cloud security at a company called Informatica where I was again directly involved in the cryptography engineering on the product. And in afterwards I moved with Cardano, which is my previous job, where I was the chief architect for Cardano and I also led a plot cryptography there.
there, and then finally now as the CTO of the Algorand Foundation. So I guess not a career that was constantly in the computer engineering space, but one that I think has been quite interesting and given the balance between finance and tech, I think I'm in the right place now.
>> I'm not going to say that.
important that as ambassadors for projects, whether it's Algorand or otherwise, I think it's important to recognize that like saying, you know, Algorand is the best or like the absolute number one, you know, to me it doesn't really make sense to be that maxi about things. And so I think Algorand is
incredibly compelling. I think I mean obviously I thought so because I left my role in Cardano to come and work here and I think it's one of the strongest platforms that are that that's out there in in in terms of the layer ones but it's not perfect and there are things that need to improve and there are other other projects that that
do certain things better in the other projects that don't do certain things as well. But yeah, so if I can just jump into algorithm, I think it's probably as I've said a number of times, one of the only blockchains out there that's fit for purpose. So what I say that what I mean is we talk a lot, you know, both
social media space, in meetings, in interactions with people, when we're hyping blockchain, we talk a lot, I think, and I'm speaking generally about people. About this idea that blockchain can change the world, and it can change the way we do finance, and it can disintermediate post-trade settlement systems, and it can be
a product that's going to change the face of economics worldwide. But actually, if you look at it, I don't think many of the Laerwun chains out there are actually able to deliver on that. And Algorand is, because it scales, it has a
robust infrastructure that has had a very reliable uptime since its beginning. And on top of that, it's highly secure. And so given these virtues, I actually think that Algaran just generally is quite well fit to execute on the
types of use cases that we talk about when we're out there getting excited about blockchain. And so that was probably the reason that I left Cardano chiefly and came to Algorand. It was because after I looked at Algorand deeply, it was the first time I felt like
Hey, this thing is actually going to be able to do the things that we say blockchain can do. And so maybe then digging in a little bit more so people understand, Algorand, just like Ethereum or Cardano or Monero is a Lairone blockchain. It has its own consensus. It has various nodes that are part of the network that are connected
it over the public internet. And it has a token called Algo, which is the both the kind of gas and the fee token that's used. It's also a representation of value on the Algo-Ran network. And Algo-Ran also very similar to Ethereum and Cardano. It has the
the technology of smart contracts and smart signatures so you can build applications upon the algorithm blockchain. So yeah, that's I guess a quick summary of what it is. Great, and I want to jump in, John, to the pure proof of state consensus mechanism. But really quick before we do that, is Algo oftentimes
This happens when you have high transaction speeds and you have high scalability is Algo sacrificing decentralization on any end to achieve both of those and so I think that
Generally speaking, like when you're building systems, no matter what you do, there's no like perfect solution. So like if you take like custody of cryptographic keys, you can either have something that's incredibly, incredibly secure, where, you know, in order to execute a signature process, you go into a
a dark room inside some government lab and you exfiltrate the key material and you load it into a machine that's had its Wi-Fi card ripped out and it's ethernet card ripped out and you convolut the key material with the message and then you transport that back on paper and you know that's the type of thing that is going to add a lot of
friction. So it's always a sliding scale between security and ease of use. And similarly, to a large degree, there's a sliding scale between decentralization and speed and scalability. And so if you have a backend, like Reddit's backend or a backend like Facebook's backend, where
where these companies have like, you know, clusters, Cassandra clusters in the cloud and they've got tons and tons of computers load balancing the requests that come in, I think it's a lot easier to scale. Dan, if you're trying to do something any decentralized, distributed fashion. So just to kind of preempt my answer with that. In terms of where I see algorithms
decentralization right now, I think it's pretty good. So pure proof of stake is, and we can talk about it maybe in the next question, is a very secure, very elegant way to achieve consensus in a way that scales and indeed is highly decentralized.
The second part of Algoron's network is the relay nodes. This is the Algoron nodes that are responsible for transporting information between participation nodes. This is basically the information's super highway of the Algoron network.
That's a place where I think it's reasonably decentralized and by that I mean we operate relay nodes in every continent in the world pretty much except maybe Antarctica. We have relay nodes running on everything from AWS, GCP to Azure to
bare metal to private servers, so it's geographically and metal diverse, but I would say it still needs to be improved in terms of decentralization. So I think we want to get to a place where anyone can run a relay node and have it join the network and indeed service any of the participants.
on the network. And right now, as I've mentioned before, the whilst the Algorand Foundation currently keeps an allow list of folks who are permitted to run relays and have those relays be discoverable by all of the different wallets that are out there, one can now
run a relay themselves and permission that relay and point your wallet software at it, but it's not completely open yet. So I think that that's a place where we need to really improve. I think we need to improve the decentralization of relays, but in terms of decentralization of the consensus mechanism and the security of the network, I think it's best in class.
And John in layman's terms, how does algorithms pure proof of state consensus mechanism differ from let's say ethereum's normal proof of state consensus mechanism? Sure, so Let me let me maybe put it this way so pure proof of state is a proof so you know
bring it back to absolute basics. Blockchains in general are decentralized and when you have decentralized systems, all the participants on the network have to agree on what a transaction being valid or not. And so we call this agreement process the consensus mechanism. And so proof of stake is one of those. There are different
ways you can achieve this agreement. Algrond uses a variant of proof of state called pure proof of state, and we can talk about that in the sec. But just to contrast that with things like proof of work, so Bitcoin, Monero, etc., they will use proof of work. This is where folks will be running a mining algorithm, so effectively trying
to find an input parameter whose hash is under a certain value in order to process the transactions. So this generally uses quite a bit of energy. Proof of stake was kind of a move towards saying, "Hey, well, rather than running this kind of mining contest all the time,
Why don't we have a situation where we will allow people on the network who hold the funds of the network. So that's the Ethereum or the Algo or whatever. We'll allow those people to say, "Hey, I will stake my money to say that this is a valid transaction." And the idea there is, if people are willing to say,
If people are holding the token so they have an economic incentive with that network, they don't want to see the network defrauded. If I own tons of algo, I want to make sure that the network stays valid. The thinking behind it is, well, folks that have this economic incentive, they are going to want to make sure that the network stays secure.
And so that's proof of stake in a nutshell. It's basically the idea that we allow the token holders to vote on what is a valid transaction. And then to answer your question, pure proof of stake is algorithms version of proof of stake. And the difference between it as in pure proof of stake and the classic proof of stake is that algorithm you
uses a primitive called the VRF. And so the VRF is a little mathematical module that stands for, by the way, the VRF stands for verifiable random function. And so this is a cryptographic primitive. So when I say cryptographic primitive, I mean like a Lego brick,
like a Playmobil brick that can be used to build bigger systems. And the VRF primitive was invented by Sylvia McCally, who's the founder of Agarond. And folks might be familiar with other primitives like signature, so we would say a digital signature is a primitive. We would say a hashing algorithm or a hashing
function is a primitive. And so the VRF is similar to a signature in the sense that you have a private key and you sign a message. But the thing is as well as putting in the private key and the message, you also put in a non-sort or a number used once.
And then on the output, rather than just getting out a signature output, you also get out this uniform string of random bits. And so this uniform string of random bits is indistinguishable from true random. And so this allows
to build a proof of stake mechanism that selects a person from the network selects an entity or a participation node from the network to produce and validate blocks in a deterministic but probabilistic way. And so this allows us basically in a nutshell it'll
allows us to say, "Hey, of all the people out there holding Algorand who have decided to engage in consensus. They've decided to be online and they want to be part of the people who create blocks and validate blocks." This VRF thing lets us kind of pick one of them at random without anyone knowing who's going to be picked next, weighted by the amount of state
that they have. So the more algo's the more likely, the less algo's the less likely. And it allows us then also to do so in a deterministic way. So what that means is, as you're progressing through the blockchain, adding blocks, you can look back and you can say, well, I couldn't have predicted the people who were selected to produce some validator blocks, but looking back, I can
validate that they did indeed have the right to produce and validate the blocks. So in a nutshell, a very power efficient, very elegant way to randomly, securely select people who are out there with Algorand to create and validate blocks in a way that can't be defrauded in a way that
they can't be predicted in advance, but also in a way that we can mathematically validate that they did indeed have the right to produce the blocks. I hope that makes sense. It's quite a complicated one to explain verbally. No, no, I think did a great job of it, John. And this question popped up into my head. Just keep in mind that
I am not not remotely close to a text savvy as you are, but when you were talking about Terministic and looking back, is there ever an instance where you look back and there has been like, well, how do I put this?
Someone that behaved maliciously or a block that has been recorded incorrectly So so so far know which is which is which is good news So far that hasn't occurred, but this is the important thing. It's important that anyone can verify this right so rather than just trust me
You know that you can go out there and technically I know it's obviously quite tricky because it requires a lot of tech savvy but Technically you can go out there and you can verify the entire chain and in its entirety from the very beginning and so And so yes this V or F primitive I want to just kind of highlight this you know
Like when you're building blockchains and I've kind of You know learned a lot about this when I was building Cardano or helping build that I wasn't the only one of course It's really really hard right because building layer ones. It's like the intersection of so many different disciplines, right? It's like
like the intersection of applied mathematics, the intersection of distributed systems engineering, which is like building computer systems that are globally distributed. It's the intersection of those things with software engineering, software architecture, and of course, applied cryptography. And so you've got all these different disciplines.
You can't just hire the kind of, you know, your normal software engineer, you got to hire all these different people from different backgrounds, including testing backgrounds, performance engineers, because you got to have it fast and blah, blah, blah. And so it's a real pain when you're trying to build these things. And so it's super important that the foundational primitives, the foundation like the
the ground that you're building upon is solid. And so, Algarand's entire consensus, the heart of how Algarand makes sure the network is secure, makes sure the transactions are valid, etc. That is built upon this VRF mathematical and cryptographic primitive. And so, I really feel like it was a wonderful design
choice because this cryptographic Lego brick is really the keystone to the security of the network and it's really a seminal piece of work because this VRF primitive is used by other chains, it's used by chain link, it's used by Cardano as well and of course the
those chains don't use pure proof of the stake, they've leveraged this VRF primitive that I've been talking about in a slightly different way. But yeah, it really is a wonderful piece of work. And I think, you know, I'm not trying to shield the team here, but I just want to say that if you look at the types of people and the capabilities of the people who are working on Algarand now,
Now, it really is super impressive. I'm not talking about myself, by the way, but if you look at the people who are actually engineering it, they truly are some of the brightest minds in applied mathematics and applied cryptography and indeed in distributed systems engineering. John, I meant to ask this earlier,
And if you don't mind sharing with us, why did you end up leaving Cardano? Yeah, so I, well, I guess a number of reasons, I mean none of them too saucy. So this is not nothing too exciting. But I guess I was excited to be able to go from, I mean when I was at Cardano, it was great.
But of course, you're still executing on the vision of Charles, right? I'm still executing in terms of where he wants to take the chain. And so, although I'm leading out architecture, I'm doing so under the types of topics that he wants to push forward on next. And so,
You know moving them to Algorand and becoming a CTO I was able to kind of start to push my vision as to where I think we should take things and of course I work on the foundation sides that's ecosystem adoption dev tooling etc It's not necessarily the core layer one, but I work really closely with Paul Regal and Gary and Luf
and other folks at the at the ink who are developing the protocol. And so I'm just like as closer to the strategic vision of the project than I was at Cardano. And then secondly, as I mentioned at the start of the call, I was so impressed with, I mean, I'd heard of Elgaran, right? I mean, because it's
It's you know in the top 50 So I was I was aware that it was there. I never really looked at it And so during the interview process when it was quite an exciting role working at the foundation with some bright people I thought okay well a better dig into this and so Whenever I'm interviewing I always make sure that I do my homework And so like I was playing with the nodes and I was seeing how I was
hard it was to use or how easy it was to use. I couldn't believe how fast it was. I couldn't believe how elegant the code was. I was looking at the node written in Golang. I was really just impressed by the overall foundation, its architecture, and its ability to build things. Sorry, the
position from which the code was in the general lack of technical debt and the fact that I felt like, "Okay, this is something, as I mentioned earlier, that's kind of fit for purpose. This is a platform that's in a position where we can go on and make something really huge here. It has the scope, I suppose I'm trying to say, to become a world-beater."
John, on that note, what are the token hardware and software requirements for the average person that wants to run their own node and participate in consensus? Sure. So, I mean, we have these on our website. There's kind of like, you know,
There's two types of nodes, but there's really, let's say, for the purpose of this conversation, there's really two. There's a really node, and its responsibility is propagating data. It's like the super highway of information for the network. And its requirements are chunky enough. So its requirements are like, you know, probably
a core processor 32 or 64 gigs a ram, two terabytes of NVMe storage because we want really fast storage so it's like you know like latest GNSSD stuff and then also you need a really chunky network connection so there's lots of data obviously the algorithm blocked
block time is like three and a half seconds. So there's tons of data being pumped around all the time. So you need a network ingress and egress, which is quite large. So you're going to want to be able to support somewhere around 30 to 40 terabytes of ingress egress per month. So in terms of relay nodes, there are
requirements are relatively chunky. In terms of participation notes, this is the node we call a participation, but it's really the node type that creates blocks, validates blocks. For that, one doesn't need anywhere near as heavy resources. So you can probably get away with somewhere around a dual core.
CPU, you could get away also with kind of like maybe I guess a terabyte or so or half a terabyte of SSD and indeed probably 16 gigs around or so. So much less. So participation in consensus, really quite efficient and quite elegant. The heavy part of the network is really in those relays.
And in terms of those relays, we actually only need about 100 of them or so or a little bit less than that. We have about 100 at the moment in order to support all of the data propagation for the whole network. John, give us a high level breakdown of what is unique about the algorithm.
virtual machine and what some differences are between the EVM that we're also familiar with. Sure, so this is really quite a technical one. So, you know, I don't want to assume too much knowledge but in general, you know, every computer out there, whether it's your Apple
or it's your iPhone that also has an Apple Silicon chip in it or maybe it's an Intel computer or it's a MIPS processor in it or whatever. Computers will have various central processing units which are responsible for processing data and doing calculations on your computer.
So if you, so if we said that that is the standard way computers work and if we move from that to virtual machines, so folks might have come across things like the JVM. So there's the Java virtual machine. And the Java virtual machine is similar to a regular CPU in the sense that a regular CPU
and the Java Virtual Machine, the JVM, both have instructions that they can do. So you might be able to say to your Intel computer, "Hey, add these two numbers." You can say the same thing to your Apple Silicon computer, but you might say it in a slightly different way, but it's still able to add numbers, multiply numbers, divide numbers, etc. And similarly with the JVM,
So basically you can think of the JVM or indeed if we now move to to to blockchain you can think of the EVM the Ethereum virtual machine or indeed the AVM the algorithm virtual machine as kind of like software based processors that like software implementation
of a CPU. And so now if we compare the traditional hardware, Center Processing Unit that's in your laptop with, say, the AVM or the EVM, they're very, very similar. They have a selection of things that they can do. They have, we call these things, op codes or instructions. And so we can effectively
ask these virtual machines to execute code for us, just like we can ask a regular CPU to execute some code for us. And so the the EVM is an attempt to build a cheering complete and that means a
Basically a complete computer that you can write any type of code on. It attempts to be a churring complete smart contract execution platform. And so it's important in the world of Ethereum that you can write any kind of logic in your smart contract. You can compile that and to to
And you can upload it to the Ethereum chain and you can ask the Ethereum virtual machine to execute it for you. And in doing so, you can lock up funds, move funds and all that kind of stuff that folks are used to. Well, the AVM works the same way in the sense that you take smart
contracts written in teal or piteal or any of the languages that you're permitted to write algorithms for contracts in. And then you compile those that logic down to instructions or bytecode and then you upload that code to the algan block chain and then the avm or the virtual
machine, the algorithm virtual machine will execute that code. Just like a regular CPU executes Safari or Chrome on your laptop. I guess the difference between the AVM now and the EVM is quite subtle. The EVM was designed at a time when it was an emergent technology.
And there was no real hindsight in terms of the engineering choices that were made. And so I think it was an excellent attempt at building a virtual machine to cater for types of workload that it needed to. The AVM differs from the EVM in the sense that it
has the benefit of hindsight, it's seen the mistakes or maybe the suboptimal choices in terms of engineering and architecture that were made by other blockchains. And so the AVM is really engineered for two things, for precision and for speed. And so
You might, you know, a lot of chains have gone, they've said they're just taking the EVM right they just said, oh, the EVM is good enough for me. I mean, everyone else is using it, so why not? And so this is a really easy thing to do right because all of a sudden you don't have to build your own CPU. You don't have to figure out all your op codes and your instructions. You don't#
set. So it's so much easier just to use the EVM, right? Then it is to go and invent your own virtual machine and then build it up and maintain it, right? And so we chose, and this is before I joined Algrang, but I can tell you, because I've asked about it, we
We chose not to take that route, we chose not to try to backport the EVM into the Algarand architecture. So Algarand is built differently. It's built to be cheap, it's built to be fast as hell, and it's built to scale. And so we just couldn't take the
numbers that you represent, right? So you're always working with numbers and computers, right? Even when you're like playing video games or you're looking at photos, the CPU, of course, only sees numbers, ones and zeros. And so the width, we call it the width, but the precision with which you can represent a number, whether it's 16 bits or 32 bits or 256
bit to whatever the how big a number you can play with in the brain of the CPU is called the precision of the virtual machine. And it turns out that Alderrand has a much more precise as far as I'm aware from when I last looked at it, a much more precise integer
So you can do more, more fine precision mathematics with the AVM than you can with the EVM. So there are two things, speed and precision, and that's the reason why we didn't just go with the EVM because it just wasn't going to give a good experience. Thank you, John, for the thorough breakdown. And can you give
some examples or at least a few current examples of complex decentralized applications that are utilizing the AVM that might not be able to utilize the EVM. You know that's a really good question and I just don't know enough about the
about the inner workings of the apps that are on the chain at the moment to actually answer that. So I don't want to guess at it and give a bullshit answer. I just did like if you look at some of the things that are on the aground blockchain, so the agifies, the folks finances, etc. Certainly the speed at which they operate
is not possible with the EVM. But I think that's less interesting, right? Because we all know our grind is fast. I think what's more interesting is is talking about things that are making use of that extra precision that I talked about. There was one project that was asking me questions a couple of months ago. They were doing some kind of like derivatives things.
and the way they were calculating the premium on an option, like a foreign exchange option was like, they needed to have extra precise mathematics so that they were getting more accurate answers. That's one example, but I'm afraid I don't have a great answer to that, so I don't want to bullshit you. - Yeah, no worries at all.
So I read that Algarand standard asset to enable role-based asset control. What is role-based asset control at a high level and you banking this giving us an example please? Sure, sure. So like role-based asset control according to our kind of like general perspectives is optional and flexible.
asset controls for people who issue assets and for businesses and for reg and compliance stuff. So in a nutshell, it's like saying, hey, depending on what kind of entity you are and what your use case is, you can have fine grain control over how assets
As it will flow on the algorithm blockchain. So let's break that down a little bit. So in general on Ethereum, but I'm not picking on Ethereum because it's actually really good. People have put a ton of work into Ethereum. I mean, it really is a massive engineering achievement.
these kind of credible airwans are really huge engineering achievements. But if you look at, say, ERC20, right? The way, I don't know what our folks will be aware of this, but ERC20 is like a standard, okay? It's like, you know, Wi-Fi 6 or 802-11-A-AX or whatever. It's just like a standard for how you issue assets on algorithm.
Sorry, on a theory. How does it work? You take a smart contract, you put some JSON inside, the object notation format, and you define your asset, and then you issue it on the chain, and you say, "Well, it has this number and it's called this."
I make my ERC20 token, I call it John coin, and I put a supply of 10 million coins. And that's kind of all you can do with a standard asset on Ethereum just using ERC20. And of course, you can build abstractions around that, and you can start having control, and you can override methods, and you can derive your own standards.
and you can do lots of other things to enable roll based asset control on other chains, but it's always more work. It's always extra stuff you got to go and do. And so the advantage here with Algorand is that Algorand has this asset control mechanism built in as an native indigenous feature right there in
inside the chain. So the types of things you can do. When you issue your asset, rather than kind of you issue it, and that's just it, you can set up things like quarantines. So you can say, hey, this is a particular asset account that can, you can like freeze assets if you have like a legal or clean
of regulatory requirement to do so. You can force transfer and asset. So you can like claw back assets from people who've already received them or you can force an asset to move somewhere. Again, there's a legal or regulatory requirement to do so. But again, I want to be clear with this.
This is not some this is kind of an opt-in thing. Okay, this is not like I can't just go and take your you know I can't just go and issue an NFT and then go and take it back or quarantine it or freeze it or move it and so The point here is not to scare people these are features that you can opt into that are supported by default
when you're issuing an asset. But if you choose to, when you're issuing your ASA, if you choose and say, "Hey, I'm not interested in these things. I don't want an administrative control on this asset. This is not in the context of some kind of regulatory or centralized issuance. This is a DeFi, DeJane asset that's going to be sold to a
person I don't know and so I have no right to be controlling it after it leaves my ownership. Of course, that's absolutely fine. So these are just layer one features that enable certain use cases, especially in the traditional finance sense. But again, it's something you have to opt into and very importantly, by the way.
When you're buying NFTs or you're buying assets whether to any ASA or any native token on Algorand, you can see this right you can go and you can check on on Algor Explorer you can go and check the contract you can check which of these things is enabled and so therefore you have full visibility as to whether or not this is a
These types of controls have been turned on for the asset that you're about to buy. Okay, so that was I'm glad you answered that. That was my next question. Although the potential and power of role based asset control, I was gonna I was curious to know how easy it is for the average person.
and the average buyer, the average participator, to actually go and look and make sure that there isn't a malicious actor putting this function on and then doing an NFT drop and then taking all NFTs back, for example. Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty good, but I think it could probably
be easier. As an example, right? I've got Algo Explorer open right now. And I've just opened up an ASA. I've just found an ASA by searching for an Algo Explorer. And so as I look, there's a section called information. And in that information, you can see technical information like it's creator and it's reserve.
You can go down and you can see statistics about it so you can see the technical information around how it was minted. And so if you click on this technical information tab, you can see this thing like manager account, clawback account, freeze account. And so by looking on this explorer, it takes about two clicks to go into a particular ASA and find
And whether or not there's the ability for the issue or to freeze it, to claw it back, or to manage it in some other way. But I think we probably need to do better. I think in general, it needs to be even easier. It needs to be something nearly that the wallet shows you, right, or that the NFT marketplace shows you, rather than having
to look up the ASA directly on Algo Explorer. But again, we're going to get there. This is the type of stuff I'm aware of, right? Because there's lots of people in my family who are interested in what I'm working at, but don't have the technical savvy or the time to look into this stuff in detail, right? And so I think we need to be making it as easy as possible for people not to make mistakes. But#
It's a journey, right? It's going to take a little bit of time to get to the place where it's really, really easy to understand. Yeah, certainly. You just, some of that was curious about. And, John, would you mind explaining, again, a high level, how, sorry, I lost my spot here. Sorry?
Man, it's been a, I have also had a Tommy transfers. Can you, can you give us some exciting use cases for Tommy transfers? And also explain what they are. Sure, sure, sure. By the way, don't worry about it. I've lost my train a couple of times. I have, I had quite a bad flu over the weekend and so it's just a
So sometimes it can really, as you can hear right now, mumble up your words. Okay, so atomic transactions. Yeah, so atomic transfers. Okay, so this again, this is like just a cool feature in the Algorand layer one. It's not something that you
You know, it's something that other chains have tried to build work rounds for, but none of them are very elegant. And so in a nutshell, Atomicity in the context of computer science is this idea that something will happen in an instant transaction. So you can think of it like, if I pay you, and then you pay me two days later, that's not a atomic
That's like, "I pay you," and then I got to wait and then you pay me two days later. If I pay you and you pay me instantly, so the act of me paying you triggers you to pay me, that's an atomic transaction because my payment to you and your payment to me happened simultaneously and they just like, they flipped.
And so that's why they call it atomic swaps. You might have heard this term atomic swaps between chains like atomic swaps to a Bitcoin and Litecoin or Ethereum and Bitcoin. Atomic swaps are this idea that you don't go through an escrow where I send my money and then you send your money and then it gets released. But instead we both agree to a trade.
And then we swap between chains and we both get our money, right? At the same time, without having to worry about this, like, "Oh, will he pay me will he not?" And so, Al-Garand recognized, I mean, the engineering team recognized that this was the type of thing that would be great to have, you know, a built-in way to do this.
Did... Irogue or did we lose John?
No, I can still hear you. No. I think you're on something disconnected. Okay, cool. I got so scared for a second because the reputation that spaces has is crashing. Hey, can you guys hear me? Okay.
- Yeah, John, you're back. We lost you for a second there. - Okay, cool. Where did you lose me?
We lost you about 10 seconds ago. Okay, cool. So if you want if you want you're you're explaining what atomic swaps are and how you know you basically explain explain explaining how atomic swaps allow you to forgo the escrow and swap between Bitcoin and Ethereum on different chains and you're leading with that. Okay, perfect. Yeah, so okay, so uh you
The atomic swaps basically let you not have to worry that the other person won't pay you because if he gets paid you get paid. And so the algorithm engineering team recognized this was the type of thing that would be useful as a built-in type in the layer one. The kind of thing that you don't have to engineer yourself, it's just there for you. And so how does it work?
works like this. When you're building, you build your transactions and you can put them into an array. So you put them into a little box and you say, all of these transactions must go through or none are allowed to go through. And so this is a really powerful thing if you think about it, right? Because what you're saying is you can take any number of transactions
Let's say we take five or six transactions. We put them into the little box and we signed them with our with our private key. And so these transactions are ready to rock and roll. They're good to go. And you push them onto the chain. So you push them into into a block for processing. And like I said, when they're wrapped inside this atomic transaction box or this atomic
for a box, if any of the transactions fail to go through, they'll all fail. And it's only if all of the transactions are deemed acceptable and correct by the network that they will all go through. So again, this is very useful. It's kind of useful for, I guess, when you're building anything,
you don't necessarily trust your counterparty or indeed where you know that there's dependencies between transactions. So you know that if like four out of five transactions goes through but the fifth one doesn't, you're going to be in a bad situation from an accounting point of view and you're going to have to start rolling back transactions.
So really, really useful primitive that comes up regularly in the types of payment flows that we see on the network. Right on. Yeah, I can certainly see what use cases. I mean, right now that would be applied towards John is algorithm the only
ecosystem that's using this or are there others as well. So it's a good question. I mean we didn't have it at Cardano but like it doesn't mean you couldn't build it. You could build something like this I think if you had the right validation scripts on Cardano like it's definitely
So, it's not that you can't do this stuff technically with enough effort on other chains. It's just that it's just another
example of where we're trying to make it easier to do this type of stuff out of the box. Got it. John, what is actually let me rephrase the question. So a lot of people are comfy on Ethereum, for example, with their liquidity, with their stake
tokens, what their NFTs, whatever that might be. How easy is it for, and we've seen other EVM compatible chains do this, but how easy is it for projects to migrate over to Alguran? Let's say Abe Curve and Uniswap, even the, yeah, Abe
So I'm going to be trying to get a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit#
We're building out Algo Kit and I've talked about Algo Kit a little bit, not on this call, but in Singapore and in Dubai at the Cypher. And so in a nutshell, I won't bang on too much about it, but Algo Kit is like a totally fresh SDK software development kit that's going to give you all the tools you need in one
box to build great shit on Algrond. That's basically it. And so it's a one stop shop. You download this tool. You can do everything from NFTs smart contracts, logic signatures, whatever you need to do with template and it helps you build test and deploy. Super easy, super good. And so
In that sense, we're getting to a good place. We're getting closer and closer to a place where it's fun and easy to build an algorithm. But of course, these projects that you've just talked about like the curve, etc. These folks are already established on Ethereum and they're already established maybe on Polygon and they're using solidities.
right. So these guys we've just built, we've just rolled out with the help of the folks at Milcomina or DC Spark as they're as they're called an Ethereum compatibility layer. So we have a layer 2 on Algorand called A1 and this A1 technology allows you to copy paste your
So the layer 2 doesn't have its own consensus, it relies on algorithms consensus and security model. But the actual execution of the slidity will be done inside the layer 2. So effectively in a nutshell, right now you could be doing this in a way that you can see the layer 2.
copy, like if they wanted to, you know, UniSwap or Curve or whoever, could copy paste all their code, drop it straight into the A1, layer 2 that we have, and they would be effectively running their, their DAP on Algarand Insulidity. And so this is the
there today, it's ready to go. And so I've been reaching out to these teams, trying to encourage them to take a look at this. And so that kind of effort has just begun, and I'm hoping to see some traction with it. That's awesome, man. I think that's going to be so huge for your adoption. And on the flip side, the users, the investors, what are some ways
that we can safely bridge assets over. Sure. So the thing about bridges is that they're always a bit tricky, right? Because like, well, the first thing is that the more bridges you have, the more kind of fragmentation you have in liquidity. Like with traditional bridges, you have this
This kind of concept where you lock on one side and you mint on the other. You generally issue these kind of wrapped versions. You'll have wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum or you'll have wrapped Bitcoin or whatever on Algorand. The problem is that now all the decks are out there, have to support
trading pairs between all of these different wrapped assets. And so if I take my wormhole wrapped asset and I take my wrapped asset from some other bridge, all of a sudden now I've got to maintain two different trading pairs for the same wrapped effectively the same underlying asset that's wrapped twice. And so
In general, I think bridges are important. I think they add some value. They add of course, composability and interoperability with the chains. But in general, I don't like, I wouldn't like to see a world where we have, you know, a growing number of bridges because I think it leads to fragmentation. And also the second thing is that of course, with these
with these bridges you have to rely on the fact that they are implemented securely. And so this is like an on trivial thing. You know, for so long, we've seen situations where we thought bridges were safe on various chains and they turned out to have unknown bugs, right? And again, I don't think that this is something that's like new, right? Because if you look at Linux or you look at OpenSSL or you
look at like any of the traditional software that's out there, or Safari or Mac OS or Windows or whatever, like all of these different pieces of software are regularly seeing zero-day vulnerabilities, exploits, new ways of breaking cryptography and other things that we side channel attacks and other things that we never even thought were there.
Software is imperfect and so in general I would say to users to Be careful when using bridges try to use ones which are which are you know audited so you know I would go to the actual bridge website and check to see if it's audited as an example I think warmhole
is pretty good. So far from what I've seen it's been formally audited twice by reputable security companies. So I think in general it's just the case of try to be careful out there. In general bridges can be a little bit, I think a little bit tricky to deal with. Just make sure that when you're dealing with one that it's one that has been audited. There's one other bridge which I
thing is kind of interesting as well, which is called Messina, which is on Algorand. And it does things a little bit differently. And so I mentioned earlier that normally you kind of mint and mint and on one side and lock up on the other. And so that's fine. And then you get this wrapped version. Well, what Messina's done is that they're kind of maintaining liquidity on both sides.
So when you bridge one asset into one side of the bridge on one chain and you bridge it back out the other you don't get a wrapped asset. Instead you actually get the native asset itself rather than a wrapped version. And so this might be something that people find interesting. So check it out, Missina Bridge if you're interested in learning more.
What are some of your favorite algorithm defi applications and decentralized exchanges to form and trade with? This is a common question that our audience members like to know. Yeah, I know. I was thinking about this one because I could ask it for a bit and it's one of those things, right? I don't want to be like, oh, this one because it's like,
you know, then I'm like, I'm shitting on the other guys. Uh, whenever ones I don't mention. So it's kind of a trick question. Okay, I'll tell you, uh, I personally used Tiny Man. It was the first one I used. Tiny Man was the first one I used, uh, when I was like, like week one. And I thought it was pretty great. Uh, I think
I think Fergal, who's the CTO there, who I met in Decipher for the first time, although he's an Irish guy like myself, so we had a video call as an intro, but I met him for the first time in Decipher. He's done a really good job with Tiny Man V2, and I think the team over there do some pretty good engineering, and in general I think it's a pretty
pretty good decks. I'm also a fan of folks in Agafy because both of them are implemented very well. They're actually going to be open sourcing later. Tiny Man is already open sourced but folks in Agafy are going to be open sourcing very soon. And Impact is pretty
I feel like I'm going to end up like if I don't name the entire top 10, it's just going to give me shit. But I think in general, we've got a pretty good top 10, I would say. One of the kind of shout out I do want to make, which is a small, small or market that I'm a big fan of is X-A-DOT market. So it's like, eat
XAXA.market. And so XA is again not affiliated with me. I don't have any any stake in it personally neither does the foundation, but it's just it's like an open sea on Algarand for NFTs. It's NFT marketplace. And what I like about it is just this. They've done a good job making it easy to use.
They've got like really good FAQs. It's clear. It's easy. It feels good. It performs well. It's pretty. And so I think they've just done a great job at building out a solid marketplace and I'd encourage people who are interested in NFT training. If you're interested in that, I would go over and check out exit.market because I think it's
I think it's pretty good. So really quick, let's break down the algorithm economics. I know that because things are so fast and so cheap, there's not much being burned for gaspies, I could be wrong. But what are some high-level utility
use of the Algo token relative to ecosystem and what's total supply cap, but also what are some incentives? Obviously nothing that is on this broadcast is financial advice, it's all for education, but what are some incentives for people to buy and hold the token? Yeah, I mean, so it's
Excellent question. So in terms like I don't work on the economic side. So I'm probably not the perfect person to ask this question because it's just not my area of expertise. But in general, the token supply is kept at 10 billion tokens. Okay, that's B would be for Bravo. 10 billion tokens. And so
So it gets kind of tronched into various chunks. And so there's a certain portion of the funds that are held by the Algrant Foundation. And then it's subbroken down. So those funds that are held by the Foundation are broken down into ecosystem support. So it's in funds that are to be used.
to help grow the ecosystem. There are funds there that are used for governance. So governance is how you earn a yield holding algo so you can hold alga around and you earn funds. You earn more algo by engaging in governance, which is this idea that you will vote on proposals in terms of
building a decentralized platform or folks can vote on proposals and where we take the platform next. Another chunk of the funds that went to the Algarand Inc, of course the Algarand Inc, are the entity that are doing all of the engineering, right?
they're building the core protocol, they're maintaining the algorand golang implementation, algode, and they're doing all of the code, all of the low-level cryptography. And then finally, I think that's pretty much it. Then the last chunk is held by people like myself, your
and the rest of the community out there. So largely breaks down. The foundation have some for ongoing operations to support the ecosystem and to promote Algrond, the ink, holding, of course, they have to pay for their engineers to write the code because they all have families, etc. They have to eat. And then finally, the rest of us holding
The token so that's I think how the economics breaks down Let me see what else is right thing else say I think that's basically it Yeah, sorry, yeah, sorry, you yeah, sorry, I was gonna say you had asked there was like I just couldn't remember you would ask you know what's the incentive to hold the token?
And so again, I think in general with any of these projects, we don't know whether the market is going to go up down or around and around in circles. I mean, I'm surprised that the market's gone as low as it has in this market and this bear market. I didn't think that in general, crypto would lose so much value in terms of market capitalization of
across the board. But of course, none of us know exactly where the market is going to go. If there's a massive war somewhere, there's some other economic turmoil in the globe, things could go anywhere. But in general, I'm hoping that the work that we're doing in terms of, and I can tell you, people are working really long hours and working really hard
And there's not that many people working on this thing, right? There's the people at the ink and the people at the foundation. So you're talking about a couple of hundred people globally that are doing all of the engineering and all of the support and all of the promotion of algorithms. It's not like there's thousands of people out there doing this, right? It's only a couple of hundred people if that. And so I'm
hoping that the level of effort and work that we're putting in to the engineering, to the authenticity, which we interact with people, trying to be as open and honest and transparent in terms of both our work, our interaction with the community, and indeed always trying to be
I guess, integrus interactions. I'm hoping that these things, when we add them all up, we're going to see appreciation in Algarand over time. And so, in terms of holding it now, the reason you might hold it is so you can earn a yield with governance. But in terms of the longer term vision, I'm hoping that Algarand becomes a very prominent
an important part of the future global economic financial system. And I think that it's good to have an exposure to something that has so many passionate and bright people working on it. But of course, the first thing I did when I joined Algaran because you don't get any free tokens for joining, I can tell
the first thing I did was take a chunk of my dry powder and I bought a chunk of alga around. I just have some skin in the game so I felt like hey I'm working on something where I have like you know holding in this myself right and so I can tell you since since I bought that when I joined I'm also suffering too with this
I'm hoping that, like I said, all the hard work we're doing in terms of pushing things forward is really going to make a difference in the long term and we should see. I'm hoping appreciation. I think a lot of folks share that sentiment, investing in people that are smart and that you believe in, they're building something.
please paradigm shifting. John, I also think that a lot of folks that love Wolf of Wall Street would appreciate the quote you just mentioned earlier about the mark going up and down sideways in circles. It's so good. It's so good. And I love that meme. I put out this thing yesterday. I was like, because you know, we've been working on
I had a mask integration for a while. Since I joined, it's been developed and so they've been writing the code. I had a demo over the other day. It's really like works beauty, like people are going to love it. But of course, this is holding people's funds, so we want to go through all of it with it.
and make sure everything is secure. So I put a note out on Twitter just to say, "Hey, look, this thing is coming because it really is." And I true up the old Wolf of Wall Street meme, it goes down a tree. I think everyone loves it. It's so good. John, with Algorand being as fast and scalable as it is,
I imagine that there might be a growing Web 3 community. Can you give us some more insight into that? Are there any games being built or already built? They're being used that are being played? Yeah, sure. I think it's interesting. Blokchain effectively is.
a big distributed database of transactions and of logic, right? So Bitcoin is transactions, Monero is transactions, but things like Algorand, they're transactions plus all of these applications that are there that are effectively logic on the chain. And so it's not really a great place in some ways to build games,
because, you know, in general, what makes games exciting and fun. It's like your graphics processing unit in your PlayStation 5 or your RTX 4090, right? That's like troen triangles around the screen like super fast. It's a, you know, a 60-inch television that you're looking at, right? Making that with great sound and stuff like that. So for me, that's
That's what makes games exciting, that visual sonic impact. And so, where I think there's two things that I think are interesting in terms of algorithm gaming. And so, the first is, we've gone to Unity and Unreal, so Unity and Unreal are the two big gaming engines. They handle
all of the graphics, they handle the rendering, they handle the physics of these games. So if you want to and you want to create a game, you don't have to do all the physics calculations yourself, you don't have to figure out how to do all of the shader design and the smoke and particle effects, these engines unity and the second one is unreal by two different
companies, these engines are like, you know, your Photoshop for games, right? You just jump in and you can start building your games straight away inside these engines. And so what we've realized is about 80% of the games out there use these engines. And of the AAA games, I want to say AAA, I
I mean like the glossy high profile 70 books per game, Elden Ring, Doom, those kind of games, they use this too, although not always. I think actually Doom uses it, tech or whatever, but ultimately most of the games out there use these engines. And so we've gone through these two platforms.
And we've built bindings into the Algorand SDK and Algorand backend for both of these engines. So they're not yet released, but over the coming months, we're going to have these released. And so what we're going to end up with then is any developer out there from an indie developer in his bedroom all the way to a major developer
developer like EA or Bethesda, whoever, you know, major developers and producers and software houses, all of these entities will see Algarand as an option when they're trying to build out their back end in those games. So if they want to, if they want to release a new version of Rocket League with skins for the cars and gold
Explosions and other skins if they want to have a new a new version of Counter Strike and in that you've got different skins for your weapons etc all those collectibles progressions Awards trophies etc all those things now can be done in a few lines of code and issued as NFTs and other types of token on the algorithm blockchain directly from within
development experience with UnityUnion Unreal. And so I think that's probably one of the most important things we've done in terms of getting gaming closer to Algorand because ultimately game developers are not really going to go out there and change how they develop, right? They're still going to use UnityUnion Unreal because that's what game developers use.
But what they might do is if they see Algarand as an option there for the to build the backend to build the coins to build the kind of tokenomics within their game. Now it's an option. It's right there and it's a couple of lines of code. So I think we're going to see a big uptick hopefully in the number of developers that are out there, you know, employing Algarand.
As a component within their game and so of course just getting us into those marketplaces isn't just the answer So we have to go out there and promote this and we're gonna be doing that as soon as they go live So I think that's that's pretty exciting the second thing and the last thing I'll just say is There's a new development company called Pima
And they're trying to do kind of role-based games on blockchain. So of course, role-based, sorry, turn-based strategy games are the types of things you can do on blockchain, especially with Algorand with its three and a half second finality where like, you know, moves can be done within three seconds. And so they're doing some interesting things. They're in talks with companies like
Sega, Nintendo, etc. And in Japan specifically, these types of games are quite popular. So different cultures have different kind of vibes to the games that they like. In Japan, they do seem to like more of that kind of term-based strategy type thing, as far as I understand. And so, yeah, I think that's going to be an interesting
So the two spaces are turn-based strategy games are going to be I think quite interesting especially where you can you know potentially gamble or game with people globally and the second piece is engagement with Unreal and Unity so that we're there as an actual viable option to build out your back end when you're building games
in your traditional languages using your traditional engines. Fantastic. John, I know that you have to go here soon and I want to be cognizant of your time. I have some community members with questions before I wrote them in. Just one more for me, especially because the World Cup is happening, but Algorand
recently announced its partnership with FIFA and I'm curious to know what excite you most about the partnership and what kind of building activity we can expect to see on chain as a result. Yeah so I mean I guess it was before my time when they agreed all this stuff so I wasn't really involved in it so I don't have great insight into it but
But I think from what I've heard, the thing I'm most excited about is the women's world cup. I feel like the world cup came up and is so fast that like as a technology partner with FIFA, we probably didn't get to do as much as we would have liked to by the time the world cup came up. But the women's world cup is coming up next. And so we've got a bit more lead time there to do more interesting things.#
I don't have insight into it, but from what I understand, there's going to be much more exciting stuff coming out. And hopefully for the Women's World Cup, we've got some new and exciting things to play with. But yeah, I wish I could give you a bit more insight there, but I just genuinely don't have it because the ink are leading that conversation. Yeah, no worries. We're looking forward to it. So Aisha, you've#
you had your request up for a while, Mike Sears. Thank you, enough. Okay, I've seen sports, music industries, leveraging algorithm and blockchain for expanding to Clipto space. I was thinking, what about medical field? Do you have any specific plan or program to bring medical
So it's, so because the chain is completely permissionless, it's absolutely something that's that folks can do. So there's not a direct program that the foundation are sponsoring, but there are initiatives that are coming out in terms of we're seeing technologies that are being
built in the medical sphere that was an announcement recently about this. And so I think the probably the hardest thing about it is achieving privacy in that context. So how do you achieve privacy for people's medical records, especially in perpetuity when there may be breaks of the cryptographic primitives that we're using today further than the line? And so it's kind of a hard
problem to solve. But in general, I think it's possible to use Algorand for medical purposes. But I think it's something that requires a very solid architecture. Because if someone builds something and then there's a data breach, then there's going to be really bad news.
I am just afraid of your medium article that you have introduced a new flexible form of storage for smart contracts and a smart contract can create as many boxes as it needs up to 32k. I was wondering can these storage boxes only
be used to store contracts or other data like medical records and files can also be stored. >> Yeah, no, you can use them to store arbitrary data blobs. So you can put whatever you want in there, whatever binary data you want and as much as you're willing to pay for. So yeah, you can use them for anything.
And I was also thinking do you have any plan of introducing your own off chain decentralized storage solution as well like IPFS and is tetas stored in the boxes encrypted? So data in the boxes is not encrypted by default no because
you would need to have agreed a key with someone and of course you can't do that because there's no central authority within Algarant to issue you such a key or to agree kind of an ephemeral elliptic herb if you help and agree with you or whatever. So if you want to encrypt data
that stored in boxes you have to do so yourself prior to uploading it. And then the second question was, sorry, I missed, I figured. Yeah. Second question was, any plan of introducing your own off-teen storage solutions as well, like IPFS? No.
No, no, there's not currently. I think IPFS is pretty good. The problem with it, of course, is that it's not permanent. It's immutable, but there's no permanence unless you pin it in host drone node. So I think in general, that's a space that needs to get a little better, but we have no plans to get into that space.
And what a powerful and sustainable blockchain you guys have. Thank you so much and best of luck for the future. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Next up is use of use of an as use of an advisor to whale coin talk.
Hi, John. How are you? I just want to ask a question about, um, so for students who have, what's like the difficulty barriers to learn teal and it's teal necessary for alcohol contracts or is, uh, piteal enough because I heard piteal can be compiled down into teal. Yeah, sure. You said, uh, good question. So teal is effectively our assembly language. It's like x86
And so, you know, teal very much is, it stands for transaction execution approval language, but really it's the op codes and instructions of the AVM CPU. I call it a CPU, you know, the AVM. And so, yes, you can write software inside into the AVM.
you're going to, you know, it's, it's, it's terse and it's hard to do. And so PyTail is an abstraction that sits above that. You can think of PyTail more like C, the C programming language. And so you're probably better off writing in PyTail. Everything you can do in PyTail, you can do in Teal. They're effectively equivalent to
in terms of their feature set more or less. As a solidity dev, what I would suggest is you come over and you spend some time having a look at Piteal itself. I wouldn't go down to Teal unless you had a compelling reason to do so. I can't think of one really off top of my head. One last thing I'd say is,
you know, Q1, 2023. So it's December 12th and whatever it is today. By next month, we should have a private, not private, sorry, a public bed of our Algo Kit solution. We're hoping towards the end of January or early February to get something out to people. And so Algo Kit's going to make it a whole lot easier. It's going to be like truffle, right? You're going to have a
like a truffle like tool. We're going to have contract level abstraction so you can focus on the like you can start developing inside the framework of a contract like the same way you do with slidity. And so I would say this, if you're a slidity dev, things are going to be a hell of a lot of
easier to build an auguron in the new year.
51% attack. Are there any advantages to having a chain that is unable to be forked? Sure, it's a good question. This is something that I think people just kind of have miscomprehension out there about this stuff. It's not that algorithm can't be forked if consensus agreed to fork in some kind of way. If we issued
an update to the blockchain where we decided to have a hard fork where it was written into the Algarand node and everyone was to execute that node, then the network could fork. So it's not that Algarand cannot hard fork. It's that in general consensus operation,
is not a curve. So let me be maybe a bit more specific. There's a hard fork where the rules of consensus change. And this is like when Bitcoin went from like having, I don't know, a block size of X to a block size of Y. And so everyone just, people who are running the node agree to like fork away like with
Bitcoin cash and like there's totally new rules to consensus. That's a hard fork. So, Algarand could do that if it was written, if the software was written into the node, the same way Bitcoin can do it, the same way Ethereum can do it. Okay, so no change there. When people say there's no forks with Algarand, what they're referring to really
is block height battles. So in Algaran consensus is always achieved on every block. And so there's never this kind of like split of a Hydra where you've got two heads on the chain for a temporary basis where you basically have a block rework or a block height battle where there's like, you know, you might be familiar with it's kind of hard to do this verbally but
with Bitcoin as an example or Ethereum, sometimes you can have two blocks mined at the same time. And then consensus is split like half the network are on one side of the chain, half the network are on the other. And then eventually the chain will collapse and re-organ and those blocks will be orphaned and then everyone will switch to the longest chain.
And so that's the fork we're talking about with Algrang that can't occur. So Algrang never has that happen. There are no block height battles. And that's how Algrang has instant finality. So in a nutshell, it's totally good. It's all positive stuff. But in terms of your one example where fork is valuable, in terms of like, you know, where you need to address
something like a 51% attack or something like that, we absolutely can fork in that example. It's just not in general usage. Okay, I think I understand now. Okay, thank you for the clarification on that. So in general, you're saying that hard forks can occur if needed, but like soft forks in general don't occur. Yes, precisely. Hard forks can occur.
of need it, but in terms of normal day to day operation as consensus is going, there's no block height battles, there's no short forks. Exactly. Okay, that's all from me. Thank you for the clarification on my questions. No props. Thank you, you should have kept and leave I you next, sir. All right. Thank you.
Thanks Noah. Okay, so I want to thank you and watch for bringing these stems whenever I speak about projects or learn from projects like this I always go back home with lots of notes. I just wanted to ask in during the course of the session you made me
of statements where you said that you were talking about the sticking process where you said the more algo that's inclined, the more inclined that stick is likely to become a verifier and the less algo, the less inclined. The first thing that came to my mind is that
doesn't this turn it into a uniquely centralized kind of enterprise, where those who are the most eligible? Yeah, I mean, I hear your point. And yes, you are right in the sense that if you have a thousand algo and I have one algo, you'll be much more likely
I think I'm not sure if it's completely linear, but let's say you probably be 900 times more likely to be slated than I will be. And so, to a degree, yeah, I can see your point. And this, by the way, this is a broad criticism of proof of stake. Like what you're saying there is basically the position that proof of work miners would have. Like the Bitcoin people would say, "Hey, proof of stake
doesn't work because look you're just centralizing it like this as you've just suggested. My response would be that in general by the way I think proof of work can be okay I know it does use a lot of energy but it has its virtues and in terms of in terms of proof of stake
These types of things are points of contention, but I think when you have a well distributed currency where you slowly over time, due to the second law of thermodynamics, as the universe tends towards maximum entropy, you will see
distribution of wealth in a more granular way across the network, then it becomes much more egalitarian. But I will concede that for proof-of-stake networks that are very young, where wealth is concentrated with a very small number of whales, then yes, you are right, it is those
number of whales that would control consensus more so than anyone else. So while I was asking, you know, I figured you were going to, you know, make this kind of statement, what came into my head is like some kind of countermeasure. What if there was a range and some require
minimum requirements, is there an advantage of running the verification with the wheels over the second class below the wheels? I mean, maybe, but this would be a major modification to how consensus is achieved. So we'd have to kind of discuss this over an RFC, I think.
All right, sounds good. John, I really, really appreciate the time we took to mention to come here and explain. I'm wishing you guys the best, and I hope that the projects will stay in bullish mode. Thanks a lot, Noah. What's up? Thank you, Kylie, Captain Levy.
Thank you, Captain Levi. And then we have a one more audience question, Rahmat and then wrap things up. Cool. Yeah, thank you. Okay, so I've read somewhere that Albu Rand will use a file consignatures in variety of their applications. And in particular, they underlie state
proof and the state proof enables algorithm blockchain to interoperate in decentralized way with other blockchains and also prevent quantum computers. So, I was just thinking that can you briefly explain how state of proof going to
and from quantum attacks, state proofs I mean. Yeah sure sure so it's a good question so state proofs are the name we have given to our technology that issues a proof of the state of
of transactions on the algorithm blockchain every 256 rounds. So every 256 blocks or rounds, there's a certificate issued that attests to the state of transactions that have occurred in the previous 256 rounds.
And so it's a small piece of data, which is able to cryptographically verify the correctness of the transactions within those 256 blocks. And it does so by being signed by a
selection of the the stakers with Falcon, which is a, as you've said, a post-quantum signature scheme. So, so you know, there's a lot here to pick apart, like just very quickly, you know, we use classical computers at the moment. Your MacBook is a classical computer, your Intel computers, classical computer. There's, you know, this theoretical
quantum computer which uses, you know, qubits. And so with enough error correcting qubits in quantum superposition, you can run quantum algorithms like shores algorithm or Grover's algorithm to break the discrete log or to indeed, you know, root the bit strength of symmetric algorithms. And when doing so, you effectively
the trapdoor function of those public e-crypto systems. Falcon is an attempt to use n-dimensional lattices. You can think of a lattice, a matrix of dots on a two-dimensional plane.
expand that to three dimensions. You'd have a cue void of points in space. And if you extend that then to end dimensions like 9, 10, 12, 30, 50 dimensions, you start to get to like this brain melting shape that you can't even imagine. And it turns out that we can build a signature scheme crafting a short path
path between points in this like end-dimensional space that is hard to crack for quantum computers and effectively even if there was a quantum computer they couldn't forge signatures and that's what Falcons all about. And so yeah I would just say that Falcon is an incredibly beautiful piece of mathematics and it allows
to secure the history of the chain so we can look back in the entire history of the algorithm blockchain and we can be sure that a quantum computer has not come out and change the history because if it had we will be able to check the file consignature and it wouldn't validate. And instead we can check the file consignatures today
And we can see that they validate for the entire history of the chain. And that's how state proofs, you know, in very brief language, that's how state proofs secure the chain against the quantum computer at the moment. There are two of the parts of this story, though, for the rest of the state proof, sorry, for the rest of quantum security. And so if we really want algorithms to be
completely post quantum secure, it's not just the history of the chain that matters, but it's also the following two things. One, consensus, so we need to have a post quantum VRF. We need to change the VRF I spoke to about earlier and make it so that it's hardening against a quantum attack. And secondly, for wallets,
We need to make sure that it's not possible for a quantum machine to reverse the discrete log and turn a public key into a private key. And so for this, we have to have two more enhancements to algorithm before it's fully quantum secure. One, to the VRF mechanism, and the second, to the standard
transaction signature and wallet mechanism. And so when we do that, we will have Algarand being quantum secure. At the moment, it's about a third of the way to being post quantum secure. I hope that helps. Yeah, thank you for explaining that very nicely. Thank you so much. Over to you, Noah. Thanks, Sean. Yeah, thank you, Rahmat. John, it's been a
Really great pleasure talking to you today. I know that you are sick and you're recovering from the flu. I am sleep deprived and I tripped up on some questions, but I think that we were able to meet each other at least halfway. I found this to be an incredibly educational episode. I think that our community members felt the same way. I want to thank you again.
the algorithm team and I see a lot of the algorithm community in here as well for all making this happen for tuning in. John, before you go, we always ask our guests to leave us with a bang, right? If you had one negative wisdom to share with our community, just based on your lucrative experience across more
multiple industries, what would that be? Your life experience, your career experience, leave us with a bang, as I mentioned, and then give us something to think about for the rest of the week. Okay. But anyway, I really enjoyed being on with you too. And I found that your questions were really well thought through and showed that you and the
community really thought about what to ask. So it's one of the hardest interviews I've had because the questions were actually quite real. So enjoy it with you. Okay, so I would just say one thing which is two things. Number one, Algarine's going to have some amazing increases in speed
over the next six months we're going to be trying to get that block finale time down to two and a half seconds which is pretty exciting and that will mean that we'll have transactions a second up to about 10,000 which is pretty great. And the second more personal thing I just like to say is that you know I feel like people out there in general when you're going through life I found it really hard
hard when I was in school. I didn't do grade in school, you know, in secondary school and things like that. I had a hard time with my exams. I just, you know, didn't apply myself very well. And it's like, I just see a lot of kids going out there, you know, in high school or the equivalent in Ireland, which is called secondary school. And so putting themselves under a lot of pressure in terms of their career#
success and exam so that they can get into their choice of college or university whatever. And I would just say that you know you can do a hell of a lot in life. Life is longer than just like you know your teens in your early 20s. And so you know just I think if you you know self-learning you know teaching yourself things reading you know reading yourself, researching yourself.
The internet's an incredible tool and I think all I'm trying to say is that you can kind of achieve whatever you want to achieve with enough effort and enough passion for a subject. And so even if you don't get the points you want or the qualifications you want to immediately jump into the university or college degree, whatever that you want to do, don't give up on that because I didn't give up on it and then
know, I push myself through that and I ended up getting to achieve and working the things that I wanted to work in. So even if things don't go great for you when you're like 17 years old, I think keep working at it and just don't put yourself under too much pressure. It will be my key takeaway. Oh, thank you, John. I think that resonates with a lot of people.
And that's the end of the broadcast. Thank you everyone for joining. John, thank you again so much for being with us. Our grand community, Whalecoin, Whalecoin Talk community. Thank you for joining in. My name is Noah and tuning in for the next one. signing up for now. Take care. Thanks Noah. Bye bye. Bye bye.