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Blockchain Evolved Show #15 - w/ Alexander Eichhorn
Recorded: Sept. 22, 2023 Duration: 1:06:48Space Recording
Full Transcription
Checking, Alexander, can you hear me?
You are muted.
You have to unmute yourself.
If you are joining from a computer, make sure that you have given the permissions for your microphone to Twitter, or whatever it usually tasks for.
Oh, I see you as a speaker in my space.
Maybe you want to rejoin?
Okay, click the request button and check if any message pops up.
Do you want to ask you permission for a microphone or something?
Do you see the request button?
Okay, now I see it.
Okay.
Now I see it.
Now I see it.
So, soon you should be a speaker.
Give it a second.
Yep, yep.
I can hear you clearly.
Awesome.
Awesome.
Awesome.
Awesome.
Awesome.
Awesome.
Awesome.
Awesome.
How are you?
How's your day going?
Oh, great.
I have two new things.
Two new things.
A bit surprising.
Yeah, yeah.
I was going to ask all about it.
And we'll ask about it later in the space.
But, if I remember correctly, you are in Dubai right now?
Yes.
Correct.
Yeah.
Nice.
So, we don't have a big time difference.
It should be noon for you as well, right?
No, it's 8 o'clock.
So, it's all good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Okay.
So, we can start, I suppose.
And the space is recorded.
So, usually, you know, because it's still early in USA and so on, most people will join
to listen to the recording afterwards.
So...
No problem.
I suppose we can start off.
All right.
Hello, everyone.
Welcome to episode 15 of the Blockchain Evolved Show.
I'm Kryptonio from Tezos Commons.
And today, I have with me Alexander Eihorn.
I hope I said it correctly.
Yes, 100%.
All right.
Nice.
From BlogWatch Data.
And today, we'll have a chat about the work they have been doing in the Tezos ecosystem
with these stats and other tools that we've built over the years.
If you have any questions for Alex during the show or after the show, feel free to post
them as a comment under the space.
Even after the show, we will be looking at those.
So, yeah.
Alexander, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me.
Absolutely.
And I think we briefly met at Tezdev, right?
Like, we met there for like two, three minutes.
It was a little bit hectic of a day, right?
It was a super busy day and super noisy and very hard to talk to people.
So, but next week, you should catch a restaurant someplace or a bar.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I hope next time it will last more like two days maybe, you know, so we can spread
out the talks and the panels and everything because it was really busy as you said.
So, did you like it this year, Tezdev?
Did you hear anything that got your interest?
So, I actually liked it better last year because as you said, there was more time and more space
for two days of conference.
But it was, it wasn't bad after all.
So, it was very well organized.
The guys from Trillitech, I think it was their first conference that they organized.
It was a pretty good job on that.
So, kudos.
Yeah, totally.
Shout out to Trillitech for organizing that and all their teams helping, of course.
And, okay, so I think we should start with you introducing yourself.
I mean, I've known you, I've seen you in the ecosystem since I joined here.
But for those that might not be familiar, would you like to make an introduction yourself?
Like, who are you?
What do you do?
And we can start off from there.
So, I'm a distributed systems engineer.
I've been studying distributed systems and security at the university.
Did a PhD degree in multimedia live streaming.
Worked in a few research labs in Norway and Canada.
And eventually, I started working in my own company.
I didn't want to do the academic side anymore.
And so, started building a cloud platform for video transcoding.
I did that a couple of years long until I think 2018 or 2017, kind of.
When kind of one of the bigger bull markets in cryptocurrency happened.
And yeah, I basically got a lot of interest in blockchain data.
I wanted to analyze which coins are actually used by people.
Which communities would grow on a blockchain.
How it would look like.
So, I basically started implementing a few indexes.
A few databases.
And yeah.
This is what got me here.
I see.
Yeah.
So, how did you end up with Tezos?
Like, when did your journey with Tezos start?
Oh, that was actually a funny story.
I didn't want to work with Tezos in the beginning.
Because I had so much work with Bitcoin and other chains.
But a good friend of mine, Mirko, from Staking Rewards.
Needed data for Tezos.
Because Tezos was, back in the day, a very big kind of staking coin.
Kind of one of the earliest.
And they were building a new company called Staking Rewards.
And obviously, they need kind of raw data from blockchain.
About delegators, stakers, everything.
And he didn't have it.
So, he asked me if I can implement an indexer for Tezos.
And I said, well, okay.
Let's try.
And it took a month, I guess.
And then we were ready with the data.
And I had a lot of dashboards, actually.
And it just happened that at the consensus conference in New York in May that year.
I think it was 2019.
I met Arthur, just by chance.
And I showed him the dashboards.
And he was, wow.
This is actually really interesting.
You must understand the protocol really deep to make these charts.
And I said, yeah.
I made an indexer for this.
And he said, wow.
This is actually what we need right now.
I'm going to make you a contact to a few people.
And I think a few days later, Roman and Ryan Lecky, if you still remember him.
They called on the phone.
And they asked me, look.
We have a little bit of trouble with our current blog explorer.
TC Scan back in the day.
They want to quit.
We need a new blog explorer.
And we heard that you might have an indexing backend for this already.
Can you actually make us a frontend?
And I said, yeah.
Why not?
Let's do it.
And this was, I think, the fastest contract I ever signed in my whole life.
It took six days until we signed it.
And then we started work for two months.
And we were ready right on time for the network upgrades at which TC Scan went out of service.
And then TC Stats was born at this time.
Yeah.
So TC Stats was basically the first project that you built on Tezos, right?
The first product.
Yeah.
The first public viewable, publicly visible project that we did, yes.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
At that point, was BlogWatch already a company or did it come out?
No, it was still an idea.
So I did this out of my old company where I worked, so I'm kind of at this media streaming.
But I always had the idea to start a real, proper blockchain company, a blockchain data
company, right?
And I had all this data collected from crypto markets.
And I had all these blockchains indexed, and now also Tezos.
And for the Tezos Foundation, it made a lot of sense to really go forward because now this
was the first and only, or kind of the second, but now only, BlogExplorer.
So they were eager to kind of support the project going forward.
So in early 2020, I founded BlogWatch Data as kind of a proper company to be able to hire
people across the world, in the US, elsewhere.
And yeah, since then, Tezos is one of our major customers, I would say.
I see.
So to back up a little bit, you've mentioned a lot of times, and we see it being mentioned
again and again, the word indexer, which is a pretty standard thing for developers,
I suppose, and backend developers and everything.
But for the average user, could you explain what an indexer does, what it is, like in simple
terms, if it's possible?
Yeah.
So a blockchain is actually nothing else than a database where you store the history of
transactions and the current ownership of things like tests or NFTs.
But this blockchain as a database is not very well organized to be searchable and to really
list, for example, all the transactions that have happened on a certain account.
And for this reason, people have been building software that's called indexers, which basically
read the entire blockchain from the very first block to the most recent block and fill up another
more specialized database that is much easier structured for search.
And that's essentially what we do as a company.
I see.
So in a way, you could say that it is like a search bar for the blockchain data, but specific,
like it takes specific data that one might require and index them better, right?
Like, so you can find them easier when you search for them.
Yeah.
So the index word is actually because it's made searchable.
So we can search for all the different addresses, for all the concepts, everything that happened
for tokens and so on and so forth.
Yes.
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
Okay.
Okay.
So this was the first product you built, and it's one of the most used block explorers in
Tezos, of course, it has great UI.
What's the most difficult part of running in blockchain explorer and what does it take to
run one in general?
Okay.
So we actually put a lot of time and thought into developing the UI and originally kind
of, there was a version one, which maybe some of you might still remember, which looked
a little bit ugly.
And then we, we quickly released the version two, which was much nicer user interface.
Our most important goal was to have it mobile first.
And so this was kind of the, the, the top of the line requirement.
And the second thing is we wanted to talk to ordinary people with the block explorer.
So it should not be so technical that it only is useful for the core developers or for the
developers in general, but actually our major audience that we had in mind were ordinary,
normal users out there on their mobile phones.
So that's why we decided to pick kind of very powerful visual terms like this, the cycle clock
that we invented back in the day to show kind of how the, the cycles on Tezos evolve, because
that's a concept that's totally unknown and totally unusual.
Yeah.
Yeah.
To be honest.
Yeah.
It caught my eye from the first time I joined the, you know, the clock that you have for
the cycle.
It kind of became kind of the symbol for the, for the blog explorer, uh, after a while.
And, um, yeah.
And then also how the, the, um, transactions are presented.
This is actually, I, I have to give credit to, to baking bed in, in that because in the
original version of the blog explorer, we had kind of tables similar to how our other blog explorers
work, but I never felt they were really right.
And, um, baking bed came up with this idea to make human readable sentences.
And I thought, wow, this is a really great idea.
Um, they, they nacked us back in the day, um, to, to have stolen or copied this from them.
But I, I think it's kind of more like a friendly, um, kudos.
I see it like more like in the, in the Japanese lifestyle, somebody else makes a good product
and, um, you honor them by, uh, copying parts of their product.
And the fun fact is that, um, I just recently met the, um, avalanche or the hour explorer team,
and they actually copied a lot of features from these stats.
So you see kind of the industry is kind of, um, always inspired better people.
Yeah.
And to be honest, uh, going back to when I first joined, not just Tezos, but Crypt in general,
it was like early 2020, I think.
And at that time I was, you know, looking through different blockchains and everything.
And I remember that Tezos, uh, had already much better explorers than most other competitor chains back then.
Like we had, uh, we could see if stuff that on other blockchains, you have to dig much more,
you know, to find regarding data and stuff.
So it doesn't surprise me if, like you say, from the avalanche explorers,
now they copied some parts or anything.
Yeah.
Um, the, the, the, um, the story that happened with, um, TC scan, uh, back in the day.
So then they, that they, they actually wanted more money and more influence in, in the ecosystem.
But the Tezos foundation was fighting back and eventually they broke off.
So they, they closed the product, but then the same team also launched kind of this competing
chain, this Dune, um, network, uh, if you still remember.
Um, I've heard, but I don't remember it.
I wasn't here back then.
So, but I only heard stories.
Yeah.
The Tezos foundation was still pretty much frightened that the same thing would happen again.
So they did everything in their power to support multiple teams to build different block explorers.
And that's why in, in the earlier days we had kind of a proliferation of block explorers for Tezos.
Like this really unusual, it's a very, very small train with almost no activity, but you have five block explorers.
Right.
Yeah.
But, but, but it makes sense, right.
To have, uh, multiple projects working on the same stuff.
Like monopoly is not good in any case.
Right.
Yeah.
And, and it's also a lot of, because it's a point of failure, right.
But, um, sadly, um, this changed over the years, uh, because as a block explorer, you can't really make any money.
It's not, not a product that survives on its own.
It always needs kind of funding from the outside.
And obviously, um, the Tezos foundation would only fund projects if they add functionality.
Right.
And the teams also have to be invested somehow.
And there were a few teams who built a block explorer, but actually had other business or other kind of goals with the business.
So, um, it, it was kind of a natural selection process.
I would say that now there is only two explorers left.
That's, um, supported.
Yeah.
And after a point, like if you have too many, uh, it kind of becomes redundant.
Uh, like if you have six explorers, it just doesn't make sense for me.
You know, uh, it's too many.
Like, uh, you, you probably can be covered with two or three, right.
Which would be more normal, let's say.
But as you said, yeah, with natural selection, basically.
Um, now the only two main ones at least left is Tizzy stats and Tizzy kitty.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There is also, I think one more, uh, Aronax or something, but, uh, not as popular, but yeah.
Um, I also like the first explorer I used was Tizzy stats.
As a newcomer, I remember, you know, uh, like you said, the UI was much more user friendly for me.
I could understand because I was new to blockchain as well, not just Tezos.
And I could, I could understand stuff much easier.
Um, but nowadays that I know more, I can also use Tizzy kitty pretty easily.
They have also evolved a lot.
Um, and I was wondering what other future plans do you have for Tizzy stats, if any?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we actually, you might've realized that we haven't done so many big updates to the
blog explorer in quite a while.
Um, the reason is that we were working kind of almost a year or a little bit more than
a year in the background, building a new type of, um, index of framework and building
lots of, um, indexing, um, decoders for different, um, protocols that run on top of
Tesla's to have kind of much richer pool of data that we, we can pull from to make the
blog explorer experience more rich.
Um, we always had this concept that we would show a few white listed tokens, but the way
this was implemented is that there was no indexer behind, so no database.
We would actually only query the blockchain nodes directly, which again, are not really
optimized for this use case.
So the, this, uh, tops where you see these tokens or your token ownership is, uh, they
are not really that useful right now.
Um, since now we have launched the TZ pro platform just recently, we are currently working on migrating
over the explorer to TZ pro.
TZ pro.
And then we are also able to show all the different tokens, all your different positions, indexes
and lending pools and so on.
And, um, also NFT trades, open NFT market positions and stuff.
So, um, it will become a much richer experience in the future.
Um, okay.
So just to clarify, I saw the launch of the TZ pro product that you launched recently.
Um, you said now that you're trying to kind of to migrate it over there, but yeah.
Like, will it have, um, will it have a new domain, a new name?
Will it be under the TZ pro domain or just, just, just the database will be, let's say
the indexes will be from.
We just switched the database out.
So we switched from the old API, the old TZ stats API to the TZ pro API, which is much
richer in, in data and in context so that, um, we can deliver a much, much better, um,
Explorer experience to people.
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
Okay.
By the way, give me one second to quickly find, uh, and pin the tweet about the TZ pro
cause I had it, I think bookmarked somewhere.
Um, and I also posted down in the comments and also it, it is a good time to remind people
that if you have any questions at any point of the show, feel free to post them down in
the comments as well.
Even if it is after the show.
Okay.
There, I found your tweet, your thread actually.
Um, so it should show up in a bit.
Yeah.
There it is.
Okay.
Yeah.
So I see that, uh, you say we've designed unified data models for each of the test activities,
like token, dex pools, taking firms, learning pools.
Uh, so with, with this TZ pro you, you will be able to see all tokens, not just wet listed
or a specific ones, right?
Uh, like any token that will be created, all the data will be drawn there.
Yes.
So, um, that tweet is actually a mouthful.
So the, the idea behind TZ pro was to get a better view into everything that happens
inside smart contracts on top of that.
So, uh, we have a lot of different contracts for different verticals.
Yeah.
We, on one side, um, we have a lot of different D5 protocols.
You can trade, you can land.
Um, you obviously have the tokens that you can trade and land.
Then you have D5 farms, which incentivize people to not sell these tokens, but just keep
them and you get more tokens as rewards.
This is one universe, the D5 universe.
And then on the other side, we have the entire NFT universe where people mint NFTs.
We have marketplaces for NFTs where they are listed.
You have all these different kinds of, of sales that can happen listings or offers you can
make or auctions, different kinds of auctions.
And this is kind of a very, very rich experience across the board and many different solutions.
Yeah.
We have many different DEXs.
I think eight different DEX providers, um, uh, have launched DEXs on Tezos, um, with the
two biggest or three biggest ones, um, Kibus, Bob, Youths, and, and Plenty.
But all the, all these developers made certain choices in how they structure their DEXs, how they
structure their data and how they structure the interactions that users can make with their
contracts.
So in a sense, everything looks very different across these different protocol ecosystems.
But what you really want to have is kind of a bird's eye perspective, because you as a
user, you interact with, with all of them.
So what you need, um, is, uh, some sort of a middle layer, a middleware in the middle that
takes everything that happens in these different contract ecosystems and puts kind of a unifying
view on top.
So that you then only have to work with this unified view so that, you know, okay, this is
my position on the, on, on, on Kibus, Bob.
This is my position on plenty spot, but both look the same, um, same data model.
And this is what TC Pro delivers.
So in TC Pro, we put a lot of thought into how to develop the data models so that they
are universal enough so that they can capture all the different aspects that we find in,
in the different ecosystems.
Um, but at the same time to make them powerful enough to have all the data that's available,
that's required for, for users.
Now, for example, for the DeFi part, we have worked with a large market maker in Tezos to
help them kind of make better accounting, better reporting.
And they basically told us what kind of features they require from an API and what kind of data
they require in terms of trading price execution prices and so on and so forth.
Um, and this is how, um, TC Pro actually evolved over the last year.
And now we felt it's a good time.
It's the platform is ready.
Um, we don't cover all the contracts and ecosystems just yet, but we cover enough to, to launch
and to see, and to, to see kind of how much interest is there in, in the community.
But also to learn from the community and from users because the product can still be shaped.
I see.
I see.
Um, how can such a product be more monetized?
How can it generate revenue?
Like, um, do you have some tears?
Do you have some, um, uh, is it a service that you charge, um, depending on the load, uh,
that somebody is doing by using it or how does it work when it comes to.
Yeah.
Um, so we, we, we, for a long time, we have delivered completely cost-free service, um,
with the TC stats API to the ecosystem, uh, from actually from day one until even now.
And we also want to keep it that way.
So the, the, the basic data, the basic index data, um, will be for free.
That's, um, kind of the, the promise that we want to give, um, all the data that is more
special that comes on top.
And the data that gives people a competitive advantage against other people who work on
the blockchain, for example, NFT traders seeing, um, having a better view on the listings of
other NFT traders and being able to follow other traders in a sense, or, um, DEX traders
who get a wider view on the entire, um, DEX ecosystem.
So these types of data we feel are monetizable.
And the way we shape it on the TC pro API is that we have subscriptions.
There is a free subscription that is free for everyone.
And everybody can view the entirety of all the data for their own wallet or bullets.
But as soon as you want to widen the scope and say, for example, you want to see all the
trades on a particular DEX or all the trades across the Plenty ecosystem or all the trades across
the entire Tezos DeFi landscape, then you have to move into a higher paid tier.
And these tiers are then monthly subscriptions.
I see.
Yeah.
And it makes sense.
Yeah.
Okay.
Um, you mentioned that, uh, you've already worked with some, uh, market maker, somebody
in any case, and I was going to ask you, uh, have you had any feedback, uh, since you announced
it, since you launched, have you had any interest so far?
Oh yeah.
There was actually quite a few people who signed up to, um, to, to, to get a free account and
to create API keys and then test out the, the, the API.
Um, Kukai is looking into an integration.
Um, and, um, yeah, obviously on the market maker we are working with, um, is using the API.
Um, and then on top, and that's something, um, I haven't really disclosed publicly yet.
Um, we actually are building another product that, um, I don't know.
I don't really have a good 80, um, ETA for when it will launch, but since we have this
unified layer of data, um, it makes total sense to create statistics out of the ecosystems.
Yeah.
DeFi statistics, NFT trading statistics, and so on and so forth.
So we actually have built, um, a dashboard on top.
And, uh, Trillitech is actually the first user of the dashboard.
It's still kind of a private project, but they are using it to, to really follow the adoption
curves of all the people who mint the McLaren NFT campaign, for example, they are following
the arts traders on the dashboard and see how much activity is in, in the arts or in other
NFT ecosystems.
So this is something that, um, is kind of say a little bit, a small nonsense for Tesos.
But, um, before we release it, um, I want to make sure that we have much, much more features
that you also find on Nansen and DUN.
Um, so that it's kind of a full featured product and not just something that we built the dashboard
and you have to look at the dashboard, but we really want to make it so that everybody
can create their own dashboards on this platform as well.
I see.
And where, where would that dashboard be?
Like, would it be on a separate domain or under the stats or what, what's the plan there?
Oh, this is what we haven't decided yet.
Um, I think, um, it might be because we, um, Blockwatch in a sense is a, is a cross chain
company.
Um, and, um, since this is one, one chain, obviously are the major chain we are working
Um, I think we, we gonna host it somewhere on, on the Blockwatch domain.
Um, because, um, we want to make it so that, that people can maybe also compare data between
different blockchains.
So it, it makes a lot of sense to not brand it as the Tesos only product.
Um, it will probably be a Blockwatch product.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
Okay.
Um, another question I had was about, um, these stats, uh, as an Explorer.
And now with all the upcoming developments with rollups with Etherlink, Oxford and everything,
um, are there any plans there to integrate, you know, the, the rollups as well to, to,
to be able to use the Explorer for inside the rollups or something like that?
Are there any, is there any work being done on that?
Um, excuse me.
Um, so for, for, for about rollups, I think the development is still a bit too early to
make any guesses.
Um, because the tooling for rollups is not really at the point where we, we know how the
data will look like that comes out of this.
There's a couple of teams, but all the teams build kind of their own data structures, which means
that every team, every rollup requires its own indexer, which will have its own API.
And then it's very hard to make a generic block Explorer on top.
And also it's very hard to dictate to those teams.
Okay.
Your API has to look like this to make it compatible with just generic block Explorer.
So it's kind of a bit of a hand and egg problem here.
Mm-hmm.
I just want some guidance, but, um, we also don't want to kind of put out a product, um,
right now because the development on these rollups is still so early.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Totally.
We're waiting on the sidelines when it comes to this.
I see.
Uh, oh, and by the way, uh, before we leave from TZPro, uh, if someone is interested in
making use of the TZPro API, uh, where do they go?
Uh, how do they reach out?
The, the best thing is to go to tzpro.io and then hit subscribe.
Um, it works with just an email address.
And the account is free.
It doesn't cost anything.
And then once you're in, in the account, you can create an API key.
And with this, you can use all the APIs on TZPro.
You can use the, the RPCs.
You can use to, to Tezos nodes.
You can use the, the normal API or Explorer or table data, whatever you need.
Um, it's essentially the same API as the TZStats API.
Plus the benefit that TZPro brings is that you can look at your own token holdings, your
own positions in, in DeFi, NFT market trades and so on.
Yeah.
And since you mentioned the TZStats API, it's good also to mention that.
But I think I saw on TZStats that, uh, it's gonna stop, uh, on October 31st or something
like that.
So people have to migrate.
Yes.
Yes.
So, um, the migration is actually pretty, pretty simple.
People just have to get an API key and put the API key in each request.
That's all.
Um, the, the reason why we want to migrate is there are so many different servers that, that
we run and we want to consolidate the infrastructure a little bit.
Now that TZPro is stable and, and, and running, and this is a newer version of the infrastructure.
Um, we just want to shut down the old stuff and just work with the new infra.
That's all.
So there is no, no, no bad intention behind it.
Um, there's actually a few.
No, that makes sense.
Yeah.
A few users who kind of used the, the API quite, quite heavily.
Um, and for them, they probably crossed a hundred thousand records per month, free limit.
Um, for them, I, because this might be a great forum.
I encourage them to reach out to us because there is probably a very, very long optimization
way that, that we can take.
Um, so you, you can, can get your calls down quite dramatically.
Um, we actually interested in this because that would decrease the load on our servers
quite a lot.
And, um, if you still need more data, um, then, um, it seems that you are running a more
or less successful business and then, um, it should be no problem to pay a little money
for.
Yeah.
I was, I was just gonna ask like, uh, what kind of use case from an individual, uh, requires
like a hundred thousand per month, uh, requests and stuff.
Uh, it's either a non-optimized script or people scraping baker information every few
minutes or multiple accounts or whatnot.
We know that Missari is using the API.
We know that staking rewards is using the API and there's probably other data providers
out there who, who also use the API.
And, um, yeah, so I mean,
Uh, stake, stake.
Yeah.
Sorry.
I was gonna say stake now uses the API as opposed for the, um, portfolio tracker, right?
Like, uh, you can, uh,
Stake now, Stake now too.
And, um, also the, the Tessos rewards, um, distributor, but, but this is very tiny, um,
amount of calls.
So they are, uh, this is totally covered by the, by the free, um, subscription.
And I even think Tessos notes, um, doesn't need more than a hundred thousand, um, requests
per month.
Yeah.
Which basically attracts all the bakers and their payments and everything.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Awesome.
And before we move on to more general Tessos stuff, uh, is there anything else you would
like us to touch on regarding TzStats or TzPro?
Oh, no, that's, um, I think we are good with those.
Yeah.
I'm also covered.
So let's get into Oxford, uh, the upcoming, you know, upgrade, uh, the new staking mechanism
and the economic model.
Do you have any opinions on that?
Uh, now we're going into the opinion territory, but, uh, I would, I would be interested in your
opinion and your point of view as well.
Um, so I've, I've actually looked into the, the, the Oxford proposal for a long time that
the first time that I got to, I got exposed to the new ideas was during the test of week.
Um, I was actually invited to nomadic labs and they gave a presentation about this.
Um, it looked a little bit different back then.
Um, it became a little bit less complex, but it's still very complex.
Um, yeah, opinion.
I mean, this is always a lot of work and all the people are that work on this are very nice
and then super highly intelligent.
So I don't want to step on anybody's toes, but, um, from an engineering perspective, or
let's rather say maybe a management perspective, um, the proposal seems a bit rushed.
So, um, there is, but this is probably the case with all the proposals they put out.
Um, because most of the time they develop in secret, there is no, no specification and also
no documentation.
The only thing that you actually see is, um, kind of their, their public test net, um,
their, their Monday net test net, but we, we, without documentation, we can't use it.
Yeah.
And, um, so it's actually the first time that we touch new proposals is when they are released,
because that's mostly the point where they also document a proposal.
But still, even then with the documentation in hand, um, you think you understand it, but
once you dive in, like I did this week, you realize, nah, it's not really, everything is
not really, um, documented.
Um, so one, one, one example for, for Oxford, for example, which maybe it is obvious for people,
but it wasn't so obvious for me in, in the beginning.
And not even for me is that when you want to stake, you have to be a delegator first
and you can only stake with the baker that you currently delegate to.
Right.
Yeah.
So the other thing that, um, I just realized, and I think it was only today or yesterday when
I saw the first data rolling in, is that the normal, um, flow that is described in the
documentation that you stake.
And when you want to get out, you unstake, and then you have to wait a bit and then you
finalize the unstake.
So you'll get your money back.
Um, this is not the only, um, possible flow.
There's also something that's hidden.
For example, when you stake and then you re-delegate to another baker, there's an implicit unstake
happening in the background.
So implicitly everything that you staked gets unstaked.
Immediately.
Um, and yeah, so, so it's implicit.
You don't really see it unless you look into the balance updates that come out of the blockchain.
Um, and your delegation, like the rest of your coins, your, your spend with balance gets
delegated to the new baker right away.
But the, the coins that are unstaked, they remain delegated to the old baker.
So they were not delegated during staking, but all of a sudden during unstake, they get
delegated.
You see, there's a lot of complexity that is hidden behind the scenes.
And this makes not only implementing this protocol challenging, but it makes our side of digesting
the data and kind of following up on, on the state updates and following up on the balance
updates, extremely complicated.
So it takes a long time.
Um, for this proposal, I would say it's kind of one of the major updates.
It's almost as big or probably even bigger than, um, the, the change in consensus update.
The tender bake one, right?
Yeah.
The, the, the two tender bake in, in it.
Yeah.
And, um, I mean, blog explorers, uh, usually get a lot of weight in terms of, uh, things that
they have to, um, change and, uh, adapt when major upgrades like that happen.
Like not, not all projects have so much work to do on major upgrades, right?
Um, wallets, um, it's people who build libraries, but the main majority of the work is actually
with indexers and with blog explorers.
Yeah.
I mean, I've heard it before that, you know, we kind of evolve too fast, you know, and it's
hard to keep up sometimes, uh, which has its benefits, but it's a downside as well, especially
for the engineers working, uh, in the ecosystem.
But as you said, not all upgrades are as big as this one, right?
They, not all of them require as much work.
Yeah.
So they try to have, um, a bigger update spaced with a maintenance update that does only very
little tiny housekeeping stuff.
So the next update is expected to be a little bit less involved.
We have to see what, what happens.
Um, but, um, this upgrade is actually, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty heavy.
I would say.
Yeah.
It doesn't, doesn't make me so happy, but what can I do?
It has to continue to run somehow and the index.
Yeah.
We have to run and our customers expect the data to flow.
So yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I see.
I see.
And, um, okay.
Have you looked at all into, I don't know, that availability?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I haven't looked so much into this.
I kind of understand what they are meant to be for.
Um, I find it interesting that the choice for the data availability layer is towards the
design that does not incentivize keeping data available.
Like there is no monetary incentives.
Um, the, the people who host data have to be altruistic or they are assumed to be altruistic.
I don't think that's, that's going to fly so well.
Um, the, um, the smart rollup update was also pretty surprising to me, like over the last
updates, how it rolled out, because remember first they did this, this transaction rollup
update, but nobody used them, but we still had to implement 30 new transaction types in
our indexes, which took weeks to, to, to, to, to do this and everything.
Right.
And, um, now we can't remove them because, um, some people sent some transactions on
GhostNet.
So there is kind of these, these, these, these updates, um, that are pushed through from, um,
nomadic are actually in my eyes hurting the ecosystem more because they take away a lot
of our attention from features that would help make usability of the entire ecosystem better.
And, and kind of channels our attention towards ever changing and ever new coming features that
may be used or that may be thrown out again in the next version or maybe changed.
Yeah.
But, um, they're not really ready to be used.
Um, all the tooling around, um, rollups is still not there or still being developed.
So there's actually no reason why the smart rollups should be on mainnet.
Yeah.
But, um, like, like what, what, what kind of tooling, sorry, what kind of tooling do you mean
that, um, it is missing, uh, for somebody, you know, to implement to deploy a rollup right
now?
It's about, it's about all the SDKs.
When you look at other rollup ecosystems like Optimism, Arbitrum, there's a full blown
SDK.
You can use as a DApp team to not have to think about how you lay out messages and other things
on the rollup or how, how you organize, um, the nodes, um, and SDK is required so that
you can think about your business logic.
The current version of the rollups that we have in Tesos, um, have basically defined the
messaging layer for rollups with the layer one, but what's the inbox, right?
Yeah.
The inbox, the outbox, how the messages are structured between layer one and the rollup.
But there's a lot of other things still lacking.
Um, it's not all, it's first of all, the SDK side.
Yeah.
And they are working on this.
I understand, but it's, it's not done yet.
And also the documentation for this SDK is lacking.
You can't just come as a DApp team and easily implement your idea.
Then the entire payment rail or the entire asset movement rail to and from, and even between
rollups is also not there yet.
The idea is to have tickets to move between.
Yeah.
Right.
But today you can't send tickets directly to a rollup.
Even.
Yeah.
You have to send them to a contract.
The rollup observes the contract.
So this is all kind of a little bit, um, a little bit early, I would say.
And that's why I say, um, I'm standing on the sidelines and I wait for it to develop
before I even understand where a block explorer can be helpful.
Yeah.
That's fair.
That's fair.
And, uh, regarding, for example, the transaction rollups that you mentioned before, um, the
way I saw it when they released it.
And I even remember them stating at least like it was a stepping stone, right?
Until they could reach, uh, the, the full scale of the smart rollups.
So like, I don't think they even expected it to be used the transaction rollup.
They just wanted to deploy it and try it out or something like that.
And in order to then get to the next level, which, which was the smart rollups.
Uh, but moving, uh, moving so fast in a way, um, I, I see your point that it's not released
as a complete product, right?
That it still needs, uh, development in some, um, cases in some of the tooling.
But, um, since you told me also that block watch, you know, you, UCI, um, is a multi-chain
company, let's say, you know, you, you work with other blockchains as well.
Um, compared to other, to those other blockchains, what are some good and some bad things that
you see, uh, regarding Tezos?
I mean, you mentioned tooling could be improved.
What other things could be improved?
And maybe some things that are better here in your opinion.
I put you on the spot, right?
Yeah.
Um, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to think what, what, where to, where to start and, and, um, how
to phrase it.
Yeah.
So that there's obviously kind of always the balance you have to strike between, um, you
want to, you want to stay experimental and you want to be innovative and have new features.
But at the, at the same time, you also need to keep an eye out to not lose your existing
ecosystem by making it harder to maintain the existing products.
Mm-hmm.
And the, the, this balance isn't, uh, Tezos doesn't strike it well, um, because the amount
of work that it creates for ecosystem developers is pretty high due to this very often changing
concepts that, that are happening right now with the, with the staking concept.
And, and most of the time they also don't think like a startup because when you think
like a startup, you think about how can I make my product so that more people like it
and more people use it and more people find it useful.
It, it seems the strategy in Tezos is more evolving around experimentation and ideas that
are far out on the horizon that might be great, but in order to reach them, there is no, no
in between.
Okay.
So I would actually wish that there was more focus on usability and focus on existing use
cases and existing ecosystems and to, to nurture them.
I know the Tezos foundation does a lot of work there and also Trilitec does a lot of work
by outreaching and onboarding new users, but these new users find it hard to do something
about useful on the chain.
Right.
And to have this, you need developers to develop things.
But who wants to touch a chain that where half of the new infrastructure that is placed
in the marketing material is still not ready to be used.
And we already get new marketing material for version 2.0.
It might be totally different than the current version.
And then every developer that looks at it from the outside says, Oh, I just going to
wait for version 2.0 when everything changes anyway.
Why should I invest my, my time and energy now to build an app on this platform and have
to change it again in the next version?
I mean, in the blockchain space, everything changes constantly, right?
Unless you are in Bitcoin, where even in Bitcoin, some stuff change.
But I mean, in this space in general, this technology, it keeps evolving all the time.
But I see that I get the point that on Tezos, it evolves too fast for its own good.
Sometimes I heard that feedback from others as well.
But yeah, it was my turn of thought here.
I wouldn't really say too fast.
I think speed is not the issue so much.
You can evolve fast, but what you should make sure is that you don't break so many things
along the way.
Yeah, gotcha.
And Tezos has a culture of breaking many things for many people.
When you look at all the libraries and the wallets that were lost over the years,
this was mainly because too many things broke and people didn't get funding to update their
solutions anymore.
And that's not a good thing.
You actually want to nurture a culture where the core engineering team says,
okay, we understand your use case and we won't break it.
We have your back, but we still add new features.
And when we add the breaking features, we help you to update whatever you run.
Don't they help in your opinion?
I mean, like I've seen, I don't know if it actually happens in practice, but I've seen
Nomadic Labs, for example, post a lot of times that if you need help with transitioning
or anything, stuff like that.
No, this is what they actually do quite well.
But I wish they were reaching out earlier in their development and design process for
new features to the ecosystem.
Yeah.
Okay.
It seems that even large custodians like Bitcoin Swiss, they just get in now into the
Oxford arena.
They haven't been asked before, what do you as a big custodian think about our new update?
Or they haven't talked to the large bakers, what do you think about our new update design?
Is this useful?
Yeah.
So, yeah, I think there is...
So better communication beforehand, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's fair feedback.
As I said, I've heard it before.
You also mentioned, you know, to put more focus on existing use cases, like, and getting
back to the multi-chain work that you do.
Do you have any examples in mind, like things that maybe, some use cases that are good in
other ecosystems that possibly could be implemented here as well?
You mentioned, for example, that when a user comes in here, he needs to find something useful
useful to do.
And to be honest, I don't see a lot of actual use cases, real use cases of the blockchain
in the space right now, right?
One of the most real use cases for me, of course, is NFTs, for example, because we see actual
people, not blockchain enthusiasts, actually use blockchains for that.
DeFi also, not all of DeFi, in my opinion, but some parts of DeFi are good as a use case.
What other use cases do you see, maybe in other ecosystems as well?
So, I think the community building and whatever community it might be, like a community of gamers
or like a community of people who have kind of a local economy running somewhere, these community
building use cases are pretty strong.
We saw that with the arts NFT space, that kind of a single guy out of South America, single-handedly
started on Tezos.
Nobody thought about it.
It wasn't funded by the Tezos Foundation.
It wasn't planned, so to say.
It just happened, right?
And this was kind of an interesting episode in Tezos.
And all of a sudden, all the people who also built on Tezos, they were all over the place
helping him.
And that's great.
So, I think it's nice to keep kind of this open arms culture.
But that was also, it came out of an experimental mindset, right?
Yeah.
Because I remember, for example, Rafael back then, and he was just experimenting.
He actually was building something else, not an NFT platform at the beginning.
And then he changed it into an NFT mainstream platform, let's say.
And it just blew up.
But these kind of things, I feel like they are pretty rare, you know, to happen.
Such organic evolution and growth.
Yes.
And that's why I was saying, because it's so rare, and also because it had so much strength,
it is very vital to nurture this.
Yeah.
Not only with blindly throwing money at it, but also with kind of reaching out and helping
people organize events, like in-person events, online events, all these types of things.
I think this is very useful.
Yeah.
Because at the end of the day, it's about people.
And it's not about technology, what we do here.
Yeah.
It's people that use the technology.
Technology connects people.
And this is what needs to be better understood.
On the business side, I had for a long time hoped that the Tezos Foundation has enough business
developer knowledge to do business development outside, because they are the foundation.
They are well received by larger companies.
And once they have a big fish on the hook, they would reach out to the ecosystem and pull
together a couple of companies that would work in the ecosystem to deliver kind of a larger
product to a larger company.
But this never happened for some reason.
And eventually I realized that Tezos Foundation is more like this administration organization,
but not really much understanding about how businesses work.
And I'm still kind of waiting for this, but it probably never happens.
It happens in other ecosystems, I guess, but it's not here.
So you mean like a more proactive approach to you would like them to go out and get more
companies, for example?
Yeah, kind of.
I told them a couple of times a while back that if they want to do something better is
that they should make better business development and also connect the ecosystem to use cases.
Right now, with all the big accounts they have, the only companies that actually work with them are Trilitec and
Nomadic Labs.
That's all.
Oh, you mean this kind of companies that they should attract?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Because in my mind, the way I saw what TF is doing is that they are there to fund companies
like that, like Trilitec, Nomadic Labs.
And they do the business development and reach out to other organizations and institutions to get them on board.
Right?
Like I don't expect, I don't think we should expect TF to do the reach out to those institutions and so on.
Like they have the companies like Trilitec and Nomadic Labs to do that work, to have a part of their team to do that work.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I guess that's better phrased.
But originally there was not so much, so many companies, Trilitec didn't exist when we started.
Mm-hmm.
Nomadic was a bit smaller than it is today.
So, yeah.
Well, yeah.
Like in any ecosystem, changes happen.
Teams come, go, you know, new teams join.
Some old teams will leave.
But as you said before, and this is important feedback is to have to put more focus on sustaining these teams, right?
And the community in the ecosystem.
So, yeah.
I agree on that.
Okay.
Okay.
So, we've been going for a little bit over an hour.
Before we close out, before we wrap up, is there any other topic that you would like us to touch on?
Anything that you would like to, I don't know, share and talk about?
Oh, actually not.
But maybe we have some questions from the audience.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I could definitely check.
Give me one second because I don't see any comments.
But yeah, guys.
If you have any questions, feel free even to request and come up or any comments on the discussion that you've been listening.
Otherwise, we are going to wrap up.
Also, before we do that, Alexander, would you like to tell people where they can reach out, like some social that they should follow?
I think you also have a Discord with BlogWatch, right?
Yeah.
So, we have a Discord on BlogWatch.
You find it on the tcpro.io website, the link to the Discord.
Otherwise, reach out to me directly here on X.
It's echa underscore IO, E-C-H-A underscore IO.
That's my handle.
Or you find me by my name, Alexander Eichhorn, to say it in German.
Eichhorn.
Oh, okay.
And I don't think I can get the German accent, but I will try.
Thanks.
Yeah, thanks so much for your time and the nice background.
Absolutely.
It was a pleasure to have you on.
We didn't get a chance to discuss over a test dev, but at least we did it now.
I loved hearing your perspective and your point of view in the ecosystem.
You've been here for quite a while.
You've been working here.
So, it's always, you know, beneficial for me as well to listen to your perspectives.
Yeah.
Also, before we close, just a quick mention.
Check out tezoscommons.org.
We have many programs over there for the community.
Alexander, you mentioned physical events.
We have, for example, we are subsidizing physical events, meetups, local meetups.
We will have one local meetup in the next week, next Saturday.
For example, here in Greece, where we have, you know, we are trying to create local communities
over the world.
So, yeah, if you are interested in hosting a local meetup for Tezos and stuff, we can
help you out.
We can fund it.
Also, check out the Tezos Commons Community Rewards Program.
We give out every month up to 5,000 tests for people that bring value to the ecosystem.
There are, like, nine different categories you can check out for developers, for people
helping, for people even, you know, having constructive discussions around Tezos.
So, definitely check that out as well.
It takes, like, 30 seconds to nominate somebody, and it's always good to reward them.
And, yeah, so you've been listening to Blockchain Evolved Show.
I'm Kryptonio, your host from Tezos Commons.
Today with me was Alexander Einhorn.
Sorry, I can't, I can't achieve the German accent.
That's awesome.
You did it good.
You did it well.
Okay, great.
And, yeah, thank you all for tuning in with people.
We'll be here next Friday as well.
So, have a great rest of the day, and take care, everyone.
Alexander, thanks again.
Yeah, thanks.
Have a great day.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye, everybody.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
