Hello hello. Hey everyone we're just waiting for a few more folks to join and we'll get
started. In the meantime I guess we'll do a little chitty chatty session. Yes just trying
to get Ben on here. Ben let's wait for Ben. Hey Fuffuffuff Phoenix man that tagline from
Meridian never left my head. You guys did a good job. How many people are going to join?
Hey Jrom hey Stellar Ireland got some folks coming on. Some of my favorite Twitter peeps.
Exactly all right here is Ben and if you guys have any questions throughout the combo just
drop them in the comments and we will try to get to them either during or at the end.
I guess they're gonna be replies underneath the the tweet right? Yep yep. Very good so keep them
coming right gonna bump those engagement numbers. Ben we just sent you a co-hosts invite you should
have got it. Hey Anuya. Anuya was gonna help us co-host today but she is not feeling well so it's
just gonna be Ben and Morgan. It's flu season which is one of the reasons why my voice is as
at the moment. I think you sound great. Can you guys hear me okay? Yes I can. Morgan also I just
got over a really bad cold and I think it was COVID and believe it or not I think all of my
dogs had it as well. I googled it and dogs can get COVID. They all had a cough but we're all okay.
I don't think I've ever seen a dog cough. I guess sneezing isn't I've seen sneezing but yeah it's like
it's a legit cough from the throat. Hey Ben. Hey everyone we're gonna we're gonna give it just
another minute for folks to join but I'm really loving the attendance so far. Are those all pups
or like big dogs like German shepherds or something? My dogs? Yeah. I have a straight hair
labradoodle so it looks just like a pretty standard black lab and the other the other one
they're just muds like. Mud are the smartest though. They are and but the most most annoying
too you know. Really? Yeah they're small and yappy. My favorite dog from China was a my man
she was the smartest dog I've ever seen. They are smart. I will give them that. I'm seeing more
people happen. It's probably to do with the lack of inbreeding because with the dog breeds it's all
about you know like essentially you're you know you're mating them with like their half sisters
and brothers and whatnot. Right. That's not a good genetics lesson to learn there.
All right look at that we're exactly on time and we've got a full crew of people here which is
fantastic. So I guess we can kick things off so hi everyone good morning good afternoon good
evening wherever you're tuning in from. So my name is Ben and I'm on the marketing team here at SDF.
Personally I'm very excited for our guest today the one and only Morgan Wilde, developer and
founder of Okashi. There's a lot to say and a lot to cover and I will promise you I will formally
introduce Morgan but I want to do a really quick intro of why we're here. So Soroban. So what is
Soroban? Most of you have probably heard but for those that have not Soroban is the Stellar
Network's native smart contracts platform and a quick bit of history when we decided we wanted
to bring smart contracts to Stellar we did a pretty thorough inventory of what was already out there
and compared it against the kind of properties we wanted in a smart contracts platform.
Nothing really fit that bill because smart contract landscape today didn't really meet
the standards we were we personally were looking for across design scalability an amazing developer
experience and so we decided to set a new standard for smart contracts and to do that we built it
ourselves and that is what we now call Soroban. That brings us to today it's been a long journey
Soroban is live on testnet we are gearing up for mainnet very soon and we've had amazing engagement
from the Stellar ecosystem and new builders and so why are we here today because as we approach
mainnet we're going to start spotlighting the many projects and the many developers who are
building on Soroban and helping bring DeFi to Stellar and who better to start with than Morgan
and so that is my very lengthy preamble and I'd like to officially introduce Morgan Wilde.
Hey everyone thank you Ben. It's it's weird that you mentioned that document about the
Soroban architecture choices and decisions that's the first thing I read about Soroban
as a fun fact. Yeah my name is Morgan I'm the founder of Okashi. Okashi is the
Soroban playground for web developers but I guess it's a it's a little more than that
and we can dig into the differences in terms of the design and mission that's separated from
other products that could be called a playground but yeah that's my mission that's what I'm doing
and I've been with Soroban with you know building on Soroban since last year
or I guess even earlier yeah this is 2024 so 2022 of December I guess is when we started
with Sorobanathon hosted by the lovely Anuya and I've known and had a Stellar address since 2014.
And Morgan has you've spoken with SDF you've run workshops in Paris Blockchain Week you've
come to Meridian and done demos and and you've presented on what you've been building on Soroban
so we're thrilled kind of with all the engagement you've done over the years
and being a real fantastic advocate for both Stellar and Soroban and I wanted to
kind of go to the beginning of what is your journey with Stellar and Soroban specifically
can you can you walk me through what what tipped the scales for you to get interested here?
Well I can sort of there's two journeys here but I'll start with the more recent one
so I was building developer tools for the past I'd say three four years
I guess since Covid started I transitioned away from like the regular software developer
team lead type of role for you know non-blockchain startup and then you wanted to build developer
tools for this ecosystem like in in general and I was building tools that are you know
not a playground something else for a different chain and I remember looking at that document
that I guess Tomer and other Soroban developers and designers created which was like the design
decisions for Soroban and it discussed Ethereum it discussed the WASM ecosystem it discussed
Algorand it discussed you know the sidechain EVM type approach and you know that document is a
goldmine for like just understanding the the genesis of Soroban and I can tell you for a fact
that folks in the industry unrelated to you know Steller were you know a little butthurt about
some of the contents of in a document because it's like hey you know like you know that's what I
sort of heard from from the conversations because that document circulated pretty
pretty widely and but regardless I did not see that document as anything sort of you know
trashing other platforms I apply it as a like a genuine you know thought exercise on
what is the platform for the future of smart contracts and I could not agree more with web
assembly being the underpinning of you know the core technology so that's that's where I was like
I want to experiment with this I want to see how much I can learn you know from going from zero to
you know executing something that's my sort of you know litmus test for if I can go from zero to
to executing Hello World or something like that in a short amount of time I'm like you know jazzed up
I love it the experience is great you want to inject Ben or yeah I mean I think you touched on
some really interesting things there that I just wanted to give like my own POV on these I think
what's what's really interesting is we have somewhat of this second mover advantage where
we've seen the landscape of the smart contract platforms today and we have the ability to say
here are the things that we want to improve on to meet the standards we think we want and need
so like the three components that I personally see are that that make Sorbonne unique is like you
have the technical backbone which is the programming language of Rust efficiency speed security with a
runtime environment of web assembly faster more versatility for building and in combining
wasm with Rust is really empowering and then you pair that with Sorbonne's kind of optimizations
for DeFi so you have that battery included developer experience I mean we have built-in
contracts the local sandbox plug and play SDKs etc and then the performance enhancements around
multi-core CPUs optimized fee models so I think it's it's given us this opportunity to think what
what is the smart contract platform that we would want to have and solve for and so we've been
building that with the input of people like Morgan and others and ultimately where does this lead is
you know I think the there is the value and benefit of bridging the gap to DeFi with
Stellar and our existing network of on and off ramps which will enable you know whoever is
building like many other people on this kind of Twitter spaces whoever is building kind of DeFi
based applications on Sorbonne to more easily tap into existing high quality assets on the network
and access the global scale of on and off ramps that the Stellar network has today so that's my
kind of interjection there but I think you touched on a couple of those ones which personally make me
very excited. Great points Ben there's obviously different ways different perspectives one can
evaluate a chain on or smart contract platform one and some of some of what you touched I haven't
sort of looked at or seen just because of my background and which is heavily sort of developer
focused and you know the economic models are a little distant personally but you know it has
it has something for everyone I guess before going a little deeper into like the opinion piece
I am you know not officially affiliated with SDF and my opinions here are my own so just so
everyone's clear but yeah the the sort of the decision of picking your platform when everyone's
done smart contract platforms for years obviously you get the second mover advantage which is like
you fix all the things that everyone's been dealing with but there's a lot of people that are upset
because like oh hey you know like we we've struggled through this and like our solution
is like the thing that should you know everyone should be adopting but then you know there's a
lot of some costs in the industry like so so so many some costs in the industry with approaches
that not necessarily work or take a lot of giri rigging to make it work and yeah I guess we can
talk about some of the design design decisions a little bit later but sort of to carry on that
arc of the the journey here which was the zero to hello world or the zero to some
viable execution of a contract of some code that I wrote I see the output when I started
this was literally you know the first hackathon and there was no not much tooling you had the
cli which is the command line interface for interacting with sorbonne contracts and then
you had the the you know the sdk documentation and you had futurenet which was you know and
obviously the rpc server so that's kind of like you know enough to get started we have to be very
tenacious a very talented and like you know a developer at heart and I guess have a lot of free
time all of those sort of I checked those boxes and and you know I had a lot of time to despair
and it took me probably close to a month to get comfortable with you know getting from zero to
something that's a pretty long time but I guess you know going pretty deep that that's reasonable
but in that amount of time I saw some of the things that I could improve and within probably
less than two months the the kernel of the idea for okashi was born the technical sort of
underpinnings and just to sort of speak to the amazing collaborative nature of stellar the you
know stellar development fund and stellar community fund is that I was just you know
recently onboarded developer I spent a little less than two months building on it I had an idea for
a product that I felt was really really important and I pitched it to Tomer you know which is again
pretty unusual to have access to you know this level of technical leadership just you know as
a random person I pitched it to Tomer and then within like a week or two we had agreed to host
a workshop at the Paris blockchain week with you know in the next I think it was in March right
so that was a pretty fast ramp from you know nothing to hosting a workshop
at a pretty big blockchain event for a brand new technology
and and just to plug this is my interjection commercial the stellar community fund or known
as SCF it's our open application award program to support developers and startups and projects
just building on stellar and sorbonne we're very excited by the momentum we've done we've had
10 million awarded to over 130 projects in 2023 we're continuing that throughout 2024
with a great you know focus lens on sorbonne applications so also plug applications are open
and you can go to communityfund.stellar.org and submit your project and build on sorbonne
so I'm definitely going to re-emphasize that to everyone who's listening and and Morgan you
you know you've applied and you've gone through the SCF program a number of times if I'm right
go for it yeah so obviously we agreed you know going back to the Paris blockchain week
thing we agreed to do the workshop and that required you know need to build out
the infrastructure to host that workshop and you know for the playground to be operational
and functional and you know production ready so to speak that requires resources and I had
you know exhausted at that point you know with built-in costs and yada yada it's not easy to
sustain sort of this high pace technical development I'm not a I'm not a student
or like you know 20 something young kid so the SCF track which was sort of opened up at that point
um was a godsend and enabled everything that happened afterwards which was
we we applied for the very first batch of the sorbonne sort of track which was
I think SCF number 12 up until that point um these community funds were done every
six months I think twice a year and by the way I remember those initiatives way back in like 2015
16 when they were sort of voting distributing funds for projects but anyway that enabled us
to raise the first grant which was something like $82,000 and you know everyone on the team
and so then two people got full-time support and we're talking about sort of high level talent
the the the the product person johannes which is you know who's a you know world-class talent
for designing and like the some of the biggest praise that we've received for Akashi is like
you know the user experience the the design and and sort of contracting out support so that
you know that first grant is literally everything that we needed to get to the point where the demo
was ready for Pierce Block Team Week and we could go on stage and demo the sequence of contracts
that we did live not slides not a video but actually live coded on a screen streamed out to
the attendees at Pierce Block Team Week which is a pretty rare site and you know it came off without
a hitch and that was you know an amazingly dense journey from absolutely nothing to having a
production ready product and everything with the support from SDFs you know availability in terms
of like all the leadership all the technical talent I could engage with everybody and then
the support of actually you know the financial support of being able to build what we talked
about and then obviously having the the chance to to present on stage so that was you know like
everything you could have asked you could have wanted was available and put forth by SDF and SCF
and this is that that's also the time when I was introduced to Anke who's the leader the benevolent
leader of the stellar community fund and I became a member of the sort of the verified
um and you know I guess we can talk about that also um which is sort of a mechanism for the
community to have a say and then eventually a determining say on who gets uh stellar community
fund um allocations and you know it's a it's a democracy right so you know the votes are
counted up um for the project submissions and uh passes the threshold um gets uh gets the funding
um so that's you know a super open process uh and it's pretty unique uh in the industry you have a
lot of um I guess you know I'll sort of my I'll share my experience of of seeing um some a little
bit how these things are done yeah yeah go for it okay yes so like in terms of like the the wider
industry right um so grant as a concept is um super popular in in blockchain and a lot of
the development that happens um on you know any of the number of the chains that are not
ethereum um which you know has captured the the the biggest percentage of the current
blockchain developers so if you're not ethereum uh pretty much the only way to attract um serious
development work is by the use of grants and and that's how you know name a blockchain that has a
smart contract platform um and you know I could name you the grants program uh that they've done
but the grants that they you know like the standard um way was a very opaque process uh it's
more who you know and how good of a salesman you are instead of whether the community really needs
or or digs the product that you want to build uh the funding amounts um is almost like you know
a hush hush private type thing that um folks can barely have access to and i'm not going to name
them the chains but i remember a pretty recent uh event where um the grants program uh became
uh public like all the entities and the funding amounts became public and then what is it a
ginormous uproar in the community as to like um well this such and such project guide 500k and
they delivered nothing or you know like this product guide um a million and they're gone um
and just an enormous amount of wasted funds and wasted um opportunities and time
without the community even knowing um so it's um you know a pretty bad state overall in in
in a lot of these where the community is not involved and the community has no visibility
in where the funds are going um stellar is different uh every every stellar community
fund submission and award is visible online you can check out the amounts the the product
the links uh whether it's active and and so forth um and that's just the breath of fresh air
yeah and i think you know we've spent a lot of effort uh and you know cheers to onco who's
who's built and run this program so successfully we've spent a lot of effort revolutionizing kind
of like the reputation-based voting uh and in the ethos of how the stellar network and sdf operate
in terms of transparency you know we've we've tried to solve the voting issues by making sure
we're distributing voting weights across community members in transparent fair and decentralized ways
fostering making sure as you said there's high engagement from community members to feel
empowered to build their reputation within the scf voting community um providing flexibility
for voting responsibilities uh and just making accessible for newcomers to join um and so i think
from a program perspective to help scale projects and development uh and the traction we
are seeing on sorbonne which i'm very encouraged by i think scf is a fantastic program uh and one
i highly encourage everyone who's listening to go to uh communityfund.stellar.org and check it out if
you are not already uh looking at or or have considered applying to scf open applications
application rounds are still open right now um so thanks for the call out morgan and it's great to
hear you know the perspective of someone who's been involved multiple times uh through the program
and has seen it evolve as well i'm gonna i'm gonna put it in bolder terms here stellar community
fund is the grants funding program that the other blockchains want to have um it's bar none
the best uh community funding program out there and so i'm just thrilled to be a voting member
of that community i'm thrilled to have received grants from that community and okashi has been
made possible because of that um so yeah big applause and thanks and kudos for you heard it
from him that wasn't me saying it and yeah not not affiliated um so yeah that's uh that that's
the enabler of of you know spending huge huge amounts of time um obviously um as the adoption
grows um and and you get people that are coming in um that are not super technical or you know
don't have the resources um you need to you need to have a chain a platform that's uh accessible
um you know on a whim essentially like i can just test it out ship something maybe an nft or
whatever it is um in in minutes and um that's going to be enabled by a big part by the community
that's building those stellar community firm projects and i'm going to go back to okashi and
the mission here um so um before okashi had to spend a lot of time um just digging through the
pipeline of how you write some code that then becomes some contract executable then that
becomes something that i can interact with on chain um now with okashi which is um a a playground
experience and you know the word playground should elicit um you know happy easy-going um
fun activities uh nothing that you're like tethered to uh some kind some kind of a pipeline
so uh online right so you go to okashi.dev and you open up a playground you have a contract which is
a rest programming language program or a library rather and you click compile
and then you get some buttons that represent every exposed function on the contract
now you can call those functions or in a sense interact with that contract by just clicking
those buttons uh which then provides a human readable format um in the in the text console
now this experience might sound a little similar to some of the playground experiences out there
and i remember having this contentious discussion with a with a friend of mine a few weeks back
where i was um you know trying to trying to sell the the idea of okashi uh and he was like well
salana or you know such and such chain you just go on their website click playground you launched
into this playground and you can do the same thing that you know i'm like all right let me test it
out i haven't tested out or tried out the ecosystem uh for for a bunch let me see if you know i'm
behind the curve at this point so i go there um and again i'm talking about some other chain here
uh salana specifically so you open up their playground and it's um it's like one of those
vm boxes where uh it's in the browser shirt uh but what you have is uh a vs code um in the browser
with the terminal open and that's it so then you know so what does a person do to to write a
contract well well you know you copy paste whatever you see in the documentation and all right so you
copy paste what happens then well then we have to compile with the command line all right well then
at this point stop because that's no longer the experience that um that i'm going for and we're
going for with okashi um and here's the reason um the amount of developers right now in the ecosystem
you can measure probably in the tens of thousands and then i'm talking about the wider blockchain
ecosystem so you know i'm talking about folks that actively work build ship contracts
uh that's a very very small sample size of the developer ecosystem in general you have
probably closer to 20 to 30 million developers of every kind globally and now the question i'm
asking myself is all right um so there's let's say 10 million web developers which is a pretty
conservative estimate why are those developers not you know adopting blockchain as a technology
whatever it is like pick any chain why not specifically stuff like whatever chain why
are they not doing that and i'm deeply familiar with the web um i've spent i don't know like my
first web kind of thing um i wrote was when i was like 15 okay so like um i'm going to age myself
here but 20 years ago and at that point um you develop you know like a whole understanding of
of you know the ecosystem and how people work and um there's there's an inertia and understanding
of what the development experience is and should feel like and if they don't get that if they don't
get that experience when they're trying out something new that's an immediate turn off
and that turn off is churn for anyone that's trying to onboard uh to blockchain so let me
be a little specific on what sort of what are the turn offs here as a web developer you want to see
logs when something doesn't work your number one tool and i'm talking about sort of the the
wide breadth of um developer skill sets and experiences out here um when you go super
technical we can go into unit tests and integration tests and and other kinds of things debuggers
whatnot but the fundamental baseline is being able to log values um to understand how your
program works or doesn't right oftentimes it doesn't right and um to do that on blockchain
smart contract platforms that's like asking for you to go to the moon that's that's the level of
difficulty um that people face when they want to log just just intermit log intermittent values
i have a function it takes two arguments a and b and i want to add them up and return the the
result the sum right and it's not working why isn't it working well if i can't log those values
if i can't you know debug this function then i'm i'm stuck the only thing i can do is throw stuff
against the wall and see what sticks and again that's a turn off um so sorbonne has this amazing
function in in the sdk which is called log now log uh you can log any value that's you know part of
your contract and sorokashi's picking diagonal in that and exposing those log functions as you know
human readable text inside of your browser so like right there is a big chunk of the developer
experience that web developers expect and it's available because sorbonne has made that attempt
to increase uh the the the developer experience the the quality of life yeah but by introducing
that function so that's one thing right that's a big big big thing people are expecting that
and with with okashi and sorbonne people get that then another thing is you have the environment
right web developers are used to the web what do you need for the web you need the web browser
you can open up your web browser there's you know there's your console there's your source
you can inspect elements you can change elements you can manipulate your stuff right then there
there's you know sort of the batteries included that experience right and with any kind of
blockchain environment because your programs your smart contracts which are just programs
like any other they need uh an execution environment they need the blockchain
essentially without the blockchain you cannot um you know play around with that stuff uh with
a smart contract and this is again where sorbonne um evolves the experience and and okashi adds on
that um with the sorbonne environment so sorbonne environment is um the key thing i'm working on
day to day um emulating that but the sorbonne environment is everything that your contract
needs um to implement arbitrary logic whatever your contract is going to be an NFT uh you know
a pool whatever that's all you need right that's that's the abstraction that uh that enables it
well the beautiful thing about that environment is that it's just a set of functions
it's just a set of functions and you know with a set of functions that are publicly exposed
accessible the contracts there the source codes there i can emulate that in the in the browser
i can emulate a subset of that in the browser all right so instead of a web developer who's not
like super like the i'm talking about the baseline web developer they're not uh command line warriors
they're used to uh GUI tools graphical user interface tools all right command line is a
turn off docker is a turn off uh running um anything that's uh you know like a blockchain
local instance of a blockchain that's a major turn off um with this uh with the sorbonne environment
as as a package and okashi simulating it in the browser you eliminate the need for any kind of
environment setup you go on to you know okashi open up the playground and that environment is
your browser you know call a function that functions in the browser you're not interfacing
with the blockchain and it's instant feedback that's that's probably the third thing which is
to be able to quickly understand playing around not get frustrated with an environment you need
that fast iterative feedback if you don't have that then you know any kind of any kind of problem
that you encounter is just a delay and then the cognitive load becomes like all right for me to
fix this i need to iterate 10 times that's like you know 20 minutes i can't be bothered i'm going
to give up um so there's there's three things that i mentioned that are sort of the key selling points
that do not exist uh on other blockchains and you know if if anyone's here that's you know
going to contradict me i would love examples i would love to see examples of where you think
another blockchain platform has something like okashi um you know learning is a beautiful thing
and i love to learn but as far as i know um based on the fact that sorbonne is sorbonne and you
know it's it's not something that others um the the path that sorbonne's taking is not something
that others have taken um it doesn't exist elsewhere yeah and just to recap i mean you
talked logs developer environment development environment and live feedback um i wish we could
screen share and actually show people exactly what you're building so that would be at okashi.dev
give us a verbal walkthrough of what is okashi and how you would use it um here's a plug i'm
going to do uh so tomorrow uh there's a a workshop that we're doing with encode and uh it's going to
be me streaming um just coding um on uh on okashi with sorbonne and then rust and sort of exploring
the the basic concepts there um and so it's going to be a screen share you'll be able to
you'll be able to see and that's going to happen tomorrow look on twitter um i think my profile
has a link and maybe stellar can retweet uh or something like that but there's a workshop
happening to satisfy those 12 30 tomorrow uh gmt minus five so it'll be eastern time um with encode
it's free to join uh we'll we'll recirculate that link um you can watch it live they will also be
recording it for future posterity um great walkthrough of everything morgan is talked through
and and you know this is this is uh i guess this goes along with with the idea behind um okashi
which is like um i feel like and this is my journey and um the the folks that are you know
really hardcore engineers that i've met in my life have had a similar journey where um you're
learning things because they're cool because they excite you because they tickle your brain
not necessarily because you see uh an roi return on investment potential for this or that or the
other um you pick up things like webgl because webgl is cool you pick pick up things like um
the large language model um uh sdks and apis because that's cool uh you don't necessarily
start with the monetization aspect which is like a business to business type sort of high acidity
uh boring high level thing um which doesn't excite developers because you know i guess it
all comes back to like the joy of writing code of the joy of uh of making the computer do what you
want uh it to do so there's going to be a little bit of that uh tomorrow or i guess a lot of that
tomorrow um morgan no sorry go ahead keep going uh the the thing about uh sort of the the usage
experience and you know this is me trying to put words in your brains that can you know produce
pictures of what it is um thank you twitter spaces for audio only um so what you have is um a a uh
a browser right you open up okashi.dev um and this only this is supported by the way on on
desktops at the moment mobile version coming soon um and what you have is a series a set of widgets
there's five going to be six soon widgets and each widget is a type of uh
a special user interface for a specific uh part of your executable or your smart contract
there's three main ones there's the code widget which pretty much looks like an editor um and
you know highlights your code and you see you know your rest your source code
and then it has that compile button at the bottom then you have your uh your your contract widget
which exposes all your all your public functions in the contract as buttons and now that's a concept
that i personally love um how how that would just go with the simple you know um how do you call a
contract where you click a button and it's surprising to me that that's not been done before
um and i want to just plug in here for for a minute yeah uh morgan was fantastic in creating
a challenge that all the staff at sdf are currently doing um and i can say from firsthand experience
it is so easy to do uh from deploying to even minted our own nfts uh it's it's fun uh it's a fun
little challenge he created for all of us um but it's it's a really easy way to get kind of hands
on with sorbon and uh i just wanted to plug that in that you've got all of us here uh chipping away
with rakashi which is like and you know things and things it's it's uh an amazing thing to think that
um when i guess i'll touch on the broader uh ecosystem as well
uh it is surprising and shocking even sometimes the percentage of people in these uh
blockchain um uh leadership positions of you know like uh uh the you know
any blockchain that has uh an organization leading in uh or a startup that's building that
blockchain um has you know a number of people right it's shocking at the the percentage of
people that do not understand or do not touch the core underlying technology in any meaningful way
and i've experienced this uh throughout the you know the years and this is the beautiful thing
about sdf um so um we attended meridian which is the biggest conference of the year for uh for
stellar everybody gathers up in one place you know we talk and uh some beautiful things happen and so
we talked with nicole a member of the sdf and she had this idea of you know having a simple exercise
for people to write a contract for sorbon now to me that as a developer that's like uh you know
that's probably been done right you know like the your your the development foundation uh you guys
interface with contracts every day um and then you know i understand that was the first time
a lot of the folks had the experience of deploying a smart contract but that's beautiful because
you guys are way ahead of everybody else where those foundations those those startups um don't
touch don't know don't understand the underlying technology while they're selling it or promoting
it or you know doing various kinds of outreach um so that's beautiful that sdf takes the effort
and you know i love to be a small part of that of you know at the core level of the organization
like the baseline is everybody's writing contracts to you know to whatever extent because
you know dog fooding is the ultimate uh expression of you know the startup experience and then like
a good startup experience and kind of mindful of time i wanted to wrap up with a few other questions
for you so this is not going to go for hours we could man if we could i would definitely do it um
but uh you know my question was on you gave a great overview of akashi and your road and path
to where we are today so so what's next for akashi um you mentioned a mobile version coming soon
mainnet um upgrade vote is currently scheduled for february 20th so walk us through like what
do you see coming next for yourself in akashi um sure i wanted to mention something that's outside
of that but please let's do that um so the you know i keep uh praising sort of on for the things
that it enabled um as a as a platform and i think it's important to highlight these things and you
know i hope some of the technical folks are also listening in um to to show the appreciation so
um you know one example of a you know a big chain uh so ethereum had uh the whole abi or
the binary interface uh for ethereum contracts as a thing that evolved through years and discussions
and then and you know it took forever to get done and now that's sort of done that's the industry
standard sort of mine from day one every single function that you know every single contract
rather uh that you create and ship to the network or you know just ship as a binary
and has the specification um for the entire interface now for for a developer that's magical
because uh when you think about just you know a web assembly executable which is you know the
contract layer uh you have just an opaque blob of uh of binary right um executing that would be
very difficult but with the specification embedded in the contract itself in the binary
you enable things like those those buttons uh for for function calls on okashi because
what okashi does is it reads that specification and from that specification generates that
interface and i can bet you that um this year um you'll see experiences where
developers can deploy and i guess this goes into the pipeline a little bit for okashi but
developers will be able to develop their contracts and deploy it with some sort of
a standardized user interface in minutes um and you know that to me sounds like a magical thing
that you know unlocks things because when you think about the bigger technology ecosystem
where landscapes we're talking about like cpus and operating systems and then all of that
uh the the things that opened up gates to new new kinds of uh uh use cases new kinds of experiences
were uh you know leap frogs in in terms of speed and capacity now we as an industry talk a lot about
transactions per second we talk a lot about you know storing gigabytes um on the chain
but we don't talk about enough about the speed of the developer experience going from zero to
shipping something yep and i think that you know you know once once this goes live and and you know
okashi you know grows up um we're going to see a lot more people talking about the the the speed
of the developer experience on saurob on and how we need to replicate that to be you know to be
able to offer a competitive experience because the developer experience is the blocking factor here
the the transaction per second is is a laughable metric most of the time because if you look on
you know the explorers for a lot of these chains you have you know a handful of transactions
included in every block so you're not saturating that capacity in any meaningful way
and that's because your developer velocity is just giant you know like a massive problem
and and that you know that's the that's the pipeline right to to to evolve okashi together
with saurob on to a point where developers are able to build and deploy things super quickly
what's that going to enable well that's going to enable use cases that are you know your your eye
cannot even think of at the moment because that's going to come from new entrants that's going to
come from the variety of people that are out there that's going to come from the 10 million developers
that have not touched blockchain that have a creative you know streak in them but are
completely blocked by the the the barriers that exist right now and unblocking those people
is is the mission for okashi unblocking the 10 million developers that are used to web
that build things on the web to start building things on the web plus the blockchain i'm not
you know the web's not going anywhere the web's going to be the the primary platform for
you know this thing that we're doing um i'm not going to talk about sort of the native app
experience because that's um you know you you enter the walled garden discussion and i'm pretty
opinionated on that but the web the web for me is is the thing like you know praise the web thank
you for it being a thing um and so there's a lot that we can add to the web with the blockchain
with uh with smart contracts that that can enable economic models that can enable all kinds of fun
persistent experiences that can enable things like in you know going back to the exercise that you
talked about which was you know write a contract that mints an ascii a five by five NFT like a
picture like a smiley face or a stick figure or whatever you come up with that then gets shipped
on to the future net or test net you know the blockchain and what you can do is somebody else
not me or nicole can write a web app that's going to take that data and render it in some kind of a
you know an interesting way like a gallery view or something and you know that that's the layer
that's the open layer for the web that i think of blockchain as the ultimate promise for and
you know you think about blockings you think about speculation a lot you think about all
kinds of uh you know um uh chart go up uh memes and whatnot but you know the the core promise of
it for me is the the open api to everything um not requiring or having to you need to get permission
from one api or the other api that has you know um you know a silo of data that i might be interested
in um the blockchain has it all open you know it's publicly accessible right that's the name
that's in the name public blockchain so that's that's that's the enabler of of the the core tech
is the developer velocity that um oh gosh he's going to build out and um i you know yeah i'd
love to the the probably the canonical deployment uh target for for that kind of tap to test this
experience is a hackathon or a game jam um and i've been you know i've done game jams i've done
hackathons and it can be really fun when the folks have access to um environments that allow you to
build stuff quickly um and and um i'm not i don't have a date yet but i'm i'm a hundred percent set
on doing a game jam uh with so i don't know kashi uh for people to build blockchain enabled
uh indie game experiences which is going to be like the ultimate task of the developer velocity
that is that is great to hear we'll excitedly wait to see more when you when you share it's
right that it that it's ready um but i think to your point look i think we built sorbon with the
intent that developers deserve open and immediate access to tools to get started uh quickly and to
just build effectively um you know it's why there's the local sandbox for kind of the fast set up in
a room of development um it's why you know i think we chose rust development so you can use the tools
you're already used to and if you don't write contracts in rust i mean that's still fine and
okay because sorbonne builds on like wasm standard um so you can build sdks in your favorite
wasm language uh and so i think for us the the developer ease of building is a key pillar of how
we approached um the architecture of sorbonne it is great to hear oh go ahead here's a a tiny
detail on the you know build your own sdk um sorbonne at the core event is um an sdk right
it it's something that allows you to interface with the sorbonne environment
and like i said that's just a set of functions um rust is great rust is you know a beloved
language by uh an ever-growing number of the community of the developer community but it's
still a niche uh programming language when compared to something like javascript
uh and here's the beautiful thing with the you know the standard uh of a sorbonne you're able
to build um those sorbonne sdks for any environment that you'd like um and we have examples already
um there's a stellar community fund funded project that built an sdk for sorbonne for assembly
script uh which is a programming language that might be more accessible to web developers um
and uh yeah it's just great seeing that um remixability uh sort of you can you can take
the the core of sorbonne and mix it into whatever you feel like and just we've got a couple minutes
left and so i wanted to wrap up just with a quick summary and then any quick q and a's for for
morgan um but just to recap here so akashi.dev check it out that's where you can find morgan
and his uh in his sorbonne based um projects um it's fantastic i'd use it myself um tomorrow at
12 30 eastern time or gmt minus five for those of you outside the us uh morgan's going to join in
code for an intro to rust and sorbonne without leaving the browser you'll get a full overview
screen share walkthrough demo of building on sorbonne with okashi um and of course finally
final call check out the steller community fund we've given 10 million dollars 100 plus projects
last year we're continuing to do that um we're excited to help support the development of projects
on steller and sorbonne um it's open application anyone can apply so take a look uh go to
communityfund.steller.org and final couple minutes open q and a for any questions for morgan is what
he's building his experience uh buildings and smart contracts and on sorbonne or why you want
to or or why i think other chains and experiences are inferior i can answer that as well freely um
oh and quick note on the steller community fund the submission deadline for the latest round
is february 18th so we got like 11 days uh so better you know brush up your skills on building
an application and submit you got some time left gives you a week and a half there you go
that's one way of thinking about it plenty of time i i think i think in terms of days you know
like all right 11 11 is a lot you know 11 um fun fact um i remember um so scf number 12 um was
was the round i was building for to to you know ship a version of okashi for the pears blockchain
week workshop and um the deadlines so you know you have your submission deadlines for the
application and then there's the sort of a community vote which is related to what the progress that
you've shown up to that point um and so i wanted to show you know the progress that i promised i
would deliver um and so the last three days before pears blockchain week um in order to to finish
and to to cross over that threshold i coded on average 18 hours per day for the last three days
um to ship a a version of okashi that was um to spec for pears blockchain week
and we had a full house of people trial by fire i remember it and it was fantastic
that was great that was and you know um it's one of those things where um the way i think about
the the community fund and you know the enabler aspects of of blockchain is like um you take these
sort of random people um and you unlock them you enable them um sometimes all it takes is this
promise of here's the guidelines for submission you can get funded if you build something
and go go try it out go build it uh and someone that might be sort of on the fence like should
i do something should i not maybe i should be on the path that i'm on these kinds of things unlock
that you know thinking of you know let me give it a go i want to try it out i'm gonna you want to
spend the time and and then you end up in a position where um you're you're you're coding 18
hour uh days and you're you know high on adrenaline and you feel great because you're doing something
that you believe in and all of that's been enabled and unlocked by you know the the the
circumstances by the environment now name me another technology that could do that
another ecosystem that could enable that kind of sort of transformation and it's a good thing i
think because there's a lot of potential to be unlocked um and people um and you just need the
right circumstances for them for sure and i think that's what we try to enable with the community
fund and so that's my final call out is to the group here is many of you have probably applied
but for those of you who are new check out the stellar community fund uh and you can see all
the projects that have submitted and get a sense of what types of projects and the level of bar
and the bar of uh readiness that we look for um but again open applications i believe the round
ends february 18th we've got that's minute and a half so uh any question for morgan from the crowd
um all yours i i i i i i've read through the thread and so just to recap anuya has the flu
very sad um she's a you know uh a great great uh person to engage to engage within the community
for an sdf um get better and again um there's questions about the tutorial so ben you answered
that uh the there's you know tomorrow um whatever the time stamp um just you know go on twitter um
and then there's some price speculation uh which i guess we're not gonna engage with
um because the price you know whatever the price of the price i will finally say here don't forget
always check out enjoyment or developer discord um check out the stellar discord we've got a lot
of different channels that are specific to sorbonne or specific to stellar um and it's a great way
to get answers from the community directly for any questions you have about your own development
and project and find new friends um it's you know a great forum for that too i remember spending
some time uh last year in december just traveling down to a random city in estonia to meet a couple
buddies from that i met on discord from from stellar and attend a conference on a whim so
good people there all right you heard it from morgan himself thanks morgan for sharing your
entire experience which you've built uh and of course the many praise you've given sorbonne
and stellar um so thank you everyone for joining um join us on this on this stellar discord
and have a great rest of your wednesday thank you all thanks everyone bye