Lomesh Dutta on decentralized apps and airdrops on Dfinity

0:01I'm Ashley Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have lemesh dutta the VP of growth of the dfinity foundation the mesh welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time thank you it's a pleasure to be here and thanks for inviting me you're very welcome it's a pleasure to have you on and we recently had on

0:22Dominic the chief scientist of the Divinity foundation and it seems like there's a lot of growth going on in the protocol right now and it's hard to keep up with all of the different blockchains and different narratives that are growing in the industry and it seems like it's moving really quickly so far in 2023 so excited to dive into what your team's been working on recently and

0:44the growth of some of the decentralized applications that are being built on top of the internet computer so let's just start from the top level for those who aren't familiar with the intricacies of the differences of all these different layer one protocols and about daffinity and why it's special so if you could just start with sort of what is Divinity working on and what is its sort

1:03of competitive advantage in the industry and why is it gaining so much traction so far awesome yeah I'm happy to so I think dfinity is basically the foundation that helps us toward the our major contributor the internet computer protocol so the blockchain is internet computer or ICP so what makes ICP or into the computer extremely different than any

1:29other blockchain out there is so let's let's take a step back let's think about what a blockchain typically does right so when when Bitcoin came in the key idea was it essentially provided a ledger where you can store like an account of who owns how many Bitcoins so that's like what it's like a ledger which gives you the ownership of

1:53digital assets if then then came like after a bunch of attempts came material and the idea for ethereum was it is not just one asset but you can write the smart contracts which are nothing but simple programs which can allow you to create more and more digital assets like I mean tokens which represent like different protocols like uniswap or

2:15uni token or account token and so on so forth but the Ledger or what blockchain does it's still about like maintaining a ledger for who owns what tokens and with a very limited amount of metadata for example it could contain a URL of an nft that you're storing off-chain but it's like just that bit of information is on the blockchain there are a lot of later ones

2:39Pretty much all of them have a very similar philosophy like on the blockchain it's a ledger to give you like the token ownership and they're all trying to scale that like vertically and trying to see how many new transactions can you kind of add in a block or how fast can you execute transaction and so on and so forth what the Instagram computer is doing

3:00is extremely different than any of those player one blockchains we started with the question is like can I blockchain be used to do a lot more when I say a lot more can it be used to run Journal purpose software completely on chain so the idea is like like you have an ability to create end to end software whether it's a game a metaverse a social

3:28network an Enterprise application where 100 of the application including all the data all the assets the application Logic the entire application is actually built on a blockchain so this is very different than like a ledger which essentially keeps an account of token ownership we obviously the internet computer does that and we have ledgers where you

3:51have tokens that goes not but you also have everything else that is required to run an application and the pump rotation power it needs is all Unchained so hence it's very unique now I'll come to in a second like why that is important and why why should you even care but I think the that is the key premise of what we started with as a as a vision for the internet

4:15computer now one of the things so we took some very interesting architectural choices on like why this is possible on the internet computer and not possible let's say anywhere else is all of the nodes of the internet computer are essentially operated by independent parties spread over the globe they run out of like dedicated data centers which again are

4:40operated by independent parties have nothing to do with like our foundation and so on but what that ensures is like these machines are really like Advanced machines which are running out of data centers so it guarantees us that we have a very high throughput so like like for example imagine a bandwidth of like 10 gigabytes per second and these machines also have an

5:08ability to like store like they have memory to actually be able to store data and so on and so forth so given the nodes are there what and this was an architectural Choice then we said okay we then eventually like organize these nodes into what we call as subnets and in our world this I mean you might have heard something from like different chains and

5:30stuff but in our world the subnets are extremely different are our subnets are basically you can connect like a certain number of nodes to form a subnet but the beauty is any subnet can talk to any other subnet as if it's just one part of the same network so what internet computer is not one blockchain but it's comprised of lots of different subnets

5:53each comprise of a few nodes and then they are interconnected in a very seamless way so you can literally horizontally scale the network infinitely so you just keep on adding notes three conforming subnets and any subnet can talk to any other and you have a infinitely scalable Network which is horizontally scaled wow very interesting and thank you for

6:15explaining that lemesh and obviously scalability is important if you know these operating systems and the applications are going to start having millions of users on them but of course having good applications that people are using on something like internet computer is obviously integral to the growth of it you know imagine having the apple or Microsoft operating system but

6:37there's no applications you can't do very much on the OS if there's no apps to actually run and I think that's where some of these blockchains are at with you know they're they're trying to find that at least developers that are developing on those Protocols are trying to find an app that is ready for people to start using you know by the millions

6:58and I've seen that there's a few applications that are already kicking off on dfinity that are getting a lot of growth and I want to sort of dive into those but could you talk a little bit about the you know obviously you laid out the infrastructure there now about the applications and like creating them easily or onboarding web 2 developers or moving web3 developers from other

7:20protocols how easy is it for them to start developing with dfinity and get their applications out there and easily used by people sure so in terms of like the internet computer so as one of the things that I explained earlier was like it is essentially comprised of like a bunch of different nodes that we connect to from subnets and we can kind of scale

7:45like that then each of the subnet hold post these what we call as canister these are essentially like smart contracts on the internet computer so what you can do in these canister smart contracts is you can essentially host your code as well as data our execution environment is webassembly which is essentially web standard which means you can essentially

8:09Write in any language that compiles down to webassembly so today a lot of programmers they come from let's say the rust background they write and rest we have our own homegrown language which is very easy and simple for people to learn as what we hear from developers is called motoko lots of similarities with JavaScript so majority of the people building today are using

8:35these languages additionally we have Community developers what they have done is they have essentially created think of them as like higher level languages where they have started the ability for people to actually write these canisters or smart contracts using typescript which essentially JavaScript and python so anybody can actually come and write like

9:00essentially smart contracts on internet computer with any of these high-level languages as well okay that's great to know and if I would expect that down the road and there'll be decentralized applications for almost every kind of use case and industry but that's I feel like we're a long way from mainstream adoption of you know most of the population looking at what's

9:26hot right now what are some of the main Niche Industries and use case applications that are already being launched on Divinity and already being used yeah so I think so if you think about it like what's happening in the Google blockchain and like let me just like deconstruct a little bit of like what does what do you even mean by an application in the

9:50blockchain Google and then I'll I'll give you some examples of internet computer so if it if you typically look at when people say this is an application running on a blockchain like typically what that would mean is that the application is not on the blockchain the real light so let's say if you're trying to say let's pick up a popular service like step in or all

10:13these step counting applications or maybe games and meta Wares that people are claiming or running on sale what in reality what is happening is these applications reside outside of the blockchain right these the entire application the logic this is not living on the blockchain and what the blockchain simply does is essentially provide a ledger where you can show the

10:35moment of transaction like token transfers and whatnot in our world these applications are actually truly being built on chain so what that means is like you could actually build systems end to end which could be governed by like by the token holder so the community could basically be given voting rights in the form of tokens and they can decide

11:02everything from like so let's say they could vote and then as soon as a vote proposal is accepted it could trigger a code chain which could actually update the application because like imagine you being able to influence what would a social network do what would a like a game do you can really revolve the game based on the voting as soon as

11:25the Voting is finished there's now holds and it triggers a code chain and you airport get updated so given that what we are seeing in our world is actually quite a few different attempts than what you may experience elsewhere so for example people on the internet computer are building things like no code platforms which means that you can actually create

11:48Like front ends and backends on the blockchain without like coming just similar to how they exist in the web tool there's like a web 3 avatar where you can do this people are writing search engines which is like for web3 people are writing decentralized versions of GitHub they're also building social network chat applications and the intention for all of these

12:11products is that they could be governed by by the community of technology so in terms of I'll give you a couple of themes of the kind of applications we are seeing so we have seen a very strong attraction with people building social products so a couple of them are discover District open chat what these products I have like

12:37already more than hundreds of thousands of users and they offer very unique abilities so you can like the experience for end user is very simple it's like you just open a browser type in a URL and you can like either authenticate with like internet identity which you as you mentioned you have tried to grip on or you can even we have a community developers like nfid which can

13:01allow you to authenticate even with Google and you can just start using this let's say a Reddit style social network and these networks then enable you to do things like you can create communities which are gated by tokens so if you have a certain nft you can be a part of the group you can receive airdrops all of those things are all happening on the

13:21network the other set of like use cases that we are seeing are on the side of decentralized Finance so the D5 also on the internet computer has a lot of interesting aspects so very recently we announced that we did a direct integration with Bitcoin without involving any Bridge what that means is that the smart contracts on the

13:50internet computer they have an ability to receive a native Bitcoin they can hold that Bitcoin and they can also send that Bitcoin so they can sign a Bitcoin transaction from the internal computer it does not involve any Bridge or any intermediary to create these assets it's like direct native Bitcoin that we can kind of hold on to it we are doing the same for

14:15ethereum so what these things are enabling for us is like people are building cross chain decentralized Finance applications which would bring in let's say evm compatible chains Bitcoin all of these assets could then be let's say you can build the lending protocol where you can stake real Bitcoin start having yield on it you can create a

14:39decentralized exchange which can essentially enable you to trade between Bitcoin and ICP today but tomorrow imagine any erc20 asset could be traded with Bitcoin and amongst each other so this cross chain is quite a bit and I would say another theme is the games and metaverse because people feel that not just an NF D is living on chain but you can imagine your entire game on

15:08chain so people are thinking about how about the level 7 of my game the entire level the entire playable experience is actually an nft if it's for a twitch person and you are playing or doing a gameplay your entire gameplay can be minted and sold as mft because imagine everything is contained so these are some of the I wanted to just give you a flavor of the kind of things that you

15:32think yeah very cool the mesh and thank you for explaining you know in pretext to that about some of the applications that are blockchain applications not necessarily actually on the blockchain more just as you mentioned at the beginning just a ledger of the token transactions but the application itself sort of hosted on web 2 or in Amazon it's really not on the

15:52blockchain I think part of that has been the fact that you know the in some of these chains like ethereum the transactions are you know they're they're not the cheapest and fastest as they can be some of these more Next Generation protocols like divinity are making it faster and cheaper but from the developers that were working on ethereum it just it just wasn't feasible

16:14to have you know especially a metaverse or a giant game all on chain it seems like it's still at the point where it's very slow and buggy and things like that looking at developing applications like you're mentioning here these social platforms where there's already hundreds of thousands of users that's great to hear on the protocol how do you lower those barriers to entry

16:36so that once you've checked off the boxes that the application is running smooth and fast actually on the Chain how do you ensure that people don't need to understand about the intricacies of divinity protocol in their wallet and all of those things so that you can move from hundreds of thousands of users on a social platform to tens of millions of people that were not exposed to

16:58blockchain or cryptocurrency at all prior to joining in this social platform on dfinity yeah actually so that's that's exactly the direction we are headed and like it's like some of the work that we as a foundation is doing also we are like extremely happy to have a really Vibrant Community of Builders who are coming up with like really creative ways in which you can

17:23kind of solve some of these problems so I'll give you an example right so when when when the internet can be repeated we make very specific architectural services we said we do not want users to have a wallet and have tokens in it to interact with the with applications right so that like I mean your your grandma is never going to do it so

17:51so if you if you think about it typical interaction with blockchain would require something like a metamask we will need to have eth you need to pay for gas and so on and so forth so our choice is like you do not need to it's a reverse gas model so what that means is like the developers pay a very small fee for hosting and running their application but the end users don't need

18:12to pick anything they can just use the social network they are interacting with the blockchain they're interacting with the smart contracts only the time when they want to do a transaction that's the time they of course need something which has value because that's the need to send that money so they need a wallet only when they actually need to

18:32trigger a transaction but let's say if you are if you are a social network you want to like anything that you do whether you like the worst or retweet something all of those in our world are smart contract interactions but these are free for users the other thing that some of our community members are doing is they are they are doing things like building on our internet identity which

18:55is web authen-based authentication mechanism highly private and like it's so for example if you're using one application the other application would never know that you use the same like account or principle to use that so the key idea is that people are experimenting with allowing let's say Google authentication so you could you could essentially ride on top of

19:20like internet identity but you could basically have your like Gmail credentials or Google credentials verify and your your credentials still won't live on your device it's never going to Google servers but they have come up with like really smart ways in which how you can authenticate to these applications without any like early barriers so today you can actually log

19:42into these applications in a simple browser just type in a URL you do not need to have any wallet you do not need to know anything about internet computer just log in with Gmail and start interacting it is it is happening even today wow that's great to hear and yeah the in the past and I think it's been a big barrier to entry and hopefully that only

20:03just continues to lower to just not have to worry about that wallets and metamask and all those things you talked about just log in with your email and you're there you're in the blockchain and it's sort of very interesting in the two types of different applications that you're talking about one of them being on the on the social media side you know which is more casual and one

20:23being on the defy side which is you know more finance and that's a lot of people are getting into blockchain and cryptocurrency for that reason and I'm curious you know being the VP of growth looking at you know what sort of use cases are are growing quickly on the blockchain I feel like you know because Finance is sort of where the money's at a lot of people are

20:44gravitating towards their first not on the social platforms and I've seen over the last six seven years following different social media platforms that try to you know create a decentralized platform form that's more fair and build that Network effect so that the hundreds of millions of people that are already using you know web 2 Twitter Facebook Instagram can actually move to a

21:06platform you know that we need right now that provides more ownership of the data and your personal information to the users of the platform because you know it's a mess in web 2 right now but nobody seemed to have done it right and there's been many platforms over the years I've followed and they all seem to die and it sounds like so far these

21:27social media platforms on internet computer are already doing really well with hundreds of thousands of users what's the key to you know ensuring that it doesn't fall off a cliff like the ones in the past and that it continues to move to tens of millions and hopefully brings in that Network effect from web to social media to be something that people use regularly

21:50yeah so I think in order to kind of solve the problem you need to take a step back and like try to analyze why like why some of those platforms didn't scale out as much as we would have hoped and so on right so if you if you look at like any end user perspective you and I right I mean there are different motivations on why we do stuff right right so there some people do stuff for

22:12ideological motivations and there's incentives which are like financial and so on I mean while there are there have been several like for example FM search engines which have tried to outbeat Google focused on privacy and so on but none of them have even reached like 0.1 percent of the scale of Google even at that much right and we keep on saying

22:36That hey like Facebook is not really good for you and it has all the data yeah still Facebook continues to have billions of the EU and so on right so these like some of these ideological motivations in my mind can get you like so War right but if you think about what happened in D5 is like super smart right so they there is an incentive there's a financial incentive

22:59for people to basically take a certain action and that really led to explosive growth of everything now imagine if you could blend the two which is what we are already starting to see with some of the people in our world are doing I'll give you a couple of examples so imagine in the chat application if you have an ability to send a Bitcoin as

23:22if like for example if the way you send the money on Facebook Messenger or like iMessage similarly if you could stand Bitcoin or ICP around or all of these assets around to your friends without them having to worry about creating a wallet without them having to do anything imagine a chatbot like in this same chat service where you can say hey take my like basically dollars

23:49from Fiat to crypto whatever but give me Bitcoin they don't need to know about exchanges market makers anything you're just simply interacting with a chatbot buying Bitcoin and maybe putting that into a learning protocol the experience is very like chat focused or a social network focused and I think another example there's a service on our platform called hot or not whether

24:14it's like they're trying to build a decentralized version of Tick Tock but they have very interesting things at play so they're saying every video that like a user uploads the audience have an ability to actually like create a bet of sorts whether this video is going to go viral or not so let's take some money and if the video really goes viral then they

24:38essentially collect a much bigger pool of money so they are basically trying to leverage these aspects around like D5 into like this like so you just take some money you receive certain rewards people are doing things like content moderation so like you have a proof of stake you basically State some money and then you are given jobs at moderating

25:02content on these social media platforms you lose money if you don't perform well but you gain money if you if you do the right thing so I would think that it's the mix of these two words will form really the rights money social incentives for people to do stuff and that's the kind of experiments at least we are seeing right now very cool well I'm going to check out

25:28the social media platforms myself because I've been looking through them over the years and looking for that one that's going to break it big and hopefully something on internet computer can do that where we can finally move off these web 2 platforms that we use but I feel like we are reluctant to use so wishing you all the best on that and lemesh for those platforms and

25:49some of the social media ones D5 platforms identity other apps that are being developed on internet computer as well how do people look is there a decentralized app store or how do people find out about which apps are being built in and what they can start experimenting with on the protocol yeah so we have we have been thinking about like a community grant

26:12for like a formal App Store today the way people discover these apps is like we have our own like page on the internet computer.org where we kind of highlight a few of our ecosystem Partners there have also been Community initiatives where they have essentially aggregated a lot of these applications so you can basically go to these sites there's a site called

26:32cycle where you can essentially look at all the different applications all of the like whether they are in T5 or building a new like a game or an nft project all of these that are listed there so it's like a primitive App Store in the words but we have some of those indicators where people can discover all of these different platforms very cool and I can leave those links in

26:54the description box below as well and we don't have a lot of time left lemesh but I'm curious on you know what your focus and for the team moving forward hopefully this Market Trend continuation of upwards momentum of Bitcoin Divinity and the market overall in 2023 continues what are some of the main focuses for you and your team moving forward in the next

27:15coming months for the growth of the protocol and the applications right so there are two two major things that we are announcing very soon basically next month and some of that has already started so next month we are rolling out like something we are calling as SNS which is a service nervous system so I mean conceptually you can think of it as like

27:40it's it's a Dao it's a Dao platform where you can essentially decentralize any application that you have and you can kind of give the control of that to being governed by the community so far the reason why you don't hear too much about the internet computer projects is also because most of these projects are actually I would say like 99.9 of these projects do

28:05not have their own tokens yet so they have been holding these products they there are lots of users interacting organically without any incentive of any token so what these projects will start to do starting next month is that they have now an ability to issue their own tokens delegate basically we can also like sell a portion of their tokens they can never drop it to their

28:30like so if you're you've been using this chat service you'll probably receive some air drops and so on and then these token holders would then get to determine the fate of this application going forward so the developer quotient proposals so say I'm building a chat application and I say I want to spend my time in building a chat board that enables people to buy Bitcoin they

28:53would put this proposal and the community would then vote on that thing and as soon as that voting finishes the anybody can contribute to the code and the code gets pushed so the application updates right there and then so this is starting to happen from next month so we see that a lot of these applications will now start to have their own tokens and there will be a

29:17economy that will start so that's that's one the second parallel initiative which is like we just finished the Bitcoin integration and we are coming up with what we are calling as a chain key Bitcoin ckbtc so think of this as a digital twin of Bitcoin on the ICP blockchain so while you can have like a native Bitcoin deposited and

29:43let's say a decks on an IC internet computer but if you want to move that Bitcoin at this freely social applications or basically chat applications and whatnot you would need something which does not really wait for every transaction to be on the Bitcoin blockchain because then it's you know like take a lot of time so think of this as like a layer two for Bitcoin

30:08where you can essentially keep on moving the Bitcoin on the ICP Ledger and you can settle at any point in time back to bitcoin so you can deposit Bitcoin that's one Bitcoin transaction moved around on ICP and then send it back so this is really good and then the third thing is we are also integrating with ethereum in the same way as we have done with Bitcoin which means bring any

30:31erc20 token also any evm compatible chains whether they are main ethereum or polygon or other other networks and then basically interoperate between any of the enemies so I think some of this is really the right dry powder we need from a growth point of view in the coming few months definitely no that sounds great I'm looking forward to it and a good hint

30:56there about you know using the applications for potential air drops of if tokens are coming out in the future if that's not an incentive to check it out now then I don't know what is so I really appreciate you taking the time let me ask to explain all of this about the protocol applications and what's coming up I'm looking forward to seeing those releases and I will be

31:15following along I'll put the links in the description box below for the viewers for the protocol and some of those Community platforms that you mentioned as well to check it out and let's definitely follow up in the near future when when all these updates are coming out really appreciate it thank you Ashton for inviting me just I'll leave the this with a quick Alpha so

31:36there is this the first application that's going to be like leveraging this SNS or basically tokenizing soon is this chat application called open chat OC dot app you can essentially check it out and I'm pretty sure there will be airdrops for some of the community members so yeah feel free to check it out amazing thank you so much lumesh and have a great day

32:02thank you really appreciate it you have a great day too