Moonbeam's multi-chain protocol and Polkadot parachain slot

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have with us derek you ceo and founder of moonbeam derek welcome to the show and thank you so much for taking the time to come on today yeah well thanks for having me great to be here i'm really excited to dive into moonbeam

0:19And you know moon river moonbeam all these interoperable networks and the polkadot and kusama ecosystem as well is like i think super undervalued and a lot of people don't understand the potential of where it's going and we are very early on in this ecosystem but i know you have a great understanding of it and that's why i want to start off with

0:38first of all just explaining a little bit about moonbeam and then we can dive into the details on the network and the value propositions and everything sure so yeah just the quick kind of the quick version on moonbeam is that the idea of polkadot is that you have a network of connected blockchains and so we're one of the member blockchains of that network they call

0:58them parachains and so the idea of moonbeam is that we've created a full ethereum-like environment so that developers that are used to developing apps on ethereum you know they're kind of right at home if they if they move to moonbeam they can use all the familiar familiar tools and technologies and infrastructure that they're that they're used to

1:19To develop dapps but the special thing is because we're part of polka dot that means that we can offer native interoperability you know in a way that you can't if you're just a standalone a standalone chain definitely yeah and i guess you know there's a lot of good things that have been built up over ethereum in the network effect and the development and that's part i'm

1:41guessing that's part of the reason why you want to take the good things from ethereum and not necessarily the bad things because there are a lot of issues still and bring that to this interoperability which i think is super important you know ethereum by itself seems like an isolated chain and we need more technology to be able to communicate with each other so we can

2:00grow even faster yeah i'd say that's absolutely right and this you know you hit it on the head when you said that you know it's all these tools that have been created around the ethereum ecosystem you know they are you know the most mature and the best development tools that are in the blockchain space right now and so i mean what you see is i think that a lot of

2:19the chains outside of ethereum that have gotten adoption have adopted a similar approach where you know they're making themselves compatible like you know you hear this term evm compatible sometimes used right that's what that means is that they're compatible with this tool set so you know the chains outside of ethereum the contractions are like chains like polygon bsc avalanche the

2:38sea chain in particular which is the evm compatible one you know these are the ones that have gotten traction and i think a big reason for that is the compatibility with these tools you know the people tend to greatly underestimate like the energy effort investment it takes to create these tools it takes you know you know for these ethereum ones people working

2:54on them for you know six seven years at this point or five six years yeah for sure and you know with the polka dot technology from what i understand you know interoperability is key but also not just everybody can go and start a chain on polka dot you know there's a limited you have to win an auction and do all these other steps so how was that like for moonbeam going

3:15through that process yeah so we've gone there is a particular process that you need to go through as a pair of chain to launch you know there's in polka dot there's a kind of scarce number of slots for these para chains and so there's a whole mechanism market mechanism that's been created to allocate those slots to the most deserving project so we're

3:38fortunate enough to be one of the early projects to onboard into one of these slots both on the kusama network which is this kind of earlier more experimental version of polka dot as well as the main polka dot network and yeah so i think that it serves as a it there are some hoops you have to jump through as a team but at the same time it kind of ensures that maybe the

4:01the most capable and the best teams are the ones that get you know access to these like interoperability slots and yeah i think i think i'll just maybe maybe just to talk about this like interoperability a little bit like and why you know i think that's like quite important in fact that's the reason why we even like went down the path to

4:19to work on polkadot in the first place and you know this was a couple years ago right because it takes a couple years to build a chain like this but i think the thing that we saw was that you know as soon as you accept that there's going to be many block chains this interoperability between the chains becomes like a quite critical capability this was less obvious in the

4:41past when almost everything was happening on ethereum maintenance you know then maybe you could say well okay i mean interoperability is interesting but since everything's happening on ethereum maybe it's not so important now today it's like pretty hard to you know take that position you see like traction on many different chains so the question then becomes you know how you

4:58know how do assets like move between chains how do you deploy software you know apps or software across chains and yeah so this interoperability is a critical capability now i think that there's there's a ton of different approaches out there you see like all these different bridging teams and the different teams are trying to solve this problem but i think when you boil it

5:17down there's only a few ecosystems where they've built in this interoperability like into the base layer itself and so that's like you know cosmos on the one hand with their ibc technology and polkadot on the other side with their xcm technology so that this is where i kind of see that they were kind of they were thinking ahead to say hey this is going to be important let's build it

5:36into like the base layer itself and so i kind of see in the future there's going to be kind of concentrations of interoperable activity right so if cosmos for one in polka dot for another and then among edm chains i think you know there's you know that's going to be another yeah great points and you're right i think that evm compatibility is obviously needed because there's a lot

5:59there but with the cosmos ecosystem and the polkadot ecosystem as you mentioned there's such valuable technology there that to have something that's working with ethereum but not be able to work with those other chains is going to be a huge disadvantage and you talked a lot there about building allowing developers to have that access to

6:18be able to develop easily and make it work on different chains and have the able people to actually use their gaps and maybe i'm curious a little bit more about that you mentioned you know the evm compatibility so i'm guessing like smart contracts and apps that are on ethereum will work on moonbeam but like if you're developed can you also just go to

6:37moonbeam and start developing an app and that works with cosmos or the other networks or how does that work for the development ecosystem yeah so i would say that there's kind of an evolution happening there too where you know historically and almost to date i think almost everyone that's developing adapt has you know has this kind of mono

6:58chain idea in mind right where it's like i'm developing a dapp i'm going to deploy it to one chain and so that's true of a lot of edm deployments or a lot of the protocols that exist have been imagined in that way and so i think now we're in this transitory time where people are saying well there's many chains so what do i do and well you see i mean and we're no

7:15exception that we're working with one category of teams working with or what i'd call multi-chain teams where maybe they started on each main net and then they said okay well now there's all this activity on naval and sean polkadot in other areas how do i get there and so you see this kind of ported approach where they might take their you know their app and their contracts they've

7:32developed for each main net they just take that same thing that they deploy it to these other chains and the l2s by the way right so the l2 or evm compatible too so you deployed to armature and optimism you deployed avalanche you deploy the moon beam you deploy and so that's kind of the strategy is this ported strategy i actually think that's like a transition

7:50little move because i mean there while you do get to all the different destinations it is kind of i would call it like an inelegant solution right so you know if you take like a teapot protocol you're making this copy everywhere so you have the these different like installations but the you know for example the liquidity is like fragmented right like it's like and as a user

8:09sometimes if you use these apps you'll pick like hey i want to switch chains to like chain a or b or c and then you're kind of switching around your user's kind of made aware of these different chains i think you know in the longer run it's going to look more like it's one application and you know we have some examples of this already starting on

8:27moonbeam where you know a little bit of the details are hidden like behind behind the scenes like the user is not necessarily aware that they're interacting with multiple chains but you're able to use different chains for the for different specialized like functions so i'll give you an example you know just last week there was a deployment from leido

8:47into like our ecosystem we've been working with them for a while they're creating a liquid staking derivative similar to stes but like for dot you know they want to make a similar version for doc but so if you think about it so the way it's it works in you know in our ecosystem is that they've built a dap that uses ethereum technologies to you

9:08know provide an interface then user but then the dot and this like staking you know these staking operations that they need to do are on a different chain they're on like the polkadot relay chain so then we've provided these like native integrations so that it you know they have adapt the dap is kind of remote controlling like the staking operations they need to do

9:26to create like the liquid staked derivative for dot the st but to the user they're just interacting with one dap so it's kind of one dap but it's spanning multiple specialized chains behind the scenes so that's that's the direction i think things are headed in you know i kind of see it as analogous to the development of computing in a way

9:45right we're in there and now where it's like you have like one server and you just put all your software on like the one server but you know you go to like a modern environment now there's like many different kinds of specialized systems you know that are involved in delivering like an application so that's you know i think there's going to be some analogous

9:59you know trend on the on the web 3 blockchain side definitely i completely agree and i feel like as we continue to grow out to more mainstream and have this more widely adopted the discussion will become less and less about you know switching between the chains because it'll all just go to the back end and people won't really have to think about

10:17it'll lead to the click of a button people don't really need to understand the technology to be able to drive it no it's absolutely i mean this ux thing is like a and you know i come from a web 2 background so this is one of those jarring things you come into web 3 and you realize oh like you know the ux that people are getting is like definitely like much different than web

10:352 but you're hitting on the critical point which is that it's like the expectation of like what the user needs to know and the ability to create abstractions and hide so i'm old enough where you had some early apps where like let's say a client server app where you have to like pick the database right and you like would be presented when you log in it's like what

10:51database you want to connect to me like typing in like oh i want to connect to database a that's kind of what it feels like now but you know you realize in a you know in a modern app like you're hiding a lot of that like infrastructure from the user like you don't you know that force the user to understand all the different like back-end components you're connecting to that's just not

11:07going to make for a good user experience so this is again where i think it's like this native multi-chain idea is that you know you present one user experience to the user you maybe have multiple specialized chains behind the scenes but you need to kind of abstract like the complexity away if you want to get you know adoption definitely and great point and you spoke

11:25there about vito that's really cool i'm familiar with using it on ethereum so it's great to see that's moving over i'm curious about the ecosystem and the dapps more specifically on moonbeam and how it continues to grow out is there any specific focus i feel like you know with d5 applications is sort of going to be some of the main priorities perhaps bringing more value locked

11:46over to the moonbeam network from other networks or having interoperability with d5 you know how is that going along on the d5 aspect yeah i mean i would say for d5 use cases they probably constitute probably 70 of like the of the deployed use cases and you know the trick is like to bootstrap a d5 ecosystem everything's connected so like this is

12:08the trick right so and it's not just protocol or protocol connections there's all this like infrastructural tooling that you need so this was the big learning is like you know you go and create an evm compatible chain but that's like step one there's like many more steps you need to do to actually bootstrap the ecosystem so the first thing is like oh there's all this

12:23infrastructure and tooling these teams like expect so that's things like ether scan and like a chain link and there's like these different things that are needed but then even like with within the ecosystem there's all these dependencies that you know frankly like i learned myself in the team learned a lot about as we were helping to like bootstrap the

12:40sequels so you know i mentioned lido right so you kind of say okay so like lido's great but you know they need like a stable swap like to function properly right so because you need like an st dot like dot like pool basically to service that so then you know we have a curve deployment like is helping with that and then you know you realize there's

12:57another other native team called the moon well right that's like a landing and barn protocol that's a native team but you realize that in order for there to be a money market like you know for a different asset they need like decks with like sufficient liquidity otherwise like liquidations like don't work so there's like this relationship between

13:14like the lending and borrowing protocols and like the dexes and then so on so everything is like kind of connected and so you need like it's hard to take any one-piece movement you need to kind of convince you know everyone to kind of move over or you kind of need to fill all the all the pieces in before you can have a full ecosystem that's functioning

13:31yeah definitely a lot of moving pieces and i'm guessing your team's working on a lot right now maybe you can hint at you know what's coming up in the near future in the coming months you know first half of this year for moonbeam and are there any things that you're looking to release as major updates yeah i would say that the big things you know i go back to the

13:53you know there's a lot of evm compatible chains out there what is it that makes moonbeam special and for us it is these native integrations or integrations with you know other chains that we can provide to developers because we really want to position ourselves as being the best place for making this new kind of application i was describing this new

14:09kind of multi-chain application and so we're leaning hard into these native integrations you know we've released some of the initial important feature so xc20 is one of the features we recently launched that's a native interoperable token that can move around in the polkadot network but when it's when those tokens are on moonbeam you know they are

14:28accessible as an erc20 so they behave just like the university 20. so even that is like attractive you know a lot of the teams that want to get access to dot or other assets you know so now they can move from other parts of the poker ecosystem and get serviced in you know dexes lending and borrowing like we were just talking about these different already existing protocols

14:45But you know these more functional use cases of you know being able to you know support things like the lido use case with this remote control scenario so things we're working on now are things like remote invocation right so that we can work with other paratrain teams for multi-chain scenarios right it might be that something happens on a remote chain and then they want to

15:02trigger a smart contract execution like on moonbeam or similarly you know you might have something a logic on moonbeam that then needs to go fire off different events to trigger actions on different remote chains so we're kind of building up these these native multi-chain primitives that's like a big part of what we're doing this year and

15:20so i think it's gonna open up you know significant like new opportunities for developers versus just needing to always think about like only operating inside of the context of just one single evm definitely yeah i think if i got anything out of this it's that the future is multi-chain and people who are you know fanatics about one chain or trying

15:41to put down other blockchains are they're probably going to be wrong in the long run you know so yeah i'm really excited how it plays out yeah very cool derek well thank you so much for coming on and speaking about moonbeam are there any ways that people can get involved are you guys looking for just more dap users builders community members and how can

16:06they get involved into mumbi yeah i would start you know the website moonbeam.network is a great starting off point it has kind of you know jumping off links to a number of different areas i would also highlight that if you're if you're a developer or builder our discord is quite active and we have you know a whole team that's providing support to folks that are

16:26building like apps that are quite active in our discord so i would suggest you know those two places as a starting point sounds great thank you so much i will leave those links in the description box below as well all the best with moonbeam moving forward and let's follow up in the near future all right thanks ashton