John DeVadoss on NEO's developer-friendly blockchain platform

0:18privilege to be here you're very welcome I am very excited to talk about neo I know that you guys just hit your 3-year anniversary of the main net launch just some time in the last week this has been one of the bigger projects in the space you guys have a lot of updates that are coming and I'm looking forward to hearing a little bit about the neo 3.0

0:38blockchain that's in the works for next year as well so if you would kick it off by giving us a sneak peek or what are we supposed to expect out of the new developments of neo and then we'll talk about some of the things that just come out but let's get a high-level overview what do we expect for neo 3.0 that we you guys are working towards right now

0:55Oh certainly yeah so there's a lot to talk about you're right let me give you just a synopsis if I may I would say at the core Ashtyn our thesis is that you know it is time to drive mass adoption the time is now right it is ready the market is ready customers and in particular developers are ready so to enable mass adoption we strongly believe it's about developers developers

1:21and developers you know this notion that somehow there's a magical D app that will change the game is just a flawed assumption you know there are 21 million developers across the world Ashton and we believe that our job is to go serve them and in doing so magic will happen you know a thousand flowers will bloom we will see you know D apps you know left right and center and so we believe

1:45in a developer focus to enable mass adoption for us for near three the singular focus is enabling broad again like I said mass adoption globally and investing significantly in tools like for example the neo blockchain toolkit for dotnet in order to enable developers to you know with as less friction as possible to build the apps to exploit the capabilities and in

2:13the best possible experience for end users that's great yeah I saw that you came out with the tool kit in the visual studio library is it can you explain a little bit on how that helps neo developers it takes the heavy lifting off of them well absolutely yeah yeah so just to give you some context if you look at for example vyas code on the average Ashton

2:38there's about seven million developers using vs code every month to give you some context you know if you ask people how many devs are there who are doing blockchain or ordi app a smart contract development you know at best there's about a hundred thousand people developers and so you look at where we are in a hundred thousand people here and then on the average every month

3:01seven million developers and so our goal my goal here is look let's make life as easy as simple as possible now what does it mean it means that unlike for example etherium where there is a new you know a specific language in terms of solidity we believe in a polyglot world ie you can use c-sharp Java JavaScript Python you pick the language you want it will come to you

3:26rather than making you as a developer come to us we go to where you are now further what's also this means is you know one IDE so for example today if you're building you know a smart contract you know you go get the compiler over here that the debugger over here the private net and the versioning is a nightmare in particular debugging is just a major

3:47major major issue today so we have strived to say look what does the mainstream developer know what do they whatever they come used to and let's make the exact same experience so one IDE you know one place to go don't have to go to six different places to download to install and again lastly but not the least one experience you know we call this the f5 experience whether you

4:12are editing you know debugging deploying testing or even pushing to test a domain at one place right out of the box and this is basically what we have done with the neo blocks a toolkit for dotnet that's very elaborate and that makes sense to open up to all those programming languages with all the current developers in the world not having to take that extra step to learn

4:33in the case of ethereal solidity specifically just for that blockchain so that's great interrupts interoperability I could see how moving forward you could have developers working from other platforms into neo very easily so that's great and I read also that in the toolkit you're working on the Neo Express Private Network and we talked to the beginning of this video about the

4:56Neo 3.0 main net can you get a little elaboration on the differences is that developers are working on the Private Networks in the mean time and can push things or suggest things to the main net or are they one in the same it's a very good question so the main net as obviously the word implies is the production public chain what we have is also a test net where developers can

5:18test ie stage the application before pushing it to the main net the private net essentially is a is a private scope chain for developers for a single developer or a team of developers to build to edit the bug test before they go to either a test net or a main net and in our case unlike some other platforms there are there are many private chairs out there but oftentimes

5:44they have built them much like a toy in our case with the new Express there is a symmetry of the code base we have taken the main net code base for neo for neo 2 and neo 3 and essentially new Express is essentially the same code base obviously customized and configured for developer scenario what this means is as a developer in often times you hear the

6:06story it works on my machine it doesn't work in production that is something that will not happen on neo because it is the same codebase we have symmetry across private net tested and maintenance that's great and one of the other tools that's very important for developers I believe our code libraries and having a lot of sample code built-in so you don't have to work

6:27from scratch you guys are working on the neo FX library is that out right now or when is that out and how will that help the developers oh I love the question I love the question so you're right we are working on library let me give you sort of I guess there are two perspectives here Ashton the first one is you know as a developer whether you're building you know a

6:47gaming app or a EFI app or an exchange today for the most part you start at the base level at the API and you build everything up from the API now what I learned at Microsoft building and working on the.net stack is you know you want to decrease the surface area obviously if why you say why because in terms of productivity time to market but also security the more code a developer

7:12writes the more you have in terms of potential possibilities for security issues so we're building these libraries and as a developer if you're building a wallet there's only so much code to write that's left for you or you're building a dphi application you don't start here the base level you start here and this is what we call essentially the new libraries now new FX is

7:33obviously one category the goal is very simple today you know if you're building a smart contract or if you're building an off chain application or you're building a plugin for a for a node oftentimes those are three sometimes even more than three programming models as a developer you have to learn and relearn it's each you know each scenario separately with new FX we said look

7:58forget about it you know you learn the model wants the object model once and then whether you're building a smart contract you're building an off chain application or you're building a custom extension for a node it is the exact same programming model so as a developer less time you know you get to market sooner but also less surface area and in terms of security in terms of testing

8:20and validation there is so much less to do because we do the heavy lifting now we believe in again we are working with obviously our friends at Microsoft and others we believe that something like new effects will be eventually an industry standard now obviously we're building for neo first but we are we do have a longer-term ambition of saying look let's take this across the

8:41ecosystem across the industry and it's about time because for now you know we believe in this mission right of enabling decentralization of enabling developers at scale and of course to create benefits for the man on the street the woman on the street to do so we have to get millions and millions of developers I believe that something like new effects is a huge building block in

9:04going down the that's great John and I mentioned you're working with Microsoft I saw that you've recently joined as the first blockchain member in the.net foundation can you talk about what was the goal for neo to get into the foundation and how will it help now that you're in the dotnet foundation yeah I love the question so you're right we recently about was about four weeks

9:27ago we are the first and at this point the only blockchain platform that is a member of the darknet foundation so what why are we doing this again to go back to developers you know on the average like I said about seven million developers using vs code every month and our goal is look even if I can get 10% of those 7 million Ashtyn there is about five times six times the number of

9:54blockchain developers in the world today right so for us in terms of enabling the extensions making it as friction-free as possible now this is a huge huge tactic in our long term strategy of taking neo mainstream to enable our vision of the smart economy of course there is more in terms of the community in terms of working with the Microsoft Azure toolset

10:16and also to get feedback this is a singularly special opportunity for us and we're very happy and certainly very thankful as well to Microsoft and the.net foundation to do so in this partnership that's great and are there other companies in the dotnet foundation or other companies that you wish to partner with as you guys move forward absolutely so the reason you know we are

10:41in Seattle is I believe Seattle is the platform city we see in the valley more and more consuming innovation around business and commercial mortals in Seattle is where asier is being built obviously Amazon Web Services people like Google Cloud and so on so our ambition as the platform for the smart economy you will see us make more announcements and certainly more

11:03partnerships in the coming months with respect to the likes of the Amazons and so on so obviously I can't shake too much at this stage but certainly you know you will see us make these announcements in the coming three six nine months and so on and I saw that last month you made an announcement about the NiO 3.0 test net is this preview one has launched can you

11:25can you touch on how did that go and how is it looking moving forward oh so it was a very very good progress we're very happy we actually thrilled about the launch of the test net it sets us up well for the neo 3 public release sometime next year in the first part of next year a very strong developer feedback the goal is very simple obviously you know in this

11:45world of blockchain and decentralized systems the goal is to get as many developers as many apps as possible to give us feedback you know yes we have a vision we have a platform roadmap we have published in terms of the features and capabilities however all said and done the key is feedback from developers what they like what they don't like the gaps and of course what

12:09to parrot eyes first and so over the next six months the goal is okay let's get the feedback let's then scale it and say okay first is this feature and so on and so forth so we are very happy and it's gonna be a busy and certainly a fun six to eight months as we prepare for the launch of neo three main networks that's great and besides the toolkit and

12:30joining the foundation the library are there any other things that you're looking at building to bring more adoption to the neo blockchain development oh absolutely absolutely so instead the toolkit in fact if I could drill down for just a few seconds inside the toolkit obviously you know a few things one we have customized the compiler to emit metadata to enable

12:52debugging so second we have the smart contract debugger we believe at this point Ashton we probably have the best-in-class debugging experience for smart contracts in the industry we also like I said investing in new effects and libraries and of course last but not the least be the toolkit be extensions itself our goal as we ship the toolkit is to invest in guidance so what do I

13:16mean by guidance again as a developer there are these recurring themes or mario's or use cases and our goal is for the most common you know the most popular scenarios and use cases to enable the building blocks for example you know authorization authentication logging right being able to make them as github open-source building blocks and so the developer out there does not have

13:40to reinvent the wheel they can just pick and choose what blocks they want and what they're building a defy app or an exchange or a wallet or a gaming app we think that we can significantly decrease the time possibly by an order of magnitude at this point for this for example right on the Neal toolkit you can actually build and deploy a c-sharp spot in a cart in about three or four

14:04minutes and our goal is to make it even simpler even easier much less friction and especially with the with the building blocks the guidance we think we believe we can change the game and again with the goal of taking this mainstream that is a singular goal otherwise will always be a niche not that the whole industry will be a nation you know what is the point right you know we are here

14:26to change the world right and the goal is look there's millions of devs out there and how do we make sure we serve them by going to where they are as opposed to being elite like other platforms they come to us you know we are the inverse and say look we will come to you whichever language whichever IDE whichever tools then we will come to you and we'll make your

14:46life easier as it evolved that's great Shawn and you got to have big goals and what this is a question that I have about big goals is what are the challenges or the most challenging thing you may come across in the next eight months in the lead-up to the maintenance the questions obviously you know Bill says to make sure that we have a very clear migration plan then we support our

15:09developers and our existing ecosystem with the tools to ensure that it's a you know as less risk as possible in terms of taking the apps forward it'll be a obviously a not a very easy journey but certainly we remain very committed and we believe that the tools we build and the migration plans we have in place will be very effective and of course at

15:31the end today the developers will tell us what they like and what they don't like but we remain very very committed to the journey and again you know so near three is just one more step in the in the longer term we have a road map obviously we will do more with new or three for instance we're shipping new ID new ifs you know we are making some significant in the architecture changes

15:52are on the Neo VM and so on but for us it's not a there is no big bank release right this was the ongoing we get near three then the next couple of weeks will have obviously enhancements and features and so on more guidance more libraries more tools so it's going to be a you know a much more longer-term roadmap that we remain very very singularly committed yeah the development never

16:15ends but you have those little mini wins on the way so best of luck very well said yeah I know software and I know that it never ends you're always working on the newest thing so how can more developers learn more get involved get access to these tool kits so they can help start working on me all right now thank you so a few places so in terms of github we

16:37have the it's we are open source MIT license so we would love to have depth look at github give us feedback you know make pull requests we're also on the BS code marketplace so if you want to go search for the new your tool kit install the extension play with it you know give us feedback we would love to hear from from Bev's on what they like you know what else could

16:58we build on what new features I mean the only the only reason we exist is because of developers and it's not for us or for me to say what is the priority you know thus far it's been a very strong community connection and the more feedback on github as well as the marketplace and of course you know always send me email John David Oz at ng d that near door org

17:19would love to hear from from folks out there you know call me tell me what you like tell me what you don't like and I am very happy to serve you awesome thank you so much for your time John it's been a pleasure let's follow up in the near future likewise thank you very much Tony other good evening okay take care