Amrit Kumar on Zilliqa's mainnet launch and blockchain scalability

0:20about silica today first of all if you would give us the problems that silica is solving in the blockchain industry from a general overview yeah so we are solving two basic problems or one is scalability so there's something that we all know about right now that popular blockchain is like in quantity reham they do not be skilled very well or the number of transactions that they can

0:41process around five to ten on average so this is one one very big problem that the blocks industry has to solve if nocturnes you know ever get adopted in some form so that's one basic problem that silica solves the other problem that we identified lately was around smart contracts so we feel that smart contracts the way they are deployed today especially in psalmody which is

1:03the most popular language or to code smart contracts is not very secure language it's not really safe language and this is why we have seen incidents like dau like parity and a bunch of other attacks that has happened in the past with solitaire smart contracts so we decided to build a new safe smart contract language which could hold funds with for developers and you know they

1:23could have peace of mind very interesting Emory and I'd love to touch a little bit further on the scalability you mentioned Bitcoin and aetherium may have a lot of scalability issues what is specifically you know limiting those block chains from scaling and what has silica done to scale more than that and what is the current scalability right now and are you continuing to grow that

1:46yeah so if you look at the we of block chains like Bitcoin if you don't work so from end users perspective you can create a transaction you send the next transaction to the network and then the network may have let's say ten thousands of nodes and each of single one of them will process a transaction it's very secure very decentralized but sort of also very redundant in so far so because

2:07imagine you know 10,000 loads running a single the transaction that's not be it's already optimizing some form and this is where we decided to employ an idea called sharding where what at a high level what you do is you take your initial network which is let's say up ten thousand nodes you divide them into smaller subgroups so each subgroup could contain let's empowers a node set so

2:28that each subgroup could process transaction in parallel to other groups so what you're trying to do is basically a divide and conquer approach dividing the network how you line the network to process things in parallel so this is a radically different approach to what a Bitcoin and aetherium are doing right now but in the competitive landscape I

2:48believe aetherium is looking at doing something similar to sharding and everyone really is battling for scalability so they're all it's sort of a race to who can do it first and is the scalability alone a unique selling proposition once all of these block chains are scalable enough so if you look at silicon in this in this perspective so we were the first one to

3:13employ and implement sorting for a real network and it's actually pretty lucky not like I know you can send transaction process smart contracts so you are we already in the game compared to many of the block chains for exploring shadi were actually implementing start charting in some form including eutherian for that matter if you can pay it Syrian but really would select the

3:31difference is that the theorem is already built in infrastructure people are actually using it so making changes to infrastructure that's already there it's like changing your foundations your building is already off so there's this a very big difference and if you have this advantage and Liberty to make changes or make improvements and so on the other thing I feel is that we since

3:49we have implemented the first version sorry you also have the Liberty to improve it now while most of the projects are still exploring how to how to build the first notional of shorty now as you asked about you know the second proposition which is around smart contract language I feel you know every other day you know recently we heard about the 0x census incident where you

4:08know there was a vulnerability that was found in the contract you feel that it cannot go on like this someone has to do something we have to develop a new language you have to convince the developer crowd that this is language to use and the language that we have developed called Silla is the right is the right language to develop small contracts that a mission-critical

4:27very interesting I'm interested to learn a little bit more about your development team and maybe your leadership team you know what's the size of your team right now and are you growing so yeah we have our own let's say 25 team members in the team spread over all sorts of countries including Denmark Russia India China the holes of the bases and we have to out

4:51say two or three leadership team so we're one we have myself resident so I you know I take a look at you know the normal operations of the company and the business and other directions or we have CTO and we also have a marketing head and the rest are mostly developers so we have a five member marketing and business team and the rest are engineers developers and researchers very

5:14interesting that's very development heavy and when did you first start developing silica and have you hit all the targets on the roadmap and how is it going yes so we first published our white paper August 2017 so it's roughly around two years now we finished our first minute in January this year that mean it you know didn't allow you to send transaction directly because we wanted

5:37to go with a staggered approach to blocking development where you fill that so we are using proof of workers or civil resistance it's all that proof of work has been attacked recently especially with new block chains where the hash it was not that high so if L it would be better if we push out teachers in a staggered way and yeah nobody will really is the first version of me in it

5:59and a couple of weeks ago really it's the final version of the meanness that allows people to develop small contracts so we are we are on the roadmap in right right there very interesting and do you foresee moving forward the team still being very development heavy and having a very light marketing and business development team now so we are going to

6:17change our strategy from now on we already have developed something that's working right now we of course will have to make improvements and you know six to eight months will continue on working or adding new features making proven speaking I think is this time where we have to push our pedal on marketing and business you have to convince the crowd

6:34that this is the right platform to build on and then engage very heavily with developers so that we can build a proper developer community right now so this is this going to be a focus for us for the next six to eight months and how important would you say the user experience and the developer experience is because a lot of blockchain companies are very tech heavy they sort of lack in

6:54that area and that's when the customer acquisition and the growth of the company after the product has been developed is very important for that to flourish right I completely agree with you I feel that there are a lot of things plottings do not blow it off for that well to regular users just just take this as an example simple address you know an account address in a bank

7:18account would look like a bunch of numbers but an address an account number on the blockchain side would look like a bunch of accessible strings which is very painful for normal users to understand even they don't understand what a 0x is when you see it in front of your dress so obviously I think user experience and even developer experience has to be improved if you were to it you

7:38know anyone was in general so I a completely agree with you and it's going to be a focused process as well especially for the development team as well to make sure that we have all the tools and you know the features that may allow normally the users to come that's great and is there a business model of any sense built in to zelicah I know you'll have gaps built on

8:01top of it which will be running businesses but how will the company itself sustain business moving forward at this stage we don't have a proper built in business model yet but we are certainly exploring many of the many different ways of bringing business for us for zelich as a company but other cities it's the regular idea that we provide a platform and like an OS like

8:22an operating system for you definitely now what challenges do you face or you foresee facing as you continue your growth so the challenge that we face and I think it's this challenge that is common to any blocks in platform today is adoption you may have built the most you know the fanciest blockchain and

8:50tech-heavy blocking platform but if you cannot convince people to come and use your platform it's going to be very painful for you this is this is an adoption challenge that everyone faces and we are not into exceptions but we are we are looking into many different ways into pushing the adoption angle so one is of course convincing individual team individual developers who have cool

9:09ideas but also at the same time working in parallel with industry players who have their existing businesses running life and are looking into pushing some of their businesses on top of a project I think is this too long to prove you know too focused is something that we are planning to push in the next six to eight months great and with you creating your own programming language

9:31for this smart contracts that's can also be seen as a barrier to entry for developers that want to develop on zelicah what is the incentive to develop on silica rather than just doing it on aetherium where a lot of developments already happening right so they are the two ways in which we can we are going about it one is of course is the language offers an alternative so I

9:53don't I'm not saying that you know you should completely pitch your did your smart contoured language that you're most familiar with but if you're looking for a smart contractor looking to build a smart contractors will bestow let's say 100 million dollars in you in it should you better look for alternatives but this is this is where in this out pitch to developers that you know take a

10:11take a look at it see if this meets your you know security needs and then go for it the other incentive part is something that's also we are also looking at so we have dedicated a pool of 5 million dollars to encourage developers to come and check out come and try out things and see if they can so if you have already built your soluti contract try and see if you can build a similar

10:32one on silica and see if how to place out in terms of security so these are two different angles in which we are pitching to you give us that's great and is there any how many developers or is there any gaps already built on silica right now so we have one very good application that's already built and running which is unstoppable domains so the idea is

10:50you don't want develop users to have and control and memorize letting some form or store a hexadecimal Act character string as your dress you want them to use very simple human readable address so they are working on building human readable address or to replace in regular account add risks and there's one one you know smile contra that's running right now on another platform we

11:15are in touch with several other companies as well and individual products for building plan to build on silica reso mmm-hmm that's great and what are your goals in terms of expansion right now are silica mainly looking for strategic partners investors customers more team members or developers I would say that you're looking in all directions to be doing

11:37that and I think it's you cannot you cannot succeed in if you're just focusing on one simple and one one entity or one target target group so if you look at developers we suddenly are expanding very rapidly both on the development side and also on the marketing and business side because we realized that this is the time where you have to push it you know push the pedal

11:55on one marketing and business adoption so we are still be hiring on that front we're also looking at expanding our base to other countries so we have recently set up an office in London and we're trying to build our foot and you know a foothold in the European market as well up until now our focus has mostly been in the Asian markets so we expanding on that sense we're also

12:17looking into different ways in which we could you reach out to new investors and see if they would be interested in getting involved in selling some form so it's not that we are targeting just one crowd but we are looking at in a more comprehensive manner that's amazing emirate and in terms of major milestones obviously the main net launching was a huge milestone

12:37what's the next biggest thing that people will need to look for in silica I think the next biggest thing would be to look at taps that will be built on our platforms we already are working with a couple of companies one company is called X list so it's a fin tech startup in Singapore and they are helping different crypto exchanges to connect them with traditional you know

13:00banks or financial sectors so we are looking into whether working to see if they can build something or at least put a part of their back-end on a blockchain infrastructure and we have also working with a company called mind share which is a company of you know helping advertisers and publishers and they're building some some sort of for let's say you could call it as a supply

13:20chain for or advertising so this is something that people should look out and see what's there live on the minute that's great and how can people follow along learn more information and join the community so we have a very active telecom community we also have a twitter handle so if you want to know your baits on what we're doing follow us on Twitter

13:42you can also go check our website yeah so these are the different channels which you can which you can use to learn more about I'll leave those links in the description box below that's all the time that we have today Emery but it was been a pleasure speaking with you and let's follow up in the near future thank you very much Josh there's nobody being

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