Lior Yaffe on Ardor's multichain blockchain architecture

0:22i know you've been a blockchain developer for quite a long time you developed the nxt blockchain now you have the ardor public blockchain and ignis blockchain i want to focus today on the ardor protocol and then we can dive more into the ignis technology afterwards so if you could start with us by explaining what is the purpose and the vision of the ardor public blockchain

0:44that would be great okay great so we started blockchain development you can track us our development back to 2013 with the launch of the nxt blockchain i mean i joined a bit later but we took the nxt pro in blockchain which was the first proof of stake in blockchain and make made it into a product that can help that can implement some of the

1:12basic use cases of blockchain like decentralized messaging system ability to record account properties a decentralized exchange voting system privacy features and so on however around 2016 we started to understand the limitations of the traditional model of single blockchain with single token of value

1:39like you see today in bitcoin and ethereum the problem is that blockchain the traditional model of blockchain has some kind of self-destruction mechanism so that if it becomes very popular it also becomes very expensive to use like we see today with a leading blockchain product it becomes clutter it cannot scale it can still be used as a store of value

2:06but for functionality it's no longer serving its purpose so it became apparent that you need a more advanced structure of multi-chain where where the consensus itself is handled by a relatively light blockchain that we call ardor and then you can have multiple child chains each one with its own token of value

2:33the first chain of this is ignis this a structure gives you many practical advantages first it's about scalability because transactions that are on the parent chain are related to consensus that must be stored forever like with the other blockchains but transactions on child chains are can be stored temporarily

3:02and later can be pruned with storing only proof of their existence in the parent chain another operational advantage of the multi-chain architecture is that it is simple for businesses to sponsor the transaction fees of their users we which is a big problem in almost any blockchain application today that's really interesting lior and yeah

3:32ethereum right now especially with all of the network every node has to verify every transaction and it's getting expensive and it's getting slow and i this is an interesting approach with this child chains now you mentioned that there can be multiple child chains and you also mentioned you don't need to verify with every every node doesn't need to verify

3:54each transaction is that right no right now in the current architecture every node still needs to verify every transaction however every node does not have to store the full history of the blockchain a new node that joins the network can get a snapshot of the existing state think about balances from the from another node or several nodes download it

4:22securely and then only catch up let's say the last 24 hours of transactions to get to the tip of the blockchain so joining a new node is simpler one of our future visions is to be able to partition the multi-chain into subnets where you can decide that your node is only interested in specific child chains and ignore the rest of the child chains

4:50it's a feature that is in the roadmap in and we thought about it quite a bit but for now we decided not to implement it until we are absolutely sure of its operation and that it is really needed now this for people that are using transactions every day on the on the front facing obviously it can get quite technical so do people need to understand

5:16multi chains or that their their transactions are only going to a certain child chain or you know the network just works it just works automatically on the back end yeah what you need to know as a user is that basically when you will be using this a child chain because all the applications are on charging you need to know which charging you're using what token of

5:41value it is managing and that's pretty much all all you need to know the rest is true the rest of how the system is working is transparent to you don't need to be you don't need to know how the bundling process that synchronizes the charges and the parent chain works you don't even even have to worry about paying transaction fees since the

6:06business that operates the child chain can sponsor the transaction fees for you so theoretically you don't even need to know that you're using a blockchain so one of the advantages of ethereum is that because there's a lot of nodes it's supposed to be more secure and it's also more decentralized right now with these child chains there's i'm guessing

6:30that there's less nodes and does that sacrifice security or decentralization at all we are we put a lot of emphasize to have lots of nodes that are supporting ardor right now we have close to 1 000 nodes distributed globally of course it's it's less than what ethereum has i mean we are

6:57we still have less you less users for sure but i think we have a sufficiently decentralized network at the moment so i'm not i'm not worried about the number of running nodes and from time to time we also we also do some incentive plans for running nodes so that to encourage users to set up more nodes because we believe that it's very important that we have

7:22lots of nodes for decentralization that's great and did you do you see a face-off and a trade-off between having high scalability versus having more nodes and decentralization or does that actually not really work as a trade-off on the ardor blockchain no there is there is certainly a trade of i mean a truly decentralized blockchain satoshi satoshi-like vision

7:53will never process let's say more than 100 transactions per second globally and it's not like you can call it the jaffa law okay it's not like the moore's law that improves by two every year and a half because the limiting factors are a the speed of light and things that you cannot control so truly decentralized network will never reach more than

8:20say 100 transactions per second and that's what we see in practice with bitcoin ethereum our door can also probably do 100 transactions per second but on the other hand you hear all these fantastic figures from everybody i can do 10 000 1000 million and so on so the trade-off is you can trade off decentralization for scalability and you can say okay i

8:46limit my deployment to 21 nodes that are somehow already in controlled environment and probably cooperating with each other and then i can improve scalability because i know that they have very strong servers and i know what will be the sequence of block generation between them and so you lose so you trade off decentralization for

9:14performance but then you can take it to extreme and just use a single database okay so what are we talking about the main advantage of blockchain is that it is decentralized and not controlled by a single entity and there is still lots of things you can do with 100 transactions per second assuming that you can also have layer 2 and databases backing your solution and so definitely

9:43great answer and now you also mentioned that there are some privacy functions as well and it's interesting in a public blockchain to and sort of necessary for you know financial privacy because at least in bitcoin you know if you send a transaction you can just look in that wallet and see every transaction that they've had and their whole bank account essentially

10:02which it seems a little bit you know invasive and so one of the functions the privacy functions is this coin shuffling now can can you talk about what is coin shuffling and is it really advantageous for people to use this function in the public blockchain yes so i mean unlike a privacy coins like monero that

10:30everything by default is shuffled and hidden and mixed up on our door this kind of mixing is optional you can take your child chain tokens or asset tokens on the child chain let's say tokens that will be used for voting and you can send them on a to an on blockchain shuffler

10:58and the shuffler basically creates on the other side a fresh fresh account without history that contains the fonts and use the keys that you provided to the shuffler but someone looking from the outside cannot tell whose entry fonts are you are cannot associate you with your original account and the

11:26new accounts that you received with a new phone so you start with the fresh history so this limits the way people can track can track what you're doing on chain it's actually it's based on a white on a paper released by some famous cryptographer and it's operating it even operates since the next two days i think since 2015. okay that's that's really interesting

11:54and do you think that people see those functions sort of like in monero where it's a dark coin and privacy coin that it attracts nefarious activity or is it more just for financial privacy and you know people that are doing totally legitimate activities just want to make sure that they have their privacy of their own funds okay so let's start with this that

12:17this coin shuffling mechanism is really really cool i mean as a software engineer it's it's a real achievement to have an on-chain shuffler on a public blockchain i would say certainly i don't want it to be used for a illegal activity and money laundering so on i view it as a privacy feature because you do so you do need some level of

12:45privacy it also not designed let's say for a really hiding your activity because there are there's still some leakage of information i mean it can be used partially for a for partial privacy but again we are not aiming for the privacy focused

13:12Blockchain users but more for the general blockchain developers that need some privacy features that's great now one of the main functionalities of ethereum's public network is the smart contracts and dapps and being able to have all this functionality programmed into these autonomous contracts now with ardor you have lightweight contracts

13:40which are similar to smart contracts but they're supposed to be safer and better and faster and can you talk about the differences and why they are better and faster yes so we have a different design approach than ethereum i mean in ethereum you can write a smart contract for every use case you can do it the right way and you can do it the wrong way and then

14:05loose phones lock your user phones and so on in ardor we take a different approach the basic smart contracts we designed the basic for smart contracts like secure messaging account properties and on top of that we build for you some of the smart contracts like the asset exchange that we talked about the shuffling and so on

14:33these all can be considered a smart contract multi-signature and so on so in this way i mean instead of some third-party developer trying to roll on their contract with all the risks the main contracts are developed by a by the core developers we provide you access to it as diff what we call

14:58transaction types obstruction and open apis where you can use these contracts the lightweight contracts is a layer of automation on top of these built-in apis so it is it is more limited you cannot just decide that today you are giving your users one percent interest and the tomorrow or 99 interest and you cannot program a backdoor and so on

15:27So you are limited in some sense to what we already built into the platform but you are guaranteed that your a contract cannot be hacked because of a technical failure of course it can still be hacked because you didn't keep the private key there are a lot of blockchain solutions

15:56that are currently being implemented because of the pandemic and to talk about you know the real world solutions that ardor and ignis can can provide to solve real-world problems have you considered what are the best use cases for the technology yes actually the current pandemic provides some excellent use cases for blockchain

16:25It's something that we still need to educate the market so that we they realize how blockchain can help but the idea of blockchain is that it's all about of enabling third parties that do not trust each other to cooperate and as you know everything around this pandemic stems from public trust okay it's even more than the medical problem it's a it's a matter of how

16:53of managing the public and if the public trusts the government trusts the health organizations and so and so on and now think about the think about the vaccines for example that companies will start shipping next month this needs to be cooled to minus 70 celsius i mean they're surely going to be

17:21multiple parties involved i mean the manufacturers and the factory and the transport and the health the healthcare who handles this how would you how would you track that everybody actually cooled the vaccines properly how would the public you know there is already a lot of mistrust around vaccines in the general public from all sort of wrong reasons in my view but

17:51but this will be multiplied now with rumors conspiracy theories and so on and so on but when if all of these stakeholders that do not necessarily trust each other sometimes they will be a competitor if all of them will use a global ledger to record their actions that every transaction is digitally signed and timestamped then you'll have perfect tracking of

18:18what happens to a vaccine from the time it left the manufacturer ring line until it's actually injected to a person okay and then think about what would happen after that when people who are already vaccinated should be free okay they should be free to roam the world but when you land in a foreign country how would they

18:44Verify that you are actually vaccinated i mean of course you can bring some kind of weird certificate from your local health authority and so on but then you need agreements between the countries lots of politics lots of organizations but much better if you can prove using a global ledger that everybody can access that you actually got this batch of

19:14vaccination on this date and that this batch of vaccination left the left the factory in india three weeks earlier and so on and many other people's got vaccinated with the same it so this is actually a use a great use case for a public ledger convincing the pharmaceutical companies

19:44to use it and the government's trusted that's a whole different story [Laughter] definitely yeah i know so the supply chain it seems like that's one of the top priorities right now and being able to track and trace from the source to any primary and secondary locations into the final destination yeah and global identity platforms as well so it's definitely great to

20:09be working on those kinds of solutions and hopefully yeah we can get past the regulation and the barriers to entry to actually get the technology implemented so that it can solve these kinds of problems so that's great leor now we're running out of time in the interview but if there are people who are interested in learning more about jelly readers technologies and

20:31ardor and ignis and trying it out what's the best way for them to learn more and to get involved okay so we build our products as a blockchain as a development platform for decentralized application you don't need any permission to use our products all you need is install the software download the testnet blockchain and you can ask someone for a

20:59test net tokens and start using the apis to build your application we provide you best-in-class documentation and of course always available on the talk.js.com for any questions that you might have yep great okay well i will leave the links to your platforms in the description box below

21:25thank you so much liar for taking the time to come on the show all the best and let's follow up in the near future thanks ashton for having me on the call thanks bye