Rowland Graus on building with Agoric's layer 1 protocol

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media in the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have roland grouse the product manager at agorik roland welcome to the show and thanks so much for taking the time to come on thanks for having me ashton you're very welcome i'm excited to dive into the blockchain solutions of agorik

0:20this is a very special time in the cryptocurrency industry right now and i think that the way that your team is setting up agorik for open development bringing in people from the outside world into the cryptocurrency world to develop decentralized applications and sort of grow this ecosystem out i think it's the perfect time for that and i would love

0:41for you to start kicking us off by getting a little bit of background information on what is the agoric protocol and what are some of the solutions that you're bringing to the space sure and so i'll start relatively high level i know we're going to dig into it a little bit deeper further on in the conversation but agoric is a layer one chain launching this year in

1:02the cosmos ecosystem and one of our primary differentiators is we're a smart contracting chain that allows developers to build smart contracts in javascript and as a result of being in the cosmos ecosystem we launched connected to ibc which means that defy and nft applications are launched on the accord chain have access to capital across the cosmos ecosystem to any other ibc

1:24connected chain so the cosmos hub or the osmosis decks or you name it as a developer building on our system you'll have access to those assets and users on those in those communities can come use the protocols you build and so there's sort of a lot more to our smart contracting framework and what we bring to the table but i'll leave that for later in the conversation

1:46definitely and i think that's a great start you know i have spoken to the ibc inner blockchain communication protocol team at cosmos and i think that's going to be a huge step in just having communication between blockchains and having d5 as a holistic ecosystem that's not isolated silos and allow us to be able to swap assets between you know any protocol really

2:08easily so i see that as a major advantage i'd love to know like a little bit more specifically about you know how agorak is going to fit into that ecosystem and where it's going to provide value to the other protocols and the solutions yeah that's a great question so the vision of cosmos generally and i'm not part of the cosmos team but i'll

2:27speak for them is that in most cases cosmos blockchains are application specific so if you look at akash for example they have a very specific use case they're solving which is they want people to be able to run compute off of other external services on a chain and osmosis dex is sort of a you know you can think of it as sort of like a balancer and that's all it

2:51does what agoric does sort of somewhat uniquely in the cosmos ecosystem is because we're a smart contracting platform we allow a whole range of flexibility of things that people can build and so for example if you're an osmosis dex user you have an lp token and you can do certain things on osmosis with that lp token but if you wanted to stake it and hold it for an entire year

3:16and change the amount of rewards based on that's something that osmosis has trouble building quickly they probably could do it and the team there is great but it would be much faster to build that on agorik and so you can sort of think about at least to start with the way we start augmenting these other chains is building the kind of functionality that

3:37they would like to have but can't easily launch because they're application specific i'll actually i'll give another example we're actually just speaking with the devrel from akash today and one thing that they'd like to be able to do is if a user user's lease terminates they want to be able to have an on-chain contract that immediately starts a new one and that's something

3:59that again you know it in a generalized smart contracting platform is very easy to do but because they are application specific it's harder for them to do themselves and so that's i think how we start adding value to ibc connected chains and the cosmos ecosystem obviously we have you know our own aspirations around what gets built and becomes sort of core

4:19and agoric itself but just right as we roll out these are where they're gonna be tons of opportunities for developers to come in and add value quickly totally and i would love to just dive a little bit deeper on that development ecosystem you know there's so many developers that know traditional programming languages and software as a service and not as many in blockchain

4:40yet you know and primarily with the network effect of ethereum there are solidity developers but they have to learn a new programming language with agorik it makes it a lot easier you know how are you planning to bring a lot of development to agorik early on yeah another great question and something we talked about a lot internally you know i think you can

5:04break it down into two possible pathways right there's one pathway where we take javascript developers that don't know much about d5 blockchain and teach them define blockchain the other pathways we find defy crypto native developers and have them come build in javascript and frankly we're going down both pathways at once and you know from a marketing and

5:31capture standpoint that our language needs to be very different for those two groups i think personally i believe that the initial group likely ends up being crypto web 3 aware developers who for whatever reason have not been able to take the time to learn solidity or don't believe in solidity as the right the right way to go and i think there are a

5:51lot of those just in casual conversations that i've had in discords of various core d5 projects there's a lot of there's a lot of those people that are developers but aren't currently building in web three can't take six months off to learn solidity and so i think realistically that's probably where early demand comes from but that said we've also and

6:15i know we'll likely get into this later but we've started putting out developer bounties for specific pieces of functionality that people can come to us and build for a little bit of cash on git coin and i've actually found that most of our applicants have been primarily javascript developers and so they're they're sort of aware of web3 they've

6:37sort of built in the crypto space before potentially but they're mostly just generalized contractors but they can build in javascript and they have a team that can build in javascript and that's where we're seeing a lot of demand naturally anyway so we'll see it's it'll be interesting to see where we get the most traction early on i think we believe very strongly that in the

6:58medium term it will absolutely be the javascript fintech developer group that starts becoming the core the core engine here because it's just so much bigger so much orders of magnitude bigger than people that know how to build in solidity right now totally i completely agree roland and i also agree with the fact that you may need to add incentivizations in there

7:19because there are just so many platforms to be working on you know how does a developer choose agorik over any of the numerous protocols right and having that bounty is obviously going to help perhaps hackathons or other grants as as well i think will definitely help and i know we're early on and i want to sort of get a snapshot just to bring perspective for everybody of where it

7:40works at right now because there's you know it's very early on and so maybe you could touch on just where you're at right now and what are sort of the next steps yeah so we have a lot of stuff going at once here and i guess to back up a little bit agoric and this is my personal view from observing the team i joined roughly a year ago in october of 2020 and

8:05agorik is sort of the culmination of decades of work by the founding team and a number of the core engineers here you know the group worked on the first production smart contract and wrote some of those sort of early seminal papers on smart contracting and computers interacting with financial incentives back in the in the late 80s and so

8:26a lot of the thinking from the team has sort of bubbled up into what we are building right now and this company agoric was only founded in 2018 but it was built off of sort of decades of thinking and work by a bunch of this group and a lot has happened since 2018 so the team has grown and we released our alpha roughly a year ago which was sort of the first view of the

8:51agora vm and first smart contracts that were built on top and a place where developers could come play and then the beta came roughly four months later i'm going to say earlier it was early spring of this year where we released our beta which included version of some of our core actual d5 protocols which i haven't gone into this yet is sort of a core

9:14part of the igor stack and actually we have sort of a vault and a m that become a critical part of our own infrastructure so we launched the first version of those as part of the beta and then through the summer we ran a multi-phase long incentivized test net which brought in validators from all over the globe and tested a bunch of different layers of the stack so

9:40to think about the igor stack we sort of have tendermint and cosmos at the bottom layer and then we have our own virtual machine which we're right now calling swingset and then on top of that we have our zoe and ertp smart contracting framework layers so that's that's the layer where as a developer building a smart contract you'll actually be interacting with

10:00directly where it sort of shows you how to create fungible and non-functional assets how to provide offers to users so that exchanges are guaranteed by the underlying framework and then above that is the actual smart contracts in the protocol so all of that is getting built sort of simultaneously here and the incentivized test net was a way to test each of those layers and then also test

10:24how they interact so an example would be we had a staking dynamics phase where our validators came in and they were staking in the sort of cosmos proof-of-stake way where you have a token and you're earning staking rewards but then they were able to bring that token that they earned as a staking reward up into the javascript layer trade it on our amm to buy

10:46more tokens to be able to sort of increase their stake faster and we had we saw some validators sort of take that to the extreme and actually try to take over the test net just you know not for any reward or just to take things down just because they wanted to but just to see sort of how those defy layers and the core cosmos layers interacted and so that was sort of a

11:05lot of the focus of the test net and just to wrap this up that the last stress test phase ended roughly a month ago and now we are sort of full steam ahead on getting our main net rollout phasing starting sort of nowish very cool and great background thank you for that brings a lot of context it's great to see you know that there's so much being

11:28worked on all the same time and yeah and you know we talked about the development ecosystem you talked about cosmos and tendermint and you mentioned the proof of stake that they're on i'm curious if there's any other information you can provide about when applications are built and they're actually going to be running on a gorick you know is it is it fast is it

11:48validating through cosmos or it's its own proof of stake and what's the you know is it fast and cheap or how does that work yeah so the way to think about transaction throughput for any any chain is that it's sort of the at the fundamental level it's limited by its consensus mechanism and you know that's sort of how the different nodes interact talk to each other they're

12:10distributed geographically and they have to come to some agreement about what happened in a specific block and agorik is using tendermint right now so if you want to sort of get a sense of what our throughput will look like you can look at things like the cosmos hub or osmosis or any other cosmos chain there will be some differences based on like the compute that actually has to

12:30happen in our blocks so things go up in javascript get computed there so our blocks may be a little longer than an average cosmos block but it's still it's sort of on the order of less than 10 seconds per block and then there's sort of how much compute can happen and it becomes a very technical challenging topic that said that the consensus layer is really what drives

12:53the throughput and from our side the igork vm is actually technically consensus agnostic so if it turns out that several years down the line there is a better more performant consensus mechanism you know maybe the avalanche consensus ends up really proving out it's it what it's been doing we could theoretically switch there and clearly you know that would be a

13:18bunch of work on our side and there this is sort of not something we could snap our fingers and do but because we're building something for the long term it is sort of upgradable as the world sort of evolves its consensus mechanisms so that was sort of a long answer to a simple question i guess what i would say is take a look at osmosis or the cosmos

13:37hub and get a sense of how cosmos interactions and transactions happen you'll find there they are quite fast and they have fast finality which is a nice property and sort of important for a lot of the d5 use cases that we're looking to enable definitely no that makes sense and i'm glad that you mentioned there you know as it continues to grow out you

13:58can sort of adapt and it's not like you're stuck with what you have and you know you have a bitcoin blockchain that's backed up from whatever 10 years ago they decided you know you can sort of adapt with the times as the platform scales absolutely yeah that's great and i also you mentioned that the main net is being worked on right now i'm curious if you

14:21could touch on if there's an agoric network token that's used you know is that just for gas fees for the transaction and governance or other other functionalities that are coming out and maybe you could talk about that sure so we actually have two native tokens for the igor chain one the staking token is called build bld and that is what's used to secure

14:44the chain in sort of the proof-of-stake delegated proof-of-stake cosmos tendermint way where you may stick to a validator of your choice and the validator earned staking rewards and you earn part of that as well as part of your risk in securing the system but it also it also secures the economy itself which is a complicated thing to explain in only a

15:08couple minutes but agorik i mentioned earlier that there are two protocol level d5 apps that sort of become core and native to our system and you if you squint they sort of look like maker down uniswap obviously they're sort of competitive differences but just to give people something that to have a frame of reference on and the maker style vault system allows other

15:35people to bring in collateral and mint our local currency which we call run which is meant to be roughly stable to a dollar against their collateral and that run currency is actually what's used to pay for transactions in the system and sort of there's there's an important reason for that which is you know if you if you talk to real businesses that want to do business

15:59on the blockchain one of the challenges they have is it turns out that paying an operational expense in a fluctuating currency is a huge pain for them right you know you have to track taxes on all that and it would be nice for them to be able to have sort of a stable currency that they use to pay for transactions so we wanted to make sure that was a core part of it

16:18We also expect that run ends up being the primary pricing mechanism in system so everything that gorick builds and launches is going to be priced and run and will sort of have run as common denominator pricing and all run has to be minted via a collateralized backing sort of similar to maker doubt so that interest or interest is the wrong word call it a

16:43stability fee on run ends up coming back to stakers so as part of their work to stake and secure the system from an actual proof-of-stake security way they also secure the system in an economic way and build ends up backing the vault system if it ever becomes under collateralized so in a disaster scenario the worst case thing is that

17:10the system actually mints additional build and then covers its depth that way so those are the two two native tokens as part of the protocol and hopefully that gives an overview of how they operate definitely no that helps a lot i didn't expect it to be that intricate so i'm impressed i'm impressed and you mentioned you know looking forward i guess the

17:36next big thing for algorithm is working towards the main net and that's going to be happening in the coming months yeah that's right and so we have a phased mainnet rollout schedule and so the first phase which we're actually calling phase zero is actually happening likely in the next week or two at this point it's only blocked on

17:57operational stuff not technical stuff and that is the launch of our cosmos chain only so that will basically be a you know proof of stake chain that has staking and governance and none of the javascript virtual machine stuff that i've been talking about so we're calling it phase zero because it really doesn't include our tech it's it's largely

18:18cosmos but it's to make sure that validators are up and running that we have all these systems working well and then mainnet phase one which will need to be voted in by token holders through the proof of stake voting system that's part of phase zero that is the launch of the agoric vm it will include our treasury which is our vault system and the automated market maker that i was

18:39just talking about and that will be sort of the first view of really the igori system and that will be q4 of this year is the current plan beyond that we have i'll skip to phase three which is sort of hurt full permissionless roll out of our system so any developer can build and launch an application and the delta in time between phase one and

19:05phase three is really about security audits so how can we be sure that the system is secure against malicious code prior to allowing potentially malicious code onto the system and so in the intervening time we have this sort of phase two which is permissioned code allowed on the system and that will have to go through some governance process go through some

19:27review process that still is tbd but we want to make sure that there is sort of a pathway in this intervening time for developers to actually get products launched on agorik even if it's not permissionless still so you know i think right now the plan is that q that q1 of next year gets to us gets us to permissionless maintenance but given the nature of security audits

19:51that date could easily slip definitely well thank you so much for all that information that brings a lot of context moving forward and i'm super excited to see all of that play out because it does sound like a solution that's needed in the space right now and i'm looking forward to your team delivering that so for the viewers that are looking to

20:10follow along with all these updates get involved in the community right away as well what's the best way for people to learn more about gork yeah and yeah just to sum up i think really our goal is to make sure it is as easy as possible for mainstream developers to build and deploy secure define nfp applications quickly and so if that's something that sounds

20:32interesting to you follow us on twitter join us on discord which is that's where we primarily do our most of our interaction you can find me there i'm in the team section and you know feel free to dm me or dm any of our team to ask questions and also just start submitting to our github as well so any of any of those work yeah well i will leave those links as well in

20:57the description box below thank you so much for taking the time roland to come on a pleasure speaking to you about agorik all the best moving forward and let's follow up in the near future thanks so much you