Developing Blockchain Infrastructure
Pantera Blockchain Summit 2019
Panel Highlights (14m 19s)
A look into the current state of blockchain infrastructure and the core pieces being developed today.
Full Panel (32m 53s)
Click the image below to view the full panel.
Highlights:
“When I look at what blockchains can provide technically, the thing that is limiting broader adoption and understanding is really simple: straight forward engagement with what a blockchain can do for you. And there’re so many different verticals over which that’s a problem. Starting with private key management, and even just the user interface toolkits available to developers to build applications for interacting with blockchains.”
– Galen Wolfe-Pauly, Co-Founder and CEO of Urbit
“Before web 2.0 applications really scaled to all the users that they’re serving now, there was about a decade of infrastructure building from late eighties/early nineties, and all of that infrastructure building led developers that came into web 2.0 to develop really fast because they had really great dev tooling. And right now what we see is a significant lack of developer tooling to be able to build a lot of these lower level protocols.”
– Jesse Clayburgh, Protocol Labs, Filecoin
“I think the goal for adoption is really to build the product that users want to use. Often times, they don’t understand what blockchain is, and the goal is that they don’t need to understand what blockchain is. The users should just enjoy the benefits of the products.”
– Dawn Song, Founder and CEO of Oasis Labs
“I think a big part of this unexplored space is ‘novel social organization’. Some of the big challenges we generally have so far is that we’ve been developing interesting distributed decentralized technologies, but with largely centralized companies, foundations, et cetera. And we build these decentralized finance machines, but those machines tend to be governed, and controlled by a relatively small number of actors. Figuring out incentives, mechanism, design, user interfaces, all of these things for large scale mass participation represents the undiscovered country now.”
– Zaki Manian, Head of Research at Tendermint
Pantera’s Quick Take
Nascent infrastructure is a major hurdle for developers today.
Building something in the cryptocurrency/blockchain space is more akin to building a rocket or, to biotech, than it is to building something like Snapchat. The developer environments, languages, and tooling are just so new in crypto — it makes it a difficult experience to create something. It’s like the early days of the internet when creating a simple website was difficult.
Building on Ethereum, you can use Solidity to write smart contracts. Solidity is a step up above Bitcoin’s scripting language which doesn’t allow you to do much at all. Building all this sort of stuff has only really even been possible since 2015. It’s time-consuming to test Solidity as well because there aren’t any good test frameworks for testing Solidity smart contracts.
The most significant challenge, however, is to ensure that written code is correct. There are two aspects here: your spec and your implementation. When specifying a protocol design, it is time consuming to ensure the technical specification makes sense. Notwithstanding that it is also imperative for the code to make sense economically.
Crypto is rare in that it combines computer science and economics quite intimately, and if you don’t get both right (i.e., incentive compatible), then your system will not work, or, worse yet, could catastrophically fail due to an attack. This requires many long nights of game-theoretical debates over different attack vectors and the ways something could go wrong. Once you have a spec, the next step is to implement it and, when you do so, it must essentially be a 100% perfect match to the specification. Otherwise, your system will not do what you planned for it to do.
Once you have your code written, you then have to do security audits by multiple independent third parties, bug bounty programs, manual code reviews, write copious amounts of tests, run static analysis tools that detect common vulnerabilities, and make sure these things have also been done for any critical code you rely on.
You can read our complete thoughts on developing blockchain infrastructure in our post called “A Crypto Thesis” using this link.
PANTERA BLOCKCHAIN SUMMIT 2019 :: TABLE OF CONTENTS
Pantera Blockchain Summit 2019 Home Page
Panels
Solving for Scalability
Building Finance 2.0
Enabling New Applications
Presentations
Christopher Giancarlo, Former CFTC Chairman
Brendan Eich, Co-Founder and CEO of Brave
Adam White, COO of Bakkt
Mike Belshe, Co-Founder and CEO of BitGo
Nick Szabo, Cryptocurrency and Smart Contracts Researcher
Fireside Chats
Christopher Giancarlo, Former CFTC Chairman
Jeremy Allaire, Founder and CEO of Circle
Wences Casares, Founder and CEO of Xapo
