Thursday, October 13, 2022

Recap of Discord Office-Hours with Will

Discord link - #office-hours


Question:

What's your thoughts of how KDA is positioned to tackle upcoming regulation both regarding finance/tax and climate. Thanks!

Answer:

As for regulations, you may have noticed that I don't comment even though I'm a domain expert... but I appreciate you asking regardless. As for climate, efficiency is the name of the game. A POS system that uses 1/100 the energy doesn't really mean much when you need +100x of the POS systems that you'd need to run one scaled-Kadena's worth of throughput. So 🤷‍♂️ ... overall, POS was supposed to be (as it this was the OG pitch) "scalable" but it failed at that (it's faster... but it still needs L2/sidechains to actually scale being it's native limit) and was only pitched as "green" when scalability failed. Overall, we're in a good place and as the energy markets mature, there will be excess capacity that I believe will be targeted at POW in a synergistic (with the environment) way.


Question:

With bitmain’s new unit being so powerful, are there any plans or concerns on the part of the team regarding a 51% attack? It will take only a couple thousand units produced to equal the entire current hashrate on network. Anything being done to prevent this?

Answer:

Us getting Bitmain's attention is a HUGE DEAL... the are objectively the hardest foundry to get the attention of and the most legit in the space. I get that there's some anxiety over the holy crap that's fast miners they made, but in 6mo/1year when the runs are out and sold I suspect the anxiety will decrease. Remember that early on in KDA history we went from CPU to FPGA to GPU and every time that happened this risk existed (until the new hardware was common) and every time the miners found themselves correctly incentivized to do the right thing. The thought that someone would buy 1000x miners just to 51% the network and expect to get a return vs the upfront investment just doesn't hold water to me atm. 51% are more an issue when a chain shares an algo with another chain.

Also, yeah, we're working with Bitmain to try to decentralize the pools/initial distro of units. That said, I trust in the network incentives as they exist.


Question:

Where do you see the KDA demand coming from? Transaction fees are very low, isn't there going to be an incentive for miners to just sell the KDA?

Answer:

Gas fees being an incentive for miners is a perverse instantiation of scalability issues on other platforms. Gas should be for dos protection & limiting tx exec time... not paying miners. This is why KDA's token economics stretches into the next century... miners will always be interested in mining KDA. As for the rest, either real scalability, safety, and decentralization matter or they don't. When it comes to those qualities, we're the only game it town. I'm still very bullish on where KDA is going (and kinda disappointed by the lack of innovation in L1 following the 2018 cohort of new projects.)


Question:

The question is, on all IDOs (I participated in all the IDOs of the ecosystem), the chain falls under load, everything stops and we sit and wait for hours, can you explain what happens at such moments and how to fix it?

Answer:

Overall, it's a sign of growth in the community... as KDA grows the network gets tested in new and "interesting" ways... and sometimes it clogs and bogs down. Afterwards, we do a post mortem and figure out what didn't hold up under the strain and address it. John's promotion to CTO has a lot to do with figuring out how to get ahead of these issues so they don't show up in prod. How the community can help... do testing on testnet ahead of production rollouts.

Also, we're still in the early stages of multichain dapp coding and most dapps are limited to a single chain... which doesn't really leverage the scaling KDA offers so it amplifies any weakpoints that we're still hammering out in the stack.


Question:

Interested in your opinion about the KADDEX project, the whole ecosystem has been waiting for it for 15 months and made big bets because this DEX was supposed to show Kadena's technology, as a result they saw a completely non-professional team, do you follow them? Do you have an opinion?

Answer:

I'm not completely plugged in on this -- as I mentioned on twitter I've been focusing on Eco & ZK for the last few months -- but I've heard rumblings to this effect. I feel it's important to remember that KADDEX is a separate team and project by design, we don't want to be in a position where Kadena is making the majority of apps and running them, as it'd really hold back the community from doing their own thing and being successful. I know it's a bit of a non-answer, I'm just not up to speed on the entire context and don't want to throw anyone under the bus.


Question:

Will we ever able to onboard on metamask?

Answer:

🤷‍♂️ Wallets are (a) hard and (b) usually a big'ol mess of a codebase (especially the early movers written in JS). Adding a non-EVM chain to an EVM wallet is probably just not possible w/o a huge effort on the wallet maker's part. So, prob not... at least probably not until the KDA community has grown a lot and at that point all of our wallets will be mature and dominant in the KDA ecosystem so people probably won't care.


Question:

When is zk coming out?

Answer:

Should be this quarter on testnet, probably mainnet in Q1/Q2'23... it's a tricky technology and we DON'T want to mess up the integration.


Question:

Hello Will, is Kadena in contact with large institutions/company's developing something on our network?

Answer:

Frankly, I don't think any large corp is looking to build onto a blockchain right now. The macroeconomic enviroment is terrible atm and all the movers in these companies that could make blockchain adoption a reality are likely more focused with cutting cost/not losing their jobs. There will be a TON of opportunity for this type of partnership when we come out of the recession, but until then public blockchain is the place to be.


Question:

Hi Will, thanks for hosting this. I'm also curious about business cases on public blockchains. One example might be art and collectible pilots, a la Disney and Polygon. Not many established businesses are going to come to Kadena uninvited especially if they don't know us. So many companies are still hiring web3 teams so there must be some benefit to sharing Pact with them. Kadena can help run certain financial technologies more efficiently, correct? If a tx on Kadena uses less electricity than VISA, is it a useful product for processors in a time of rising energy costs?

Answer:

Probably, but again the macroeconomics atm aren't in a place where companies are taking real first steps into crypto. Until the marco env changes, we'll see some press releases in the crypto market but that's about it. I suspect that after this recession, especially as the core motivation of bitcoin (quantitative easing) is finally starting to bite (inflation), crypto as a whole will be seen with a new light.


Question:

Hey Will, Is their any behind the scene private action in terms of killer ecosystem development, lead by dev teams close with Kadena devs? Or The ecosystem development is solely dependent on the community led grants projects?

(Like for example how the Aptos team is approaching with ecosystem development in synchronous)

Answer:

We've been ramping up the Kadena.js team massively over the last 6 months, and they are nearing the point when things can really accelerate and get our stack massively updated (e.g. to graphQL, better event infra, typescript, etc). This will make eco dev way easier and smoother. After that's out in beta, it's time to start talking about the first Kadena/Pact conference. I'm hoping its in Spring/Early Summer '23. As for the Eco Fund, good stuff is happening there as well but we can't talk about it until things are signed 🤞


Question:

I heard some rumors about "Pact core". I understand that it could be a complete rewrite of Pact with a completely new syntax... Can you give some more information ? Objectives? ETA?

Answer:

It's not a rewrite with a new syntax etc, but it'll be a faster and safer runtime that is 🤞 cross platform. John/Emily/Jose are all over it.

But it's a longer term project


Question:

Hi Will. Using baseball as an analogy...where is Kadena overall (adoption/tech/Eco/etc.)? Are we in 1st inning, 3rd inning, or are we still back at hotel and not yet on team bus? (trying to understand repeated phrase "we are early")

Answer:

Hard to use a baseball analogy, but we're def in the first half of the game, maybe the first quarter. I think when Kadena.js is out and we're doing pact conferences, we're nearing half-time.


Question:

Hello Will.... Can you tell us Kadenas block size?

Answer:

Block time is 30 seconds and each block has a gas limit of 180k. There isn't a finite size limit in the protocol... though I think the endpoints have some fallback size that won't fit 180k gas regardless.


Question:

Hey Will, there's been some drama around the butter standard being applied on Kadena for NFTs. Are you able to put some clarification between the butter standard and the marmelade standard? Should we only support projects that strictly follows the marmelade standard? Thanks.

Answer:

Marmalade may be better, hard to say as from what I gather Butter isn't released yet/still in POC. I think we'd rather the community stick to one standard in the early game, but at the same time I appreciate any investment (i.e. sweat/time) that KDA gets from the community so 🤷‍♂️


Question:

Gotta throw this one out there for the potential fun response: has Kadena reached out to Elon and Jack about being the L1 for their decentralized social network? 🤣

Answer:

I can't imagine a bigger distraction than trying to work with Elon before twitter is decided. Maybe after 🤷‍♂️ but I doubt it. He's pretty much a doge guy and I suspect will want some very centralized controls L1 controls with KDA is specifically designed to avoid.

I just want starship to launch!!!


Question:

Wen NYSE settlement on Chainweb?

Answer:

When crypto defeats fiat on the field of battle... so 2030 (half kidding)


Question:

Can the block time be reduced in the future?

Answer:

Maybe? It could be, I think 15sec is doable. The issue with sub-15sec is that you essentially give up decentralization at the P2P level.

BTW, at this point 30sec is best. We need more work done on the P2P layer before we can be fully confident that a 15sec blocktime is a good idea. Overall, I'd rather see kadena's core stack go multi-server and be ready to scale to 50chains (and in so doing become way more reliable) than dropping the blocktime.


Question:

Earlier we're promised that chainweb in itself is enough to provide scalability to Kadena chain than why we're exploring towards zkSync?

Answer:

Because I think that zk based bridges for crosschain is the future of decentralized & safe bridging, and step one to that end goal is integrating ZK in such a way that it can do rollups.


Question:

When second Grant cohort announcement will come

Answer:

Soon ™️ maybe late this month/Q4


Question:

Will, Any alpha to share? Its just us here...😉

Answer:

42


"Ok, we're definitely doing Reddit next time. I need more than an hour of furiously typing to get to all of this and scrolling up so I don't miss anything just ain't working"


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