24 August 2019 - Dorjee + Kenta Live Periscope AMA

Transcript of Dorjee and Kenta's live video AMA using questions sourced primarily from Periscope. This was one day prior to Perlin's Binance IEO.

A full video recap can be found here.

Contents

• Introduction

• Question 1: How did you guys meet?

• Question 2: What is the difference between Leaderless Proof of Stake (LPoS) and normal Proof of Stake? Why did you choose LPoS?

• Question 3: Why the name "Perlin"?

• Question 4: How does your team differ from others?

• Question 5: Where do you see Perlin in 2-3 years, and how would you explain Perlin to a 5 year old?

• Question 6: How do you make sure nodes don't fork? How do you prevent mining of critical transactions?

• Question 7: How will the global financial trade wars affect Perlin?

• Question 8: Why did the team stop using the Avalanche consensus mechanism and change it to a new protocol?

• Question 9: Why does Perlin prefer WebAssembly (WASM) as opposed to other smart contract platforms?

• Question 10: How flexible will DApps be on Wavelet? What do you think are the limitations to building DApps?

• Question 11: We know that Perlin is the fastest with a 31,240 TPS, but can you guarantee that you can achieve this speed on the main net? What are the main features of Perlin that make it valuable?

• Final words

Transcript

Introduction

Dorjee: Hi everyone, I’m Dorjee, CEO of Perlin! And this is…

Kenta: Hi, I’m Kenta, CTO of Perlin.

Dorjee: Thanks to everyone for finding the time to join us. Today is our Periscope.tv AMA, we’re sitting in Singapore at 11am on a Friday. Just a bit of background on me, and then we’ll go through the questions coming in. I started my first software company at university. Since then I’ve done nearly 20 startups and I was also in the environmental space for 10 years. In 2007 I started doing carbon credits and rainforest conservation. So particularly with what’s happening in the Amazon Rainforest right now, we’re actually going to be using blockchain to solve for some of those problems which we’ll talk about a little bit later but as a result of my environmental work, we made front page of Time magazine, front page of Wall Street Journal. I was one of Time Magazine’s heroes of the environment, and everything was really pretty amazing until the lack of government agreement resulted in the carbon market not really playing out and so at about 2014, that was when I started getting interested in Bitcoin and that’s also when we eventually started investing around the $500 dollar mark. Subsequent to that we were involved in about 30 different ICO’s and IEO’s, and have also done a bunch of angel investing and co-founded a hedge fund in the Bitcoin arbitrage space. So really really deeply passionate about the decentralised economy and the benefits that it can bring. I was also previously CEO of Santiment (SAN token), Co-founded and was a director and advisor to Republic Protocol, which is now known as Ren. You might wonder what’s on the back screen, and if you’re interested you can check out this link: http://perlin-network.github.io/clicker/ and just start clicking away. (PERL Clicker is being played by Dorjee on the TV screen behind him)

That’s enough from me, and Kenta?

Kenta: I started programming since when I was about 6 years old. Main reason why was that I used to play a lot of those online games when I was a child and I really had a short temper/patience so I wanted to finish up those games quickly, and so I got into hacking games. That went on to me playing multiplayer games, hacking those, and learning how to create my own software. Afterwards, I created my own little online shop selling virtual currency for real US dollars back then. That went on from game hacking to me eventually developing into a great hacker. I used to make a lot of malware, RAT’s, key loggers, etc. In making them and using them, I would be selling them off to a lot of other fellow hackers and a bunch of different underground forums. I just want to mention those underground forums because this was all the way back in early 2009. What was really interesting was from what I saw from my perspective when I was little, these underground forums were the first ones to adopt Bitcoin from an early standpoint. Back then, hackers found it very tedious to be able to give money to other hackers in exchange for buying licenses for all different kinds of software. They used to use Liberty Reserve, Western Union, PayPal, but as of course as you know they’re highly centralised services. Some of them actually got shut down by the FBI. I think Libery Reserve is down now. And then Bitcoin got into the space. Hackers all of a sudden started mining Bitcoin and just decided to use it to facilitate all kinds of different underground deals. As part of the movement I had a whole bunch of Bitcoin back then. I intentionally sold mine when it was around the 1.4K mark around 2014ish. Then afterwards I eventually I retired off of my hacker career. I went over to doing some legitimate businesses; learning how to make web, mobile, desktop apps, did a bunch of contract deals, worked as a freelancer when I turned 14. Then went on to doing AI, signal processing. I got a knack for it because I entered Google science fair, won that, and then proceeded onwards to working as the Head of Research for Naver. I then did a bunch of hackathons- University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Google, etc.

Dorjee: Awesome! Let’s jump into a bunch of questions.

Q: How did you guys meet?

Dorjee: Oh, how we actually met was because we read one of Kenta’s writings - he was doing blog posts on second layer scaling, as we were like wow, this guy really knows his stuff. At the time, he was hitting up a bunch of AI research at Naiver in Korea. We got on a plane, we flew over there and then convinced him to quit and to take a dive into Perlin. And so that was now 18 months ago, so we’re one of those project where we’re really focused on the long term. We’ve had a lot of people ask us why are we IEO’ing, why are we also raising so much money even though we have 6 years of runway, and after the IEO we’d have 10 years. We had a really solid team of 30 people which we’ll go into, but we’re really focused on the long term adoption; the marathon.

Kenta: Before we dive too deep into the questions, we should tell them what the heck is this game we’re playing here. You know, on Wavelet what you can do is build a lot of DApps. A lot of are really interested in the TPS that we can provide; 31,240 transaction per second with 0-4 seconds finality. That’s easily 300-400 times faster than the finality latency you’d get out of any other blockchains. What exactly does it unlock, what exactly you can do with that kind of scalability - a lot of people games developers especially have reached out to us. They’re really curious - “Can i build much more real-time games with it?”. Because so many people have been asking us, we just thought why not and built our own games. Some of the devs in our core dev team used to be game programmers back then. I also used to work for a company called Nixon for the game Maplestory when I was younger, so that led us to do a little demo. So, well we’ve now got a full fledged game for you guys to show. It’s a spin-off of a really popular game back in the day called cookie-clicker which you can guess what you do - you click.

Dorjee: And also, to be frank, I’m not a huge gamer so they had to do something that was intergenerational. And this game I kind of get - it’s addictive and fun, and when you buy stuff, you can even buy some clever stuff like the seafood factory which even talks about the insurmountable problems around the FDA and how it actually ties into real world economy. So I thought that was clever. There was definitely a lot of beer drinking happening. There’s a Titanic, and if you get to the lost city of Atlantis we’re gonna throw in a Perlin T-shirt. You might ask why the Perlin T-shirt has such a large Perl, well I’ll let JJ answer that on social media. If you want to know why our office has very little seating space, it’s because someone also over-ordered a thousand of them, so there’s a thousand of these. So very stylish. Kenta and I are going to have a 1 minute click-off to see who clicks the fastest. And the prize… is a mini banana. Okay, moving on! Let’s go through the questions.

Q: What is the different between Leaderless Proof of Stake (LPoS) and normal Proof of Stake, and why did you choose LPoS?

Kenta: So I’d like to give an overview first of what exactly is PoS and what counts as LPoS and normal PoS. I’d attribute PoS to any kind of existing blockchain right now that claims that they could scale up. They do maybe 1000-3000 TPS - the ones like Algorand, Cardana, perhaps even Tendermints. If you look carefully, all of their products deeply follow one single methodology on how they achieve safety, achieve consensus, and the way they do it is they rely on some small portion of the network which you would call a committee to validate all of the transactions that occur or come from everyone else in the network. Here’s the thing though - I always argue about this, if you look at any different articles that we’ve wrote or even like sort of the videos that I gave a little talk in, I basically say there’s no way you could really assume that trusting the subset of a network to validate all transactions is safe in any way. Simple reason why: Say you’ve got a country with a million people, with a small government of 1000 people. Let’s give that government complete veto power, and they’re the ones responsible for monitoring every monetary transaction whatsoever; every single computer system within this entire country come from all of those million people within the country. Obviously that kind of politics… just doesn’t make sense right. Why would I trust a thousand people to control every single little aspect of what I do or what I do in society? Let’s take that political setting, and virtualise it. That’s basically what Algorand, Cardano, Tendermints; all of these other big blockchains are saying, and it just fundamentally does not work. They say, “well, what if you re-shuffle this government/committee that controlled all the validation - what if we do a bunch of little mechanisms: what if we put some economic incentives on top of it; what if we delegate stake?” The point is, economics are fine are all but you can’t just apply economics to virtual systems, no matter what you do. Ideally if you don’t have to use these economics to get the kind fo guarantees and consensus you want, you really shouldn’t. Economics complicate things a whole bunch and there’s a lot of attack vectors. Theres a reason why poker is still a very exploitable game, just to give a context. All PoS protocols have this safety assumption. They all rely on a committee for consensus, they don’t actually let nodes rely on themselves. In Bitcoin and Ethereum, nodes rely on themselves. They get to participate in a random lottery and do Proof of Work (PoW). It’s a random chance, and nodes have full rights to determining whether or not a transaction is valid or invalid. In a committee based system, nodes do not have those right anymore and what we’ve done with Wavelet, is that we’ve taken this leaderless aspect that is described above above a coin, and we finally made a PoS protocol that can be leaderless and let’s nodes decide for themselves whether transactions are invalid or invalid without talking to a committee. You can imagine that talking to a committee where messages are being sent back and forth increases consensus latency; that increases time complexity means to achieving consensus. There’s a lot of horrible things involved in both jeopardizing scalability and also safety when it comes towards using the PoS protocols today which we’ve fixed with Wavelet. So Wavelet is the only PoS product from what I see - If you guys have papers or any sort of mechanism that you’d like for me to read or review, leave it in our telegram or discord and our community manager JJ is going to come on and bring it up. We’ve been looking at blockchains for two years straight, and we’ve just been desperate for an ‘all means’ solutions, and not having to fall back to some weird layer to scaling solution kind of crap on Ethereum-

Dorjee: (chuckle) Calm down - next question! He gets a bit worked up.

Q: Why the name Perlin?

Kenta: 11 years old, I also had a little moment in time- Dorjee: (mockingly) “Back in mah day, back in 2018”

Kenta: … I did a bit of game development and polished an Android game. It got a lot of hits. Basically in this game, it generated this infinite procedural world and created all these little structures and used this algorithm called Perlin Noise, made by this mathematician named Ken Perlin. He’s a really big hero of mine in terms of mathematics, because he’s one of the only mathematicians that actually uses math to create some sort of art. If you’ve watched the movie Tron, there’s all of those building and landscapes - those are generated using entirely using the Perlin noise algorithm. If you’ve played Minecraft, the worlds are also generated using Perlin Noise. So they whole concept is that you’ve got something extremely complicated, being noise in mathematics. And you can actually twist and twine the noise a bit; modulate it and actually create artistic structures out of it. So that’s our sort of theme looking into tech in Perlin - Can we take a bunch of untrusted nodes and make consensus out of them? Can we take a noisy landscape being the blockchain space and actually derive really interesting innovations out of it?

Q: How does your team differ from others?

Kenta: A lot. Dorjee: I think there’s two very distinct parts of the Perlin team. On one hand we’ve got the dev team, which Kenta can talk about in a second, and on the Business Development team - I think we’re somewhat older, more experienced in terms of the BD and the sales cycles for what we’re doing are particularly long. So you might have seen in the news, it was covered by Forbes: there was the first partnership with the International Chambers of Commerce (ICC). So the ICC is 100 years old, it’s the peak Chamber of Commerce and it has over 45 million different businesses as members. So why that was such a strategic partnership was because in the 100 years of operation before WW2, they actually created a standardised platform called Incoterms. Incoterms are how you know which party bears responsibility if a container shipment of plantains gets shipped and something happens to them. And so we’re building the smart contracts “Smart Inco’s”. So Incoterms 2020 is released in September and we’ve already got an event booked with the Singapore business Federation which is the government-backed business Federation. There’s 30 events around the world, so if you’re interested or do international trade, that’s a huge area that we’re working on with banks and major corporations - actually even tonight we’ll be doing a Public Ledger launch, one of our products at Westpac, which is a hundred billion dollar Australian Bank where we are now going to be co-located. We’ll also be hosting many of the major commodity companies, and that’s largely because Singapore is a hub. 80% of the big commodity firms are here, and we’ve partnered with a number of them. They’ll be coming out over the next few months so get ready. On top of that, being based here for 10 years we’ve got the Singapore government as a partner. So going back to the questions, if you look at our dev team it’s led by Kenta and I’ll let him talk about it. But on the BD side with myself, Darren and a whole bunch of the more experienced guys - And Milani, a professor at the University of Chicago is one of our advisors and he’s helped us work really closely with the Indian government where he’s doing a big piece of research. The Indian government has signed an MoU with us and we’re looking at a lot of privacy preserving stuff. So that’s a quick snapshot but the most important thing around our team is that we have an attitude that it’s a marathon. We actually started recruiting more crypto related people, but we found a better way to approach it is more as a 10 year startup. So if you look at our token distribution - 4 year lock-up. All of us here are very happy to do that because we’ve committed to the project. 1 year cliff, so there’s not going to be any dumping by the team - we’re really committed.

Kenta: In terms of the dev team, we’ve got around 14 people at the moment. Ive got to say, the devs that we have on our team are absolutely crazy. What exactly i mean by crazy is that we’ve got a whole bunch of child prodigies. These guys, they’ve worked in distributed systems, one of the guys has around 9 different open-source project, developed a whole bunch of different compiler backends, contributed to Linux, the distributed systems cryptography - all that insane stuff. And you know, each and every person on the team has done their own open-source projects before so for us when we look at it from the dev point of view, we’re all just coming together. We’ve got the funding, we’ve got all the support necessary and we’re just working on doing a whole bunch of open source projects to really just get the blockchain tech field fixed up, because if you look at the traditional tech space today - almost everyone hates blockchains and they have their reasons why. Blockchains promised a lot, and then they suddenly get up to the enterprise heads, and the enterprise heads start nagging the developers down below the ranks and nothing really works out because realistically, people don’t really need blockchain. For the cases where a blockchain could be useful, a lot of people do not know about, especially in traditional tech space. We’re fixing that by improving the developer ergonomics overall in this space. WebAssembly and all of that I can explain a little later, but that’s pretty much it.

Q: Where do you see Perlin in 2-3 years, and what are your focused topics, and how would you explain Perlin to a 5 year old?

Dorjee: I’ll explain the non-technical side. In 2-3 years… it actually does take a lot of time obviously to ship a good product and then to find product market fit, and then to have a proper sales cycle. But by the end of this year we’ll have a number of pilots in international trade. So if you think about the verticals, we’ve started with supply chain traceability - Check out followourfiber.com. It’s basically tracing from the seedling all the way through to the rayon product, as a partnership between Perlin and APR. APR is one of the world’s biggest Rayon companies, and it just shows the full lifecycle that it is certifies. It verifies the traceability from the seedling all the way through to the nursery, to the plantation, harvested wood, dissolving pulp, etc. You can scan the barcode, or you can launch a batch. You can see the shipping port, the viscose mill, etc. So the power of this is that in 2-3 years, how do you know whether or not this banana or Oyster is sustainable sources, and that it hasn’t been shipped in temperatures above 30 degrees that would cause it to go off? This is the type of traceability that’s going to be created. As I mentioned earlier, one of my passions is the environment and if you look at the Amazon deforestation that’s currently occurring, I think it’s very important to know that the produce you buy is not actually being sourced from deforested Amazonian land. So that’s where we’re going with a whole bunch of sensors and satellites. Sector One is supply chain traceability and this is huge, because of the amount of sustainability pressure coming onto all produce. The second sector is Trade Finance. Singapore routes about 1.1 trillion dollars a year. It’s the world second biggest hub, and will soon be the world’s biggest hub. 80% of the commodity companies, whether it’s iron, aluminium, oil, gas - it all comes through Singapore and what we’re doing now is looking at the 600 pages required for me to ship a container of pens from here to Europe. It’s 600 pages of documentation just to know whether its arrived. You need the Certificate of Origin, the Bill of Lading, the Letter of Credit, etc, and all of that is currently manual. An estimated 70% of those documents have errors in them, so obviously moving it to smart contracts makes a lot of sense. So in 2-3 years I really see trade and supply chain as the biggest work that we’ll do in the business side. And we’ve already engaged with 30+ partners which we’ll be unveiling over the course of the next three months, so very traceable events. And the third area that we’re focusing on is Distributed Computing, but it’s going to take us about two years for the technology; the hardware to catch up and for us to build out the decentralised marketplace on the ledger, so I’ll talk about that a bit later. Kenta: The second part of the questions was “Explain like I’m 5”. First, I can say a bit on the tech side. It’s quite simple - in 2 -3 years, one of the biggest technology trends is the whole cloud and serverless function space. Developers really enjoy it because you don’t have to care about infrastructure anymore. You can just write a function and it will be automatically scaled up, and then you can use it for your websites or apps. Basically an instant API. Wavelet’s smart contract interface is exactly like writing a serverless function. You write a bunch of different function, and all of a sudden each function is an API. In 2-3 years, we want people to be using wavelet exactly like how people are using server less functions right now. The latency is negligible and its good enough for real workloads. So if you’re a developer, we highly encourage you to try it out as well.

For the Explain like I’m 5 part, I can explain for the wavelet, the ledger in itself, with the WebAssembly and Solidity fight. Solidity is a slow, broken car. You’ve got this professional driver and then afterwards you give him a slow broken car that’s difficult to use and very different from other race cars. He drives it, and breaks down, and quits racing because you gave him such a horrible little car. All of a sudden, you’ve got us. We give him brand new… what is it, like McLaren or something, I don’t know actually what’s a good car… Anyway, we give him a new McLaren and when we do that the driver is going to be the happiest person in the world. That’s what we’re doing with developers, we’re giving them Wavelet, which is their new race car.

Q: How do we make sure nodes don’t fork? How do we prevent mining of critical transactions?

Kenta: Okay, well first thing is that there’s no such thing as mining. Specifically, you have a couple chances, say 10,000 out of a 2 to the 64 chance of possible permutations you can make to the critical transaction seed so it’s kind of like mining but the whole point is that it’s significantly less permutations. Because of that, there’s a chance that your transaction might not at all be a critical transaction no matter how hard you play around with the payload of your transaction. There’s no way it’s seed will be of the right prefix amount of zero’s so that it’ll actually be critical. So mining isn’t possible. Because the entire infrastructure is shaped as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of transactions, there’s no way you can fork either because the whole point of our protocol is that we merge forks together so that we can solve conflicts, and then afterwards linearly order them into a single block chain so that you’ve got a consistent, totally ordered log or ledger state.

Q: How will global financial trade wars affect Perlin?

Dorjee: That’s a really pertinent question. I’m actually doing a speech for the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Geneva in December, and in September, Ajay is doing a speech for the ICC Banking commission in China which is 600 banks. What’s really fascinating is when you look at the trade wars, all focus is really on democratising trade. If you look at the Brazilian economy, 99% of it is comprised of small to medium sized business but only 1% of international trade is small to medium sized businesses. So what you’re finding is trade is getting harder and harder, and it’s a big economic growth engine. With things like trade wars, you’re just going to get even more complexity because if you can no longer trade with, e.g Britain because of Brexit via the EU, do you go to the same efforts to go through different customised British import/export customs procedures?

So the Singapore government is putting 300 million dollars into building this and we’re fortunately to be hopefully working really closely with them, and we’re already building some components of it, but they’re building the rails to allows for smart contract and blockchain enabled trade. So instead of having to have literally 600 pages of documentation from a dozen or more different agencies, you can hopefully have all that digitally documented on the blockchain which allows for faster settlement and more convenience.

Whether or not you like Libra or Telegram’s Gram, there is a tipping point happening where this type of convenience and enablement - so if I can do a trade deal and settle with Libra or Grams or Perls, obviously that will enable a tremendous amount of small to medium sized businesses to start creating value and wealth, and that’s really what the decentralised economy has to do.

The last point I’ll say on the trade wars is if you think about the huge amount of compliance requirements because of banking laws as Basel IV is coming out next year, we’ve been looking at how that affects the capital ratios of banks. But if you think about the huge amount of compliance for a centralised system, that’s why you’ve got sub-10% banking rates in so many countries. Bangladesh is sub-10%, and just thinking about in India, you’ve got 500M users of mobile phones with broadband, but you have a tiny minuscule of them having banking accounts. So that’s where the decentralised work we’re doing in Perlin is seeking to open up.

Q: Why did the team stop using the Avalanche consensus mechanism and change it with the new protocol?

Kenta: It’s very simple - Theres a lot things we want in a perfect ledger. We want smart contracts, we want scalability, we want safety, we want to be sure it’s decentralised and that our money doesn’t suddenly disappear one day. Avalanche doesn’t provide quite a number of those things that we just said. One of those biggest things (Avalanche admits it in their white paper) is that it’s very difficult for them to support smart contracts. The reason why, and this goes to a fundamental protocol level, is because avalanche guarantees what you would call a partial ordering of transactions. What that means is say you’ve got three transactions. It happened in a particular order. They all get finalised and accepted into the network. If you look at two different nodes, they will see a different particular ordering in which those transactions were actually finalised. You can imagine that if you supported smart contracts in that kind of network, that would not work. In crypto kitties, if you have kitties spawning and then send those kitties to somebody else - if that ordering was different then you might try send a kitty that you don’t have and afterwards you spawned a new kitty. The ordering in which smart contract functions get called has to absolutely get preserved for the entire network. Avalanche is not able to guarantee that and hence a lot of use-cases that you could have for a blockchain does’t work. There’s a whole load more problems - the algorithms they claim on the paper, there’s a couple of typos here and there that the community have pointed out. We’ve spent about 6-8 months working on a full, production ready avalanche implementation, eventually finding out all of these protocol flaws that we’ve hot-fixed. We eventually got tired of it and looked into the fundamental reason why Avalanche works really works, being the Snowball consensus protocol that Avalanche builds on top of. We wiped away Avalanche, which is basically a bunch of DAG construction on top of snowball, and we made our own DAG construction that support smart contracts and allows for a total ordering of transactions. It doesn’t do an weird hacks to achieve PoS and to achieve smart contract support. The Avalanche team claims that they’re able to support smart contracts, but by strapping other consensus protocols on top of it, but why do that instead of just fixing your base layer solution?

All that being said, that’s the reason why we stopped using Avalanche. There’s a lot of haze around it and the team does not want to publicise the actual research. The end goal for Wavelet is that all of our research is open and public. You can chat with us on the community and we’ll tell you all the answers you want. We actually really care about this ledger, because it’s not only from the whole open-source spirit - we’ve got the whole business side to worry about working with governments and huge companies, and so we have to really care about whether this can be maintainable and this protocol being absolutely robust.

Q: Why did Perlin prefer WASM (WebAssembly) as opposed to other smart contract platforms?

Kenta: Solidity is this thing that was developed in 2014 for Ethereum to represent smart contracts. The thing is, programmers take a long time to adopt. It takes time for a community to program a language, and here’s the thing - Solidity has been highly focused on security. Programmers want ease-of-use, compatibility, and stability. Solidity changes very frequently, and there’s not much you can do with it either. You cannot do unit tests, and you cannot do the standard procedures you normally do when it comes towards building programs. And because Solidity is the trademark language for all smart contracts out there, that has depraved developers away from the potential benefits of blockchain. Traditional devs are scared to build blockchain apps because of the high amounts of complexity. Beginners cannot easily jump in. Actually if you want to build a production ready Solidity smart-contract, most likely you need to know another programming language very well. You cannot learn Solidity on its own because you can barely do anything with it.

WebAssembly is this sort of safe programming standard, but rather than it being introduced by a blockchain foundation (being Ethereum), it’s supported by a browser vendor (Mozilla) which obviously has way more support than a blockchain foundation. Mozilla started in 2017-ish. Because of Mozilla’s stance as a browser, they have to care about safety, they have to care about performance. In developing WebAssembly they’ve really catered to those two things.

Actually, one of our devs has worked a lot with WebAssembly, and has even done stuff like deploying WebAssembly programs onto the kernel and we also have our own WebAssembly VM. That’s a bit off track, but the whole point is that because Mozilla introduced it, a lot of programming language communities got behind it and all of the big, top, popular languages like Java, C, C++, Go, Rust, etc, almost all of them support compiling down to WebAssembly. That means you can use all the tools and methodologies that you know and love. You can write unit tests, you can write fuzz tests, you can do the most complicated things to build production ready apps like the usual! You can just write your code expecting to be a web app or whatever, and all you do is tinker with a few lines of code and then it’s all of a sudden a smart contract. That’s the potential that WebAssembly gives, and you can try it out right now. We had a workshop a couple of weeks ago where we got people to build their own decentralised chat DApp, like a Telegram or WhatsApp clone. We got two lawyers who knew barely anything about coding - they knew a bit of HTML and CSS, and they build a full telegram clone. A full decentralised chat app on Wavelet, just because of the sole fact that we support WebAssembly smart contracts. So you could use javascript, or whatever you really want to go about building whatever you want.

Dorjee: Just to expand on that, why we’re so excited about WASM (and Kenta hates it when I call it WASM), is because 11.5-12 million active developers are engaged in WebAssembly languages, which opens up the developer community tremendously. And actually I was quite blown away because I did a Law degree and just seeing the fact that in 80 lines of code, you’re able to get non-developers building smart contracts. I think that’s a huge factor around mainstreaming and actually one of the questions that came out was: “How important our developers are to the ecosystem? What are the benefits and advantages of your platform?” Well that would be our biggest one.

Kenta: We love developers!

Dorjee: We do!. Where we see it is in order to bootstrap the network, we’ve identified three main verticals, so the supply chain side, the international trade, and the decentralised distributed computing. But then it’s up to you guys. We’re here to support. We think we’ve built a pretty damn good layer 1, with a really accessible platform for developers. I’ll let Kenta expand on it in a little, but just coming back to those verticals, there’s a tremendous amount of work within all of them. Just to give an example, the Dubai Chamber of Commerce which is backed by the UAE government are helping us distribute our products in their ten offices across Africa and the Middle East, and that’s simply because we’re a lean team. We’re not going to go to Africa and the Middle East regularly in order to service those markets. Building on top of the superstructure that’s created by the ICC, for the distributed computing we’ve already partnered with the Indian government and a TP Telcom, the national telco carrier in Indonesia with 180 million handphone users. So the way that we see that is we’re helping to build these user bases. Now it’s up to the developers to help build things that add value, and that are used to be sticky for those users. So i think that the evolution of the decentralised platform moves away from just ‘Oh wow, decentralised, distributed, blockchain’ , to “What is the user product market fit?”, and hopefully give you guys the tools to do that.

Q: Will Wavelet support application based on IoT, AI and Big Data?

Kenta: AI? Yes. We’ve actually done experiments compiling AI over to WebAssembly. We note that there are other people working on it as well, such as Oasis Labs. They’re doing awesome work and we’re also working in that space a little bit.

Big Data? You shouldn’t really be using a blockchain for big data - maybe access to big data control rights, sure, in that case, definitely go for it.

IoT? Yes! Wavelet nodes have an incredibly low barrier to entry, so you need avery minimal amount of hardware specs - 512 MB of RAM, a healthy internet connection, which yes, a lot of IoT devices do not support, but especially with a lot of the more modern ones, the newer micro controllers such as the Beaglebone Black series or SCM 32 series; they all have everything necessary to be able to run their own individual Wavelet nodes. You’ve those emitting sensor data - you can ledger it in and do all that. Wavelet already support IoT upfront. Dorjee: And why that’s important for our trade work, is that if you imagine self-executing smart contract, if you have sensors and IoT devices you’re then able to create web hooks or triggers for smart contracts, so you know when a particular ship moves past a particular point, then the incoterms under which the contract has been signed would be able to self execute that movement. So there’s a whole bunch of those things that are going to be able to evolve into future.

Q: Oh my gosh, Dorjee Sun and Kenta look like a father-son partnership.

Kenta: Don’t go there…

Dorjee: Thanks Randy. I like to be called a father to Kenta. He just doesn’t listen to me very much. Kenta: You’re making it worse.

Dorjee: Who is the mother?

Ajay: …please continue.

Q: How flexible do you think DApps will be on Wavelet? What do you think are the limitations to building DApps?

Kenta: (Pointing at the PERL Clicker game on the monitor behind him) That’s a pretty good representation of what sort of possibilities there are. You’ve got real-time interactions. On the more per-click level, you’ve got transactions being sent out, so you can get all sorts of nice different user flexibility. Dorjee: Put this into simple terms: so versus how 12,000 active users crashed Ethereum, what happen if a thousand people played Perl clicker right now? Well I think this is a really good example of an application, and Kenta spooled it out in a fortnight. Obviously the artwork and so forth was outsourced. Kenta: I did the UI though. Dorjee: Oh, so that’s what he does from 1:00am till 4:00am.

Q: We all know that Perlin is the fastest with 31,240 TPS, but can you guarantee that you can achieve this speed with Perlin’s main net? What are the main features of Perlin that make it valuable?

Kenta: Can we guarantee it? Yes. Very confidently. Why? Benchmarking took two weeks. We actually delayed release because of benchmarking really rigorously. A lot of people don’t give out specific stats, but we made very sure that the network settings during the benchmark really reflected that of a public network. There’s a 220ms communication latency; so that’s simulating the speed of sending a message from SIngapore to the US, and also a 2% packet loss so you’ve got a sort of hazy connection with lag every now and again. You combine those two factors together and make a simulated network environment, that’s where we got the 31,240 TPS number from. If you could have all of those network conditions to be negligible, we’ve went all the way up to 180,000 TPS beforehand, so for the private blockchain network setting where network speeds are perfectly fine and you could trust some of the nodes, you could could go all the way up to 80,000 easily, so that’s guarantee from us. Dorjee: So on my side, just to chime in from a non-technical perspective - So part of our role on the BD side is that we’re building out the ecosystem. One of the partnerships you may have seen is with Staked US, so even before main net they’ve already been trivialising us on the test-net, but we’re really keen to make staking as a service available for everyone, and as Kenta mentioned, the requirements for staking is super low and anyone can stake. Not just block producers. So just think about it, all of the income, ledger fees, and DApp fees that we’re able to direct from supply chain, international trade, and distributed computing, that will all go to stakers and those node rewards will be shared. This is why we think we will have a lot of people securing the network - because the ease of it. These are some of the benefits beyond just the speed.

Dorjee and Kenta proceed to battle each other in PERL clicker.

Final Words:

Dorjee: What we’re really trying to cultivate in the Perlin network is a community where contributions are really able to be recognised and we’re able to have authentic contributions. So if anyone out there has interest or a friend or family who works in trade finance or supply chain, well we’re really looking forward to partnering with you guys. From a cultural perspective, we’re funded for 10 years after the IEO, so we understand that this is going to be a long road to adoption, but hopefully you guys will stick it out for us. On behalf of the team, thank you so much and if you’re ever in Singapore, please drop us a note because we’d love to meet up.

Kenta: If you guys have any more questions please feel free to ask them in the telegram chat, that’s @perlinnetworkchat. The whole team is there so we’ll always be happy to answer any that you may have.