Leaving as CIO to start Blockchain Company | Kevin Riedl | Podcast With Raushan #W3R8

Introduction

0:00 hi everyone welcome to another video today i have a very special guest from austria kevin is a web 3 expert previously he was a web 2 software developer then he jumped on to web3 he worked with many organization led organization as a cto and has worked as a blockchain developer himself currently he is building his own blockchain consultancy and development firm called wayvac in this episode we had really amazing conversations on zk rollups

0:24 optimistic roll ups side chains blockchain infrastructure legal side of things austria how things are moving entrepreneurship in web 3 and many more so without wasting any more time let’s just jump into the episode okay what happened oh you have to first like and subscribe to in order to move done okay hope you like it let’s enjoy the episode i got in crypto in 2018 it

Potential of Blockchains

0:49 really fascinated me what would you consider that one particular moment that changed your life like for me it was when i got i shifted to a new place with new flatmates and got introduced to blockchain what did you think about that so i was in traditional stock market and all and i was uh into blockchain with investing kind of perspective just investing in crypto but on the development side and how this can change the entire world or improve the

1:17 entire world that was something new which i found after looking deeper into the projects understanding how those projects work and what are their real world implications i think many people especially the ones that actually just entered crypto don’t even see all the possibilities that come along with that most people just see oh wow nft is community building brand building which is amazing i love it but there’s so much

1:41 more to blockchain just looking back two years ago where there weren’t such things at that scale at least it was all about nfts and and if these will change the world and i think they will but at that point we had many other use cases that have been core of the blockchain virtually it’s really really hard to to name a favorite here there’s so many interesting applications for that those with a strong real world use case are my

Blockchain Trends

2:11 favorites so recently balaji released a book called network state which talks about creating a country of decentralized world do you feel that there could be a country where the citizens are living all across the globe and they are virtually connected to that nation everything that would remove power from governments or companies is less likely to happen because they have the power now why should they give it away but instead what we see right now

2:41 is that the really large corporations are now entering rep3 they are then controlling part where the web feed space is moving so in austria um are people creating more and more web 3 startups are the meetups happening are people going to meetups are web 2 developers shifting at an accelerating pace to web3 100 it’s great that people uh are interested in this space what i don’t think is so great is that everyone just washes into it because they think

3:12 they are going to earn a lot of money with it yes i think that’s actually bad it can be entering for the wrong reasons and staying for the right reasons something a little bit sad but it’s great for adoption so why not so how did you enter the ecosystem how did we act start basically i entered in 2018 uh

Discovering Blockchain

3:31 someone approached me on i think linkedin okay and said hey uh kevin from nearby so we were able to meet physically uh i have an i’m working on this blockchain startup like a decentralized identity startup and i met him i wasn’t convinced i said no half a year later a former friend of mine approached me as well and said hey he is working on blockchain startup and i trusted him you know because he more experienced in that

4:03 specific area that got me to think okay let’s move that guy and finally it was the same one you know and that yeah made me join his startup what did that startup do they still try to provide uh identity solutions on the blockchain which many other startups always already do and um it’s a really difficult topic it’s still a major challenge and it’s always a very political one whenever there is a link between let’s say the

4:36 web 2 world or the traditional world and web 3 world which is very uh prominent in id solutions like you are connecting a citizen who has government ids and all to a decentralized organization then it becomes a challenge especially on the legal side of things yeah yeah 100 uh the legal side the whole regulation

What’s Wavect?

5:02 are you guys solving any such problem with wave act for any of your clients or your very effects in channel is uh on one side are pure uh service provider developing smart contracts the apps uh consultancy advisory workshops and so on and on the other side we also developing our own products uh but none of them have been released yet that’s uh where i’m working with other uh freelancers and now even my first employee together in within the service

5:32 provider and product area we basically also uh build some minor identity solutions yeah but it’s not like uh past then where you really try to build an app or build your own wallet and so on your identity wallet but more like uh a more modern approach i’m coming with the buzzword soulbound token for example where you have social recovery when you lose your private key you can get your nft back which is basically your identity for example

6:04 and all that kind of stuff but it’s more research at the moment oh nice so what kind of request do you receive the most from clients depends on the market cycles what are forms right now right now it’s more fundamental right it’s more technical product management advisory uh smart contracts for huge corporations which for example want to launch a security token or nft collection yeah small startup became way less since we

Startups in Bear Market

6:36 were in the bear market that’s worse that makes a lot of sense they they lost the funding they lost the fuel to uh drive so in the last bull market we had unisop we had liquidity uh incentives and a lot of new things came up so do you think a similar phenomena would happen in the next bull market you know there will always be our projects that go to the moon off the charts right but since we are seeing now a huge amount of institutional money

7:11 coming in and uh considering i i’m not an economist right i think that’s important to note but what i know or at least read is the crypto market is super inefficient still right but the more efficient it gets according to market theory the less volatility we will have which is great i think we will uh for a long long time been in a superior uptrend but let’s see how that recession is going i think the next bull market

7:44 will have such tokens such projects but they will be much more fundamental it it will be much more useful and way less the hype gets less every time what do

Advice For New Devs

7:56 you think a developer in web 2 space should do in order if they are looking to switch to web 3 or wanting to try out things and grab the opportunity in the next coming years i think the first one i would say is get your hands dirty right build your own little projects try things don’t wash into your first project because it’s not a regular software development it’s not a web app or a mobile app where you can fix things

8:26 uh during the process where you can make major mistakes when you make a mistake with smart contracts that can cost a lot of money and can also put a lot of risk on you and your client and that’s why i think uh test home development code as much as possible what are the mistakes uh which developers do in their early days we are just coding thinking it works and not testing enough not utilizing the ecosystem properly because there are

8:56 many uh for example static analyzers for example sliffer where you can analyze your smart contracts for basic security issues for example okay all right that’s something that already helps always recommend your client at least a security audit where you get some feedback as well so that also removes some uh pressure here so how can one start building let’s suppose i am a full stack developer in web 2 i know i’m on stack and i want to now shift to web

9:29 3 how can i get projects how how can i get interns

Learning Strategy

9:33 to work with especially in a global environment like web3 um first of all get yourself familiar with blockchain itself like i would never hire a smart contract developer who doesn’t know how blockchain somehow works and why blockchain exists right because you um we are getting in a phase now where smart contract isn’t the only solution right when a client comes to you and says i want to achieve that you shouldn’t think small conflict smart contract the

10:08 app and the app but what i think how can we solve that problem in the best manner for the current market for that specific client for his community right and most of the time uh when he’s approaching a smart contract developer it’s likely that it is a smart contract right but without understanding blockchain itself you’re not able to do that that’s the first thing okay when does blockchain make truly sense after understanding

10:40 blockchains it’s not important i think to understand it on the deepest deepest mathematical level because 99 don’t right and smart contract developers don’t need to work on the blockchain itself most of the time right it’s just important to understand things like consensus gas and the use case of blockchain and yeah just get yourself familiar with that topic first i’m a really practical person i when i learn something new i just start

11:15 right i don’t take 60 hour courses udemy or something like that um i basically think of a cool project like a really simple one if it’s really my first one i try to build 99 also not a project i will deploy on mainnet right but rather it’s a learning process that’s just my opinion but everyone is different and what languages should they try i would say that’s quite easy especially if you start out um start with solidity

11:46 for two very simple reasons one side uh it’s the largest ecosystem and there are the most chops out there secondly it’s way easier than rust

Polygon vs Solana

11:57 comparing polygon with solana what are your thoughts on i have my solana bags still unfortunately i love what they did with community growth it’s amazing with their blockchain gets halted all the time i think five times already this year yes uh that’s not what our blockchain is supposed to do right and solana is super centralized as well i i think it’s staying here it will grow they have a great network what’s your favorite blockchain as such mine is

12:27 right now i am leaning towards polygon tourism uh so many good projects and especially started from india so i like polygon as well but less because of at least the regular polygon chain right because it’s a side chain it’s uh not as secure as for example a voila which is much more secure way of actually building a layer 2 chain for example optimistic optimism optimistic wallops or ck wallops that are just on the rise right

13:01 now multiple x and so on they actually have much more data rooted in ethereum itself right they’re really secured by the ethereum consensus mechanism to a huge extent polygon is not how is a

Rollup vs Sidechain

13:17 rollup able to maintain the security of its parent blockchain let’s say ethereum if you are talking about optimism whereas sidechain have their own security when you have a sidechain for example you always have the responsibility to actually secure the chain yourself how can you even think of building a chain that’s as secure as a such established blockchain uh as like bitcoin or ethereum when you are much much smaller right that’s

13:48 just from a pure look what logical standpoint not gonna work because you need some kind of decentralization you need you know all that kind of stuff that goes along with consensus but when we look at wallops for example on one side we have a much more mature optimistic wallop and we have ck or more accurately validity wallops and both of them basically work with proofs optimistic call-up site for example you execute transactions optimistically the network

14:22 has some time to submit fault proofs so-called fall proofs that transaction that block doesn’t look right when it happens it just won’t be included if it is included it will be submitted to the firm l1 chain right so really we have the whole uh pipeline here you really submit the data to the firm itself and that’s how it is secured what do you exactly mean by uh submitting the transactions optimistic optimistically versus what

14:56 the side chains are doing which is transactions and computational on the their own blockchain please note i’m not 100 familiar with their architecture no worries for the viewers yeah so this is just our opinion and uh it’s not fact-based it’s not research based whatever we know we are trying to share with you guys and this is for purely entertainment purposes do your own research learn about these concepts go to the official websites to know about these

15:23 things and don’t take our word for granted so yeah please awesome perfect on a side chain basically what polygon does as far as i know uh they actually don’t really need to submit anything to film itself right the purpose of a side chain is more that you can scale right that you can move your funds from a firm to another chain and easily move it back right it’s just a very strong connected chain to ethereum but what a polygon does is

15:56 they submit some transaction data as far as i know as said and that makes it somehow seem to be more interconnected right but that doesn’t really secure the chain right it’s just submitting some data what for example optimistic follow-ups too for example if you execute a transaction on optimism right or boba or any other optimistic follow-up you basically are broadcast it on l2 right and the sequencer which is the block

16:29 producer includes it on the l2 chain and at some point those blocks are then submitted in a very compressed form to l1 right so the l2 chain is always able to reconstruct what actually happens from the l1 chain yeah that’s how optimistic wallops for example get their security and that’s also the reason why you need to wait seven days for example when exiting such an optimistic wallop because they give the network for example seven days time to prove

17:12 that some transactions may be faulty maybe not correct okay it’s just a time frame right that’s why it won’t be so easy to reduce that time frame without sacrificing um security or providing liquidity so to

Optimistic Rollup Summary

17:31 summarize the optimistic rollups network just accepts whatever transaction is coming saying that it’s fine it’s correct and then it gives seven days or whatever time is allotted for the other nodes to verify that this is faulty transaction or anything and while submitting the transaction the transaction is submitted in a compressed manner so that the efficiency uh the entire transaction is not submitted it’s like rolled up version of

17:59 compressed rolled up version of all the transactions into one transaction let’s say as almost as secure as the parent blockchain yeah okay so let’s now talk about zk roll up which

ZK Rollup

18:10 is super duper interesting and i i that’s one of my favorite things in blockchain space like in contrast to the optimistic collapse you have the so-called validity proofs basically validate the transactions right on the spot or in a very short time frame right that enables you to withdraw faster from the chain and it’s general in general also more efficient in terms of gas usage and so on but one major a really huge disadvantage

18:43 our validity roll-ups have they are not general as it’s really hard to channel generalize them because it you just can’t validate any arbitrary uh transaction by default right it’s it’s a mathematical uh constraint for example immutablex it’s a specialized chain it’s specialized on infts having a really generic chain just like ethereum bsc kcc uh arbitrary whatsoever like optimistic follow-ups you have to narrow down your validity proofs

19:21 to specific transactions right there are some projects out there like ck sync 2.0 for example and others that try to achieve that but it’s a really challenging thing i’m super excited about ck wall ups as well they come with some fallbacks as well right validity proofs leak some information okay that’s why it’s more correct to say it’s ability proof instead of ck proof for the viewers let me try to

Simplified ZK Rollup

19:50 give an analogy of how that cave works and correct me kevin if i am wrong imagine there is a cave which has just one door and the cave is circular in nature so you go all around the cave and come back to the gate now there is a second gate on the back side of the cave and uh you want to make sure that okay let’s suppose i say kevin kevin can you please prove that you have the key to that gate without showing me the key

20:16 yourself you can just go through one side open the gate cross the cave and come from the other side and that’s that proves that okay there was a gate and you opened it so definitely you have the key awesome yeah that’s uh knowledge proof yes but you can provide uh information without leaking the actual information correct for some uh party goers here if you go for example to the to the guard to the person who is uh watching the entrance yeah uh you don’t

20:51 need to show your uh id guy licensed id card yeah but instead uh you just prove him uh however with your face that you’re they can ask some questions for example yeah or asking you some questions yeah so they don’t know your actual birth date they just know you’re old enough yes or no yeah you can basically prove that you either have the information or that the constraint is correct right first step

ZK Use Cases

21:25 in mass adoption i think would be somehow connect users to fiat ramps in a secure decentralized manner and um digital ids in some manner so that they have an identity and they are able to transact fluently transact their current wealth to web 3 wealth ids if we are using zero knowledge for that it can solve a lot of benefit like so without disclosing that id number i can prove or i can validate anything on the internet which is super required i can

21:56 do the kycs i can verify my identity as well there are for example some projects out there where just an as an use case example if you uh sign up for a whitelist for an nft airdrop for example or token airdrop you always have to provide your wallet and maybe kvc yourself associated with that wallet so basically your wallet is cable seat what cks could do here for example and i saw a project and that’s actually super cool you give a c yourself

22:28 and you get a proof a ck proof that you can use to then get the airdrop to another wallet that’s unrelated to your krc so your wallet is still anonymous absurd enormous okay but you’re okay receipt right and the project owners don’t know it themselves so that’s that could be something that might work in regulatory frameworks but i don’t know they have been around for a few years as well so it’s not something shiny new that just popped up somewhere

23:05 they’re just getting some traction right now what do you think is the future of

Emerging Tech

23:10 ux in uh user experience in web3 how can that be simplified how can people do like what we are doing right now with login with google any similar things happening in web 3 world every ux uh improvement comes always with a small uh drawback on one other side right yeah sometimes maybe not always but i think in a blockchain space crypto space most of the time it does for example lazy minting or where you basically um get a signed

23:47 information message from the project owners or whoever from the government from a company it’s just a coupon code like a voucher that you can use for some things right and that would allow users for example when signing messages themselves like on openc for example they use that you can seemingly do transactions on openc without actually doing transactions right it looks like you can mint your first nft without having a single way or

24:24 eve on your wallet you don’t need any funds you can mint on polygon on openc without having funds right that works with lazy minting right you don’t actually mint something but it works different in that regard for example it looks it’s in a centralized database in open seas database that you minted that nft minted and as soon as someone buys that nft or wants to buy that that specific buyer needs funds anyway and he is actually minting the nft then

25:08 so that actually removes the whole barrier for creators for example is it same as a guest list transaction not necessarily lazy minting is for example just post as delaying the transaction for example to someone else or to a later time but guess less transactions can also be also include yeah you we do that transaction right now and you do it you execute it but we pay for it or the contract pays for it that also the company based further okay

25:40 okay that’s another one yeah we

Thanks Kevin

25:42 discussed a lot about a lot of technical things which i don’t generally do but um thanks a lot for um telling me in so much detail about those things i understand you were trying to make it simplified for the audience to understand and for me to understand but this is really cool um thanks a lot for coming thank you for having me it’s really a pleasure and i hope i didn’t get too technical i really tried to give my best

26:14 no it was perfect yeah it was perfect

Outro

26:16 thank you so much for watching till now hope you enjoyed it if you found this video helpful valuable do share it with your friends do like the video do subscribe to my channel and in the next episode we will come with another great episode so till then see you next time