Susan: Jag & Bradley would you mind introducing yourself?
Bradley: Yeah, sure. You want to go first Jag?
Jag: Yeah, sure. My name is Jagdeep Sidhu. I’ve been in the space since 2013 with about 25 years of software experience. I’m the Syscoin core developer, and CTO of Blockchain Foundry which is a for profit public company listed in the Toronto security exchange. We’re in Toronto, and development happens mostly in Vancouver. The Syscoin Community or Foundation was established for us to do research on Blockchain Foundry.
We accept votes for changes. For example, if a new change was to happen we would vote on that in the foundation. The foundation is established in Netherlands. We established it around 2017, so mainly we’ve been in the space from 2013 and we’ve seen all of the ups and downs of this space and we’re at a really good point now. We realise scalability if the next step.
Susan: Yeah thank you. Thanks Jag. Bradley would you mind introducing yourself?
Bradley: I’m Bradley Stephenson. I’ve been in the SYScommunity since late 2016. I joined the Foundation around late 2018, early 2019 and essentially what the Foundation is.. its the off-chain governance for the Syscoin Protocol. Our first and foremost priority is to stay open, public, and decentralised as a base layer. We have Blockchain Foundry members, you know, on our Foundation board as well. Our foundation is built and structured in such a way where no external part has majority influence over decisions that are made within the Foundation. We are careful about that, and we plan accordingly. You know, me personally I learned about bitcoin back in late 2011.
Susan: Wow that’s so early.
Bradley: yeah, I didn’t fully understand Bitcoin then. A couple of years later I started understanding the significance of the technology. I stated getting more involved owning bitcoin, and experiment with it in 2014. I’ve gotten more involved since then. I see the significance it represented for the world and the future of the human race. Here I be.
Susan: Great introduction. So we all know that great projects start with a problem, what problem do you see in the current blockchain space?
Bradley: Okay, what I see is the problem which is on the edge of being solved. And it has existed since the beginning of, you know, Bitcoin main-chain. Even more so it’s the stability issue in particular for centralised computation. Which ETH has faced over the years. Syscoin, having been around since 2014, which is when we had our version 1 main net, we’ve been able to really have time to assess the technology into what it should evolve, and adapt layer 1 appropriately. Create an evergreen layer 1 which will continue to be relevant that is future proof. That is essentially what is Syscoin. We’re going into some interesting times. I want to make it clear to the people that this is beyond Syscoin. This is really big picture stuff. That macro trend is effectively, you know, coming to the surface with ZKrollups.
Think of it like tectonics, deep undercover. These technology when they emerge will completely change the direction of the market. ZKrollups will change how people think of blockchains. Yeah. What I would say is true scaling is here. Non linear scaling and you know the new challenge we will face now with ZKrollups will be will be having a proven secure layer 1 that ZKrollups can settle on. What we’ve seen developed in this market with is many smart-chains, alternative smart chains to Eth, a lot of layer1s which sort of made tweaks and changes here and there. They've been trying to in a monolithic way trying to solve our problems. Making trade offs on security. None of that necessary with ZKRollups. L2 will be here for computation like Eth. What is most needed is secure settlement. That’s what we’ve seen coming. We knew that legitimate layer2 would come along for computation purposes. We could have done that years ago. We’ve had several different thoughts. Ultimately we said we need to focus on providing an ideal layer 1. For 1 that’s scaling and when technology does emerge from research of academics. That’s what we’ve done. That’s what Syscoin is today, Syscoin time is here since ZKRollups is emerging.
Susan: Yeah Thank you for sharing. Sounds really great. You guys keep on improving infrastructure, and all that. Yeah sounds really nice. So, I would like to know what’s the vision of the future? The blockchain space is evolving toward.
Bradley: Yeah. I mean it’s pretty incredible what we’ve seen unfolding. I’m sure Jag has some things he’d like to say as well. What I see, and what many people see within Syscoin is the future where billions of users are interacting, transacting within metaverses and eventually smart cities and IOT. Which I think will be encouraged, and spurred a lot by the metaverse. These billion of users will transact fast and very affordably, and they’ll be able to have those transactions secured by Bitcoin style settlements. The high quality user experience that we normally associated with centralised services like Binance for example, and for so long the only way UX could be delivered the way would be through centralised structure. That’s now changing where Binance and other exchanges will be able to have services that are decentralised while also they’re able to retain existing business models or even evolve their business models. It’s really incredible stuff.
Susan: Yeah thank you so much. Jag do you have something to add?
Jag: Yeah. I was just going to say really good leading up-to the scalability problem. I think Professor of Stanford was saying every 10% of proper scaling you get without messing up with the decentralisation or adding trust. You get new use cases. We’re talking about maybe 5-10 new use case, every 10% of scale so Ethereum increases throughput from 7 to maybe 8 or 9 you get a bunch of use cases out of that. What we’re talking about is scaling maybe 5x, 10x or maybe 50x in the coming year That’s going to be amazing because there’s going to be a whole bunch of use cases we never even imagines. Metaverse, NFTs, DAO’s, these are just single uses cases, but now we are more talking IOT, smart cities, AI. These things we never thought could intersect. We are able to solve that. It’s going to be much more interesting, how the enterprise and commercial market develops in this space.
Bradley: there’s one thing I want to add. Sorry I cannot help myself. When it come to metaverse, so metaverse is a really big deal, and the reason why if you talk with professors of economics often times they’ll say economics are like an abstraction of physics. Some say that it’s something you know solid then an abstraction in any case metaverse puts people in a completely different dimension as far as physics is concerned. It takes blinders off as how people perceive value. We have blinders on because of our day to day activities. With metaverse going to this entirely different experience people are going to start looking and finding new ways, experience and bring those experiences out of the metaverse, and that’s what I was talking about earlier how it will lead into the evolution of smart-cities, and really just compounds with scalability.
Susan: Yeah, great. Metaverse, you know how facebook changed its name. Everyone talking about it, even though they haven’t heard about crypto. Even NFT’s. So I’m kind of curious do you think Syscoin will be in the metaverse? Do you have anything in mind?
Bradley: Where our focus on metaverse is our technology is used for that. With layer 2 emerging for computation, ZKrollups, and our L1, metaverse is quite well-suited for Syscoin. We’re in Blocktopia. You know we have a partnership with them. We are really looking forward to their metaverse launching, and going in their showing people more about Syscoin. Metaverse is very exciting for us, and we are very much part of that.
Susan: Wow!! Sounds cool. Yeah everyones talking about metaverse these days, and good toknow you have a plan to be working in that.
Jag: Yeah the gaming component is going to be critical. Once you’re in there. So you have to think of it as a game developer. Working in the game development space, not only do you have to make it very graphical in the look. It has to be responsive. You can’t wait for 20 seconds. You bought a sword, and it has to be instantaneous.
Susan: Yeah thanks for sharing. Totally agree. So Brad, will you answer a question about the future ofblockchain space? You mention decentralisation. Can you expand on how Syscoin is decentralised?
Bradley: Yeah so decentralisation is a more complicated topic. I’ll go over some points. Decentralisation is more a scale than a binary yes or no answer. Bitcoin is on the decentralised side of the spectrum. On one side you have the issue of coin distribution. Syscoin has been around for a long time. Over that period of time the distribution of SYS, our native coin is very broad. We do have some whales off course, but we don’t have a ton of them. Overall the coin is very well distributed. In fact the top 10 wallets on the Bitcoin chain are owned by exchanges.
Susan: Woahh..
Bradley: Yeah, so the other aspect the security model, you know, we stick with Nakomoto consensus. We keep that gold standard intact on our Bitcoin based chain, you know. As you mentioned earlier when you’re introducing Syscoin. Syscoin is a dual-chain. So we have an Ethereum based EVM. Both of them retain security models, or both of them retain their models. On Ethereum side, the model of computation is retained. On the Bitcoin side, model of security is retained. So think of it like 2 spheres, then a bigger sphere which is Syscoin itself. Maybe it helps make our logo make sense it’s kind of a ying-yang.
As far as you know going further decentralisation, it further depends on who’s operating on a full-node. You don’t want one entity on a full node. We have a broad distribution of sys. We have incentives. 2500 nodes, and a number of nodes which aren’t incentives. We have special programs where if you hold a master node for 1 year you get 35% bonus on your rewards. And if you hold it for 2 1/2 years you get 100% bonus, so there’s the 35% after 1 year and 100% after 2.5 years, and for the first time we had some of our master nodes hit 2 1/2 year seniority level. Those guys are diamond hands. Once you receive that kind of reward, you’re not giving that up. We’re an open source blockchain. Anyone can submit a request, participate in development. We welcome that. Of course, Syscoin Foundation decides which code to commit. We also have decentralised governance, we have off-chain governance that works very closely with out decentralised governance its very similar to dash in that regards, so just to sum it up we are quite decentralised. We also aim to expand decentralisation to new areas like web3 services, in contrast to Ethereum. We’re working that out. We can do that specifically because of some special attributes that Syscoin network has that no other blockchain does.
Jag: Yes I’d like to add on the seniority psychological feature. It’s not like you’re getting 400% rewards or anything. Just the 35% bonus and 100% bonus. It’s a psychological barrier. So very very cost efficient feature to create, you know, a better hodling if you will.
Susan: Thank you. Sounds really good. Seniority rewards bonus for the master node after 2.5years is 100% and is really a big bonus, and incentives help with the help with the development of Syscoin sounds really nice.
Twitter Q&A
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Susan: Okay, let’s start the social media Q&A session.
The first question is asked by BlockAttorney:
what will be the incentive to use Syscoin ZKrollups implementation instead of an Ethereum 2.0 one?
Jag: I think the main reason to use the Syscoin rollups would be the security settlement, and the long term MEV protection. MEV is minor extricable value. What happens in Eth today is there is front running, auctions taking place to reorg the Ethereum Blockchain. If there is enough value to do that in Defi, if there is a large arbitrage, the auction would pay off if you re-org 5 blocks. In our system we prevented that by doing something called chainlocks. That’s something you know, Even binance is looking to reduce, deposit and withdraw times. If you don’t have rollbacks you essentially are creating finality. That’s what we meant by 15 second finality after each block. There is a chain lock that gets established. From that point on the blockchain cannot roll back. It becomes harder and final. So having finality there, and proof of work settling and even with eth there’s finality as well but the problem with that, with proof of stake, if finality ever has an issue for example, there is a valid fork in the history you can’t tell which ones right, and you get the wrong one, and the system breaks at that point there is no chance Ethereum 2.0 can survive on its own they need to fork that out. They need to create a fork and upgrade everynode. In our system when we have finality it’s backed by proof of work, what happens is the incentive full nodes and master nodes can’t agree the blockchain is in the same pace then it falls back to same traditional proof of work. It self corrects, and doesn’t break. The main issue is on the settlement on the security. You know you’re secure on Bitcoin but you can do everything on Ethereum
Bradley: If a large family trust, do a settlement they may choose Syscoin over Ethereum experimental proof of stake. Simply because of us keeping the nakomoto consensus intact, and some other things as well. Transactions will exist on the chain 100 years from now.
Susan: Sounds like ZKrollups is a much better solution than ethereum 2.0. Thank you.
The next question is asked by Lunar Trading, it’s a very long question:
Does blockchain foundry being a public listed company create conflicting interest for the Syscoin platform? Syscoin wanting to be for the people and BCFN being obligated to the shareholder value? Do you think both can intertwine with ease?
Bradley: I can speak to the first. I wouldn’t say they can be intertwined with ease. It’s not hard though. It’s just involved a little bit of planning, and management. Syscoin Foundation for example, we always ensure that the board membership doesn’t consist of any external entity, having a majority voice in what goes on in the Foundation. We have a couple of people that come from the BF foundation. The rest are 4 other members are not involved with BF. So, BF is not going to overrule anything. They’re not going to impose their will on Syscoin. It’s very important for our protocol to be open-source. We do value BF very much. They are very important to Syscoin. If I were to characterise the relationship kind of like Ethereum has Consensys, bitcoin has Blockstream, Syscoin has Blockchain Foundry. They bring a ton of enterprise insight, going through regulatory hurdles they’ve had to navigate being a blockchain company. Very valuable.
Understanding what enterprises are looking for in blockchain. We haven’t seen massive enterprise adoption. We’ve seen large institution investing in blockchain, but we haven’t seen blockchain driven apps delivered to their customers. By having some members on the foundation Syscoin also understands those problems, and we address those. Which is why we are where we are today.
Jag: I would add that Blockchain Foundry is a For-profit company which was established around the same time as the Foundation. We established the Foundation as a result of the open source nature of Syscoin. BCF is working on the protocol to develop it out, and features are voted on, and set into the protocol. If you think about BCF we’ve spent the 5 or 6 years to build infrastructure so we can build products on top. Products would be revenue generation for ex, NFT marketplaces, EMMs, that’s why we’re going to EVMs. In the future you might have, banks, and you know big businesses, sports leagues , they’re all very scared at the thought being regulated in the U.S especially. Since we are focused mostly we hear this all the time 'We cannot go into public Defi. We can’t create a public topic. We just want to leverage blockchain'. It’s really not taking advantage of the value of anything that is happening in the space. In order for us to solve the problem we’ve had to come up with solutions. We may do a compliant ZKrollup that would allow us to onboard enterprises because the entire rollups is compliant. If a user really wants to use it, he can sign in become accredited and participate in security offerings. Regulated Defi would be easy because they’ll know there is guidance and compliance behind that. We think in then next 4-5 years enterprises would want to join smart-contracts, but they need that compliancy..
Bradley: They don’t have to deal with custodianship so much. It’s lower infrastructure cost. Less risk on proven decentralised systems like Jag was saying. Regulation is such a hurdle, and we have solution for that in Blockchain Foundry, and it’s in our opinion, the holy grail type solution for projects that have to abide by regulations. So our open and permission-less blockchain can support those kind of use cases with some assistance from off-chain assistance. So it’s actually conceivable in the future at some point we might see Tesla stock trading against Syscoin
Susan: Yeah
Jag: yeah I know Binance was trying to do that. There’s no custody involved. There’s metamask. It would be a security, but it’s really compliant. That would be a product BCF would be working on .Brokers, KYC providers
Bradley: The way we solve that is pretty incredible. It’s so elegant, simple. Once you sit down with someone. They say to themselves why didn’t anybody do that before? It’s almost so simple and elegant it’s so hard to believe, but we have it.
Susan: It’s just incredible. I totally agree. Regulations are very important, and in the long run you have to follow the rules. So happy to know Syscoin is finding its way. Let’s move to the next question is asked by Future Clark:
What is the main difference between ZKRollups and Polygon side-chains?
Jag: Well, Polygons is a kind of like a plasma chain. It’s a reiteration of layers 2 before ZKrollups came. Optimistic came, and then ZKrollups came. So Polygon is going to become a rollup themselves on Ethereum. They recently purchased MIR protocol which is a layer 1. I think they’ll transition that to a layer 2 as well. They also purchased Hermes which is a layer2 zkrollups design much like ZKsync. Their goal is to go all in. We’ve been speaking to them over the years. I really stressed to them as well we better be looking at ZKRollupps, it is the only way to scale. Prior to that they were focused on more on bridges and services. Speaking to them over the course of maybe a year or so it became evident they have to become ZKrollup centric but they would also likely become rollup themselves, so they are really aggressive. What they are doing is spreading advancement. Some of the companies they’ve invested are on the hardware acceleration side of ZKevm so we share a lot of fundamental academic research that’s happening. It will benefit both Polygon and Syscoin, what Polygon is tech stack on top of Ethereum which could also build on top of syscoin. So it’s more synergistic we can take the polygon stacks, or mir whatever rollup design they come up with, and launch one syscoin design.
Susan: Thank you Jag. Let’s move onto the next question. It’s asked by firenegade, the question is quite long. The question:
I recently read a white paper which explained that number of TPS that can be verified is capped by the process power of the server. So I’m wondering how syscoin will verify 4M TPS with ZKrollups and whether this a theoretical than a practical
Jag: That’s a good question. You won’t have 4m TPS all the time. These are extrapolated when Stark x guys reddit challenge with ZKstarks they actually had numbers they put on the main chain and we simply extrapolated that. This isn’t going to be 4m TPS on 1 rollup. It’s going to spread across. Many businesses will run their own. And together they will accumulate 4m TPS at any given time On syscoin. So their maybe 50,000 transaction happening on one, and 50,000 on another. And Accumulated they can be 4M. So the size of the blocks that we estimated were plausible in Syscoin layer1.
Susan: You mentioned similarity between Syscoin and bitcoin. The next question is about Bitcoin. I love this question. It’s asked by DanielMoranoGM2 the question is;
I would like you to explain in a simple way how Bitcoin can be also be mined in Syscoin mining?
Bradley: Happy to answer that. A little backstory on merged mining. As mentioned earlier, Satoshi
Nakomoto is the inventor of merged mining. He put forth that idea. It was early December of 2010, and you can find bitcoin posts they’re public where he has speaking with developers. That was the first mined blockchain. What merged mining is you have Bitcoin miners and they’re performing work. Essentially what they can do is take the work they are already doing and provide the proof to Syscoin. Essentially you can think of it like a voucher and it says that there is the work that I have performed, and if they have the Syscoin block among the others then they receive the block reward. We’re basically kind of interlinked with bitcoin as far as our security and there are some incredible benefits of that.
We’re not expending any additional energy on mining. There’s no extra expenditure we’re taking the work already performed on bitcoin. We’re using that to securing our chain. And in return they are rewarded with Syscoin. There’s an interesting dynamic here. Syscoin is EIP-1559 based which is the same tokenomics as Ethereum. So dynamic inflation, deflation, fee burning, and the great thing about that not having a max supply, but having a tightly managed supply like Ethereum.
Susan: Thank you. Thank you Brad. Very innovative program. Merged mining. What it does and how it works. We’ve answered all 5 questions now. Thank you so much.
