Writer, Editor: VaporAviator (M), Jiahui (F)
Meta Potatoes finally launched our English channel {PotatoEng}! We will mainly focus on emerging projects that are building the foundation (technically and ecosystem-wise) for Web3 and Metaverse.
Hello everyone! With the high exposure of Web3 conferences and events over the past few months in New York, Meta Potatoes finally launched our English channel {PotatoEng}! In our conversations with practitioners, investors, and entrepreneurs from all over the world, we got attention from many friends interested in Meta Potatoes’s podcast and look forward to our English content.
Yeah, we’re excited to start the bilingual mode and invite the core founding team members from Web3 developing projects we are interested in, to be our guests on this English channel! We will mainly focus on emerging projects that are building the foundation (technically and ecosystem-wise) for Web3 and Metaverse, at the same time aiming to onboard more users. We will make each episode one-project-focused, and will also talk about market trends, industrial ecology, etc., in some episodes.
As always, we want to introduce Web3.0 and metaverse technology support, application scenarios, etc., to our audiences who are interested in this field but not familiar with the specific technologies or terminologies, by introducing interesting projects and explaining the tech details in a casual and pleasant way.
{Potato Eng} will become our fourth channel in addition to {Potato Cultivation}, {Random Ideations}, and {Potato Tea Time} series, and will be updated under the name of Meta Potatoes. The English transcript will also be published on WeChat, Medium, and Mirror.
Nevertheless, we planned to build our Discord channel into Meta Potatoes’ Farm for developers, designers, BD representatives, marketing experts, and Potato enthusiasts to communicate with each other. Welcome to get your Potato identity (there’re no ordinary ones in the Potatoes Farm! haha), and start your Web3 cultivation today!
🌟 Project of this Episode: Blockless
Established in Dec 2021, now in private alpha testnet.
🥔 Potato Host & Guests
Butian | Blockless Co-Founder; Ex-NGC Ventures investing crypto, Ex-Lightspeed. First got into crypto in 2017, WABI COO
Liam | Blockless Co-Founder; Ex-NGC Ventures. Prev Defi researcher
CoHost F. | Ex-theatermaker; Ex-VC investor; Building Web3 infra
CoHost M. | Experience designer; Strategist in Web3 & Immersive tech (Due to technical issues, her voice wasn’t well received during the recording, so this episode is mainly hosted by F.)
{ 1 }
What is Blockless and the advantages of decentralized web services over centralized ones?
Butian: A refresher about Blockless:
Off-chain infrastructure. Off-chain: anything that is cross-chain or cannot be built solely on a single blockchain.
Decentralized web service that supports hyper-applications that have both on-chain and off-chain components through crowd-sourcing all the compute power (from mobile phones to supercomputers).
Liam: Blockless is at the bottom layer of the modularized Web3 stack. Prev blockchains like Ethereum have consensus, execution, and data availability all in one, which causes (mostly) scalability issues such as high gas fees, slow transaction processing, etc. It’s been a trend to take the modular approach where different functions of the stack are separated. So the entire ecosystem can be more efficient, production-level, and real-world.
Q: Speaking of web services, people may be familiar with AWS, Google Cloud, etc. What’s the advantage of decentralized web services like Blockless over centralized ones?
Liam: Take a step back to look at why we did a decentralized version of cloud services.
Two use scenarios: modular blockchain ecosystems (a layer that handles exclusively the load), and off-chain applications.
In Web3, 5–10% of activities are on-chain whereas the rest are built on centralized clouds. If we believe in a decentralized future, we should have decentralized web services built for Web3 native stacks — the starting point of Blockless.
Think of current off-chain applications like Chainlink, they’re building and maintaining their own backend or node network. Lots of monopolies happen in the off-chain space because building one’s own node network is tedious and time-consuming and requires engineering power. (It may take a year to build the infra even before pushing out a private alpha)
So with Blockless, off-chain applications can just deploy on a decentralized web service stack and they’ll be off-to-go within several months/weeks.
{ 2 }
Off-chain, and the modular blockchain world
Q: For non-Web3, non-technical people, could you explain a bit about off-chain? Does it stand for Web2 activities or is it another space?
Liam: The trajectory of progression of Web3:
Monolithic blockchains (like ETH, BNB, AVAX, etc.), everything is packed into one protocol. Adv: can handle everything. Downside: low efficiency, and scalability issues.
They are self-sustaining ecosystems detached from any of the current Web2 tech stacks. You can’t easily call the outside data and put them inside. (Oracles are needed)
Imagine all blockchains are individual silos that are self-serving and there’s (almost) no composability between them. (Bridges are needed)
Prev problem: mostly scalability issues and mostly with ETH. Now, with the expansion of blockchain networks, the problem becomes: the space is quite fragmented and requires lots of outside services feeding data into the ecosystem to make things work.
So Blockless is the underlying omnichain fabric and connects blockchain to Web2 services. Abundant data and activities in Web2 can be discovered by Web3 communities and easily integrated into the blockchain ecosystems.
Butian: Blockchain itself is a database, a shared ledger, and a closed ecosystem. If we believe that one blockchain will take over the entire space, then there’ll be no such thing as off-chain. However, it will not happen in the foreseeable future.
A big gap the industry needs to close is that, in a multi-chain world, things on-chain can talk to things off-chain. How do we utilize the entire tech stack to integrate real-world transactions, business activities, etc. on chains — that’s where off-chain comes into play.
Off-chain: the interoperability between the blockchain and the rest of the world.
Q: Thanks for the clear explanation. I read an article by Polynya that talks about blockchain functions of execution, data availability, and security. I saw on your (prev) website that Blockless is on the execution layer, could you elaborate on that?
Liam: The purpose of blockchain is to have a shared database with unified truth. The usual procedure to publish something on this ledger is:
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Everyone in the network executes a piece of arbitrary logic (a smart contract, or any piece of code) and gets a result
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Everyone agrees on this result (run the same logic — get the same result)
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Everyone updates every single ledger in their computers and gets a unified truth
The problem is, (just on ETH), there are thousands of validators, and for everyone to run the logic and reach a consensus is enormous work. There are several ways to cut down the computational burden in the system:
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significantly decreasing the repetitive work existing in the system (2 nodes instead of 2k nodes executing to get the result);
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developing customized consensus mechanisms (ZK, Optimistic, etc.) that verify the result is true and uploading this consensus/proof/truth to an arbitrary blockchain.
Things are oversimplified here, but that’s basically how we solve the Web3 scalability issue now.
As for Blockless, imagine a global computer network (can be phones, laptops, server clusters, etc.) where the workload (say, of a spec task) is automatically dispatched to individual computers. Say, there’re 1k computers in the network. One workload is dispatched to 3 of the computers. The 3 computers execute it and conform to an arbitrary consensus (that is defined by the developers), and the final result can either be uploaded on chains or sent somewhere else (other databases, etc.). In this way, we take a lot of load from monolithic blockchains and move the execution off-chain while maintaining certain degrees of security. That’s how we envision the future.
{ 3 }
Connect on-chain and off-chain, Blockless and other pathways
Q: The notion that everyone can join this network and contribute computation reminds me of community network projects like Helium. What’s the difference between Blockless and Helium?
Liam: Helium is single-purpose: providing Wi-Fi connections to people. Blockless is general-purpose: arbitrary applications can sign in, get executed, and return to results. You can’t really do that with any of the off-chain node networks out there.
Q: There’re lots of ways to bridge between on-chain and off-chain. Decentralized node network is one of the technical pathways. I would like to ask why Blockless chose this pathway out of others like oracle, community network, etc.
Butian: Tech stack -
- At the bottom: Hardware
Helium is a hardware provider and they build Wi-Fi services on top of that, bundle them as a monolithic entire stack and sell it.
2. Upper layer: Software Infra
The analogy of Blockless is the run-time environment, where you can define your own functions and spin up your own applications.
3. On the top: Application
The bottleneck is not with oracles, because they are just applications. The bottleneck is actually for the middleware to utilize the hardware and have a more general-purpose infra where everyone can code some sort of apps without setting up everything from scratch. That’s why the industry is “slow” in a sense. Say, in Web2, anyone can code several lines to set up a website, whereas in Web3, unless you’re trained to be able to code in Solidity/Rust/Move, etc., you have to pay a lot to devs to help you set up the node network as the fundamental layer of the infra to run your oracle (or any other apps). That’s why the middleware is me, Liam, and a bunch of other devs is paying attention t/
{ 4 }
Developer use cases and the notion of Serverless
Q: Blockless is developer-facing. Can you contextualize in which scenarios developers will use Blockless in the process of building decentralized apps?
Liam: The ethos of Blockless is to 1) enhance the overall dev experience, and 2) bring decentralization and Web3 connectivity to the entire workflow. Building on the ethos, the dev experience is similar to using traditional web services like AWS. We really take pride in that.
The main product we’re pushing out is Blockless Functions. Imagine a function-as-a-service platform that has serverless functions traditional devs are used to and responds to on-chain and Web2 cloud events. Completely WASM-based, multi-language, and multiplatform-support. User experience like AWS, Cloudflare, etc.
The second product we’re shipping out later this year or in Q1 2023 is Blockless App Engine. We will recreate the entire virtual machine running on Alpine Linux within WASM and provide a managed environment for devs to build full-set apps. User experience like Google App Engine.
At the same time, we also integrate a majority of Web3 APIs and call it Blockless SDK. One of the pains devs have now is the integration with blockchains, oracles, indexers, data storage providers, etc. individually and repetitively. There’s so much work and you also have to set up the account for each platform and set up the payment reel in fiat or crypto. For the latter scenario, Blockless SDK is really the simplified and unified way of solving this, you just call the functions (like blockless.sv or blockless.ipfs) and all of the payments go through Blockless payment reel, which is Web3 native — you only need to log in with Web3 credentials like MetaMask wallet, pay in different currencies, processing through different ecosystems and they are all going to be our own token BLS. It’s really convenient for devs to use.
That’s how devs can use Blockless — you build an app and deploy it on Blockless, and off you go. For example, if you build a Web2 app and need to interact with smart contracts on ETH, you just call blockless.ethereum and it’ll pop up all the APIs. It’s that easy.
Q: I’ve been talking to devs who are not that familiar with the blockchain space, they said that when they look at your website, they think of a concept “serverless”. Putting the blockchain aside, does this concept relate to Blockless, in general?
Liam: Serverless is definitely a huge trend in all dev communities. It has multiple advantages (in scaling/integration/etc.) over the traditional way of building apps, whether in Web2 or Web3. That’s why we take that approach. But we also recognize that many people are still building apps in a monolithic manner. That’s both good and bad.
Here’s the reason why we applied a serverless architecture is our tech stack:
Think about recruiting 3k nodes (even if they are just avg computers), you need to consider lots of real-world issues like the sudden shutdown of computers, no additional processing load due to playing video games, etc. We take that into consideration.
We call them “resource nodes” — they provide computer resources and receive payment accordingly. The way we’ve done it is through a WASM special run-time environment customized by our team, providing security, extensionality, as well as the ability to track precisely how many resources one computer has contributed.
For minimum load and processing time for each node, we made the key decision to take function-as-a-service. Then our R&D took a step forward to recreate a full-fledged virtual machine within WASM (WASM is a standard newly developed in the last few years, you can run WASM on a browser — web-native, light-weight, multi-platform, multi-language), which is really hard. But just a month ago, we discovered that it’s potentially possible. We’re working on it right now, and if we bring it out, I believe it’ll be a huge progress for both Web3 and the WASM community.
Butian: Serverless services help remove the overhead for devs to manage their servers and align with the modularization in modern development work. Remember the days when we didn’t have Amazon/Shopify, etc. it’s really hard to run an e-commerce shop — you have to do the backend, frontend, and almost everything on your own. Serverless is like a one-stop “third-party” service that runs the shop for you. It’s similar to what we see will happen in Web3 and Blockless really falls into this philosophy of development.
{ 5 }
Regular user cases and Blockless’s competitive edge
Q: Let’s put the development aside, and talk about how ordinary people can use Blockless, and how you reach out to that community.
Liam: We call node operators “network contributors”.
Prev node providers: not really putting the user in front. Open-source, need to read tech doc to get started, pretty tedious setup process, install their software, join their node pools, and become resource providers.
Blockless: a user-friendly way for people to plug their computing resources into the network. Download Blockless app, open it up and it will automatically run a script where you can choose the payment and incentive method. Right now, incentives are calculated based on resources or time (in this case, you need to stake tokens). Graphical user interfaces, and easy-to-install.
I believe it is a great step forward for the entire Web3 ecosystem.
Q: Are there any similar providers (say, competitors) in the space, and what’s your competitive edge?
Butian: Talking about our “frenemies”, I’m actually listening to Akash’s Twitter Space this morning. Akash is our partner and arguably our competitor because they are a distributed cloud service provider, which is also crowd-sourcing long-tail service providers that don’t have all their services working 24/7. They provide this service to Web3 protocols or Web2 businesses in need of cloud services. Blockless is one layer on top of them, as we utilize their cloud services and make it easier for devs to use web services with ready-to-use functions/templates/etc. That’s one partner we’ve been working closely with.
Some competitors provide peer-to-peer apps running on other hardware resources with SLAs or some permissionless arrangements so that those apps can open up the device for them to be part of it.
Another vertical of competitors is players trying to consolidate from the ground up (having their own nodes, oracles, apps, etc. all in one). Especially at the early stage of the industry, people are good at providing those kinds of monolithic services because you can’t just have apps without an infra.
Blockless is a decentralized computation engine running as long as the ecosystem supports smart contracts. We’re definitely not alone, and we’re really trying to combine the flexibility and easiness to build in Web2 and the decentralization and security in Web3.
{ 6 }
Bear market impacts and Blockless’s future plans to democratize Web3
Q: You’ve already shared future plans. Let’s focus on now. Does, and how does the bear market impact Blockless, and how do you deal with it?
Liam: I don’t think the bear market affects us that much other than it’s harder to receive funding. But we do believe quality products will have more exposure and market in the space.
In the bear market, it’s easier to hire better, more qualified devs, and it’s easier to focus. Prev as investors, we tended to be lost in constant market cycles (DeFi, NFT, GameFi, etc.). Now, we’re with Blockless full-time, heads-down, steam ahead, going towards the future we actually believe in, and really have no time to hear much about what’s happening outside.
Q: A question for the founding team of Blockless, what will be the future of Blockless and Web3, and how it will relate to everyone’s daily lives?
Butian: My vision for Blockless (and the industry) is that one day we’ll stop talking about Web3 because it’ll be the reality. We won’t worry much about how to put Web2 and Web3 together, or all the integration issues, instead, we’ll be talking about apps. Probably no one will talk about Blockless because it’ll not be a “visible” infra solution, they’ll talk about application-level innovations that end users can see and feel. Instead of taking a couple of years/months to develop, it’ll take days/hours to see our ideations become reality.
Liam: First, I believe in the Web3 future. But in terms of decentralization, there’re perfect use cases that need to be decentralized, and also perfect use cases that do not require global decentralization. My hope for Blockless is to bridge between the current Web3 community and the Web2 world, so that in the future, people will forget about Web2 and Web3 and really see the entire stack as a continuous progression.
Second, I want Blockless to be the platform for sth we’ve never seen before. Benefiting from WASM expandability, we can allow different types of hardware to join as a network contributor — what does it mean? Now you have computers. Imagine sensors or other electric vehicles can also provide resources (sensor data) to the network via our WASM extension.
In that way, it will be a global computation network that can do much more than computation. For example, software wanting to display global real-time temperature can get access to all the weather sensor data from the Blockless network. Like Apple App Store serving users, the Blockless “App Store” is serving devs so that they can create more robust software with more and better data sources.
That’s a double-layered answer.
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