LONDON/WASHINGTON (Bywire News) - Block.one recently threw down the gauntlet to their community. Setting a challenge to create blockchain interoperability between EOSIO and Ethereum. The bounty was set at a staggering $200,000 for the winner of the competition, and a timeline of one year given. Just three months later, with an overwhelming level of high-quality entries, the problem was solved by Syed Jafri, the creator behind Bloks.io. Then, in June, Telos launched an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on its testnet, in what is the first implementation of Jafri’s solution; an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) implemented on the EOSIO blockchain. Ethereum smart contracts, running seamlessly within EOSIO, for the first time ever. This solution will create a bridge between the two blockchains and allow developers to build and deploy decentralised applications faster and with no middlemen and without using a new codebase. Developers will be able to code in Solidity and deploy those smart contracts on EOSIO.
Michael O’Sullivan spoke with Bart Wyatt, Solutions Architect Director at Block.one to talk more about the new solutions and what interoperability might mean for the blockchain space.
MoS: Describe your role as Solutions Architect Director for Block.one, and what drew you to working within this emerging technology, particularly with Block.one?
BW: The role is relatively new for me. I’ve been with Block.one for three years and have been Solutions Architecture Director for almost a year now. The thing I like the most about it is that I’m now directly responsible for going out into the real world and meeting businesses and seeing how it can make an impact on what they do.
We’ve talked a lot about the blockchain being a transformational technology which can change the way a lot of people interact with each other. Until someone goes out there and actually shows these businesses how it works and explains to them the benefits it can have, it’s hard for them to really see it and really get it.
I came from a heavy engineering background. I was there before version 1.0 sitting with the rest of the engineering team leading it and trying to get the software out there into the world so various public networks could launch on it. So, to see it coming into being and also be in charge of taking it even further and introducing it to new people and showing them what it is capable of has been a treat for me.
MoS: Can you explain what blockchain interoperability means? And, given the comparison to Windows and Mac incompatibility, how important was the implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine?
BW: What we’re looking for with interoperability is; when I say bring blockchain to the world, I don’t just mean EOSIO. I mean all of the blockchains. We have a set of blockchain technologies, Ethereum being one of them and EOSIO being another one.
They all have some trade-offs. They are all good at one particular thing which is the core fundamentals of the blockchain and that’s what we want to be out there in the world. To get that done, we need to work together. It’s kind of a team game at this point and without the ability to work together and interoperate we leave half or the other of the workforce and the brilliance on the table and that’s not going to get us where we want to go.
So, with things like bringing the EVM into the EOSIO ecosystem, we’re trying to open the door and say why don’t you come over and see what that technology… and you liken it to Windows and Mac and that’s accurate to a point. At a developmental level, these developers are trained into the blockchain concepts. They know how to transform businesses but they have picked a toolchain which for reasons which are a little bit unknown to me are tied to consensus mechanisms and each one of those has a pro and con.
We want to break down those borders. There are times when Solidity and the developer workforce there is going to be a better fit for a business and EOSIO will be better, and we don’t want to force people to make a misfit because they need some of the guarantees such as delegated proof of stake offers or they have differences in opinions about how you manage resources on the blockchain. It’s those kinds of decisions that we separate out. We invite people to come and hear all sides of the argument, so by inviting ESM into the EOSIO ecosystem, we not only said to Ethereum developers ‘come over to our side’, but we actively promoted some of the best and brightest minds in our community to go and study the EVM to get down to how they would implement it themselves. We’ve sent our emissaries out to talk and make sure that, when we go forward, we do so as a team.
MoS: So, are you saying now, today, any Ethereum smart contract can be run within the EVM without any code modifications on any EOSIO network and, if so, how important is that transformation for the wider community?
BW: As of right now, with the work that Syed and his team have done, you can drop almost every Ethereum contract right on top of an EOSIO chain, hook up the exact same client, point it to a different web address. Everything just works, straight out of the blocks. To their credit, they went the extra mile from the challenge perspective and adopted some of the common tools and frameworks so they will work straight out of the blocks too.
I think this is very important. It’s going to start a conversation and break down walls and get these developers talking to each other, but it will give people who have made a choice one way or another more freedom. They might have chosen to develop on Solidity and then, at the last hour, something changes about their business use case or another very successful application launches and it becomes congested and they’re looking for safe harbour. We’ll give them an option with no strings attached. Just drop it on the blockchain and continue with your business operations.
When that happens, it’s going to raise the ecosystem generally. We at EOSIO will get a benefit even if it was authored in solidity on Ethereum.
MoS: So, are you’re saying you could run costless transactions, Ethereum smart contracts on EOSIO at a rate of 10,000 transactions per second with no gas fee?
BW: Sure, that is one possible configuration you could run. Remember, governance on EOSIO is a flexible thing. So, as you look across the pantheon of the EOSIO chains, you’re going to see different models and transaction templates because they’ve incentivised their block producers in different ways and the options you’ve given developers to fit their business use case, those options are huge. Everyone likes free transactions, they’ve powered a lot of the EOSIO ecosystem, but that’s not the only business use on the table and EOSIO affords them all that opportunity.
MoS: Given the hackathon was originally intended to run for a year, were you surprised by how quickly Syed Jafri, the genius behind Bloks.io and who won the bounty, solved the problem?
BW: While Syed is a genius and we’re very happy with what his team did, there were half a dozen other teams which did an amazing job. We had to pick a winner. There’s a broader thing which blows me away which is not simply that they are able to do it, but the community behind this technology believes it so much that we’ve got multiple teams of geniuses out there who can solve this problem in a third of the time we thought it would.
We wanted to challenge the community and have them ask what they can do if they put their minds to it and dig in. And the response blew us away. If we could elevate all of them, we certainly would do it, but it turned out there were more of them out there. There are truly amazing teams taking EOSIO to a level we suspected was possible but hadn’t proved it yet.
MoS: What motivated you to offer a bounty rather than try and solve the problem internally or hire a team and do it yourself?
BW: There’s the old adage, ‘if you teach someone to fish they’ll be fed for life’. We at Block.one are trying to be a part of this movement. We hope to be thought leaders, but it’s going to thrive on the grassroots effort. We wanted to incentivise an explosion of interests in pushing the boundaries of EOSIO and get the community bootstrapped into the idea that they are in the driving seat and they can really make this thrive.
MoS: Do you plan to offer similar bounty projects in the future?
BW: In the future, what I can say is that we are going to continue to work with the community and try to incentive this feeling of working within a community to deliver community led innovations and community led development. We are going to be there as a partner to the community. We can not really talk more about the specifics at this stage, but we will be constantly looking at ways we can make an impact and do those things. You have to remember we did the EOSIO challenge and the virtual hackathon this year. Those are two experimental things that had really good success and really got the community engaged. I am sure we will try more things like this in the future.
MoS: Block.one has often been described as the ‘Ethereum Killer’. By paying a $200,000 bounty, were your intentions to improve the overall community of the blockchain or are you building a bridge for users to travel easily across from Ethereum to EOSIO?
BW: That’s a possible interpretation. It’s hard to do something in the industry which can’t be interpreted one way or another. In order for us to get those two blockchain technologies working together, with an application deployed on Ethereum and EOSIO, you need the developers to understand each other. This was one of the better ways we could think of to get our developers talking to each other across that border.
The technology itself might also be able to facilitate that, because it is nice to have code you can write in one language, and be able run on both sides of a bridge [blockchain], without having to mess around with the rest of it. I do not know if it would have looked better or worse if we had tried to write a solidity contract that runs EOSIO [C++] on Ethereum. Someone had to take the first step into this idea of interoperability. Here is the olive branch, lets get talking, lets get this solution working.
MoS: What does this mean for the general blockchain community? Will it increase collaboration and what real-world outcomes can we expect to see?
BW: I hope it does increase collaboration between the two communities. There are a lot of opportunities out there in the world right now with the pandemic and everything else for industry leaders to come together and solve bigger problems.
At the core of each one of our missions, we have the idea that blockchain can transform the world for the better and, I don’t know if you’ve looked around, the world’s going through a bit of a hard time right now. It could use some help.
When you look at blockchain as a nexus of technology but also group movement community action and incentives, and you look at some of the problems which have been exposed by the pandemic, I think there are a lot of use cases in that for blockchain, but there won’t be one blockchain which comes along and suddenly aligns the entire globe to address a pandemic. We’ll have to work across geographical and political borders but also technological borders. I want us to be prepared as a community to address those things when they come up and work to a bigger goal than just trying to win the blockchain race.
Now is not the time to be trying to take over a small section of the pot. Now is the time to expand the pot. The rising tide raises all boats. We’re in a situation where the blockchain can have transformative effects on a lot of industries and really change a lot of people’s lives. We just need to do it and we can do more of that more quickly if we work together.
MoS: Did the emergence of DiFI have any bearing on the acceleration of the need for an EOS/Ethereum interoperability solution and do you think interoperability will exist between most blockchains in the future?
I don’t know if the emergence of DiFi had a large effect on it, but decentralised finance will certainly benefit from interoperability, but not to toot our own horn, we have a lot of successful projects like that, already in EOSIO. So, I do not think it dramatically accelerated the need for interoperability, we just need it.
In the future, yes, for the most part, I do think this will become standard across many blockchains. Blockchains will be judged on how well they operate with each other, especially with regards to legacy systems, as we modernise, older chains will become foreign chains, so, again interoperability is key to sustaining the infrastructure long-term otherwise we would not be able to run applications on older chains.
MoS: Are there any limitations to the current solutions and how does Block.one think they may be overcome?
BW: Even though the work is stellar We still have to consider the improvement concept. We took EVM and Solidity off the shelf to see if we can do it. That doesn’t mean it’s the best way for Ethereum developers to come into our ecosystem and for EOSIO developers to discover the Ethereum system. Now that we’ve opened that door, we’ve got testers. We can look at their experience and say what didn’t quite meet our goal and adapt to it. It’s going to take a little while to look at this system and think what’s good and what’s bad and evolve. I don’t think this is the last word in EOSIO integration. It’s the first. Every journey has a first step.
MoS: Do you have any concerns around security or are those alleviated because of the EVM? And, will you look to improve EVM or even synchronise error handling, given the lack of try, catch, throw, error handling within the EVM?
BW: I don’t think we’re going to take efforts to change or evolve the EVM. That is not ours to move. Since we’re starting to work together, I’d be interested in joining those conversations. I don’t think we’ve adopted any additional security risks. EVM was pretty well battle-tested. Aside from some of the well-known issues with EVM from their history, there are no additional problems which have emerged from embedding into our machine.
I do hope we’ll work more closely with those tech teams and understand how their changes in the future and our changes in the future will affect each other.
Two different languages talking to each other has become normal. You don’t see many technology stacks which are working with a single language all the way through. As a broader industry, we’re good at adapting to using the right tool for the right job and I’d like to see even more languages show up. Because every one which shows up comes with a base of developers which is well trained and maybe just missing some of the nuances to blockchain and the more we can reduce the barrier to entry the more talented developers will align to our cause.
MoS: What advice would you give to someone starting out in the blockchain or in tech in general, given many may need to retrain given the looming recession and growth of the sector?
BW: I think now is a better time than ever to get into the blockchain. I would think we have a really compelling offering and set of tools, but if you decide you want to go somewhere else, we’ve already set up the bridging network so you don’t have to worry if that decision has put you at risk of being out of date.
My advice after, of course, try EOSIO, would be to go straight for how blockchain transforms the experience I’m trying to make. If you study what blockchain can do, and you nail that, the rest will fall into place. You will find many people in the community who will help with the rest of it. We’ve done a lot of work with these communities to ensure the technology is stable. We need the next level of innovation to allow developers to nail the use cases.
Look at the fundamentals of blockchain. Understand how it can affect the information which is being processed by the application you are making.
(Reporting and interview by Michael O'Sullivan, written by Tom Cropper, edited by Klaudia Fior)