Helios Horizons - Episode 3 - Building From First Principles with Robert Sasu

Lukas Seel: 0:00

Welcome everybody. This is episode three of Helios Horizons. I'm very happy to be joined by MultiversX core developer, Robert Sasu. Robert, how are you doing?

Robert Sasu: 0:13

Hi, thank you. It's been a long day and it's 10 o'clock here, but I am quite happy, quite happy, and we had another amazing day in the team. We managed to move some things further ahead, so that's pretty great.

Lukas Seel: 0:35

Well, let's jump right into that conversation. When the Elrond team got together about like eight years ago maybe four years was the launch the first idea, I think, was like 2017 or so they came together to fix what was wrong in the blockchain space. There was the blockchain trilemma that was set out to be fixed, and when Elrond launched, which is now MultiversX, a lot of these things were really in place that set it apart from other blockchains, and I want to talk to one of the architects of that today with you, Robert. Take us back to these first moments, when you guys were starting out. What were the problems that you saw in the space and how did you go about fixing them and how did you address them?

Robert Sasu: 1:38

And with what purpose. Actually, I knew met blockchain, Bitcoin back in 2011, 2012, really early on, and already kept a few presentations about it, but I did not take time at all to develop anything because, from my perspective as a developer and somebody who likes hardcore optimizations, there was nothing to do on Bitcoin other than trading or other than keeping at a store of value. You can't really build stuff on that. Then I went into AI and then got back into the space with the Multivers X team, because they actually had a vision how to scale the blockchain from every step. And this was some of the big differences early on that it was not just about optimizing one single thing in the stack, but to rewrite everything. Back then, in the days like 2018, people were copy-pasting mostly Ethereum code or Cosmos code and then adding one or two new modules on top of it, and that was it. Or they came up with complicated solutions which did not really work, and even if there were no fancy words in how Elrond's architecture, MultiversX's architecture was designed and we did not came up with new names for our consensus algorithms or stuff like that, we were hardcore developers and engineers who actually resolved problems, what others couldn't resolve. And then the first, we wanted to resolve the blockchain dilemma, which was security, decentralization and scalability, cannot exist. All three. Choose two of them, and we demonstrated that it's possible.

Robert Sasu: 4:01

People still, even after these many years, still don't believe that so many transactions per second can be processed with low-end machines. But we demonstrated that a few times that 10,000 transactions, 30,000 transactions per second, can simply happen with a well-designed architecture, well-designed architecture, and we have innovated a lot, from peer-to-peer to storage, to how the tree actually looks like, how one transaction is processed, the whole process of a transaction. We innovated in a lot of components there and all those innovations added together in order to resolve the problems. And still we are the one and only chain with sharding, with complete architecture around sharding, everything resolved. And then, from that basic architecture which was not basic but, let's say, the base architecture of having a shardage chain with meta chain and a few shards who execute the transactions, and the meta is the coordination layer. We had to resolve fork issues, we had to resolve consensus issues. All of those were resolved and we reached this kind of ecosystem and foundational layer which simply works.

Robert Sasu: 5:40

But we never stopped at simply working. We always added new and new things as the development went on. So right now you have three shards in the meta chain. The meta chain coordinates only shard headers which have really limited amount of data only a few hashes and some signatures. Data only a few hashes and some signatures, and then all the processing is done on the shard levels. Back around four years ago, before the Mainnet launch, we had an example where we run with the public testnet with over 1,000 nodes from the community running on 50 shards. We achieved a quarter of a million of TPS all running on low-end machines, no more.

Lukas Seel: 6:49

I think it might be fun to redo that test, but let's see when we have time to do that. I agree. I think now it would be very interesting, especially with the lower finalization and all of that coming very soon. I think one of the things that I wanted to also ask about in this outset this idea of Multivers X or Elrond.

Lukas Seel: 7:06

At the time, the thing that struck me with the Elrond white paper when I read it while I was reading all the others as well was it seemed to really have this user focus that was more or less absent, or at least a secondary thought, in other white papers, or at least a secondary thought in other white papers. Can you speak more about that and maybe also how this low-end machine ties in there, because I think that's an interesting point. All of us can basically run a validator node thanks to the low technical requirements. So how did you guys think about that particular aspect, this sort of thinking about the end user think, thinking about how the network runs, but also how it's used and and how that can be used to onboard the next billion there are different things here.

Robert Sasu: 7:58

I think it was always the vision of Satoshi and all the guys who first started building blockchains and Crypto the sum of the OGs that it's not only your keys and your funds but you validate at home on your own machine. And this has super nice implications and super big implications for security and actually security against network state attacks and against censorship and actually when you run, you are able to run the whole system at home. You do not have to rely on a third party to give you the truth, because you have the truth on your chain. Some of these things have been forgotten with this L2 craze in Ethereum or the BitVM or other such things, they forgot the thing that at any time, a state can come and say, okay, this kind of software you are not allowed to run. And if your sequencer or your company developing that sequencer runs in that state, what will actually happen to all those users? All those users will have to use the exit trees on l1 to get out their funds. What about the people who have only 50 dollars in an L2? It will cost more to guess on Ethereum than getting out. So I think that blockchain and really building beautiful architectures around blockchain it's possible, but we have to keep in mind all these primitives and to build on top of these primitives. If we delete these primitives, if we delete the primitives of making it possible to run at home, if we delete the primitives of composability, if we delete from the language censorship, resistance and these kinds of things censorship, resistance and these kinds of things, then how are we different from a centralized database running on Amazon, like, actually, where is the disruptive end of the technology? I think these are one of those core things, core principles we have to keep. So that's why we always said you have to run on your own laptop the whole chain and we have to optimize for that.

Robert Sasu: 10:55

We saw a lot of other architectures going in other directions, but we said, okay, it's much better to do it like this, because blockchain is not about the big players. Blockchain is about everybody, like the whole community and every user out there. And let's say this is one of the first things that you can run everything at home. You can see that or even in cloud with all the cloud providers. They have amazingly good prices compared to anything else out there. I think it is almost the cheapest to run a MultiversX node and then, starting from there, we never stopped at only building the blockchain and outsourcing everything else to others, because we saw a lot of problems in the ecosystem and back at the time we actually went and asked about some of wallet teams or DeFi teams or other people to come and build on top of us. But actually there was not so much innovation they wanted to do, they wanted only to copy paste what they have. They didn't really necessarily care about what kind of primitives, new primitives we have, so we started to build ourselves. It was actually it was cheaper, because working from Eastern Europe it's much cheaper than working from US and we actually could innovate.

Robert Sasu: 12:41

And right now you see all these wonderful apps on the ecosystem which were, which are right, like right here, with community created, with a lot of innovations, with beautiful interfaces. Such things you don't really see in the crypto space. And we should be really, let's say, proud of everybody from the ecosystem, how much innovation have went into and how much they fought in order to create awesome applications. And I think this is another differentiator that you never stop innovating and that you look forward in order to resolve all the problems.

Robert Sasu: 13:36

And I always say that one of the huge differences with how the MultiversX team and how the MultiversX development works is that whenever there is a project, and the project comes to us and says I would need this kind of opcodes, this kind of processing, because it would resolve this, that, and that we are open to debate it and then implement it. That's how ESDT V2 have arisen, or that's how big floats were implemented or other stuff. You don't really see this kind of openness in other chains. We have, let's say, the capacity to build these kind of things. We have the architecture, the whole code. It's built on modules and interfaces, so it is quite straightforward to add new things. It's not like one mess added together and then at one point it became easier and easier to add new things and we can still do that. I think that's a big differentiator.

Lukas Seel: 15:04

Yeah, I want to zoom in on this debate on primitives and also this kind of adaptability and taking on this feedback and then building things that are needed, because I mean, obviously we're all out there seeing the scams and the drains and all of these things that keep happening, and a lot of the remedies that are proposed on a regular basis in this space are like, okay, well, set up more kind of primitives you thought were important that still differentiate multipersects from other chains blockchain is coming.

Robert Sasu: 16:06

Decentralization, scalability, security, censorship, resistance, interoperability, then composability all those things and trust and authenticity are already on the chain, and everybody who builds on top of the chain is inheriting these kind of things. So this is like the base. And then we, very early on, we have discovered how hard it is for people to differentiate between what is a scam and what is not. You know, actually, when the mainnet was launched, we put up a support team in order for them to help people, because we were actually onboarding a lot of non-crypto native people from Eastern Europe or Europe. And then we put up a call center let's call it a support team who were there day and night resolving problems. And then we just saw the abundance of how people are putting their seed phrases in stupid webpages. And then we figured it out okay, this cannot go on. And then we implemented the Guardian's feature, because, from an engineering point of view, that's the best way to do it. The best way to do it is on the foundational layer. That's why people have changed from HTTP to HTTPS. The whole foundational communication layer of HTTPS is secured and it works on another type of security than HTTP. Or that's why people have moved on from Flash, because through Flash, every single computer could be affected by tens of thousands of viruses and keyloggers and everything around them.

Robert Sasu: 18:10

It was a mess, that kind of language. With the ESDT tokens. It was somewhat the other way around. We had to create the native assets because of sharding, and let's say that was the kicker that we have to do it. Then, by doing the native assets, we have discovered, wow, these are like why haven't anybody talked about this? Like transfer and execute instead of approve and transfer from. But even when this like designing the native assets we thought it is so stupid to have approve and transfer from. That's like every scammer loves it, or increase allowance or stuff like that. And then people actually would need like a computer science degree in order to see what's a scam and what's not.

Robert Sasu: 19:22

And the thing is that a lot of OGs or a lot of projects who've been living in this bubble of the crypto world, where they made their chance in one of the pool markets and they've been, let's say, developing, and all their friends are crypto people or crypto native people, and they look around and only speak about all those. They do not see the problems of the users, they do not see the problems of the newcomers and actually they don't care about it. Like it was a video around two months ago or three months ago about like layer 2s with Vitalik Buterin, and Vitalik said that the user interface of Ethereum is great and all the L2s were saying that the user interface of Ethereum is not great. Yeah, the user interface of Ethereum is much greater than how it looked in 2016. But it's not great. So that's one of the problems that when people get used to something, they say that it's okay.

Robert Sasu: 20:43

But when you are thinking in a startup environment, when you are thinking about like all these technical, new technical things coming in, you cannot say or cannot remain the same.

Robert Sasu: 20:57

You have to evolve, you have to create more. Actually, you have to debate yourself over and over again in order to create better and better products, because that's how we can fight somewhat entropy and move things forward. And then that's what's another big, big differentiator. And, yes, some other types of execution models came up, like the SUI with Move and UTXOs and Solana with their own set of factory contracts, but they somehow resolved only a part of the issue. We went deep and we thought, like from ground up, from the primitives, that how to build these kind of things like really really, really well, and I think the multi-transfer and with the ESDTs resolves all the issues about wallet drains, plus the guardians actually protect the users and since it's implemented, there are actually no wallet drains and there are actually no reports of all these kinds of things, and we are the only ones to have this kind of security, and it's quite.

Robert Sasu: 22:28

I've read Dimi Crypto where he was speaking about security, user security, in one of the Twitter spaces and I got the same feeling over and over again. And I got the feeling over and over again in Denver and in Dubai as well. The builders some of them, or the OG builders, let's say, they are in their own bubble and they cannot see outside of it. And then they say that okay, it's the user fault. But I would say that you have to step up, step down from your high horses, because not everybody went through a computer science degree and learned the hard way and all the way what is a scam and what is not. And people who actually do not use computers so much, they do not know what Twitter is, they do not know actually, they might not even have a web browser installed on their phone because everything is Facebook or stuff like that. You cannot teach, you cannot educate billions of people. That's an impossibility, especially when, like, there is a system so like a heaven for for scammers and the nightmare for developers, with the re-entrancy attacks as well. I don't know how much of you guys but have seen, but in Facebook, Instagram there is right now. It's a video going around. It's not necessarily related right now with blockchain, but it's a video going around as how Dubai was covered with snow. Yeah, it's actually a fake video. It's an artificial intelligence fake video. But you would be amazed how many people from over 40 years of age or 50 years of age think that that is the reality, because they cannot fathom the power of AI. How can you educate such people and there are like billions of people like this in the world no, you can't do that. You have to build a better software solution for them, and that's what engineers can do. It might not be as sexy as launching a new DeFi on an EVM chain or a copy paste of another ETH L2. But that's what engineers have to do. That's how you can move this kind of space forward, the crypto space, and I still believe this is of utmost importance to have user security, because if utmost importance to have user security, because if you don't have user security, the mass adoption will not come. That's a fact I had to speak about.

Robert Sasu: 25:40

Like I shared a story about a guy who lost. He lost 250 euros yeah, but you know it was his monthly salary because he's not working eight hours per day. Even in the Coinbase wallet that USDT was. At the first glance it looked like it was real. It looked like there were over 20k USD as value. That's how in Coinbase wallet it was shown.

Robert Sasu: 26:15

And I had to dig in and I have an understanding of what blockchain means and what things can be done in order to figure out what is happening there. And we know there are scammers and they were sending him mails that he has to prepay 10% of tax before he can retrieve it. So he would have paid $2,000 more in order to be scammed, and that kind of wallet was not showing the user that he had problems. I think this is wrong and I think people have to fix this and nobody wants to fix it. But yeah, okay, we as MultiversX, we are differentiators and we build things which matters and are good. So I am quite happy about this and we build things which matter and are good. So I'm quite happy about this, Like actually resolving these problems for users. I'm quite happy about it and I see that this will be great. It might be not as sexy as some meme coins on Solana sometimes, but actually it will lead to organic growth and more coming in and not leaving because they were scammed.

Lukas Seel: 27:37

Yeah 100%, I think it's so interesting also this Dubai experience. I want to ask you about that. When you're there and you talk to these other chains and the developers on them and the and the people who lead them, what? What is the general feeling about where the space was when you launched versus where it's now? Is there a greater understanding of what users need, or is it still very much catering to the same people and not thinking about all the stuff that you just mentioned about the endpoint users and the people that we actually want to get into the space and benefit from everything it has to offer?

Robert Sasu: 28:17

People did not really care about the user security. They cared about our sovereign chain technology and the TPS around that and the VM and how Ethereum links to other and interoperability. So I spoke about that and I spoke how easy it is for developers to build applications on Rust or, as I saw in this week, that Quentin have made that kind of Swift smart contract. That was great. So I could speak about that as well. But this is the crypto world. I can think that we can go much further than this and build applications, what really matter and what resolve issues in the world. And I don't necessarily think that crypto should be about like looking for the next sexy thing which is in the crypto space, but to actually go out there and resolve problems for users, because that's how you get massive adoption. After that, you can make Ponzi schemes if you want, for billions of people.

Robert Sasu: 29:26

But this was like you know, a joke of people. But this was like you know a joke, um, but uh, I think that the blockchain has to a little bit. Developers have to move on from this kind of okay, everything is financial and everything is about tokens or points or stuff like that, and to actually create apps which will bring billions of users, and the foundation is here, like the code as the foundation, and the base layer is here. You can deploy anything you want as you want it scales. But you need to, let's say, go further on resolving problems, and I know that even the startup world has changed how funding is received in the general startup world right now because of how AI destroyed and incentives destroyed that kind of environment as well. But let's bring some golden age of good application development on top of the blockchain led by Multiverse 6. I think this is a nice slogan.

Lukas Seel: 30:48

Very nice, very nice. I'll remind everyone, we are joined here by Robert Sasu, Core Developer of MultiversX. This is episode three of Helios Horizons. We're going to give away, some EGLD, the digital gold that you need, sendable anywhere, anytime, to anyone, in the world. That's the promise of the decentralized crypto system. Just retweet the pinned tweet and you'll be entered. Robert, I want to talk a little bit about this. You mentioned this evolvement and the onboarding, the next billion. What was this sort of path that you guys saw where you felt that elrond needed to become MultiversX? Let's talk about these different sort of verticals, that that you are targeting now, and how that's different from, let's say, the initial vision, or maybe it's been unchanged no the initial vision have grown.

Robert Sasu: 31:44

Let's say, at first we wanted to resolve only the trilem, only the blockchain trilemma, but after that it became quite obvious that we can innovate so much more and that we can create so much more that it is time to evolve our vision. And then that's why the name came Multiverse to the Power of X. It's about multiple worlds, multiple industries, and everything is benefiting from the same trust layer, from the same layer of authenticity which can scale forever, layer from the same layer of authenticity which can scale forever. So that was behind the name change and it's actually much more, let's say, much more clearer or much more explainable to people, all those people who don't know what Elrond is. It's like it's only a name, but with Multiverse to the Power of X, it's actually. You have a, you have some sort of explanation behind and in terms of narratives, there are all those great narratives, from the crypto space, from DeFi to NFTs, to gaming, to payments, but I would say that developers can find and build like actually everything they want. We are like a completely general chain where you can deploy any application. You have the Wasm, which is heavily developed by Mozilla, Google, Facebook. Then you can use any sort of language to develop your apps.

Robert Sasu: 33:54

I think that one of the we want to create a new SDK for app developers where everything is abstracted away from the user, like an account abstraction with pass keys from your phone using another cryptographic primitive, the SECP-256R1. When you have the passkeys, you have an account abstraction which verifies this kind of passkeys. Then you have a relayer, the relayer service, with a subscription or with Paymaster. Then you can imagine that you can offer apps for users which are exactly the same as in Web2. They don't even have to know anything about it, they just download the app and they say okay, I have to pay $1 subscription per month. Then everything is handled from the relayers side and stuff around. That People can imagine things like okay, for the first part, until the user is in, let's say, in the free mode, transactions are not necessarily returned to the blockchain, but they are kept and signed and put it in a database and then from there, when the user starts to pay and the user wants to use the blockchain, he will pay for a subscription and then use the blockchain primitives directly. Like you can imagine having freemium games like that you play for free, whatever, everything. Then when you want to start to use new primitives and new premium features. Or you want to list your received NFT into a marketplace, then you will start using that, but actually without the need of seed phrases and stuff around that.

Robert Sasu: 36:18

I think that having this kind of like all I explained, like this, it's still, it's possible right now. You can do it, and then I think that we might see several versions of it from several developers why not? I think it's like a cool project to have in several languages because you have swift developers or javascript developers or cross developers, and then, when you have this kind of SDK, you can go to universities, to hackathons, to web, to places to wherever and say that, okay, this is how you can build an app, this is the SDK. You can start from here and then look, these are the primitives. You can directly tap into it from the blockchain space without any hassle and the user will have full security. The user doesn't have to give out authorization calls like on Ethereum it would have with their account abstraction.

Robert Sasu: 37:29

Sorry about Ethereum. I have to say it out loud that your ideas about outcall or ERC 4337 on top of the ERC tokens are wrong and they will lead to even more wallet drains. And then you have to make a better design in order to resolve those. But yeah, we will try to even innovate, even the Ethereum virtual machine with our sovereign chains, but that's another story.

Lukas Seel: 38:05

But yeah, but let's talk about that for a second. The future development, because I think that's super interesting how you guys think about the future and what apps are needed and how to get people in. You mentioned the sovereign chains a few times.

Robert Sasu: 38:22

Let's, you know, give us a quick overview of what that is and then also what other things you have planned or in the pipeline and how you think that is going to push this race forward so it's a bigger, bigger, bigger switch the sovereign chains from what we've discussed since till now, because with sovereign chains, you can use all our innovations and all we have built into the Multivers X ecosystem and launch your own blockchain. You can launch this with gravity risk-taking or without, and you can actually use the gravity risk-taking with sovereign chains, but you can reuse gravity risk-taking layer with other binaries as well. So those are two different things but can be combined together. The sovereign chains, as I said, will get all the innovations I previously discussed about, but running your own chain it's much more complicated than deploying your application on top of an existing L1. So running on your own chain has to be for application-specific, more complex things where you need different type of economics or you need a different type of VM, or you want to run it in a private environment as an industry leader or as a corporation or as a public service. So, on top of all those 30 plus things, which is from the MultiversX innovation, you will get multi- VM support as well, and that's, I think it's another killer feature, because you can actually atomically compose one of those worlds which were lost by the Ethereum developers, but you can actually atomically compose applications from multiple VMs. Yeah, all built with the Space VM or under the Space VM. But the Space VM can be talked about like two layers one is the coordination layer and the coordination and communication layer with the blockchain, and the other one is the actual executor. So, building the EVM executor with the Buildly team actually, the Buildly team built it. I just had to be in some sort of calls in which I discussed about architecture and unblocked some of the development points. That was it, and it was built only in a couple of weeks and I think it's actually faster. Not, I think it's actually faster, not, I think it's actually faster than the real EVM.

Robert Sasu: 41:34

And what you can do, how you can improve, let's say, evm, is that you make all the calls from SpaceVM and then ESDT, spacevm and the Guardians protect you for all the interactions with the apps on the EVM side. So you don't have to give approved calls Actually you need. But one such example is that or let's say, you have the guardian by default, so every transaction has to be double signed with the guardian, which is great. Then you don't actually have approval because you can do a multi-call from the Space VM, which does approve, execute and revoke and for multiple tokens at the same time. So right now, for example, on Ethereum, when you want to add liquidity to a smart contract, you have to do two approvals and an execution, because you have to approve the Uniswap contract, to take your USDC and wrap it and in order to execute something, you allow them to take out those money from your pocket Not from your pocket from the third-party deposit box, because that's how ERC contracts are. Then you can actually streamline all this process in one transaction through the SpaceVM, so improving all the UX of Ethereum.

Robert Sasu: 43:31

It will be still slower than running on SpaceVM and Wasm, but if people want to go in that direction, it will be a possibility. And then you can launch and tap into the liquidity of Ethereum and by bringing that kind of sovereign chain to be, for example, an L2 over Ethereum as well, with actually resolving some of the most concerning user security issues and plus being much more faster and cheaper. So that's possible. And other than this, the sovereign chains will enable all sorts of interoperabilities with other chains which we are planning to work together, such as Torchain, such as Polygon and maybe, if the demand grows and there is a need, even Solana or Solana VM, and then I think Near looks good as well and as they have like Wasm at base, it will be pretty easy to do that. Then you know the Cosmos IBC ecosystem through the CosmWasm. It's again a pretty simple thing to do to have IBC there. I'm speaking like simple as not. It will not take years to do it, but it will take months. And then you will have through the sovereign chains, you can offer seamless experiences between ecosystems and make everybody, let's say, happy.

Robert Sasu: 45:29

I still believe that the best to develop its own SpaceVM because it has the most opcodes and the most support for developers to build and then it is secure, no reentrances and the spacecraft SDK it's like I think it's getting just awesome. I recently tried out a few other dev ecosystems from Solana to Move. Tried out a few other dev ecosystems from Solana to move because those were, let's say, the more outlook like than Fuel was. Again one more. And I think that with the new additions of unified syntax and interactors and all the things going on on unit and integration testing and proxies and smart contract to smart contract calls developing on spacecraft SDK. It's the easiest one and we have read this one from other builders who have went into the path of developing on Ethereum or on Solana than developing, on our case, the path of developing on Ethereum more on Solana than developing on our case.

Lukas Seel: 46:40

Yeah, it's very interesting how you still kind of stand out and I think you've made some very extensive lists that were fun to read and very impressive. I want to take some time. If there are any questions in the audience, feel free to request a mic now or write a comment so I can pass it on to robert. Um, robert, on that last note, I I want to say, like elrond probably stood out as being the first blockchain that solved convincingly solved this blockchain trilemma. How would you say multiverse x stands out from, from the rest, feel free to provide a 25-point list or just give a quick explanation.

Robert Sasu: 47:22

No, I think I've wrote a few times the 25-point list, but we stand out from user security and we stand out from how easy it is to build and how wonderful applications can be built without a hustle, and users will feel familiar with their web-to-webs and then developers will feel familiar with all those, all their development outside of the crypto world.

Robert Sasu: 48:05

I believe, as I mentioned today, that there will be a flippening and I think it will happen pretty soon in the sense of number of Rust smart contract developers versus of Rust smart contract developers versus Solidity smart contract developers. It's just, I think, one or two years at most, when this kind of number of developers will completely it will be much higher on Rust than on Solidity. Rust is the most loved language and it's quite easy to develop on it, especially when you have a DLT on top of it. And I think it will be quite hard for Ethereum to actually compete with Rust, as the number of people developing Rust and the number of entities who are eager to develop Rust are just much higher. You know, all the big companies are developing Rust and stuff around that.

Lukas Seel: 49:16

For sure. I don't see any requests at the moment or intelligent questions in the chat, but that might change. Feel free to still comment. Feel free to repost the pin tweet for a chance to win electronic gold. Robert, if I am a developer and I want to start building on MultiverseX today, where do I start?

Robert Sasu: 49:42

Right now you can go to the MultiversX docs and then you can have to start with a 50-minute dump, or you can try to build the crypto zombies via our partners. There is another 15-minute dump there. That's one of the things you can start. Then you can explore all the tools people have created for the builders directly from the MultiverseX. multiverse6.com page. Those would be some of the things to do. And then even right now on the main page of MultiversX, there is a tab Builders, where you can actually start to discover MultiversX, learn how it works, go into the docs and start building your first app and actually join a hackathon. I think when there are hack hackathons, joining that it and when you have a price, they're seeing that you can get something. It really motivates the people.

Lukas Seel: 51:08

So, and it actually makes people to learn have you announced the dates yet for for the hackathons this year? I? I got some alpha yesterday but I'm not sure if it's public yet.

Robert Sasu: 51:21

There were actually. There was a hackathon in Bucharest already. Then there will be on the first week of May. There will be one in Budapest going to Hungary, budapest going to Hungary. One will be in the middle of summer, then the big one for X day, those are for sure. We might create other hackathons for other universities as well, where we are partners, because I think creating hackathons for other universities as well where we are partners, because I think creating hackathons for students actually make them learn more and then they will create a lot of things.

Lukas Seel: 52:17

Amazing. I did get a question. I hope I understand it correctly, but this is something I actually wanted to touch on but probably wouldn't have time to go into depth here. But let's talk a little bit. The governance question came up. We just had this vote on the new staking V4. Is that something that you guys also think of as a way that it could work for nation states in? In a sense? That's the the question. The question is governance of MultiversX as proof of concept for governance of nation states. Question mark oh uh.

Robert Sasu: 52:51

So for nation states, I think they would need to do some kind of KYC before and there would be some kind of regulations. But yeah, they can use the same kind of smart contracts and the same kind of process where you can vote and then have all the results live and getting around it. This kind of governance it's more like a referendum, because you have something which, let's say, would be clear and you want to activate something clear. That's why we choose to do. Governance is when, let's say, the code is ready or is in his last phase. If we made, let's say, a mistake of evaluating some stuff, then let's say, it's on us that some of the things were not activated because of that, because the vote didn't get through. It happened on Cosmos with the veto. That was actually vetoed out.

Robert Sasu: 54:12

But I think that having a vote directly on the final version, like you know you would have you would vote on the referendum, but on the final proposition of how a new law would be written I think it's better for the people or it just makes much more sense. You can have initial discussions about the idea, but the final vote should be like on on the real deal. We have like stories here in Romania where we actually have voted, like over 10 years ago, that the parliament shouldn't have more than 300 people, and it was never implemented and it was a referendum where over 50% of the people got out and voted. But it was just a question, you know, would you like to have at maximum 300 people in the parliament? Everybody voted yes. Never was implemented. But if you would have something like the law is written and would you like this law to be activated as it is stated here, on the day of whatever, that would be like much better for a referendum, and that's what we wanted to try with the governance.

Lukas Seel: 55:43

Yeah, very interesting Also this sort of direct democracy concept. Pleased to welcome Arno to the stage. We had an interesting discussion earlier today about onboarding enterprises to MVX, Wondering if the question will be related or not. But, hi, Arno, feel free to ask.

Arno: 56:03

Hi Lukas, thanks for giving me the opportunity to ask the question. Good evening, robert, and yes, the question is going to be related. This morning, Robert, we had a very interesting roundtable with Lukas, Joe Wu, Rad Reedsy and some other guys, and we came down to the same conclusion. As you know, we've been listening to you tonight and it's very frustrating because MultiversX has an amazing technology foundation, both for builders and for users, and we feel like, you know, it's not being recognized as it should.

Arno: 56:45

And when it comes down to businesses bringing more builders, bringing more businesses when you compete in the same space as some other blockchains, like Near, Solana and MultiversX is in competition, direct competition with those ecosystems you feel like you don't have the same means, the same resources.

Arno: 57:13

And so we were wondering you know, the world is what it is and sometimes, sadly, the best product doesn't win, it's not the product that gets adopted in the end, and I'm sure that everybody here we don't want that. And so we were wondering this morning morning, why isn't MultiversX raising a round, a series of money that it could? Because the way it generates revenue today, the user base, the growth it it could most likely raise a lot of money that could be used to fuel the ecosystem growth and and bring in some champions. I know you're you're not a fan of that because you would prefer people to come organically, but sadly, you know, when you're competing in the US markets, you have deep pockets that are funding ecosystems and they are fueling those ecosystems by incentivizing builders. So, yeah, that's my question why is not MultiversX playing the same game as the others in that sense?

Robert Sasu: 58:31

I think one of the answers is that we have raised 5 million versus others raising hundreds of millions. Is that we have raised 5 million versus others raising hundreds of millions? So you cannot be in the same boat because you don't have that kind of money.

Arno: 58:46

Why don't you raise 150 million, 200 million? Because the way the company is today, it could raise that sort of money.

Robert Sasu: 59:01

I have no answer as I'm not directly involved in things like raising. I'm much more for the developers. But yeah, that's actually a pretty good idea. But I would say two things.

Robert Sasu: 59:23

Raising money, it's okay, it can create incentives for builders, but one of the jobs, the hard jobs, will still remain to find those builders who will really go out and build the stuff here I see in this space, who are actually innovating and actually finding and creating new products, not just, let's say, paying a couple of million dollars for a team which have built an application on another chain to bring it to the Multivers X.

Robert Sasu: 1:00:29

It's a good thing just for the name. I think if they bring some application, then they should innovate on top of it to make it much better than it exists on the, let's say, on the base chain, because they can do it through the MultiversX innovations and then it makes sense. So but I think that even if right now there is not so much amount of money, like directly stated, that there is like I don't know 100 million of dollars of developer funds Right now, still if there are insane developers who create in super great applications, the VCs and the foundation and everybody will still fund them and make the the things happen. I still believe in this I and arno.

Arno: 1:01:45

Can I continue?

Lukas Seel: 1:01:49

Yeah, I don't want to keep robert too long. I also have another question, and I think this is a great space also in in the Agora. I think this is also a very nice, perhaps separate conversation, but I I got one more agora thing and maybe we can pin the link here as well, which is the sovereign chains everybody seems pretty excited about. There's a bunch of discussions happening on Agora. Is there going to be another governance decision on economics or or the implementation of that as well?

Robert Sasu: 1:02:24

haven't thought, uh, about that yet, about creating a governance for the gravity layer, for the risk taking, because risk-taking can have its own life and actually be somewhat a separated business and it would mean a lot more freedom for that and to move forward. We have to see, but most probably for some of the features which shared security enables in terms of the transfer and execute by user opcode, most probably there will be like, okay, let's have a vote that this address and this address will get whitelist for that opcode, because it's actually about users and it's actually about how the chains are connected and what kind of assumptions we make on those chains. So, on that sense, definitely yes, the sovereign chain SDK you know it's built, it's open source, so as it exists. But you know, for every new improvement we make and new code change we make, we will create a complete governance and voting for that in which we explain each of the features, what it brings and what's under changes.

Lukas Seel: 1:04:07

Great. Thank you so much for being here, Robert. Thank you all for tuning in. This was episode three. I'll leave you with one last question request for a short-ish answer what are you most excited about for the future of MultiversX?

Robert Sasu: 1:04:28

I'm excited about bringing billions of users through awesome user interfaces Brilliant, thank you so much. We shouldn't forget that one of the killer features of blockchain is payments, so payments shouldn't be forgotten and here in Europe we have a good chance for that to happen. On a broader sense, like on a really really broad, broad sense, pretty excited about that as well amazing.

Lukas Seel: 1:05:04

Thank you everybody for tuning in. We can continue the conversations on the agora. Well, also, Robert is obviously quite active on Twitter and and the team is very responsive on on some channels now there. So you know, go engage in the conversations, bring your ideas, because they're actually heard and some of them are implemented if they're good enough. So, thank you so much, Robert. Thanks for all the work you do. Thank you everybody for listening. This was episode three of Helios Horizons. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye, guys.

Robert Sasu: 1:05:41

Thank you, bye-bye.