Transcript

(00:00) [Music] um thanks everybody for sticking around we are here for the last session today definitely not the least uh one of the ones that i’m most excited for um very very happy uh and privileged to be able to introduce uh hugo fillion uh who is an incredible founder has become a dear friend uh and is the founder of flare.

(00:31) x which is an incredible project that is adding um utility to chains which have less utility he’s going to tell you a lot more about it and i have to say that he’s come out in the past you know four maybe two months as a really strong supporter of handshake um and it’s really interesting to see uh peop people from uh different chains and protocols who are finding ways very interesting ways to kind of use the handshake ecosystem in the handshake blockchain for ways that thanks jihan um let me see if i can

(01:02) share my screen uh that might help um let me play this uh hopefully everyone can see that um i can’t see you guys now i can only see this this presentation um so so what i want to discuss today if that’s possible um to try and break down quickly is how how really why we’re building flair and and how flair might uh add some additional utility really to the handshake ecosystem through uh potentially the the use of the creation and and distribution of slds on flair but also the tokenization of tlds and of course slds uh as sort of i guess

(01:52) nfts um and then also additionally you know why flair might be an interesting option uh in order to i guess increase the community that handshake um has uh you know available to it so i’m just gonna jump out of this presentation for a second just to make sure that um i’m not getting any messages that say you can’t see anything or anything like that okay cool um great uh so yeah let’s just um let me just jump back to that then no that’s a long one okay so okay there we go great so you know without further ado

(02:41) sorry about that um one of the things we think about a lot and uh really sort of the the reason why flair exists is that uh you know in our industry a lot of people talk about adoption and getting mainstream adoption um and all that kind of stuff but but decentralization is quite a tough topic for people to understand uh and you know it’s it’s something that’s i feel you know we’ve got this this group of people uh users and value um that exists already in our space but are massively underutilized

(03:22) because if we we think that many of the sort of leading applications now are smart contract based um really you’ve then got this huge kind of tail end of things which is uh not accessible really to smart contracts in a decentralized way um or a trustless way i appreciate that there are bridges that have been built to different networks however uh you know we we’ve we’ve done a lot of analysis on those kind of bridges and and most of them have an element of a custodial or a centralized nature so really we we look at this this

(03:56) ecosystem you know bitcoin xrp litecoin bitcoin cash stella doge even cardano which today doesn’t have smart contracts or or even potentially i’ll go around um and to us that’s a huge amount of people and a huge amount of value that really can be brought into an ecosystem and then uh hopefully used for for the greater good and really that’s the place if we want mainstream adoption that we feel we should start um so you know as a brief intro to what flair is trying to achieve uh it’s built to bring scalable

(04:32) trustless smart contract utility to tokens and networks that don’t have it that’s kind of our strap line is actually unlocking value symbolism we see a token and its value as just being like a currency um and we see the user base as people and not you know not uh people that we want to necessarily push away because they don’t share exactly the same ideas as everyone else with regards to decentralization and that kind of stuff uh so uh that’s really what we’re building it for and so flares really being built to

(05:06) allow these networks um to access smart contracts and the really cool thing which i’ll hopefully touch on at the end is that the wave flare is structured it’s a federated byzantine agreement network uh it’s the first kind of fba uh that that has uh capable of uh being touring complete so it integrates the ethereum virtual machine uh and it allows uh each underlying network so let’s say handshake let’s say bitcoin and say stella to participate in the consensus and and that’s a complex idea but

(05:40) uh i’ll try and bring out security testing we’re going to go open source in april uh and then we’re launching in june july so one of the things that flair is trying to do is we have something called the f asset protocol and that’s an economic trustless bridge from each of these these networks that flair will attach to so at the moment it’s xlm xrp doge and litecoin uh and you know potentially you know many many others uh and of course handshake uh but the economic bridge for handshakes uh a little different we don’t have one

(06:14) we’re not planning on building one yet uh there’s a there’s a different thing that we’re building for that and i’ll come on to that in a second but the idea really behind flair at its sort of core is to bring the value from these networks onto a smart contract platform so that they can be cross-composable so that we can aggregate the liquidity because a lot of the um solutions i see at the moment that are being put forward as interoperability solutions actually they fracture liquidity across

(06:43) uh you know zones or subnets or whatever they call them um they fracture that liquidity and and to me actually the big breakthrough in smart contracts has been the idea of composability the idea that i can have you know some protocol and then someone else can come and build on on you know above that protocol and then someone else and it can all be composed into i think you know the best way to call it is money lego um and so we feel that this liquidity aggregation getting all this value trying to get it into one place rather

(07:17) than them fractured across lots of sub chains or zones really should breed engagement and participation and at the heart of flair is a kind of defy protocol because the the bridge is economic so here’s what’s really relevant to handshake um because we handshake today isn’t suitable to be part of the economic bridge because it requires a high volume you know token like hns but flair has this really robust and free-to-use kind of oracle system whereby each node on flare is coming to consensus and contributing

(07:53) to consensus over the state of another network actually at the consensus level of flare so it’s free to use and essentially flair can basically observe handshake or any other blockchain um and and and see what the state is uh you know as it goes through time and so that’s a very useful tool because it then allows uh you know smart contracts to be built and other things to happen um that allow for greater utility and we are you know with regards to get their tokens represented on flair as a as in a trustless manner we can use

(08:29) that for anything that has state um so we can use that for top level domains uh and and that’s kind of where we’re going with this so we have kind of two we’ve just started working really uh with with a few people in the handshake ecosystem so chango and t chung um and i think that’s kind of expanding out into i guess a working group that’s looking at how to get you know tokenized tlds slds of those tlds and then um and then tokenizing those slds on flare and we’ve got a couple of kind of models

(09:10) and this is not meant to be prescriptive we have no uh fixed thoughts on it but i’ll just take you through like kind of roughly what we think the models look like today and it could change massively so you know our idea would be that you could lock a tld on uh on handshake using something like an htlc uh system um and then that would allow for um you know an hclc uh basically can either be locked in perpetuity or for some time period uh and we call this like a leasing or a total locking mechanism so um if it’s totally locked uh you know then

(09:49) that that um you you can’t really come back on that htlc and it can’t be unlocked at a later date um and and for us uh you know that that gets the tld onto flare in perpetuity but that may not be the only you know desirable way to do it so there’s a there’s kind of like a leasing model whereby the tld can exist on flair for a certain period of time and then that tld can be um you know the tld representation can be locked in a smart contract um on flair that then enables the minting of myriad slds which either you know are

(10:27) in perpetuity based on it for tld’s in perpetuity or you know essentially least like the traditional sld model for uh some period of time essentially for the period of time that the htlc uh locks the tld form and so the upside of this particular kind of idea is quite simple um the the downside really is that you know uh the tld is either locked in perpetuity which maybe may give a lack of flexibility to the owner because they may you know flare might become you know less interest not um locked in perpetuity then there’s a

(11:03) non-renewal risk for the sld owner um and and so they may lease a particular uh sld for a period of time uh they may become successful with that and then they may not be able to renew it because the the owner uh takes that away so we think there’s a another model as well which uses collateral which kind of aligns people’s interests such that you know if an sld is incredibly valuable um that there isn’t uh a renewal risk because it’s definitely in the um tld owners uh uh interest uh to uh to to renew the lease

(11:40) and so we think you could have a collateralized smart contract um where the tld owner essentially loses the collateral when the name service changed you know erroneously uh and that would be essentially if the smart contract says it’s there for a year uh and and after six months the the records have changed um and so the positive for this would be there’d be uh sort of more security for the sld owner we think versus a temporary leasing model um because as i just said if it’s a valuable proposition then the

(12:11) tld owner will obviously carry on doing it um and then more flexibility for the tlt owner versus say locking tld onto any particular network in perpetuity and so the the negative of this is that it requires meaningful collateral but that’s where d fight comes in uh and there’s you know this gives the opportunity for someone else to provide that collateral uh and there to be a sharing of revenue against let’s say the leasing of slds um or the tokenization of slts and so you know that’s that’s the tld sld uh

(12:47) kind of ideas that we have and you know we can it’s nothing to do with us we we aren’t building it but that’s where we’ve gotten to with the um with the kind of working group and and and we’d like to uh sort of continue thinking about various different ideas uh now i mean you know our envisaged uses for slds are you know something we’ve been thinking about for two months give us a year it could be you know so much more um but really it opens up the sld and in fact the tld market uh you know the tokenized tld market to

(13:19) all of flares integrated tokens so you know dogecoin litecoin stella xrp you know obviously at some point probably bitcoin cash bitcoin you know i assume those will be integrated um and their user bases uh and those user bases are vast um and and some of them especially xrp for instance are extremely motivated to get engaged with things because they’ve been held back from being engaged for three or four years so that’s that’s a real uh i think value proposition uh the second thing is of course defy on

(13:53) you know borrowing against your own property whether it’s a tld or a an sld uh you know you can lock that in a contract and someone might lend you money against that essentially is a collateralized uh debt um and and that you know to us is a it’s a really interesting proposition and i’m sure there’s a billion things that could be built on that but the last is as a kind of tokenized version of any object on the planet whether it’s actual physical space like a three by three foot representation

(14:26) or whether it’s you know as i’ve put here in this example you know um you know a barrel of oil that is sweet crude from a ramco or a barrel of oil that is sour crude from petrobras you know these are just physical objects but they can be you know uh identifiers to anything that could be tokenized and traded in in in the real world so for me that’s that that would be a really um interesting kind of way to to uh adapt the sld concept to be a sort of more generic uh registry and naming device so you know that’s just

(15:03) some ideas we have um the last thing i really wanted to cover was the participation in the flair consensus so every network that um is attached to via the state connector which is our kind of oracle that happens at the um at the at the consensus level um flair as as i mentioned at the beginning is a federated byzantine agreement style network and we we set that up as a deterministic unl so there’s no foundation deciding who is the node uh who are the nodes and there’s no um there isn’t the fragility of total unmitigated fba

(15:46) which has a real issue with fragility and and finding the quorum intersection property so it’s a deterministic unl but essentially and we’re lucky because we have all these kind of uh partner networks we might call in um that maybe derive some additional utility by coming to flair uh and and so uh we can essentially assign uh uh we the calculation based on i don’t know market gap we think is that it’s the right way to do it today um but we can assign a certain amount of power in the unl and then the validators from

(16:24) each underlying chain they then have the right to run a flare validator uh and they they get that and then they get a mining incentive for doing that but they’re also contributing to something you know as a larger community uh and that’s very important uh and so you know just very briefly the power in the unl goes to each underlying network miners and validators as capped at 25 per network or per merged mind network so dogecoin and ltc would be capped together um so if handshake is integrated with the state connector

(16:57) handshake miners may run flair nodes and be part of the unl um so um what are we doing specifically in the handshake eq system well right now as i said we’re working on um you know bringing slds and tlts as tokenized assets to to to flair and secondly um we’re working with some of our custodians to get the hns asset onto flair we can’t do it trustlessly yet because it’s not liquid enough but we’re working to get a wrapped custodial version onto flare so that it can be traded on automated market makers with

(17:33) the aim of increasing uh the liquidity of the token um which you know should bring tangible benefits to the community um and so in summary uh you know flare’s purpose built to serve a network like handshake which has you know a very defined purpose but you know could acquire more utility through flair uh i i think it’s really important to uh you know stress that you know we we really see these communities actually as the basis of of what we’re doing but also the basis of the the future of of the uh entire industry and we’re

(18:07) you know we’re interested in bringing communities together to to build something bigger than the sum of the parts because frankly that’s how we feel that this this whole decentralization idea goes mainstream uh and so there’s you know as i hope i took you through there’s multiple models for top level domain representation and sld creation they have different trade-offs but they create very exciting use cases we’re already working with parts of the handshake ecosystem and if you integrate with flair you know

(18:38) you’ll have a role in the flare consensus please reach out to chango t shin jihan chu or or myself uh really to get involved or ask more questions i would just i would say probably at this stage um so let me just stop sharing um there’s a question in the chat uh it was mentioned in a previous session from phase one that slds sold to traditional registries would no longer be decentralized which is true in handshake natively so essentially with flair you could maintain decentralization of the slds and not just the tlds is that

(19:09) correct yeah i would i would think so a fairly accurate assessment and i mean you really want that because uh you know once you have the sld and then let’s say you do turn it into just a tokenized uh asset so for instance the oil barrel um uh sort of example i said by the way i think this is wonderful for mineral traceability um you know which is actually a really important thing um so yeah once you’ve got that as an asset it’s very important that it is decentralized great thanks um how how did you get into

(19:44) handshake anyway i mean what’s your kind of so i partly i mean i’ve i read about it a while back but i hadn’t seen that much about it for a period of time and then we discussed it um and really one of the things we started thinking about was okay so we have to organize a whole bunch of validators um and a registry is an interesting idea for us uh you know we haven’t figured out where that registry should be based yet um ultimately there needs to be some some kind of access token for for for validators

(20:22) of you know the that are part of the unl for for a specific period um and and we’re looking at different methods and and handshake seems like a very interesting method for doing that can you see i mean the the idea for i mean when you first brought it up the idea of using handshake as like a reference layer or a registry layer for other systems it was pretty like revolutionary for me i never really i never really thought about it because as i said in my opening um i feel like i always think of handshake as like an

(20:52) identity layer for like persons places things and ephemera um and you know i love the idea of being able to tokenize um objects right because for me the whole digital twinning is like especially in nfts as a foregone conclusion and the idea that you can have a namespace which actually names the nft um you know down to its location perhaps is super interesting but the idea that you could actually you know have identity for systems or system level identity which is secured by other um other systems like like like handshake is pretty interesting can

(21:27) you kind of tell me a little bit more about how you see this playing out or what other applications of handshake as a registry layer for things other than the actual domain yeah i really want to have handshake as a registry layer for physical physical space um i think to me that’s one of the sort of holy grails is to take our our physical world and and have like real and i guess you know you’d have to have some kind of soft human consensus that this is a way to do it um but uh you know we’ve seen some early

(22:04) example early centralized examples of creating kind of human readable uh registries such as there’s a great example what three words uh but i like the idea that that should not be controlled by uh a a a particular company and it should be uh you know something that is a shared community asset this idea of you know physical space it’s because it’s a public good um and so you know i like that got it thanks i don’t know if there are any more questions from the crowd there’s one lou had another one so to maintain

(22:42) decentralization on slds would mean that it becomes essential for handshake name resolution to be integrated into browsers and routers otherwise mainstream adoption may be stunted so does the decentralization of slds rely on um the adoption through browsers and routers yeah if if the only thing you’re trying to do is to to achieve uh you know the ability to reference things in that way i guess what i’m saying is for physical assets um or even for the you know flare as a as a flare using handshake as a registry

(23:17) for uh for its network structure that doesn’t need the adoption of browsers and routers um that that needs the adoption of whoever’s using it and the first example of that might be flair as a system um so that’s that that’s that’s an example yeah that that makes sense i mean again for some reason i always just think about uh you know handshake is like this kind of meta naming layer for a lot of different chains and a lot of different kind of applications and a lot of different types of you know digital

(23:50) digital material digitally referenceable kind of materials uh and that’s where i think this starts to kind of get super super interesting um cool the handshake has kind of decentralized certificate authority vr a kind of idea of it what do you think about the tradability uh what what do you think like the ability to have wrapped domain names you know whether tld or sld what becomes possible in flair in terms of like the the kind of trading side you mentioned like collateral being being able to get loans on your domains

(24:25) and being able to kind of collateralize what else do you think kind of makes what other applications will be on flair and how will they get on flair such that we could use machines so it’s pretty easy for people to build on it um so it’s it’s i think it’s largely going to be about us as a community promulgating the ideas about like okay so this is what could be done is this interesting um but with regards to trading i mean i you know i’d almost start with just a borrowing idea you know imagine you

(24:56) have a really hot um tld you know something you know awesome that you know is is acquiring loads and loads of slds right because it’s got a great it’s got a great you know uh traction let’s say it’s nft right um and and let’s say you know you want to monetize your nft domain now if you sell it you may have you know you may not want to sell it you may think there’s more upside but you may you may wish to acquire a little bit of liquidity from it so you know one of the first things you could

(25:28) do with a tokenized tlt that sits on uh on a on a smart contract layer is you know just borrow against it lock it you know see what people will lend against it for what kind of period of time they can take the token if you don’t pay it back um you know and and and and and ultimately uh you know that that would be the the way we would administer that and then they would inherit the slvs ultimately so um you know that that would be an example there’s really interesting models of um kind of like liquid liquid bidding i’m

(26:01) just making up words here but uh in the nft community uh where you know you can kind of bid on things that don’t have a bid so somehow i think it was like somehow using like automated market maker systems to actually project bids at nfts which don’t have uh which aren’t necessarily for sale um and i i kind of like that idea um uh i think so it might also be kind of a feature that’s being looked at at shake decks and others but um i can see how all these kind of different systems can be can be utilized

(26:29) with fire so it’s pretty interesting um so go ahead yeah we’d love that cool um i think we’re just about out of time um and uh really happy to have you kind of with us uh and able to kind of tell us all about flair uh and i think hopefully you know we’ll see everything coming out when is when is it going to be coming out again when is the launching test we’re really pushing oh test net is um so tesla’s already been up but public open test net is uh sort of middle of april um and and we’re doing a few

(27:05) uh sort of private and then public betas uh and then we’re really pushing to try and get it out by the end of june great all right well looking forward i think we’re gonna wrap it up there um thanks again hugo and i really appreciate it and we’ll might be a trick thanks [Music] you