Derek Yoo, the founder of Moonbeam, participated in the live broadcast of the Base Layer theme as a guest speaker, sharing his personal entrepreneurial experience and industry insights. The following is a written review we have carefully prepared for you:
David (host): Welcome to the live broadcast of this issue of Base Layer theme. I have been paying attention to the Polkadot ecosystem for a long time, and its explosive growth has attracted much attention. Among them is a project called Moonbeam. Today we are very pleased to invite Derek Yoo, the founder of Moonbeam, as a guest to share.
Derek Yoo: Hello everyone, it is an honor to participate in this live broadcast as a guest.
David (host): In this live broadcast, we will discuss from several different aspects. Moonbeam believes that the future is multi-chain, what does this mean for Polkadot's smart contract parallel chain compatible with Ethereum? Before diving into Moonbeam, we wanted to take a look at the founders' personal experiences. How did you bring decentralized systems into the blockchain world? And why did you create Moonbeam?
Derek Yoo: My entire career (almost 25 years or so) has been basically building software companies and technology companies. It can be said that it is from the Web1 at that time to the Web2 world later. The one that had a greater impact on me was the creation of a Web2 cloud service company focused on technology business in 2006, named Fuze. It took about 13 years for us to witness the company's scale gradually grow. At the beginning of 2019, Fuze had grown into a company with more than 700 employees and an operating cost of US$150 million. I decided to leave and devote myself to the blockchain field. I have benefited a lot from the whole process, which is also a valuable asset for my future life.
Speaking of why I entered the field of blockchain, it is also due to Fuze co-founder Steve Kokinos. While Fuze was booming, he left to start a blockchain project. I have known him for many years, which made me very curious why he chose to leave and what he was doing.
David (Moderator): If you guessed correctly, the project you mentioned is Algorand?
Derek Yoo: That’s right, he met Silvio Micali in Boston after he left, and then founded Algorand with him in 2018. I knew what he was doing better than anyone else, and it gave me an idea of what I wanted to do in this space. Then, in 2019, I founded the PureStake company. After deep research, I found an opportunity to take advantage of the Ethereum ecosystem and combine it with the blockchain of the Polkadot ecosystem, thus embarking on the journey of creating Moonbeam.
David (Moderator): Next let's talk about Moonbeam. Moonbeam is one of the parachains linked to Polkadot. We see that some blockchains focus on NFT, some focus on games, and some focus on DeFi, and Moonbeam as a parachain linked with Polkadot, for those who have spent a year and a half to understand Ethereum, What does it mean? Can you explain it to us in depth?
Derek Yoo: First of all, let me start with why I was attracted by Polkadot and why I built on Polkadot. We're in a Web2 world, and there are many ways we can see what's coming. And because of this, the way we look at the blockchain ecosystem has a big impact. Different blockchains, data information cannot communicate with each other, and each blockchain is an isolated island. So who is solving this problem? In my opinion, Polkadot is one of the best examples. Their vision is to solve the cross-chain problem so that independent blockchains can communicate. This is exactly what attracted me, and it is also the first stage of our entry into the Polkadot ecosystem.
The next question is what is it? What is his professional chain? and what can they do? In the Polkadot ecosystem, they provide Substrate, a framework developed by Parity to efficiently build different blockchains. They provide this basic developer kit as a way to build blockchains within the Polkadot ecosystem. Its features are very powerful and it is definitely one of the best options for anyone starting to build a blockchain from now on. Using the Substrate framework, the workload of building a blockchain can be greatly reduced.
We all know that building a blockchain from scratch takes a lot of time, effort and even money. For example, a team of 30-40 people can reduce the workload by 10-15% by using these development frameworks. So, we didn't hesitate to use it at the beginning, it was very powerful and easy to use for us, but we realized that it might not be for everyone. Because you're still building your own blockchain, even if it's a lot less work. It may be suitable for some use cases, but it may not be suitable for all use cases, and we see an opportunity in this, we should build a smart contract that can provide a higher level development experience. Because most developers are already familiar with the development environment and development tools of Ethereum. This is an opportunity for us to create a developer platform that provides a familiar environment for existing blockchain developers.
David (Moderator): In my opinion, this is where Substrate and Wix are similar. Wix came out around 2006, and suddenly a ton of e-commerce sites flooded in, and everyone wanted to create their own e-commerce platform. Similarly, if you want to build a blockchain, it has been very difficult in the past two or three years, so the Substrate framework came into being.
I believe that interested people already know a lot of information from the Moonbeam website, so can you tell us the details of Moonbeam, for example, who will benefit from Moonbeam? Existing Ethereum-based projects can migrate workloads from Ethereum Layer 1 with minimal changes. We have been discussing for the past 6 months, how will this huge transition from Layer 1 to Layer 2, such as Polygon off-chain scaling and data availability issues, benefit Moonbeam?
Derek Yoo: We clearly know that this is a good opportunity for us to create a higher-level developer-oriented platform in Polkadot. The question is what approach can we take? As we all know, Ethereum is currently the world's most well-known and widely used blockchain smart contract underlying platform. Based on our many years of experience in starting a business in the technology field, having an Ethereum-style technology stack means having the largest number of developers and code bases. So for us, implementing this Ethereum-style technology stack will attract more developers to deploy on our platform.
There are two main advantages to doing so, one of which is a huge user base. Compatible with existing Ethereum ecosystem development tools. These development tools have been developed for at least 5-6 years, so for developers, it is already a mature developer toolset. The other is opening the door for developers deploying on Ethereum. With an Ethereum-compatible approach, developers are able to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and Dapp front-ends on Moonbeam with minimal code adjustments. That's the part where we're working closely with Parity, and they're implementing an environment or experience similar to Ethereum, but on Polkadot.
David (host): Do you think bridges like this are the way of the future in terms of interoperability with other blockchains? Regardless of whether they are domain-specific like NFT blockchains, or gaming blockchains like Flow, do you think the future will really be seamless between Layer 1 and Layer 2?
Derek Yoo: As I said before, I think the number of blockchains will continue to rise in the future, and with it comes the need for cross-chain interoperability. The information intercommunication between existing blockchains is presented in a variety of ways. Many of the current cross-chain communications, as you said earlier, have the concept of bridges and different technologies on top of the underlying protocols, and new experimental innovations are constantly occurring in this field. These different technologies can also try to create connections between blockchains. But you also need to consider a lot of factors, in the case of a bridge, who built it? What infrastructure supports it? How to ensure its safety? These all need to be considered in advance to ensure the safety of the cross-chain operation process. Polkadot has these inherent advantages because it builds the network into its base layer. So having this kind of networking capability natively on the platform without making additional security or trust assumptions, we think that kind of connectivity is really important.
David (Moderator): Now let's talk about the governance part. At present, all projects are clearly developing in the direction of decentralized governance. Many people are concerned about how the project works. Could you please share with us how the governance of the project is carried out?
Derek Yoo: My thinking is that I think the core philosophical principles that can be found in the Polkadot ecosystem have a considerable contribution in the form of on-chain governance. However, this is still debatable, and other chains (especially those from Ethereum) do not believe in the approach of on-chain governance. But we do believe that moving governance on-chain and having a clear system for deciding what will happen in the future can handle a lot of things, like behind-the-scenes politics. Anyone can see, and anyone can interact with the governance system. Participating in governance must use the Token of the network to express their opinions, which is also the key function of the Token of the network.
In addition, for us, how to make key decisions clearly is very important. Governance is a bit like upgrading around the chain, which is a very critical component. For a blockchain project, they will perform multiple upgrades, such as three times a year. Using on-chain governance mechanisms on the network and using them to drive upgrades is a way to iteratively update quickly. Any chain needs to develop faster, and the market is changing so fast, so it is very necessary for this similar ability to respond to what is happening in the market and give feedback to users, so this is very useful for us attractive.
David (host): It is worth noting that there are two different digital asset tokens in the Moonbeam ecosystem. One is Glimmer, which is a utility token on the Polkadot network, and the other is Moonriver, which is a utility token on the Kusama network. Share with you what are the functions of these two Tokens? And what are their corresponding purposes?
Derek Yoo: One of the important parts is the governance function we mentioned earlier. In addition, there are two very important parts. One is the decentralized block production that drives the network with a pledge system on the platform, that is, the infrastructure of the chain. The other one is that this system allows us to have an open and permissionless set of collators who are the block producers of the system basically responsible for producing blocks. We have a system similar to Ethereum, and we have tried our best to become an Ethereum-like system, so our Token also has similar functions to ETH on Ethereum. Take the execution of a smart contract as an example, which is used as a gas fee when sending the contract. The most important utility function is to provide security for the system to enable the execution of smart contracts.
David (host): What new news should we pay attention to in terms of deployment and development in the next six months to one year? Is there a new strategic plan for the network?
Derek Yoo: Yes, we have been working on the project for a long time, so we will now focus on enabling two networks, one is Moonriver on the Kusama network you mentioned, and the other is Polkadot ) Network Moonbeam. Both of the network launches mentioned above will happen within a few months and go live, and it will only take about 4 weeks for the network to be fully operational. This is a very important milestone for us to start, as well as our achievements in the development process.
About Moonbeam
About Moonbeam
secondary title
For more information, please visit:
https://moonbeam.network/
About PureStake
Moonriver is Moonbeam's peer network designed to provide a permanent testing environment for incentivized experiments. The code of the newly launched project will be deployed to Moonriver first, and undergo a series of tests and experimental verifications in its real economic environment. After the verification is completed and passed the test, the project code can be officially deployed to Moonbeam on Polkadot.
For more information, please visit:
https://moonbeam.network/networks/moonriver/
About PureStake
For more information, please visit:
For more information, please visit:
https://www.purestake.com/
