Anna Rose (00:00:05):
Welcome to Zero Knowledge. I'm your host, Anna Rose. In this podcast, we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web, as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online.

Anna Rose (00:00:27):
In this multi interview episode, I dive into the wild world of Kusama with my three guests, Will Pankiewicz, Raul Romanutti and Bruno Skvorc. We explore the connection and difference between Kusama and Polkadot. We define some of the key components of the ecosystem, do a check-in on how Kusama governance and on chain decision making has evolved since its launch. And we learn about the secret society. Kusamas creative chaos culture, and more. I also chat with Bruno about his novel Kusama based NFT project Rmrk. But before we start in, I want to let you know about ZK Hack, a multi round online event with workshops and puzzle solving competitions. This is put together by the podcast and the ZK Validator and supported by a number of fantastic sponsors. It kicked off last week, but it runs on a weekly cadence. Every Tuesday, we're doing a workshop and a new puzzle is released, and this is going on for seven weeks.

Anna Rose (00:01:20):
So there's still plenty of time for you to join in if you haven't already. So I hope to see you there. I've added the link in the show notes. I also want to point you to the ZK jobs board there. You can find hiring ZK in blockchain focused teams. So if you're looking for a new opportunity to work in the space, be sure to pop over and check it out. I would also like to thank this week's sponsor Centrifuge a real-world DeFi project. Centrifuge puts real-world assets on the blockchain, allowing issuers to get liquidity on their assets and investors to make a safe, stable yield in the volatile crypto world. It's built on Substrate, which you're actually going to hear a little bit about in this episode. And it also bridges the Ethereum and Polkadot worlds. Centrifuge are currently hiring for a number of positions, such as protocol engineer, product manager, full stack engineer, and more check out the link in the show notes to find out more about these jobs. So thank you again, Centrifuge. Now, here is my episode all about Kusama.

Anna Rose (00:02:18):
In today's episode, I'm exploring the world of Kusama and to do this, I'm going to be inviting three guests on the show for three separate interviews. My first guest is, Will Pankiewicz from Parity. Welcome to the show Will.

Anna Rose (00:02:31):
Thank you. Thank you.

Anna Rose (00:02:33):
Well, you've been at Parity for two years. Tell me a little bit about what you do at Parity.

Will Pankiewicz (00:02:39):
So I have a funny title called Master of Validators. So I, I haven't seen this elsewhere and this is also kind of a thing that's it's funnily enough, actually like on my passport nowadays. It's like for my German visa and stuff like that, it's actually listed as like Master of Validators in there, which every time I go through like customs and borders, it's people look at me kind of funny, but essentially what this means is I kind of coordinate a lot of people in the ecosystem, people that run infrastructure solely, well, I guess mainly kind of, I guess like validators, but also just anyone that runs nodes. So this includes people like exchanges, block, explorers, wallets, anything like that sort of, but it's a little bit more kind of general as well. I'm pretty interested in just kind of participating in just the ecosystem of people, doing things in like governance and people just integrating things in general is like participating. And so, yeah.

Anna Rose (00:03:28):
Cool. Are you doing this on Kusama and Polkadot or just on Kusama?

Will Pankiewicz (00:03:33):
Both networks generally kind of the process of actually like doing things like releases, actually putting out binaries, putting out things that people run the process is actually pretty similar. And so in this sense kind of the communities for both that, that run things are a bit different, but the process of doing things is quite similar. And so generally I will kind of coordinate both kind of groups of people I would say.

Anna Rose (00:03:54):
And when you talk about the validators, you're primarily talking about like the, the central network in one case, it would be like the Relay Chain of Kusama or the Relay Chain of dot because there's like parachains now on Kusama as well. And you're not necessarily working on that side or are you like, where does, where does the validator set end for you?

Will Pankiewicz (00:04:14):
Yeah. And that's that's I guess what I kind of say, I do just things in the ecosystem then kind of people that just run infrastructure in general the line between like, okay, where is Kusama and where is kind of like Polkadot. And, and whereas also the ecosystem is actually kind of a little bit blurry there. Generally it's kind of like people that will run things, all these different teams, all these different parachains, all these different projects will also have to run infrastructure and whatnot as well. And a lot of the things that they're kind of building upon and based upon is also kind of built on Substrate, the same thing that we're using to build out Polkadot and Kusama. And so there's also a bit of kind of coordination effort between a lot of the people that are running things like collators for, for parachains and just nodes in general, across the ecosystem.

Anna Rose (00:04:53):
Let's define, I mean, I've done a couple episodes on Polkadot and a couple episodes I've done at least one episode on Kusama, but let's define for folks like what these words mean, Substrate, what is Substrate?

Will Pankiewicz (00:05:04):
Yeah. So Substrate is kind of this, this blockchain building development framework. There's been like a lot of lessons that have been learned from kind of Parity building out like blockchain clients from like Ethereum, but also Parity has been kind of working on things like like a Zcash client, a Bitcoin client, et cetera, et cetera. So at some point while we were kind of building Polkadot, we realized there's kind of a lot of similarities in just the way that you actually build things out. And so we decided to kind of encapsulate a lot of these things as kind of primitives and in this module kind of framework called Substrate. And so Polkadot and Kusama are built with Substrate, but also all these kinds of teams and ecosystems also building out Substrate Substrate is this like blockchain building framework that allows you to be able to just build your kind of like application specific blockchain with a lot of kind of flexibility and modularity.

Anna Rose (00:05:49):
Cool. What is the relationship between Polkadot and Kusama?

Will Pankiewicz (00:05:53):
So Kusama is, as we call it kind of this like Canary network, is this very much kind of this experimental kind of thing that we will deploy things first that we kind of will push the limits. Generally kind of this idea of like a Canary network is actually not really new, the idea of kind of Canary deployments or actually like kind of like, well defined like software thing. If, if there's any kind of like big traditional companies like Facebook or Google or like anything like that, that make kind of like massive applications, generally kind of like Canary deployments is this idea of you want to kind of have new features. These may not be like featured complete these, these may kind of be like experimental things like that. And you want to kind of roll this out to users. You want to actually roll this out to production. And so generally calling, you might kind of like segment out the amount of people that actually will be able to experience this. And so for example, if you're going to like facebook.com or something like that, you would segment out, it's like, okay, maybe it's like one 100th of the people that actually visited the site will kind of like experience this thing. Yeah. And so generally it's this process of actually kind of just like, how do you deploy new things, new features, new really like anything. And so Kusama is very much this place that you'll kind of deploy new things. You'll maybe have things that are more experimental. You would actually kind of test the limits of kind of like what this thing actually kind of is. And generally kind of compared to Polkadot is very much more so kind of this place where things might be a little bit more stable. Things might be a little more kind of predictable things are more kind of a conservative. Kusama is more of kind of this place where we're kind of like push things to the limit or try things that we may or may not sure, actually kind of like work kind of in general, the purpose is actually to, to break Kusama to make sure that Polkadot is actually a place that people will have stable and conservative and really good applications and whatnot.

Anna Rose (00:07:39):
So we also use the term Relay Chain and maybe we should define that in the Kusama - Polkadot world.

Will Pankiewicz (00:07:45):
So this idea of the Relay Chain is mostly to be able to have things kind of like interoperability, to be able to have a lot of these different chains, actually being able to come like talk to each other, to be able to share different kinds of like messages and whatnot and security. And so basically the way that you can have things kind of like interoperability via a lot of like these messages and whatnot is all these different parachains will share this kind of like same security via the validators and the validators that for either Polkadot or Kusama. So this is kind of like where finality is derived in the sense of, okay, once a block gets in kind of Polkadot or Kusama from all these kind of parachains, it cannot be reverted. And so all these different parachains will have consensus related to actually doing like block production. The thing of like finality and whatnot is kind of like once it goes on to Polkadot or Kusama, that's where this idea of like shared security and the idea of kinda like a Relay Chain is kind of like where, where that comes from. I actually really kind of like this, this blog post by Mustafa from Celestia, he kind of put out pretty recently where they're talking about kind of like this idea of like clusters. And so you can imagine in the idea from this, this cross chain interoperable world, there's kind of like different trust assumptions and different collects security assumptions for a lot of these different like chains and these different environments. And so you can kind of like group these somewhat by like clusters sort of. And so you could have like inter-cluster communication and also like intra cluster communication. And like these clusters will kind of like share similar kinds of like environments for things. And so I can imagine maybe like Ethereum and all these like L2s will share kind of like the same kind of environment of sorts being Ethereum miners, and just kind of proof of work and stuff there. But it's something like Polkadot for example, shares also kind of this same similar environment of everything's by kind of like these, these Raly Chain validators. And so like this would be like a cluster in and of itself. You could have inter cluster communication and then intra cluster communication where it's like, okay, maybe something from a Bitcoin bridge from Polkadot, to Bitcoins. Like that's kind of like just one cluster communicating to another cluster and things like that. And so I find that actually like a good way of actually framing this in like a paradigm to think about these things by.

Anna Rose (00:09:58):
Would you then think of Kusama as a cluster and then Polkadot is a different cluster?

Will Pankiewicz (00:10:03):
Yeah. So and so, and that sounds like all the things on, on Kusama or kind of like they're their own things sort of. And so it's very much the same way that like Kusama is to Polkadot. What Ethereum is to kind of Polkadot where it's, it's very much still kinda like separate. There's still kind of like a bit of separate boundaries there. There will be kind of bridges and there will be ways to actually like communicate and share things and send things across and whatnot

Anna Rose (00:10:26):
But it might be easier to build because the logic is the same.

Will Pankiewicz (00:10:29):
Yeah. Like there's different trusts assumptions, there's different kinds of paradigms of how you would actually transact and stuff like that, but Kusama itself and Polkadot out in and of itself are different just because they're two different clusters. And so the way that they actually kind of like communicate with each other and within itself and outside of itself are a little bit kind of separate.

Anna Rose (00:10:50):
The funny thing about doing this episode on Kusama currently, like today is that as we speak Polkadot parachains are coming online. And so the attention has been on Kusama for the last, I guess, six months because parachains were live and people could actually participate in crowd loans. And, we start, we start to see the true vision for this like central Relay Chain and the parachains connected, but only on Kusama, but come, I guess, a month or two, we're going to see it on Polkadot. What do you think happens to Kusama if that sort of attention and direction now goes towards Polkadot? What happens to the projects on Kusama? Is it enough of a network of its own that it would actually survive this? Or is it kind of like gonna fall more into the realm of like a testnet incentivized? Testnet what it maybe initially was.

Will Pankiewicz (00:11:40):
Yeah. So, I mean, like, we don't really use this term testnet that is kind of a dirty word, I suppose, but a lot of what I think the difference will be is there's at least come up with Rob .... Recently kind of mentioned this in some, some talks and like a blog post, but the idea of kind of like technical readiness versus kinda like maturity in the sense of like, okay, right now kind of prefer a lot of parachains. Things are kinda like, touch, be ready for, for this, this means, yes. Well like both Polkadot and Kusama. This is the idea that, okay, things are going to like feature complete. The code works, all that kind of stuff, but this isn't actually kind of like as mature as it probably could be in the sense of like, okay, optimizations, actually having things being like kind of very like Bulletproof and kind of sturdy and, and just kind of like very robust kind of codebase in, in infrastructure for a lot of these things. And I think Kusama is very much this place where these things will mature a lot quicker than they will on Polkadot. Both kind of like from the perspective of Kusama itself, like the actual kind of like Relay chain, but also a lot of these parachain projects just because they can come like test things, they can iterate things on kinda like their features and their kind of code a lot faster and eventually kind of like, it will be mature on Kusama and then eventually it will kind of be mature on Polkadot there. And so in this sense people, I think will experiment a lot more on Kusama and actually like try things and test things out and test the boundaries of, of all of this. And for that reason, like a lot of, kind of what we'll see on Kusama, I think will, will differ just in the sense of like, if you think about like assets, for example, there might be like a little bit more exotic assets. There might be a little bit more kind of like interesting use cases, things that may or may not actually like make it over to, to Polkadot. Like maybe things are kind of application that may be kind of like experimental or something like that.

Anna Rose (00:13:25):
And it will fail...

Will Pankiewicz (00:13:30):
Even if it doesn't necessarily not necessarily fail, but it just doesn't necessarily like succeed. And so in that case, like it can exist on Kusama and not like succeed, but still exists and kind of just be this like existential thing. But it just doesn't make its way onto Polkadot or something like that. And so just the, the amount of things that exist on Kusama, I think will be a lot more than Polkadot, but also there's just gonna be a lot more like interesting wacky experiments, I think.

Anna Rose (00:13:55):
And also, I mean, maybe a note for the listeners, when you think of a parachain project, a lot of them, a lot of them kind of that are live today, actually have two versions of themselves. So they have their usual like their brand, their name that they've been working under for the last, I don't know, a couple of years, which is very much associated with Polkadot, but then they've created these, their own sort of tests. Canary, not, sorry, not testnet sorry, sorry to all the Kusama fans listening, I feel like I've offended some people sorry, but they have their own incentivized Canary networks. So like the parachains basically have two versions of themselves, two iterations, and those Canary versions are the ones that are using crowd loans to do the parachain auctions to get a slot on Kusama.

Anna Rose (00:14:43):
So what you're saying is like, cause I think that's maybe important for people to envision, like it's not necessarily the, the Relay Chains of Polkadot and Kusama doing crazy experiments, maybe they are, but it's also these parchain Canary versions. I guess the most, like in the Polkadot episode, I actually interviewed Acala and Moonbeam and Centrifuge all of those networks actually have recently, I think all gotten parachain slots on Kusama. And so, yeah, I guess what you're saying here is like the experimentation that they would need to do could happen there as well. It's like it's created an environment, not just for Kusama developers and Parity team to experiment, but also these parachain.

Will Pankiewicz (00:15:25):
Yeah. And I know a lot of these teams will actually have like very, almost different strategies for how they'll launch their Kusama chain and also kind of like what their Polkadot chain will look like. I think for example, like Centrifuge there, their chain for Kusama is called Altair and their chain for Polkadot is called Centrifuge, but they're there use cases for things I think they're targeting kind of like different markets and different users for Polkadot very much there. The idea is that like, you want to have real world assets in like liquidity for a lot of these real world assets for Kusama or at least for their like Altair chain. I know a lot of, kind of what they're interested in is kinda just like wackier assets to be able to have like liquidity for. So things can like kind of NFTs things like art, things that you might kind of just not necessarily think about maybe things to experiment with. And so like, just because of like a lot of the partners that they work with and stuff like that is a little bit more more traditional kind of companies in on the Polkadot chain. Some of the companies in kind of entities they might work with on Kusama might be a little more like out there more interesting use cases for things. And so I think a lot of these teams will kind of have just different use cases for, for different chains. Maybe they want to like try things out and just like, see, okay, maybe he does this market segment work that we want to target and work with. And they don't know that they don't necessarily want to test that on, on Polkadot necessarily. And so Kusama is very much a place to kind of be able to validate kind of like business ideas and be able to come like test it and see if things actually kind of work and be able to kind of like fail quickly and then iterate and then kind of like actually make really cool and awesome innovative products and experiences.

Anna Rose (00:16:56):
I think of sort of a follow-up question or a thought I have here is, and I know you can't predict the future, but like, will there be teams where their main, their main sort of Polkadot project doesn't work that well, and then they are only a Kusama parachain, like, do you, or do you expect projects to only launch on Kusama as well? Like I guess I'm trying to understand, like, can you really think about this as a truly unique ecosystem where it's so significantly different and has its own players, or is it always going to be connected to Polkadot?

Will Pankiewicz (00:17:25):
Yeah, I think there's actually a handful of teams that have been interested in kind of the sentiment of only launching on Kusama. I guess one, one particular that kind of comes to mind is Zeitgeist, which they're kind of interested in this kind of futarchy ideas of prediction markets and whatnot. And so far, I think their plans are solely to, to launch on Kusama. I think in general, like just the communities for both are a bit different. You find people that will own either Kusama or Polkadot. And just kind of like participating in things is also a fairly separate both from the perspective of like people participating in crowd loans, people that are staking people that are running validators and whatnot both actually have divergent communities as of now. And so I think in the future, a lot of kind of the differences will be the way that these communities actually conduct participate in things the way that they kind of like organize themselves the ways that they kind of actually come together to actually be a part of what this ecosystem actually is, is I think I like one example of this is the society on Kusama, which is this very interesting thing where people will get tattoos to join this. You can think of this as kind of a DAO of sorts. And I think this might've also been covered in a previous podcast or something like that.

Anna Rose (00:18:33):
I know that I talked to him. I mean, we did an episode on Kusama, but so long ago, I don't know if it already existed. This was before it launched. So do you describe what the society, is it a secret society? Or is it an on chain very public society where everyone knows who's in it?

Will Pankiewicz (00:18:52):
Yeah. I mean, people at least know who's in it based on their addresses and whatnot...

Anna Rose (00:18:57):
And the tattoos they've gotten with Kusama logos.

Will Pankiewicz (00:19:00):
Yeah. It's like the idea is kind of this thing of almost like a human blockchain. And so people in order to join the society this, this DAO or whatnot, you have to get a tattoo of something resembling the Kusama network. So it could be like the Canary logo. It can be like the Genesis hash. It could be kind of like anything very abstractly kind of like related to it. So long as it kind of also contains the head of kind of the previous person that also kind of joined. And so you could like think of this almost as like a human blockchain sort of

Anna Rose (00:19:31):
It has a reference the previous tattoo?

Will Pankiewicz (00:19:33):
Or the previous, the previous person.

Anna Rose (00:19:36):
How would you do that with the tattoo has to....

Will Pankiewicz (00:19:39):
The tattoo has to have like an identifier of the previous person. So this is oftentimes people will use these indices, which is kinda like a very shortened version of kind of like the, the public address of that. And so, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so like in order to join this, you need to have kind of what's called like proof of ink. You need to kind of like submit a bid for it. And people actually will be able to go like get money from this pot of funds for getting a tattoo. And so it's actually really interesting just because the way that a lot of the, the economics of kind of the way that like funds work and stuff like that, part of block awards will go to the Kusama treasury and the Kusama treasury. The idea is just spending funds for kind of like good projects, public infrastructure, that kind of thing. But there's this kinda like spending pressure where if a certain amount of funds aren't spent by some period of time, generally they would get burned. And this is the case for Polkadot. They would get burned, but on Kusama, instead of being burned, they get distributed to this, this pot, that's funding, this society. And so people that get tattoos will get money from kind of this, this pot of funds. And so right now, at least kind of the sole use of, of this kind of sidy treasury thing is kind of just solely in synthesizing getting new members and whatnot. But right now it's kind of at its limit sort of. So right now there's a, I believe like 150 people that are already kind of like in the society... Who got tattoos. Yeah.

Anna Rose (00:21:05):
They all were also not tiny tattoos, right? Like there's a minimum size.

Will Pankiewicz (00:21:09):
Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's like pretty, pretty evident thing.

Anna Rose (00:21:13):
At least three people who got these tattoos and a lot of them got them really early. And I feel like what was, what was the amount you get early on?

Will Pankiewicz (00:21:22):
I think like the most someone got was like a thousand KSM which like, as, as of today's prices is like hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is honestly quite ridiculous at the time. It was like, not, not as much, probably like I know tens of thousands of like a lot of people got like, wait way less. At least at those those days prices, if they held on to things that might've appreciated nicely. But yeah, it's kinda like just incentivizing people to do like interesting and wacky things I think is kind of just the idea there. And right now, at least kind of the society is a bit constrained just because of the fact that it's literally on the Kusama Relay Chain itself. And so there's not as much kind of flexibility and actually kind of like doing things Kusama in Polkadot in at least kinda like in Substrate, there's a lot of primitives for actually doing really cool governance things of like having the ways that you actually organizing things in coordinate, say spending funds doing like treasury proposals and things like that. There's actually a lot of like really interesting primitives there. And so in the near future, I would expect the society thing to actually probably become its own like parachain. And you can imagine maybe like a lot of the people there are pretty, I guess, like artsy, the fact that they kind of tattoos might be a little bit telling you, like, I guess some of the kinds of people that there are, but you can imagine maybe it's kind of like a lot of these people that will come together that are in the society will, can come together to kind of like create decisions of like what to do with this pot of funds, for example. And so you can imagine like this thing that is self-sufficient and actually like funding art and actually like funding kind of like making like NFTs or something like that. Really like, does it a lot of just really cool structures there for kind of just making cool things that are not necessarily for the purpose of like getting money back in return or something like that. It's very much, I think kind of this thing of like making art for the sake of art, I think, which really is kind of like funding art for the sake of making cool art, which can be really cool. I think.

Anna Rose (00:23:10):
Nice. So what else do you see coming down the line for Kusama?

Will Pankiewicz (00:23:13):
The only thing I think that's kind of like interesting to think about is right now, at least when people snake crowd loans, they kind of like give up the rights for like voting and staking and stuff like that. And they kind of give them their rights up to these parachains. And so in the near future, this might be this thing where it's like parachains will be able to vote on stuff in and of themselves. So it's like the funds that are locked into the auction for that we'll be able to participate in governance of the Relay Chain.

Anna Rose (00:23:38):
Really. I always thought it was like just locked in launch. Can they stake those? Can they vote with those?

Will Pankiewicz (00:23:43):
As of now, no, but that's, these are the things being discussed. I think it's like I'm in the works for actually having an implementation of sorts.

Anna Rose (00:23:52):
But this would probably happen on Kusama first and it would probably be tested out a little bit there. Yeah. That's fascinating. Thanks so much for the interview, Will.

Will Pankiewicz (00:24:01):
Thank you so much for having me.

New Speaker (00:24:02):
And for coming on the show.

Anna Rose (00:24:03):
So next up, I'm here with Raul, a council member and community manager of Kusama. Welcome to the show Raul.

Raul Romanutti (00:24:13):
Hi Anna, nice to see you.

Anna Rose (00:24:15):
Raul, tell us a little bit about your involvement in the Kusama network, how it started, what you're doing now.

Raul Romanutti (00:24:22):
Yeah, so I sort of work as a community manager for the governance bodies of Kusama network. So I'm a council member at Kusama and my job or role is to provide all of the information that counselors need to review, discuss and vote on motions, and also provide this information as well for community members in democracy module, which is one of the collectors and democracy in order for them to also discuss and vote on referenda. So basically I make sure that everyone has the information they need in order to make an informed decision when it comes to motions, referendums or treasury proposals.

Anna Rose (00:25:06):
Cool. Actually, so in our last interview, in the last interview I just did with Will we talked very much about like the structure of the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem or Relay Chain, parachains. And we did kind of near the end of that touch on community and governance. I think with this interview, I want to focus a little bit more on that. I know you're kind of the perfect person to do that with. So how would you describe Kusama governance? It's now been how long? Like a year and a half or two years that the network is live?

Raul Romanutti (00:25:34):
Live, I think almost two years. Yes.

Anna Rose (00:25:37):
Okay. So maybe tell us a little bit about like where it started and how it's developed to now. Is it, if it's changed.

Raul Romanutti (00:25:43):
The governance design on both Polkadot and Kusama are very similar. The difference is that on Kusama, everything is faster. Everything is four times faster. So this means that decision-making is as well faster and you can experiment and change the parameters in the network in a very speedy way, right? This involves decision-making and voting by not only council members, but also by the community in Kusama. The governance system is divided into three collectives, right? One says the democracy module, the other one is the console. And the third one is the technical committee. The democracy module is the most important one and it includes all of the Kusama holders. So anyone who holds Kusama tokens is part of this democracy module and is able to either propose referenda or vote on a referendums, the console. It's also a very important body. It kind of like initiates proposals and initiates legislation for democracy module to vote after. In general, the council can not really change parameters in the network without the approval of the democracy module without the approval of the community. So this is why when we vote, for example, on runtime upgrades, we see that the console initiates the voting and then this passes to the community to be voted and accepted, right with the help of the technical committee. And the technical committee is the third body. And this, this collective doesn't really have the right to, to propose legislation, but they work very much in coordination with the council in order to fast track proposals that need to be fast-tracked for emergency reasons, for example. So if the council would pass a motion to be voted by democracy module, let's say the vote would be up for seven days and then you would have seven days enactment. But if the technical committee intervenes, this can be faster. So you can vote on referendum for let's say three hours and then have a delayed only one hour, if it's an emergency. And we have, we found, for example, a bug on the code that needs to be fixed because we need to remember that Kusama network is a Canary network, right, as we call it. So it's very experimental. It allows us to ask stress the chain in order for any changes that work to be after deployed on Polkadot after audits. So it's very important to stress the network in that sense.

Anna Rose (00:28:19):
Cool. You just described these three bodies. Let's kind of go through them again. There's sort of the general democracy module, which is everybody, there's the technical council and then there's the council council.

Raul Romanutti (00:28:30):
There's a technical committee and then it's the council, the council.

Anna Rose (00:28:34):
Okay. So the general you sort of did say though, can the general public also submit proposals or is this, are the proposals mostly? Okay. So both the council and the general can submit proposals.

Raul Romanutti (00:28:46):
Correct. So there are two funnels. So to say, two submit proposals, once would be one would be the council only council members can propose motions to the council. And the other one will be token holders, be a democracy module. They can propose public proposals, I mean public proposals that are seconded by others. And then they go up for vote as referendum.

Anna Rose (00:29:08):
Do they need a council member to weigh in for it to go through? Or it could be any,

Raul Romanutti (00:29:13):
You only need others to to second your proposal. And then the most seconded proposal will pass first to be voted in referendum.

Anna Rose (00:29:24):
I should mention the Zero Knowledge Validator is actually a member of the council as you are as well. Tell me a little bit about voting on and off the council members. How does that actually work? Like is it the general public or other council members who get to decide who's on the council?

Raul Romanutti (00:29:39):
So the council is supported by the general public, the council is voted by the community, on Kusama, the council or the set of counselors can change every 24 hours. So it's very important that the community votes on their preferred council members or on their favorite council members or the council members that most align with their interests to enter the council and be able to represent them. We have to remember that the council represents passive stakeholders, right? And so all of the community votes on their preferred council members and then the election fragments palette, which is same palette that elects the active set of validators chooses the active set of council members from all of the possible sets for the best set only. And this changes or is recalculated. So to say every 24 hours. So if the community changes, its vote every 24 hours, the council would be changing every 24 hours.

Anna Rose (00:30:37):
Is there a lot of turnover on the council at the moment, or would you say it's pretty stable after two years?

Raul Romanutti (00:30:43):
Let's say after two years is pretty stable. The changes we see the most are the last two or three seats. Those are the ones we normally see changing, not every 24 hours, but I would say every week or every two weeks we have a new council member and we had to make them aware. Okay, so your candidates, he has been accepted and now you're a council member. And then I talked to them, I have a call with them. I explained more or less how the process work. I tell them to please join the Kusama direction channel, which is the public channel where everything is discussed when when it comes to the direction of the Kusama network. I would say right now it's pretty stable. And only the last two or last three seats in general change.

Anna Rose (00:31:26):
You see this expanding though? Cause I know it's been expanded once, right. You've already added a couple more seats.

Raul Romanutti (00:31:32):
Twice.

New Speaker (00:31:32):
Twice. Sorry. So is the plan to eventually like the validator set that was expanded from, did it start at 198 or something? It expands now to 600. So like that expanded quite rapidly and it's quite big. Do you see the council also expanding or have you kind of settled on like this number for now?

Raul Romanutti (00:31:53):
I would hope so. I mean, I think a bigger council would be much more representative of what the Kusama community is. We been, I think at the beginning it was 13 council members, then it was 17 and now it's 19 council members.

Anna Rose (00:32:10):
Yeah. I think we joined when it became 17. That makes sense. Yeah.

Raul Romanutti (00:32:14):
I would hope, I would hope that the council goes up to like something like 23 members or something similar. I think it would be much more representative of passive stake holders in the Kusama ecosystem. The same way as the active set of validator has increased. Right. That said it's important to emphasize that governance on Kusama as it stands right now, it's likely be, I wouldn't say problematic, but to raise a lot of questions and issues, if the regulations that are being discussed at the moment pass as loss...

Anna Rose (00:32:50):
Like which ones, what do you mean?

Raul Romanutti (00:32:51):
Like the, the financial action task force policy. And so we need to, and we will try and experiment with new forms and improve the governance to be a bit more fluid, more decentralized, more accessible and more inclusive, and then put this up for vote and discussion by the community. So the community can be aware and they can give their input to new ways of governance.

Anna Rose (00:33:17):
Interesting. I didn't actually think about how like real world regulation, intersects, but I guess, I mean, I feel like it's always been on the radar, like in the future. We're going to have to think about that, but it's crazy that you're actually thinking about it now.

Raul Romanutti (00:33:31):
Yeah. And I mean, I think this was widely discussed at SubZero, which happened last week at SubZero conference. And it's not something that will happen one week to the other, right? Like the regulations will not happen like that, but we have to be prepared and we have to face them and it's important that they happen. So we need to see how we can comply or adapt to them as well.

Anna Rose (00:33:53):
Kusama parachains have also been live since I'm going to say like the spring, this spring. Yeah. So has this changed the way governance works actually on Kusama? Like it does it in any way affect, I mean, I, in a way some of the supply has now been locked in crowd loans. I don't know if that affects voting power or what have you, but it's like, I am very, very curious to hear if that has changed the thinking around governance?

Raul Romanutti (00:34:19):
In general, I would say that right now, teams that are connected as parachains, so products that are connected to parachains on Kusama are much more active when they participate into, in the direction channel or in decisions that the council or the community staking, they propose new stuff, they propose new things. For example, the reduction of some transaction fees for SEM protocol is about to be proposed right now because a lot of parachains think or projects think that it's very prohibitive for them. So we're gonna, we're going to be discussing it next in general, parachain teams are much more active when it comes to governance because it's now changes that affect them as well directly. Totally. And, and governance can also help them fix issues that they might have since they are connected to the Relay chain as well. Right now I think we have 12 parachains on Kusama and this week, which has voted the next batch of auctions, which will happen once a week for eight period leases. And the onboarding of the winners of these slots will happen off by one. So at the next lease, the winners of the, of the current will be onboarded. And so and so on.

Anna Rose (00:35:37):
Cool. Cool. I think a big question. And I mentioned this in the last interview too. It's like, I'm doing this interview kind of a funny moment where Polkadot's parachains are about to come online. Everyone's sort of shifting a lot of focus to Dot and I wonder like, what is Kusama now? I know it's been, it's been sort of the test ground, but when Polkadots starts to do this, do you think the sort of spirit of the Kusama parachains could change? Do you think people will still have the same enthusiasm or do you think there's going to be like a period where people are kind of distracted? Are you worried about it? Maybe it doesn't matter, but

Raul Romanutti (00:36:10):
I don't think it really matters. I think the community overlaps a lot, right? The two communities overlap a lot, but what Kusama has in particular is that validator operators tend to be much bigger in number, the active set is bigger. So validators are much more diverse, which means that nominations are much more diverse and the discussion is much more active Kusama is cheaper, eh, which means that projects can experiment easily and they don't need to be as worried as the cost of experimentation as they would be on Polkadot for example, and this can lead to other new use cases that on Polkadot might not happen. So for example, I think a big usecase for Kusama would be a web3 social networks, right? So we have different projects experimenting with that or identity, for example, or experimenting with common with chains that in, in, on Polkadot with might not see. Right. so I think the community will evolve into different usecases and we will see the differentiation between these two communities in the next year, right? When we have the first chains on Polkadot connected and already 15 or 20 or 25 Kusama chains connected to this particular community.

Anna Rose (00:37:32):
Very cool. What do you actually see the spirit of the Kusama network being in the future? Like you sort of mentioned a few use cases that you think could emerge, but like in terms of the community and Kusama as a unique chain, do you ever see it like splitting away in a way from Polkadot?

Raul Romanutti (00:37:48):
So the way I see it as both Relay Chains Polkadot and Kusama, are part of the same ecosystem. You know, my hope is that eventually in the future they will be bridged. So...

Anna Rose (00:37:57):
Not split away then...

Raul Romanutti (00:38:00):
Exactly.

Anna Rose (00:38:01):
Not the rogue incentivized Canary network.

Raul Romanutti (00:38:04):
I hope not. It depends on governance of course, but I'm hoping not. And that Kusama parachains will be able to also interact and enjoy the relationship with Polkadot parachains, right? Once the bridge exists, I think in general, the spirit of Kusama, it's very free, right? And it's no promises and it's very chaotic and it allows us to discuss very I could say controversial or I would say very borderline topics that could be dangerous for a community to discuss. Right. but this is the nice part about Kusama. Like if you enter to the Kusama direction channel, you'll see very candid discussions, right. About like why we shouldn't change certain parameters, why we should make the network cheaper or why we should, why this runtime doesn't work. What does this palette means for the entire business logic of the network? What does it mean for the stakeholders? How does, how does this work? You know, these discussions are in the center of Kusama development and counselors take them very much into account when when they vote for runtime upgrades or for change of parameters. So I think in general, what Kusama allows us to do is to discuss this in a very safe environment, so to say.

Anna Rose (00:39:24):
Kusama has now in a way shown how this governance works, how it works kind of on a little bit of a longer scale. But do you think that, like, do you feel like the experiment is satisfied? Do you feel like yes. You know, there's enough proof that this is a system that can maintain a network for a long period of time? Or do you think there's still like a testing period that we're in basically to understand if some of these like governance systems and like full on chain governance to this level with the sophistication, if it works.

Raul Romanutti (00:39:55):
I think we're still in testing grounds. I think we can say that this works, we can say that on chain governance works and it's a valid mechanism or solution to create consensus in the community and avoid the community ruptures, so to say. But there are still a lot of things we need to improve, right? There's still a lot of things that need to be a change on the governance side of things in order to be optimally working. One issue for example, is asymmetric information. So the community having different type of information, different sources of information, how they get the real or the truth or how they get the information right from where and by whom and how they vote also, right. Turnouts in general seem to be low for proposals that are not very controversial and this needs to be changed. We need the community to be educated and informed. We need the community to participate and to join the direction channels and to join the water coolers and the validator lounges, to be able to be part of the discussion on what's the direction of Kusama network. And I think this has to do a lot with off-chain coordination, more than on chain coordination on the governance side of things. Right. But it's something that's really needed for the construction of consensus to work by on chain governance mechanism.

Anna Rose (00:41:20):
So people are like, we'll often elect representatives to deal with this minutia. I guess the question here is like, do you think that there needs to be new levels added to Kusama?

Raul Romanutti (00:41:30):
Right. So I mean, yes, you're right. This is the reason why council was the sign, right? So council represents passive stakeholders. And so the governance system on Kusama is a combination, right. Of representation and direct democracy. I think new discussions and new designs will bring other levels of direct participation to the system. We will see maybe forms of liquid democracy. We will see forms of speediness of execution of a proposal based on the turnout and the participation of stakeholders. So there are different levels and different parameters that will be taken into account when it comes to enactment of proposals. But yeah, initially the design of Kusama was meant to be a combination of representation and direct democracy, of course always taken into account that the council can barely execute change parameters or change of the business logic without the acceptance of the community.

Anna Rose (00:42:29):
Do you imagine though, also like kind of extra levels created for funding? I guess this is like not only the council level, but also like even more granularly. We were actually talking quite a bit about this bounty curator, bounties, like kind of creating a second layer of mechanisms to distribute funding. And I'm wondering if that's still something that you see in the future. Do you want to have like the council maybe decide larger funding that then gets distributed down to smaller, more granular groups? Yeah. What are you, what's your thinking around that?

Raul Romanutti (00:43:01):
Yeah, so yeah, this is something we should mention also for the audience that Kusama has a treasury that is distributed on chain and the treasury is funded via staking inefficiencies, transaction fees and slashing events. Right. And the council at the moment is the guardian of this treasury. And so there are different ways the council can use in order to spend these funds in general. The most used one is the spending proposal mechanisms, which basically works as a grant for a team to develop an idea. Then we have tips, which is basically recognizing the work of individual people or teams when it comes to add value to the network. And it has to do with tutorial, translations bug fixes and whatnot, right? And in general, it's a one off. And then we have this new type of mechanism, which is what you're talking about. It's called the bounty mechanism. And the bounty mechanism allows the council to delegate the responsibility of spending the treasury or at least a portion of the treasury to an expert on what the bounty is related to. And this expert is called a curator. So basically this curator that is selected by the council, it doesn't need to be part of the council. It can be any Kusama address has the autonomy to decide how to spend when and in which amount to spend certain allocation of the treasury for teams that are developing things that add value to the network. So these three are the methods that we have right now, or that the council has right now to spend the treasury. This may change in the future. Maybe more will be added as well as the categories for sponsoring and for funding are, are changing, are continually changing based on the development of the network, right? So at the beginning, we have eight categories and then given the development of Kusama and parachains, getting connected to the networking, whatnot, the council is seeing new funding proposals when it comes to cross chain applications. So for example, that's a new category or the education category is a newly added category as well. And so all of this changes continuously, right? And it depends on what the needs of the network are. At the moment we have three mechanisms we hope to have more in the future to be able to spend the treasury more efficiently. Of course.

Anna Rose (00:45:35):
Where does this secret society fit into all this? We talked about that with will too. And maybe you can, you can just, I mean, we did just hear about it as like the listeners will have just heard about it, but I'm wondering yeah. If you can just sort of weigh in on that.

Raul Romanutti (00:45:47):
So Kappa Sigma Mu is not part of the governance

Anna Rose (00:45:51):
And you guys have a Kappa Sigma it's did you say Kappa Sigma Mu

Raul Romanutti (00:45:56):
Yeah, that's the name of the society. It is, yeah. Yeah. This society is not part of the governance society. It's just a membership club that was created in order to experiment with on chain decisions. Right. And tattoos, yeah, because of course you need to have a tattoo to get in. It does have a treasury it's own treasury, right. And it is funded by the treasury automatically. I think it's like 1%, every, each period or so 1% of the, of the potential burn of the treasury each period goes to the, to the treasury of the society. And from there is where new members are rewarded for bidding to enter the society and successfully submitting proof of ink or the two. But this society is not related to the governance society. Doesn't make decisions insider within the governance side. It's just a membership club for Kusama aficionados. So the community hardcore Kusama aficionados.

Anna Rose (00:47:03):
Yeah. Are you in that by chance?

Raul Romanutti (00:47:06):
I am. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Anna Rose (00:47:08):
Yeah. Do you think, I mean, do you see actually some funding coming out of that though? Like that's a relatively large percentage, 1% of treasury burn, like that seems high. So is, does it now have like a massive treasury it also has to find a way to distribute?

Raul Romanutti (00:47:23):
I mean, it has some funds for sure that can be distributed at the moment. The only way the pallet allows us to spend the funds is by members bidding and getting their reward for a successful bid. Right. But there's a lot of discussion among the members about changing this logic and allowing the existing members to decide kind of like the council right, to the side, how to spend this funds. And like, if some members have ideas about proposals or about things that could add value to the network, maybe also fund these members via the society treasury. So these discussions are ongoing in the channel, which is also public. The society channel is also public and that's where you can see also the submissions of the POIs and the challenges to existing members and new candidates getting information. And so on.

Anna Rose (00:48:14):
Crazy. Is there any last thoughts you want to share?

Raul Romanutti (00:48:19):
I think if you're interested in the direction of Polkadot, it's always important to see the Canary network first. So if you're interested in the direction of Polkadot pay attention to Kusama network as well, Kusama network is a much more flexible and faster network, and it allows us to experiment with the code that the teams are creating, join the channels, pay attention to the discussions and talk to your counselors and vote.

Anna Rose (00:48:47):
Very cool. Okay. Raul. Thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing with us the insights into Kusama governance. A little bit about the society and yeah. Where you could see it going.

Raul Romanutti (00:48:58):
Yeah. No problem. Thank you.

Anna Rose (00:49:04):
So I want to welcome Bruno Skvorc, founder of RMRK to the show. Welcome Bruno.

Bruno Skvorc (00:49:08):
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Anna Rose (00:49:10):
In this part of the episode, Bruno and I are going to be talking a little bit about the RMRK project and NFT project on Kusama. And then we're going to also talk about Kusama. So it's a bit of a shift from what we just talked about. Rmrk is like Kusama first project. So Bruno, maybe you can introduce yourself and share with us what the RMRK project is all about.

Bruno Skvorc (00:49:30):
Sure. I I started out with Ethereum in 2015. When I data mined my happiness and figured that JavaScript was making me miserable. So I dropped all of my web contracts and just transitioned cold turkey. I spent the next year just learning. Then I started educating, built some educational websites, a magazine where I taught web2 developers how to transition to web3. A few hundred posts and a book later, I got hired by Status to work on Ethereum 2.0 and I was their technical writer. And then after a year or so of that, I got poached by the Web3 Foundation to work on Polkadot and Kusama also as a technical educator, actually. Nice. And RMRK came about when I noticed that the NFT craze was ramping up again in August of last year, I had been pretty deeply into Kusama by then. And I, I liked the chain very much and the little cult grew around it that had this little artsy bend. So I figured it would be a real shame if Kusama missed out on the NFT wave that was coming. And I recognized it because I was a big part of the first one on Ethereum, when, when things broke due to CryptoKitties, but, you know, Kusama being Kusama, no smart contracts and stuff. So we needed to get creative with hacking NFTs onto it turned out really great, but it was really Russian roulette. So it could have gone very, very wrong.

Anna Rose (00:50:59):
Tell me a little bit about RMRK then. What is RMRK? How do you get NFTs on Kusama?

Bruno Skvorc (00:51:05):
When I first came up with the concept, it just recycled the idea from Bitcoin's early days with colored coins, where you just basically store custom messages alongside transactions and interpret them in a special way. And then you kind of get extra data from it. But obviously that never went anywhere on Bitcoin because nobody wants to wait for two hours for their and NFT transfer to confirm. But the, like the idea is, is good, especially on Kusama because when you issued these transactions and there's like every Substrate chain, like Kusama has this RMRK utility, which is where the protocol got its name. And if you issue a RMRK on the chain, that's basically like you graffitiing the chain, you don't issue. You don't make a state change. It doesn't get stored in the database of the chain itself, but it gets stored alongside the blocks. And so it does get stored on the hard drive of the nodes that are running, but not on the chain itself. So it doesn't bloat the state. And if you compare it to something like blocks in a blockchain, being a shipping container that contains transactions and transfers them. What we did was we graffitied the outside of that container. So that value is still there. Only we've built a special language on how to interpret and read these graffiti to actually get NFTs out of this. So this, this is, yeah, this is how it started.

Anna Rose (00:52:20):
So, let's explore what RMRK you just said. RMRK is like a, it's a code, it's a, it's a call in Kusama. Where does that actually live? And is that like the equivalent of like memo field?

Bruno Skvorc (00:52:31):
Yeah, it is exactly like the memo field only in most chains actually. Yeah. It's exactly like the memo field. It lives alongside the block. Like, so like a RMRK isn't extrinsic, the function is an extrinsic, which means it's an external input into the chain and usually extrinsics have some sort of effect, like they will make a state change where an account balance will change or you'll, you will write a new value to the blockchain's database. Like I am now nominating this guy, or I have just voted for this referendum. So those are state changes, but RMRKs are, are stateless extrinsics, meaning that they're just basically, you know, you shouting into the ether and them not having any effect. So they don't actually change the chain, but all the full nodes off Kusama and any Substrate chain actually do save these alongside all of the blocks on their hard drive.

Anna Rose (00:53:25):
The follow-up question I have to that then is, so what you're doing is you're trying to create an NFT-like experience, but there is no smart contracts. So NFTs, as they're known to most people, what is it? ERC 721 or whatever the new ERC that's being used to like design an NFT, that's all reliant on smart contract enabled mint. Like you have to be able to deploy contract in order to mint an NFT. You don't have contracts. You're using this RMRK utility you're using the memo field or RMRK field, I guess. So like what do you put in there? How is it that you could still have an NFT that's transferrable if you've just written something into a memo field?

Bruno Skvorc (00:54:09):
Yeah. So we use the RMRK field, the RMRK as an event in an event sourcing database. And so you essentially, what you essentially get is every single change to the system is a new write into a RMRK. So you will issue in block one, you will issue a RMRK like mint this picture of an apple as an NFT. And then in block two, you will issue a RMRK saying, send this picture of an apple from Alice to Bob. And then if in block three, you say, send this picture of an apple from Alice to Charlie. That RMRK is now going to be invalid when processed by our, by our tools that are looking at all of these RMRKs because in block two, it was already sent to Bob. And so this is the first problem of the, of the RMRK system as it is, and that in order to sync it in order to be able to know the up-to-date state of the NFTs and the ecosystem, you have to basically sync from scratch and consolidate all of these events squash them into one final state that is calculated from the very beginning. Now we do maintain a regular automatically updated dumps on IPFS of all of this. So people can just fetch the latest, valid state of the entire RMRK ecosystem. But this is obviously very inefficient and this is why we are currently rewriting the logic to actually move away from RMRKs and get into palette territory and smart contract territory as well.

Anna Rose (00:55:33):
Okay. Yeah, because the way you describe it, there, you have almost an external system. That's looking at these memo fields and you'd almost have to compile like you're, you're basically watching states change in this separate thing. And so what you're saying now though, is you're thinking of moving it onto a pallet. Are you probably gonna make a parachain then? Is this like going to be its own network?

Bruno Skvorc (00:55:53):
No. So it is exactly like that. So we run a consolidator service, which has also a standalone script that anybody else can run, which then fetches all of these RMRKs and squashes them into this final state that is valid. Okay. Now, during our fundraise phase, we had buy-in from all of the heavy hitters in the Kusama ecosystem, all of these parachains, where they basically committed to adding our pallets to their runtime when they are available. So moving to pallets has always been the plan only because there was no parachain technology when we were starting RMRK, we had to improvise. So they have actually committed to adding our pallets to their runtimes. And this in-turn means that when the RMRK pallets are on all of these chains that have committed to this, we kind of made the first unofficial system-wide spree in Polkadot because all of these chains will share a runtime and you'll be able to seamlessly teleport your non fungibles from one chain to the other. So this is, this has always been the plan and we're also moving to a smart contracts because fundamentally it is incredibly easy to write this functionality that we have in Solidity. So we are, there's also an ongoing effort to rewrite it as Solidity and deploy it on Moonriver and Shiden. Though RMKR has significantly evolved since it's, you know, NFTs and image days in the, in August of last year. We, we now we, we, we went from a hack on Kusama to support basic NFTs to the most advanced NFT system in the world. And I say this like with full objectivity and awareness of how cocky it is. But I can promise you that in like three to five years, every single NFT in the world will be based on RMRK or a copy of RMRK purely because nothing else will make sense. RMRK is to NFTs. What Ethereum was to blockchains when it came out.

Anna Rose (00:57:44):
Whoa. These are huge claims, but I want to take a really quick step back because you use two terms that our audience may not be familiar with. You've mentioned a pallet, pallet being kind of like a module in Substrate. Is that fair?

Bruno Skvorc (00:57:57):
Yeah. Pallet is a plugin for Substrate chains, which allows you to add in custom functionality.

Anna Rose (00:58:01):
Cool. And we did talk about Substrate in an earlier part of this interview. So people should be familiar with it. You also mentioned SPREE. I have to find that on previous episodes with Polkadot people, but maybe you should explain what SPREE actually is.

Bruno Skvorc (00:58:14):
Yeah. So SPREE is or short, short for like Substrate protected runtime execution environment or something like that. That's basically like when you have like a programming language, you have some libraries that you can reuse across your projects to get some functionality that you already use before somewhere else, or did somebody else wrote, and SPREE is very much like that. SPREE is like a common core library for parachains to subscribe to. So SPREE is like a system that parachains can declare that they're supporting. And for example, you can imagine a balances spree where two chains declared that they support the balances spree, and now they understand each other. The problem that that's Spree is solving is when you have two parachains that are not developed by the same team, and that may not even know each other, these chains can, can send each other a message through the cross chain messaging protocol on Polkadot. But that message doesn't have to be interpreted properly by the other chain. Cause the other chain, like if chain A says to chain B send user user Bob a hundred tokens, the other chain might not know what user is, what Bob is and what tokens are and what a hundred is even. By having SPREE in a, like a central place, like a, like a Relay Chain. It's kind of like a library in between like an interpreter that both chains can declare. All right, for any balance changes, I'm going to listen to what this Spree guy tells me. It means. And by doing this, the chains can intuitively understand each other. And the execution of the message that is sent is guaranteed because there's no way that it's good that it gets misinterpreted.

Anna Rose (00:59:47):
Is it sort of standard, almost like a standards channel?

Bruno Skvorc (00:59:51):
Kind of yeah. Yeah. Kind of like that only it's, it's a full implementation with its own database on the Relay Chain or probably going to be a Spree parachain. I don't know what the plan is there cause SPREE is really under development yet. And this is why I say we're the first like unofficial Spree in that if all these chains implement our pallets, then there's no need for a central Spree of RMRK. And this means that they can actually talk directly between the paletts that they implemented, which is kind of cool.

Anna Rose (01:00:18):
Crazy. Okay. Like I, I need to dig into your claim that it's the most advanced NFT. Like, so you have this, you have the NFT pallets on all these different chains you've created sort of your own version of a spree. Like non-official how like is it, is it that infrastructure that makes them so advanced?

Bruno Skvorc (01:00:38):
Oh no. Not, not, not that it's purely in what it makes possible for NFTs in that it allows them to move away from expensive images right now all you have is basically expensive image NFTs. And this is because on Ethereum where basically all the NFTs are, you have two standards, ERC 721, and ERC 1155 and these support, the lowest common denominator, which is just a reference to an image somewhere. And this is for good reason because when you're a general purpose, computer abstracting away, all of that functionality is really hard. And all of these marketplaces and incumbents that are already on Ethereum have a huge problem implementing new things. And so they like to play it safe and ERC 721 makes them a lot of money right now. So it's economically rational to reject change there. So this is problem. Number one, problem. Number two, is that on Ethereum when you're doing any kind of standard development like on ERC 721, or even ERC 24 for fungible tokens, what you're doing is you're basically just writing a spreadsheet and that spreadsheet has many rows with many columns of data, only NFT spreadsheets, just to have more columns. So whereas an ERC 20 spreadsheet will have just an address and the balance an ERC 721 spreadsheet will have an address and the balance, and then also an attribute of that NFT and another attribute. And so fundamentally this is inefficient because all of these spreadsheets are abstracted away to the most common data structures, which means that you're always storing strings and numbers and storing a lot of strings in these data structures on a public blockchain with high demand is incredibly expensive. And this is why transferring a simple NFT costs a $100 to $200 bucks on a good day on Ethereum. This can never be efficient. Now what we've built on RMRK with RMRK 2.0, especially, which is live now, we have five fundamental NFT Legos where when you put them together, you can compose a system of arbitrary complexity without smart contracts, but also any UI and any app that supports these fundamental primitive Legos automatically supports any derivation of them, any permutation of them, anything that you can put together from them. And this is what gives the system its power because in Ethereum, if you want to build an NFT project that has any custom functionality, anything more creative than just an image, your community is beholden to your UI. You, they, they have to rely on you to build that custom UI for them. If you disappear that functionality mainly disappears, nobody is going to be interacting directly with the contract to play with your things. And if you get an actually advanced NFT project out on Ethereum, it is going to look extremely plain on marketplaces, like Rarible, like OpenSea and so on. Because by definition, when you customize your NFT, you've written a custom smart contract, and these marketplaces have zero incentive to add UI support for your custom contract. But if you have fundamental Legos that you can very easily support technically in the, in the UI way, then you also support any derivation of them. And because you can build really rich projects from these Legos, any UI that supports them will also support them automatically. Now you can always smarten that up even more with more custom contracts around this, but in the vast majority of cases, we've abstracted these Legos enough to support most of what people want to build. And so these Legos are NFTs being able to own other NFTs NFTs being able to equip other NFTs and change their appearance. NFTs being able to receive on chain emotes, so reactions from people, which is pretty cool in terms of price discovery and social mechanics. NFTs being able to have multiple resources so that you can have different outputs depending on different contexts. So like I can mint on a video game NFT that contains code a PDF manual and a high resolution cover image. And if you're loaded into a game compatible marketplace for NFTs, you will just have it autoplay run. But if you load it into a primitive environment, like something like OpenSea, you will just see the image, right. And if you load it into something like our marketplace Singular, it will open the PDF because we have a PDF reader built in. So you can read ebook NFTs there as well. And so one more Lego is a conditional rendering where it can have a little bits of logic called JSON logic in the NFTs that will trigger based on some on chain and off chain information,

Anna Rose (01:05:01):
Some change, basically.

Bruno Skvorc (01:05:02):
Yeah. So if I have like something like a mountain that that's surrounded by flowers and birds and everything I can say provided that this NFT has an alternative resource that's a snowy mountain. I can say to the NFT, if this NFT gets 50 snow emojis switched to display to the snowy mountain. And now if you make that equip-able another NFT, so that it's a background, for example, then you now have an evolving composable image that can react to emotes that people sent. And the fifth Lego is fractionalization of NFTs.

Anna Rose (01:05:35):
I've done, I've done a show on fractionallization with Andy Chorlian, and we can actually link to that if people want to find out about that idea. Cool.

Bruno Skvorc (01:05:44):
Yeah, the fractionalization is, is a really cool concept, but it's used in Ethereum precisely because of the limits in functionality and because of the gas fees only to gamble. So all it can do is speculate with these fungible tokens. Whereas in RMKR, you can use them to democratically govern well, plutocratic govern on NFT so that if you need to collectively decide that an endgame avatar needs to equip a piece of equipment, you can distribute that avatar's fungible tokens to the community and they will vote for it. And now we have like collaborative gaming sessions on Twitch, where, where the audience is alive, modifying the load-out of a character that the gamer is getting into battle with. Or, stuff like that.

Anna Rose (01:06:23):
I mean, this is a wild project. Thank you so much for sharing kind of this insight into it. I do want to link us back to the topic of this overall episode, and that is Kusama you've decided to put RMRK. I mean, it started on the Kusama network, I guess you said like August 2020 was when you were starting it?

Bruno Skvorc (01:06:42):
Yes.

Anna Rose (01:06:43):
So Kusama parchains came live on in April. Now we're getting close to Polkadot parachains coming live. Do you you're primarily a Kusama project, but are you thinking of moving to Polkadot? Is there a reason you're on Kusama?

Bruno Skvorc (01:06:56):
The reason is that this was a wild enough hack to deploy on a wild enough network. Kusama seemed friendly to it, and I didn't feel like it matches the context of Polkadot, to put this basically vandalization of blocks onto Polkadot. It always felt more at home on Kusama, which is much more artsy, much more open to things and which I'm personally a bigger fan of. However, by the time Polkadot is ready for parachain deployments, we will also be deployed on some chains with our pallets. So by extension, we will not be necessary in the RMRK format on Polkadot. And so we will be implicitly available through our partner parachains. We will not launch our own parachain, but we do not intend to have a separate deployment on Polkadot per se, especially with the announced bridge between Kusama and Polkadot. I don't think that's necessary.

Anna Rose (01:07:50):
So you are a Kusama-first project then. You just described this Kusama ecosystem that it's more creative that you were doing basically graffiti on the side of the chain, which I love that image, but yeah. Tell me a little bit more about Kusama as it stands and maybe how you see it developing now that Polkadot is live or going to seem to be live in this fullest form?

Bruno Skvorc (01:08:11):
I don't actually think we've seen much, we've seen as much testing on Kusama as everybody wanted to see. And so I don't really consider it the Canary network for Polkadot haven't considered it for awhile. I've always considered it, its own mainnet that is growing its own audience and its own projects. And I think it's, it stands really well standalone on its own. And I think it can evolve in that direction really, really well. There are certain problems that need to be resolved, like decentralizing the council some more and, and just generally fixing some issues with governance in particular. But I think Kusama is on a really good path to be an incredible powerhouse, especially for this experimental nature of projects that that might be seen as weird. Like I've always compared Polkadot and Kusama to like Kusama is your, your garage band concert, where your friends come and you have a few cases of beer and everybody's having fun. And somebody spells some beer on a speaker and it doesn't matter because the other one's still working and you shout songs at the band that you want them to play and nobody cares and everybody's happy and everybody has fun things break people fight. But at the end of the day, this is the story that we tell our children and friends. Whereas Polkadot is like a symphony that is, that is rehearsed. That requires, you know, like people with bow ties and pinkies out to calmly sit in the first row. And when you need to make a change in the symphony, you have to have buy-in from the conductor, the audience, the orchestra, the singers, everybody who's involved has to agree to it. And it'll take awhile to make a change. So in a way, Kusama started out as kind of this practicing ground where you kind of practice your instruments for the symphony, but in effect, it turned into what actually happens. And that's that the punky garage band stays a punky garage band and the, and the symphony guys are just schooled elsewhere. I really liked this independence of Kusama and I think it can go a long way if it decouples even further.

Anna Rose (01:10:12):
Amazing. I really love the image you just presented. Yeah. Do you have any last sort of thoughts? This is the last interview of the Kusama episode. So maybe if you want to send any encouragement to folks who are listening to this, it might be the first time they're actually aware of this network or have seen some insight into how it's, how it's running.

Bruno Skvorc (01:10:32):
I would say that no matter if you're technical or non-technical, if you have any ambition in launching anything, just ship, don't plan, don't think I used to be of the persuasion that a lot of thought needs to be put into things like I would spend four weeks on a domain name and then four more on a basic design. And then I would log onto Twitter and see that three different people have done the project during my deliberations. He who ships wins. So ship and win, you know, tune in and do something mint an NFT on singular build a project, attacks the chain or you know, deploy something, deploy a new prediction market on a Zeitgeist beta version go in, explore, click around. There's literally nothing to lose if you're this early. So yeah. Be brave and explore this, this crazy ecosystem.

Anna Rose (01:11:21):
That's very cool. And also you have very much this NFT ethos. I've been hearing this from other folks in the NFT space of just like shipping so fast. You just have to do something quickly. You can't sit there and plan the same way you maybe even did in web3, especially not the way you would have done in web2. Wild. Cool. Well, thanks for sharing your journey Bruno and thanks for coming on the show.

Bruno Skvorc (01:11:41):
Sure, my pleasure.

Anna Rose (01:11:42):
And I want to say a big thank you to the podcast producer, Tanya, the podcast editor Henrik, and to our listeners. Thanks for listening.