The Block sat down this week with Preston Van Loon, Co-Founder and Team Lead at Prysmatic Labs, to discuss the origins of his client implementation project, the future of Ethereum, and life as a Xoogler.
Here are some of our notes.
Prysmatic Labs:
What were you up to before starting Prysmatic Labs (PL)?
- Software engineer at Google working on DoubleClick, the enterprise-focused ad serving service
- Wasn’t particularly intellectually stimulating — day to day largely consisted of updating legacy codebase
- Started checking out Ethereum in Summer 2017
- By 2017, with the rise of token sales and infamous CryptoKitties launch, became increasingly apparent that scalability was essential
- Started looking into the Sharding specification and from there continued to ask questions
- Met with Raul Jordan, the co-founder of PL, in January 2018, and decided to put a team together
What kind of backgrounds are necessary to develop a client?
- Need people who are genuinely dedicated to and excited about open source development — initially there was no funding for PL so had to be willing to work for free
- Need at least 2 people for code review, engineers
- Project manager also useful
- 10-15 people would be optimal
- Current team completely distributed
What have the biggest challenges been to date and what challenges do you expect to encounter moving forward?
- The biggest hurdles so far have been self-inflicted — wanted to get up and running in January 2018 before the spec had been finalized. Was then re-written after Spring retreat in Taiwan
- As for future challenges — some concern that ETH 2.0 might not be complete before competing protocols launch and attract users
- ETH 2.0 contains an optimistic set of features: putting real value on shards, EVM on shards, cross-shard transactions etc.
What does success look like for PL?
- Want the client to be a major player – at least top 3 by market share
- Primarily motivated by making a big impact, solving problems
Why did PL decide to implement their client in Go?
- PL team already familiar with Geth
- Go is typesafe, meaning easier to prevent errors, and human readable
- The alternatives were C++ and Rust (used by Parity)
- Python is terrible — nice for prototyping but bad for performance
With 8 teams currently working on ETH 2.0 clients, how necessary is wide client diversity?
- There’s certainly value in having at least 3 succeed — need different perspectives, have individual groups asking different questions
- Client diversity also important in scenarios where one client has bugs, vulnerabilities
How well-capitalized is PL?
- PL has enough runway for the next 12 months
- Received grant from the Ethereum Foundation, and then another 3000 ETH from Vitalik and an anonymous donor
- Currently still holding ETH as haven’t set up institutional account on Gemini
- Want to get down to 20% ETH exposure
- Funding only important up to certain point — beyond that, need more collaboration, communication
Will PL have to rely on grants in perpetuity?
- Can leverage experience working on client implementation to consult other projects down the line
- Might possibly work on a staking-as-a-service product
As a client implementor, would you like to be more involved with Ethereum research?
- Primary goal right now for PL is to catch up with the spec and then get a testnet working
- Once that’s done, would be great to focus more on research
The State of Ethereum:
What was it that drew you to work on Ethereum versus Bitcoin?
- Found that Bitcoin wasn’t fulfilling its initial vision of p2p money
- Difficult to get involved with Core development
- Ethereum community more welcoming, exciting
What do you find most exciting about Ethereum? What are the best use cases?
- MakerDAO and DAI – fulfills Bitcoin’s original vision of p2p money
- Uncensorable gaming applications
- Sovereign identity
- Asset ownership
What does it mean to be a good ‘Ethereum citizen’?
- It doesn’t mean being interested for the sake of making money
- It doesn’t mean being interested in technical aspects but unwilling to help
- A good citizen is engaged, trying to actually help solve Ethereum’s shortcomings
- Doesn’t spend time criticizing other projects
- Generally welcoming, friendly
Recently there was a discussion about the extent to which protocol developers should care about Ether price. What are your thoughts there?
- Holds some ETH in personal portfolio
- Price of ETH important with respect to funding — higher the price, more capital to go around
- Doesn’t like talking about price on daily basis – too distracting
Lane Rettig recently proposed the following question: ‘Fast-forward five years and the Ethereum experiment has failed. Why did it fail?’ What’s your take?
- Could be several reasons
- Research team could give up for some reason
- Ethereum network could be attacked in a way that makes it impossible to recover
- Not enough funding to support protocol developers
What are your thoughts on protocols like NEAR, Dfinity etc, which are attempting to challenge Ethereum’s supremacy?
- The community support behind Ethereum is important – has a distinct first-mover advantage, network effects
- Can understand why these projects are emerging — way to monetize core-protocol development through token sales
- dApp developers want a scalable platform — they’re going to build on the platform that best serves their business
- If Ethereum cannot solve scaling problems, might not have any meaningful dApps left – Aragon, for example, just announced that they will be leasing a Polkadot parachain
How can Ethereum solve for core protocol funding?
- MolochDAO a good initiative — have been in talks with Ameen
- Like the idea of on-chain funding, similar to Tezos/Decred
- Suggests a fee/tax to be paid for protocol advancements in the same way that the network already subsidizes miners
- However, imagines the Ethereum community would reject such a proposal
- Perhaps something that can be solved in the future once better governance solutions have emerged
What is your relationship with the Ethereum Foundation?
- Slightly chaotic at first but getting better by the day
- Would like them to be more transparent when it comes to funding
- Think it should be operated as a for-profit business – keep costs low, maximize value
- Don’t think it should disappear over time, useful organization to answer hard questions, work with governments etc.
What are your thoughts on Ethereum’s existing informal governance mechanism?
- Has worked historically and working right now, although that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good
Life after Google:
How is Google thinking about blockchains?
- The company doesn’t favour any one protocol but if blockchains can enable access to information then will make sense for them to explore
- Allen Day, Science Advocate at Google, launched and running BigQuery, with Google paying for compute and data storage
What’s life like after Google?
- Happy – glad to be fully focused on Ethereum
- Before leaving Google, was waking up at 5am every morning to fit in some hours on client development
- Can now spend more time with wife and friends
What are your off-screen hobbies?
- Flying planes — originally went to pilot school before switching to CS
- Got pilot’s license in 2009
- Flies several hours a month out of Farmingdale Airport
- Enjoys the freedom of flying
The post In conversation with Preston Van Loon, Co-Founder and Team Lead at Prysmatic Labs appeared first on The Block.
In conversation with Preston Van Loon, Co-Founder and Team Lead at Prysmatic Labs written by Matteo Leibowitz @ https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2019/02/06/in-conversation-with-preston-van-loon-co-founder-and-team-lead-at-prysmatic-labs/ February 7, 2019 Matteo Leibowitz
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