P: All right so welcome back today we’re going to dive into ecash and what is the future of this split from what was known as bitcoin cash my name is paul barron. Welcome back to techpath joining me today is Amaury Sechet who is one of the lead developers for ecash abc and uh great to have you on the show
Amaury.
A: Hey nice to be here.
P: Excellent, where do we find you today?
A: uh i’m located in france in like the northern part in the middle of the
forest by Chante, maybe people who like horse racing are gonna know the place.
P: Very nice very nice. Good deal let’s talk a little bit Amaury about.. for our viewers is a little bit around the mission of eCash what you guys are
trying to do as a whole. uh to.. before we get into some of the detail of how the split occurred what were the you know some of the things you guys were trying to achieve but give us kind of a rundown of where you guys are today?
A: yeah so really the the mission of ecash is to be sound money i’d say but it’s you know very broad very vague so i can dwell a bit more into it
um typically you know there are two forms of money that are used a lot just like excluding crypto which is you know new and exciting and there is a lot of stuff going on there but, traditionally there are two form of money like one of them is going to be what we call hard money so this is going to be stuff like precious metal for instance gold or cpu this kind of stuff. um it has very good monetary property in the sense that you know it’s fungible its scares uh all of that but, it’s not very convenient to use on a day-to-day basis right? and so what happened is that you know people they stop to use that and as they
trade as the ecosystem grows um it becomes very inconvenient to use that and so people switch to what we call “fiat money”. so fiat money is like what we have today right the euro the dollar the how like whatever currency you want to use uh all of that are fiat money. and so those currency are way more convenient to use on a day-to-day basis but they don’t have the hard money property not the big you need to trust a central bank to uh you know manage that in a good way to not emit a ton of it for instance. and even if the central bank is trustworthy like experience show that as time goes on over time there is always a point that comes where the central bank becomes untrustworthy and this is the end of it. um so with ecash we’re trying to unify both, we’re trying to make a currency or a form of money that has the property of hard money and also the property uh of fiat money there’s already like you know the convenience of use of fiat money. um that would be like really the most important uh.. the most important thing.
P: I was looking at your roadmap which kind of explains the main categories in improvements that you guys were looking to do and obviously one was scaling the transaction throughput from about 100 transactions per second going up to 5 million transactions per second and then also improving the payment experience instant reliable baseline how close are you currently in terms of your roadmap to reality with eCash?
A: yeah so the first one is you know it’s easily explained in one item like that but it’s actually like a a ton of stuff right? like to get from 100 to seven millions it’s not like one improvement. so we are doing some uh over time one after the other. you know as long as we stay ahead of the
curve on that front i think we’re good. uh the second one though i think is much more important like that’s very binary. we are doing that with a technology called “Avalanche” and so right now the state of affair is that we have the core consensus algorithm implemented um and the path that is missing is what we call peer discovery so.. the different nodes that include that protocol need to talk to each other and find each other on the network automatically to be able to run the algorithm between them and that part is not completely finished. but it’s you know.. it’s in good way so hopefully.. it’s difficult to give a specific date but you know being pessimistic i think even by the end of the year which we should have something on the network.
P: Yeah, explain to me the fork-free upgrades because obviously we’ve seen you know various forks and variations all the way from Ethereum to changes within what’s happening over at Cardano, a lot of different projects have really started to kind of re.. i guess re-upgrade their own internal protocols to try to adapt to the new functionality of what the blockchain is experiencing right now in terms of growth and, right now we’re still in very early days so we’re gonna see continued scalability issues probably for the next five years.
A: Yes.
P: With this kind of approach without a fork option, explain how that is going to work for ecash in terms of scalability in the future?
A: so i think there is a bit of a misconception like we can still do forks um if we need to right but um the fact that like one of the cool stuff with Avalanche is that not all the nodes have to agree on all the parameters of the protocol for the system to work and that means that we can release a new version of the node with different parameters and initially it’s not going to have any effect right, but as more people deploy the new version and use the new version at some point those nodes are going to be the majority using the new parameters and at this point the new parameters take effect and that enables a past or the grade that is way easier uh in the general case as long as this is something that you can do in that matter.
P: on the EVM compatibility with uh Ethereum have you.. explain the differences between what you’re doing on the Avalanche chain versus what you guys are doing within the EVM compatibility kind of uh the comparison of cross chain, or how are you adapting to the various chains that are out there right now?
A: yeah absolutely so.. um ecash is a bitcoin style blockchain right? and so those type of blockchain have certain property but one of them is that you
know they don’t run Ethereum type smart contract.
P: right.
A: The reality is know that the EVMs or the virtual machine that run Ethereum smart contract has become de facto is standout to write smart contract right, and so many other chains have started to add up the EVM technology for for their own chain and doing that on the bitcoin style blockchain has always been a huge challenge. I think nobody has been able to do it so far and the reason is they fundamentally work in a different way right, so bitcoin is “UTXO based” and Ethereum is “account based” and those two work they really don’t mix. so if you want to mix the two.. what you need to do is that you need to have like a word that is on the side that runs an EVM and you have still your.. you know bitcoin chain that exists and then you need a way to move from one to the other and this has been a subject of research in the bitcoin space for for many many years now and we know to move in what direction meaning from the main chain to like a side chain or drive chain or whatever but the way back has always been a challenge uh it’s it’s exceedingly difficult and it’s not a solved problem using exclusively nakamoto consoles like bitcoin does, uh because we plan to deploy uh the Avalanche consensus algorithm in addition to nakamoto processes we can do that you know reverse paths uh much better than any other bitcoin type chain can do and what that allows us to do is create those other system that work differently that can interact with the main chain and so uh the two of them that we’re specifically looking at is one with an EVM because the EVM is the de facto standard to write smart contract now and another one is one with zero knowledge technology so that you know it can be like completely private but because it’s on the size not on the main chain we keep auditability on the main chain.
P: When you look at the benefits of what you guys are trying to do with some of the other projects that are out there on the open blockchain and and kind of the evolution of what we’ve seen with many different projects moving this direction really what is the main characteristic of what ecash is trying
to do versus say some of the generalized modules out there that are essentially trying to kind of achieve the same result?
A: So there are a few things right because.. well as you mentioned there are many other technology out there so uh it’s difficult to give like a comparison against the other.. right… like i would have to pick each one of them and tell you why it is different but the general trend like first the the account based DVM type system are way more difficult to scale than the bitcoin style system, which i always find very like on the technical basis which always find very funny right because the bitcoin people they want to keep the block small and they don’t really want to scale the transactions throughput whereas the Ethereum people are working very very hard to make that happen uh so so there is a cultural aspect within those communities that intervened but from a %100 technical perspective Bitcoin is way easier to scale than Ethereum. so having a bitcoin base uh allows us to scale much more easily so that one is is pretty important but then by griefing on top of this bitcoin style core, the capability to have other chains so we call them “subnet” uh but other you know like network and you can move your coin back and forth from those network and those network can be completely different like completely alien to to all the main chain works.. allows us to bring like whatever feature or whatever also system we want to have we can if there is sufficient demand we can build a subnet for it.
P: I like that. Okay so in general size of the team right now or in your group that is currently developing on the project.
A: Oh it’s just.. it’s just very small team um if you talk about like just developer i think we’re five or six something like that plus a few
contributors that are in you know it’s an open source project right so they are contributors that contribute like you know very often and
then there are people that come and go uh because they need the future they implement it and then they move on to something else right. but i’d say there’s like five six people that are very core to to the development of the project plus you know uh people that come and go and then we have a bit more people around that to you know like organize a bit the work uh
make sure that uh we do some promotion around it um uh you know talk to the exchange to supports and all of that.
P: Yeah, well i think that’s the challenge that a lot of projects have is getting their.. you know getting the word out, letting people know more about what it’s trying to do in terms of its overall mission, and in getting people..
A: Yeah that’s one thing… oh sorry apologies..
P: Some of the functionalities of it some of the key functionalities of it for sure. has that been a case with you guys?
A: Well something we’ve noted uh that i find like very interesting and and very captivating is that in that space you have projects that don’t really bring anything to the table but a fantastic.. marketing
P: Marketing *laughs*
A: and you know like they do well but they don’t they tend to not do well on the long term right but on the short term they do very very well like one example of that that we’ve seen recently is SHIBA right?
P: yeah.
A: There is not much of anything in that project except like it’s a cool man it’s fun and you know like people like it for that and they have like a fantastic way of communicating and marketing and getting themselves known so those those kind of projects you know they do fantastically well in the short term but not that well on the long term and then you have projects that do very cool stuff but that are very obscure um that don’t know to communicate it very well and so we have tried to to do a bit of both um we want you know.. we want to take advantage of those new way that people try to communicate about their project but actually have an actual project behind it.
P: yeah yeah, Amaury when you look at the market as it is right now and you see some of the change or challenges i should say with some of the projects that are kind of rolling out we’ve seen a little bit of slowdown in the Cardano ecosystem mainly because of the challenge that they are they’re going through right now which is rolling out their new development of Alonzo and and many of these scalability assessments that have been done and obviously Ethereum’s in the middle of theirs right now going to ETH 2.0 , do you feel like we’re going to need another year before we start to see real mature projects really implementing because right now it’s a very speculative asset class most everyone is investing on you know mostly top movers in the market or something that in most cases like you just explained maybe don’t have core tokenomics and principles of what the project really could be in terms of functionality it’s more of a marketing engine than anything. Do you think we’re a year away from that or maybe a couple of years away from projects really implementing use case in real world uh scenarios?
A: Well it’s very interesting because there have been a breezing effect uh on that where some use case grow and then become victim of their success right..
P: Yeah.
A: So um if you go back about five years bitcoin was used quite a bit for payment you know like it seems strange right now but at the time it was accepted by Steam and by Microsoft and by Dell you know like the computer company like many big retail stuff like you know people are asking no like when Walmart or when you know when Amazon or when whatever but i like five years ago it was happening five years ago it was actually happening and then what happened is that the whole system became a victim of its success right like more and more people using it and then it reached capacity and then the fee becomes uh very high confirmation time become unreliable and voila at the end of it, it’s not that good for payment anymore and people stop doing that and there was a lot of that on ethereum as well Ethereum is still like very successful obviously but um ethereum has a lot of scalability issue now as well and the fee are pretty you know wild and that have cornered the whole Ethereum ecosystem in you know in a way that is a bit self-referential right because now all the new stuff that come out on Ethereum are solving problems for people that are already in crypto right this is a discussion i had with Vitalik actually recently, like if you look at all the taxes for instance all the DeFi in general right that’s a fantastic ecosystem where you can trade a bunch of token um and and do a bunch of financial products um using crypto right so that is pretty good but that does nothing for people that like there is no reason to go into crypto for that right like if you’re already in crypto and you want those financial services then that’s fantastic but you know um it doesn’t solve the first step and it seems that you cannot bring any more people because the system is running at capacity already. uh yeah so there have been a lot of there have been a lot of real world use case i think more than people realize for those different systems but quite often they have been victim of their own success so well that’s a good problem to have right but that’s also something that the industry needs to get out of yeah i’m not sure how long it’s gonna take right because there are a lot of problem to get rid of that some of them technical especially on on evm style blockchain it’s very difficult and some of them more social right because you need to change something to make the system scale right it cannot become bigger and stay the same at the same time and you need the community to be happy with those change and uh as we saw in bitcoin for instance they were not right and so bitcoin never really increase its capacity so their both social and technical problem is probably gonna take a while to get all of that solid out.
P: Yeah, i think what we’ve seen in in just analyzing projects individual projects some of which have been much more mature and doing you know much more real world activities and then some that are kind of setting up the pace of where adoption is moving right now in terms of financial adoption both from a global stage as well as the banking systems things of that nature. Europe has been one of those though that has been leading the way in terms of i wouldn’t say necessarily adoption but definitely much more open armed relationships with what’s happening in cryptocurrency in general versus what we’ve seen here in the us which is a lot of lack of clarity a lot of uh moving around in the governmental agencies trying to figure out who’s who’s going to be managing and or potentially regulating what’s happening in cryptocurrency in general and the blockchain with Europe kind of leading the way and now also South America. Do you feel like Europe is going to have a leg up in terms of adoption for mainstream usage in the coming years when it comes to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in general?
A: um i don’t know this is a bit difficult to say like first, because Europe is very heterogeneous right like way more than the US um right to begin with like people speak a variety of languages..
P: Right.
A: so they cannot even speak to each other, so the situation can vary quite a bit in different uh in different countries in Europe but in general i don’t know because on one end as you mentioned yeah there are a lot of positive on the other end i feel like the culture of economics is not as strong in Europe as it is in the US for instance right yeah and i’d say also probably in South America for different reasons, like in South America people have to like they had to understand the hard way what happened when you did the wrong stuff with currency right because many countries there uh made like very poor economic decisions that that were you know very damaging for the population but while that’s not the case in the US um people in the US tend to be much more savvy about economics on average than Europeans, yeah that’s at least my impression i lived there a few years that’s the impression i had.
P: Yeah i think it’s it’s interesting to watch for sure, i mean between the the different countries who have.. you have a lot of adoption and to some extent a lot more at least consumer awareness on what’s happening in bitcoin i mean five years ago or back in 2017 the last bull run you know you did not have near the amount of retail investors active in the marketplace that we have now obviously there’s a lot more and because of that we’re seeing a lot of regulatory uh impositions that are being put on the market so and now we’ve got ETFs all kinds of things that are really developing and guiding the market as a developer and working on the blockchain day in day out is there anything specific that you guys are looking at that says “Hey this could be a challenge in the coming years you know from a technical aspect that we if we don’t address it soon.”
A: um it’s very difficult as a generic question right because different technology are gonna have different problems um but i mean like the scaling problem is always uh always coming back and it’s kind of like the nature of those projects because you know at some point you need to order everything that’s happening on the blockchain right.. because say i sent the transaction where i send you some money and then i send the transaction where i send someone else the same money right like what the the first one of those two transactions is gonna be correct and the second one is gonna you know have been unsufficient fund and not be able to go through and the network as a whole needs to decide in what order does transaction happen and now um intuitively you know like people they would expect that this is an easy problem but this is actually not because transaction they don’t spread over the network um instantly right so if i do.. if i send two transaction roughly at the same time at you know two different people on the network well you know depending on how those two transactions spread part of the nodes are gonna see one before the other and part of the also not gonna see the reverse and because of that you have this bottleneck right where you have this decision making for every single thing that happened on the network you need to order it um and that that creates a natural choke point and people have been you know people have been going through different ideas on what to remove that choke point but it’s not clear what pass forward solve this so um one one pass that people are exploring is parallelism so what if you could make this computation you know if you could spread it on several machines and do it in parallel right because you know you can always buy more machine it’s not that expensive and if your system is like so much successful that you need that people are gonna have the resources to do that so that’s one way people explore another way is to create several pool that are more or less isolated from each other and know the bottleneck exists just at the pool level but then when you want to move from one pool to the other it’s more difficult than you start to have liquidity issue so this is what’s happening with the lightning network for example this is an example of right model right you create payment channel and you put liquidity into each and now each payment channel act independent from other payment channels so that scales much better but know your liquidity problem because the monetary is in one payment channel it cannot be in another payment channel right..
P: Yeah.
A: and and there is not always a route through the network that have the right liquidity and all of that so you have liquidity issue there another fast forward is your knowledge technology meaning instead of spreading all the information to everybody you spread the proof that the information exists and that is verified by someone and that it is correct right so one example of that is uh zika rollups on ethereum for instance where instead of sending your transaction to the ethereum network you send them to a server and that server is gonna alter all the transaction it receives and then it’s going to settle the end result of all the transaction on the ethereum blockchain at some point and provide the proof that you know there are all the intermediary steps are correct and verified uh without providing all the intermediary steps so that’s like that’s another way forward.
P: Exactly yeah, and i think uh just the consensus protocols that we’ve seen on Avalanche and just some of the companies that have really end projects that have kind of evolved into utilizing uh the consensus proto i think that’s going to be a big uh push in the right direction Avalanche has had it we’ve had John Woo on here a couple of times that just the amount of ecosystem involvement that they’ve done has been pretty uh pretty dynamic for sure in terms of the future where that protocol is going so exciting stuff ahead uh..
A: That protocol is very cool this is why we’re using it as well.
P: *laughs* Yeah for sure.. *laughs* definitely. Amaury hey listen it was good having you on today thank you so much we’re going to be watching ecash and
kind of where you guys are going as things develop out for you and also as the ecosystem in general i think uh especially around payments and also
wallets and some of the evolution of what we’re going to see in the financial system i think the architectures are definitely being built right now ecash is going to be a big part of that so great having you on the show today thanks for stopping in.
A: Thank you for having me.
