Building Dapps with Generalized State Channels

Transcript

1. prototypal.com Building Dapps with Generalized State Channels Erik Bryn
 Counterfactual core team Founder, Prototypal An introduction & my lessons learned
2. prototypal.com About me • Founder of Prototypal • Ember.js & Counterfactual core teams • Recently moved to Austin from SF • Relatively new to the blockchain ecosystem
3. prototypal.com What are State Channels?
4. prototypal.com A connection, or channel, between two or more parties that facilitates the transmission of signed commitments What are State Channels?
5. prototypal.com These signed commitments can be deployed on-chain, but don’t have to be What are State Channels?
6. prototypal.com State Channels facilitate off-chain interactions with the safety & guarantees of the blockchain What are State Channels?
7. prototypal.com State Channels are an evolution of Payment Channels State Channels are to Payment Channels, as Ethereum is to Bitcoin Payment channels
8. prototypal.com Raiden & the Lightning are examples of payment channel networks. Payment channels
9. prototypal.com Why should you care about State Channels? Blockchain (on-chain) interactions will always be expensive The blockchain is a resource that you will always have to pay for
10. prototypal.com Not every interaction between parties needs to be published on-chain into an immutable database that lives forever Why should you care about State Channels?
11. prototypal.com State Channels might be a better default for many types of Dapps. That said, they’re not a silver bullet. Why should you care about State Channels?
12. prototypal.com State Channels scale! State Channels give you instant, private, free, trust-less transactions. State Channels are built with standard off the shelf technologies and can be as scalable as your typical centralized web applications.
13. prototypal.com … but what about Sharding/Plasma/Casper? It turns out all these Ethereum scaling technologies are complementary However, with on-chain scaling, you’ll always have to pay gas, wait for block confirmations, etc.
14. prototypal.com What are Generalized State Channels? A technique for creating State Channels with a minimal on-chain footprint for both privacy and gas efficiency, while being secure and game theoretically sound
15. prototypal.com At the core, a Generalized State Channel is built upon a multisignature wallet. The multisig acts as an escrow for assets being used within State Channel Dapps. What are Generalized State Channels?
16. prototypal.com Counterfactual instantiation is an important concept that enables us to sign commitments in State Channels that can build upon Smart Contract logic without actually needing those contracts to be deployed or invoked What are Generalized State Channels?
17. prototypal.com On-chain Off-chain
18. prototypal.com Our white paper was recently released: https://counterfactual.com/statechannels What are Generalized State Channels?
19. prototypal.com How can you use State Channels today? There’s been a lot of talk and research published over the past few years, but it’s difficult to get started today
20. prototypal.com How can you use State Channels today? A recently released paper detailing a technique called Force Move Games is a great place to start: https://medium.com/statechannels/introducing-the- force-move-games-framework-for-state-channels- b32dd953c13f
21. prototypal.com State channels in use today…
22. prototypal.com
23. prototypal.com It’s really hard to use State Channels today, but we’d like to change that
24. prototypal.com We want to see Generalized State Channels exist in the world, so we’re building the Counterfactual framework. It’s an open source, holistic GSC implementation targeted towards everyday Dapp developers.
25. prototypal.com And no… we’re not doing an ICO This is just good ol’ fashioned open source
26. prototypal.com The scope of our work spans from core research all the way to the user experience of Dapp developers and their users The Counterfactual framework
27. prototypal.com In my experience, the best way to build a framework is to build applications and extract the framework from them
28. prototypal.com We’ve been exploring what the Counterfactual framework should provide by building example Dapps
29. prototypal.com Ethmo: our first GSC Dapp Ember.js counterfactual-client Ethers.js Ember Data ember-ethereum counterfactual-contracts gnosis-safe-contracts Ethmo ganache-cli Node.js Websocket Relay
30. prototypal.com Ethmo: our first GSC Dapp
31. prototypal.com Ethmo: our first GSC Dapp
32. prototypal.com Ethmo: our first GSC Dapp
33. prototypal.com Ethmo: our first GSC Dapp
34. prototypal.com Ethmo: our first GSC Dapp
35. prototypal.com Ethmo: our first GSC Dapp
36. prototypal.com Ethmo: our first GSC Dapp
37. prototypal.com Ethmo: our first GSC Dapp
38. prototypal.com Ethmo: our first GSC Dapp
39. prototypal.com Tic Tac Toe: our second Dapp
40. prototypal.com Lessons learned Both of these GSC example Dapps used their own WebSocket relays for communication between parties We’re interested in exploring using libp2p / Whisper
41. prototypal.com Lessons learned The most important thing for user’s safety while using State Channels is to ensure their channel state is retained. In our example apps, we simply used the browser’s localStorage, this isn’t quite good enough for production use.
42. prototypal.com Lessons learned To avoid every State Channel interaction requiring user signing, our Dapps create ephemeral keys which are the owners of the underlying multisig. These ephemeral keys are also important to retain.
43. prototypal.com Lessons learned For these reasons, and more, we strongly believe the success of State Channels is dependent upon their adoption / integration with wallets.
44. prototypal.com We're trying to experiment and build a holistic understanding of the system before we starting promoting any particular implementation details outside of the paper What’s next?
45. prototypal.com Working towards our first public release in the coming months What’s next?
46. prototypal.com If you’re interested in this space, 
 we’d love to have you work with us! 
 
 If you’re building an app that could utilize state channels today or in the very near future, reach out! What’s next?
47. prototypal.com @ebryn on Twitter erik@prototypal.com counterfactual.com Questions? Thanks!