INTERVIEW SCRIPT
Melvin: Would you like to start off by commenting on the current state of the crypto industry?
Derek: Well obviously, a lot of things have changed since six months ago. Right now the bear markets represent great opportunities for one who is building something. It’s a time where there’s a lot less distractions. Frankly some of the worst parts of crypto get washed out and many of those kinds of things are gone. We have more time to be a little more thoughtful, to think and to strategize. It’s not that of kind of feeling when you are in a middle of the bull, in every mode or state that you are constantly behind and trying to stay top on top of everything. Real building and positioning takes place and this leads to the moves that happened in the bear are what set up good projects for the next success when the bull comes.
Melvin: I don’t want to be cheeky, in bear markets you guys are building, but what happened to the bull market, aren’t you guys building?
Derek: Well, we are definitely building in the bull market but it’s like we are building at such fast speed that we may not have time to look at the nitty gritty stuffs. Right now, we can spend more time to think and strategize, have a clearer picture of what our strategy is such as launching a new messaging and a new website that reflects our current thinking. And honestly, this kind of inspiration is hard to get when we are in the middle of a bull, there are many noises and distraction and you might not know what’s real and what’s not as there are really too many things happening. Now with less noise, it’s much clearer to us where to make the right bets.
Melvin: What do you think will propel crypto to the next level in terms of adoption?
Derek: This is tied in really to the last point I was making. There are some ideas we had all along. One of our core ideas is that there are going to be many blockchains and that’s one of the form and main principle of the formation of Moonbeam. That’s what led us down the path to using substrate, which is a development framework to build our own blockchain and that’s what led us to, into the Polkadot ecosystem.
But the question is how do we fit into that world where there’s many blockchains? And I think that’s becoming a bit clearer. We have this idea of connected contracts. If you have a lot of blockchains, how can developers create apps that serve all of the users and assets and combined services from all of them. And I think that’s largely an unanswered question now, because people are still building things largely on a chain by chain basis. Currently, we’re in a time of fragmentation where things are getting split apart, users are getting split apart and app deployments are split apart.
To set the context, so for me, I think the technologies and the protocols that I’m most interested in are the ones that have this element of unification to them. Allowing people to pull together disparate elements into like single experiences or single applications. That’s really a large part of our focus. Why do I think that’s important? Firstly you could create more efficient protocols and secondly it’s a way to scale. Distributing your application across multiple blockchains, it’s a recipe for scalability. But most importantly probably, it’s the user experience. I’m trying to unify user activity across multiple chains which will lead to developers being able to offer superior user experiences.
I think the number one reason or the number one headwind to larger amounts of user adoption is still user experience. I came from a web2 background in a cloud technology company where we built mobile experiences. The level of thinking on UX that were able to vie were vastly better than most of the web3 experiences.
Melvin: Name us your 3 to 5 of your favourite coins/projects
Derek: We have made a big bet on using the substrate development framework and Moonbeam is a parachain on the Polkadot network. I will be remiss if I didn’t mention Dot as one of the coins that we are quite bullish on and the whole Polkdot ecosystem in the long run. Because the technology takes a long time to build and it’s very difficult to replicate what they have done. Polkadot right now maybe a little bit less popular these days, but the underlying tech fundamentals are extremely strong. So we are long and bullish.
We are anti maxis so part of the idea of Moonbeam is to connect many different ecosystems. And I think the one that’s probably the closest in terms of philosophy, spirt and collaborations is the Cosmos ecosystem. Cosmos also shares this vision of many blockchains. They provide development framework such as the Cosmos SDK for developers to easily create their own blockchain. I’m a believer in such an ecosystem as it will stay and remain and to be a force in the crypto space for the foreseeable future.
I am also big on interoperable technologies, there’s a number of folks we’re working with, I will probably single out a project that’s about to have a token but don’t have it yet, it’s the project Axelar. That’s one of our key partners and they are exactly providing this kind of cross chain infrastructure that allows developers to unify different deployments. It also turns out that there were a number of shared collaborations that we have where projects are deployed on Moonbeam, but are also using Axelar. So they are a natural partner and I am bullish on them having known the team for quite some time. They are super smart with very good credentials such as MIT PhDs putting this together.
Lastly I would probably look inwards into our own ecosystem. Moonbeam has its own ecosystem with a number of projects and there’s too many for me to name. I have come to know Luke Youngblood over at Moonwell. They are providing the main kind of lending and borrowing service, as part of the ecosystem on Moonbeam. They have a very high quality team, and is also one of the leading projects in Moonbeam.
Melvin: I must put a disclaimer to our audience, these are not financial advice.
Melvin: Now let’s talk about Moonbeam. Can you tell us what Moonbeam is and what’s your inspiration behind it and perhaps the name too?
Derek: It was a funny story. The name Moonbeam actually came from a song that we liked. It’s like the key kind of networks we have are named after songs that like have the word moving them. There’s an old jazz song called Polka Dots and Moonbeam. Some of our networks like Moonriver is a song, we have Moonshadow as one of the test networks And we thought maybe that makes sense, there’s this connection to this old song. We didn’t understand initially it’s kind of memetic towards crypto like going to the moon. When we found out, we were a little worried if people are going to take us seriously. But we decided to own this and just go along with it.
As for the inspiration behind the project, I have already laid some of the groundwork and the concept was, how do we fit into this world where there’s going to be many blockchains? To be a little bit more specific on some thoughts we have around this.
So there’s going to be many blockchains, but simultaneously we believe that there’s going to be consolidation around different operating systems or tech stacks that developers use to create those blockchains or work with those blockchains. And so I already mentioned two of them, for building your own blockchain, there’s really going to be consolidation around substrate, which is the technology we have used as part of the Polkadot ecosystem and the Cosmos SDK, which is used to create cosmos based chains. These frameworks are very difficult to make, takes around four or five years of development work to create and you need a community and all the things around it. Thus I think it’s extremely difficult for people to create new blockchain building frameworks as they’re very specialised.
These two frameworks are going to see the lion share of the adoption when it comes to building new chains. And then when it comes to deploying on to chains, we can tell that obviously Ethereum is the king, still. The tech stack that people use to interact with Ethereum, is the most widely adopted developer tool set for building web3 applications by a long shot. We anticipated and saw those two trends and decided that we want to be at the intersection of two of these. That’s the reason why we are part of Polkadot. It ought to be able to access anything that’s based on substrate, but we did an implementation on Ethereum tech stack so that developers can use all of the tools that they are used to using from Ethereum. Plus now we are working with Axelar to allow us to connect to Cosmos. This is how we are trying to be at the intersection of where we think the concentration of developer activities are going to be.
To explain in simple terms, what Moonbeam is, it is a smart contract platform. The thing that’s different about it, or the thing we’re focused on are these across chain scenarios. Apps that work across blockchains. We have kind of specifically built features and optimised Moonbeam to support those kinds of scenarios.
Part of that is we can use XCM, which has Polkadot native messaging system, cross-chain messaging system. And then we had a number of integrations with other cross chain messaging providers like Axelar and Nomad. Layer zero is in the midst of a deployment right now. We are integrating with many of the messaging frameworks that are out there, so that developers have maximum set of options when they are looking to build these new kinds of apps. For us this cross chain connected smart contracts on Moonbeam can be used to work with any asset, any user, any service on any blockchain, regardless of where it’s located, that’s kind of the concept.
We don’t want to constrain developers of just on what’s on Moonbeam, but you can build an app on Moonbeam that works with and across different chains. That’s the vision and that’s how we are trying to be different from other EVMS.
Melvin: Coming to a question that is related to your answers, what do you think of this statement:
Layman see Moonbeam as the door in bringing Eth based projects to Polkadot vice versa.
Derek: Both are true. Moonbeam by virtue of having EVM environment that’s accessible and one of the first cross-train integrations that we’ve delivered on Moonbeam as part of this cross chain connected concept is this thing called XC20 . So is basically a feature that allows any substrate based asset that is in the Polkadot ecosystem to move to Moonbeam using this XCM technology that I was describing briefly before. And then when it’s on Moonbeam, it looks like an ERC 20.
So what that means is you have this EVM environment where you can deploy existing solidity based code that exist from an Ethereum mainnet and it can work with Polkadot based assets straight out of the box without doing anything. That alone, plus the support for Ethereum toolset such as Metamask and others from an end-user perspective. I think those things combined to make Moonbeam called like an on-ramp or kind of the easy access point to Polkadot ecosystem.
Our concept is, once developers are there then learning can begin. They can look at all the other interesting things or these other chains they like to work or integrate with. Developers can use substrate themselves to go create blockchain level functionality and link it into their Moonbeam based contract. That’s kind of the idea Moonbeam is and how we see it allowing easy access to the rest of the ecosystem.
Melvin: What is this Harvest Moon campaign about?
Derek: This is something that the Moonbeam foundation is running. As we are a young network, about six months old. During first six months, a lot of the story has been around bootstrapping all of the necessary infrastructure that people need. A core blockchain especially for a developer oriented one like ours, there’s a lot of tools and infrastructure that you need around the core blockchain to make a full environment. That is where a developer can be effective. There’s all these tools that need to be deployed. As soon as we launched, we needed to build the ecosystem that is needed to support it and we started having projects deploying on Moonbeam.
We felt like we had gotten to a point where a lot of the basic tools are in place such as Ethscan and chainlink pricing feeds. This marks kind of the end of the bootstrapping phase where we accomplished and deployed all the infrastructure that was needed.
We have had quite a bit of interest from the Defi sector. Probably where I’d say at least more than half, probably 60, 70% of the projects deployed to Moonbeam are Defi projects and you can now track them. That’s kind of the rationale behind this campaign and we wanted to celebrate that and say now Moonbeam is fully operational with a vibrant ecosystem and I think now there’s something around 250 projects.
Melvin: What do you see are the current challenges for the Polkadot ecosystem to grow? Will the adoption gap be wider once Eth 2 comes in?
Derek: I would reiterate Polkadot’s strengths are its underlying tech which is solid. It’s been worked on for many years. There’s a very strong community within Polkadot and a lot of people are very strong believers in it. A lot of those people are also part of the Moonbeam community. The challenge I see is really around further substrate adoption. Meaning having more good teams building parachains. It’s a network effect. As we’re part of Polkadot, every new pair of chain that comes on board that offers a unique and valuable service, that’s another benefit to everyone else that is on the network.
I think the best way to do that is to continue to have investments in making substrate easier to use and there’s are things like the documentation, the developer relations and other softer elements. And I know the team at Parity is working on these things.
Melvin: I would like to end the interview with a hypothetical question. Imagine you have switched hats and are now a top government official in the US overseeing crypto regulations. What sort of regulations will you implement?
Derek: It’s an interesting question. I guess what I would say is for builders in this space, the kind of uncertainty or lack of clarity around regulations is a key challenge. In the U S there’s many different bodies, and many different regulatory agencies. I mean, just thinking out loud, I think one thing that might be effective would be to just consolidate responsibility, into one agency, even if that’s just for a short-lived amount of time to be able to create some clarity.
And of course the net obvious negative effect is that without better clarity, project teams might choose to build elsewhere towards crypto friendly countries. US has a long history of being in leading in tech, so I think they have to catch up on this.
Melvin: How about on regulations that protect the retail on crypto investing?
Derek: A lot of these regulations exist are there for good reason to protect, to provide appropriate protection. My belief is that most financial services will be based on blockchain of some form as crypto products become mainstream in the future. So obviously there’ll need to be adaptations of existing regulatory frameworks to accommodate for it.
Melvin: Once again, thank you for the interview.