Citi Report, Durango, and Avalanche NFTs

Emin Gün Sirer (0:07)

OnChain with Emin Gün Sirer.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of the podcast. It's a glorious day here in New York, and there is a lot of stuff to discuss.

And really just a couple of insights that I had this week from meetings with people in the asset management space. So let's just dive right in, because there's been a lot of things, exciting things happening on Avalanche. And the most exciting of which is the Durango release. So I don't know if you guys have noticed, but obviously we have some kind of a scheme, a naming scheme to these releases. Durango is the fourth major release of Avalanche.

So very, very routinely, much faster than any other chain. We've been introducing new features and Durango comes to us. And even as I speak, it's active on Fuji. It's ticking along and it has brought to Fuji and it will bring to the main net very, very shortly thereafter. An amazing new functionality and along with a lot of cleanup and so on. But I want to go through that functionality with you. The main thing it brings is this thing called Teleporter. So what's Teleporter? Teleporter is based on warp messaging, which in turn is based on BLS signatures. What is BLS signatures? It is a way to get a statement from a chain.

It is a way to get a statement issued by the current validators that comprise a chain in cryptographic form signed subject to all of the full security of the validators that comprise that chain. So that means there are no intermediaries, there are no additional trust assumptions. If you trust the chain, then you trust the BLS signature issued by those validators. So that's essentially the ideal, not essential. That is exactly the gold standard, the ideal in trustless technologies. If you have an asset on Avalanche, well, then that statement issued by Warp is equivalent to essentially, if you trust Avalanche to hold an asset for you, then the Warp messaging adds no additional trust assumptions for you.

So, but on top of Warp, Durango introduces Teleport, a mechanism essentially that makes Warp messaging practical and easy to send between subnets. What does that mean? Well, it means this. Now, from here on after, you can start your own subnet and that subnet has seamless access, seamless access to all of the services and features that are accessible on other subnets.

What are some examples of things you can do? Well, so a common thing that happens is, for example, that somebody wants to start a subnet, but then they realize, you know, actually, standing up a chain is hard work. You need to integrate. You need to integrate with exchanges. You need to integrate with oracles. You need to integrate with data providers, et cetera, et cetera. And those integrations already exist on the C-chain.

And what Durango, what Teleporter, and underneath, what Warp Working in Concert provides to us is the ability to create our own subnets and have them access those integrations that already exist on the C-chain. So for example, if you want to, like something that a lot of people want to do is use a chain link oracle. Well, all of those oracles are on the C-chain. So now with Teleporter, it's trivial to access those oracles. You want a random number. Normally, you'd have to go to chain link. You'd have to take a ticket, get in their queue, pay them for the integration, et cetera, et cetera. This is why it's so hard for a bunch of these other services on other chains to get started. That's why there are so many ghost chains around. They lack the integrations. That's why it takes a good year for all of these services to get built up on any new chain. We went through that phase with the C-chain on Avalanche. And the C-chain is a rich, thriving ecosystem. And an issue that some people face is when they want to have their own chain for their purposes. They want to have their own token for staking. They want to have their own token for gas. They want to have their own validator set for compliance purposes. They want to have their own virtual machine. They want to have their own restrictions and rules, again, for compliance or for other reasons. They want to run a different validator set at a higher Hutter's setting for higher performance, or what have you. The sky's the limit on why somebody might want to create a chain on Avalanche. We support it all. But one drawback was, well, if you go at it alone, you might actually be facing a difficult process. You might actually have to pay a bunch of other people for these services you might need. With Teleporter, that's no longer the case. Our vision that was there from the get-go, our vision that you will see get copied by everybody and his brother. They all lack imagination. We are the most copied chain for a reason. And we are technologically the most advanced chain we have always been for a reason. You will see other people copy this vision. It's very simple.