All right, welcome to part three, glad you're still sticking with me here.
So, this is about the Olympia network.
The Olympia network is sort of like a mega release we've been working on for a long time sort of asynchronously with everything else
and particularly on the runtime side, also on the Pioneer side, obviously, and I’m going to get to it.
And it's such a big release that it's not even scheduled to be the release immediately after the Sumer release.
The reason I’m sort of putting it on the table is because it's probably one of those big milestones which may or may not be the last release,
even before main net probably going to have one or two big releases, even after that,
but it's a very important piece milestone for where we're trying to go.
And it's also something that we were working on for such a long time that I thought it was worth sharing.
So, what's going on in this release?
One is that we're shipping a new updated simplified benchmarked and audited runtime which sees major improvements really across the board
and new functionality and features for, I would say, every subsystem.
And then it's introduction of Pioneer 2, version 2.
Pioneer, for those who don't know, is the governance app where you vote and stake and buy memberships and run for the elections in the council and forum and blah blah.
So that's all the stuff that actually has to do with participating in the system.
Pioneer 2 is the sort of user facing application for doing that through a user interface.
And I want to say that really probably the big bottleneck for going live with Olympia is actually Pioneer itself.
It's a tremendous piece of work in terms of on the infrastructure, the design, the application development itself.
There are a lot of pieces that are coming together, and we really could have released the runtime improvements that we already have but it just doesn't make sense for us
to try to upgrade the version of Pioneer which is currently live, that we're calling Pioneer one, and try to upgrade them to work with the new runtime.
It's just going to be a lot of work for very temporary benefits, so our thinking is currently that we really will go live once Pioneer 2 is ready,
and that will simultaneously reveal a system which is quite different in many ways from what we see today.
The overall structure is, of course, the same but there will be, you know, important improvements everywhere.
So, I think the best way to get a flavor for what the Olympia runtime currently looks like, and remember it's a moving target whenever we develop
something new that we're not ready to put out right away, it will sort of get go live in the Olympia runtime.
And we can sort of put it in the context of what we currently expect will be in the mainnet runtime.
You could see that on the runtime side we're really getting there.
There are basically two major subsystems, well, it is an open question whether the channel tokens and DAOs is a subsystem, but two big pieces that really we haven't started on at all.
Everything else is in some reasonable state of development, to put it that way.
In addition, again, my image is covering that, but we're working with SR Labs, one of the premier auditing firms that work with Polkadot
and that old ecosystem, and they've already audited a substantial part of our Olympia runtime to help us identify problems, and that's gone really well,
and we're probably going to do another audit once we're sort of at the finishing line.
But we've already done a very meaningful step towards getting production ready, I think, and at the same time we've also done benchmarking, as I mentioned prior.
So, what is benchmarking?
This is one of the important or necessary steps involved in deriving the fees that will be used in your blockchain.
If you're used to Ethereum, you will know that the fees associated with doing anything is sort of computed on the fly
because the whole system is a dynamic, and the set of contracts changes, and so on.
In substrate there's sort of a step involved in the development process where you try to compute basically how expensive it
is to do all the operations that people can do in the system - that's called benchmarking.
That literally boils down to sort of measuring how much time each action or transaction, if you will, takes on certain reference hardware. I am skipping ahead here.
And we've done that for a big part of the system - we've sort of built that in-house skill, and we will be doing that for all the modules
modules that go into Olympia which means we will have meaningful transaction fees as well.
I think at the current runtime basically every transaction has the same nominal fee which is sort of a random number that won't be the case in Olympia.
There is an extra step from benchmarking to getting fees which is more about figuring out how much you're going to charge
per unit of computation and per unit of block space, so to speak, in terms of your native token.
But that's, you know, that's a smaller exercise.
So, let me try to just briefly talk about some of the things that have changed.
It will be way too much to try to cover all this but one of the very very important things we've changed is that,
what's referred to as the referendum module here, which has to do with electing the council.
You're now able to use stake that you're using for something else. Let's say you're a validator or let's say you're staking as a working group lead
or in a proposal or something, you're able to take that stake and redeploy it to vote or stand for the council.
This was, I think, a big step in the right direction in terms of making it much cheaper for people to participate in governance.
In the current system that's live you really have to pick whether you want to participate in governance or you want to stake,
and then it's really easy to get to basically do the, you know, the selfish thing of just thinking about your own private returns
on your own T-Joy account and stake rather than thinking about, you know, managing the system overall.
If everyone does that, it doesn't work out as well as we would like.
That's a very big change in the tokenomics of the system overall.
That stake is basically reusable towards this one specific thing of being participating in elections.
We are introducing obviously the new content directory that I've talked about in Sumer.
We're introducing the idea of a constitution which is a very simple idea, actually.
We're not, I think, the first chain to do this but, basically, it's sort of a social commitment to all the conventions and standards and,
you know, improvement proposals, if you want to follow sort of bitcoin or Ethereum parlance of things, that are sort of on the social layer of the system.
There are all sorts of metadata standards, for example, about how you encode an application for a working group, for example,
that would be in the constitution and all sorts of policy things that the chain itself doesn't actually model and capture goes into the constitution.
There's a council blog where the council can sort of speak in one voice to the system.
We’re adding crowdfunded bounties which is basically a way for community members to fund the creation of all sorts of goods
that can be useful for the platform where they don't depend on the council to contribute.
So, if you want to improve some software or really anything, you can get people on the system to fund a bounty basically where someone is tasked
with the responsibility of following up with the bounty, and distributing the funds according to what people contribute and so on.
What else should I cover?
I think maybe that’s sufficient for you to just get a flavor for some of the things that are changing.
conveniently in the current state of the chain, and that really limits your ability to do all sorts of searches and queries and look back into history I think maybe that’s sufficient for you to just get a flavor for some of the things that are changing.
So, that's the Olympia runtime and some of the things that are being changed.
Then we have Pioneer itself.
Pioneer is the product where you actually engage in governance and participate in the community,
so it's extremely important obviously given that this is a video platform DAO,
and we have really for a very long time been using and trying to maintain and evolve a fork of the Polkadot apps application.
You know, that has a lot of limitations and problems not least of which is that you really can only access information that's in the current state,
about who has done what at what time and what happened and so on, which is a critical precondition really for people to accumulate reputation
and you being able to distinguish, you know, who's a good guy, who's a bad guy or girl for various positions and roles and everything.
Pioneer 2 is really focused on this this goal of conveniently lifting out all the historical information that exists in the system
where you can understand what the history of a person is and also actually frankly sort of aggregating and summarizing
a lot of the complicated state that is in the system into a more digestible form.
And, well, a lot of what enables that is, on one hand, of course, a product that's been redesigned from scratch by a team of excellent designers
but also this infrastructure piece called Hydra which I'm going to talk about in the next update which allows you
to sort of look through all of the transactions and all the events and all the state in one simple query and allows you to do really cool things like,
for example, search for anywhere you're mentioned in the forum, for example, or in a proposal or you could look at all the time someone was fired, for example, in one easy click.
There are all sorts of ways of lifting out all the information which currently is sort of either not possible to get out or your application has to like go
and talk to an archival node for you know five minutes or something before it could fetch and filter and query and search for whatever you're looking for.
So, Pioneer 2 is really a big piece of making it practically possible for the DAO to actually work.
So, that is it. The changed runtime, Pioneer 2 – that’s what is coming up in Olympia.
Thank you very much, see you soon for Hydra.