SAITO Community Town Hall # 2 Highlights and Recap

Saito Network Co-Founders Richard Parris and David Lancashire hosted another monthly town hall on Zoom. They gave the latest tech updates and brought the community up to speed with the latest happenings as well.

For those who missed the live meeting, you can view the town hall recap here.

Check out the full transcript below.

Richard: Thanks for joining everyone, great to have you all here. The format for today will be a quick update from me on some kind of general stuff quick tech update from David, then a new kind of feature just introduce someone from the team which will be Clay, and then we’ll get on to the real purpose of the of the Town Hall which is open question format, you know, letting people dig into the project, find out things they don’t know.

There are some questions already in telegram and I’d really encourage people to drop questions into the chat so we can get a sense of what people are wanting to know and so we can kind of flip between different people on our side make sure it’s not me droning on or David getting most of the words in. So, kicking all of that off just a kind of quick update on where we’re at; on the marketing side the first thing I’d say is I hope you’re seeing more of the project around and about, we’re really trying to expand what we’re doing in the marketing space. Some of that includes more of things you would have seen before and some of that is experimenting trying new things some really great stuff come out of community as well, like the guys putting together the voice the citizen voice, just sort of recapping and bundling up some of the great stuff that’s happening in community and making that available and digestible to people. We’ve also done some stuff I kind of think of as flag waving type marketing, you know, it’s not so in-depth but it’s just getting our brand and our name out there, trying to pick up new people and let them see that we’re there and hopefully pick up some of them as a sort of converts and we’ve seen that with kind of twitter competitions and the arcade photo competition. We’re just really trialing stuff there and seeing what works and what gets some traction for us.

We’ve also been trying some new stuff around dot arcade, just trying to push into Polkadot communities etc. Again, you know we’re trying to sort of make sure we get our voice out more broadly than we have before and to different communities and things and anyone who’s got any ideas of ways we can reach out better to community there we’d really encourage them you know hit us up in telegram make suggestions we really love that.

And then the last probably biggest thing that’s happening as well is that we’ve started working with some new people in the ambassador program, so we’ve been uh advertising that for a week or so, we’ve got some people who’ve come in, most of those people are from our community, they’re not totally  new, and they’re involved in other parts of the crypto space or forums like reddit etc., and we’re working with them to help them get that Saito message out more organically and into deeper into groups where it’s hard to enter as a stranger and jump in.

So that’s really a broad update on marketing and we’ll be able to answer any questions in more depth later in in the main section. Before we move on to text some quick project updates, one is we got listed on ZT so it’s always good to have another exchange and we hope that keeps up for the next while, other just big functional news; the second tranche, what there was of it that hadn’t gone out already of the seed and private investment round tokens, went out about a week and a half ago, that wasn’t too much to go out and went out without an issue so it’s a while before there’s any more token release and on that note we um have made some updates on medium and on our blog if anyone’s interested in details and we will be moving basically all of the treasury tokens to gnosis vaults in the next few days; we’ll have announcement about that, and that’s really just a security measure particularly now that we’ve well and clear that second charge and bettered in what our spending and things are around the raise money as well, so the only thing really to note there is you’ll see an announcement about that just to be completely clear to community about what’s going on with treasury movements because people should know that

So that’s a quick update on the project announcements and then I’ll just kick over to David for a quick tech update.

David: I’ll keep this really short and if people have specific questions, we can talk about them. As people know we’re in the middle of a bunch of stuff the big thing is the Rust implementation, you guys will hear from Clay in a bit, he’s done a lot of work with this. If you’ve noticed the username registration is working a lot better now than it used to, he also had a bunch of pain on that.

Richard: We just throw the bugs at Clay.

David: Yeah, he gets the unpleasant ones. But yeah, we’re about halfway done. We started working  on networking which means getting multiple nodes connecting and we’re moving beyond the classic implementation of just a golden ticket paying a miner in router and we’re moving towards the golden ticket now paying multiple routers kind of cascading backwards, so there are a couple of big things that need to happen um and but you know we’re on schedule, I think is the important thing and anyone who’s got questions, you can fire them off or just follow what’s happening on GitHub.

Richard: by popular demand from community wanting to see someone that’s not me and David talking to them occasionally, we thought we’d introduce you to someone new in the team this Town Hall and that’s Clay; so I asked clay to just sort of quickly introduce himself and then again the point of this meeting is more for questions later so we’ll get around to those as soon as we can.

Clay: Hi everybody, so my name is Clay, like Richard said, I’ve been on team Saito for I think over nine months now. Prior I studied electrical engineering in school, and I have about 15 years of software development experience. I’ve done a little bit of everything, mostly web stuff but prior to becoming more blockchain entrepreneurial I was at google protecting their ads ecosystem on a team internally called Ad Spam externally called Ad Traffic Quality, where we basically have to detect all the fake clicks on all of Google’s ad products, so that was a lot of responsibilities. It was a cool experience and I learned a lot; it was like big data ML sort of stuff, but after that I got really into uh blockchain and surprisingly at google there were very, very few opportunities to get into that space, so I had a startup with a partner here in China where we were trying to do a platform like turnkey solution for enterprises to enter the blockchain space trying to target rewards programs and things like that and we ended up going separate ways because there was a disconnect between me and my partner and one of the big problems we ran into was actually technical. We couldn’t, the things that my partner wanted to do, I kept trying to explain to him you just can’t do that on Ethereum, I felt like we were selling something that we didn’t really have and so  while i was doing that I ended up running into David in a WeChat chat group and we were arguing about something about bitcoin and bitcoin cash I think I bucketed him as a BSV guy initially because he was some principled arguments about bitcoin cash and most of people that were  trying to speak in that sphere at the time were, there was a big disconnect between the bitcoin cash and the BSV people so we ended up meeting for a pint here in Beijing and David talked to me for like an hour and a half about Saito while the rest of the team were being more normal.

David: one lesson there is that Saito a lot easier if you have beer.

Clay: Yeah [laughter]. So at that point I was still stuck in my in my other partnership but I knew at that point that if I ever was able to exit that and looking for something cool to work on in Beijing that Saito would have to be it, so as soon as I was available I joined the team and it’s been a great experience so far, we’re really doing cool stuff here so it’s great. So yeah, happy to answer questions if people have them.

Richard: I see one question here from someone saying you know they’d love to see us talk more about these 51 attacks, etc.

I’m actually seeing the telegram group, there’s news of a big 51 attack today but I haven’t actually followed it today, I’m a bit busy preparing for this and other things, so I’m not sure if anyone could give us more information on that but I do think that that’s one of the things that does present us with chances to talk about you know what is different about Saito out there.

Clay: that’s very interesting, I’m curious what are these 51 attacks that are happening because we should know more about the space but we’re just building Saito all the time, so we don’t always know.

David: someone’s gunning for BSB so they just keep reorganizing whatever TAAL does, it’s actually kind of funny

Richard: is that what’s happening?

David: yeah, it’s just a hash attack and all of the miners are now leaving, so anyone who’s not TAAL is now fleeing for the door which makes the attacks easier so, it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

David E: Clay, where did you learn rust?

Clay: So I had a quite a bit of experience, I had once upon a time done a game platform in C with embedded Python and I learned a lot of systems programming doing that and then obviously at Google everything’s very low level you’re dealing with pushing bytes around but I did not know Rust prior to joining Saito and Richard and David were keen on using that so I’ve just spent some time up at Saito learning it here but, you know, once you know enough languages it’s easier. I mean Rust is very unique and there is a steep learning curve, but I love it, i think it’s a great. I mean, it’s by far my favorite language now. I think it’s just so cool.

David: it’s got the most helpful debugger, you know?

Greeny: I’m sorry if you’ve answered this question in the past, but why did you all choose Rust over other languages?

David: JavaScript runs in the browser, right? but it’s using one CPU and what that means is that as the block gets bigger and there’s more and more work to be done, more and more cryptographic stuff to be done, you get a limit on how fast you can process a block because you’ve got one CPU to do it.

You can optimize and trick your way around it by doing things like taking that block dividing it into 10 chunks, sending it to 10 processors and then they do their own stuff, the problem is that there are all these trade-offs that you can’t avoid. Rust is so beautiful because on a fundamental level it’s designed so it’s really easy for us to do something like read the block into memory and then it sits in that space of memory and we go to like 10 CPUs, 20 CPUs ,40 or 60 CPUs and we say each of you guys take some of this work and do it. So Rust is much, much better for parallelization and that’s really great because as blocks get huge you start to hit bottlenecks reading them into memory and moving just that size of data around and we don’t want to be doing that multiple times. I think we’ve shared some numbers; we can share some more, but basically Rust is outperforming my expectations of how fast we can get things. I think Clay’s comments as well play like mine and he’s blown away

Clay: I think the only other reasonable choice would maybe be Go, but the simplest answer is we want to get a low level language, we want to get something that’s compiled and where we’re doing real systems level stuff and we can push bytes around to really just squeeze out every bit of performance from the machine and as far as like Rust versus C++ or Go would it’s just a bit of a subjective choice but one that i definitely agree with just because Rust really lets you do low level stuff but without a lot of the sacrifices you would have to deal with C or C++ at least. I don’t know Go so well but it’s just a really great choice because it gives you the best of both worlds, I feel like we’re able to be really productive, almost as productive as you would be in JavaScript as far as just getting the functionality down but then it’s like 40 times more performance if you’re going to use 40 CPUs.

Emilio: how is the dot arcade different from the regular arcade?

Richard: One way to answer that is it really isn’t. The reason I’m saying that is the point is that it’s demonstration of being able to simply develop In Saito and then use code that you’ve written in regular standard web format to do things with other cryptos is a lot of work doing in other ways. So, the idea is really that it demonstrates how simply that you can slot other cryptos into the into the Saito ecosystem. The difference is right now it’s supporting Polkadot ecosystem tokens and in future we hope to expand that a lot more.

David: I’d just add that the um it’s really milestone one of that grant proposal that we got into the Dot people we can probably spin out milestone two anytime, I think we’re waiting to see how the outreach with the dot arcade stuff goes because partly it’s a marketing effort. You know, see how receptive that community is. One of the questions we’re thinking about post getting Saito rust up is exactly what’s the best way to make it so that we can really easily add stuff because the way we are doing things with Dot is really custom to their hardware and their servers and there are other ways that might be easier and more flexible, but yeah like Richard says is going to be pretty much the same as the normal one, the question is really when we get that second milestone in and when people can practically come with other cryptos.

TheAltz: How actively engaged are the VC investors and do they have any actual say in the direction or project or are they completely silent/hands off?

Richard: the real answer to that is it’s really varied. So we’ve got, for instance, the seed investor who is a really early supporter who’s now with a new fund that they’ve set up, that have come in again who David and I tapped for advice and investment quite on a regular basis so you know we will talk to them for advice and feedback. They have helped us find staff they have helped us structure the IDO, etc. Really daily activity, we’ve got other investors who have put some marketing muscle and things like that behind us and help amplify our messages and we’ve got others that really are very much silent partners and that’s something where we’re working with, is getting the most out of them, it’s a two-way street we need to push them to do it and it’s really changed, I think, in the space, we got a lot more investors in the recent rounds who are investors with something they bring to the party with whether they’ve got communities that they can message into or they help us with outreach and marketing, so yeah it really is very varied but we’re looking to get more out of all of our investors.

David: I think it’s something we’ve actually been focused on finding out for the last two to three weeks, we’ve been proactively reaching out to people and figuring out who’s helping with what sort of thing, because different kind of investors also mean different obligations to the project. Like Richard said it runs the gamut from like our lead investor in 2017, those guys are amazing, to a smaller person that might have got a smaller allocation because they run a blockchain promotion group or something, so it’s different.

Richard: yeah, we’ve been blown away by some people and we’re less impressed with others let’s say that as well.

Just looking through other questions, George George George George George George is saying that he’s considering becoming and applying to be an ambassador and I would say to anyone in the community if you’re interested in being part of that program, let us know, we’re not um expecting specific things, we want to find out what people can bring to the project and we want to work with them to make sure that’s rewarding and fun and exciting for them so seriously don’t feel like there’s some kind of threshold that maybe you don’t qualify or whatever, we’re happy to talk to people and it’s not wasting our time or something you can’t do, if you’re if you’re already participating in Telegram, that’s great.

Pawel: How Saito will revolutionize ecommerce?

Richard: I think the whole purpose behind Saito and the core idea of web3 is to get away from various technical and financial systems that allow incumbents to monopolize and to control what users or consumers can do. What we’re hoping to do is be part of doing that, letting people use keys online to be their identity and to own and maintain their identity and not have to give that away to the credit card company or to Amazon to be controlled on their behalf, so we’re hoping that we will see things like open marketplaces and I think that will start with things like content aggregation and stuff like that where people use site tools built on Saito to use crypto and micro payments and other things to share revenue with producers directly and other people like aggregators who are doing something useful for them rather than it being Spotify, google music maybe, one or two other services and you just have to hand over everything to them and that’s what you’ve got.

Thanks everyone for giving us your time this evening for being part of this it’s been great fun and we really appreciate everyone’s coming in and being part of it tonight.

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