Keynote Clip: Polkadot’s Shawn Tabrizi Presents Web3 Cloud JAM
Shawn Tabrizi, a lead developer at Parity Technologies, shared his keynote presentation and presented JAM in front of blockchain developers using the Polkadot, a layer-0 protocol that was launched by Gavin Wood, one of the founders of the Ethereum blockchain.
- Tabrizi presented his keynote presentation about JAM during sub0, a three-day conference for Polkadot developers that happened from November 9 to 11, 2024, in Bangkok, Thailand.
In Focus: Join-Accumulate Machine (JAM) represents a prospective design to succeed a relay chain on Polkadot. Its name originates from CoreJAM, or the Collect Refine Join Accumulate, which outlines the computation model the machine embodies as first described by Wood.
- According to Polkadot, JAM will be a domain-specific chain that handles one particular domain of problems, which in this case is roll-ups. Technically, JAM makes Polkadot, a highly domain-specific roll-up chain, less opinionated and more generic.
- Worth Reading: Learn about Polkadot, its history, how it works, and its $DOT token in this BitPinas article.
The following excerpt from Tabrizi’s keynote focuses on his presentation about JAM, how it is related to Polkadot, and how it helps Polkadot to offer a better platform for decentralized app developers.
- Also, the event recapitulation of the November 11, 2024, sub0 event covered by BitPinas is at the end page of the article.
Table of Contents
Keynote Speech by Shawn Tabrizi of Polkadot
Shawn Tabrizi, Lead Developer, Polkadot: So, this is what my presentation is going to be about. It’s going to be how JAM changes that future for web3 development for applications.
There’s actually a lot of really cool narratives around JAM. There’s so many cool things to talk about with JAM that are all super technical. But I think there’s actually an even cooler narrative than all of this and the one that I would want you all to have imprinted in your head and that is, I think, the most important narrative is that JAM evolves Polkadot from hosting just blockchains to a platform for hosting any web3 application or service.
Tabrizi: JAM is not just about blockchains anymore. Polkadot is not just about blockchains anymore. It’s about web3 applications and services. So let’s take a look at that idea. You know what is JAM and Polkadot? I think a lot of people have confusion of, like you know, is JAM something new or different or a change? What is the relationship? For that? We need to start with the basics.
How is JAM Related to Polkadot?
Tabrizi: I want to argue that Polkadot is not just a blockchain. Now, Polkadot has a blockchain, it has a token. But I really think, when you say Polkadot, when we talk about the people in this room, the meaning, that logo, it is actually talking about a vision, a vision towards a world with less trust and more truth. That is really what we’re trying to do here
I mean, obviously we acknowledge the fact that you can’t just change the world with technology. That alone is not going to do anything. You need a lot of other factors here. But I think we really do believe that the first primitive to actually get us started on this pathway is actually through technology.
And this is why there’s such an excitement around the blockchain space, and so this is really kind of the starting point for how you would want to build and get to this world. But remember, it’s not the end. There’s so much work that needs to be done and again, this is why Polkadot is not just about blockchains. It’s a vision. There’s many more steps after we’ve accomplished this blockchain scaling problem to actually achieve this new world.
So then, what is the mission of Polkadot right now? Well, our current mission is to build that technology, is to provide a scalable, secure and resilient platform for web3 applications and services. Right, and so that’s really all the stuff. We’ve been building the relay chain, all the work up until now, JAM, has all been done, building this first technological primitive.
JAM as a Solution
Tabrizi: But with all of this in mind, there are still limitations. You could scale a blockchain as much as you want, but there’s a fundamental limit about the fact that a blockchain is a chain of blocks, that a block itself can only execute so much in one kind of time window, right?
So whenever you’re building an application, whenever you’re designing something, you have a fundamental limitation even if your blockchain can scale to millions of transactions, that it can only do execution within the scope of one block, and this is a big limitation for application developers. Blockchain development has always been its own specialized practice, right? This achieves yet another barrier to achieving this world with less trust and more truth. If we could just make it much more simple to create applications for blockchains, it would actually open up and accelerate our pathway towards this future world. So I want to argue that JAM solves this problem, and specifically with this PVM, the new virtual machine environment inside of JAM. Okay, let’s go into that.
Introducing the PVM, it is very exciting. You’ve been hearing a little bit about it. It’s based on RISC-V, it’s easy to transpile to all the common hardware. It performs very, very fast, near native speeds, has all the tooling you would expect from a good developer environment cheap gas, metering, fast compilation and way more. There’s a whole presentation we could have on just the PVM and there are videos. Actually you should go look online that they have it.
How JAM Helps Create the Polkadot Cloud
Tabrizi: So the old paradigm of developing applications on blockchain is you have to split up your application. You have to be aware that you’re building on a blockchain. Split everything up, push it onto individual blocks nasty. The way it should be, and the way it has been, is that you just build an application, you deploy it to some kind of cloud server and it just runs.
And the JAM way is exactly that we can abstract from you the fact that you just build an application, you deploy it to our cloud and we’ll split it up for you using continuations, using the PVM and this multi-step state transition function flow. So really, you can see how Polkadot is just a web3 cloud and it always has been.
Tabrizi: We’ve been building towards this vision, so really I want to introduce to you now, with JAM, the Polkadot Cloud. The Polkadot Cloud is the mission. It is the secure, scalable, resilient platform for web3 applications and services. It has all of the different web3 services that you would expect from a cloud provider. It has decentralized execution, settlement and finality, data availability, object storage, blockchain hosting services, smart contract hosting services.
These are all the things you would expect from a cloud provider. These are the things we have been providing all the time, but we’ve been bundling it up and telling about parachains, a bit of a talk about blockchains, but JAM takes us to a new state where it’s not just about blockchains anymore. It’s about any kind of application accessing and using these web3 cloud services.
The Polkadot cloud has crazy specifications it’s gonna have over a thousand validators, 341 cores, a Nakamoto coefficient of over 300, 85 times a single CPU load, 852 megabytes of input output bandwidth, two petabytes of data availability, over a million transactions per second. This sounds like the kind of platform you would want to deploy your web3 application on, that, one that would actually scale to your needs.
Closing Thoughts
Tabrizi: So really, what I want to say is that Polkadot with Jam is the web3 internet you’ve been promised. How many blockchains out there are saying to you oh, we’re going to change the internet, we’re going to make a web3 internet, but they’re all just for blockchains, but for any kind of application that wants to absorb the resilience, the strength, the decentralization of a web3 service.
So yeah, JAM, in one sentence, JAM evolves Polkadot. So that’s the beginning right from a hosting, just blockchains to a platform for hosting any kind of web3 application or service, and really the even simpler sentences Jam is the beginning of the Polkadot cloud, so what I wanted to do is I want to take this opportunity to actually start a discussion.
I’m sure there’s a lot of application developers out there, right, and people who are building a combination of services or applications directly on the cloud, who are thinking about the future of their pair chain and answer any questions about how and how they might shift their way they think about the Polkadot cloud and their applications.
Keep following BitPinas for interviews and speeches of people who move the crypto industry in the Philippines forward.
Event Recap: sub0 Day 3
[November 11, 2024, 3:16 p.m., PH Time] Now ongoing: Polkadot’s sub0 developer conference in Bangkok, Thailand.
This is a three-day immersion and summit of like-minded developers, builders, and visionaries—united to build the future on Substrate & Polkadot SDK.
Kian Paimani offered a ground-up explanation of Polkadot 1.0, Polkadot 2.0, and how it will all evolve to JAM.
Brian Chen discusses how, by building on JAM’s capabilities, Acala Network will aim to simplify DeFi interactions and drive mainstream adoption in the decentralized space.
Shawn Tabrizi discusses and engages with the audience on how JAM changes the paradigm of not needing to build blockchain-based apps on web3.
This article is published on BitPinas: Keynote Clip: Polkadot’s Shawn Tabrizi Presents Web3 Cloud JAM
What else is happening in Crypto Philippines and beyond?
