 So I was wondering if you could start just by telling me about your background and what made you end up working with cryptocurrencies and blockchain specifically. My name is Jota Steiner, I'm the CEO of Parity. I started this company three years ago together with Gavin Wood who was one of the original co-founders of Ethereum and I myself used to work for the Ethereum Foundation looking after security before the launch of the Ethereum platform. Before that I have a background in applied math so I spent quite some time at Uni, worked a bit in consulting after my PhD and then got more and more interested basically at around the time of the Snowden revelations interested in like what's actually happening online, what's happening to our data, like how does this all work and I ended up reading a lot, accidentally came across Matesave which was an early project in the space as well and then saw people discussing Ethereum in that context about four years ago, like how to use it for access management of data and then yeah met the Ethereum people this is how I got involved basically. So it's all started with Ethereum for you then. Yeah I mean I had read about Bitcoin and it was like interesting to me like from a math perspective and but I didn't I only realized like the potential when I came across these discussions of like what can you actually do with Ethereum already like this level of abstraction yeah. So why don't you next tell us a bit about your relationship with Ethereum both personal and business of course we want to hear about Vitalik. Back at the time I got interested in like what can you actually do with it? Like this whole data perspective was interesting but then also around the same time I met Jesse Baker who was just starting a company called Providence where she looked at sort of trying to create like a Facebook for product products like bringing transparency to supply chains that was sort of the idea like what's the history, what are the people processes behind products and we started to speak about like how could you use blockchain in a particular Ethereum and I ended up sort of doing this and working for the foundation on security so working with external researchers making sure that certain tax scenarios analyzed in a bit more detail before the launch of the platform so that's what I did like initially but then basically why working on Providence realizing that really the technology isn't there yet where it needs to be in order to go mainstream and so out of that frustration Parity came out so as a company where we wanted to further work on the fundamental technologies and push that forward so which kind of nicely ties back to my math and science background so being able to push to push the technology on that end pretty pretty good fun. And so what's Parity doing now that's new because I'm just doing Googling before this I saw that you guys have the polka dot blockchain platform now. Initially we started with a clean slate implementation of Ethereum when we started Parity just to like basically taking all the learnings from the early days of Ethereum and coming up with a new implementation and then over time like through different projects that we did and the different discussions we had we understand more and more like what it is that is needed to to bring the technology to a state where it can actually be used. Initially the ideas involved a lot around just pure interoperability like few years ago the discussions about private chains and public chains started so it seemed sensible it also seemed sensible like as a way of optimizing scalability like think of when you have parallel chains where certain clusters of transactions are being processed like and then you have interoperability between the chains that's one way of scaling a system right but then over time like things like scalability sorry things like governance became also more of an issue and and we really started thinking about like what is sort of the next level of abstraction that we need to bring to this technology in order to make it much more general much more easily to adapt to solve for these issues and and that's why Polkadot or the technologies around Polkadot sit right now so substrate is a technology that we are that we just released in a POC state there's a testnet it's a very general framework for spinning up your own state machine so if you think of initially you have Bitcoin with with a platform that way you could do payments basically if you want to think of it in that way then with Ethereum you you got this like general platform for building decentral applications and then now with with substrate you get a framework for spinning up your own decentral platform so spinning up your own Ethereum your own your own Zcash your own Bitcoin and and because they all use the same framework framework by default they interoperate and and that's that's where where that's the problem that we are trying to solve at the moment it's like very technical engineering basically creating these frameworks like peer-to-peer technology and networking and like they are all sorts of elements and it's really not that easy to build them all together that they work yeah okay so this might be kind of a stupid question I mean I understand everything you said because I write about crypto a lot but to our YouTube audience or to people could you explain what everything you just said in like one simple sentence you know like what does parody do what does polka dot do so what we're doing at parity is coming up with a fundamentally new way of building online services so the way how the web has evolved and applications on the web is everything we do every service we use we always have to rely on centralized servers where all our data is hosted where there's like an authority that decides on like how does the service work what happens if there's contention like it's it's always like push to them or like they they are in charge they have the authority to decide and and what we're trying to build is basically a system where there's much more agency on the user side where there's less of a divide between service provider and the people that use the services so that it really becomes a much more open much more much more peer-to-peer way of interacting with each other where we don't have to go through Facebook through Google but instead have like seamless interacting with like our friends or whoever we want to interact with that's like web 3.0 that's how you 3.0 yeah yeah the next level of the web yeah so how long do you think it would take before we actually would enter the web 3.0 era because it took us a while to get to web 2.0 so do you have like a time timeframe for that with Pocotot specifically we're aiming to release Pocotot at the end of next year now that doesn't mean we already see applications I think that that's gonna be a gradual process I mean there are things you can use already to make your applications more the central more peer-to-peer there's some solutions for having interoperability like cross-chain transactions I hope that over the next few years we're going to see the first implementations applications that fundamentally use this a lot of what we have to solve evolves around usability and user experience and this would probably still take a bit also there is sometimes like an advantage in having systems a little bit centralized because you can have a massive efficiency gain in certain cases and and we still haven't found out like where we have to make these trade offs like how central how decentral should things be because if a system is completely decentral that also means as a user I have a lot of responsibility and what are the right ways of putting in redundancy so that when I lose a private key like which is the access to my wallet like I still can move the cash or the money I have in the wallet so what would you say to someone that says you know I don't know what you're talking about this web 3.0 I like using Facebook it's comfortable it's familiar I don't care if they take my data I have nothing to hide you know what's your argument to people that would say that if people don't don't see like what the underlying mechanisms are that make systems like Facebook really not like the perfect systems to intact with but I guess like the recent revelations around Cambridge Analytica have shown and in particular have shown the governments how powerful these platforms have become which like the hearings have shown like there is a lot of spotlight now on on all the services to come up with answers and like because like governments via the interference that that come through through these services and I believe we're gonna see regulation that will play in favor of decentralization to a certain extent and we've seen that in Bureau Borready like with GDPR so the directive on data protection although there are some questions around like how this intakes exactly with blockchain I believe like on the political side there's a there is a lot of will of making sure we don't give power to quasi-governments that are completely unregulated bringing up the data privacy bill I know some blockchain companies have expressed problems with it because of the whole right to be forgotten and the whole point of a blockchain is that nothing is ever forgotten so how do you see that contradiction playing out so I think we I mean I hope that we'll see clarification from regulators and from lawmakers over the next couple years like in principle I see that like the people that believe in blockchain technology and the people that were behind the GDPR have a have a huge set of common goals basically giving power back to to the users and at space basically unfortunate that the drafting of the GDPR came just before blockchain became a thing and so it became way too specific in the way it was drafted I mean politics can be slower but I would hope that people will recognize the the potential of the technology and therefore I don't know create sandbox boxes or like actually find a way of just leading to more clarification so what do you think is maybe an example of a country or regulatory framework that they're doing everything right does that exist yet I mean Switzerland was interesting because it's like it's a small country like small countries have it easier right or like easier because then they've always like struggled with retaining maintaining relevance and so they had to be more agile and adapt to changes in the environment much more quickly so I think we're gonna see a lot of regulatory innovation or like regulatory competition between countries which helps entrepreneurs to a certain extent but then only so much as like this is all global like this is technology that we're building for the entire web so even if you're complying in one country that doesn't help you necessarily so still it gives you a lot of assurance yeah I'm not sure whether I've seen anybody who does like everything right but it's it's quite good that the fact that people are mobile these days and they just move around wherever they can build their business has led to regulatory competition so this next question is changing the subject a bit but I saw you retweeted the other day kind of a mean about women in crypto where the media is shouting where are the women in crypto and there's a woman in crypto shouting back like I'm right here and they're not listening so I'm sure like my question is how many times do you get asked about what's it like being a woman in crypto I get asked frequently like my perspective on this and what needs to be done and then I guess my frustration with that topic comes a lot from often those discussions are very nuanced but then in the end all that gets printed is like just a complaint like there aren't that many or like the top like the main topic of the article is then all the Lambo's and I don't think it's helpful like I believe it's more helpful to just talk about the work that people do and like see that as like I don't find it as inspiring if I see people just like driving their Lambo's either like that wouldn't have been the reason why I would have come come in and work in crypto but instead like seeing people that just work in the space and becoming like interested in the topics that's why what I believe should be talked about my next question is about the Ethereum and the frozen wallets that happened well a while ago but it became a news topic again in April because there was the Ethereum proposal to reverse the hack and it ended up being or not the hack to reverse the freeze and ended up being voted down and I was wondering if that's something that you guys at parody are still thinking about how to get the Ethereum out of that frozen library or if it's kind of like it happened it's done we're just moving moving forward so we're still I mean there are a lot of efforts in with any Ethereum to come up with answers like how to fix the issue of like governance just in general and the reason why governance is an important thing is because have if you have like an answer to this like it's easier to to come up with ways where you decide on like contentious issues like whether you want to like do a hard fork or whatever to to unfreeze the funds so and I believe this is a fundamentally needed debate because we haven't figured this out yet like how do we actually want to want to govern decentralized systems and that's what what we are trying to work out with the community I do believe if you want to encourage innovation in the space you need to make sure you don't discourage discourage experimentation like the optimization that led to the to the freeze was a very sensible optimization back at the time it became clear it will be an issue like transaction throughput the cost of transactions and we made an optimization that would lead to less cost if you deployed a wallet and the truth is like the tools that we need in order to write smart contracts safe smart contracts aren't there yet and so not not finding an answer to like and and the parent the wallet freeze wasn't the only issue that happened where people lost access to their funds like there were other issues and I still hope that we find a solution where where like bugs in infrastructure that led to people losing access will be fixed in a in an adequate way today during the tech crunch fireside chat with Vitalik buttern he mentioned something about recovering frozen Ethereum funds by doing a soft spoon and I was wondering if you could explain what that phrase is if I even got it a soft spooning isn't exactly a way of recovering like what you do with a soft spoon is you basically use whatever the current state is of a chain say theorem like who owns how much ether what is the state of the contract and whatnot and use this as a starting point for a completely new chain so and then obviously you have all freedom to propose also changes to that state and in that case what you could do is you decide to fix the buggy buggy library contract and so all of a sudden that would become accessible again so basically in a new chain maybe maybe like an Ethereum 2 that's proof of stake based you would start with a clean state where all known bugs are fixed and that's what what falls under or like some solutions like this is what's called a spoon like you just take sort of the state as as inspiration for the state of a new so you're like scooping it up in a spoon yeah okay got it what is the normal day in your life look like oh what's a normal life I mean it's a mix of like all sorts of tasks like meeting the team there's like a lot of a lot of travel going to conferences speaking meeting with partners I mean I guess there's no typical day but yeah I mean the company also has changed over time like we're by now around 50 people and so we need to find answers like how we scale our company internally as well and yeah that's that's the topics that coin telegraph like subscribe and hodl