Essentia Explained

Key Takeaways

hello world it's Suraj and today I want to talk about a decentralized application called essentia so what essentia is is essentially a gateway to the decentralized web so if you are familiar with the decentralized web then you know that there are a bunch and what even if you're not familiar there are a bunch of different apps that run on these protocols that are not a part of the traditional web that we're used to right so you know Google Apple Facebook these are centralized apps but there's a whole host of other types of apps decentralized apps out there that normal people are not eight normal people normal users of the internet that are using a standard web browser like Chrome or Safari they don't have access to them because in order to reach these decentralized apps you need to either download a Chrome extension like meta mask for example for hit theory and based apps or you to download a you know a separate browser like brave or you know whatever mist and this is just not the way to move forward with this field we need something that's going to act as a gateway between the centralized web and the decentralized web and what essentially is is that it is that gateway it's a it's this interoperability layer between the centralized web and the centralized web so we're gonna learn about essentia in this video and also we're gonna learn about cross protocol bridging blockchain Seeds a bunch of you know different things about the blockchain just by learning about essentia multi signature transfers encryption and cross chain atomic swaps all of it tonight is very technical jargon but in this video we're gonna cover those those things as well okay so I want to start off with a demo of this service so you can access it at essentia dot one definitely check out the link link is gonna be in the video description but what you can do is you can try it out immediately so you can click we can click on this try button essential 1.0 15,000 users are already using this great so now I'm gonna create a password password whatever I want it to be and once I create a password what it's going to do is it's going to create my own profile in a decentralized such that I own my data and then if any service then wants to use my data they have to ask me for that data okay so it's a it's a user owned the user owns their data in this gateway and so the reason I call it a gateway is because there are so many different types of decentralized apps out there right there's steamin - there's khyber there's crypto kitties there's you know whatever augur D - and there should be a way to access all of them now some of them have this kind of bridge between HTTP and whatever else they're storing their data on you know ipfs see what have you but some of them don't and so this is a way to kind of combine all of them into one one kind of yeah gateway or view that you can see them all so the first part of essentia is it is it is a wallet for all wallets so you can have your etherium wallet in here you can have your Bitcoin wallet you can have whatever type of wallet you can have it here and there they're adding more over time which i think is very cool like I want to use a service that can combine all these wallets together so that's the first part the second part is storage right so this is a decentralized storage platform we can use ipfs we can use swarm we can use storage a and then once we have some file we can upload it and so it's going to store that file and I'll talk about the use cases of this in a second but that's one part of it the other part is for us to be able to log in to any of these block chains you know the etherion blockchain what have you and now good I successfully logged in with my address continue great and there's also an exchange right so this is we're gonna talk later about cross atomic swaps but this is an exchange we can exchange any kind of coin with any other coin and lastly it's it's it's a it's a DAP store not an app store but add app store so we can find other decentralized apps in this platform we can see you know Aragon status I can add status ok so now I've added status and now now that I've added status it's here in my in my dashboard so now I can use status I can send messages to people status by the way is a decentralized messaging platform and so now I have access to that okay so very very cool stuff and right so my point is a is that a decentralized web is fragmented and there are so many different protocols out there and just because there are so many different protocols that all you know say say different things it doesn't mean that one is any better than the other there should be a way to combine all of them together right we're talking about not just us as developers or you know enthusiasts in the technology using this we're talking about our you know grandmas and our grandpas and just everybody people who are not as familiar with technology being able to access these services and and this really does that in a great way and so one thing I found very you know very cool about this was that when we log in what it does is it creates a unique seed for us right so it's a unique seed that acts as our identity now this is an identity and so first of all many companies and people have tried to create one identity that accesses all the different services right all the way back to the 90s Microsoft tried this with their I think it was called one service or one something anyway it didn't work out but now that we have the blockchain and we have these new methods of distributed consensus that's vision that dream is now possible so there's one one login that you can use for all these services and so that's that's a great feature of essential right so and what what it also lets us do is it also lets us bridge protocols together for example HTTP and say ipfs we are accessing this ascension app using HTTP and we are then able to upload our data to say IP FS which is its own protocol right it's ipfs colon slash slash whatever it is the content address not the HTTP address or the IP address so this is very cool and I want to I want to show you for a second how this works how this kind of cross bridging works so essentially uses this but if we look you know deep down the stack into how this works inside of ipfs is go repository we can see this we can see this file called gateway code so if you haven't done go before it don't worry about it go is a very beautiful elegant simple language which we'll learn which will see why you know as the video progresses but essentially think about it so you can be an IP FS note anybody can be an IP FS node they can store data on their computer and so there has to be some bridge to be to be able to access that ipfs data from the HTTP web and so this is one way to do that with this gateway and so that what the Gateway is is it says let's see but we can see inside of this function that any node can be a gateway they have that option to be a gateway so in the handler we can see that we have these headers for HTTP that are being sent from this IP FS node so essentially an IP FS node can double as an HTTP node so they have their own HTTP server and they act as the bridge so whenever you're accessing this HTTP server / IP FS node you are then able to access everything that that ipfs can node is connected to which is every other ipfs node now so does this take away from some of the benefits of decentralization yes but does it take away all the benefits no can what I mean is can you censor that HTTP node yes but the data will still live right so that HTTP web site can be censored but the data will still live which is which is a great thing anyway I just wanted to talk a bit about why bridging is important and how essential does that you know by by implementing this okay so one so it's not it's it's got some great features right so it's it does a lot it's not just like a you know one wallet for everything it's it's a wallet for different crypto currencies there's voting's there's a voting system you don't have to use a password for all of these did all of these decentralized apps it's multi device so because it because it runs in the browser and you don't need a Chrome extension you can run it on a phone you can run it on a desktop app you can run it in your browser a lot of different options here and one thing I think is very cool is that because it's got this decentralized storage option you can upload your kyc information to it and then participate in multiple icos with just a few clicks so if you are a crypto investor then you can invest in all of them with just a few clicks it's a very simple way to do that and so also because these different block chains are integrated you can program scripts in a single language which is very useful and you can orchestrate operations between services so they're working on an API and that's coming out soon but that's gonna let you you know work with these different block chains so if you think about it like okay so it's got a lot of features so where does it fit into this space right we have different options for you know different things like you know a social network decentralizes steam it for messaging it's not whatsapp it's status for remote jobs up work that's eath glance for storage it's not Google Drive it's ipfs where does this fit in well it's kind of at that operating system layer right if you think about it it's it's a gateway it stores your identity and your data that's something you want to keep really close to you right so what do you keep closer to you what what's that the lowest level of the stack right it's your operating system and so this acts as an operating system layer and right so all these different crypto currencies they use they use a seed they use a seed to verify that you're the unique owner of some wallets right so what if Sencha does is it creates a seed and that seed acts as your ID for all of your wallets and it doesn't in a very interesting way so what I want to do is I want to talk about seeds so we're gonna code a seed in a second okay we are going to code a seed and we're going to do this in JavaScript I've still got this evolution simulator up I can remove that okay okay so we're gonna code this in solidity to give you an example of you know how seeding works and in the context of essentia and just in general because it's a great learning exercise so if we have a contract and this is in solidity by the way but this is just like you can use any language for this but so if we have a contract and we want to say generate a random number okay so a seed is a random number okay so one way we can do that is inside of a blockchain by looking at the blocks themselves and then modify and then you those values to create a random number so I'll show you how to do that so we can create a function that is called random number Genesis one line it's a one-liner function all right so we have the header which is random Gen and it's gonna generate a random number given some seat so I'm just gonna say some value like two three four some scalar value and what it's gonna do is it's going to return a random number so I'll call this again this integer a random number that's it okay so how do we do this I'm going to paint what in one line I'm gonna return okay it's gonna be an integer an unsigned integer that's what that you means and I'm gonna use a shot three which is a which is an encryption protocol to then encrypt the contents of this and what is this this is a block this is not just a block in the blockchain this is that that blocks hash and we're gonna take that blocks number we're gonna subtract one from it combine that with the seed value that we have before run modulo 100 which means that this is going to create a ram number between zero and a hundred based on the last block hash that's it okay so we're gonna do modulo 100 and that's it this single line of code in solidity will generate a random number based on the last blocks hash between 0 and 100 see how simple that was and this lives on the blockchain it's using the randomness or the-the-the determinism of the blockchain to then create numbers that are non-deterministic which you can do this single line of code so I just want to show that for a second and there are different ways of generating unique numbers anyway technical overview time with essentia so there's a lot of modules here if we look in the white paper there are quite a lot of modules are 29 different modules in this white paper which is very ambitious and if we look into it you can see a list of all these boxes are the modules yeah yes s home s core s base as office you know it's config and you know aetherium is also very complex and a lot of block chains are very complex so and they've integrated with aetherium so so core is really interesting so core is you know as you would think the core of the application it it allows the ID to destroy restore and back up you know itself it also allows for the creation of multi signature capabilities so multi signature transactions are very popular in the blockchain community and this allows for that so the idea is that if I want to send you some money and I don't know you I would need a third party to be that intermediary Amazon eBay you know up work what-have-you but if we can automate that process then that would make our lives easier and we could do this faster so multi signature transactions originated in the Bitcoin blockchain the idea is that you have three people and it requires two of three signatures to then make that transaction happen right so the third person would be a third party it could be a single person it could be your friend it could be anybody it doesn't have to be a single you know company it could be any person and so here's an example in JavaScript using the Bitcoin library to show you an example of multi signature transactions which essentia uses essentially we see this list of private keys right here okay these are my these are some private keys and we're gonna take three of them all right so we're taking three of those keys and we're creating a script using those alright in this script we're going to perform multi-sig right so now we are going to add an input and an output and sign one of those transactions okay so right here we're going to push that transaction to the network right so we've created a single transaction we push it to the network and we're going to do the same thing for another transaction right here write the same exact thing and then we're going to do that for a third transaction just like that and the the the unique part here is this Bitcoin dot scripts that multi-sig output so because we pushed all three of those transactions to the blockchain we've also signified to the blockchain that hey this is a multi signature output so we have three transactions Multi signature outputs on the blockchain and now each of two of those three addresses has to then send a transaction to the blockchain saying that yes I agree and because of that's that you know multi-sig output function there if two of those three send that transaction the funds are unlocked and that's multi signature okay so yeah anyway so about ESS base so there's a there's a base module as well and basically you can it accesses API to course was this high level API to what's essentially the core of the of the system also for authentication there's this there's this off module that lets you control different parts of this very complex network of modules which which would you need and then there's bridge right so there should be some way either off chain on chain and a hybrid approach to be able to transfer value between all of these different block chains that are integrated into Ascension and so the way to do this is an atomic cross chain swap and I want to talk about that at the end and but there's one more module ESS pay which it encrypts the it encrypts the wallets it acts as a plugin to connect and manage other payment processors and it it's basically like the store of value for all of your different crypto currencies so essentia has its own cryptocurrency as well and there's going to be an ICO on June 25th which is surprisingly soon and you can see a link to that in the description and when it comes to encryption there's a lot of different ways to encrypt a payment or in general anything and this is what this is what I mean when I say go is a great language because you can you can encrypt so many different ways using the built in libraries I mean look in this single crypto library that go has we can use sha-256 random AES cipher hacks you know and a bunch of different encryption algorithms in a single line right so encrypt just means run these functions on this data essentially and that's why if the reham ipfs and a bunch of other blockchain protocols that essential has integrated has you go right so the last thing I want to talk about our atomic cross chain swaps which are essential to this platform and in general is a very important topic so the idea is that if I if I have some aetherium and you have some Bitcoin and I want to transfer some aetherium to you and you want to transfer some Bitcoin to me how do we do that so the way that traditional I guess you would say traditional it's only been five years or whatever way to do this in cryptocurrency is to have an exchange right so coin base or you know whatever would at whatever crack in and they act as a third party so we got rid of banks but we still have this third party so the way to get over that is to implement what's called an atomic cross chain swap and so this is a protocol of saying I'm person a your person B I want to transfer value to you you want to transfer value to me how do we do that with that in an automated way so that what happens is person a me my funds are sent to this escrow in the blockchain person B's funds are sent to the escrow on their blockchain okay so then their funds are locked your funds are locked we both receive a message that you know each other's funds are locked and then off chain we're both going to agree on an exchange rate okay so we'll say you know what let's let's do it for this much to bitcoins is worth one either or whatever well then well then send a message to our to our block chains that indeed we did get it and because they got that message the funds will be transferred and so cross chain atomic swaps are a subject that is it's a it's a very interesting subject if you want to see an example of this in solidity you know this is this is the most simple example I could find but check out this example it's written in solidity very simple stuff but yeah anyway so decentralized gateways are very important to the space the Sencha is a great example of that links to everything i've talked about are going to be in the video description please subscribe for more programming videos and for now I've got to link all the block chains so thanks for watching