Ethereum: Past, Present, and Future with Parity Core-Developer Wei Tang

About this Episode

In this episode, hosts Joe Petrowski (Research Analyst, Parity) and Phil Lucsok (Product Communications Manager, Parity) speak with Wei Tang (Core Developer, Parity) about his work on several Ethereum- and Substrate-related projects. They discuss Tang’s experience working on Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Substrate, including innovative proposals for account versioning, backwards compatibility, and bridging and merging different Ethereum chains, as well as the future of ETH 2.0 and the broader Ethereum community.

Tang is known amongst his peers as an exceptionally gifted and prolific developer, having built the SputnikVM Rust implementation of Ethereum from scratch just by reading the Ethereum yellow paper (without looking at other clients), and having created the Substrate EVM implementation in just a few days.

Highlights:
00:57 - Why open source and Rust
03:30 - Building an Ethereum VM implementation from scratch
05:53 - SputnikVM and ETC
08:22 - Ethereum account versioning & backwards compatibility
15:10 - EIP 2225: bridging and merging different Ethereum chains
20:00 - Multi-client transaction validation for Ethereum
25:00 - Contentious EIPs and improving governance
26:52 - Shasper and implementing Ethereum 2.0 on Substrate
31:57 - ETH 2.0 challenges and roadblocks
34:07 - Substrate EVM
37:19 - Solri and Kulupu: Substrate meets proof-of-work

Links:
Wei Tang on Twitter
Wei Tang on Github

Key Quotes:

“I really like working for open source because you are essentially building a community.”

On EIP 2225: “Currently it’s really easy to create a chain split…you just disagree on something and it just forks. But if the disagreement disappears, if the community decides to come together again, there’s currently no way to merge those blockchains together again. You can split but you can’t merge. I just think that’s a bad thing.”

“Currently we rely too much on the people factor for governance. Everything is a human procedure….What I always want to propose is that we should add more automated processes into this.”