Hello everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of gossip about gossip, the podcast where we talk about real world applications of distributed ledger technology. My name is Zenobia Gods talk and I am the SVP of communications at World's labs, helping to grow the Hedera ecosystem. I am joined by Michael Garber on our team. Hello, Michael. How are you? Hey, guys. Hey, Zenobia. How are you doing? Honored to be here. Good, good. So today we are talking about the hips process, the Hedera improvement proposals process. But before we get into that, Michael would love to just share with our audience a little bit about you and your background and how you came to the world. Sure OK. I started out at a blockchain consulting company called chain yard. I was a blockchain engineer there, and when COVID hit, I got a job as a contractor working at Mastercard on their cryptography as a service team. And this whole time I've been interested in blockchain and kind of sitting on the sidelines watching. I really like bar since I worked at chain yard. I'd been watching you guys. And then I would say right during that, when the pandemic hit is when I put on my barbarian suit of armor and became one of you guys. And I'm thrilled to be here and be part of the team and. Just yeah, just very happy to be here. Fantastic well, it is an awesome suit. So I'm in here for 1,000 or 0. All right. So tell us a little bit about your role at World's labs and what you focus on day to day. Sure so I'm a developer advocate. Essentially, I'm a liaison between projects who are wanting to build on us and their technical questions that they have and planning and stuff like that. Right now, I'm in the DeFi accelerator, so we're working with a company called lab 49, developing DeFi primitives to make the developers job easier. The developers who are building applications in defi, and that's what's going on with me right now. And that's what I will summarize my role as. All right. Fantastic and, you know, over time, as Hedera has moved down this path to decentralization, I think one of the really important things has been the improvement proposals. So for those who haven't engaged in that part of the community or participated in those, can you share a little bit about what those are and how they work? Yeah, you took the words right out of my mouth. That was one of the things I was going to touch on. Is that on haddara, we have a high degree of decentralization. We have nodes in every continent except Antarctica. And one of the reasons that we have such a high degree of decentralization are these hips. They're community driven, formalized suggestions to improve the network. It starts as discussions in GitHub or Twitter or Slack or Discord. And then the community gets together and forms a hip. And that hip drives the improvements and features that you see on the network that roll out. Yeah, I can give some examples of that. You read my mind? Yeah all right. So give us some examples of some of the features on the network that have come about as a result of the hip process. Sure I wanted to highlight a few of them here. The first one I'd like to talk about is hit 42, that JSON RPC relay. This was essentially hip for us, for retail users because it let MetaMask users interact with Hedera. And that was a big thing for retail users because a lot of people use MetaMask. And another hit that we have was for 12 are NFT metadata JSON schema. When we rolled out NFTS, we didn't have a standardized way of writing this metadata. And so the community came together. I think you had patches, may and ash, wonderful people from the community. If if I left you out, I'm sorry. I came together and talked about what sort of standardized structure should we have for these NFT metadata. And so a hip was created from that discussion. And now that is a standard that we have on Hedera. And then, of course, we all know for a sixth the staking hip that rewarded users in a bar for contributing to consensus, and that was championed by none other than Dr. Lehman. Richard and we all love that hip. So those are some examples. Those are great examples. So if we think about the way we learned in middle school, how a bill becomes a law, can you walk us through the process of great I have this great idea for functionality, a feature that is I think would be so important to have on Hedera. How does that come from idea to fruition? Sure, there will be discussions going on anywhere in adara every day. This happens in Discord or Slack or Twitter or even anywhere, even on engineering calls. Discussions will happen and somebody will think of an idea on how to improve the network in some way, shape or form. And then this discussion will turn into a formalized discussion on GitHub. And out of that discussion, some champion of it fills out a hip template, which is on the hips repo site on GitHub. And they fill out this template and they submit a pull request for it. And then the maintainer, who is me, currently looks at this hip for any feasibility, any obvious things that are not right with it or what is good with it. Give some feedback to the author and then move the hip along in the process. I'll give the hip a number and then I'll change the status from review to last call and then it gets merged into GitHub. And then that's how the process starts. Now, depending on the kind of hip that it is, it will have a different part. It will take a different path. In the life cycle. There are six different kinds of hips, but I like to think of them in two categories. You have hips that change the code base and then you have the ones that don't. The ones that do require council review. They get voted on and pass through that way. And the ones that don't touch the code base, these are like informational hips or process hip or standard track application that uses the network that builds on top of it, but doesn't exactly change the network. Those hips don't require council review and just straight through the path that way. But once if they did require council review and they get voted on and accepted, that means that the feature is ready to be billed. Not that it necessarily is, but that is ready for being built. And once I'm sorry and that council reviews that through ted.com. Right and they vote on it. And if it gets, if it passes the vote, then it moves into accepted. If it's not passed, then it moves to rejected. Which is interesting. We haven't had a single rejected hip yet, which is why we spend a great deal of time in trying to make sure the hip is formalized and looks good from at least a technical perspective and a granularity perspective before it ever gets to be voted on. And then once it's voted on and it gets accepted, it means that it's ready to be billed out as a feature. And once that feature is built and implemented, it gets moved. The status of the hip gets moved from accepted to final and it lives on the network. All right. And so as you look down the road, you know, can you share with us some of the ideas that are in the pipeline or that are being discussed in some of those community chats? Yeah first, I want to talk about a hip that just got accepted or at least conditionally accepted. It's kind of the same thing. It means that conditionally accepted means accepted, and some of the pieces of the feature may change, but overall, the idea is the same and it's approved to be built out. And this one that's been conditionally accepted is 583. This has been championed by Nana and it's called expand alias support in crypto create and crypto transfer transactions. Now that's a lot of words for a high level overview of that is to say, OK, I'm on another EVM chain, EVM network and I have an address and I want to use that address as my public address on Hedera. So before this hip, that was not a path that was possible. But now people, users who are on other EVM chains can use their public address to derive an account on there. And so if I'm using an application on Avalanche per se or polygon and I have my address there. And then I connect to a decentralized app, a dapp that is built on hedera, I can connect to it and change my network over and my address will make an account on Hedera. And then so my address is the same for all across all chains, which is very useful. And it was a very important step for retail adoption. So that's why I wanted to highlight that. As far as ones in the pipeline that are not even hits yet, they're still in the discussion stage. I wanted to tell you all about two of them. First one revolves around dynamic NFTs. So the discussion there is adding a mutable metadata field to support that. I kind of view dynamic NFTs akin to not that we're working with Zillow or Redfin or anything like that. But if you were to have a house, a piece of property as an NFT, like a Zillow card or a Redfin card. And as details change, the property stays the same, but attributes of that property will change, like whether updates happen to the house or something like that. So when ownership can transfer and you can still see that NFT, but the fields on it, some of the properties can change. And you can see a history of that change. And I like to view it like for like real estate or something like that. You have a piece of property and there's additions that happen to that property and stuff we need for that kind of use case, you would need a dynamic NFT immutable metadata for that. Yeah, I could see that for any kind of asset where any kind of asset changes over time. Yeah yeah, it's really, really hard or something like that. Yeah exactly. Yeah and, and then the next one I wanted to talk about was this is being championed by patches. That's normalizing topic data with a couple of new attributes. So these topics can be aggregated by third parties without the third party having to probe its contents to see what it is. So for instance, with this idea, third parties can look at a topic and immediately see that it's a voting proposal without having to look at the whole structure to see, oh, well, this must be a voting proposal. They can just see with the ID. Oh, it's a voting proposal. So that's a cool one. And those are the two main discussions going on. Yeah, Yeah. I didn't I didn't give the shout out like I wanted to for the Extend alias of the crypto create and crypto transfer because that was a huge piece of work. This was the one we were talking about where you could be on another chain and use that public address and then derive it to create a account on Hedera. That was a huge piece of work and our engineers are the best and I wanted to give a shout out to Nana who championed it and also danno. A tool, Richard. Ali Michael tinker. Mohsin and of course, Lehman. You guys are awesome. Thank you so much for that. That was a great tip. Well, it takes a village. And on that note, Michael, wrapping up any last words of wisdom or thanks? Before we close here, I know the community loves to see these as they progress, so Thank you for sharing how that works. A little more insight into the process. Awesome Yeah. If I had to say anything in closing, I would just say all hip start as a discussion. So make sure you're engaged in discussions, whether it's in Discord or in one of our Slack channels or on Twitter anywhere. Just make sure you're engaged in that. Anyone can submit a hip so you don't have to be a developer. All you have to do is have a GitHub account and then go to the repo and fill out a template. It's very easy. And there was something else I wanted to say about it. All right. Well, I'm sure we will have you back on. I know. I know. I know. In order to ensure the success of a hip, you want to keep the idea as small and granular as possible. So if you have something that's, like complicated and fairly involved, you might want to break that down into several more granular, smaller hips. And that will make it more technically concise and more easily understood by the community. And community support is a big one to if you have community support behind an idea that will literally move mountains. And that is what I would suggest for tips to ensure your hip success. All right. Tips for Hips. We got it. It's for hits and they don't lie. All right. Well, Thank you so much, Michael. I think that was really insightful. Great advice for anyone looking to contribute to the process. We know there are so many folks who are doing. So today. So a big Thank you to all of them. And Thank you for joining us today.
