Interview with Pavel Prigolovko, CSO at TON Labs and active participant in DGO SG (part I)

This interview will comprise two parts. It will help us get to know the co-founder of TON Labs, who is engaged in analytics as well as in search and attraction of partners for Free TON and who also participates in DGO Sub-governance as an initial member.

We will learn:

• Where and why Pavel got his education;
• How his history of involvement with TON Labs began;
• What the difficulties of creating a decentralized control system being implemented in Free TON are and how the difficulties of scaling such a system are overcome;
• Which network participants will be supported in the future;
• Will independent capital participate in the token distribution meritocracy, and if so, how;
• If any new blockchain development team comes to Free TON, ready to create something, then what is their path here, where should they start;
• Which SGs are the most problematic and what the problems are;
• Why Pavel became one of the founders of DGO Sub-governance and what DGO is up to now;
• What role moral values ​​play in the community and what the fundamental values ​​for the Free TON community are.

Svetoslav Bauer: Today our guest is Pavel Prigolovko, CSO at TON Labs. We want to get to know you a little, Pavel, and talk about DGO Sub-governance. So let's get started.

Ruslan Soluyanov: How are you, Pavel?

Pavel Prigolovko: I’m great. Mood isn’t ruined yet ..

ivan kotelnikov: Do you generally get up early?

Pavel Prigolovko: It depends, this time it’s not because I got up late, but because people are already trying to spoil the mood since morning.

Svetoslav Bauer: Pavel, before asking questions about your activity in Free TON, we would like to talk about the period of your life before this. Could you tell us about where you got your education and why?

Pavel Prigolovko: I got my basic education at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, Moscow State University. I studied there, because before that I had studied at Kolmogorov's school, from which, quite naturally, people got to the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics . Two groups from this school were then assembled on my course. We got there without entrance exams, because there were olympiads at which I placed.

I also went to an independent university in parallel, which was organized by Arnold (a Russian mathematician very famous in the West). There I studied number theory, group theory, fields, etc. which was interesting, but vaguely useful at that moment.

ivan kotelnikov: So, you are a mathematician?

Pavel Prigolovko: Yes. But I realized what it was for only after the creation of TON Labs, since all cryptography is based on this. It was interesting to read all the works on this matter, as I remember something from those times.

At the same time, I went and received an MBA in Moscow at aibec.org - American Institute of Business and Economics.

ivan kotelnikov: That means, it’s more mathematics than business, am I correct?

Pavel Prigolovko: It’s the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University. So yes, I am a mathematician. Right.

ivan kotelnikov: How did you get into TON Labs?

Pavel Prigolovko: Long way. In fact, I have visited many places and did a lot of things: marketing as well as finance.

ivan kotelnikov: It's on the Internet, it's understandable. How did it happen? Through personal contact?

Pavel Prigolovko: Yes, of course. We have formed a very large number of business contacts over the past decade. I was also involved in ventures with varying degrees of success. As a matter of fact, TON Labs was organized by a well-known group of people: Alexander Filatov, Dmitry Malyugin, I also invited Mitya Goroshevsky in the beginning.

We were engaged in some joint projects, formed an Industry 4.0 fund, which was supposed to invest in exponential technologies. Somewhere at this junction, when we formed the foundation, it was Nikolai and Pavel Durov who started the TON project. We decided that this was the most promising direction we can explore. Plus, such a hype that happened among investors on this basis amazed us. That is, when ten pitches out of ten are sold, at the same time they sell not just what you ask for, but they say: "Maybe ten times more?" It makes you think.

Ruslan Soluyanov: Pavel, I have one question for you, when do you sleep? If I am not mistaken, if the Internet does not deceive me, you are a co-founder and founder of different companies, different funds, you have shares in different companies, how do you manage to do it all?

Pavel Prigolovko: Having shares you don't need to spend a lot of time on it. But, naturally, in different projects different people are engaged in operational activities. I'm mostly focused on TON Labs and Free TON.

Ruslan Soluyanov: If the Internet does not deceive me, you took part in the construction of Khan-Shatyr in Astana. I’m wondering - how is the weather in Astana?

Pavel Prigolovko: Yes, I took part in this. In winter, it's cold there, really cold.

Ruslan Soluyanov: I returned from Astana in December at -25 C, it was wonderful, and those Astana winds... But I'm more interested in the analogy with TON. After all, architecture and construction are the final points of building. And at TON we are working with decentralization, there is no control. So, can you draw any parallels or clearly say which is more difficult, or which is more interesting - to build an integral building and with well-known people or a decentralized project?

Pavel Prigolovko: There are certain people, good luck, bad luck, organizational structure, issues that should be addressed. But, of course, everyone likes what they like. And at that stage, I liked that project. I was in this project from the developer's side.

The analogies end at the fact that people are here and there, and so are processes. Of course, Free TON is a completely different system and a different kind of project. And this is good. In general, the idea is as follows: let's implement control, like we submitted applications like “let's make Analytics & Support SG check, retain, pay”-  this is a wrong way. It is clear where this all comes from. We all, in a sense, have some experience, some people have more, some have less.

Ruslan Soluyanov: Hierarchical structure.

Pavel Prigolovko: Yes. At the same time, in general, a company can be quite flexible and not bureaucratic.

There are all sorts of stories about matrix structures, which, by the way, are quite close to what happens in Free TON. When people can participate in different projects without being in a rigid vertical in some department.

But, personally, looking at everything that happens, of course, I formed one criterion, I also voiced it out several times. We do not have a task to achieve some maximum efficiency. In what, I believe, many state structures make a big mistake, which comes from the mentality of people who have built their careers and lives, starting from the state work. They believe that every budget penny should be spent as efficiently as possible. At the same time, many other factors and missed opportunities are forgotten. I mean how much time all of you, as a structure, spent on achieving conditional efficiency. Then, while you keep every penny and don’t spend it, your economy is stagnating and waiting for you to spend it. There are many nuances like that. It turns out that out of good intentions, you can spend a penny through a very difficult process. There will be a bunch of experts, a lot of resources will be spent on the process itself, but the economy itself will work poorly. I, too, have said many times that we do not need to do everything as efficiently as possible. Naturally, there must be efficiency, its level must be acceptable.

Speaking about that, there is a great phrase, which usually appears in another area, but I think it's well-known: "Half of the advertising money is wasted, but I don't know which one" (Ogilvie). We are well aware that a significant part of the tokens was wasted and will be wasted in the future, hopefully a smaller part. But it is very difficult, at any given time, during the voting process, to understand whether this will work well or not.

So what's important? In my opinion, in the process that we are trying to build, scalability is important. That is, the process should have an acceptable level of efficiency, it should be fairly easy to scale - this is the key.

You can make a very efficient small team, a small company. It will be very effective, but it will remain small forever. We want to make a big ecosystem.

Ruslan Soluyanov: But there is both horizontal and vertical scaling. How to keep balance?

Pavel Prigolovko: Vertical scaling is not scaling. The vertical scaling is more of a mechanism for maintaining the efficiency of the horizontal scaling. All that is upward is aimed at regulating what happens during horizontal expansion.

In this regard, we have not yet formulated the final goal of the project. And despite the fact that this question is simple, when you go more into detail it becomes not so simple. On the one hand, we can say that we want to build a large decentralized ecosystem.

Our main value is decentralization. Decentralization itself is a very complex concept, since there are many levels of decentralization, usually everyone thinks of this as the number of validators, but that's a big separate topic. But there is a why. The most correct answer (and Mitja and I completely agree on this) is so that there are many entrepreneurs in this ecosystem. And in general, what is an ecosystem? An ecosystem is a community of entrepreneurs who do something in it and earn money. It is beneficial for them and it makes a part of their life. There is a big problem here.

First, while business models in decentralized systems are very limited, there are few working use cases. The first is the transfer of funds and the conservation of value as a consequence.

Second, DeFi has been formed. It seems like a big story, but still at least half of DeFi is controversial for many reasons. Accordingly, for a large ecosystem to form, with real entrepreneurs doing something useful for the world and society, it is necessary that the basic technologies allow it. Hence our favorite DeBots. Without these technologies, a decentralized system simply won't bring anything useful for users on a large scale.

And then the question arises: how to scale the business environment? How to maintain it? Any selective support for a project distorts the competitive environment. On the one hand, it gives support, and on the other hand, it brings a distorting effect. So how do you strike a balance? There are no answers to these questions yet, but they will come.

ivan kotelnikov: I will let myself interfere. I remember that during one of the internal calls Mitja said something similar to an internal postulate that the system will always depend on the initial rules very much. With a small number of initial rules, you can lay down a certain DNA. And here, if we are talking about the environment of entrepreneurs, Mitja believes that a free competitive environment will attract them and give healthy rules of the game. Therefore, he is a fan of contests and all that. What do you generally think about Mitja having quite rigid axioms in his head? That only direct contests and competitions are acceptable and nothing else. What do you think about it?

Pavel Prigolovko: You absolutely correctly described how it works. If you want to create a competitive environment for entrepreneurs, you need to hold contests, so contests are like a derivative of this idea. In general, I agree with this direction. And our goal is to create an ecosystem with a competitive environment for entrepreneurs.

What difficulties can appear? They are connected with the fact that the issue has not been resolved at the community level. Such issues can cause serious controversy. For example, you need to translate a lot of materials to different languages ​​in order to increase adoption. This is useful for the development of the entire ecosystem, but you cannot do it through a contest, because you do not need a hundred nor ten translations, even two is too much. The orthodox answer to this question is that you don't need to translate at all. Those who need it will translate it themselves. Because in bitcoin there is no support for transfers, and people are great at developing it themselves. Bitcoin has many websites.

Serious disagreements can arise here. Someone thinks that we are in the wrong position, we still need to reach a certain point when it will develop on its own. And someone, let's not say who precisely, believes that, in principle, if you step over the line, then you are violating certain principles, and that this is wrong. Until we grow to such a size at which it really will no longer be of fundamental importance, these disputes will continue.

Darkwing Duck: Good afternoont! My question is: we just started talking about translations into other languages, etc. From my point of view, when representatives of several countries with their own mentality participate in one task or area at once, best practices to be applied are kind of blurred, and the number of developers who will participate is blurred, but this is useful. Some kind of competition appears. The question is: how important it is now to popularize Free TON, not only with Russian developers, but among other countries, because enthusiastic interested people appear there too. But, perhaps, since there are no translations or some kind of transparent access to information, few people from such countries are attracted. Personally, I think that this is a rather important aspect, it is important to "dilute" as much as possible the number of people that we have. What do you think about that?

Pavel Prigolovko: I absolutely agree. The project is international from the very beginning and it should develop globally, all around the world. The most important question is how to provide support to such areas without direct funding for any specific activity to create something. Creation of one thing, for example, a website, by its nature, through contests, is almost impossible to do. You can try but this is inconvenient. This approach is more likely to generate problems and conflicts than value. Therefore, again, the orthodox answer is that you just don't need to do this. This should appear by itself. In fact, given the technical features of Free TON and its uniqueness, it will probably happen by itself. It's just a matter of time. In addition, we are not in a vacuum, there is serious competition in this area from other projects, which may be technologically weaker in many respects, but they without hesitation spend large resources on promotion, advertising, grants in the end. This problem, in my understanding, has not been resolved. This pain point will become much smaller over time, as the ecosystem evolves, because there will no longer be such a great temptation to take and send resources for the centralized development of some direction. Everything will already be more or less developed. Plus, when there is already some kind of environment, it is easier to do contests there, because there is someone to participate in them.

For me, this question is still open, you can argue about it endlessly. The mechanics of competitive development of certain areas, in fact, may be non-trivial and not always obvious. Therefore, they will have to be invented somewhere, offered somewhere, and tried somewhere.

With PR, again, Mitja wrote a certain concept before the new year. I think we'll try to do it. It is about a contest in which the winner is actually determined by the number of views, and not by some subjective decision of the jury.

In the mechanics that Mitja proposed, there was only one important question: you need to have a certain number of people from Free TON who would verify the original text of the article, views of which are counted and taken into account in the contest. I suggested that these people should be chosen by voting of all token holders when you support either one person or another, and there will always be some top people in Free TON. If you didn’t like how some person spoke, expressed something, you simply transfer the voice from one to the other. This is a way of decentralized list building. This will also require some kind of network contract, but again, this part is already quite well developed.

Speaking about websites, there is also the idea that we don't need to maintain only one website, we need to make the websites compete. In principle, there are already a certain number of them. Conventionally, how freeton.house is worse than blog.freeton.org or some other website? That is, these are all websites that in one way or another help the development of the project. Therefore, the idea, again, is still being discussed. If you have any thoughts - join us to do some kind of objective contest to support different websites. This can also be done by the statistics of visits to the website. It is clear that there can be cheating and abuse, but this is the main challenge: how to design such contests. Bitcoin does not have an official website. In this sense, freeton.org may eventually become just a directory that contains links to those sites that are most popular with the community.

ivan kotelnikov: It’s very funny to observe how, in response to most questions or criticism, you, as members of the TON Labs team, begin with the words: "bitcoin ...", "but what about bitcoin ...". This is very cool in terms of public recreation.

In general, my question has now been born, such a strategic, economic one about the network. It is very clear that you, as the main technical team, support the network and worked out the issue of coordination and support of validators very well, it is clear that this community, a subgroup of validators, was a priority even before the launch of the network, most likely. We see the lyricism of the TON Labs steaks that are earned in contests and vesting are now getting into some depools. How do you choose them, are they independent or are those your depools, that you will recommend to validators in general? What are the criteria for choosing validators that you support, if you do? And to which network members will support be directed in the future, if any? Will independent capital participate in the coin distribution meritocracy, and if so, how?

Pavel Prigolovko: That’s a number of questions, I will answer them one by one.

1. Market depools - as TON Labs, we have nothing to do with them.
2. About the choosing process. There was a post in validator chats where it was written that all those with a commission of less than 5% can get an additional stake. This was openly stated. The very purpose of support is to level the steaks in the network, while for us, this is quite justified economically. Because you can keep your own node, have expenses, or you can send a steak to a depool, with a small commission and get the same income. Pay a commission, but do not bear the costs of maintaining the nodes. In this sense, this is also a reasonable action for TON Labs.
3. About independent capital, we had a discussion with Fedor Skuratov, regarding the fact that he planned to form a certain fund that would support small projects based on a different principle, not through contests, but through direct, small grants. He thought to raise private capital for this. There was an idea not to use the "body" itself, but to use only staking income for such payments. It turned out that you need to collect a lot and somehow the topic disappeared. In general, the very idea of ​​some kind of venture funding within the ecosystem will probably come up at some point.

I will say this, I am sure that we will be able to form new business models. Like some useful functionality that works in the network. For example, registering the transfer of ownership of some objects, for example bicycles, we even have such a project and it was approved. It is clear that this is a service. Users can pay for the service, this income can be received by the development team. And the development team, given that it provides versions of smart contracts to the network, is organized as a DAO, and a very natural business model is obtained on the network: a certain DAO with the owners of the tokens of this DAO signs a service smart contract that is used by the community for real purposes. for real tasks, it is paid for, the DAO receives income. All DAO members can earn income. Here's a fully networked business model. This business model, you need to see how it will work, what volume, use, etc. But this is still just a model. I think that further the creative community will give an opportunity to come up with many similar stories. When you have the use of the company itself on the network, which develops this use case, then naturally you may have the next level - financing of these companies. Funding as Credit - DeFi backed by the equity tokens of this business. Similarly, venture funding can also be here. Any model can be made, so it's still ahead. We are at the beginning of a ten-year cycle in such projects and such areas.

ivan kotelnikov: I got you. Filatov recently left a question on the forum "let's discuss what successes we achieved, what conclusions on partnerships in 2020 can be drawn". Can you comment on successes and failures in terms of partnerships? Especially among those partnerships that you personally accompanied, because then there will be more insight information. And if so, please mention the name of these partners. And can you draw any conclusions from the outside?

Pavel Prigolovko: Great question! It is still too early to talk about successful partnerships, as many partnerships are still in the development stage of integration. We do not yet have complete statistics on what effect was obtained. Therefore, it is clear that now the community has some kind of emotional judgment for a number of partnerships. And let me remind you that some partnerships are in force for a month or even less. And we still hope that these partnerships will work for the long term. Therefore, as the saying goes, "chickens are counted in the fall." Let's see for a while how things will go. Naturally, we, partly me,and other people who brought the partners, are all in contact. There is not a single affiliate network where people would refuse to interact and naturally, we expect more results.

In general, this is a topic that causes a lot of debate, and I want to remind you that we have repeatedly said that we are following the path of trial and error - this is the first thesis. The second thesis is that everyone very quickly forgets that three months ago there was nothing at all. Some contests, some validators, but basically the project was nowhere. Now, there is a dynamically developing base of users, ideas, a fairly active appearance of accounts on the network, it can be seen. Surf installations, as a proxy for network activity, have grown quite dramatically. Accordingly, the ecosystem is developing. In many ways, part of what was approved by the members in the beginning was just a "need to jump start" approach. It took place.

Now we need to focus on getting the maximum value, that is, to fully ensure that something is working or not working. After some time, it will be possible to say: this kind of partnership is good for us, or this kind of partnership did not help us very much. In a few months, such conclusions can be drawn.

The general consensus is that it is necessary to reduce any upfront payments, to focus more on KPI results. At the same time, my personal opinion is that at some point in time we will generally only focus on supporting direct on-chain projects. Because this is the only fundamental difference between Free TON and others.

We are currently the most powerful smart contract platform for decentralized logic to work. Naturally, it is necessary to promote the development of such use cases that cannot be implemented on other platforms, since then the advantage of Free TON will be most obvious on such use cases. But again, due to the fact that the release of DeBots was delayed, and so was the open source release of Rust nodes did us no good. The Rust node has certain peculiarities - it can parallelize computations (use all processor cores), since it is written according to different principles. Accordingly, the preparation of blocks will be much faster, and in this sense, the capabilities of the Rust node provide another leap for scaling performance. We will demonstrate this a bit later. This combination is: a productive platform, convenient middleware, a user-friendly interface. On this aggregate, we will need to obtain and maintain such use cases that use this stack.

Partnerships were quite chaotic and were chosen in order to just start. And from this year on, we need to be much more attentive to this choice, and again, at some point in time, I believe that support can only be given to a project completely on the network.

Read the second part of the interview →

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