One of the most important presentations from Hivefest Rosarito from the technical standpoint must be the one @vaultec made for the @vsc-network.
Unfortunately for us not onsite the live transmission dropped several times during his presentation. From what I heard afterwards, this was due to an unstable internet connection. Hey Elon, do you read this? :) Yes, it was a Starlink connection from what I heard... And no, there were no clouds, some people present during the first day of the conference before it was moved inside got sun burns...
Now that everyone settled down after the Hivefest and is back home, we started to have more rough materials from Hivefest processed and published. Among them, each presentation held is cut from the full YT recordings and started to be published on 3Speak.
Today it was time for vaultec's presentation to be processed and uploaded to 3Speak. I watched it again and realized I lost quite a bit from his presentation when it was live. I mean from the parts that were recorded because it seems that the live feed must've crashed like 4 or 5 times during his presentation seeing the edits. Talking about bad luck and bad timing...
From my understanding by watching the presentation again, it seems VSC can be thought of as "off-chain", using IPFS for storing data, and Hive as an anchor (still not sure what exactly this role represents). This architecture would allow non-Hive accounts to connect to VSC (vaultec gave the example of Ethereum wallets).
At the same time, the part I lost entirely during the live presentation, he described how the HIVE-Bitcoin bridge would work via VSC. Although a demo wasn't ready in time for Hivefest (he said it should be a few weeks away, so it should be about time, but we'll see...), I understood a few more things about this.
This works by wrapping and unwrapping bitcoin, terms we might be familiar with from other blockchains and wrapped tokens. Wrapping bitcoin on VSC will work through collateralized trustless bridges, which means a bitcoin wrapping bridge service would verify and mint wrapped bitcoin on deposit and will destroy (I assume, it wasn't specified) the wrapped bitcoin on redeeming. If the service doesn't provide native bitcoin during the redeem process, its collateral gets slashed to cover for the amount being redeemed.
From my understanding, the entire process would work using v4v (the lightning network) in the middle, because otherwise it takes too long, if I translated what vaultec said right, although I admit parts of the presentation are still above me.
Another thing that will be interesting via VSC will be the introduction of smart contract - controlled Hive accounts, which expands the possibilities of using Hive accounts by applications immensely. That will permit even an account ownership market.
Some of the things presented for VSC may seem years away when we think about the current capabilities we are used to on Hive, but VSC is coming. And vaultec said... soon.
I am convinced a platform like VSC, if everything goes well, has the capacity to send Hive to another level because one of the things lacking on Hive is smart contracts.
Want to check out my collection of posts? (work in progress!)
It's a good way to pick what interests you.