The JAM experience. What’s it really like?

Dr Gavin Wood has stood on stages in every continent of the world many, many times over the course of his decorated journey in Web3.

But it's probably fair to say he has never been more passionate about an individual project than he is about JAM, the next iteration of Polkadot in which the network's underlying tech will be redesigned as a semi-coherent multicore computer.

And this is perhaps most apparent once he has finished his excellent presentation in Emmanuel College's Queen's Lecture Hall. The question-and-answer session is particularly revealing because of the long and detailed answers that are provided.

The first, from Xcavate's Richard Houldsworth, is a short one: "How easy is it to spin up a service?" The answer is largely provided through the medium of code as opposed to a verbal response with Gav flipping to a new tab on his laptop to run a demonstration.

He has (of course) a screen ready with some previously compiled code - part of his own prototype version of JAM. Having mentioned the "refine - accumulate - on_transfer" process multiple times in his talk, here we get a flavor of how it looks to a coder.

This demonstration is reminiscent of previous live coding displays by Gav, perhaps the best known of which was the time he ran a Substrate chain live on stage from a fresh-out-of-the-box MacBook at the 2018 Web3 Summit.

JAM = AWS for Web3? 

The second question takes us up into the clouds, so to speak. The Web3 cloud that is. "How does the Polkadot Virtual Machine [PVM, the machine of choice for JAM] compare to things like Amazon Web Service?" That's the question, and the answer takes up around five minutes of careful consideration and detail.

Gav says: "JAM could be potentially compared to Amazon cloud services. The comparison is a bit questionable because we're talking about Web2 to Web3. You wouldn't run the whole Bitcoin network and a Bitcoin authority and trust it on Amazon - you wouldn't trust it not to do something in its favor. The whole point is resilience against special interests."

One of the slides from Dr Gavin Wood's JAM lecture

Then he explores a different path: "There is a way of scaling JAM out, through what I would term a JAM grid - many instances each connected to another instance. You can select any JAM instance, run your services there, and it allows your service to elastically scale through many instances of JAM. It kinds of scales indefinitely. You do need bridging, but we have good designs for lightweight bridges.

More questions, more detailed answers. Applause. A short walk to a reception with drinks and canapes, and some one-to-one-opportunities with Gav, or some good old networking. And finally, for the non-locals, a train back to London. A big shout-out to Pala Labs, a relatively new ecosystem team, for its excellent organiZation of the Cambridge event, and some great updates on the current India leg of the tour.

A student-dominated audience

There is, within the Polkadot community, some strong feeling that enterprises should be more directly targeted at this point in time. And it is true that the many students in the Emmanuel College audience are not ready to launch their start-ups right now. But within there are a few early-stage founders too in the room, and the CEO of a crypto investment/risk intelligent company, who takes copious notes during the talk.

Inevitably, there are one or two familiar faces from the London Polkadot crowd. Houldsworth, a tireless advocate for the community, is one of them. So too is Dr Lisa Cameron, a former MP from the Scottish National Party ousted in the last elections but busier than ever as she tries to build bridges between Web3 and politics.

Houldsworth and Cameron are among the preliminary speakers. You can call them warm-up acts if you like, and there is a sort of concert vibe going on given that there is a very clearly defined "main act" to follow. The whistle-stop nature of the tour as it now expands across Asia adds to the flavor.

Some of the Cambridge attendees posing with the Polkadot founder. Photo: Pala Labs

The third pre-Gav speaker is an impressive young man called Kisso Selvan, president of the Cambridge Blockchain Association, who only graduated last year but has already secured a fun-sounding job in the BD team of a Web3 start-up. Kisso's involvement in the association includes the very first Polkadot Blockchain Academy course back in the hot summer of 2022 - which already seems a lifetime ago.

Gav's speech is not purely JAM-focused. His opening remarks are centered on the purpose and ethos of Web3, and a criticism that many projects claiming to be Web3 are simply not decentralized enough by design. There's a consideration too of what might be meant by the Web3 cloud and how Polkadot - via JAM - can seize that territory.

JAM's focus on coherence

Plenty of concepts are relatively easy to understand for a non-developer. The notion of coherence is tabled. "As systems grow, it's harder to maintain coherence," says Gav. "If a system wants overall interactions to keep going fast we have to relax coherence, and that's where we get problems. This is what JAM aims to fix."

And the slides that are borrowed from Shawn Tabrizi's latest talk are very easy to digest. (Tabrizi, one of Parity's most important developers, is often put up as an alternative choice when Gav has to turn down the many speaking invitations he receives.)

A former Parity colleague now involved in a Cardano project tells me afterwards that, in his opinion, even engineers might have struggled with some of the content in the final segments. That said, there's no way that you could leave one of these lectures without being significantly enlightened, and perhaps that's really the whole point, isn't it?

The JAM Tour - East & South Asia Edition has visited Cambridge, New Delhi and Mumbai. It continues in Mumbai, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen. Full details here, and you can follow Pala Labs on X for more updates from the JAM Tour.