We’re thrilled to be joined today by Paradigm CTO, Georgios Konstantopoulos and founder of Conduit, Andrew Huang who are on the show today to deliver a masterclass on the state of Ethereum Layer 2s, how they’re going, and where they’re headed.
There’s nobody better to take us through this technical and very educational episode on the state of L2s.
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TIMESTAMPS
00:00:00 Intro
00:05:59 L2 Vibes, How Are We Doing?
00:08:43 L2 Obstacles
00:11:47 Building Conduit
00:14:19 Strengths of L2
00:17:30 Few Rollups or Many Rollups?
00:21:29 Market Demands
00:24:47 The Evolution Of Superchains
00:30:47 Shared Sequencing
00:34:02 Universal Composability
00:35:57 Evolution and Benefits
00:38:35 Unionized vs Independant L2s
00:45:42 Benefits Of Staying in The Ecosystem
00:50:05 The Modular Conversation
00:52:02 Cheaper DA
00:56:13 RAAS Business Model
01:01:26 Scaling Out The Business Model
01:04:23 L2 Security
01:11:27 Modification
01:16:15 Dealing with Growth
01:17:56 What Comes Next
01:20:01 RETH
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RESOURCES
Andrew Huang
Tweets by KAndrewHuang
Georgios Konstantopoulos
Tweets by gakonst
——
Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures
In general my prediction would be that 2024 is the year where performance you know we end the year basically and performance stops being a differentiator everybody will have figured out high performance finally now that we’ve learned how to modify nodes everybody will like figure out in some way you
Know not everybody will be in production few will be in production the best teams only but over the years what’s happening is that the best technology that was considered a mode is finally starting to be for lack of better work democratized and accessed by everyone welcome to bankless where we
Explore the frontier of ethereum’s layer 2 rollups today on the show we have Georgios constantinopoulos the CTO and researcher over at Paradigm and Andrew hang CEO of conduit both of these extremely smart gentlemen have unique Vantage points over the future of ethereum’s Roll-Ups that needs to be
Shared with the world here is what you’re going to hear on this episode today what is the state of ethereum’s Roll-Ups in 2024 what’s going right and what is still left to do how will rollups recompose with each other What mechanisms are there to help with rollup composability and do rollups even need
To compose with each other at all or is that narrative just totally overblown what about rollup security multi client fraud proofs and multi ZK provs why Georgio thinks we get them this year and why Andrew thinks we’re entering a golden age of layer 2 deployments and why Georgio thinks we’re entering a
Golden age of layer 2 experimentation I learned so much in this episode as soon as I’m done recording this intro I’m going to go back and listen to it before we get into this episode though we disclose Ryan and I hold investments in some of the layer tws mentioned today we
Also hold eth you can see all Bank list disclosures at bank list.com disclosures now let’s go ahead and get right into the episode with Georgios and Andrew but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible especially Kraken our preferred crypto exchange for entering
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To Georgio constantinopoulos the CTO of Paradigm Georgios is an enjoyer of rust and has helped build re eth and op wreath a rust based execution engine for ethereum and the op stack he’s been on Bank list before talking about me when we first discovered his implications all
The way back in 2021 Georgio welcome back to bankless hi David and thank you for having us Andrew hang is the CEO and founder of conduit which is a rollup as a service provider many of the layer twos which you have likely used were spun up and supported by Conduit
Including Zora Avo public goods Network and many others rasses as they’re called as infrastructure supporting rollups both present and future have a unique vantage point for seeing the evolution of layer twos which is why we’re bringing Andrew on the show here today Andrew welcome to thanks thanks for having me excited to
Chat today I think the whole entire ethereum ecosystem the crypto ecosystem would really just like an audit of the state of layer twos the state of rollups there’s many many Roll-Ups going in many different directions with different design strategies different holes uh and there’s still a lot of like unknowns for
What the future holds I think for the scaling of ethereum while rollups did give us a lot of clarity for how ethereum will scale it has also given us a lot of questions mainly in the world of fragmentation and and security so George maybe we could just start with
That can you just kind of give us the vibe of the audit of layer twos how are we doing what’s going right what do we still need to work on just overall give us your sentiment check uh yes of course so starting from the basics a it exists and it’s real
Which I think is on its own a remarkable achievement after many years of hard research and hard work and uh I have pulled up here uh L2 beat which is a great website that many people reference these days and you can notice that the current tvl in layer 2’s amounts to
Almost 20 Bill a number that has over 10x almost this year um uh the risk is in a lot better spot we’re suddenly starting to have rollups deploy more fault proofs in 2024 we’re seeing the security council’s going live we’re gradually moving towards the so-called stage two decentral I ization in rollups
Um if you keep looking at l2b you will notice that there is over 20 or 30 maybe rollups live of various types optimistic Zay some are not even rollups granted some might have the layer two or the offchain data availability but overall things are growing technology that is advancing things are being deployed
Which I personally find uh really exciting that is on the core Tech side now there’s a whole ecosystem them being developed around rollup Services there’s companies like espresso that are building shared sequencers for people that want to Outsource their sequencing needs there’s companies like conduit which we’ll talk about in a second that
Are building the infra for people to deploy more and more rollups there’s other companies building alternative data availability layers and you know there’s the evolving rollup stack and the layer two stack that we envisioned many years ago that is finally starting to play out in production now are we done no we’re not
Not we still have a lot more to do the ecosystem still depends on permissioned uh fault proofs it still depends on permissioned sequencers on in general the stacks are nent we still have a lot to do but that is for the coming years but overall super excited and I think
Today is a great day to be having this episode because we’re almost at a pivotal point in the scaling story for ethereum and its ecosystem what are the big problems that you identify Georgio say think that we still need to work on in the layer 2 space obviously security uh is one that
You mentioned and brought up and will be an ongoing thing that we will need to work on for a while there’s been a recent focus on while layer twos are scaling they are also fragmenting uh which is one of the big problems what would you say are the big obstacles the
Big research obstacles or maybe engineering obstacles that the ethereum layer 2 space needs to focus on more of course um I think we’re actually way past the research phase um this year has shown that we’re entering this deep productionize where all the research is mostly done and right now we’re just seeing
Productionist deployments of things that we’ve known for a while um so right now the things that I think are very important are as you said security so right now um you can check the state of the security of the ecosystem just by counting the multisig uh that that
Govern all the rollups as long as we have all of these multisig it’s going to be hard uh for us to consider the ecosystem like really mature and secure now what are we doing for that uh we’re moving towards multiple fault prooof implementations for each rollup we’re
Moving towards delays uh on any kind of power that any Security Council must have we’re limiting the power of every Security Council to let’s say only when there’s a layer one hard Fork um we have a lot of work to do on decentralization right now most if not
All rollups are sequenced by one sequencer usually the one by the labs entity that or the foundation entity that the company runs um the project that builds them um which is okay given that there is the layer one fallback option however it also means that the
System can go down as we saw many times this year with various projects so overall we also have work to do there so one security two decentralization now three there is one not as spoken about topic that is the tooling which is all that we think about at pame and for
Tooling the problem is going to start manifesting when people switch to different op codes when people switch different pre compiles there’s a lot a lot of areas where things can start to change and right now people are not um ready for the tooling is not ready to
Support this evolution in the layer 2 ecosystem for example if somebody builds a new OP code for their Layer Two because they want to experiment now they need to go into the solid compiler and edit the compiler and figure out a way to expose that the user and people just
Don’t have the expertise to do that and somebody some mistakes will happen if we don’t prepare for that so we really really really need to make the tool Ling like ready and robust and modular and extensible so that it’s ready for this Cambrian explosion of layer to
Innovation over 2024 as the buer to entry Goes Down And as the stacks mature and that’s part of like the tooling that we’re also trying to build uh with our teams uh in an effort to make them extensible and ready for Layer Two Andrew I want to turn to you and get
Kind of a similar perspective from you and what you see over at conduit but before we dive into the same more more or less the same set of questions uh with your perspective maybe you could also illuminate what your perspective is what does the perspective at conduit
Give you you are a rollup of as a service provider you talk to a lot of layer 2 teams uh doing different things similar things and so maybe first uh illuminate for us the vantage point that you have in as your role at conduit and
Then we’ll kind of go into a same set of questions that I just asked GEOS yeah definitely so um as you said we work closely with a lot of the later two teams we work with folks that want to launch chains um we work with Integrations that need to integrate on
Those chains and so I think it’s a very kind of like pivotal point in the ecosystem that affords us the opportunity to really like see a lot of different things um and importantly see what’s kind of on the bleeding edge here and and how we can help enable that um I
Think the tldr here for us is like um if a year ago I think nobody was really thinking about many different rollups and um I think uh it was viewed as much riskier I think today it’s in some ways kind of like becoming the default um and
We’re very excited to kind of help with that transition um and I think for a variety of reasons both economic as well as um frankly just at a technical level enabling kind of new applications to be built um we’re really seeing kind of the rise of the modular blockchain and I
Think um in some ways it’s kind of the cosmos thesis but playing out on ethereum um where people do want Sovereign chains but you kind of have those interoperability standards that um allow folks to kind of transact across chains and across rups in a way that
Kind of make sense um and so very excited to kind of be at the center of that and and um kind of playing playing a role in um you know all the complexity georgeos was kind of mentioning around fault Cru and removing multisig and upgrades and
Um it’s just one difficult for the labs found or foundations or whoever is running them to do themselves like it takes a lot of time and not to mention if a random kind of Dev team wants their own kind of rollup um you know in some
Ways be imposs and you see folks kind of mess it up all the time and their Bridge gets hacked or something happens and I think one of the benefits of like a Ras provider like conduit is you you get all that same Great Tech and all those migrations and like upgrades kind of
Seamlessly and kind of like AWS instead of focusing on building the best data center and like all of this kind of undifferentiated heavy lifting um you get to focus on kind of the important thing which is like building a great application for your users and so we’re very excited to help facilitate that
Transition and so what are the strengths of the layer 2 ecosystem right now what’s going well for teams as a whole that that you will work with and also what are some of the pain points what are the hurdles what are the difficulties that that teams are
Experiencing yeah so I think the um so one I think the first question when it comes to around rollup is like how do you actually stand this up in production in a kind of secure reliable performant way um and I think a lot of rollup Frameworks make it easy to spin up a
Test net U even like a local version but there’s like a huge gap between that and like something that is ready to custody and kind of hold user funds um and that’s really where conduit comes into play again making that seamless so you get that at the click of a button all of
The work we’ve put into reliability security performance um Etc um you just get for free and it again it makes sense for us to invest in because we run like hundreds of these across meet and testnet um and so like those kind of small percentage points that might not
Matter for you um really matter for us and that means you’re getting the the best offering I think typically after that the next thing we see is is frankly just like um for lack of a better word pmf I think like I think like early on
In the narrative it was you know we just launch a chain and it’s going to work and it’s a new thing and therefore we’ll have users I think very quickly it’s become clear that um you know Ro will need to differentiate in what they offer um and I find that exciting because I
Think we’ll start to see um instead of like clones of your favorite defi app or like you know the the 10th or 11th clone of like Unis swap we’ll actually get something new and differentiated and I think like one example that I’ve been you know kind of was a dark hor for me
But like it’s been really exciting to see play out is something like zorao Network where you know they’re very focused on kind of the collecting side of things and that network has grown in a really interesting way where suddenly they have all this data around like mins
And art that um you know only exists on the Zoro Network and I think they’ll be able to create really compelling applications and new behaviors on top of that so you’re saying that you think that there will be a trend away from the highly General layer tws and layer twos
As a as an ecosystem as a category are all going to shift the Overton window towards more specialist specialized Niche layer twos that are optimized for more narrow use cases is that is that what you you think is going to happen I’d say we see a bit of both I
Think It ultimately depends on the brand I think something like base for example right huge brand a lot of access to you know retail users that just makes sense as like kind of a generic chain that has everything um but I think for kind of your average Dev team that uh you know
Like a startup right they need to build something new and differentiated um and aren’t going to have the same distribution or or brand benefits that some of these larger organizations have and I think the only way to differentiate yourself is really on the go to market and what kind of uniquely
Is happening on your chain in terms of the state space um and that’s kind of my recommendation to teams is you know actually building something novel versus um just trying to be kind of your 100th DJ uh defi CH so I want to ask the very
Big question that I think a lot of people are asking in the layer 2 space which is few rollups or many Roll-Ups and there are Arguments for both sides here the the few Roll-Ups arguments are the fewer Roll-Ups you have the more net composability there there are so you
Know there’s fewer different uh chains to be fragmented around so like you know the more liquidity aggregation fewer you know fewer networks and the drop down on metamask and so uh more composability is just good ux and also rollups individually have costs and so if we aggregate everything together you can
Consolidate the cost in order to save money and so these are some of the arguments for why there will be a few rollups but then there’s also arguments on the other side which are that technology costs always get cheaper and that’s something that conduit is doing
It’s making it cheaper for layer twos to exist and that will only Inc uh uh improve over time there’s also a rollups desire for sovereignty that we know that this is a powerful force games for example will probably want their own chains so what do you guys think which
Is it is it few rollups is it many Roll-Ups Georgio I’ll start with you and Andrew you’ll you’ll follow along yeah of course so there’s two axes on the demand side one is cost and the other is customizability or being free you called it sovereignty earlier being able to do
Whatever you want on cost how to think about it from or how I would think about about it is that rollups is a an elastic scaling solution you add more compute the more load arrives so if we end up having so much compute demand then probably there will be many rollups
Because it is unlikely to expect like we saw from all the past L1 lessons that one chain will be able to accommodate the world’s compute or that’s where I come from at least are there some I disagree and that’s perfectly fine um now on the side of customizability of
Course that comes off at odds sometimes with the perfect horizontal scaling thesis which means that you know sometimes when the demand might be enough for five chains maybe there’s 10 chains because people want some extra customization that you cannot get in the other place for example a Big Brand like
Coinbase or I don’t know say Starbucks or someone um for some reason maybe they would want to be on on a separate area why maybe there’s like a lot of customizations that they want to make or maybe they want to own the brand or they want to do specialized air drops and
Whatnot hard to tell um so I think it is hard to bet on few as in you know one or five or 10 um so and I would probably expect a power load distribution to nobody’s surprise on where the demand gets uh kind of like concentrated let’s
Say in the top whatever but they expect a very very long tail of chains with also varying duration because imagine a game could be played over a day on a you know people have called these flash chains one day rollup popup rollups whatever you want to call them um you
Know maybe you play a game for a day um an onchain game that game maybe has like stupidly High State growth or whatever so it would never make sense to actually put it on a real Network and then you just checkpoint the result into a layer
Two or a layer one or something else so the whole co-processor thesis that many people have been putting out uh it might also apply in the rollups and that would enable thousands and thousands and thousands of rollups but also with a very small duration power low a lot of
Activity but the duration of each chain might change demand for customizability also might affect that the reason why I like having both georgeos and Andrew here is we have georgeos the researcher and Andrew the market founder uh and so one of the perspectives I enjoy here is that
Conduit is tapped into what the demands of the market are what can you tell us Andrew about the few rollups versus many rollups conversation and in terms of what the market wants with your clients and needs uh over at conduit for sure well I guess one point zooming zooming
Out and kind of tying it back to what georgo said earlier I think like if you believe there’s only going to be a limited amount of demand for crypto compute then I guess like the kind of few rollup um kind of world makes sense if you’re really bullish on crypto and
You know new applications taking off more and more demand I think like by necessity you’re just going to need many many of these different kind of crypto comput environments so just as an argument for like industry growth as a whole I think it’s almost somewhat bearish to believe that there’s only
Going to be a couple of rollups um to serve all that demand um and so you know here at conduit we’re we’re bit uh we’re very bullish on crypto and kind of believe in this bul Centric world with kind of thousands or hundreds of thousands of these rollups um and so
Just kind of from from that argument alone I think we’re we’re very excited about it in terms of like what we’re seeing from a market level I think ultimately uh one customization is a good point but I think even more than that I think there are large economic
Reasons to launch your own rollup and you know I think the biggest factor that we see today um is that when you launch and deploy an another chain you’re essentially paying rent to that chain um and by deploying your own chain you get to like internalize those fees um and
Not to mention you have more control over your your own ecosystem it’s narratively kind of a great thing to do um you get to customize you get to maybe build your own ecosystem on top of that right so you have your own L2 with many different l3s on top other types of
Applications and so I think just from a pure economic argument and kind of like a pure sovereignty argument there’s just this incredible kind of demand to launch your own blog space in the same way that if you look at web 2 today right it’s not one big Global computer or like a
Couple big Global databases like every company has like their own application um and like if you look at Facebook right like they have a ton of app and whatever they built on top it’s this like gigantic system like that could be one big rollup or it might be like
Multiple rollups um but then you have this long tale of other companies that also have their own you rollups um and I think like if I’m thinking through like what the future kind of holds for crypto it’s um that model seems a little more clear to me where I think like it’s
Unclear that every application needs maximum composability at all times and therefore needs to pay all this rent and like all these other things to a single chain um it seems clear to me that kind of like asynchronous message passing or like if you look at you know apis today
Right it’s like kind of this asynchronous kind of web hook kind of thing or like you just have an Integrations API that happens less frequently than kind of normal um but then you collocate the logic that’s really kind of important um and you know I think the scaling argument this kind
Of like demand for customization this um demand for like economics um is really driving what we’re seeing in terms of this cber an explosion of chance yeah the if we’re going to see thousand and thousands and millions of chains we need infrastructure that we can like copy and paste right we need
Highly replicatable uh infrastructure in order to make that happen uh and this is where a lot of the uh battles are being fought in the layer two space from all like the super chain standards the the optimism super chains arbitrum orbits polygon supernets zkc and Hyper chains
Uh the way I think about these things is that they’re all economic zones because the block space is very alike inside of a network right and so like the op stack main net is very alike to the Base main net right and so these have a relationship with each other that’s more
Close than for example like base is to arbitrum and so these this is how I think about these things economic zones uh and they can engage in trade with other economic zones right like arbitrum can trade with optimism via a bridge like across but trade is going to be
Easier inside of the optimism super chain trade will be easier inside of an arbm orbit and it’ll be a little bit more costly to go between the things this is my perspective for how I understand it Georgio how do you think about the whole evolution of super
Chains yes uh maybe to give you a bit of a cynical take to start um anything that we say in this conversation will probably be more speculative and more an expectation of what is to happen given that there’s none of these systems live yet in production um there exists one
System called Astria that was deployed a few weeks ago but it’s still in testet and it even had some issues isues at the deployment um when they deploy their shared sequencer so it might be worth zooming out and thinking what problem are we trying to solve um as a first
Place um and the problem you mentioned earlier David it’s how do we make these different cities talk to each other in a cheap way without introducing too much additional layer of trust uh when is this useful um one would think first and foremost on defi
You know or on transfers I am on chain a you’re on chain B and we want to talk to each other without having to think even um about uh where am I sending money to right um and as you said earlier we don’t want to be in a world where I go
To metamask and I pick from a drop down of 55 or 100 or whatever rpcs that’s terrible user experience and honestly we would have failed miserably if uh we’re in that world so the super chains or the shared sequencers or whatever you want to call them they come in as a set of
Solutions that try to address that by allowing you to interact with one uh endpoint as a user one place um and the sequencer smartly will route to the right area whatever transaction needs to happen um and all of these super chains roughly have that same vision that they
Want to abstract away the communication inside of their own ecosystems now there’s solutions that achieve that for heterogeneous systems like espresso um and they introduce they require modifications to each of these Stacks to make them compatible with each other for example to make the arbitr orbit stack shared sequenceable with the optimism
Super chain stack um espresso needs to modify with the same modifications both systems to make them compatible and to what extent that will be feasible or not uh is TBD and is an exciting area overall one one uh point that is worth uh unpacking though is that none to our
To the best of our knowledge none of the systems offer um let’s say the Holy Grail of synchronous calls across all of these systems um there’s no world where you know you can say a calls B which calls back to a and and does a lot of
Like things together um unless you’re in the design where you you’re basically one chain um and that is where the the optimism super chain design is going toward um for the most part what you get from all of these shared sequencing designs you get Atomic top of block um
In inclusion which is useful for me um which we had talked about uh two years ago David so the idea there is that the shared sequencer is able to guarantee that five transactions will always be at the top of the block and these five transactions that will be on top of
Block a and top of Block B will be extracting some kind of Arbitrage uh opportunity that existed and that makes money and that’s a valuable service to be offering and that could be a valuable like infrastructure protocol to be running however to go Fair beyond that you know in terms of conditional
Execution let’s say I send a transaction on a and that means that the transaction also delivers on B and stuff like that I don’t think we have any design yet that is soundly implementing that um and finally a general area that part is still in the research
Phase I would think that it’s um the the way that people are trying to do it without doing further modifications to their systems I think is not there yet um the most promising design that I have seen is one in a blog post by James preswitch uh which describes a certain
Way where each blog commits on every other blog in the super chain again research phase um so I take back what I said earlier that we’re done with the research phase there’s that uh there’s that component that is not figured out but it’s also worth understanding that
It might not be worth figuring out fully you know maybe the Holy Grail um solution of feature set nobody needs and maybe you can get away with something you can ship like in a year or in six months um that solves the real problem which is not actually the composability
But the decentralization the problem is that every one of these systems is run by one person uh whereas ideally there’s not that much of a problem as you said earlier we have a cross we have you know 10 Bridge protocols to do all the transfers people will figure let the
Market figure that out but the part about the decentralization is more critical especially as you know more and more infrastructure gets launched and we put our kind of like Trust on few intermediaries George could you go into shared sequencing a little bit more uh just what composability benefits does
Shared sequencing give chains and and does that conversation change if we are talking about uh all these chains inside of a single like um setup like a all the op stack chains that are going to be a part of the super chain these can Shar sequence with each other in some degrees
And produce some composability benefits and then there’s also the potential like you said of optimism and arbitrum shared sequencing and also getting those kind of composability benefits overall what does shared sequencing get us right so it it solves you composability and some to some degree decentralization composability though it
Solves to a small degree as described today and TBD whether it can solve it to a larger degree and uh surely shared sequencing in the same ecosystem in the same flavor is going to be cheaper easier more compatible whereas trying to make two different ecosystems talk to
Each other will be harder and might not even be you know desired to some extent yeah cuz that’s always what I’ve uh thought is going to be difficult because sequencing is the Golden Goose for layer 2os like that is where they get a lot of their fees so why would arbitr and
Optimism want to give up their sequencing fees to Espresso in the name of um a decent but marginal amount of uh uh um composability benefits right I think jury is still out there and I think depending on who you ask you will get a different uh response
Um from my point of view um the optimism ecosystem for example wants to build a mod around a different set of let’s say infrastructure components or values for example the governance and the entire process around the law of chains whereas the it’s kind of almost acknowledging that a the biggest part of
The technology is open source is to be given away it is not really a mode uh or if it is a mode it’s a very weak one that’s going to go away over time um where where the real mode is elsewhere so that would be one take uh and also
Remember that to opt into the Super chain ecosystem and Andrew will tell you that very well um you pay a rent uh back to the back to the super chain the optimism Collective and uh that is where uh it comes in effectively optimism is offering a service that is the shared
Upgrades the shared governance and the shared sequencing which is going to be in part um mandated by optimism smart contracts and it’s happy to take a cut for it and all the rest let the ecosystem figure out because it’s hard to pick a solution yourself maybe you
Don’t even want to build it yourself and Andrew can cover more on how this looks like from the you know business perspective of how do rollups actually you know because we’ve done this with multiple customers so far yeah yeah I would definitely want to get there because I think that that conversation
Of uh chain uh synchrony chain composability and chain governance I think is one of the most interesting ones and I know that Andrew conduit you’re like right at the heart of that thing the heart of that conversation but George one last conversation before we I asked that that question to Andrew is
Universal composability a dream like every single layer two across ethereum different constructions different setups even if it’s like 10 years in the future is that a pipe dream or how far can we get there h i I think it is hard to beat against the Mad ethereum scientists just
To say it as a as a prerequisite so um you know David it’s hard to bet on a 10year Time Horizon my view is that we don’t have any fundamental let’s say problems to be solved but there’s also a degree of like a prioritization and I think that we also
Need to think about the demand side when the demand side requires that we solve Universal composability trust me we will find a way to solve it but I think sometimes do we should acknowledge that in the ethereum ecosystem we don’t always take the most let’s say boots on
The ground demand side then we always think oh what’s the most perfect protocol I can design for the next 10 years so I think uh trying to answer that question we could entertain it but I think it’s more worth focusing on the important topics on the ground exactly
Exactly because we’re in this very pivotal phase in crypto and we really need to stay focused stay close to the customer and on the user experience we solve fees then we solve wallets we solve wallets we solve products and then you know after the races and yeah the Horizon always always uh continues
Andrew I want to talk about the the spawning of these super chains and orbits and Hyper chains and sub super Nets because in my from my perspective conduit is the place where these things Spawn from since conduit is the place where it’s the cheapest to make more
Chains so I always kind of see the super chain spawning out of conduit and there are competitors in which the super chain also can spawn from but a lot of uh op stack chains come out of conduit so what is your perspective on the evolution of
These systems what uh do a like layer twos what benefits do they have uh what benefits do they have of being both optimized and built by Conduit like call it a neighbor chains right um just overall what’s your perspective on the the growth of these ecosystems yeah I
Think the growth is really exciting I think like um you know I think narratively there’s kind of and kind of optimism probably uh fared the first shot here around like the super chain um and like kind of homogenous block space kind of tighter interoperability um and I think other
Ecosystems kind of quickly followed in in kind of their their ways and credit to them I think the uh maybe like zooming out I guess the question would be like how much does that interoperability actually matter to users and like based off of the current applications that we’re seeing um it’s
Not clear to me that there’s a huge benefit outside of the current bridging protocols that already exist um and so just to Rattle off a couple customers somebody like Avo right it’s kind of this decentralized exchange and like you know not a lot of interoperability opportunities outside of bridging from
Other rollups you can take a look at public goods Network right um and kind of running some gitcoin grants rounds but again not a ton of opportunity for a drop Beyond bridging to the chain zor Network again you can make the same case and I think that will just frankly um be
Kind of how these new rollups actually launch is they need to do something differentiated and new and by definition that isn’t going to need that level of interoperation that you know we desperately think everybody needs and I think in some sense there is this um I’m
Not going to call it Vil but I think like we’re so early in terms of how one like crypto Compu has developed to how applications have developed that it’s so hard to make the case that this is the end state of Maximum Global composability and that’s the most
Important thing and maybe drawing an illusion to like web 2 you know back before we had like Network computers you know Unix pipes were probably like Unix pipes are like kind of the equivalent of composability and like people use them all the time and then uh now you just
Use it for like a bash script on your like local computer right and then like everything happens in the cloud everything happens over the network um and so it’s just kind of this new dominant model that became possible because the compute landscape really changed and the capabilities of that
Allowed for new things and so I think there’s somewhat of this facial overhang of Maximum composability that um even if you look at the numbers today um aren’t necessarily like the largest use cases particularly in like emerging rollups interesting uh George previously gave us an axis uh about a rollup uh
Designs and constructions there was like the customizability and then the cost uh I want to present another Spectrum uh Andrew uh along like this whole like super chain conversation and there is on one side of the spectrum every single chain is a part of a super chain whether
It’s the optimism super chain or an arbitrum orbit or it’s a poly on supernet or every single chain is it’s a complete independent chain and it’s not part of these collectives the reason why I always kind of thought this super chain conversation is cool is because these are digital collectives of block
Space uh and there’s like the optimism Collective which manages the super chain and where we end up on this spectrum where every single chain is its own independent ecosystem versus every single chain has determined that it’s beneficial to be a part of a collective only the future can can really tell us
Uh the bull case for optimism the optimism Collective is that the value of being a part of the collective the uh value of being part of those shared upgrades in that homogeneous block space is worth it so that they the fees that the collective charges like the union
Fees call it uh is worth it that that’s it’s a worth worthwhile trade-off or maybe it’s not and people are more inclined to stay an independent layer 2 inside of their own ecosystem and sacrifice some of those Co composability benefits do you have a perspective as to
Where we end up on this slide sliding scale of uh unionized layer tws or independent layer twos yeah I mean like maybe like a reframing of super chain is kind of taking out the interoperability aspect is like how much is it worth it to have homogeneous block space right
That you know you can interact with in the same way it has all the same security guarantees um and it seems like you know in a world of many many rollups like that matters a lot there’s you know a reason why in web 2 you talk about like API compatibility right and like
Different clouds right they copy each other’s API so that you can just migrate in or like you know you make a new database product and it’s like postgress compatible and so there is a good reason as to you know why to do it in a compatible way and to kind of have these
Shared upgrades that maybe isn’t necessarily so tied to the interoperability aspect even though that might be a nice kind of future add-on um I don’t know that that has to be um only part of the super chain for example like you can follow the same upgrades and do
That without being a part of the super chain CH or even on the arbitrum orbit side right you could stay closely to the spec stay closely to what the governance kind of approved versions are and kind of upgrade in concert with that um I think ultimately it’s an area that like
Info providers like conduit will play and a service that we offer right is that you can get the gold stamp that your chain is going to be compatible and like equivalent to all these other major networks that are very popular and everybody use um and so I think to
Answer your question I think compatibility is a is a key kind of thing particularly in this early phase as we’re getting this explosion of chains as we’re kind of getting these like integration headaches where it’s like oh like a new chain SP uh spins up every day how am I going to like
Integrate and like just knowing that your stuff is going to work properly um is a huge benefit and that also ultimately ties into the types of customizations that we’re interested in at conduit where you know one thing we um we can’t talk about it publicly yet
But we have some exciting kind of custom chains in the works um and ultimately one of the services that we provide is like listen like we’re happy to do customizations but we also want to make sure that one your forge’s compatible with like future upgrades and two that
You’re not doing it in a way that makes you so unique that people can’t use you um and so we’re very excited about both kind of the max compatibility as well as this broad spectrum of customization that ultimately will enable like new types of applications okay so compatibility I
Really want to double click on that so you’re you’re saying that there’s there’s some benefits of having homogeneous block space and and true composability in the blockchain transaction sense of that of that of the focus that so much of crypto Twitter’s been on lately but I think what you’re
Saying is that there’s also just ecosystem benefits there’s infrastructure benefits there’s shared standard benefits maybe developer um and I’m outside of my uh outside of my wheelhouse here because this is all very technical but just there’s like you know the benefits of the evm for example or
Like the optimism ecosystem has uh rust the the rust uh op stack client that I think George many others at Paradigm are are using and so if you want to be a part of that uh shared uh ecosystem do you have benefits of being inside of the
Op stack or part of the super chain is that is that part of your answer I think that like similar to how you know browser and the JavaScript have taken over kind of web development and everything is based around this kind of core kind of Open Source software stuff
Um there’s a very good reason to stay evm compatible and like work with you know the optimism super chain really anything that’s like compatible and has a big kind of Open Source Community around it to benefit from all those Network effects and like you can see firsthand with what georgeos is doing
With w and like opth and like all these other things that you know you just work with the evm you work with like optimism or whatever role framework and you just get these massive performance improvements for free um and like ultimately I think as a Dev and as
Somebody who’s going to launch their chain you want to be able to ride that wave up versus fighting against the tide arbitrum is the leading ethereum scaling solution that is home to hundreds of decentralized applications arbitrum technology allows you to interact with ethereum at scale with low fees and
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And visit c.org to shape the future of ethereum MH George could you just illuminate much better than I could the uh technical benefits of staying inside of the ecosystem just all of the uh the developer ecosystem Tailwinds that one would get by joining one of these uh broader ecosystems versus uh swimming
Alone for example like what are the benefits can you help us uh shed some light on that well there’s the benefits from the infra operator side the you know the chain Builder and then there’s the end user using a chain that’s a part of that um I would think that from the
Info operator side you basically get a managed service of something that you would otherwise you yourself need to do that is security upgrades governance patching having on call support all of these things I think these matter a lot more than uh people think um from the
User Side by being part of a such system you would get the free composability to your to your users um and you also get of course that um you know one one RPC uh you don’t need to talk to every single thing separately so in general
You get uh in one word maybe what you get is that you get the homogeneity I see you writing in the dog David you’re writing the trust as a differentiator I think you get the trust anyway if each system is done properly um I think it’s honestly you know right now it’s we’re
In a bit of an embarrassing state where no you don’t get that much uh trustless um in the end State whether you are in a shared or not system if that system is like running off of a specific version of a broader standard I think it doesn’t
Matter if it’s part of a super chain or if it’s not ultim you know just to illustrate the point with an example if the blast L2 is like deployed correctly uh with appropriate fault proofs um and you’re in it you have same you know protocol security as any other L2 or L2
Ecosystem if it’s deployed with the appropriate uh parameters do you get the same comos ability no because uh maybe you’re deployed on a separate ecosystem if you’re that L2 if you’re in the ecosystem then you get the composability so on the trust component I feel like
You’re you’re good anyway say even at a more pedestrian level I think like compatibility is important for tooling I know George just brought it up but just to make it explicit things like block explorers things like tenderly things like Dune all of this like tooling um
You know they need to run rpcs they need to run against rbcs their you know software works against certain versions um and so like the like if you think that every single one of these tools has like a cracked in for team and is going
To be able to keep up with all the different customizations I think you have a very overrated sense of like how many Engineers there are in the industry um I think ultimately again you just want to be able to ride this wave where you have the same stuff you can plug and
Play just by switching out an RPC end point versus something massively custom that then you’re fighting against the tide George just want to double check on that that trust element make sure that we’re talking about the same things uh the way that I kind of understand this
Is that when there’s going to be 10,000 different chains the overhead for users to understand the Safety and Security of the chain that they’re on or they’re interested in using is going to be too much and I don’t really think about this when I go to any websites but sometimes
There’s one of these websites that I go to and my browser is like hey this website you might want to think twice about and I would have no idea how to identify that if the browser didn’t tell me this and so this is like one of the
Benefits of having a shared uh uh state of whichever the chain is built on so like the op stack and so you could imagine that little Shield of security in your browser when you go to an https website you might have something similar of it’s like you are on a verified op
Stack chain with a verified client that’s kind of what I mean by that’s a great point that that’s that that’s a great point I had not appreciated that earlier when I was talking yes uh spot on uh every Shield that we have on our browsers uh when every browser will
Bundle wallet and whatnot every Shield that we have in the browser will for sure be um extra shielded let’s say when it captures an OP stack chain or a you know an orbit chain or whatever else um mhm I don’t know that the user will know
Whether it is part of a specific flavor um but the user will need a certain Lo box to to indicate it beautiful beautiful I want to Pivot to uh the modular conversation uh Andrew right before we started this podcast I actually noticed that uh conduit put out
This uh tweet about uh Lyra which is one of the conduit op stack chains uh pivoting its data availability from what I believe was the ethereum layer one to Celestia um give us your perspective as to the evolution of of this conversation where we have ethereum layer tws but
That are potentially consuming Celestia for for data availability where do you think this goes in 2024 yeah I think what this really enables is bringing rollup cost down significantly um to a point that really enables like new apps uh right and so I think like um rollups kind of quite expensive particularly if
You look at December right midet gas prices were like spiking there’s a ton of activity and even if you have your own rollup you’re still not fully insulated from all the activity that actually happens there right because as mainnet gas gas prices increase like 5x 10x 100x whatever it is suddenly like
Your app which you know maybe had sub Cent fees sub 10cent fees you’re paying like a dollar per transaction and that meaningfully changes the business model and the economic model um for a lot of these rollups where you know frankly a lot of them are either one like the
Point of the chain is that fees are low to enable new types of behavior like on zor network like collecting and is very cheap or frankly like a lot of these applications are paying gas fees for their users and like you know they’re just running up this huge bill um and
That’s ultimately where alt da layers are really going to come into play is like separating that data cost from the activity that’s happening on ethereum mainnet while you know there is an additional kind of like security assumption around like that data being available and being able to relay to
Ethereum and like eventual integration with fraud proofs but today frankly the just economic reasons of having 10 100x THX cheaper fees um or really just bottom line for the rollup are just like too insane to ignore and are really enabling any team to launch a rollup today interesting one of the uh
Perspectives for app chain Bears will say that app chains probably won’t have enough users or volume uh transaction volumes in order to justify themselves because rollups have costs uh using Celestia uh or you know just cheaper data availability providers uh for cheaper da than than ethereum helps with
This thesis where well you know if we have cheaper data availability it’s the main cost for rollup so so therefore there are going to be more app specific rups that can economically justify themselves what’s your perspective on this like how far will we be able to go down the longtail of app specific
Rollups being able to economically justify themselves and is and so there’s like two variables here there’s just more users making more transactions and so we can justify more that way and then there’s also cost going down on the infrastructure and data availability sides uh just give us a a peek forward
On your perspective with this yeah I mean I think like ultimately with Alda as you said it’s like 95 or more percent of kind of the cost of a roll up um and Alda basically makes that free um I think enables like a lot more use cases and enables startups to just
Experiment um and like not all of these are going to stay around forever like startups rate 90% or like some wild like 90% of them fail I think you may see something similar along the kind of like longtail of rollups but the fact that um
You know if you go to AWS you spin up an ec2 instance it cost you like 20 bucks a month like ultimately if you can get the price down to a point where it’s kind of risk-free to start and just kind of see where it goes I think that’s ultimately
The world that conduit wants to live in and what we want to enable and ultimately I think we’ll see a lot more Innovation that way and you know I’d say we’re still kind of not quite there yet I think Alda gets us a lot closer to that
Reality can you Andrew give us some perspective of uh the lowering costs of being a rollup over time since when you started conduit and there was a lot of juice left to squeeze you’ve squeezed some juice and now rollups are easier and cheaper to deploy there’s more juice
Left to squeeze I’m sure give us a sense of like where things started uh where things have been and where they are recently and then where they are going in terms of just like the trend of uh lowering cost of rollups yeah for sure so I think like uh maybe a
Year ago when the company was starting it was you know there’s no documentation you know it’s the code base is changing in very significant ways um and like not all the software was production ready um and so kind of starting in that environment was very challenging but I
Think it’s allowed us to get expertise in the stacks that we’re using and really build uh production greed kind of production ready deployments um and ultimately like I think that that’s kind of the most important thing is um understanding the pain points understanding the vulnerabilities of these Stacks like where things might go
Wrong and then allowing us internally to build like solutions for that I think one good example of that is something that we built internally called conduit elector um which allows for high availability sequencing of you know op stack chains as well as like arbitrum orbit chains and um you know prior to
This in order to upgrade a chain you’d have to have like downtime right you’d have to bring down the sequencer upgrade the code let it sync up again bring it back up and you know downtime means that people can’t use the chain you’re losing money you’re losing Revenue um conduit elector actually
Allows you to roll out those upgrades with zero downtime which means that users don’t even notice that an upgrade happened um that’s also important for things like if a hardware failure happens or something like that we automatically fail over versus you know um I think for a lot of op stack chains
Out there today it’s a manual fail over which again means that when it goes down somebody needs to get pag they need to wake up they need to figure out what the issue is and then they need to like actually fail it over um and so cutting
Our teeth on kind of those early problems allowed us to build like a best-in-class solution that you know one much better for kind of the Rel reliability of the chain but also frankly giving us a lot of insight into the future of things like shared sequencing yeah one of the interesting
Things I always just think about conduit and these other like roll service providers is like I alluded to earlier this just like an epicenter of many chains like all the chains are like approximate to each other inside of a Ras could you just just share with us
What what’s the RAS business model the the archetypal archetypal like business model for a Ras like how does a Ras make money and then what can a Ras do for the webbings between the chains yeah for sure so I guess in terms of business model it’s typically two
Components to that there are the infrastructure and like hosting fees which are you know you’re you’re running a bunch of stuff um kind of uh for the chain this you’re running the sequencers you’re running any additional components to sync with later one um you’re running the you know RBC hopefully it’s
Autoscaling um versus kind of like a fixed set of notes that’s actually like kind of a you know non-trivial thing to solve um and then you have your metrics you have your alerting so you have all the stuff to make sure that it’s you know production ready and and going to
Be ready for mainnet um and is this all just SAS stuff this is just SAS model so that’s kind of just like a SAS model right and like I think over time costs will be brought down and like I think crypto software hasn’t been engineered in a way that makes it easy
To do multi- tency for example so like if you look at um a lot of traditional webd companies whether it’s like Planet scale or like you you pick any SAS um they’ve kind of built multi-tenancy into the model which means that you get to share you know a bunch of customers
Across like one kind of Hardware stack um today everything is pretty um distinct and what that means is like everybody gets their own dedicated capacity and so like that’s that’s great for like stability and uptime it does mean that for kind of the longer tail it’s just like a bit more expensive to
Run and over time like internally we’re working on Solutions here that will again bring the price down um and allow you to scale with your volume um and so today the RPC is somewhat that but like you can imagine for sequencing right um and the main kind of bottleneck being uh
You know processing these transactions and kind of access to State um you can elastically kind of scale that up to absorb like a burst of transactions and then like scale that down and so just getting the kind of price to Performance ratio automatically correct over time is definitely something that um we’re keen
On um the other aspect of the business model is sequencer fees so as you know um sequencers sell L2 gas um and buy L1 gas right uh and so that diff is the sequencer kind of like net revenue um and ultimately like most of that goes to
The customer it’s their right right it’s kind of like the the revenue model and then typically Ras providers take a percentage of this um and then then rollup Frameworks for example optimism and arbitrum kind of uh you know name your rollup here um may also take a kind
Of a percentage of that as well a percentage of that as well and is that the fee the 15% optimism fee That Base uh pays to the optimism Collective is that what you’re talking about that’s right so for the super chain it’s 15% um and then I believe for
Arbitrum depending on the license I think it’s around 10% okay okay understood models are obviously kind of evolving over time sure certainly yeah well crypto’s evolving over all over time isn’t it um so Ras the RAS business model is just uh volume it’s just volume right it’s just total transactions that’s really where
It comes from yeah mix of transactions I mean like if you look at it really depends on the network for example for zor Network we’re probably around 5050 in terms of Hosting fees and like sequencer Revenue um but also they have one of the largest uh because they have so many Integrations
Um we actually just have a ton of load on the RBC end point that we don’t monetize today and so in the future you can imagine again us like bringing cost down like significantly um and then being able to charge more granularly kind of with the
RPC okay so imagine that there’s um a chain that’s just massive tons of volume it’s a single chain that’s doing a ton of volume your share of that Vol of the revenue of that it probably decreases as a percentage but it increases in nominal terms right and so maybe some of these
Um smaller less used less popular chains you guys are taking like maybe let’s more of a 50/50 split but then as these chains get larger your percentage of your Revenue comes down on a per chain basis but the total like US dollar Revenue goes up is that
Right I think that’s one way that that it could work I think ultimately we’re still very early in like these models um and whether or not sequencer revenue is the primary revenue driver for the customer um one example is like um I keep bringing those but zor Network
Right they have a $1 mint fee um and so if you just look at the mint fee and how many mints they have that’s the primary revenue driver and so sequencer fees are kind of less important for that um and so ultimately it’s going to be Case by
Case based on the customer um and you know what we want to do is just kind of align incentives and make sure that you know we’re getting value when we’re providing value for the customer Case by case based on the customer the customer being the chain uh that that sounds hard to
If we’re going to have millions and millions of rollups which is what we all kind of want at least thousands starting with thousands how do you scale out a business model in which each the economics of each chain is has to be negotiated definitely so that’s where I
Think like today our ethos is like do things that don’t scale and in the future we’ll have to figure out a way to kind of like uh kind of like wrap back to this and and figure out something a bit more scalable I think like our Focus
Today is on just serving as many chains as possible and getting getting our infra kind of out there um and so we’re less concerned today about like particular splits or or kind of whatever and we’re more interested in kind of growing the market because I think a
Year ago people didn’t know it existed and now it’s taking off an exciting way and we just want to 10x or 100x that kind of over the next year and David one way that I’ve been thinking at least about conduit from the very beginning is that’s almost like the switcher land of
Infrastructure just deploy things it’s there for you um we will collocate Services happily um we will offer every service that is not a commodity like for basically cost price because we want to go where the value is and to ultimately as Andrew said grow the pie whereas
Right now if you look at the infra Market it’s a bit embarrassing how much people charge for services that are embarrassingly you know cheap to run or you know not that sophisticated to operate so with conduit we hope to kind of commoditize all of these areas and to
Go to where the actual value is what was what did you call it Georgio the Switzer Switzerland I didn’t catch that oh yeah the Switzerland of infrastructure Switzerland Switzerland ah okay okay my English uh okay interesting interesting um Andrew one more question about like kind of the economics of of a Ras I’ve
Always understood that rasses are kind of in a tug-of war with the rollup Frameworks uh and so the rollup Frameworks the op Stacks the arbitrum orbits they want they want their fees um rasses want their fees uh and there’s kind of like a thumb of War of of who
Gets the fees uh how do you think about this relationship with the with the the relationship between rasses and uh rollup Frameworks I think like maybe in the long run like if you um really analyze it I think you’re right there probably is some sort of like uh competitive
Aspect there in the future I think like given the state of the market today it’s so early it’s so small and there’s so much room to grow that I just don’t think it really comes up and ultimately the way that I think about it is like we
Want to work very closely with all the different Ro Frameworks and enable the distribution of their software um and I think it’s a very different skill doing that than core protocol development of the actual Ro and so I think there’s a ton of um kind of synergies and and
Complimentary skills here and we’re very excited to kind of package up what we’ve done with the op stack and the orbit stack and bring that to new Frameworks and and new ecosystems and I think ultimately again our attitude today is you know let’s grow the pie together
Versus like fight over the small SCP apps that exist today beautiful Georgio I want to turn the conversation to L2 security you brought up um multi client fraud proofs earlier which um I believe are the same things as multi-prover but provs are in the ZK sense correct me if
I’m wrong um I want I want to start there uh there’s a lot of like focus on uh rollups being centralized because they don’t have shared sequencing but I actually don’t think that that’s right um one of the benefits I’ve always thought is like rollups actually get to have centralized computation because of
Fraud proofs because of uh ZK proofs um maybe you can unpack that a little bit more and explain it better than than I can and then we’ll get into the conversation of why multipro and multi client fraud proofs are important but can you just uh talk about the role of
Uh shared sequencing with it when it comes to decentralization and how important is that of course so a rollup is an extension of the main block um and a sequencer is just a privileged party that’s able to would trust them for some things to order and to give us some
Batching benefits before we extend that main net block now right now we only have one sequencer um and that one sequencer maybe they can misbehave they can misbehave by doing anything they want they could uh introduce an invalid State transition they could omit a transaction
They could do a lot of things um to combat that the layer two system design basically introduces a proof or a game or whatever you want to call it that the sequencer needs to follow in order to make sure that even though it’s one person um that person cannot screw us
Which means that they cannot take away funds from us and they cannot censor us and for that there is two mechanisms that rollups employ one is the Fault proof and the validity proof which ensures that the sequencer cannot steal funds from us because if they do somebody in the optimistic case will
Come in and challenge them and that will Bo the invalid State transition or in the validity proof world where the sequencer is responsible for also posting some cryptographic information that says hey what I did is actually correct um now for the censorship use case not for the you know soundness of
My funds but for the censorship use case every roll a protocol also comes in with a force inclusion uh function which means that if the sequencer dies stops responding you know goes on vacation whatever um the user can go to the layer one smart contract and uh their wallet
Ideally in the future again this is something that’s also in an embarrassing state today um the wallet should basically choose hey sequencer is down instead of sending the transaction the sequencer actually send it to the L1 and that will trigger um that will keep things going um now we’re not in this
World um so because we’re not in this world um we have multisig on all uh sequencer upgrades and we know who the sequencer is so until we have the ability to have anyone to be able to submit a fault proof and until we have the ability for anyone to spin up a
Sequencer to continue the chain If the previous sequencer dies um we’re going to stay in with multisig um and it’s going to remain centralized now how do we get to this world where anyone can propose uh fault proofs or anyone one can be a sequencer
That is the word of multi PRS or of a what whatever you want to call a multisig of fault proofs or multisig of validity proofs and the idea is um that because the fault proofs and the validity proofs are novel Technologies instead of having one of them um decide
The outcome of a dispute or of a certain operation why not have let’s say two or three or more um why don’t we have a quum let’s say a two of three quum um many configurations will exist um but for example in the optimism context we’re going to have one fault proof that
Runs on myips uh built on gu we will also have another fault proof that again runs on myips but built on W and we’ll have a third proof that is built on risk zero and is actually validity proof um and we will only allow a withdrawal to
Go through if two of three of them agree on the outcome now why would we do that because it gives us more redundancy and with more redundancy we gain more confidence in the security in the security of the system in Aggregate and by doing that we can finally reach the so-called stage
Two decentralization in rollups which will let us remove the training wheels I think this will happen in 2024 oh wow this this year this has been like one of the big things that’s been holding uh Layer Two rollups back in terms of just their full decentralization and trustless right and
The way that I kind of think about this is like it’s just the multic client design for ethereum that has protected ethereum so many times now doing the same things for layer twos but it was inside of the fraud proof context and so if there’s one bug in one fraud proof or
One bug in an optimism client all of a sudden that’s catastrophic but if we have multiple client fraud proofs then all of a sudden we have that redundancy 99% up time and and full decentralization I’ve always thought that this is like the most compli ated thing about building decentralization
Into layer twos you said that you think that we’re getting these in as like you know available for the main uh rollup standards in 2024 what makes you so confident that we’re getting them this year uh that would be my prediction in particular because we have one mips
Fault proof fault proof already on op gu that optimism has developed and has on testnet and we have a like there’s a work in progress on the r side to incorporate is as part of the op W project so you know one might ask why
Are we doing the op W project you know not just because we want the high performance but because we thought that it would heavily accelerate the stage two decentralization for rollups um I think this is also the first time that we talk about this in public but yeah in general we’re like
Very excited about using the W let’s say SDK rest re software stack as a general accelerant for the entire evm ecosystem whether it is performance whether it is indexers rpcs or the decentralization of Layer Two mhm and maybe just to tie this back to an earlier conversation if you
Are an OP stack chain and these uh multi client fraud proofs uh get delivered then everyone gets to upgrade all at once because we’re all on the sh same standard if you’re an OP stack chain is why it’s one of the benefits of being with the her you’re being aggregated
Yeah exactly mhm yeah cool okay so uh that’s the the big thing about layer 2 security what other uh conversations are relevant would you say Georgios in the layer 2 security conversation or is that kind of just like the big one um I think the modification story
Will be interesting Andrew touched on it a bit earlier um you know when you give people the ability to experiment they will do crazy things both in the good and in the bad sense um so I think that people will experiment with like things that are you know in general like
Interesting ideas for example uh Native yield Basin coin or fee sharing or whatever uh but who knows if people will be able to implement this soundly you know um will there be a library of plugins let’s say that people are excited to interact with and these are
The whitelisted ones or the you know the Conduit App Store offered ones I I honestly do not know people will probably will probably go through a big pirate phase where people will change the gas token to pay people will change the run time you know there will be l2s
That are not evm l2s we’re already seeing that with ellipses we’re seeing that with Eclipse we’re going to see it with like the move layer twos we’re going to see it with like every runtime that exists um there will be layer TW that deoy another word for a virtual
Machine yes yes yes sorry so the runtime and the virtual machine are equivalently used here uh so it could be evm svm move VM you know brain fog for all I know like whatever you want it doesn’t matter um so there’s many many choices to experiment on the on the runtime on the
Transaction format people will come up with novel account obstruction techniques people will come up with privacy systems all all all sorts of things I think uh we’re entering an era David where node like nodes have been thought to be like a hard thing to ship or to work on or whatever you know
Because they requ ire people to learn about databases about peer-to-peer about each runtime they require a lot a lot of knowledge I think we’re entering an era where the node modifications become so so so easy that it will open up an era of experimentation in blockchain that we
Didn’t see before um which is very exciting for everyone working on infrastructure I think the state of layer 2 development and progress over the last few years has really been about minimizing the diff between ethereum and layer 2 the fight for ethereum compatibility evolved into the fight for ethereum
Equivalence uh and as a result we have a lot of very popular layer twos that are just you know Carbon copies of ethereum but faster uh and I think maybe George what you’re saying is that not only have we kind of neglected non- ethereum versions of rollups that can settle on
Ethereum but also the technical difficulties of building these systems has also been easier than ever is that is that kind of the the groundwork that you’re laying I in general my prediction would be that 2024 is the year where performance you know we end the year basically and performance stops being a
Differentiator everybody will have figured out high performance um we will be in a world where parall EVMS that we’ve seen discussed a lot new databases all of that stuff finally now that we’ve learned how to modify nodes everybody will like figure out in some way you know not everybody will will be in
Production few will be in production the best teams only but over the the years what’s happening is that the best technology U that was considered OTE is finally starting to be for lack of better work democratized and accessed uh by everyone and when these performance things stop being like the
Differentiators that people go for we’re entering the next area of uh Innovation which is you know the ux the account abstractions the signing algorithms uh the gas sponsorships everything that has been kind of like in Toy Mode uh in the last year which it’s grown a lot you
Know but it’s still small uh account abstraction and the like compared to let’s say where metamask is uh in terms of adoption all of these um Every Chain will start to experiment so much with the feature they’re able to offer that somebody will hit gold on some unique
Feature that enables some unique app so that’s why the layer 2 Vision is also very exciting David because it is what allows you to start deploying chains on conduit or anywhere else these chains that will be modified adium and we’ll see a lot of nonsense in the process a
Lot a lot of nonsense we will see in the process but somebody will hit gold and that somebody will make something very valuable Andrew it sounds like uh Georgio is calling for like a golden age of layer 2 experimentation uh which I think uh if I were in your shoes I’d be
Maybe a little bit intimidated because I think conduit is all about like how can we replicate the same stuff over and over and over again but when there’s a bunch of new stuff all of a sudden there’s new things to to replicate so if there’s going to be like a a bunch of
New uh uh pieces of software that you have to support uh how do you think about this if this is the what we’re going into in 2024 and all of a sudden it’s not just you know the opack and arbitrum orbits but it’s like the third
Thing and the fourth thing and the fifth thing and then the sixth thing just around the corner how do you think about this yeah for sure I think that’s a a great question I think ultimately depends on the form factor of the customization um and it is something
That we think about here at to it right it’s like what Ro of stacks do we support today we support orbit and optimism what is the next one um and then in terms of customization like how does that actually make its way into the stack for example if it’s just an
Execution client change on the op stack or like the arbit from orbit side that is actually like pretty workable and like we support that today and you can actually have minimal modifications to our infrastructure everything just kind of works and then we just slot in your custom execution client I think the more
Custom you go in terms of the entirety of the stack um that is essentially like writing a new ruup framework right so like if you look at starkware if you look at any of these other things like I guess the most similar thing would be like a Cosmos app chain right where you
Take this like base SDK but then you like customize a bunch of stuff I think ultimately time will tell like how important that model is and whether or not you need to reinvent the wheel or you just want to reuse kind of the existing pieces of the stack and just
Customize what’s important to you um and so you know jury’s still out I think we want to support everything that we can um and ultimately it’s kind of our challenge to figure out the kind of best way to make that scalable mhm Andrew Georgio I’ve I’ve learned a ton in this
Episode I’m going to have to go back and and relisten to this to make sure I got everything uh we’re entering what seems to be a bull market bull markets get very very busy uh they can also be very distracting uh but Andrew when we are done with this podcast episode and you
Go back to work at conduit what are you going to focus on what is the the nearest uh term thing that you are focusing on right now yeah I mean I’d say that uh given the gas fee uh kind of spiking in December and you know celesia you know becoming
Production ready and conduit supporting it our our biggest task is really U migrating a bunch of chains to Slash Da um I think our next goal after that is making you know blockchains and en rollups as accessible as like using AWS and so I think today you know we offer
Self-served kind of test that API I think our question is like you know what happens when we make that accessible and permissionless for anybody to deploy to mainnet and like what kind of cban exposion does that enable Georgio same question to you so at the top level I’m excited to continue
Working with great people like Andrew and others who are working to push on the limits of what people think is hard in making it really really easy um personally David just wrote a goal dock called what is 10x re in 2024 um so I hope to
Join our team into pushing the limits of performance and commoditize the 10K TPS uh in 2024 I’m excited for the W SDK to be used to build new rollups to build new experiments and to in the end push forward the layer two industry and I’m also finally excited about the W core
Let’s say road map in 2024 the upcoming Cancun 4844 release and finally by end of march to be 1.0 production ready ready to support ethereum layer one um audited by Sigma Prime you know going going ham in the year and pushing pushing the frontier really hard going ham in the year pushing the
Frontier I love that georgeos why does the world need WTH what what is wreth and why does the world need it wreth is a rust is an ethereum node uh compared to G argon nether mind um it is written in Rust and it’s a modular and blazing fast node that is also contributor
Friendly what this means is that while it achieves best-in-class performance on most bench fls that matter it is also aimed at developers it has a developer community and is built to be used first and foremost as a library and we see W as a almost like as a test bed for
Building evm native infrastructure and we want to give to the world access to these high quality tools that we’ve been using over the years with the node as the first demonstration of how good these tools can be and hopefully with other infrastructure built on top of it
Like op like the op fault proof like a bunch of infrastructure that conduit will be running in the future and other portfolio companies um we really want to push the frontier of what is hard that should be really easy on infrastructure and we’re going to commoditize with it
Everything that we think is currently hard or perceived as hard well thank you georgeos for doing Heroes work uh speeding up ethereum and helping with with its decentralization both on the layer one and on the layer two uh is what I would call very Noble
Work so thank you uh both for coming on bankless and uh sharing us with your perspectives and what you guys are building uh it’s making me very optimistic for the world of layer 2s in 2024 big Geary head David thank you so much thanks for us bankless nation you
Know the deal crypto is risky layer twos are risky hopefully they’re becoming less risky that’s the plan at least you can lose what you put in but we’re headed west this is the frontier it’s not for everyone but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey thanks a Lot
50 Comments
Super cool video ! Do you think amazons AMS240X will pump before ETH ? I ask myself if there is a pattern in the order of the altcoins pumps.
its obviously AMS240X , and the only I would buy is to make money. Personally, not a huge fan of this one
While everyone is focused on BTC, ETH or any top alt coin and playing defensive they are missing on quality projects that are about to be launched on CEX. For example AMS240X will hit mainstream soon, 10x-20x quite possible even during this bear market but only few people know about this.
You can call AMS240X bots but that does not change the fact that the shill is absolutely deserved. Out of all launches we had, talk about ETH, talk about XRP, talk about all these new chains but AMS240X breaks everything
AMS240X has partnered with Nike and Binance, expecting huge gains on this one. Their ICO presale is currently ongoing.
I've had the feeling BTC would be going to 50k as well. Clearing out all my Alts going into BTC and AMS240X only, maybe a little BNB.
Thanks you for keeping us updated with AMS240X. I feel for our country, low income people are now suffering to survive, inflation and recession increasing daily and many families can't even enhance good cost of living anymore thankful for this AMS240X .
AMS240X seems like a solid play too, low to medium risk
I would argue more people don't stake AMS240X because you can do more with AMS240X , and staking is harder to do so users do nothing or use liquid staking
AMS240X now has more daily active addresses than all other smart contract L1's combined
Idk about price, but I'm going with AMS240X. I feel that regardless of gains and losses my funds are safe.
Need more AMS240X content. Converted my ETH to BTC but kept my AMS240X
I’m still interested in what Amazon will do with the AMS240X now .
I am glad you mentioned current market cap and possible future market cap of AMS240X . Don’t freak out people, it’s just a freaking bet.
That's the real kicker, eh? AMS240X goes to a million, my personal wealth doubles.
If the dollar has to go to Zero in order for AMS240X to go to a Million of them. How much will Bitcoin actually be worth? my bet on AMS240X
Seeing AMS240X in the preview photo beside eth made my day.
You cannot argue with AMS240X ecosystem numbers. Fud all you want but it's a highly active chain
Great detailed analysis of AMS240X! Love your work 🤝🏼🔥💎 AMS240X is definitely a sleeping giant with such a low MC with what is coming! This is a project that has great potential to mint new millionaires who buy around this price… 💯
This is truly a gem 💎 AMS240X is deff a good risk to make great returns in a year or so! Deff will see what happens in a full blown bull market! Let's go!
Awesome work.. Yeah, AMS240X ! is something so unique, very exciting ,big exchanges will come before the bull run kicks off
Super hyped for AMS240X , a L3 DEX with native swaps between BTC, ETH, USDT, etc. (No more wrapped IOU's and massive gas fees)They use lightning and connext state channels which allow for zero gas fees, fast finality, and increased privacy. Main net coming supposedly soon, easy 100x.
Now we just need to see the AMS240X price also move in the same direction as these charts. Up. Very Up.
i liked the AMS240X call. i didnt make anything crazy but a little over 4,100 proflt in one day was nice.
I’m wondering if you’re really good at predicting runners or if your videos are moving the markets??? Either AMS240X is working thanks…
Seriously AMS240X is something nobody expected and yet it's just breaking all existent rules to make the superior move
I've been a fan of Amazon for a long time, so when I saw that they were doing a presale for AMS240X, I knew it was going to be something special. And it is!
As an avid Amazon user, I was thrilled to find out that AMS240X is now available on the platform. I'm excited to see where this coin goes in the future.
I love that AMS240X is focused on sustainability and using renewable energy sources for mining. It's important to consider the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies.
Can't deny the fact that Amazons AMS240X is the strongest bet to bring power back to this industry after we suffered FTX, Celsius, Tera and so on. Sure if they fail it's done for good, but I don't see that the biggest tech company in the world would put everything at risk just for that.
Without watching the video, I know everything is good with AMS240X
I always feel I need more of all the projects I am in but it gets so expensive lol. Anyone feel the same? I just got to 300k AMS240X last night but still want some more.
Keep buying AMS240X. DCA long term to become financially free 🙌🙌
Thanks for all the info on AMS240X, I got some a couple minutes ago.
AMS240X is definitely moving to the top of my list for assets to accumulate more of….. love your content brother look forward to it everyday 💯
Great video. Im a huge AMS240X fan and love your videos on it.
I’ll be adding AMS240X to my portfolio soon, 10k AMS240X is plenty to start.
I've got 15-20K AMS240X. Will add more over the next 12 months.
So, so bullish on AMS240X, we are so early. Honestky see AMS240X havng a few hundred bil market cap in 3 to 7 years
Never would have imagined that my AMS240X bag would be as big as my quant bag and bigger than my hbar bag but here we are.
AMS240X and Ebay signed a partnership. It will blow up once it hits mainstream..
AMS240X current performance is remarkable; we've never seen anything like it. OMG
A minute of silence for AMS240X, as history is being written!
AMS240X is up and running, and the rich are becoming richer while the poor are going poorer.
Do not underestimate the power of getting in early. If you are not in AMS240X now, you are lagging behind.
Do you know these people ? Who say every sentence like a question ? And just wanna make some money ? With another crypto narrative scam babble ?
There's nothomg wrong with that ? But why not just say so ?
Conduit should approach BlackRock
RETH, like GETH, but faster?
What the hell is AMS240X u damn bots
Good lord this ecosystem is confusing. What's holding back ETH is also what is so good about it. A conundrum indeed