ETHKL24 | Panel | Finding Our Way With the Ethereum Scaling Roadmap

all right guys we have our chairs on stage may I invite Our panelists Ladies and Gentlemen please welcome Victor G from Manta Network triel Kong from Mega E ly Lou from caliber and our moderator Hubert klinsky from [Music] l2b the topic that they are sharing today is to discuss finding their way on the ethereum scaling road map ladies and gentlemen take it away test test okay so welcome everybody to our panel titled fighting our way with the eum scaning road map H so so today I have with me Victor G co-founder of manta shuya okong co-founder of Mega E and lyu founder of kyber and caliber I hope I didn't butcher your names guys my Eastern European accent is very strong as you could uh here uh okay so if you could just briefly introduce yourself and let the audience know what you are bu buing uh and how you aim to contribute to like the broader ethereum ecosystem so they they know let's start with Victor yeah uh hi everyone I already Shar like little bit about Manta like I'm co-founder CEO Manta network uh we are the I think first and the largest modular L2 uh which means like uh using other da like using the like other TCH stack but we build a platform firm use e as a guest free and uh like uh get quite good adoption uh we were top three TV in the like all L to space before right now still top 10 and really focus on uh s Asia and uh like this area developer community and the user communities yeah thank you so yeah you also just saw me uh my name is sh ya you can also call me brother Bing just Ling as a as a dude on Twitter um and then so I'm one of the co-founder of Mega East before Mega East I used to run Global BD consensus for six years so covering products such as metam mamos infura Linea which was a tkm I've also sunset summer products uh truffle anyone of sunset truffle of sunset Quorum so rip uh fat chain hi hello it working hi everyone um my name is l um let me see um so this is my second time in itkl I think the first one was e KL 2018 and I think it was the first one and I think like you know it was a lot smaller Cozier right and uh I think probably like only a few like uh e people from Singapore and also like some of the OG here in in K like uh Matthew and and Bobby from boako uh were in the like speaker list and I think it was um I mean it's it's super exciting to see like etherum has been like growing a lot over the years right um but quick intro about myself um I started kyber back in 2017 as on the earliest decentralized change and I think I stepped out probably like two and a half years ago is and uh you know started becoming more Hands-On in like investing and helping uh helping our new fathers right in build uh you know new application uh new infrastructures to scale up ethereum and uh yeah being around uh work with a lot of like you know different e researchers through the through the years um yeah seeing like all the trend from like you know shatting layer to and now like you know a lot more other things yeah okay thank you very much uh yeah so you should introduce yourself too yeah all right thank you I'm so my name is Hubert and I am part of uh the l2b team almost from the start of the project so what we are doing is we are basically Gathering the data about all of the layer two solutions soon also about da Solutions and we are also verifying all of the ZK circuits in all ZK projects so you actually know that the projects claiming to your ZK actually use the tech and no are not just using it for the marketing purposes so we are kind of you know like a fact checking neutral Watchdog of our space uh yeah so coming back to the topic of our panel so ethereum scaling road map I have it open here on my phone so just looking at it quickly we have the perge the Splurge The Verge so many many weird names uh and I wonder who came up with those probably vitalic I guess uh and I guess during this panel we'll mostly focus on the merge and the search um so one dedicated to perfecting the proof of stake consensus and the other to enable ethereum to process uh many many more transactions allowing wider adoption because uh let's be real like compared to Visa or Mastercard right 12 transactions per second are looking uh like seems terrible right uh so I think like to look forward and understand our way with this huge road map we need to also look a bit into the past right so let's maybe quickly imagine uh that we are uh like you know the March just happened uh the rollups were something new uh like the proof of stake just happened right that they weren't so many l2s out there so what were you guys thinking back then right what were your plans why did you started you know uh thinking about the projects that you actually build that and are in in in charge of today so maybe Victor you could start yeah uh I feel you know like uh um man always have their like uh like kind of own explanation of the etherum like uh different terms and the different kind of like alignment uh but in general like the reason we explain in different way is uh we are more like focus on user and uh I think that's the like eventual like uh the only Rising we are doing like you know for to get Mass adoption or should do to to to get Mass adoption uh I think you know like uh in terms of the road map like you know uh I just think actually like U right now still uh compared to last year I would say last year basically the whole ethereum ecosystem was the year focus on talking about you know like whiches like CK type 1 to type four evm and all of this timing wasted make Sana great again you know and um if ethereum for focus on you know like D5 or you know like uh respect the def5 founder same as the L2 founder it can gr again after the Sana so let's see how that work but that's how like you know I think uh uh what we try to explain is you know the layer to is basically first thing is you use ethereum as gas fee that's how you align ethereum that's what I I think you know metalic talk about five different points recently that's actually the most important point right you know you're you're building on ethereum and then use like some random token as gas Fe does not make sense but uh like on top of that like how to make like uh balance the security B balance the scalability and at the same time like uh make user easy to use that's how you know we've been keep thinking and uh that's why we use slra da at the beginning and then right now we have multi da there's six different da right now like running at the same time but uh like I think eventually we will choose the cheapest da and we will like also have fast finality make the withraw have less period and also leverage this like uh AVS like uh like raking and uh but you know we try not to keep playing the TV game we try to get users that is event the road map I think you know ethereum should focus more and we are keep building that but we we have limit impact we cannot cover the whole world user but in in our Ro map we start from Southeast Asia and uh because we have strong Community here and Builder here okay so so you mentioned like multi daas right so one of the questions that I always having when I'm talking about man to basically why so many Das right why not just enable blob stream on Celestia right like get the data verified on ethereum and call it a day why why why your approach right to scaling ethereum is like that with so many different days uh yeah I mean like uh I think you know uh from user perspective very honest reason more da more airdrop right you know like user willing to have different kind of like uh get different kind of product and the experience and eventually get air drop that is uh like uh you know think for user they can get incentive but uh at the same time I do have to say like celestra right now still cheaper if like a blob come to that same level we probably switch back but also like uh I think you know uh the partner working with us we try to grow together and I do think you know slra in the early days help us grow that's why we keep having this kind of like uh uh kind of the the the ship the product together with them and uh like make user educate the modular blockchain and that's kind of become what our Ro part of the road map okay so does mega if has the same approach as as Manta or yeah I think we're quite different uh I mean we use IG da because my co-founder literally wrote the IG da white paper so we also believe that they are high throughput uh but also with I mean we're very different from menta from another regard is we innovate on the sequencer right on execution environment and uh we don't really think too much about da or the consensus part we're using optimistic proof for now but we actually believe DK is the future um but I think the beauty of Mega E is we don't try to own everything right rather than build everything from scratch we use what other people have done so well and we're willing to give what what we've done so well to others as well which is actually optimizing the sequencer so for example we rote the entire State try and that's really 99% of ethereum performance bottleneck if no one knows about that uh we also invented our own paralyzation so compared to what Monet and movement all of them using block STM which is the move which is coming from aptose uh our engineer actually developed our own paralyzation which is 10x better than everything else uh but then yeah we used everything else that etherum is doing really well um so I think we're very different from a technical perspective but but like to answer your earlier question right I feel like that question would be a good one to some of the early layer to team like it would be really good question to arbitrum to stock whereare to ZK sync I think at this point ethereum is not about technical trade-off as much as about if you're building an ecosystem you're automatically building application at the same time no matter how good your technology is if you don't have a few Flagship application you're going to die like I'm sorry you can't get your narrative you can't get your users and I think that's what like Solana is the best thing that has happened to ethereum I mean they're centralized they're going to die but they're very good for ethereum because they tell us what is important yeah so so you because as I understand Mega is focused on becoming like an Universal uh L2 right so you wouldn't say that like what you are saying the better approach would be to just focus on up chain with like one specific use case yeah the other reason we are the real salana is because we believe in a global statement machine we believe that if your chain is powerful enough you can solve the noisy uh neighbor issue you can have multiple application Live on the same chain to explore interoperability Capital efficiency so why would you sacrifice that for app chain where you still have to worry about bridging and uh user experience and Etc right like that's why sometimes we believe that Mega E solves fragmentation because the chain is like freaking powerful uh and I think what salana has taught ethereum is that it's powerful to have a global saate machine and that's exactly what we're trying to do but we're like if you remember one thing we're just way better than salana because we have a theum okay so I wonder what the founder of kyber will say about it since you know liquidity H and everything multichain um I could say okay so I think like some sort of like um story like from history okay so I think like back in 2017 I think I think ethereum uh I mean we really like saw the set of like you know chain clocking and stuff because of all the Ico Cates and crypto kitties and people started like talking about like how how can we like scale ethereum right I think the reality was that um you know we didn't have all the technology that we have today right we didn't have like ZK we didn't have like a lot of like Network Improvement and you know all the you know improvements on Hardware as well so I think I think ethereum as a community like I think we discuss a different solution there was like State Channel there was like plasma there was like Shing and stuff and I think Al still loves plasma from what I know so um I think it's still a s concept um it's just that I mean I think like in terms of like my share and or attention I think gr up is is obviously winning right and I think and obviously like Rob up was only like brought back uh alive like probably three years ago is and um you know it became like the main direction right uh for for etherum scaling um but yeah I mean like I think From kyber's perspective uh I think back then when we started I think obviously our role was like you know we focus on liquidity we focus on users and and that's how I mean our way of like scaling ethereum back then was that one we need to bring a lot more users to ethereum right I mean because like end of day if you don't have users then what are you want to scale for right and two um I think we did a lot of work in order to bring other asset um to ethereum so we started like rap BTC with uh bit and couple of other guys and obviously like now it's become like a 9 10 million fdv kind of like asset um we also like try to bring in other like asset uh that was popular back then like OS and stuff through ethereum right so we we buil the first like trustless kind of like bridge between ethereum and and EOS and we call like the peace relay it's like there was a huge like conflict between OS and eum back then um I mean not as big as like you know Sol and etherum now but like you know they were like the probably like the one of the only few competitors um but yeah I think like you know I think they are different way to scale ethereum as well I mean like we're talking a lot about like TPS and like making like cheaper and and and things like that but there's also there's also like you know the like improving the number of users that can use ethereum uh the amount of asset that ethereum can serve right and then can host and I think that's also equ equally important okay so I really love that you mentioned the users because I have additional questions to all of you is like do you think that the current road map of ethereum is like too much research oriented and not like product oriented to actually like you know like get the masses but only like kind of like come up with more complicated and more complicated pieces of tech what do you think Victor uh I mean of course I do believe that I'm a I'm a product guy myself and uh I mean like I don't like shiling you know I don't think you know like uh uh I think you know the they they're definitely you know something uh you know I think for Sana they make it like come again maybe more help a bit but I do think you know they the F focus on like ecosystem and product actually make you know uh Sana get lot of traction again because I keep talking Sana because I learn a lot from you know how they like focus on ecosystem focus on product and I want to use that into the you know like U uh see if that can help on etherum as well but you know like uh I think after this I think seven years right now and especially recently I read a book you know about the the history of ethereum back in the day you know like uh about the r back about you know how eum start and all these co-founder and then eventually left uh I find you know like um uh this is the ecosystem start from bunch of nerds and a bunch of geks but uh how this kind eventually you know run a country cannot run by a bunch of nerds that is a problem but you know like uh on the other side I think you know other like Sana or binance they're not coming from like you know kind of this kind of this centralization thinking but they kind of thinking how how to survive first and they didn't get much recognization so they need to prove themselves and keep working hard and get recognization at the same time acquire enough user at the same time they push you know their tax stack getting better I've been thinking you know like eum keep pushing the TX stack um focus on like type type one to type four like you know ZK evm last year and right now just focus on like base row up I feel this goes totally wrong direction you know like uh base row up have you know maybe 1% of the total row up what the is that you know they they didn't even like bring some real user they're parasite the existing user and uh they been keep mention by ralic is now Mak sense and uh but you know like I'm glad the great thing about ethereum is you don't have to rely on falic or rely on like uh uh eum Foundation to recognize you you can still success that is the power of decentralization and uh that is something I've been keep having like you know bullish about the ecosystem so I think like Mega if is kind of in the middle right so like in the middle of tech and users or I don't like to Mid curve anything so I'm not mid curving either um so what was your question that we mid curving yeah no no no no so like I like always thought like at least from what you are like posting and you know uh sharing that you always like you you focus on the like Tech perspective on This research but also at the same time you want to actually get new users on boarded as all of those new new l2s are kind of focused on right absolutely so we have this Builder program called Mega Mafia and it's we call it the YC of ethereum because it's extremely difficult to get in and if you can't build something that's completely zero to one actually uses ethereum a blockchain and you're not a grifter uh so if you can't fulfill any one of the three we actually kick you out it's the most competitive program and the goal is we're going to have a bunch of applications that's graduate from Mega Mafia that all of you guys can use right so the decentralized VPN is one of them I hope every no one uses web2 VPN because you're actually selling your data uh biome which is a fully Minecraft is also there uh we have a decentralized Luma right we're in crypto why are we using Luma and the only crypto interaction of luma is it allows you to input your crypto address which is I think most likely salana address whereas lemonade which is a um evant application on Omega e what they're allowing to do is to really clock your granular level detail interaction with an event right so for example you come to e KL the moment you sign in for example you start earning token and you can decide what the token will do right so all of a sudden you actually have a profile of what you you did with an event or I have been hosting H poal for the last five years one of my biggest problem is people register and they don't show up right like I actually want to tear those people apart because I actually pay for their food but what if I allow them to stake and I slash them if they don't show up actually that that's going to be a game changer to my life so we're thinking about this like really small Innovative interaction with the blockchain uh that's also like user friendly to bring people on chain right and that's the goal of of my a lot of the technology we're doing is really behind the scene we I always saying this to everyone like a mega Mafia application this web three application will be bigger than Mega E like I hope in two or three years no one knows this bunny ears because everybody is using our application I think the other point is I really emphasize what Victor said about why I love about ethereum is that when we are building Mega East I don't have to go to etherum Foundation for any acknowledgement zero and I'm pretty sure they don't like what we're doing because we're freaking centralized sequencer right we're proud of centralized sequencer but I'm still able to like attract user because everyone loves ethereum not because ethereum foundation so this is so powerful and we have to talk more about it and the other things at the end of day I don't think ethereum is talking too much about research this is in our DNA ethereum loves research and loves Cutting Edge technology I think what etherum has is a coherent marketing problem we need to tell the world why we are so different I love what Skyler uh posted early on which is the idea of a global computer right so nowadays the more I think about what e theorem is the more I go back to 2017 narrative which is we are building a world computer a permissionless that's open that's a synchronous transaction right I want more people to talk about word computer go that more layer twos okay but wouldn't you say that basically this like huge research focus of ethereum community is actually what allowed us to be where we are here like a lot of other ecosystems tried to do like a multi-chain ecosystem as well but none of them actually achieved that like poka do and all of the others or Cosmos even uh so wouldn't you say that even though that we are we don't we are not so great at marketing right now at least like thanks to that that research orientation and like slow like adding the new things a bit slower than other ecosystems that's why we are actually succeeding you mean why we're a succeed like like BAS basically like this like research like because like I would say that at least for last couple of years like this research Focus over the user focus is what actually allowed us to have projects like yours right to actually have the the the product well I think if Mega youth was born earlier we would not have salana to be honest I think we came too late because it was very obvious that someone needs to innovate on the sequencer but I think everyone was flooding to build another TK evm which by the way I built one myself which which was linear within consensus right it's it's a different DK evm that use some sort of DK proof that honestly no one cares and it's still very expensive now I'm not discouraging more DK evm more DK because it's cool and it's going to be useful one day it's build you know anti fragility to to the entire DK stack but I think that if we were more user focused someone else could have built Mega and by the way the idea of Mega is not even novel vitalic wrote in his 2021 blog post is called endgame in which he wrote the endgame of a scalable blockchain within ethereum is one with relatively centralized block production very decentralized block validating that's exactly what Mega is is Right centralized sequencer allows you to continue continuous to stream blocks and then you have a extremely light validating Network you can freaking run it on your mobile right that gives you the correctness and sensorship resistant so if we were more user friendly I think we would have done it earlier on okay thank you very much okay so like we are slowly running out of time so maybe couple open questions so first one uh so from your perspective uh what are the key factors that will push ethereum to mass adoption right now that are like part of the you know our scaning road map right uh and like in which ones you should act we should actually uh focus on so maybe like like maybe from the perspective of kyber so like the more like user oriented I mean I think um I think first of all I think we have to um we have to be um clear that I think there are a lot of innovation on ethereum that actually no other ecosystem has I mean like you know you talk about like infrastructure like cor layer one layer two Innovation but also like in terms of like application Innovation there are tons of innovation out there but like basically you cannot fabricate them on Solon now like other ecosystem because this is not the right environment right let's just take so just talk about say you know um next aggravation or like de in general right I think like there are like I think like every every now and then there will be like chain is the top like five of like you know number players in deex and de aggregator in in in evm Chains but on Solon like you know you probably have like only one or two that's it mainly because like there's not much room for Innovation there right and like people just talk I mean end of the day like you know what's the point of using Dex aggregator if people only trade on pum fund right uh and on I think on evm I think it's a it's a much broader ecosystem and there's a lot room for you to innovate um you know from protocol level from like infrastructure level and user level as well right um I think I've seen like a lot more Focus from the etheral community on the user um user uh experience um from the onboarding and also so like people are talking a lot more about like account attration and all the different like standards right uh to make sure that one is going to be a lot easier for people to be on board it it's could be less confusing uh like you know for example now if we give someone an address and we we need to tell them is you know it's a ethereum address right it's a layer one address it's not like op BNB it's not like you know optimism it's not arit address um and you know um I think like I think a lot of more standard between like communication between layer tools is also quite important um and I think um yeah I think I think basically taking care of the fragmentation that we have right now right yeah I mean like eventually like what you want to have is users they just use ethereum and they just don't know like you know whether they are on Mega it whether they are on like optimism whether they on layer one right wouldn't you said that right now for example the focus is like to connect all of the projects using the same stack right so op stack and like arbit orbit and Z think elastic chain they all want to have like the you know shared liquidity so you wouldn't say that I think um I think at the moment there's still some fragmentation because of like multiple standard multiple approaches into scaling and even like for like cration there are like different like you know groups working on different things right but I think eventually in the next five to 10 years I think everything will converge into one winning standard or more like you know one sort of like you know United Standard right um I mean all of those l2s also has huge road maps right so yeah I mean it's I mean just eventually we'll get there so so so so I mean from the perspective of say a DEX or like Dex aggregator like you know eventually users they would know like whether they're using like kyber or they're using one in or like zerox or uni swap right they will just like you know go to the uh uh say metam m or like rabid wallet or whatever wallet and then they just do the trade from there because everything else is abstracted away from the users so they don't need to care like you know whether the SS is on Mega E or like optimism or ABS right they just do it I think that's the Futures okay thank you very much uh so for the last question I just wanted to ask you guys uh do you think that we'll be able to actually finish this seemingly unending road map that is I don't know like still uh planned for another like 10 or 15 years right uh and the evm will maintain its leading position as the as the smart contract platform or we like like eventually like some other L1 will uh get this place out of us what do you think Victor uh I mean like uh I'm definitely first I'm definitely still bullish ethereum and we are keep like uh try to get more new user new Builders and you know some Builder they go to other ecos and we try to take them back but I think the approach probably definitely not only use the eum approach maybe learn from other blockchain doing great things and then like uh even the smart contract language like uh I I don't think you know evbm will dominate the whole smart contract language unfortunately because you know like uh it's not designed for the adoption it's just designed from Gavin wood if you try to design you know for adoption polka dot will get become Solana unfortunately everyone left you you have the l2s that are using alternative VMS right now right yeah right eventually maybe we will do more things I think because we use evm I find you know the problem is we build the whole ecosystem everything is full landscape but then Builder come from polygon and the arbit from op and then they go scroll and then they will go Monet and maybe Mega East and they is endless game but they're not keep keep thinking about literation product that that's what L said about you know we don't need so many tax aggregator but we need one Jupiter level Dex aggregator they can keep literation product and the E should support this kind of Builder who keep literation product rather than go farm AR so so I I guess we can summarize it up as we are still positive about the whole it ecosystem and that we we will take our time and eventually we will get that there right so so I we run out of time as well so I hope all of you learned something cool today and yeah thank you very much uh for coming to the stage with me today and if any of you want to learn uh a bit more about any of our projects and about like more about our uh views and uh approaches to ethereum be sure to catch us uh after the panel we'll be probably just running around the conference for for the today and and tomorrow So yeah thank you thank you very much one more time ladies and gentlemen another round of applause for finding our way with the ethereum scaling road map panelists