EVM Interoperability Across Ecosystems - Panel

um so thank you all for coming uh it's it's interesting being in denver in 2022 at an ethereum conference because i feel like two three years ago it would have been controversial to um even mention that there could be another layer one outside of ethereum and now we have a panel full of different founders who are working on different layer ones and other ecosystems so i'm really pleased to kind of see how this space has progressed and so we'll kick it off really quickly i'm i'm ashley tyson i'm with hypersphere but previously i was a part of the founding team at web3 foundation so worked on polka dot and then i worked on mir and now i work with all of these guys on stage so i will give them each a moment to introduce themselves and the projects that they're working on derek sure so i'm derek hugh i'm the ceo of pure steak but the main project we're working on is moonbeam moonbeam is an ethereum compatible uh parachain on the polkadot network um so um yeah i think we'll be talking about a number of a number of things related to kind of evm implementations and we just went live we're about five weeks from our maintenance launch which was uh on january 11th so yeah great to be here awesome brian from layer zero uh we are the only one that is not in l1 uh but uh we're interoperability so the goal is to connect all of all of these fine people together um yeah thank you hi my name is nico arqueros and i'm the ceo of this sport this is park is working in the commedo protocol the mikkometa protocol gives evm capabilities for non-ibm blockchains using rollups and we are deploying to algorand solana cardano and terra so we are going to be giving event capabilities to those chains and to close it i'm alex from aurora we're building an evm compatible solution on top of near blockchain so it allows ethereum developers to launch their contracts without any changes on top of more performant scalable blockchain and i cannot say that that you're the only one who is not from the layer one kind of thing because we similar one but also not a layer one so yeah i believe uh let's kick off the great discussion here sounds good just a quick question can you raise your hand if you work on ethereum specifically okay raise your hand if you work on another ecosystem okay good to know just wanted to know um okay so i'd like to start off by brian asked that we keep things a little spicy i don't know if you'll find this question spicy enough for you but we can get to that later but the future of solidity and and evm so we've seen more and more blockchains building in rust there's a lot of talk about wasm being the future and i'm just curious what everyone's take is on the future of solidity and evm alex you've got the mic feel free to kick it off sure um so from my point of view um evm as attack right now has the the biggest amount of the developers the biggest adoption the biggest amount of tools available for it so um from my point of view it's logical that many people are building for the evm their contracts right and uh maybe in some kind of design aspects it's not the best one right or it's not you know was not like back then in 2014 people were not thinking about what is going to happen in eight years after it but uh we have what we have this is the default kind of thing and my recommendation and my point of view that in the next years we are going to see evm become becoming a de facto standard for the execution environments and maybe some additional languages like wiper or some more advanced kind of things are going to appear there but the evm as an execution environment i believe is going to be there and that's why that's why there are lots of people that are working on the evm kind of compatibility thing uh so we are all boring projects here because we are the compatibility divisions of these new new blockchains right that appear in but it is us because of which you know the ecosystem can go and adapt new technologies that's that's my point of view on this okay i'm going to try to spice things up a little bit let's see how it goes so as one of my co-founders say the programming language is whatever what do this means that basically more important than the programming language is the programming model because right now every blockchain has problem with the scalability and they're looking to get there and right now i think i and i believe that there is like different models but the most likely that's going to help with scalability is the ones that are like related to secure roll-ups so it's super important to have a model where data availability is like easy to use and it's scalable and this should be going in hand with hand with everything that's related to like also create like the uh the validity proof for ck roll ups because right now it's not the easiest and for example for evm uh this is like a well-known thing because for example vitaly is talking about this concept of i'm going to try to pronounce it correctly state less ness and this is what vitalik uses but right now to create like this validity proof is kind of like difficult because the state is quite big but the evm and the ethereum community has realized about this and there's like a specific path we'd like to merge to like solve these things so i think the programming language is not going to be that important because you could be like compiling from like rust to like a specific built-in machine that doesn't do this well so i feel like the uh if evm is able to move fast and so all these issues to be like really well uh like a virtual machine that works really well with validity growth i think it's going to be like maybe uh the end game yeah i'm uh i'm the one who asks for contentious questions all the time so um i think it makes panels much more interesting although i don't think my answer to this is particularly contentious i think in general we've seen long term in all of sort of the history prior that the market can just bear like significantly worse languages and constructs if it has like escape trajectory in terms of adoption and tooling and because of that you know i i don't think in terms of primary ecosystem cylinder evm is going anywhere for any within any near term like you know probably not forever but uh within the near term i don't think it's going anywhere yeah i'm trying to think of controversial takes here but i have to kind of agree with my fellow panelists that uh you know there's a consolidation you know in my mind around different tech stacks at this point if you're building chains that might be substrate or cosmos sdk when it comes to smart contracts i mean it's just i think people tend to underestimate greatly underestimate um like if you have a new tech stack just what it takes to build all the tooling infrastructure like you know other kinds of things around that new tech stack and um you know for so from my perspective uh you know the evm is here to stay 10 years from now it's still going to be here um back to the point of it being maybe not designed in a way you would do it today i mean it reminds me of i've heard this story about uh like x86 right so when intel came out with this chip it was this interim almost throwaway thing they're like let's just do this thing we need to get to market quickly we need to do these things and then they had all these planned upgrades of like better chip architectures better instruction sets but guess what like you know that got adoption tools and all these people developing around it and then here we are like you know 40 years later still using the same instruction set so that's kind of how i see the evm uh playing out okay so then to make it a little bit more controversial um if you know that ecosystem is already in place uh and that tech stack is already in place let's talk about l2s all right so with like optimism arbitrom boba a lot of these l2s are launching some are rumored to be playing with the idea of launching a token so do l2s on ethereum eliminate the need for evm compatible chains in other ecosystems yeah i would say that there's you know there's many evm chains but you'll need to specialize you know i think there is a differentiation that's needed so you know the l2 is really if you want you know good security and just cheaper execution i think it's going to be probably increasingly challenging to have that be your differentiation angle as an alternate evm compatible l1 um so you know take our example like we're trying to differentiate more on interoperability right because we're a para chain on pokedot that means that we can offer like native integrations for example using the polkadots xcm technology to other paratrains in the ecosystem so we're leaning into that and extending the base ethereum feature set with these native cross chain integrations but um there's other angles one can take but i think you'll probably need to take like some kind of angle right that's not just cheaper cheaper faster kind of thing uh yeah um you know from a layer zero perspective i don't think we necessarily need to care um and sort of like where it ends up but i will say in the current state of l2s versus alternative l1 that the market has clearly shown there's much more of an appetite for alternative l1 than it is for l2s i think people want things that are fast and work now when they're they're willing to have shown they're willing to sort of sacrifice certain things to to do that and that's given sort of these ecosystems a like to stand on and grow and innovate um so in a perfect world where l2s inherit basilar security and are fast and scalable and has everything then like no maybe not but it doesn't seem like we're living in that world yet so i think we'll see a continued um sort of let's say high usage of alternative real ones as opposed to strictly everything rolling and tell twos so how is he thinks that right now uh like to get the token out of the ways i token is sometimes helpful but not enough and for like scalability there is like two major things going on the first one is scalability and the layer one and this is going to be really difficult to get full scalability for all the needs that are going to be any in the industry in the future so there's still like going to be like a competition in the layer one but also this to be played really well with choose because that's going to be like the way that these chains are actually going to scale up for like the needs that we need for the future and i'm convinced that right now that charting has shown like so many uh difficulties and for example even like some chains that are working with like charting they have like problems that one chart could sort of like the the os the other one with like this like sort of messages that could like uh generate like these reactions so i believe that uh the layer one that you optimize for uh data availability and this is like super important and also to have like uh what is like everything related to like the smart contract and also uh the state separately uh there's one blockchain that nailed this one but they're not very friendly towards rollups so i think that's like a huge miss and most likely like the future for scalability is going to be like ck roll ups with validity proof so uh the chains that are going to be able to like nail it in the layer one and also they're going to have a virtual machine that's going to be like very friendly towards validity proof i think that's going to be like the winner and it's not going to depend that much about like the token so although there is like layer two launching ethereum maybe the layer one is going to be different uh in the future maybe these layer twos are going to end up like moving to other chains that actually nail these specific points um so i would like to split this this part into into several several different questions so first one is is the usage of the security right when we're talking about l2s we first of all think about the security of the ethereum blockchain that is you know inherited inside of the l2 solutions right there are many different ways how you can do it you can launch inside of your inside of ethereum you can launch a validator of your l1 other l1 blockchain that would mean that in order to break your l1 blockchain you would need to break ethereum right and from that point of view this blockchain l1 will become an l2 right it's going to be protected by by the security of the ethereum blockchain this is just one of the examples right so utilizing the security of other solutions from my point of view is a great thing to do because you do not need to build from the ground up your own security of your own blockchain right so this is uh i believe more and more solutions are going to become you know an l2 from the point of view of the security but they are not going to use you know you know the the paradigm that l2 is right now are developing in right so this is one thing however in terms of the evm compatibility the first thing that comes in but into my mind is just uh the adoption of the comparison in between the adoption of the optimism and arbitrary right so uh optimism who's building on optimism anything okay who is building something on our bedroom okay so obviously it's not it's not like a huge a huge difference here like but zero versus two people one of the reasons why people are not building things on optimism because they change the virtual machine you cannot run directly the smart ethereum smart contracts there right you need to rewrite some pieces of it i know a very very well-known company that is integrating with optimism for more than a year right now right so like that that's that's kind of approach this is what it takes the the um so from that point of view if you're losing the compatibility if you're doing some kind of changes that are not backwards compatible again uh just reiterating on on the things that my colleagues are were saying that you might be underestimating the efforts uh for you to build all of the tooling and all of the you know things for this so keeping keeping and like arbitrary is absolutely the same solution but just with the evm compatible kind of thing so it is a little bit easier to run your stuff on our bedroom and now from that point of view i believe just keeping that compatibility it gives lots of lots of great things for the developers and for the community to to develop stuff so my next question is about attracting developers um so it's always a question of do we build our own kind of ecosystem do we you know work with other ecosystems do we maybe siphon off some developers from other ecosystems so um how do we attracting developers and capital from ethereum versus creating a homegrown ecosystem what are the strategies for each of your projects and then maybe we can dive into a second question from there well from my point of view in general blockchain is is too small he's too small in comparison with web2 so um like in my in my dreams layer one slayer twos need to stop competing with each other and instead trying to bring on board the developers from outside right we have lots of challenges as the industry we need to scale we we are we are not growing like combined blockchain is not growing as fast as freaking tick-tock right so this is already an indication that we are doing something wrong right lots of great tech minds here and they are not not not able to make the tech viral it means that we are not selling good all the things right so so that's why from my point of view there is no need for us to compete with each other everybody will find the place in case we all going to succeed so let's let's instead uh trying to either getting the developers from other protocols let's let's let's together educate people from outside of the blockchain and bring them on board so quickly assuming that's the case for you what would you say is the difference from aurora and like what type of developers are you looking to attract what type of community are you looking to differentiate with yeah so so our approach is again like retweeting all other things that i was saying um is to keep the compatibility so people are not seeing something that is unusual it's like you're using um i don't know c plus plus you can run c plus plus on intel cpus you can run c plus plus on uh amd cpus or you know some kind of arm chips you know you can run there are there are compilers that are compiling it into the m1 chips right so from that point of view for the developers the less you change the better right obviously we need to we need to make from my point of view the ecosystem for developers high enough so they are not thinking about the blockchain that they're working on uh we need to we need to we need to make it you know a little bit better uh than right now we are we are too low level right now and that's why that's why the docs of uh docs of aurora is pretty simple you just go to see disability docs and go to see web3 api docs that's it there's two links so this is what this is our approach thank you uh so uh for this question maybe uh um i can try to answer from like the developer perspective or maybe first we like atheists at least i'm convinced that there's not to be one blockchain that's going to be the winner takes all but rather they're going to be multiple blockchains out there so having said that and to be consistent with my answer sometimes a lot of people have different opinions but if you put their opinions together they're not consistent so if we are going to have this future with multi chains uh and also there is this point that vitaly did about like bridges that could be like kind of scary and sometimes like the security the security that you have in a layer two is like basically inherited from the layer one which is completely different when you're using bridges that actually you should be able to have like local deployments of like different tabs or like different things and for these evms like compatibility is quite important because uh if you have a specific protocol for example in ethereum and what i have seen that's happening that in other blockchains maybe they're not copying the code because they don't have solidity support but they're like copying the same project it works the same way they're basically translating the code and for me this is like uh ways of playing power which you have like people like inventing new stuff and this that's why for example when you look at the d5 uh primitives i think most of them they have come out from ethereum and they have been implemented in other chains so i think like evm compatibility for other chains like quite important and that's why we are doing with milk meta so people that want to like i know specialize in some things they can like spend their time to create something new and also there is the point that i was mentioning on my previous answer about scalability so developers are going to be like they want to code something that is not painful they if they follow documentation it works right away that they can debug they can visualize like different use cases so this is like quite important and right now evm is like way way ahead and it continues improving quite well especially for like scalability and related to validity proof so i think like developers are going to be looking for is to code but also what is the future of this blockchain so i think blockchains layer ones that maybe don't have evm support but they could be like quite fast they could have like a shot to like gate again developers because if they game evm and they're like wi-fi in the layer one uh developers can have like the easiness to code but also they can see a future that maybe this specific day one blockchain could make it in the future because you don't want to spend time learning a new programming language and in a new blockchain because it's very risky and maybe as long to make it and most of your work and your knowledge is going to be deprecated so that's why i think like we are going to be trying to like uh make developers exciting about other layer ones using evm technology i think some of us like the pain though nico i think you might be wrong there i think there's a lot of masochists here brian what are your thoughts yeah i mean i think ultimately there's two ways to attract devs and i think you attract them either via capital or by giving them something that's actually interesting and they want to do right and i think most ecosystems right now just attract with capital which is why you see the same projects being forked 100 times because they'll get paid to be forked here and then they'll pay to be forked there but like nobody actually cares right so i think it's more about giving people something that's genuinely interesting um i think for us obviously the goal is is like seamless interoperability but i think solana's done a great job of like it's like a closed ecosystem was a really risky bet in that if they like didn't hit a certain critical mass i think the developer community would have just like died but they did and now they have people like building interesting things because like it's hard like people need to actually care and be motivated enough to build there and then once they've gone through all that like they feel beholden to it i think one of the issues right now is everybody is is just purely attracting they're like bootstrapping protocols with just capital incentives and i don't think it's enough fortunately i'm not running a layer one or layer two so i don't need to necessarily think about it on how i would do in that ecosystem but from our end in attracting devs it's really just use cases i think whether it's you know the d5 protocols or the largest fintechs in the world like whoever we're talking to ultimately what we're offering them is a use case that they don't have now that is genuinely interesting to them and that they want to execute and i think in any case like that that's what's going to get people to kind of be interested enough to really build something and genuinely uh be sort of committed to building on top of you um yeah i mean part of the question you asked was around assets actually so just to take that part first i think you know if you're an alternate l1 you pretty much like have to target at least part of your strategy has to target like ethereum based assets that's just just where so much of the value is um you know and there's a whole bunch of bridging solutions such as uh layer zero that like it can help like move those those assets but you know i kind of see that as almost a required when it comes to developers i mean first it's kind of these prerequisites for evm chains i think the thing that you know was really an eye opener for us was yes you know you need to build the ethereum implementation and have that work well but there is are these like critical other pieces of infrastructure um that um you know developers really really want and some of them are like not that easy to get because they're single threaded through certain organizations so that would be like etherscan i'd point out it's like being one um that you know they have like a long backlog for integration so that's like a very critical piece um along with chain link you know chain link is like a big unlock for a lot of default activity and they also that's not something that you know there's only a certain rate at which those integrations are delivered so um so you know you need these prerequisites and then what we've seen is i mean in my mind the right strategies to have a mix of what i'd call multi-chain teams and native teams so you know multi-chain teams there's a number of teams now that you know many of them started on youth mainnet and they're then pursuing a multi-chain deployment strategy in our case um i would highlight you know folks like sushi or curve that have deployments into our ecosystem you know they're they're multi-chain um there you have a lot of confidence about their you know their brand their brands speak for themselves right people have confidence in using those protocols and that that may even be you know confidence enough to say hey i'm going to use this new ecosystem because i trust you know this other brand um i think the the challenge with them is though when you have a multi-chain team like that you know their attention is divided right so if you have 10 deployments then that team is kind of minding 10 different you know ecosystems and you're going to get maybe a 10th of their attention right something like this and so you know i think that's where you have to complement with native teams you know they may be newer they'd be doing having new contracts and maybe some smart contract risk and other things but you know you're compensated by you know having that team's full attention and they're often gonna be doing community building efforts and other things you know to help your ecosystem alone what's the breakdown uh of moonbeam versus like multi-chain versus native teams yeah i would say that it's it's also been different over time so like initially um you know our strategy was to target um multi-chain teams you know that was kind of our initial go to market strategy but what we've seen is much more uptake on the native side now but that's just a sign of you know the ecosystem maturing a lot of these tools i mentioned being you know integrated and available so yeah it kind of changes over time i think so we have four minutes left and brian specifically asked that we made this panel really spicy so i'm going to ask you if you've got any questions for fennel fellow panelists or for yourself that you want to answer that is uh spicy and controversial and meets your expectations of of that um i i wish i did right uh if if this was an interoperability panel and i could argue with people on on ways to address it i would you know that's that's the fine i think we could take it there that's that's what i think about all day uh so like i love to have those conversations but in terms of like the the trade-offs that these guys are making i may be less equipped to ask the the right contentious questions so maybe i'll leave it to you guys if you have something for each other or i'm happy to field any if anybody has one i say it every every time i speak like i i very much love adversarial lines of reasoning so uh feel free i mean vitalik had this like post right that a lot of people were talking about about like different like um consensus and security domains and you know kind of being a bit of a naysayer then on like you know cross consensus like um you know what that looks like in the future but it seems clear to me that that's going to exist so yeah maybe i'll you know that's obviously something that sounds like you have thought a lot about so like i mean is he is he wrong or like what would you say you know what do you say in response to him on that point yeah i i wrote a thread after it and i basically said i agreed that wrapped assets suck and like ultimately at the core of what vitalik is talking about is wrapped assets right so you have some inflow from one ecosystem the other and the way that most people design bridges now is like you're gonna lock an asset on chain a and you're gonna like mint a synthetic derivative on chain b and so if you have 10 billion dollars of inflow like from chain a to chain b you have 10 billion dollars of like systemic risk that lives in that contract that if something happens or wormhole was like a great example of this recently like uh the underlying like the entire amount of the underlying is basically a risk right so i think what will happen is well one is the question like vitalik obviously thinks through wrapped assets because like there's no contract that can like mint eath on another chain so like all eth anywhere else is like weth right um which is fine but like there's a bunch of assets that have native deployments everywhere so like do we really need ethon avalanche and solana matic and like all these other chains like maybe uh but maybe in the future like that's going to be more likely to be like usdc or some algo stable or something else right and so if we move towards something that's actually deployed on multiple chains like okay let's say it's ustc and you can have a pool of let's say 100 million on each chain of these two chains of usdc and you can get the same 10 billion dollars of inflow assuming you can incentivize rebalancing correctly uh with none of the systemic risk like you only have like the 200 million dollars that's deployed so it's slightly less capital efficient than being able to mint and burn but it's much much much more capital efficient in terms of like actual risk right you only ever have that 200 million dollars of immediate risk any point in time you can still have the massive inflow and so you're talking like orders of magnitude greater from a security perspective not to mention like the user building like all the other reasons why you would not want to have rap synthetics but from from my standpoint like things will trend in that direction but i 100 agree with them that wrapped assets are bad in general and like especially when you're going from like you have five bridges you have five different versions of that wrapped asset and then sometimes you're like daisy chaining wrapped assets we're like okay like this bridge has dominance here and now we're not even gonna bridge the native over like from this chain to the other we're gonna go through like a different bridge of that wrap so you have like this daisy chain of bridges where if any of them breaks like the entire chain is broken and people don't even necessarily understand like the risk that they're inheriting by by using one of these on on a given chain that's basically the entire trail prior to that i guess we're out of time but thank you guys so much for joining thanks everyone for joining us um have a good eat denver [Applause]