Alex Shevchenko I Virtual Chains on Autopilot I Aurora I Pragma Denver 2025

[Music] all right we are ready for our last Talk of the day and without further Ado i' like to bring on Alex to tell you about virtual chains please give Alex a big round of applause hello everybody I know that you already tired um this is the last talk for today and after this will be a happy hour so please bear with me a little bit and listen a little bit more about the EVMS um today's talk is about about the virtual chains on autopilot so this is um an additional concept uh that probably not many of you have heard of right so let's start um I'm going to start with a very simple idea every successful founder every ambitious founder is willing to launch a chain this is a straightforward thing this is in the nature of people it's the same thing as if you are willing to um kind of move out from your parents' house into your own home and uh that's why we are seeing that there are lots of things that are happening in this space but there are some pragmatic reasons besides just the human nature here um namely you would like to Des C centralize your product you would like to get an additional uh building uh around your own ecosystem maybe you would like to bring some additional um uh utility to your token making it a gas token maybe there is a business model behind this gas talk and maybe some portion of the fees that are collected within your own network um is used for something else right so uh there can be many many different reasons right but the human nature is always something that is that is there and uh actually what we have is that things are happening in this space even the absolute core ethereum projects they are launching their own networks um and this is this is just happening now all of them are using roll up framework right l2s there are different versions of it obviously there is Optimus marbit ZKA evm several others uh that are less um going of that people are talking less about them and uh the L2 approach has a number of problems that are connected with it um and the reason why these l2s they do have these problems is in the very nature of why l2s were created in the very beginning so l2s were the answer to the question how to scale ethereum right right Monet was not back then in place so the answer to how to scale ethereum was an L2 and uh this is not the same answer to the question on how to launch a network right that's uh that's a different question so maybe the answer to this question is a little bit different now the problems are here on the slide and obviously the biggest problem here is the cold start of a new network you need to integrate lots of different infra um inside of this network stable coins Bridges listing of centralized exchanges um custodian Solutions explorers indexers base defy infrastructure all of this is something that you need by default in order to have one specific product on top of it or some kind of use case that's why launching a chain is hard at the moment H it is not for everybody it's it's own only for well capitalized projects um and U for example you know just couple of months ago Andre cronier have been tweeting about the costs for launching Sonic right and it was in tens of millions of US Dollars this is what it takes to set up a proper chain and uh even to add here all of you probably know about the great website um that is called L2 bit and you can open it there are 140 plus l2s and out of these 140 plus l2s there are three who are integrated with centralized exchanges right now this is a metric that shows you that build in a proper adopted L2 is very hard so what is the fix to this problem and the fix is something that I'm going to present and this is something that we have been working for three years um and this is something that we called virtual chains right so what a virtual chain is a virtual chain is a smart contract that has inside of this smart contract the full evm implementation and uh with every transaction that is coming to this chain this transaction is wrapped as an argument of a bigger transaction uh which calls this smart contract you can think of it as an L2 which settles every single transaction instead of uh kind of creating batches of these transactions and then sending it to the main net what's the point it's not scaling obviously it's not scaling because this concept is answering the different question it answers the question how to launch a chain instead of how to scale a chain we have this solution with virtual chains we call it aora Cloud it is available it is working on top of the scalable blockchain scalable L1 uh which is near protocol it is fully evm compatible it supports PR hard Fork uh we are I believe the only rust implementation of the evm that passes all 100% green tests of the um evm test suit um the most important thing here with h with this solution is that it is completely free it can be deployed in less than one minute um and the again most important thing the thing that actually solves the problem of this cold start of the blockchain is that since these chains are just smart contracts these kind of sand boxes uh or playgrounds inside of the bigger Network inside of near all of the existing infrastructure of near protocol and other virtual chains is available from the first Block near has uh stable coins officially deployed uh usdt and usdc these table coins are available to your chain the table coins are listed on binance so people are able to deposit these stable coins directly from your chain chain to binance and withdraw these tokens from binance directly into your chain again from the first block without additional need for binance to integrate with your chain warm Hole uh deep Bridge um Rainbow Bridge um they are all integrated with near and Aurora layer zero if you will uh these bridges are available for your chain right away custodian Solutions again index and Works gnosis safe is working on your chain right away also without the need for gnosis safe team to integrate it because Kos safe works on the Aurora main net and this is true not only for the existing infrastructure this is true also for all of the future infrastructure that is going to be deployed on near or any other um virtual chains which means that the setup that we have here ensures the network effect in between the virtual chains and they are going to enhance um infrastructure infrastructure that is available for everyone there our Target is to launch 1,000 virtual chains during this year and I think it is pretty low Target because up until now only within this less than two months of this year we have launched already more than 70 chains uh usual profile of the teams that are coming to us are the teams who are not able to afford to spend tens of millions of US dollars to set up an L2 these are smaller teams who are willing to to experiment they would like to have something that really works so that they are not taking care of the infrastructure um and they are able to focus on their own product and this is what I also um telling to you uh because infrastructure questions uh are very complicated I'm working in in blockchain vertical for 10 years within this 10 Years I'm building infrastructure and it is hard I I'm telling you that you probably don't want to do this uh with exception to the cases like monad or maybe some other or or Alo um if your core product is infrastructure so where are you able to get this um the thing we able to get it on the website that is called Aurora cloud. deev this is the website that has Aurora Cloud console this is like an admin panel in which you're able to to customize your chain and launch it and I'm going to hopefully show you a video in case someone is able to click this video um uh nope thank you very much so um it is a little bit long video but please bear with me I'm just going to comment um uh this is like a literally demo this is what you're going it was recorded today this is what you're are going to see one to one if you're creating um a virtual chain you can get there you can log in into the Aurora Cloud console you can go through the process of setting up your chain you can choose it is these chains are customizable you able to choose your base token it can be different tokens including stable coins you can set up additional Integrations that are going to be available for your chain you can customize the name of the chain obviously um you know do different things around it and after you saving your configuration for your chain you can just click deploy now and everything that you're going to see right now happening in the real time in less than 30 seconds your chain is deployed just because it is a simple smart contract and the infrastructure around it RPC with the end points uh the uh block Explorer everything is spun up and available to you right away the thing that you able to see right now is the integration with the central calized exchanges this is a tool the handy tool that we call a forwarder and this particular thing what it does is in enabling the withdrawals from centralized exchanges and in general any token transfers directly into your chain it works very straightforward this is just a smart contract on near blockchain that forwards the assets inside of your chain into a particular account so you can see here that uh you've set up this forwarder contract it is deployed on near it is non-custodial and uh you're able to directly withdraw from binance directly into your account through forwarder um the tokens including stable coins again this is working right away right now you can set it up in in just minutes um and you can try to use it and this is also available not only for you as a founder of this project but also for all of the other users that you're serving within your ecosystem obviously it's not going to be like a direct direct integration so users are going to go in binance through choosing the near Network as the withdrawal and the address where you're going to put it is going to be the near address another thing that is available to you is what we call a near intent this is a cross-chain DEX on which you are able to swap um in a permissionless and trustless way uh different assets from major networks including Bitcoin Ripple zcash and all of The Usual Suspects main net salana base and other evm compatible Solutions this thing is working on top of near and it is available to all of the virtual chains which means which means that uh you you you and your users will be able to withdraw assets directly in side of your chain in case these assets are available on your chain and if we are talking about any near side assets including stable coins like this thing is available right away so you don't need to build all of this infrastructure it is already there just take it use it it is completely free um and uh it is open to everybody all of the obviously code is open source so you can validate it and check that everything is is working well and uh by the way you like the all of the stuff around the near protocol the fact that we are working on top of the near protocol is completely transparent there is no single uh time when you actually see the near protocol it is completely hidden from uh from from you and from your users the only thing that they see is your evm compatible chain now now we actually have quite a lot of ideas of additional infrastructure that uh we can build and make it available for everyone and besides our own ideas we are uh inviting all of the infrastructure Builders to connect and make their infrastructure projects available to all of the Aurora virtual chains so this is one of kind of our um goals is to create this kind of marketplace of the infrastructure so that people can log in into their Aurora Cloud console just click uh on choosing the particular infrastructure provider and then they're getting this infrastructure in a automated way the same way how they are getting uh these things however different things that I would like to I'm not going to go through all of these different pieces and this is the road map only for the uh for the first quarter and some things are already available um but um I would like to to put an emphasis on this Force Milestone so the one of the very common requests from the teams who are building on for launching their virtual chains is that they would like to have this uh kind of minimum defi infrastructure setup so they would like to have a an amm Unis swap style amm they would like to have an AA style Ling Market available the Oracle solution is already in place right but we are targeting the automated deployment within this 30 seconds of these smart contracts together with spinning up the front end um of Aurora main net native IMM solution uh and make it available already to everybody on on this new chain so this is thing that is not yet happening but it is going to be but it will be available in several weeks from now so if you are looking to deploy a network or you have been thinking of this or maybe you're from the project who believes that you need to have a network and you have been hesitated you you you have been hesitant on uh launching an L2 because you're thinking a couple of steps ahead about all of the infrastructure uh the only thing that I can tell you you can go and spend several minutes on trying out the Aurora infrastructure and maybe this is going to be the answer to a question how to launch your own chain thank you very much [Music]