Hello, hello. Um, yes, today I'm going to talk about Gnosis Chain and how it's becoming the first Easy chain. Perhaps we should start with a little context. What is Easy? To do this, let's remember how blockchain works now.
So blockchain works now. So , if you have a second-level chain, rollup second-level chain, rollup . Normally you need to use a bridge to get to that network, right? Imagine you want to interact with L2 and you want to send funds there because you don't have any , right? You need them for interaction.
You don't want to use a centralized exchange and just want to stay in crypto. Then you take funds, for example, in Ethereum, and transfer them through the bridge to your L2. This takes a lot of time. You need to go into the bridge interface for the specific circuit. Execute a transaction, wait for it to complete, then go to L2 and make another transaction for interaction.
This takes time. This is inconvenient. It's just not very good. Easy aims to make this process instant, atomic, and within a single transaction. So instead of—you can't see the pointer very well—but instead of waiting between bridge events, everything is done in one transaction atomically.
You can initiate a transaction in Ethereum, for example, exchange for L2, and then withdraw the funds back in a single atomic transaction. To make this possible , there is one very important thing: you need to do the reorganization do the reorganization when Ethereum does it. The reason is that if you make a swap on two chains at the same time, and Ethereum does a reorganization does a reorganization , canceling your swap, L2 should also cancel the other part of that swap, right? To work with EZ—a prerequisite for any cross-chain security—you also need to interact with contracts, run composer, and use cross-chain proxies. I'll take it all in turn right after this.
Importantly , EZ is a kind of communication framework designed to simplify secure cross- secure cross- chain composability, but it is not a full chain stack. You don't have to use the same chain as us. It's simply a communication layer between chains. So after that you can be base- can be base- chain, sequenced, ZK- sequenced, ZK- proven, have multi-signature for verification, or whatever. Either be an EVM whatever.
Either be an EVM chain or a Wasm chain or a Wasm chain. It all depends on the chain itself. So, a composer is essentially a component that can be considered a block designer block designer , but for many chains at once. For example, there is Titan Builder, it builds L1 blocks, right it builds L1 blocks, right ? It simply takes transactions, organizes them, performs MEV, and so on.
And the composer does the same thing , but for many chains at the same time. So it takes transactions from the L1 and L2 mempools, for the sake of simplicity of the example. But in reality, it can work with a much larger number of chains at the same time. So, in a simple case here you get transactions from L1 and L2. You execute a transaction and simulate it on both chains simultaneously.
Again, if we take an example, starting from one chain, for example, you take a flash loan in Ethereum, transfer it to Gnosis Chain, do a swap there, go back and extinguish the loan. All this happens automatically, and the composer simulates all these steps. As a result, you get a block for Ethereum and Gnosis Chain with the same timestamp, performing the transaction at the same time the transaction at the same time . For this to work, the composer needs to know when a chain boundary is crossed. You are in Ethereum, making a challenge, how do you know that you are now targeting Gnosis Chain?
We do this using proxy using proxy contracts. Here we have a contract B in Gnosis Chain and its proxy and its proxy representation B* in Ethereum. This simply means that if someone calls B* on Ethereum, it means they are actually trying to access B on Gnosis Chain or any other network. A more complete example: let's say a very simple sale, or whatever. If someone here launches contract A in Ethereum.
This contract can do anything, just like regular Ethereum contracts. At some point, he will summon a B-star. And here the execution in Ethereum seems to stop, or seems to stop, or rather, the simulation, and moves to the child chain. So in Ethereum, you know, we try to, for example, call B-star dot increment. So, let's assume that B is just a regular counter.
In Ethereum, you stop, and then on the Gnosis network, a call comes in from A star, which is a proxy A star, which is a proxy representation of A, but on the Gnosis network. This causes B dot increment. Now again , the Gnosis network is doing all of L2, whatever it's doing there, whatever it wants to do. So it wants to do. So here, for example, it just increments the value, and the result is 42.
Now here's where the execution on the Gnosis network ends, right? So, you have a contract on the Gnosis network, everything happened there, you have a direct state transition. Uh, and yes, you send the result back to Ethereum. So they continue executing, uh, well, contract A on Ethereum again, knowing that this increment call will result in 42. I think it's all a little hard to explain.
So hard to explain. So , for example, this example with flash example with flash credit, right? So you take a flash loan on A. Uh, you do a swap, for example, on A, and then move that into the system chain that into the system chain . So, execution stops in Ethereum.
You continue execution in the system chain. Once this is done, you can transfer the funds back again or do anything else in Ethereum. Uh anything else in Ethereum. Uh , yeah, I don't want to go into too much detail about the packages, but it works like this, essentially, because we obviously can't say, "Okay, Ethereum stops execution here, and we move to another chain, right?" So it works like this : when the composer calculates, uh, or simulates what's happening in the system chain, we kind of get ahead of that result inside B star.
So we are effectively saying: " effectively saying: " If A called B star.increment, then the result or return would be 42." return would be 42." So, the composer will execute the transaction before the user transaction that calls A here. So we kind of get ahead of it to write inside B star that if A causes B star, then the result is—42.
So we kind of simulate it in advance . We place this in a chain. And then the L1 chain. And then the L1 transaction can actually go through. Now, of course, this all has to be atomic, right?
Again, if, uh Again, if, uh , suddenly the return value is now 43 because someone else called the function on L2 instead of 42, then everything has to be undone. So, it's atomic, and it's certainly proven. You can't just say the result will be 50, because it isn't. I mean, we can prove that it's not true using ZK- not true using ZK- proofs or any other system for that. So yeah, again , we're a little ahead of the curve here with the post- post- verification package, it's just a specific thing.
And then the first level transaction comes in, and it already has the context that if you call increment, the actual value is 42. So the good news is that we've already practically built that practically built that . Jordi Bailina, you may know him from Zisk, published the first E-research article about Easy in February. And since then, we've built everything we've built everything I just mentioned. So we have instant deposits and withdrawals between multiple chains.
We have cross-chain return values, cross-chain flash cross-chain flash credits, nested calls, meaning you can go from L1 to L2, to L1, to L2, as many times as you want in a single transaction, atomically. So, we've had all of this for a few months now, actually. On the testnet, of course, it's not quite ready for production yet, but we're moving towards it pretty quickly. It was pretty simple, as was the communication structure I mentioned earlier. What does this mean for Gnosis Chain this mean for Gnosis Chain ?
I hope some of you here know what Gnosis Chain is, but it's essentially a network that's been around since 2018. It is very similar to Ethereum, which means we have the same architecture. We have a consensus chain, a execution chain, and it's pretty much the same as Ethereum, with just a few minor differences. And we, of course, have a real ecosystem. We have the infrastructure, DeFi, all of that, as well as Gnosis Pay, Circles, and a few internal applications.
So why do we want to be the first Easy- to be the first Easy- chain? Firstly. As I mentioned, this allows us to immediately leverage L1 liquidity, right? Instead of providing Gnosis Chain liquidity for DeFi or whatever, instead of having our own oracles, we can simply use L1 oracles, i.e.
Ethereum, because we can call them directly with proof that their answers are correct, all in one transaction and atomically. So instead of having liquidity on the Gnosis network, you can just say, “I have assets, I want to exchange them,” and to do that, you just go to L1, exchange them there, bring them back, and it’s still one transaction. This means no more cities, everything is instant, much faster and much better. Of course, we want to be the first implementation because there is a first-mover advantage, and also because we want to show that you can take an existing network that is complex and has had state for many years and turn it into an easy- turn it into an easy- chain. So, Gnosis Chain will change significantly to make this possible to make this possible .
One of the things is that we will become sequenced, instead of having our own level of consensus. We will become a little more limited in access rights. And we will use Ethereum for data availability. The ultimate goal is data availability. The ultimate goal is to make this fully provable through ZK, because we want to prove that everything works correctly.
We won't do this right away because we still find ZK a bit slow. We want to have a greater diversity of clients at the execution level as well as in the ZK area. So we'll start, essentially, with multi-signature attestors or evaluators for the chain. And we will also likely use TEE to confirm execution on the chain. But again, for easy, it's all customizable, so you can use whatever you want, and we can update it gradually.
So, for the chain, we will start with multisignature, then move to TEE, and then, for example, to ZK then, for example, to ZK . All this is made possible by easy. Why do we want to become sequenced? It's a pretty controversial choice, I would say, especially for us, because historically we've tried to be very decentralized, very censorship-resistant, very distributed. Becoming sequenced is somewhat at odds with this.
But at odds with this. But , in fact, this is a technical requirement. Casper, Ethereum's consensus mechanism, is simply not built for fast block creation times, for example. We want a two-second block time like in OP Stack, not a five-second one, and that is simply not possible with the current level of consensus. Even with the delays, if you want to reach consensus between nodes distributed across the entire network around the world, sorry.
This is a bit complicated. And compositeness is a difficult task. So you have to run a lot of chains and simulations between them. So, it takes a lot of time. This is not easy.
Conventional validators are usually not capable of this. And again, this whole thing about needing to be reorganized when Ethereum is reorganized Ethereum is reorganized . In fact, apart from that, we also can't do the reorganization if Ethereum doesn't do it, because then we would have one part of the swap, for example, but not the other, and that would be really bad. And again bad. And again , Ethereum is designed to finalize on its own, not based on another chain.
So it's too complicated, and yes, it makes sense to become sequenced. So what will this give us? In principle, the Gnosis chain will lose its consensus, well, actually, the chain itself. And with it, reorganizations, for example, which we know and love in Ethereum. The block creation time would be reduced.
The reorganizations would be tied to Ethereum, as I have mentioned many times . And ultimately, finalization would also be tied to Ethereum, meaning it would be slower, but Ethereum is working on speeding it up, and we will of course inherit those improvements. And of course, there's all this composability, which is the main goal of Easy, so you can do synchronous atomic transactions between L1, the Gnosis chain, and any other chains that join Easy. We create all of this publicly. It's all open source.
I will share the repository a little later. We have already created this multichain multichain composer, a common interface, actually Easy contracts, that allow chains to interact with other chains, L1, as well as other L2s that are compatible with Easy. There are a variety of proofs, as I said, you can use multi-signature, ZK- multi-signature, ZK- provers, whatever you want. We've already considered all the failure modes: what happens if L1 reorganizes, what happens if we miss a bundle, and all that. And this is bundle, and all that.
And this is , in fact, a repetitive path. If we could do it with a working chain, there's no reason why others couldn't . This is our roadmap. As mentioned, we started all this in February. We now have a fully working devnet, and specifically for Gnosis—GIP and specifically for Gnosis—GIP , where it is planned how Gnosis Chain can become a zk- Gnosis Chain can become a zk- chain.
This is because Gnosis is a DAO. Of course, you are free to interact with it if you are interested. The technical specification will be ready very soon. Our goal for Gnosis Chain is the Our goal for Gnosis Chain is the end of this year or the beginning of next year. This is quite ambitious, but I believe we can achieve it.
And next year, we will work on improving compatibility between chains, nested challenges, and real-time ZK proofs. All of this is our goal, and someday it will appear someday it will appear . Now I invite everyone who is interested to join our efforts. This is an open protocol. It is designed so that other chains can also join in on this work.
So if you are managing the chain, developing clients, provers, infrastructure, or applications, please reach out to us—whether it's with me in person after the talk, on GitHub, on Twitter at Gnosis Chain, or on EEconomyZone. Well, that's all I have . Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.