The Bull Case for AppChains and How to Build Them | Luis Schliesske - Gelato

he's the founder of gelato and I'm not going to try to pronounce his last name so I'll let him do that for you guys thank you li thank you hello eth Denver so I'm going to talk to you today about zero gas infinite scale web 3 the bull case for app chains and how to build them I'm Louis and I'm the founder of gelato Network and we have a booth over there in case you want to join us there uh yeah you will be greeted by very very nice people there so highly recommended okay so let me first start by taking you a quick trip down memory lane and let's talk about how web 2 scaled uh looking at the audience I think not many people were there for that but it did happen at some point all right so um web 2 started with local hosting on physical servers so at some point people who hosted the website literally had a machine in the basement and there was the website uh running on that machine and obviously that didn't scale very well like if you had visitors on your website from another country or continent you know they would have very slow loading times and also if your electricity was out or anything else happened to your server your website would be down as well so yeah basically very early days of the web very unscalable lots of problems from there we went to Shared hosting GE cities and dream host I don't remember them some people here might remember those um yeah and uh basically they did solve a problem uh they managed servers for you and they managed website hosting for you great but there were still a lot of issues with it so um you you would be very constrained in your scalability still because you were sharing that infrastructure with everybody else using that same shared Hoster provider that means that if you had another website on there that suddenly had a huge search in traffic your website that has nothing to do with that website would also suffer from that and maybe be down right so not very scalable and also one of the biggest issues is it's very inflexible because these shared hosting providers would have a specific framework a specific programming language to work with uh and you would be constrained by that you would have to learn that and write your application in that and you would lose the benefits of all the other nice programming languages and architectures out there that maybe would have helped you to build a much better web app the way you actually wanted to right so still bad endgame for web 2 is surprise surprise AWS and Google cloud and whatever else have you right and really what they brought to the table was they allowed you to have your own server but not physical anymore a virtual server with a virtual machine on it so now you could truly deploy your web application in isolation you wouldn't share bandwidth with others you could could horizontally scale as many instances of these servers that you needed uh and nowadays to be honest like ec2 elastic Compu and so on they even allow you to Auto Scale based on traffic and so on right like it's very smart hosting and with your own VMS you could also use all of the technology out there um and really build the web app just the way you wanted to build it right so that's that's the end game here of web 2 so the the key Point here is that the internet is not one you World computer it is a web of interconnected computers and web to scaled via asynchronous Services you would deploy a bunch of your services instances machines whatever and they would all talk to each other via asynchronous communication tools like HTTP right apis and whatnot and also they would talk to the rest of the internet that way and it was all interconnected so let's talk about web's Evolution and let's try to draw some parallels here and the claim is that asynchronous cloud services are scaling web 32 today already on gelato and in the web3 evolution what we have observed is that there is a movement from the early days of web 3 monolithic chains to where we are today uh infinite virtual chains or Roll-Ups in the web3 cloud so just like I showed you those three stages of web 2 scaling I'm going to now show you similar stages uh congruently of web 3 scaling and web 3 started with Bitcoin and other special purpose l1s before ethereum and back then when if you were a developer back then in 2013 or whatnot if you also wanted to build an application like Bitcoin you would similarly have to bootstrap your own valid data set launch your blockchain the way Bitcoin was launched or similar and yeah that's I mean even harder than you know reliably hosting a physical server in your own home for website hosting that's much worse even you had projects trying to do this like mastercoin Dogecoin some of them still live right uh but obviously this wasn't the end game here because it was way too expensive imagine if if you want to build your blockchain application imagine you have to bootstrap your own valid data set you have to generate your own token you have to inflate the token you have to pay them and you then still have to be sure that it's enough for there not to be 51% attack so basically impossible uh and from there we have ethereum yay East Denver right ethereum ethereum was huge because ethereum allowed people to deploy their applications not as blockchains not as valid data networks but as smart contracts right and very similar to Shared hosting providers go cities and dream host and so on ethereum was a great managed service for applications smart contracts um it gave them the shared security it gave them the global sort of of Network all out of the box high like basically infinite up time and some all great but it has It suffers from the same problems that the Shar hosting provider suffered from which is it it is very inflexible right like you have the evm you have solidity compilers and so on but you can't really do that much on ethereum in terms of a wide array of programming languages parallel execution what whatever you want to do you can't really do it on there right um so uh so yeah and and on top of that you're sharing ethereum with every other application out there so if if a dgen is doing like an Ico or nft drop suddenly your your application and your users have to pay huge gas fees or like they suffer from high congestion your application suffers and yeah it's it's basically not scalable and I think everybody agrees today if vitalic agrees CU he published the rollup Centric road map three years ago right so yeah the end game for web 3 scaling is virtual blockchains on roller as a service virtual blockchains are just rollups you can think of rollups as virtual blockchains they are blockchains within a blockchain they are blockchains that are holed offchain on centralized sequen like gelato but they are still sort of posting commitments uh and data to the real blockchain right so um yeah it's a bit like VMS uh where on web 2 like uh on AWS and so on where now a rollup as a service provider like gelato can host your application as a rollup not as a smart contract anymore it's now a rollup with smart contracts and uh you are in isolation you don't share this bandwidth with others you can spin up as many instances as you need and as you want we can all you know automate this for you even if it's all Autos scalable just like in the cloud and yeah you still have the benefits of ethereum you still have maximum security from ethereum and now you have maximum customizability as well because you can actually on a rollup modify the evm you can merge eips that you like that aren't live on mainnet yet you can take the svm like salana you can do whatever you want one on there and that's really equivalent now to to web 2 endgame and we're reaching this end game thanks to gelato now and web 3 as well so let's unpack gelato web3 Cloud a simplifies simplified version or model here is just to think of the base layer those are the rollup Frameworks op arbitrum polygon da layer Celestia I da whatnot right that's one part and then the second part is uh essential services just like on on AWS you have mongod Tob you have various Linux os's you have all sorts of apis like SQL databases whatnot similarly to that in web 3 you need a specific range of services to really make your application powerful and and scalable and yeah gelato has its own Suite of services that's what we known for for four years like two years ago at eth Denver we weren't talking about rollup as a service we were talking about smart contract automation serverless functions all of these things still exist and they benefit our rollup as a service clients today but yeah there's also many other partners that we are deeply integrated with and working with on rollup as service we have the graph we have gold sky for indexing block explorers ether scan block Scout bridging cross messaging layer zero across oracles P Redstone and so on right so that's sort of how you can think of it there's the chain and then there's the services you need to build and and like if you combine them you can build actual applications that aren't you know subpar to web 2 anymore they actually rival with web 2 so you can see how easy it is to deploy a a rollup with gelato you can just go to our UI you pick your stack Pick Your da layer yeah you can configure Services you need on Rams off Rams bam and then the rollup is deployed I'm going to skip forth a bit you can look at analytics you can can see what services are live on the rollup Bridges uh blah blah blah so yeah all right let's go go a bit more technical now still very high level but yeah the core blockchain design right this is what you're looking at here is essentially a rollup we have the execution layer the the modified version of the evm normally that's op G arbitrum polygon cdk whatever and then you have ethereum as a settlement layer and that's really crucial right that's the whole point of a rollup is you don't actually spin up a new blockchain with new assets on them you actually still have your assets in smart contracts on ethereum and you just upload them into your rollup for High throughput execution But ultimately if the rollup somehow uh is is you know uh has a fault you can still get your assets out on ethereum and ethereum is saving you in that case uh yeah and for data availability nowadays it's you know you can use uh ethereum but you can also use Celestia or others if you want to really save on gas cost and that that's really what you know gets you to zero gas rollups uh which is also the title of this talk as well right uh basically zero gas rollups mean rollups where you your users pay zero transaction costs and yeah let's let's expand from here so we still have the rollup stack as I will go through these charts with you you will see that we expanding from the inside out and we still have the rollup stack here but now we're adding scalable rpcs drpc for example is our partner right now so and block explorers uh and and the native bridge that lets you bridge assets from ethereum to your rollup in the most secure way known today via the rollup Bridge the cryptographic bridge or even a zero knowledge Bridge like in polygon cdk so yeah that's like the essential infra with the rollup call infra and and the sort of block Explorer and bridge that you sort of need and that's where most rollup as a service providers stop right uh it's pretty cool already but it's also pretty useless uh because there's a bunch of services that you really should consider using to build a fully fledged application that Rivals with the likes of web 2 and that's where gelato really shines as a rollup as a service provider because we're more than that we are not just a rollup as a service provider we are a web free cloud services provider and we are a web three Cloud platform that means you get the rollup as a service but you also for example get CH to functions the serverless environment you can liken this to a AWS Lambda right in the AWS architecture or and you get relay and so on right so you can now and and actually our rollup as a service customers are heavily using these services with their rollup and from day one for example when they launch the blockchain they can use functions and and data from Redstone or pith to immediately stream price feeds to the blockchain and have a fully functional defi application from day one like a perex or whatnot right and taking this a step further if you want to have the best ux on your UI you can use your out to relay now and have your users send transactions in an account abstracted way to your rollup so that they literally just sign in with Google they get I don't know wallet as a service keys and they just click buttons no more metamask popups no more tedious gas management just buttons and trading and and all the fun right all right and beyond that we have gold Sky graph and so on from day one on your rollup so that you have graphql indexing for your UI you can display data in a very nice way and and last but not least we have liquidity provider and cross chain message bridging on your rollup from day one so that you can also not just work with a very slow process of bridging e away from your rollup or I mean the native Bridge doesn't even allow you to go from other rollups to your rollup but liquidity providers like across and so on allow you to connect to the world of other rollups space optimism main ad you know you name it so that's like a full stack gelato rollup as a service application uh it could be used for a defi rollup if you want to build a perex it could be used for whatever else have you like a game but yeah let's take this one step further um because you still have to talk to other chains right like now you roll up is life it's super scalable your users just click buttons they're happy they don't pay any transaction fees but they still need to talk to other chains sometimes right like you still want to connect to other user bases from other chains and you know it's it's a very simple piece of the puzzle for asynchronous communication in web uh in the web we have HTTP and so on and and then in the blockchain world we have these cross chain messaging protocols like layer zero Conex and so on right that let you connect to other chains and move assets from your rollup to those chains or more importantly for you from other rollups to your rollup all right almost finished but let's take this to the absolute endgame there's a buzz word on here for those of you who are uh knowledgeable here in the in the rollup space which is shared sequencing so in the web 2 world if you really have you know massively scalable applications like I don't know World of Warcraft or whatever usually you have a ton of servers and you sort of segment your user base into regions right like maybe you're on the I don't know European server on the US server whatever it is and this way you can guarantee a high throughput for your users but if your user in the US on a server wants to play with a friend in Europe that doesn't work unless these two users or Gamers meet on the same server so you for that you would then migrate your your character your ingame assets and so on from one server to another it works and just like that in in in web 3 with cross Shain messaging you can also so sort of if you wanted to if you were building a game you could launch I don't know three rollups and sort of segment your user base and divide them amongst those three but if you want to have them operate interoperate synchronously with each other if you want the smart contracts on these rollups to talk synchronously with each other um then you need shared sequencing and just why do you even need this in the first place even if you have this hypers scale with your rollup with super GDA on on gelato so if you have crazy use cases these Technologies like op and so on even today they have certain throughput limits so at some point you need to scale horizontal just like you would on AWS you know your your server instances will eventually also need they will run out uh and you need more of them and you then need to load balance between them or or whatever like you know so so yeah uh similarly you could build like a massively scalable gaming application on gelato where you would deploy five rollups but you still want the game to be a single game experience everybody is on basically the same game and for that you need share sequencing and that basically just means that you have these different execution environments these different rups processing all of your gaming transactions but they all are synchronized amongst each other basically in a single block that is created by the sh sequence and there's projects out there trying to solve this problem today like espresso and and others and I think that's not reached yet that is not solved yet but I think end of this year this will also be solved to be honest if if you're at this stage it's it's a luxury problem you know uh normally in web 3 we don't even have that many users but at least now the technology is ready for it so if you're there you know uh you can be proud of yourself Kudos and we have we will have a solution with chat sequencing at the end of this year for you there as well all right all right so ethereum is not one huge World computer it's a web three of interconnected rollups on gelato and yeah if you want to come build with us to scale ethereum here you can see a bunch of applications that have been working with us in the last four years many of them are now middleware Services limit orders and so on like pancake swap Sushi swap synthetics optimism P Redstone all these great projects beefy Finance many of them have boo here today have been working with us for 4 years some of them are already deploying chains on our rollup as a service today or tomorrow and yeah basically it's just chill like if you if you want to build with gelato build on gelato you're going to be in good company we've been doing this stuff for four years we've been trusted uh in production with our technology for four years by the best protocols in the space and yeah we are we are more than ready to provide you not just with smart Contract middleware Services but also with your own block space so that you can scale and actually build a meaningful application where your users are not annoyed anymore and where users prefer that even to a web to counterpart so yeah uh thank you very much for coming to this talk uh you can find out more about gelato Network on X first time I said X and not Twitter so so yeah gelato Network and also good Pusher um that's me on Twitter uh just jump into our Discord we have many nice developer relation stuff many nice people that will help you get on board it help you integrate our services and yeah you know let's scale web three together thanks a [Applause] lot all right