Hart Lambur I Cross Chain Intents with ERC-7683 I Across I Pragma Singapore 2024

[Music] all right next up I want to bring on Hart from across to tell you about how do we make intense and inoperability better so please give heart a big round of [Applause] applause all right guys how youall doing um GNA try to keep this exciting and interactive since you guys have uh had a bunch of bunch of talks um okay so I'm hard lamber I'm co-founder of across uh I have another protocol I worked on called Uma um that has left me knowing cartic and the eth global Community for many years now uh uma's best known for supporting uh poly Market prediction markets right now um coming out of that though we uh we built a cross too um and let's let's level set here so the problem that ethereum had in 2020 that uh it was expensive and didn't scale uh if you guys remember defi summer lots of fun usage crazy transaction fees crazy congestion didn't quite work uh everyone invested really hard in scaling ethereum and uh it worked um I don't know what your recent experience is and I think sometimes in ethereum we don't celebrate our successes enough um but post Denon just earlier this year L2 transaction fees are dirt cheap speeds are fast feels like salana feels like a web two like experience it's pretty amazing um and one like nerdy slide for uh the data nerds in the audience um we saw this in our data as a a cross chain uh Bridge or interupt solution which I'll get into um but the average transaction size of users bridging L2 to L2 dropped by 10x uh with Denon um so now people are bridging 50 bucks commonly between chains and they're doing that because it's cheap um we made ethereum cheap and scalable and people actually start using it so I feel like that's very bullish for for what we're trying to build um but we have this new problem now uh the new problem in 2024 is there are too many blockchains and the user experience for moving between them is absolutely horrendous so what does the ux for moving between uh for for using a cross chain application look like uh without intents uh I'm not even going to read this it's like go to dab website connect chain figure out which way to bridge go to the Bridge website connect Chain Bridge money from A to B wait wait a long time go back to the original tab switch wallet back to chain a use app um I sold this from Umar Roy who presented on this about a year ago year and a half ago and this takes like 10 minutes you got five tabs you've got three wallet connections on Two Chains it absolutely sucks this is never a way we are going to have a billion users use crypto uh it just isn't going to work so what do we want what we want cheap fast secure interrupt so seamless don't even know you're using blockchains users want to click buttons they want to click buttons and they want things to happen they want them to happen quickly they don't care about the other stuff um we do because we're nerdy Builders but they don't and so the spoiler alert yeah I'm biased this is what we're building but we can solve this with intents um and I don't have permission to play this file damn it I I wanted to do a demo of across here for you guys uh and I didn't think cark was going to let me use his computer to sign transactions so I recorded a little demo of what AC cross looks like you guys should all go do it if you're like on your phones and tired of listening to me go to across. two and go and bridge between a couple blockchains uh I just recorded a demo earlier we've moved 20 bucks cost less than 4 cents and it took all of one second to go from I think in my example it was optimism to arbitrum so we have the technology and I'll I'm going to go into how we do this um but we have the technology we have the ability to move assets between blockchains with an experience that is web to like um I probably shouldn't stay on this slide because it just looks broken but uh there's a cool demo go to across. two and you guys can check it out um there we go and what my demo was going to show was this example of using a cross in its own application but what we're working towards and what this intent narrative allows is you can build this into your dap itself so this is a gif of uh co- Finance which is integrated across uh to fund a D5 position from any chain and if you think about what's happening here they're just saying Co is saying here's the transaction I want to execute on uh this chain I I forget what example this is but here's the transaction I want to execute on arbitrum and I want to be able to pay for it from any chain I have funds and I mean honestly this is solving the ux problems okay but I'm going to run out of time because I want to tell you guys how this works uh so we'll transition away from the user experience which I think is so important to solve to talk about how how intense actually do their thing and how this differs from what I'm going to call traditional Bridges or traditional messaging okay interoperability I've got two blockchains how should I connect them default model that people think of is this should be like TCP IP it's like I have web servers and I plug them in with ethernet cables and they talk to each other using messaging makes sense for the internet my argument is it does not make sense for for blockchains um and here's my example okay so blockchain A to blockchain B send a message what are the problems here well in order for me to do this blockchain a I got to wait for finality or at least a sense of finality on blockchain a and then I got to wait to send a message and then I get to blockchain B and then I can do my thing and outside I'm going to go through why I think this is not the right security or cost structure but purely from a speed perspective you are screwed if you wait for this architecture you will never have a two-c like experience at least with chains like like ethereum and l2s that don't have a sense of uh of very quick finality so you'll just never have a user experience that works here so I I I think using this kind of traditional approach to send messages it's not gonna it's not going to give us the ux we need the solution is you simply stop sending messages uh you do this asset transfer without sending a message and the observation here that enables this is that tcip is about moving bytes it's about moving bespoke messages between servers blockchains are mostly about moving value moving funable money like eth from chain a to chain B maybe I want to execute code with that value on my destination chain I want to execute some transaction which intents support but the fact that we're all about just moving value means we can use this fungibility to solve this cross-chain ux problem if I'm moving money I simply do not care which money it is I just want dollars I don't care if it's that particular ethereum that doesn't even really make sense I just want one ethereum on my destination chain and this core observation is why uh we pushed on this intent design and why we think it works so well so what does bridging with intense looks like it looks like you don't send a message message you don't send a message at all at least initially um rather the user deposits on blockchain a their intent and their assets go into what's effectively an escrow contract excuse me their assets go into what's effectively an escro contract third parties third party solvers we sometimes call them relays are observing that intent and then they are competing to fill the user with their own money on the destination chain on blockchain B so what happens here is we've actually transferred the finality risk and the reor risk to these sophisticated third parties the solvers and they're going to compete and race to fill the user and if my demo worked you'd see that they can do this in like a second between blockchains um because they're able to price the finality risk and take it on and give the user an amazing experience uh once the user's filled the protocol then verifies that the intent did in fact get filled before releasing the esro user funds back back to the solver so that's the core architecture and you know maybe that's a lot but we'll we'll go through it and I'll tell you about some of the advantages here so tldr cross intense solvers fill users with their own Capital quickly and cheaply and then they get repaid later and in this there's no message that gets sent to fill the user the messaging is used later on to verify that the intent was filled and repay the solver okay so our structure here I like to think of this uh this architecture as having these three layers looks like a cake we're stealing this term cake from our friends at Frontier research so the intent layer user or application says here's what I want to do um mental model think of it like an order ticket the user saying I have asset a on chain X and I want asset B on chain Y and then they sign that message that's the intent um that intent then gets distributed to a solver Network that's going to race to compete it to compete to fill that and meanwhile the settlement layer is escrowing the user assets and only releasing them back to the solver after we verify that the intent is filled so that's that's our architecture there and this can be really really fast My Demo didn't work but we got data here so across for L2 to L2 transactions these numbers are actually going to be pretty small but our median fill time is 3 seconds um and there's room for us to get faster than that still but 3 seconds is like two orders of magnitude faster than our competition one to two orders magnitude faster and I think it's actually a qualification for the type of user experience we need um uh the other I have Stargate I like to battle with Stargate on Twitter um Stargate uh is this traditional Bridge Approach um and their their field times are more on the order of a minute or or three minutes depending on on the option you're picking and that's simply because they they they need to wait for finality and they need to wait to send a message different architecture um not as fast but the other advantage of this that I think is overlooked is security here too um so we should at least care about decentralization in our industry to some extent um and if you're trying to send a message very quickly in real time that's a very hard thing to do securely at least it's very hard to do that securely and cheaply so intense has this uh security property that's pretty nice because what we do is we separate the Urgent part of what the user urgently needs which is a fast fill we separate that from the complex part that's hard to keep secure which is verifying that the intent was filled correctly and in doing so we buy ourselves time so user gets their fast fill but then we can take all the time we we need to to verify that fill was in fact correctly filled and we can use the best messaging technique available to do that doesn't matter whether we use canonical Bridges which is the way a cross today is mostly built or we use ZK proofs we use optimistic systems we use uh ecosystem native interop like super chain native interop fits very nicely in here all sorts of advantages so they let us maximize security while not sacrificing the user experience and uh intense can be really cheap so one of the major advantages is that we were able to batch verify all of these uh these these intents and um if you think about that and I I'll go in more detail on the other slide messaging has a cost it has a cost from a gas perspective and it also has a cost where you have to pay your messaging provider something for security um so if we're able to compress thousands of intent transactions into one message we can an ize the cost of messaging over many many many transactions and so here's some other data uh again looking at across our our average cost uh on an L2 L2 transaction is 4 cents and there's room for that to go lower um some of the traditional Bridge approaches you know Stargates bus is six cents 5 cents 6 cents average cost this isn't exactly Apples to Apples because we got to look at trade size but the point is we're really cheap here too and so um going a little bit more deeply like kind of creating a theoretical model for where this cheapness comes from let's assume we're moving $50 million uh over 50,000 transactions uh and we're going to batch these together uh in a one-h hour period so our solvers in this network they're going to be lending $50 million for an hour which sounds like that might be expensive but then if you kind of do the math around this a 10% interest rate for one hour is uh on 50 million bucks is $500 that's the the total cost there and so we pay $500 in quote unquote interest that uh our solvers need to get compensated for um and we send a few messages to verify that cost us about $500 in total kind of security costs to verify those uh 50,000 transactions um meanwhile if you're sending 50,000 transactions and they cost you five cents to verify you're going to end up spending $2,500 in like a traditional approach um here's where I'm picking on Stargate so that's kind of our trade-off our theoretical argument as to why intents are in the long run actually cheaper still so um I'm actually doing okay on time here but um okay what are we doing with a cross so a cross is an intent-based architecture for interop uh we have a a settlement system that supports cross chain intents that really looks something like cross chain limit orders with some extra features like I can execute arbitrary code on the destination chain and we've been positioning across more as a platform to support intents from anyone that wants to build on this standard and with that um we actually introduced a standard so we co-authored ERC 7683 with our friends at Unis Swap this is a standard for cross-chain intents and what it's meant to do is help create a a common language for what uh an intent looks like so that we can have solvers that can fill intents specified in this common standard and our thought process here with our friends at Unis swap is that there's going to be lots of intent protocols that are competing but all of them want the deepest most liquid solver Network and so if we make it easier for solvers to support uh different types of intent protocols because they conform to a common standard uh it's positive some for everybody involved we are able to have deeper liquidity and a better user experience so that's what we did and um encourage you guys all to go check out uh ERC 7683 uh we have a website uh we this the standard is in draft mode uh we want feedback uh and our thought process here is again we're not looking we don't think that interoperability is going to be solved with vendor lockin or with one provider kind of being the gatekeeper uh of of this uh cross chain interop experience uh we do think that there is a need for standards here because there are going to be many approaches that are going to be complimentary to each other um and some other news so one of the things that uh I look at From ethereum's perspective we have these L2 ecosystems that are awesome in how they're innovating you have like optimism super chain innovating in one direction arbit from orbit uh the scroll folks we heard from Sandy earlier ZK sync polygon cdk they all got their own architecture going on and I think that's something that within ethereum we celebrate this diversity uh and this kind of push push for innovation in New Directions all of these ecosystems are also trying to make their own chains talk to each other better they're developing techniques for Native interop between them but if you then zoom out and you look at that from the perspective of a standard ethereum user you've got this like horrible user experience again where I don't know how to go between these ecosystems it's like ethereum is being splintered into W Gardens and so um our solution to this is actually using this intense standard as this lightweight uh simpl to reason about uh layer that connects these different ecosystems within ethereum and our friends at optimism um and amongst others we're close with all of the the rollup ecosystems they see the value in this too and they want to use this standard that we're pushing with Unis swap uh as the basis for super chain interop so they're going to have the same sort of super fast user experience between super chains powered by this intense standard that doesn't just allow you to move assets or inter do interoperable transactions between the super chain it also lets you go in and out of the super chain from arbitrum from polygon using the same uh architecture uh that we're promoting so we think that's pretty cool and pretty exciting um yeah and so on our road map we've been pushing really hard at being fast that's been our our push for the last year fast and cheap um we care more about speed than we do about cost right now because we really do think the user experience is what matters most and now that we're down to like two basis point like fees for user transactions there it's getting so cheap that's not the hurdle that's preventing um users uh from adopting uh web 3 daps the hurdle is ux and it's that user experience so our Focus now is bringing intense to more chains we're on 13 chains right now we've got 10 more in the pipeline some very big ones launching very soon and we're trying to get to the point where this intent architect Ure can be a day one architecture day one on every new uh L2 that launches um and that's it that's my presentation I'm Hal 2001 on uh Twitter and I uh yeah hit me up and we're happy to talk about the future of intense [Music]