Building a Unified Ethereum through Scaling - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2024

hello everyone good afternoon hope everyone's arriving okay today we're still missing a esteemed panelist Alex from ZK sync but we'll get started um today we have some exciting projects and Founders here everyone here is in a different building and token life cycle I would say right but we all have been in this space for quite some time so maybe to start off Sandy uh you guys just released Ager very recently but it's been uh since January so it's been quite some time share a little about that and also kind of where have you been up to from there uh the aggregation pie like like yes so um what we are seeing uh especially uh in the ethereum world and I think all of us like building in the ethereum space uh share the same uh kind of thought process that how this like trustless internet I call it web3 you call it web3 or trustless Internet how this trustless internet scales to the level of like the trustful internet that is today right how web3 scales to the level of web two and I think like most of us believe that you are we are we are going to see the the way we have application servers on the cloud you have application servers mobile app servers on the cloud people are going to have these app chains for individual applications and it will like my personal thesis is that eventually every single app whether you are a Unis swap or a or anything you will have your own chain people will say that you know you don't have composability if everybody is at is has their own chain the liquid is fragmented you don't have the composability smart contracts can't compose with each other and so so yes that's a fragmentation that's an issue and that's like aggregation layer is uh you know an answer to that so again the thesis is that they're going to be hundreds of thousands and you know overtime millions of chains the way you have millions of application servers today but they are all aggregated together via some protocol whether it's polygon's protocol or something else that's why we call it aggregation uh you know we call it aggregation thesis a lot of projects are already building on the aggregation thesis and the way you guys hear modular today in 6 to 8 months maybe maybe 12 months you're going to hear that much about aggregation it's going to be so much more about aggregation and so all of these chains even though they are fragmented but they will feel like a single chain to the user in terms of the user experience and in terms of the liquidity moving around and that's the thesis of aggregation layer that you have infinitely scaling internet and that's the goal of polygon like we don't care any middle stage care about any middle stage like having 10,000 transactions 50,000 transaction we don't care about that we want to build a platform which has million TPS th 100 million TPS ever increasing TPS basically but to the end user so how it is done is like it it is done with multiple multiple thousands of these hundreds of thousands of these chains being built but they all to the end user feel like one single chain the way we feel internet today is one single internet we just connect and we use the apps that we want looking to use that's yeah I love to dig a little deeper into that but I love to start with Sandy also to talk about scroll scroll's launched main net since last year I love to learn about what you guys been up to um and your focus there yeah um we launched mayet um about six or seven months ago and um what's been really interesting it's about kind of watching the stability and also the ecosystem development along with technical maturity um kind of reaching a wider audience like I think one of the insights from last year is that like research innovation has its own timing I think there was a lot of ZK research that happened like in the world like at a certain time and certain projects capture that opportunity and then there's like Market timing and then there's also technical product maturity timing and then there's also user awareness timing and then there's also timing for developers to understand these infrastructure Tools in order to build something new kind of timing each of these timing um in aimation plus like the crazy crypto cycle timing um has really interesting kind of chemical impacts on how the ecosystem evolves so I think it's been it's been an interesting Journey um watching different developers in the ecosystem evolved and how the technical um the tech stack evolved over the last couple of years and um and I think we will see a lot of um I'm hoping the industry the the the dev like learning about the infrastructure maturity process is going to accelerate over the next year and then we're going to see some very notable applications that could only exist on ZK so what's the most kind of top of Mind timing for you as you were referring to multiple different kinds of timing currently for squirrel yeah so for scir one of it is about how at what point are we confident about the stability and security of our chain obviously the longer time it runs without incidents the more confidence we build around like you know and and right now we're at a stage where we're confident enough to step up on our marketing and go to market efforts so um last couple of months has given us a lot of confidence around like the compatibility aspect and the liveness aspect and um and how many users we can kind of you know cater for and the using the city analogy it's like a it's a new city scroll is a new city but it's got very robust infrastructure it's got Plumbing it's got everything and even when the flood comes everything's still held together and so now we're ready to see the cloud a little bit and see what happens so um Renee C has been exploring the L2 kind of Journey for quite some time you've announced that you will be building on top of L2 since last year what's the journey been like and what should we be expecting are you guys going to be building your own L2 I'm curious yeah so um on Monday actually is our fouryear mainnet anniversary um and one thing that really hasn't changed is the focus on solving real world problems right so we uh we started with some pretty out there ideas which um now in 2024 are actually finally possible at really kind of mass adoption scale and you know some of the features that I think were for the longest time I think preventing really Mass adoption um of of kind of web three enabling some of these kind of use cases you know like low fees fast settlement right the ability to um use the stuff easily on mobile phones from a ux UI perspective um um you know just recently like last few months we've had usdc and uh us deployed on cell and users can use us as gas currencies right so I can send someone five usdt and they can without having to have you know cell or eth or some other token simply send that on to a friend right those are some small tweaks that uh are really kind of totally creating a very different user experience that I think makes this year really ready for seeing a lot more people coming in not just to um you know buy an nft or me coin but actually for this to become uh the fabric of their kind of financial life and ultimately economic life when it comes to yeah not just you know building Financial wealth but actually using as a way to get paid um and when tying that back to the L2 path right it's for us what's been really exciting is to kind of say Okay long term with ethereum scaling and a lot of smart teams some of them on the stage right working towards this kind of shared Vision it's very clear that that's kind of a architecture and it's going to bring long-term benefits even for uh a chain like C and so we were the first L2 uh sorry the first L1 uh that I I think remember you know that said okay we want to be in L2 and we're going to make that transition a lot has happened since a lot of new Innovations and we've been sort of making sure that we uh really understand what are the different trade-offs uh of each of the different approaches uh to ultimately optimize for maximum ethereum alignment and long-term resilience right because we have active users on the on the Chain there's 2 million people using Opera's mini pay wallet across Africa right we we don't want to mess with that right we want to uh make sure that this transition can bring additional benefits uh to uh to everyone building and using cell uh but but really from a from a user perspective that shouldn't even be something that a user has to think about right so it's kind of making sure that that transition also can be can be seamless uh so yeah to answer your question precisely we're um you know we've been pretty transparent sharing progress on our forum and uh you know we've the last sort of update from the the core team at cabs was that by the end of this month there's going to be some updates uh so yeah definitely uh for folks to stay tuned on how that's progressing yeah following up with that we're very excited and looking forward to the end of the year end of the month announcement looking you know out to five years sell looks back and look at the decision of what they chose as their L2 partner um I'm curious how would you know that you're successful or how did you know how would you measure that you chose the right partner and I love to hear from you and also how would you as to L2 providers to kind of think about that when you're talking to Partners yeah I mean like I think the this resilience element is is very important right ultimately um I think there's many really great approaches right but you don't want to go down a path that is going to kind of end up in a dead end right uh for for you EOS system right so you you really optimizing for uh whatever you're you're choosing to be a path that can uh be sort of long-term viable right and not uh create a situation that you are um yeah that's that's going to create some technical debt or other debt right and so that's kind of back to the ethereum alignment right which we are self experienced right early on we um actually cell started with a wallet that we built on top of ethereum and you know that at the time proof of work ethereum right like everything it didn't make sense for like micro payments or you know applications we were excited about so we for GU and made a made a couple changes which uh yeah ended up you know being things that required a lot more work kind of in terms of maintaining uh that compatibility and with the recent gingerbread hardw fork in September as the first step to this L2 transition we actually uh took some of those away right to enable uh that kind of clearer path to the L2 so in some ways that's that's an important factor and something that we've been looking at very carefully in this process like how do we balance some cool Innovations and stuff that you know we certainly see in the future for the broader ecosystem but also for us having something that you know gets us ideally to a launch sooner than later with a kind of uh you know kind of proven approach that doesn't create sort of debt that we may not even understand uh right now s you have thoughts yeah um when I think about the L2 space someone who's looking at it from a very very far away looks at a bunch of l2s but for someone who's very in the space I see all the l2s as having very very different DNA and very different missions so even though there are a number of l2s um there's only like cell is the only one that is like very focused on the developing World in terms of its Mission and serving like you know customers in Africa and having that real world mindset is just very unique and it comes from a place of like this is where we want to be and each team kind of has a has its own flavor and its own mission and there are teams that cares about building fun things and there are teams that cares about liquidity and there are teams that cares about like being fast and you know being cut Edge Tech and so on and so forth everyone has its own like standard of success and it wants to go to a different place so I think one observation is that I've not seen any general purpose L2 builders for the last year so I think polygon is a very technical oriented like general purpose L2 builder in for Z EVN and so are we but I've not seen any newc serious newcomers for quite a while and um and but there are multip multiple teams coming into the space all have different missions and they all have different things they want to achieve so I see a future where the tech providers will become like a a clust like you know a number of different standards that um providers like you know and and and then different goto Market teams and and and different founders with different missions will try and take bits and pieces of different standards or pick different kind of things and I think the picture of success is one where all the um like every L2 will find its Niche and find its own kind of Technology provider in a way that is sustainable for its own growth where they're in control of their own um where they're in control of their own governance and I think success also means you need to be in control of your own Keys you need to have like a sovereign setup and be able to kind of determine your own future in this kind of like in a in a technical Lego where you can piece things together so that that's the way um I I I see this yes and you have thoughts yeah uh that's a very interesting thought from Sandy uh that you know this the layer tws will differentiate based on the culture uh what they are or their missions I was actually going to answer that you know their success will not be dependent on which layer to they choose it will be defined by you know how they you know do their go-to market and everything because all the L two technologies are actually you know approaching a commodity uh commoditization phase right everything all the techn all the teams like you know uh I mean polygon has been like you know on the ZK side like doing a lot of stuff and all that but every techn everything is open source approaches are open source a lot of other projects are also like you know picking up those approach and what I have seen is that on the ZK technology like it's a matter of like you know maybe 12 months everybody will be at the same same Pace right and uh so differentiation based on the technology will not be that that well that's why I'm saying like you know maybe Sandy is uh you know bringing up uh this like you know it will be dependent on Mission and culture probably probably that but I I have also seen looking at the ecosystems like you know polygon has had a very big ecosystem for last like four five years and what I've seen is that the founders of for the projects which are dependent on let's say polygon for providing help and for their success are generally not that successful the projects which are successful we don't even know about them right like they they building on polygon like they they the founders they figure out their own path and and do their own stuff so that's why like you know the I think even now I'm seeing like the the the the success of the partners who are on a particular L2 barring let's say one or two like let's say base for optimism like you know there's a very close uh partnership over there but apart from that like I'm seeing like whatever success those projects have it's dependent on their own like how they do like a general startup for an L2 I think technology wise everything will be commoditized maybe the culture and Mission and DNA would be good I have one more thing and which just like you know we've all been through the last cycle right and back then you know it was like this would have been a panel about like you know L1 Wars and like what's happening right and back then is actually it was much more of like as a builder right whatever L1 you picked you know could determine your fate right if you B on an L1 that's not going to be around in two three years right that could be kind of you know that could be the end for your project right unless you you jump off early enough now with I think the the opportunity with kind of um l2s and sort of the especially ethereum l2s right and kind of looking at sort of this shared road map of you know really scaling ethereum uh that's actually really a great thing happening for developers right because you whatever you're building right you can you can start somewhere but you know whether you're building say you're building a wallet or a dab right you you end up tapping into not just the Brain Trust but also from a whether it's liquidity right or whether it's other applications or components that you need you you're not as sort of siloed as you were you know three four years ago when when you would have to make this decision so I think net net this is really a positive and ultimately I think there's this kind of initial phase of yeah some fragmentation just based on people trying different approaches to get to the the goal but long term I I do really see that kind of unified kind of broader ecosystem right where ultimately who wins are the developers and with that they're users right of the products they're building and so from a cell perspective I see us hopefully just playing a role accelerating that even by you know with what we've been learning right kind of sharing that I mean the reason we're doing that is not to like you know like I don't know like not we're not hoping to get much imper fromit but we we feel like there's going to be others that are going to look at that right and it's going to just help move everyone forward that's making a similar decision or wants to just get smart on all everything that's happening damn it like looking at or hearing uh Rene's answer that should have been my answer like you know that I should have shied aay for that like you know because but he's saying like maybe choose choice of right L2 will be defined by how these uh sharable uh you know things like liquidity and developers and all that which ecosystem provides a more fluid system so that they can benefit from whatever is happening on the whole ecosystem so that's why probably aggregation layer I should have shielded more on that thanks R uh by the way welcome Alex from ZK sync um I I think following up that point um San um what are the kind of top two and you talk about liquidity as one of the top priorities that projects are looking for um I think originally my coming into this panel I really had a lot of concerns for ethereum especially given how many l2s we have in the space versus what you've seen in salana for example um uh I mean they are be maybe l2s and there'll probably be other kind of modularity built on salana as well but the point here for ethereum is that we have a lot of different l2s running in parallel trajectories and the question for me and the concern for me was how do we actually eventually build a UniFi experience for the individual the end user end developer whatever have you um and I think now from what R was saying it it felt like you know reaking chair security is actually one example of a UniFi experience that we're trying to provide for the end user right and I'm curious you know do you think that we have become more Unified as a space ethereum and for ethereum or do you think there are things more things that we can do to push further in this along this line I think we like the user experience if it's better if it's more unified and better that's obviously that we need but I don't think like we should be unified in all our approaches and everything that's not that the Divergent approaches and having multiple of these layer tools doing different different kind of Technologies and experimenting on it is a feature it's not a bug if you like I highly recommend everyone to read this on Wikipedia protocol Wars and see how Internet was developed like internet was not developed like somebody just came up and said that okay this is tcpip and this is the final standard like there were multiple competing standards then it became like one main standard and then on top of that multiple competing standards eventually one or two like survived or you know few of them survived in different different domains uh different different protocols I'm saying so you know that's a feature I'm not worried about like you know in crypto we need we tend to be extremely short-term because these markets move the prices move in in the matter of 6 months these Protocols are developed on a scale of like 10 to 15 years 20 years right and you know I'm absolutely not worried about ethereum's you know future in that sense I am like only thinking these different different approaches at the end now like all everyone in our ethereum ecosystem we all now recognize that okay user experience is becoming probably a little bit more fragmented everybody is now trying to work in you know and try to find like compatibilities for the end users and you will see like maybe in 12 18 months that will not be a problem something else will be a problem we'll keep solving those problems scale was a problem now scale is no longer a problem block space is no longer a problem now ux is a problem we will solve it in 12 18 months then something else and eventually this becomes the trustless internet yeah y any thoughts Andy or Alex yeah um I think ux probably is becoming prominent but for certain Alto experimentations um that focuses more on liquidity on on yield aggregation this is slightly kind of less urgent but there's an increasing number of people who thinks onboarding new users and getting net new kind of users onto the ethereum ecosystem is becoming like a critical issue and then the the the fragmentation of various standards is becoming like a blocker and um so I think when when when we we issued our our our blog about like a key store solution to somewhat resolve the onboarding problem so many different teams reached out to collaborate and I'm sure there'll be more experimentation and collaboration along this way where you know chains can have their different stacks and and and and different like parts of the stack but the user experience needs to be more um more simplified and then there needs to be um a way where a net new user can find their fitting within the ecosystem so we're making a lot of pushes on on that front yeah Alex uh I I I think that today our problem is not so much the fragmentation of user experience as the lack of create user experience in the first place this is the problem we should be all solving and I think the the um great thing about ethereum is this permissionless Innovation that we are like the liquidity is connected between all the l2s on ethereum even if it's not native even it's not convenient for the users it's convenient for the actors behind the scenes for the arbitragers for whoever liquidity providers who move liquidity and so gives us a lot of space to experiment and come up with user experience which is great and then something will crystallize that has capability to on board the next 1 billion users and I'm pretty sure we quickly propagate throughout the uh the entire space yeah Alex why I have you there I had everyone kind of share a bit of an update their project I love to hear about more about ZK sync and what you guys have been up to um sure so well at zyyn we are uh in uh the space of scaling ethereum with zero knowledge proofs uh I'm sure you you discussed it before uh me so like we we all understand that Zer knowledge proofs is the ZK is the end game for scaling because it's the only way to scale verifiable computation in a way that does not compromise on the important properties of of the protocols and we we've been working on this for six years now we're very uh Mission driven very focused on on on preserving the the original values there with with technology and we're very excited about the growth of the ecosystem right now like we have um you know I don't know if we we spoke about that but it's quite obvious that the uh scaling the ethereum is not a uh a single chain or it's not going to be a collection of a few Chains It's going to be many potentially thousands of of different chains that are all interconnected and uh we see some ecosystems emerging that have this property and ZK syn is one of them and we we have a number of really interesting ZK change Zig chains launching in this EOS system recently so uh this is one thing I'm really excited about and the other thing is decentralization of the protocol and thinking about the future where the community takes over and the prod is um standing on its own with ultimate resilience that comes with this community layer so I want yeah go ahead just a quick reaction to what you you said before on um The Challenge being the ux UI I think I think you're you're right on that I think we've like this it does feel like we we kind of have these waves where we have like massive infrastructure Innovation right and then sort of application Innovation kind of comes as a as a result of that and then app developers realize oh there's a bunch of stuff that's still not working and so there's that triggers the next wave of you know Innovation I think Chris Dixon wrote a post about this a while back but I think this is kind of very true right now right with like a lot of the infrastructure that's been built in these past few years now is like an amazing point in time to build applications again right and like I hope everyone in this room is like or most people in this room are looking at this right there's so much that's possible which sometimes like crypto Twitter is like oh yeah but we still can't do this because like fees are too high or like there's this you know like problem of moving assets or liquidity is not there what like you know actually like there are Technical Solutions to most of those critiques now and it really shouldn't be an excuse anymore to not build amazing apps right and so I I'd love to see the number of people that buil applications like 10x in this cycle um and hopefully it's not all everybody just kind of doing meme coins but actually building great applications because that's really I think we are at the point where there's so much more that can be done and for regular users right there are experiences I'm seeing in our ecosystem whether that's mini pay I mention or whether that's things like you know what talent protocol is doing in others where the experience is very close to a web two experience right so someone using like I don't know like WhatsApp on their phone or Tik Tok you know or like a web3 app you know it's it's it's not as kind of different as used to be a few years ago where you're like oh yeah for this you kind of like have to have your kind of web stre friend spend the weekend with you and get you set up but no the stuff now is much more accessible but we don't have like you know just tons of people experimenting and trying to build cool stuff right like even at hackathons people are are are still building some of the the same stuff they were trying to build three four years ago so I'm I'm really hoping for like a wave of applications um anyway a little rant I agree and I think right now I'm currently seeing more folks building l2s than applications and I like to see that change maybe it's just from my perspective I think from also in addition I'm seeing also a lot of projects even existing L2 space right like existing you know ogs at this point um some folks are now you know proposing the the launch of l3s and then some folks are even building into Bitcoin right like we're seeing a gamut of like what everyone's building towards to acquire users and I think that's there's a diversity and variation in the opinion of how do we get to the end user um I know polygon just launched uh uh the okx chain with okx right which is very exciting um I love to just get your thoughts on you know the general space of what l2s are building for and like you know these peers who are building in different directions yeah that that makes sense I didn't get the question yeah um I think my primary question is like what do you think about the folks build like into l3s right what do you think about l3s what do you think about like even l2's existing in ethereum building for a Bitcoin uhhuh like l2's building on bit Bitcoin yeah um like taking a little bit step back from that like you know this is basically the market whenever we see these short-term Trends in the market I'm not saying Bitcoin l2s are a shortterm but first like I'm saying all of these short-term Trends are basically the markets because like Sandy you know articulated beautifully that this speculation and markets run much faster than the product Cycles products take time to catch up like layer tws take time to catch up and right now when you say like you know you have more layer to chains than the applications right now right it is re the reason is that because like you know having an L2 chain brings speculation to your coin or token and all that you see like before that we had a meme coin like having the L2 label bring it's all Bitcoin l2s also it started with like a like you know Bitcoin l2s as a narrative that you know Bitcoin l2s are going to be and some coins started doing well and then everybody wants to launch Bitcoin l2s because they want people to speculate on them uh but the actual Bitcoin L2 development that is going to take time there are some legit like now at least I know two three legit projects who are doing or who are trying to scale Bitcoin where there is like you know legit uh methodology using like especially where the ZK has you know reached now having snar proofs and having some sort of like optimistic games on bitcoin script you can have some sort of fair enough guarantees and a optimistic rollup kind of uh situation on bitcoin and you know because it will bring a lot lot of speculation people will build it and you know good part of the speculation is a lot of money comes in lot of brain power comes in into this Talent comes in in and then you know eventually you get good things coming out um so that's the same thing with the with the layer tws like ethereum layer tws like again I want to say that you know the market Cycles are running too fast and everyone is like last 6 months the markets everything is all T ones are going up and ethereum ecosystem is not going that much up ethereum is not going up everybody's like oh ethereum has this problem that problem but I think like you know those are those are features not bugs like you know as Alex also said the biggest power of ethereum's ecosystem is the permissionless Innovation that's why projects like us like projects like you know scroll uh ZK sync and now even cello who have multibillion sell a multi-billion dollar protocol and then they are now moving to the layer two because they see they think that they can build and innovate over there and build value for their communities also right this is probably less possible in many other uh ecosystems and it is it is a feature don't believe this Market Cycles you you know layer to Innovation and all these problems that we have that UI ux and all that like people don't even realize like the kind of products that are being built to solve ux issues on the layer TOS like you know things like from the uh you know open uh you know authentication like previe pwas all those things people are working on multiple things like that uh gasless transactions and so many other things um you know these problems will be solved eventually so yeah I'm super bullish on l2s as you can see yep y y s any thoughts on l3s I guess Bitcoin l2s even but I think just curious um l3s yeah I think the um I think most people building on l3s need to understand their their user needs to Strictly Come From the L2 so the there there is a ux tradeoff in being an L3 as opposed to a parallel inance if an L2 but on the other hand I think I think we need we're hoping to see more ambitious experimentation with how the L3 setup could benefit the end user experience um like L3 is that focuses on very very specific features whether it's like optimizing for Speed or throughput or optimizing for like usability um we would love to see more of that I think so far uh L3 has been like a very like interesting narrative and it's good for kind of differentiating your application which would otherwise exist very well as just an app or just as another L2 um but I think that I I think those teams are working on ambitious and differentiated L3 designs are are coming I hear you any thoughts Renee Alex I'll leave my time to Alex um I the question is about l3s versus l2s and and sorry it's about l3s and l2s right yeah yeah just your dos if you have any yeah I think that the uh distinctions are are getting like very technical where we should not be like I mean from the perspective of developers and users at least the way it's architected in the zync ecosystem it doesn't really matter which like how you settle your proofs or how you settle your uh your state together and what with order ultimately there are just Sovereign chains that are fully interoperable with each with each other it doesn't really matter if you're L2 L3 or L4 the the notion doesn't exist in in our ecosystem and so like if you have to explain why you L2 or L3 then probably we need to work a little better on abstracting the interfaces and abstracting the user experience the users should not care they should like and we need to cooperate on the standards on the um addication and and like interrup uh functionality so that for the users they just like do one click and transaction happens between any point of the ecosystem with any other point so that's that's our perspective yeah I think said related to that before that we might get there in terms of the UniFi user experience in six to 12 month do you think that's the case for like all darium yeah but like l3s I just missed that answer that you know L3 uh I think like all the l3s currently they are mostly Sandy said like for differentiation I would say differentiation so that they can invite more speculation otherwise I don't see much use of l3s especially when these aggregation Technologies and and these things are coming in where your proving cost and everything is going to get amortized anyways so it's Absol like you know you don't you don't really have a benefit of having a layer three like layer 2's launching their more more on their layer 3es to expand their block space so that they want to keep the users in their value acral value ecosystem probably but otherwise I for me like I I don't see I've not seen many compelling uh real uh reasons for being an L3 yeah I think we're out of time but let's give it a round of applause for our awesome guests thank you so much panelists thank you okay