Permissionless and Modular Interoperability | Jon Kol - Hyperlane

[Music] we're back at eth Denver it's another year and um what's different this year than last year specifically what we're going to be talking about today is the continued Evolution the expansion of the modular ecosystem this thing that this time last year was really just an idea today this time in 2024 is really starting to materialize and take shape so why are we here we're here you know the approximate reason for us being here today is because all of us find these internet computers pretty cool sorry my slides keep moving around don't know why um we think they can have a real Global impact and we think that they are the means to perhaps creating a new Financial substrate a new substrate for computation but by this time in 2024 we've seen the pitfalls of their inherent design and you know back to this question of why are we here well the approximate reason is yes we want to advance this thing we think it's cool we think it have a real impact but the bigger is is we're all here because we're trying to increase demand for these internet computers for these blockchains everyone here is probably spending most of their effort a lot of their life force in advancing demand for these systems in a way in an effort to try and make them achieve this Global impact that they can have so depending on the audience sometimes I go deeper into this we're not going to have to do that today but I love this visualization here from tick Street showing uh blockchain transactions as different buses and bus lines even before they created this I always thought that the bus line analogy is a really nice way to think about blockchains every blockchain is a bus line each block is a bus with a fixed amount of seats representing the the block size the gas allowance the Cadence of the uh of the buses coming in on that line being the block time but unlike buses which kind of take a fixed market price in a first come first serve basis our buses have similarly a fixed supply of seats but pricing not first come first serve rather determined by the market and we know what happens we know what happens whenever we're a little bit successful in our quest to increase demand we run into the same problem this problem that in a way is really counterproductive to our entire effort because we increase demand Supply stays the same now we run into the same issue each time the gas is too damn High the networks become unusable and we exact kind of shoot ourselves in the foot with respect to being able to scale this thing to a global impact so by now we have two general approaches for how to deal with this problem one is let's build bigger better faster buses the monolithic approach as some like to call it the other the modular approach let's create many many many more Bus Lines within each type of bus line let's enable more customization different types of buses different seats and what's that sading for us to um to create is the early Innings of this modular ecosystem and so where are we with this modular ecosystem well arguably no one's done more for this than Celestia not just through their technical work to create the first alternative data availability layer but also through the hard the hard-nosed work of ecosystem building which I can tell you as someone immersed in this every day might be just as challenging if not more challenging than the technical work of getting this type of thing to work but it's not just them it's a wide array of teams whether it's arbitrum and offchain Labs optimism and op Labs each creating their own rollup framework and orbit and the op stack respectively the different rollup providers and folks like Calera conduit aler and several others and just a whole host of uh different players that are working on these solutions that are advancing the modular ecosystem so I'd argue that the mar EOS system sort of had its a big band moment its Inception of the universe uh in Q4 of last year a culmination of events with Celestia's launch giving us the first live alternative data availability layer continued progression and maturation from uh the rollup frame Frameworks in orbit and the op stack and improving of the offering to become more robust from rollup providers again like the calderas and conduits of the world in the mix of different uh contributions by other players in this ecosystem all of this serving to make the act of creating a new rollup or chain increasingly easier so where are we today today I would say that we are past that big bang moment and entering the first expansion phase of this universe in the months since that big uh that big bang it occurred what have what's been happening as we've entered with phase we're seeing more rollups and more chains again driven by the lower costs uh to create those chains the increasing ability to do so we're seeing more customization and experimentation at each one of these where is this going to take us earlier or sorry coming up this year we're going to see additional launches for data availability layers with the likes of Avail end da coming online and as we continue with this trend we think as the modular system expands and evolves we're going to get Sovereign rollups in an expansion Beyond just the smart contract rollups we have today that are only tackling execution to also include settlement in that beyond that we're going to see Bonafide ecosystems building around these new rollups each with their own merits their own communities their own norms and so where do we get to uh beyond that beyond that phase I'd say that beyond that the the mere notion of a modular ecosystem in and of itself that's going to begin to fade kind of like if you've ever heard David Foster 's famous commencement speech where he talks about the two fish swimming in water and encountering an older fish who looks at them and says morning boys how's the water and the fish they keep on swimming and they look at each other and they go what the hell's water right as this continues as this expansion uh Builds on itself everything is going to be built in this way such that stating it talking about the modular ecosystem in specific terms is going to lose its meaning because it becomes so pervasive it's like the water that you're swimming in it's the thing that surrounds you so how do we get there well I'm here to tell you how we at hyperlane intend to pour gasoline on this uh budding modular fire that happens specifically how hyperlanes permissionless interoperability is going to be the thing that connects all all the moving Parts in this modular expansion so I've argued before may have had um if you've encountered some of our writing some of Celestia's writing that I think that talking about the modular stack without talking about interoperability is nonsensical we just went over how different um different efforts are making it increasingly easier and easier and easier to spin up a new rollup a new chain whether it's because the cost in dollars the cost in developer Cycles the cost in time keeps going to go down whatever it is we now have an increasing array of rollups and chains coming online but what we don't talk about enough especially when we talk about this notion of the modular stack is interoperability yes we're making it easier to create your own rollup yes you can get one done in 5 10 minutes but if it's it doesn't have interoperability if it can't connect to anything you're basically created an island in the middle of the ocean don't you want to have trade routes between it and the mland between it and other Island networks don't you want to have a path for economic activity of course you do so how is it that we don't talk about interoperability as being a part of this stack right again that's why I'd say it's nonsensical so interoperability changes that interoperability allows all of these things to connect but it's not enough in 2024 I it's not enough to Simply have some way to connect these you need a permissionless way to do it you need a way that has no gatekeeping that preserves the C The Core Concepts of crypto of permissionless and sovereignty you want to be able to connect without gate in on your terms however and whenever you want to and so that's what we believe here at hyperlane hyperlane was built specifically for this world of many many chains this world where there's not just a lot more chains they ex they come to Market at an increasing rate and so we basically ended up building it for the modular expansion before anyone even knew what those words meant today anyone in this room can deploy hyperlane to any chain they would like if you're feeling bold scan that QR code and what you'll find is a guide for how to use rcli to deploy hyperlane between two local networks if you're feeling extra bold you could scour the docks and easily find a guide for how to do this on a live network not just local networks I leave it to you whether you want to do it on a test net or a main net but have at it so if you don't already know about hyperlane let me tell you about hyperlane the one truly open framework for interoperability so here we have a little schematic of the architecture kind of going over it at a high level again due to time we're not going to go deep into the weeds here but we'll cover the basics probably the most interesting thing to know about hyperlane beyond the fact that it is permissionless beyond the fact that it uh changed how people think about security and interoperability which again we'll spend more time on soon once hyperlane is deployed on any chain it can be connected with any other chain and hyperlane security works in the outbound Direction so you you have a hyperlane deployment on say ethereum you have a security module observing that deployment then any message going out that is signed off on by that security module it can be think of it like a broadcast that broadcast can then be received by any other chain that has hyperlane in that sense the hyperlane mailbox function as both a broadcaster and receiver of enter chain messages so how do it work really a message is constructed by a sending contract often initiated by an end user and then sent through the mailbox a security module which in just a minute we'll cover that in more detail observes that mailbox and if everything looks kosher signs off on the message at that point it can be picked up by a relayer the relayer is a uh permissionless role can be ran by anyone does not play any role in the security purity of a message pure and simple a delivery guy one that can't meddle with the contents of your package so it sees that you sent something it sees that it's been sent signed off by at least one security module then it takes the necessary information from the security module takes the message and initiates a transaction on the destination chain interacting with that mailbox if everything checks out the signatures look look good that message is going to arrive on um our destination again anyone can run a relayer we're even working on uh features to let users relay their own transactions if you want if you took my challenge of scan in that QR code earlier and you're now fiddling around with the CLI very soon you'll be running a relayer yourself so what's unique about hyperlane that makes us so convinced that this is the right way perhaps the only way to connect this vast and accelerating modular expansion and do so at scale well it's this notion of modular security for modular chains so hyperlane does security differently historically and interoperability pretty much every protocol took this approach of we have a product on one hand the actual product from these protocols is the connectivity between chains the interface for sending information between two chains and then tightly couple that with the security mechanism often times enshrined directly in the protocol such that the two are tightly coupled and basically inextricably linked starting with hyperlane this was decoupled we felt there's no good reason to do this other than well it's just how it's been done people come to these protocols because of concern about security tightly couple those two things things why not we've been in crypto long enough right most of our teams going on year 5 6 7 and one thing you know is whenever you think you've just cracked the you know cracked things when it comes to security that you've just designed the state-ofthe-art and no one's going to be able to figure it out you're just a few months sometimes even less away from someone more clever with more time on their hands figuring out how to break that thing you wanted so enshrining a security model modu never made sense to us and we're glad that in the year since hyper Lane's launch we're now seeing other teams taking this modular security approach So at their core hyperlane security modules all they really are are rappers on some logic that expresses either a state attestation or a state proof you want to know how you want to know that you can read state from another chain and act on that state and you want to have something telling you why you should trust that state now whether it's you know you want to use some validators that you know and trust to secure your message trust their Authority go ahead you want to ask them to put up a stake and provide Economic Security whether it's your own or it's inherited through e through something through igen layer through something like a hyperlane AVS even better you want to use that ground breaking new ZK technology all of those can be expressed as hyperlane module now in the case of hyperlane an integrating developer always has the choice of which module to choose from you're defining how you send messages and how you receive them and when you define how you receive them you say hey I want to use the this module or this aggregate of modules or use this custom logic you know in crypto we generally use the same security regardless of the context of what you're doing transferring $10 transferring $10 million sending sending a governance message that will completely upgrade the protocol or you're just initiating a simple deposit everything goes the same why is that why should the same security protocol be enforced at all times irrespective of context if there's one thing Banks do right and no one dislikes Banks more than myself the one thing they might do right is this EX izing of context based security protocols they treat you differently when you want to withdraw 50 bucks and when you want to withdraw $50,000 and you want to close an account they're going to treat you very very differently so what does it mean for someone who's building with hyperlane before we get into these use cases any type of logic can be wrapped as long as it provides a state at the station as a state or a state proof as a module anyone can build a module and once they've done so any other developer that integrates hyperlane can benefit from that module so you can see how a real Network effect in the provisioning of security starts building around um these security modules in hyperlane so let's talk some use cases um I could do the thing where I could tell you hey you know you could do this with hyperlane you could do that and you can imagine but let's talk about what's already here because it's 2024 and it's um already a bit more advant a is using hyperlane for their interchain governance when the protocol sees a governance change uh emerge on the parent on ethereum it uses hyperlane to message that to a deployments on other chains alongside layer zero and ccip super form is providing access to yield in an interchange sense you deposit on one chain and can earn yield on a number of chains mitosis providing users with access to interchain liquidity so again in the interest of time I'll Rush a little bit but what's the endgame for something like hyperlane well we talked about how it's an open framework for interoperability it's not something that one team can build on its own and in fact to date it's already benefited greatly from external contributors hyperlane today is implemented and most robust on the evm but it's also live and in production with kmm and and with the svm the VM for salana it is about to go into production for the moov VM all three of those efforts were either taken to completion or initiated by external teams of contributors if you're interested and looking into this uh check out our bounties check out our repo and give it a look if you want if you're looking for your next job our most recent hire is someone who built a ZK module for hyper picking it off off the bounty board another is someone who joined us after winning several hackathons hacking with hyperlane hyperlane is absolutely open to any and all external contributions and those are what will help us get to that endgame where hyperlane can facilitate seamless interroll up interoperability can facilitate oneclick hosted deployments for those who don't want to deal with self-hosting and can really bring about a seamless interoperability and an expanding uh modular Universe where the number of chains just keep going on and Ticking up higher much like the US national debt so I hope you enjoyed this if you have any questions uh don't hesitate to reach out join our Discord follow us on Twitter send a DM either to myself or anybody else and uh happy to tell you more about