Ali Serag & b z I Building Cross VM Apps With Flow Foundation I ETHGlobal Taipei 2025

[Music] How are you all doing today? Um, my name is Alli Suririch and this is my colleague Bezy. We are both Devrell leads for the Flow Foundation. I have a question for you guys and I want you to shout it out. If not, I'm probably going to walk over to you.

I'm not like the other speakers hiding behind a pedestal, you know. So, so be brave. What what is the one thing that kind of kicked off everything that we're seeing today about the conversations of, you know, L2s and scalability? Something that really like started the conversations of, hey, maybe we need more scalable solutions for EVM or Ethereum and we need to to look at new architectural or or consensus mechanisms. Can anyone think of any particular event that that comes to mind that kind of kickstarted all those conversations?

Cryptokitties. I heard a bunch of different things. The the cats. Crypto cats. Okay.

It all started with these, right? If you don't know the story behind this inconspicuous cute looking little guy, one day there was a group of developers that came together and they were wondering what could we do with web 3 that could make it more engaging, more exciting. How could we push the boundaries even further? And they came up with an ingenious type of game where you would have these genetic codes. You could create new NFTTS by breeding two different cryptokitties together and then it would create a new one that you could collect, you could share um and you could grow.

All of a sudden, guess what happened? Same thing. It's like as a species, we never seem to learn. It was the exact same thing that happened when we put cats on the internet. They exploded.

Of course they did. All of a sudden, one, two, ten thousands, hundreds of thousands of these cats ended up breeding on the blockchain. And people were like, "Who the heck are these cat people?" All of a sudden, the price for gas on Ethereum 1x, 2x, 3x, 5x, 30% of all the traffic on the network were these guys, right? People were like, "Who are these cat people?

Why are they breeding these cats? Why are they ruining it for the rest of us? We want to do our DeFi strategies. want to trade like what what the heck's going on, right? Why am I talking to you guys about cats?

Well, the story of these crypto kitties are intrinsically tied to the story of Flow. It was the team behind CryptoKitties and like Dapper Labs that really got together when the scalability issue first arose and were like, "Hey, we need to do something that solves this. We need to create something that is by developers and for developers that is able to truly scale. And that's where Flow came about. It's a layer one blockchain that is built for consumer apps and scaling to billions of users.

Does anyone know of any applications off the top of your head that might have been built on Flow? Any popular any basketball fans here? Just shout it out. Just shout it. Topshot.

So NBA Top Shot was one of the first massive applications that millions of everyday people who are fans of basketball, they were like, "Holy hobbit, I can start collecting not only regular cat images, all of a sudden video clips or moments in in in NBA history of your favorite player like maybe Stephen Curry doing a slam dunk at one specific moment. All of a sudden, they were able to collect these digital assets and millions of people used it. Like it it proved that there was an exciting revenue model that was resistant to the hype cycles of web 3 where you know you have a bull market, everything has product market fit. There's people running over each other to use it. You have a bare market, it's crickets no matter if you're solving world like hunger, right?

Um so yeah, that was one of the first applications launched on Flow and it has a very unique multi-roll node architecture. So what what the heck does that mean? On EVM and on on Ethereum, you have nodes that are responsible for essentially all the same tasks. Imagine like an army of clones. Each of them are doing the exact same work.

Or imagine a car factory. You have a thousand people lined up. Each one of them is responsible for assembling the entire car, the wheels, the engine, like the chairs, etc. Right? And on flow just to oversimplify things we kind of introduced a Ford assembly line where we have like several different types of hyper specialized nodes.

One node is only responsible for for accessing information. Another is only responsible for transaction verification so on so forth. What that unlocked for want of a lack of jargon is horizontal scalability without sharding. To put that in everyday people's terms, when that first application that launched on Flow, Topsh Shot, went live, it had more transactions than the entire Ethereum network. It proved that there was a way technologically to create a blockchain where single applications could scale to the level of entire networks.

And after that, many more consumer applications started launching like the NFL, um, Ticket Master. If you've ever went to New York, went to watch a Lion King musical, you probably use Ticket Master, right? It's it's one of the largest ticketing platforms in the world. And a lot of people don't realize this, but it's also one of the largest NFT platforms. Over 60 million NFTs have been minted.

Every time you go to one of these events, it's minted as an NFT that you could integrate into applications on the flow network to token gate experiences and build all sorts of cool applications on top of. Similarly, Disney launched Disney Pinnacle with with Star Wars characters and Disney princesses. And of course, if you have Disney princesses, you need Barbie. So, Mattel also launched a bunch of cool digital collectibles. And I'm I'm naming some of the big ones, but I really want to emphasize that like, you know, FL has been focused on consumer applications at every level.

We have thousands of of uh DeFi protocols, AI agents, um NFT projects, so on so forth. But what we're really pushing for is how do you make experiences that everyday people can use to really unlock the value of web 3. The millions of users of Topsh Shot, NFL, All Day, Disney, like Ticket Master, they don't even know that those applications are running on a blockchain because we put so much work to make it so easy to build apps that abstract away all of those complexities. So, one very unique thing about Flow is we're one blockchain with two virtual machines. Cadence and EVM.

So, what that means is we we really just became EVM equivalent last year. If you're a builder and you haven't really heard about Flow, but you might have heard about NBA Top Shot or or NFL All Day or Disney Pinnacle, it's likely because you know you heard about Flow before we became EVM. The reality of the situation is you got to meet builders where they're at. If you learned about development by watching Patrick Collins 40hour videos or you were playing around with cryptozombies and you launched your first forkinstein project in EVM, you probably are used to forkensteining things and you don't want to relearn an entire new language and stack and like virtual machine, right? You want to be able to get up and running like that.

So really that was an effort to meet developers where they're at. Some of the benefits of being able to support EVM is, you know, familiar tooling. You could use Alchemy, Hard Hat, Remix, everything that you care about and are used to. You don't need to learn any of the new frameworks. You can use Solidity.

You don't have to learn a new language. And you could leverage a wealth of audited smart contracts. There's a website called wreck.news where there is thousands of projects. Like every day there's new projects that are are being listed of of wrecked projects where people lose hundreds of billions of dollars, right?

You don't want one of your projects to be those. So using those audited existing smart contracts is a cheap and efficient way to fork and style and mix and match things that you know you're not going to regret later. Although stats do say that a lot of exploits happen to happen on already audited code. So that's a whole other conversation on cadence. There's a lot of exciting things.

So one of them is the idea of smart transactions. So how many people here are hardcore or consider themselves hardcore devs? So, I'd love you to see you guys raise your hands or our our devs in general. All right. All right.

We have some. All right. I'm going to ask you guys some questions. So, if I wanted to create an application that Okay. What is one of the biggest usability problems in web 3?

I'll put it that way. Yeah. Yeah. User experience. Like, could you name a couple?

Signing wallets. Okay. Um I'll give a little bit of a tangent of a story. Imagine your friend one day says like, "Hey, there's an awesome game. You got to check it out."

Your friends or you don't know anything about Web 3. First thing you see is Connect Wallet. What the hell is that? Is that sign in? I click on it.

Now I have to download some weird plugin online. Now I have to memorize like a bunch of keywords. But don't don't save it on your computer because you could lose money that you don't have already. So now you're getting a little bit paranoid. You eventually set up like this wallet.

You set up all this stuff. You log into the app. The first thing you do as a transaction, what are you going to run into? gas. What is this magic internet like tax thing?

All right, where would I go to get tax? I'll probably like this magical tax thing that I don't really understand. I'll probably ask a friend or I'll probably go to a centralized like exchange or an on-ramp. If you're from a country like me in Canada, you literally will get on a call for the next four hours with a fraud department trying to convince them that you're not being scammed, right? That's not a good UX.

That's that that user experience is hellish, right? So on flow we have smart con transactions that allow you to do things like sponsor transactions without the need for pay masters. It's built into the transaction model. It separates the roles between the signer, the payer and the proposer. So this gentleman could be the maybe his application is the one paying for every transaction that happens on flow and authorizes it and I'm just the user.

I just propose it. So I don't have to click authorize or approve every single time I'm making a move in a game. And I also don't even know that like gas exists because they're sponsoring and gas fees on Flow are ultra affordable. For less than a dollar, you could sponsor more than 20,000 transactions, right? So it's it's very affordable to do cool things like that.

There's also transaction pre and post conditions that you could do to create things like really next generation adaptive yield farming strategies. And we allow for bundled transactions without the need for account abstraction standards or or proposals like 4337 and 7702. Um in addition to that there is like you can essentially access verifiable random values without oracles directly in solidity through pre-ompiled smart contracts that that access cadence. So if you wanted to do that elsewhere oftent times what you do is go to like I don't know chain link and use an oracle. This allows you in one line of code literally within half a minute to get a random value to use in your game or your application etc.

Um and then also we have something called capabilities which are like fine grained permissions. This is like AWS im for crypto or for for web 3 development. This is super exciting for a lot of different reasons. It's super exciting even for for AI agents as we delegate more and more responsibilities to these agents as they take on more and more important roles in our work whether it's book like using MCP booking airplane tickets for you managing your future wealth etc. You want to make sure that you're able to put safeguards in place that allow it to only interact with specific functions in a contract or only allow specific accounts to withdraw or coordinate accounts.

In addition to that, there's other things like account linking which allow if an agent goes offline, you're still able to recover all the funds and like almost like Google Drive folders decide who has permissions to which accounts, right? Very, very exciting stuff. Um, what we're going to focus on right now is an exciting demo that my friend BZ is going to um walk us through that's going to show one of these. We're going to focus on bundled transactions. And again, this is super exciting.

You're able to essentially bundle hundreds of transactions together into one approval. If one of them fails, the entire transaction can revert. Imagine you're in a game like World of Warcraft and you're trading a bunch of assets. You could literally instead of trading like one piece of armor for one gem, you could have a hundred of like item X, Y, and Z trade for another item in one transaction. You could use this one.

Okay, I'll use this. Hey everyone, PC here. Um, yeah, let's go to the demo. So basically some of the things you can do as when you create a crossVM app is that you can create um do batch transactions and as you see in this repo if you go to sources and goes to the the page basically what we have done is that we have combined our FCL flow client library and Wagmei to ensure that you actually don't need to know how to write Kate and smart contract code. So basically if you already know how to do solidity as a EVM builder, you can call multiple transactions in a single transaction through crossVM.

As you see here in the code, we have EVM batch calls and there we're calling um two functions deposit to wrap flow um into rap flow and the second is approve. If you were to run this app um here's a deployment versus app. It would look like this like the UX. Um just for example, right? Um let me See if I can find my low wallet.

Well, I have so many. Yeah. Okay, I'll just create a new one. So, So I installed the w the wallet extension creating a new wallet. We call it flow.

Yeah. Yeah, you can do that. And one one exciting thing about the flow wallet application on flow is it it has an amazing user experience. So if you're going to flow as a brand new user, it actually sponsors every interaction and transaction you use across the ecosystem. If you're going to launch a memecoin on pump flow, the premier token launcher like in our ecosystem, literally you can go create the token, launch it without paying any fees whatsoever in in gas, right?

It's a crazy user experience where we focus at the wallet level to sponsor and it's only possible because the gas fees are super super super low and ultra affordable onflow. One one Zultan technical genius Well, it seems like we have some yeah uh issues with connecting with the flow wallet unfortunately. Um but basically what it would demo is that it's going to like show how you can like run Yeah. switch sections. Yeah.

It's a Yeah. We don't have a main version that works. Yeah. So I guess for for now for now for for this case uh since we can't like really show it um we should we just like show the Yeah. deploying a smart contract EVM.

Yeah. Murphy's law. You know, I I always believe that if you wait until the last minute to do something, it'll only ever take one minute to do it. That's that's what a dear friend once told me, but sometimes uh yeah, that doesn't really work for me. Cool.

So, we'll just like show how you can like normally deploy a smart contract on Flow EVM. Um because it basically just works as like any EVM chain. Okay, you get your made mask wallet. You write your password and then you get flowm network. And now we see that full test net is added.

You go to remix Are we about at time? Okay. Yeah, we're a bit at time. But like to to add flow um to your, you know, your your stack and deploy a contract, it's literally as easy as deploying on any like um EVM L2. It literally takes a couple minutes to set up.

the the main point I wanted to get across today like beyond beyond this like small demo was that the future very much is crossVM and like different virtual machines are able to do very different things um on flow it is very possible to do something we call EVM++ and that means in your EVM application with your solidity code you're able to access a lot of really powerful functionality whether it's the VRF whether it's batch transactions whether it's sponsored transactions without having to learn a completely new stack without having to learn a completely new language from scratch like doing things that you're very much familiar with. If there's one thing I want you to take away from today, it's this. CryptoKitties was a smart contract project that literally changed the entire industry. Very few people know this, but the CryptoKitties contract was actually launched at an ETH global hackathon in ETH Waterlue. what you're building over the next couple of days.

You might see it as like, okay, it's just a side project. I'm going to play around with MCP, like AI agents. I'm going to test some really cool new stuff. But I I really want you to keep in the back of your mind that if you're trying to do something that creates an amazing experience for people or that solves an genuine problem, this application that you work on for two and a half days not only can impact millions of people, it could change the entire industry. Thank you very much.

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