Scaling Ethereum for Global Adoption with L2 Panel

hello all right I have a microphone amazing hello Eve Denver there's a ton of people if you want to squeeze towards the center we can make more space it doesn't have to be standing room only I know it's a really exciting panel that everyone wants to be at but if you all take a seat we're gonna get started thank you so much for joining us for the panel on how l2s are scaling ethereum to achieve Global adoption this with the recent launch of base on top of op stack from optimism is a super timely panel so we're gonna have an awesome conversation today um my name is Molly McKinley I lead engineering and research at protocol labs and I'm really honored to be moderating today's panel I'm going to start by letting each of our panelists introduce themselves just give a quick name organization and then we'll jump into things and get started go for it thanks Molly my name is Eva Bayland director of the graph Foundation really excited to be here well my name is Liam horn I'm the CEO of op Labs been working on scaling for half a decade yeah go ethereum Jesse Pollock uh leading base uh hey I'm stani the founder and CEO of oven and we're a team that built the the RV protocol and and uh lens protocol as well all right to get us started I'd love each of you to give us your one sentence prediction about how you see chain scalability and adoption evolving in the next two to three years uh one sentence I would say uh ux so the user doesn't know that they're bridging between chains I think the one sentence a prediction is that projects with large distribution bases are going to be finally able to get those user bases platformed on ethereum in an affordable way that's customized to their user base uh in the next uh definitely this year and then a lot more of the next coming years one sends a million Builders and a billion users coming on chain I would expect some uh permissionless Innovation on EVMS that leads us to scale a bit more we brought some audacious Visions here um so Jesse I'm curious with that one billion Builders and 1 billion users how are how are we going to get there what are some of the main things that have changed in the past year that put us on the cusp of that sort of adoption yeah I think we've been for the last 10 years of crypto kind of waiting for the moment where we're going to be able to actually make crypto work for everyone and in the last I'd say one to two years as we've been in this bear Market I feel like for the first time we've started to have line of sight on uh two really big things the first is cheap enough fees to actually bring everyone on chain uh with layer twos we currently have fees in the kind of like 10 to 50 Cent range with the work we've been doing on EIP 4844 on ethereum we're gonna get that subset sometime this year and that's just going to be a huge enabler for use cases basically coming on chain so that's one and then I'd say the other big thing is wallets I think wallets have been too hard for everyone to use forever they've gotten it way easier with coinbase wallet and metamask and Trust wallet all making it you know pretty straightforward for people to use it I think this year with account abstraction we're going to see that get even easier and so those two things cheaper fees plus easy to use wallets are gonna basically make it possible for us to go from having crypto this thing that's you know sometimes people can use it to being the thing that brings billions of people into a new crypto economy I love it anyone else what are the biggest things that have changed that have like this on the cusp of your yeah I wouldn't say from our perspective as the graph and maybe file coin like the maturity of developer tooling is completely different than it was five years ago so when we talk about like one million developers in my mind that's like the one million JavaScript developers or typescript developers that are building in web 2 and how do we make it as easy as possible for them to build on ethereum without having to be an ethereum engineer or having spent years like Liam has focusing on these problems that's awesome totally agree um so I'm curious I know we're making a lot of progress but what are some of the kind of remaining challenges that are really standing on our way what what do we need to be focused on as a as an ecosystem to achieve things like the super chain vision yeah one thing I'd mention is like uh and it's also something that's kind of like change and been spearheaded by uh but coinbase is just the the willingness and the desire to collaborate on shared uh systems as opposed to the desire to create kind of bespoke one-off end-to-end systems that kind of fragment the existing user bases in crypto and then force your teams up to solve every problem from the entire stack and so um you know coinbase I think is really doing an excellent job particularly here kind of leading the way um uh by saying hey we're not going to just like build our own completely new system here we're going to try to reuse a lot of the free and open source software and and work that we've been doing on the optimism side to enable them to get their uh user base on chain um and I think that's just like one example of what should be like many many other examples of saying hey we have say an amazing proving technology we have an amazing data availability technology or an amazing wallet abstraction instead of saying let's build our own brand new custom system and go to market with uh let's like commit to contribute to the same thing and that's what happens in ethereum years ago and that's literally why we're all here is We're All in This shelling point of ethereum building this platform together if we're building a layer two world then we should kind of do the same thing let's work on shared bridging standards shared sequencing standards share data availability shared execution environments and do it collaboratively as opposed to in these silos yeah I I think that the Innovation part is very um fascinating and important because you know end of the day you know it Denver also is a hackathon so you know normally what we have been used to do doing here um and in hackathons we hack different kinds of use cases and applications on top of the um existing uh Network infrastructure what's interesting about what is happening with layer twos and is especially with the uh Optimus ecosystem is that in the future you can start actually thinking that you know what kind of uh um you know a evm or like a computer you want to have for your uh use case and and build a ecosystem towards um particular specific um uh usages and for me what's what's been very fascinating especially for the um uh past year I I've been building uh these interests Finance for um the past years and and that has been the very root for um that three because you know Bitcoin was there to you know solve payment transactions and then you know with evm and virtual machine uh you know you have a computer and you can make Financial applications and now uh you can do also non-financial application and that as a use case is something that brings more users into um into the space and and those different use cases and users you know they need different kinds of configurations and that's why I think uh we're going to see a lot of exciting uh exciting Innovation and I think it's very uh fascinating that we can actually move quite quickly on layer twos because that's the place you can actually experiment and and do a lot of uh tweakings where uh ethereum for example itself is a place where you want different kinds of changes to happen slowly and and have those experimentations on the the uh the layer two actually and and then expand to the other uh layer twos and and then up to ethereum if it makes sense totally agreeing I'm curious what you guys are thinking about in terms of like L2 interoperability like is bridging a solved problem now like how how are you know layer twos like base and optimism and this whole super chain Vision gonna fit together as an ecosystem instead of kind of segmenting out or separating users so um so we have this thing called the op stack that we've been talking about and you can like kind of mentally conceptualize it literally as like a stack of protocols that um kind of all kind of contribute to this super chain idea um and one example of a protocol that's going to be uh enabling uh shared uh movement of funds and cross-chain transactions is at the lowest level it's just shared bridging if we're all sharing the same Bridge contracts for our layer 2 environment then all of a sudden now the assets that are in those contracts are interoperable and fungible so the next question is okay well how do you make it fungible and it's like okay well uh we need we can do it kind of in multiple different ways one way is we can share a sequencer uh between multiple l2s so like optimism and base for instance having a the same sequencing protocol that can enable synchronicity between the two chains and that's one way that you can begin to enable cross-chain transactions by sharing the sequencing protocol another way is by showing approver so right now we have a proof architecture in the future with the super chamber we're gonna probably have a ZK proof architecture and with a shared proving architecture you can also instantly move assets around through proofs from one trans one transaction on one chain uh being recognized and proven to have occurred on the other chain so like these are just you know two ways enabled through the shared bridging uh standard that you can do cross-chaining transactions and they just they're just there's the beginning like there's there's a vault there's ways you can evolve the evm there's wage you can involve the Json RPC um yeah the key point is if we're collaborating on the shared standards then cross the interoperability becomes way easier than than the present day situation which is always different completely Sovereign chains with different security and Trust assumptions and yeah yeah and I'll give a strong post one to that as we were building base um for maybe those who don't know bases uh L2 incubated by coinbase that's going to be a home for all of our products users assets and then also an open ecosystem I think one of the things that was really important to us was not being a silo but instead being deeply interconnected and and likely I'm saying the way you get to that deep interconnection is by building on an open source platform and by prioritizing interoperability from day one and so I think we have a lot more work to do like in right now the super chain Vision the base optimism mainnet interconnection all of that is early but I think we have a pretty clear road map that over the next one to two years will basically make it so that um as users are starting to come onto this on-chain platform as we bring you know millions of developers billions of users they're not thinking about bridging they're not thinking about is my application running on you know this chain or that chain uh you know which almost feels like you know no one would choose am I running my app on AWS or gcp they're just being like I'm running my app and it's working and it's secure and it's easy to use and it's decentralized and so I think there's the path to do that over the next couple years we have a lot of work to do but that's what we're focused on I would just add there's a lot of network effects that are kind of understated here for adapt to then choose which chain or ecosystem it wants to build on the more bases and other chains that are launched with a super chain the more valuable that Network becomes so I think it's important for daps to start thinking about that in their decision making around which chain they want to deploy on something about the ux perspective I I I personally hope that we can abstract a lot of uh bridging away and I think it just requires a bit of more uh um you know standards and work towards interoperability um you know even like things like switching one network to another which in my opinion shouldn't exist anymore and you know everything should happen uh in the background and adding new networks should also be abstracted away from the users So like um I think the bridging makes sort of sense and um in in a way that you know you can actually explore other communities um but I would say like a lot of users will come to a specific Network or let's say a layer two for a specific use case and then you know you you might be using multiple networks at the same time for different reasons because you want to apply a certain type of security or policies for different use cases and I think that's kind of valuable but that's something where especially if there's like Builders here that are looking to make bridging or the ux better like that's a that's an area to to focus upon because currently it's a bit clunky Are there specific developer tools or abstraction layers or infrastructure tools that are going to help us with that kind of like cross L2 interoperability or you know Jesse pushing on that road map you're talking about to like actually you know smooth the developer pathway of building across multiple l2s I think like there are currently some solutions out there that are doing like they're they're enabling you to move assets around like hot protocol and connects and things like that that are kind of building on the current Paradigm of the today which is that there are the completely Sovereign systems my prediction is that as we roll out the super chain and there's shared bridging and shared sequencing and others projects like connects and hop and others are going to start saying okay well how can we like take the core interfaces of our protocol and plug them into the Super chain and dramatically reduce the complexity of particularly like their cross chain component um such that they can enable a product for cross chain interoperability for developers and users that actually just like kind of plugs into the Super chain apis as opposed to having to have their own relaying service so I think it's like today the current status quo is what what you see out there in the space and in the next year we're going to see like a whole um you know indoors box explosion of new new ideas yeah and I mean one of the things that we're really excited about is the op stack which is you know what we're building on and where a lot of this interoperability stuff is going to happen um is fully open source it's MIT license you can go to ethereum optimism Dash let's say what is it uh is this optimism just slash optimism and that's the full code base that enables interoperability and so if you're a developer and you're like hey I want to see how this is working or hey I want to start contributing to this roadmap you can just go and do that and you'll be contributing alongside the op Labs team you'll be contributing alongside the coinbase team and increasingly more and more teams that are saying hey let's go all in on an L2 stack that's open source that's freely available that anyone can use and that can power this kind of future world of having hundreds or thousands of chains that to a developer gives them the flexibility to deploy where they want to have the kind of customizability that they want to but to a user gives them the ease of use the the kind of seamless experience that lets them just use the applications they want to use because I think for the last five years we've all been in a very chain-centric world where like every single time you want to do something you have to make an infrastructure Choice first and I think we are just now entering an app Centric world where you're just going to use the things you care about and they're just going to work and they're going to scale they're going to be increasingly cheap they're going to be increasingly secure and all of that's going to be handled behind the scenes just like for the last 25 years as the internet's matured all of that has been handled behind the scenes and I think that's like it really does feel like we are in this moment where we're crossing over into the next era of crypto that is going to make it possible so it's not just the niche of us who are here it's not just technical people who are here it's literally the entire world that comes on chain and in the period of you know one two three five years we go from having what like a handful million of people using crypto every month to literally having billions of people using crypto every day it's coming and like we're at the moment where that starts audacious uh now from a slightly spicier question we've mentioned security a couple of times we've talked about sharing components between l2s um I think a lot of folks here in the audience are maybe aware of the kind of Oasis exploit that happened last week where they exploited a vulnerability in their own admin multi-sig in order to recover funds from the Wormhole exploit that happened last year um how how do we see this affecting the layer two Vision what what what sort of decentralization is actually sufficient to protect users and protect application developers against kind of centralized failure points even with the the L2 systems we have today yeah I think I think um there's a lot of like there's a lot of different ways in which decentralization and security matter for these systems um I think the most like pernicious one you can point at is kind of the upgrade process for the bridge contracts um on our side at optimism and broadly with the op stack like currently like the P0 priority they like every single person is like um laser focused on is effective it's effectively increasing the decentralization security of those Bridge contracts and it's not just one way that you do that there's there's multiple ways one way is increasing literally the the scope of uh the decentralization of the the council that decides on how to do upgrades uh ideally it's not a small number of people ideally it's many different uh organizations many different independent people it's kind of running through a governance process like that's something that's really really important to us and there's a whole roadmap that um we're publishing about that relatively soon uh so we intend to have like but by far the most decentralized kind of Security Council for any L2 um that as soon as possible and it's also a launch blocker for some of the major things that we're doing uh later this year with the actual launch of super chain and so on the other end is on the technology front in terms of like fall proofs or ZK proofs and I can say on that end right now the whole Space is kind of in a bit of a weird spot where we have like kind of working things like um there's multiple fault of implementations but none of them are like completely permissionless except for like the very first limited scope fuel one um and we need to get to the point where those systems are actually truly working in production reliably and only in the case of them any any error that's found do we need to even intervene with a security Council of any kind and so similarly in our end it's a massive priority on the on the technology front to get not just our Canon like MVP and proof of concept but like uh a truly productionized system uh uh running uh first testing on test Nets and then later on Main there to demonstrate how the whole thing works uh and that's it's similarly like a top priority for us so um I think you'll expect to see this year like that being something that is just like constant launches and releases from our side on on the op stack for yeah I think it's a big elephant in the room because you know um layer twos are are quite centralized at this point but like it's um it it there's multiple reasons and and I think uh something that is very valuable to what uh actually Liam said is that you know decentralization is um is a journey and it's a progression and and you know there's different paths that you can take um but also there is uh different levels of the centralization that you should apply because you know decentralization um in some ways you can actually um quantify as a cost so you know the more decentralized system you want um you know the that that will be more expensive expensier and you kind of like you have to find a right balance for different use cases what is the amount of decentralization you want to have something like for example the Ave protocol where you know you have um cryptographic assets that have value you know you want to store uh in a more secure secured environment um then something like for example what we build on the other side with lens protocol you know it's more about social capital and you know you're not dealing with the same security requirements and you can have um less validators for example um in in that execution and environment so it's actually interesting to see um in the future like how this different um uh layer twos on on the optimism ecosystem will choose their security and and how much they will apply uh that as well and I think that's going to be uh uh a fascinating way to optimize our our costs on on chain yeah and I think you know as we've launched base I think one of the big questions that we've seen pretty consistently is like how is coinbase thinking about decentralization how is coinbase thinking about how you run the chain um and and like Liam said I think like stani said our our priority is to extend ethereum's kind of foundation of permissionlessness we see Layer Two as an extension of layer one uh it's basically a scaling Solution on top of layer one and so that means that we believe it should have the same characteristics as layer one because those characteristics are what enable us to have an open Global accessible crypto economy and in order to preserve those characteristics you know the way ethereum has built that crypto economy is by being decentralized and so as we've been thinking about Layer Two as we've been launching base what we've been optimized sizing for is how do we get to that same level of decentralization as ethereum as quickly as humanly possible and I think the the kind of like key thing that we believed was well if coinbase was going to go off and try and do this ourselves there's just no way like it would take years and we would be a centralized company off on our own trying to do this decentralization roadmap and so instead what we decided to do is we said hey let's do this with other people let's build on an open source technology stack let's work with someone like optimism who has been leading the way on decentralization for so long so that the path is not years it's months and I think that's exactly what we're doing that's why we're building on the op stack that's why we're working together with optimism on the security Council that's why we're basically putting our best brains together and being like how do we make it so l2s are no longer essential centralized but they're decentralized and they you know live up to the best values of ethereum and we're not we're not quite there yet but we're going to be there shortly one one thing I would just add is there's quite a few manual and analog processes still you know in l2s and protocols and I think we spent the last five years building this foundation and now we need to elevate it and a lot of that is verifiability so I know even with optimism you guys are working on the verifier um you know in the graph context we're working on verifiable indexing and querying and I think it's this new chapter of a new standard of quality that you know having manual or potentially hackable mechanisms is not okay it's not Kosher and especially in contexts like dispute resolution you know right now maybe that's just a few nfts here and there but in a few years there might be billions of dollars so I think that's the really big priority for all l2s and all protocols right now is what is that roadmap of including zero knowledge proofs to add security to your protocol um and one thing I'm also going to add is that there's kind of like responsibilities for a lot of folks in this space like on on the end of the folks working on the op stack and they're kind of administrating these L2 systems like we need to very clearly say this is what is decentralized and secure today this is what is not here's our roadmap here's like a public page you can click on and be like uh I see the status of this particular part of the Fall proof like we need to communicate the hell out of that stuff so that everyone can understand what we're talking about because like it's very easy for the dialogue to get muffled uh in the technical jargon and confusion in this space like it's not just a matter of like make the fall proofs work if there's all sorts of complexity and it's our job to communicate that to everybody so you can also expect that to to be something that comes out of the super chain collaboration is like a public roadmap to how we're going to actually decentralize the stuff and the second thing is on the on the end of the users and people in this space is like kind of holding uh everyone to account and there's one great site l2beat.com that I I think has been like a really useful um asset in this space it communicates what are the what's the degree of decentralization of these systems and how far along are they and I think more things like that where we kind of have a shared dialogue about where are we actually at um and it's not just like this black and white is it is it decentralized or not question um I think that would be more of that would be really great strong plus one and then shout out to l2b uh l2beat is like an incredible resource that you know they've invested in yes shout out to l2b good Round of Applause um and I think in general like our our ethos on this is we want to be able to use the term secured by ethereum for Layer Two like that's the messaging that I think will really land it's you know that we're inheriting the security of this base layer that's been kind of making the crypto economy possible but I think my feeling on that is like we have to earn that you can't just say secured by ethereum and not live up to the best values of ethereum and so do I think we've earned it entirely today no we have more work to do um but I think that's the like mental model we're taking to it it's like we're gonna be open we're going to be transparent we're gonna be this centralized and we're gonna be working to decentralize further so that over time we can earn the right to say secured by ethereum there is a lot of responsibility for the community just to say it because a lot of users will really not care about you know how much these systems are decentralized um and we do we care we're here um but end of the day more more and more people are coming here so it's up to the uh Community to actually realize and and uphold those standards and you know and ensure that um you know we can put labels that represent the the what it exactly is strong plus one of that so call us out you know tell us how we can be doing better tell us where we should be pushing harder uh you know we don't know all the answers and I think the best the best work done in crypto is done in community and so all of you all are part of that and just to tie home a point uh I mentioned earlier around sort of like um kind of collaboration um it's not going to just be like a small number of people make everything work it's the case that we can leverage some of the amazing work that's been done by products like scroll and matter labs and Etsy one thing that's kind of interesting is Jason toys from truebit years ago that kind of pioneered some of the dispute game stuffs in the audience like there's all sorts of people in this space that have solved very important difficult problems that are a part of the decentralization solution here and we want to invite all of them to contribute to the road maps so that we can leverage the best Minds in this space to build one system that is the best attempt at securing a decentralizing layer two as possible as opposed to kind of relying on one or two actors one super team with one super dream building the super chain awesome do we have any final um calls to action for all of the builders here at ethanver how can they get involved in the super dream um what components can they work on if people are hacking this weekend what do you most want to see any final things to leave the audience with I would Echo what stani said like we should never be choosing our networks ever again period so let's fix that yeah I would go to stack.optimism.io it's the op stack website check it out there's all kinds of links to do all sorts of cool stuff uh I think the three things on my mind are eip4844 if you can go to eip4844.com we're pushing that forward trying to scale ethereum for everyone um account abstraction four three three seven there's a huge launch this week or I think today where we announced that the you know 4337 contracts are on mainnet so go build on that experiment with how we can have better wallets and then have to plug base build on base you can go to base.

org easy L2 connected into the Super chain um come build with us and if you don't find anything in interesting to build or you have you have a hard time to figure out uh you can come to the uh to the other boot or lens Boot and and I might be there so we can uh We can brainstorm further and if you want to hear more from me and stani because we are you know an incredible Duo as you can tell from our chemistry on stage we will be in the basement over there which is where the base area is it's all the way down that green line I think in like an hour um or 30 minutes we're gonna drop some Marathon at 2PM just talking through some Alpha um about the future of the internet so we'd love to see you there awesome well we have to wrap it up there thank you all so much to these phenomenal panelists and go find them afterwards thank you thanks everyone thank you [Music] well thank you so much for the awesome analytics I'm constantly impressed yesterday microphone thank you [Music] thank you