Cross Chain Protocol Architectures: Key Trends and Challenges in 2023 with Derek Yoo

um my name is Derek you um I'm the CEO of cure steak we're the main primary contributor to the project Moonbeam but what I wanted to talk to you today about was about cross-chain architectures cross-chain use cases this is something that uh we work a lot with teams on Moonbeam around different kinds of cross-chain use cases and there's really is a lot of interesting things happening at a very fast rate right now in terms of taking advantage of new technologies taking advantage of like new creating new architectures new cross-chain architectures and so really that's um that's what I wanted to talk to you guys about today a bit so just starting out when we talk about cross chain you know we've been working this area for for some years now it's really not a question of of if but just how quickly this is going to happen and I'll point you guys to you may have seen recently that uh there was an important governance vote uh in the uniswap community right so uni token holders were voting on what system to use to pass messages from ethereum mainnet to BNB chain and this proved to be a contentious vote right so there was different factions within the uni community that were voting for different Technologies there was a faction that wanted layer zero to be the technology that was used there was another group of people that wanted a wormhole to be used in fact it is Wormhole that like ended up winning that like vote what was in question though was you know what technology was going to be used to pass governance messages from ethereum mainnet that the uni token holders voted on to this remote chain and so you're starting to see that this this kind of thinking about okay I have a protocol it's deployed on multiple chains how do I connect like these different deployments together how do I how is there how do I create a single governance domain as an example uh on a multi-chain deployment so this is the kind of things that are happening now when you look at multi-chain look at cross-chain scenarios and the kinds of problems people are dealing with so just to give a little bit of context as to the point like how um you know the point of view that I have and how I'm getting information about these different cross-chain scenarios Moonbeam is a layer one blockchain that specifically focuses on cross-chain and interoperability use cases it's built as a parachain it's part of the polka dot ecosystem so it has some built-in Communications capabilities with other chains that are within the polkadot ecosystem uh they're called parachains but it also has a number of other tools and Integrations around it that are designed to facilitate cross-chain development some of those are General message passing protocols you see some of them here like protocols like axlr hyperlane Wormhole layer zero there's a number of different development teams building protocols on Moonbeam that are leveraging one or more of those uh new message passing systems these systems are all designed to facilitate sending of messages back and forth between different blockchains and um so it's really this is an area that there's quite a lot of like interesting development going on right now um the other thing about Moonbeam is it is evm compatible so a lot of the standard ethereum developer tools are in and around the platform things like etherscan chain link price feeds and so on right there's a whole Suite of tools that one expects these days in an EDM compatible platform and um and so just before diving into some of the architectures I wanted to talk a little bit about um what is it that motivates developers to create cross-chain applications uh what is it that like uh that are the unlocks and I think the Q3 unlocks from my mind that I'm seeing across teams that are building these Solutions are one is definitely on market right so historically you chose one chain and you're limited in scope to servicing the users and Assets in that one chain that's not good enough these days right people want to be able to service users and like access Services across many chains so it's this idea of going cross-chain to increase your market share is an important one but at the same time there's an opportunity for improved efficiency so like when you have a deployment that's an isolated island on each chain that's much worse than having a single system that is connecting like multiple chains together at the same time and so that's one another theme that we're seeing and I think in the end the key unlock that is possible using these cross training techniques is around user experience you can you can hide away a lot of the infrastructural complexity from the user and create simpler user experiences when you use cross chain Technologies and I want to just dive in quickly to talk about an example to kind of make this a little bit more tangible and illustrate what I'm talking about so we'll take the example of a team that is building in the moon ecosystem they're going to their mainnet launch uh towards the end of March so they're just about to launch the protocol is called Prime protocol it's in the defy space and the way it works is this uh it's a it's a hub and spoke architecture so there's a hub on Moonbeam that's kind of the center of the system but then there's a number of different spokes to the system where there's remote contract deployments on a bunch of chains right so on ethereum bainnet Avalanche polygon you have these like Remote Smart contracts on each of these chains and the Remote Smart contracts are connected back to the hub using these cross-chain messaging systems and so the the interesting thing that this allows Prime to do is that it behaves like one system even though it's deployed across many chains and let me illustrate with an example of how it works so it's a lending and borrowing protocol users like you could have a user on Avalanche that would make a deposit on Avalanche into the local contract on Avalanche so they're interacting with a local Avalanche contract a message is sent back to the hub saying hey this user deposited this much avax into the contract the avax doesn't move it stays like local on Avalanche but the information about the deposit moves to the center so now in the center you have basically this almost this like this state across all the chains of like what the balances are right what the what the borrows what the lens are and so that same user now can go to ethereum mainnet let's say and they can say like I want to I want to borrow now against my deposit right it'll query back to the hub on Moonbeam using cross chain messaging and it says Ah Yeah this user has this much avac so let's allow them to borrow eth against the avax and in that scenario the assets never move there's no bridging operations right there's just in like information about the state is basically moved to the center and there's almost like a database at the center that's keeping track of what's Happening across all of the chains and so this is there's like a bunch of like interesting things that are possible once you have an architecture like this right so one is you can cross leverage right any deposit on any one chain you can leverage on any other chain from a ux perspective right like the user is interacting just with something local right they don't have to like switch or like do bridging actions to like get to the protocol right they're interacting with something local and uh yeah there definitely is like an efficiency game like um from this kind of architecture I think it is much like the real world where you might have an HQ and then you have a branch office location in multiple different cities but they're all connected into the same organization and so that's a good example of the kind of architecture we're talking about just to give another example in a different domain if the last example was defy here's an example from the gaming space so there's a gaming project on Moonbeam called exiled racers they as well are using a hub and spoke architecture uh using cross-chain messaging systems to connect all of these components together in their case it's a it's a racing game so you have Pilots ships different boosters as nfts right that you purchase that you can use to race and there's different race tracks basically where you race your ships basically against other people now the way it works is uh Moonbeam is is kind of the Hub there's a set of race tracks on Moonbeam but there's also race tracks and a number of other chains and so you can move your nfts from Moonbeam to race on other tracks if you want but the data like the about like what happened in the races is aggregated back to Moonbeam so you have like a kind of a universal view of the performance of the of what happened across all the different chains and then you know there's kind of interesting things they're doing so for example you see this uh Zeitgeist chain below so Zeitgeist is another parachain on polkadot they have a prediction Market um and so what uh what the integration there is is okay if the data about the races is all aggregating back to Moonbeam now people can use a prediction Market on Zeitgeist to make a wager on the outcome of a race so you can wager on a race no the race happens and then the outcome of the race you know the user can then like claim like you know uh winnings if they guess correctly in the Zeitgeist prediction market and so all of these things are made possible by you know cross-stream Integrations using messaging to share data but not moving tokens right you're not that kind of moving tokens like in the traditional bridging sense so I think it's quite interesting and here you can see that they're going to be able to get new users by going to all these different chains right and offering something unique on each on each chain so just to talk a little bit about I mean obviously all these things are great there's great new capabilities but there are um of challenges there are I mean this is a new kind of development right and most development historically has been centered around one chain and so now when you're moving into this multi-chain environment a lot of the dev tools for example like are not designed to deal with like these multi-chain scenarios or messaging systems so that's one challenge um I would say that a lot of the teams that are putting uh cross Gene Integrations at the center of their architectures you know they face this challenge of it's kind of scary to go all in with one right so if you choose just one system like axelr let's say what if XLR is down well then you could be in like big trouble in the case of prime it's a lending and borrowing protocol right where uh prices could be changing and users could be subject to liquidations and so a lot of these teams are then saying okay I need to learn at least two in their case it's you know axlr and um worm and so then if one is down maybe they can still send messages out the other ways it's kind of like redundancy in the system and uh so this is like one of the areas that I think is you're going to see a lot of movement in in creating kind of more redundant techniques around using uh cross chain messaging um the other thing is around security so I would say on the security side a lot of security thinking is centered around threats from the same like virtual machine you're in so if you're on you know on ethereum mainnet you're worried about other contracts and other calls happening inside that VM once you like Network you know your contract so that you can receive messages from the outside you have this new class of network threats right when you receive a message you have to check okay who sent this message is it was that an authorized person is this like an invalid message or someone trying to game the system so it's a new class of security threats that a lot of developers are tackling now as they're moving cross-chain with these native techniques and so I wanted to after going through these examples just wanted to pull back a little bit I mean part of what I wanted to share with you guys today was thoughts on where things are going right and thoughts on how I see things playing out and I'll share with you one way of thinking that um a kind of a mental model that I use and I'm trying to reason about what's going to happen in the future uh I'm I I'm kind of a bit of a technology history buff so I like the history of Technology and in particular um I think a lot about the history of compute right so like how computers evolved and use that to try to reason a little bit about how web3 is going to evolve and so in my thinking if you look at the history compute you know you started off with unnetworked standalone computers they were very scarce resources so then you had all these features to allow like multiple people to use them at the same time right yeah like time sharing right everyone could have their own terminal but you're sharing like one computer around the scene that seems to me very much like where we came from right that's like ethereum right something like that and I think we're now entering into this era called kind of the 80s right where you have like multiple multi-user systems they're starting to be networked together um but it's proprietary like a lot of the networking Technologies are proprietary there's not a lot of Standards right now around how interactions across changes are supposed to happen even these messaging systems I talked about you know they're generally speaking they're they allow you to deliver bite payloads right it's like byte arrays that you're passing to the remote contract and uh I expect though a lot more higher level protocols to develop there would be like the messaging standards that are used inside of these like messaging payloads just like happened in like with Computing right where you had different kinds of protocols that were built that had more features um on top of just the raw networking uh capability itself but so if we're in this era now of this kind of networked multi-user systems like these evm chains that people are connecting together you know I fully think that things will continue to evolve in the same way compute did right more servers more blockchains right it's going to be ever easier to like produce blockchains evm blockchains or it could be a blockchain centered around other technology Stacks like Cosmos SDK or substrate and you know I start to see like the teams that are pushing the edge are thinking about like multi-blockchain architectures like we just like we just talked about where you may have specialized blockchains that are performing certain functions like data storage or uh transaction processing much like uh you know internet architectures evolved and um yeah I think that like moving to a more cloud-like experience just like happened in web 2 is likely to happen here where ever easier to create these specialized blockchains ever easier for the developer to consume those uh those resources you know I expect that to be the way that things evolve um you know the whole thing is that like a history uh things like rhyme with history they don't repeat but they rhyme there's like some patterns that are similar and if I look out at the landscape now uh there's these connectivity protocols but when you talk about compute right how do you get like block space for your application you know there are certain areas where I see um you know it's a similar patterns emerging so you know up at the top we are part of the polka dot ecosystem that's one ecosystem it is a network set of like of block space let's call it or like resources same thing in Cosmos it's been around for quite some time but there are new environments for example like Avalanche with their subnets I think they're recently rebranded to hyper chains so they have this idea that you can launch your own application specific blockchain to get Block space for your application same thing with polygon has their super Nets that are coming out that's like an evm compatible like it's called side chain or kind of application specific chain and all of them are thinking about how to network these things how can you pass messages in between these different application specific blockchains are being launched so there's that's a set of things that you know or I see similar patterns emerging and then of course you have like a number of uh of app specific layer 2 Roll-Ups like on mainnet for example like the op stack right like it's making it easier to deploy application specific roll-ups and I don't think there's you know it's not clear which way things are going to go right there's multiple different options but these these style approaches are definitely in keeping with this idea that it's going to be ever cheaper and ever easier for developers to get dedicated block space for their applications just like it was it became ever easier for developers to get compute resources from the cloud right for their application and I think that like when I think about like the way things are going to evolve you know I myself was involved in a web 2 um where the web 2 startups sorry about that I guess I shouldn't stand forward to the line here um and uh uh the the architecture supporting our mobile application had thousands of servers basically right so this was using multiple Cloud environments there was different platform as a service features being used out of AWS out of Google Cloud um you know a lot of different specialized systems but in the end like the end user experience being presented was a very simple like mobile experience and so in web 3 we're obviously not there yet but I I do feel that things will evolve in a similar path right there's going to be multiple different specialized kinds of web3 infrastructure Services right that developers will be able to use but in the end the key will be to abstract that away so that the user doesn't need to know about all of the different components that they're interacting with you know being able to offer a simpler user experience to users that's the direction that I see but it might be that when you're in the future when you're interacting with a web free application there may be dozens there may be a hundred blockchains like behind the scenes that are servicing those like requests and I think that's you know this kind of simultaneous Evolution into specialized compute resources resources that are easier for developers to access but simultaneously user experiences that require less and less knowledge of the users less knowledge about the infrastructure they're interacting with that's the direction that I see things moving in and so um yeah if anyone wants to learn more like these are the kind like these cross-chain use cases are something that Moonbeam we're specializing in so if anyone in the audience is interesting in learning more about developing cross-chain Solutions uh you know different messaging protocols we support a bunch of them on Moonbeam there's a whole bunch of tutorials and other documentation I encourage you guys to either join our community uh come to our Discord we have a very active devrel group that can help you learn about these different techniques and so yeah thanks very much [Applause] [Music]