The Era of L2 Innovation: Fraxtal & Modular L2s | Sam Kazemian - Frax Finance

hey everyone how's it going so I'm Sam from fra uh I think a lot of people might know fra started out as a stable coin and grew a lot to an LSD platform with fra ether and a lot of defi stuff so the past year we've been working on a new modular rollup and I'm really excited to talk about it and show you what we think about the new era of modular L2 Innovation okay so I always love to start with this tweet because it's actually really really good and and describes exactly the situation coming up and this is a tweet by John Sharbino if you guys know who he is great writer on l2s and the basic idea is chains are the new smart contracts right and this is basically the actual life cycle of uh an app which it starts out at the yellow square and it says app on a general purpose chain wants more customizability launches an app chain to capture block space and the app chain goes really well and the app chain says that now it's a general purpose chain and wants developers to build on it and all these apps come to the app chain and there's a lot of really big apps one of the really big apps says oh I'm a really huge app oh I know what to do I want to capture my own block space I want to launch an app chain they launch an app chain and then you start over right and so one of the main things that we thought of is this is going to happen thousands and thousands of times in the next 2 to three years right in the era of L2 Innovation this is how the life cycle of apps go and so what we thought is we looked around the industry and we said a lot of this stuff kind of looks fairly similar there's a lot of very very talented teams building L2 uh Frameworks just like everyone up here from stet from scroll polygon arbitrum super chain from optimism and we thought we're not going to actually compete with that that's not what we do we're not actually people building a framework for rollups what we want to do is we want to actually have the largest settlement layer for nl2 so when we decided to build fraxel we actually named it after fractal so the idea is that everyone can build on top and under and above the fractal rollup and what fraxel actually is is it's a modular rollup the execution environment is oback and it's super chain compatible everyone loves the super chain I think the next uh panel will tell you all about how good the super chain is and there's a uh settlement layer and module so that uh applications can build l3s app chains or rollups using any of the other Stacks right now obviously if you use uh op stack you can be an L3 on fraxel uh the idea is to increase the actual uh modularity so that anyone building anything whether it's arbitrum chains uh ZK sync hyper chain uh polygon ZK evm starkware everyone can eventually settle and then the data availability is not something new that we've built but it actually is data availability to multiple places we will actually push the data from fraxel to multiple locations which is a first instead of just picking some favorite or something like that so when you settle on fraxel you get a lot of security and so this is a screenshot from conduit which is a leading rollup as a service provider and the reason I like to show this is that it really illustrates where the battlefields kind of are in in the coming L2 era and the modular blockchain era right there's the the framework layer right which we kind of had people talking about with scroll starkware arbitrum and everyone and there's the settlement layer right which is where everything where the value actually gets settled and then the da layer right and the most important thing for us as fra is we're money people we're mechanism design people we're not building a new framework to tell you to use uh something else over this we're not building a new data availability layer we're not saying we have a better uh Das algorithm or something like that we want anyone to pick any kind of actual framework that they want and then have the choice of settling on fraxel and then the next question kind of that we came up with is well people will say why fraxel right sure frax is one of the biggest defi platforms we have yield in in R rwas we have SRS we have a good LSD but why would people actually want to settle on frax itself well one of the things we designed is the ethereum EIP 1559 reimagined and and flipped upside down the idea behind this is we call it block space incentives we'll call it flocks for short and the idea is that if your contracts are popular whether they're nfts whether they're routers amm whether they're L3 contracts that push State and settle on fraxel whatever they are you'll actually get rewarded fraxel points based on the amount of popularity the amount of gas and the amount of state that actually settles on fraxel and these are block by block incentives they're not air drops they're not quarterly things they're straight yield in fractal points and this is kind of the the way that I like to explain it is that there's block by block mechanism for actually rewarding people rather than just trying to burn eth right instead of actually capturing value in order to bootstrap the network and distribute points everyone that actually builds something that uses block space should be incentivized especially settlement especially assets and another thing that we have in the block space incentives is something we call Asset availability sampling which is a play on words of Das which means there's a list of assets and if your token is in the list of assets so if you're a uh an application on fractal or you're an L3 and you actually hold these assets on the Chain random blocks are sampled and if you're address actually has these tokens you actually earn fral points so the best place to actually hold assets stochastically is just on fractal on L3 contracts on fraxel or anywhere else because you actually earn uh fractal points based on the assets that you have if they're in this asset availability sampling list and this is a unique way that we've reimagined how to actually incentivize people to slowly bring value slowly store value slowly bring stable coins lsds and everything and build on fraxel and make the block space very valuable and so as I was saying fraxel execution environment is a op super chain compatible uh execution environment we're big fans of optimism we work closely with the optimism team and again the the point with fraxel and what we're trying to do is be a settlement layer and a settlement black hole so we're not trying to tell you uh what to build in terms of framework used or any of the data data availability Solutions we want to actually give you the most amount of utility the best neuro operability and also incentives to actually come here when all things considered you get all the utility and extra incentives for actually bringing assets and and using the block space so fraxel is indeed a super chain uh and we have a lot of good relationships and we're building stuff with optimism and so fraxel will be here in in the super chain developer console and and everything that optimism offers and uh I think the next actual panel will talk about all about the super chain and and the positives of it and this is part of the reason why we call fractal a fractal rollup because you can build on top of it as an app you can build under it as an L3 you can build over it you can do whatever you want in terms of building anywhere on the fractal essentially right and and the idea behind it is we're not opinionated on what framework rollups uh want to use we're not opinionated on anything other than bringing assets bringing yielding assets to the chain and having it be a a very big hub for settlement for value and making the state of fraxel the fraxel main net State extremely valuable and composing and lastly just like more of a highle thing um a lot of people in the audience probably recognize fra we've been around we've been we've seen Cycles we've seen a lot of stuff uh We've survived continued to ship and so we're very very long-term oriented and so working with us uh I think a lot of people that that have heard of fra know that we think very very long term and so this is why we're building this not as an app chain but as a as a philosophy of what we want to see as an AS an L2 so we think very very long term we think in multiple Cycles uh a lot of things that are being built right now uh they won't last a lot of things being built that are by long-term people they will like the rollup Frameworks and we want to make sure people know that we're we're one of the people that actually will stay thinking in decades and in very very long term in multiple cycles and this is kind of more of a macroeconomic slide and people that no fra and defi were were money people and mechanism design people and so this is kind of a a cool idea that frax still is the first M2 chain not an L2 chain and and for people that aren't in economics basically M1 is the raw money right it's not hypothecated money it's for example it's just Bitcoin it's just ethereum or coins notes and bills uh not hypothecated by Banks M2 you can kind of think of it as one layer of additional risk but good yield on top of that re hypothecated layer right things like money market funds things like Bank savings accounts right things like Stak ethereum things like fra ethereum things like WAP Bitcoin that hypothecate one additional layer we like to think of fraxel as an M2 layer because we want to capture all of the the value of the M2 Supply and settle as much of the M2 Supply as possible we're not trying to be fixed Supply money we think eth is money I think Bitcoin is money and what we want to do is make the the fraxel main net State AS Val Val as possible and if we're lucky and everything works out and execute properly in the end everything should look something like this in terms of interoperability with the the fractal Vision fractal scaling right and lastly if this vision is interesting to you you can already add your project to the repo uh you can start building before deploying and check out Frack scan.com like we said the execution environment is opack super chain ether scans already deployed their block Explorer and you can try it out and and see everything and how it goes and thank you everyone that's it and connect with [Applause] us thank you Sam that was awesome