Unlocking the Potential: The Why and How of Running Your Own Rollup | Mahsa Moosavi - Offchain Labs

hello hello cool hello everyone we are back with another presentation this is unlocking the potential the why and how running your own rollup by Masha mavi she's an integration engineer with offchain labs and she's going to take it away thank you uh is it showing okay yeah it worked awesome thank you excited to be here and yeah I'll be diving into arbitrum orbit and uh we learn about uh what is orbit and how can you launch your l2s or l3s so a little bit about myself uh my name is Massa and I'm an integration engineer at the offchain labs I'm also doing PhD at Concordia University in Montreal and this is my Twitter uh if you need to get in touch with me if you have any questions about the co the the talk whatever and this is my website anyways uh all right so let's dive into the orbit and do a quick intro so what is orbit so maybe most of you or even all of you you've heard about orbitron one or orbitum Nova these are our uh public chains that have been live for quite a while now uh they have a lot of users they have a lot of applications and they have been saving a lot of gas for us so far so there's this specific piece of technology behind these two public chains that enable them to operate and what is exciting about arbit from orbit is that the orbit program allows you to grab that specific piece of technology and then do whatever you want with it you can even launch the grab Arbitron one and then launch it under a totally different name and branding but the tech would be the same so uh let's look at how orbit evolved through the time so when we first uh launched orbit the program uh it was only about the L trees permissionless one so uh it enabled everyone uh to launch their El L3 chains on Arbitron 1 and arbitrum Nova so at that point there was no need uh to go through the Dow no need to get any permission from the Dow and uh it was totally permissionless but if anyone wanted to do their L2 uh L2 orbit I mean uh they had to go through the dowo so they need to get the license so they would go to the dowo foundation and they would get the the license and then they were able to launch their orbit chain but this caused a lot of frictions and there's because there's always this General desire for efficiency uh we decided to make it more efficient so what we did is we did a lot of community calls there was a lot of doubt talks uh calls and then we decided to come up with an arbitrum expansion program which is basically a program that allows everyone to launch their uh L2 and L3 chains totally permissionless no need to get any permission from the Dow and uh there's no fee except for uh you have to pay a portion of your sequencer fees to the Dow uh because you need uh it's kind of a revenue sharing so you need to share your Revenue v a dow and uh it's awesome because let's say you w the best uh L2 stack that is available in the community you can just grab it and you don't even have to go ahead and talk about it publicly beforehand so uh yeah so this arbitrum expansion program is what we call a community Source license so you can grab the tech it's kind of an open source but at the same time you're paying back to the community by sharing the revenue with the arbitrum Dow so so it's really cool and so there are two types of uh orbit chain L3 orbit chains and L2 orbit chains as I said and both of them are permissionless both of them uh they can sett up to any uh any chain that derives its security from ethereum it can be arbitrum one arbitrum Nova it can be even base and optimism so any chain basically so this is really cool about it and uh both of these chains can use either rollup or any trust Technologies which I'm going to go ahead later in the talk and discuss them further so what is orbit how hard it was for us to come up with orbit so for orbitron one uh the rollup technology in order to operate uh the way it works is there are some smart contracts that they're deployed on ethereum L1 and uh they have rollup smart contracts we have Bridge smart contracts that they are all responsible for communication between L1 and L2 and also the security of those those Communications so uh what is arbit from orbit is basically you can grab those same exact smart contracts with very minor modifications and you can just deploy it on any parent chain let's say you want to do an L3 on top of arbitral one you will go ahead and deploy those smart contracts with those modification that I mentioned on orbit one and then uh you have your uh orbit L3 on R1 and you of course you have to uh do some minor modifications on the notes software as well to provide support for that so was it hard to come up at orbit not quiet but it wasn't really easy either all right so why maybe you have this question now why would you want your arbitrum orbit if you have already access to Arbitron one and you can go ahead and use it and interact with it uh so there are tons of a reason that uh like it might like push you to do your orbit chain uh which I'm only going to go through some of them here uh but I'm hoping that that will inspire you to think even beyond what I'm going to describe so the first one is you can go ahead and uh totally customize uh the software the state transition function so Arbitron one the way it operates is uh it's been always uh in line with ethereum so it has this Moto that it it's always evm compatible uh and it was always like the but this hasn't to be it doesn't have to be the case with orbit chain at all so what you can do is you can grab the tech behind Arbitron one and based on your needs for your protocol you can do anything basically so I have some examples here hopefully they will inspiring you uh the first one is you can do Native account abstraction and uh directly integrate uh smart contract wallets in your chain you can add a support for those eips that you think uh ethereum is is not going to add support for them anytime soon and you can have access control in place so uh you can have part of your chain or even the entire chain private and permission and basically the possibilities are endless so you can do anything so hopefully these are inspiring enough for you the second reason is the gas price reliability so when you deploy an application on arbitrum one arbitrum Nova or basically any blockchain the the cost for your user it the really the cost depends on what other applications exist on that chain and what is going on on that chain so block space it's is something that is relatively available on Arbitron one now for users but this is not going to stay the same especially as time uh goes on and we have more demand so at some point if you have your applications on our Arbitron one you'd have to compete for the blog space and uh the way you really can hedge against that is to have your own orbit chain so you have a dedicated chain for your application so users your users do not have to worry about uh other applications monopolizing the blog space so you don't have to worry about some meme coin being launched in some specific date which are uh going to monopolize the whole BL space and uh we have the customized protocol logic as well so I talked about the customized State transition and the way blocks are produced but you can totally go ahead and change the protocol logic based on uh your product needs so uh there are some examples here that again I hope they will inspire you uh the first one is uh you can incorporate different alternative data availability layers for your chain so right now uh any trust technology it posts everything to arbitrum Nova so it uses arbitrum Nova as a DA layer but and it's very strong and it's powerful but it totally is not the only solution out out there so you can use cicia you can use igen layer or whatever the you want and uh directly incorporate that with your chain and you can develop your own governance system so right now our public chains uh of course they're all governed by arbitrum Dao but that doesn't have to be the case so you can grab the tech and you can come up with your own government system you can adapt the challenge protocol to refine settlement logic so this is the topic that has been quite uh has been discussed quite a while in different research forums and uh you can even use Innovative cross-chain communication methods so if you've ever used arbitrum you know that we have this specific cross-chain communication method called retriable ticketing system and that perfectly Works uh but I'm pretty sure there are tons of those methods out there that you can explore and at the end U you can use a different sequencing model so sequencing has been a hot topic for a while now in the rollup ecosystem so if you have decentralized shared and distributed sequencing So based on your need you can go ahead and plug in those uh models into your chain okay so the other question that I want to address in this talk is maybe you're thinking of why would you do an L3 instead of L2 so we'll talk about the trade-offs here and uh we'll see so the first one is uh the finality speed so uh the way rops achieve their finality for the transaction is through uh the etherum L1 so when you're interacting let's say with Arbitron one you send your transactions uh to the sequencer the sequencer would batch those transaction and it would post those batches back to L1 ethereum L1 so if you really want to have the hard finality for your transactions you have to wait for those batches to be finalized on L1 and this badge posting it it has some fixed cost that you would rather to spread over more number of transactions so that you would pay less for that and um of course on L2 these fixed cost would be a lot less than posting on L1 so at the end of the day the bottom line is that posting those batches on to something like Arbitron one is a lot cheaper than than ethereum L1 so this way if you have an entry chain on top of Arbitron one you can send batches more frequently in a cheaper price and you can achieve finality a lot faster than posting to etherum L one the other thing is support for arbitrum stylus so if you uh run an a tree on top of a chain that already supports stylus you can do a lot of things so the possibilities with stylus are endless so stylus uh is a new technology that adds support for writing smart contracts not only in solidity but also in CC C C++ and Rost and this opens a lot of opportunities so if you run an L3 on top of a chain that supports stylus I I wouldn't be surprised if your L3 chain is way more advanced than the the current l2s so the example is uh the way uh outbox Mar contract works on Arbitron one uh which uh with veral trees which has been uh talked about for quite a while on ethereum it would be more efficient but verat trees because they need some Primitives that are not available on evm on ethereum they can be implemented but stylus on stylus they are feasible and possible so uh they add a lot of values and the last but not least is having the coste effective bridging Solutions so uh many rollups they rely on different bridging Solutions different exchanges and and those things that they want the users to be able to interact with so if you have an L2 on top of L1 your users would need to go through the the ethereum blockchain so of course transacting on something like ethereum is way more expensive than arbitrum so if uh if you have an L3 on top of nl2 your users would need way less gas price for for interacting with those uh exchanges and those bridging services so things to really focus on here would be the token and E deposits between two chains withdrawals and cross chain messaging all right so let's say you're sold and you want to know how you would launch your orbit chain so to launch your orbit chain on mainnet WE strongly advise you to go to the rollup as a service providers cuz is it is a risky process and it has a lot of corner cases definitely we provide support on our Discord but this is what we recommend generally but here I'll walk you through how you can launch your orbit chain on a testnet so we provide this very simple UI tool it's orbit. arbitrum doio you visit that link and uh you have two options so either you can uh choose the rollup or any trust Technologies we're going to talk about the differences in a bit U so in a rollup orbit in a rollup technology the way is for sure I'm not going to go through the details of how uh roll up works but let's say you send your transactions to the sequencer the sequencer as I said it batches the transactions compresses them and it posts the those attaches to the parent chain which in this case would be the L2 chain let's say Arbitron one so let's say you choose the the orbit roll up and then uh it would open up some very uh basic configuration for you you have to choose the CH chain ID chain name and then the challenge period blocks which are the number of blocks that uh the dispute periods are going to take this would be on the parent chain and the stake token which is a token that your validators that chain validators need to stake in order to be able to validate the chain this is currently hardcoded on eth but uh we might we will open uh the possibility for other erc20 tokens as well and Bas stake in ether the minimum amount of ether that uh your validators need to stti in order to participate in a challenge protocol and then the owner of the chain who is uh the address eoa address that does the chain upgrades and those things by default it would be the wallet that deploys this chain and uh you can see the gas token which is hardcoded you can change it I tell you why and then you have the badge poster address which uh is configured automatically for you so when you do that when you deploy your chain on a parent chain when the deployment transaction gone has gone through uh this will show up and you you you have to download two files one of them is the uh for configuration the node as I said at the beginning of a talk you have to change the node to add support for your orbit and the other one is the configuration for your orbit chain so what you have to do is you download those uh two files and then you would go to uh what we uh kind of a like a setup script uh in our repo that we provide and there are some steps that you have to go through here uh there's a Docker uh container that you run and it basically what it does oh yeah this is the setup script link that you go to after you download those files and then uh there are some steps as I said that you have to follow there's this Docker that you run and once you run the docker with those uh configuration files that you downloaded already uh it would just launch a node with uh public RPC which is reachable at your local H at this port and also it it the the cool thing is that it runs a block Scout instance for your orbit chain so you have everything at hand you can use that RPC and plug it into your metamask and start interacting with your chain and uh that is all done so now you have as I said the RPC uh link you have the blog Scout Explorer for your chain and uh inside that output info that Json file that you download you have the chain config you have the core contract addresses for your orbit chain and you have the token breach contract addresses so everything for your chain sitting there you're done so uh let's say you want to choose an any trust so what is the difference between any Trust and rollup so remember I just described how rollups work so the only difference between rollup and an itrust is that here the sequencer would not post the batches to L1 so what it does is it posts them to a set of servers which we call data availability servers so those would kind of attest on those uh data and they put their attestation on the parent chain which here would be L2 so uh the like the comp like the the differences between anyr and rollup would be uh because any trust does not post everything on on a parent chain it's a lot cheaper um it as I said it relies on data availability committee for those uh data to post to uh parent chain so it's really suited for gaming and social media applications because they're not really requiring a like high security uh because it kind of compromising security a bit for cheaper cost and uh rollups specifically they're uh good for financial apps which need higher security so the only difference here for any trust is that you can add your custom gas token which is really cool so uh this is not available on rollup by the way only any trust can have their custom gas token so this gas token they uh it h it has to have some requirements which I'm not going to go through because of the time limit but we provide all the info on our docs you can easily have what whatever token that has these requirements as a custom token for your chain which is really cool and then there's this some extra step for setting up and orbit any trust which is to configure a key set for those data availability servers uh which is really easy to follow that the instruction is there and then we have tools and resources available for your orbit chains we have an STK for you uh to build these orbit chains we have the docks available and we even have a monitoring tool for your orbit chains which is really cool you can uh monitor everything about your chain and at the end I want to say arbitrum is freedom so you can basically do whatever you want with this orbit chain it's totally permissionless you don't need to get any permission from dowo and uh that would include my talk I hope you really enjoyed that thanks