Enter the Modular Playground by Yaz Khoury

okay I'm gonna let you in on a little secret destination that will change the you know everything about web free forever I want to welcome you to the modular playground so reality is this is the current party you're at it's a really sad party there's separation between the application and the core developers historically in blockchain there's no bridging and interaction between application and core developers when it comes to building uh application and infrastructure and blockchain and by the end of the stock you'll be able to come here so this is where I'm at right now this is like a really great party where application and core developers can mingle and there's like less of a gap between both in the stock we're going to cover their status quo on blockchain architecture the communities that support those application and developers that use them we will also cover how blockchain architecture changing in community structure and the developer skill set so historically this is how things were in blockchain we have what you call a monolithic blockchain so monolithic blockchain combined consensus and execution in one layer so my experience for the past five years in devro and crypto has been with monolithic blockchain for example the work I did with ethereum classic with cello with ethereum through flashbots or the eea or hyperledger the evm and ethereum-based networks or monolithic blockchains execution and consensus are one layer in a monolithic architecture so that leads to a separation so if you see there's a separation between application and core developers application developers they focus on building their dapps deploying their smart contracts they're looking for that RPC node and some test net token to deploy their smart contracts core developers they focus on the consensus and execution so they care about the network itself that the network is producing logs and they work on the evm as an example of an execution layer or other execution layer so you see there's a separation between both another thing I want to introduce you to is communities as it is today in web3 are what we call Network first communities so a network First Community is a community in web tweet that aligns on the values of a network like for example here at East Denver we're here for ethereum we're aligning on the values of ethereum core developers in these communities care about a lot of historical things that happen in the network like a great example is the merge in ethereum in Cosmos people align around the cosmos Community same with polygon and Solano so historic evolution of Monolithic architecture so Bitcoin introduced what we call the app chain era um when Satoshi published the Bitcoin white paper and you see examples of app change like Bitcoin and Monero vitalik published the ethereum white paper and introduced what we call the monolithic era where vitalik added execution to the consensus layer and that's what we have the evm it changed everything because it allowed us to deploy applications on top of the blockchain but naturally this has led to a gap in blockchain architecture so monolithic scalability is actually linear so there's a linear relationship between throughput and the amount of nodes that you're running and that actually turns out that transaction fees actually increased linearly over time there's another thing that I want to point out there's a disconnect between application and core developers let's say I'm an application developer I want to benefit from improvements to my execution environment I can't because the execution environment is owned by the core developers now on the core developer side core devs tend to prioritize the network over the execution environment but for good reason because the network has to continue producing blogs you got to improve the network throughput and other things but that takes priority over the execution environment so an application developer cannot really direct how the execution environment can go and the core develop a core developer tend to de-prioritize the execution environment over consensus so one great tweet that I really really love that kind of highlights the lack of ownership of application developers over the protocol so Hayden Adams the CEO of uniswap posted this week every time an airdrop or NFD meant takes up the block space I'm reminded that it's not that hard to paralyze execution of transaction that don't touch the same story slot now what does he mean it doesn't matter what he's looking for it could be parallel execution it could be account abstraction it could be anything that the application developer wants the problem is Hayden has no control over the protocol the protocols controlled by the Apple you're the core Developers so another problem that you see in execution environment diversity so in a network First Community there's a political alignment around the values of a network to align around that execution environment so in ethereum the alignment is always around the evm Solana is around the svm cosmo cosmosui is around move VM now there is no it I'm like if I'm an ethereum poor Dev and I think that Solana Russ smart contracts are cool politically I can't really exercise or energize that kind of passion because I'm politically aligned with the evm so this is what we look if you want to visualize this problem as a playground imagine a monolithic playground is a playground with one slide there's no other game in in that playground there's no abundance of fun that you can have there's that one slide and that slide would represent that execution environment it's basically the evm as an example or specifically svm per Solano so that's a terrible reality right I mean there's no diversity I can't play around with different toys or different execution environment because I'm limited by the network ampardo so it turns out modular blockchain actually closed that Gap that we're seeing before and let's find out how they do that so the evolution towards modular architecture we covered we started with app stream error with Bitcoin and produced by Satoshi we covered ethereum introduced the monolithic ERA with vitalik's white paper Celestia introduces what we called the modular ERA with Mustafa al-basam's white paper the lazy Ledger being published now let's talk about modular blockchains so an overview of modular black blockchained is simple block modular blockchains separate execution from consensus now if you remember from the monolithic slide execution and consensus are one layer but here what we're decided to do is separate execution from consensus this allows us to do a lot of great things where on the consensus layer validator don't have to execute transactions they just have to order transaction and execution is where all the transactions get verified and they can be verified by different uh roll-ups so example of different modular blockchain So currently ethereum is going toward the modular architecture with eip4844 and that's a great thing to see because that will help scale ethereum a lot more significantly than the current model of Monolithic Celestia where I work at provide the first modular blockchain architecture and introduces what we call a data availability layer polygon of Bale has a so it's a solution a d a layer solution for polygon and finally we have eigen layer with their eigenda solution which is also another form of modular blockchain so my journey to this promised land so my experience has been mostly evm right so I played around with hard hat with truffle with like boundary I built smart contracts and like applications that allowed me to really experience solidity right but I always like because I'm in Deborah I like to play around with different Technologies right so I want to play around with cosmode I want to play around with Solana I want to play around with move and fuel that lack of diversity and execution environment for me has always been limiting to me because I had to work mostly with one execution environment evm so I don't know if you guys ever watched Tron legacy it's my favorite movie but there's one quote that kind of really highlights my discovery of like modular blockchain when I joined Celestia and it's I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see then one day I got in and that's kind of like the feeling you know when you got into that modular um Paradigm it showed me that there's an abundance of different execution environment that I can work with at any given time so this creates a new and better reality for blockchain architecture and for the application and core developer so with modulus with scalability in a modular blockchain actually transaction costs are at the transactions increase the fees actually you know relatively stabilized over time because of the thing that we call data availability sampling in data availability sampling you can run a light node that scans one percent of the block to verify up to 99.99 accuracy what is included in that blog so in other words you don't have to download the whole block you can just sample less than a percent of that block customizability now this is a really important core value for me in customizability with modularity I can select the execution environment that I want to play with Cosmos evm fuel I can select the kind of sequencer I want to use a centralized or a decentralized sequencer or a sequencer as a service I can select what kind of roll up I want to use whether it's a sovereign roll-up or a settlement roll up and from proofs I can select whether I want it to be no proof so like a pessimistic well-up a fraud proof if it's optimistic ZK proof if I'm a ZK roll-up and another core value that it in produces is something that we call sovereignty so you as a developer if you're an application developer playing around in solidity you have no control over your execution environment that is owned by the courthouse and what modularity introduces is full control over the stack for your application from your smart contract all the way to the execution environment and it turns out that can create what we call a modular playground where there's an abundance of different games that you can play in this playground if you want to play with fuel or with uh the evm or would cause them one of them you can do it any way you want you can build a roll-up and fuel that's settled on ethereum you can build a roll up that uh like a Solana based roll-up that settled on uh ethereum but takes data availability from Celestia the combination of different modular toys that you can combine together is infinite so going back to the example about Hayden Hayden said I wish there's parallel execution in the evm it benefits uniswap now if I was Hayden how would I solve that problem in a monolithic world I say hey I want my application to take advantage of parallel execution I create an EIP I submit the IP and I beg and Advocate to the core devs to include it in a future network upgrade and I hope that works but that takes a lot of advocacy for me so in this example it would take me a very long time to have new changes adopted by the core Dev that would benefit application Developers so what is the solution in a modular World simple I picked an evm version with parallel execution and I deploy it as a rollout done how do I do that I bought an evm version that has parallel execution now the evm you can see a lot of improvement in the evm that it never adopted by ethereum but there are branches so me as a application developer I can take a version of the evm like I want this version with parallel execution now with a few lines of code I can deploy it as a roll-up and as easy as deploying a smart contract and then after that I would Deploy uniswap on that roll up and then finally I can settle on ethereum and that's the promise that you can get with modular blockchains so modular blockchain Mark a new beginning and close the gap between app developers and core Developers if you want to visualize it here's how you bridge the gap because we separated the execution layer from the consensus layer application developers and core developers can focus on that Medium layer separated for concern so if I'm a core Dev I'm focused on the network but I want to add parallel execution to the evm I can create a branch of it and deploy it and now me as an application developer I can take that branch and use it and deploy.roll up and then deploy my smart contract and application on top of it and benefit from those improvements so that is the promise before there's a separation between application and core devs but there's now what you're seeing with the modular error the transitioning into what we call roll-up developers where application developers can easily deploy a roll-up and core developers can actually do a lot of improvement on the execution layer without having to worry about a network upgrade and then another symptom like another affected us is network-based community what we covered before become execution environment communities so around Solana for example the svm you have Network communities like Solana people from Cosmos people from polygon aligning around the svm you have in the evm ethereum folks Cosmos folk and polygon folks aligning around evm it was them you have cosmoism and Solana and ethereum communities aligning around that execution environment so the alignment now is no longer around the network but around the execution environment so communities now align around values of the execution environment that matter to them the most so this is a really great tweet by Zhang the CEO of uh optimism change now are the new smart contract and that's the reality you saw the announcement by base that's only the beginning of the tip of the iceberg now you as an application developer do deploying a smart contract is now you becoming you able to deploy your own roll up and then deploy a smart contract and that's the reality that you're gonna head to it might sound scary but actually the tool available to you are so easy to use so with a modular world the playground becomes more abundant you have more tools and toys to play with and deploy Roll-Ups and as an application developer you are in you know you know you're taking a lot of the trades from core development as an application developer and that's pretty exciting and then you know with that reality everyone can come to this party where application and core developers can mingle and they become one and with that thank you so much um if you want to test out deploying Roll-Ups uh scan the QR code we have a tool called Rocket for deploying rollups if you want to connect with me on telegram or Twitter see asinator um and if you want to email me ciaz celestia.org and yeah thank you so much because [Music]