The Secret to Zero Gas Fees on SKALE - ETHGlobal San Francisco 2024

[Music] welcome everybody my name is uh Sawyer welcome to the secret to zero gas fees uh Workshop I'm here today representing the scale network uh so I hope we have some hackers here I see some faces I met last night so let's kick things off so again uh my name is Sawyer I run scales developer success team and I'm also a active community devel veler so uh super excited to be here this actually my second presentation at eth SF which is awesome uh great to be back um just for a little bit of background on me uh software engineering background uh got into kind of the devil uh developer success uh kind of work a couple years back with scale and since then I've helped hundreds of developers build uh on blockchain across scale and overall just uh really love to support everybody building so if you're around this weekend come find me at the booth I'll be here helping uh you guys hack onto scale so for those of you that don't know scale Network it is built different it is built different for Mass adoption how do we actually do this we do this through a combination of high throughput sustainability and scalability I know that's a lot of buzzwords but throughout this presentation I promise I'm going to work through all those okay on to probably the most important thing and the thing that most people at least if you haven't heard of scale yet you'll know zero gas fees soon enough zero gas fees is something that if you haven't seen in the blockchain space before that's okay it's here and it's been here and it's big Okay the reason for this is blockchain's really great right I think everybody can agree that it's pretty cool to see people take control of their data of their assets right do things in a way where they can be more flexible right maybe a little bit more freedom but we don't always want to do that at least I don't ever want to do that by sacrificing the user experience and so the biggest thing that zero gas fees enables is an incredible user experience on top of that it also enables great business economics or unit economics okay now moving into scale itself because I know I haven't really touched on it I've just thrown a bunch of buzzwords at you scale is is 100% evm compatible so if you use hard hat solidity right uh Foundry all your favorite tools 100% compatible this is obviously big because we don't want to force you to learn something new just come build we want you to be able to build what you want with what you want on top of that high throughput high throughput is critical and it's also one of the reasons why scales had such incredible growth over the last couple years not only is it one of the top blockchains in the world it's actually been called the top blockchain uh for gaming uh by coin gecko which is really exciting cuz I've worked with a lot of games some really incredible ones and they're really pushing the pace with how they use the chain to throw data at it like nothing you've ever seen now on top of that something really critical is building Without Limits okay I'm all about this I've written a couple blog posts about it I live and live and breathe this kind of thought process which is when you're building a traditional application right so let's say let's take blockchain out of it for a second you've got a database you've got a web app you got a mobile app something like that you are not limited by oh you can only send X amount of data you've probably seen llms you've seen big AI data applications they're pushing terabytes of data back and forth throughout the cloud without any issues so how come so many blockchains are restrained by 30 million gas units in a block we are not over 268 million gas units in a single block allows you to put more on chain than you've ever been able to before by the way for comparison that's about a 768 time increase than most of your popular chains let's step back to Y zero gas fees and before I do that I should probably intros scale a little bit otherwise uh some people in the crowd are going to be a little bit mad at me so we have this blockchain right scale network but it's not just a single blockchain it's also not a rollup okay so if any of you are uh L2 people scale is not a rollup it is not a layer two it is a network of blockchains okay and that's really critical to the scalability piece I mentioned at the beginning so this network of blockchains right every single one is evm compatible has zero gas fees super high throughput hundreds of TPS per second it's essentially a network of many ethereums but cheaper faster and allowing you to build what you really want to build now looking at zero gas fees because that's what this presentation is about right that's what our bounties are all about so if you're hacking make sure to to check those out why zero gas fees again user experience is critical we want you to be able to build for real people right not just Bots and and whatever else people are doing on their chains we want real people using blockchain and that's what you can build on scale additionally a big thing is because there's no valued gas token right so we do have a gas token it's called s fuel I'll get to that in a second but because there's no valuable gas token you do not have to force your users to go to a centralized exchange or an on-ramp in order to start using your application that is a huge area of friction we see lots of people churn out trying to come into blockchain we don't have to deal with that additionally I'm not going to hate on it because it's really cool technology a account abstraction right it's hot everyone's using it but why is everyone using it primarily gas abstraction again you don't need that on scale because we don't have gas fees additionally no gas fees means greater scalability right I know no pun intended the name scale but uh throttled throughput is a big problem right so one of the things we haven't seen in a while cuz we've obviously seen you know we're we're in a bit of a Down Market from a uh usage perspective we're seeing a lot of chains have much less users and throughput going on and the reason that's important is because gas fees are a lot lower and so with gas fees being a lot lower throughput is not really a concern for a lot of these chains but when everything kind of picks back up and you see a lot of these chains start to you know grow in usage they start to get throttled they start to kick people off send them to their own l2s things like that right we saw it a few years ago and it wreak havoc on a lot of ecosystems and so that is one thing you do not have to worry about with scale lastly again is unit economics so looking at a gas fee right gas fees being variable as uh chains start to get congested things start to cost more right because you're essentially uh trying to out bid someone else for that compute space if everybody's gas fees are zero you can basically have the best unit economics hands down right because again you're not competing for every single little bit of block space You're simply outright buying this block space I'll get to that more in a little bit as well deep diving into s fuel so especially for the hackers here s fuel is really key um s fuel or scale fuel right works just like ether on etherum Main net or you know other gas tokens and other networks the big differentiator is it has no monetary value right so so again it cannot be purchased it cannot be you know swapped for it's not on uh decentralized exchanges anything like that it has to be given to you and that is by Design because scale at kind of its base layer was designed to be an app chain Network and so these chains are designed to be uh encapsulated right kind of within their own ecosystem if they want to or our Hub chains allow these ecosystems to grow let other people in and kind of let that s fuel trickle down that being said if we're zero gas why do we have a gas token as you can probably see it's for security right we do recognize that you know networks that have very cheap gas tokens we've seen them get dossed in the past it's not pretty things go down everybody gets mad because s fuel is a protected resource it allows us to well not us it allows developers to meter the users right and meter other applications to protect the network and its resources again s fuel right if we have to give it to people we have to talk about distribution the reason I wanted to add this in specifically is cuz for the hackers here this is something that if you add into your dap this weekend if you're building on scale going for the bounties this will make your dap way better it's something that we work with every single project building on scale to help them add and it's critical to having a great onboarding experience so scale chains they don't have any gas fees end users need this s fuel to transact so what do we do we give it to them right but you'll notice the very last word on the slide is invisibly Right zero gas fees very fast great user experience how do we do that we create invisible experiences and so a big thing is if I go to a Dap on some chain and they say Hey you need gas tokens they throw a modal in my face they say hey put in a credit card kyc do all this stuff you don't have to do that on scale right in fact you don't even know there's gas when you go to these daps you connect your wallet or maybe log with an email or maybe they spin up key for you whatever it is right there's no restrictions here so decentralized Network they just give you a little bit of seal just like that you're Off to the Races moving on to a bit more about how the network operates based on this because the question that we always get is if there's zero gas fees how do the validators get paid how does scale make money right before we can kind of look at that we have to recognize that because there's zero gas fees right validators are not getting paid transaction by transaction block by block validators are getting paid to essentially work together and make the chain and that's one of the reasons why we don't have forking right things are incredibly fast and things are incredibly secure additionally as long as uh just kind of a call out to the broader scale architecture as long as less than uh onethird of the nodes are not Byzantine AKA not malicious not unsync not down the chain just goes right so again there's no round robin consensus nothing crazy there the chain just builds looking at the actual incentives because these validators are all just working together they have to get paid right because the way a decentralized network operates is someone has to be incentivized to run it and everyone else pays to use it but as we've recognized and and built out it's not sustainable for us to do this transaction by transaction block by block right things are too variable it doesn't work for real businesses that is how most networks work whether they're l1s alt l1s l2s l3s whatever it is they have gas fees and if they are proof of stake Network they may have some form of inflation that their validators get scale validators do get inflation there is a token called skl it lives on the ethereum main net it's delegated by people the validators take that token they stick it into the network they use it to collateralize their nodes it's part of why the network is so secure they get bounties every month they take a small fee of that but we recognize that with pretty much all proof of stake tokens the inflation generally goes down over time right because there's less and less tokens that get created the supply starts to shrink and so we had to make sure that this was something that would last forever and so in order to do that what we have is kind of akin to a uh Cloud as a service right your aws's your Google clouds azures of the world there is what we call scale chain payments or scale chain pricing this pricing is something where chain owners right so again scales of multi-chain Network there's many chains the chain owners pay into the network every month directly to the validators and so this is again very different I know than many other chains but the key is that it creates sustainability and stability right as a uh a developer what happens if you have a million users tomorrow you have five today and you got a million tomorrow you're your chain is just going to break right gas fees are going to go through the roof with scale they just stay at zero the entire time the price is set through governance through the scale Dow uh the fees themselves are paid in the skl token they're actually paid on the Europa Hub which is one of the scale chains uh they're not paid on ethereum Main net that was a decision made by the community to help save uh chain owners gas fees and help validators not have to pay those gas fees when they were claiming and then lastly again just kind of kind of calling out to the uh sustainability validators all get paid equally out of this so it does not matter whether you're running one node five nodes or someone in the future could be running a thousand nodes right as the network continues to grow every validator node gets paid equally okay and so again that's very critical because what this means is every validator node can run multiple scale chains and so it doesn't matter whether you're running one chain or five chains you're making the same amount of money and this is key because in order to allow the validator set to continue to grow we always need to have excess nodes in the network to allow new chains to be created and so this again creates that sustainability to let the network continue to grow as needed without running into any sort of supply issues jumping away from more of the technical stuff and looking again at you know why zero goas fees is so important uh user experience so this is actually a demo which I'm hoping it'll let me play here perfect so this is uh one of our earliest games that went live on scale called voxe uh incred rible game devs great pedigree but what you'll notice is as this guy walks around he's picking up rocks he's picking up wood he's picking up meat and you'll notice that on the left side there's transactions firing and they just happen again no metamask popping up no you know extra clicks no gas fees uh in your face it just works um so again this is just a great uh great Showcase of how the scale network uh design and architecture lets people build real experiences especially for gaming where if anybody's a gamer here you're probably aware of uh some web 3 games maybe not being so great this is a way for web 3 games to build great games first and then add blockchain for the benefits of blockchain afterwards right they don't have to sacrifice one for the other sorry about that the uh there we go um moving forward uh and kind of double clicking back into unit economics because this is really critical for kind of long-term uh long-term people sorry people trying to build long-term in the space right so the idea for I think most companies or most people trying to build a company is you start and you want to grow you want to grow big right so today most developers that are building on scale they start on one of our skill hubs we have four of them we have a gaming Hub called nebula we have a Define liquidity Hub called Europa we have an AI Hub called Titan and we have a clipso hub which is a bit of our social kind of broader Innovation Hub however as you grow right let's say you start out doing a few hundred transactions per day you move up into the thousands next thing you know you're doing Millions you're going to be eligible for your own scale chain right because you need all that compute now when that happens you're now thinking oh wait I have more expenses right but you also have way cheaper transactions right if you look at these unit economics this is kind of how the the economics of the network are designed scale chains cost a flat fee okay right now the network fee is set at $3,600 per month paid in skl tokens however this number that you're looking at is actually based off of $110,000 a month based on the fact that the community believes that over time the pricing will increase because the value of a chain is very high and so this is actually more expensive than what it costs today um but what you'll notice is this is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a penny right we still see l1's and l2s out there today that have you know 10 10 cent 5050 Cent even sometimes you know Dollar Plus gas fees and again it's just not realistic to on board the next let's not even call a million the next 100,000 people into web 3 it's just not going to happen right with those gas fees and so this is just some really good proof for how great the unit economics are that allow you to build a real business on top of uh of of the scale Network additionally just a call out to some of our other bounties this week we are putting the majority of it behind zero gas fees but we have a bunch of other features such as our native IMA Bridge uh our onchain RNG our onchain Oracle system in our file storage um all of those are part of our other set of bounties it's important to note that these are all included in that price so you're not paying extra for Oracle you're not paying extra for RNG you're not paying extra for file storage this stuff is just baked in so again I know it's a lot of information coming at you very quick the scale network is uh generally more Flex than other chains but it is incredibly powerful so just keep that in mind as you're planning to build this weekend this is my last slide so I'm going to pause here for a second because I'm a bit ahead of where I thought I would be and so I just want to kind of take a step back and kind of recap scale Network again because like I said I know I went pretty deep into gas fees first um but I wanted to make sure I had enough time to talk about the benefits before I went into you know deep technical information so kind of taking a step back real quick and then I'll open it up for questions so again the scale network is multi-chain okay it is not one chain it is not an L2 it is not a rollup it is a network of many chains layer one chains very powerful chains I always like to call them Min ethereums just because you know I knew ethereum before everything else and I think it's a great way to kind of conceptualize what the network looks like looking at the scale Network as a whole obviously like we've talked about here right zero gas fees is kind of the bread and butter right it's the thing that everybody knows it for but it's incredibly fast it's incredibly powerful and it's incredibly versatile you can build almost anything on this that you can build on any other blockchain plus you can build true web 2 experiences side by side looking outside of the unit economics specifically at the validators it's also really important to call out that scale is very decentralized uh a lot of people right in again in the space right now there's a lot of back and forth around what should be decentralized what shouldn't that's an area that scale has never uh kind of you know taken a step back on and said hey it's okay to be Central Iz we want to be decentralized because we believe that if you're building on blockchain use blockchain for what it should be and so all of the validators are third-party organizations they're not run by scale Labs they're not run by uh the node Foundation often referred to as the scale Foundation they're run by top tier validator organizations figment block demon chorus one as well as a number of smaller ones that we love to work with like 01 node uh easy to stake uh etc etc it's also really important important to look at the time that scale's been around scale's been around for over four years now I think we just had a birthday uh couple weeks ago which is really exciting and that's on mainnet in that time we've had a number of releases uh our V3 was actually uh just a few months ago we had some incredible performance improvements uh and then looking back a couple years ago our V2 opened up chain to chain communication so again there's a lot of features not enough time to talk about all of them um but if you want to come ask me about them later I'm happy to talk to you about them um but lastly I think the most important thing when it comes to scale is there's always more information we have very detailed docks uh we have an incredible team uh we have Jack here uh CEO of scale Labs we have Connor our head of Sal sales and strategy at scale Labs we have Ben our uh head of partner marketing uh and then Zara is one of our amazing marketing uh individuals as well so we have an incredible team here to support everybody this weekend and so like I said I know there's probably a lot of unanswered information and I will get to it uh probably just individually cuz there's just never enough time but um that is what I wanted to to get through so thanks everyone for listening to me ramble for for 20 minutes uh questions thank you what happenss p1,000 and one of the US and I have like $10,000 and suddenly the company starts it's a fantastic question um so what happens is as per the governor's proposal which all this is public right this is all uh 100% online you can go to the Forum you can go to the scale da on Snapshot you can see it all the way it works is if a chain stops paying they have a three-month uh period where they essentially have the ability to pay down their debt right so let's say they stopped paying today come I believe it's January 1 they need to pay back all that debt otherwise at that point their chain comes up for uh is basically eligible for deletion by the network in that case what happens is all of the assets on the Chain would be migrated over to one of our Hub chains and so that can happen in one of two ways either one uh a team of developers can basically take a snapshot and they can airdrop essentially all the tokens back over or uh what would more realistically happen is our IMA so our interchain mesing agent is our native Bridge it is actually baked into ethereum so we have a lot of pieces of Network that are actually baked into ethereum for extra security and so our primary bridge is actually a uh lockin mint bridge where people deposit assets on ethereum they get minted on a scale chain and so what happens then is there's actually functionality where when a chain is being uh deleted all of those assets get pulled out of the chain back to ethereum back to the the chain owner and then that chain owner can again then air drop them back to the user so the big thing here is again this is a decentralized network and so there's not one single person in control of all of the chains it's really a chain by Chain basis thing but the big thing that we recognize is if something like that did happen you know there's a lot of people that would obviously want their assets then it's basically developers come they say hey how can we transition all of this over to a place that's going to continue to exist which realistically is going to be those hubs long term uh great question yeah so I understand like whenever you deploy an app like when does the app so as as a developer I have to the gas absolutely also I apologize I forgot to repeat your question I'm supposed to repeat the questions first um question was when a uh app is going live on scale when do they get access to S fuel on Main net so I'm actually going to start on test net just because it's very important to the process uh we always recommend people to play on test net first right especially cuz scale is very different make sure you kind of hit everything make sure it all works once you're actually going to mainnet what then happens is you'll either be introduced uh to the owner of a hub chain if you're going on a hub chain or we'll work with you directly uh the DS team will work with you to get you the assets you need aka the S fuel you'll get a small deposit of s fuel during that kind of go live process you'll then be able to deploy apps you'll be able to get Whit listed on mainnet have access deploy Etc so all of that happens when you're actually going live um that way there's no wasted resources and no we'll call them leaks in the network meaning if everyone just got a bunch of s fuel it obviously wouldn't be a scarce resource wouldn't be very secure and so the idea is that only people going to deploy actively on mainnet are eligible to attain these resources and then you would then distribute that out to your users as they come and then usually the natural followup to that question is what happens if I run out of s fuel you simply request more from The Hub owner there are public faucets on all these chains that distribute very small amounts directly to users but we do find that a lot of applications prefer to do uh more manual distribution Just For Speed purposes it allows them to create better experiences and again because it's a decentralized network you're more than welcome to right there's many ways to do the same thing and it's a great option for people trying to create invisible experiences yes yes correct testnet is 100% permissionless so this QR code on the screen will take you right to the docks um it'll take you we actually have uh one of the only documentation sets where you can get gas and uh erc20 tokens right in the documentation so go on pick a chain there's four of them are again our Europa nebula clipone and Titan hubs you go on you select your chain it doesn't really matter if you're hacking this weekend they're all pretty much the same from a technical level minor optic differences you can get gas right in the uh right in the docks if you don't want to go there uh SFU station.com is the community CR it um it has all the test net chains as well but if you ever run into an issue you're having problems getting s fuel just come find me or join our Discord ping uh the developer success team again we're here to help uh everyone should have access to the resources they need but fantastic question anything else yes scale uh yes it's a complicated question it's a loaded question because there's a lot of factors sorry is scale the world's fastest blockchain thank you um it's a complicated question because there's a lot of factors that come in but the answer is yes and the reason is for a couple of reasons one throughput is obviously key right but everyone's fast now everyone can do high throughput or at least so they claim finality is what is relevant here because at the end of the day you can Hammer a blockchain with as many transactions as you want but if things aren't settling right away then you're basically running in an optimistic nature optimistic rups right but a lot of these chains have you know multi- minute or even multi-day periods for settlement especially when you start to get down to the L3 level and so the way that uh speed like I said is kind of looked at it's generally looked at TPS is like the primary metric but the answer is scale is not only the fastest in terms of TPS at least according to the Dartmouth report which uh if anybody's interested we can send anybody after but more importantly in my opinion is finality because if you are not final fast then you're just like basically run centralized right there's there's no reason to be on blockch at that point cuz you don't care um and so hope that answers the question like I said I know I have a bit of a different opinion on it but we are both fast and finality is insanely quick it's about one 1.2 seconds on average on a scale chain right now and it's only getting faster our engineering team is making incredible advancements uh month over month quarter over quarter and things just keep getting better and better also fun fact for everybody scale chains can't Fork so I know that's still something that a lot of chains have to deal with uh because of how unified validation op Ates where all the validators work together basically if there is a fork that means there's a state mismatch and those validators have to resync and get themselves back and so it also means that when a transaction has one block confirmation AKA it's added to the chain it's it's there it's done um and so again speed is is very important but I think there's multiple ways to look at speed so hopefully that uh answers the question [Music] it could be either or um the current skill hubs are all doubt operated or just kind of like loose groups of people some of them are at different stages so our uh nebula Hub is run by uh primarily by a team called Prospectors but they're in the process of decentralizing out into a DA uh the Calypso Hub is operated by a group of about seven different people very Loosely again they're also looking at kind of moving more into a dow format I say Europa Hub is probably farthest long ter being a DA they have some uh public pieces that they've looked at performing and and and pushing toward for a while um but at the end of the day scale chains are rentable resources so any group of people or entity or Dow can come and say Hey I want a scale chain I'm willing to pay for it and they can operate that scale chain Dow business Corporation group of people partnership individual [Music] if it's on your if it's on the chain that you are operating you have the ability to choose who deploys once someone is deployed and they're active there is no current way to censor a project because again it is a decentralized permissionless network um but you do have the ability to choose who can deploy uh any other questions these are great keep them coming yeah so um it's less of an issue now on ethereum specifically since the transition to proof of stake I believe the metric that I saw last was 99% of blocks are are good they there's no Forks but um basically what happens is when you have a decentralized network there's a bunch of different we'll call them people here or entities trying to build a chain right a chain of blocks but the problem is is no one can trust each other right that's where you know everyone's putting up a bunch of collateral and they're Loosely you know sending transactions broadcasting grabbing stuff out of a me pool if there is a me pool etc etc and what happens is when there's a disagreement a new validator selected who builds the biggest chain in a proof of work chain the basically there's a hard Fork every time or a soft Fork technically right so that was back when it's very common with Bitcoin still uh very common with ethereum back before the transition to proof of stake because again whoever builds the longest chain you can go back and basically change things and so that's why if you ever did like we'll call it it's not as common anymore but if you look like five six years ago back when you used to deposit to a centralized Exchange they tell you like wait 100 block confirmations because they're waiting to make sure there's no forking in the chain because scale chains work together or at least the validators do meaning they're all building together and they're just working through block proposals as quickly as possible it solves the problem of the fact that the chain cannot Fork functionally because all the validators are on the same page this is done through a combination of uh threshold encryption and BLS signatures where essentially every validator who's running a node when they get a transac action that comes in they sign that transaction they broadcast that transaction at the same time people are giving them transactions then they get to the blocks they're building blocks once they believe that they have all the transactions they then sign the block and say hey this is the winning one they then broadcast that well they're also getting broadcasted too then lastly what happens is the winning block proposal that gets 2/3 of the the signatures aka the super majority gets actually selected and posted to the chain and so because this is how this is scale specific by the way because this is how scale operates it's physically impossible for the chain to Fork because it forked it means that the validators are on different pages and people are going Byzantine and they're malicious and so at that point the change just pauses that's also fun uh fun fact scale chains they don't go down they just pause as long as there's validators running they just basically keep trying to build the chain and as soon as uh 2/3 of the validator nodes AKA 11 out of 16 in our current chain sizes are uh back and running and healthy the chain just picks up where it left off and keeps going yeah I um I know I'm a bit overtime I don't know if I need to vacate the room but if there's more questions I'm happy to field them until they kick me out also for anybody watching on the live stream that was a question about how does skill chain prevent from forking um if no other questions everybody's leaving um 20,000 up for bounties build zero gas fees build with the best use of zero gas fees or our scale native uh Integrations and features again link to the docs I'll be around all weekend um come by the boo come by the booth thank you everybody [Applause] [Music]