Anurag Arjun I Data Availability I Avail I Pragma London 2024

[Music] for our next interview I want to bring on unck from a veil we've kind of heard about a lot of things happening in the world of managing data at scale and data availability is a term you've seen show up a lot earlier today and you will a lot more even uh starting today um and also when we going to see things like blobs and EF 4844 and all the other things in that world so we're going to cover what all of this means what does it actually imply for all of you what do you need to worry about or not worry about and everything in between so with that uh please welcome anog on stage to talk about data availability y good afternoon good afternoon all right the mic's working all right so want to talk a lot about data availability but the thing I'm curious about is uh when you kind of first co-founded polygon did you know this is going to be a big issue that you had to kind of spin up and spin out and actually start this as as a new platform like just uh talk us about sort of what made you focus on this as a as a problem and just kind of the timeline of what a veil how a veil came to be yeah um so when I founded polygon back in 2017 right we started off actually I don't know if people remember but we started off building out a plasma solution back in we remember and so if you look at plasma plasma was this offchain execution offchain data availability sort of solution um ultimately didn't work out of course rollups um came into the picture uh but it was very clear back even in that day that um data availability was going to be a huge problem if you wanted to take execution offline right like and uh like by the time we built out polygon p uh in 2020 ethereum had already launched this uh rollup Centric road map um and it was becoming very clear at that time back in 2020 that uh rollup Centric future was going to be the future of blockchain execution um and so within polygon we took out took the decision to kind of on the execution side pivoted to ZK rollups uh at that time um and you see some of that coming into fruition last year onwards uh but we also started aail within polygon at that time because we knew if we had to support rollups at scale uh we also uh had to solve data availability issues and not only the execution issues so that was kind of the motivation behind uh starting a whale um along the way we also kind of you know like uh of course you need um scalable da for enabling these multiple rollups but um you know like we also wanted to think about things like rollup fragmentation that resulted in you know like this we're going to cover all of that um cu cu it's one of those scenarios where solving one thing kind of creates a separate problem now but we didn't realize it would be a problem until after we had solved it um so maybe let's actually let's uh let's nicely get there instead of jumping right in um what is Avail now and uh let's talk about the the set of products that you offer yeah um so aail initially when we started back in 2020 um so we saw this opportunity to build um scalable data availability only blockchain that would um offer rollups scalable da right like what that really means is we kind of break the conventional blockchain into pieces so execution is you know like given to rollups but we build this specialized data availability layer that is focused on only just that right like and we also Implement something called Data availability sampling which is this technique that gets you to verify data availability very suly using light lines and such um this is sort of the similar Primitives that ethereum wants to do on what is called the dang sharding uh road map item um but we figured out that you know like it would take a little bit time for ethereum to reach there because ethereum is such a huge Network securing billions of dollars of value and it's not easy to change it you know like over night right like it takes a lot of time and yesterday you know we had that very successful Denon upgrade and I mean it was it was a little um you know like um uh amusing to find that a lot of people just found out the implication yesterday you after seeing the low fees instantly too I mean it's like suddenly you just saw everything was free how that happened yeah yeah I mean um I think for a lot of us building in the space it was of course pretty evident that was one of the reasons when why we started building out a in the first place uh but yesterday I kind of realized that you know like unless the system ships into production and you see results a lot of people don't understand that but I think the Denon upgrade has been this you know like years of research and Engineering that you know like finally went to in um and so I think data availability in general is you know like more and more coming uh into the picture right like a lot of people have been talking about it most people don't understand it but yesterday I thought like uh now a lot of people understand so you know like it's kind of Vindicated our uh motivation of building a wh in the first place nice um so I guess you talked about the the data availability solution that you have but you also have two other products uh what is Veil Nexus in a veil Fusion yeah uh so we released um we announced aail Nexus and fusion at Denver couple of weeks ago uh this is something we've been working on for the last 6 to 9 months so most people don't know we've been working on aail since late 2020 within polygon we just spun out of polygon last year um into a separate entity um but the data availability solution we have been working on almost three and a half years it's going to mainten it next month um but during that Journey we understood that of course you know like we've kind of solved that problem of data availability and we will enable rollup scalability uh in general through scalable da but what we will also contribute to the problem is that we will enable a world of 100 or a thousands of rollups right like I mean and these are not necessarily just evm rollups rollup technology is also um maturing day by day we have today Cairo rollups wasam rollups RIS zero rollups Mina rollups you know like and so that design space is increasing and so the number of rups are only going to increase right like uh and so once you get into this world of uh thousand rollups like what happens to the user experience you know like the fragmentation in that user experience even today it's you know like uh when you go to you know when you listen to Solana people people are like saying you know like we have this one big chain U you know like users don't really need to think about chains but look at ethereum so many chains you have to think about switching bridging so on and so forth right like I mean but it's a it's a system design thing right like if you like not all apps on the internet for example operate on one big supercomputer right like I mean everybody has their own servers and we use different servers yes exactly exactly so systems design wise the rollup Centric future is what we fervently believe in and we think that there will be like these multitudes of rollups and some of these will be like synchronous environments like the evm or you put the svm on a rollup for example and so on so you can have synchronous City but there will be a lot of independent rollups and they might talk to each other when required right like in a more asynchronous manner so this is saying that not all rups need to talk to a global State it's just they can just live on their own and they don't need to have any knowledge of the outside world is that what I'm understanding or so let me give you an analogy from again microservice world right like when you go to Amazon and you want to purchase something right like you uh click on the buy button a Visa page or a payment page happen uh you know like appears now what is happening in the background like the Amazon microservice is sending a request when required to a Visa microservice the Visa microservice is sending that request back when you put in the payment it validates the payment then gives a success of failure back right like I mean so the Amazon the e-commerce app and the payment app don't want have to live on one server right like these can be very different servers can scale independently and can communicate when required right like I think in that example the latency is so low that users don't even notice right like the stage at which we are in blockchain infra because of the latency it's a very pronounced problem but I think with improvements in Z technology over the last few years I think the latency element will be you know like at you we've gone from a few minutes to a few seconds I think you'll just become a few hundred milliseconds or lower so yeah that that goes away automatically um well so I think you kind of brought up an interesting point so it's not obviously all about just ethereum rollups you can have just different app specific Roll-Ups that don't have to necessarily use uh the evm and we kind of saw just from kind of your earlier comment like 4844 went live yesterday instantly we kind of started seeing effects transactions are much cheaper it costs way less to do kind of store all this information on chain um isn't that like a good thing in terms of like doesn't that mean we don't need any da solution like what does that mean for for everybody else and and why should we think about a different da solution out there and and specifically like does what does cost savings looks like now no I think there's a a valid question um in general how we think about this is right like uh of course we knew 4844 was coming right like I mean but if you look at really look into the details right like uh there is like three of six blobs that can be used like I mean there is some this is the first step towards the data road map right like so of course there is capacity fees will be certainly lower on ethereum rollups after the Denon upgrade but once more and more rollups join in there will be a slight increase in prices for example and as I said right like I mean there's a it's not these 10 rollups or 30 rollups coming right like I mean if you already go to L2 beat there are like 50 rollups on that there's a upcoming list which lists few few hundred right like and if you look at how the rollup Stacks have commoditized over the last one year right like so initially there was going to be one polygon ZK evm chain now there is polygon there's like 100 polon cdk chains coming there's like 100 zking hyper chains coming or starkware Madara chains or arbitrum orbit chains or op stack chains right like I mean so these rollups are going to increase and these are the bigger ones I'm talking about like I'm not even started talking about Sovereign Labs stacker Labs oneof one sir now we have l3s yeah I mean see it's it's essentially like I mean is there a limit to the amount of microservices that the internet has I mean so it's so entally what I'm trying to arrive at is that there's always there's going to be hundreds and thousands of rollups all of these will require scalable da ethereum you know like will satisfy uh to a point of course when dang sharing comes uh that's a different question but in general I think Alda uh always will have you know like um um uh a need uh it will meet a demand and it is actually meeting a demand right like look at all the validium that are launching optimium that are launching but I will also say that the da space is going to be also very commoditized pretty soon right like I mean in general we don't see da playing at a premium for example and that's why the the the that's why we work on or we announce aail Nexus which is this uh you know once we enable all these rollups at scale right like how do we deal with the rollup fragmentation issue so really like if you look at the architecture that we build right like it's validity proof based data vality sampling we use a combination of data vality sampling plus execution proof aggregation to really tie these rollups together right like so that they do not operate in silos they can you know like asynchronously talk to each other via this proof verification uh for example right like again and so you can you can actually do this even on ethereum like proof verification of a single aggregate proof or multiple proofs can be done on ethereum but what we kind of introduced with aale Nexus is sort of this L 1.5 sort of a construction where rollups talk to Nexus proofs get verified aggregated and then posted uh to ethereum for example and this is only possible because we spend time building this data availability sampling solution which is based on validity proofs uh and this kind of for audience what is a validity proof um validity proof is you know like the you know like the correct ter te ology for what is called the zero knowledge proofs that um um that are used in let's say ZK rollups and such in general what happens is um you can use this technology to kind of prove let's say some execution or some fact without actually re-executing uh the logic again for example so you share like a sustain proof of the execution so that uh you don't have multiple nodes reverifying it uh or re-executing it again and again so so the thing I guess that I'm hearing is that it's not just about cheap storage it's the fact that you have to actually simplify the experience of interacting in a world where there's hundreds of chains um and and you kind of mentioned this is kind of how you get there with Nexus the the Nexus product okay what in terms of kind of I guess is what's upcoming um well is NEX is live does it exist or is it something that you only get to do once there enough chains that are using avda like so so how should we think about these timelines so a DA is uh mainnet is going to go live next month uh the first version of Nexus will arrive in Q3 Q4 we already released a prototype using RIS zero uh next quarter we are releasing a prototype that showcases uh me passing a message between a ZK sync chain and a polygon ZK evm chain uh that's the that's cool yeah it's pretty cool uh so I mean I think uh we'll be also releasing more details about the design in a couple of weeks but we are very very excited to show the first uh you know like uh prototype uh between these two chains uh pretty pretty quickly amazing well I was going to say like what else can we look forward to but seems like it's already a pretty packed uh next few months so test net sorry main NET LIVE next month um and then Nexus in Q3 uh what about um Avail Fusion yeah um so Avail Fusion is this uh new um mechanism that we've been working on which leverages you know like uh techniques like reaking and such so essentially we we kind of act as a consumer for um rest e for example BTC from Babylon for example it's basically we are a new chain we have to bootstrap Economic Security pretty fast and so of of course we use the AIL native token for that but we also uh want to utilize BTC and E to bootstrap our Economic Security initially uh so that's the uh that's that's fusion um in general awesome um well is there anything else you want to talk about for what we can look forward to this year yeah I think um yeah yesterday I know I was quite happy after seeing the Denon upgrade you know in terms of the immediate decrease in fees and such so you know like in general uh for those uh people who who might not be following the rollup Centric future road map that clearly I mean I'm I'm I'm saying this on stage right like rollups are going to be the future there's going to be these thousands of rollups right like and at least at least like I mean uh and these are not going all going to be these heavyweight evm sort of chains I'm very bullish on these app specific rollups um and in general you know I anticipate that probably a year down the line rollup app specific rollup tooling will become mature to a point that abds when they think about deploying smart contracts today I mean the ease of doing deploying an app specific rollup will be so easy that they you know like uh they will just you know like think of doing that instead like a lightweight app specific rollup and you know I'm I'm pretty bullish about you know like blockchains going the microservice asynchronous we awesome well let's hope that future becomes more and more possible this year and definitely if not it'll be next year but uh I want to thank you for taking the time and having this amazing chat and can't wait to see how main net goes next month congrats thank you thank