Uncovering the Transformational Potential of Modularity | Kenny Li - Manta

testing oh hi okay cool we got five seconds never mind all right um so hey everyone I'm Kenny I'm one of the uh co-founders of Manta Network and I'm here to tell you about the other side of the story which is why modular um and so for those of you that don't really know man we are an ethereum based layer 2 solution and we are the first one to actually start attempting this sort of modular approach and one of the first major uh movements that we've made as a network was to actually uh migrate over to Celestia for modular data availability and so uh just wanted to talk a little bit about that experience the tradeoffs what to think about it and the the the overarching higher level purpose of this this quote unquote movement of modularity and what this all means um click oh it's okay I'll just use my fingers all right so um oh I think okay yeah there sorry um so yeah I'm I'm Kenny that's my dog and um you know I've been in the crypto space for a while now actually before we started Manta network with my uh co-founder I was finishing up my uh MBA over at MIT and I was the teaching assistant there for Gary guinsler who for those of you that don't know is now the you know chairman of the SEC um but um anyway so that's where I met my co-founder as well and after uh we both finished and graduated we decided to go work on uh Manta Network and so uh we are the first uh L2 that actually leverages uh data availability what does that mean what does that actually mean for us actually over the past 30 days uh using this modular da approach uh rl2 has been able to save our users $18 million in gas fees in a period of one month and so that's like $20 million over the course of a year right and so as we continue to see this type of onchain activity pick up I think the savings the cost savings from the uh from the user side is going to continue to grow so it could be even you know more than 20 million over the course of a year which I think is pretty cool right I mean that's a lot of money save for users um I can get into how that all works but um why we decided to take this sort of modular approach is uh goes back to sort of um even around 2011 that's um when Litecoin started how many of you guys remember Litecoin nice we're all ogs in here okay so um Litecoin I think of as more of a movement to become this you know quote unquote Bitcoin killer right because what ends up happening is you have Bitcoin which came out um but then subsequently people start saying okay this thing's great for a store of value but it's a little bit slow and uh I'd like to make a faster version of this so you've got the litecoins the world that come out you've got the digiyes of the world that come out you've got you know uh later on bitcoin cash and Bitcoin silver and all this these other Forks of Bitcoin that are supposed to be better than Bitcoin uh because you reduce the block generation speed or you increase the block size uh etc etc and so as a result you see all these Forks of this core technology coming out and they're all building as a core team to try to out compete Bitcoin and so while they're in this little um you know small community this little Pond of trying to out compete Bitcoin you see this huge Innovation come along right you see ethereum and teering completeness comes out and so now all of a sudden the needs of the users have shifted and so once ethereum came out now we're starting to think as a community about decentralized applications but at the same time all these Forks all these attempts all this Talent that's been pouring into contributing to Forks of Bitcoin has now you know in 2024 Fallen a little bit by the way side right I mean you know Bitcoin still sort of the core community and everything else is kind of you know still chugging along in in 2017 we see the same thing happening we see the same thing play itself out with ethereum right I mean I don't know how long everyone's been in here but for those of you have have heard of the ter the term ethereum Killers who's heard of The ethereum Killers all right what's killed ethereum right like nothing right so um you see all these Forks come out for ethereum as well um the the most notable one with like the year-long Ico and everything EOS and then you've got like Forks that have different programming languages that are supposed to be better for you know developers such as Neo for example right like they come out they say okay we're going to kind of do the same thing but put a little twist on it we're going to have our own sort of feature set we're going to have our own differentiating technology and it's going to be that killer of ethereum and you fast forward to 2024 but nothing has killed ethereum yet and you know shout out to eth Denver stronger than ever right we've upgraded to a bigger sport Castle um and so you know all this Talent again pouring into all this Innovation that at the time was such a differentiating feature of everything but now that we fast forward to a generation where now we're looking at scalability all these other Forks have become Obsolete and these Forks have not been able to Pivot have not been able to innovate to continue to provide value for users in an everchanging space now fast forward to 2024 and I think we're going through the same problem right like you've got this proliferation of l2s and I guess like we don't know who the winner is going to be here yet but the point here is that we see the same pattern where these l2s you know including Manta are coming out and saying you know what we're going to do exactly what that person did but we're going to add a little spin on it and that spin is going to be our core technology that really differentiates us but I mean we've heard the same story in 2013 we've heard the same story in 2017 and so what makes 2024 different with l2s right and so the question here is like okay what happens in the next 5 years when your technology that you once thought was such a differentiator now doesn't matter at all right so so my point here is the web 3 space continues to develop continues to change continues to evolve but at the same time we don't know where that's heading right like if if these uh Bitcoin Forks knew that we would have tiering completeness in the next five six years right they could have prepared for that but they didn't and when ethereum launched and we knew we were going to have a scale ility issues then we would have talked about ethereum as a te complete settlement layer rather than thinking about building Uber on ethereum but we now know that these types of bottlenecks are unsustainable and we have to continue to innovate and pivot to continue to build and drive towards this you know quote unquote one billion users um and I I don't think you know l2s are the Beall endall for scalability as well right we already see sort of issues in that and so you know when when we started launching our L2 one of the things that we thought about was okay how do you how do you really future proof this and and so that's kind of why we decided to take more of this uh modular approach but um I think at the core of it you know what does it mean to be modular I think that modularity is a term that's been kind of uh marketed a lot recently but at the core of this right like what does it actually mean modular really just means taking components from specialized services and using it to plug in to whatever you're trying to build right and this could be for the sake of enhanced security and enhanced agility enhance go to market speed to Market um and enhance feature sets um etc etc enhance specialization for your own core team as well um but at the end of the day I think what this truly means and what this why this matters is because you're essentially able to now future prooof your own systems um and so you you don't have to necessarily fall in the same trap that you know the Bitcoin Forks The ethereum Killers have experienced in the past because now we do have specialized technologies that can help you such that you focus on your core competency and everything else can be handled in the background it's almost like you know um who still here how many of you guys are developers okay all right three three developers in the room right cool so you three developers how many of you guys run your own servers one all right that's 33% and I guarantee you law of large numbers would have given you a much different result so no one runs their own servers anymore right because we use AWS we use Google compute we use Microsoft Azure and I'm not saying those are perfect solutions for infinitely scalable systems because at some point economically right it does make sense to run your own infrastructure in house so congratulations to to that billionaire right there but for everyone else right like you know cloud computing works for the 99% um and I I do think that like that is an example of this type of modular approach because you are you don't have to deal with your own infrastructure you already have a Specialized Service that focuses on this type of activity for you um and so what I'm trying to get at is the emergence of specialized Technologies with um you know Celestia here being the the core focus of this new generation of specialized Technologies because every time you think about modular right people think about Celestia and so I I do want to talk about you know how being able to leverage Celestia's modular da systems have been able to help ourselves help our users and help us think about how we continue to Future proof because you know when when we first thought about fully settle fully full settlement over to ethereum versus taking some components the call data specifically and putting it into uh Celestia right like no one has done that before I don't know if you guys know but Celestia mainnet just launched and so it's it's uh it's definitely experimental it's definitely tricky it's definitely risky and so we we didn't know what to expect here right we ran a lot of tests on our test environments but at the end of the day right main net launch you know every demo goes well until you have to actually present it um but at the end of the day what ended up happening was there was a very smooth transition here and that smooth transition meant that we were now able to service users on our Network at a fraction of the cost and they experienced no downtime at all right there was no halt in Block production there was no like Network having to hard fork or anything everything was going just according to plan and the only difference the only thing that users started noticing was oh the gas fees are much lower than before which is really cool right um so I think that you know could the Bitcoin Forks of 201 11 have done this no because there was no specialized technology there's no specialized teams to build these types of feature sets that can be integrated on the infrastructure level to actually produce some type of quote unquote modular system uh arguably even the ethereum forks couldn't do that but in 2024 I think we're starting to see this emergence and so I think that this is an opportunity that is going to continue to grow and continue to increase in adoption and I do think the module approach has a lot of advantages here in terms of being able to be flexible and that speed to Market um increasing scalability and throughput right like I'm just going to kind of list off a bunch of cool things that happened as a result of this sort of modular da shift um one of which is um that increasing scalability and through but how many of you guys saw this whole wave of inscriptions just like pile driveth through ethereum right like I saw one hand two hand okay all right is everyone else in web 3 no worries no worries yeah so um you know there was this inscription craze that started off in Bitcoin and then one day someone said you know what what happens if we move this over to ethereum we found out what happens it just it just drove its way into ethereum and crashed a bunch of networks right and so either block production slowed or block production entirely halted because the throughput and the scalability of L2 is already kind of limited uh which means that you know we're not done with the scalability problem here guys right like L2 doesn't mean we can all pack up and go home um but also right like one of the cool things or not one of the cool things I don't know whatever you decide um the inscriptions made its way to Manta as well but by that time we're actually leveraging Celestia already for that data availability side and so that throughput was able to sustain us throughout that entire sort of um chapter of major onchain activity without having to significantly increased cost I think at the peak of the inscriptions on Manta we were seeing around 10 cents in gas fees um and then at the same time there was no halt in Block production because the throughput was significantly increased right and so we were able to you know we're not masterminds we didn't know that the inscription problem was coming but at the same time by being able to take something that's been specialized built and then plug it directly into our ecosystem into our infrastructure on day one rather than having to build it ourselves we were fully prepared for it and reducing user cost right I mean again going back to the gas fees right uh I think that you know most of you guys in here who's heard of ethereum all right four of you guys okay so so you know the the dankun upgrade with Proto Dan charting right because the ethereum foundation and the ethereum community is thinking a lot about scalability on the L2 side as well now right and so that a lot of the the the Proto charting concept with the increase in the blob space and everything you know it's kind of been addressed with Celestia um on the the the modular Da Side and so I'm glad to see you know ethereum also kind of starting to think about that approach and then hopefully in the future you know we have full dink charting which allows scalability based on the number of nodes but anyway um what does that all mean it means that you can save a lot of gas fees and so by actually leveraging Celestia from day one right where we over the past month and a half or so month or so we've been able to save that $1.8 million so I do think that the value of this is also extremely tangible on the user side and finally uh increasing resiliency okay so um who's heard of salana all right so you know resiliency and salana right you don't hear them in the same sentence often but um you know in this case in this rare instance right like imagine salana with resiliency right and so um being able to reduce the gas fees which you know hopefully increases the number of transactions and brings the more financial inclusion um while at the same time increasing resiliency of course you can build in the resiliency monolithic monolithically as well uh but these modular systems right like for example Celestia okay what happens if Celestia goes down and I have nowhere to put my call data right like what happens to man then uh that would really suck but fortunately there's fallback systems such that if Celestia goes down for whatever reason right we can fall back to ethereum to place call data and so that means the network stays up in the event of any type of these types of emergencies uh at the same time right Celestia is the first to Market but definitely not the last we see a lot of other sort of Da systems coming out most notably igen layer right a veil and so in the future what this means is that you know Manta Network could possibly take advantage of all those other da layers as well plug them into our core infrastructure such that if Celestia Falls then you know we've got other options to choose from that will still significantly save on gas costs while also being able to deliver that same user experience with no impediment to block production and so that's resiliency and I think that's really amazing for modular systems because now you have this optionality to build in additional components for the sake of resiliency for the sake of redundancy um yeah and I think that's about it and I've got about two minutes left um the point here that I'm trying to make is you know definitely uh modularity comes with these trade-offs right one of the major trade-offs here is flexibility if you build something from the ground up I was watching this Tik Tok video the other day of this lady like creating her own sandwich from scratch she like kneaded the dough she put in all the ingredients and you know she made the cheese herself that's pretty impressive but like imagine like I I don't know if that's for you guys but like I can't do that every single day right and so I do think that the the the monolithic approach allows you to make the cheese exactly how you want make the bread exactly how you want but at the same time right like when you think about the modular approach it's more so you've got the bread from the grocery store you've got the cheese from the grocery store and so you can you can start putting these pieces in place today um and so I think you know John from the previous presentation was talking about you know that speed to Market I I think the speed to Market is definitely a benefit here um at the same time you know these types of components are still in the early stage are still very experimental I'm not telling all of you guys to start taking the jump and start thinking modular and start building in modular components right now this is not developer advice but at the same time I think that two three years from now when this type of practice continues to mature then we're going to see the same type of deployment development as we already do in spaces outside of web 3 right just like in cloud computing you don't build your own servers you don't build your own operating system you don't build your own database you take my SQL you take some type of Linux drro right and you run it in a data center that's hosted by AWS somewhere geographically that's great and that's exactly what works for 99% of applications and I think that you know as we start heading towards this modular approach I'm hoping that you know um the blockchain space at least on the infrastructure side starts behaving in that scalable manner just like in the cloud computing side that we've seen so much success in um so with that being said I'm Kenny I'm from man and uh mik drop