Barry: Dymension – Modular Blockchains and RollApps #489

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Sebastian cuccio and this is episode 489 today I'm speaking with Barry AKA Shaolin of Dimension Dimension is a protocol to build application specific Roll-Ups and they are building this as a Cosmos app chain um I go deep into application roll ups on Cosmos with Barry in this episode this episode was actually recorded on my podcast the interop which is a podcast where I dive deep with Founders and builders in the

cosmos and interchange ecosystem if you want to subscribe to that you can find it on YouTube just search for the interop and I record weekly episodes there and we're posting it here this week on episode because we thought this was an interesting topic that you guys would also appreciate so without further Ado you here's my conversation with Barry of dimension Hey Barry how's it going glad to be here yeah thanks for joining me uh this is uh we've been like trying to plan this for a long time and I'm glad we're finally getting it getting to around to it and like Dimension is it's a product and a and a protocol that like I've seen a lot of obviously you know you guys are

everywhere on Twitter and uh you know sort of announcing cool Partnerships and uh but haven't spent a lot of time like diving deep into the protocol um I've done a lot of research for this so I've got like tons of questions and so I hope to uh really get to the bottom of how Dimension Works how it scales uh how it allows developers to build scalable applications but also I want to talk about how you know how the how the narrative around scaling has changed over the last couple of years I think you know people don't realize just how much that whole narrative has changed and how much Roll-Ups and um uh interoperability infrastructure is is alive in that so thanks for coming on and uh right before we cancel this

conversation yeah yeah I know we talked about me coming on about like two months ago and I was like wait for testnet we'll we'll schedule something then something fell through uh we released tested in February uh now it's at the end of March and we're releasing another stage of test net soon so we could talk about that as well but there's so much to cover so like where do we start yeah well I think we can start with uh yeah a little bit about yourself and yeah how do you uh how you came to become part of this team and how you got into crypto right so my name is Barry I'm uh kind of like I'm a DJ pretty much I've been in cryptos for a decade or now or so in the weeds out of the weeds in

the in like the community aspect in the technical aspect in the business aspect uh I started the crypto in 2013 if I remember correctly mid 2013 in the Dogecoin Community uh those were Good Times where where it's like you're you're skating by kind of the law with the Silk Road back then and the Bitcoins and the Dogecoin where we were fundraising uh the Jamaican bobsledding team if anyone recalls correctly I do I do that was one of the first epicenter episodes we uh really we were talking about this yeah yeah we're talking about how Dogecoin hedge funded the Jamaican bobsled team oh my God that's right yeah that's what that's what that's what

brought me into crypto like back then when people were just tipping each other on Reddit uh that's what like the community aspect is what brought me a lot of people in my in my position come from the technical aspect and I and I studied Engineering in University and a different business uh courses and and degrees but what really keeps me here is the community and what brought me here was Community back then uh over time I worked in different jobs different protocols and I came with the team the team is uh founded in Israel with by a bunch of Engineers phds and uh business people they were working in the ZK space with uh primarily on the Stark

uh Stark ecosystem and then they were like Hey we're moving to the cosmos ecosystem and they talked to me about uh me coming in as a leading product and for me product is awesome because I could hear like what the community wants where the tech is and kind of put the pieces together so for me I think it's a it's been a great experience it's been a great learning experience because there's so much to learn and every day the protocols are evolving for myself for the community for the all of the protocols that are leading to charge in the modular space in the role of space uh everything's changing so rapidly all this new information and then the quick reiteration and implementation into the products is one of those things that

kind of rare in web but very common in crypto is like this rapid pace of innovation and people may not see it in like the token prices but the tech has gone crazy the tech is really expanding and as you've said uh the roll up architectures and the roll-up idea is really just kind of growth gone out of proportion now like everyone's building roll-ups yeah it's crazy how the narrative has changed in the last couple of years because you know scaling has been uh sort of a topic that has followed me in my crypto career you know I I started about the same time as you and you know obviously there was like the Bitcoin

scaling debates right and a lot of the kind of primitive arguments uh or the The Primitives for the arguments of scaling uh began then and then ethereum started having its issues with scaling and you know there have been you know multiple conversations and sort of evolving narratives around ethereum scaling over the last like seven years and and now it seems like there there are people have more ideas about how to scale decentralized applications but it just like it still feels like there's you know tons of solutions for scaling nobody has like a clear um I mean there isn't like a Clear

Vision for scaling there's like multiple Visions for scaling you know how how do you perceive this narrative change over the last couple years and you know what's been sort of the Excel the major accelerator for you know where we're at now in terms of scaling so it's an interesting point because customers also skills right you have ethereum which is the idea of ethereum is like this world computer where everyone does the financial transactions and non-financial transactions and there's like this decentralized world computer whereas Cosmos comes in a few years later after ethereum's launch and they say hey we could have these Sovereign interoperable communities not it doesn't have to just be one chain and

I thought that was really cool like you have these interoperable chains versus this one computer where everyone is kind of fighting for Block space and that was the issue with ethereum is like you have like arbitrarm come along at like more more recently at least and optimism and they're doing these these Roll-Ups quote unquote where they're processing these transactions off chain and putting the data in and state on chain but it's kind of different than the cosmos idea which was you you can have these Sovereign communities in these applications and then enter interact with each other more asynctly or more like cross chain and this is where kind of Dimension comes in is that they look at arbitrary and optimism scaling the idea

of one blockchain the main blockchain of ethereum mainnet whereas Dimension comes in and says hey Cosmos is an amazing idea it's really incredible interoperability the tech that they built out the tender mint and uh IPC from the cosmos has been built out and it's been standardized and formalized and we could expand on that by doing these Roll-Ups on top of Cosmos so instead of scaling one chain we're trying to scale a network of chains so people can deploy rather than using a validator set of 50 validators or 100 validators you can use one or two or three nodes but you're tapping into the decentralization of the of quote-unquote

base layer which is the dimension chain which is a cosmos chain and you're you're inheriting this like security you're inheriting this decentralization you're inheriting the stake that exists on or the bond the bonded Capital that exists on the on the cosmos chains themselves so the idea is pretty much its roll ups but instead of scaling one network we're trying to scale a network of Networks yeah I mean for for me I think the first time I I heard of this idea of app chains was in Cancun uh Sunny was giving like a talk to a small group of people in a hotel in one of the rooms at this hotel and presenting this vision for app

chains and it like it it kind of clicked for me at that moment and that's when I think I really got on board the app chain Vision or at the chain thesis and and started looking at like these kind of sharding solutions that ethereum or the ethereum community was discussing at the time as um not long-term viable at least not the right kind of design choice and what's interesting is how you know the I think one of the prevailing narratives now is these kind of like Sovereign Roll-Ups or Sovereign zones or you know even app chain like things even in the evm world and how things have kind of come back around to

that construction or that um that design uh pattern um how does Dimension borrow from that design pattern yeah so did I mention in a way can be seen as like a super modularized and broken apart ethereum we have these execution charts which are the Roll-Ups then you have a settlement layer in between which is the you know ethereum main netsmart contracts then you have these data layers which are could be like data availability committees or something in ethereum for Dimension and how it integrates into Cosmos and how it scales the cosmos is that you have these execution charts which are the roll apps and there for the user it's just like interacting with

the cosmos blockchain you have the minting you have the banking you have the staking or different forms of staking and there's some uh adjustments to the cosmos SDK that we make for the as like the rdk the role of development kit and then you have the settlement layer in between which is the dimension Hub and it's a cosmos blockchain that connects all the pieces together and then you have these da layers and like a primary one would be like a Celestia which people are very familiar with now and it's going to be the most scalable da because they're using like client sampling and these really cool mechanisms but in dimension size any cost shame can be a blockchain it can be a DA layer so all they have to do is be able to accept that data down from from

a roll app just post the data to that blockchain and the state route to the dimension help and then it kind of connects all the pieces with IBC so in a way you can consider it like a super modularized and broken apart ethereum but also it's also scaling the network of blockchains of Cosmos so as you said the idea is kind of mesh together and you start getting these fuzzy barriers so you see like Sovereign blockchains on ethereum you see uh smart contracts on Cosmos but in truth the ecosystems kind of mesh together and eventually I think they will interoper interoperate with each other when like there's like Stark like clients and IBC uh working like

back and forth um yeah before we get into Dimension there's there's one thing I want to talk about and sort of ask you about and so when we're talking about Roll-Ups uh you know when we there's there's all sorts of terms that was thrown around like there's The Sovereign roll up there's execution Roll-Ups we were talking earlier before the show about validiums yeah yeah I still have a hard time wrapping my head around how these things are different in terms of their sovereignty in terms of um the the developer experience but also the use cases for which each of these and maybe other you know like celestium and yeah how each of the and then also

you know thinking about that in the context of app chains and smart contracts how do how do you see the differences between these different things and these different sort of configurations and how should developers reason about which to choose when building an application yeah I agree with you I think that's one of the most unfortunate things about blockchain is that all of the definitions are fragmented so you have the people on ethereum saying like a roll-up has to be uh has to use the same L1 or or blockchain for posting transaction data for posting State updates and it all has to be contained to get like full security from that chain uh that's arguable that's understandable as well you can also say

that a roll-up just processes transaction off chain and posts the on-chain and then that's also a roll-up but in essence what what Roll-Ups versus Sovereign versus validiums it really just depends on where the X off chain execution client posts the data and the state so for example on ethereum it's considered a roll-up if it uses ethereum mainnet full economic and full decentralized security to uh to post transaction data and State updates for a sovereign Roll-Up there's like these new uh these new phenomenons that are arising from like

using these specialized blockchains called the da layers or what's commonly known as Celestia as one of the protocols building this and it just it posts the data on chain and then it handles the state and settlement uh kind of on their own layer under but so it's it's you can argue either way I think it's much easier to say like what's an L2 and what's an L1 versus what's a role of versus what's not a roll-up so stop enroll UPS pretty much RL ones that post data to Celestia and ethereum Roll-Ups don't are l2s because they uh the smart contract on ethereum manages what is the proper fork or what

is the the the correct State and what is the correct chain so for for Roll-Ups on Dimension like that's the that this definition of like what's the correct chain is defined on the dimension hub for Sovereign Roll-Ups on Celestia that definition of like what's the correct chain is defined on the roller player and not on Celestia for ethereum that that's defined on the smart contract uh even though there's a lot of debate in ethereum world that I tried to not get into but uh because a lot of people talk about semantics but practically for the for the developer uh security matters a lot but it's kind of like choosing the tool set from the

cosmos with the dimension included or choosing the tool set from ethereum with like the op stack so I think those are kind of like the Divergent paths right now which is the cosmos SDK versus the op stack which is getting much more popular uh but in terms of like what's Sovereign what's not uh that's kind of people could argue semantics all the whole time and what what not but the most important thing is like bringing users and bringing applications and bringing Developers yeah I think that what I'm you know one of the things that strikes me here is that you know we're looking for for years we're talking about like how to scale blockchains how to scale

like how do we scale blockchains but it almost feels like the wrong target you know we don't need to scale blockchains we need to scale decentralized censorship resistant uh applications and um the way we end up with applications that inherit the properties of blockchains and that their sensors are persistent they're secure they're immutable right like all the things that sort of came from Bitcoin the way we scale those applications is by having infrastructure that allows them to retain those properties while um while being usable right and uh and it doesn't really matter what underlying infrastructure there is and you might want to you know you might reason about

okay which which are the trade-offs that your application is going to make uh on this on the kind of like blockchain trilemma for each of those layers but you can sort of you know you can um you can decouple and that's what the modular blockchain uh thesis is trying to do right you decouple each of those layers uh such that the application retains those properties even though there isn't like a one thing underneath it that is fully decentralized and then and we haven't gotten into yet like you know decentralizing other parts of the infrastructure like the RPC like you know the wallet and this sort of thing but but ultimately I think that's like a good way to look at where things are going is like we need to keep our eye on

the prize which is the user what the user interacts with needs to retain the properties of a blockchain the infrastructure itself you know we can we can break that up in a million pieces and probably will right if we look at how technology and like internet technology has evolved over the last 30 years that's exactly what happened and this is probably also it's also Happening Here I think uh decentralization is a skip is a spectrum so there is Bitcoin on one end where you you can run your full node from Genesis and be sure like you're on the proper chain uh then there's chains like ethereum where you're kind of either delegating tokens to a protocol that lives on the protocol which lives

on the third mainnet like Lido or rocket pool and you're not really running your node or you're you're running your node from snapshot like from a particular State and that's kind of the same thing with the cosmos chains where most people aren't running their full node to interact with the system so it you get you know you have to choose as a as a developer more so than a user because the user doesn't really know which chain as like a regular user as a regular user they don't know like which chain is decentralized which chain isn't like they're not really comparing the centralization aspects of our optimism or arbitrum and you know we give it we let that for the experts but for the user like they just want to make sure

that they're secure that they're not going to lose funds that they're not going to lose funds by like some weird Bridge attacks or attacks in general but decentralizations expect from for both for developers to understand and core uh blockchain developers as well so adapt developers and blockchain developers like Bitcoin is one of the and or probably is the most decentralized protocol just because you can run a full node from Genesis and know that you're on the right chain yeah I mean I I'd love to talk more about you know this kind of uh high level Vision stuff if this is the stuff I find often the most interesting there's one last thing I want to talk to you about before

we get into you know Dimension and talking about more more technical things is you I mentioned at the top that uh you you don't think that interchange security uh should scale to more than five chains so of course you're referring to uh Cosmos interchange security why why don't you think that interesting security should scale to more than five chains uh interesting security puts more effort on the validators so if I'm a validator and I want to a secure or Adam wants to secure for example 10 chains 50 chains then in its current version I'm not saying the future versions because the future versions kind of uh partition the the work that each validator needs to do but

in this current version I don't think it should scale more than like five chains just because you start centralizing the applications and you want to make sure you're not hurting the actual the atoms value as you're getting more and more chains so you don't want to start deploying a bunch of chains kind of kind of uh coins that devalue the atoms efforts because each validator is taking their that same atom and that same amount of capital for each individual chain so as you grow the amount of chains the likelihood for those chains to compensate for that effort is uh probably negligible where there's like a

negative expected value you as you increase the amount of change but there are chains that I think should be secure from day one like a usdc uh a generic acid asset issuance chain a liquid staking derivative chain things that really flow in The Interchange so you don't want to you don't want those to be economically attacked but there's chains that like there's no reason for them to be secured by 50 uh not 50. they wish three billion dollars in market cap but you know that's kind of my opinion I think it makes sense especially for validators after speaking with a lot of validators like they don't want to secure every chain or they don't want to run the binaries of every chain just because

that team decided to participate you know they wanted things that are both economically beneficial for themselves and by products the atom token as well yeah that makes sense I mean like I think that obviously things like noble um some like a liquid staking solution things that are kind of core to the cosmos Hub and more broadly the cosmos ecosystem I think it makes sense also those are the things I think that for validators can make money but you know um I don't I don't see a point for like having a Chihuahua chain or something

similar to that or or you know some like kind of user I think I think that interchange security should be reserved for infrastructure or defy Primitives you know primarily you know for Adam right because I think other chains are considering using interchange security as their own chain as well so like if Chihuahua tree wanted to uh secure other chihuahuas or or other Yorkie chains did that make sense uh but for Adam because Adam's like a special chain it's the first chain in the cosmos so I think it should secure as like as core of interchange protocols as there are yeah absolutely

all right so let's let's talk about Dimension we've gone on long enough here uh yeah so can you describe the the different components of of Dimension and you're looking at each layer so you know we have like roll apps there's the dimensions and you talked about this a little bit earlier but let's break each layer down and how they interact with each other yeah so Dimension I consider and it's kind of like a subjective uh consideration and point of view even though I'm a builder of the team one of the builders I believe Dimension is the layer two of the cosmos and it's the layer of two of modular blockchains and the layer one of Cosmos are the monolithic app chains now Dimension Hub is a cosmos blockchain

that is similar to other Cosmos blockchains like osmosis Juno and others that they're different implementation but it at its core is a tender means Cosmos SDK chain or Comet fbt bft sorry uh it's connected via IBC to other Cosmos chains and then what happens is on this Dimension layer 2 are these modular block games the modular blockchains and why why are they much other blockchains and monolithic blockchains it's because they handle execution or transaction processing off chain so you get very low latency and then they post the data on chain and the state routes on train so someone could easily verify hey like this data doesn't

match the state route I downloaded it so like what's going on so they can submit uh what is called the fault proof or fraud proof or validity proof whatever you want to call it so that's the point of Dimension is that dimension the all the Roll-Ups are modular blockchain so it's an ecosystem of layer two blockchains in the in the kind of IBC world uh that those roll apps for example they're not using the cosmos SDK and tenderment of what a cosmos blockchain actually does or uses they use what is called the rollup development kit or the rdk for short and it replaces or changes a few of the modules of the cosmos SDK

for not having validators instead of they have a sequencer so it's kind of like this a block producer that posts the data off-chain and then they use Diamond which is a fork of temperament uh non-tenement optiment which was initially a year ago forked from that protocol that protocol Optimum is built by the Celestia team for building Sovereign Roll-Ups but instead of that we decided to remove that aspect of sovereignty on the on the roller player and it posts the data to a DA layer like Celestia and it posts the state to Dimension so it enshrines Dimension as a settlement layer now what does this

provide why not use a stubborn roll up instead of a roll app is because uh the the speed you get a significant uh speed increases when you use an enshrined settlement layer versus a sovereign roll-up so Sovereign relapse they gossip the blocks to each other per block so like there's a sequencer opposed to a DA layer and then all the nodes in the network communicate with one another and like they see if like the updated state is the correct one so it's like one block one block one block you can imagine it's much slower than what rollaps do and what Roll-Ups do is

that there's a sequencer that batches all these midi blocks together so you get very low latency of like right now we're running a test net of zero points per second the roll up and it both the batch of blocks to the DA layer and the post the state routes to the settlement layer and the settlement layer has a period of x amount of blocks to say hey someone can submit a fraud proof or or a dispute and say hey like this block producer X blocks ago said it was the state was supposed to be y but it's really X so the dimension Hub is the arbitrary between the ecosystem this is like the

difference between sovereign okay so I've got a couple questions here about basically like why you're building this so um what I was reading so I read through the white paper and it sounds like this uh roll-up development get this rdk uh is a a fork of the cosmos SDK or which has uh new modules that enable uh Roll-Ups to be deployed I guess you know in in terms of efficiency and

um you know leveraging existing infrastructure what makes it maybe I'm missing something here like maybe this is a stupid question but why why not just build those modules into the cosmos SDK and allow basically any existing Cosmos SD gate chain to support roll apps so that you could have like roll apps on the cosmos chain and you know benefit from its security or roll apps on on osmosis and benefit from insecurity why why build an entirely new infrastructure to do this when we already have things that are highly secured that can provide data availability and settlement uh just you know building those modules into those chains or is there something

is that possible or like am I totally missing something here I think it's possible but what dimension provides is the ability to arbitrate and to prove a different environment that it's the correct environment so for example if you have a a roll-up onto injective if I'm not mistaken and it's a Solana rollup an injective is a wasm then the injective has to be able to understand the uh what's going on the state machine logic and everything what's going on in the roll up so what we say like chains don't need to go crazy and start beefing up their their their minimalistic app

chains and become settlement layers and da layers because it's quite a complicated process for actually uh understanding different execution environments to actually to handle the proofs to verify the proofs of either ZK proofs or validity or problems so what dimension does is two things one it says the cosmos chains they don't have to do anything all they have to do is be able to accept data and then develop can post the data to that Cosmos blockchain so the demand for the token and the demand for the block space of the cosmos blockchain increases so it inherits a part of the security from the da layer

and that's because all the transaction data doesn't go to Dimension it goes to the DA layer and that's either our sponsors or our sponsors relapse Atmos uh for Admiral evm roll ups Celestia for generalized Roll-Ups that don't want to like pick a specific app chain because that's kind of like the core is dimension people say it's Roll-Ups it's really more similar to validiums in the sense that the roll-up sequencer decides hey which chain do I post the data which block space is gonna which block space am I going to pay for so the for for the options that already exist they don't have to change much they don't have to change anything for a

lot of them but for why is dimension built in the middle is because it handles those uh different virtual environments those different execution environments so it handles the proofs the ZK proves the optimistic fraud proofs and that's the purpose and it then it becomes a bridging Hub between all of it but the Roll-Ups themselves they still inherit a lot of the security from whichever respective da layer that they choose okay I think I think that makes sense so just to recap here at the top we're gonna have roll ups and we'll get into the different types but here you can you can you know currently there's there's an evm uh uh environment there's a cosmosm environment so people

can deploy contracts there they can deploy apps as evm or cosmosm the dimension chain which is a cosmos SDK chain that has a validator set what it does is it is able to understand proofs from each of those environments and potentially other environments in the future you want to build like Solana VM or you want to build I don't know like whatever you know build any any of any VM on top of that technology and then it's agnostic and then data availability the that that will post so that's basically the settlement layer and then it'll post the data to data availability chains like Celestia could be one of less generalized data availability but it could also post to the cosmos Hub to evmos to any to it

doesn't need any specific permission from osmosis to like post data to us Moses anybody that that chain can post data there for each option they will need to either include a module or a smart contract that accepts the data because they're captions at the core it's like Bitcoin why is Bitcoin a dealer now because they accept like in the script or whatever it is the bill yeah the the ability to post arbitrary bytes of data and that's the same thing for any chain so any chain could be a d layer and what happens is dimension Hub Bridges all the all the roll ups to the the IBC world and why I mean why couldn't like Cosmos Hub or osmosis or any other chain just

integrate whatever module like whatever Logic the dimension Hub has to understand you know these like to understand the proofs from uh from from higher layer roll-ups what what is preventing say osmosis and I mean like what they're is there would there not be an incentive for osmosis to also or or the cosmos have to also integrate that uh logic in order to support an ecosystem of roll apps we just haven't uh finished building so they have to wait but uh the truth is it's an open source ecosystem and at the end of the day as I know very well that

a lot of it is community so if the cosmos Hub decides to take a module and their osmosis takes a module and we take a module from osmosis it's an open source Community the tech is a small part of it uh it's not a small part you know it is the core part it's the foundational part but anyone could take open source code we have very open licenses we open source everything we've been building in open from day one pretty much uh we we don't close Source anything people could take our modules at the end of the day you can't take uh intellectual abilities and like focus our Focus the team's focus on this particular core

Mission from day one we've been really focused on so we understand the ins and outs and things that people don't talk about in the public we understand and things that people do talk about in the public so at the end of the day you know you could take modules that's pretty easy it's almost as easy as copy and paste but there's much more core things to building a blockchain protocol than taking a module yeah and and um what what is the I mean does the dimension chain have any particular interests in posting data to the hub or Celestia or osmosis or is that a function of the application and what it's doing and what it's

interacting with or or all those data availability that are sort of at you know an equal um level or like offering similar security so Dimension chain is a tender Man chain it doesn't post data anywhere it's like it's their own validators but the Roll-Ups do Post two different chains right so there's the dimensions which is a tender mid chain and it's like osmosis you know you don't it's not a roll-up of anything Dimension Hub is not a roller Dimension Hub is a chain uh it has the this is why it's IBC connected from day one this is why people could go to the test net and interact with a roll-up and also interact with IPC because all of the IBC

goes through the dimension Hub which is tendermint or come at bft soon uh okay that's like a core aspect that a lot of people don't get people think it like Dimensions that roll up on Celestia or people it's a different whatever it's not it's a settlement layer it's a settlement chain uh the The Da Gnostic part is where the Roll-Ups can post to whichever obviously connected uh chain that is connected to dimension I hope that's a little bit a roll up I mean in choosing in like say you've got a roll up why why like what goes into choosing which chain they would post uh their proofs to

so where they would post their data to right because they're posting their data yeah so they're posting the data first it has to be approved by Dimension help governance that Dimension has to they have to say how oh like this da is secure enough like we believe that as decentralized it's like a it's a community thing so the first one that will be of course use this Celestia Celestia has been proven to really be experts in this field they've been proven to show how they could scale the The Da part and they're very it's very easily verifiable where the data is especially when you're talking about uh autonomous cross-chain communication so like that's a core protocol that's going to be a part of Dimension but we could

also say hey like eventually edmos wants to have some EA as well to fill up their block space so then Dimension help get approved Atmos and now Roll-Ups have two options they could post data to Atmos or they can post data to Celestia now which one are they going to use one of the core decision uh processes is which one is cheaper uh that's because the sequencers that run the rollups actually pay for transaction bytes and which one's gonna be cheaper it's like it's a market or it eventually will be a market and that's probably like which one's the most scalable interesting okay yeah so so it comes down to then

yeah the availability of block space and uh and uh and the the cost of of storing that data and posting that data to to chains uh in terms of interoperability so you mentioned that the dimension changes IBC compatible do the chains do the roll apps themselves interact directly with other IBC apps contracts Etc or does it have to go through Dimension how does interoperability work broadly so I Dimension Hub has a diamond-like client which is the like client of the rollup and the roll-up uh sends that message the sequencer sends a message to

the dimension Hub via IBC and the dimension Hub looks internally and says hey did this this Pew period end is there a fraudulent State and by looking internally they could then allow people to bridge out so IBC goes through the dimension Hub because the dimension Hub looks at the internal State and says okay like this run-up is good to go this role of something happens so we're not gonna allow bridging you know it depends on what the internal state is and then by being IBC connected and you can use like pack a middleware you can get these one hop IPC transactions or one IPC transaction from a evm chain or or a cosmos chain to a rollup

interesting um but in your white paper there is this IRC this this inner chain roll up communication how is that different from IBC so IRC is pretty much not different than IBC there is no difference between IBC it uses the IBC protocol it just adds a client type to the IBC protocol um IRC was formulated a year ago but now that we've kind of ossified or beginning to osify what is the IPC protocol for Roll-Ups then it's just we've made some adjustments where we could one of the

core aspects in our decision and design process is to be as compatible with the community as it as it is but being as compatible with the cosmos SDK being as compatible with IPC those are two critical things that we want to keep and we were able to keep IBC as it is So eventually you could use interchain accounts interchange queries all the applications that are built on top of IBC will be able to be used in rollups as well okay that's very cool um so talk about the what what are the the what's the role of sequencers where do they sit in all of this and how are they incentivized to act honestly so in sequencers post Capital to the

dimension Hub and this could be in the form of dime token which is the dimension protocol token uh superflu is taking from osmosis which uses the LP of dime and the uh the role of token or the roll-up token itself when approved by governance so the sequencer published a post Capital on the dimension Hub and then they get this block production time they get allocated x amount of blocks so if there's a Marketplace or if there's a permissionless sequencing then whoever posts more Capital then they get more block production time similar to like a delegated proof of stake those guys they get a portion of the revenue from operating this

roll up so they post the data they pay for publishing the data they post the state they they pay a little bit for update in the state but then they get all the revenue and it could be in terms of minting it could be in terms of transaction fees it can be in terms of Meb however the protocol decides to capture this a lot of the rewards can go to the sequencer to pay for the operating cost uh so it's kind of like similar to a block producer on a on a on the blockchain on a regular blockchain but instead of everyone downloaded their own data the sequencer is uh trusted for that period and then they post the data on chain and then

someone else could come and download that data and say hey that was incorrect and I could prove it to the dimension Hub and by this you have this one-of-n trust assumption instead of like a two-thirds trust assumption and so like if the sequencer is doing something invalid if if they post like a invalid State transition then someone we just need one actor to prove that they're actually posting something that doesn't make sense okay so it's an optimism it's an optimistic roll-up design so to an extent we use DK for parts of the protocol but because DK has inherent latencies and just the tech isn't there

to fully integrate into uh showing the correctness of State updates then we are focused on doing optimistic rollups and integrating ZK and less stateful things okay can you expand on that a little bit yeah so one of the aspects is so there's two aspects one is a sequencer withholding attacks which it's a bit in the weeds where like this even though the D is good yeah that that so a DA sampling and uh what people are are aware of is that how do you avoid data withholding attacks by block producers on the on like the data availability

chain or the L1 chains for L1 change for regular like ethereum all of the validators download the data and they check the end result for da change the the light clients sample the block producer because what happens on like Celestia for example is the the consensus network is very light that a sequencer or someone posts the data but there's only like a commit to the data on the consensus Network and all the data it goes to the DA Network and the DNA Data Network a lot of sampling goes on to probabilistically deter German like the sequencer uh the the block producer on the on the consensus network of Celestia isn't hiding any data or like that commits and contains all the

data but that doesn't prevent a sequencer from acting maliciously so the sequencer is not this is operating on a different layer than the celestial Network so the sequencer could gossip blocks to their peers which it may not be the same block to their to the DA layer or vice versa whatever it is so we have to make sure that the sequencers that are operating on Dimension that when they post data to a chain that they have to prove to the dimension chain that all the data that was posted was actually posted by them so we could kind of ZK proves uh ZK proof that they were actually posting the data uh we there's

another way to uh if you have a fraud proof instead of re-running the whole state machine like someone comes and the dimension Hub instead of actually uh virtualizing the machine and then re-running the whole State against the the logic and the context you can do a ZK proof of the front proof which kind of shows hey like this input is not the correct output of what the the sequencer did and these are also things that were just only researching but at the end of the day the ZK protocol or the CK aspects of of Dimension will be there and will be integrated there will be in aspects that

don't require low uh latency so for example the Roll-Ups require low latency one of the one of the main selling points of a rollup is to have very low uh user experience latency 0.2 second you could go lower it's configurable so that's because it's a it's a mixture of optimistic design for publishing data and also the batching the batching process of quick blocks but when you have ZK it's the latency becomes much slower or much larger even if you increase like the approver um requirements or decrease the requirements so for us we integrate ZK in aspects that don't need necessarily to be low latent or very fast

okay so when you when you're dealing with aspects that that uh don't require low latency you can leverage ZK but in in other aspects you're leveraging this optimistic design that has much higher latency or much lower yeah right much slower and at the end of the day it's a settlement layer so it'll be able to take in a ZK proofs of uh Roll-Ups that are run by uh by provers sequencers that are actually running on like executing the ZK uh logic but that's not that's not scalable or the tech isn't there for everyone to

just run the ZK prover and to have this kind of system it's much much more scarable in the near future in the in the midterm future as well is to have all these roll ups to uh have just regular nodes operating the sequencers instead of these approvers so indicating the event of a dispute what's the resolution time that's expected or is or is that variable depending on like the type of application or you mean like the dispute period yeah yeah that's uh so it's configurable in the dimension Hub right now for enshrined settlement for contracts and insurance settlement layers optimism and

arbitrine were using seven days uh we can use that it's it's not a like an empirical study to show that you need seven days to actually uh uh secure an optimistic chain it's more about the crypto economic incentives and disincentives that exist so we one of the things that we do is we we're building a protocol called eipc which is just like an application layer on top of IBC where a relayer would uh confirm a transaction prior to the dispute period so they would help in bridging out so for example if I'm a user on roll up X and I want to bridge out tokens but I don't want to wait the seven days then I just do the fast withdrawal and someone else yeah takes

that transition to risk yeah and once they take the risk they're assumed to also be verifying the change so that's kind of like that fast withdrawal Market maker stuff that we've integrated in a trust minimized way within IBC okay that's that's cool um it can can can Dimension also settle to ethereum data availability or is it is something prohibiting that from is it like yeah how does that work uh so for ethereum maintenance to be communicating with uh Dimension there needs to be like clients that understand

the uh ethereum maina tender means not the problem Thunderman has already like clients but because of the constraints of what is the consensus network of ethereum it's kind of like their issue but once they kind of figure that out and maybe you kind of take maybe greater economic risks or less economic security with eigenlayer uh with uh people like different nodes only like a selection of nodes using or giving like validity or giving a attestation then you can for example potentially use protocols that are built on top of ethereum but to use the whole ethereum security for da you would need to really have kind of snark

the consensus of the ethereum protocol and then put into like client I mean this is the same issue that ethereum runs into for interacting with IBC right I mean it's it's like it's the same thing census yeah yeah because Dimensions isn't final finality is an instant and so therefore there's a delay between uh the moment that say like a roll-up would post data on chain ethereum would take some time to catch up so yeah I don't think finality is definitely one aspect I think there's other aspects in terms of uh the way that the consensus network of ethereum is structured because I know uh

ethereal IPC is connected now with um composable and they from my understanding polka dot also has kind of maybe not a probabilistic finality but maybe they do so uh I don't think finality is the only or probabilistic consensus is the only problem with connecting with IBC but I'm not in the weeds of that yeah that's the dream right it's the dream that ethereum and and IBC just work hand in hand without any middle men or middleware or anything like that yeah it's the dream so we could get more liquidity off of ethereum I think yeah the more liquidity on the

IBC protocol the better for the whole blockchain world but right now it's just siled on the on the polygons on the ethereums of the world which in my opinion are worth Tech products and worse economic products than what Cosmos allows you to build So speaking of building I want to I want to go back to the developer a little bit so there is there's the um there's different ways of building a roll app so we've got the evm uh roll app the the cosmos and roll up but you also have this um rdk which is this roll-up development kit it from from what I understand it's kind of like the cosmos SDK and that it has modules that allows you to build a

you know custom blockchain is the idea here to just kind of like build Cosmos SDK chains on top of uh on top of Dimension and you know why why have evm and cosmoasm specific modules when you know I uh we already have cosmoaza modules for the cosmos SDK that could also sit within this rdk and we also have ethernet which could sit within so because it feels like these are three separate products uh no they're one product are they just different they're just okay it's just one product okay yeah so the rdk is a cosmos SDK Fork where you integrate in

Ethernet or wasn't so it's the same stuff like where we don't really build anything we changed the speaking module we changed the staking module because uh what happens is the staking module is tied with tender mints validator changes whereas the sequencer is different for and when we replace Diamond temperaments with diamonds we have to change some of the Integrations or the coupling between the business logic of a app chain and the on and like the networking logic or so like the rdk is apci compatible but we changed some of the things and one of the things that we change is say we we have validators and Cosmos and there's a coupling between governance and

computation so a validator also validates the network so they make sure that all the blocks that are being proposed are aligned with the state logic so they're all on the same chain but they also participate pretty much the fact though as as uh governors of the chain so people delegate tokens and they don't really the delegators don't pay attention we separate this into two parts on the on the rdk the the compute is handled by the sequencers but because the sequencers can be centralized what what the idea of of the rdk what the idea of dimension for for people who are watching is that hey we want people to build Cosmos blockchains just with a few

nodes but with that inherit the security of the decentralized base layers but when you have this uh kind of aspect of where you only have a few nodes or one node even then you start to centralize the computes and the governance so if it was a validator that means that everyone's about delegating to one person and that sucks so we say hey we cannot allow that we can't allow a centralization to one party of governance and computes we can allow a centralization of computes because you only need one person to disprove that that uh sequencer was actually doing the correct state but we decentralized the governance by using at

the nfts so that each roll up can distribute however many entities they can have one nft they could have a thousand nfts or they could have different uh functions of Distributing creating the nfts and then you delegate tokens to those nft members so it's similar to what people are using like SBT tokens uh cell bound tokens on different ethereum chains but here you could actually trade uh and you could actually start to accrue more value to the nfts and also to the tokens so we separate in the rdk two aspects the governance and the computes because we don't want we also don't think it's like economically aligned for a sequencer to

decide how much rewards he gets so it's kind of it becomes a negotiation and it becomes more of like a real world corporate structure where you have the employee which as a sequencer could be the CEO but he is operating the ecosystem then you have board members which are the nft members and then you have shareholders which are the token holders that delegate to the nft members and there's also Roll-Ups for example don't need their own token so you can have like just pure one one user one vote so you can get like these different structures and different hopefully uh very novel government instructors on the on the road player because they're already inherent the security of the

base layer uh that's the core difference between the cosmos SDK and the rdk you inherent the developer tooling you inherit the go the most most of the goal modules we try to stay up to date even though we're we're moving to the version 46 right now um so a lot of the tooling a lot of the protocol is very similar and tied to the customer's ecosystem at the end of the day it is a layer two on top of a layer one which is the cosmos and and you guys are just like constantly refactoring or sort of merging back uh into the rdk the cosmos SDK module so that there's always this

compatibility whichever ones we see fits for Roll-Ups so not maybe like anything that's upstreamed uh from the staking module for example that we may not want to use it but if there's something that's new like the group module I think the group module which allows kind of these sub sub-dials and with now you include like the nfts as Governors and these sub-dials I think that's a great uh integration between kind of like the main community pools and the sub-dials so like these things are upstream or Downstream to the rdk but there's things that are that don't necessarily need to be changed

very interesting um yeah with regards to the rdk you know when uh when developers are building applications here what what kinds of what like compared to building an app chain um what are the what are the key differences that developers should keep in mind and what kinds of applications do you think are just not suited for roll apps like if you were talking to a developer and they're telling you hey like we're going to build this new app we want to build it on rollout like what kinds of applications would you uh consider not well suited for this construction and and sort of steer them

towards building like an app chain or interchange security or something like that yeah so when you're developing a roll-up you're getting very low latency and you're getting easy bootstrapping so instead of bootstrapping 50 or 100 validators you get one or two or three nodes that you really need to operate as sequencers so you have this uh reduction of nodes operating in the system because you're inheriting the decentralization of the base layer so with this reduction of operators you get a very fast experience for users so if you want to do online games or whatever or D5 products uh then it's amazing it's amazing because there's two aspects one

you never the users never get increasing data costs so the costs are always maintained because you could choose one da layer and then you could use another da layer as long as you can balance your cost and then you also have this latency the detriment or the other side is like why would you build an app train over a roll-up is because your protocol really needs that uh instant censorship resistance so a decentralized protocol like uh like an app chain especially with uh new tender mint style or new Forks of tenderness called uh new lupus lupacy or one of the one from Duality okay I don't know about this yeah so so

their product their ideas like uh there's a few black proposers and then like one block Builder and then each one the block Builder has to have transactions from each block proposer based on stake so there are applications that really need or uh inherent or should inherent the the instant censorship resistance from a uh from an app chain but that's also it's a spectrum and maybe you could wait like a couple of days or a day for censorship resistant uh so it depends on how sensitive that transaction is to type I think that's kind of like the critical

decision Factor if your application should be built as a nap chain or if it should be or should be built as a Roll-Up and is there a like I've been talking to a lot of people about this idea and I I'm starting to see this idea um you know in a lot of places and and and so this this idea that you know smart contracts Roll-Ups app chains are not so much in opposition to each other but exist more on a gradient uh and and so that we should see things as um applications evolving or sort of graduating uh steps up that ladder uh is there an upgrade path for applications

that maybe start as a roll app and at some point for reasons that you mentioned need to upgrade or transition to building their own app chain or some other form of consensus is there is is that something you think will happen with applications as they grow or and is there a way an easy way for applications to do that I don't think it'll happen because the core aspect of a relap is you're getting very low latency which you just don't get the same latency of like 0.01 seconds like there's a reason why you're a roll up and then you also have this coupling you have to kind of change the structure to fit the validators of an

app chain so you have to reconfigure things is it possible I think everything's possible and blockchain is very fluid especially when you get into like the social layer of things and social consensus but at like a practical level I don't think that's going to be very common I think it's more common for interchange security uh consumer chain to move to a sovereign chain and I think that's actually one of the great uh product Market fits for cons for interchange security is that it can secure by chains but maybe eventually those things kind of should recycle but in terms of Roll-Ups like if you're if you're building a roll-up then you're probably wants the like super low latency and that kind of aspect of and flexibility of roll up instead of the

napkin cool well um what's the roadmap and when can I think you guys already I mean I was I was in the portal a while ago and sort of fiddling around there so there is something that's live uh can people already build on this and uh what are some of the early projects that are building uh using dimensions we're building the first we built the first test net which is gonna it's a staggered test net so in February we released the first roll up and the dimension chain the roller post the data to Celestia in the state routes to to the dimension chain it's connected via IBC we're integrating next week or in two weeks the EV umbrella with with collaboration with the atmos team and

the celestial team so it posts it's gonna reuse the IBC token for gas of Atmos so evmos you people are gonna take their Atmos faucet token IBC through the portal to the ebm chain and then interact with what we're going to deploy is a uni swap Fork so people could trade on this test net so it's going to be the first evm roll up and that's IBC connected and the cool thing is that it uses a different token and it doesn't have its own native token uh that's going to be in collaboration with Atmos and Celestia and and so after that we're gonna move to incentivize testnet we may throw in a few one or two more surprises in between uh with other collaborations

like a gaming dial that we're that we're very close with and then we're gonna deploy an incentivized testnet where people could deploy their own rollups and this is going to be in the second quarter uh likely in the latter half like towards the end of the second quarter and people will be incentivized to deploy their own chains people will be incentivized to participate in the ecosystem and then we'll move on to mainnet maina is going to go from permissioned to permissionless over time very cool and uh yeah working I think people can go to dimension.xyz and you've got everything there the documentation the light paper they can uh learn more about building a roll app

on Dimension right yeah check out the Discord we're pretty out we're definitely active we have a very active Community uh so sometimes it's hard to get into our community but we do that on purpose we want to make sure that people really kind of have heart and we really really really really value the people who are building the community because it's a decentralized chain it's their chain that we're building we're we're taking a centralized idea an idea that was in someone's head to to an actual product to decentralized protocol that you know is going to be autonomous and we need people all around the world to operate these nodes and we need people to just spread the gospel awesome well yeah it's been really

really fun uh chatting with you and learning more about Dimension and um yeah looking forward to seeing uh more more coming from this ecosystem and certainly uh you know decentralized applications being developed as uh roll-ups definitely definitely I look forward to as well thank you for having me