Bitcoin and Beyond EP3: Molecule is Bringing SVM To Bitcoin Scaling

Transcript

[Music] [Music] [Music] welcome back to bitcoin and Beyond today we have Chase from molecule discussing a nextg VM on bitcoin talking about the salon VM and how it all works under the hood Chase thank you for coming on and

welcome yeah thanks for having me uh I can dive a little bit deeper into uh what I'm working on why I'm so excited about uh next gen VM on bitcoin uh and uh I can kick things off here so uh what we're building here at molecule is really a ecosystem of svm uh blockchains uh and rollups and our main product is a what we call the fastest programmable layer on bitcoin the problem that we're solving here is Bitcoin has been slow expensive and it's not tur complete meaning that you can build uh Native DS uh using spine contracts using Bitcoin

script so there are two versions of solutions um that are tackling uh this problem one is you building a side chain on bitcoin and the other one is a vop or L2 on bitcoin so for side chain side um what that means is it's usually settles on another economic layer or it has its own consensus mechanisms uh typically it doesn't have unilateral exit exit of assets uh the advantage of building side chains is there's faster uh Market uh but uh on the other hand it does not inherit Bitcoin security uh for l2s uh it settles on bitcoin with unilateral

exit of assets uh and therefore inherits Bitcoin security it is slower to go to market because there are some R&D involved that uh we as industry are still progressing towards which I can dive a little bit deeper later on as well so the current most used execution layer on uh Bitcoin l2s or Bitcoin side Chains It's the evm it is also the most adopted execution environment in the space right now on L1 side you can have you have the OG ethereum and also other evm chains like Avalanche uh you have l2s like arbitr and optimism but what we are really excited about a molecule is

the next gen VMS and these VMS improve on the single threaded VM to enable higher throughput and lower cost our solution therefore is to bring the most performant VM that is the svm to bitcoin and svm provides the highest throughput with a super battle tested execution environment and already has a vibrant development Network so here are some stats uh you can reach 1,000 true TPS uh the cost per transaction is a fraction of Penny uh that's more than 3,000 active developers already on Salan and how we decide on the VM uh it's two folds one is we as team has

been in the Salan ecosystem for uh more than two years uh and have seen firsthand how uh Solan Foundation together with us uh activating at different hacker houses build up a very strong community of developers and two is really on the technical side which is uh looking at speed cost and usability I think speed and cost I talked a little bit about uh in past few slides and usability is really about uh the infrastructure uh that's uh built around uh that ecosystem or that VM such as evm svm and movm and that brings us to adoption which is really the most

important part how many developers are building already what kind of apps are being built what kind of users what kind of Community are you attracting that's really important as well and here's a side by side comparison of the different VMS svm as part of the nextg VMS is the most mature it's already in development uh development for about five years and the language itself is also very uh unique compared to the others in in the sense that the other languages are uh essentially web3 specific languages but on salana or SPM it is rust and there are already more than three million rust

developers uh globally and in terms of TPS it is also the most battle tested uh and uh highest one right now at about a thousand true TPS that's not counting any voting TPS that Solana has as well so what how we come to I guess this the conclusion that we have is really svm is the most battle tested execution environment and therefore the most to solve the programmability problem on bitcoin and the next question that we have is uh you know the debate between monolithic and modular Vision I think Solana has always been uh about the monolithic vision and it makes sense for

an L1 because you can have the execution da uh and settlement uh on one chain uh with high FID but that is simply not possible on bitcoin because of the restrictions of layer one uh where you don't have native smart contracts and therefore we need to take a module approach and that is possible now with different uh technology or mod sexs that we can leverage as well so how think about Chase quick quick question on that note um and I I love the idea of Bitcoin going modular um and so I I just want we've had some other people kind of like high level talk about the the restrictions of of Bitcoin at the layer

one level um this might be a silly question but why don't we just change the parameters to allow like to allow people to put more data into Bitcoin blocks and and kind of provide some more processing power yeah I think that is to do with the security of the network so because Bitcoin is uh so uh I guess super mature and there's one one trillion of liquidity that's at St it is difficult to make drastic changes to the opose on bitcoin uh but that being said we are in the progress of having some breakthroughs in terms of uh

more upcast that can simplify a lot of the complicated Tech that we are exploring on bitcoin so the one that's most exciting is opcat uh which essentially enables complex transactions to be written in the much simpler and therefore uh occupies less space uh in the shared utxo of Bitcoin and uh I think that guess it might be controversial take but I do think it's going to come in the next six to 12 months uh and the reason is in the past uh during the tap group upgrade upgrade uh we already have the op code that's written into uh Bitcoin

that is in the form of op success 126 and uh which means that that code is already existent and therefore to uh reinstate that you just have to do a soft Fork instead of a hard Fork uh so that like a much uh easier process uh because essentially you get you need to get the uh miners globally to come to a majority consensus and as long as they upgrade the software uh this change can go through uh and that is to me is really exciting it can lot a lot of potential uh you know calculation methodologies on bitcoin itself and enable uh ZK robs in a much simpler fashion awesome thank you for the the

explanation yeah uh for sure I'll go on to the next page uh so that leads us to the svm rollup stack and how we think about it is we strip out the execution layer of salana and and enable ZK verification of transactions through a ZK VM and what we call a molecule appr here then you post that DK snark to uh Bitcoin using a challenge reward uh mechanism um so there's a few uh progress in this uh area uh and I think upcat I talked about it already bit VM is another uh way to do it um so that is really the fin vision of how we want

transactions to settle and be finalized on bitcoin itself and then dive a little bit deeper into the ZK VM how uh we go about doing it is in the uh in the salana uh modules there's a bank module where essentially uh we can take out uh the BPF uh and allow transactions uh and states to turn into a function and we can plug it into a ZK VM for example from risk zero um and using the risk five EF binary we can then uh post the state change with a DK receipt back to

the svm and with this methodology we can create a Stark that can be wrapped into a snark that can then be verified on bitcoin itself uh and I think to go back to the adoption part what we believe is the most important is still you know how many developers are developing in your ecosystem so etherum definitely has a lead in this in this area uh with around 14,000 overall developers so but Solana is like a close uh I guess it's like a second uh most vibrant ecosystem right now uh with more than 3,000 active developers uh but just taking a step

back this is actually a small number compared to you know just globally how many rust developers there are so right now based on estimates there are you know more than three million rust developers meaning that uh we are only seeing you know 0.1% adoption so we are really early but I do think there's large potential here to attract more developers into the space and the key here is really how can we make the user experience the easiest for uh anyone to come into the space how can we build retail skill consumer applications do you think this is a an incentives problem or do you think this is like like a reputation problem where developers are a little bit apprehensive

to be associated with cryptocurrency for for legitimacy purposes like you know like you you know why why do you think there's only 0.1% of global developers that are that are currently in the web 3 Community why why aren't there more what's missing yeah I think it's it's mostly to do with maturity of the industry and education that goes along with it uh for uh the longest time we have been educating the public that crypto is not a scam and I think we' have come to a solid conclusion on that with uh the ETF of Bitcoin going through and now there's development on the ethereum ETF as well um and uh it takes time for developers

to you know realize that there's this space that they can uh you know try new things try cool things um and therefore I think it's like a concerted effort of the whole uh industry to push this forward and we have seen it from salana hack houses for example that has been a huge success and ethereum with uh you know East Denver and all this conferences bringing a lot of people and I think the next step is really how the infrastructure right how can we create you know really usable blockchain ecosystem and I think on ethereum for example even with the scaling Solutions that's um uh the costs are still relatively High which means that you can't build uh

retail scale consumer application with you know tens of millions of users so that's really where I do think the next gen VMS will play a big part and svm will be at the Forefront of this yeah um I just have uh one last slide here so the question for us is really uh what next uh so we are focusing on the spvm SDK now uh where we can enable any svm app chains um and the next step we are exploring is a decentralized sequencer we're essentially creating sequencer Network for molecule and SPM vops uh and our final vision is to create a uh rup

network of svm chains on any chain so you can imagine svm on uh ethereum svm on BMB chain uh and other chains as well so uh super excited uh about this and uh I think we're seeing a lot of interesting developments on on bitcoin itself so uh yeah excited to share more sweet man could you move back to the slide before the prover yeah okay so all right so let's talk about this so um this trust minimized Bridge could you please give us a bit more information about how what the validators are what

the what the trust assumptions are and uh kind of what that setup is yeah so essentially we are building a uh we are uh working with a few teams on like a a bit VM Bridge uh so the trust assumption there is really you can have uh a challenge proven mechanism on bitcoin itself so you can verify any asset transfers uh from um molecule back to uh Bitcoin there's a challenge period where you can you can any verifier can come in and say that hey uh there's some uh issues uh then uh they can go through this

challenge mechanism so that's how we think about uh a bit VM bridge and another solution is really a DK Bridge that's that can be enabled by op cap uh so uh that is also in the works um and I think that will depend on you know how fast we push forward the industry standard uh I think for a lot of other uh Bitcoin L2 solutions they are choosing to go with a multi sake bridge at first uh but for us we are uh thinking of building for the long term uh so uh we want uh you know main that as and the trust minimized bridge to go out at a similar time period and so does that mean that you guys

won't go live until bit VM is stable uh so there are ways to simplify the bit VM bridge for example uh I think uh bit VM is a is a general purpose uh computation mechanism through like offchain comp computation method combined with uh onchain challenge approver so there's ways to simplify that for a a rollup specific Bridge with less challenge mechanisms for example so on BBM there's like six different types of challenge mechanisms I think there's like 50 plus op codes you really need you know less than 10 of those OP codes and you know one challenge mechanism for

example for a rollup specific implementation so we think we can you know push that forward faster than you know the general purpose of BVM implementations got it and does uh does require a soft Fork to bitcoin uh to implement those OP codes no no uh you you don't have to do a soft for for that uh but for the second option where you uh essentially the DK Bridge uh we need a soft fork for upcat to come through got it okay and that is uh opcat is currently in bit

420 right uh upcat yeah so it's it's currently uh I guess hidden uh with the tap RP upgrade and then uh I think we can there there is a good chance that you know we can push forward as industry I think there's a couple guys like the quantum cat uh taper wizard guys uh pushing uh this initiative forward so yeah excited for that as well cool um Okay so so in this stack when you guys post blocks to a data availability layer um that that would be like a data availability layer like a Celestia or Veil or I da or

something yeah yeah so there's a few options here there uh there celesia uh which has you know uh Das and light noes out of the box uh this IG that's uh more ethereum aligned uh but I think from my understanding the costs are slightly higher uh there's some new I guess newer da solutions that has even lower cost that's coming out uh and and I think uh what's exciting also there's there's a few Bitcoin specific uh da Solutions so I think b square Hub is one uh there's new bit as well uh so uh I think we have a good uh you know selection of uh data availability layers uh some are native

to bitcoin which is really exciting as well okay so then when this is passed from the data availability layer to this economically incentivized verifiers is this an svf or is this a molecule ran verifier Network or or like what does that mean yeah essentially any any Bitcoin notes um full notes they can uh take part in and become part of this verifier uh Network and and you know do and I guess uh very verify I guess they can challenge any uh transactions or blocks uh from molecule so that's really uh

What uh I mean by verifier Network here cool um if you wouldn't mind moveing to the prover uh graphic as well okay so let's talk about this more in depth um what is the so like I I guess let's just start with the very very broad like why why do you need uh to interact with ZK VMS um to to reach uh consensus and and kind of finality with molecule yeah so the ZK VM part is really producing the um the proofs uh so instead of writing all the ZK circuits

ourselves uh there are general purpose uh ckvm that's specialized for that uh so we intend to leverage the progress that they' have made uh on on uh the ZK circuit part uh and I think uh and there needs to be some changes uh for uh the svm as well to do that uh so we have uh essentially modify the bank module uh from salana uh in order in order to interact with the ckvm okay so when you've modified this okay so that makes sense right we we get the proofs um and you you're able to modify this Bank module to interact with

the zbm you know like Risk zero succinct Etc um now as far as the modifications go for the bank module um do you feel that the modifications that you've made uh open up any vulnerabilities compared to like the battle tesed nature of svm itself uh so much so that the reason that you've chosen to use svm is because you believe it's you know if not the best battle tested uh execution environment but then by changing the bank module don't you introduce another level of security problems or trust assumptions where we have to assume that what you guys have done to the svm doesn't have unknown KnockOn effects

which you guys may not be aware of yeah I think I think part of it is we'll still go through a extensive audit process um so I think that is to make sure that uh you know all the code is you know well well written and doesn't have any security impl implications and the other part is I think what we've done is essentially uh write uh I guess writing a part of uh svm to uh relay information uh that is the transaction states to ZK VM so it's not really changing you know how the execution is run within SPM and on top of that it's um the the final transactions are still uh

proven uh using the ckvm um uh to create like the fra proof and verify it on bitcoin itself so I think security wise uh it's probably one of the most um I guess highest security uh Frameworks uh that we can Implement got it okay so so then you're kind of uh referring to molecule as like a ZK a ZK rollup on bitcoin but you're using you're planning to use a data availability layer then it's more like a like a

validium um like I I I I guess how much do you think that like the Bitcoin Community being so or I I mean even just opposed to bitcoin l2s or very opposed to like changes in kind of like the like the core uh Tech and keeping that level of security like how much do you think that the Bitcoin Community um cares about the difference between like a whether you're using a data availability layer or you're using Bitcoin or kind of like what trust assumptions that you have like you know do do you think that that there's a strong demand kind of for for one way or the other and has that kind

of influenced your decisions yeah I think I think the Bitcoin Community definitely demand uh programmability for Bitcoin uh and uh spvm is best solution to that in terms of througho and cost um and in terms of uh bitcoiners being uh you know Die Hard uh Bitcoin fans and doesn't want l2s I think that's really changing uh rapidly and uh I think it's started out from tap upgrade to ordinals uh and recently runes so people have been seeing a lot of activity on bitcoin uh and how do you move on to the next step when you can create uh applications directly on

bitcoin that is only possible by having an L2 so uh on Solana uh I guess Solana inspired or svm uh chains uh you know a lot of uh cons consumer I guess uh scalable consumer apps can be built so you can imagine on on the payment side you can have you know close to instant finality on and I think one example is you know stripe has been integrating uh and you know they showed the dep of how uh you know crypto transactions work uh and they actually integrated ethereum and polygon as well but during that demo

they showed salana uh only uh just because of how fast and how cheap it is um so I I do think that svm is the best solution to the programmability problem on bitcoin it definitely takes time but there are uh I think a general consensus that you know you need uh program you need to have like L2 for programmability on bitcoin uh in terms of security assumptions uh there's actually a few uh groups that are spearheading uh definitions for l2s and I think the most important part is really uh the settlement and the bridging so as long as we tackle that you know have a trust minimi minimized bridging solution uh that allows unilateral exit exits of

assets uh I think that uh fits in the you know definition of an L2 or roll up on bitcoin cool cool yeah that's um that's that's all that I have at the current moment I I appreciate you answering and fing the questions um and and for coming on Rob do you have any other questions yeah I've got like two unrelated questions one is pretty specific I guess we can start with that one uh like all the way on the the last slide um you mentioned a decentralized sequencer with um with other svm rollups uh would this give Atomic composability

between uh for instance rollups on on bitcoin using SV M and and Solana uh so it will give Atomic composability for any rollups rollups on uh using our sequencer so that means that it won't be uh I guess essentially composable with salana uh but it's uh relatively easy to bridge from an SPM chain to Solana for example there's also a few providers for are doing Solutions like that for example hyper Lane so uh I think that is really how uh you can transfer assets between svm chains and

salana itself cool um and so hyperlane would enable like interoperability between a Bitcoin svm rollup and traditional like either salana L1 or salana rollups yeah yeah I think that's that's something that uh from our understanding uh D can offer nice yeah we're we're uh fans of their Tech as well um cool and then the uh theh second question I had unrelated to that one uh was like just it was like a higher level question like more in general here I'm curious why do you think uh like Bitcoin rollups and Bitcoin side chains Bitcoin l2s in general are going to succeed where

lightning Network and and some of the attempts at scaling Bitcoin have failed in the past do you think for instance lightning network was just payment channels and it just was too too simple there wasn't like enough that we could do with it and that why it didn't really get a lot of adoption or generally like why why do you think those iterations failed why why these are in position for more success yeah I think timing is definitely a big thing uh it Tes it took time for people to really uh get accustomed to the fact that you know uh potentially there can be DS that's built on bitcoin um and I think in in Lightning's case there are uh are many issues with lightning uh for example I think the operators have been online uh

at all times um and uh there are uh because of that I think adoption is low for aligning and uh I think people have started to shift Camp uh towards the L2 side uh because that is where you know truly any application uh can be built uh so that's uh that's something that's really exciting as well because I think lining has really paved the path uh for you know uh Bitcoin usability uh and also I guess another part is lightning is more focus on payments I I I don't think they are you know focus on general purpose uh L2 uh so that is that creates like a space that's you know uh

I guess uh right for um development and together with rups on ethereum that's really showing like what can be done uh that uh sort of inspire this wave of you know exploring exploring programmability uh and usability of Bitcoin awesome awesome Chase thanks so much for coming on and uh for sharing molecule uh very excited to see this go live and uh for Bitcoin to scale in general so thank you yeah thank you J