ETH Rio 24 - State of EVM Networks | Bruno Maia, Rony Szuster, Jaime Varela

Transcript

so guys hello have a very very good morning I'm very happy to see you all here and now we're going to talk a little bit more about the evm so both the evm itself and also a little bit about its ecosystem so we have these two very nice invitees here so please guys present yourself so that we can start thank you Ronnie so I am haime arela I am from Shain safe we are a research and development firm we are the people behind web PJs loads are amount our public goods Al so we provide infrastruct uh interoperability infrastructure and web free gaming products hey guys I'm Bruno uh I would like to thanks Antonio and and everyone

for having me here today super excited to to share this talk with you guys today uh I'm from cartei cartez is actually a model execution layer we are expanding the design space on Eon on on evm I would say ecosystem and allowing developers to do more web tree and we we can talk more about that along the panel but I'm super excited to to be here today with you guys perfect thank you guys so let's start we saw in since the evm was incited back then by vitalic and gave you wood so a lot of years ago in crypto at least right H we saw that it gain a lot of momentum right we saw uh first of

course only ethereum using the evm but also new chains aggregating now we have lots of rollups layer toos so nowadays we have more than 50 rollups and layer toos using ethereum and of course the evm evolved in those years right so we have the merge for example in 2022 we have the shella Fork we have denum Fork which you just talk about and we have both changes in DM as an infrastructure with new up codes for example and also new uh options of development in the chain but we also have some new challenges that we need to overcome right so for example now that we have more than 50 chains how can we do to interoperate all those Solutions right I

mean I have some e on arbitr but I need to use it on base or I don't know I want to deploy some contract on ZK sync but I don't have e there how can I how can we integrate all of those chains solve this problem and of course also keep the price in a reasonable range right we don't want to pay like 10 e for each transaction that we do so how can we how how do CH safe and how do you guys work in order to solve these issues yeah so uh we are seeing solutions that bring other challenges as well right so we have modularity but modularity brings uh fragmented liquidity uh so what do we do with it a

change if we have built six Sigma for example it's one solution we addressed for for interconnect this liquidity and we building over our experience with web p and web PR Unity we have seen that one of the biggest challenges currently is in the ux that developers have uh by building on top of these tools so if we have our bridges we have a lot of security issues we must provide the tools that are very easy for not web tree developers to build on uh that's basically where shf has put efforts in for example no that's perfect do what's your

opinion about this yeah I think to to answer that we could could got a step back and maybe give a more broader perspective to the audience on why those problems happen right um if ethereum a while ago will Embrace as a as a road map as a technology path to evve and be capable to be the real world's computer it's embra a path where it's in a SC in the scalability road map it Embrace in a base layer its fundamental property which is the decentralization of trust which is a hell of a problem to solve by itself and that allow AUM to Outsource to other ecosystem members part of the

infrastructure that will scale and together we'll be able to address real life problems right because we only reach mainstream as we all want to do if we start addressing uh uh I would say reel people problems in life right so when you do that you have this fragmentation that haime mentioned right you have those challenges and and modularity right you you get specialization you have modular execution layers you have data viabilities and you have chains starting to stack in a horizontal in completely different I would say uh architectures and that brings problems for developers because as mentioned on

the previous I would say uh um panel here it's complicated to developers to figure out what exactly to use so of course we need to solve that convenience the ux for developers must be addressed but also it it POS a challenges on composability itself right um and I would say that composability as we have in in a base layer might be overrated right we don't need exactly that perfect composability that have the theum for every single use case but we do most probably require composability on the liquidity access to Capital right and and and solving that it's already a challenge by itself right we we have

some I would say promising initiatives uh with what we call uh sequencers right decentralized sequencers or with initial um uh prisy technology that initiated by uh polygon but it's not a a polygon project some is a neutral project called aggregation layer right so those are the technologies that will bring and allow different execution layers different l2s with a different architectures scale what needs to be scale meaning scale computation scale the design space for developers to do more in web three while keeping the

fundamental properties of trust security of theion Bas layer and access to this wide range of capital that is available that on on that ecosystem right if you mix those things then you start unlocking in this modular layer more us case than we have nowadays right that's perfect you mentioned the polygon aggregation l right so we have nowadays multiple solutions to to at least they're trying to give a solution to this problem and I'd like to know for you guys which ones are the ones that you're most bullish on the one that you most believe that you think will be the next future of the evm ecosystem well personally I'm really

excited about the rollup as a service for example on which you can easily one click and deploy a new blockchain that's really bullish I I mean it's it's really very new and we are just seeing the Early times of new developments being made with such easy to use tools for for the builders uh another very exciting thing I think uh Shan has been working on for example is the account of Wallet transaction we are doing something else Also regarding on on blockchain transaction is for example on gaming it doesn't matter which chain you're going to deploy on with our tools for example you you

could easily access all liquidity across chains across uh even soft State even Bitcoin liquidity we are we are enabling now so yeah those two mainly the easier to use r with service services and and the other one regarding the blockchain abstraction tools reability perfect and I also have a question for you and we as as you see we have roll loop as a servic it's really easy to set up a new rollup nowadays a new layer to and we see a lot of new ones as as I said we have 50 layer ches now in the ethereum evm ecosystem and we will have more 20 in the next months so how are the the risks being assessed in this market how

do you guys think like we also had a lot of hacks in bridges right so 70% of the hacks of the last two years in crypto were in bridges so this is definitely a big issue definitely something important for us to developers to take care so how do you guys see this developing the next years and how can we solve this issue yeah uh that that's why I start the panel uh highlighting the the fundamental property of uh the centralization of trust when you the fundamental I would say atos of blockchain is the dis intermediation right so to do that the BL the the network itself assumes the role of the intermediator right it's the

network that will guarantee the consensus among the stakeholders and make the transactions progress so if you lose security you end up with nothing right that's why modularity and all this composability that we are talking and reading a lot it's much easier said than actually done right I think this year in the next year we will see fundamental progress on that and increasing safety on this because it's uh the only property that we cannot uh I would say give away in terms of blockchain and that together should come exactly with the convenience right uh take an example Kazi we offered a convenience layer for developers to launch the app chains or

application specifically rollups using a VM that boots an entire Linux right and in a very convenient way if a few clicks off a button so our project is an infrastructure project we are aiming to solve the complications on developers level we are aiming to solve the friction on developers level but of course we still have one level of my friction which is regular users how they will uh access and use applications right then you have all account abstractions how to onboard wallets how to keep the wallet saves how to to protect users and how to protect preserve identity and Etc so there are two levels of frictions for that's

separating us for a more I would say robust compelling Mass adoption right uh but I'm super excited and answering your question about what I'm bullish on on the composability and and I would say integration I would say aggregation layers is starting so uh I think we need to give more time for for that concept to Lear properly I would say sharer sequencers are are in a more advanced stage for example with espresso sequencer which is a pro a project that we close collaborate uh so yes share sequencer maybe will come first and start allowing different layers to to interconnect in what it matters especially liquidity

right and while these different layers will serve for different purpose on on developers on on creating applications those applications they have different verticals different requirements is expected to each vertical use case have a separate need and we need to abstract that from developers from the users we are still talking about technology here we're not selling solution yet so we are super early stage in blockchain technology right still some progress to reach the level that we still talking about Solutions and abstracting away all the all the protocol stack that is below yeah that's a perfect point I mean when we use the bank nowadays we're not

interested in how our transaction goes to brades servers and then to monco Central service that doesn't matter for us right we just want to use it in order to get the money from place a to place B so as I understood of I just said we need to do that also with blockchains right we need to abstract all of this complexity from the end user so at least in my opinion the end game is for my grandma to use blockchain right for her to log in of course not in ethereum layer room because it's it's expensive I would say the end game is people even don't know they're using blockchain right yeah yeah why we should be aware of that in your solution nobody knows what Instagram use to Ser to to offer a service right so that that is the end

game and for developers they should have a friendly environment where they can use all the tools available and that's the problem to bridge Web Two developers to web three world right the solidity evm it's quite Limited in what you can do and and that's a beautiful thing that that a t did they say you know what you can deploy no evm uh execution later on us we we all be in the same ecosystem I'm embracing my role here as a deteran I offer you security you your role is to expand what is possible to be done in blockchain and offer to developers the easiest path to to jump and stop building applications right I think the the way to

achieve that people doesn't take into account which TX is used behind the tools they're using is to provide the same logic but to Developers for example in web pgs uh developers can code on typescript on JavaScript uh code that actually connects to the blockchain really easily there's no need to learn uh new language there no no easy to be an expert in solidity so that that's the way to do it like apply the same logic but for Developers couldn't agree more right and and for example having a VM that boots an entire Linux is a very nice way to expand that that there was a hackaton

that a lady she just implemented chat GPT inside the RM and start doing fully verifiable chat GPT applications right you and this on top of etherum so so yeah it's happening now we are planting the seeds of the infrastructures that will allow us to achieve Mass adoption we are not there yet but we see clear progress on that so I'm I'm super excited it's a it's a great time to be in in in the industry I would say definitely is so I want to explore two topics that you guys mentioned actually one that you mentioned and one that I curious to know more about so you mentioned about account abstraction right which uh may be a shift in Paradigm for the whole evm ecosystem right so nowadays if you lose your

private case if you lose yourit phrase you lose the access to all your PHS right so if you stop to think about it my grandma would never use this kind of bank or this kind of transaction Med right and most of the users if we want to get so mainstream adoption we need to change this right and account abstraction of course is one of the ways to solve this but I also have another point that I also want you guys to talk about which is mobile right we don't see a lot I mean Solana has a little bit of a of a footstep there in with Solona Saga and some other initiatives but I don't see a lot in the evm ecosystem related to mobo I'd like to know also so first talk about a little bit about

account abstraction but also if you guys know some initiative related to mobile because in order to unboard billions of people we need to have some support for mobile like we we rarely use computers nowadays I mean we still use it but we don't use as often as our cell phone so we need to have deps made for cell phones we need to have anyway I let you guys talk but please comment about the those two topics well I'm going to start with the letter so mobile wow that's so just like the Big White elund Room in a crypto conference uh for example in gaming 80% of the industry an industry bigger than movies and Music Joint is on

mobile and it's always a a big challenge like how can we break this platform um Power that app Apple and Android half and let us do crypto and mobile because if if someone here had the had the experience to deploy an app or for iPhone a crypto app you know is terrible so I think uh yeah the Solana phone for example yeah it's one of the one way to try to break this this issue but definitely uh we go back into what the greater issue here is that we keep being

very separate from the trafi from the traditional Industries we still are like the web pre space and we we even talk about it like web3 we2 I mean there should be the a difference there there should be a difference between real world assets between the crypto assets if we try to address real world problems uh with crypto Solutions eventually uh uh the for phone Builders uh platform providers they're going to be embracing the tech so let's stop being so divisive is is the message I I think we have and start embracing traditional tools and start talking with with apple with uh

this traditional industry players yeah I think I think history has this crazy behavior to repeat itself right so um what we seeing in the in the blockchain industry right now is not a novel thing uh it's it's Tech fragmentation uh we saw that I maybe I I I will I will give away my age right now but uh in my early days in Telecom before the before joining blockchain 2018 um back to the early days of f first G second G you see you saw this huge fragmentation on technology right that that's what uh that's why the the European Union uh back then came with

the GSM uh protocol standard which is um it means a global system for mobile communication that allowed vendors manufacturers phone manufacturers equipment manufacturers reach scale because they have and they set a combined set of Standards on how those things should work right so all those things that we are seeing blockchain right now that would be a moment that we need to startop standardizing things right that what will allow for example any pH manufacturer start building uh in build security applications to sign into the blockchain without knowing exactly

which blockchain or which signature model or what what is the protocol I'm implementing here if we don't solve this problem standardization in certain aspects across the board would be very difficult to reach scale on on certain equipments right including phones and uh and the and the application adop adoption in the phones it's it's of course it's the phone adoption for for mobile is a for for blockchain industry I would say it's a it's a whole day topic right it's not a single panel you you you have the difficulties on launching application on the on the uh hosting pages of iTunes and and Google you have difficulties on on how you sign and preserve your identity in the phone

you have different on the complications or lack of Standards so many problems that you need to solve and of course that brings together issues with ux for developers right so I would say that the main driving Factor here should be part of standardization of specifically key things that involve phones and that will be more compelling to to deploy at scale right otherwise you keep sending nich solution which is a Solon phone right solop phone is is an attempt of Solon to show a POC to the world industry that they can become a standard right and if they become a standard then you have a billions of

phones coming after right so so that's the role on Solona phone perfect and so we're starting to get out of time so let us Rush a little bit I'd like to discuss uh what in your opinion are the most exciting impr promises Technologies for the evm ecosystem in the the next years but also I'd like to just meanwhile I give you some time to think I will tell about my the the last update that we have the denum fork which was mentioned on the last p on WE it happened on March this year and we saw that the fees for the layer CH dropped by a huge amount

right so now at least using layer choose is the same price as using Solana as using other solutions that we have in the market so in my opinion it's it's a past event but I think this is huge for scalability in ethereum right so I would choose this Innovation I'd like to hear from you guys you you made a perfect start here I would say that I'm most excited with the fact that we're finally unlocking the roadblocks that we have in blockchain to really enable new use cases to flourish right computation scalability which what is that is the capacity to execute sophisticated codes in the blockchain right the the base

layer is really limited the complexity that you can run that so all this scalability all this modularity uh approach that unlock you more computation together with that you have scale on data capacity right what we call data viability so once you SC scale computation you scale data capacity you're really truly unblocking what we call in cesia the cone of innovation so I'm very excited to see new use case coming because of the release of those restraints right yeah following up of what he's saying what's the main driver of development on gpus it's not AI before AI it's it's

video games so video games is absolutely a really good use case to for example launch a whole uh game on on top of a new rollup using this RS as a service one click and and you go then we can continue to explore new use cases such as what if we launch a whole LM a whole AI sh B in in in in a blockchain that's really excites me because one of the big issues uh we are seeing as a society is hey uh these big AI how they're going to control everything uh how they're how going to have so much power what if we start competing with them with decentralized AI applications that I

think that's something that really excites me and another thing uh just to finish uh definitely want to double click on the wallet extraction on blockchain extraction we're then we're not going to know you uh developer is not going to need to decide on which blockchain he wants to launch it doesn't matter uh he could use any of the tools for example Sigma uh chain safe Tool uh to to deploy any blockchain access all liquidity so other things are really things where the Market's moving perfect so you also mentioned C action and AI right so I also have an idea that AI may help more developers than users right so in order to create

our application I mean we have low code no code already today so we don't even need it but I think that for complex applications which is I mean we need to find the killer app in crypto right now like Excel was for Windows and stuff like that that this is will be the main driver for billions of people to really use script this and of course the abstraction of the the difficulties of using it right so maybe AI will help a developer to find these killer projects on on a blockchain right this this is also a path that I can see uh the next years in crypto and I think this is almost a necessity what do you guys think about it absolutely and you mentioned correctly right um so far the killer

that app or a killer us case that we have been able to deploy stable coins to be honest right um and and unlocking the computational scalability and the data scalability we are removing the barriers for these new case comes and finally we we we find some something meaningful Beyond stable coins and and and H mentioned about gaming we are very interested in gaming as well because traditionally game industry is a huge disruptor right it was the game industry that transformed all computers and laptops that we have here in powerhouses right if it was only to use Excel and and and and docs your computer will be much much more like a early 95 or 98 computer it

was the games that push uh video cards sound cards memory uh and and Etc that boost the capacity of the personal computers and then pave the way for for for mobile computers right so uh in that way I would say that we will continue seeing gaming as a vertical uh that will show a lot of and exqueeze a lot of value on the blockchain together with that we cannot ignore the huge transformation that we are having here in Brazil with the Central Bank enabling uh Drax uh Brazil is becoming the world's labor laboratory on how blockchain can enhance Finance system and main chain in the

mainstream uh it's very unique what is happening in Brazil all the projects are coming to Brazil to use Brazil as a as a huge sandbox to later on export that so and and and what will come behind that is a ton of an of innovation on how I use AI to create risk assessment models but fully verifiable ones that I can I don't need to trust right and how that can compose with Lending protocols with iot sensors that are delivering fully verifiable data to take decisions on on if I promote a lending or not a credit risk so there's so many things that will fit together and bring up a new

structure of the banking 3.o that we're seeing and I'm super excited what's happening there and for all of that to be possible we for sure we need a programming environment that allows you to play with different program languages on fetching the data and really work on the data um a a blockchain or scalable blockchain that can allows you to have compelling computation and data capability right so that's why once all this infrastructure is settled in a convenient way for developers all and with the friendly framework that we have here in Brazil then we're going to see a lot of those Innovations coming and finally applications that solves real people's life problems and behind the hood under

the hood something that they don't need to care about it right perfect so we're almost at the end so in order to finish in in a funny way I'd like to ask you guys some a nice question in how many time do you think that my grandma or at least yours Grandma will be using at least indirectly blockchain for something anything at all a game uh defi application or anything that you want I personally think it will take something like 10 years from now what do you guys me one year yeah I think and and I want to add something to that I don't know my grandma like we might see in the US in all these developed countries they

develop the Cool Tools you know but how to use it how to take them to a real world that's what we are going to see in Latin America that's why I'm really bullish on the region I will start answering a question with right now if my grandmother used web 3 she will should be most probably ruged right um but uh uh that that is a more Innovation not in the developer side but in the in the end user side and I would say that ZK technology is progressing so fast there's a lot of I would say projects offering sign in and creating wallet with your Gmail account so it's starting become to be very

interesting and easy to on board users uh I would say that's more it's closer to one year than 10 right but there are still some bumpy roads to to to polish some roadblocks but but it's coming it's coming soon I would say I love your timis guys thank you very much and see you next time