Ethereum's Next Upgrade: The (Solana) SVM w/ Sydney Huang (Eclipse Foundation)

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome back to the strange waterer podcast thank you for tuning in for another fantastic conversation right now building on ethereum basically implies that you're building within the ethereum virtual machine which is the internal computation environment native to the ethereum blockchain I'm not going to plant this flag with too much confidence but suffice to say that the evm was conceived in 2013 and then written into existence with the release of the ethereum yellow paper in 2014 since then the evm has seen

countless changes and upgrades but the evm from that paper still largely stands as the comput UT ational Center of ethereum fast forward to today and the evm has exploded in popularity both alternate l1s and ethereum anchored l2s have built their Technologies and businesses around the dictates of the evm this has had some incredible benefits for example tools are reusable developers are comfortable and smart contracts can be redeployed with ease but it also comes with consequences were're locked into the decisions and the paradigms laid out in

that 2014 paper now 9 years is a lot of time in the world of crypto and we've seen a lot of innovation in the world of blockchain VMS perhaps the biggest success is salana an L1 blockchain focused on speed efficiency and financial accessibility while still smaller than the ethereum evm community salana boasts thousands of developers building applications with hundreds of millions of dollars of tvl and because the svm is a completely different environment than the evm the salana community is able to innovate on entirely different

things today when most people think about ethereum l2s they automatically assume that these l2s will exist with ethereum like Computing environments but the deeper that you get into the research the more you begin to ask yourself is there any reason to limit ourselves in this way today's guest is Sydney hang from the eclipse Foundation who have answered this question with a passionate no eclipse is working on building the first ethereum L2 that leverages the salana virtual machine during this conversation we cover everything you need to know about how eclipse is bring together the

security and censorship resistance of ethereum together with the performance and parallelization of the svm to create what they believe is the fastest ethereum L2 one more thing before we begin please do not take Financial advice from this or any other podcast ethereum will change the world one day but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then all right let's bring on Sydney from the eclipse Foundation Sydney thank you so much for joining us on the strange waterer

podcast thanks so much for having me of course so um before we get into what you guys are building at Eclipse um I'm a huge believer that the most important part of every conversation are the people in it so um with that as a preface can you tell me a little bit about like who you are how you found uh crypto and why you weren't scared away yes of course um so I'm Sydney I'm the product manager at Eclipse we are working on a ethereum L2 that's powered by the svm so the salon virtual machine um and I guess a little bit of how I got into crypto I bought ethereum back in 2017 so you know two bull runs ago I feel like that's probably when a lot of

people started buying crypto um and I bought it purely because one of my friends said like an off-hand comment of oh there's going to be a lot of things built on ethereum I had no idea what he meant at the time yeah well I think in hindsight I think he was talking about like smart contracts and everything but obviously I didn't know what he meant at the time um but it wasn't until I think 2021 2022 is when I really like fell down the rabbit hole I started reading a lot about the tech um and there's a lot of interesting problems to be solved both from you know technical standpoint but also from like a social coordination standpoint and I was just reading every single day about

crypto I even have a notebook somewhere where I was documenting kind of all the different user experiences of interacting with crypto apps um as someone who like wasn't Crypton native at the time a lot of things are really confusing to me I was like what is a seed phrase um but that notebook obviously is a is a great um uh pretty useful tool for me now to like keep in mind you know sometimes you forget when you're crypto native um that these are maybe unintuitive to someone who's not crypto native um so I started like keeping a notebook trying out all these apps and it just got to a point where I was like I just have to go like you know all in you know go all in into crypto and and go full-time in crypto so like what what is your background pre crypto were you a

computer science person were you a finance person were you like not related to this world at all but just like was enamored by it like what what were you doing um so I was in finance so like right for crypto I was actually in inventure so in Venture Capital um and that's kind of the reason why I was like reading so much about the tech because every V every ventor capitalist and their mothers probably wanted to invest in crypto at some point um so I was doing a lot of research into it no that makes a lot of sense my my I guess where that question came from is like what were you doing that you had like both the desire and like the capacity to just sit there and research for a couple years and you know just a put my cards on the table I

joined crypto in 2021 or yeah yeah 2021 so relatively recently and I only had time to like do the research to go from like nobody to crypto native because I was unemployed at the time so yeah that helps yeah that does help but um okay so now like you've like begun and like Gone full research like you realize that this is like what is like worth like really dedicating the next you know chunk of your career to like how did you break into the industry and like um were there multiple steps before you found eclipse or like how did you get from VC world to he I first broke into crypto through like uninstallable domains and it it did

feel a little like 2.5 web 2.5 so it was a nice transition um but then I think once I was there um obviously you know I I love the product and everything like that and I and I really like the idea of decentralized identities um but I think it was just well first it wasn't as Crypt native as I wanted it to be in the experience and also was a larger um Team than I would like it to be so I knew I want to go smaller and probably more like in the weeds um so I went from Unstoppable and then I was also doing some work for dlab so D gods and Utes so somewhat familiar with like the nft space um and but I just knew I wanted to go more like technical than more

consumer so obviously eclipse was a great fit um especially since I think eclipse is very much in line with how with like the reason why I got into crypto in the first place right these are a lot of like challenging problems that people are trying to solve um I think what we're building is pretty net new to the ethereum ecosystem um so it's like a a new territory like unchartered territory which I think is really fun um yeah cool so I guess um let's like take a pause from like what you guys are building at Eclipse we'll get back to that in a moment but I think like the most kind of interesting and provocative thing about Eclipse right is that you're building ethereum L2 using the salana virtual machine so like let's build a little um you know foundation for the

rest of this conversation can you talk a little bit about like whether it's through your own research that was pre- eclipse or like what you've learned since you've been working there like what is the really cool thing about salana that um you know someone like myself who I would embarrassingly but like actively call myself ethereum Maxi like can you just help me understand as someone who understands blockchain but don't understand why you would walk away from ethereum like what what is going on in salana that is worth bringing on to uh ethereum I would say so I use both ethereum and salana like pretty often and on a day-to-day so I definitely um like higher value transactions that's on

E for me but like dayto day I probably transact on swana more um purely because the user experience is really great on salana um and that's something that we want to bring into the ethereum ecosystem right so um I would say the builders in salana are way more like product focused whereas ethereum seems more like Tech focused if that makes sense they're more like researchers academic whereas salana you know I think the builders are focused on just building a good app or a good experience um so like if you do anything on salana if you're swapping on Jupiter for example you the swap is pretty much instant the feed are fairly negligible um so the experience definitely is way more catered to the end user so I guess um we'll we'll kind of pick apart like

where that Advantage comes from as like we understand what eclipse is building but um I guess like can you tell us a little bit about what eclipse is and um you know I I think you can kind of assume some base uh knowledge of what an L2 is but like what are you guys um trying to build and yeah like let's just start with the elevator pitch like what is Eclipse yeah so we are an ethereum L2 powered by the SPM like I said earlier um and we are using slesha for data availability at least for the time being until um ethereum is at a point where it can handle significant you know scale um but we're aiming to be kind of the fastest L2 so the experience should

be very similar to uh to Salona because SPM is such a high it's just a highly performant um battle tested you know production ready virtual machine that were're bring into the ethereum ecosystem it uses eth for gas um so you don't have to you know buy new tokens or anything like that and it's way smoother way easier for people to to just onboard onto the chain and of course we're inheriting certain security properties from ethereum um yeah I think that's that's the that's eclipse in a nutshell Okay cool so let's like uh unpeel that one layer and like walk us through the actual architect here so you know I guess like let me just set the scene for what a like very typical let's say

rollup does which is takes you know does all the transactions on its blockchain and then posts an entire record of every transaction and the state on to ethereum main net and um you know rollups are like a subset of this bigger category of l2s and Eclipse fits in this L2 category so can you just talk a little bit about like where are all these pieces what are all the different components that make um the eclipse L2 possible and like how should we understand them fitting together yeah so I would actually say probably l2s have a more stringent definition whereas like rollup is maybe more of a generic term um but honestly like the like crypto definitions just like all yeah for

sure no no for sure point taken but um just in terms of like the architecture what does the eclipse like L2 system look like so we have our validating Bridge or canonical bridge is on ethereum so that will essentially determine um the canical chain so the rollup node will always look to that bridge to figure out what the correct uh you know ordering is what the correct chain is um and because it's svm it's actually easier to prove than like your your traditional like evm just because it's register based um and so we'll have like fraud proofs it won't be live at launch but we are um iterating on it

right now um so of course like fraud proofs will help with the the security of the chain got it so on the canonical Bridge which is the Smart contract on ethereum Main net the idea here is internally is stored like the state of the eclipse L2 um which is in ethereum or sorry in evm world is like literally just one commitment and I'm guessing it's something similar and in svm world and are the record of the transactions as well being posted onto ethereum mainnet or it sounds like that's where like Celestia uh comes into play right yeah so we're using seles for data availability um which means you know any user can run a light known and make sure

that slush is not withholding um any any information from from the eclipse chain um but yeah celesa and and I think when you like were originally uh describing this it was like Celestia for now but once ethereum can like support you know truly industrial amounts of data availability which like to be clear what we're talking about is once dank sharting is implemented like is the the idea is to move over uh sorry Eclipse um data availability into the evm or how what's the thought process there yeah so we're definitely looking into it of course um I think 4844 probably is still not enough to handle the scale that

we're um that we're targeting um but obviously like we're always open to evaluting all the different options um so if it's ever feasible uh that's definitely going to be on a radar yeah well cuz the other thing I noticed on your website was um the IG layer uh logo everywhere and I guess another question for you is um are you guys looking at Igan da as like an basically what I'm trying to get to is um do you you envision that at any given point eclipse is like tied to a specific data availability solution or is the idea that you're going to like kind of be spread across all these different solutions um for for you know resiliency

reasons for uh cost reasons for all these things like do you have a thought process on what Eclipse looks like when we have like a robust set of choices for datab abil data availability yeah so I mean I feel like that's the the beauty of modular blockchains is like you kind of take the best piece of of everything and so obviously if there's if there is like a better da solution then we'll explore it um but for now like celesia has Das so data availability sampling um and just like the light no capabilities that's like able to handle the scale and everything like that um so I think for us right now cesha is the best choice but of course you know it's modular so we'll see as you know how fast things

change in crypto um so we'll figure it out from there yeah and like let's be real it's basically the only choice right now so it yeah um okay great so I think uh that's good for data availability now can we talk a little bit about like what sucks about the evm and like what what is um the svm have that like really like will make the ux I guess like what are we getting from having the svm environment but having the eth level secur yeah I think well two things really and I think this is like what what a lot of people probably point to which is just you know it'll be faster and cheaper

right so instead of setting a transaction and waiting you know couple seconds or whatever it is for it to get confirmed you know it's pretty much instant using svm um and of course it's going to be much cheaper and as we see like in a bull market the fees get pretty crazy um even in the last like week or or so with the spike in activity and token prices going up and whatnot gas fees were already probably too much to handle like your average transaction for the average person right I think in crypto we don't really notice it anymore but for any other use case that's probably not feasible um so I think those two things faster cheaper on ethereum and like

without getting technical but like what about the svm is faster and cheaper so the main different is that it's parallel it's paralized which means you know evm is single threaded um so the analogy that I always use is like if you're crossing a border and there's one toll booth or you're trying to go into a toll road and there's one toll booth every car has to you're waiting in line behind like every single car right whereas if there's 10 toll boots open it's going to move much quicker so that's kind of how I think about paraly versus uh single-threaded mhm and these thread are about the actual execution of transactions that are submitted by users what you're

saying is that ethereum just has this one lane Highway where every transaction has to go through sequentially where the svm has 10 lanes or many more Lanes exactly so the svm um if your transaction doesn't it basically like isolates like State a little bit so on evm um you can touch any part of the state like on demand basically whereas svm is if there's no like overlapping State you can execute in parallel got it and this is definitely too technical a question so we will move on from this topic after but do does the svm start to pay a lot of overhead for like isolating the state or are users forced to or I guess smart contracts forced to do a lot

of overhead or pay a lot of fees in order to bridge through isolated pieces of state or is that really not a problem because the state is so huge that like generally every slice like contains all the things that are relevant to it um can you repeat that question I'm not quite sure if I understand yeah no I mean sorry that was a dense question I guess the my question is without like knowing too much about how these things actually work my thought would be like well it's great like it makes sense that if you isolate State you can do a lot more things in parallel but the problem with that is that users can't do anything that cross through these isolated pieces of State and so my question is does that like end up

forcing you know the svm or users or somebody to pay a bunch of like extra fees or overhead to like move through different pieces of isolated State um so I would say so in terms of cost it's like Salon is optimized for like multiple cores right so as as we get um like more Hardware advancement salana should theoretically get cheaper and faster um and there is like this kind of uh myth I guess that oh it's like really expensive to run Salon nodes and everything like that but I think for a very like basic um basic construction you could probably run it for 300 $300

or so um which is still probably we could we should probably still get that down um in terms of cost but I do think that'll that'll come down as Hardware advancement come online yeah and I I don't know even I mean $300 like are we really saying that it's important for blockchains to have like nomadic farmers in Africa be running these things like I don't know I think $300 might be a like decentralized price point I like how there's that's the threshold decentralized price yeah yeah um cool so can we talk a little bit about um well F first I you you brought up an interesting uh point which is like

whether or not it's um a myth or not but like the perception is that like the hardware behind salana is like super super um expensive and hard to set up and like one is that true two do you inherent those problems if they exist um through the svm yeah I think it's definitely I mean it's definitely not like trivial right the cost of of running a note salana it's not like um like for cesia you can run there's the light note meme which is you can run a light note on your toaster if you wanted to so it's nothing like that um and I think salana definitely like salana alignment would totally like recently

revealed was that uh to be Salon align is about throughput and like reducing latency which is probably a little bit different than than ethos of other ecosystem uh I would say for us um we're not just we're not just looking at throughput L we're trying to preserve that as much as possible within the SPM but we still um wanted to be we still want to have like Das on the chain for example um we still want to make sure that we're inheriting like security properties uh that are more like core to ethereum got it and does that require like a lot of changes to the svm or like because the svm is this like computational environment and the things that you're talking about are about

consensus with which is outside of the VM like you you're not really forced to like do a lot of modifications um so there was so we've explored like a lot of uh ways to design this and I think the challenging part is definitely um like if we meriz essentially right because Sal doesn't have uh Merkel trees but e does so if we add a Merkel tree into the svm it would it we tested it out and it it really damaged kind of the throughput um so we scrap that idea now we're on to like a different design so there are some like intricacies in terms of how do you make sure it all like works together um but yeah we're uh

slowly figuring it out yeah yeah I mean that's why you like are building a company around it no no for sure so let's like pivot to the application layer so um for starters can you like unpack what you mean when you say that um the svm is really about like ux like let's talk about as a user that uh wants to make a DEX trade or wants to like take out debt in a CDP CDP position um like what what does it mean to have better ux how do I describe it I wish I had my notebook of uh all all my ux

experiences um so it's kind of hard to describe I I don't know it just feels like the even like Phantom wallet for example um Phantom wallet it just feels a lot more intuitive than than metamask does um although I'm sure you know there'll be some improvements to that and whatnot and there's some other great ethereum wallets I'm sure um but I think just it's more of like an ethos of the entire ecosystem that's more concerned about the average like consumer experience rather than um maybe more of like the or the research behind it um yeah trading on a deck for example if you if you go on Jupiter Orca um whatever it is it's

it is especially coming from eth like seeing that uh like swap successful thing pop up instantly was like very jarring to me in the beginning I was like what do you mean um whereas before I was like oh I have to view transaction I'm watching ether scan I'm seeing like how many block confirmations you know all that stuff um so it definitely feels a lot more in on salana mhm and like how would you compare what it feels like on salana uh compared to like what we're seeing in these l2s now so like arbitrum optimism like ZK evm starkware like do do you is there compare like is it comparable what's happening on starkware with what's happening on salana um in

terms of because it because to me sounds like what you're saying ux is really just about like speed and the ability for salana to feel like a modern computer as opposed to like a old system from like 1980 well I think with kind of the rup Centric road map and this whole idea of having thousands of app specific rollups I think there are a lot of uh complexities around that especially for the user experience mainly because now you're bridging over from chain to chain now there's interoperability issues you're fragmenting liquidity so um so a little bit of history about Eclipse we actually started out doing app specific r rups so that's how we're able to kind of dog food the tech and that's why like

firsthand we understood first of all the economics doesn't really make sense for most applications to become their own rollup um but second the user experience just isn't there to like warrant you know all these different ABS rollups so we think it makes a lot of sense to have um a shared general purpose L2 that's able to handle kind of the scale that we're looking for yeah I I've seen a lot lot of companies that have like are going down the route of like rollup as a service and I think that's like eventually supposed to be like app chain as a service but um yeah I think you're totally spot on that until we figure out how to like really like the the great thing about ethereum was that all the

liquidity was there and all like the composability was there and while we're gaining a lot from this like rollup or L2 Paradigm we're losing this like core most cool feature and so um I think you're like totally right that needs to be solved for yeah exactly I I actually saw a tweet the other day that that made me laugh that was um someone genuinely in in distress asking metamask to add a search function in their networks cuz they were on so many different chains um yeah but that's just like such a good reflection of of kind of the direction that that we're going down right so so are like what are you guys doing on Eclipse that like is with that in mind like how how are you designing it to be

um like prepared to like hopefully win in a like competitive crowded landscape but also like be integrated part of this ecosystem um in a way that like solves a lot of these problems yeah so I think our thesis is that you know we don't think there should be thousands of rollups I think there should be a a couple rollups um they'll handle most of the the general transactions and then maybe um a few uh like more like vertical specific rollups but there definitely shouldn't be thousands because that just sounds like a nightmare and now you have dust on every single chain um so that's kind of how we're thinking about it share general purpose L2 with uh enough um with with like enough like how do I say this um

that's able to you know just handle a lot of transactions at the same time all right so last question on uh like this application layer I think that like some like real competitive advantage that you guys are going to have is the ability for this entire other like major ecosystem to Port their like technology and their apps like from salana to the svm and like be you know an e roll up have you um I guess like how do you think about like these kinds of opportunities to bring people over without um you know just like creating like fractured communities across like these two different ecosystems yeah I think that's that's one thing that was

um and always says like modularis not maximalism right so it's funny that it's like oh is it are you either ethereum axi or Salona axi well it doesn't really have to be that pppp necessarily um and I think obviously it is a like it's svm so it's very easy for any Sal developer to um deploy to eclipse or really any other svm chains as a if if there are any that comes online and I think we're kind of seeing the beginning maybe of the svm um ecosystem hopefully right like evm evm compatible um evm tooling there's all there's a whole ecosystem around that whereas we don't really see that with

the svm so hopefully um with this we'll see more svm adoption no I mean I think that's like my favorite part about crypto at least while we still have it is that everything really is positive some you know and I I believe that you by you guys creating a svm based L2 that is again just going to draw more developers in like if you have the ability to we've seen with the evm like the ability to just clone your smart contracts and Deploy on new chains has led to like more Innovation and definitely a lot more noise but um has definitely created like most of the 1+ one equals 3 like moments that we've had in the last I don't know since we

started having like legitimate alt chains yeah I wish more people thought everything was a positive some yeah well I think yeah especially like I too entered through the finance side and I think that us from the finance side don't really appreciate that well but like all of the like real programmers and the open source people like definitely understand that yeah definitely yeah cool all right so let's uh hop back down from the application layer and into the infrastructure layer and like let's talk about um like sequencers or you know the the actual layer of computers that are going to be running this stuff so about 10 or 15 minutes ago we talked about like regardless of what the uh Vibes are out

there it's like whether or not we're talking about today or in the future it's not that onerous to run this kind of computer but let's talk about like what Eclipse believes is appropriate for l2s in terms of decentralization so like what is your guys's like thoughts and strategies about how many like distinct individual ual people need to be running the eclipse svm nodes in order for like this whole system to like be I don't know valid so the goal is always you know if Eclipse didn't exist the chain could still run right so if we take ourselves out of the equation it shouldn't have any effect um on the Chain itself so

that's that's kind of our our Northstar in in terms of decentralization now in terms of an actual number it's we don't really like have that metric right we're just trying to get main it out at this point um but yeah once we once we have all the pieces together that's definitely going to be like a core focus of ours yeah and again I'm not at all trying to like pin you down or put you in an uncomfortable situation but I'm just like trying to wrap my head around is this something that is like okay if we have a 100 nodes running this and the fact that we have data availability and state route on ethereum so even if everyone was crazy like you could still exit onto ethereum are we is like 100 good or is

it like kind of the ethereum ethos of like literally more is better whatever it is more is better like are you guys thinking about designing the system with that in mind or is it uh really first about getting it out there and then we'll talk about decentralization later well that's um that's kind of the beauty of rollups is that you don't need as as many NOS per se right because since you are are getting some security properties from ethereum like forced inclusion so say there's a sequence or the one sequencer is trying to not include your transaction trying to censor you in any way um you can essentially force that from E L1 so Almost Doesn't Matter like how many are really running the the

rollup nodes per se um but of course there there is um there's some thought around like shared sequencers and whatnot that's been a really uh popular topic you know there's espresso Astria and all those um and I'm sure they'll help decentralize kind of that layer yeah know I mean I that is like kind of where I was trying to push us towards is in these um like companies or Dows or like whatever however we're organizing ourselves these days but there's just so much energy around like first decentralizing sequencers and then second figuring out like the economics behind how do we incentivize like 30 different um you know

node software to run like is it different networks is the same networks I mean I think what igen layer is doing is like a lot of work into saying like you only need one computer and then let's shove all the computation onto that computer and then just use economics to make sure that um it all works out I guess is are how much in designing an L2 it does that go into this like pre-main net phase um are you really thinking about like the pH physical structures of the network or is it more just about um like technology and proof of concept and making sure that there's an ability to like send in process transactions definitely focus more on the the Tex are right now like we have to figure out obviously um

because it it is a little bit more complicated in terms of just spinning up a a evm rollup right so like if you have the bridge on ethereum how does that translate to the svm um when you know they don't maybe they don't use Smart contracts or using program um like token programs uh so there is like some complexity there how do you like do fraud proofs um I'm not sure if that answered your question no yeah I mean I think uh it was a tough question so so like let let's talk let's like pivot forward and like talk a little bit about Eclipse road map so like very clear like what's ahead of us is like a launch and that's exciting like maybe you can talk a little bit about that but

um can you talk a little bit too about what does like the medium to long-term road map look like for eclipse and like what types of um like features are you really excited about getting out there so in terms of the eclipse road map um right now we have test net out and that is like a realistic test net so it's the the Contra contracts are deployed to ethereum the program is deployed to salana and it's also posting to the cesia test net so everything is pretty much how it would be structured on uh on mainnet so that's where we're at currently and we're aiming for mainnet um obviously we we'll see how test net goes mayet developers will will be after

that um once we make sure that developers are onboarded and everything's fine um we'll open it up to the public and then like for medium to longer term stuff like what um features that you guys know are coming but like aren't uh going to like launch with mainnet like what what are you really excited about that is a little bit further down the line well we have a lot of incubations coming out so the the idea that we they went in with is we want to showcase kind of svm's capabilities right I think a lot of um evm developers maybe are a little con or pigeon hold into kind of the constraints of ethereum and and the single-threaded evm so we have a lot of incubations

coming down the line which will really showcase uh the capabilities of eclipse and you can actually test set out on test n right now um we have a game called chomping glass as well as SE several other apps that you can test out um and you'll really get an idea of what that user experience is like um so personally I'm really excited for these incubations coming out and obviously talking to a lot of the Sala apps right now that are working on compressed nfts and just interesting use cases so really excited to see that in the ethereum ecosystem yeah wait sorry I'm not familiar can you talk to me about compressed nfts yeah so compressed nfts is I want to say it's like relatively new in the salana ecosystem or on svm um but you can mint I think like a million

nfts for a couple thousand dollar I want to say don't quote me on that but the number is is pretty crazy so so this like new paradigm allows you to like mint like a a massive massive massive amount of nfts for like relatively tiny amount of money that that's what we're talking about yes so there's like some interesting use cases right for like dpin um and yeah I think dpin probably is the most like prominent use case I can think of but of course whenever you have something new I'm sure people will come up with with interesting use cases around it yeah no no for sure and then so this like Paradigm is like specifically built out of like the parallelization and the

features of the svm and I guess like the unlock that you're trying to bring is to take the new paradigms that are like coming out of the Innovation Garden of salana and make them available to people associated with ethereum yeah that's definitely kind of something that we want to do is highlight like the net new use cases right so one thing that's pretty common on salana is uh like clobs like Central limit order books and that's like much you don't really see that on ethereum if you have to constantly adjust your position that gets really expensive really quickly and um it's you yeah it's just not really feasible right now so we're hoping to kind of bring a lot of those use cases so interesting defi use cases um

obviously deepin use cases uh you know as well as like the consumer stuff with with compressed nfts we're hoping to bring that into the theorum ecosystem yeah and I mean I think I think something that is like really important to highlight is entire categories are born when you have order of magnitude of scaling stuff right like when we started with the internet all we could do was basically send you know like chunks of text and it took like minutes for it to load but then like we had you know 10x Improvement and then 10x Improvement and then 10x Improvement and then like over and over and over again and now we live in this world where like I mean think of like all the crazy things that you just see scrolling

through like Tik Tok or whatever and so um I think like I remember I went to Coachella in 2022 and we all got like this is so before the fall of uh Luna and the fall of SPF and all that craziness the world still like didn't hate nfts yet and we went to Coachella and like were given a free you know nft and I just thought it was like pretty interesting that it was all salana like not only salana um like backed by salana but it was like built into the Coachella app and you really like had no um exposure to like the fact that it was like blockchain and like so you know in my head I was like why why do people

even care if they don't know as blockchain and like that starts a whole another discussion but um I just think it's like the the point of Moore's Law is that like by improving things 100x like by 100,000x like new use cases like open up and so it sounds like that is like the ethos of what you guys are trying to do with the clips yeah definitely and I also love that um that analogy of oh before like I remember internet you know it's like loading a picture takes 5 minutes and you see it like one one line at a time and loads on the screen and now if my internet takes an extra like half second I'm like what's going on no for sure and like it it allows you know I think another good

example is this whole like crazy thing that happened with Silicon Valley Bank right and like forget all the good things that like forgot like that happened that that felt soal I know can you believe we've had a banking crisis this year and like moved on for it we had a pandemic a banking crisis and just life goes on no and so but like that happened because our technology and our financial technology got so good that you could withdraw like you know $50 billion from a bank overnight and so um that is like so are you saying now it's too good to revert maybe yeah I think it's uh yeah I think there's a lot going on but um and anyway so let's talk a

little bit about like the I think the big opportunity that you have in front of you which is like what we already talked about what the ability to draw a bunch of salana developers over to the ethereum ecosystem but two is like the ability to transform a bunch of ethereum developers into like SPM developers and so can you talk a little bit about like what you guys are like first of all how difficult it is to explain to an ethereum the benefits that you get out of svm and then two like how do you do it and what are the you know like organizational efforts you guys are uh doing yeah I mean we definitely want to see SPM adoption so bring in E developers um into the ecosystem would

be great um so in terms of like support that we have for ethereum developers right obviously we have neon um which means that they'll spend up like an evm prox you know they can deploy kind of the same smart contracts and have it be live on on a Clips um so don't actually have to interact or be able to you know code and rush or or whatnot um there's also like souling so compile solidity into uh into you know rust but there are some more like intricacies around that you kind of have to know a little bit around just like specifying State I think um um around Community right now we're um we're like that's definitely

something that we're thinking about probably right behind the tag we have to get the tag out first before we start thinking about Community you can't really have a community with with nothing out there um but in terms of community obviously we're ramping up our our Discord um so we do have quite a few developers in our Discord right now even without um us being a little bit too involved which honestly is kind of a nice thing almost like they're forming their own little Community um but we're going to focus on that a lot more uh we'll be more active within the Discord we'll bring in you know Community man and whatnot in terms of conferences or events that is kind of up in the air like we I think we've had events at most

of the conferences this year um we had a I think we had an event at uh Dev connect most recently um an event at breakpoint so for salana um several other events as well um but yeah definitely thinking about it but pushing to get M it out first yeah well I guess um like especially at breakpoint um like what what is the reaction that you get from developers when like that when you just pitch like svm L2 ethereum svm L2 like is it something excited is it in this world of like Orthodoxy and polarization is that like almost like an bad word like how what is the reaction

that people get uh that that you get when you talk about Eclipse um I always love I think most people have a very similar reaction especially the salana folks so point if you first expl first surprisingly I was um um I was probably expecting a little bit more negative sentiment but there really wasn't I would say the reaction is first they're a little bit confused they're kind of like thinking through it in their head you can see the wheels turning and they ultimately reach the conclusion that that it is a net positive thing um so the reception has been surprisingly positive um which is which has been really nice and I guess like in this while we're in this like mindset of thinking about these two communities

like how what would you say is like the biggest thing that the ethereum community doesn't understand about salana and like the salana community doesn't understand about ethereum I'm just like so struck by your unique position of like straddling the two like I'm wondering if you have any insight about that I mean I think for those two it really is just difference in ethos right like and that's kind of reflected in like every part of it whether that's the infrastructure or the community um like I said salana is probably more focused on on throughput and everything like that um so everything they do is around that whether that's infrastructure or the apps built on top of it right that's a core core tendon of a lot of the apps um whereas on ethereum

I think it's a lot more uh like researchers academic like Tech focused solving like hard cryptography problems not saying the problems on SOL aren't hard but um I think it's just a in ethos and that's reflected in both the tech as well as all the applications yeah and then do you I mean this is like a huge question but in the like long you know history of uh blockchain like looking forward do you see a world in which like forget talking about all these how many l2s we're going to have like what do you see about the L1 um ecosystem in the long term like do you think that we're going to have a bunch like including the names that we know today like in Avalanche salana

ethereum or and then a bunch more or does this kind of like collapse down into like a couple winners or even just one winner which like cards on the table like I do think that the point of this is to have like one shared computational space like one and that's why I don't like the term but like I'm willing to say I'm an ethereum maxi because like the point of this is not to have a bunch of playgrounds it's to have one and you know this is the one that we have yeah I mean I I agree with that in some sense and honestly I wish I knew what the L1 um war is going to turn out because then they'll dictate what tokens I'm gonna buy I have no sure um but of course yeah I think it probably makes sense to have

I think it's probably a similar situation as l2s where where you know most people should probably be on a couple um and maybe there's some specific like use case specific chains um at the L1 level yeah yeah or those sound like app chains so like maybe they're or yeah maybe they just sell yeah or they don't like they they're just yeah I don't know I mean I think um that's like kind of the crazy part about being this far out on the Innovation curve is is that like we're still worried about like getting technology that works that none of us have any time to think about like well how does it change the world true and I mean it's it's so hard to predict because you just don't know like regulation wise what's going to happen

right are they are they going to have like more private blockchains is that what companies want um it's yeah just obviously I would love if everything settled to ethereum or you know everything congregates to a couple l1s um but really hard to say yeah yeah and I think we can go like all day on um on that so all right Sydney like this is incredible and like has really changed how I think about like what what it means to be an L2 and like what the possibilities are and um I don't still really understand like I I understand what you're saying about parallelization in salana but like now I need to go figure out like what is that unlock so um I I just like want to first and foremost say like I think this is so

cool and like just something different that ethereum needs in order to like really change the internet and then through that the world so uh first of all just want to say awesome job awesome like idea with the clips and Before I Let You Go um can you just like let everyone the audience know like where to find you where find clips and like if they want to learn more and maybe get involved like what should they do where's this Discord you talk about yes the infamous Discord um you can find me on on Twitter my handle is Ox Sydney so ZX Sydney in true ethereum fashion um and Eclipse you can also find us on Twitter the handle is Eclipse fnd uh or you can find us at eclipse.

Builders that's our website um and from there it'll link you to our Discord Bo or wherever else you need um as well as the docs great well again thank you so much for the time and for just like the energy and like the different like thing that you're bringing to um this like space so um I really appreciate the time and hope to stay in touch thank you thanks so much for having me a