A Holistic View of Ethereum and The Modular Ecosystem

Transcript

welcome back to the rollup for today's episode I sat down with Ganesh from coent to discuss many things happening in the modular realm I talked about the convergence of the road maps in ethereum and Cosmos as well as the challenges faced by Cosmos zones and the need for constant hard Forks we talked about scaling data availability what's next for Celestia as well as the broader data availability scene and how long-term data availability plays a part we also talked about competition within ethereum and with in the maer space as well as the challenges and the Dynamics of the private Market investing space today hope you guys enjoy this episode let's Jump Right In after a quick word from our amazing sponsors [Music]

[Music] welcome aboard on our journey into the singularity this is the endgame road map for fra and fraxel the new L2 out of the fra ecosystem that is totally based on fractal scaling fractal a modular L2 blockchain built by fra with modular and fractal scaling in mind fractal scaling is based on the mandal BR set of fractal images and it explains how l2s become l3s and the entire app chain life cycle

goes through its Evolution the FRX ecosystem is made of some of the top builders in the space and has stemmed from its OG days of the frax stable coin it is now in the LST space the LRT space and this fraxel L2 joins the existing site of fra products including Frack Swap and fra lend you can see fra fairy the bridge to go from any chain arbitrum optimism or main net into the fractal main net Bridge your tokens and bring your FRA assets into the fractal ecosystem join today to get the best out

of fraxel you are still early join today take part in our Expedition into this [Music] Singularity cartey is your home for app specific rollups at the Forefront of developing new tools and platforms that enhance the capabilities of blockchain Technology ctei enables applications that are flexible and built to scale build on a full Linux environment and use traditional software libraries but in blockchain development go to cy. that's cy. to learn more about building your

own app chain today going on guys welcome back to the rollup today we have Ganesh Swami of coent to talk about a multitude of I would say the current Zeitgeist in the market as we have it today uh as always going to dive into some of of the technicals uh today speaking about kind of what's next for modularity where the road maps of ethereum and Cosmos have converged where we think Celestia is heading and also maybe some interesting uh topics around tokenomics investing um and the General market space GES great to have you on H fellow Canadian I told you I was American but used to have a dual citizenship but I think my parents took it away for some reason but uh maybe we'll have to get that Canadian passport

back one day if the uh if gendler keeps coming down so good to have some Canadians on today happy Lake Canada today Andy uh a pleasure to be here excited to to uh to roll into the rollup podcast yeah man um being you know you're kind of a I'd say an OG in the space you know I entered in 2017 um but was very was very young and kind of new um but you've seen quite a bit since the Inception of coent as well as your time in the space maybe you could just like speedrun some of the uh some of the maybe more more interesting ideas you've seen try uh tried and also like what you guys have spent time on over the last five six years yeah no

absolutely so uh coent was an accident uh it rains a lot in Vancouver which is where uh Coan is which is where I live and uh one rainy Saturday uh a friend of mine said you should go check out this database hackathon and I was a database engineer for pretty much all my career and um ended up attending this hackathon and I didn't know much about blockchains this is uh during the Ico craze and I was just watching it from afar I didn't really uh know what these things were and um so I built this very simple connector that lets you pull out ethereum transactions um in Excel so just a simple interface and in the database world uh you know you have to pry Excel

from people's uh you know cold dead hands because people love that tool so it doesn't matter uh what underlying database you have you have this unified Excel that's really what people want to use so it doesn't matter if you're an analyst or whatever that role is so built this really simple tool end up winning that hackathon and then commercializing or starting to commercialize the technology and I think that was uh in the 2018 kind of era and uh back then um most the biggest use case of the ethereum blockchain uh was icos uh you know Capital formation funding mechanisms and uh erc20 wasn't really a thing it wasn't really uh used as much

because most of these funding happened in e that's really the the pair and then eventually the erc20 is were issued and then it starts trading and so on and then over the years I think some things uh I could have predict predicted maybe five six years ago some things you know took me uh by surprise I think um the thing that I could have predicted was that there's going to be a multitude of settlement layers execution layers consensus layers and I think in a database world I kid you not there's a website called dbdb doio it's a database of databases there's over 800 databases out there people's needs are very diverse you could have graph databases you could have key value stored databases you

could have time series databases you can have analytical databases you can have fast transaction databases and our vision or at least our idea was that blockchains are the same so you're going to have uh a spectrum of scalability solutions a spectrum of Security Solutions and um needs are diverse and therefore Solutions have to be diverse and that was essentially the Genesis idea for coent the word coent comes from coent bonds I don't want to bore our audience with the chemistry lesson here but I used to be a physical chemist uh early on in my career working on Cancer drugs and so here calent is The Binding between blockchains and databases or web 2 and web 3 centralized system descen systems and so that's really the analogy

there and so yeah so coent uh you know get it got it off the ground it took a while to actually build the tech took about about a year and a half and uh you know it's not a traditional startup per se in the sense that most startups if you go through the Yom near School of startups you have to find your initial customers you have to charge you know uh focus on growth you know they they suggest a 10% weekly a week or week growth and you know and then you have your demo days and then you have this you know urgency mechanism to raise capital and then you go to market and the clock that's starting to tick for your series a and it's a very standard

kind of like Cookie Cutter kind of template I think the crypto space you know has its own kind of like funding Cycles a lot of days uh funding uh like if if you're like a token project happens like beforehand and so on I think there's a just a completely different kind of like life cycle you have to understand so it took a couple of years to to get it off the ground and we boot strapped the the company for the first couple of years and uh we're in a fortunate position that we didn't really need outside capital and we got the company profitable uh with some actually really big customers like consensus they were one of our ear customers and then yeah that was the the birth of coent and then I think the first there's more that

happened in I would say the last two years compared to the like the two years prior and it feels like almost like the time scales are getting compressed now and so you know you had a whole season for defi in 2020 you had a whole season for nfts in 20121 and now it seems like you know things are moving a lot faster experiments a lot faster and I would uh give credit to the infrastructure layer people say you know everyone's building infra who's building the apps but I think because infra has become so easy to use that now the applications you can you can just start to iterate like you know you have stable coins now you didn't have stable coins in 2018 2019 you have these embedded wallets now you

didn't have that like two years ago you have all these other like dexes and infrastructures you can trade basically any token uh without having to go to a centralized exchange and pay the listing fee and you know do all of that traditional stuff so I think uh it seems like progress is slow but I'm actually very bullish uh for the future yeah % um interesting story lots of lots of points um 2018 was a wild time because it was like is crypto GNA survive this it wasn't like this bare Market this past one was like okay um we're good like we gotta just one more liquidation

then up only 2018 was like okay like is this actually going to come back um I remember like Kobe buying the the candle um at like three 3,400 on bitcoin and be like this is the bottom Twitter that actually meant marking the bottom anyways that was wild times H fast forward to now as you said like this this thesis of of many execution environments many chains has kind of happening um you know and we kind of saw that with Cosmos we saw that like Cosmos decided to start out building this network of of chains interconnected through basically IBC and ethereum was like we're just going to build one layer and then eventually kind of scale and so like I kind of have this

mental model of these of these road maps converging in a way where Cosmos is now I think trying to figure out the ux and interoperability and uh kind of bringing things together and like enshrining more and even certain chains within Cosmos are actually scaling more vertically like osmosis for example is trying to add different application Stacks within their one chain uh and there other examples as well and then ethereum is like well we need to figure out how to get off of this main layer and scale through rollups um and it's also trying to kind of figure out how to put those together you have some interesting history with both ecosystems um so I'm curious about your thoughts on this

convergence of the road map Theory kind of how you see Cosmos may have had the idea right or but the execution may not have been the best or there there's been some some interesting situations there so let's kind of dive into this idea here absolutely so with ethereum what comes to mind is Charles Darwin's quote in in his book he says it's not the fastest or the strongest organism that survives it's actually the organism that's most adaptable to change and ethereum is going to win by default because no single idea comes from the ethereum camp they they just absorb ideas and etherum is actually a concept

it's not a specific set of Technologies and so I remember back in 2019 2020 you had the rise of e killers and uh I think near in particular was executing on the eth 2.0 Shing road map faster and better and cheaper than ethereum itself but what ethereum did is completely abandoned the charting idea and moved to the rollup ecosystem the rollup road map and so that whole point with charting it just became and so I think that's really the benefit of ethereum it's the community it's the social layer and it's not one specific piece of technology and this is why a lot of the biggest and greatest apps and

experiments start in the ethereum camp and not anywhere else you know there are other pockets of innovation for sure you know Solana has a lot of innovation too but I think ethereum is where uh the bulk of developer interest and a lot of the uh Native apps appear before anywhere else and so that's like super interesting now talking about Cosmos Cosmos always had this idea with Sovereign blockchains and it kind of makes sense that you know Sovereign uh Sovereign like Sovereign Nations Sovereign blockchains are a must because again uh people want to control their Destiny they don't want to be beholden uh to a you know a superpower right and so we have that uh I think the the US

does a better job here with you know the the states being uh having their own uh agency uh and I think in Canada it's less the provinces have less of an agency so I think you know I think a US kind of setup where it's just an amalgamation of states is is a better uh setup for people's ideas and and the road map they have and so I think cosmos had that idea pat down so every Zone has its own parameters has his own systems and use IBC to transfer assets between because you have to talk you have to trade you have so you know uh it just goes back to the basics of Economics where you focus on your uh core skills and then you Outsource or you trade

everything else right so you have single purpose uh vertically scaled uh Cosmos zones for different uh use cases now from a technical standpoint uh there are some challenges with that and uh I think ethereum has just executed um I would say uh differently and perhaps more uh in a more user friendly fashion compared to how Cosmos has done it and I think one of the key challenges in the cosmos ecosystem uh which ties into some of the work that we're doing today is this habit of Cosmos zones doing a hard Fork every time they have to upgrade a cosmos uh

Zone and so what does this mean exactly so Cosmos is built on the cosmos SDK so it's a it's a go uh go SDK and you can use it and they have all these modules built out of the box so you have a banking module for token balances you have a staking module you could have a slashing module and you can just you know compose all of these different bits and then create your own basically blockchain and it's just like you know just off-the-shelf components right and so these components are all battle tested it's part of the SDK and lots of zones lots of Cosmos chains use them and I think it's an incredible setup now the the problem with uh with I think it's a cultural problem it's not really a

technical problem is that every time Cosmos wants to do an upgrade what they end up doing is taking snapshots of the balances doing a hard Fork completely changing the API and the interfaces and then propagating the blockchain from there on so this happens all the time so if you look at Cosmos Zone I I uh I don't I don't recall what the latest hard Fork is but back in 2020 I think it was like hard Fork number four and so it was impossible to get the actual Ledger prior to hard folk 4 because you basically snapshot the balances and you start propagating from there on and so if you want to have verifiable data you want to see all of

The Ledger Deltas the movement of assets and so on is basically impossible and it impossible to pregate the blockchain from the Genesis block right because the Genesis block gets reset with initial balances each time on I think that is I would say if not the major reason why Cosmos user applications are still lagging behind and I know this from a firsthand experience because in 2020 as we started to gain a foothold in the ethereum ecosystem and we were trying to uh by ethereum ecosystem I mostly mean the eum main net because the other chains were not live then there's no optimism no arbitrium and so uh we wanted to support a second chain using

you know our data products and we expanded to the cosmos Hub and we got introduced to this whole ecosystem of applications I think there was a there was a wallet called Looney app which is a pretty cool it's another Canadian team really beautiful app and the problem they had is that as they were supporting let's say a dozen different zones and they had this one wallet for all of your assets across all of these disparate zones but the zones themselves every 6 months or so do a hard fork and the application the user application has to redo all of the work they have to redo the integration work so now your integration costs are super linear with the number of chains that you support unlike the ethereum ecosystem where most chains you

can pull out the transactions from the Genesis block as long as you have a full archive note and you can propagate the entire blockchain right so ethereum mainnet I think Bitcoin is the gold standard for having access to all historical information right there's everything is on chain uh ethereum is also really good you can literally get the Genesis block and then propagate the entire blockchain to where it is today uh same thing with the rollups and arbit room had this little bit of a hard Fork where they they switched over the balances but arbitrum ZK sync polygon everyone that is essentially the N the the the standard right so you should be able to pull out any transaction any token balance at any block height if

you ran a full archive note now a full archive note may not be feasible for everyone right it's mostly the exchanges and the custodians archive node like what what does that entail so there the notes can be configured in in multiple uh multiple ways so I'm going to use the nomenclature for ethereum so there is a archive note there's a full archive note and there's a light client and the these are the three primary roles that you can use um you can configure your note so before before like the the easiest thing to start is with just a a full archive note which is you download every every block all of the transactions reexecute

the transaction so you get basically the full trace and then you store all of the historical information from the Genesis block and as you can imagine with a busy chain like ethereum this will lead to terabytes of data plus it's also super slow because you're basically serly executing the transactions or re-executing the transactions but that's basically how you're able to verify that the transaction and the transaction outputs match exactly because the propagation happens block by block by block right so there's a complete continuity from the Genesis block now ethereum's ethos is to enable people who can stake ethereum at home which means you need lighter uh lighter nodes so this is where you have for the full

archive noes to just the archive noes which don't do the execution to the live clients that only have the block headers they don't actually have all of the transaction information and then you have pruning where in the database of the node you delete the old data because there's no need to keep that because all you care about a node's entire purpose is to just propagate the blockchain right it's not really to access historical information and this comes back to the key aspect that blockchains are actually Billboards they're not databases so that is a key Insight uh that we came across maybe a couple years ago so blockchains require information like a billboard

where you post information on there and then you wait for other nodes to challenge that during the challenge window and post challenge window which could be two weeks for example if you're uh an an optimistic rollup uh you don't need that transaction data so you just deleted prune it whatever it doesn't matter right because you propagate it and you just keep the commits from those transactions to propagate the blockchain so I think that is how the the node landscape has evolved and this is basically how most ecosystems work some newer blockchains don't have light clients they don't have all of these other features the only way to run it is a full arive node CL supports over 200 blockchains and I think there's at least

I would say 20 25 blockchains that don't have a like client so you the only way to run it is a multi-terabyte kind of especially these faster blockchains that have subsec block times it just gets a lot of data right so uh it's just you know just a efficient way to to have everyone participate in the ecosystem yeah when I think of like clients I think of data availability sampling I'm and kind of not needing to download the entire all the data on uh different blocks to be able to to verify that it's been posted and that it's uh you know that it's uh the correct information effectively um why are why is why is this so powerful for for for

blockchains I mean I think we've we've kind of addressed it a bit but even deeper like what has the evolution of like clients further enabled in the space as you've seen this the development of more and more iterations and things like dask coming online with Celestia and other Solutions so let's uh let's take a step back it's not always a fair assumption that everyone believes in in a live client kind of Stack right so take salana for example salana is known as a you know for better wor a data center chain so what it means is you need heavy gear and bare metal hardware to run a Solana node you know

the salana stakers and the salana node operators some of the most sophisticated technically competent people if you want to run it at scale and that is the that is diametrically opposite to the ethereum EOS where they want they do not want uh Data Center Chain they want um solo stakers at home who are able to run these nodes without a lot of configuration so I think they value different facets now let's take a step back and understand what is happening with transaction datas on chain and why you need data availability and data availability sampling and what's unique about Celestia as opposed to some of the other uh da layers so uh before you had this da layer before you before you had

uh modular blockchains basically a blockchain like ethereum has the execution environment which is the evm has the settlement layer has the consensus engine and also has the data on chain so take an example of these rollups so these rollups what they do is they take the computation offchain right so it's usually like a centralized system or whatever it doesn't matter and then they post the transaction data at the end of whatever that Epoch on the rollup to the ethereum mainnet and before the deck couldn't upgrade all of this was going in call data so if you go to Ether scan and look at the top gas guzzlers before the Deon upgrade the top

gas guzzlers were all is these rollups the sequence are posting the transaction data on uh ethereum so you could see arbitrium and optimism and ZK sync and polygon and all these different chains just posting all their data so even though your data has scaled your execution is scaled with an offchain system with a rollup your L1 is still congested because the more the number of rollups you have you coming back to the same problem and now the gas that you pay on the L2 is a essentially a pro a share or it's just subsidized by the cost of the L1 sequencer posting that data on chain on or the L2 posting on L1 so that's passed

down to the users so there's a floor on the shared resource which is onchain data availability right so that's like the fundamental congestion point and so from there what has happened is there's multiple solutions to scale that data available so the approach that Celestia and I and Avil and I think there's one from near what they do is that you post the transaction data from the rollups to this another you know could be a blockchain could be a some kind of Ledger could be could be some kind of system it's not always a blockchain and then uh you wait you hold on to the data for the challenge window so the other

validators post Challenge and the challenge is uh accepted and that means the data is fake then you know you get slashed and so on right and then you just post the result or the commit of that transaction hash on the L1 so that's one way to scale and that is how blockchains that are using Celestia to scale are able to uh not compete for that expensive onchain data availability on the L1 so that is one solution that is uh that's very popular you know Celestia has about a dozen rollups that are now actively using Celestia I believe Manta is one of the biggest rollups to use Celestia as a DA layer now the other solution that has come

from the ethereum camp is to split segment out the da to blobs and to onchain Da and make this an optin so with the dickon upgrade uh what has happened is now you have a new fee market for blobs and one of the most interesting things that has happened is that basically all rollups have now started to post their transaction data to the blobs rather than using onchain da da which is the call data or using a Celestial like da layer and what is incredible is because it's an alternate gas fee Market if you look at the the the the cost of posting blobs it's uh

most days it's under one grade so what has happened is has become Dirt Cheap because you don't have all of these rollups uh for a lack of better word I'm saying spamming on chain da so that's like incredibly scale if you look on a on a day like today I think it's like sub 10 gray like the gas fees on eum it's ridiculous like is this a is this a bull market I don't know I don't it's it's it's like it's crazy what's happening here so that is one other approach uh to scale like da so those are the you know the the the spectrum of solutions that available to rollups so that um you're able to secure your transactions your offchain compute

essentially and post it on the L1 but because of the because the because it needs to be secure the D or the blob has to have the same Economic Security as the L1 otherwise what would happen is that if Celestia did not have the same security as the L1 you could fake the data on Celestia and post garbage data on the L1 then the rollup data can no longer be trusted right so that's another key requirement here uh for for making sure the security scales uh along with the throughput Manel was a layer to blockchain with one of the biggest onchain treasuries in all of crypto and

they have a 100 day campaign called metamorphosis live now what this is is it is a campaign for their liquid Stak e token m as well as their upcoming liquid reaking token c m where you can utilize this token on the mantle Network in a variety of different apps some of your favorite reaking protocols and defi protocols and earn yields in the form of powder which will eventually be turning into a governance token Mantle's been around for a while we like them because they use their own form of Igan da uh they have a good ecosystem and they're growing so check out this 100 day metamorphosis campaign and hope you guys enjoy the rest of this video makes sense

yeah celesia has like a fallback mechanism as well in case something happens to the chain that falls back to ethereum Da I think other data the providers will do something similar um to kind of help blow up operators feel comfortable using their solution um I have a question on ethereum's and I think we can we can talk more about the future towards the end here but like do you think that ethereum is moving towards just being like a settlement layer for roll up blocks for the for data availability blockchains posting their uh their kind of pointer contracts and their blocks and settling to uh settling data to ethereum and like rollups just posting their data to ethereum like do you think

that the ethereum L1 is going to move towards like basically having like very few high-profile applications that are used by people with you know significant sums of money and then the rest of the block space is going to just be used for uh basically settling other chains built on top of it like is this kind of something that you're considering so I would say uh I believe in that Vision where the ethereum main net the main chain is a pure settlement uh chain which is all the rollups used to you know sync with each other but I think it really falls on your philosophy is blockchain cheap or not cheap is block space abundant or not abundant so that's

really where it comes down to so if you look even in the Bitcoin Camp uh there's been so much push back against increasing the block size because it makes the noes heavier and so that's where you're you know that's where you know the the uh it tells you what camp you belong to and so if you I think block space should be abundant right so that's counter to like this blockchain uh ethereum blockchain being scarce and therefore you don't want to spam uh your L1 with your like you know your gambling apps for example it doesn't make sense right um so I think you know that's where there's a disconnect and the benefit of the ethereum architecture

with all the rollups is that you can innovate at the edges and you don't have to like you know the AUM main net itself can reach a a state of like almost Frozen in terms of the feature sets right so all of the pre- compiles all of the features all the The Innovation can happen when the rollups which as they should because ethereum like the block space is so scarce so I think that's how the world is moving to and I think it definitely makes a more interesting world because the pace of innovation definitely increases when you have Innovation at the edges yeah so like ethereum becomes like this the narrative for the onchain world shifts to like ethereum being this global settlement

layer almost which is kind of interesting though because if we're talking about where's celes is going next and some of these data availability providers what you kind of realize is like you don't even need a settlement layer so much if you have data availability sampling and um proofs whether it be like ZK proofs or uh fraud proofs Celestia is moving towards like this like introducing this like ZK verifier or this ZK contract to do to bring snarks in that'll allow oneway Bridge or two-way bridging from Celestia to Sovereign rollups and um from The Sovereign rups to each other and like also allowing that to be their own ecosystem and now they have their

own Sovereign rollup ecosystem um I'm curious like do you think that Celestia is like positioning to be a competitor to ethereum from that perspective as well as like Avail and other data availability solutions that have sampling and proofs and can build roll up ecosystems on top of them without needing to settle to ethereum um and like generally curious what you think is like next for Celestia and kind of the broader modular space as well so I think it comes down to uh where is the value of crew right so the most valuable thing is the state and so State can be transported across rollups using Celestia then um you know then your settlement layer becomes moot so I would

say Celestia is starting to think about how more value can ACR to celesia how they can capture more of the scaling I would say benefits they provide to the ecosystem because right now you post data to Celestia and then the data is deleted after two weeks uh because you can't provide this L1 level security forever because it's very expensive and then um and then that's it that's the the role of Celestia so what's uh what's beyond that and so I think that's where uh Celestia will be thinking about how uh we can hold on to a bigger share of the pie right why just pass it on to to ethereum and settle on ethereum

how can we do things a bit differently and I think these different chains have different or these different da Solutions uh I'm not you know 100% to be to be honest up to date on all the Cutting Edge research that These Guys these excellent guys are doing uh but I think that's generally where people would move there are some people who think that these layers on just transitionary kind of like State like it like you don't really need uh D layers in the long term because your base layer itself will scale tremendously which is what you're seeing with The Blob and the gas Fe in Blob there's no need to use a a d ler you just post directly to the blobs and everything works as this right

that's exactly like that was the the for today for this year for today exactly so so yeah I think it's it's uh it's it's you know it's a very Dynamic market for sure right and everyone wants to capture the feast everyone wants to be uh you know this critical infrastructure piece and you don't just don't want to be a literally you don't want to be a billboard right because there's like really no value that ACC crws there Bes besides the the challenge window yeah I mean so the other kind of side of the puzzle for the data availability question and for like blockchains is like you mentioned that they're they are more of a billboard less of a database but I from what I understand when data is posted to Celestia or different data

availability layer they kind of hold it if you will and there's a certain time period I think it's like 12 to 18 days or something like to this extent where they're able to like you know if they need to go back and reconstruct uh the blocks based on that data but then after a certain point that data just is basically like pushed into so like The Ether um and so like you guys have thought about this and or have put out something labeled the ethereum Wayback machine maybe you could just like highlight what this why this is a problem why people should care about like like the data after gets passed on to data availability providers why

should why is that important um and kind of the input implications of of preserving that these are a great question so let's start with what what is being posted to the D right so what you have is essentially uh some kind of like commitment to the transaction data you don't have to provide all the transaction data to the D so if you look at ZK sync for example the data that they post on the L1 for the onchain da is actually not the transaction data it's a transaction like State diffs so it may not always be possible to reconstruct the block and the transaction data from what has been posted to the DA layer it's not not always a given right so the whole point

there is that if it's a if it's a commitment then you can reexecute the blocks in another alternate execution environment that's offchain and then match the commits on either the da layer or the onchain da da and then that's how you challenge what has been posted by the official sequencer if you want to call it that right so that's how the system system works so the data is not that usable so so it comes down to this right the data is not usable uh the data in the case of Celestia is two weeks after two weeks it's deleted because it's very expensive to have this L1 level security for a very long amount of time right the security mechanisms is is

very different if you're using onchain uh if you're using blobs blobs are deleted at 4,000 that's 18 days on ethereum Main net so you can't get any of the historical blobs if you you're uh using onchain da with State pruning uh which should be roll out in the in the next year or so your historical onchain data also being deleted from ethereum so where do you get transaction data how can I say okay at this point this transaction happened if the IRS were to come to you how can I post a transaction hash where is that where's the data right so that is the the Crux the acute problem that we're trying to solve right and I think the whole point of ethereum and having the

transparency and having all of this data out in public is kind of mood if you cannot access historical data so in the case of these da layers what you you have an attack called a withholding attack which is basically you withhold the transaction data so no one can challenge that or the commit or whatever and so here this is almost like an ecosystem attack on ethereum where no one knows where the data is and this is exactly the problem that we fac in the cosmos ecosystem as the cosmos Hub which is the first Zone went through multiple migrations hard Folks by the time you were in hard folk number four it was impossible to get like transactions from

hard folk number two just impossible because all you had were just the account balances as of that block and just snapshot it and then restarted with the Genesis block with these new balances right so in many ways you need a solu solution that keeps ethereum uh decentralized so that is the role and that is the solution that ethereum Wayback machine does it's a you know a a hat tip to the ethereum Wayback machine which if you've used archive.org you can go put any website and it just has these snapshots of you know internet websites going back forever yeah so it's kind of the same thing so you are able to basically get a catalog of all transactions across all rollups that you know obviously equivalent in the ewm

supports at any point time and so you're not relying on other centralized intermediaries to access historical data because if there's no decentralized solution to get this transaction data at any point in time then what what would happen is you'd have people like Alchemy and these RPC providers and other kinds of vendors maybe custodians who would provide centralized access to transaction data and in our belief system uh that makes ethereum less decentralized and that's going counter to the ethos of the space where you want to have more decentralization and that wasn't you know tradeoff that you know we felt was right so that is the pro

that is this that is the problem that we're trying to solve and just getting access to historical transaction data across all the RO that supported their ecosystem yeah and so this is like so we have risk and this might be a silly question but like you know based on what on what you're saying I guess like what is the importance of having data from a year ago or six months ago um and like you explain kind of why how the the hard forks and Cosmos cause problems for Builders and developers um but like from your perspective what is the like what

are the key points as to why it's so important to have that data and then going forward like how do you plan to to like interoperate your Solutions into the modular space so in in the scientific Community we have something called peer reviewed research where essentially anyone should be able to replicate your experiment and replicate your results and so that comes to having verifiable transactions and verifiable data so essentially it's peer reviewed so what that means is that I'm able to get the same set of initial conditions and the same set of program codes and get the same kind of output right there

is no question on what is correct and what is not correct so the ground truth should be uh traceable and so if you don't have this transaction data then essentially the balances and transactions that you read off the tip whatever is not prune is not verifiable anymore right it is it's it's veryify information because it's gone past the challenge window but it's not verifiable from the Genesis block anymore right no one in the cosmos ecosystem can trace their latest balances it's impossible you just can't and so this is a very important attribute or facet of uh of blockchains where your your data and

your transactions and your balances and all of the key aspects are verifiable not just verified information so this should extend to offchain compute systems right so that is really the uh the the value in having and solving this problem now why this is practically useful having access to all the information in the past is critical for R ke2 it's critical for you know any kind of like uh challenge systems in the future if you have quote records if you have like the whole point of having an immutable Ledger is is you it's immutable but it's not really it's not really useful to have an immutable

Ledger if you can't pull out historical data if you can't pull out you know the past data so that's really what uh uh the point of this this archive system is right and I think the the needs here and the requirements are quite distinct from a d the security requirements are different the storage requirements are different uh even the the time span things are different so from an inte ation standpoint what this is is it would sit adjacent to all these nodes and so just as these nodes are posting the transaction data to either blobs or onchain da or uh offchain da which is like Celestia or igen da uh they would post their data to the weback machine as

well and the ewm is able to catalog and store this in this full decentralized kind of ecosystem So Cal today has 32 uh 32 nodes that dispersed across the ecosystem and we are coming up with a light client sampling technique as well on how you can scale the verification of these transaction data that is posted on uh across all these different rollups got you okay so it's yeah so it's like an adjacent add-on to the current solution I think people kind of like confused about like data availability data storage um two separate ideas here uh with regards to like the use case for each one being like verifying of the

publishing and verifying of the truth the other being like storing of the information for the long term in case of needing of of recordkeeping of of uh past history you know it's like you you would well I don't know burn your your previous tax returns right you would always want to keep those on file it's a similar idea so to be clear the E Wayback machine is not a storage solution we just use ipfs off the shelf it's that whole mechanism of how that data gets to storage uh so that's a basically a replicable verifiable pathway yes yeah so not a solution itself um but yeah the process of getting that data off chain or onto ipfs in a decentralized manner is very

important because if if you if there's somebody that has the power to change it then you literally can just rewrite history which is just an extreme problem um cool man well I think I have one last question for you uh more of a fun one as we kind of wrap up um you know I thought I thought Angel Investing was easy I thought VC's was easy and everybody's just gonna make a ton of money if you get into the early rounds and coins are just going to go up and launch high and seems like this isn't happening it seems like there's an inflection point in the market where there's like this kind of like there's just a lot of projects launching there's a lot of tokens you've been around for a while you've seen a lot of this happen um yeah man like like

where are we at in this meta of of like of sustainability with uh token launches and kind of um you know what's your what's your general take on how the progression of new projects coming to light and uh early stage investing in these markets is gonna kind of happen and um you know is the market becoming more more difficult more sophisticated what are the current market dynamics that you're observing Everclear is pioneering the clearing layer the clearing layer can almost be thought of as splitwise when you go on a trip with friends but for the blockchain what I mean by that is when users are sending cross chain messages there's often times fillers and solvers who have balances

left on different chains that they need to rebalance and reset their positions this is where evercar comes in evercar is pioneering a collaborative approach to the chain abstraction future and they are willing to work with interoperability partners solvers and other providers in the space to build a interoperable and chain extraction future check out Everclear ever clear.org and welcome back to the Lup very very interesting question so I've been an active angel investor for many years now and I only like I'm only interested in infrastructure projects because I think being part of a project is almost like a commitment to be part of their

team that's how I feel and as a Founder I really just like debt Equity or investors to widen their capital and never talk to you ever again and some Founders like this some Founders don't and so I always want to be uh supporting a founder and if there's any kind of like Crisis moment you know even if it's a Friday evening Saturday morning take up calls with and and support them with whatever challenges they have now from a from a financial perspective uh I wouldn't say it's uh let's just say it's a very expensive hobby right Prett expensive hobby the the challenge is like a couple a couple things one is that it usually takes about you know uh eight months to a year and a half to

reach your TG your you know your token generation event these are token projects and then usually there's a you know a a two to three to four year lockup for the seed round you know it only makes sense to get in at the very earliest uh like that's where the most risk is that's where it's the most fun and that's where you can have the most impact so if it takes let's say let's say it's a three-year lockup and then a year to reach your tge that's like four years so if you wire in your money today you're looking at hard to believe by 2028 before you're fully liquid so from a risk reward uh perspective it actually makes sense to go doe your due diligence on liquid assets and and then you know

take take a take up a position there right and uh that is I think definitely if you look at the the the projects have been a part of in 2021 like from a from a Time perspective and the opportunity cost of capital being locked up there and the risk uh it doesn't make a lot of sense so if you look I'll give you a concrete example like layer zero is a very project you know great project another vancou uh vancou team they uh raised their most recent round a$3 billion valuation uh about two years ago so that's a $3 a token and uh back then

when they raised that R Bitcoin was uh $21,000 literally and so you could have put your money into Bitcoin and beaten so layer zero is about $4 now so you know that's that's like a 25% bump on what what the seed or whatever price round was and so you would have made more money and it's also liquid like layer Zero's unlock schedule is only starting as of like last week or two weeks ago right so it's another three years of unlocks so you're looking at a fiveyear kind of commitment so yeah I think it only makes sense uh if you're an Institutional Investor to invest um otherwise it probably makes more sense

to take up Liquid positions now I'm not a I'm not an investor uh you know I'm I'm a builder and so when you go to the liquid markets it's less fun because you have to do a lot more work uh so as an as an operator you know it's it's hard to get your hands dirty if it's a liquid position yeah but not investment advice not Financial advice that's just generally my uh my read on on the market and the whole like FTV uh kind of thing is like I mean they're pros and cons right I think you know uh if you don't have a high valuation you have uh challenges uh with the exchanges and the custodians taking you

seriously just simple simple matter of fact and we face this issue right uh so I don't think launching with a low uh valuation a fully valued valuation is really an option uh these days because the competition is stiff uh I saw some I I think there's going to be another like four or 5,000 tokens hitting the market in the next like six months right so competition is super aggressive I heard another stat that there's an exchange called mexc that's listing 300 assets a month that's 10 assets a day so that's the number of new assets that are coming on the market so competition is stiff and so you have to do whatever it takes

to stand out if you want to survive and I think in crypto also capital is fleeting so if you don't have an exciting narrative if you don't have uh you know a strong Army of supporters who have the conviction uh it's quite challenging so yeah that's that's just certainly my take I think it's uh it's super hard to get a project off the off the ground uh these days I think if you're in if you have a like a hot space like you know da or AI or execution environments uh that's really nice uh but if you're in the app space you know there's not a lot of apps that have any meaningful traction and uh traction is

just a drop in the bucket compared to web two kind of traction and so it's it's very hard to get your app off the ground especially from an investor sentiment perspective so yeah I think that's just uh things are playing out right now yeah I mean there's a couple there's a bunch of good points in there I mean I think on the INF side it's been the the way that people are investing uh I think that that I'll start to ship as the Returns on some of these l2s infra bets you know don't do so well I I agree with you like for for us it doesn't make that much sense to you know invest in like series a or like if teams are raising at like 200 million at FTV or something you know for like for like being Angel Investors it's like yeah you

would need institutional Capital to to theoretically get the returns that you're looking for especially in a bull market if the liquid Market's doing well um so kind of learning these things as as we go and uh been been been a good ride it's definitely an extensive hobby um it's fun to to support teams early and um yeah generally I think that this was a great conversation and appreciate your time and a lot of your insights on the technical side as well as just like understanding the ecosystem and the evolution of the space from your perspective so thanks thanks for uh coming on and um yeah it's been a pleasure Andy appreciate it so much uh and let's chat soon all righty sir