Modular March Episode 8: Modular Appchains-As-Service With Gelato

Transcript

welcome to modular March I'm handy this is Robbie and we are the rollup modular March is an educational experience about all things Moder [Music] enjoy [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome Lewis to Maja March another episode today we have Lewis from gelato here today talking about zero gas

rollups and the bull case for app chains hello hello nice to be here thanks for having me on very excited to learn about zero gas rollups and all the stuff that you're doing at gelato and feel free to take us off man all right yeah so I'm going to jump straight into the slides here I brought a little presentation to basically explain uh a bit about what we have been building at gelato and what you can be excited for in 2024 uh so yeah I'm basically going to talk about zero gas and infinite scale and and the bull case for app chains or rooll apps and how to build them so yeah I'm Lou I'm founder gelato and uh yeah let's let's jump straight in so basically I actually stole this from Mustafa from Celestia I think he has

this amazing analogy that he likes to say on podcast and it's basically the story of of how Web Two scales so let me briefly walk you through that um and then compare it to web 3 so basically in web two in the early 90s uh probably none of us here were there for that but uh yeah you you basically in the beginning of the web you had um physical servers that you needed uh if you wanted to host a website or web app so you would literally have to buy a machine you would have to deploy your software to that machine to be able to host a website and obviously this wasn't going to be scaling the web because just imagine you have users outside of your continent or something they would experience very slow loading times and in general just maintaining a server to

host an app is just like crazy right like imagine your electricity goes out your page is down super unscalable like you have to do all of the maintenance even though you just maybe I don't know want to have a website or web app about coffee or something right so didn't make any sense so we we had to graduate from there and and next came the era of shared hosting so there we had providers like geoc cities and dream host and uh and yeah basically what I mean these guys really solved a big problem for the first time you were able as a web developer to just you know have a managed hosting service uh where you would be able to deploy your web app website and enjoy a lot of uh you know um managed servers uh but there were still problems with that it was

definitely much more scalable you know you would be able to uh you know uh you would be able to have failover in case some server went down and so on all of this was managed for you but the problem was that these shared hosting providers still were very restrictive like for example you would have to use their specific framework their specific programming language and so on uh and uh that's you know like just constraints the ability to build amazing applications and especially what was really bad on the shared hosting infrastructure is that you sort of shared your server space with everyone else on there so I don't know if your competitors app or something exploded had like a day of huge traffic a huge search you would pay the the cost of that sort of as well by maybe having a degradated service on your own app or

maybe even downtime and so on so it still didn't really scale well and uh and yeah the end game here was basically uh virtual machines in the cloud so now for the first time web developers in in web 2 and and this is still uh the state of art today uh you can just you know uh create your own instances in the cloud they're fully virtual server they're fully managed for you on AWS you can spin up as many of them as you need they're isolated from everyone else so you know you won't suffer any degradation if someone else on AWS has a crazy amount of traffic you you won't notice that uh and and most importantly also this gives you maximum flexibility in designing your application and building your web application you can you know pick any VM and then sort of just build your your app the the way you want to build it using a wide array of

programming languages everything so here we have maximum scalability usability all managed for developers in the cloud sort of available to them instantly and very very important they can scale that horizontally so they can scale up and spin up as many instances in in in AWS or Google Cloud as they want right so now the the key learning here is that the internet is not just one huge World computer it's it's rather a web of interconnected computers and uh all of these um Services uh talk via asynchronous mechanisms with each other so for example I mean generally speaking in the web um your servers would talk to other servers via HTTP which is an

asynchronous uh protocol and and also like even within your service probably those different micr services within your application would also talk to each other in an asynchronous manner so yeah the the the main claim that we have at gelato is that asynchronous cloud services are SC in web 32 to today already actually as as we will see later in the presentation so uh let's talk about the web3 evolution here and let's compare it uh to what we just saw with the web 2 Evolution so in web 3 we see a shift from like a view monolithic chains to what we call infinite virtual chains or rollups in in the web3 cloud so in web 3 we initially similar

to to how you had like huge barriers to entry in the early days of the web where you had to buy physical servers and everything uh we initially had these special purpose blockchains like Bitcoin um and if you actually wanted to create a new um application specific blockchain back then or a special purp purpose blockchain back then you literally have to rebuild or Fork Bitcoin and the barrier to entry here is huge right like you essentially have to spin up a valid Data Network similar to bitcoin that has similar amount at stake um otherwise you know the 51% attack becomes very uh very likely uh and for that you basically have to create a new coin a new token you have to inflate the supply and yeah it's basically an insurmountable task to to be able to to replicate what Bitcoin

did and to also build an application similar to it U yeah so so basically people tried with Master Co and so on but it was pretty clear that it wouldn't work uh so so then uh next you had ethereum and ethereum is like a shared hosting provider and to where ethereum solved a huge problem um basically it allowed application developers from deploying the application as a new blockchain uh from going from there to actually deploying your application as a smart contract on ethereum and ethereum the network would take care of all of the global distribution for you um the networking the hosting everything so it's like a manag service and you just deployed your smart contract there uh the issue is very similar to Shared hosing providers is that ethereum itself is a very constrainted platform form like you

would only be able to write your application solidity on the evm right so we all know that has a lot of shortcomings evm for example is not parallelize so you wouldn't be able to process transactions in parallel it's it can get and especially the biggest problem is you're sharing this infrastructure with everybody else out there deploying applications so that means in times of congestion your users have to pay a huge fee or maybe have like a very degradated degradated experience on your application simply because some some dgen is doing an Ico or an n T drop or something right so so that's uh you know also not ideal uh definitely pretty cool much better than what we had before but but definitely suffers from a lot of scalability issues and and other issues as we know so so the final stage of web three scaling is

essentially um ethereum's rollup Centric road map which uh we at gelato say basically leads to Virtual blockchains or rollups on a rollup as a service environment and essentially what a rollup as a service does is very similar to what AWS did for for web developers which is it allows you to to modify um the the blockchain virtual machine or to just you know spin up many instances of it you can just take the evm you can take op you can take polygon you can take arbitrum and just spin up an instance of it or many instances or you can even go beyond that and and modify it right like we see people actually now uh have the Solana virtual machine and they deploy that as an ethereum rollup so so that's super cool it gives the developers much more flexibility you

have more Innovation again um not everyone has to build the evm the exactly same way that ethereum has you you can for example merge some eips that aren't on ethereum yet early on your rollup and many other things and and most importantly you deploy uh as many instances of this for your application as you want so your application is not a smart contract anymore it is now a rollup blockchain um and you still benefit from a lot of the sort of network or shared shared hosting effects of ethereum like for example you can use ethereum as a data availability layer or Celestia right so so you sort of modularize the stack a bit there and uh and or as a settlement layer so and and as a share security layer so you you really G you still benefit from from everything ethereum has built but you just move the execution um to a roll up

and you g gain a lot of scalability like so there's there's some tradeoff here with liquidity fragmentation and so on but beyond that really it's it's just very logical to do that as a as an application developer so yeah that's that's the end game of web 3 and U just quickly um very high level Tech here you can you can think of gelato web3 Cloud as consisting of of two basically two layers you have the base layer this is these are the the rollup Technologies like optimism arbitrum polygon ZK sync and so on you name it the the other modular Parts like data availability layers like Celestia and so on and then so this is sort of the base layer Tech that you need on this platform and that you get on this platform and then secondly you also need services and I think this is really important to understand why why gelato

isn't just a rollup as a service provider and why just the blockchain itself is cool but pretty useless uh and you also see this on AWS where you have this nice ecosystem of composable services that developers make use of when building the application similarly like this on gelato web3 cloud and on our allinone roller service you also get all of the gelato Services baked into your chain so for example our serverless functions if you want to automate your smart contracts or if you want to I don't know connect to data offchain like P or Redstone and make it available on your on your rollup for example if you have have if you have a defi roll up that's very important to have oracles there from day one right so yeah all of these services are available to you on our platform for your chain um you also have the graph and gold sky for indexing

you have block explorers like ether scan you have messaging protocols to to be able to asynchronously connect between your rollup and other chains like like L zero for example right uh oracles like P and redstone and yeah many more so uh so yeah here's just a a quick I mean actually I think this PDF so we won't see it but yeah there's it's just a quick show of how you how how easy it is to just deploy your rollup on gelato we have a app for that that allows you to do that you can just pick your stack Pick Your da layer and you know um just with a couple of clicks you can spin up your rollups actually we will have a big Rel release there soon with uh with OP stack arbitrum polygon eventually as well and so on where you can literally just very quickly as a developer spin up

a test net and eventually M up as well and yeah just some more some more Tech here uh basically um I mean very high level Tech but uh what's key to understand about why why rollups are basically um you know like instances in the cloud or or virtual blockchains is that um yeah basically we were able to modularize uh the the ethereum blockchain stack by having ex execution layer which is your rollup um that is essentially like your VM in the cloud where um you you know you can use gelato rollup as a service gelato sequencer to to essentially run the transaction execution engine for you uh and you don't have to worry about that that's fully managed by us in the cloud and the reason that's still cool is because you can still use etherum as settlement

layer and data availability layer I mean today is dun right like so I guess more people are bullish again on ethereum as a data availability layer now that blob space is there and and da costs are going down but obviously we have great projects like celestian on that are really leading the way there and that you can also pick and choose from that are outside of our Cloud offering right like these are trustless decentralized networks and um yeah by just having the execution in in the gelato Cloud uh you can still benefit from the security of these decentralized networks but you can also benefit from the scale of having a cloud service like gelato you know uh fully scale up your application uh but yeah what we always say is that's not it right like on top of that you have essential services like you have the native Bridge UI that you

get on gelato roll up as a service you have our RPC partner for scalable rpcs currently we're working with the RPC there and you get Block explorers on top of of that as well so so that's like sort of the the base chain but going beyond that actually uh on gelato uh web Cloud you can now connect your rollup from day one to for example our functions service our service functions if you're familiar with AWS just think about like on AWS maybe you pick your your database like and you pick your VM uh and so on and and here on on gelato you can now pick your database like let's say ethereum or Celestia and you can pick your VM like op stack or arbitrum and now on adars normally you also have a rich ecosystem of apis and services that you can use and just like

this on gelato web pre- Cloud roll up as a service you can immediately pick gelato functions which allows you to very easily connect to pth and Redstone for Oracle data or you can pick our relay service and counter Inspection Services with with zero dep if you if you want to have an account abstraction experience on your rollup you can connect to Gold Sky for for indexing and and uh and so on and yeah so you uiu application sort of from day one doesn't just have a blockchain but it has all of the rich services that you need to really build a nice blockchain application uh and very importantly as well the the cross chain messaging services that you see on the right here um these are extremely important because just like on AWS with your application you still talk to many other services like stripe or what whatnot right uh

over HTTP uh you you uh onat rollup as a service can use layer zero or or connect or across or whatever to connect uh your rollup with other rollups um most likely to have bridging right so that so that your users can Bridge tokens from let's say base into your application or from from ethereum or optimism into your into your application so yeah that's that's also the interrup part here it's as simple as having an asynchronous messaging protocol um on your rollup uh that supports your rollup that connects to other chains and now you have basically you've achieved the what web2 has already achieved on AWS you you've now achieved in the web 3 Paradigm which I think is really amazing this is already happening today uh so so yeah um last slide here is a bit more future

futuristic um this is shared sequencing it's it's obviously a bit of a buzzword um I'm going to keep it short here but let's say like I think most users today would be completely fine to just have one rollup instance one of op as they roll up and process all of the transactions but some people are already thinking ahead maybe game developers usually they're thinking on the order of tens of thousands of transactions per second um and and yeah these guys might already think okay I want to have multiple horizontal instances of my application as you would on AWS there oftentimes you know you even have Auto scale where you you know have three four instances of your application running in parallel and and yeah so um this can actually already work with asynchronous communication uh but some application developers might want to synchronize

between these instances uh for for cross sort of synchronous Atomic smart contract calls so they want the application to to be processed by multiple instances of of an execution VM but they still want to have synchronous um calls between them and that's where you need shared sequencing this is currently in research still there's a lot of stuff ongoing like espresso um base sequencing from the etherum foundation and so on we also heavily invested there and research and just a teaser that I think in the not too distant future we will also have a a PC or test net for having uh for deploying your application on multiple instances and still having it be like a single instance uh sort of um where you can you know um you can process synchronous

smart contract calls across these instances so yeah um that's that I mean the key takeaway here is that ethereum is not one huge World computer it's a web threee of interconnected rollups um and built on gelato obviously so so yeah um I would like to invite all of you to come and Bild with us to scale ethereum and yeah this is just like an ecosystem chart that we have all of the projects that have been using our services over the past four years like you know many names there like synthetics pancakes for year optimism AAR actually launched a a zkm with us very recently Bey Finance has been using our serverless functions forever so yeah many projects on here so you'll be in good hands you'll join a nice community of of integrators and Builders and yeah

that's it thanks a lot awesome thank you um yeah we've heard this analogy of uh of web 3 embodying and following a very same trajectory as Cloud compute um the first question I have is um going to um oh if you're able to put the slides back up we can uh sorry sorry that's okay so um going to uh yeah yeah first of all very modular right that uh that ethereum is an interconnected web of computers um and each of those computers are modular there was a word here

uh and I think did you mention the word infinite scalability at one point here yeah okay so I just wanted to push on that because in the current cloud uh uh landscape we have the these server Farms that are all over the world and the scalability is limited by the hardware itself so I'm curious if the scalability of uh virtual blockchains in the web 3 Cloud are also uh limited by hardware and if so like what are what's the kind of current Hardware and where is that going yeah no absolutely infinite scale is always a bit of a a marketing buzzword I think it's infinite in theory now in practice you still have uh you

know you still need the hardware and and whatnot but like the idea is that um the idea about infinite scale is that you have a system where you can simply add add a machine or add a new instance in the cloud this would be a virtual instance so it's not like an actual machine it could be like that you still are on the same machine but it's just like the yeah it's a virtualization but still you can just add a machine or you can add instances and every instance you add can can basically process more uh transactions for you right and and this is now um I mean obviously we still have a lot of problems to solve here in in web 3 that are already much better solved in web two like for example um you know um communication between these rollups uh I don't think there exists a

rollup today which already has three instances that so of interoperate nicely with each other like I think we will have the first of these things on testet maybe mayet this year uh my candidates here my runner-ups are definitely game gaming developers they already think this way because uh yeah I mean I think in in online games and so on this is where you already have a lot of servers that operate inter very nicely with each other um to to provide the game so so yeah I think this is a similar similar idea here the idea is that uh you know in ethereum right now on the layer one if you add a new valid dat they don't really add anything in terms of processing capacity to the network it's actually quite the opposite almost where every new validator has to do the exact same compute that everyone else does so you don't really gain anything from

adding machines to the network other than arguably decentralization security and whatnot right and the idea with rollups on the layer two is that now since it's just about execution you can actually add more machines and every machine allows to Pro process more transactions don't quote me on the math here but like very simply said let's say one instance of op can process a thousand transactions per second or yes let's say a thousand just don't quote me on these numbers then adding a second instance would allow you to go from 1,000 to 2,000 right um in ethereum it's not the case in ethereum if you spin up a new validators the network doesn't gain 10 transactions per second more or so right like it's still the same uh so so yeah this this is the the the unlock here the mental unlock of of rollups and moving our execution uh of chain to to

the cloud environment gotcha here in the beginning we were kind of touching on um on zero gas app chains and I'm quite curious to to kind of understand how that would work under the hood and some of the developments that you guys are working on yeah so zero gas essentially just means um that uh the gas price on your chain is zero by definition so this means like every user that sends a transaction on your chain does so for zero cost in reality you will still as um the app developer you will still have to pay some cost some infrastructure cost like maybe settlement cost on ethereum maybe some da cost on Celestia right um but uh but these costs will be negligible as compared to what they are today if you want to sponsor all of your applications gas right um uh but yeah

users definitely don't pay any infrastructure cost any gas cost anymore so this is like on like the US experience that you're used to on on Netflix right like if you watch a Netflix movie you don't suddenly get a bill from AWS to pay for some ec2 instance that you used while watching that streaming that movie right that would be weird but that's currently like on ethereum and elsewhere it's like okay end users actually have to pay these weird infrastructure costs it's it's super bad and and this will go away with zero gas rollups where the the costs are so cheap that the developer the rooll app developer can very feasibly uh pay them for all of the users and it's just like a normal infrastructure bill that you pay to the rollup as a service provider which includes uh settlement costs to ethereum and ba cost to

ethereum also and so on right um yeah there's uh there is some problems with that because gas is this weird mechanism where um you also really have a lot of span protection um it's like this double- edged sword where uh once you remove it you also remove the spam protection but I think gas is a very bad uh mechanism for spam protection because it's very misaligned with the developer with the end user if you think about it uh on very low gas cost blockchains like Solana you already today have a lot of spam issues so actually gas is only like gas is a um a Spam protection mechanism that gets better the more expensive it gets but also the the the worst does gets the ux right so so it's it's not a

good mechanism and we need other mechanisms and traditionally in web to I mean there's a bunch of things websites web apps and so on do to limit spam right spam is not an issue in web PR it's just as much much an issue in too and there I'm like I'm really bullish on like sort of newer identity projects right like projects that assign essentially um addresses on your rollup some form of hey this is like a real person and not a bot right like this is and how do they do that like maybe they like they prove that your address like the public key that you use on your address has completed some capture or some video ENT or kyc or whatnot right so so actually I think um the era that we are ushering in at gelato this era of zero gas rollups where we want to be at

the Forefront because we believe that every rollup at some point should be a zero gas roll up to be able to provide similar experiences to web to and even better um but yeah that that means we need identity identity projects to succeed like onchain identity project so I mean there's a bunch of them already out there right like there's old ones like Civic and so on I think they probably have to sort of reinvent themselves a bit but new ones include polygon ID I think they're working on something um that IDE web3 or and so on all of these guys have announced that they're working on something so so yeah I'm very bullish on working with these projects actually and ultimately I think what will happen is that when you use an application in the future that is a rollup first of all you might not even notice anymore that

you're using blockchain at all because you'll just be clicking buttons you'll be signing in you'll be clicking buttons right and you'll be trading you'll be gambling whatever it is and and like ultimately blockchains for me are mostly a B2B solution they they uh rollups blockchain zero knowledge all of these things are B2B Solutions I think we nowadays get often confused about their benefits because we think we all like cryptonator we all use this stuff um you know like we always think it's for us but actually it gives developers the opportunity to build a gambling casino to build a bank or whatever it is without having to so without having to assume so much liability like it allows you as a developer to build a secure defi protocol without actually custody all of the users f and you can sleep well at night at least much better than

a banker or or sand bankman fredwood because you know that your servers can't just be hacked everybody's money is money is gone right so so I think this is really the power that blockchain smart contracts and so on afford is like it allows developers to it reduces the barrier to entry massively so that developers can build Banks without having to invest heavily in security and heavily and I don't know licensing compliance and so on to make sure that they don't accidentally uh lose their user those funds like the blockchain takes care of you for that right zero zero knowledge takes care of that for you so so yeah I think if you think this way then then actually users will just click buttons again uh developers will be happy because they were able to have a casino have a bank have a trading application a a finance application uh

with a team of five people or 10 people without risking or without having so much liability just because of technology and that's really what what we have here and then you will probably have spam protection mechanisms like you will notice suddenly when you use a defi application that you have to do a capture maybe you have to do a live video ENT or something right this is I think what will what will happen this year and so with the uh payments on the back end is that working through something like a pay master I know you mentioned the account abstraction kind of Technologies embedded into some of these rollups is that effectively what's happening on these rups is like basically as you said the the debt or the team pays for it through some sort of like pay Master function which they like preload up for the entire chain to

operate and they have to like keep a balance of of of e at in a certain contract or something yeah actually it's exactly that and I think account abstraction especially 437 so I've always been a bit of a skeptic because I think like 47 itself is uh like implementation wise is way over engineered and so on but still people adopted right um and I think account obstruction itself will look a bit different and much simpler on rollup as a service um because just like you like you say like actually you don't really need a pay Master anymore and nowadays if you look into the account obstruction implementations out there on ethereum polygon arbitrum and so on they really have a bunch of complexity and code that's just there to regulate payments and estimation of fees and so on and actually all of this is just there

because gas is so expensive um so every line of code and account abstraction today and every processing and so on is is really there because gas is EXP expensive if once gas is really cheap um you you really don't need a lot of like like heavy pay Master logic and protocols on chain anymore because you can literally like the developer like the app developer just pays the bills the app developer just pays the bills to ethereum and Celestia and that's it right like they're so cheap that it's as easy as okay I'm going to fill up a couple fill up a couple of hundred of bucks or so per month on my etherium sequencer that post the settlement um State updates and maybe on my um Celestia whatever that post the da or or both on the ethereum right and I'm just going to see this balance deplete super slowly but I'm just going to top it up

and that's paying for all of my users transactions so it's like you as the app developer are the pay Master without maybe even really realizing it and you don't need all of this heavy boiler plate anymore that that you have with 437 and so on at least not for this use case like there's other use cases for 437 like account obstruction like I don't know um uh signing Keys recovery and like smart contract wallets and so on there there you probably still have a bunch of of stuff that's needed but just for the sort of gasless payment of sponsoring it's much easier on on roll up as a service from some of the naysayers for the modular blockchain thesis there's been a lot of talk about Rass being erased to the bottom and being fully commoditized what's your kind of rebuttal to this or how you thinking

about the landscape of Ras with regards to sustainability for this kind of modular expansion that we're embarking on with this explosion of app chains yeah I think that people are not giving enough credit at least at this stage of how hard it is to actually run these things reliably in production so technically you can very easily make the argument for almost anything especially in infra that it's commod going to be commoditized for me that just means that there's uh there's value there that there will be enough competition to drive prices down and this is certainly true but like I mean this is also true in AWS right and I wouldn't say AWS as a business model I think they're fine don't think they're complaining right so so this is true elsewhere as well um

with Ras specifically um yeah I I think that I mean especially not in the short term like uh because right now it's not yet so easy to just have a very undifferentiated uh copy paste Ras service H for example like with the zero knowledge rollups you need a lot of um knowhow and so on to still to to actually run these things efficiently because CK proving has a lot of cost um so so yeah I mean eventually with time these things will be easier and the barers of entries will become lower and so on but especially in this year I think like Ras providers the good ones have to be very specialized still uh the ones that actually have reliable production chains you know they will they will get a lot of brand recognition

for it and so on so I think there's a lot of value still there to actually build this brand and to prove to the market that you're one of the view ones that can actually have super high up time and so on and and maybe also already lower costs on proving and so on so so yeah I don't think it will be commoditized immediately like some people already jump to conclusions over sometime it will be commoditized prices will come down I think that's totally fine we actually want that like we want more app developers to be able to to afford this right today we can only address a certain um part of the market but actually want to talk to way more app developers that they can then also come online once costs get down so so yeah we we're working actively to bring the costs down and ultimately like I think Ras

itself um will have some premium always because even though you can Outsource a lot of the security to ethereum and Celestia and so on which is point the point still as the execution environment you still have some like you still have importance obviously uh so so yeah having a brand there that stands for high uptime reliability um you know little little to no cast cat catastrophic failures on any of the rollups that's just going to be a m build building that brand right um yeah I mean I guess there's a reason that there's not too too many Cloud providers and there there's like a a power law here do you envision a world where normal traditional app developers are choosing blockchainbased Cloud solutions

for their compute over something like AWS like is it possible that it's cheaper for someone to use a Ras solution than a traditional web2 Cloud compute solution uh yeah so I mean first of all what's important to notice is that most of these Ras uh Ras providers today ourselves included are deployed on existing Cloud environments like AWS and Google cloud and so on and most most of them are like we we still we also use bare metal here and there to bring cost down like for example ZK proving nowadays uh you probably don't operate in the cloud because ZK proving today is the machines you need are still like crazy and they just cost you dearly in the cloud so there you have to go bare metal but that might also change like

you know ZK proving cost there's projects working on bringing them down but but yeah so ultimately ultimately uh AWS and and Google and so on what what differentiates them from from Aras providers that they own a lot of Hardware they own a lot of data centers and so on right I could see a future where as a Ras provider we would also own some Hardware like maybe in ZK proving and so on um or or similar but but that's still a key differentiator the reason why you as a web three developer and so on why you would use AAS is first of all because this is highly tailored to your developer experience you get like like I mentioned you get all of these knives web pre Integrations that we've already built like with your blockchain uh you you get the expertise that we have like we it's more than just clicking a button and

deploying a chain right like you you need a lot of advice a lot of Consulting handholding in that process to make sure that you launch well and that that that you know everything goes goes smooth um and and yeah so I I think ultimately web3 developers and also fintech developers will choose blockchain over what they have in web 2 like blockchain itself uh rollups it's themselves just allow you to build much more powerful Global applications um you know um you don't have to worry so much about liability and so on thanks to the technology because you know it's it's you have less attack vectors you don't have to worry so much about your servers being hacked anymore and so on if you properly prove everything and and yeah so so first of all I think um as

blockchain Tech and web Tech matures and becomes more mainstream more and more developers will just choose it over the existing Tech te web too and they will find that the best uh experiences that they can have as developers will be provided to them by by Ras providers like gelato uh where yeah definitely yeah how are you thinking about um like some of these non evm components adding to gelato like uh like fluent has like a wasm VM or or a move VM or svm or is are those Integrations able to happen um what kind of you know tooling is required and then also similarly like you guys have some interrup uh Partners already um what are your thoughts about

expanding that uh as well yeah so custom VMS I think personally is one of the things that I'm I'm quite excited about but a bit more over the the medium to longer term and the reason being is that we still don't get have the luxury problem usually that a given rollup cannot process enough transactions like um you know I think we we haven't fully yet tested those limits uh especially if you think about nowadays R rollups using um you know cheap da like Celestia and so on and and now dun coming online today um so so I think uh these limits have to be a bit more test at first uh but yeah once you reach these limits or maybe you launch an application like maybe you are a big

gaming studio that is literally bringing millions of users over you need that scale from day one then you'd be looking at either the horizontal scale right like this what I mentioned like okay how can we actually just deploy two or three instances of of op stack or what whatnot and arbitrum polygon and sort of have them interoperate in the application or you look you look at okay more like vertical okay maybe let's modify the VM maybe let's use svm maybe let's use Monet right and and have one instance process more but yeah this is definitely possible in the rollup um construction uh you have that opportunity and we definitely want to offer that as well we have amazing developers at gaso right so we will definitely Tinker with that and yeah I'm pretty sure that maybe come summer this year we will maybe have the

first projects out in testing where we already see such modifications to a BM and then with regards to the interoperability Solutions like I I assume that like once AG layer is out from polygon all the cdk chains which launch using gelato will be able to plug right into a layer and kind of etc etc yeah and this comes back to my point from earlier like um uh actually some people might not realize the power of something like egg layer and egg layer from polygon for me is just like um you know bringing um really um boosting asynchronous communication between rollups by boosting settlement times um and um yeah I think some people might underestimate something like egay a bit

because they think oh it's still maybe 30 minutes or so right like no user wants to wait 30 minutes it's either instant or it's not instant right but actually egger and and ZK Tech as long as it's not instance once it becomes instant and we're a bit I mean some ZK you know um fans will tell you oh it's coming soon I have my doubts there but it might come eventually right but but yeah so until ZK is an instance it's not going to be an enduser product right but what it is is um if you talk to liquidity managers liquidity Bridge managers like hard from across for example right um or or whoever else manages liquidity like I guess socket nowadays Stargate and so on um and these guys have a super hard time building efficient systems on optimism main Base

Main and so on on these optimistic rollups because um they constantly need to rebalance their inventory to always have tokens where users need to have tokens right like if if if they they they allow they're basically giving people fast liquidity exits and for that they need to have liquidity wherever the user wants to go and and the problem is if they put their balance sheet if they put their inventory on something like arbitrum they cannot get it they cannot rebalance from there unless they have to wait seven days right um for these rollups that use canonical tokens which is the the the rollup weight to use tokens the most secure way right there's also mint and burn where you siep this problem but you lose a lot of the benefits of a roll up if you go mint and burn if you don't go with econic assd Bridge so so these guys they they will

love something like egg layer from polygon because it just brings their their rebalancing speed down to 30 minutes from like seven days that's I don't know like 100x Improvement or what whatnot right and then suddenly they have to deploy way less Capital to to provide their service so it's way more Capital efficient and so on right so so yeah I think this is like people really need to start seeing the B2B aspect of these things I mean we we often think we always think about ourselves using this on a day-to-day but really if you think about okay who are the people Building Solutions on top of this like across and so on like these are the guys who are gonna who are going to to benefit immediately from Solutions like this and you as a user won't maybe you won't notice it you will still use a cross you won't use the EG layer you won't know

about the K you will still use use a cross on bung but underneath across had a way easier time to bring the service to you and way less cost and and and yeah again the barrier to entry has been reduced for developers um and project owners thanks to thanks to the technology fantastic um I'm a out of questions um I'm I have had all my questions answered Rob how how about you yeah same I I mean this was a blitz this this was a lot of fun too um if I had one one more question I guess it would be like this this like just to close the loop on this interop conversation um so are you are you uh at gelato uh going to or planning to integrate those b2c Solutions like

across or do you stick primarily to the messaging the general cross chain messaging providers and then you let teams like across and and the rest of the the services that provide that fast path you let them kind of like do their own thing not necessarily integrate into all the chains that gelato supports yeah so um bridging has definitely proven to be one of the harder nuts to crack because it has a lot of scalability issues it's like you know you have to be very security minded because a bridge is how I roll up sort of launches but also dies uh very quickly as we've seen in the past with with side chain so so yeah it's definitely like I don't think there right now is a one size fits all solution uh recently I looked at hyper

and I think what they're doing is great because they're really thinking in this they were the first ones to really realize this world of of thousands of app chains and you know you need sort of you know you can Self Service um and sort of deploy hyperlane yourself which which I mean to be honest just means that you put put in some more work but at least you don't have to wait for teams and ask them to deploy for you right like you just do the work yourself um but you ultimately also with hyperlane uh unless you go for Min and burn you will if you want to go the canonical roller Bridge route which is the most secure way and the the best way to leverage all of the benefits of the technology of the roller Bridge technology ZK technology you should you should definitely use economical tokens there I'm not saying like I actually

think there's a actually so I would segment the user base here like there are users High tvl chains high security chains maybe more like Defi and on where you you probably should uh use the canonical assets and the canonical rollup bridge to make the most of the technology but I'm sure there's a lot of use cases less maybe less tvl less high value and so on who are totally fine with having mint and burn instant bridging and and they just want to have this fast thing and and and not bear the cost of actually maintaining a liquidity Bridge solution uh so yeah so there there you already have the problem you don't really have a one siiz fits all you really have to see what the user needs and then you have to make a a judgment call of okay um should we go full security or or or full flexibility here um and and yeah so I think hyane is

on the one end right now pretty cool where you can sort of have full flexibility you can obviously combine that as well with with the liquidity providers also they're quite modular there uh and on the other hand you have something like a cross which is sort of very focused on full security canonical Bridge assets um yeah so to to answer your question um haven't found the perfect solution yet working with all of them definitely working closely with with hard like he's a nice guy recently with a team from H Lane layer Zero have been working with Conex forever so we work with all of them and uh you know don't have a definite answer today what what will come out on top on the end it's definitely interesting to watch this diplomatic very diplomatic answer here yeah it's very it's very hard to tell

actually I mean actually I think this is one of the most interesting aspects like looking back on the year at the end of 2024 it would be interesting to see like how are these like what bridges are these rollups using so far it looks it's just going to be like a mix bag of things which which is a bit yeah I mean it doesn't really help with interoperability that much yeah well thank you Le for coming on and uh being a part of modular March I uh I'm very excited to see the future of R and of gelato and kind of embark on this majer expansion and um you know I think that we'll see hundreds and hundreds more app chains this year and more and more of these protocols on general purpose chains go ahead and move over to the app chain route so guys are

in a good spot thanks a lot for having me that was great thanks l