MONOLITHIC VS APPCHAINS with Eric Zhang & Brian Breslow of DoraHacks

Transcript

you look at monolithic chains they're certainly not going anywhere there's a lot of network effects around monolithic chains and this is due primarily to the monetary premium like those tokens are able to achieve um this is something the cosmos Hub token for example has like never achieved right there's never been a monetary premium for atom um because it's not like the base layer you know uh fat fat protocol thesis where like everything settling on top of it and it's not like one particular token that the entire Community is coalescing around the option CES is the freedom cissus where every ecosystem every option has its own sovereignty which means you'll have your own ideology you'll have own community and you'll

have own Innovation and Technology [Music] welcome to the interop I'm here today with Eric Zang who's the founder of dor Hax and Brian breslo who is in business development and Venture AT dorah Hax D Ventures um dor Hax is a leading developer in cental platform focusing on developer ecosystems and they're funding hackers primarily through you know hackathons Grant programs Etc and they're working on a new L1 called

dorota that is going to improve that is improving uh the way we fund open source projects and public goods before we get started be sure to subscribe to get notified when new episodes drop every week and remember none of what we discussed here on the interop as investment device and if you enjoy this content please consider sticking with us just look for interrup in the active set hey guys thanks for joining me thanks Seb thanks for thanks for having us really appreciate being here thank you s so Dora hack has been in this base for quite some time and I think a lot of people know J hacks as a team that organizes hackathons and helps fund projects in the ecosystem but uh as I've

learned recently through talking to you guys like it's so much more than that you have this Venture arm you're organizing events and you're also building this L1 that I think is really interesting because it sort of pushes the frontiers of blockchain voting so yeah how did Dora get started and what was the thesis um for door hacks yeah so um so thank you SE for having us I think dorah uh started almost 10 years ago it was the very small organization it was the era of um student hackerson and like the initial phase of the hackerson movement where you could see like a very big hackers in different us universities and gradually spread it out to Europe

and UK and some other Asian countries so the the the hackers at that time was like uh organized mostly by students once a year or twice a year uh super big uh and mostly sponsored by very big web to companies and uh like students attending those hackerson they they wanted to find jobs mostly and uh uh those companies will be uh sponsoring this this kind of hack and the idea of durah Hax was uh quite different from this idea which was like organizing very small hackerson but very frequent hackerson like every week uh if he can

organize uh two or three hackerson uh in different places but much smaller so that uh whenever people could people wanted to join they could join a hackers on at Dora Hax so that was like the very first idea of Dora Hax um and the uh gradually there were uh there was a merge uh of uh the web movement and hacker movement right because mostly in web 3 and and blockchain Technology like 99% of the uh technology is open source and obviously that is very friendly to the uh uh developer community so like everyone could just build on top of other people's work given that they

comply to the open source licensing so uh it's a completely different thing so it's it was very natural that D had became a global ha organizer in web 3 and uh and later we decided to so you know like in the first a few years we organized hundreds of hackerson in different cities in the world uh which was a very amazing uh experience but uh we wanted to enable more communities more organizations to host uh different types of hackerson so so that's why we started to develop the platform to style that you could see now and hackathon is

like the basic feature of that platform but on top of that we have so many things uh that could be added uh like quadratic funding like bounties like ideas and many other interesting features and the idea of the platform is then to allow any open source communities or hex organizers to uh host their own hackers and enable their own Community uh to u to innovate around open source technology and at which point did U did Dora hacks shift from you know early sort of like web 2 and into like early crypto and web 3 I think

that was um around uh 2015 so we started 2014 in 2015 we we hosted hackerson in different topics and uh I remember that there were like think Tech and uh data uh Tech related hackerson but what we observed was that half of the hackers were Building blockchain Technology at that time right and then it was pretty obvious that uh the movement was towards the blockchain technology but at that time there was no term C web three so people were talking about ethereum

people were talking about uh Bitcoin uh smart contract um and in 2016 we had like enss and people were building like uh algorithms to uh beat en domains uh so like there were a lot of interesting developer teams uh back then already but in 2017 uh there was a big boom in uh in the blockchain community obviously mostly because of the uh uh bull market and um uh we were able to host um a huge number of hackerson in different cities in the world that's impressive uh I I

didn't realize that dor hacks had been around for so long and uh that you guys had gotten your start like very very early in the space so what are the different things that D hacks are involved in today obviously there's the hackathons um you guys like a venture arm like what yeah what what are all the different sort of facets of D hacks that people might not be familiar with I'll just try to package it together real quick too and Eric definitely jumped in as well um I think it's kind of interesting like how everything kind of builds off on each other in terms of what we're trying to do which is ultimately support the Everlasting hacker movement um so dorah hacks is obviously a platform to bring hackers together and create this decentralized

community of developers that are going to be particip in different Community hackathons um at a global scale because most of what we do is virtual um and obviously the platform has a lot of features that enable different ecosystems to incentivize developer activations right as Eric mentioned hackathons grants quadratic funding opportunities Etc um so this is the platform that we've created um and what extends this platform is some of the infrastructure incubations we have like door Factory which is enabling aent infrastructure to better facilitate This Global movement of hackers right this is onchain tooling related to decentralized governance that we can get into um quadratic funding modules as Eric mentioned um rewards

mechanisms for sustainable funding of ecosystems this is something we call public good staking that we can talk to and then it also C culminates most recently with the arise of door Ventures which is a way for us to also participate in the upside of these communities that we are curating right it almost makes sense to want to be able to capitalize the most promising teams and developers that are em emerging organically from this platform to provide them continuation funding um so that they can reach full production and also allows us to um like grow ourselves and benefit from the community resources that we're instilling you know at a very early level so it's kind of like a basically you can look at it like a coup

like all of these different toolings and infrastructures and capital formation tools we have that allows developer communities to grow from a very early stage and also provide them resources to you know sustainably survive long term once once they've gotten larger um so I don't know I don't know Eric if there's anything you'd want to want to add to that I think uh like all the products we're building uh are really centered around the uh vision of um advancing the hacker movement so obviously like d hacks is a platform but behind the uh this platform we need some other infrastructures that we can use to support the movement so one thing we

care about is how we can sustainably funding like fund the open source developers the communities he organizers and the other thing is if we have funding right how how can we distribute this funding in a decentralized setting uh that's going to be very different from uh from the traditional word so uh so more more advanced governance technology will definitely uh enable a lot of things uh make it more fair and more uh and also make it more efficient um yeah so those are the things D factu is building cool yeah I definitely want to talk about the the the governance aspect

here a little bit later on U but I think uh I'd like to start maybe with um with a topic that we're all very passionate about which is the the app chain thes and I know that this is something that like dor hack um has been you know interested in invested in and certainly like you guys are organizing this app chain day um conference as well like I was at your app chain Day in Denver it was really great like um and so you guys started investing in Cosmos pretty early I think and um what was the what was the prevailing thesis there in terms of you know how blockchains were going to scale

um you know there were a lot of different views at that point I think early on like in 2017 2018 about how blockchains would scale you had you know the uh ethereums of the world um you know really pushing for this more monolithic uh idea of scaling um and then Cosmos and polka dot came around and had a much different view that chains width scale by becoming sovereign and introducing interop ability between them um what about that was um what about that made sense and how do you think that has translated into how we're thinking about scaling

today yeah I think that's a really good question um and I guess I'll preface it by saying like just because we are very much proponents of the op chain thesis that doesn't mean that like we don't like monolithic ecosystems right like our goal is to support developers ultimately that's our highest and most important goal is to support this Everlasting hacker movement um but of course from an from like an area of like us wanting to get involved more um app chains and the multi-chain is really where we play and spend a lot of our time and you should think about that like quite naturally right um as a hackathon platform what what and and just hackathons in general right they're

very important for like the longtail of communities um it's very natural for hackathons to occur in early stage ecosystems because that are looking to bootstrap their developers um and grow adoption of their Tech Stacks so just by the nature of what hackathons are and what they're important for you end up covering a lot of the longtail of assets and this originally is how we started getting involved more with some of these like new Cosmos chains and new app chains that were new but didn't have the existing developer communities um that some of the large monol itic chains had so I think our experience and you know our bullishness actually developed um from a part from a from from a existing

from a from an initial point of like actually starting to get involved in those developer communities and seeing you know what what they needed to to grow um now when you look at monolithic chains like they're not they're certainly not going anywhere there's a lot of network effects around monolithic chains and this is due primarily to the monetary premium like those tokens are able to achieve um this is something the cosmos Hub token for example has like never achieved right there's never been a monetary premium for atom um because it's not like the base layer you know uh fat fat protocol thesis where like everything's settling on top of it and it's not like one particular token that the entire Community is coalescing

around right when you look at a theorum ecosystem everyone is coales around eth this basically um helps maintain a monetary premium and because of this there's a lot of network effects around these ecosystems that's why like original monolithic chains like even things like Bitcoin cash you know eth classic Bitcoin SV I mean these are like not very active developer ecosystems anymore but they're still ranked like top 100 top 200 uh you know in market cap just because once they get these Network effects and establish this monetary premium it's very hard for them to go away um so I think that like a certain level of Monolithic chains will

always Prevail and like be relevant um to to a certain extent um especially ones that have very large developer ecosystems like salana um but in terms of like where we see a lot of upside and we see a lot of change in the market is is like is app chains in general um we think that it's a bottomup uh movement um where developers actually are demanding um the ability to sell their own block space because of the benefits it it creates for their project for example you know uh dydx went through a very long transition period of figuring out what architecture they wanted to use um originally they

were an application on ethereum just a Dap then they were a rollup using Stark net and then now with before they're their own Sovereign app chain uh on Cosmos uh SDK this is a like very common story you hear um once an application reaches sufficient size in terms of its user base um and the amount of liquidity it has uh it's very common and natural for them to want to transition to their own app chain because this can lead to benefits um in sovereignty they're not held hostage by the ethereum road map anymore for example right like they have their own road map um and a lot more freedom to do what they want um they

have governance sovereignty as well that's kind of tied to roadmap but they can bootstrap their own like governance needs and create a more robust um you know uh part like participative community that way um there's also the ability to drive additional value uh to their token um you know for example like d in dydx you stake dydx to partake in uh fees generated by the protocol um so the Staker like so the validators of the network are staking the protocols token directly um this is something that like for example doesn't happen in Unis swap right um the validator like the like the stakers of ethereum and the people that

are benefiting from the fees that Unis swap is is generating um obviously like and when I when I say fees I'm talking about like me opportunities um protocol fees um gas fees Etc these are all going to ethereum stakers not Unis swap token holders um so I think a big advantage of becoming your own app chain is the ability to drive additional utility and value to your token and then finally there's there's a wide range of ux improvements you can make as well um you know related to um gases transactions um like w like embedded wallets um you know uh when you have dedicated block space often times the application could be faster uh lower

latency these types of things for my opinion I don't really think think this thesis is arising due to a need maybe originally the first l2s came about because like gas prices on ethereum were so exorbitantly high that we needed a scaling solution but at this stage in the cycle um I think that the continued success and growth of app chains and other modular architectures in general whether that's an L2 or rollup are actually stemming from the fact that developers themselves um are demanding this architecture because they prefer to develop on it and they want to Pivot their applications to it um regardless of scaling needs yeah I I am I'm reminded of this uh this Dan otzer article from 2023 22 um the uh n Capital

Partner wrote this article about the inevitability of uni chain and basically describes you know all of the benefits that that you just went through and it just made so much sense to me that applications would want to be Sovereign um from the perspective of execution but also from the security of their chain and and that sort of resonated with me in terms of how I saw um app chains uh overtaking applications on monolithic chains but it seems like now there's we're we're Landing some kind of somewhere in the middle where you know the Cosmos app chain thesis that every chain has its own validator Set uh Every

Chain is Sovereign from top to bottom you know makes sense for some chains obviously like dydx I think is one of those examples I was just talking to the Mantra team today um and you know maybe at some point Unis swap also does their own chain but at the same time there is this in between right there is this uh growing number of chains that are being built on someone else's security uh actually I'm kind of reminded of the you know of the cloud whereas you know the cloud is just like you're just using someone else's someone else's computer uh l2s and and uh app chains secured by um shared security systems also kind of fall within that same um idea I think

what what is your thought is you know you you mentioned l2s and I think I've heard you speak on on some other venues talking about l2s are not actually for scaling but they're more about building an ecosystem and capturing developer attention um yeah what what's your thesis there for L2 I think it's all Antics um that are off youca the underlying trend of developers wanting to sell their own Sovereign block space um in my opinion that's what underpins the modular apppp chain thesis in general um I view it as like a triangle of tradeoffs that you can make right between like how much sovereignty you want how much security you want um how much liquidity alignment

you want for major ecosystems right there's there's all of of these tradeoffs you can make along like the sovereignty slash like shared security access right and that depending on like what you're optimizing for might like direct your choice of whether you're launching you know your own Sovereign app chain with your own sequenc with your own validators using SDK um or if you're launching you know your your project as an app specific rollup you know using the op stack or arbitrum Nitro or some other rollup framework um but in general like I think it's all the same thing uh to be to to be quite Frank I think it's all like regard like I would view I would view op stack arbitr

Nitro cosk hyp SDK which is developed by aval laabs um substrate um polka dot like I view it all as like these are all just like competing option Frameworks in my opinion um they all come with pros and cons they all come with like different things that are part of the stack some have native interop some don't have native interop um you know some have customizability at like a very granular level in terms of like being able to customize like block speed and block times some don't um some have governance modules built in some don't um so there's all of these different tradeoffs you can you can think about in terms of like what you're particularly optimizing for um but in my opinion it's all the trend is we're

seeing top applications with existing liquidity sizable communities wanting to to Pivot to their own app chain infrastructure um to sell their own block space because block Space is really one of the things in web 3 that really has product Market fit um it is and is like quite obviously a valuable resource um if you're an application that doesn't have existing liquidity but you want you want like the benefits of sovereignty or you want the ability to sell your own block space maybe you're looking into an L2 architecture like the op stack because you can draft off of like ethereum mainnet liquidity um but if you're if you're a major application like dydx that already has a lot of users you know they're more comfortable taking the leap into their very own

Sovereign L1 but at the end of the day like it's all the same thing I think we'll see what framework is is most successful in the long term we obviously have our opinions as well but you know I think I think that that's kind of the the lay of the land as I see it I do have a different opinion though uh so um yeah so I think one of the biggest reasons why we care about Cosmos as DK is because I think for developers it's critical to think about like whether your application needs to uh you know submit some attestation to to the L1 and then there is a big difference between the cosmos SDK chance versus the layer two chance whether that's Layer Two or other monistic Layer Two I do think it

makes sense for some of the uh applications to to submit the test stations to L1 uh for example like uh there are uh so if you are a isum L2 and you breing some ex assets to your uh L2 for trading or other uh type of purposes uh you have to uh submit a proof to toir whether that's a ZK proof or a a fraud proof whatever that is that is necessary right if for example you are doing a um content of protocol you might want to test your content on bitcoin or uh or other chains um like optos or uh even

your chance however like there is a wide range of uh applications that do not actually need to submit any proof to any L1 uh and that's where uh these developers can build s options I think by sovereignty we we do mean that uh you're not paying uh gas fee regularly to the L1 and and and I think that's making a big difference uh to Cosmos SDK because that is the that is probably the only uh framework you can easily and reliably build up your soling uh option for your for your application so uh in

general I think both monic CES and the option CES will coexist but the world view of the option CES I mean in the world VI uh the monistic chains are eventually options right so they like larger options but the option CIS is the freedom CIS where every ecosystem every option has the has uh has its own sovereignty which means you'll have your own ideology you'll have own your own community and you have own uh your own Innovation and Technology Etc uh so that is in contract to uh like a world where you only have a

very handful of monistic chance uh because then your as a user or as a developer your options will be very limited you'll have very limited option uh for for example ideology or uh culture like what kind of culture the community uh is having something like that so um to uh for us the um the option Ser is is all about the worldview of providing more options and freedom to the users and to the developers yeah that makes sense to me I think maybe just one thing I would say here you mentioned that you the main thing that you get by running your appap chain is that you don't have to pay for

Block space I I think it's it it's more about it's more than that I think you know there there's also um you know if you're looking at the cosmos SDK for instance since there's the ability to also Capture Me U there's the ability to now you know run your own Oracle on chain and leverage your validator set um there is the ability to leverage different execution environments perhaps even multiple execution environments on the same chain um so I think I think that the app chain thesis is security sovereignty but it's also execution sovereignty and um and we're we're seeing more and more chains you know leverage things like like Slinky for you

know skips Slinky to be able to you utilize their validor set to run oracles um now to what extent you can do that you I think for the oracles for for instance you do need a validator set to do that um but you know if you're running um some sort of an L2 or some sort of a uh application specific rollup um then you can certainly be a little bit more flexible in terms of you know leveraging any VM that you like or implementing sort of specific um logic in terms of sequencing so yeah like the the sovereignty gradient I think you move along the sovereignty uh scope uh or or or Spectrum as you you know increase um your like add of validator set and and

now with things like you know rooll chains where you can not only leverage a validat set but also leverage the security of Celestia or underlying da a layers we introduce a whole new paradigm I think of uh ways people are going to be thinking about running your own chains and um how they think about securing those chains I think what you're describing SE is actually exactly why um alt VMS and things like the salana apch thesis um have begun to grow right it's exactly what you just mentioned which is freedom of execution right the modular thesis doesn't just mean you're CH modular it means that

there's like modular components that can be quickly snapped together and and picked and Cho chosen from right so what you just just described of like the caos SDK for example um creating this amazing ability to have execution sovereignty um that was originally our thesis behind why we might sort seeing the svm uh become a big player in the aping thesis as well right there's a lot of benefits to this execution layer this isolated execution layer outside of just the Pure Performance of the salon and Main net right you could and this is the case with a lot of alt VMS right Salon in particular you have compression you have local fee markets you have parallel

transactions I mean these are all things that are beneficial regardless of how fast the chain is um obviously parallel transactions can add to speed but but these are just things that are good for throughput generally um and that can be beneficial for many different types of applications in general um regardless of what the underlying framework is so I think what you just Des Des as a big part of how we see the space evolving as well yeah I want to talk about salana but but before that I I want to talk about the Hub because um sort of the elephant in the room here when we talk about Co Cosmos app chains and I think broadly there's just this like Cosmos identity crisis that has been going on for for some time it it feels like Cosmos is

going through a shift where the cosmos SDK technology is is beginning to decouple from the cosmos ecosystem as we've known it until now you know the the 60 or so app chains that use the cosmos SDK that have their own validator sets that are connected in the IBC ecosystem can you share your vision for what Cosmos is or should be in the coming years uh as you know we have things like now the cosmos SDK being used in igen layer and being secured by restake eth or restake Bitcoin or components of uh other components of the stack like IBC being used in the

movement ecosystem totally outside of the scope of the cosmos SDK you know what's beyond Cosmos from the perspective of how we've known Cosmos until now yeah I think this is the billion dollar question uh uh for for the Hub but also for the whole ecosystem um so I think many of the production appli ations will need a an option uh as a platform so that you can host your uh application so so maybe some of the projects will develop modules uh or like additional uh protocol notes some of the uh options will be

more cosom driven for example Dava is a uh more like smart contract driven uh option but like sashia uh just because of uh his architecture is like building additional uh layer on top of uh the cosmos SDK as well yeah so um but uh for the SDK I think uh the the biggest Str is that it's open source it's totally free to use it doesn't charge anything right so uh anyone can just use it for free and and uh uh there is no mandate that you have to pay gas fee to the hub

you don't have to pay for anything um like there is a dilemma so the benefit of that is obviously it it truly empowers the option ecosystem uh I think this is the biggest uh strs um so we can see DX we can say injective uh and there are so many cool Technologies and options being built on top of Cosmos SDK and the downside of that is uh is the token is not capturing value uh so so I think that's the uh uh problem that is being discussed within the community

and obviously uh there are lot of uh interesting uh experiments like the Shar security experiment uh and and currently ongoing uh partial security uh experiment so I think uh like monetization of the Hub uh or monetization of the cosmos SDK would definitely be a very interesting and important question both for the SDK um and also for the Hub uh and uh any kind of experiments from the community should be welcom but personally I feel like the the biggest strength of Cosmos SDK is

that it's open source it's free and it provides Freedom so we should keep it so uh and maybe we should think about for example like inventing some new kind of Open Source licensing um protocol or some like unction enforced open source license so that the the options uh using Cosmos SDK can subscribe to the open source license let's say there is a paid open source license that you can subscribe to but only after your option is post pmf uh so if you have a definition of

like option pmf and uh and you can subscribe to this open source license it's going to be very consistent with the um Cosmos Cosmos SDK um score value but obviously uh so that's that is just a thought right now but uh I think uh something that wor exploring uh should be consistent with the core value Cosmos SDK is providing yeah yeah as a as a a Perpetual atom holder I'm always just you know holding on uh Holding Out for you that that value or cruel uh to

the hub um that you know it will one day come yeah I think these you you you sort of hit the nail on the head here where you know we've had several experiments on the Hub and those experiments until now have not been successful in uh acur value to Adam and I think that the one of the issues here is that they are they always seem to be sort of experiments with a lack of real Direction resources um and organizationally just like things like Business Development Etc are are are lacking um I think informal is now taking more of a lead on the Hub um but

um you know and and you know obviously like they're competent they have uh people who really understand the tech and understand ecosystem but uh the the the experimentation attempts are are numbered I think that you know the Hub has I think Zaki was had said this last year right was like the Hub has 18 months to find product Market fit that was almost a year ago so I guess I guess it has six months now um yeah maybe it was 24 months but yeah the the clock's ticking uh and it's and you know I think it's it's ticking primarily because there's just like so much more competition now and so many more shiny things that you new uh people in the

space are uh discovering and looking towards in terms of a way to build their application specific chains or even you know chains secured by um restake eth or or Bitcoin or you know salana Etc um so there's a lot of there's a lot more competition now than there was two years ago and um and so yeah but uh yeah still still stinking at them for some reason U yeah so I know you guys are pretty um pretty deep in the salani ecosystem and I was watching one of your presentations earlier and and um there's this there's this term that keeps coming up and it's just like every time I hear it my my

brain just can't comprehend it which is like salana app chain or salana L2 and and I think the reason why is because Solana's entire MO and vision has been this monolithic chain where everything settles to that chain all the applications are composable and it scales now salana is often down or you know over congested and so I think they still have some issues there but but at least in terms of sana's vision like putting salana and L2 together sort of um is a feels to me like an oxymoron can can you uh maybe help us unpack what is the

the salana app chain thesis and why would someone want to build an app chain on salana from my side I personally think that's very qu questionable but uh obviously bran has been doing a lot of research into that part uh so bran can share a littleit more yeah I no I think I think Eric's like actually totally correct I mean like we've gotten to a point now so this is kind of how how it how it worked like when we we have supported Salon ecosystem on hackathons for a long time um you know recently on the developer side of things like well we still want to be active we've prioritized like more modular ecosystems particularly like Cosmos as as you know but definitely have kept tabs just on Research like as

part of like you know our job as proponents of this achain thesis um so when it comes to salana like when we first started to think that maybe there was something there probably about 18 months ago um where when we first like this was probably around the time where maker like first made their new chain announcement basically when they said hey we're like maker Dow was interested in launching their own app chain using the SPM um that was a pretty big deal um you know there were it caused like kind of a Ruckus in the community as well but basically what it signaled was that the SPM might be a comp competitive app

chain framework for applications to become more Sovereign um and at that point in time like the app the salana app chain world was like still pretty small um and and also this is underpinned by my personal opinion that regardless of your architecture rollup side chain app chain it's all the same thing um so that was like pretty this is like was also the lens that I was looking at salana right because at that point in time you had um like rumors of new chain from maker you had existing salana app chains that basically were just a fork of the L1 code base like uh pith with pith net um Cube exchange which is a new Dex on salana that calls themselves a side chain but like once

again like I view that as an app chain because it's they're selling Sol block space um that they also Fork the L1 code base you had participants like eclipse and Nitro working on modular SPM implementations for l2s on ethereum and you even had like some more like controlled thought experiments like magic block uh which is a protocol on salana for launching ephemeral rollups this was probably one of the first projects where even like monic Maxis were like oh okay like maybe that makes sense and the reason for that is because it had a game gaming perspective right their whole thing was like if you're playing onchain games there's a lot of state that these things throw off like if you think about like a RPG game or

like a Call of Duty like firstperson shooter there's a lot of random state that gets thrown off during like different rounds or matches that isn't necessarily crucial to be stored in perpetuity at the base layer so what you can do is actually per per round right you can spin up an ephemeral rollup and then the only data that gets sent back to the to salon and mainnet is like the important metrics of the game like who won how many kills did you have you know what was your kill death ratio what you know things like this what level are you like this is the important stuff that needs to get get stored but a lot of the random State can just disappear so they have this emal R gaming framework for rollups on salana and that was pretty interesting and that that's a use case

that that's actually a scaling use case right to preserving State on Main net like you don't need to save this on Sal main net you you're better off doing it this way um but then there's also like the aspect of it where we just think that there's a lot of advantages or potential advantages to the SPM and I'm not saying advantages like relative to other uh Frameworks I'm just saying like these are advantages that any given developer could like things I mentioned earlier like compression local fee markets parallel transactions and then just like the rust based like anchor framework as well like salana has an existing developer community that likes coding in this language and likes coding you know using using salana Frameworks where it could be advantageous to Port this execution

layer onto other underlying infrastructures like the Kos SDK even for example so we were really excited at it from that perspective what if you had you know you already have Cosmos SDK chains with kmm as the VM you have cosm SDK chains with evm um like it makes sense that you might see cosm's SDK chains with the SPM as its execution layer as well and I think that's originally why we got excited in the thesis from an early stage where it's like we will see the svm as an isolated uh execution layer sooner rather than later um and I think that that's starting to prove true the salon aping thesis has ballooned um like it might it's probably gotten a little ahead of

it itself as well at this point you know as like just becomes like a popular go to market for fundraising um but needless to say I do think that um ultimately like without spending too much time on it and without getting too deep in the weeds I think ultimately what I think is important is an open- Source isolated svm framework um similar to Ether or Polaris or cosom this is a BM that anyone can use and plug into a L1 blockchain so I think I want to see that get developed there's a lot of teams working on it right now including salana Labs which is rebranded as Anza they've are releasing their own iteration of it this is something that I personally am most excited about but

yeah a lot of like the oh I'm launching SPM L2 on bitcoin or I'm launching ANM L2 zkm L2 or whatever like there there's definitely a lot of like Vapor out there probably um but I think that like people are getting more excited about it and you know regardless of whether or not all of these SPM l2s are successful um what it did do was force as I mentioned salana labs to actually roll their own module imp implementation of the SPM so I would look at that as like a huge win and I think that's like the core takeaway from this whole exercise is that even if like all of these spml 2s aren't successful or you know a lot of them are not needed what it did do was Drive attention to svm as an execution

layer and it forced the hand of labs team to actually build their own version of it um and I think that's a benefit to developers yeah I think like the more execution environments we have the better as we have more execution environments in in in the ecosystem that brings different and sort of various types of developers that are can to be looking for specific features that might be coming from different languages or different sort of like web to ecosystems they will serve different types of applications and use cases that um developers will you know uh either want to associate with one VM or another just like you know how in web 2 we we have like different languages that early in early on sort of competed

uh and um and now we have like a landscape of several development Frameworks there U many of many of those have disappeared but in the end I think like we have a a much um richer um ecosystem of development Frameworks as a result and I really you know encourage that in web to web three as well so I'd like to switch gears and talk about Dora Voda and Dora Factory how did this project come about and what's the thesis all right yeah so Dora Factory was built uh a lot later than Dora ha uh it was in 2021 and uh um at that time there uh were in general two problems uh from

open source communities and and hackerson communities uh one given the uh scale that we were funding the open source developers it was very uh very much affected by Cycles uh like in the bull market there uh there will be a lot of funding and in the bare markets uh there will be uh like the developers will be poorly funded so uh we were always thinking about a way to uh just mitigate that uh because the developer funding should be exactly opposite uh opposite to that right so in the bare Market

developers should be more incentivized to build uh and uh in the bull market obviously there will be a lot of money and uh and developers like good developers will always be funded so um so whether we could have a super sustainable way of Open Source funding and haxon funding uh were like was always a top priority of uh our team and the um we were thinking about because you know in web 3 the special property of a blockchain is that it's generating value over time and it's generating value based on the uh uh

activity of the ecosystem so let's say you have an infrastructure you have a protocol so like you have a bunch of applications on top of that the more these applications will be used uh the more value this infrastructure will create um so the the very first idea was uh was during a uh discussion over mayay actually uh we were talking about okay so why why not we uh create a super you know objective uh kind of uh developer funding mechanisms so that we can uh move towards the uh like block incentive driven um uh developer funding so in the

very first place we were thinking about like modifying some of the blockchain consensus algorithm so that they dispert uh 1% of their uh transaction Revenue to a uh funding pool where we could just like run constant uh qf for other type of events like haon uh but uh obviously that was very hard uh we wrote an article about that but very soon we were thinking about a practical uh solution to that problem right so uh how could we achieve the same goal without modifying the onling

consensus algorithm and uh uh that's how public staking came came came out um so the idea is that uh D fact maintains and host the validator to uh first increase the security of the network secondly participate in governance and then we use uh a large portion of the uh of the income from that validator to support the open source developer communities so that's where public good staking orig Al uh was conceived and the uh implementation took a bit longer uh I

think we uh we started in 2021 uh and uh we actually implemented uh the whole mechanism in 2022 and definitely uh that is now a very well received model in the in the whole industry uh I think more than like 50 uh CH have uh or previously adopted pgs so uh so that's one thing uh dur Factory is doing and the other thing is the uh kind of obvious right uh so now you have funding how how you could distribute this funding effectively and efficiently because that's making a very

big difference uh let's say you have 100 milal to distribute over a year and uh if you can uh improve improve the efficiency by a factor of two the outcome will be very different so we we care about governance technology we care about uh Distributing the funding very efficiently we decided to U build DAV Vota and deploy U most of our U de tours and protocols on Dava uh partially because we can continuously improve the infrastructure uh instead of just

improving the smart contract uh and also partially because uh through D VTA we can uh um provide this uh uh this Technologies to uh of the option ecosystem because we can just use IBC and uh uh with that we can do qf we can do uh for example Community voting uh with a lot of the ecosystems so uh public staking and the decentralized governance tax deack are the two main things of D factur okay and you guys use this Macy voting um so Brian we had an opportunity

to talk about this uh in in Hong Kong a couple weeks ago and um can you explain what is Macy voting how it relates to quadratic funding and and now there's this like uh Anonymous Macy voting like this a so like help us unpack all of these interesting kind of like voting mechanisms that uh D Voda is implementing the original idea of mayay was proposed uh in uh in the in the Ser Forum by vitalic several years ago and it's a very simple but powerful framework for anti-collusion purposes so it's not necessarily like only for voting but uh voting is definitely the

uh biggest use case for mesay so for those who haven't uh uh come across mesay it stands for minimal anti-an infrastructure uh so the process of mesay is uh quite simple you have an operator uh who is like the administrator of a voting round um and you you have voters so the voters will register to this round by a function called s up uh and after that they can uh cast their votes on chin but their

votes will be encrypted with the public key posted by the operator uh so that means uh imagine you're in a decentralized setting right so like you have people from everywhere in the world uh and everyone is like posst in encrypted messages on chain people cannot figure out who voted for what because the messages will be encrypted and then uh the operator uh will download all the votes after the round uh and decp uh uh the votes and T the votes and lastly the operator will post the final results for example in dorik case we have a lot of

uh grants and the the the final results will be in the form of leaderboard uh but it can also happen in elections or uh in in other type of type of voting so the results will be posted by the operator and in order to prove the uh Integrity of these results the operator will post um a zero knowledge proof that is proving this results is authentic uh so then we have the leaderboard or we have the final results without telling or revealing who voted for what but people know that the the

the leaderboard uh is is true so that's basically what Mesa is doing it's very simple and uh is uh it's very useful cool so what do the use cases here I mean obviously you know there's the whole kind of like uh grant funding and open source funding use case but if we take a step back here and see davod as more of a you know a generalized um voting platform what do what other use cases like how does this extend out into maybe things outside of crypto that could be useful yeah so I think the um the reason

why uh anti-collusion or collusion resistance is important is because in decentralized governance uh this is a major problem uh for uh scaling so uh think about uh quadratic funding right so uh if we're running a quadratic funding round over the years we have been uh handling a lot of the uh problems from quadratic funding like there is a problem of uh civil attacks uh like how how you avoid that and there is a problem of um like unfair uh distribution like how how can we make

sure that uh so they're like Pro projects with huge communities but maybe they they are not the ones uh that actually needs the most funding so there are other of practical concerns of quadratic funding and uh we were able to address address most of them but the problem of uh ction is really the elevant in the room right so um is there uh if you don't care about that uh then the the voting scheme schemes cannot scale whether that's quadratic funding quadratic voting or uh different type of community governance so it's not going to scale uh so so I say uh if there is

the governance proposal out there for any CH including the Hub right and some big wh uh could influence the outcome by saying okay so if you vote for this option I'm going to air drop uh tokens to you uh that's kind of kind of easy for whales uh but how how do we aoid that so that is the most tricky uh problem in decentralized governance uh which is solution and this problem can only be uh solved by uh privacy and the way we uh provide privacy is to use zero knowledge proof uh and that's why we

care about maay and we started to uh research and engineer uh mayay uh from late 2020 and uh uh and I think by that time there were uh two groups of people uh doing mayay uh I think the EF uh PSC was uh creating a framework of Missi 1.0 which was super helpful uh to developers uh and uh we were working with the stver and we integrated mayay with dorah Hax and E stver became the first like medium scale Community adoped mayay uh and it was

pretty exciting because like uh 2022 um had 15,000 people uh and it has the big Spork community so we allowed everyone from the spor community to join the maing Round And the maing round was to select the winner of the East stver 2022 hackerson and there were other people uh participated in the Ming round and mostly it was the first time they participated in such uh a weird thing at that time but uh I think people saw the power of these kind of schemes and um

and later there were uh other adoptions like uh Open Sea uh with r plate uh they hosted the hackerson they adopted mayay andur ha uh zerox they adopted mesay so there were a handful of communities when when they host it hackerson they adopted maay then the question is how how can we make sure that everyone could use maay uh and the answer was okay can we make maay available for every Community the complicated part of Mesa is that the operator has to run a script right so it has to download the Z key it has to uh set up the Run deploy the contract uh

tally the votes provid the zero knowledge proof and the verifies the proof um unchain etc etc uh so it's very complicated so what d v was doing was that we provided a all-in-one script so that people can just deploy M on the UI and do all the uh complicated work with one command line uh and that's the original version of Dava so now comes a say uh so so what a uh is the problem a is solving is the uh trust Assumption of M right so according to my description of meay the uh trust

assumption is not unconditional so people have to rely on the operator and the operator knows who voted for what so if the operator cludes with the community then uh everyone um is sunk um so how how how do we aoid that uh that kind of became a very tough problem because if we can solve that problem it may say would be would be very interesting uh uh if it couldn't then like the operator could be this single point of failure and M cannot scale so uh we started to work on a Maya based on

some uh proposals from from some research and uh uh we first implemented a in 2023 uh we did some like initial testing and I think this year in March uh East Vietnam adopted am uh for the first time and there were like uh more than 100 people uh tried out and uh with how it was there it was very uh exciting and uh so that was like the first adoption of am but in general like the the most important thing of am is

that uh because of the reduction of trust assumption uh am allows that everyone can run operator for any community so imagine you are a community but you don't want to be the operator in the traditional Mage setting it's impossible because uh you cannot trust other people but in a in am setting uh because the operator cannot know who voted for what um so the anonymous feature allows uh the operator to be permissionless which is super powerful and that's something we're working on

right now very cool um and so what's the next steps here what are the road what's the road map for aoda and how can people you know utilize it in their own hackathon or for their own funding yeah so uh for a our uh implementation was based on a uh non NPC implementation uh so uh you know like uh the way how a was Anonymous M was implemented was we added uh a few data structures uh there is the set called deactivate set which allows uh users to deactivate their keys as well and we make sure that the

operator doesn't know who so so like after the activation of the keys a a voter will register a new key so uh how how Anonymous M works is that we make sure that the operator doesn't know who deactivated what key and who registered for what new key and then to the operator like from the operator perspective in the end it's just like a bunch of random votes from a bunch of random addresses but he he or she doesn't know who actually vot voted for what um so with that we uh use some techniques to uh do the

implementation and uh uh the next step is that we will have a fully automated service like we can uh do the operator job or anyone can do the operator job for all these communities or hackers whoever is using a and we will make uh Anonymous maay very uh simple and very cheap to use and we believe that it's going to be very helpful to the adoption of anonymous maay uh in fact the adoption of anonymous maay will be much easier than the adoption of maay so there will be two uh things that

would happen potentially at the same time so first there will be integration with dorax um we will add uh mesay judging to all the hackerson it's not mandatory but uh like every ha organizer could use anonymous mesay as their way of judging uh and uh uh on on the D Factory side or on the D vter side uh we're going to extend our current dur a voter tour so that like any type of community or uh voting round operator can just uh spin up am around right way

whenever uh that operator needs to but but that that person doesn't have to be the operator so someone else can be the operator so that's going to be a very exciting uh m product very exciting um so where can people find you and uh how can people get involved I guess um is everything under the dorah Haack website or are there other places where people can interact with you dorah hack. uh is the uh platform uh for developers so if developers hackers hacks and organizers uh ecosystems uh you'll find everything there of the features and D A effect fact.org is the website for Dora Factory you uh you'll

be able to access uh public staking as well as door V and documentations there great guys thanks so much for joining the podcast today and um hope to talk to you soon thank you s yeah thanks s great great being on