The Next Chapter of Modular Blockchains: Decentralized RPC w/ Gil Binder (Lava Network)

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome back to the strange waterer podcast thank you for joining us for another episode let's start with a very brief reminder of what a blockchain computer is in the physical world it is a network of real computers that are all running the same virtual machine which is just a piece of software all of these computers are in constant Communication in order to guarantee that every single virtual machine is exactly in sync using some sort of cryptoeconomic system like proof

of stake therefore looking into the virtual machine on one of these computers is equivalent into looking into any of the virtual machines on any computer in the network and each of these is an identical window into the virtual machine of the blockchain computer so what happens when someone wants to interact with a blockchain computer in the best case scenario this person is operating one of these real world computers they would be able to pull up their local copy of the virtual machine read the current state and then send commands to change it any changes made locally would be synced to every

other computer in the network and likewise any changes made on another computer in the network would be synced back to their local copy we call these real world computers that run the software that supports the blockchain nodes and in an Ideal World all users of a specific block blockchain would also operate their own node giving them direct permissionless access to the blockchain computer but running your own node isn't always that simple let's just look at ethereum today running an ethereum node requires a relatively modern computer a

constant power supply and internet connection and north of a terabyte of bandwidth every month and it's only going to get worse with EIP 4844 and DK sharding the reality is is that running a node is just not accessible to a lot of people even if they're interested in being node operators but without a node you cannot access the blockchain computer and so centralized RPC Services arose services like infura and Alchemy are simply just node operators who offer to relay requests and data back and forth between the blockchain and its

users so that users can access the blockchain without operating a node themselves these Services have invested an incredible amount of money to allow millions of people to use blockchain computers instantly and with zero direct costs but the indirect costs are massive as more and more users enter the crypto space without becoming node operators a larger and larger portion of people access decentralized trustless blockchain computers via centralized trusted RPC services and while incredibly effective the concept of a centralized RPC service

threatens the fundamental value proposition of blockchain computers themselves but this is not a doom and gloom episode in fact it it is very much an episode of Hope and solutions today we have Gil binder co-founder and CTO of lava Network a protocol looking to take all of the paradigms and Technologies we've built to create a decentralized blockchain computer and apply it to the RPC level over the next hour you'll not only gain an appreciation of how RPC works and is changing for the better you'll begin to real realiz that the modular

blockchain Revolution is about so much more than just execution versus settlement rollups and data availability it's about modularizing the entire world computer one more thing before we begin please do not take Financial advice from this or any podcast ethereum will change the world one day but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then okay enough of me let's talk to Gil Gil thank you so much for joining us on the strange waterer podcast yeah

thanks for having me a pleasure thank you of course of course so I'm super excited to talk about lava Network and I think that um you know just the whole realm of RPC is kind of the Forgotten stepchild of blockchain computers and decentralization and all that so super super excited to get there but but I'm a huge believer that the most important part of every conversation are the people in it so with that as a preface will you tell us a little bit about yourself uh how you found computer science and crypto and I guess um why what about it uh resonated with you so much that you decided to build a career in it yeah definitely and and thanks for having me uh you know uh my background is a bit different from many uh crypto

uh Founders I think I'm originally from Israel uh and I started you know when I was a kid uh programming and uh see and Visual Basic but uh when I I was recruited to the Army when I was 18 I did five years at a top uh Elite intelligence unit uh doing computers uh so I gain a lot of knowledge there and uh after I finished my service you know I started a startup in cyber and we were able to uh sell it in three years it was very successful um you know and when I finished doing that basically I had like 10 years uh of experience is doing uh reverse engineering so looking at like really complex systems like kernels uh operating systems browsers uh JavaScript

engines stuff like that and then like finding the flaws finding the bugs and seeing you know how things work with each other in the system uh sometimes even completely without access to the code um and you know after doing that you know I was looking into crypto uh from a friend and he was saying you know Gil you have to come and see uh you know what ethereum is and I was like and this was only like two and a half years three years ago so I'm pretty fresh but I learned very quickly uh so you know I was looking into uh ethereum and I was I was I thought that all of crypto was Bitcoin right I didn't know anything about it once I saw that you know you have this touring complete virtual machine that is basically uh executing a

consensus across computers all over the world to reach you know one state I was like whoo this is this is pretty interesting and you know my my cyber mind was like so that means that I can run code on every single machine that is executing ethereum which is like tens of thousands of machines like okay this is pretty interesting I'm going to look into it and basically from there I wrote some MV Bots I did some some types of sniping and Arbitrage and uh uh you know some nft sniping for some drops and it did pretty well until the space got uh congested but you know at that point I was like okay I'm in you know I love this technology what it brings to the world and I think it's you know it's so

early so that I can still like really invite and bring something to to the table so your background is like really hardcore cyber security I mean you're in doing military stuff like I can only imagine but can you talk a little bit through this moment where your friends like you need to check out ethereum and I guess like was your first inclination this is something that I need to penetrate that I need to get into that I need to reverse engineer or was it like this is a platform that I can build upon like what what was your first uh instinct when you saw ethereum my first in Instinct was how can I take advantage of the system and you know what is wrong with the system and how can I you know what are the flaws in the system and the

way I looked at it when what really triggered the interest for me is that um my friend explained to me that you know in on ethereum you know there's only one state and every block has a list of transactions and every transaction is a function call at that point they didn't know anything yes and then I was like okay so and he said if you execute a transaction you can write a smart contract and that smart contract can execute multiple trades for you and th and those trades if they're bad then you can just revert and if you're using like flash Bots at the time uh that transaction is not going to be included so you never paid gas so basically you had a pure

profit uh way to generate Arbitrage and I was like he's he's bullshitting me I don't believe that it sounds yeah know whatever but then I went home I went on vacation and I had some time and I pick up uh started reading about the evm and dived into the go ethereum code and then I was like really oh wow okay so it is true and I started seeing all these transactions all these sandwich BS uh at the time we saw some people like abusing the actual BS I think it was called salmonella or Cham I don't know if you're familiar with that uh I'm familiar with the efforts you're talking about yeah so basically it was a smart contract that baited other uh BS to sandwich and give

them salmonella by uh taking not basically completing the swap or giving them a small portion of the Swap and on the transfer function um and I was like whoa this is really d know up my alley of doing reverse engineering doing security and cyber and this is really what drew me in only later on it evolved to uh let's build on this and now I understand the technology and what it brings and so can you talk a little bit through maybe as a get us to Lava network but can you talk a little bit through why you so you entered this space like very much through kind of the me lens or let me put it a different way from your story I could totally imagine you starting a startup that is about me

whether it's block building or part of the supply chain or whatever and so can you talk a little bit through like what was the journey that led you leave like the nitty-gritty Dark Forest and like enter up into this layer that is almost outside of ethereum yeah okay I think that's a great question you know I was looking into so I was doing the MV and it was doing very well uh and at some point he became very very competitive so much so that I would have had to invest a lot of effort and time into maintaining the Bots to be profitable because at some point they stop being profitable also the opportunities started to be more crowded so at the time uh the for example nft drops uh you need to have some kind of Alpha and then

to snipe them but at that point everybody was sniping them also there were pools that were being uh you know established on chain for other people to put in and snipe these nfts so it become so it was becoming so competitive that I was like what else can I bu build upon uh to uh even get like and to build actually more technology uh and and you know seeing that blockchain is not just me right there's so much more there like you know this primitive it gives you the ability to reason about logic in a way that's distributed and there's consensus I thought it was really really intriguing at the time and my experience with uh

you know running these Bots and you know doing MV uh was that I needed to have my own notes so I had like you know a bunch of computers here and a pretty fast fiber connection and you know I was running all these nodes on these PCS locally so that I can get the face this you know latest data because that's crucial for for blockchain data and this is really what brought me to Lava first how difficult it was to maintain these nodes kept updating stopped working from some obscure reasons you have to go to the GitHub find out why um and then trying to scale it to many chains like okay okay ethereum is crowed let's go to you know Avalanche Avalanche squ let's go to polygon

right every single one of these you need to run their own clients their own noes and I was like it's so fragmented it's so difficult to do uh so this is how the idea of lava came let's just build a network that basically brings in people who are experts like me at running these nodes right and give them the ability to give service to users yeah I I hear you and I guess like just to close off the me part of the conversation look like obviously a lot of people like continue down that road and are making a lot of money from it and that's not like a dead space but I do think that there's a little bit of tea leaves to be read about where me is

going and like whether we're talking about something like me burn or we're talking about uh um like a bunch of different mechanisms that we're building to like Smooth out me and and then more just like bigger picture like what happens to me when the majority of transactions that are happening on mainnet are just like blobs and proofs like ZK proofs and so like I don't really know how much like reordering there is between blobs and and if that's even possible and so I do think um whether or not this is what you were thinking like it turned out to be the right pivot to just get away from like kind of the knife fight in the dark Forest to like figure out how to um look kind of you know just more positive sum

and more about how does the ethereum transform into the world computer yeah so I I'll say I still do you know I still have these cool projects from time to time I see something cool and I I build a B for example French deck I was able to to bought it and and make really good returns and really bought really cool people on Twitter uh and then dump it uh so it was a lot of fun so I still do it from time to time and I think there's still and I don't need to think empirically there's like a lot of MV happening it's just moved to different places um so it's still but it's much harder to build the competition is way more uh difficult and you need a lot more Capital to do it today makes sense so so uh queuing back into your story I

just want to uh com I guess commend you but also notice that um history doesn't repeat it Rhymes and I was speaking to one of the uh advisers to Alchemy and they were like oh do you know the story of alchemy and I was like no I don't I and he goes so what's very funny is this was back in the early days of ethereum and they were trying I can't even remember it was either some def thing or some game or whatever and they spent so much time just building like the RPC relay so that they could get the data they need to make their application that they realized like oh my god let's just build a company around the amount of tooling we had to build and it sounds like that um is like a very similar

experience to what you had it reminds me of slack as well you know their story was very similar where they were building something else and they're like well we need a good tool to communicate inside the team and they've built slack wait this tool is really awesome and that became like obviously a major success so I guess before we get into lava and decentralize RPC let's start uh just with like a real uh brief explainer of what RPC is and you don't have to go to basic like if you're listening to this show you probably understand like the basic concepts but why don't you just walk us through like we have the base ethereum Network the ethereum network is upheld by nodes which can directly access into the evm like hopefully that makes sense to everyone but like what is this extra lay of RPC

on top of it and how do most users like use that to interact with ethereum yeah so RPC is very simple it's just a way to get data from the blockchain right so so um most users interact with it daily by going to their metamask or any wallet when you see your account balance that's RPC how do you know the account balance you query a server that server is a node and then nodes tell you it has access to the evm state as you've said and it goes and brings the balance from the state to you this is RPC in a gist it's very simple when you send a transaction we send it to an RPC uh Noe and it gossips about it to other uh uh nodes and then it gets included in a block mhm and and

I guess just to be real basic here I thought the point of ethereum was that we're able to interact with it directly and trustless like why am I as a user have to go through this third party that is doing the trustless part for me and then I'm trusting that third party that's an amazing question and this is what I've asked myself ever since I got into this space and I think you know this is the Achilles heel of blockchain right everyone is talking about this amazing technology and then people are talking about Celestia right data access they're talking about di mention you know building rups iing layer reaking all these networks require access to data and this is what lava is

it's this layer that gives you access to all blockchain data so why do they need to trust somebody because in the end they're not going to run their own node because it's expensive and as I've said you know I'm an expert doing stuff like that and it was difficult for me and I had to you know have equipment to make sure it's fast and reliable but no one's going to do it on their home computer it it doesn't make sense especially if you think about adoption and I think one more thing that's worth um pointing out here for like running your own node is 100% uptime is critical and like well I'm not even referencing the fact that if you don't have 100% uptime and you're staking a crypto asset that has implic

ations for your p&l let's say what I'm talking about is if your node isn't like perfectly in sync with the rest of the network then it needs to catch back up and so in order to be running a node it basically needs to be running not basically it actually needs to be running 24/7 and so the reason that you're not running it on your computer is because like I don't know you're running a laptop like you you need to go to Starbucks like you need to go to work like you need to turn off your computer or you need to let your kid play World of Warcraft on sorry people my age play World of Warcraft not kids but but point is is that um like as of today running a node requires dedicated ethereum

machinery and like that's just not really viable for most people that like want to throw around a few bucks on base right yeah and and don't forget that if you're working on other chains you also need to run those chains so yeah okay let's say you're running ethereum what let's say you want to you know go to binance are you going to run a binance smart chain uh you know node that takes you know hundreds of gigabytes to run and you know weeks to syn no you want to trust somebody else to do it for you so how do you how do you do that without losing the values that are these you know everything that we've you know come to love in this space which is you know being permissionless you know not having to

trust anybody KN that the data is correct and these are the question we were asking ourself in addition to the fragmentation how do we build a modular you know piece that allows all these chains all of these rollups to give access to their users in a way that's not you know just web to like Facebook right in a way that's permissionless trustless scalable so let me walk through uh how a transaction Works using a centralized RPC today then maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong but then why don't you retell that story on how this works using the lava Network so today I R I open up my browser I click metamask and metamask has no information so first what it does is say okay this is the

address I need to check so I need to go ask a centralized RPC what is at this address the centralized RPC says this address has one eth then metamask can say okay I know you have one eth and I know you want to spend half of an eth so I'm going to craft a transaction that does what you want it to do I'm going to wait for your signature and then once I get your signature I'm going to send this back to the centralized RPC and the centralized RPC it says this is a signed transaction and so I can submit it on behalf of metamask to ethereum and then once ethereum has it hopefully we all know what happens it's part of the trustless execution of the evm and things are over but the the important

thing to focus on is I'm not directly communicating with ethereum I'm using a centralized RPC to get my messages into the actual World computer so first of all is that correct that's that's correct on a high level yes there's a few more details uh in there right but I think in overall yes okay great well why don't you uh walk through now if you're using lava RPC how that works and if any of those more details are relevant just feel free to walk us through them true thing so let's take as an example hopefully everybody should know Unis swap uh you want to do a Unis swap uh trade right so unpop has a contract on chain it's called like the unpop router

and that contract knows how to make uh trades on the Unis swap uh contracts set right so when you go to their website they have the definition of how to make a transaction for this um you know specific trade and it's called Uh this data is called like ABI and it defines the functions that exist on the chain it's like a program you set a world computer it's like a program you as a program and the AI defines how to call like uh what is it called a swap let's call it swap uh the swap function so you call the swap function you generate the uh the data for the swap function and then you send it to your wallet uh and then the wallet has a private key so you

click sign it signs it and then broadcasts it to the RPC right and from then on we discussed there's a gossip mechanism or it's being sold to somebody for MV and then it gets to a block um generally that's how it works in lava it works almost completely the same the only difference is that we have something called the SDK and this SDK basically has a list uh of many many providers like Alchemy like uh we talked about like INF fura which is another big uh OG uh you know RPC provider for ethereum and many more right uh so we basically have these providers some of them are actually on lava uh like chain

stack and block demon they're actually staked on the lava blockchain um they are staking tokens on the lava blockchain and this gives them access to give you service so once they're staked you are getting this list this list has let's say 10 providers uh we have something that basically talks to these providers on your end and finds the best one the ones that's closest to you the ones that is the fastest the one that has the latest data and then it takes that uh transaction and sends it to them and then gets to the blockchain so very similar only the only difference is that first you're using the lava protocol which is a lava's superpower it basically reps the query

and uh the second is that you're talking to many providers at the same time so let's we'll stick with this number 10 just cuz it's easy let's say there's 10 providers in the lava Network when I am sending a I guess a request to the lava network is that request being sent to a subset of the 10 is it being sent to all of the 10 is it being sent to just one like how does that part of the uh process work great question so let's say there's a 100 and the 10 is what we call the pairing list okay so the pairing list is rotated every 30 minutes so every 30 minutes you get a fresh pen uh you might get the same ones and the the list is determined by how much money

they've staked to give you service and what's the utation which is over time how good was the quality of their service determined by you the user so over time based on how much requests you've made uh this will affect or affect is affects the quality of service of the provider the reputation of the provider so this is how they're chosing this list so you go to every single one of these providers and you just prob them you see who's the fastest and then you ask them you know give me your latest block this is all done seamlessly in the the background so one tells you I'm going block 100 one tells you I going block 200 okay block 100's done this guy's you know out of sync he's not 100% up time

so you choose the best ones there's an algorithm it's a very uh complex algorithm that uh probes them and and finds the best ones and then you can talk to them and get the data or send the transactions so let's take a case where like super clear if uh one participant is saying we're on block 100 and another is saying block 200 like obviously the first guy is just not caught up right but what about the case when both people say this is block 200 but in this case your account has one eth and in this case your account has zero eth how does lava Network resolve that conflict that's that's so this is a different mechanism that we can talk about uh but you know it's also really dependent on the actual blockchain that we're talking about for example on

ethereum you don't have finality for like 15 minutes for your transactions right this is one of the things that ethereum is working on to bring fast finality uh like Cosmos I think some other chains like near have them um which basically means that you're sending a transaction your transaction is confirmed that doesn't mean that it's finalized it means that there could be some kind of what is called reorg and then your transaction will not be included so meaning the results of the transaction is not as you expected um so for these types of chains is a little bit more complex but in general um when you send a query o over lava when you

like asking what's my account balance uh optimistically every once in a while you send the same request with the same block number to another provider over time um if there's a different difference between the two answers this is what we call conflict so this can happen from two reasons one uh or three reasons I guess one there's a reorg which is okay you know it's not their fault they're just seeing a different partition of the blockchain they're thinking this is the right blockchain uh the other reason is um someone's lying to me they're telling me I have no money what the hell um and the third third reason is like the

second one only they made a mistake okay their server didn't work properly there was a corruption whatever they gave me the wrong number uh so for this the malicious option um and the and the uh corruption option we basically have an onchain consensus algorithm this is where the lava blockchain comes into the to the plate we so far spoke mostly on the actual protocol this the superpower again the superpower of lava is this protocol and the concept of specs which we can touch on later um so you take these two uh responses they they are signed by the provider because all Communication in lava is signed you bring it on chain and there's a vote on who's right whoever's wrong might get

slashed or penalized in some way so they don't want to get slashed obviously this is why uh we have staking in love yeah no and where I was trying to get is to understand how the love like the the wrong way to say this but like the intersection between the lava blockchain and then the lava uh user experience let's say but I think maybe it makes sense to just like let's quickly hop over to the lava blockchain and then we'll we'll bring this all together so can can you describe this a little bit just like from from almost like spec standpoint like what type of blockchain is it um did is it you know an evm Fork is it um yeah just just can you describe like at the base layer what is lava blockchain yeah of course so lava

blockchain is a cosmos based chain meaning that it's built on Cosmos SDK and what used to be called tender M now called Comic bft consensus mechanism which is a very tried and tested and true um consensus algorithm and uh SDK very very good uh it's it means that it's a sovereign chain it has its own validator set it validates the blocks it also means that we have chosen actually to make it a lazy blockchain it's not a very fast blockchain because it's not general purpose right it's not like ethereum it's not a world computer it's more of like RPC apis you know trustworthiness computer which it's very application specific and so what's

happening on this main chain is one just the proof of stake which allows like everyone has the stake to join and that gives you uh collateral to slash in case there's any problem so there has to be this slashing me it sounds like all that's going on on the lava base chain is a slashing mechanism which is the ability to take in reports from the you know individual participants validate that against actually I'll ask you what are they validating that against and then um if there's a problem then executing slashing but and that's all that's happening on lava chain or or the lava blockchain correct there's a bit more and many many many thousands of

lines of code but I think it's a good a good way to portray it the the actual lava blockchain so when we started this we were like we want this to be fast RPC again when you go to your wallet you don't want to wait 20 minutes to see your uh uh balance you don't want to wait uh you know and don't forget and just to let the listeners know when you go to your wallet it's making like tens and tens sometimes hundreds of RPC requests you know every few seconds it's not like one question what's my balance like what my what's my balance what chain am I on what's the latest block what's the spot price of this pair it's it's happening all the time it's very crucial to understand that this is like the base

layer uh the base data access layer uh so on the chain that we have this is why we separate a protocol from the network uh so the blockchain itself as you've said it handles conflicts of data it hand it handles uh payments right so these providers they're joining to get paid they're not doing it for free right so they submit proof of payments uh proof of service on chain to get paid based on how much service they gave you it the chain also allows users to buy subscriptions on chain so you are from your command line you can come to Lava buy a chain uh buy a subscription and never see you know never see any centralized website and access using

your your private key you can sign requests and send them to providers so this is one of the cool features um did I forget something so quality of service uh payments conflicts uh there's a few other things but these are the main the core things and I guess let's talk through the the payment side for a moment so I think like what is a little difficult to wrap your head around is today like we are paying for RPC but it's one of those hidden costs in the same way we're paying for Facebook but we don't actually put our money out right and it's like the reason specifically metamask is willing to use infura and and no one's going to charge us for that is because they're made by

the same company and like there is this idea that ecosystem lock in and the data that you can collect to build analytics off of the the requests that are being being made are worth it to you know the the company that owns both both these products and I guess eventually we're either going to realize like we're all just going to be farmed for data and going to be okay with that all off Facebook or we're going to have to enter a new paradigm where it's you pay for your service and uh you get what you pay for and so like that is essentially what you're describing here with lava is like we're asking users to pay for the service but in exchange we when I'm just

going to guess this tell me if I'm wrong almost we would never ask AER to pay right we would ask the developers or the ecosystem I I will definitely let me let me get into that who pays for service today and how it's going to and how it works and I it will work in the future but just remind me later to talk about specs because this is the part that I forgot that is huge in in lava blockchain which is what makes it modular this is what makes it part of the modular spe uh stack the specs or the notifications so think about um who who is paying for this service who is bringing these users it's very similar I I would say it varies between uh the type of blockchain so e ethereum it's a huge blockchain right it's number one

blockchain um the most uh used blockchain and the most robust and reliable and known blockchain right the ethereum foundation does not pay anybody to provide RPC for users so who ends up paying for RPC uh the people who want to capture the market and the audience of ethereum so for example um as you've said metam masks it pays or I don't know if it pays but it has an agreement with infura and they give them service Unis swap probably pays somebody like Alchemy uh they have a contract and they pay a lot of money for the um Unis swap users to get access to the data because besides the wallet don't forget that the website or the D

also needs RPC to show information on the on the website so I guess let me just take a pause here because there there's basically like two ways to experience a a daa website a d app front end right one is you get on there you see the little connect wallet button up in the top but everything populates you see all your aprs you see all your tvls and that's what you're talking about in that case Unis swap is paying let's say in fura or Alchemy to pop populate all of those fields uh on your behalf but we've also seen maybe some smaller projects or or different projects that when you log on it is completely blank it's almost like the page didn't load

until you hit connect wallet and then when you hit connect wallet all of the data Lads and in that case the D app is leveraging the fact that they know that metamask isn't charge isn't getting charged for infura and basically it's it's not really worth walking through like how this like Financial construction came up but there there is this important distinction where sometimes the D app is directly paying the RPC provider and sometimes the D app is relying on the fact that they can assume that the user has a connection to the RPC and is going to find a way to pay for it with why and who pays what because last year alone we spoke to like

a thousand projects no joke uh from from daps to you know ecosystems Etc so wallets if you need need Fast Access you're not going to use the wallet RPC there's there's only so much that you can use through the wallet RPC the wallet RPC might be slow it might not give you the fast access that you need to show you know real- time data or a lot of data it might rate limit you it's like a public RPC in a sense this is why uh every production grade almost every prodution grade dap that you'll use uses a separate RPC all you need to do to check is Click right click inspect page go to console or network and you can see

that it's making queries to an RPC server it's almost every production grade uh RP uh dab or service so yeah so so again if we go to ethereum this is one so very well established blockchain we have a few of those right we have binance we have Avalanche we Etc uh they will not pay usually uh for providers to provide RPC so providers will come provide RPC and the developers will come and pay for it because they need it it's it's a necessity uh then you have chains that are you know upand coming smaller ones like we work with a lot of these chains they really need help with RPC because their users they don't have anywhere to

go and buy RPC it doesn't exist and if it exists usually it's very expensive so these ecosystems want to subsidize just like metamax subsidizes access or F subsidizes access for metam Mas these ecosystem they want to subsidize access to their RPC so that people can use it this is what we call public RPC right and every almost every blockchain has it so this this is the separation uh we've been working with a lot of uh uh ecosystems for example we just launched what we call IPC it's a really really cool concept I I would love to get into it but we launch it with OS successfully uh We've La we're launching it with starnet uh We've

launched it with near uh and many others the concept is that the ecosystem basically pays lava but it doesn't pay lava it pays the market the market of providers so let's say you are running nodes for near you can join the laa Network provide service to users and users and get paid from the near foundation for providing that service so this is basically the the vision of of the lava Network where basically you have and we have hundreds of providers actually on chain uh right now we have uh from bespoke providers like uh chain stack block demon blast you know 01 node all nodes you know just the list is just goes on

to actually people just run nodes and some of them are really good by the way some of them always rank at the top they are you know expert at devops and running nodes and they they uh they run notes for a lot of these chains and only in the last few months since we started IPC uh the end of last year with I think the uh foundation and the different ecosystem have distributed close to maybe $50,000 Plus in tokens and I think there are like hundreds of thousands more that will be dist distributed this year not making any promises but as far as I know there's a lot of contracts that are happening now um so it's it's really really interesting and cool to see so in the longterm vision of blockchain computers

do you think that the the state that we have now where all the RPC costs are like swallowed by uh the applications whether they're the DS or the wallets do do you think that's always what it's going to look like or do you think that we will eventually move into a place where the option is run your own node but because it's we have light clients and things are a lot easier or you need to like have a subscription to an RPC like do you think the cost will ever hit the end user directly no never I think it should never hit the user directly because it's all about um user experience in the end we're building technologies that enable

really cool stuff but uh to bring adoption to the space they need to be simple and easy to use just like Google doesn't charge you a subscription to use their servers so does doesn't uh you know lava or anybody to charge the end user for uh Service uh there's different models that allow for this and you know one of the things that I'm thinking about in the future of blockchain is complete chain obstruction I think you know if you're bringing your grandma or you know your uncle whatever and they want to use the blockchains they don't care they shouldn't care if it's ethereum salana Cosmos uh if you know what gas token they need to use how much gas it's going to cost what contract they're interacting with what bridge they're

using all these things that's like asking you know when I talk to my bank or when I go to Google when I go to Facebook is it HTTP you know 1.1 or two are they using uh you know are they running PHP or they running uh python or goang or are they running it on kubernetes or lava or they running it on Apache servers these things are the core technologies that we're building right now and this is is why I think the modular stack is really interesting it's basically the the bones the that will be uh what's built on top of them is is the user applications that will get the mass

adoption so this is how I see it and this is a little bit of a tangent but I'll ask it anyway I I just want to queue in on the what you said about like end gain state of chain abstraction because like in a certain sense I hear you like obviously ux for us is just like a mess right but but taking a step back right like if Grandma was like Rex I want to buy a eth and we were lived in a chain abstracted world and I was like Great Grandma all you need to do is go on the Google portal and there's going to be all these routers and stuff and then your account's going to say one eth and then all is good right there is a like major major major difference if that eth actually represents one e not

even wrapped e but naked eth on ethereum versus verus like a wormhole wrapped eth on or sorry even better Ronin wrapped eth in the axi universe right and so like I I totally hear you that no one goes and checks which version of SSL certificates like are being posted but so so maybe the question right maybe the question is and I don't want to get too too high level I think we have cool stuff to talk about maybe the question the grandma should ask is not where can I buy eth maybe the question is you know how can I order Uber on this app and maybe Uber is a decentralized network that reaches consensus using all these amazing Technologies we've been building or maybe she goes to eBay or Amazon and

she's buying you know she's buying something for her house and this is all down in a way that allows users to extract more value from the network versus big huge Enterprises you know uh getting more revenues for the shareholders maybe it's a better way to create these types of big systems maybe I don't know but I think it could be interesting yeah I hear you and we won't spend any more time on this I just the idea that like what chain you're on doesn't matter seems to like really go counter to what we're building right because then why don't we just use AWS chain no you still you still want to get

all the values of what we're building but you shouldn't care the underlying technology is I just I think those are the same thing I think like I think that you can't have the values without the technology and if you disagree we'll just like ask uh well I don't want to pick on anyone like ask Phantom right ask uh ask ask people that have watched their chain M melt down because of like decisions that they made in ask Luna how about that I have no no comments on anyway let's let's bring it back to uh let's bring it back to Lava and I and I think um totally hear you asked an answer like the the goal of our all RPC systems is like never expose the direct cost of the

users that's just going to kill user experience and yeah but at the very minimum let's agree that you know right now it's a fragmented mess and the more time that passes we're getting more and more and more chains and it's becoming more and more difficult to first for me even our user to remember what wallets I have on which chain and what tools do I need to use on each chain to move my tokens or swap or you know take a loan or make trades so I think you know this is what we're building in lava right we're building this this network that allows it's like another step of the modular stack this is how we see it for example Celestia or like Dimension and on top of that you have

lava because every single rollup on Celestia or Dimension will require and requires RPC requires that layer and we are that layer where we're connecting all of them together and then the next step is now think about our Network we have huge uh number of providers for each one of these rollups and these providers are staking tokens on the lava Network so they're saying listen my data is accurate you can trust me because if not you can slash me on chain right there's so many things you can do with this primitive to prove to other people and other chains that the data that these providers are bringing on

chain if you want to is correct so this is how we see the vision and how we see lava part of the modular stack whether it's on on uh you know Cosmos or or Celestia or igen layer but definitely uh the scor PES so this brings me to the specs concept that I wanted to talk about so so the spec concept is basically and feel free to stop me the spec concept is basically uh how do you define each chain what uh data it can return to you so it's like a menu at the restaurant right it's saying oh you can get uh you know uh salad or soup or entry uh these definitions Define uh the

data that the RPC the providers on the Chain can give you as a user what's my account balance all all those things are defined in that spec so each chain has a lot of similarities but also a lot of different uh types of specs so in lava we have what we call Champions champions are um members of the of the market that basically build and maintain these specs and for these chains they basically Champion the the chain into lava uh and these specs allow us to dynamically um observe what's happening inside of the actual queries and this is the superpow was talking about so uh specs combined

with the lava protocol itself allows us to make to do really really cool things for example uh we can talk about uh what we call validations so let's say some contract is censored nobody is willing to give you access to that contract on chain we know it exists you can be a champion and you can bring a spec to Lava that says if you want to be a provider for this spec every provider is a provider ref first spec you have to give access to this contract and this goes on chain now when I'm talking to this provider if he's censoring my query I can take that answer take it on chain and slash it so

it's a way for us to actually uh make sure that there's no sensoring happen happening for some contracts one more thing that might be a bit more technical is what we call archive notes so everybody knows that or I think a lot of people know that uh the blockchain takes a lot of storage to to uh to store right so the state every block every block in a blockchain the state changes right there's transaction transactions change the state um but to store all the blocks the state at each and every single one of every single block is very uh expensive it requires some cases uh ter terabyte tens of

terabytes of storage I don't know how much for Solana but probably even more right so how do you incentivize people or companies or uh you know node Runners to store this data and give it to you but why you you need it because you want for example to know the price of uh a token over from the beginning of time or you want to know the the all the history of all the transactions of your wallet something very basic so how do you incentivize them to do it so in lava this is what we built basically there's a way in the spec to Define if you're giving me blocks that are you know two weeks old or more you're gaining more rewards for providing them so this incentive can be

built in into the spec system incentivizing archive data so essentially what you're saying is the spec system not only allows you to like Define the specific data or requests that you're willing to to serve but it also you allow it also allows you to add the economic lever onto it and say like okay we want to incentivize this Behavior so we're going to pay more for it exactly yeah and and we want it you know everybody's asking us when can we get archived data for this when can we get archive data for that and the only question is how much are PE our companies or ecosystems or Debs are willing to pay to give that dat to get the data and sorry just on the the censorship piece specifically like the

tough part about censorship and slashing is that it's really hard to produce proof that somebody didn't do something so how how do you work that through in like a automated slashing mechanism that's a great question and and you know we've built this mechanism from the ground up not just for censorship but for anything any validation that you want to do so one of the validations that we do right now on chain for example is you have to have two weeks of blocks uh available for the users for some chains so basically there's a validation a validation is basically a query like uh making a relay to the server an RPC call and you're asking the server give me block from two weeks ago and if you don't know how to answer it

then I ask somebody else give me from two weeks ago and then again we have this conflict if you don't know how to do it we bring it on chain and then you get splashed there's there's a consensus there's a vote uh everybody provides proof that they're able to capture the same result and if it doesn't and whoever sides has the most votes based on stake wins the the debate on whether or not you provided bad information for censorship it works the same for example let's say you want to query a contract what's my balance on this contract you put this validation on chain you ask two providers what is the response and as long as there is even one provider that is you know honest

eventually you will get a conflict you will go on chain and you will say that uh it doesn't work also there are constant validations that you could do for example you could ahead of time ask the contract um what is the response for this query you take the response that is expected and you put it on chain so now you only need to query the provider without any conflict from anybody else the conflict is with the response on chain and the response from the provider and and this is it's like a Swiss knife right so anybody can use it to build whatever spec they want in whatever validations they want so these are all the options and I I want to get to just

like modularity and the modular blockchain like revolution in a moment but while we're just like still very much on lava and in this construction the the thing that I'm thinking about in in a medium to long-term rat standpoint is you're building a network of computers that are able to communicate cross chain right and then that is built on top of a network of capital that is like held by these computers that communicate cross chain and so my question to you is like as you're building this how much longterm does this construction start to look a and I don't mean to be reductive in the best possible way start to look like a bridge and like do you see uh the ability to

expand what lava network is by also like not only being able to move data between chains and to users chain and vice versa but also start to be able to move Capital as well first uh yes you're on to me okay you're on to my vision but wait data is capital on blockchain this is what's interesting and this is why we love this space data is the actual the data is the actual Capital this is it this is what's interesting about it so yes we're building a network of providers who stake and they and claim that the data is correct and there's a mechanism to dispute it and then others could potentially in the future rely on this data to build an interoperable

network of blockchains which is you know again going back to the vision and the modular stack is exactly how we see I see the future at least so let's let's take the last 10 or so minutes here to talk about modular the modular vision and I the thing that is most frustrating to me right now in this narrative is that modular blockchain really just means like rollups and and then maybe some data availability and no one really knows what data availability means right but I am a huge huge believer in modular blockchains not just that like we invented rollups but in the idea that we figure out what's important to keep in the trustless space and we make sure

that nothing ever touches that and then everything that doesn't need to stay in that space we pull it out and we find ways to make it faster and more efficient and better than could possibly happen within the evm and so again I'm frustrated because right now that means execution and data availability and why I'm so excited to have this conversation is because the next obvious one is um rpcs and so um I I'd like love to hear just like your Reflections on like what the modular roadmap memes what it means to you and if you're feeling really ambitious like I'd love to hear um if you have any thoughts on like what else is on the list of things that um will be modularized and therefore will like

supercharge ethereum or or blockchain computers into um like really like the next level of uh capability I think you know it's a there's many ways to um I think it all comes to scale right scalability because uh in the end you don't it's very hard to scale blockchains blockchains are these beasts that require consensus that is distributed over sometimes uh true in complete logic it's so difficult to do so there are many ways to do it right we maybe touched on that before but today we have a few models right we have Solana so the trade-off is that you can no you know

you have to be a professional node Runner to run it because it's very very very resource intensive but it allows for very fast uh data up to a point right there's also El there you have uh uh the uh rollups on ethereum for example where they store it's like an optimistic a proof but you have one sequencer you have to trust and sometimes the proof is not even uh yet uh the I mean the optimistic proof or the fraud proof is not yet implemented for example op stat I'm not sure how many people are familiar with that it's on the road map they're developing it you know it's an amazing team but it's not yet implemented on chain um then you have the cosmos version which is like

Sovereign chains that serve in a specific application so the modular stack for me means that you're going to be able to choose pick and choose the different parts that are relevant for your application to build the best application that can scale for your needs uh to offer cheap gas uh to scale to many many users without crashing uh all these things are super important um so this is this is what modular means for me the problem with modularity which you know coming from a security background I always look for you know where the most complex code is to find the

bugs once you have many many complex layers there could be many many integration bugs between them these when these pieces don't talk to each other correctly this is when you can have a big fault and because it's you know the data is the money the data is the capital so um you can end up losing money which is really really bad so these are the pros and cons and I think over time they will sort out all the bugs and obviously um I think I do believe that modular is the way to go because just it opens up so many possibilities um and the other thing that we didn't talk about is like raking right so this is I think the next

modular thing is like with the igen layer just the ability to take the the stake tokens and then use them to secure other chains I think is insane and uh it will be very awesome to see that live so I'm really really waiting for that yeah I mean I agree there's lots of uh Insanity around igen layer but I guess I guess a good question to walk out on is in this modular blockchain n in this modular blockchain world like I the the biggest question mark to me is like every layer of modularity implies like a new layer of 10 to 100 to a

million sorry 10,000 to 100,000 to a million new computers running new software and like so now we have like uh like distributed sequencers and then distributed da layers and that's on top of our distributed main net and now we have distributed rpcs and like the the the next layer of modularity that I have my eyes on is like BAS around ZK SQL so we're going to have like modular um distributed databases like but all of this is just more and more and more computers and like we can barely get ethereum to like break into the five-digit number so I guess like with your parting thoughts as someone who's building another decentralized Network

how do you see the endgame state of um these distributed computing systems when uh there's only in my head there's a finite number of people willing to be like hardcore node operators so this is exactly why we've built lava right we're incentivizing these node Runners to provide this exact service that you're talking about so I I really like what you're saying but think about the scale of even one company like Facebook or Google the amount of compute that they use I don't have numbers I don't want to make up numbers but if you exclude Bitcoin obviously uh how much compute do you think blockchain is doing in comparison to one of these Giants I would say it's probably close to nothing

yeah 0.01% maybe yeah so so this is just and remember this is just it's a nent field it's like it's in uh it's still like it's uh uh very very new so very very early and and again my view is that what we're building is like the core Internet it's like TCP IP HTTP and then the first you know Apachi PHP what people used to use back in the day right so this is what we're still building uh so I think there's enough Compu to go around to run uh way more than what we're doing now 100x THX you know in orders of magnitude and when we'll see that we'll know we have like true

adoption of of this space and this is what I'm waiting for awesome man well I I think we can keep going especially on this kind of more outer edge of the things that are coming but um for the sake of your schedule and everyone's attention I think I'll cut us off here so uh Gil thank you so much for the time I now now that I'm remembering we didn't even get a chance to talk about your incredible news your $15 million raise so I guess uh walking us out a little bit can you just tell us a little bit about that um and and with that uh how people can find lava Network how people can find you and if they're interested in being an RPC provider um what are we in beta are we live like what are the next steps yeah of course thank you yeah

we just announced our 50 million million round s around from uh you know super ogs in the space uh like tribe hashy jump and many many many other supporters it's been very exciting uh we've been developing uh lava for one and a half years now we've been on testnet for the last year and as I've said we launched our first product about three months ago or four months ago uh with OS uh we just launched with near you can become note providers uh and get rewarded for for running notes uh Manet is coming soon and yesterday we what we call uh magma uh the foundation basically lava Foundation launched a points program that I think it's the first of its kind to try to incentivize people to use uh

different rpcs so if you switch over go to the points. laavan net. XYZ switch to the lav RPC you can start accumulating points which I think is really really cool in the space um yeah find us on Twitter find us on on uh on our website and yeah it's been really really great thank thank you awesome man well again congratulations both on of course the Rays and like the big things that this means for lava but really in a bigger sense congratulations on like really understanding one of the true centralization and like Risk points that we have in this space and like doing something to to solve it and I think that um you could have very easily stuck in me or you could have very easily

become like a shitcoin Trader or or anything that is really about value extraction and instead you found something that's about um positive sum and about like bringing the future closer to us so um just want to say thank you and I'm so excited for you and um yeah man just have a good day thank you man have a good day too