Pioneering the Modular Rollup Future with Manta Network

Transcript

welcome back to the rollup High Roller Community as always nothing on the rollup is to be construed as Financial advice we are just an Educators in the defi space toss us a quick like give us a share a repost send it to a friend who may want to watch this and finally give us a sub or a follow it means the world to help support credibly neutral educational content in def5 we're here to educate Empower and enrich you and let's jump in what's going on guys welcome to Dev connect 2020 three here in istan buul or istan bullish brothering oh if only we had a beer or something or like three beers we could retake this have you drank enough this

week though here I don't know if I drank enough today coffee definitely yeah but maybe the beers I'm a little lacking I was thinking that's actually going to be my fuel for the night oh yeah yeah yeah you got to switch off to tea at the early afternoon didn't they teach you these things at MIT sir yeah yeah yeah I learned all about the chemical process and now I'm trying to apply it and what what what did you study at M so in my grad in my grad program I was um doing my MBA okay and so I was studying business um and that's where I had mat Victor who's the other co-founder of manta um I was actually the teaching assistant for Gary Kinsler no way chairman yeah no way yeah but he

was quite bullish and happy about crypto back then should we say um I think that the I think when people you know see it from the outside looking in it may seem that way um especially because he checks the boxes in terms of teaching crypto courses and stuff but I'd say he's always been a very um taking quite an objective approach yeah I mean certainly have to uh heed some caution when you're leading the largest economies uh you know forces so not to not to blame Gary but there's quite a negative sentiment towards Gary these days and on that note actually Black Rock has just filed for a spot ethereum ETF today officially nice nice what do you think pumper dumper I

have no idea who cares right if I knew the market like that then I wouldn't be a builder I'd be a Trader man I wanted to be a leverage Trader so bad when I first started and then I realized that I actually have to create something of value in this world to make money gotcha yeah I mean you know I would love to be a leverage Trader too but I've only heard bad things about leverage trading yeah I'm not a huge risk taker so but you're your career is in crypto yeah yeah but I feel like building a well the facade of building a project is that you have more control correct in terms of you know the outcome but in reality you know once you flip through that facade it's all uh it's all just grinding and luck yeah yeah that's that's interesting

take right before you jumped in you were on a I assume some sort of Team call or Community call uh discussing some I think incentive designs I don't know how private or confidential the information there was but um incentive incentive designs huh important yeah definitely yeah I think that that is um a lot of what drives um you know getting that initial adoption and um putting the wrong sort of incentive designs in place ends up having some um issues longer term right so trying to figure out how to go to market in the most sustain Manner and then get that initial adoption and drive from there yes for those of you who are uh you know new to Manta uh originally a a optimism based

rollup or sorry originally a polka dot pair chain uh now uh has transitioned into the rollup space and then soon transitioning to a ZK evm based rollup uh with polygon cdk stack and the interesting part about ecosystems and chains is that there's different ways to incentivize grants liquidity marketing deployment ments Integrations and so you can you know what's good about your position is you're not the first one so you can kind of learn from previous uh and study and research previous ecosystems which I encourage you and the team to do if if you're not already which I assume you are um and then kind of put your own twist on it right and that's kind of what you guys are trying to do with Manta fest with the native daps um you know trying to bring on new daps but also incentivize the key native

daps that are part of man Foundation or Manta ecosystem itself and also like nonnative depths so kind of what's been the thought process there um have you done some research and studied different programs you know what's been the implementation the goals yeah if you could give us like a good rundown I'd appreciate it yeah sure so um yes we have looked at a lot of different programs um I think you know it's it's really interesting because you see different sort of Dynamics uh when it comes to uh these types of programs on test Net versus main net right uh what kind of AUD audience you're reaching um and so you know definitely took all that into account when designing Manta Fest um you know for those of you guys that

don't know Manta Fest is in our ongoing main net Odyssey campaign actually I guess by the time this releases it's probably not ongoing anymore yeah it'll be sorry folks it'll be ended by 20 yeah yeah so um but yeah so I mean definitely took a lot of those into consideration and I think the overall goal is to try to introduce people uh to as many of the ecosystem projects as possible uh one of our here is you know we do want to make sure that we can help uh kind of grow the ecosystem projects as we grow as well um we we I guess we're not really as hands off as other sort of l2s may be right I understand the you know sort of objective approach and see you know survival of the fittest kind of

neutrality yeah yeah yeah yeah but um for us right like we we're new Eco system you know they're uh a lot of these are new projects right they can get the support that we can provide so you know we're definitely helping them or trying to help them uh in that manner so I think like that's a lot of around what motivates the uh manifest design for us yeah yeah I mean it just takes me back to like the original liquidity mining design from like all the way from 2020 to just token emissions now there's different things like call options there's different things like um uh you know kind of you you can earn tokens that are locked you can earn ve tokens as as a as a in in a yield Farm should we say similarly from a a chain perspective it's about like trying to

create those that incentivize sustainability long-term growth and actual development you kind of want to try to get rid of the let's say rent Seekers or liquidity that is just kind of there for yields or there for Grants and I mean kind of brings to an interesting point which is a little bit different arbitrum has their stips going on right now uh short term so 90-day incentive program um do you guys think that you guys will do something like that similar or do you have a are you farming or do you are you allowed to say you're farming arbiture um are you farming arbiture sticks am I personally farming arbitr I am personally farming AR STS I am personally not at the moment um you know a bit preoccupied yeah a

little busy a little bit busy um you know but kudos to them but do you think it's a good idea to do these kind of 90day Sprint programs and and try to boost the ecosystem I think it really depends right like really depends on what your goals are I think that like if you have a lot of new ecosystem projects that are kind of Green Field and you want to drive some user activity over there just to get people to try out the apps and see what sticks and all that like it's it's not bad you know um but you know it really depends on the underlying motivations uh for us right now like we're trying to get that all covered under manifest we are thinking about future campaigns as well um but all of that is you know with the total goal of just making sure that we get as many

eyeballs as many users onto ecosystem applications as possible yeah sweet and I think this um partnership with layer zero integration um you know could do that layer zero obviously has their ofs their Omni chain token standards um they've big uh ecosystem fund they've got which is actually under wraps uh um and a ton a big marketing Community big you know just big name um so what's you know kind of what's the uh technical reasons uh for that uh partnership and what are the uh uh external benefits which are public that you can share um yeah specifically with layer zero right so layer zero um I

think there's there's the benefits are twofold one is um on our ecosystem side right like a lot of these applications they want to be within the layer zero ecosystem as well because that kind of gets them a user exposure and ultimately that's again what our goal is right especially for the ecosystem side um and then the the other part of it is you know tapping into the layer zero ecosystem and having those projects on boarded as well um so I think there's you know the the benefits on both sides there um yeah on the on the technical side I mean just more access to users across various different chains I think you it's a pretty no-brainer yeah I mean I think something that that is like uh

annoying for users from even from my perspective you know I've got I've got some some eth and aperture swap on you know some Stak eth WRA eth pool earning some yield I did some polyhedra bridging so I've been you know I've been doing my little thing in manest you know you're like a Bonafide de yeah oh yeah how many points do you have uh let's just say I've been a little busy preoccupied you said yeah just slightly preoccupied as a week you know but the concern was and is still for myself and others is I I don't know why it must be the the hacks or just the laziness but like the bridging it's just like I've got to get to Manta and so I think ler Zer kind of helps that with their Omni

chain token standards but also you guys have a couple Bridge partners and I'm just curious like how you guys plan to get over that cuz from my perspective and from a user perspective the hardest thing is just doing the initial Bridge cuz I'll Bridge back and forth now but if I never get there the first place I never get there ever but if I get there once I'm comfortable doing it I'm like whatever I have funds there you know it almost becomes compartmentalized so curious on what you think about that challenge I mean you see the number of bridges on us right now that's what we think about the challenge right trying to just uh get as much access as possible make it as simple as possible in terms of like what people may already be using yeah right we have our native Bridge as well um I think definitely you

know there are some frictions right downsides in using um Bridges these days not just on well I guess not as much on the L2 to L2 side but like the L1 to L2 side like the gas fees definitely are also a friction but um yeah like we're just trying to implement as much as possible in terms of getting the right solutions that users are already using that they're familiar with and you know hopefully tap in from there yeah and I think polygon's going to help with that I mean not necessarily on the bridging spot or on the bridging part but potentially and then also on the liquidity marketing just overall Community Front I mean seems like a bit of a no-brainer but also like optimism is quite is quite significant as well I know that we were at dinner the other

night and conversation is not for a recording not that anything was said that was not supposed to be said but there's different preferences that come with working in different ecosystem so talk us through kind of your decision- making uh you know uh from going from a a optimistic rollup to ZK based R is it more on the tech side is it a ecosystem support combination of both kind of what's the what was the thought process there yeah I would say that it's you know a little bit of both um on the technical side at the end of the day one of the uh philosophies that we subscribe to is just like how do you remain relevant 5 years from now 10 years from now right like you look at like the 2013's and the 2014ss of the world you got you know

Bitcoin cash or all of a sudden you just see all this money come in because you have Bitcoin or something right and like are they still around yes they're still around and no disrespect for them they they definitely you know pave the way for certain thought processes innovation in the space and then you have like 2017 where now it's not just Bitcoin Forks but you have ethereum Forks right and you've got like I'm not going to name projects we all know who they are um Google it um and then the um but how many of them were still relevant in 2023 right and so I I don't think like we've broken that curse and so the question is you know how does Manta stay relevant how can Manta break out of that curse right and so I think we're all foolish

to think that we are not going to be the next victim and so uh the the the foresight in us is thinking okay we do have to take much more of this modular approach right like instead of building everything from scratch doing everything ourselves why not Leverage The Amazing teams and the technologies that they have available and continue to innovate through that right and that's exactly why we were looking at Celestia and we've been working with them for the longest time we have them on test net already we're trying to get them integrated by the end of the year right so now all of a sudden bam we can take advantage of modular data availability lower gas fees for everyone everyone's happy right we take a step forward in that user experience same with um ZK evm right like we've always thought about um

deploying as a ZK evm but at the time when we were really thinking about it right like we're we're we didn't know if the technology was mature enough and I think we're getting to a point now right cuz main Nets really just started launching like you know scroll just launched their main net as well right and so it's it's a un Uncharted Territory um and so for us right like you know we could try to build from scratch as well um or we could find you know the partners that already can do so and polygon cdk right they're getting a lot of positioning there getting a lot of market share a lot of amazing projects that are already uh looking at them if not already on testnet and so you know like this is our step into you know jumping into the ZK evm side

providing more cryptographic security rather than Economic Security and I think you know it's going to be the same process same thought process same philosophy for any future sort of innovation and I think that sort of approach um hopefully will keep us relevant for the next 5 10 years yeah yeah I like the I like the thought process on that um even the 2020 projects are some of them have lost mind share yeah you know one interesting way to stay relevant is to be polarizing Donald Trump is a great example obviously there's a lot other things going on there but give our opinion on Donald Trump is that going to polarize this that will certainly polarize this this video yeah yeah get the view stay relevant yeah exactly um so so that's

one way uh which comes with um you know marketing branding decision- making incentives um uh leaders team so that you know that's it's a way doesn't have to be the way um and then on the kind of tech side I think the modular stack is is is mind-blowing um I was at uh epic infra day shout out to Epic web 3 okay um and so at Epic web 3 infra day uh we had a talk from one of the guys from near they just also launched their daer of course um and they advertised 8,000 times cheaper to settle on uh near da than eth L1 uh obviously it's different if you

settle compared to Celestia or other Das is much more of a similar comparison but the point is that I asked a question I was like so rollups as we know it without da are quite cheap rollups with da are going to be a level of cheap that we haven't even we can't even really fathom like 0.0 and a ton more zeros for swaps for Lending for nfts for mints and so that is just so from the user experience side that's huge and then I think um zkm side is interesting as well because that's also on the user experience side right where where you can have there's different kind of function ities of ZK VM and then also there whole world of like alt VMS um which have like parallel execution or

different kind of uh gas markets that you can kind of isolate right different things I know ZK VM I'm not too sure on the specs on that what is the key like compared to an ALT VM compared to evm itself why is zkm uh differentiated or better for like is is there gas fee um kind of separation or execution yeah yeah so um you know I think I think you definitely uh hit the nail on the head in terms of like thinking about it from a user experience perspective at the end it's all it's all it is right like you can you can optimize user experience on the infrastructure level you can optimize user experience on the application Level and so you know we're we're more focused obviously on the infrastructure level but specifically you know Y is z km um well you know first it it needs to be at least an L2

um because that's where the whole ZK evm lives right the the point is to be able to have some type of proof that this batch of transactions that have been settled to you know ethereum is correct right and so the um it's more of a security guarantee when you take more of like the optimistic approach then it is more of like an economic guarantee right because you're you're hoping that all the transactions are correct and if some something is wrong you're also hoping that someone's going to find out within seven days and so U ultimately you know whether someone finds out or not the impact is on user experience right no one likes to say withdraw and then wait seven days if you want to do do that you just do a bank-to-bank transfer right so

um there's there's definitely some friction there that I think can be eliminated by using zkm on the user experience side reducing the withdrawal time on the actual security side it's cryptographic versus economic um and then you know how's that different from alternative VMS I think that's less about zkm and more about the evm ecosystem in general right like it's just when you you know there's this term in Cloud I was in the cloud industry before this um and you know it's called vendor lockin and so you know when you put a bunch of your stuff and do all this stuff on AWS all of a sudden it's so complicated to migrate everything over to like a Google cloud or Microsoft Azure or something I think the same concept applies to blockchain right like

if you if you build on an alternative VM you are taking a risk in assuming that this environment is going to succeed because if that environment does not then you can't just Port it over to another evm right like you've got to rebuild you've got to start thinking about how to be compatible ebm compatible in all these different environments so I think like ebm zkm right it gives developers that safety that sort of peace of mind um in being able to deploy multi-chain much more easily being able to manage that multi-chain deployment much more easily um so yeah yeah I think alternative the end is definitely more of a risky uh Endeavor in a sense but one that could pay off uh big time for for those who

want to use it just because of the potential for uh developer on boarding and capacity and inframe tooling and things but that's the beauty of this modular stack it's like you Mr gigabrain gets to get put up against three more gigabrain like a mega brain Mega okay Killin get to stack up against three other Giga brains and they all get to put their alak cart menu of modular stack to test obviously there's other Factor not just Tech but we can kind of like see who kind of wins in a sense you know and that's like that's fun it it's cool experimentation and Innovation and that's kind of what we're here for that said what aside from Manta what is your favorite zkm aside from Manta what is my favorite zkm oh boy or you could say something

nice about another zkm if if you like is this subliminal messaging is that why you're wearing that shirt right now I mean the the space is very small right like I know all the founders and you know we're all friends in all the zkm space so you know I are you able to say are you able to say anything good about Z kbm or not um I am definitely very much able to say very good things about a lot of the founders of the ZK EVMS right like I mean uh on the scroll team on the Tao team polygon zkm right like I I know these people um I know that you know just being a Founder in

general is extremely tough um and so you know the the the decisions the the work put in yeah I think I'm just power tripping a bit since run camera oh yeah but it was funny because I had a panel um at L2 days they it was all all the names that you just mentioned uh maybe one or two more and they they're sitting like this in AOW and the question was from terum from Gauntlet was um look to the person to your right and say something nice about their zkm stack I heard that I heard about that question that's how it was hilarious amazing it was and if you guys want to see that check out either our website or my Twitter there's a full recap of each and every comment it is hilarious this the

lad from scroll ye looks over at Alex from matter Labs sinking takes about 15 seconds of giggling before he could tell him that his GPU provs were fast or low cost or something that's all he had to say just it's great I mean I would if if you were sitting next to me I'd probably just be like nice hair that's it that's it guys nice hair idiot Pico brain that's why we're on the media side guys cool that's that's the absolute beauty of this uh of this role though you know every day we sit down with people and just like it's like going to ZK College modular University crypto freaking MIT every day so maybe maybe

maybe one day we'll be uh learning the engineering side as as well but as we kind of close out here I'm going to hit you with a a rapid set of questions okay and you can't think you just have to answer I'm great at not thinking so I think this is going to be easy I hope your VC is like that all right here we go all right all right so Bitcoin or ethereum uh ethereum uh Litecoin or Bitcoin cash Litecoin did I just say that did I just say that um the next one is uh modular or monolithic modular um I'm running out of uh I'm running out

of thank God out of quick quick hit I'm regretting some yeah hoskinson or Craig Wright oh hoskinson hoskinson cardano or EOS oh cardano Stell l or Ripple oh Ripple Ripple yeah nice one um yeah man that is uh I think that's it for now okay cool thank you Kenny that was the toughest part you should have warned me about that just power tripping full time here um yeah so I guess um I guess just where can our community find you guys and how can you get involved um oh one thing that I wanted to ask about as well for you potentially for us but just for

other content creators or contributors in the space are you guys planning on doing retroactive grants for data boards for content for uh contributions in coding engineering Etc similar to other L2 ecosystems you know I I know we have a lot of builders in our community content creators um that's something that they would want to know and then where where would you guys be found yeah that's a really good question and we actually are in the process of setting something up like that um in terms of where we can be found um depends on which day you ask me um somewhere on this planet and uh on the internet I can be found on Twitter um super Anonymous C it's called X now dude come on the program cut that out all

right you can find me on X um it's One X not three so um on X it's super Anonymous k um and then on the Manta Network side you can find us on at man network yeah awesome yeah it's always a pleasure man great to meet you out here che's my palms are sweaty like spaghetti that's how the wrap goes right um yeah