Solving Ethereum’s UX Challenges | Hart & Dan

Transcript

what do we want we want the ability where I click a button and an action happens on another chain and so that button click if that action on another chain let's simplify it and say that action is I just need to get one eth to the other chain the traditional like classic kind of way you think of a bridge is send money on chain a to some contract wait for finality on chain a uh send message to chain B release funds that's like the kind of classic Bridge architecture and the biggest problem with that in my mind is speed like you're waiting for finality On the Origin chain hey everyone this episode is brought to you by Fuel Labs who's launching fuel ignition a new high performance ethereum

L2 powered by the fuel VM now you're going to be hearing all about ignition later in the program but for now what you need to know is they are launching phase two of their points program so click the link at the bottom of the show notes and head over start experimenting messing around on fuel today thank me later hey everyone quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode nothing said on bell curve is a recommendation to buy or sell Securities or tokens this podcast is for informational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions not Financial advice our guest and I may hold positions in the companies funds or projects discussed all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve this is a very fun episode because we're joined by two veteran uh co-hosts of

individual seasons of bker we got Hart lamber and Dan Robinson fellas welcome thanks Mike thanks for having us back on this is great this is a call back to the original the original episode that we actually did Dan during the season on dexus where we had heart on um so this is going to be a fun call back to that episode we're gon to be talking about some interoperability themes that was actually the episode heart that you and I met on and uh I like hey this heart guy is actually pretty cool and I literally called you cold after that it's like hey dude I know we met that one time on that podcast but you want to host a season with me um yeah I was honestly Mike I was surprised I was surprised by that I was like what I do right uh but or or or our podcast

co-host is it's such a raw rough job that like no one else is gonna do it but yeah dude I was just I was giving you sharing you the load but I was presenting it as like a a fun uh fun thing that we could do together but um all right guys I wanna so obviously the the meat of what I want to cover is has to do with interoperability and this exciting announcement between this integration in between across and Unis swap but before we get there I want to maybe start with just setting the scene in terms of where we're at in ethereum r large maybe hard I could kick it over to you here where are we at this particular moment in time and what are some of the technical challenges that we're dealing with as an ecosystem yeah yeah Mike I think there's

a story I want to tell and I want like this to be a broader ethereum story um zoom out go back like four years ago and eth had a scalability problem like it just didn't scale and everybody kind of knew this it became very obvious in defi summer when transaction fees were like 300 bucks to do a Unis swap swap and it's like okay this doesn't work we got to scale this thing and if yall remember right the ecosystem they tried a few different ideas charting and other stuff and then we aligned on this rollup Centric road map we're going to scale ethereum through rollups um and different teams started innovating on that Optimus AR from ZK sync polygon um and I would say it's only this year like March of this year with the denune hard

Fork that like we achieved it uh e scaled um any individual L2 now is fast and cheap uh it is a salonik experience it works really great maybe we can critique like centralization sequencers which I think is like a fair critique but like from a pure scale perspective it's great um and Unis swwa putting out uni chain um another another kind of bit of uh another example of how cheap and fast an individual L2 can be Q up new problem so okay first of all we don't celebrate that enough ethereum solved this big hairy problem and did it really well but and like yeah like go e we should be a little bit more uh bullish

that way um but I think a lot of the negativity on the timeline right now does stem from okay scalability is solved but ethereum now feels super fragmented um we do not have a unified user experience across all these l2s and I think it is time I'm hoping that out of Devcon um you know in two weeks this becomes really front and center and the ethereum community kind of aligns we got to solve this interoperability problem and we got to align on a direction to do that and I'm biased here I think this intent-based bridging architecture that across has pioneered is a good direction to do that but I think we can talk you know on this pod more about what are the

ux challenges and how do we how do we address them I fully agree with that and I I agree with Hart that the our solution the great ethereum solution to um to scaling has given rise to this interoperability problem um that I think across and and others are working on I also want to add that I think it turned out that without us even knowing it a lot of the work that we've been doing in ethereum research um was actually preparing for this and I think that's what I'm talking about here of course is decentralized exchange research which turned out to be in a lot of ways setting up for um uh interoperability and this and this new kind of um parad in which a lot of interactions that would happen on chain involve potentially interop an interoperability action and that's

because I think with dexes we were trying um this whole time to basically make it faster to be able to get fills and to make it cheaper to be able to have someone some Market maker be able to fill this uh intent for you on chain and I think what we've discovered with interoperability is that those two things getting someone to Bas some Market maker to take an action somewhere for you in exchange for some money that you're paying them is exactly the problem of fast interop ability and it's one that I think um hard and across have done a lot to really figure out how to actually push that space forward and then it's turned out a lot of that as paralleled by and and enhanced by a lot of the work that um that the decentralized exchanges have done um in trying to solve a very similar problem

um but in a slightly different context yeah so let's rip on that for a second Dan because I again it ACC it up well but um what do we want we want the ability where I click a button and an action happens on another chain um and so that button click if that action on another chain let's simplify it and say that action is I just need to get one eth to the other chain and maybe later in the Pod we can talk about how that action could be something else so all right uh that is a bridge right but is it really like do we need to use this word bridging um the traditional like classic kind of way you think of a bridge is send money on chain a to some contract wait for finale on chain a uh

send message to chain B release funds that's like the kind of classic Bridge architecture and the biggest problem with that in my mind is speed like you're waiting for finality On the Origin chain um so sort of sidebar here I think if we're really going to unify ethereum and make it feel like one network the speed here has to be sub two seconds um and I'm making that sub two seconds up kind of but you know you look at a lot of web2 ux research and if a website takes more than two seconds to load people just like disappear it's like it's like it's like browsing the internet on an airplane is a horrible experience that you don't want to do because it's so damn slow um so you

don't do it so okay so the classic bridge design doesn't work but what if we just kind of delete Bridges here what if instead we say this is more like a swap I have assets On the Origin ch and I want to swap them from assets on the destination chain um that is what the across intent-based architecture does it's uh user funds get escrowed on Origin chain third-party solver Market maker relayer filler whatever you want to call them fills the user with their own funds on destination chain and they can fill them extremely quickly because they they can take on finality risk and they don't have to send a message so right now across in the intent architecture our median fill

time is three seconds we're not quite at two but we're like getting close so they fill the user really quickly user's happy and then the protocol verifies that the intent was filled before uh user funds are released back out to the solver so I'm setting this up and I kind of repeat this intent architecture to anyone that'll listen but to Dan's point this isn't a bridge anymore right we're not bridging here we're doing like a swap between two chains and we're using this intent architecture to make it be really fast to execute that swap between two chains and then using the kind of intent verification to keep user funds safe um and so I think what I'm kind of riffing on what Dan's saying is like

this intent-based bridging isn't a bridge anymore it's more like a DEX um and I I think there is a lot of work that like aligns those Concepts yeah I want to double underline that because that was when when the three of us did our episode back about a year ago that was a huge light bulb moment for me I just never really thought about in that context before the similarities in between what dexes are really trying to do and what bridges are trying to do and you know I'm channeling my inner Brian here and saying even in the intent based framework you do still need some amount of General message passing underneath it's just potentially maybe less right when everything gets batched up at this intent top layer right yeah yeah exactly like we're saying okay this intent layer

is this layer of abstraction the way I I the way I actually kind of mentally think about it is the intent is an order ticket I think like old school like I think old school trading floor I have an order ticket I want to sell 100 shares of Apple stock to buy you know uh 2,000 USD right that's my order yeah and I give that to my broker and they go and execute it right this intent is an order ticket that is a layer of abstraction that's just like what I want to do do in my kind of quote unquote swap between chains and then the the settlement layer here the settlement layer is where I need to verify that happened before user funds get released to the the market

maker or filler right um and at that settlement layer yeah you need to verify that that intent was filled but you can use whatever type of messaging technique Works uh to make that happen you could use messaging you use ZK proofs you could use uh super chain native interop uh you could use like coin bases working on a really cool uh proposal for storage proofs uh between l2s there's like lots and lots of things you can use here and so messaging is a critical comp component but it's like on the back end of this architecture and I I'll make one caveat which is actually there are ways to do intent based swaps that don't even involve the need to be able to send a message from from one chain to the other

um and so one of the one of the examples of this which predates all of us is htlcs which was are B hash time lock contracts which are a design that Satoshi himself um roughly came up with um I think in like 2011 or something um but for doing interoperability between chains like Bitcoin and Litecoin um and th that's a that's a way to do a trusted or trustless Atomic swap between two uh between two different platforms um but never involves the ability to send a message between um platforms so I'm not the biggest fan of hlc's actually in general and I didn't you do like four years of research on H htlcs yes I I I have a talk you could look up called hdlc is considered harmful um and I'm

I'm generally not a fan of hlc's as a as a mechanism for uh for interoperability but there are other uh mess and I have I have a pitch in that talk actually for an alternative one which is outside the scope of this but um an alternative way to do uh Atomic swaps across chains without um hlc's and also without message passing but in general I would say it's it's a very flexible uh Paradigm this idea of I'm just going to pay someone on chain a in exchange for them paying me on chain B and getting atomicity or fairness across those is a much simpler problem actually than uh in general or or rather it's a much more there are ways to solve that problem that don't necessarily involve the ability to pass a general message from uh from A to B hey everyone this episode

is brought to you by Fuel Labs who's unveiling their new high performance ethereum L2 fuel ignition many of you know fuel as the launcher of the first optimistic stage two roll up on ethereum with fuel V1 and now they're launching ignition to address some of the creeping centralization concerns around some uh L2 architectures today and if you like noting out about the tech there's a lot of reasons to get excited about ignition including how they solve State sustainability and perform and execution they have this utxo asset Centric architecture that's very very cool but there's a lot of other reasons to love it super easy to use you can either use a fuet wallet or your existing ethereum or Salon based wallet like Phantom or metamask or whatever it is they're are

cool apps that you can experiment with and again like I said at the top of the program they're launching phase two of their points program so click the link at the bottom of the show notes head over start having fun on fuel ignition today and just tell them that I sent you all right so we're at this place now where we have a ux challenge for ethereum intents offer uh a potential solution for maybe like an 8020 there's still there's still a question of finality which maybe that's beyond the scope of this podcast like single slot finality I think has held a lot of structure stuff back but I I want to uh I want to zoom in now and start to ask you guys about a couple of specific events recently in Hart maybe this is a little bit more aimed in your direction

because that seems like there's been a little bit of a a union or a marriage or some sort of joint um a lot of cooperation in between across and Unis swap so you know I first saw this there was the uni chain uh long long awaited announcement um you know and it I think that there was a an across component to that as well you guys have Al co-developed a standard together um which is how uni chain was going to achieve um interoperability in between other l2s and then uh and then recently there's been a much tighter integration in between across and Unis swap so can you guys just wherever it makes sense there chronologically you know when did you first start developing the standard

together maybe we can talk a little bit about the uh the outline of what the standard actually looks like and then what is this like take us through to this most recent integration yeah totally um so across has been doing this intent-based bridging for a while which as we kind of set the stage four isn't really bridging it looks like a swap between two chains um here and uh to remind the the viewers Unis swap announced Unis swap x uh they released the white paper and the single chain version of uniswap X at ECC last year so like July last year so year and a half ago is um and in that white paper they talked about their cross-chain Unis swap X

design which looked a lot like a cross and they referenced and credit us I think Dan your name's on that white paper I I'll say basically I think Hart about a year before that um at ECC the year before um Hart First actually pitched me on on this idea of intent-based um but you didn't invest you didn't invest back not it's true we did not invest we did not invest back then um but you know uh maybe regrettably because I I should have known hard is hard is really good but um hard pitch us on this design for Bridges basically being yeah being based around intense and then when a cross came out I think you know we we kept in touch and heart has always been a um an inspiration to me um in general and I

think um uh Hayden as well both of us we basically got convinced that the doing something like this for cross chain swapping actually made the most sense and then that it folded directly into what we were doing with unisoft X and so the X paper exactly was as as it mentions in the paper was heavily uh inspired by intent based cross chain designs like uh like a cross I think I think might have taken Heart by surprise um that that unisoft was doing a was doing something like that cross chain the unisoft team actually gave me a heads up to their to their fair to be fair to them so which was nice but um like I walked out of that being like oh they're gonna eat a lot here right like that was the honest reaction um but then we talked to them and went a bit

deeper and we're like okay look you guys are doing single chain Unis swap X Unis swap X today only exists on a single chain um the cross chain architecture is different because instead of in a single chain it's all Atomic like I just I'm figuring out the best way to do this Swap and I I fill users atomically on one chain cross chain you have to have these solvers that front Capital to fill to fill the user very quickly and that's like a it's a different muscle um here and what we realized was like okay what if we Define a standard for what again this order ticket this cross chain order ticket could look like what if we Define a standard and we build out a solver Network that is like shared resource that isn't owned by any one

protocol uh because that feels positive sum it feels like okay across can use this solare network Unis swof X can use this solare network whatever else might happen there and that was the origin of us putting together this standard uh called ERC 7 683 which is a very hard number for most people to remember uh it's been ingrained in my mind though um but we put together the standard for cross chain intents and we've been building support for it um and again it really is nothing more than defining the shape of this order ticket uh it doesn't Define what messaging should be used to verify intents or even if you need me like to dance point doesn't Define how you verify the intent it just defines

the shape of the order ticket and um working with Unis swap on that went deeper and deeper and they're like actually we kind of need like bridging inside the Unos swap app immediately uh let's let's integrate across here um and so that's the Genesis of the deeper Unis swap integration of across and now and uniswap did a beautiful job on the UI here if you go to the Unis swap app uh either the web app the mobile app or the the wallet um you can bridge between Bridge eth between networks or bridge usdc between networks uh it feels like a swap it feels like un swap swap um and it's integrating across to do this

intent-based bridging uh in like a median fill time of three seconds um so that got turned on I think a week ago today um uh from this podcast recording done I think 2% of unof users have tried it uh like which is kind of cool something like that uh which is small but growing um uh and it's worked you know knock on wood pretty seamlessly we've had um it's been a very seamless integration so far that's awesome man congratulations that's uh I honestly when you because that was going to be my first question to you is like they you know across looks like a DEX Unis swap looks like a DEX where you know what's the Synergy and that makes complete sense one is

same chain Atomic and the other is cross chain and that makes a ton of sense can we talk a little bit about just what the what is the standard that you guys develop like you know we talked I mean standards are I guess another Hot Topic in especially ethereum land at the moment and uh you know we use this example of I believe in in one of these Seasons sorry they're blending together a little bit for me but uh of like um Auto like Automotive Jesus Automotive Wheels um right you can have different sizes of the wheels but you need the Hub to be the same size you can go to any service center whatever in the United States and you don't need to be locked into to whatever service center your OEM has so like talk to me about what the specifics of actually um the standard

that you guys developed yeah um so again mental model order ticket the gist of it is uh I have uh asset X on chain a I want at least as much asset y on chain B um and then there's like an extra bytes field that you can do other fun things with um and the standard specifies what I'll call what in this in the in the standard it's called the settlement contract so um I've where are user funds going to get escrowed they get escrowed in the settlement contract and the settlement contract is what verifies the intent gets filled so uh the the the kind of Hub to use your analogy of like same

siiz Hub here we're saying simply uh asset X on chain a I want asset y on chain b um and I'm going to settle using this contract here and that's that's really it that's the the concept here um so it is pretty lightweight like by Design um much in the same way that like the erc20 standard is just like here's what a token should look like it should have these basic functions but you can add other stuff to it too um it's pretty lightweight but it it does be become a common format that all kinds of systems and protocols can ingest and use does does that kind of Track Mike it totally tracks um I was actually ask you guys

I'm c i i i was with a A friend of mine who's very involved in uh he runs a company in like the Dow governance or like Dow tooling sort of space and he was actually talking about the erc20 standard as a big mistake or something that we got wrong and it's pretty interesting because I'd always thought of the rc20 center something ethereum did really right and probably What attracted so much um I mean you could call it speculation but definitely a lot of capital and can I can I guess his his critique approvals sure yeah guess I I was I was going to guess this critique was that we didn't do it like Solana which Solana has just a built-in basically Factory where everything is more standardized so right we we have a a very flexible erc20 token standard that like you know is compatible with

technically a lot of implementations where salana and a lot of other chains have a much more opinionated rigor like uh uh strict token standard yeah it was similar to that yeah and it it's one of the one of the tricks that I think with standards you you need obviously a set of standards that everyone is operating on the same um wavelength but there's a question of when do you implement that and who gets to implement that standard and how do I actually I have no idea how this process really works in ethereum like what is it actually like just like many things I have no idea how they work in ethereum but like how how does it actually work to take like to propose a standard and to get it widely accepted what does that process actually look

like I mean Dan you probably know this better than I do but you write a spec uh you put it up on a forum post uh people comment on it and if the kind of the uh uh moderators of of the Forum think it's good enough uh they'll actually it might even be automatic they'll create a a a GI up like pull request with your standard in draft form and you're done then you gotta go and say okay this is a draft standard what do people think and then you got to be like get people to use it here right yeah in in my understanding most most of the time stand I would say what we call like standards are not actually set by what you would call some kind of like

standard setting body or process right like most of the actual deciding of what's going to be the standard I think and maybe this is a slightly hot take like doesn't happen for the people who are reviewing pull requests on the you know EIP or ERC uh example with Unis swap um before Unis swap uh V1 launched there was there were standards people had written these like ERC you know standards for here's how a a decentralized exchange the interface with a decentralized exchange should Implement and I think like he didn't looked at those was like I don't I don't

want to do it that way and then just did it did it this other way right and then I think with unisoft particularly with unisoft V2 ultimately just what what unisoft V2 ended up implementing became the standard for the for the interface and in general I think that's that's often the case is it's pretty rare to have a St uh a standard or an interface that's defined totally separately from the implementation I think in general it's the leading implementers of of an idea who ultimately are defining the standard and why does it get adopted it gets adopted because the the the top you know the best implementation happens to use that interface and then so others basically match it to that interface rather than because like some someone decided oh this is the standard that everyone should should abide by I think that makes sense of a development

perspective too totally you you you want the de the stuff to be developed by the people who are like actually building and figuring it out rather than by someone just sort of thinking abstractly about it yeah and we try to follow exactly that so like across as the highest volume intent-based bridging protocol we've got actual order flow we've actually been doing this in production for a while uh we're like okay let's what why do we want to make this a standard there's actually like sort of some business risk here too if we think about it um why do we want to make it a standard well and we like okay we want we don't think in ability is going to be solved by one protocol that actually seems I don't think that's quite right that's kind of like saying

you know one rollup ecosystem is going to solve eth scalability that wasn't the way it worked there was like many rollup ecosystems that worked uh to solve eth scalability under the rollup Centric road map so we're like okay let's make this into a standard that other people can build on top of and effectively share uh the solver Network that we've already built in order to get people like un swap X on board um and excited about it um and like we we'll be announcing more of this into into Devcon um but I think we have 30 teams supporting the standard now um including like optimism polygon uh scroll Linea uh there's a

couple others that I won't mention quite yet but like you've gotten pretty good buy in for it which feels like it's good for for theing feels like we're like hey here's a here's a reasonable way to to do this interrupt thing um and just out of curiosity like what's the reception been in general people been pretty much like Yep this makes sense we need this have you had to do any hardcore get your lobbying hat out and go bang it on some doors or what's the sales sort of process been like well kind of to Dan's point it's not like um it's not like we're starting from nothing we're like hey AC crossup is doing this intent based bridging thing it's fast and cheap uh we want to standardize this what do you do you support this and because we have

order flow because we're not just like starting from scratch people are kind of like yeah that makes sense let's let's do that um we're not really making a it's not a hard ask to be like do you think this is a good idea um and there's actually a way where it can go deeper so you know the the real interop nerd listeners uh of your pod will know that like different rollup ecosystems are working on their own native interop Solutions so the super chain talks about super chain native interop uh polygon has like egg layer for egg layer interop ZK Sync has elastic chain uh arbitrum has like chain clusters um and on one hand I thought like okay wait if I go

and talk to these guys about this standard for intense they're going to be like oh wait we've got our own native interupt thing for our ecosystem but that's not it's not comprehensive you know if you're an optimism chain you don't want to just talk to other optimism chains you want to talk to all the chains um too uh you need something that is homogeneous and um part of talking to the L2 ecosystems about this what they like about it is this intent order ticket is this very lightweight standard that sits a layer of abstraction that sits on top of all of these other interrupt techniques so it's fully compatible with like the optimism super

chain where optimism super chain actually makes intense and the standard better where I can use super chain native interop as the settlement contract to verify intense and settle them quicker um and so it just makes it super chain native interop makes intense cheaper um between two super chains so you kind of get like seamless upgradeability every time a new interrupt technique comes online you can just plug it in on the back end at this like settlement contract layer and the developers just keep writing intense the same way they just get cheaper that's super interesting yeah I did not understand that about the design at all but that makes a ton of sense then so I

I would be curious like okay so we're at this we're at this moment in time where we have these ux issues it feels like we have the shape of a solution what is the role of uh I mean i' would be curious both from The Joint Unis swap Swap and across perspective here like what a future you know like the like how tight is this integration are we expecting this this these types of collaborations to continue and then I guess each for you know Dan you and I spent an entire season talking about Unis swap it is progressed an enormous amount since that time we now have uni chain right which the long rumored uh uni chain that we have um and it feels like Unis swap is um I don't know if vertically integrating is the right word but trying

to own more of the the full stack in between the wallet and the front end now you've got your own sort of execution layer um and Unis swap X and yeah hard I would love to know what's what's next for across as well yeah I mean there's we we need Hayden to talk more about like Unis swaps plans um and you should get them on here to do that but I do think Unis swap wants to vertically integrate they want to have like a a ux they're big enough that like any problem for a user in the life cycle of using ethereum and Unis swap is their problem so if like if a user is going through and it's confusing as hell how they get assets to UNI chain that's their problem uh and they want to fix it so um yeah from my

perspective where uh where we're really aligned with the Unis swap team is like ethereum needs to feel unified in order for uni chain to be successful it needs to feel unified in its connection to other chains that kind of makes total sense um intents are the only architecture the only viable architecture that has this Tu sub two second experience between chains so like let's double down on this architecture uh let's define a standard and From unisoft perspective like let's use a cross uh because it's it's working and working well to do this uh this this this very fast seamless intent based bridging between Chans beautiful well we

will we have Hayden coming on uh with hosu in a couple of weeks um so yeah he was he had enough of me for he couldn't do two episodes so uh yeah I had to had to make the choice there but um Dan I don't know what you're uh at licensed to discuss about any Unis swap future plans or I mean frankly I just love your take on the whole unit chain in general because it's something yeah we talked around this a lot uh during our season that's right yeah so I think I think with uni chain it's the culmination of a lot of what we've talked about on this um on our seasons of the show and I think a lot about what Unis swap has been working toward in particular I think it's built largely around this concept of interrup ability and the idea

that um it should be as easy to swap on any chain basically as it is just to swap on the chain that you're currently on um and so given that I think it if you can solve that problem and I think across is a huge part of the way that that uh UD has figured out to help solve that problem um then it actually makes sense to basically try to aggregate as much liquidity as you can in one chain that's that's primarily designed for swapping um another topic I think that it's uh so interrup ability is a big part another one is Mev um and I think you know me has obviously been a huge part of of ethereum and of uh um unisoft work over the past five years um six years uh as well as work that optimism and Flash Bots have been doing and I

think uni chain is largely you this not the topic that we're here to talk about today but really designed around trying to figure out okay how do we actually um capture Mev for the user and the B the way that best actually benefits the the customer or the application rather than trying to capture as much as possible of it for the for the chain and so uni chain is very aligned I think uh because again it's being it's being designed and built by uh by Unis swap in collaboration with um optimism flash Bots it's very designed around how do we make this the ideal place to run a decentralized exchange which means not trying to maximize how much Mev gets captured by the by the uh L2 but rather actually returning it to the users or or to the application to uh to be properly

distributed and so I think that you know that's what motivated the their choices around Mev it's also what motivated the choice to use a crossability is just what actually is the best thing for the user experience um and yeah I think that's that's largely what's been what's motivated uni chain as well I think when you look at the amount of do of uh money that's been lost both to Mev on L1 and in base fee and paying eth uh terms of fee by Unis swap users I mean it's it's immense it's in the hundreds of millions of dollars um and so part of the goal of un is say okay let's actually recapture that for the user and provide somewhere where they can actually um save save all save on all that and get a much better user experience yeah the uh I I took

your recommendation I read your piece Priority Access is all you need so it's maybe a little bit beyond the scope of this podcast but uh I it makes an enormous amount of sense um right just ordering based the one sents t ldr is just ordering based on priority fees which is very difficult to do in an ethereum type setting just based on how many different proposers there are and some of the challenges there but especially leveraging the te setup of rollup boost and you know basically single sequencer suddenly those types of ordering rules are very simple and very intuitive you know that's right in fact it's out of the box is what all op stack chains do an OP stack sequencers so Bas already does this and yes the key idea of that uh post is that if a chain actually obeys these rules then it's

possible for an application to capture Almost 100% of the Mev uh in many for many types of Mev um and return it to the to the appropriate user and so some examples there is it can it can uh reduce the loss versus rebalancing of a um of an amm or it can um yeah capture the uh capture more value for someone using Unis swap X um and let the swapper get a better price or get better more efficiently routed anyway that's uh that's just that part of what I'm saying is that's how it was all Incorporated essentially into I think the design for uni chain and what um what uni chain is trying to do as was again this focus on interoperability um uh yeah some some key some key design philosophies there really like yeah goart sorry no I was just I was only gonna add like so Dan

elitzer uh put out the his blog post on predicting uni chain like two is years ago something like that two um and it's funny at that time I thought it was a horrible idea because I thought oh wait you're gonna have to have the user Bridge from whatever chain they're on to UNI chain Do a Swap and Bridge back and I was like that ain't GNA work right um and it's funny how it's evolved because now I do see that you do the intent thing you can internalize this we have the this intent architecture lets us actually do that fast and cheap um and when I when I was pushing Dan on this blog post whatever it was two years ago I'm like dude the bridging just isn't going to enable this uh and he's like it'll get better and you know he was

kind of right so thanks you yeah he was he was right at the end of the day yeah yeah yeah yeah I think what he was doing was daring you heart it's was like yeah it'll get better go do it um all right the maybe we can end on uh you know just on the subject of U so we've been focusing a lot on interop but there's another uh potential standard coming to ethereum se at 72 which is around account abstraction and this is something that's been in the works again for a really long period of time but you know it's the potential to transform like eoas into smart contract addresses and do unlock a whole bunch of cool ux features like you know allowing apps to pay for users and a whole bunch of cool stuff like that so yeah it feels

like that's one of the other Final Bosses here in terms of fixing some of the ux challenges for ethereum yeah maybe to give you some like let's maybe look at this very specifically from a cross chain interop perspective um so I have two chains uh let's make them A and B arbitrum and Bass Just A to B okay so arbitrum is my home chain as example I want to do something on bass I've never used Bass before um it would be very nice if I could like just send a message that could get executed on bass I just want to like have a message that that works on bass um and I can't do that without some form of account abstraction if my my account

on base is an eoa so it's a it's a standard ethereum account uh I don't have any ability to execute on that chain uh unless I send a transaction directly to that chain chain um and so 7702 which is a flavor of we'll use four-digit numbers so 3074 was the original version that vitalic updated to 7702 earlier this year and there's another standard called 4337 these are all account abstraction standards that let you uh e execute code like send a message uh to an an ethereum address and execute it even if uh it's an eoa that before these standards requires a

transaction Dan did I get that right do you agree with me so far yeah I think so yeah okay so what happens now so if we have account abstraction and we have this fast intent-based bridging what if you like plug the two together so now I could be on arbitrum and I have funds on arbitrum and I want to do some action on base where I have no funds no nothing but I can now sign a message a 7702 account abstract C message I can sign a message and I can then create an intent that says my intent is go execute this message on base and here are the funds to do it on arbitrum and so now I have a remote control from arbitrum where I can

do any action on base without me actually having any funds there um and I think that seems really powerful and really cool it's super powerful and cool and the I mean this already exists in a mini form where if it any funds that you have in your coinbase account you can use on base like that it's just cool to see this in a more decentralized context because as much as we love coinbase and as much as we love base you know it it also is a you know at least coinbase is a centralized company and I would love to see some of the more decentralized solutions of the world compete so I feel like if anything that enables that type of functionality is super super positive yeah Dan what are your takes on this I haven't talked to you about this

that much yeah I mean I I'm in general I'm excited about especially when you put it this way and I think one funny thing is when you start thinking this abstractly um you real like oh everything is actually fits into this framework right and so like even single chain account abstraction for example right it's just a swap where it's like I'm just paying you in order to pay my gas um or do this or do this thing right and then multi and then multi-chain and of course you you can get a little bit too far into um out into space when you think like that and of course it's important to basically then try to like build one concrete thing with it um but I do think uh yeah like actually turns out all these all these things you know like and what is the what's the other

four 4337 or something right like all these all these other Setters as well like end up tying into the same thing people have been um that like we're sort of all all yearning for this particular capability um across with a bunch of different applications um for so for inter for decks we've been hoping for it but I think like ordinary you know like people focus on wallets have also been coming up the the same thing and then I think nice thing is we're sort of starting to um yeah like find here here's the right S I think 7702 was like quite possibly one of the key ingredients you need to actually do that um that maybe just like solves it across a whole uh a whole SWA of those so yeah I find it pretty exciting yeah it's sort of again when you zoom out and make this

abstract okay so going back to the start of the episode or the Pod um ethereum solves scalability in a very scalable Way by horizontally scaling by adding all these chains problem they're fragmented not connected okay how do we solve that problem let's define a common standard that says I here's what I have on chain a here's what I want to do on chain B right and let's have a permissionless network of thirdparty solvers that compete to fill these things now if the thing I want to do on chain B is any action that I can Define via account abstraction and 7702 okay that does feel like I've unified this whole thing and now from whatever chain I'm on where I have

assets I have a remote control to do whatever I want on any other chain and if that's fast and cheap sweet we have a unified ethereum that uh also has immense scalability right um we have the building blocks just gotta like kind of push them together and get it done har can I ask you and Dan for you as well I mean so I'll show your Devcon panel that you're doing with um falik and Jesse from bass and some the op arbit and optimism folks which I'm very excited for but what what do you get the sense is the feeling in terms of you know falik and these people that are building these Solutions like are they like do they think that ethereum

has this big ux problem does does it feel like everyone is kind of united in solving this like what is the actual feeling on the ground from your Vantage Point in terms of what are the big problems that they see how are they prioritizing like I would just be curious to understand how they're thinking about this for large so okay I don't I cannot speak for vitalik right he's like the god with a brain bigger than all of ours combined but um I do think he's on fire right now I do think a way he's in war mode which you know was it it's Kyle that said vitalic not a wartime guy I don't whatever I think vitalic in war mode in a good way um and I think he's very I think he's

very pragmatic too um and so he's like look we had to solve scalability they came up with a very elegant and highly scalable architecture to do it um now we're on to the next problem um and the next problem I think is make this feel like one network so when when I have chatted with him and again I'm no no vitalic Whisperer but when I've chatted with him he is very focused on this um this interoperability problem and how we can in a way that doesn't sacrifice the ideals that ethereum upholds like decentralization permission list that kind of stuff how can we actually make this feel unified um and I think he he thinks this is a practical solution that

particularly if you have a settlement contract that is trust minimized that is IND introducing no new trust assumptions this Fe feels like the biggest downside you have is that you are now uh you are riant on this thirdparty solver Network to do this these cross-chain interactions um but like it's not a downside you know ethereum itself is reliant on uh validators to go and validate blocks like you you have offchain actors to make a blockchain run there's nothing wrong with saying you have offchain actors to connect blockchains that's like a completely valid statement provided that those offchain actors are permissionless anyone can do it and are properly

decentralized this is a big theme of um I remember of our season was that the deck season was that if you can make some turn something into a competition where anybody can compete uh globally and just like you just give you give the award to the best the person who did best um then like it just solves a lot of problems and the outcome may end up actually being um uh that a few people end up doing um uh doing most of the work or some people have an advantage in it but ultimately it ends up the out it's so much better basically than a situation where um even if you have like you know sort of decentralization but you don't actually have competition um that yeah I think that I think it's worth it and same with I feel exactly the same about these cross chain fillers

as you actually just end up seeing a market will just grow up out of um you know out of the ground when you sort of lay the right groundwork for it and set set things up for it and it's just sort of like beautiful to see just these Nanobots come out of the woodwork to um to sort of accomplish these tasks for you and it works if you set up the game properly yeah okay and this is where I like jump up and down and what Dan and I have spent like years and years getting excited about is like when you think from a mechanism design perspective let's define the rules of the game like on chain here are the rules of the game they're they're they're anyone can see them they're totally verifiable here are the rules of the game if you design the

rules correctly anyone can play the game and get to the good outcome right and I think that is so powerful and so cool and so we're saying okay for the intent architecture here are the rules of the game for how you fill these cross chain intents anyone can play uh we have remarkable diversification and like I'm shocked at how many like solvers a cross has today I think we've got like 30 and no one solver does more than 10% of the volume there's like real diversification and these guys come out of nowhere I don't know who they are know they're like Discord handles um and it's not wintermute there's like this meme that it's like wintermute doing all this winter mute doesn't do anything on our

Network as far as I know um and uh I think it's again it's pretty cool that you have this permissionless game that anyone can play that is hyper competitive it's good for the user do you think that the solver market right now is there any like when you look at the ctra market I feel like it kind of started as this um you know very grass like a couple dudes in their mom's basement like you know sniping sandwiches or whatever and then it then it sort of matured and it became um there were kind of these more integrated Builder Searchers are we at a I I'm I'm trying to get a sense of the crossover in between the solver market and the Searcher Market in general like are

there parallels to draw in between those two markets are they similar actors they completely different like what do those two markets look like I think the type of people that want to be Searchers uh would like what what is their motivation they're literally people that like see the rules of the game and want to play they want to play to win that game right so it does make a lot of sense that they'll that across or intent based solvers are going to become more professionalized to me that that makes sense um um uh and I think that's a good thing as long as it as long as there's still competition uh I don't think anyone has an advantage here like any advantage that gets discovered by a solver is

going to be replicated by others very quickly and so you really are just gonna have constant competition that just helps make this thing cheaper and faster for users um and Mike like we've seen it in our own uh our own like across history you know the protocol has largely been unchanged for two and a half years but we are way faster and way cheaper than we were two and a half years ago and that's because the solver network has gotten more competitive and figured out all these shortcuts and there's still a lot of room to go um so yeah I I get kind of I just think it's kind of

bullish awesome I love it um I pumped we said we were going to keep this at the around the 50 minute Mark and we're we're nearing up on that uh har I know you're going to Devcon Dan are you are you heading across to Bangkok I'll be there um yeah so was that an AC cross pun was that an a cross pun no I actually just uh I'm such a I'm such a supporter that yeah I'm adjusting my language right no but I was not a not an intentional one but um I can claim some credit but it should be fun I'm pumped to go this year I don't know when the last time you guys were in Bangkok but I think it's been never been I'm excited it's a cool City I went there for a month after school I graduated from college so a long time ago um but should

be a blast it's going to be fun I think people are kind of like there's this weird negativity around ethereum right now that I think I I really do think Devon's actually gonna be pretty bullish and people are gonna be like holy we built cool stuff um we should be proud uh yeah we got problems um but like we also have the building box to solve them you know let's go do there is a just as an organizer of conferences there's a perfect one toone in negative inverse relationship in between when Vibes are good and when you should go to conferences you should literally only go to conferences when Vibes are bad um and just avoid them when they're good because it's going to be a complete waste of time you're gonna get mobbed with a bunch of people and yeah it's I'm I'm I know that there's a lot of

negative sentiment in ethereum but I think a lot of it is just I don't know ethereum became a little bit of the incumbent and you know people like to take pot shots of the incumbent I don't know I just think this to will come to pass like it's still where most of the money and the developer energy and all that stuff is going in so I it'll be a good Devcon here so yeah all right fellas I think oh I must I was gonna say see you there Mike it'll be fun see you there man it'll be fun all right guys appreciate you both hopping on and uh yeah just blessed yeah we also under 50 minutes we kept it short um that's a shocking honestly so yeah a record I think for us yeah all right see you guys take care