We're getting rid of Bridges! by Robin Roy

Transcript

All right. Um, hello everyone. Um, I'm Robin, developer relations at Avail. Um, today I'm Yeah, today I'm going to be talking about well, how we're planning to get rid of bridges. So, we're we're getting rid of bridges. Um, bold statement. How do we do that? Right. So before we uh talk about that let's uh first go through what uh aail has done and what that journey has looked like and why we're going to do what we're doing right so aail uh launched its DA layer in July 24 2024 uh it launched with a DA throughput of 2

MB per block and we've subsequently uh now upgraded that to 4 MB per block that's twice as much data throughput uh that you can have as demand increased we increased our uh data throughput as well and now we've uh got a progressive road map to reach 10 GB blocks with 16.67 67 GB per second data throughput. Um, and this is for our DA layer, right? And DA layer, if you are unsure about what that means, it's basically just an infrastructure layer for roll-ups to scale beyond execution. They need to store that data somewhere to uh verify settle uh the transactions and

stuff. All right, so the ALG layer launched. Um we've got uh a multiple number of chains ranging from lens, suon, skate and many more live on a day mainet already. We've got 50 plus rollups planning to deploy on day this year and we have 21.29 GB data posted on mainet currently and it's keeping on growing. Um that's great right? Um we've solved DA uh we've solved scalability through DA but with the rollup centric road map um and by solving scalability we encounter another problem the status quo

of web 3 is fragmented um as we enabled multiple different rollups L2s and L3s to basically launch and row uh we've started seeing fragmentation. This is a you know screenshot from L2B uh where we can see tons of L2s and L3s. We can see tons of bridges because each time you want to you know use a particular chain you have to now find a bridge that supports this particular chain go to their UI bridge your tokens wait for the funds to reach there all of that good stuff. I mean, not really good. Um, the typical crosschain experience, it's

terrible UX, right? You've got to, like I said, you've got to go to a bridge, lock your funds there, mint the funds on the other chain. Um, once you're done with it, you can bring it back to the other chain. It's still terrible UX. You are unsure about uh, you know, how to go about it. Sometimes um, you cannot just go and use the app that you want to right from the get-go. you have to go you you are forced to go to a third party platform to actually bridge uh your tokens, right? So we at a whale as we enable scalability through TA, we asked the question, what if what if users could interact with L1 or L2 applications or any other L1 or L2? What if interoperability did not

require any trusted middleman and bridging is no longer needed. Quite interesting, right? And most of all, what if it is all verifiable by anyone using ZK proofs? Basically, can we make it trust minimized? So, I've been blabbering about all of the whatifs. Now, you might be asking how? Well, that's where Avail Nexus comes into play. Avail Nexus is a trust optimized blockchain interoperability protocol that is part of the AI stack. You can consider it as a precursor to chain abstraction. So there are a couple of

parts to the Nexus component of a veail. The core part of the Nexus runtime is a permissionless verification hub that unifies chains by enabling the verification of L1 or L2s with single aggregated proof. So what you can see here on the left side of the uh image here is that you've got all these chains which need one is to one bridges to each other chain which creates a very complicated situation as you can see and with nexus that comes in between you are able to have a unifying framework or a middleware protocol that kind of helps you communicate with all these other chains with ease. And of course, Avail Nexus works with the AI DN uh chain that it allows

you to seamlessly integrate with not only a chains but with any other chain that you know L1 or L2 regardless of the D layer but all of it lives right on the avail chain itself. So you can look at this architecture that kind of kind of breaks down how the how this would look like. You have all these chains chain A, chain B, chain C up to N chains that is powered by avail Nexus. U and you've got three different parts or three different kinds of apps that Nexus provides for a developer to basically optimize for what exactly that

they need. And all of this lives on top of your BGA layer, right? The ZK interrop app is basically a cryptographic u security runtime. It basically is what you call what I just talked about as the Nexus core or the Nexus runtime. It basically allows you to aggregate the proofs of execution of all these different chains or different apps and aggregate it and be able to prove it. uh prove the execution of that. This makes it very trust minimized and also allows you to have lifeline verification. A veail has this entire P2P lifeline network that currently only uh samples and verifies consensus and TA. But for

the Zinrop app of Avail Nexus, you are you are in addition to that able to get security guarantees by allowing the light line to verify this aggregate approved from the Zein prop app. In addition to that, we've also got three different uh uh two different paths. So, if you want a more hardware specific security uh for your interrop apps, you can choose the TE path and then you've got the OP or the optimistic uh path that is powered by crypto security, right? And the cool stuff about this is we've this optimistic nexus or the OP Nexus is more of like the traditional intentbased uh me uh in intentbased

interroperability as you would probably know and whereas the Z interrop and the T interrop is more about the message passing interrop that you might have heard of right and this means we're trying to combine both the worlds of both message passing and intentbased architectures um and make it verifiable as well at the same time. The optimistic route also comes with comes with dis dispute resolution although it does um not have the full lifeline verification that you would probably have if you use zk path right uh so that's fine right because the op the the optimistic or the opex is that what we call it will be ver will be verified or the execution of

that would be verified via the zk drop app but so you still get some guarantees from that as So let's just look or dive into what the Nexus runtime would kind of uh look like. So basically we've got the avail network and uh on top of that you've got this PTP layer of avail LC network or the light line network and what they do is that it can basically pick up the headers of you know the different chains and also verify the ZK proofs zk proofs uh from Nexus. Um each chain in this case or each application

in this case would be uh would be attached to Nexus via Nexus adapter wherein you you basically provided the proof the state truth and transactions route and it's all stored on the Nexus runtime and anyone can come in and verify that right um so in this way with Nexus act acting as this middleware chain one and chain two are able to communicate with each other in uh in a very magnificent way. And one thing that is enabled by this exe by this aggregation or this ZK nexus if you want to call it is basically contingent execution via Nexus which basically means that you can in a sense now

program if there if this then that kind of interactions u within your applications because now you just have to verify the execution of a chain of an action. that has taken on another chain and you can if you are able to verify that that happened or did not happen you can execute some kind of action on your own chain right so let's look at this example right here for um a simple NFT app chain and a payment app chain that you can have right you've got the user and the user goes to this NFT app chain and initiates a buy order they lock up their NFT and a payment request is now made on the payment app chain

because well the NFT app chain does not have the capabilities or it's not optimized for payments. So you want to have like a Visa type payment app chain that can handle that for you. So the user makes a payment on the payment app chain. the payment inclusion is now approved is now approved on Nexus and once the NFT app chain gets this proof of payment uh inclusion or non-inclusion proof so if the payment was not made or of bas or basically uh the payment timed out uh you can get the proof of that as well so if that's the case you can basically confirm or cancel the NFT transfer right but if suppose that the payment did take place you now get to confirm that NFT

the transfer. So you've made the payment and now you can basically confirm the transfer and uh give the NFT to the user. So this would be very similar to our current web two like experiences wherein you go to Amazon you pick what what you like you are and when you click buy you are redirected to this payment provider or a payment aggregator like PayPal and then you put in your details and PayPal sends these details of Visa which then authenticates it and then the Visa then talks to the bank networks and they authenticate it and approve the fund transfer and all of that stuff. But eventually at the end of the day you as a user do not know that this is happening behind the scenes. You just

click buy, you make the payment request or basically you do the payment and you get the items, right? The order is placed, you get the items. And this is currently very hard to do in the current web3 landscape. But with a veil you and this contingent execution uh dream that we have we can make it a reality and we have made it a reality. So uh instead of your Amazon you can probably replace that with an NFT marketplace or NFT app chain and you can have it be connected to the veil Nexus make the payment on another chain and still get your NFT or

any other item that you would like to buy. Right. And finally, this is not just uh a dream. This is a reality. And one thing that I want to also kind of show is not only are we like showing or like are we working on the ZK nexus which I just was talking about about the contingent execution and all of that because there is the bottleneck of ZK uh proving we also have this optimistic route. So if you've got high liquidity chains and you want to uh do actions on these chains in a verifiable manner but you don't want to wait for the ZK proving we have the optimistic route

which is uh secured by cryptoeconomic guarantees and through this optimistic route we are essentially going to be providing you with a chainless experience essentially right uh basically horizontally scaling your uh apps to use any chain or borrow liquid basically use liquidity from any chain to power the app that you're using right now. So I'll just uh move the next slide would be a video which would kind of showcase how that would work.

[Music] right? So in that video what you just saw was a user wanted to deposit their funds into a right. So most of you might be aware of what a is if you you don't it's basically a liquidity protocol where you can deposit or borrow funds uh in a collateralized manner. Uh it is one of the largest liquidity pro protocols out there in web3 today. And the thing is it a supports a bunch of markets. It

supports markets in multiple different chains. But now the issue was in the video I wanted to um deposit my funds into the base market but I did not have funds on the base market. I had my funds on a couple of different other chains like probably polygon or arbitum or optimism doesn't matter what chain. Um now if I wanted to maybe le uh you know make use of the greater API that was being provided in the base market I have to in the traditional way go to a bridging protocol um you know select my networks bridge my tokens from polygon to base then once wait for it to confirm

then go to probably arbitum and then bridge my USDC from arbitum to base and you know a couple of other transactions if I have more chains to actually bridge funds from. And in this video basically uh similar stuff we had three chains that were being used uh we bridge funds from Polygon and BNB I think in the video and we bridged that to base and what would have taken otherwise three to four different transactions to actually do this. We did this in just one transaction. We did not have to leave the platform that we wanted to use which was our way. We did not go to a third party uh platform like um I mean any of

the bridging protocols that you have out there and you had no UX difficulties. You just have to click supply and approve the transaction and it happened. That is a Nexus effect and we will be launching uh a developer SDK for this soon. Um the video that I showed was a demo of what could be possible and yeah that's what we're doing and that's how we're getting rid of bridges. Uh this is a veil. Um I'm Robin. If you have any questions I'll be here for a small amount of time. You can reach out to me.

Thank you.