Relayers as a UX Solution for Fragmented Ecosystems

Transcript

all right hello hello can you can everyone hear me perfect awesome all right everyone thank you so much um for coming to the talk um so yeah i'm really excited to be here in paris um i think it's the first time been here like 10 years and super excited to sort of talk about what we're doing up by economy so um so topic um for today is really talking about what we've been doing um for really for the past two years um and really sort of just you know sharing our learnings and and really what where we see going um when it comes to sort of how the ux will look like in this space um especially within the context of relays within a multi-chain world um so a quick sort of background about

who we are um so you know we we came together as a team around two years ago where we were just focused on how we can make the web 3 experience as frictionless as possible because i'm sure you guys are aware you know that everything is just clunky it's cumbersome it's just you know it's very hard to onboard new users and even you know as being a dj um or you know someone who's very crypto native it's still very hard to you know do so many things um and so for us you know we've been you know we we so our thesis is that yep the future is multi-chain um you know when you look at traditional web 2 when you remove friction from from anyone it really expands markets i mean that's super important and that's also the case that we're seeing here in the

web 3 world as well and of course you know bet you know having better tools always enhances um innovation so um really quickly i mean what are we seeing in this ecosystem um you know gas is still you know this sort of complicated um thing that many end users especially new end users still don't understand and it's still sort of a you know a thorn in the space we're seeing sort of all these amazing scaling solutions um and all these sort of different bridges but some are still inefficient we're still sort of seeing delays um you know whether it's you know a one hour delay or seven day delay when it comes to exits and deposits and also fragmented liquidity now we're

going to have sort of all these different chains and there'll be so much liquid you know there'll be liquidity on these different chains but it's you know it's it's kind of fragmented and so how can you really um um sort of um bring them together and so the end result here is that there's always going to be extreme friction for you know um daps who just want to sort of do their thing and and for the end users as well um and so uh really what for us you know why are relays important and um you know i also cover some use cases as well so you know for us um when we look at um relays they sort of they serve as an important function particularly in the sense where um we sort of we split them into two the first is the abstraction part or the

delegation part so um the idea is that a relayer would do something on behalf of the end user um and the other part the second part is that relay would just you know relay information from you know one place to another and so it's very useful for sort of you know communication and cross-chain communication which we'll talk about later on but what we're seeing is that you know um lots of the use cases right now is for onboarding and improving ux um and it's really interesting to see the different use cases as well between you know a single blockchain level and also on a multi-chain level um and then again how how they could interact um so let's look at some of these cases on a single blockchain level um

so of course you know the first one like lots of people aware about is you know easier onboarding where you could have sponsored transactions and so this makes a lot of sense you know um on on chains like polygonite or xdi where developers are able to sponsor the gas views for their end users um it's sort of dissimilar or equivalent to sort of paying aws fees right um on a monthly basis and so um this definitely makes sense for low fee chains on ethereum not so much um but this is where we realize that hey on ethereum you know you could potentially pay the the gas fees in the tokens that you are actually dealing with right so imagine

you deposit into a contract you deposit usdc you pay the gas fees in that usdc and so here the relay as well is sort of um enabling that um so a quick sort of overview on on sort of how this would work you know what's a relay would be sort of this off-chain component they would take in the transaction parameter and the signature from the end user and then they would sort of push that transaction on chain um other interesting use cases of relays and we see them in different contexts particularly within sort of the xerox protocol and that is very um highly specialized for sort of um sort of their liquidity protocol which

is really interesting i'm sure you guys are aware of mev and sort of what flashbots are doing in the space and it's it's interesting to see how they're using relays as well um to sort of bundle transactions um to to sort of um you know to to to maximum extract value in in this sense um and of course tornado cache as well um they also use relays um but in this sense to sort of preserve privacy and so it's really cool to see like how you know the same piece of technology has been used for a wide variety of use cases um and what about on a multi-shade level so you know one thing that we realized was that um it was actually pretty easy for um a dac 1l2 to enable um their end users

to stay connected on their metamask wallet on the main ethereum without having to change the rpc endpoint and this is really interesting because again you know this would basically mean that the end user would just basically able to sort of sign the transaction and then um so they could basically do anything that they want on on the dap um and so this this connectivity um is uh is something that we're actually doing with one of the daps that we we work with which is called perpetual protocol so it's it's really interesting how how that use case has formed one interesting um sort of thing that we'll look into later on in this talk is

about cross chain transfers and so what's really interesting here is is um you know these relayers can essentially um you know transmit a certain piece of arbitrary smart contract call which would tell you know um one contract hey this thing happened on one chain and therefore execute um this method on on the other so we are actually building use cases for this which which i'll cover um in a bit um and then what's really interesting is is that you know um once you sort of establish this cross-chain transfer capability this could then be generalized to actually having you know smart contract calls um across a number of different um a number of different uh use cases and

so this could be for for arbitrage use cases it could be for you know dowels and governance um and it could be reused for anything that has a use case for for adapt that needs to do things on a costume basis um and then again you know as you have you know composability in um smart um in protocols within the same chain what's also interesting is seeing how would aggregation work in a multi-chain context right and then we also see relays here being able to sort of transmit data at scale um for for this use case as well um and so we've we're already talking to projects um like there's this one project that's you know trying to

sort of be that aggregator for sort of cross chain transfers um so again that that's a really interesting use case too um and so um let's see how sort of we are sort of what what which part of the stack that we're really focused on and what ux problems we're solving on on layer 1 and layer 2. so i'm going to go over three things a's enabling a gaseous experience b it's enabling simpler gas payments and easier connectivity between l1 l2 and then the third is is the cross chain transfer piece um which i i kind of wish i had uh you know a demo already but it um hopefully we could actually release the product

soon so i i didn't have it with me today um so the first is um enabling gases experiences so you know we have this thesis that you know you know polygonal x die these you know would be sort of side chains that are you know that would get so much demand especially based on sort of you know the fact that compared to ethereum gas fees are cheap as well as that it's just easy for developers to just sort of deploy um and so right now you know we processed over sort of 3.7 million gases transactions across all the chains that we support and three million of those are all on polygon actually and it's really interesting to see how many users there are on polygon itself because of the fact that

you know developers there really understand the necessity for easier ux um and so um they sponsor the gas fees for for their end users um we've got yep 30 live integrations which i'll um sort of walk through in a bit and uh uh and fought for at least how we look at so relays what's great about them is that in this particular use case they are non-custodial and trust us by design because we cannot change any of the transaction parameters and we cannot fake the signature right um the only trust assumption is is that we are sort of responsible for putting for pushing the um for pushing the transaction on chain so

i mean this is just sort of a um the initial ecosystem i guess that we have um of the projects that we're working on across um you know d5 applications nft applications gaming um and others and we are deployed across a number of chains on both mainnet um and testnet um so yeah so this is sort of a growing ecosystem so one of them is uh zedron zedron i'm sure you guys are aware yesterday raised um sort of a really big round and they've been using us since day one so all the transactions that happen on zed run all the breeding or the betting all the races that's all going through by economy and so they've enabled that easier ux for their end users that's enabled them to get sort of to the next level

all right so i'm going to sort of quickly go through this just because of um of time um so again the the second part of how we're enabling um sort of a better ux um is uh really a enabling simply gas payments um and an easy connectivity between r1 l2 so the first part of this is network agnostic transactions and again this is sort of mentioned earlier here is that um again the end user doesn't need to switch their rpc um to to um to the the chain that the the dap is deployed on and so um this is really interesting because again like we're here all for ethereum and then it's easy for end users on their

metamask or or um on other wallets to just um to basically connect by the ethereum wallet and execute transactions now this is sort of limited to some use cases which we're sort of still exploring how to how to generalize it but we have a couple of projects which which are using this basic feature um and again the second part of this is paying the gas fees in and sort of different tokens we're actually going to go live with idle finance um who are going to be implementing sort of the you know they'll be the first project implementing this where you know any deposit into the idle finance platform and the gas fees are sort of payable in in in the token you're depositing so we

we actually think this is going to be such a big use case in in the future you know wallets will enable it dapps will enable it and it's just sort of a current you know um sort of um short-term um problem that this industry faces um now the third thing that that we've been working on um quite recently um is um especially since we've been talking a lot of developers um especially on polygon as well they've been complaining how end users cannot you know withdraw deposit money very quickly um and so you know we've been thinking how can we just enable this to sort of make it very easy for for for end users and so you know for us um we you know we thought about this

problem deeply and we have built something we call hyphen so hyphen is an instant crosston transfer service where end users could easily transfer their you know usdc and or any erc20 token from l1 to polygon or the other chains that will be supporting very quickly and very cheaply and so the way we do this is that we'd be sort of having liquidity for contracts on both sides of the chain and essentially pull that liquidity from yield aggregators or you know liquidity pools such as you know curve rv or we just bring our own liquidity as well and so then what we'd have in the middle is a sort of relayer that executes

um this sort of cross-chain um contract call and so right now we actually have have hyphen in mainnet um sort of production we're starting currently into i'm testing it and turning in the team and this is a transfer i did a couple of days ago where i sent 241 usdt from polygon to ethereum and the transfer was completed in in six seconds um so you could see the amount depositors two for one the amount received was 231 dollars because of the fees um so here um uh and like here we're really optimizing for sort of for speed um and i know some of you might ask like what's the trust assumptions here so

right now we are in this sort of semi-centralized state where sort of we believe in progressive decentralization um and sort of collecting feedback um um in production and so um and this sort of goes back to sort of where we're heading right um and you know hopefully very soon like next week we'll be sort of uh releasing our uh sort of um our funding announcement whereby we'd sort of be sharing that we're going to be building a sort of multi-chain relay protocol which is going to be permissionless decentralized and we'd want as much parts with we oh thank you we'd allow participation in in all forms of um in in in all forms so that's

in especially in sort of liquidity providers who'd be able to enable these cross-chain transactions and so you know we for us you know we've we've always been sort of a project that has thought about you know being product first and then sort of um decentralizing as we go along and so you know we we really believe that as we build up this multichain really a protocol it would enable all these different use cases that we just talked about um at uh you know at least at a trustless um level and so over here you know we'll be able to um like essentially you know provide that sort of primitive that allows for cross-chain communication um which would sort of enable sort of a

better ux that that we believe will um sort of help scale this industry and move forward so this is sort of a um a quick overview of how we um sort of think about our transaction stack um and so you know we we really think that um there could be so many use cases that that will be built on on top of our um on top of our protocol we will be releasing q4 sort of a roadmap and how the architecture would look like and we'll be releasing a view on white paper as well hopefully very soon as well so i know that um the team from eip3074 is going to be speaking i think after this or later on

um but this is you know for us important considerations for the future because right now um if you know if you're a developer using bi economy um you would have to um integrate or basically bring in eip2001 um and integrate into your smart contract um before sort of you know you could execute these meta transactions um and there's this really interesting sort of eip called 374 um whereby you know you could whereby this will be how there will be a protocol level change i mean the the guys will explain it um in in the next talk but it's it's really interesting because it it could essentially help us make the developer experience way easy to basically facilitate um these same

transactional use cases and again like one of the biggest pain points is the approved functionality on on ethereum and so that could easily be rid away as well um and again this i'm i'm really interested here sort of the the future of 3074 as well because um you know we'll see when it will be live we don't know what's going to happen there's a lot of trust assumptions there as well um so i'm i'm keen um to um to explore that um more as as the the afternoon goes by thank you for listening um follow us on twitter um comment our discord channel and if you you know if you're a dab and you'd like to saw more please just

come talk to me after this after this presentation thank you any questions no question thank you [Applause]