Is Blended Execution the Missing Link for dApps? | Dino & Stephy

Transcript

hey everyone Santi and I have been talking about salana a lot recently and we're excited to have a salana sponsor of Empire marinade marinade is a staking protocol on salana and the only stake pool that delivers autore rebalancing me rewards and automatic downside protection with their new protected staking rewards optimize your soulle stake with marinade by hitting the link in the show notes big thanks to marinade we'll talk more about them later in the show this episode is brought to you by Avalanche Avalanche is a leading network of blockchains giving some of the world's largest financial institutions new use cases and business models while leveraging completely customizable infrastructure check them out it's core.

apppp slcover you can explore avalanche's subnet ecosystem at core. appd Discover I was playing around earlier today really cool this episode is brought to you by mantle mantle is an L2 backed by over a $4 billion treasury obviously one of the largest in the industry they recently launch launch their airdrop program called the reward station to distribute both pre-sale token allocations or listed tokens to MNT holders who stake their MNT mantle has nailed their Rewards program recently would highly encourage folks to check out the mantle Rewards program at mantle.

XYZ rewards station hi everyone welcome back to Empire we have two very special guests uh you know we have Stephie and Dean do o uh from fluent Dino is a co-founder CEO Stephie is a CEO um and I think this would be a great episode we're going to talk about um they just rolled out something really interesting called Blended execution environment but uh when I first thought about bringing these guys on the Pod um first of all I'm an investor so full disclosure uh obviously biased but I I think uh you know there's been a lot of chatter um you know over the last couple years around these different execution environments different VMS we've had multiple people on the PA talking about

different tradeoffs and when I think of someone who's at a very interesting vantage point that can talk about all the different tradeoffs and is is really Dino and when I first had a conversation with him last year um I found him to be extremely knowledgeable about just historically what has happened in crypto someone that has paid a lot of attention um you know at the you know first in ethereum and then started to pay attention into other ecosystems as well and so I think this episode would be really great to talk about the different execution environments and then ultimately you know what fluent is building and this Blended execution environment which I think is coming at a really interesting time so welcome both excited to have you on thank you thank you good to be here yeah than here yeah

so maybe Dino seie why don't you uh get started with intros and then we'll go from there um sure yep um as Santi said um Dino one of the co-founders of uh fluent and we are building the first Blended execution Network and uh Steph is a CEO of COO of uh of of fluent yeah we'll start with the status quo I mean the the way we've seen things historically is um you know these execution environments have been built and and again what this could be like a L1 L2 L3 um any uh any execution environment um the way we've seen them build so far has been in what we'd call U sing the single execution Paradigm and so the way we Define single execution networks is um you know a

network that support for um apps from one VM Target so like very simple like one VM this could be the evm this could be the svm this could be the move VM um it doesn't really matter but like think of like an execution layer that supports one of them um and uh what we've found and and historically this has really just been the the evm right I mean over the past few years there's just been like a ton of evm l2s that have like popped up all over the place um but they largely kind of look similar um and what we've what we is I mean this is clearly like limiting right like you can um evm has certain technical limitations that people love to point out and like we we certainly have seen those as well um and um and even like on the on the language

side right like you can only deploy solidity smart contracts Viper Smart contracts and those two things can kind of like natively interoperate but you can't really you know benefit from any other um libraries in in other languages you can't have Smart contracts in any other languages it's you know people are working on kind of like changing the evm to support like things like paralyzation but like by default that has just like not been the case um so what have so what have you seen you've seen over the past year there'd be a you know especially a lot of excitement around um you can call them alt VMS you can call them nextg VMS but things like the svm things like the move VM have got gained a lot of steam and for good reason too right like U people know uh the svm for kind of like parallelization that

obviously supports like rust as a language um and there are also I mean that's gotten popular so there're also not only technical attributes that are interesting but also I'll say like ecosystem or go to market attributes that are interesting like just like a slew of other like tools and and things like that um and then the uh you know move obviously has like formal verification which is interesting for like security purposes and so you see more and more of these like VMS popping up um but the the problem is that like in a single execution environment you you have to make this tradeoff like I as a developer if I'm a Dap developer like I'm innovating on some some new type of decks or some like social f app or whatever I have to make the choice do I deploy on one of like the evm l2s and

get all of kind of like the network effects so it's like okay this is great if I have a problem I can I can type it in a chat GPT like I can I can kind of copy paste some of like The Primitives smart contracts and build upon those the quick reiteration Loop uh huge user base wallet Integrations but I cannot use any of kind of the new functionality of like the the the nextg VMS that are popping up so like what do I do um obviously if I care enough about that functionality I'm placing a pretty big bet because I have to build something new and I have to take a bet on this ecosystem um and I don't get any of the network effects like I hope they succeed and I hope they get escape velocity So like um this has clearly been like a problem over the

past year and what we've seen is like the alt VMS become more and more desirable uh by developers and so what do people naturally do they say okay like it it's not a totally um novel idea to be able to say like let me just try to get the best of both worlds but like it it's the way that people have approached it so far that we've kind of found suboptimal or people like in in our view fundamentally are just like taking these two different like VM or more different VM environments and trying to kind of like make them as interoperable as possible um but if you don't architect that from the ground up in a way that actually makes the experience good it gets clunky and then people don't use it so I mean there's been a few different approaches that um that actually Steph maybe maybe you want

to like talk to but um fundamentally we do see these as like two different environments two different single execution environments either being like stacked on top of each other or like put next to each other they're different approaches but maybe stuff you could talk a little bit more to that yeah sure um so basically these evm plus networks or any network that tries to combine multiple VM most of the solutions involve um actually having two different like States so what does that actually mean in practice it often means that like let's say it's it's an svm Network work and you want to also support evm on top of that so in addition to contract and Salon arrest you want to also support contracts and solidity what ends up happening is that like you have your svm down here and you have contracts

like salonic contracts here and you have like a proxy Network which is the evm network up here and so generally what happens is you'll have to have as a user you'll somewhat Bridge into that Network you'll have a separate wallet a separate native token and in effect although you know everything eventually does you know make it into the same blocks like of the overarching network like the user experience is completely fragmented into two separate State environments so you the network does support multiple VMS but not in a seamlessly interoperable way so at fluent you know our our journey was okay we want to support zkm we also want to support the evm and able to have that you know those Network effects bring in

like or sorry solidity developers and things like this but we found it to be an unacceptable tradeoff that it would effectively be two separate networks so we thought thought to look deeper how can we get both of these networks and put them on a shared State environment such that as a user I get to use you know one native token one wallet of my choice um and as a developer I don't have to like think about the additional complexities and you know have these two separate environments effectively acting as one um in doing so we also notice that in our design it's actually extensible so we first started with you know wasm and evbm but then we're like oh hey look we can also add svm we can also add movm and event effectively have them all like live in this one shared

State environment um I'll pause there before going to technical but um yeah I think that was why you're getting out you know well there's a lot to unack there and I want to just double click on a lot of those features but like just for like the general user I want to make sure that things are pretty clear here like when you just let's define an execution environment let's define a a virtual machine and then and then I think I want to revisit what you just said Stephie yes yeah no that's that's a great point I feel like over uh because V the the idea of a VM right is actually not unique to to blockchain like it it's kind of like this it's it's like this virtual environment um thinking of like VMware you know exactly right that what

is when was VMware started like 2000 or something like that right so like it's it's been around for a while but I think what's gotten confusing for a lot of people in um blockchain is like the term VM has kind of been bastardized a little bit and like I I think you can probably blame the evm for this like it's funny because I don't I actually don't hate on the evm that much because I do I do see a lot of value in like the go to market attributes that we were talking about before right just like as a startup person but like that did bastardize the term so like what people do is like they kind of conflate two different things together right now in the space one is a virtual machine and and the other is an execution environment so really what an

a virtual machine is is just kind of like a Sandbox to run like certain types of binaries right like it's literally just like um in it's like the smaller sandbox and like the execution environment is like the bigger sandbox so if you look at like most of like the the from our view the interesting areas of innovation are actually in kind of the broader execution environment when you when you see um you know people try to like things with like account abstraction if you're trying to like add IBC into some type of environment like that doesn't really have to do with the the small sandbox where you're putting your solidity code or whatever code that's actually in like the broader execution environment so what we're what we're trying to say is um and and and by the way another way to think about it is

the execution environment is like the whole state transition function it's like it that state transition function can actually include other state transition function such as like different like VMS and then it also does some types of like protocol checks um and then you know an our case like it gets like kind of ZK proven so I guess maybe you can think of it as just like a little sandbox inside of a bigger sandbox or something like that but we do think most of like the interesting area of design is in like the broader execution environment that's why we don't really look at it as like a blended VM per se We call we say Blended execution Network because it's really about the bigger thing so hopefully that's helpful but I can go further yeah the way that's really because I think like the key point I think is and I

think you you're you're going to keep hearing it over and over in this episode is a state transition because ultimately like blockchains are that like whenever you're swapping tokens whenever you're sending stuff whenever you're doing whatever function that requires it requires this thing called a state trans transition and then that's ultimately recorded in a particular block and then you need to make sure that that blog's actually included verified you know the proper you know gas and all the other all of that happens at the execution environment right so so so that's why I think and I think exactly and and the thing is like with what people have I think done so far is just kind of called both of those things like the the VM so sometimes when people are talking about a VM they literally mean just like you know the smaller sandbox and sometimes

they mean the bigger one which which makes it a little bit confusing so yeah sephie I want to go back to what some you said and also Dino you alluded to like there's been a lot of different um I guess experimentation um on execution environments and um I'm curious like when you think about the Journey of fluent like what inspired like what was the problem that you saw um and and just I want to understand like that Journey um and and and then transition into like Blended execution environment and and what that ultimately solves yeah I can take this one um so the beginnings of the project were you know focused on wasm so the notion of

how do we bring traditional programming languages to ethereum um and that's you know a major unlock because traditionally there are other execution environments that or sorry other networks that do support wasum but we hadn't seen it yet in the ethereum ecosystem and how you know why bring this to ethereum it's you know the network effects of ethereum um as a rollup and so you get basically The Best of Both Worlds so that was the initial thought um but you know as noted we realized that like you know when you get on to the L2 um especially in where you know the state that we're at in the market like people are most familiar with solidity like with evm standards things like this and so jumping straight to wasum on ethereum was um you know it it could potentially limit us from being

able to support all of the people who are already in web 3 like we want to also talk to web 3 developers and web two developers so then that became the Journey of how do we make this wasm environment also evm compatible um and so I kind of mentioned it before um there's been a number of attempts in the past and you know other networks are also doing this like an lvm plus an evm um but we we just didn't want to sacrifice on you know user user experience in any way um so that became the question of how do we enable you know wum uh contracts in in Rust and typescript and whatnot contracts in solidity but have those natively talk to each other and you know have atomically be able to compose which you know there's two benefits to this like one

well actually there's a number of benefits to this but you know one um you you enable this like broader uh like pool of developers you know being from web 2 and from web 3 um but also you're able to make some really interesting applications that you know not only use just rust or just typescript but also can like add some you know crypto related logic you know in solidity so you can imagine like trying to make a more performant Dex in rust or something like that um if it were just you know a wasm based environment and you didn't have any you know tokens that people are familiar with like your c20s then you know where where's the financialization in that but with something like Blended execution and everything being in one state shared State machine you're able to have that Dex which is performant and rust and it

can interact with the rc20 contracts um seamlessly in a way that doesn't like affect the user or developer experience so that was the first part of the journey was like how do we mix like this web two the performance of web two thing and then also like the financialization of web 3 and crypto and solidity and bring some of these two worlds together um but then we realized that we didn't want to limit it you know to just the evm because our design was extensible and because it it was a different way of doing it than other networks had done it before and hence kind of expanding to this notion of Blended execution of different um virtual machines or supporting apps from different virtual machines um but I think I'm kind of going a little bit too far here but

Blended execution in in the fluent context is going to involve um you know wasm evm svm but the idea of a blended execution Network and using the fluent based framework means that a developer could build a rollup that has any kind of mixture of execu or of VM support that they want right so it could be I like things from the movm I like things from SPM like that's the mix that I want to do and so we want to encourage experimentation of this idea of bringing different VM targets together um whether whatever combination a developer finds most interesting so I'm going to pause there um but it really can go beyond what fluent supports just being what developers find interesting for for their mix of Blended

execution yeah do you know anything to add there yeah I was just going to add just kind of like zooming out to more of just like the the the startup context and kind of why we we took the approach that we did I mean I think generally it's important to innovate but at the same time like meet the market where it is and so like you see this all across board right like even dating back to like like a Netflix and how they started with just like DVD by mail but also had an eye towards streaming and kind of built the like kind of built their systems along the way to like introduce it whether it's on the tech side or on the marketing side towards streaming and then of course like they like they had an eye towards that or I think in the

web 3 context like I think forecasters done a really really good job with that where they they did start with they meet the met the market where it is in terms of kind of messaging the product itself around kind of crypto natives but as you could see like now they've architected the system in a way where like it is super scalable towards the masses and like we kind of like have that same philosophy and and that's why we we do really wantan to and and that's like where it's more art than science it's like how do you meet the market where it is enough but also design the system to where it's kind of future proof enough and so that's kind of that was always like our design goal um and then obviously Blended execution uh is is the way we've you know executed on it so far

um and just to uh just to add a little bit more to kind of what Steph said on the um you know the W the the why it kind of like matters side actually would it be helpful if we like dove into Blended execution first and almost like defined it or kind of like yeah why don't we just Define it yeah okay so I would probably say um Blended exe like a blended execution network is it could be a blockchain so it could be an L1 L2 L3 doesn't matter um that supports native composability between apps from different BM Target now obviously throwing in some like technical like Words there because I wanted to point out that it it's really just to reemphasize that it's not kind of taking a number of VMS and kind of like running

them in the same place it's actually like an environment that uses some pretty like low-level um you know Primitives to support this native composability so um in our case right like so we're building the the first blonded execution Network hopefully there many more to come but what we're focused on is evm apps Wasa maps and uh svm apps and the Beauty from like a developer and user experience is that um like from a developer perspective these smart contracts so like the wasum Russ smart contracts can actually call they could directly talk to the um you know the the svm Russ smart contracts which can directly talk to the solidity evm smart contracts and this kind of creates like a and actually Steph maybe maybe

this is where you can kind of like pick up the thread from before and talk a little bit more to like the benefits but I mean it really does actually unify these different ecos systems and create this like diversity of like this this much more versatile design space for people again I guess like just to to make it like abundantly clear like Blended VM is different from the notion of multi-m um although there is like support for apps from multiple different virtual machines it's at the end of the day it's actually just one virtual machine which is like the rwal and virtual machine which is used to simulate these different VM targets right so I just want to make that very clear because in other Solutions you're actually like running two diff like two three different state transition functions but in our solution it's just

one you know all under the hood but that complexity is abstracted away from the developer um as well as the user so in the end State what should happen is that a developer will be able to effectively copy and paste some solidity code so let's say like any existing app that already exists you should be able to Port it over um and you port you in order to call contracts like so if it's just like a solidity solidity conversation you don't have to think about it um but if you are you know calling a wasm contract or calling an svm based contract you just have to route through these things that we call the compatibility contracts which are core system contracts which enable that communication but there shouldn't be too much additional overhead for you as a developer um we want to make that as

easy as possible so it's effectively as seamless as possible as deploying um an app on you know a native evm or a native SPM Network um you know so what are the benefits to that like effectively like you know it's twofold so one was the example that I mentioned before uh which was this notion of being able to make really interesting applications that make use of smart contracts that pertain to different BMS generally and be able to mix and match in that way we're effectively creating like an additional execution point where um apps from other ecosystems can come and you know just redeploy quite easily um so you know you know why would you want to do that well fluent is effectively an additional market for you like you can have let's say radium on salana and you can have

radium on fluent and if it's just a copy and paste situation there's not much overhead you're able to access you know a different pool of users than you might otherwise wouldn't have had you know on salana um and what's great about it is that like like Dino mentioned before right like you have to convince people to come to your lvm network you have to show them why it's valuable you have to hope that people are going to want to come over use this new virtual machine and like build Network effects from there but what we're saying is how about this we can create an environment in which everybody can come join and so you benefit from each other's Network effects and so salana apps talking evm apps talking to to WM apps and adding that additional web to functionality um and then you know the pie can grow from

there yeah in many ways um I want to get into the type of applications that you foresee that would be like huge unlocks um but but just putting it more concretely for people to visualize so like you're saying you know if a there's a DEX in salana and a DEX in ethereum it's going to be extremely easy to just copy paste into the fluent um environment like the user would much rather go directly to fluent than trying to you know bridge and interact with all these different other you know just hop across networks so yes I I I think you can look at it from like the developer benefits and then the the the user benefits and obviously they like

intertwine in places so like a developer benefit is kind of as Steph was saying like kind of a a greater access to um you know more types of apps and liquidity that that wouldn't exist kind of Elsewhere because if you're put yourself in the shoes of a developer right like if you're going to um deploy in some like purely alt VM context um well that that ecosystem is being built from from scratch but also if you were going to deploy even if it was a solidity contract right and you were going to deploy it in one of the hundreds of evm only l2s um well that there you're never going to get that like emergent effect of like your app being like composed with these like the 10 best svm apps and the 10 best wasm apps and stuff like that and so there's

there's somewhat of like there's I think people can Intuit it that that's useful because it's like okay like there's kind of like a new experiences that can compose with each other and then there's kind of just like more of like an emergent effect of um you know that I think it compounds over time um and then from a user's perspective you could also think of a base case as I am an evm wallet user and I want to just like use like I don't want to change wallets like I just want to like use all the good apps and not really have to think much about it like I don't like there are plenty of salana apps that that I would love to use um uh but I I don't want to like change a bunch of things I just want to use them um so that's kind of

like the way I look at developer and user experiences hopefully that's like helpful yeah definitely so you announced this uh I think it was a couple weeks ago y right what kind of reception have you been getting from developers in particular uh what kind of apps are been most interested or um is it existing apps is it just people that have said oh wow like you know you're really abstracting all the complexity I really have thought about this particular app but haven't been able to really build it because of you know this fragmentation that currently exists I'm curious like what kind of reception you're getting so well I I think we've been pleasantly surprised so far with um the the reception to the

value propep that I just mentioned from developers like it's really I think like the base case is is kind of that straightforward of like okay well look we we have a multi-chain strategy I mean usually it's so far it's been a lot of people we've talked to who are already kind of like deploying a different rollups and it's like okay well fluent gives me access to like a broader Market of things and there are some existing things like people and keep in mind like we're still in private devet so like it's not like you know we're still kind of like building building the ecosystem but as far as kind of like the the reception that we've gotten so far it's oh wow like so there's going to be svm apps and W and VM apps that um that deploy there so like yes it like Steph

said it's an extra execution point and usually that's kind of enough for somebody who already has like a multi-chain strategy they kind of get it um and then I I think for like some brand new and and that's for the most part been like kind of like defi so far um and then I think if you look around to some of like the conversations we're having with like new app experiences um I think that there's there's certainly a lot of like social and like Gaming use cases that um lend pretty well towards web assembly um and I I think and so it depends how far you want to go with that like because if if you step even like further and say like okay well there's the the solidity apps and the value prop for them there's kind of like the the

the wasm or like um kind of more like social consumer apps in the value prop for them now um You can actually go a step further and say all right there there's this notion of like Blended apps right so like where the app itself is actually composed osed of smart contracts from these different VM environments and that's where I think that things could get pretty interesting and we're we're we're actually just experimenting with that ourselves and we actually our our Dev rolls just spun up like a couple of games that we'll hopefully demonstrate in the next like week kind of like a chess game is the first one where like you could actually see the different parts of like as as somebody's like using this game like what's actually happening under the covers is like like a rust smart contract is like talking directly to a

slity Smart contract and like I think we're in the early Innings again but like getting the juices flowing as to what can be built in that environment I mean so far and this was kind of evident in like just the wasm only world that we were in before but I think that there there's some cool stuff that fits into like I'll say the autonomous World type way of thinking where like all right I'm a developer and I can just focus on I let's just say I only know um solidity and so I can just focus on building Like A Primitive towards a game or a world or whatever experience in solidity to pulling it on fluent and then what like maybe I don't build anything else but I know that now the market the audience of people who can build on top of my like

low-level primitive and the let's just say in this case like the games that can be kind of built in parallel using that primitive now goes from solidity developers to any developers who care for any of these different ecosystems can all compose on my primitive it's just like a very like exciting notion yeah I want to at some point get into these compatibility contracts you mention CU you know composability is something that is talked about a lot but I think is like is is not properly understood or doesn't like has the right Nuance to it because you know this this was uh you composability started to like oh you remember the time of like uh devc con and uh Osaka was it Osaka everyone's

like oh you know things are going to break you know we're going to go on L2 and you know composability but I'm like my my thought then and still is is like the internet had this problem too and so ultimately you had to just build better like middleware so to speak like better like connective tissue between these different ecosystems and standards and oftentimes like when I talk to teams like whether it's a new L2 or you know a new you know Network like like a movement based language like chain or you know a near something like that it's like the tooling is not there and it makes it very hard for developers and I think like in ethereum like this is like the appeal to like you know um for wasm right it's just like bring in just a

whole wider range of developers but I I'm curious like if we can go into these compatibility contracts which I think are like pretty fascinating which are powering all this like you know connectivity right so to speak yeah um I can take that one um effectively like the compatibility contracts are what enable you to speak to different contracts pertaining to different VM targets um so the alternative approach to that like like what is composability or interoperability but like generally speaking if you were going to be like an ebm app or a solidity app or you're a user of one and you want to then you know move over and do something on salana world like you have to use a bridge um you have to move over and like that adds an additional trust assumption

um you you know you can't it's it's it's not Atomic you're going to have to wait a couple blocks like there's a little bit of like a delay um and that's just kind of the status quo um for compatibility between different networks at this point um with the comp on that point like there's a lot of interoperability today with chains you are taking some trust and lag And Delay assumptions right because you have to your point so there's a lot of interoperability but not like composability is like a ton like well when I think of composability it's like it's Atomic or near Atomic or whatever tradeoff if it's defire gaming well maybe it's composable but you know in one you're you're willing to accept certain degree of latency because

otherwise there's a lot of me yeah but uh there's like two really important points that I just heard like interoperability and composability two two different things right good point um I guess like you know what that's that's a fair point like I I I guess I in my my my mental model I never saw composability as 100% pertaining to Atomic composability like I feel sometimes those words kind of get like you know traded around and so when I say composability I guess I mean it in like the broadest possible sense um that you're able to talk from you know one contract one network to another um but I I will uh then you know dial in more that like these compatibility contracts enable Atomic and real time composability um just for for sake of do

I'm just because I wasn't in my mind like no one's no one's been able to do that from from my correct me if I'm wrong but like that that's the key novelty here because there's people might be comparing it to Bridges and again interoperability but not Atomic composability at the Smart contract lat like that this in my mind that's that's the key Hall like that's the key innovation that I think is so so awesome totally and so yeah like how in in the world we're in right now right where you have like you know various disparate rollups um you're thinking about how do we maintain interoperability how do we try to achieve Atomic composability and there's like a number of different ways that's being done like via shared sequencers um or you know via you know zkc transition proof Bridges I think is the closest you can get but at at the

end of the day like you are trying to kind of fit things together that are from different environments right and so the with with what we're doing it fluent is we are the same environment so it's just I want to reiterate and make very clear that it's not to different VMS talking to each other we're not enabling composability between two different VMS but it's like the one larger fluent VM which is able to simulate these VM Targets on top of it and hence the atomic composability happens all like on that same state at the rwm level so the compatibility contracts are effectively a way to Route transactions between the different types of contracts on the network but everything is then compiled down to rwm where the composability

actually takes place so you're not um you're effectively not doing interop between different networks different state machines it's all one state machine and hence it's Atomic and synchronously composable there's there's one thing I want to actually just build on from what foot steep was talking about which is just like generally how we see kind of like these execution environments shaping up right we're talking about like composability we're talking about interoperability and I just want to make one thing like pretty clear this is our thesis is um not that there should just be kind of a consolidation back to one big fat L2 right like we're not trying to eat everybody's lunch we're not trying we're not realistically like we're not even trying to support um you know all the all the VM like Targets on

rl2 it's it's like hard to do right there's a lot of different like coordination like things under the hood um and so right now we are really just focused on those three uh app uh VM environments um but regardless like how how we see the kind of the future of these execution environments is really more um you know that Blended execution is just like a better way to create them and so if you're somebody who envisions um you know a million different execution environments a million different l2s l3s whatever I mean we would just definitely prefer those to be kind of like s uh Blended execution networks instead of single execution networks and you can hyper customize them for whatever you want right because there's still a million reasons why you might want to build your own separate

State machine from the other state machines right like privacy there's kind of like Enterprise use cases there's even just like monetary like incentive use cases maybe like value capture and stuff like that like that's all real and that's still going to require like really tightened interop Solutions between even Blended execution networks so it all does kind of um like I think it fits very well personally into like the modular thesis so I just wanted to like um clarify that really quick no that's such a good point um so when you think about like the I guess on the modularity point like we are seeing an explosion of as you pointed out multiple you know l2s l3s uh we're seeing something like movement uh you know move

based L2 you have the multiple svm implementations you have like Aurora like I'm curious like how you think about like now that you've introduced this Blended excution environment how do you see them existing with like in a blended execution environment like what is their place in the world now that we have Blended execution like how do you envision this kind of your place in the ecosystem and also what it actually means for the rest of the kind of the different um um execution environments yeah I think um kind of touching on it before and what you know said like not here to steal anybody's lunch and like there is obviously benefits to like having a state machine that is like customized to to exactly

what you want so like there could be there there certainly a world in which like you you just want like an ebml to like because like that's the flavor of you know products that you want to to offer to the world um so so in our mind we're just kind of working on like really innovating at the execution layer so if developers want to you know like if you want to like comment to the fluent L2 you'll benefit from all of the different like VMS that the network supports but also like you can innovate even farther like Dino said you can support we can you know enable support for for different VMS like maybe you want to have like fuel VM plus evm and that could be some kind of interesting combination for you um maybe it's just ROM and fuel or you know just being able

to mix and match in multiple different ways but I we fundamentally don't see it as like taking value away from these single execution networks that can also still live in harmony and offer you know their their unique value props like to to their users as well um at the end of the day like we fundamentally don't believe that there's going to be like one state machine to rule them all like it's just there's no way we're going to get the entire world's traffic on just like one giant L2 or or one giant L1 um so we're just offering a different way to to innovate at the execution layer but certainly not at the expense of all the great things that these other networks offer and and by the way just to add on that like even though we've talked a lot about the technical innovations and differentiation like I I

even as somebody building like this L execution thing like I I see that is only part of the the puzzle like you can innovate in other ways right you can innovate in so even if you are a single execution netk work right like you can do perfectly fine innovating on um you know different different mechanics like maybe governance maybe like um incentivization uh you can kind of bundle things and unbundle things something can go with kind of like you know some apps baked into like the pre- compiles or or some type of pre compiles that make like ml easier on their thing it really doesn't so I I maybe I'm just like a hyper Bull on like how many of these like State separate State machines like people will actually need but this is just I think a really innovative um way to kind of like architect it like on

the on the technical side of it but there's just like way more to the puzzle hey everyone Santi and I have been talking about salana a lot recently and we're excited to have a salana sponsor of Empire marinade is a staking protocol in salana I remember when they launched I think it was back at a salana hackathon and they were funded with this 8K Grant it's super cool to see how far they've come they're the only steak pool today that delivers Auto rebalancing me rewards and automatic downside protection with their new protected staking rewards you can stake natively or liquid stake with marinade and get the same high performance delegation strategy that thousands are using already to stake your soul to over a

hundred of the best Salon validators marinade has been live for over two years and they have audits completed by four of the top security firms in crypto the delegation strategy is a first of its kind so if you're staking your salana if you want to start staking your salana if you want to get some yield from your soul start staking today with marinade go hit the link in the show notes big thanks to marinade for everything that they've done in salana staking land go check them out go stake your salana with marinade today this episode is brought to you by Avalanche Avalanche is a leading network of blockchains giving some of the world's largest financial institutions the design space to explore new use cases and business models while leveraging completely customizable infrastructure everything that Avalanche has been

building the last few years has culminated in this moment where today you have institutions and developers able to essentially have Limitless possibilities with the chain they've enabled developers to build cross-chain swaps or create gaming environments where one subnet can unlock features in another or can use usdc as a native gas token Onyx for example by JP Morgan or city or dtc's digital assets or uh the Australian New Zealand banking group they are all building on Avalanche Evergreen subnets really cool stuff big thanks to Avalanche for sponsoring this episode of Empire go explore Avalanche subnet ecosystem at core. slcover that's core C.A slcover thanks again Avalanche this episode is brought to you by mantle

mantle is an L2 backed by one of the industry's largest treasuries at the time a recording it's valued at $4.4 billion the mantle ecosystem engages in a lot of early stage exciting projects such as Athena and Igan Lair and they give out actually the rewards to the mantle community there are two airdrops I want to tell you about the first one it was with Athena they offered 2.5 billion Athena shards to Holders of their native token MNT so the reward station program distributes these pre-sale token allocations to MNT holders who stake the tokens the second one they have G on is with myso myo that gives out over 990,000 miso tokens worth about $50,000 today that starts on April

25th runs through May 2nd if you want to check that out you got to stake your MNT and you can check out the reward station at mantle. XYZ reward station big thanks to mantle for sponsoring Empire I'm curious like what would a skeptic say to Blended execution environment like what have been the criticisms that you've heard or what are some of the things internally that just don't know if they're going to shape like a big hypothesis is just this convenience factor but maybe there's a type of developer that says listen I I hear you but I'm building for long term and I just have this idea that the svm is the winning strategy or move is where defi is going to live I don't want I don't care like fine Blended is cool and whatnot but I'm just going to double

down just go direct like I could see someone saying that but I'm curious like if you've heard it and what would be the counter argument or the you know response to that yeah iess guess to answer that is in a fact that like because the experience is going to be so let's say like you're you're salable and like you you know you just want to dovm like you're not you don't want to think about anything else right so like you've deployed your app on salana and like that's it but we're not suggesting that you undeploy or like stop focusing on your app on salana like we're just suggesting like hey like look over here like look at all the evm networks there are like you know if I'm a a DEX on ethereum I can just as easily copy and paste my code and become a deex on

arbitrum on optimism on Phantom Etc like there's a lot of different markets that you you can attain um and a lot of these different VMS like specifically the svm like haven't really had that opportunity yet right so we're not looking at it as a way we're not taking away you know from your business in the salano ecosystem we're just providing like an additional market so that's how we would answer um not like it's not detracting to you know your commitment to the salon ecosystem um but in terms of uh you know some of the like challenges like you noted like some of the more like the complexities something that we are working on in the background is like how do you really handle like multiple different token standards on a network right because you're going to have like erc20 you're going to have SPL how do

those interoperate proper um you want to enable support that a user you know doesn't they they want to have the choice like do I want to use metamask or do I want to use Phantom how do you enable Phantom to be able to like support or interact with erc20 tokens so that's something that we're working on in the background it's it's going to be abstracted um but there is like a number of different methods of which we're exploring to do so but that is certainly one of the biggest complications is like how do you support all of these different token standards and things not get too messy I'm just going to add a a little bit onto that I mean there's just there's always trade-offs right like there there's always going to be some trade-offs and like for example um we are optimizing a lot of this to be

around you know actually sorry what we've talked about is like apps from these different VM targets and like the way they work together but we're also optimizing kind of like more of the execution environment to be to fit with kind of like the evm compatible realm right and as Steph kind of like pointed to before you know somebody might prefer something optimized around kind of like the move ecosystem in terms of like infrastructure and tooling and stuff like that and that's perfectly fine um and you know I I think we're going to naturally see kind of like just different communities and Pockets like for these different ecosystems some people just might like the fact you know you you'll have I have to you're G to have people who love um you know the fact that like even the fact that salana

is like monolithic and like they want that like hyper you know low latency environment and that's perfectly fine but there's going to be other people who just like want to innovate on like an svm app that's really badass and they just want to like take kind of that as a core primitive and kind of like build their own thing and like I think I think the fact that you have you know this like such an open like industry that you can just kind of remix everything all around like I think as we develop as we onboard not you know the 20,000 developers that are here today but just like millions of developers I think you're going to see an explosion of all these things so like and but at the same time like there are just to kind of zoom in on like our environment like what

would a skeptic say like almost like technically there's the token standard stuff that Seth mentioned there's um gas like how do you like think about interacting in two different environments that might have different gas requirements when you're at at the ux level when you're presenting to the user is that even a thing I think with gas like you know obviously we're our gas is in in E like we're paying like our L2 is like paying in eth but like the fact that we're um evm compatible too like we can we can do a bunch of account abstraction stuff and enable tokens and like you know whatever type of tokens so like we don't have have that enabled yet but I I think that that becomes like a very easily solvable problem over time um but also just to kind of go with like the more

fundamental tradeoffs right because like I want to acknowledge they're of course trade-offs and So like um even even at and we haven't actually just done this yet or even like decided what we want to do here but um there's kind of the base layer environment which um we mentioned before is called like reduced web assembly that just kind of makes it all work under the hood now if we paralyze that then we get the paralyzation benefits of the svm apps if we don't paralyze that we don't get any of the parallelization benefits of the svm apps so like think about it like if we decide to do kind of one thing I mean maybe there you say okay why would you not paralyze it and so maybe that's a silly like example but the point is like the design space for this stuff is so big

that there's always going to be tradeoffs and um you know somebody else might focus more intensely on the paralyzation part and they support like move move apps and svm apps and maybe like you know people like that environment as well for different cases maybe that's where like more of the high like security need stuff lives or whatever like I I think you're going to see so many different kind of combinations and again this kind of all goes back to what we saying about the execution environment versus the VM itself like the execution environment is just like this this very big design space and I think we're going to uh I mean we're still at the end of the day just like exploring a part of it yeah do you foresee some hardening of particular standards or Blended exec ution

environments where you know right now you're kind of opening the doors saying come you there's these three that you mentioned presumably there could be more um do you foresee kind of a hardening of like just people gravitating towards svm and move or uh something like that like over time I think um it's more so the notion of like you mentioned the the composability or like the atomic realtime composability um because I think that like the solutions up until this point that were you know as mentioned before like you know the different state environments on the same network like that was always kind of like an unspoken thing like you'd have to be like a researcher or like a you know a very like intent user of a network to understand that like this is

actually what's going on because like when it's announced it's just like oh support for multiple VMS and you don't understand the trade-off space there and then when you get into it you dig into it you realize oh I need to use a totally different wallet and a totally different token to interact with this app from a different VM that's apparently on this multi-m environment okay okay well why don't I just go and like you know bridge to to real salana you know what I'm saying like it's just like that I think is more so where we're going to see hardening in that people are like oh hey like we don't want to we don't like we don't want to have that tradeoff on our Network anymore or on a network that we're trying to create like we want to create this really interesting new lvm that has you know

properties X Y and Z we also want to make an evm compatible but we don't want to like have this like composability trade-off so that's where I think the hardening is going to take place where people are now aware of this issue and they realize there's a different way to try to architect it to like keep everything together yeah so I was just on the phone yesterday with an U an app that's had decent success pretty good success actually in blast and they were like hey where should we go next because if if we're not in another chain someone else is going to copy us someone else is going to be there and we have the opportunity to go elsewhere and it was fairly easy to talk about other l2s that they would deploy but then the issue of salana came up um and they go we're

going to have to hide and it it just it's much harder for them presumably with this um it would be easier for them to explore that implementation much much faster like what what would that actually look like for a project that is in ethereum and says Hey listen I want to deploy salana um what would that look like in a blended execution like for them well I guess if I understand your question correctly um I think that it wouldn't it wouldn't actually look much different than like so like blast right so it's like an evm um Network so it's like you you know you have your solidity smart contracts and in the same way that you could then go and deploy that um on uh Phantom or on arbitrum or on optimism

you can go and deploy that contract on fluent um just like same look and feel as any other evm compatible network um you're not getting you know you're not getting access immediately to all of Sal's users per se because that's an entirely different network but you if you were to do so on fluent You' be gaining access to like the salon of developers and their Network effects and their you know users that decided to come over and also use fluent or other people who came across that ANM like you know or so so you wouldn't have to um like modify the like if you wanted if you wanted to go to salana like salana itself you'd have to go and like modify you know your contracts like bu or yeah do all that all over again that's still

gonna be that's still G to be the case right if you still want to go direct to Sal you're going have to but in if you want to as a hybrid step to test it you know a lot of these are startups you know they have limited resources this might be a great intermediate step to just kind of test the waters and just get a good feeling of you know through you know fluent and ultimately an svm environment well sort of but at the end of the day right like you in your mind like as a developer like you're still only interacting with the evm environment um it would be that the users of the svm environment or you know of fluent which encompasses like SPM evm wasm are easily able to also interact with your app just as easily as they're able to interact with the sbm based apps

is what it is so it's like you're not um it like in your view like it's still an evbm app if that makes sense yeah yeah yeah yeah I guess like we haven't touched on the user side of things a lot we've talked a lot about from a developer standpoint but like my theory is ultimately users will have no chain like a affiliation like or brand like we're currently in an environment like we're we're very attached to oh you know ethereum aligned or like I love salana but mainstream doesn't look like that I feel like mainstream looks like a user wants to swap a token because they heard it from a celebrity on Twitter or whatever and they want to get access to that they don't want to think about whether they need to go to the standard the the type of wallet like they just

want to it's very action oriented and it's not there's no affiliation to particular chain so this abstraction is a you know multiple as you alluded to there's different ways to abstract the complexity of interacting with these you know in a web three context you guys are doing in a very seamless way for developers but also I think that has very meaningful benefits for users um do you foresee an environment where you I appreciate you're not like eating other people's lunch but like where the primary landing spot for users just becomes fluent because you know that's where a lot of like ultimately that's like the most convenient way to get access to this world I see what you're saying I think that you know as it

stands right now right you want to go trade like a salana shitcoin like you're gonna go straight to salana like that's just like what what it's going to be right like that's where it is always gonna be the case yeah like that's yeah that's what it is I I would say maybe not always the case but like you know certainly right now and I think I saw a tweet the other day like talking about like escape velocity and network effects and things like this and like noting how like in the traditional world like you know I'm blanking on exactly the numbers but like that traditional apps like you know don't gain kind of escape velocity until they get like a certain number of users like in like the upwards of like hundreds of millions and like we don't have like anywhere near those numbers of

users like in any of the ecosystems at all in crypto so from my perspective like I think the state of things now um is going to be very different than the state of things in 10 years so it's like through various different forms of abstraction so whether that be like chain abstraction between rollups whether that be like Blended execution networks um it would be really amazing if there was like just a couple you know very easy to use uis with different trade-offs and the same way that a user can choose like a couple different apps like for the same job like let's like say their banking app or like their sorry real world apps um not crypto apps um I I just think that like the like we we're so far out

from knowing like which networks are going to rule them all and like at this point in time like you know it's clearly like ethereum and like evm stuff and like then addition salana like those are the two winners but I think that the end state will be much different and it'll be the networks that innovate and provide like the best experience to users that will ultimately Prevail and so with something like Blended execution right like you're just offering so much more than what is traditionally available in like a single state machine and so I think it puts us in the running of like having Blended execution networks like be something special that has a lot more accessibility to users than just going to a single Network and so yeah you can you know trade in the in the the shitcoin casino over here and you're not

pretending to compete against that it's it's more like the touch of apps you're going to be possible where you have this like you know greater preference both of a developer mostly the developer side where you're like you can pick and choose a different type of you know execution and and I guess the bet is developers would most would rather just build using your standard in a blended execution environment so more interest apps ultimately get built there that attracts more users and then that really kick starts the flywheel but it's it's that b around like your point is a really good one which is historically it's just been thinking about execution environments in a very kind of narrow way and you're really expanding the possibilities of saying no no wait a

minute we're just going to allow you to like pick and choose you focus on building the best out and then whatever under the hood is required to power that gaming D5 social F whatever it is you'd rather be a blended execution environment for most cases maybe there's some on Enterprise that that you know that it unlocks a lot of this and catalyzes a lot of innovation totally and like 100% I agree with that and you know I think that there's a lot of we're yet to see a lot of these new interesting apps that like really do blend like contracts from different languages so like you know performance like I think I mentioned before like really performant decks like written in Russ that like is still

interacting with rc20 tokens and like things like that like there's also like if you want to go like crazy on the wasum thing there's this notion that once we enable type script you could have like verifiable front ends and verifiable back ends and in addition to you know verifiable back ends just being a traditional dap and like things like this and like as a user you know when I'm navigating like through the world like I'm like trading over here in the in the casino and then like I want to go and I don't know I want to you know make a I want to like just interact with you know another app that I'm trying to think of a good example but I'm blank in here um but like by my social fi app or something like that like I can easily like just like you know in one in one

movement in one transaction I can like pull out of the the casino and I can go over there and then just start interacting over here and I don't have to like think about different networks and think about like different ways of getting there and it's just like all happen seamlessly under the hood for like a variety of different use cases yeah yeah like social fight is a good example and Dina we were just talking about like I think ultimately the BET here is that most developers would favor Blended execution environment for its flexib ility and convenience and so that really catalyzes a whole new set of applications that maybe we haven't seen before and that ultimately translates over like it starts with a developer and and the developer favoring for most cases maybe not Enterprise maybe not defi whatever some

certain very but for the most part like a parto here like you would rather go in a blended execution environment assuming that you have some Lindy on these like compatibility contracts like nothing's breaking there there's no like but if that really works then I'm not a developer but like I talk to developers all the time like I would see them be very interested in deploying in and using your standards and like ultimately maybe deploying in your L2 and that like having a being a a big Catalyst to like unlock this Innovation that we just haven't seen before because you know there's there's been like limitations and big tradeoffs at the you know um but like social F what I try say is social

fight is a good example because you have three different like social fight apps that are gaining some decent traction they're all in three different chains and there's like issues around hopping around and maybe if it were to happen in a blended execution environment it might be just easier for the user to just think about interacting with those three different apps without having thinking about like just a ux limitations complexity so to speak I don't know yeah totally I I mean I think whether um can kind of also separate the notion of like fluence L2 our implementation of this Blended execution network from even like the kind of app specific Blended execution networks that we we do hope kind of like emerge right

like let's just say you want to hyper customize an execution environment around social stuff and you know you you start off by like deploying um those three applic you know whatever like those three applications end up deploying and like that then that kind of becomes like a very heavy kind of a social chain or something like this or maybe like I said before there's like new developers who want to like take those as like Primitives and kind of like remix them but all like remix them in kind of one environment so I think that there's I think what we start to see like as we Veer away to your as you kind of said before beer away from these like very kind of like tribal like in the weeds kind of like crypto natives which we obviously are them and love them but like when you reach mainstream

adoption you just get you know people just want to use like the best tools of the job build the most efficient kind of apps for for their use case and I I just think that like Blended execution networks like as a concept are just like present like a much better playground for these developers to build and honestly if it follows I think the BET like one part of the bet is also that the the Paradigm for building things in web 3 starts to look more like the Paradigm for building things in web two where because if you think of web two right like people do just reach for like the best tools for each part of the the thing and so um I I I you could see like think about um two here's two different examp ex um think about uh in the AI

space right like what are AI models they're kind of like python rappers around like C++ libraries and stuff like that right so like technically like there's like different tools that are being used for like these different like pieces of that app effectively you're not going to do that on two different Networks you're going to do that on like one shared State environment it just otherwise wouldn't make sense and even if you look at other examples right like think about I like to use figma and I've probably I've been using that since uh we were talking about like WM specifically where like like kind of figma came along and said like hey it it wouldn't make practical sense for me to to build this whole thing in JavaScript in in the browser so instead we're going to use wasm as this base and build part of the app in JavaScript because it

JavaScript is good for kind of like more of the UI like elements and you can kind of like manipulate things better on the screen um but then also use kind of like rust or c for kind of like the more compute intensive Parts um and just you know that creates the things together have these like emergent benefits I think of like creating like a really amazing highly optimized experience so I think a a vet is also another part of the bet is that like people generally just want to build that way and if it's and because that is that does represent how kind of like the masses of developers do build yeah I think you're already seeing it now I mean I think the best Builders Founders in the space um really go where the users are and they're very practical like this idea of

linemen in tribalism look is important but ultimately you care about delivering the best user experience and going where the users are and so um and that's in flux very much so like six months ago we hav been talking about salana and now you know salana there are days where it you know it eclipses ethereum and on liquidity and user side right and so and there might be telegram might come along and just totally swoop and surpass and so I think we're in a very interesting time of the crypto the evolution of the industry where the last you know better part of a decade or plus has been just building infrastructure but I would characterize it as like very primitive fundamental building blocks you guys I think are

coming at the right time with like really interesting middleware and like tooling I would describe it to just facilitate like Joe Luben like again like in um his keynote speech at um Devcon and Osaka was like let's bring a million developers well if we're gonna most of I talked to are like well the tooling is still not there or it's really hard to you know and so I think like you guys are really a step in that direction to have this huge unlock that ultimately just makes it extremely easy for developers to just focus on building the app and less so thinking about all the other components um and having to learn a lot of things that they shouldn't right they should just focus on the app and and not

have to think about all the kind of limitations or tradeoffs there will always be some trade like it's it's it's like a Utopia to be in a place where like there's no trade-offs but still you know I think this is a huge Improvement in that direction yeah no that's certainly certainly agree and I think that like we we do encourage like even more kind of BL Blended execution networks to just push boundaries as well and and just like run those experiments and optimize for like different things basically just like use the versatility of the design to just like try to make the best possible user exper and developer experiences for for different cases yeah um let's talk about the like the road map from here you've announced

it um you know you've getting attraction attention what is the path to like mayet look like and what are kind of the things you need that you're going to be most focused on uh sure actually Steph you want to take this one yeah um I was just going to say you don't have to give concrete uh T timelines or dates because I know you're engine might kill you for it so I'll I'll save you that yeah I'll just um yeah let you know you know where we're at and where we're headed um you know right now we're in um a private devet stage um and will soon be entering a public devet stage and um their most recent version of devnet does enable composability between rust and evm based apps um and so that's like quite new um our previous devnet was only um you could deploy apps um in

solidity and Viper and deploy apps in Rust but they weren't able to talk to each other quite yet um so that is a recent development um that will be coming soon for people to play with um and you know as Dino mentioned we have our sample chess game and we're going to have a bunch of other sample um you know apps and developer guides to be able to explain how those interactions work and you know what what minor modifications you might need to do um when talking to the compatibility contracts um and then we're targeting a you know a public test net um within 2024 um and you know main net um sometime you know thereafter um moving into 2025 um that is our road map um for the moment that's great well I know we we we've covered a lot guys anything else

that we haven't touched on that is you guys want to double click on or just talk about I'm I'm good I think we did actually cover cover quite a lot I appreciate it and uh sorry if this steered on the on the technical uh side I like course but I mean it's quite early but I could keep asking you questions about the type of applications that we're going to see but this is part of the beauty of it that it's it's like hard to conceptualize like you know like no when the smartphone came out like no one really kind of understood that we were gonna have Uber you know but but but you just had a feeling that it was going to be like a thing that was GNA connect us and make it easier for us to but you didn't have really good internet well y

y but anyways it's really hard to predict I think these type of consumer applications and Chris T it talks about like skoric Concepts which is like you know things that exist in web 2 and we're trying to copy in web 3 I'm more interested in kind of the New Primitives uh like flash loans and stuff like that and I I have a feeling this is gonna allow like and unlock like pretty interesting stuff I just I just can't put a pin on it and and I don't that sounds like you guys are just like this you know it's hard though but maybe we should have you guys on later this year or early next year to to see because I'd be really interested in the type of like what developers are like missing like mashing and and like mixing and and the type of applications that um are going

to come out of this because I I think that's going to be pretty exciting what they're blending yeah would they're not cooking they're blending they're blending exactly so no we would love to and we're you know I think you you stated it pretty well like I mean it's it's early and like we we also kind of have kind of good intuition um around this and we're um starting to see the excitement that I feel like is a good leading indicator but we'll would love to hop back on as we kind of you know transition towards like public testnet and uh and and we see things being built absolutely for developers and just people that are interested in learning more like what is the best way is it your Discord Twitter like what would be the best way for a developer to

get their hands on this totally so um yeah I mean you could check you could follow us at uh fluent XYZ on on Twitter um hop in our Discord as well that's accessible on our our website fluent labs. XYZ um and honestly just like you could ping ping me Steph ping anybody on the team we're like super accessible if you just want to like chat talk about your idea like clearly this is as as you've gotten from this episode uh like you know a new a new design like we're we're still like we are we want to explore this design space and and clearly with anything new like we want to take a very like Hands-On approach to just you know help people in their crazy [ __ ] that they want to build so reach out amazing Stephie Dino thanks so much for coming

on it was a real treat and um yeah yeah go we'll uh link uh your Twitter Discord on on the show notes so people could go check it out but thanks thanks again for coming on really enjoyed the conversation thank you s it's great sh [Music]