Can IBC Become The Interoperability Standard For L2s? With Polymer

Transcript

I'm a cosmos Tech bow um and this Cosmos B always have been even though the price goes down the tech goes up what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup welcome to a chain abstraction paloa where we just wrapped up an epic One Day marathon in the heart of New York City diving deep into chain abstraction with some of the top teams in crypto trust me the series is packed with insights laughs and a few surprises you won't want to miss shout out to alni network for helping them to put this together with their upcoming main net soon targeting the interoperability and ux problem that we're currently facing in the ethereum and majer ecosystem we really enjoyed this series and looking forward putting all this content out there let's jump right into today's

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cartei is your home for app specific rollups at the Forefront of developing new tools and platforms that enhance the capabilities of blockchain Technology ctei enables applications that are flexible and built to scale build on a full Linux environment and use traditional software libraries but in blockchain development go to cars.io that's cy. to learn more about building your own app chain today New York City Podcast last one New York City final one I think we should kick it off with the obvious question in the room um how dare you work in crypto and look as good as you do um I feel like everybody usually kind of looks like a I don't know like I

don't want to say a loser but I just I just dressed like normally this guy's just like got like a designer shirt on or something like do you think that they put those paint drops on there on purpose or I fell into some fell into some conru dude yeah here yeah all right you're a uh oh no sorry you were sorry Mr podcast host here um you uh you're in New York so you live here in the in the New York area yeah yeah am I supposed to look at the camera or just okay no you can look at us okay if you want to make a big point you can like stare at it and make eye contact yeah okay okay um yeah I live in Bloomsburg I think a lot of it's not uh unique among crypto folks there's a lot

of people there yeah yeah what does this eth Bushwick meme I I like it it's a Vibe I yeah I I don't actually go out to Bushwick that often minus like a few Raves here and there um but yeah it's decentralized so it'll it'll organize itself apparently is that how those things work I mean that's what they put on the Twitter account so I'm assuming that's it's just going to happen someday loose consensus social consensus and then just going to show social layer it's consolid it's a crypto social of New York yeah they have all the steak out out out in Brooklyn I saw I saw a map that was like Manhattan is bag lands and then just across the street or the bridge is like

in I guess like Williamsburg is area is like ether land and then like in south of Williamsburg is like salana land is that accurate I think that could be accurate I I think I have a feeling or like I think anom lives in salana lands okay so he's somewhere in there so he's like like the density of soul in that area is like fairly High yeah although uh funny enough I think um one of some of the salon folks do also live in Williamsburg as well yeah but I think anom kind of so on a weekly basis how often do you like hang out with crypto people uh I I don't I'm just going to be honest with you uh I like talking about like Tech stuff with people but I I normally don't like socialize that much

yeah socialize that much or with crypto people just in general um I like to I have you have a girlfriend you have a girlfriend so nice like primarily most of my social life is revolves around her so so what what's your like role at polymer like what's your day-to-day I think at one point I used to write code um consistently and I used to spend a lot of time doing like like research uh like product like engineering work uh these days it's more like marketing like branding BD uh it's very different now than it was before different problem when did you guys start polymer originally we started working on the pro

interoperability problem in 2021 uh I think we started in Earnest like early 2022 that's kind of when like like funding came in we we managed to hire some people so I would say like early 2022 is like when we had a team in 2021 I think it was just like exploratory trying to raise funds for an idea mhm and were you always uh in love with IBC is that a fair way to put it no actually it I think it uh the obsession or or love or infatuation kind of grew over time I think initially we were uh taking a similar path to axar so our first idea was thorchain was really popular at the time I don't recommend forking it the

code Bas is like was God awful I don't know if it's better now um so we looked at Thor chain and our idea was okay if we can take Thor chain they have threshold signatures and we just replace the decks with an interop protocol we can do like you know crash chain inter op generically uh and you know get to Market fairly quickly with that uh that product uh at some point we realize we're going down the same path as Axel that's kind of Axel's uh product essentially like they have threshold signatures they have their own like GMP uh in protocol and at the same time we're also designing our own we're like okay if I'm designing an protocol what do I need and we felt like as we were designing it we were repeating a lot of

the same things that like IBC had already saw for and if you look at the specs there's a lot of like like Corner cases edge cases around like upgrades like what if you like do a application upgrade and there's like four different chains how do you do it safely like there's all these edge cases that they like put a lot of thought into and we're like do we want to put a lot of thought into the same things and come up with something similar or do we want to just use this thing that already exists and I think that that's kind of like where like we we came around to IBC and then since then I've been just Shilling it on Twitter for like the last few years mhm and tell me about kind of so I know the uh the current strategy is like in ophub

right yeah but previously you guys I know you're putting time into like ZK IBC I'm curious to hear uh I feel like we went through a trough with ZK where a lot of time across the industry was spent on ZK and a lot of people came out thinking uh basically like proof generation times for too long long and it's too expensive right now tell me about like how your team like was thinking about that as you guys shifted away from because you're no longer using ZK uh in any component right uh well we're we we are open to working with like zkm teams uh there's a number of zkm teams working on proving the op stack mhm so I think that work will naturally carry over over time although like you're right like ZK is not our Focus we went away from ZK for different

reasons besides proof generation uh with our we had a proof of concept ccept for uh we call it ZK mint and the proof generation times weren't that bad we just modified how like headers were encoded we modified like a few internal implementation details um to get it to work a little bit faster we moved away from the ZK part because we wanted to focus on the rollup to rollup market and in the rollup to rollup Market we realized the best architecture uh from our perspective was to create another rollup and you know creating a rollup and especially building on op stack we just didn't need to verify like these like ZK consensus proofs anymore um and now we just settle to ethereum instead so that's how that's

what replaced it essentially okay and is the main customer here like dap developers or like who is the main person that you're targeting for this like connectivity problem yeah so dap Developers for sure uh we also want to Target solvers and you know chain abstraction is very popular we're working with a few chain rtion protocols which way like how how would you work with those uh transaction protocols we would help on the settlement side okay so different wallet abstractions and things like that yeah yeah so like uh I guess the way I'll describe settlement in layman's terms is something happened on this chain prove it to me kind of yeah like like uh you said you filled some users order or some like users intend uh prove that fill

essentially and you can there's many ways to do it interoperability uh or general message passings like wind one of those ways yeah so you think like chain abstraction is a collaborative effort for you guys you guys are doing focusing on the settlement stuff but there's other teams building on the ux side that you can collaborate with to allow their ux to have the functionality that that the ux provides basically yes yeah essentially like we don't want to like reinvent the whole stack we just want to solve the thing that we enjoy solving very well and just focus on on on that alone and what is polymer's vision for chain abstraction within the ethereum space or within the broader space welcome to the ignition Mantle's newest campaign to liberate the growth power of Bitcoin fbtc ignition has officially

begun with a total token supply of over 2,000 fbtc with a tvl of over 150 million right now you can go on the fbtc website to see all of the featured campaigns saking opportunities and liquidity pools where you can utilize fbtc onchain today for some of the best yields of available on l2s the ignition Sparkle campaign can be found at fbtc ongoing dampa so like I think the market right now is very focused on solvers and intents yeah I think the reason why we have solvers in intents mostly is because there's just laot latencies going across layer 2os yeah like like

what time there like what what times are these latencies that you saying that are along uh to do it safely it's like 12 to 16 minutes uh you have like if you want to bypass ethereum finality you're going to incur some reorg risk some messaging protocols will take will allow applications to take on that reorg risk um there's a few like I think laters during hyper Lane do like like 30 seconds 40 40 to 50 seconds I think Wormhole and axel do like anywhere between like 27 minutes to 40 minutes so you have one class of these applications that wait for ethereum finality and that's safe to Route liquidity of course because it's finalized and some that like there is some risk involved and I think uh a lot of the solvers that like do these fills they are taking on

some of that risk so they're like I will charge you some amount of money and you know I I'll take on this risk for you and you get your the ux that you want um but if we end up in a world where uh there's a lot of maybe hypothetically there's like this like superb Builders just go off and there's like a bunch of different super Builder things so like uh uh like polygon AG treats like the agler as a giant BM like this is single state machine and it's like these are just portions of State I'm going to generate a whole ZK proof for the whole thing and then everything's like composable in that world you don't necessarily need like the solvers because like the latency between those pieces of State like if uh when like when the super chain launches there in our protocol uh they're also aiming for

that to be like composable like intra block um and like node Kit's uh goal is to also make things composable intra block so if they if you have int block composability you can just have just onchain liquidity and just have people like use that liquidity versus like having someone like you know fill it ahead of time then you have to wait like 12 to 16 minutes for it to settle um so like I think Within These like tiny ecosystems there's going to be less of a need for the solvers and maybe across them there still will be a need for for those solvers how do you think about polymers rollup in comparison to the value prop of like the inop across something like the super chain I think polymer's value prop is whenever you treat something like a giant State machine there's some like upper Bound in

how big that state machine can be come um cuz you could imagine that like you don't necessarily want to include everyone uh optimism has this concept of a dependency set so they're like in this dependency set everyone can interoperate and if you're outside the dependency set that's a whole different rollup cluster so now you starting to see these rollup clusters form and each cluster is going to have like a size limit where it's like efficient for the folks in that cluster to to to like you know uh establish like economies uh or like establish trade with one another and I see polymer's role primarily in like cross cluster communication polymer can help in uh intra cluster communication but there's

much more value in Cross cluster because most these clusters don't won't naturally talk to one another interesting do you so basically what I'm understanding or hearing is that you don't really imagine a huge role for solvers within each of these individual clusters but kind of without that and operating across all of them together that is where you imagine solvers playing the B part yeah wherever there's increased latency so if there's increased settlement latencies then I think solvers make sense if there's like no settlement latency then probably salves don't make sense CU then like you're you're paying for ux you would other you would get otherwise with just onchain liquidity um so just depends on settlement latencies got it so you guys

have been in uh in development since you got funded like two two or so years just to testnet I think in March or some sort of like version of testnet um how's the development going and are you guys still on testnet or is there a next iteration like what's what's coming ahead here yeah so uh the Test's still live uh the test will will continue to keep it live for people that want to like you know do some uh development um across like some of the across the sapoia networks or the sapoia l2s we are planning on launching mainnet soon um in like the next like few months or so but yeah that's an next step just me at launch yeah do you imagine that uh end users are going to be putting is it more of a B2B protocol

or is it okay so like I'm never going to put my funds directly on polymers rollup yes uh unless unless the user wants to and this is like you would have to get probably some bridge to build this functionality like over IBC you can naturally do these transfers um and no one's going to charge you for them they're like kind of like these like free bridges that just come like like with IBC um so if you have like a wallet that integrates us technically a user could like use the wallet and be like hey I want to transfer some funds over this channel but whether or not that like wrapped because essentially like over IBC like these ic20 or IBC transfers still result in technically a wrapped asset the way it's locked is a little different but it's still a wrapped asset whether that wrapped asset

has value or not is like up to the the application protocols on that chain so if there's some D5 protocol that has utility for it sure it has value but yeah anyone can create like like Bridge tokens anywhere they want over this protocol for uh essentially for free minus like gas costs got it okay is the initial go to market going to be centered around you said you actually said it in a very precise way which I'm fell out of my brain at this point but uh effectively it would using interop allows you to just look at the state of other chains and that can be used to like settle balances uh for solvers so does that mean your initial go to market is effectively going to be focusing on offering polymers interop as a uh a tool to facilitate settlement for requests or

like intents that they fulfilled yeah that's the idea since there's that's just where the market is today I mean the hope is that the market will evolve beyond that since I actually think that uh just for settlement alone interop is not as interesting of a product and and the reason why I think this is because there's a lot of features uh in IBC that only like Advanced applications will really be able to leverage uh there's like timeouts authentication like uh application versioning like upgrades like there's a long list of things that like if you were building a very complex app those things can become a lot more interesting besides just like yeah proving state from one chain in the next if you're just proving State like like a zero knowledge proof uh of of like the state of that chain or uh some other

mechanisms can also work as well or like an oracle okay that's short term what how are you thinking about it like long term then in the long term we well I envisioned that there's going to be a lot of like these like application specific rollups so I'm sure you guys saw like uh the story announcement earlier today they announced like their like purpose-built like L1 blockchain and from in like a macro sense like if you look at like dyx you look at story you see this uh acceleration of the time between when an application is the first launch is as a smart contract to like prove like the concept to like them finding some sort of PM me and being like okay like how can we scale this

thing and you saw some of like uh I think Jason did a good job of like writing all the issues that they encountered as they went through this journey over two and a half years uh where they finally ended up saying that hey look we need to build something that's purpose built for our workload so we need to make something that's optimized for these um giant like dependency graphs of these uh different like IP assets and I think as like applications start to like go in that direction and as this time starts to shorten uh I I might we anticipate that there's going to be more and more like app specific Roll-Ups than generalized l2s I think I know any has talk always yelling this always yelling this so thatan makes sense yeah yeah like we're really bullish on this uh future we're working

on this framework called monomer uh it's a it's similar to RIT it enables ABCI compatible like Frameworks to be deployed on top so like Cosmos SD rollups um on ethereum would be possible and uh I'm I'm a cosmos Tech bull um and just Cosmos always have been yeah always have been and I uh even though the price goes down the tech goes up so uh so like I think from like a a practical engineering perspective the cosmos s is is ahead of it is ahead of the curve with respect to other app specific rollup Frameworks um and I think story is a testament to that and like some other many other protocols have chosen to build with that framework as well yeah no I uh relate to that on a personal level as well like a lot of our

work uh we definitely explored a number of like Stacks that were out there and there have been a ton of issues in the cosmos ecosystem but like a ton of good Builders uh and like unbiased technology I mean IBC is like a great example of that yeah you got anything for us any kind of yeah any final alha Alpha for the community I I have some one I have one alpha besides like the like the main thing um we're working on this really interesting uh self finality in protocol so we we talked a bit about how there's reorg risk beneath finality uh so so far no one has properly solved the problem of if ethereum has not finalized how can I properly communicate across maybe like

even across clusters of rollups so there's like teams working on solving that for a single cluster but no team trying to solve that across these clusters so we saw this Gap in the market and and and basically the ux we wanted to end up is like how can we communicate with block time latency across these rollups with some safety guarantees um and the the intuition that that that we're kind of leaning on here is that the only information that the rollup knows at like 2 seconds when you generate like the rollup just generates a block is the rollup knows about the layer one the layer one does not know about the uh the rollup so using this layer one information we uh developed this protocol to essentially create this uh dependency graph of transactions sub uh beneath e theum finality and at the

end of uh this process like after 12 to 16 minutes we look at the entire graph gra and based on which view of the layer one actually gets finalized we commit or revert the entire graph so this is a novel protocol that that that we're working on and planning on launching uh later this year yeah interesting so does that mean that like what what are the like functional outputs of that for end users I get using that kind of like graph like structure and what does that give you an advantage in welcome aboard on our journey into the singularity this is the endgame road map for frax and fractal the new L2 out of the frax ecosystem that is totally based on fractal scaling frax a modular L2

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they need to rebalance and reset their positions this is where evercar comes in evercar is pioneering a collaborative approach to the chain abstraction future and they are willing to work with interoperability Partners solvers and other providers in the space to build a interoperable and chain abstraction future check out Everclear at Everclear .org and welcome back to theup the graph structures internal implementation detail in terms of like the ux for the user they will get like sub 10c uh Crossing transactions with some uh reor protection yeah so like it removes so like if I guess to use in the context of like uh like intent based liquidity Bridge or or settlement for these

solvers like normally solvers like yeah sure I can settle this transaction and get my liquidity back in like 30 seconds without reorg protection the solware has to price in the reorg risk so the has to say like okay I want my liquidity back in 30 seconds but I'm taking on significant risk so I'm just going to charge them like more more basis points yeah uh but in with this protocol you can say like okay well I I can settle in 30 seconds but I'm protected against a reorg so I can like charge a user Less in terms of basis points for this fill does that mean that like the end transaction would end up being reverted for the end user or effectively it's kind of like a generalized insurance mechanism for solvers in the event that there is a reorg it it's not insurance

as there's no payout it's that the transactions will be reverted okay so it will be reverted cool all right makes sense super cool well thanks for coming in man yeah cheers man thank you yeah thanks