DeFi by Design EP#124: Where Fluent Fits in the Modular Thesis

Transcript

welcome back to the rollup High Roller Community as always nothing on the rollup is to be construed as Financial advice we are just an Educators in the defi space toss us a quick like give us a share a repost send it to a friend who may want to watch this and finally give us a sub or a follow it means the world to help support credibly neutral educational content in def5 we're here to educate Empower and enrich you and let's jump in welcome to D5 by Design we talk all things blockchain and cryptocurrency while striving to educate Empower and enrich what's going on guys welcome back to d55 design podcast the modular Thursday today feeling varied modular

and byby today I've been on pod since 8 AM and woke up this morning and talked about uh my story in the crypto and I always tell the same story with Rob about how we started the club and then we got wrecked on bit Max so feeling unwrecked today Rob and got wrecked on bit Max I got wrecked on bitrex it took very very two different Journeys to get to the same place um and uh and yes we've arrived here on this modular Thursday The Vibes are uh are feeling very modular indeed I feel like that's uh that's a particularly

nice uh design choice for Vibes nowadays so very very special guest today is Dino from fluid uh fluid is building a consort of things in uh in the space we're going to be talking about some of the novel design choices that fluid has made um in their VM and their Layer Two and I think a good way to to kind of like kick off this conversation is to like kind of like tell tell the story of fluid like you guys have been around for quite a while thinking and building what are some of the some of the patterns and the trajectory that you've noticed ethereum going and where did you start to have ideas as far as where you could

fit in where fluent could fit in and sort of take ownership of of one or more of these patterns yep um so first off good to good to be here guys it's it it is indeed a very modular Thursday um as you know it's it's actually getting me even more excited which should be a very modular March coming up um in a couple of months um but quick teaser so um yeah happy to give like a overview of of kind of what we're doing myself I guess and what we're doing on a fluent if that would be helpful so um like you said Dina one of the co-founders of of fluent Labs um where and we building a layer two blockchain on ethereum um and I

guess the best place to start I guess is where um you know the Inception of this thing if that would be a useful uh beginning um I well I I had spent a number of years in um in web 2 in Cloud infrastructure specifically so I've worked on stuff kind of all over the place always in early stage startups always in kind of like developer Tooling in infra so done some stuff with like kubernetes based ecosystems I've done some stuff in Edge Computing some like AI inference stuff and like some data science tooling um and then I got interested in crypto well I was interested in crypto before this but probably started getting involved in

crypto maybe like three or so years ago and started just dabbling as like investing in some stuff like you know how it goes and then started being like somewhat of like a hobbyist like researcher writer just started like you know started a Blog and just started uh interacting on like crypto Twitter and discourse um um and I got sucked right down like the rollup in modular rabbit holes like I remember kind of like mid 2021 starting to see the like penia pieces and like starting to see Celestia start talking about modular and like I was just hooked I mean they came from like the microservices background right so it just like made sense to me um and then so went down that rabbit hole at the beginning of the past year 2023 I was like all right I need to do

something in the space like I need to build something um and the first thing I did just because I had kind of like the the the the you know builtup knowledge base and kind of um Network in the in the modular ecosystems I started modular media which is um you know news research education for like the modular INF infospace and um then maybe like four or five months later I was actually introduced by a friend um to what is now my co-founder and CTO but he was like hey he's got he's another researcher in the space at at scroll and he's like hey um you you know these guys are working on like a ZK w uh rollup like this would be pretty cool you should you should probably talk to them and I actually went out to um zalo like the experiment in Montenegro for a

couple weeks and me and Demitri my my co-founder um we just hung out I mean talk about like the perfect place to just like Workshop an idea around and kind of like learn about it you got like 200 like researchers and like devs there and you're just kind of asking them like hey like is this is this interesting and kind of pressing into it also um we obviously had the time to get to know each other and so that was kind of the Inception I I I can't um you know I I would definitely say like kind of he he was thinking about these things for specifically wum for for longer than I was but coming from the web 2 background I'm like this just makes sense I mean w wasum has started to dominate as like a runtime and like very uh desirable um

kind of compilation Target in in web 2 and like all developers like know this thing it has a brand of its own and all the tooling and libraries and packages that are compatible from Web Two um can just kind of be ported into web 3 and that just made a lot of sense to me I'm happy to kind of like describe offer a little bit more context on like the WM piece of it and like maybe how you know what is it what does that mean like how did it solve problems in web two like why was it popular there and like why why does it make and how does it exactly get applied in web 3 if if that would be helpful yeah I mean I think um I think people uh um may or may not understand

uh the the intricacies I think people understand that uh solidity and programming language of Ed as as um difficulties it's had some downfalls so we SE to understand um you know what was is why it's important why you guys chose this designed Choice and then even further like what DK law them really enables yeah for sure no I think it'd be helpful to to kick it off with um you know just put W like what is web assembly and kind of like you know what um and kind of put it in context that way so um you mentioned and there's a lot of parallels this is the interesting thing it's it's it's there's a lot of

parallels between what happened over the last 1020 years in web two and what's happening right now in web 3 so what happened in web two is like you had cut the you know the the consumer internet and the consumer web kind of come online started off as static web pages and then there was this intro introduction of JavaScript which is just like this amazing like kind of an amazing tool that like you know um enabled more kind of dynamic and interacted web web pages to the point where we now have and it and it took off obviously so now we have like full-blown like applications that are possible in the browser um but then like anything else developers want to do more they're always pushing the boundaries of what's possible they want to build kind of like more performant

things more flexible things just more novel things and so now over the past like five or so years like Dev started rubbing up into the limitations of the browser and um and uh JavaScript frodan sliff um but and and what happened is like the you know web assembly which is like kind of a think of it kind of like a VM type thing it's like an execution like a runtime um that a bunch of different languages can compile down to so basically if you splice in this web assembly thing into the browser you're not limited to just JavaScript but you can also kind of Port over your rust code or your C++ code or things like

that um and the reason this is powerful is because there are reasons you might want to use those other languages and so you know whether it's for Pure Performance and efficiency like you know people will use C or C++ for like very lowlevel system things because it's like highly perform it it requires a different skill set but all these things make trade-offs and so um you know you might want to use see for something you might want to use rust for something else maybe just like it maybe you just like the syntax there's a lot of people who are just like big fans of of programming in some type of specific way maybe it's because there is some type of functionality that you're trying to accomplish that isn't as easy to do with the other one they're just they're trade-offs so what happened was when

kind of web assembly came to be and it was spliced into this browser context um it it really opened the design space for what developers can build and just one easy example well that it's used all over the place we actually wrote an article on this I can I can maybe drop in the show notes or something but um one very interesting example is figma so everyone knows figma like you know disrupted the design space now 20 billion doll company disrupted Adobe Etc um what they did that was really novel that kind of enabled this disruption was actually based on web assembly now they had you know if you think about Figo right it's like what they did from a user standpoint is enable kind of an interactive like collaborative design tool in the browser

that was never really possible in the browser these things were always done on desktop because that's where you were able to get the flexibility and performance and in doing it kind of fragmented um the the inter you know the interactions like it wasn't able to be a real time kind of interactive tool with your teammates right you you designed something in a a little isolated bubble and you would maybe email to somebody or whatever so they they enabled this fundamentally new experience by combining um like Java typescript actually rust and C++ for different pieces of that application in the browser that enable different things completely unlock the design space and lo and behold 20 billion doll company um so that's just like one example of like

the power of kind of enabling developers to just do more um in in in like unlocking things on certain platforms and um I think the same thing is happening with web 3 so you kind it kind of parallels it right like you had you had ethereum um got really popular you know this solidity thing and evm um was easy enough to use it like took off like a rocket people really want to build for this this e etherium destination um but the actual like execution environment that's being used the evm andity are also do have their limitations and we're we're starting to rub up on those and that's why in our view when you kind of bring this kind of tried and true web assembly like

execution which solved this exact problem or very similar problem in web 2 and kind of put it onto web 3 for developers to interact with um I I I think you'll get kind of similar results and so that ties into the ZK wasm part what the ZK part clearly comes in because we were building a ZK rollup technically like an technically a validium ultimately I think we will shift into being a true rollup right now we will use like alternative da to enable hire throughput applications but nonetheless the ZK part helps us kind of like you know put it on ethereum if you will and then um the wasm part enables kind of smart contracts and and Beyond actually which I'm sure we'll talk about

but um it enables these general purpose languages and libraries and um and tools to be used effectively on etherum so um so yeah that's that's kind of how we see things and uh we we think that we're about to unlock like a very very like big part of the design space before we get into uh kind of the choices uh and tradeoffs of validium and rollups and and alternative da and ethereum da got kind of like I'm coming to realize that as you describe web assembly and as it applies to web 3 execution environments it sounds like web assembly is like this like execution environment aggregator or like this VM

aggregator because it allows you to splice together these different pieces of code and then kind of like has this runtime that is composed of like multiple different multiple different programming languages with different syntax and by combining them together you're able to unlock new uh applications and and possibilities is that like a fair like mental mod model to think about wasm um yeah pretty much I mean I wouldn't look at it and say that it's a bunch of different like VF come together picture it as like one VM that um that support it's like a substrate for all these different languages um and these general purpose languages and when you bring along the general purpose

languages what happens you get to you get to bring along the general purpose like tools and Frameworks and libraries that people have built up over the past five to 10 years like every one of these languages that have been just used in Daily de in everyday development in web 2 have some some hundreds or thousands of like like pack packages and libraries that each individually have Network effects to them that make developers give developers like an easier time building things because it's just you know how how it works um it's just a bunch of tools more tools than the toolkit and so yeah I do think of it think of it as like a VM that um lets you kind of like bring in all those toolkits from all those different languages and um yeah I think that I think what you said was a good way of

looking at it so um the I got asked this morning on the uh on on block thoughtcast what I think about alternative BMS and without digging into the details about the technology too much the the main thing that I said was that the onboarding of developer potential is absolutely so bullish and regardless of which one wins or who succeeds in all the other different components this this idea finally some sort of uh technology capable of onboarding tons of non- Crypton ative developers is like basically here and ready to be played with um and I I you

guys think it's even to the next level because uh dabs can basically go contract in a variety of different languages um which can also still interact with each other at the core level um in the code base so um yeah would love to kind of died into that a bit more as well like so if if I if I'm a a russb r Hy dab we can both contribute to the same uh project or same idea same application using different uh and they'll have it functioning all on once one code base how how did that kind of work like how does the differentiation of languages work um you know and is that kind of am I thinking about that

the right way as well you are you are and I I'll I'll set like uh set the foundation and then we can go into like a specific example to make it clear um because because you're exactly right and it um let's see so the way if you're if you're a rust developer um you might be you might come in kind of like two different flavors I mean you could be somebody who's a rust developer who's already kind of familiar with blockchain things and then like you know you know how to program in like smart contracts you're familiar with maybe you've built on salana or maybe you've built on ethereum L1 or something like that and and that's where we're making it easy for that person because they can as part of our kind of like smart contract

environment on the L2 um you know they can basically write those rust smart contracts the same way you described um and everything on the on on that part of the platform is evm compatible so um that means we're not trying to reinvent like our own standards for rough smart contracts or for types for smart contracts we're basically T saying okay solidity The Wait So many people already in in crypto know how to program in solidity and for evm things so let's just make it as compatible and like close to that developer experience as possible yet let somebody um program in rust or some of these other languages so we're trying I think it kind of hits a nice sweet spot for people who are already kind of like web 3 native um because it's like hey we're we're we are

we're following like the standards of kind of like evm and solidity and stuff but letting you kind of bring bring your own tools and and kind of fit into that framework and people have seemed Dev seemed to really uh like that so far in in our experience um on the other side if you're if you're a web 2 and I'll come full circle to the question about like these things interact the different languages interacting with each other but if you're a a web 2 native and maybe you come in you say oh I don't know smart contracts right now at all or or maybe you're maybe you do but like the use case that you want to build does not is not best suited for smart contracts like maybe the use case that you want to build is really just needs like verifiable computation of just like

regular code um you can do that like you can that person can just come and not even have to worry about the smart contract part at all they just kind of write their logic in Rust in whatever language and it gets kind of the computation gets like proven and is verifiable under the hood so like there's there's a few different ways you see you kind of had me put you know sit in the seat of a rust developer like there's a couple different ways to look at it depending on the use case but now okay let's just say you want to build a Andy wants to build a smart contract in Rust and Robbie wants to build a smart contract in like a typescript or or solidity or something um like what what what does that look like uh let's let's root it in an example so we've been

talking to a number of of like onchain gaming and like autonomous World Builders and what seems to be interesting in that world is um you know maybe one developer who is building kind of like the Baseline Logic for like a game real world or something right like a digital physics or like maybe just maybe a more simple like modding use case where like you have like a you know Super Mario or something like that kind of game and somebody wants to build kind of the Baseline of that that game or just the core components of it in one language maybe in Rust and then they want um some parts of the game you know at any layer of abstraction it could be like down to some like digital physics or it can be kind of just like most of

the game and let people kind of interchange the weapons or the way that somebody jumps up in the air or whatever um or the background um that can be composed together in a different language so Robbie can come along and be like you know he can be anybody in the world anywhere in the world and come along and just be like okay well I know I know typescript and I want to like extend that game or kind of like tailor that thing um in typescript you can just come along and and do it and you know you can obviously do that if both of you are writing code in the same language as well but it's just a matter of like broadening the the the market of people who have access to build on that Foundation that Andy set yeah that's why I'm so bullish on on

all of this Fe that think it's like you you widen the scope of can build on crypto ORS um and that's just like I mean that is the end game here like there's there's another other way to get to the vision of of like the the strongest and loudest ogs with their ideas and and and you know that that coure he up some outto uh you know what out kind of having this functionality even taking the dating examp a bit further you've been kind of pushing on uh on these uh alternative uh capabilities whether you call them l3s or um you know various different functionalities which uh you know these these uh these developer

tooling uh capabilities can enable i' would like to kind of explore that a bit as well kind of thinking outside the box on on what what you're seeing out as like some interesting use cases or or design choices for like how this this this core this core principle of um of you know multiple languages onboarding you know devs and building in this uh web assembly environment then setups enable yeah yeah yeah no this is where it gets really interesting right because like um it it'd probably be helpful for me to set the stage with like the two main different ways that you can build on UNF fluent so if you picture fluent is this layer two blockchain um we support two

different I'll say like categories of applications the first category is what we call shared apps this is like what we were just describing before for the most part just like smart contracts there's it's a smart contract platform very simple um and you the evm compatibility and all the stuff that we just mentioned before but it's smart contract um and then you know we also have is the ability to deploy what we're calling shared Sovereign apps which the design space for this is where it gets pretty crazy because in in its simplest or yeah in its simplest form I guess or it's like most near-term form for us it will be what you could call l2s or like app specific rollups right because like we have our we have our codebase we still we still up our chain and like yeah

we're building this framework alongside it and you can kind of like know deploy and customize your own like app specific chains L3 whatever but it doesn't stop there and this is where it gets cool um it also it could be basically any type of isolated like custom I don't want to say isolated but like Standalone custom um State machine that you can build using fluent base which is which is our our framework um like I said that could be an AB specific rollup it could be like literally a chain of blocks that has some type of computation on top of it um but you don't it doesn't have to stop there it can be just uh it could be like web front ends it can be um you know we can eventually get to the point where um thatof Sovereign app is like

your browser that's getting ZK proven under the hood so you could have kind of like you know browser based games that pop up and um like ZK State channels and like all this kind of stuff is possible like I don't know if you want to call it l3s because it it depends how you define kind of like the L2 L3 thing but we'll we'll go with Sovereign apps because they have control over that State uh machine in in whatever way they want but essentially it you get the computational Integrity um of ethereum uh in just like this crazy design space of like whatever you want to deploy you can deploy um you can build like databases and new types of databases or um typical like Cloud

developer infrastructure you can um you can do kind of like verifiable AI inference like there's just like all types of of stuff that you can do there um and I think that's where things get really really interesting that's I mean a lot of that is best suited for like application specific use cases like if you if you want to deploy some like defi thing like maybe you still want to um to have it in like a shared environment and then you might deploy it as a a shared app on fluent L2 but you kind of see where it's going there I mean that's um I don't think we we're we're we're throwing around different names for these things like kind of like shared apps and Sovereign apps and I feel like it kind of gets the point across um but yeah hopefully that paints a little bit

of a picture yeah I mean l3s have been getting some hate people have been like bro we don't need l3s we we hardly have L that are lot decentralized and functional so yeah maybe we fade l3s for a little bit longer but also like I that is kind of what they are if you're settling if you're you're rolling up and settling to the L2 I mean I guess you're just a St r at on the L2 but yeah shame that's fing to the L well well it depends right the reason like it in in our like nomenclature there like a sovereign app could be like a an L3 chain itself but like you know if you have a like a web front and if it's just like a website that's getting

like ZK proven do I want to call that like a do I want to conflate that with like an app specific rollup or L3 or chain like it's not a chain like you know so I I don't know it's uh we can we can have open discourse on like what these things are called honestly but um we we didn't want to pigeon hole into like the L3 term because a lot of people don't seem to like it yeah it's weird it's funny like the like the the concept like of a chain and an app like just get they get like so hazy because like both of these originate from like like a ledger right and you can even point at like something that is pretty definitively like an application like a like a has like its own Ledger of like

account balances on all that but like no one really considers it its own chain yeah yeah yeah the the lines definitely start to blur like the more um the more like things get modular and kind of intertwined and and the more you're taking like a little piece of this over here and it's I think we're we're we're always going to have these like crypto Twitter battles about like what's technically what but I I think the good thing is that um you know the separation of concerns and specialization that's happening with this whole modu movement just ends up like increasing like the rate of innovation and in like a really crazy way and so yeah you know we have we'll

have the The NeverEnding hurdle of finding a decentralized way to like come to consensus on the terminology but it's you know I I think at the end of the day if uh if you're if you're putting more kind of verifiable computation and like keys in people's hands and like you know permissionless assets and and and logic I think we're we're in a good place yeah yeah that's what it's all about hence the the the value in providing people with a wasm module um like like fluent is doing cool man well let's uh let's shift GE a little bit and talk about um like why you chose like first of all what is a validum uh why it's maybe a little bit different than a rollup and

then why you chose to go the validium path um and maybe da is part of that maybe we'll talk about that afterwards yep no da is definitely part of that um is it is it helpful to uh to distinguish between the different types of designs or do you want me to just dive into um like why we chose Aidan yeah probably high level like differentiation is going to help okay um yeah so there's diving deeper into the terminology part of it without getting like clinging on to to you know the the debates of the day um I think some of the things that are pretty non-controversial are um you know the difference between a rollup of idium um a volition and and an optimium Jesus

um so rollup obviously you I mean you're your listeners I'm sure have enough like modular context for this um the a true rollup will put kind of like the the they'll settle on they'll settle and post the TR input or output data to one chain let's just use ethereum as an example um and uh you know that's like what is the settlements like kind of posting the proofs to be verified like that layer tracks like the state roots and and kind of like has an eye and like the state changes and it updates the state roots with um you know based on the proof verification uh and then the The Da part of it is like posting either the full transaction data or like the state differenes like how One you know

the the record of like what change from one state to the other um so that's a full rollup if you're doing all that on ethereum um and then a validium is if you take the input or output data and put it somewhere else um so maybe that's on Celestia let's or Igan da um and a volition is a hybrid where you give like an app developer user the decision whether they want that this app on your chain to put data over here or over there so it kind of maintains this like dual State thing where you know some of the apps and some of the transactions on the Chain have higher security full rollup security and some

of them have fidum security slightly less security um it's extra work it's extra logic to kind of like maintain that as like the chain itself but that's a volition and then an optimium is just like a validium but with optimistic rollups instead of ZK or sorry with optim with fraud proofs instead of ZK proofs very simple um we chose a validium at least for the time being um we will probably roll that out um well okay let me go into why we chose aium so I I we chose validium because I think it's it is really important that we maintain kind of the safety assumptions of of ethereum or stay as close as possible to that um and yet we we see a big opportunity to serve like hire

throughput use cases like like gaming social F stuff um there's a lot of gaming projects that are very interested in what we're doing and like they typically end up needing like a higher throughput uh execution um and so uh you know I think IG da obviously hasn't shipped the the main main it yet but that that is our plan to deploy there just because the the specs look really really promising to be able to support these these use cases so so uh heav ruup that's not baching to the data is death considered aium no longer a rollup any the key get friend she that's not posting the the like the the

transaction data or the input data yeah that's either a validium well actually that could fall into the category of like a validum valtion or optimium honestly because all right but but it's not a rollup it's not it's not a rollup yeah ex a that look xxist and y axis in terms of the like I think it's like gas STS and like decentralization that's like I will obser like like the highest in terms of highest cost and highest levels of decentralization yeah exactly I mean it it I guess get a little bit trickier because there's the other uh the other variables of of um you know what type of data that you're posting in the da layer like you're posting the full transaction data it's going to be more expensive than if you're just posting the state

disc but you get even like better kind of like a trust model if you're posting the full transaction data so it's like what ends up being more expensive if a rollup is posting transaction data on ethereum versus like a validium is posting sorry a rup is posting State diffs on ethereum cheaper but then a validium is posting full transaction data on somewhere some it's not it's not yeah but typically typically it's exactly what you said yeah it must come down from the B perspective especially with now the admin of up like da to the you look on my timeline it's like Celestia integrated with somebody new every other

day I mean it's like well if you can't compete with other rollups or rollups which are into gred with d well then I mean you guys a problem there so uh do do you think that that Alterna da is kind of a a bit of could be a bit of an issue for decentralization or is it is it like it from a bonus perspective it's a trade-off worth worth uh you know kind of taking in I definitely think it's a trade-off worth taking in um I think that um the the types of app first off I if if you can tell from the kind of beginning of the conversation like my mindset is absolutely that developers will just

keep on pushing the boundaries of what's possible I mean we saw that with the internet right like with internet bandwidth like every time like we would constantly just push the boundaries of what's possible and like have to roll out like more and more and more infrastructure and people will just flood the thing and so as soon as I think when some of this other stuff comes to fruition and you have like millions of developers trying to like build on chain in a very like ible way and you know um kind of we break through with some key applications that changes like the broader sentiment around it and and blockchains become like an exciting place for people to build I think that people will just keep pushing the damn boundaries of like what's possible so I do think that there's like a whole kind of design space and like a ve like a

very big design space for even just the da component and like things will Celestial get filled up Ian die will get filled up a will get filled up and like I I really think that if we break through if if things yeah it's bullish you like this right Andy so wild I know yeah we are and so I I kind of think of it that way so is it was it worth people considering those trade-offs like yeah absolutely especially because um with da right like um like we're pretty good at solving for uh like scaling data like we we're pretty we're pretty good at it um in in general even before blockchains like it's just like we we we know how solve that problem like pretty well so I I I

think it's all worthwhile and it's worth me mentioning that I I forgot to say before um The Sovereign apps that I described uh that are built using our framework called fluid base that'll be really really modular as well like we'll end up integrating with like the Celestia and um you know avils and and near and and we want to make it so any Sovereign app that gets built can decide and that's why that's the point Sovereign like you could decide like to post use you know whatever for sequencing for da even settlement and uh like messaging and interupt all that kind of stuff so we we we definitely you guys how to do like raft and so not maybe not going to like try to address that market necessarily but like if bers want to come build apps on fluid you

have a system where they can go from A to B all internally with the necessary Tech and in well so partially so you can think of it more like an OP stack kind of thing than like a than like a Caldera or conduit like we would be working with the RAS providers to deploy like Sovereign apps like as part of their platform basically and under the hood be using kind of like fluent base which is our framework that will then aggregate that where fluent L2 would then aggregate all the proofs and kind of serve as the layer underneath yeah I see it yeah any I was going to go in a similar Direction and then like once again we think about like well what's the difference between an application

and a rollup if it's just like a framework to deploy those things yeah I mean there's a lot going on there I M that I was gonna gonna further ask about what that like what what's your what your uh your like end end game is or the vision it like fluent has you know doz and doz up different apps that are you know launched using F based with up allra using like shman seeing different da trying to all come together like bring like kind of what's the like what's the what Vis um all of it man like um I I think that we would love to get to a point um

where it's so easy for um you know any even like web 2 native Dev to just like come along and yeah maybe they maybe the application experience that they want to build is um let's just say it's a let's say it's a game let's go with that um and let's just say that like some smaller portion of the experience they want to build is kind of like more financial in nature and maybe they want to do that in solidity so yeah they might learn um a little bit of like the blockchain kind of like specific stuff um and then maybe they deploy that as a shared app like a smart contract on fluent L2 and then maybe like the broader part of their experience is not really like Financial in nature it's just like the logic of their game or

whatever and they want to build that in like a high performance like rust environment using like as close to just like rust code as possible and all like the libraries that they know frictionless and like I would love it if like that latter part of the experience um was just like a couple clicks away frictionless to build as we were just describing but also frictionless to deploy they would just click a couple buttons on like you know Caldera or something like that or you know you know whatever maybe like AWS has kind of like a Ras offering where it's like kind of the way that you just like click a couple buttons to deploy some code in like in AWS Lambda which is just like a common developer thing that people do R your code very easy throw it over the wall adws takes care of it I would love

for that to kind of Be The Experience on um on flu um working together with some of the RAS providers very very cool yeah I I I it's starting to come together for like how fluent integrates with the rest of the modular landscape to ultimately provide this like throw overthe wall type of experience to the end end developer yeah yeah exactly and and under the hood like that could be going um there can be like a big kind of mesh withd between like fluent and a lot of these other ecosystems right I mean like under um using fluent base if we have a thousand or several thousand Sovereign

apps like maybe some of them are um some of them are rollups themselves or sorry some of them are let's say validium themselves and posting the data on any of the all da providers that we talked about today maybe some of them are just like websites that people deploy that are getting like ZK proven under under the covers so um right now all the all the webs all the the web front ends that we're using even for our crypto apps even for our adaps are like hosted on a centralized place like that could all be decentralized um there's just a ton of stuff there and I just think that each one of these different use cases will probably incorp different parts of the modular stack like across the board yeah yeah I think it's um it's done Coury but it's like a you your your

job is like an Al altruistic one for the whole state uh s of crypto where like um Luca is going out and and and launching this toy business and this py world to onard as many basically normal people into into owning up uh nmt and having a blockchain wall without kind of even really understanding what's happening they really like you and and kind of some of the other builders in this uh um you know L2 alt VM kind of developer experience non- Crypton native demed world is like the main job is to just on board as manying as possible get them to build with wom base hope hope that uh

you can help them um that'll build something super valuable whether it be consumer fa in infra Etc maybe get a couple hits um and you know further change the landscape for for developing I mean that's like the bullish like the most bullish thing about uh I mean you might have a different opinion but my opinion is like the most bullish thing about this like alternative um VM and also uh rollup and non solidity uh programming language uh smart contracts like you know we could bring out so many people so many developers and also non-developers ERS people who think and understand those languages it can be a Theo can be a daugh can be a you know like a um like a dead R right and these

kind of people too so I'm curious like what your what your plans are uh to actually go out and you know try to onboard some of these uh you know people da is it Oles is it like Grant like how does want to go and get these you know get these uh smart people yeah it's a good question and um you know you mentioned the the whole like like what's what's kind of our our our mission there like in terms of like democratizing this stuff for like everyday developers I mean just a quick note on that yeah we have we have everybody in in web 3 screaming like hey like how to be on board the next one

billion users and just like our perspective on that is like empower the first 1 million developers and they'll build the 10x better apps that a billion people want to actually use right like that's just how it works it's like that type of if you go from whatever 20,000 or developers uh in web 3 today which is I'm pretty sure it was like 22k in the latest like Electric Capital report and you go to a million developers man the like the creative like energy in this thing like the imagination just kind of like compounds like crazy and then we will get those those killer those killer apps um and um your question about finding or like kind of actually going

about enabling like all these developers I I think you kind of have to meet the market where it is to some degree like so we definitely want I mean the the reason we're placing most of our emphasis right now actually on the smart contract L2 part of it is is is because of that it's like you know there's a lot of people who want to um are already sold on like blockchains and just want kind of like to broaden the design space like on top of ethereum are just like already in the modular like ecosystem and I mean that just goes hand inand with like our frankly just like our development like progress and stuff like we're getting off the ground and like that's kind of like the lowest hanging fruit there um and just sufficient number of problems to solve um also like

you know I think I think over time um as you start demonstrating hey like look what's possible like look this is this is useful for these types of use cases in in web to I think you can start to kind of bridge that Gap but honestly I think the most organic things will end up being um done that way versus going to like an Enterprise and just being like just use it like trying to like sell them on it like we're gonna I think it makes sense for um to kind of straddle that that line for a little bit and um just always try to meet the market kind of like where it is um because otherwise it's just going to kind of fall on deaf ears um and so to answer your question most directly like right now we are focused more more on

kind of like the web three native side of things but I I I do I do see that uh uh evolving over the next year and there's an important piece there like on that line which is like to to onboard those developers like like if I'm like you know a computer science graduate I'm coming out of college and I'm looking at like where do I go use this these skills I'm me they're going to go to like you know a web two firm that's able to pay you know a pretty significant salary or I'm going to go like we to the to the web 3 startups and potentially like you know get a much larger incentive so what are like the incentives right now to like build fluent build on fluent use

fluent like what are those incentives that we can kind of like we can kind of use to inspire these developers and and and onboard them a to fluent um if not it's like influent but just like that you've seen in crypto as well like you know like um yeah like like like how do crypto firms compete with Google that on board the next you know you know it like token package is it like like what it you know yeah yeah I think um I think we we're in a bad spot if we if that ends up being like direct

Financial incentivization like you just start getting into this like bribe flywheel think that wouldn't make that that wouldn't be ideal I mean I I think the best way to do it is like um is educating on them what's possible in building on a blockchain that's just simply not possible uh building on like an AWS um and that can really vary I mean I think we'll see as presumably like a kind of a bull market is kind of like you know getting started and like as more attention kind of comes back into the space and people start looking and dabbling in blockchains more and more I think will it it what sticks in terms of value props to like the regular web 2 developer I still think depends

right like I think there are some class of people who do care about kind of like the verifiability of things but like maybe that's more of a nice to have for a lot of use cases than um than the new kind of like business models that are enabled like maybe that's the thing that draws people in and then the the verifiable computation is like oh wow that's like a nice bonus like I could just put this whole thing and it's like a platform that just like can't be with like that's kind of cool but it kind of comes after the financial components and what I mean by Financial components is like Financial Primitives and tools for them to use not like hey come here I'll give you like a grant or like just token token token you know um and so I I think it's really I think

there's a huge gap in terms of um developer education I think that's like part of empowering like the the web too nativ I think it's important that we like show that we're really clear and about what blockchains can do and like right now I don't think we've honestly done like a very good good job of that to like the external World outside of this little bubble yeah kind of uh kind of wrap in that loop I think um I think that there's a lot of work to do with University clubs also I think go up technology is at the best advertising ever I think you're right as far as like not competing on financials if somebody's goingon to want to build in crypto then it it should kind of come

innately but also at the same time um it's competitive market out there um but if you can kind of you know there's a lot more upside and a lot more fun frankly uh buildings here I think than um you know in in a traditional environment so um I kind of want to just revisit to your thought as one of the early kind of modular Pioneers um you know you mentioned that you started modular media back in the day in like April or May this year or previous year sorry so you know almost going for a year whereas you know in June July I I we were at NCC and you know I've remember seen modular day it

was just kind of like damn I'm not really sure what that is I'm GNA go to like L2 day and now of course it's like I'm like a modular penguin and like we are just talking about modular of March so yeah I'm just curious as to like how you've seen this thesis develop you know the beginning I I guess since you started mod Ria like like what kind of guy you interested and intrigued um and maybe even like what is your individual like Modo thesis outside of you know what everybody else may may kind of think about you know if you have one just kind of want to Ping down some of this and really get to the the nuts and buol as to why you're building what you

are yeah a lot that could go a lot of different directions that's that's that's an interesting like route I mean I probably started getting interested in the the modular what's now known as the modular uh like thesis before even modular media I would probably say it was like mid 2021 honestly just sitting and actually like Portland Oregon just like um uh just like reading crypto Twitter and like I think it was a it was a bare Market byy Ben definitely um and like Co and and like so I'm sitting there and I'm reading these like posts by this guy like Pia or this sorry I don't I don't know still Anonymous I have no idea who it is but this Pia

figure on crypto Twitter and um I'm like this is this is a different way of framing blockchains than I've ever like seen before and then at the same time I quickly discovered like the celesy guys who like actually predated that in terms of like conceptualizing it but I just happen to find like plenty of first um and it it it honestly just like it made it made a lot of sense I mean like I said like coming from the background of like cloud computing and developer tooling like that is how like modular is how apps get built today everybody in the space seems to analogize blockchains to like the iPhone or something like

that it's like do you know how those apps actually work like the there's a little part on your phone that you're looking at in the back is completely mod like every one of the apps that you use today actually whether it's on like your browser and your computer or your phone or whatever has a backend that uses like 15 other modules under the hood like it happens so fast you don't think about it it all just kind of works but like that's that's what's happening so like um it's like apps are already modular it just like they are and and so I think it makes sense that as you're and that's because like people the cloud infrastructure space learned over the course of 20 years that that like the monolithic thing is um is good until a point but then you kind of need as the

industry matures you it naturally gets towards like specialization and like um it's just kind of like a more flexible way to kind of like create competitive markets and then ultimately like scale scale performance but also scale like the the consumer like experience because you have all these independent parties that are kind of like battling it out for each different component and that ends up being like the best at the end of the day like the best possible experience for like devs and users so like sorry I might have lost track of your question to be honest with you but no no I mean just it's very open-ended man because um people have different answers I think they they come along along the similar route but yeah just just just very curious about um yeah just just about how you how you're

thinking about this right because even yesterday and we're kind of getting just into the into the free thinker here so the free to just kindy of expand our minds and just just take this wherever but even even yesterday it's like M bin arey in the past cuz polygon just put out a post system about head beated blockchains put this little Evolution diagram where you've got like monkey the monolithic like the half walking monkey humanist modular like all human evolution is so it's just like like we're so AR like body will be here pushing us like pushing it back so it's just H it's just craz it is is yeah that's funny I saw I didn't see the the the the human analogy

one I saw one of their other like diagrams but it's interesting actually so you you can kind of look at um the flu and L2 as um as like these Sovereign apps proliferate I mean the flu and L2 turns into kind of like an an aggregator layer as well actually like like that its main responsibility it'll have two responsibilities the first one is to execute the smart contracts and the second one is to aggregate proofs and like post them down to to one so like I I definitely align with um I I'd have to read their post like I don't I don't know right off the bat like hearing it as kind of like a different breed of thing I I gotta I gotta look into it I'm not sure but like I definitely bullish on like aggregation layers because I

mean um it just makes a lot of sense right it's just this like hyp scalable thing where you can have like thousands of proofs that just kind of like instead of having to post all of them on ethereum you just like take make a proof of all those thousand proofs and all you have to do is post that one proof on ethereum which is like this this beautiful thing um so I the space is changing fast though I mean the mental the hard thing and what causes all this tension on like crypto Twitter is like right when somebody forms a mental model around something it's broken yeah of course or someone's tried to break it for the S of out of positioning um but the on that on that point about folin's

decide and even further about your thesis with regards to um you know why why modular components are are important that's what they've been web too um you know and now just Mak s to transition that here into crypto 3 um something that that I asked uh rushi andal from a very curious to hear your answer like what is your personal value of cral thesis for uh modular blockchain the stat right like um you know I've send a transaction into on a rollup on a flid rollup um you know it goes through uh some da layer maybe uh a sequencer shared sequencing layer or uh that it

goes to the VM extion that set us back out to ethereum or maybe one day diping set layer there's all there different exchanges of value there and then also like broadly like um you know the different pieces of the stacks like out of they themselves a crew value from a business perspective how can they value like yeah what's your value crew you just put us that and again it's quick broad so take yeah it's it's an interesting question um I I'd probably say I could touch on like my value of cruel thesis and then I guess the valuation of all this stuff is kind of a separate beast and I'm not too sure but the value of cruel part um I I think people are I

think people are too rigid in they're thinking right now of like what acrs value like people be like oh da can never ACR value it's like okay shared sequencing is going to suck all the value away from Ras it's like man I think that all of this has opportunity to ACR value like if you're providing a valuable function and there are people who want it like you can charge for that like I think that um and that again just like relate it to web to I mean it's the same thing like you have Uber for example if you have if you're building Uber and under the hood you're not you're not building your own messaging service like to to to Route like the text messages and stuff like that when

drivers are coming but instead you're using twilio it's like an API that's sitting in the cloud under the hood and Uber gets the payment and they somewhere in the back end all streamlined and out of the thought process of an end user they pay twio for that service so and that is if there's 14 other modules that are like underlying Uber maybe they're using like a hosted database for some type of like big data like parallel processing maybe they're paying like data bricks for like their Sparks their spark manage spark or something like that maybe they're paying under that maybe they're paying like you know AWS or some like kubernetes service or like whatever um but the point is like I think all these things can ACR value if

like you're if you're um you know you're providing a valuable service um it's just simply supply and demand and like yeah things get very in the open kind of crypto environment things get like more and more competitive um but that doesn't mean everything goes to zero I don't think that's how it works um by the way another another thing on uh on value acrel and and kind of like value capture that I think a lot of people get wrong is thinking that everyone has to or just will choose to price uh based on cost I think if there's something that we've learned from again web to is that like software like the best software teams that I know certainly price based on value and I know that might sound kind of like up in

the air and silly but it's true like you you you get people like when you pay for a software application when you when you buy some SAS thing whether it's like Dropbox or whether it's like like slack or whatever put yourself in the shoes of somebody who thinks you have to charge based on cost do you think that every additional seat in slack or Zoom costs like you think they're they're charging you based on the cost that the cost is nothing like it costs absolutely nothing for them they can scale from 10 to a million seats on the back end of Zoom for near nothing they'll do it for free for half the seats and then they'll start charging they charge for Value like it that that's how it goes and like I think that the same thing the same principles can apply to um like the

settlement function or the da function or any of these different pieces of it like I mean hey man like like people who say settlement will like go to zero it's like think about think about a network of a thousand chains and you know some of them have like um like corporations working on them some of them have like are more crypto native like whatever you have this like full um my friend Ryan burkman's the ethereum ecosystem calls it the ethereum Trade Network and I kind of like that because if you think of like this even just think of rollups think of a thousand rollups and then you have one rollup that wants to like plug in like what's the value and this is where the settlement piece comes in so it's okay you can look at what the cost is for that rollup to post their proofs on

ethereum L1 and be like oh that's 5 cents a day but okay so you might think it goes to zero but what's the value of being able to plug in to the economic activity of a thousand chains in a way where they will where the the trust assumptions are all well understood and you'll get like an a for plays nice with others like basically people will trans those other chains will will actually transact and interact with like that is an incredibly valuable function and so I just think that people are are I don't know I still think we we need to evolve how we're looking at a lot of these things yeah yeah like the the very primitive mental model for Value acrel uh was fat protocol thesis or fat

application thesis where like the valley was either gonna it was either going to flow upstream or it was going to flow Downstream to the it was either going to flow Upstream to the applications or Downstream to the infrastructure that was providing like the the you know tool and the the chains to settle those applications that was in the monolithic era we're now in the modular era where that is broken and like what you're talking about is like it doesn't just flow one way or the other it's like it's like this just like giant like well and you know it just kind of like flies off into these a million different directions and in every direction where a tooling is providing value it'll it'll

be able to charge for that value because like you're saying it's not based on cost like it'll spin off value in each of those directions to the to the the projects that are providing those functions as long as the the market finds it valuable exactly that's what it's all about it's just it's whether the market finds it valuable exactly I mean even take the example of like a uh even take a Celestia right like I mean you got people who will will on da value AC crr and be like all right like how you know if something can um scale without issue almost like it's a bad thing like okay realistically um if you're uh you know even if you have let's see and know I'll make it I'm I'm making this up right now

um so I this there could be some holes in this but um think of like Celestia might be able to scale like indefinitely in theory and I I believe like I believe that it's it's a very scalable thing and those guys will figure it out they're great um but in in reality like it's going to like if there's manual intervention that's needed every time they want to make the blocks bigger like maybe it scales for the next like five years in like a pretty seamless way because crypto is just kind of getting going but then after that like um after that there's always a point where like it might the supply might be less than like the demand is increasing and then

you can charge more like and then it's it's this Balancing Act and I think that you end up in each of these and assuming they're providing a valuable service which they are it's going to be very like scalable um very scalable like dataa secure data availability um I think that uh you yeah I think the market kind of like finds an equilibrium for that and like it'll they'll be able to charge appropriate value like people just I think oversimplify a lot of this stuff yeah yeah I got asked not the da RIS to the bottom and my answer was like I don't really understand how race the bottom uh because the only thing that's happening is a better experience for

users so like and this is kind of what uhal was saying um where the value of cral thesis for the modular stack actually all just come with all backs to the users with better apps better ux cheaper fees and just a better experience overall and the way that I answered that as well was similar I was like I think I think the da r at the bottom quote unquote is just it's a it's a it's a race for users to pay way less fees across their favorite rollups favorite apps and it's a race for sequence service to be forced to decentralize uh and create a more robust um kind of network of of verifying rollup transactions so if that's a race

to the bottom in terms of the Direct Value then like we need more race to the bottoms of crypto because that's just how I guess how we're going to get to you know more inov I guess you can look at everything especially in software then as like a race to the bottom it's just like how long is the race you know like I mean if the race I feel like every time some kind of like new functionality comes out like people will will charge for it like it'll be more valuable or more scarce and they'll more they'll charge more for it whether it's like a new car feature that Elon pushes over or like whether it's like some whether it's just a new like software product and and over time yeah it's always it's all race to the bottom like I mean obviously it'll get

cheaper and cheaper than they'll offer that feature for like free but then they'll offer something else that's more novel that that pops up and just how long how long's the race you know well it's still early you know and uh I think uh I think we will kind of come to a close here where can our um where can our commity find you uh influent where where where would you like to kind of uh th them off to um yeah I would check out our Twitter um you know at fluent XYZ um and I mean if you're somebody if any of this resonated with you if you're someone who's you know trying to to push the boundaries on what's possible like on ethereum deploy daps and some of these languages like we're on private

test net going uh on onboarding new partners as as we speak so we're all accessible to reach out and we'd love to chat yeah thank you so much on it's been an absolute pleasure a lot of a lot of insightful and uh a lot of parts of the brain being interconnect to hear thanks for having me guys it was fun