DeFi by Design EP#86: Why Sharding Is Undoubtedly The Future of Scaling Blockchains with Shardeum

Transcript

welcome to D5 by Design where we talk all things blockchain and cryptocurrency while striving to educate Empower and enrich it's your boy Andy and welcome back to the D5 site YouTube Channel smash the like button on this video that really helps us out and sit back and enjoy the content thank you very much what's going on guys welcome back to the D5 by Design podcast here for episode 86 and we are talking with our buddy Greg from chardium a new layer one blockchain coming to the market shortly excited today in the midst of the market Madness kind of dive deep into a future vision for applications built on blockchains and kind of in the web 3 world starting

to see more and more convincingly that there's going to be a variety of different blockchains hosting all different sorts of applications that will have different use cases across all different you know kind of spheres whether it be Enterprise chains kind of D5 nft friendly chains um you know more more you know there's just going to be a lot of of applications and and different types of blockchains for for you know different countries or different people um you know and there's going to be some large like ethereum and kind of some of the other ones like we've seen still on in such kind of uh take the stride but here we are uh in the midst of like I said the market Madness and I hope everyone's staying sane Rob I hope you're keeping your head on straight as well

um and it's good to it's good to be back on with you so how you doing Rob good man good good good yeah um lots of chop amongst the markets but it's uh it's good to you know hop on a podcast continue building really uh continue learning all the way through and uh not really mentally capitulate ever because uh then you would miss out on all the fun so uh yeah there's tons going on I'm uh stoked to talk to Greg about uh really everything that's going on um on chardium there's some interesting kind of developments um recently like uh like Andy said about kind of like these applications there's gonna be so many of them uh that's where like you know a lot of the user activity

is going to end up and I'm stoked to kind of like hear Greg your thesis on uh like fact protocols or fat applications and kind of like which way the uh the uh the trend is gonna go and then generally like all the applications that um you expect to see on shardium which ones uh you're really excited about so yeah without further Ado I'll uh pass it over to Greg and uh we can get started talking about Shard him how's it going man hey Andy hey Rob thanks so much for having me here I'm the head of fundraising and ecosystem at chardium and I'm really excited to talk with you guys more about you know our vision for the future of web3 and uh what shardium is and why we're building it

um how do you guys want to get started yeah sounds good um well first and foremost how was uh the conference token 2049 how is Singapore oh yeah token 2049 and midnight over the past two weeks were awesome um you know speaking of the market uh you know when you go on online I think a lot of the talk in web3 today is still just about you know the market and the performance of different crypto assets but it's so exciting to go to these conferences because that's where you you meet the builders who you know all share a common vision for the you know the future of web3 at decentralization and understand how massive decentralization is for society and so you know

everyone's excited to to reconnect that at these events and talk about the latest and the development of their software and technology and the new cool exciting things they're working on so it was a ton of fun meeting meeting all the builders in person and learning about uh what's upcoming and in their ecosystems and projects and and what's next foreign yeah it's funny when you go to the conferences nobody nobody wants to talk about what the price is well I guess unless the price is super high then everyone's just giddy like I remember East Lisbon it was like no don't talk about the Press sisters November of last year so literally the top um and everyone was you know there's still little talk about the prices but everyone's just giddy on their on their

on their High horses and then you know things are things are different as as the bear Market kind of progresses as we enter into like the uh you know talking about price because it's sad but that aside um I do agree those are so fun man just being able to chat with uh a lot of different people and yeah it sounds like you had a successful time with sharding as well completing your raise um yeah that that's always good news yeah absolutely um it's a great place for you know to meet uh some of our existing investors and new investors and as I was mentioning earlier you know you know my two weeks traveling there we uh closed the remaining 1.5 million in

our rounds so it's definitely really exciting to not only be able to attend these events and um you know um just meet such talented intelligent people but also be able to you know make a lot of progress on chardium in our fundraise as well yeah yeah for sure what's that process like you know like um kind of talking about like chardium kind of like before it exists you know like you're kind of talking to people that um are starting to align on like a similar Vision that uh they want to see shardium exist so you know you go out and you start raising Capital to fund the development of this layer one

blockchain like like what what were you know some of the conversations like what turned investor heads um and ultimately got people excited about the same thing you're excited about yeah great question Rob I think this is a really good question for you know people that want to get into web 3 and want to learn about you know how how do they turn an idea they have into a product that they can raise funding for um and so you know different VCS have different thesis and they look for projects that fit their thesis and try to find really strong Founders building good technology within that thesis and I think a lot of money is pouring into infrastructure in web3 today because um you know there's a lot of awareness around the scalability challenges that

web3 has and investors are just trying to make you know really strong bets on on good scaling technology um and so at chardium we believe there's a lot of improvement that can happen at layer one uh before we you know go and scale that layer to like CK rollup is good technology but the the foundations that Roll-Ups are scaling on top of uh you know have a lot of opportunity to improve and so um we think that sharding hasn't been done to its full potential yet in web 3. you know one of the biggest concerns with sharding today is the fact that it breaks Atomic composability so if you have a transaction that calls two contracts where one contract is on chart

a and one contract is on Sharp B the composability of those contracts in one transaction can't happen atomically in the current sharded blockchains and so you're limited to what you can achieve with composability on the existing charting chains today and shardy him solves this challenge so now you have a sharded layer one where you have the benefit of linear scaling we can increase our TPS capacity with each node added to the network while also retaining Atomic composability so the same experience is ethereum or Solana or any monolithic layer one but you add linear scaling into the mix where now you don't have this fixed TPS capacity

you can always increase it and so this is the pitch we've been giving it to investors and uh you know uh we've been building this technology over the past five years so that's one thing that really differentiates us is so many projects have gotten started in this space in 2018 2017 just as like an erc20 token as in a white paper or even some of the new blockchains popping up launch like an MVP in a white paper of the the vision that I plan to develop in the future um and and they focus on raising funding first and acquiring users and building out their future features second uh with shardium we've been building the protocol layer for our project shardis

since 2017. so when we launched our mainnet in q1 of 2023 it's feature complete there is no like road map of features that we need to build we've already built them so that's definitely one thing and investors are really excited about the second thing investors are are just extremely stoked about is the fact that our co-founder Nisha Shetty is the CEO of the largest centralized Exchange in India called whizzier X which last year did 45 billion dollars in volume over 100 million of it was profit he has about 500 000 followers on Twitter primarily you know from people in the web for ecosystem in India and so you know I think when you take up something in the

market you need good Tech and you need distribution so you can get awareness of this technology and you know we have that five years of of product development proving out our Tech and we have uh you know Nisha in his presence in an audience in India to distribute this and build an ecosystem sweet um so to to your point about composability so let's kind of touch on like for our for our our audience like when when you say sharding you know how is how how would like in you know for uh for ethereum I I guess you know how would that kind of make sense um and then I suppose what what does uh the composability look like

um when it comes to sharding and kind of what does that process look like for sharding yeah great question um so let's start with sharding uh you know so many people hear about sharding in web3 today but many of these people aren't Engineers so they they don't know that there are different types of sharding most people think that just sharding is sharding um but really the goal of sharding is to the goal of it is to parallelize a function you know sharding does performs functions in parallel and in blockchains you have different types of functions that you can parallelize so like there's data starting ethereum 2.0 plans to implement data sharding where they'll have 64 different shards

that store different sets of data so that layer twos can read and write faster from layer one the ethereum wants to optimize data availability for Layer Two so they're not going to parallelize the processing of transactions they're just going to store data in parallel you also have projects like silica which did compute sharding so they parallelized you know the computation or validation of transactions which they gave them some increase in TPS but uh you know a blockchain has three functions or scalability bottlenecks that it performs uh you first you have to validate a transaction and that happens at the CPU but a CPU only has so

much capacity to validate a given number of transactions per second once the transaction is validated it needs to be gossiped to every other node in the network but there's only so much bandwidth available in a network to gossip a given number of transactions per second so you run into the bandwidth bottleneck and then once every node sees every transaction they need to write to the disk to update the state of addresses involved in the transaction and you can only write to a disk so many times per second so you have the disk IO the network i o in the CPU capacity that limit blockchain's scalability now the way to mitigate these bottlenecks is to use something called state sharding which parallelizes all three of those functions and the way it

parallelizes it is rather than having every node in the network for example in a blockchain like ethereum or Bitcoin every node processes every transaction and stores all of the data in the history of the blockchain um and and so when you add more notes you don't get parallel processing you just get more decentralization and redundancy but eventually you have enough like you have there's a point where you have too much redundancy in decentralization and then you you I mean you can never have enough decentralization but there's a point when you have too much redundancy and what you really need is parallel processing so you can increase your capacity to process more TPS and scale and so what sharding does is rather than

every node performing these processes for every address and every transaction now you have different groups of nodes that are performing these functions in parallel so for example you could have you know one Shard a processing transactions for addresses zero to one hundred and then sharp B processing transactions for addresses 101 to 200. and this isn't actually how addresses are named but just wanted to to make it simple for for the audience yeah so okay so so kind of to to put a so there's there's there's multiple bottlenecks that

um affect the basically efficiency and speeds that blockchains can compute certain certain data calculations kind of um executions right and um what sharding allows you to do is effectively basically like you said take these functions and kind of allow them to happen in various locations if you will or various transactions in a parallel manner so that way that you can scale dramatically more transactions per second without effectively overloading the blockchain causing like high fees or failed transactions or just overall uh you know lack of skill um and so by conducting these in

parallel you effectively have all of these different shards of the chain that all report back into one um and I'm not sure if you touched on kind of like the uh well okay so that's that's broad proof that's broad sharding at its core what the what it is now with Sean it sorry to cut you off but just to clarify uh like uh shardium doesn't need to report back into like uh like one Beacon chain uh per set okay um that is one thing about chardium but uh the best like uh you know way to explain sharding to the users is you know here we have Andy Rob and I and Andy Rob and I can each have our own wallet in a blockchain

in in an Uncharted blockchain every single node in the network is going to have the data for all of our wallets and when we submit a transaction every single node in the network is going to need to process the transactions for all three of our wallets now in a sharded blockchain maybe Shard a has my wallet sharp B has Andy's wallet and shark C has Rob's wallet and so if all three of us you know submit a transaction at the same time now these transactions can be processed in parallel rather than being processed sequentially one by one by every single node in the network and yeah cool oh so so Greg like the the

parallelization of of these transactions increases the scalability and um to kind of like summarize what you're saying just like really really simply like we have ethereum Bitcoin like these non-shorted blockchains where every Miner or every validator is processing every transaction and that creates a redundancy where each time a transaction goes through it's rehypothecated to all the other nodes and then that that creates like this enormous uh amount of redundancies where we could kind of like uh specialize the nodes for one process

in a sharded Network and then some of those nodes are doing uh the gossiping some of those nodes are doing the uh processing some of them are doing the uh ADD test station to the state and as a result of like this almost like the division of labor the nodes start to specialize in their in their certain role and that allows them to to work together more efficiently yeah that was a you you're very close from um uh but we're not segmenting the the the different functions in parallel uh like we're segmenting the address space so you know you Andy and I each of our wallets have a unique address and a

blockchain needs to perform different functions for each transaction that our addresses it submit to the network and and so now we're not segmenting like you know some nodes store the data in some nodes process the transactions and some nodes are responsible for like you know the networking um we're just segmenting the processing of transactions based on addresses so every node performs the same functions but for different addresses does that make sense yeah yeah that that does make sense so now like you know uh each of these uh nodes are doing the same function and

um there's like certain nodes that are processing addresses like the first 1000 addresses on the network uh there's a certain set of nodes that are processing those transactions um and then like the second thousand addresses are getting processed by another set of nodes and it it almost seems like you know like we look at the evm today it has uh like certain Roll-Ups and certain Layer Two networks that are feeding transactions into the evm and those uh those rpcs like you know arbitrum optimism

Avalanche to name a few um those networks are processing the transactions of the addresses on uh their networks and they're feeding it to the overall state of ethereum I call it the overall state of the evm is that a similar uh you know maybe you could draw some is that is that a fair similarity between the evm and shardis um and maybe there's some important differences to highlight between how the the evm functions um and how how shardium operates yep yeah sociardium uses the evm so we use the same virtual machine uh it's

just the architecture you know of our network uh uses the evm is a sharded Network and at the protocol layer we've also designed this architecture that allows us to uh parallelize the evm um so you get parallelization from sharding but you know now imagine like a node being able to spin up multiple EVMS uh in one node like like why can't a node in ethereum today process multiple addresses transactions at the same time um yeah you should be able to like parallelize the processing of transactions within the node but

um you can't because like ethereum uh views the world as pre-pre-state and post-state and if you if you start to try to parallelize uh you know transactions on ethereum you'll you'll have chains where one chain gets longer than another chain and then they lose synchronization of the current state um and and so that's why like you see you know content come out from new projects like Aptos which say that you know you can't parallelize the evm at runtime but um chardian does consensus on each transaction individually which is really unique and that allows us to uh you know

parallelize the evm within each node but then also use sharding to get even even greater parallelizing but we're getting uh I don't want to get too technical here just to go just to again explain the architecture of chardium in simple terms um you know in ethereum and Bitcoin every node processes the transactions for every address uh inchartium no one single node is assigned to the same range of addresses every single node covers a unique range of addresses while ensuring that each address has the required redundancy of 128 nodes so if if any one node ever goes down or goes

offline there's 127 other nodes that is processing the transactions for an address and storing that data um and and so now what this allows is because each node covers a unique range of address space you get an immediate increase in TPS capacity with each new node added to the network and and so the the feature or the value proposition here is TPS per node you know now we're not like you know ethereum which does like 15 TPS or you know no matter which blockchain you have today if they're not using sharding they have a fixed TPS capacity where they say this is how much TPS we can process and

once you get more demands than TPS then you have the two of transactions that build up which is when users need to begin bidding gas fees to prioritize their transaction first the idea with shardium is that we can always increase our TPS capacity by adding more nodes to be higher than demand so there should never be a queue of transactions that build up which users have to bid gas Visa yeah and there'll there'll always be increased decentralization with the increasing amount of transactions per second which is kind of opposite to what we've seen right now like Finance smart chain for example they are very fast but they just had a hack and they got they

just rolled their chain back with a with the blockchain trilemma what you usually think of is decrease decentralization leads to increased speeds because centralized databases for example something like a Visa can process faster than something like ethereum however with shardy and what we're getting at right now is that we can also increase decentralization while increasing the speed but we haven't touched on so much is the third kind of important model of the blockchain trilemma which is security but my initial thought is that because you guys are part of evm you guys are basically inheriting the ethereum security model as kind of your own security model because of being part of the evm but talk to me kind of about

what how your how you guys are viewing the blockchain trilemma if you will uh and you know we've covered speed and decision and decentralization but you know security yeah great question Andy um so when it comes to a sharded blockchain that the biggest risk for security is a 51 takeover attack of one shard and so you know sometimes people think that there's like a greater security risk in a sharded Network because now you don't need to take over 51 of the entire ethereum network you just need to take over 51 of one chart which is a smaller amount of notes and so in shardium's case that each Shard size is 128 notes

so if someone were able to theoretically take over 51 of one Shard then they could take over the network and so how does chardian prevent that um there's so much Innovation here that you know people haven't haven't seen yet in in this space which we're really excited to bring the market and one thing about shardium is that uh there are two types of three types of nodes in the network but two types that we're going to talk about here are standby nodes invalidator nodes so in a in a blockchain most blockchains pay the validator notes node rewards to incentivize them to you know operate a node in the network and so in chardium the network doesn't want to pay a

hundred thousand nodes gas rewards or node rewards if it only needs a thousand nodes to process the current demand and so the network is uh fully permissionless in the sense that anyone in the world can operate a validator node but the network controls its size so you have standby nodes which are nodes waiting on standby to become validators and you have validator nodes which are actively in the network validating transactions and the network controls the amount of validator nodes in the network based on the demand so if there's only if there's a thousand TPS we might have 2 000 notes for example but now three hours later from now some

application goes viral and now there's demand for 10 000 TPS you know now we may have 30 000 validator nodes in the network and and so you have these nodes waiting on standby and you have validator nodes and every 60 seconds the standby notes are sending a join request to the network to become validators and so every 60 seconds the network is swapping out standby notes with the existing validator nodes and so when when it comes to security uh the reason the way we prevent A Shard takeover attack is because every 60 seconds a percentage of the nodes in the network are getting swapped out with the standby nodes and

so you can't choose when your node is added to the network or which Shard your node is added to and you don't know how long your node is going to be in the network for you could be added you know two minutes from now to A Shard you don't know which charge your node is going to land in and then three minutes later it could go back to standby and and so just like Bitcoin or ethereum you have to have 51 of all stem like in chardium you have to have 51 not only of like of the network nodes but you also have have 51 of standby notes to be able to get a majority of notes into the network in the same chart at the same

time so this node rotation um it is what makes the probability of A Shard takeover attack uh at uh just like a very far less than one percent and so that is the overall downfall to sharding is the potential for a takeover attack similar to like Bitcoin mining takeovers if all yeah that's one sec that's one Pitfall of the sharding is concern about uh like this Shard takeover attack where now you don't have a network of you know hundreds or thousands of notes that you have to take over you only have to take over A Shard which is usually somewhere

between 100 to 300 notes but you know these projects have really talented engineers and you know raising millions of dollars and they're not going to launch something that doesn't have an efficient security mechanism in place to prevent this of course you know we've seen so many hacks are are possible in this space there's definitely a lot of hackers out in the world trying to find ways to get around these mechanisms but um at shardy and we're really we're extremely confident that there is no security risk for a Sharp takeover attack and we're working with really talented uh security auditing firms and we'll also be launching a a bug bounty on platforms like immune by where you

start to get this game theory in place where if I'm a hacker and I discover a bug today should should I wait until the main net goes live and exploit this bug and potentially earn millions of dollars but if if I if I if I if I wait and I don't report the bug today and earn the bug bounty and I I want to exploit it what if someone else discovers this bug as well before the before I exploit it and and then because of that this other person gets the bug Bounty and I don't get it should I should I be a hacker and try to exploit this bug or should I record it today and earn a scholar reward that's why I thought body platforms are so great so there's a lot we're investing to improve the security

um yeah and I think the other the other so the other big Pitfall of sharded blockchains again is just this uh this idea of breaking composability where now each Shard is like its own blockchain and so how do these shards communicate it damages the user and developer experience when applications are segmented across shards and they don't have composability with each other um the reason shardium is able to retain Atomic composability is because we do consensus on each transaction individually which for your listeners is going to open up this whole can of worms like why are these guys doing consistent on transactions instead of grouping them into blocks

fair enough does that does that create like like uh like a stateless kind of machine where you don't really need to like update the uh like the blockchain anymore is because like each transaction comes with its own like blockchain embedded into it uh yeah that I I think this is getting above like my my engineering level of Education uh you still need to like maintain a state in in chardium chardium is still like uh you it we can call it a blockchain because that's what all these networks are called but uh we do have a concept of blocks which happens after consensus we group transactions into blocks after after they've been

consensus upon but um prior to like when we're validating transactions and coming to consensus we do consensus on each transaction uh individually and um it like we we're performing the same functions as a traditional blockchain we're just not grouping transactions into a block and doing consensus on a block we do consensus on each transaction individually and so that's one of like when when people ask what's the trade-off of shardium uh the major trade-off is that shardium is less performant than it could be if it did consensus like right now we're doing consensus on each transaction which is more compute intensive and consumes more

bandwidth so we we could be more performant if we did consensus on on blocks instead of each transaction individually but in a sharded blockchain like one of the biggest challenges is guaranteeing Atomic processing of transactions across charts what that means is if you have a transaction in a sharded blockchain that does consensus on a block and that block or that transaction contains two or more addresses on different shards how do you guarantee that the transaction in the block on Shard a also gets into the block on Sharp B Sharp B could have higher gas fees so the transaction doesn't get into the block and then

Shard and then Shard Ace block needs to be rolled back so the transaction either needs to be accepted in both shards or rejected in both shards but sharp B could have higher gas fees than chardey so the transaction doesn't get into the block or some of the transaction is in sharp Beast block could get orphaned and that blocks rolled back and then Shard AIDS flock needs to be rolled back as well and so to get a little bit into the technical details the current sharded blockchains uh the way they achieve Atomic processing is when a transaction is submitted to the network the network sees the first address involved in the transaction the transaction will be routed to that addresses Shard that Shard will process the transaction as

much as it can until it sees another address that it doesn't have the data forward once it finds this address it'll route the transaction to that address is Shard with a receipt of the work done on Shard a and this process will continue until the transaction is fully processed and then the data will be shared with all those cards and so you get this like asynchronous processing of transactions where transactions are hopping across shards it asynchronously one at a time and that's what breaks composability like when these shards can't come together and communicate with each other and validate a transaction at once in one consensus you don't have composability of contracts and applications across shards

and so this limits things like D5 where you know if if you want to launch an amm and use like our Dex and you know in an amm you have different token pair contracts and in a sharded blockchain amms don't work if you have different token pair contracts on different shards because those shards can't communicate with each other and come to consensus atomically um but in shardium when we do consensus on each transaction individually we no longer have to worry about this Atomic processing transaction the atomic processing challenge you know every transaction is either accepted or rejected we don't have to worry about it

getting into blocks on different shards and so what this allows us to do is use this novel architecture where only the nodes responsible for the addresses involved in a transaction come together and form a virtual Shard or consensus group and validates the transaction at once and so now you get the same experiences you have on ethereum or Bitcoin or Solana where it's one network where all the applications can interoperate with each other users don't need to think about which Shard they're currently on developers don't need to think about which Shard they can deploy their application to it's one seamless experience but you have the benefit of linear scaling and uh that that's so important because like one of the challenges Solana is

facing today is uh they're getting congested they're reaching like their TPS capacity and the only way for them to increase their TPS capacity would be to use more powerful validator notes and and scale vertically or scale that layer to um and and so they're getting they're reaching their capacity and and hitting their bottleneck and now they need to implement fee markets where users can prioritize their transaction first by paying a higher gas fee just like the way it works on ethereum um you know that's what's so great and important about chardium is that we can avoid fee markets and requiring users to bid on transactions by increasing our

TPS capacity with each node additive and you mentioned you like how there's like a virtual Shard that's formed by the nodes that are a part of uh that transaction and is it almost like like there's not really like a a certain amount of nodes online at one time like because these nodes are kind of spread out spread out across the uh the the addresses that are that are part of a single transaction and since you alluded to like uh one node um

that that kind of processes the transaction for that address do these nodes for each transaction come together to process that transaction and then kind of like this band and then like cease to communicate with one another um is that is that yeah the only times that nodes which are assigned to different addresses need to communicate with each other is when there's a transaction that involves like both those addresses so if I'm node a and I'm assigned to address one and your node B and you're assigned to address two and some user has a transaction that involves address one and address two our nodes will come

together and form a consensus a virtual Shard or what we call a consensus group where they'll validate that transaction but then they go back to you know processing other transactions which don't include both of their addresses and so they can continue processing transactions in parallel um yeah nice and uh you mentioned like fee markets um this is just kind of Switching gears as we kind of like wind uh like you know to the top of the hour like uh how does how does gas work uh um Gas Works just like an in real life gas station where uh you pay the same cost

per gallon or the same price per gallon but the cost of your transaction can vary based on the amount of gas you consume so in in shardium each byte of data is charged the same price but the total cost of transactions can vary based on the amount of you know gas consumed just like an in real life gas station and so this opens up a whole other like bowl of benefits like now we don't have Mev because transactions are ordered based on time and you can't front run other transactions by paying a higher gas fee because we charge the same price per per byte of data

and you also have like the fair ordering of transactions we like we if we want web3 to go mainstream I I personally don't think we should commoditize like transaction processing times imagine going to a grocery store and every time you want to check out of a grocery store you have to get in this bidding war of who gets to check out of the grocery store first like I you know we already have this challenge with wealth disparity in our in our country and across the world and imagine okay now I'm not as wealthy as other people so I have to wait 20 minutes in line every time I go to the grocery store because I can't pay a higher gift to check out

I think this is one of the things that like damages referee's user experience and that's one thing that's really cool about chardium is that transactions are ordered based on time on how much you can afford to pay the bills yeah we almost have this like uh social mechanism where like you know there's there's kind of like the social Market where like you know you cut in front of the old lady you know to like check out sooner like probably not you're gonna you know get you know let let this like the old lady kind of like check out before you because she doesn't really have like uh that much time left so you're just kind of like cognizant of the time that she

has the time that you have and then you know the uh the uh the market kind of just kind of like settles based on uh the social record recognition of another's time and then kind of like another another sorry yeah I just also wanted to make sure we leave the listeners with a another few points that are just on the top of my mind um one thing is that uh like there's so much more to learn about sharding than what we discussed here today uh but sharding is going to be needed in all blockchains to be able to scale like you can only scale so far vertically before you run into scalability bottlenecks uh

like in polygon if you if you search polygon in January of 2022 it's Gatsby's Rose to 50 cents when one game became popular on its POS network if you look at arbitrum its gas fees were as higher than ethereum's in June you know when when arbitrim launched and it there's a it you know there's just a lot of transactions being submitted and it's guys gas Visa is higher than ethereums as I mentioned with Solana um uh like they now have to implement fee markets because they're becoming congested and so you know all of these all of this new technology being great invented is amazing and you know arbitrary and polygon Solana have all

contributed their own unique proprietary technology to the space and our great projects um but you do need sharding no matter which layer you're at to scale at some point because you you need to be able to parallelize the processing of transactions and be able to increase your throughput capacity uh you can only hit the network so hard until you run into those bandwidth and compute capacity and and disk IO uh bottlenecks that we were talking about earlier in the call um that there's um the EIP 4844 that's been circulating uh on the ethereum side of things like you know

with ethereum's kind of like generally like what are your thoughts on on like the proto-dink Chardon implementation um like and I guess where does it stack up uh against like the the other sharded blockchains that are out there now and and uh you know how does shardium like Implement similar technology or or like what's the reasoning not to go with the same method of uh charting that ethereum planes to implement yeah uh great question um so I mean if you ask someone from the ethereum foundation they'll definitely be able to explain proto-dink sharding better than I can uh I don't participate

in their team meetings and I I'm I can't I'm not an expert on this topic but we do have someone on our team named zahora Muhammad who previously worked at Prismatic Labs which is the developer of ethereum 2.0 prism client and so um you know my understanding of ethereum's vision for shardy is that uh you know they've given up on this idea of scaling and execution happening at layer one you know ethereum is pushing execution to layer two or the execution of transactions happens on off chain add a layer two and layer one is the settlement and data availability layer and so uh if I understand correctly what uh like this the EIP you're mentioning

here is for is to be able to have 64 shards which store different sets of data and so now rather than having one network that like layer twos can read and write from now they'll have 64 different shards where each Shard is like its own chain of data that layer twos can read and write from so they're whole focused with sharding is to optimize data availability for layer twos they're basically just optimizing the performance of layer ones to support layer twos they won't increase the TPS capacity at layer one like you'll still be limited to 15 TPS if you submit a transaction on ethereum even in a

sharded environment but now layer twos will have better performance however one challenge is if they do Implement data sharding there's a coindesk article and a few different articles that have come out about if if ethereum does implement data sharding they're going to break composability at layer one which means that what we talked about earlier different contracts on different shards won't be able to have composability with each other and so they're taking a very large bet that layer twos of their future and you know damaging the user experience at layer one to optimize for Layer Two um so in short ethereum plans to Shard

the data but they don't plan to Shard or parallelize the execution of transactions so you won't see TPS increase at layer one you'll see better performance at Layer Two um what shardium plans to do at layer one or what we are doing is called state sharding which means we don't just Shard the data we also start the the network and the execution of transactions so now we can get this TPS increase with each node added to the network and and so now we get more scalability at layer one and the great thing is we can also support layer twos as well and so layer twos will you know have even greater performance on chardium

this is our whole focus and and thought is that layer ones need better performance and the reason Nisha wanted to start recently wanted to found chardium is because he's the CEO of the largest Exchange in India and in his seat you know he gets to see like he gets a high level view of the market and all the data from the users and what he's noticed is that users in India are buying crypto on centralized exchanges but they're not using decentralized applications that crypto is not like a small percentage of people are using decentralized applications and everyone else is here to just buy Bitcoin and ethereum and hold it on a

centralized Exchange but eventually people are probably going to become interested in decentralized applications and we think most users in web 3 are going to come from Emerging Markets but in an emerging market like India where people are extremely price sensitive how do you get someone to use a you know a blockchain if the gas fees are higher than 50 cents people in India aren't aren't most people aren't going to pay more than 50 cents per transaction because our merging markets are price sensitive and so we need a layer one where people can experience decentralization that can retain stable low fees no matter how many users or transactions there are

it like layer one shouldn't be for the wealthy people that can afford to pay high gas fees to have more security into centralization and layer twos are for everyone else that can't afford security and decentralization um so that we we think there needs to be a lot more Innovation at layer one and and that's our Focus yeah it's a it's a really novel uh solution to the scalability trilemma which it seems like ethereum is also trying to solve but has the trade-off of losing composability across these shards shardium has already you know you and you shall have thought like clearly ahead of these other problems um where sharding starts to lose

composability and embedding um the consensus for each transaction into uh those those transactions kind of allows you to keep that composability across Shores in addition to improving the scalability um with each with each node that's added to the network and I think it's you know a really elegant thesis to uh to build this uh expansive protocol layer that also grows with the amount of demand um and like you say like we aren't really seeing it yet there's just not that killer application on blockchains just yet maybe it's a social one maybe it's a gaming one maybe it's a financial

one um we probably see it eventually and um it'll be it'll be really cool to see if those applications exist you're just looking up a whole nother conversation that we could spend another four hours on is like the future applications of web free I love to think about this all the time uh I'll just say that I like to think about like what would it take to get my mother my grandmother to use web3 I think I mentioned this earlier in the call and it's not digital art as nfts uh it's not D5 I'm not going to get my mother to use a DPI application or Buy digital art as an nft but she would use a decentral like a real world use case of web 3 that added more convenience or

lower costs to her daily life I posted a tweet the other day and it was about the story of doordash like the founders of doordash started doordash because they surveyed like 200 small businesses in the Bay Area and they found that all of these small businesses shared a common problem which were deliveries are a pain in the ass and so they built technology to make deliveries easier for businesses so they found a common problem that users had and they built technology to solve it I think in web 3 today everyone is so focused on these like futuristic use cases that don't exist yet like the metaverse like not everyone in society today needs or cares about these use

cases what I really want to see Founders start doing is the same thing doordash did go out and Survey people in the United States and different countries around the world finds common challenges that a lot of people have and use decentralization to build a solution that more efficiently solves this challenge than a centralized application can you know that's what that's what we need to to get web free to go mainstream is real world use cases and applications of web3 but the I think the big reason those don't exist today is because we're Limited in what we can do on the current blockchains due to the scalability bottlenecks you know you can have an application that goes mainstream and has billions of users and like hundreds of

thousands of TPS like just think for example the fact that WhatsApp does 1.1 million messages per second you know if you combine Bitcoin ethereum polygon and BNB chain on their busiest day haven't surpassed 350 TPS so we're at 350 TPS versus 1.1 million messages per second let's scale it up brother yes sir let's go let's ride yeah great this was uh yeah this was a lot of fun talking about the infrastructure level and uh definitely uh come back let's talk about the application Level map

for sure let's uh meet again in uh six to 12 months when we see some Innovative new use cases building on chardium we'll bring those teams on the call here and you know talk about real world use cases that are being built in web3 I'm excited for the day when we watch uh you know uh football on the weekend or whatever sport you like or whatever TV show you like and in between the show you see a commercial of decentralized application but it mentions nothing about blockchain nothing about decentralization no like web3 buzzwords it's just focused on the features of the applications and behind the scenes it's decentralized our co-founder Omar likes to say that like in the 90s everyone was talking about the internet and like how the internet

works and you know like just the technology of the internet but today no one's really talking about how the internet works anymore we talk about new new applications built on the internet but we don't talk about like the speed of like you know like the internet and the different challenges it has because all these challenges have been solved it works today web 3 and blockchains blockchains are so new they have a lot of challenges so we're all talking about these challenges and getting all caught up in the tech but soon we're going to fix these challenges and no one will be talking about blockchain or anymore we'll just all be focused on the cool new applications popping up exciting stuff man yeah thanks for

coming on Greg excited to see shardium grow and uh push it forward so yeah cheers man it's a pleasure