EVM vs SVM Tradeoffs, Ethereum Alignment, and App Specific Sequencing | Alex Watts

Transcript

we're kind of seeing in real time in ethereum land especially how a lot of what started off is like kind of like an ethos how a lot of this alignment has started to become more about business and about commercialization where typically the thing that is being put up as being aligned with ethereum is being put up by people that benefit from that perception such as l2s benefit from being perceived as being ethereum aligned and so when you look at like people that don't have l2s or that aren't really in any way connected to l2s or have any sort of business

dependencies or revenue dependencies or future plans to be on an L2 when those people say that l2s are ethereum I listen hey everyone this episode is brought to you by Fuel Labs who's launching fuel ignition a new high performance ethereum L2 powered by the fuel VM you're going to be hearing all about ignition later in the program but for now what you need to know is they are launching phase two of their points program so click the link at the bottom of the show notes and head over start experimenting messing around on fuel today thank me later hey everyone quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode nothing said on bell curve is a recommendation to buy or sell Securities or tokens this podcast is for informational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions not Financial

advice our guest and I may hold positions in the companies funds or project discussed all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve today I'm joined by Alex Watts Alex welcome to the program man Mike thanks for having me dude yeah man I'm uh I'm pumped to do this I I gotta give you a little bit of do here because we've talked about a lot of technical subjects over the years I did a whole M season with hu and I should have credited you with a exec producer for That season because whenever I had a question about how does this crazy me stuff works you were one of my first calls and deserve more credit the overall uh history of bell curve that I feel like you've you've gotten so it's good that we can make this episode work oh dude I'm I'm

super excited to be here and I really like that season a lot too I um I dude I really appreciated that uh you know you reached out to me from my point of view dude hu is a legend you know he's like one of the ogs and um since then I've actually just started pinging him directly rather than like hey Mike can you ask him this hey Mike but um dude I love that season that's like one of the all-time best podcast seasons in all of crypto in in my mind oh thanks man you know the other thing about hu is that he's a very nice guy it was a it was a fun he's obviously a very intellectual Powerhouse of a dude but uh yeah very nice guy very fun to do it with and uh

and yeah man I I don't want to sell you short as well either like a lot of the um you know I think that me and just a lot of the technical discussion in crypto Falls prey to the same group think and and you are someone who I consistently will talk to and oh I wasn't really thinking about it like that or that's a different way of approaching that issue and um you know I'm excited to get into some of that with you today and some of what we're going to be talking about actually is I guess the headline if if we had to put one to this episode would be the differences in the evm versus the svm and part of the reason I'm interested in having this discussion with you is because obviously everyone is bullish on the yellow coin and the svm because it's

parallelization and everything goes fast and I'm for what it's worth highly influenced by the arguments but you rarely hear people make the opposite argument about things that the evm can do better than the svm and so I'm interested to get the Devil's Advocate take on that and then we'll end with a little bit of a spicy take on some of the standard stuff that's going on in uh ethereum today but before we get there Alex could you just give everyone a little bit of a background on yourself and fast lane and in particular you know I'm interested in the early days of Fast Lane the smart Contracting um solution that you built over at polygon and then we can kind of do a neat through line into the work that you're doing uh today absolutely so I first got started in me back in 2020 trading a just doing

very basic stable coin Arbitrage on an exchange called Titan and I had a blast doing it I made way more money than I thought I was going to make doing it and that is what prompted me to go from trafi but not hft trafi more like you know sales and Excel spreadsheet trafi into crypto full-time and was doing me on polygon in particular doing a lot of Market making so-called or CI defi Arbitrage as well as atomic Arbitrage as well as stablecoin minting redeeming Arbitrage even liquidations and it was a lot of fun how to blast doing it and then

polygon started to get uh put under too much stress by spam transactions and at that time I was playing for you know the red team so to speak and I was also just spamming a pretty pretty decent amount not as much as some people but I was no stranger to spam and I'm sitting here thinking like if if someone doesn't do something about people like me then that could lead to very bad problems for the polygon blockchain and so I actually reached out to one of the teams that had started running a Mev Fork on polygon and I actually pitched them this solution uh

that later became fast lane and at the time they had said no you know this is suboptimal Game Theory this is suboptimal mechanism design validators aren't going to want to run this and I'm sitting here thinking like validators don't want to run Mev GE on polygon and the reason why they didn't want to run Mev GE isn't because Mev G is a bad program it's an objectively more profitable program than what I was proposing like I wasn't trying to say that I had some more profitable type of me architecture than what flash Bots did Flash Bots had a better program for sure but on polygon the validators were not willing to run custom clients and the reason why they weren't willing to run

custom clients is because polygon Foundation had told them not to in a in a very loud message and this was when was under a period of high stress validators especially institutional uh like validators you know your entities like coinbase binance figment Etc these validation companies are very risk averse they're also very beholden to the interests of their stakers and this is in a way very different from the proof of work miners or like you know the the mining coalitions that had existed before uh the minor were typically very technically Savvy very you know devops focused entities and organizations whereas with proof of

State these validators are in essence asset managers right their job is to go out talk to institutional investors talk to large stakeholders and the ecosystems uh largely talk to the foundation of that specific ecosystem and to then use that stake and produce more blocks and to uh earn a yield for them but it's a very different risk profile and so when uh you know people at polygon were telling these validators don't run custom clients these aren't your you know Cy cypherpunk miners who are like we're going to do it anyway you can't stop us these are you know institutional validators they're like okay we won't

and it's but but it's like like here's here's this other team on polygon like running this Sy like all right well we're going to be able to talk them into running Mev gu on on polygon because it makes more money and it's like well polygon Foundation is you know saying not to and validators are going to not do that and so what I had proposed is a system that would allow validators to earn me without modifying the validator client and the way that this worked was by effectively throttling transactions on the way in and gating them in such a way that without the validator having to actually do anything at all these

transactions would just so happen to arrive in the exact right order to make a very profitable block and again like not as profitable as Mev Geth for sure to be clear but still quite profitable and still a big improvement over nothing and the neat thing is in order to do this validators didn't have to do anything they still ran the regular vanilla client no modification they just had to peer with us and we would take care of the rest by sending them things in the right order and yeah it was a it was a blast I actually pitched this idea to the the team that was running the me system for polygon at the time they were very stubborn they you know made a lot

of comments about how this is not game theoretically optimal and this is not something that validators are interested in those are those are fighting words in crypto not I know not not Game Theory optimal oh my heart my soul you know like I'm I'm just like like so so the game theologists there's a lot of really smart Game Theory and you know they weren't wrong it's not game theoretically optimal but it doesn't [ __ ] matter if no one [ __ ] runs the program you know like Game Theory stops where compliance departments start and a lot of these validators had like pretty big compliance departments um you know what just to comment on that as

well is that I think that we in crypto sometimes are guilty of assuming that we're designing all of these systems in a vacuum and that everything needs to be completely incentive compatible Game Theory compatible and honestly I mean it's kind of an interesting I don't want to go off too far on a tangent here but it's like why aren't there more 51% attacks on networks that have really low Economic Security because I think they're illegal because uh you know like all these other reasons and so it is just it's a little funny to me that I don't know there there are like no assumptions about anything extra jurisdictional in these chains and Designs but dude no dude you're 100% right and I think one of one of the other just fascinating things is that

when you look at the game theory like decisions and Designs like a lot of them make a lot of sense Up Until you realize that the same participants that are supposed to be limited by these new designs are also the ones that are voting on whether or not they're implemented and so it's like yeah we can talk about how um like epbs allows like for more Mev Burn For Less Mev for validators to make validators more incentive compatible but and like again that game theory is all true but validators are the ones voting on whether or not we even do epbs it's like I don't know there's just there's a lot of just Little quirks where yeah like I I I like the game theory I think it's fascinating I love the models I love the research I read

all of it like it's all it's all real it's all right it's all good I just don't know that it's all applicable all the time I mean dude I I feel that so hard I mean this whole podcast is basically for people that get nerd sniped about this stuff that that is why bell curve exists right that is the that is the mo but I I have had that feeling before as well where you know I'm sort of what this is a little bit emblematic actually of sometimes how I felt in between what ethereum chooses to focus on versus salana focuses on and look I love the game theory stuff and the mech design and the auctions and all of that stuff sometimes I'm like this feels a little headyy and I'm not sure

how much a lot of this can get solved by this is a little bit not entirely but a little bit how I feel about te too it's like we basically spent years and many research man hours and it's like well we kind of had tees from the start you know we could have saved ourselves a lot a lot of time here if we just wanted to trust the boxes um and sometimes salana is very focused on like make it go fast um and it's like oh feels actually kind of tangible and real although as we're going to get to in this episode there are downsides to that that uh being that focused on that on that sort of myopic view before we get there I have I have a question for you so the polygon background is super helpful in terms of how you took a smart contract approach

to dealing with me which is extremely unique I would say because mostly what it when it comes to me it's been uh basically what I would call sidecars or offchain Solutions and it feels like even it's been interesting to watch like I've definitely gotten nerds sight by the work that georgos is doing over at WTH and it feels like we're in we kind of seesaw in between trying to innovate at the either the consensus layer or the protocol layer versus the client layer and it seems like we're we're moving back into a realm of client Innovation now but you know when you when you approach specifically me you know what are the pros and cons in your view of these more offchain sidecar approaches versus like smart contract protocol

changes I think that fundamentally we start running into this very interesting scenario where with a lot of these sidecars and with a lot of these infrastructure approaches you have this design that's really focused on simulations and on having predictable reliable output to where someone will build a block they will simulate the block and they will know that this is exactly what will happen I will have exactly this amount at the end of the block and that this is my profit and I think that's like a really

useful Paradigm for environments where that's feasible from an engineering standpoint I think that if you look at PBS and you look at like who's going to have the most efficient block and if you Define efficient as extract the most value which is questionable but let's let's go with it um if you define that as like the most efficient block then yeah PBS is an ultra efficient system from a game theoretical standpoint just in terms of value extraction but where it gets interesting is that that all has a cost and that cost is typically engineering right if if you're sitting here doing a bunch of simulations if you're building a block which is like a oen to the something

complexity problem just like a type of problem that doesn't really scale well it's also time consuming like it it takes a lot of time to go through and simulate all of these transactions and that's just for one block if if you were to try different permutations of the transactions in the block to try to optimize to figure out which block is the best that also takes time and this time that it takes to do these things means you have to stop making the block relatively like earlier than if you were working with a mechanism that didn't use something like PBS and so when we're looking at these offchain

Solutions it's like yeah they're very efficient much more efficient than maybe not much more efficient but they're more efficient than the smart contract solutions from a value capture standpoint but much less so from an engineering efficiency standpoint much much less so from a latency standpoint much less so from a throughput standpoint um PBS in general has this like two commit uh or two second long commit reveal mechanism where validators will commit to a block and then the block gets revealed like that alone is something that's not going to work on a blockchain that is you know only two seconds long and so like the question becomes like how do you start to deal with these systems on blockchains that

are much much faster how can you why does it need to to be 2 seconds for the commit reveal is that in ethereum land is that just the amount of time that it takes to get transmitted from the relayer to the proposer revealed block gets stamped and then it needs the relayer has to shoot that all out for attestation or what is that what's the time requirement there I think it used to be a lot shorter and then a very clever person uh was able to bamboozle the Mev boost relay and make off with $25 million because he was able commit and then uncommit and then commit again uh and so they increase the duration of the is that low carb

Crusader Mr pece wow rip yeah turns out by the way going back to uh mechanism design versus illegality turns out that's illegal so questionable question yeah yeah that is that is gonna be a very interesting oh dude if you want a spicy subject we can talk about that um that is going to be a very interesting court case because I think that what the low carb Crusader did well first of all he definitely definitely did some things that are not good um I think in general when you're trying to hide or like obfuscate what you're doing it's probably not a good thing that you're doing but what's interesting is that he didn't really do anything wrong like he he did one thing to the relay and he did

something else to ethereum and I think that like if you look at exploiting a system in order for him to be perceived as having exploit exped it you have to view the relay and ethereum as the same thing because if you look at it from just the relay's perspective Lop Crusader behaved regularly if you look at it from ethereum's perspective I mean he he equivocated he got slashed but that's like inside of the ethereum system um the exploit was playing ethereum and the relay against each other and so one of the interesting things with that entire court case is that there's sort of this this this comingling of this concept of the Mev boost relay and ethereum and like maybe

the Mev boost relay should be considered a part of ethereum I'm not a lawyer I don't know but I do know that people are going to feel strongly about that one way or another and it's going to be exciting to see how that plays out it's very funny that you bring that up so people used to talk quite a bit about there was that great barnabe article several years ago seeing Through The Eyes of the protocol and I think there was I just remember all these discussions about what should be within the I was called the pomarium right like like the the line of what is actually in protocol versus what is out of protocol and then the meta level on top of that is let's say that we design the protocol in such a way where we're reliant on large centralized actors to make it work

and that's how PBS is designed right what we're what we're counting on Via incentives is the creation of infrastructure like relays or large sophisticated Financial actors in the form of Builders to make what's actually inside of the protocol work and then the question is well yeah it is that a part of the protoc if we're if we're explicitly depending on that uh is it part of the protocol what dependencies do we have could could we realistically rip that out if we were to rip these dependencies out what would break in the protocol and there's you it's Turtles all the way down you could have the same conversation about l2s and uh centralized sequencers and yeah maybe they'll give up the key you know to the multi at some point I maybe um it hasn't

happened today so it's it's an interesting conversation about how these Protocols are designed I think it's it's going to be a major focus of that court case and I think what's really interesting is that there's clearly somebody with a lot of knowledge about Mev boost and about ethereum that has worked with the US Department of Justice and is painting a picture of Mev boost and ethereum being the same thing and I think it'll be very very high drama for everyone on crypto Twitter when we find out who those people are I don't think they're gonna end up looking good yeah this is going to be an interesting I guess I

didn't bring my tinfoil hat with me but yeah it's that's I've heard rumors about you know about anyway sources for that information and it is it's going to be interesting but it also I I remember people talking about this as well around the time that the ETFs were getting released about there's going to be increased scrutiny on this space some of it very positive some of it slightly less positive or more worrisome and I think what people were worried about was the scrutiny that was going to get placed on the Meb transaction supply chain in uh and now I think this was sort of the interesting first foray into that um so he everyone this episode is brought to you by Fuel Labs who's unveiling their new high performance

ethereum L2 fuel ignition many of you know fuel as the launcher of the first optimistic stage 2 rollup on ethereum with fuel V1 and now they're launching ignition to address some of the creeping centralization concerns around some uh L2 architectures today and if you like noting out about the tech there's a lot of reasons to get excited about ignition including how they solve State sustainability and perform and execution they have this utxo asset Centric architecture that's very very cool but there's a lot of other reasons to love it super easy to use you can either use a fuet wallet or your existing ethereum or salana based wallet like Phantom or metamask or whatever it is there are cool apps that you can experiment with and again like I said at the top of the

program they're launching phase two of their points program so click the link at the bottom of the show notes head over start having fun on fuel ignition today just tell them that I sent you all right I wna all right we took a little bit of a tangent there I want to return all right so here we are we've built this smart Contracting Solution on Fast Lane and could you just give me the through line then in between what you were doing there with almost like I would say metering the transactions and ordering them you know by a smart contract before they arrived at the validator um into application specific sequencing which I there's there's a small But Mighty case to Rebrand uh that to Ace um instead of ass but I'm not sure we're going to be Victorious on

that particular front but can you just could you just give us the kind of some of the work that you're doing in uh in application specific sequencing in general yes so with the like validator aligned me operations we we used a smart contract and the reason why we had to use a Smart contract is because we were in essence just throwing these transactions at a validator and we were throwing them in the right order but we didn't know what the result of these transactions were going to be like we weren't able to simulate the transaction and and be like hey this guy paid what he said he was going to pay or like hey this spot is going to be the best spot for the top of the block we didn't know we couldn't know because we weren't

running a modified validator client and so instead what we did is we came up with this concept of flash execution which is where we would have the Searchers or the Bots send their transactions to the fast lane smart contract um inside of this transaction there would be call data and the call data like the first four byes uh are the function selector and so when we are looking at these transactions as a real we can see without simulating anything at all we can see hey this is a transaction that is to the fast lane smart contract and it is calling this specific function on the fast Lan smart contract no simulations we're able to know that um we are also able to look at

the call data and see exactly what their bid amount is and so we would just throw these transactions at the validators in the order of their bid amounts without knowing which ones would succeed or which ones would fail the failures did get free reverts because we didn't know that any of the other ones in front of them would have succeeded we couldn't know and if we had given free reverts then it would have been very easy for people to game the system and so what our smart contract did and like where this concept of smart uh or of flash execution really came into play is that because these Searchers were going through our entrypoint smart contract we

knew one of two things would happen the smart contract enforced either that the Searcher would effectively pay their bid by the end of the transaction which meant they didn't have to pay us upfront they could actually start off with no money execute the transaction and then pay us at the very end um or the transaction would revert and the me opportunity would be preserved for the second highest bter or the third highest on down the list and so this was a fascinating solution for us because we didn't have to simulate anything we just have to sort and by sorting and by throwing them at the validator in that order we knew that the smart contract would take care of the rest it was in

essence an meev settlement contract uh flash execution very much modeled on how flesh loans work where if you don't pay back the loan by the end then the whole execution just reverts and so we quickly realized that this approach that worked in the absence of reliable simulation information like we spent a lot of time thinking about how Searchers could break it and we spent a lot of time thinking about how also to protect Searchers from validators in case validators tried to uh mess with things to try to double collect uh payments themselves and so when we started looking at this from a very adversarial standpoint where like

well what if there's other transactions in the block ahead of time we can't stop that and we quickly realized that these are the same problems that applications face with application control execution and so we started looking in and thinking like all right well what if we take this concept of flash execution but we dial it down a little bit like what if instead of taking transactions and throwing them at a validator what if instead we take these EIP 712 signed messages and operations if you will will and we cram them together inside of a single transaction the same way that a block Builder crams transactions inside

of a block and what's interesting about this is that again just like with flash execution for validators we don't know what transactions are going to occur in front of an apps own transaction and we don't know what transactions will occur after and so we have to be very careful we have to have Smart contracts that'll enforce certain things and that are very good at making sure that no one is getting taken advantage of a lot of checks um definitely not as gas efficient as doing something that's simulation based and that can rely on accurate simulations but this adversarial assumption and handling

these adversarial assumptions with smart contract checks that are checking in real time like during execution itself allows apps to take these messages aggregate them together sort them however they want um either through like a smart contract logic or through infrastructure through a sequencer of their own doesn't really matter how they do it but in general the settlement concept of sorting these operations into a single transaction but also allowing for if something goes wrong this is how we handle it um if these two things both want to do the same thing this is how we address that like putting all that into a smart contract into a single transaction is a great way for applications to internalize value and it

still fundamentally relies on this concept of flash execution where if someone says they'll do something and they get sorted based on doing that thing and then they don't do it then one we actually will charge them the gas for that portion of the transaction but two we just undo what they did and it allows for the preservation of these opportunities it allows for like internalization of me in a very robust way that works even in an environment that's as hostile as something like like PBS yeah the reason I I love this through line so much is because it's when when people thought about me Solutions in the past they thought about

going to the source of who is building the block and the the intuition even pre pre merge in ether is that there was mining right and there were these mining pool operators that had an enormous percentage of the you know the hash power at the time and so it actually much easier to build and much more intuitive to go to the the block Builder level in terms of controlling M and making sure that it was a you know the big problem they were trying to solve back then was the PGA that were running and because there is this funny constraint that you guys had working with polygon and the foundation is that hey we actually have to approach this from the perspective of a smart contract not this side car and then it's like well what if we just move that up to the

application itself right and instead of acting as an intermediary you know act you know we could craft a solution here where everyone kind of agrees that the apps and especially the users more so even than the apps should be getting this me back it's not a great solution actually to just funnel a bunch of you know user I don't know user fees uh to to validators we probably want those to get kicked back to user from a ux perspective so it's super interesting to get there and now you have worked in a couple of different environments here and I you know 30 minutes in here I want to get to the meat of what I wanted to chat with you about which is that there are different execution environments

where it's possible to do different things in the smart Contracting layer and so could you walk us through a little bit you know for folks that might actually be helpful could you just Define what a virtual machine is uh I'm sure everyone's heard that term a million times but just give us a definition of a virtual machine and then what does the evm look like today versus the svm how should we understand the the major differences gosh I think one of the one of the downsides of me coming from a trafi background rather than engineering background is I don't actually know the succinct definition of a virtual machine um I've I've looked at question about yeah yeah like I can guess um I feel like I feel like a lot of people afterwards will be like that's incorrect to to me though a virtual

machine and again my experience with that terminology is solely inside the bounds of like looking at the evm looking at the svm looking at kmom um for me it's sort of a way to handle instructions that a program is sending um whether that program is like a smart contract or on salana they actually call them programs um to me it's like a way to Barse and to handle uh program I again I don't I don't know if that's right but that's no hey I'm not going to be the one to fact check you on it but uh yeah I think that's that's how I conceptualize of it as well it's a set of rules in terms of

how those instructions can get transmitted Etc and there are big differences in terms of what that virtual machine actually looks like so walk us through I guess you know the evm and some of its core components and the svm and how you know especially more non-technical people should understand what the difference is in between them I think one of the major differen has to do with composability and engineering and just in general what things you should allow and whether this new property or this new action that you're allowing uh hinders throughput disproportionately and I think ethereum and salana are both very opinionated on how they view that question ethereum

allows for a lot of smart cont contracts to call a lot of other smart contracts I think like the Max uh call depth is I want to say 64 um you can have up to like a thousand slightly over a thousand different like Words which are like you know 32 bytes you get like a very you can do a lot with it but the thing that I'm most interested in that I'm most interested in is the fact that ethereum actually allows for these partial reverts and so before we had been talking about Flash execution for apps and application specific sequencing for us the reason why these partial reverts are so important is because inside of a single transaction we can do something

and then check did it finish doing what it said it was going to finish doing before we started doing it and if the answer is no then we can revert back to where we were before we started that and then the transaction can just go on and do the next one and this is great this is something that allows for just a very high level of composability uh for Searchers this uh really adds to this concept of onchain solving which is where you are able to do like route finding or searching on chain in order to like capture Arbitrage without maybe a full view of all of the information necessary and again this is something that's very useful in high throughput environments where simulations are

unreliable so you kind of have to Outsource some of the execution into your smart contract through things like onchain solving like onchain like one of the things I used to do back in the day was onchain swap amount calculation where I would just swap different amounts figure out which was the most profitable and then went with that and so evm allows this you can go very very deep into the stack you can do like a lot of calls within calls within calls within calls and you can partially revert all of them Solana is very opinionated on thut the downside to the ev's ability to do partial reverts is that when you look at this from a memory management standpoint each time you do a call that

you have this like option to undo the call like each time you go down that path if you start executing something but you want to be able to go back to where you were before you have to copy the state to return to like if you start making changes to the state that you want to be able to undo you have to still store the previous state to revert back to somewhere and so with ethereum and it's ability just go like very very deep into the call stack you can get like a not small amount of memory just used up storing state that you need to be able to go back to and so salana looks at this and it looks at like the memory overhead of doing this kind of thing and it's like that hurts throughput that's not what we're about

you know we are the fastest chain we are the highest throughput chain so we're not going to allow partial reverts and like they're not wrong if you view high throughput as being the most important thing to focus on because it does like like they're right like if you're copying everything to memory every time you make a call then you're G to have a pretty big burden on memory um also salana I believe they only allow a call stack depth of five um programs like you can't even really go that deep into like layers of allowing uh transactions to like call or programs and Sol smart contracts and ethereum programs and SAA like Pro you can't really have too many programs call the

programs there's like a maximum depth but more importantly with Solana and with the svm if a single person wants to revert or undo something if a single actor that's like sharing a transaction wants to revert or undo then it just cancels the entire transaction and everything fails which means like if something goes wrong you can't have error handling you can't have um my favorite term is actually error accounting which is where if something goes wrong maybe you have to you know handle balances or handle for accounting adjustments or gas attribution to assign the gas cost to The Entity that screwed everything up

for everybody else there's a lot of stuff that you can't do in the svm because every party inside of a transaction every program every actor has the ability to just cancel the whole thing and undo everything for everyone else you know it's like if you're playing a game of kickball and a kid loses then he just takes out a knife and slashes the ball and then no one can play kickball anymore is kind of how BVM works with like sharing a transaction and from from our point of view this this really um this happened to me like one time I'll never forget it bill you yeah

with you was 30 years ago but stuck in my mind but um but no so like like the way that works on salana is like yeah you can't have adversarial actors share a transaction and this means you can't sequence adversarial actors inside of a transaction and it's like well adversarial actors yeah if you're trying to attack each other sure but like what if it's just party counterparty and you're trying to do something where the counterparty wants to get a free look and so they bit high and then all of a sudden it uh price moves against them and so they want to undo it and so they pay a f for a front Run To You inventory there's like a lot of things where in ethereum we can handle these problems by

just stacking a bunch of different solutions behind the user so that if a handful of these solvers end up not doing what they said they were going to do that's fine because we've got a whole bunch of other solvers atomically like available and this this has a this is a good ux too where you can have all these Solutions you can have a a user submit something and that's one transaction that the front end can track and so the user has robust confidence in execution quality because if one solver messes up they know that they've got 10 other solvers that'll execute afterwards like sorted and ready to go and you can't do that on salana because if the first solver messes up then all the other solvers won't execute because it's a

it's a revert and so you run into these free look problems where one solver can just bid high and then cancel it for everyone else if they don't get what they want uh you run into onchain solving problems where you lose the ability to have two parties do onchain solving concurrently where like one person says all right I'm gonna do some computations with realtime Atomic State okay after I've done these computations this is how much I want and then another solver says all right let me do some computations and this is what I can give you like you can't really do that very effectively on salana because if either one of those parties wants to back out they cancel it for the other party

rather than allowing for someone else to take their place and to me and this is probably the spiciest part of the whole thing I think that's quite slow I think that's like very slow and the reason why I think that's slow is because on salana like you have to add in these offchain Network hops where it's like all right let's get it on chain all right it's on chain now we're going to read what's on chain in this offchain network offchain infrastructure and then now we're going to send in this new thing and will it land will it not we don't know let's let's figure it out but you're adding in these infrastructure dependencies to handle solving because you can't do solving on chain in a robust

permissionless way because no partial reverts and the alternative is to do it offchain and I will you know go on the record saying that it is always faster to do stuff onchain than offchain even if your chain throughput is 10% the fact that you can have these parties execute atomically that's instantaneous and I think salana has unfortunately just in pursuit of having a really really high TPS I think salana has built in these infrastructure dependencies where there's just a lot of offchain simulations that have to happen and a lot of state that has to propagate

to offchain sources in order for parties to interact so I I want to get to a conclusion here because I I found myself thinking something as you're talking but before can you just you've been uh could you just land the plane for in that guart episode that you did recently and I saw you going back and forth a little bit with Kyle some money on Twitter this Dynamic of no partial reverts on in the svm in your mind makes it difficult to potentially impossible to do something like Ace um application controlled execution so walk us through that uh just help us land the plane on that line of reasoning yeah so at the end of the day with a lot of these application specific

sequencing the entire purpose of application specific sequencing is to sequence things in a way that the validator might not want it to be sequenced the idea is to remove this dependency on the validator because if you don't remove the dependency on the validator then you have this actor who could potentially insert themselves into the the roles and who could potentially make a lot of money by really leaning into their own Monopoly on block production and so like with application sequencing the idea is to handle the sequencing without needing any sort of dependency whatsoever on the validator and on salana there's really two ways to

do it the first is by or really not even on salana just in every ecosystem there are two ways to do it the first is by taking operations or actions and sequencing them inside of a single transaction and on salana this doesn't work because on salana if a single one of those actors wants to revert or undo then it cancels it for everybody and this has a very bad ux it's a very bad ux because if you're you're a user of an app and just one of the other people in your batch let's say wants to revert or undo then all of a sudden your transaction gets undone too and it just it's a deal breaker for for apps the second way that any entity in ethereum land can express a constraint

around sequencing that the validators have to follow is through this concept of nonis uh and people in ethereum are very familiar with nonis if you have a transaction from an account and that account's non is n then that transaction with a non 9 has to come before another transaction from the same account with a nons of 10 you can't validators can't first mine 10 and then mine nine it has to be in that sequential ascending order and so an alternative way to do application specific sequencing which is different from how fastan does it would just be to have a uh transaction like an account that actually is just signing these transactions from the application in a

certain order and validators wouldn't be able to change the sequence they would have to mine those transactions in that order they could censor but they couldn't actually alter the sequence and on salana there are no nonces there is this concept of a block hash um the last 150 I believe 150 block hashes are available for users and it can like users in order to show that a transaction is relatively recent they will include one of these block hashes inside of their transaction and that is proof that this is like a recent transaction that block cash has to be part of the uh blockchain or the the hash the chain of block hashes and so it's a way for users to you know have

confidence that this transaction will get mined soon and if it's not mine soon if it's not mine dependent on the like actual state of the block then it won't get mined and so in that sense it's a it's a good system but there's no way to use that to express any sort of constraint over like The Ordering of these transactions inside of a block and so those are the two ways in operations inside of a block or operations inside of a transaction and transaction side of a block can't do robust sequencing with either one of them on Solana so if there are anym Engineers out there listening thinking aha but I have a way hit hit me

and Alex up because I want to hear the the counter to this the all right so here's what I found myself thinking you're giving this description it is I wonder if we're about to watch the beginning of salana alignment to some degree and because what alignment really is is inevitably when you are engineering large complex systems you have to make trade-offs and the tradeoff should align with kind of the vision of what you're building which and there's an ideology and a and a value set and what alignment is is basically extolling the virtue of our values and not being so kind to people who go outside of the bounds of those values and so in ethereum land what that has looked like is hey we've made these

trade-offs where we think that eth is money and you know when you kind of do these things that make eth behave not as money or imply that it's not money or or something like that we we we do not actually appreciate that very much and so we would keep that out of our little domain thank you very much much and for salana what it seems like it is is look it's it's speed it's IR you know increase bandwidth reduced latency right that is the that is the guiding principle and you know we had a a great panel permission list this year with some of the cosmos guys and they described the the the gravity this inevitable force of people wanting to build their own chains and I think this is going to be sana's challenge here is they are trying to keep everyone one

shared layer and the the inevitable gravitational pull is for people to build their own chains off of it now the way that um even just doing the episode uh last week with Anatoli is you know keeping the block times very short but there are other ux things like in it you what you would like right if you're trying to you know not discourage but you know l2s don't really fit the one shared layer set of values and tradeoff is it' be nice if you then have to find another way to give applications the ability to exert the sovereignty and control of their own economics that they would want which is Ace but now it doesn't seem like Ace is potentially possible so it'll be I guess something to figure out um you know maybe it could

be overcome with engineering but that that's where my mind went a little bit as you were giving that description I I I mean I think you hit the nail on the head there and from my point of view I look at salana I look at a ecosystem that is just laser focused on High through put but that has made sacrifices that has you know hit certain trade-offs made certain trade-offs in order to focus on throughput the way that they have um meanwhile in the opposite end of the spectrum you've got uh ethereum which has just completely given up on throughput but is very focused on mechanism design on composability they don't have single slot finality yet but they know that they need it um and so

they're they're moving towards certain things and they're very they're very values driven I personally think both of them are wrong I think that both of them are Maxis and I think that neither one of them are remotely close to an efficient point in the trade-off Spectrum I think that if you if you have a 100,000 TPS but like 95,000 of that is just Spam because your mechanisms are so lacking in robustness that they incentivize spam then it's like do you really have a high TPS or are you just like you know designing mechanisms that or designing engineering that just makes mechanisms that stop spam you know harder to do and

I would argue that application controlled execution is something that helps mitigate spam and so from from our perspective I'm very very very excited about Monet and the reason why I'm is the is the chain on the frontier of that design what's on your Hat by any chance or uh in in my mind yes um and and the Reason by the way Monette I've made it clear that I can be bribed with swag on this podcast so I I you know I've received noad hats I know I've see the little Mand do stuff it's like hey you know I would uh I'm a small and proud monad bag holder actually so uh yeah hey any swag you know you can send it my way here and uh yeah my my favorite monad

swag or my socks dude I've got these amazing monad socks they're so they're so comfy I absolutely love them you know maybe it's just getting a little older I just really deeply appreciate a good pair of socks they're these bomba socks that are like 25 bucks it's ridic they're stupid for a price but they're so soft they're so thick it's like my feet are walking around on clouds all day you know just you appreciate a good pair of socks but love it all right talk to us about monad a little bit and just why it is what like what is this efficient Frontier that you see in between ethereum which has basically given up on execution maybe salana is a little bit too optimized for throughput why does monad fit at the efficient Frontier space there so I love monad because monad has the evm and the

evm allows for application control executions or as some people call it application specific sequencing because it allows for applications to like take like we were talking about before to take these operations or these actions from adversarial users batch them all together you know throw in smart contra ract logic around it and make it composable and make it composed with each other and make it Atomic in a way where like one or two Bad actors inside of the batch can't ruin the party for everybody else and so like on monad you can do that and you can do that very easily and more importantly like for application specific sequencing or application controlled execution it's very easy for apps to like while they're

in the process of doing that like they can add a like a an extra gas fee that acrs to the apps da or that goes to just like the the apps sequencer or however it sequences these operations and so you can get these effectively all of the same benefits of an app chain if someone can think of a benefit that you can't get with this please debate me I'm very open to debating on this subject um just keep in mind I've actually built out a lot of these like alternative designs as well just to just to see but like at the end of the day you can get all all of these same benefits of an app chain without having to abandon the ecosystem that the app developed in and so for us and I mean

like like Mike you see this all the time alignment is very very important and one of the like very interesting things that we have seen is that like apps love our system because apps can stay in the ecosystem that they have such strong alignment with they don't have to make their own app chain they don't have to disrupt composability with any of their ecosystem Partners but like most of all it's like they're not betraying the team that they were probably working pretty close with right up until that point and like yeah just very very interested in that I have a complicated feeling about the word alignment as it's used in crypto I it's one of those things where

I've got two different ideas in my head that I oscillate in between which is on the one hand you need alignment because it's very important to get people rowing in the same direction I am sympathetic to the current critique of ethereum that there isn't a Northstar and some people say that doesn't matter there is everyone needs to be in the same direction you need to get people bought into one idea and Mission so that you're not shooting off in a thousand different directions you and organizations will actively work against each other in that case and so you you need to do that on the other hand I dislike alignment in the sense of I feel like in practice it ends up looking a lot like social shaming to achieve outcomes which I don't like so

maybe there's just a better way of doing this than than I've seen but yeah I have complicated feelings about the word alignment in general I I think that alignment is fascinating subject I agree with you completely in especially about the social shaming I am notoriously Shameless which is maybe why I've not been affected by this I I continue to be viewed as somewhat unaligned but for me like what's really interesting is that we're kind of seeing in real time in ethereum land especially how a lot of what started off is like kind of like an ethos how a lot of this alignment has

started to become more about business and about commercialization um just just this last week we've seen a lot of people a lot of people very loudly talking about ethereum is you know strong and robust and l2s are ethereum and I I look and I'm like all right well who's saying this I click on it and it's oh wow this person works for an L2 that's so weird and it just like this this strong sense of ethereum alignment where typically the thing that is being put up as being aligned with a the ium is being put up by people that

benefit from that perception such as l2s benefit from being perceived as being ethereum aligned and so when you look at like people that don't have l2s or that aren't really in any way connected to l2s or have any sort of business dependencies or revenue dependencies or future plans to be on an L2 when those people say that l2s are ethereum I listen that means a lot to me and I don't know that l2s aren't I personally think it's uh a great area as with everything in crypto but like what what's fascinating to me is just that all of the people that I saw see uh saying that like you know l2s are

ethereum over the last like two weeks have some sort of critical business dependency on an L2 and to me that just makes the whole thing seem very disingenuous um I don't doubt that at the very least there's some sort of like coordination effort at least someone has to know something like when I see like the arbitr or arbitrum CEO and like the optimism people like they're saying like L2 is AUM it's like well of course you want people to think that you are L2 and you know that trickles down a lot of these narratives are propagated a lot of these narratives are driven and I think that we're going to continue to see more and more like

co-opting of the social Lair for this alignment because for all of the alignment pushes we've seen so far there are clear uh beneficiaries for those pushes um yeah yeah so here's a challenge that all right so to what make one final statement on alignment here's the reason I really don't like it more more so than I recognize it as being in some instances necessary because it allows this was Sam bankman freed for all he did wrong said something that stuck with me at least and I think a lot of other people is it's that quote about we in the western world you just say the right shith and you're in and it that's that is the real issue from a functional

standpoint with alignment is if you just say the words that you know that everyone wants you to say it allows you to avoid a level of scrutiny which I think is actively harmful in a lot of situations and but with ethereum I so people don't really frame it like this but I think it's a very interesting question especially for new l1s like monad to think about which is all right what are IV rollups is inevitable I know everyone's like hey is the Rolex H road back a mistake that's who cares because it's out the genie is out of the bottle and it's not going back in so we're getting Roll-Ups um now the question is what services should the L1 provide to

the rollups and then what is the service model and what I mean by the service model is how much do you leave up up to the L1 versus how much do you allow the private sector to the market to provide Solutions and I think that one of the things that I think one of the things that ethereum didn't get right is it didn't it had too minimal of an offering to its l2s to the point where it's not sticky I I don't really see I don't see the l2s going off and being their own l1s but in the current construction where it's it's a multisig and you know most of these l2s are trending towards being fums right they're not using eth for da

they're only using it for settlement the pain of becoming your own L1 is not very large whereas if you look at a base rollup construction which I'm slowly getting pilled is the best construction from the perspective of ethereum TBD the challenge is are they going to be able to make it to Market before some of these framework gets uh Frameworks get critical mass that's the challenge but I think that would you know it looks like it looks much more painful to rip out a base rollup it looks much more actually ethereum is providing many more critical services to the rollup than in in the current construction and then you know one of the things about ethereum that I just can't tell I guess you we just have to wait till the fullness of time is what is the right they have left a lot of things up to the free market to build

and the trade-off of doing that is you know free Market's you better at providing Solutions than the quote unquote public sector which is in this case the L1 and that's kind of what happened right with sharding is we tried to build charting within the F didn't really weren't really successful said hey Market figure it out and it did figure it out but in a way that had these weird incentives and potential drawbacks so that is the way that I think about this question i' I'd push back a little bit on on one of the things you had mentioned which is about how the free market is better at coming up with Solutions I don't think I mean like in a broader economy yes absolutely you know I'm in no way am I saying that the you know we should go down some sort

of you know government control Market in in general I think that's true but I think that when it comes to l1's in general I am not convinced that l2s are better at coming up with Solutions I am convinced that they're faster at coming up with Solutions and one of the problems that I am just like terrified of with crypto in general and we've already seen this play out it's way easier to make some centralized solution and to just be like oh we'll decentralize it later and like there you go now you've got literally every L2 um

and so like in a sense it's fast and like hey we've got this solution and it's fast but it's a [ __ ] solution and the problem with all this like centralization and the fact that like free the free market yeah it's better solution sols but it's also faster Solutions and I think the faster Solutions are what we're seeing the most of and the reason why that worries me so much in Def is that it is always just orders of magnitude faster to have a central like to make a centralized solution than to make a decentralized one and the reason why like I push back on this like l2s being having better Solutions is because in large part the L1 is going to only want to make decentralized Solutions and you know

there's an argument to made that like you know hey maybe users aren't sensitive to centralized Solutions and I would say they can go use a regular bank if if that's how they feel but like at the end of the day to me I do think that there's danger in letting whoever is First Market set the narrative for that market especially when being centralized helps a lot with being first to Market and especially when if there is one thing that history has taught us about all of this it's that people with centralized power are very hesitant to release it and so all dude all of these promises were like oh you know it's just centralized for now

but we've got a solution in mind we'll decentralize later it's like okay because that worked so well for the last hundred apps that said that exact same thing like I know yeah it's history man like all right here's here's a here is a okay so basically and then I want to get to the the the spice here about because there's a very interesting standards conversation to be had especially within the context of ethereum or just generally modular blockchains but the the I'd be curious here here's how I see the current L2 landscape today I think there are three potential Solutions here one is the current state which is uh mainly multi- sigs optimistic rollups um that settle down to eth and the they've got

the critical mass at the current moment and they're going to be very influential in terms of setting standards up at that layer then there is another solution which is and the challenge by the way there is interop because there's just no incentive to be inter there is plenty of incentive for op stack chains to be interoperable with one another arbitrum orbit chains to be interoperable there is no incentive for an arbitrum orbit chain and an Obie stack chain to be interoperable with one another politics y right then there is it's it's a social problem then there's a then there's another solution where there is uh some sort of ZK proof AG layer um combined with a shared sequencer where you know there's but you know we'd have to have

to make ZK Tech actually economically feasible which every year it's happening next year but I I believe uh I believe we're on the cusp here I talked to Uma um but some sort of proof aggregation layer with a shared sequencer where then you probably get you know maybe latency is still an issue but you get pretty good interop in between different rollups um and then there is the base rollup approach where you're using ethereum as the the shared sequencer here and I I don't know my my I could see a couple of different ways of this playing out I think base rollups I'm in the camp now that it would be the best solution for

the market if we could get there the challenge is going to be can the base rollup scale faster than the uh you know the existing Solutions can start to look like monopolies then there's another solution of that both the shared sequencing layer and the a layer it's it's another social problem right you got to convince these large Frameworks to buy into this idea um and then the other one is just that you have a couple dominant Frameworks that win out um and also hopefully like swap in uh ZK Tech as opposed to being optimistic like they are today I could see it playing out a couple of different ways I'm not really sure what is your how do you how do you what do you think the rollup landscape looks like in five years that's a good question I think there's what I think it will look like and then

there's what I hope it'll look like and I think that those two things aren't really the same thing um to from my perspective just kind of like double back on a few of the things that that you had said um a lot of these scenarios like a lot of these systems do not have this critically important concept of single slot finality um take for instance ethereum no single slot finality it's on the road map I hope my grandkids will be able to enjoy it I'm not expecting it anytime soon um from my perspective an L2 that's on ethereum sort of inherits the lack of single slot finality and yeah you can you know do

all these complex things where it's like oh we'll use igen Lair and we'll rebond and we'll like you know reimburse if there's any you know then we'll do slashing and it'll be and it's like like I I get it and like yeah you can kind of do it these like really backwards ways but it's still you still don't get like the same kind of robust composability that a network like Cosmos has natively like every chain in Cosmos is single slot finality and so they can do intrachain or interchain transfers through their IBC system in a really like robust clean way and like that's that's interop right there and it's really easy and it's really clean it's because of single slot finality um I I think ethereum is still a pretty long

way away from single slot finality and I think that the l2s because they inherit the finality from ethereum uh they're just they're not going to be competitive from a technological standpoint as long as they're on ethereum um another system that you had brought up and I think this is something that's critically important to understand like in the ZK space and if a ZK engineer disagrees with what I'm saying or if I'm saying it wrong please you know let me know and push back but like the way that these aggregated proof systems work is by deferring in finality uh in an in an interop setting um is by deferring finality until all of the proofs are proven and so that it's it's if if you've got an

interupt system where you've got four chains transferring between them none of them have finality until you've got all four proofs and you aggregate them together and then the layer that they're settling to verifies that none of them are doing anything that exceeds the like inventory that had gone in you've got this sort of like robust uh Atomic inventory accounting system but this happens like at it's really like kicking in like as the proofs are being finalized and verified and you need all of them before you can give any of them finality and that is a very delayed finality if like every chain is only as fast as the slow slowest chain that it's

interoperable with especially in the ZK space like some of them might have fast proofs but some of them might be trying to prove some like really complex stuff and so to me again like these these networks might be interoperable with each other but they're not really going to be able to have easy interoperability with networks that are not a part of their system and so for me I genuinely think that single slot finality is critically important because it like single SL finality like like all of these Solutions or solutions that are elaborate and involved that have many steps that typically have like massive C costs of capital just because you have to you know have Economic Security and

that's going to cost something because someone's gonna have to put that money there and it's just it's very elaborate solutions to a problem that doesn't need to exist to begin with and so for me like maybe I'm left curving this but I I I think that just a a chain with single slot finality that has an environment that allows application Civic sequencing like I don't I don't it's not clear to me why it's it's not clear to me what benefits you could get in one of these like more complicated slower systems that you wouldn't be able to have just by being an app on a chain with shared state with other apps and that has single slot finality so you can

be composable even with you know apps that are on other chains with single slot finality do you have a sense of where single slot finality is in terms of prioritization right now for on ethereum the problem with single slot finality on ethereum is solo stakers really yeah the the issue is that like the way the epoch work is you get some of the validators so an Epoch is I want to say 32 blocks you get some of the validators in and they're voting on each other but then during the next Epoch all of the stakers are getting their votes in on the previous Epoch so

it's kind of like it's it's like a it's like a scaling solution where first this small set does it and then the next Epoch I think like each block one out of every 32 solo sakers let's call them is actually voting on the entirety of the previous Epoch like all of those blocks at once so it's like 132 votes on all of the previous 32 blocks and it's like one of these things where if you start trying to have everyone vote on everything so you can have single slot finality it it's a lot of network messaging it's a lot of delays you know that solo Staker on the moon's not gonna be able to get his vote in on time to be counted and so it's it's it's

problematic there are solutions like rainbow staking is one that I've heard of that's you know very optimistic I don't know as much about it as I'd like to it's a this is a problem where from my point of view it's the most important thing for ethereum to work on if this is this is me being unaligned with unaligned people um if ethereum could choose between having a 3 second block time or having single slot finality I would rather it go with single slot finality just so it can like so so much of this just fluff and just this like baggage that's like being built up around the chain for composability would just no longer be needed if we have

single slot finality yeah I yeah I I agreee with that I the the solo sacr thing is challenging this is also part of eth alignment here is the is the gotta protect the Raspberry Pi solo stakers and I know Max Resnik is waging a war against the solo stakers at the moment I I don't know I think one of the best parts about ethereum the parts that I really love about it is how optimistic it is and how the average person is so hope about the future the challenge with that can be unwillingness to make compromises at times and there is this there is this

history of the market walking back the solutions that ethereum has tried to mitigate and I actually it's probably two years ago now but I went on Bank list actually and did an episode on this and the two things that I think they shouldn't have optimized for as hard as they did is non uh no in delegation um because what you just wound up with was like I'm a huge fan of liido uh but you know what they did was surrender clearly there's consternation about it um and people are worried that they've handed over the keys to a very critical part of e infrastructure and you know uh I I understand both sides of the argument I feel like I like Li a lot uh and then there's the home stakers and

the the trade-off on on the side of the hom stakers is you know the less that you can do on chain the more you push stuff offchain and this is why I don't really like these myopic definitions of what decentralization means like I do there's I see a push to Define what decentralization means and I really like that because is a system more generally what people are talking about when they talk about decentralization is hardware and bandwidth requirements for L1 validators but really what the product these blockchains offer are strong settlement insurances you want to know that your inbound transaction isn't going to get reversed for XYZ reasons and the original thought about that is if you

make the app validator too big they're going to likely end up being companies that can be subject to government seizure or enforcement action or whatever and you're not going to have those nice properties the other way that you Cann not have those nice properties is if the if the scale if the system scales to a certain degree that you can no longer accommodate on chain and you're Outsourcing critical tasks to that small group of of actors that you were trying to avoid in the first place that is another way that the chain is less decentralized it it is because again it's not absolutely decentralization is not an end it is a means and the means and the the end is that you have these strong settlement insurances that your transactions don't get reversed so sorry I just went a bit of a rant there but I think I would love

to see more Nuance around that that word you know totally and like like from from my point of view too we see this in a very direct way as we're doing you know our work with applications when we're talking to apps that are on ethereum like the way our design works is that we can do a lot of stuff on chain and unfortunately doing stuff on chain costs gas and because of that on ethereum a lot of the apps that we talk to are like you know what rather than verifying this onchain let's just have the relay do it and that's more centralized that is

taking something like onchain verification onchain like route finding onchain like sorting it uses more gas it's expensive and so just by virtue of like ethereum having relatively limited block space like they are very directly incentivizing the applications built on top of ethereum to centralize so that they don't have to pay these costs right and so like to me like there's definitely the first order like centralization which is where we're not going to do it we're going to expect someone else to do it and then you know typically the first person to come in is the first person actually ship something

and that's typically you know the person who's comfortable with centralizing it but also you've got all these second order like economic incentivization of centralization where if you make block space really expensive people are going to try not to uses much of it and that means having other centralized dependencies and if all the apps on a chain are centralized then is the chain itself like really able to say that it's like the most decentralized chain and it's like yeah I guess maybe but like I don't know it's you know I I have I have these problems with this too I I feel like I've thought too hard about rwas recently where I'm like

scratching my head and questioning that what sort of benefits that you're get like when you look at something like rwa especially issued on an L2 which has other critical dependencies right they like all right the benefit of blockchains are because they're slow and more expensive is that you get these nice censorship resistant settlement Assurance properties and it's like do you get that at all for rwas on and I'm not you know I should say like I I'm very positive on the l2s for the most part like I know we're giving you guys a bit of a hard time on this episode but like I I understand like the the other thing too that I will say in defense is that when you meet these teams I don't think they're bullshitting or intentionally

gaslighting it's like I really believe that they believe what they're they're saying but there there are additional dependencies in the way that they're constructed now and so okay I'm the holder of an rwa and who can rug me it a lot of people can rug me I can get rugged by the L2 I can get rugged by the issuer it's like who cares at that point if the L1 is even decentralized like I could already get rugged by these other two sources and the other thing is I'm I'm less convinced Than I Used to Be That RW are even bullish for the L1 asset because if the whole bet that were trying to make right now is that these l1s are money then rwas like treasuries and stable coins compete with that money

use case so I'm unclear on who's winning does that does that make sense it it I don't know I feel like I've thought too hard about it and I'm I'm winding myself up but yeah that's uh I'm on I'm on a little bit of that thought train at the at the current moment that makes a lot of sense to me I think that fundamentally a lot of people look at crypto as this solution for everything and expect it to be perfect I think that crypto maybe can't be everything I think that sometimes in order to do things it has to make trade-offs and like the rwa thing for instance like I think you're 100% right I think that at the end of the day you know

crypto is like decentralized but also you know if if there's some sort of like linking to these you know offchain assets then yeah you're going to be vulnerable through that link and so to to me it's like yeah like I don't think crypto can be everything um but you know if you look in trafi you look at you know Futures contracts or forward you've got the same like thing going on right um you've got like even with um like uh like some of these like notes you know you've got you know this uh this security is subject to the like you know credit risk of the uh like underwriter or like to the credit risk of the issuer and like like that's a

problem and I like that's still a problem in crypto and so I don't know that that's a problem that crypto should solve I don't know that it's a problem crypto can solve um and so from my point of view I think what is interesting is that like one of the perks is like let's say an L2 does rug somebody usdc can unrug that person if want that's totally true and look I can ALS I can hear people's responses to this already I'm not this is not an attack this is a I'm just pontificating out loud on a which is always dangerous to do I understand all the good reasons why we've imported rwas there's the yield that for protocols like maker

multic collateral die has been super helpful to expand the die Supply I get it I I understand all of those reasons um and I'm not a purist in the sense that I don't know I think one of the valid criticisms with Bitcoin over the years is that is is a little bit too purist and and and look sometimes it's okay to make a series of compromises I'm completely okay with that Alex I'm unfortunately we're we're we we're out of time here we didn't get to the we we might have to do a part two of this because we had a whole other segment planned and that's my fault as the interviewer here I got detoured but I got into what we were chatting about so uh so we have to do we might have to do a part two to this podcast um and uh

but yeah man this has been great uh also for listeners who um you know we just uh kind of said hey who who might have counterpoints to any of the stuff on the engineering limitations on salana or or you know you know we're going to have we'll have to offer a rebuttal to some of the salana or ethereum people who object to Monet as this central point of efficiency or whatever um open to rebuttal here on any and all of the above right uh but but uh Alex man it's always a pleasure to talk um yeah thank you so much for sharing your perspective and if people want to find out more about you know what you're building um what's the best way for them to follow you or get more information or whatever yeah uh definitely give me a follow on Twitter um fast lane the website fast

lane. XYZ um um we are right now just very focused on Monet and you know the question of like taking a lot of these Concepts we've talked about today and fusing them together in a way that allows apps and validators to work synergistically and to add value to each other under pine through a liquid staking token but like most of all is the best way to find out about fast lane is to follow our core ethos which is to just look on chain and like for us like a lot of these these problems by just handling things on chain we can solve them and so if you really want to learn about fast lane find us on chain hell yeah brother love that all right dude love to do it again soon

thanks so much for coming on guys check out fast [Music]