Foundations for the Superchain / Karl Floersch

Transcript

I'm Live Well hello um let me see I guess I just so my slides are visible that correct all right I'm going to assume they are well welcome welcome everyone I'm very excited to be talking to y'all about the super chain and unfortunately due to passport issues I am not here in the flesh and instead transmitting my virtual Essence to you um and additionally just another caveat is due to uh cascading failures this is also I did not get a chance to create new slides to you for you so we're going to be going over things that do exist

somewhere on the internet however because of non-determinism in my presentations I will be giving more new information and fun caveats so without further Ado let's dive into the Super chain um context right back in devcom we first started really talking about the super chain we were saying how of course all of these different chains will use the same op stack standard come together and form the super chain well today we're going to get into the weeds this is about fundamental concepts the underpinnings of the super chain and

this is not going to be fun you're not going to have a good time it's going to be hard but let's do this now I'm just kidding it'll be a lot of fun I love I love deep deep technical topics as evidenced by my my life for the past many many years okay so blockchain today is insufficient for the decentralized web this is the context this is the setting for the super chain why we are talking about it of course we're talking about Layer Two just for context in case you don't know we're talking about Layer Two we're talking about optimism we're talking about scaling ethereum and funding public goods but why is it insufficient blockchain technology today well meet congestion we have a problem

the reality is that the capacity of our networks are way insufficient um a a small game would take up more data than exist on ethereum today you've got a few you got like a hundred kilobytes of data per second on ethereum today and even in the future where it like this is this is this is insane if we're if we're trying to put the internet on chain so and we are trying to put the internet on change so blockchain is on scale right the reason why we have these huge gassies is because everyone is competing for a very limited resource and we can't be if

we're going to be posting our random games comma tweet you're not gonna pay 13 for that tweet it just does not make sense so this is not new information even since the beginning Bitcoin introduced after the Bitcoin white paper the first response or second response was we very very much need a system but the way I understand your proposal it does not scale to the required size so we need to scale this up and that was 2008 it is now 2023 if I'm correct no just kidding um and we still have not gotten there the tech is not ready this just it demonstrates what a difficult computer science problem this is so

for a moment imagine a future imagine a future where things were different where you were not just you know blockchains were not just used for trading you know memes and uh everyone could be happy using the system those people are very scary but regardless right imagine the entire world was on chain what would that look like well look like a few a few different things first off we would be able to abstract away the entire back-end software stack right now we have to worry about what saw what you know who's running our software who is hosting it if we have decentralized protocols that goes away they all become part of the same network the evm really is the ultimate

serverless platform and application composability because we're using the evm can be supercharged we can deploy an app here and then extend it we can say okay I'll deploy a you know this is the the beauty of uh for instance uniswap all of these different protocols after uniswap was deployed all of these different protocols built on top of it and used it the whole D5 Legos it's not just D5 Legos it is literally just internet Legos period and additionally we can build out systems so that developers we can decouple this idea that the developer must host their software instead when developers write protocols that allows them to instead just Define the business logic of their

software and then other people can run that business logic so this is really a powerful primitive for creating the the the conditions for a developer to just in their back in in their you know their time over the weekend deploy an application and for that to get Mass adoption we don't need to be limiting people to uh tightly coupling developers and hosting so this can turn the internet from a kind of barren Wasteland into a vibrant ecosystem of tons of different applications and composability and unfortunately this picture can the

reality is that this is actually the this is actually what it used to be and that's where it is so let's solve global warming and down with uh you know sunblock okay which is the sponsor of this video yeah just kidding so we should be getting to the point though where we can support Twitter on the internet on the EDM all right the decentralized web can be realized right we have been working on it for an enormous amount of time started out in eve two then we formed plasma Group which was this not uh open source non-profit dedicated to scaling ethereum and then he's formed optimism which then took it to the next level what by scaling ethereum but also funding public goods so this is this is something that

we have been working on as an industry though as an industry in ethereum community everyone has been working together to get the abstractions right so that we can solve this scaling problem and we're actually making massive progress you know from the roll-up Centric uh roadmap to various uh other community contributions we have been able to figure out what the abstraction layers really should be this is key in other words in order to Wrangle the complexity of scaling blockchains we need to find the right ways to encapsulate it the right modules that all come together to form a beautiful system so what would this roll-up Centric future look like right

we have L2 we've got these amazing contributors very way that you know we are starting to see the picture clearer so congestion versus the super chain let's go okay so what is the super chain I've been talking about it for a long time it's more than one chain supporting scaling to the support the internet requires a lot more than one change why is that well pretty simple if you have a node and you try to increase the block size eventually the node is going to explode and become a black hole um if you if you make it big enough um so it's not but the thing is that's this is like uh you know it's obviously more than one chain but it's not a multi-chain design so each one of these chains in in traditional kind of

multi-chain designs each chain is different each chain has its own validator set it adds its own security risk but as and as you Bridge across all these chains it compounds that risk that means that bridging from chain a to chain B to chain C is non-fungible with the bridging from chain a directly to chain C so that's a real big problem and then also just deploying and managing These Chains they're expensive we need to get the cost down to basically nothing chains need to become fundamental developer Primitives that people have access to as they are building out their applications and so we need a system where change are truly commoditized that's how we're going to scale we're going to get to the point

where we can write things like kubernetes configs that orchestrate all of the different you know chains together right we don't want to have the to reason about an individual Chain by chain system okay but it's also not monochained to be very clear right because obviously it it doesn't fit in one chain but at the same time it's not multi-chain and so it's super chain classic all right so we're gonna Breeze past those properties but I will say that this is like at a high level what it kind of looks like you have ethereum at the top layer and oh I hear okay anyway guess the theory about the top layer then you've got the optimism bridge and then you've got all of the different op chains that are

connected via a cross chain messaging protocol so all of the op chains is standardized and dapps get super powered right Deploy on the super chain Okay so it's oh yeah this is just me warning y'all it is not here yet right this is definitely a this is a kind of vision this is a uh uh design for how we are thinking about the future of these systems so that you can build it too it's already been almost a decade and we're closer than ever so please do join the cause help contribute to the op stack get started um anyway let's dive into some Core Concepts alrighty so again when there are things that are beautifully done

they're good abstraction layers I'm going to talk to you today about those abstraction layers let's talk about super chain derivation so by the way before I even dive into this topic I just want to say that there are two resources that are worth discussing that we need to scale in order to solve the scalability problem for ethereum and those resources are compute scale B compute the gas per second that is available on the network and additionally we need to scale the data the amount of transaction data per second on the network so those are the two resources if we had instant infinite data on both of those fronts then we would really we would have solved scalability but because we don't we're

going to have to introduce a bunch of Concepts and that is the context for this so super chain derivation that is focused on scaling compute let's dive in though so what is block derivation block derivation is how you derive how you compute the L2 chain State now the reason why we call it derived is because your starting excuse me you're starting from the you're trying to determine the resulting L2 chain State based on layer one so really you're just kind of taking the layer one as input you're running this pure function over it and you're deriving the layer too that's exactly what it's described here where you say okay here's the derivation

function here's the L1 chain and let me get the L2 chain out of it all right so what does that look like visually because I like visuals as you all may know okay um we've got ethereum L1 right then you derive the layer 2 Chain you run that pure function over it so by the way there is an important call out here that I'll I will note is that ethereum this derivation function is almost like an index it's almost like a like you know the graph or or uh you know any other indexer on top of ethereum that is really fundamentally what these Roll-Ups are they're kind of index indexers over ethereum that

actually have the uh have state that you care about and you can transact with in a way that resembles the layer one state so it's kind of a different view on the same blockchain so anyway let's keep going because I think it'll you'll get more intuitions as we as we as we go through these pretty diagrams so Alice sends a transaction to ethereum that gets included in the ethereum chain then it is derived to be included in the optimism chain the red chain now we do this again ethereum grows a bit and it is derived now notably right there is an important property and a really cool property about Bedrock which we by the way released as an upgrade just moments ago but the Bedrock release

of the op stack this includes this this me this uh uh this abstraction so that you already know yeah of course oh all right well we've got one minute to go friends um I'll jump to the I guess we only got through one this is unfortunately I was planning for eight for for eight more minutes but that's okay we have the layer two chain where we're deriving but we can actually derive multiple different chains and if you want this is how Layer Two scales but now if you want to go to the Super

chain we can Define this function that allows you to take the L1 chain take a chain config which is basically a chain ID and then derive any op config chain from that L1 you can use this look into the kaleidoscope and you can see all of the different chains that you can derive there's basically an infinite uh uh number I mean infinite bounded by a number of configs that you can find but regardless this is how you end up with all of these different chains that you can Define and that allows you to make use of these chains permissionlessly to transact on okay unfortunately we were not able to get to

message passing which is how chains communicate we were also not able to get to uh um uh what's it called uh uh uh sequencing which is how chain chains actually synchronize with each other so you can do things like uh Atomic cross chain arbs um and also we did not talk about the scaling the other thing which is data availability however because I have given this talk before maybe you already know what are we gonna do okay I have to have to say because I've already given this talk before maybe you already know some of these things and we also they also cover some good ground so in other words please ask me questions because I assume we still have time for questions is that is that correct um or are we totally totally out of time

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