Getting Started with Fuel Network

Transcript

GMGM. Welcome to what's going to be another great episode of Devantel. So, if you didn't know, Devantel is a weekly podcast hosted by Developer Dell, allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between to come on the show and showcase what they've built. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome DDoG and Fuel Network solutions engineer Naz Vora. Uh, if you didn't know, uh, Fuel is a operating system purpose-built for Ethereum roll-ups. Fuel allows roll-ups to solve for parallel parallelization state minimize execution and interopability without making any sacrifices. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll see NA give a overview of fuel, what it is, the problems they aim to solve, the uh the

fuel way of solving them, and how to get started building with fuel ignition today. All right, let's get into it. [Music] GMGM, welcome to the show, Naz. Pleasure to have you on. It's been it's been a while and uh happy to finally get you on the show here. Yeah. Uh thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I mean, like uh it's it's like coming home uh after really really long time.

Totally, man. Totally. Uh yeah. Uh I guess uh well for folks who aren't interested or sorry not interested folks who aren't familiar uh with you um uh would you like to give a brief introduction about yourself? Yeah sure definitely I would love to. So hey guys I I'm Nazi. I am solution engineer at fuel. Uh I started my uh web three journey back a couple of years ago with DD obviously. Uh DY was the first open source community that I uh joined and I got a lot of exposure to the web3 community and just after joining DY I got to meet a lot of cool folks like NAB

and a lot of other people and like I did a lot of open source contributions there and after that I also started uh actively contributing to some other web three communities like Gitcoin DAO and buildg And through which I found my first uh web3 gig uh full-time and just like that I did a couple of uh multitasking work like publishing articles uh creating video content and like lot of other things and yeah uh I think since almost one year now I am with fuel as a solution engineer. So I think that's a bit a rough overview about me. That's wonderful, man. And uh

just curious like what brought you to uh developer Dell? Like what what was the allure? I know a lot of people say that it was like the the NFT craze at the time, but yeah, just interested to hear. Yeah. So I think for me it was uh a situation. So I was into college at that time and it was a covid time. So I was doing a lot of exploration. I was actually working in a web tool job uh at that time and I was a front- end engineer by the way during those time and uh I was looking to explore some new uh new stack. So I uh came across u this whole solidity and I started learning solidity and then I got exposure to

whole blockchain world. So I did some crash course from Udemy to learn solidity and then started following some uh educators on Twitter and that's how I got to know about Nater and once I uh was watching his live stream where he just like minted the uh the NFT collection and we kind of ended up in a DAO. So that was kind of like the whole story um of me joining the DAO and that I I still remember like when I joined there were like only nine channels in developer DA. Yeah. And we had only one voice channel for like the meetings we have had. So yeah it was really early back

then like just a group of people hanging out every every night and building cool stuff. So yeah. Yeah man. That that's that's basically the the soul of developer DAO. And yeah, um we know the Discord kind of got um out of hand with all the channels, but we're we're bringing it back um to the old days. Um reducing it just like the bare minimum. Yeah. Um yeah, that's Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. No, no, no. Um yeah, I guess uh what was your um fascination with tech? like what got you interested to come into the tech scene?

Um were were you always a builder uh at heart even at a a younger age or Yeah. So for me uh I think I was always into technical stuff and by technical I don't mean like coding but I always like to go into the rabbit hole of how things work. So when I was in school I was really much into physics like I uh used to like go into rabbit hole okay how this thing work how this thing work and that kind of carried away with me through the college. So I uh I used to question things like okay how this things work and how uh the whole entire uh things works. So uh I think that curiosity got me into uh the development

and initially I was a uh Android developer because I had this cool thing in my mind that you can just ship apps and you can put it on play store and you can earn money with that. So that was my intention to like uh earn some money while in college. So I did Android development back then for an almost like year but I didn't like it it much. So I started doing web development. I I remember like I didn't know how to like build a basic web app and I participated in hackathon and I was I somehow got through it. Uh so yeah that kind of built curiosity around tech scene and the whole coding. So after that I also did a bit of uh competitive programming

back then to get into some tech giants but yeah I I again left that and yeah here here is where I am and here you are exactly exactly at fuel fuel network today. Yeah. Uh awesome man. Yeah I I'm always uh very fascinated to hear everybody's origin story. It's everybody has like a um an interesting flare to to theirs and you're you're no different. Uh and I guess um now that you are a field network uh what drove you um to basically go there uh what interest you interested you the most? Yeah. So uh ever since the beginning I am very much into uh making the life of developers easier because being a dev I understand

what's the pain point of dev and what they struggle with. So uh uh since earlier times I'm always into like building infrastructural tools even if you like even when I was not at fuel I was uh building all the dev tools and infrastructural tools. So I was always uh wanted to work some on such uh project or such infra that helps to make uh lives of people as essentially devs easier and fuel was one uh such platform which is building really cool stuff and which are solving the things that they are doing from the complete scratch in a really really uh uh different way from the scratch. So

that kind of got me interested and I thought of giving it a try. Excellent. Yeah. Love it, man. Uh yeah, I think that's a perfect segue um to get into what fuel is and what you have prepared for us today. Yeah, sure. So I have actually a presentation. So if you wouldn't mind, can I share my screen? Yes sir. Awesome. So let me just do it. Uh let me know if it's visible. Yep. Screen is all yours. Awesome. Yeah.

So firstly uh let's talk about a fuel what that is and uh what we are doing and why we are doing the way we are doing. So firstly to get started uh I am Nazi. I am solution engineer fuel. Uh again a bit of uh history about me. I used to be a front end engineer opensourus contributor and I also create uh written as well as video content and you can find me on ax at this handle. And now uh before talking about fuel let's talk about EVM and what uh problems we face as an EVM. So uh firstly everyone of us have used

Ethereum and I think most of us have struggled with one of the other things to start with uh the bad UX. I mean like uh Ethereum is sometimes not a really good chain to use during the high congestion time or like the peak period. There are certain reasons why we are facing these issues to start with the lower TPS. So I I'm not saying Ethereum is the issue. I'm saying EVM is the issue. I I mean like both are a bit different. So firstly EVM offers lower TPS. So lower TPS I mean like the uh lower uh throughput and that uh contributes to like higher gas fees. uh

by higher gas fees I mean like uh it is still uh $1 or $2 now but earlier back then in 2020 or 2021 one has to pay like $50 to just maintain NFD and I I don't want to like pay like such a high bucks for a free NFT so this is uh one really big pain point imagine you are like uh launching an NFT collection which is token gated and next thing you know that okay like Ethereum is not usable because the guest SPS are beyond the roof. So that's a really big problem. And another thing is the large state growth. So uh the way Ethereum model and Ethereum is

designed uh its state is like growing like tremendously and every time uh I make a transaction the block builder has to go through the entire state growth and just deal with the entire state and this state keeps on growing piling up and up and eventually uh it will be like unhandable at one point and that is also a reason that Ethereum is so slow otherwise it will just uh uh just pile up this this state growth tree really quickly. So all in all this uh this points towards the direction that Ethereum is not really scalable on at least on a consumer hardware. So all

this contributes to like uh some uh layer 2 solutions like uh for example let's say if I would want to uh you know like uh make it scalable like Ethereum is not uh the one or like not the solution and if you can just like go and Google like uh bad design decisions for EVM then you can I'm sure like you can find a really really good articles on it. So let's talk about how we can fix this. And here comes the fuel VM. So fuel VM is designed to withstand like large amount of transaction volumes along which providing Ethereum security and that gives uh I think the tagline to

fuel VM that fuel VM is Ethereum without limitation. Now imagine that all the things that you are experiencing or like all the problems that you are experiencing with EVM it just vanishes away and you can just have the superpower EVM without any limitations that is called the fuel VM. Now let's understand like what fuel VM is what does it provide. So uh firstly uh due to like the unique architecture and the unique design of fuel VM we have been able to achieve the Ethereum security even though like fuel is not an EVM chain. Uh it is uh nonvm.

So it does not compromise on security. you can still achieve Ethereum security on fuel VM and along with that it also provides uh native assets and what do you mean by native assets for on so for example let's say on EVM you have got like all these ERC20 tokens those are not really native assets you need to like deploy the whole contract and like do all the stuff while on fuel each uh token is a native asset and by that I mean like You can actually pay gas fees using like any of the token. I mean like I can just deploy my own uh uh token ERC20 token and it can behave as a

native token. Now another thing that fuel VM provides is a parallel transaction. Now what does it mean like so currently in on EVM it can only execute one transaction at uh at a time. it does not uh let's say bunch bundle transaction and execute all at once in a single um batch and that is also a reason of like lower TPS. So fuel fixes this due to like the unique design that fuel we have we offer parallel transaction out of the box. Now another thing is native account abstraction. Now you you don't really like to have uh to use like the EIPs or like other things.

you can just use fuel VVM and it will provide uh native account absolution out of the box. And due to all these uh design goals, we have been able to achieve 600 TPS on E3DA uh which is like a really uh high TPS especially on EDA. And we are also working on our uh another uh upgrade of the network called redacted which would be like uh Ethereum on steroids. Oh sorry fuel VM on steroids because we will be using alt DA and we have been able to achieve like 150 TP 150 KTPS on alt DA. So that would be like fuel VM on

steroids. So due to all these things uh I mean along with all these things we also provide great interoperability and by great interoperability I mean that you can even though fuel is non EVM chain you can use any wallet uh on fuel let's say it's metamas it's solana wallet or any wallet even though I have phantom installed I can just use that and interact with fuel. So these are like some great uh user experiences and the powers that fuel VM provides out of the box and at the native level without doing any some kind of tweaks. I mean uh this is not the only layer 2 that

provides such thing but uh there are other layer 2 as well but this is the only layer 2 that provides all these things combined in a single solution. I mean other L2s do provide but they do one or the other tradeoff and uh compromise either on the security or the interoperability but fuel provides all of these experiences in a single uh solution. I would like to highlight one such uh tweet from one of my friend. So due to such great uh TPS and such great design on fuel you can actually do 8,000 transactions with $1 uh gas like which is like really really uh highly

efficient way of doing the transaction and it's actually signifies that how scalable fuel is while on optimism you can do 11 transaction and 14 on arbitum and likewise so like there are you can see like there massive difference between the number of transactions you can do with just like $1 on fuel. Now let's talk about how fuel is doing that. So we have uh couple of uh design choices that we have made fundamentally different and one of them is the predicates. Now I would like to uh give a high level overview of what predicates is because it is relatively a

newer concept. So you can imagine predicate as some kind of safe which gets unlocked uh when you provide a key. So for example, let's say you have some uh USDC logged in and you have put the password in it and you are telling this predicate okay like uh only uh allow someone to access the fund when they provide this password. Now what the what uh it does like whenever you make a transaction request it needs to come with uh the password. This predicate will check the password and if it satisfies the condition it will allow the transaction to pass otherwise it

will uh block the transaction. Now uh let me uh just show you some uh really really good example. Uh uh just a second my keyboard got disconnected. Yeah. Oops. Yeah. Here we go. Now let me uh show you some good examples of predicates. There we go. This is not the easy one.

Yeah. Search searching through the GitHub UI is always a interesting experience. Yeah. Uh all right. So yeah, here is some easy one. Uh let me just zoom in uh for better clarity. Yeah. So you can see that in this uh I have stored the password and I have this function over here that will return true if my password matches this 1337. So you can put in basically any condition over here. It could be let's say EVM signature. uh you can check for the signature over here and it can behave

like an account abstracted wallet out of the box and that's how fuel provides native account abstraction as well. So this is a really cool architecture and the main highlight about uh this is that this is whole uh completely stateless. I mean like the bite code does not leave on chain. you can actually provide the bite code while with the transaction. So you can imagine this as a stateless smart contract. I mean this can this could be anything. This could be like uh stateless order book where you are not storing state onchain and the entire transaction or like the entire uh state

is like in your transaction and it does not really bloat your state. So it solves a really massive problem uh that we have with EVM. Now uh due to predicates these are some really really uh good benefits that uh it provides to start with native account. So I just mentioned that inite instead of the password we can just check for the signature and it can behave as uh the contexted wallet. Now these are stateless contracts and by that uh I mean it doesn't really store state on chain and due to this it also provide parallel transactions. Now let me just

give you high uh highle overview of how that's possible. So uh with EVM when a transaction goes through it does not really uh mention that which state changes it will touch and that's the reason that EVM not is not able to provide parallel transaction. While on fuel we have UTXO based account model which is totally different from the traditional account made model on EVM and with UTXOs you are certain that okay this transaction will touch these state elements and with predicate you can actually uh you know uh release those funds in a uh uh in a different way that

it doesn't really touch each of the states or like each other states and that provides parallel transactions out of the box. Now this was one of the main key feature of the fuel VM and another one is scripts. Now scripts is another uh architecture of fuel where it lets you batch transaction in a single transaction. Now let's say that I have 10 different functions right and I want to batch those uh transaction in a single one then I can use uh scripts and it will bunch the whole transaction and it will just put that as a single transaction in the VM. So this uh

optimizes the whole uh transaction architecture in a really really good way and up to a very high level. And uh let's uh let me give you uh an example of what it's capable of. So let's let's consider that I have uh token A and I want to reach token D and in between there will be token B and token C. Now if I am on EVM I have to let's say uh first swap from token A to token B and token B to token C and then token C to token D. So this is three whole transactions. And if I am on Ethereum, I will also have to give allowances. So like the whole transaction will get doubled. So like from token A to token D

there are six different transactions. Now if on fuel what we can do is firstly there will be no allowances as like all the assets are native assets and what we can do on fuel we can just uh mention like hey like I want to swap from token A to token B then token B to token C and token D to token D. Now instead of doing this whole three different transactions what I can do is I can just club those in a single one and I just need to like uh send one from uh transaction from my wallet and in return I will have token D in my wallet. So that's uh enhances the whole transaction architecture in a

really really good way. So this is uh these were like one of the key uh I would say architectural changes that we have done and that lets you do uh and achieve like so uh such a high TPS. I mean these are not the only one. I'm just mentioning the high uh like the main ones over here. I mean of course like we have uh better op codes and like a lot of different things. uh I mean like we also uh just launched uh this decentralized sequence a couple of weeks ago. So like there are lots of different things but I'm just mentioning the high level OV. Now this was from the user perspective but I think like uh a

successful L2 is only possible when it is also for uh developers and it's uh really uh good for uh onboarding new devs. So let's uh see like what we have uh for devs. So firstly to start with we have uh our new whole rust based DSL called sway and sway is basically the combination of solidity and rust. It extracts away the best part of rust and solidity and fuses them in. Uh it is really really good to get started with. You might think that okay like it is uh completely new but let me just uh show you this

uh Sway playground. So this is similar to what we have for Ethereum. What you can do is like you can click over solidity and it will give you the uh sway code for the uh solidity code. We uh you can also use this for your own smart contracts. We have our transpiler charcoal that lets you transpile the whole solidity code into sway code and uh you can just like get started with it. Now another thing is uh UTXO based transaction model. I I I like touch a bit on uh that in a couple of previous slide but to give you an highle overview

uh UTXO behaves like coins. So let's say in a traditional world you can uh you can have uh coins let's say $5 coin $10 coins. So whenever you are going to a grocery shop you are telling you are if you are buying let's say $12 item so you can say okay like uh I want to buy this uh $12 item and I have $15. So you will just give $15 to the shopkeeper and he will keep the 15 and give you uh $3 change. So, UTXO behaves uh similarly uh I mean like you you can have uh UTXO coins and you can just spend those coins

and actually this is the one of the reason that uh that's why fuel offers parallel transaction out of the box because whenever you have UTXO coin you are certain that okay my transaction will touch this and this state so you can execute multiple transaction in parallel And also uh let me touch the uh this another really cool thing about UDXO. So in accountbased model whenever you uh want to let's say get uh balance of a user address. So what you have to do you have to like uh calculate the all the transaction history of the user and you have to like add up all the transactions and then give the user

address uh user balance. So here you have to store all the transaction of the user like imagine if I my address has done like thousand transaction. So for the entire uh uh time of my life uh Ethereum will have to store all the transaction and then give the address which is like not really efficient way of storing things out. So what UTXO does is basically let's say I have 50 coins of let's say 20 uh 10 or let's say like uh another 10 or 10. So I have like such coins of UTXO. Now whenever someone ask for my balance I just need to like add up the UTXO and give the balance. I

don't really matter or like I don't really care what transaction I have done previously or how many transactions I have done. So it also reduces the state load in a lot way because I just need to like look at the existing UTXO and gives out the balance. So, UTXO is another uh architectural change that uh enables such a high throughput on fuel. And another one is our own execution client that is fuel core. And following up with that is the our own orchestrator for and for uh building on fuel we have a really really good SDKs and tooling. Firstly, wallet SDK. I

mentioned previously that you can uh use any wallet on fuel and that is possible because of our wallet SDK. I mean you don't have to do any uh other thing or uh any complex thing to implement it. If you are building on fuel and you want to add support for metam mask or phantom you can just use our wallet SDK and you will be good to go. Now another thing is our TypeScript and Rust SDKs. I mean these are really really uh good SDK if you are building on uh in typescript or rust. You using rust you can uh test the whole smart contracts and with typescript you can uh build the for out of it and with this

whole uh tools you can get a really flexible development environment out of the box. I mean I have mentioned the main ones but we have many more. If you just visit our docs over here, you can just scan the QR code. You can uh really find some uh good getting started guides. Uh let me just show you. Yeah, you can just follow along these guides and you'll be good to go. If you want to run node, you can just go over here. And also I would like to uh highlight over here that uh a lot of other chains are claiming some high through uh TPS and some high uh really

really million TPS. So uh I would like to mention that uh fuel enables scaling on consumer hardware and by that I mean that you don't need a supercomput. Some someone will say like okay like we are offering 1 million TPS but on what hardware? If you are asking me to use 1TB RAM or like uh some 15 core CPU then I'm not up for it. So if you uh just look at the node requirements for fuel. Yeah, then yeah you can just uh run uh let me just zoom in for a bit. You can run fuel node in your own MacBook. I mean you can just uh spin up the whole uh fuel node

in your uh MacBook and you'll be good to go. So fuel offers scaling on the consumer hardware which is I think really really good uh way of scaling things out and not much others offer that. So that is the uh rough overview about fuel and uh yeah I mean you can just go over here read about what is fuel what we are doing and you can quickly get started with it. So yeah that's the rough about fuel.

That's amazing man and yeah that it certainly seems very very uh feature- packed. um like uh what would you say is the best way for um developers who want to start working uh with Fuel? Um what's there what what would you recommend as their like hello world or um Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let me let me show you again. Um yeah. So uh if if they want to get started I I think they can firstly uh get uh some uh understand and how things work and first thing they will uh they can do is like

if they want to learn sway then we have sway by example just like solidity by example and this is the hello sway program that will get them familiar with the whole uh uh smart contract language and another thing is we have create fuels uh yeah we have this create fuel. So this is kind of uh the super super command I would say that lets you scaffold the entire uh project for you.

For example, if you just run this simple command, it will out of the box initialize the entire project for you. Uh you can see the directory structure. It will have the really good front end that will be uh pre uh uh I mean like that would be uh already that already comes with the good counter example. You can just interact with it and if you want you can just deploy deploy it on node and you can also customize contract and yeah it basically allows you to fully customize and also provide a really really good boiler plate to get started with it and you don't really need to worry about okay how things work

just like uh run this simple command and you'll be good to go. Amazing. I love simple. I love simple. So yeah. Uh and um for folks who start uh playing with Fuel over the weekend um and have questions, what's the best way for them to get those answered? Is there a discord? Um should they reach out to you personally? Um what would you recommend? Totally. So uh first thing I would recommend is the get on the fuel forum. We usually replies within like uh 12 to 24 hours. And if you want to even reach on discord, you can find the discord link in our uh website

and yeah uh there must be somewhere in the bottom. Yeah, here you can just find it and join our discord and we are uh highly active there. So yeah, amazing. Yeah, this is certainly uh very uh a very positive thing for for the Ethereum ecosystem and uh it's really cool to see how you guys um uh brought together the best of Solidity and Rust um like from from your experience um was there a high learning curve um to be able to get started pretty quickly with Sway or um yeah so uh if you are coming from a Rust background then it's very

similar to Rust I mean like uh you are already onboarded with Sway but if you come from a solidity background then you might find a bit difficult for a day or two but yeah just I mentioned you can use our street playground and it will uh do a lot of things for you. So for example you can compare uh code uh line by line side by side and you can really get good grasp of things from here. So, I mean it is a bit of a learning curve, but with the tools we have, it gets really simpler.

Yeah, I I really like this. I like this playground how it how it does the side by side. Um, and and even you can just compile things out from here and you can just deploy in one click uh from here. So, yeah. Excellent. Making the developer experience that much better. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. You can say no, I was just going to say that if you can just like click deploy, you can connect your own wallet and it will just uh you can see like we have burner wallet over here. So, you don't really need to install the fuel wallet as well and you can just like get started things quickly.

Sorry, I was trying to unmute myself. Uh amazing. Yeah. Uh yeah uh unfortunately uh we're at time here Naz but uh yeah this was this was an amazing overview and I'm really looking forward to seeing people um build their next app with with fuel um because it certainly seems there's a lot to be uh a lot to be had from a developer standpoint. So yep and uh yeah uh with that I want to wish everybody a uh happy Friday. Uh thank you again Nazi for for taking the time to come on. I know you're very busy. Um but yeah, this was uh very um uh this was a great um overview of fuel and and for those of you who watched us live

um go at it and claim your uh attendance badge uh on bit badges um to prove that you watched uh us here today live if collectibles are your thing. Um but yeah uh again uh wishing everybody a very wonderful Friday, happy weekend and that we'll catch you back here next week for another great episode of Devon Tell. Cheers. Shoots.