How Monad is Breaking The Barriers Of Blockchain Scaling

Transcript

and it's the house of mandok mandok yeah you're in the house of mandok I'm in the house of moyak actually what are these houses what and why are you in one cuz I'm not in any house I'm feeling I want to be in ch can I what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup welcome to a chain abstraction paloa where we just wrapped up an epic one-day marathon in the heart of New York City diving deep into chain abstraction with some of the top teams in crypto trust me this series is packed with insights laughs and a few surprises you won't want to shout out to Omni Network for helping to put this together with their upcoming main net soon targeting the interoperability and ux problem that we're currently facing in the ethereum and majer ecosystem we really enjoyed this series and looking forward putting

all this content out there let's jump right into today's episode after a quick word from some of our awesome Partners who make this [Music] possible rtiz is your home for app specific rollups at the Forefront of developing new tools and platforms that enhance the capabilities of blockchain Technology cartey enables applications that are flexible and built to scale build on a full Linux environment and use traditional software libraries but in blockchain development go to cy. that's cy. iio to learn more about building your own app chain today

verx Edge is now live on say Network say users can now trade 50 plus spot and per markets with the unified order book liquidity of vertex Edge across arbitrum blast mantle and SE the next 6 weeks 850,000 SE tokens will be up for grabs as trading rewards every single week exclusively on say join vertex onay Network now on vertex Edge that's vertex protocol.com all right New York City here with Keon from manad monad or manad manad monad right you got and it's the

house of Mandu mandok yeah that's you're in the house of mandok uh I'm in the house of moyak moyak yeah yeah there's only two houses in the mon Community right or there three there three there's three okay what are these houses what and why are you in one do feel neglected you're right you're right that it would we did talk about if team members should be in houses or not but there you know there's a good spread of different people in different hous which one's which one is James in I actually I think he's in House of chog actually that's the I think Tunes tossed me in the house of maland duck and ever since I've been in that telegram chat it's just it's quite amazing guys I'm not in any house I'm feeling uh I want to be in chog can you add me in ch after this uh do I have

to do something to get actually have House of chog as a telegram group that's another thing is they're a little over okay okay and we can get you added to something well welcome in um honestly I think this is a great I'm sure you get asked a ton about the community but I feel like this is a really good place to start and then get into some of the more technicals um I mean I'm I'm messing around about these different houses and things and I saw your post you were recently in Turkey I believe um with the stuffed animal of the little Mullen duck um like how do how do you feel this little mascot and and this kind of memeable culture of such a serious project how do you feel this like has helped you to build your brand and like how has this community uh kind of uh

organization allowed you guys to really organize socially like pre-product if you will yeah I think that the barbell approach is appropriate in a lot of different places in life so the 70 IQ 130 IQ but never never be in the middle so our technology is really building from scratch the entire ethereum stack there's a lot of low-level engineering that's gone into that um but equally or some might even say more important is the growth of the social layer and that's come through the formation of the manad community which is really just driven by individual members of the community that are really talented

really passionate about crypto's values really passionate about um following Along on crypto Twitter and and um you know maybe spent time as not very well-known members of the crypto Community just like normal everyday people scrolling and now are you know taking on more prominent roles in the monad community it's really just about um friendship having fun um creating great art and appreciating great art um creating memes starting initiatives we have the monad Run club uh which was initially uh just an idea that one Community member came up with to to motivate themselves to to run more and now so they set a goal of running 10,000

km and um pretty quickly hit that um collectively and now they have a larger goal of I think 880,000 kilm is this distributed or is this like here in the city like can I um anyone can participate yeah I mean it's it's on Strava I believe it's a Strava Club Runner I'm uh I'm a midr runner okay I ran one Marathon once and I was like never again oh wow okay that's pretty good yeah but yeah that's definitely on the right side of the barbell but um yeah things like that or mon lingo which is an effort to learn new languages because there's so many different really strong Regional communities within monad and people want to learn languages of other

other friends in the community so people are studying Japanese Korean Turkish did you all come in so like you know man's Community has grown so big that it's like a meme in itself at this point like other projects talk about like what is manad doing that like we could be doing to grow and Stu did you come in with this strategy in mind or did this developed kind of organically like where did this come come from originally it was initially the goal although I have to say that for me personally I couldn't ever have predicted that the Monet Community would be so big so early on um it's really just Testament to individual community members but when we did start uh when we did open the Discord and

start building the community and made our first Community oriented hire Bill Monday the idea from the beginning was that we should follow certain mantras and one that we followed was Community is the product so we need to deliver a great product that is enjoyable that community members want to take part in and not feel like they're being farmed like not feel like they're being asked to do things they don't want to do um I just think that there's a a trend in the space of using questing platforms and using certain um quote unquote growth hacks um but they really while they boost numbers they don't actually build relationships They Don't Really build

community so we just took the exact opposite approach and said let's just create like an environment a house almost that is enjoyable to be part in where people can make friends um it's also very path dependent because it's also started during the bare market and yeah December 22 so there were a lot of people that were you know kind of bummed out about what was going on and I feel like that yeah I feel like that's where you were able to like pick up Tunes as like you know he was he was doing a lot of writing and things and like he was pretty big in the space and then you know those people in the bear kind of wanted to go work on a good project for kind of like the next cycle or the future and also one thing that you said in particularly interesting is this idea

of In-House I was having lunch with Anil from Dela yesterday and we we were chatting about like these Community strategies we do a lot of like similar business stuff and we're talking about how the strategy which MAA has taken with which is kind of internalizing key influencers from various parts of like crypto space or the industry if you will and bring them inhouse is likely a strategy that a lot of teams are going to have to adopt to do marketing and his point was and I resonated with this is that if you Outsource your marketing as your community as your project you almost Outsource your voice to these other people and when you bring in house you have a bit more control of your brand and of kind of this like marketing voice and so I think that you guys have

probably paved the way for the for more competitive uh uh business happenings with regards to influencers and various thought leaders in the space to be internalized on teams and so just wanted to bring that up as part of the conversation yeah that's interesting I mean it's it's not just any um I guess person that has influence that has a lot of followers that um you know can like join a a project and immediately start advancing the overall goals of the effort I think it's you know definitely understanding crypto lore and understanding the memes and the culture is definitely a leg up but um yeah

talking about Tunes or in turn or other members of our team that are extremely Crypton native or welln yeah um you know they bring so much to the the table that um maybe people don't know as well and and that's you know that's what's needed in order to build a really successful effort um so yeah I definitely agree that it's a um what do they say like necessary but not sufficient condition um for for um building out a great Community Building effort um I guess other thought but yeah I definitely agree with you that building things from scratch rather than Outsourcing is the

right view the right way to do it um it's hard though because you it requires more resources it requires a lot of time um from the the rest of the team it requires anticipating that ahead of time and getting started early on so for example for for our team we started building the monad community I.E open the Discord um in November 2022 and that was like uh 20 months ago now which is crazy so there it does take a lot of time you have to start early and it's um it also can't just be like trying to copy what existing projects have done like it has to be a new playbook that comes

from believing what the right thing to do is and then working really hard to make it happen did you have a second thought or was that the was that the second thought there ever clear is pioneering the clearing layer the clearing layer can almost be thought of as splitwise when you go on a trip with friends but for the blockchain what I mean by that is when users are sending cross chain messages there's often times fillers and solvers who have balances left on different chains that they need to rebalance and reset their positions this is where ever comes in ever is pioneering a collaborative approach to the chain abstraction future and they are willing to work with inoperability Partners solvers and other providers in the space to build a interoperable and

abstraction future check out Everclear at ever clear.org and welcome back to the L up yeah I think it it's just consistent with the um the way that our our community approaches things as well which is um there aren't shortcuts like with the technology that the monad engineering team has been building it's it's taken a lot of effort we built a database from scratch um we built a lot of things from scratch and I think in the same way if you if you want to take a shortcut and use a questing platform so your Tweet gets a lot of likes and a lot of you know that's just not it's representative of the tech or of the to of the broader idea of the team Etc right yeah and it's

going to discourage real people from wanting to use it because they'll be like well you know if if there is anything you know if there is any opportunity it's going to be diluted by all these Bots yeah fair enough yeah yeah all right well let's get into some of the text shall we yeah um yeah I mean so we could dive deep into monad stack or manad stack um or we could talk about chain abstraction and like its relation to that where you want to take this um let's start with the just like the thesis of the performance I I'd like to kind of just further understand that and then we'll kind of bring it in in the end so like the particular like pointed question that that I have CU I think that we understand like the the vision um I think like like the the key

question that I'm kind trying to understand is when you guys are going to approach if you guys are very successful and you guys have a ton of apps a ton of users things are going very very well um I feel like and I could be completely off on this I feel like you're you're going to be faced with the question of do we centralize our validator set more to scale more um as as a trade-off or of course you know we push like a lot of a lot of the mod stuff do scale with rollups so like do you think that you're going to get to this point and like have to be faced with a decision how are you thinking about like scaling SC in you know at 10K TPS like how do you think about scaling if you if you have you know hundreds of millions of users like

what are you going to do about that future or like how are you thinking about that scale like in a very successful monad I think of monad as a project that's Building Technology to make really computationally dense networks um that are fully decentralized so one monad is one network with hundreds or thousands of nodes that are globally distributed that can process a billion transactions per day um and has a lot of great properties such as censorship resistance decentralization um and Open Access so that anyone can run a node very cheaply um these are all properties that are

really important to our team that's how we've that's the core principle that we've design the technology for um but your question is like if we get to a billion transactions per day of usage then what do we do Beyond there um and that's the point where horizontal scaling I.E uh multiple um subnets if you will to borrow a terminology from from other ecosystems like multiple subnets makes sense or vertical scaling where um there's you know using roll up um Bridges to um have separate environments also powered by Monet also using Monet execution that um

commit uh transaction data somewhere and commitments I.E State Roots um to the the bottom layer so there's no um yeah there's no conflict between the idea of making a really performant single unit of blockchain like making this single uh environment that's really perform it and the roll up like vertical scaling or subnet like horizontal scaling it's just for our team from our team's perspective we want to make that really dense unit we want to make it so that also oh sorry another thing to mention is um we sort of take the principle of Max performance Min

Hardware so you know that means anyone should be able to go get a laptop from Costco and run a node yeah right and is benmark like the latest MacBook Pro or something um I I think the latest Pro will be Beyond The Benchmark yeah but but um yeah the point is like we don't want to just throw Hardware at the problem we introduce software improvements architectural improvements so that we can get the most out of the hardware gotcha did you um I mean this more of a historical question did you ever consider just building it as an L2 or has the vision always been its own independent Network U the vision has always been an independent L1 and there's a couple of reasons for that um

the first being centralization um and maybe second and third being cost and performance which are really tied to each other but from a decentralization perspective we do think that decentralized block production is really important for censorship resistance and trustless um we don't want to see one actor just having control over what transactions get sequenced um so that's why there's this whole effort to build this performing consensus mechanism yeah do you imagine a world in which the blocks that monad chain is producing are ever outsourced to builders like what has happened in the ethereum ecosystem

or do you imagine that will always stay kind of within the core protocol it's hard to predict the future um I think on day one the block production will be done by um the core validators themselves but um you know we'll see how it evolves over time uhhuh what about in this world that I think that we're training to towards like abstracting away at least the idea of chains perhaps not every aspect of like the community and The Vibes and the certain apps on each chain but at least it's kind of the kind of goal of today was to get different perspectives about chain abstraction and like do do you think that because monad for example has such high TPS really fast execution do you think that in a world of abstraction

a lot of execution could take place on manad for just to basically get the best of uh of its use case um instead of doing it on other chains or like how are you kind of viewing mad's performance within this this like execution Pathways of abstracted chains whether l2s l1's other uh ecosystems as well yeah I think the chain abstraction movement makes sense um it's really about I think I think you could interpret chain abstraction in two ways one is like um just having really good on recording and ux um things like what privy is doing or what dynamic is

doing um I realize that's not like what most people mean when they say chain abstraction but just to call it out like the focus on making it really easy to make a wallet without having to like worry about the pass phrase um and then I think I believe now like these Solutions are cross chain as well so they can create a wallet for anywhere and gas those three things the wallet creation the gas and the multi-chain that's it that's like could forus now think I see um right so I think that that directionally makes a lot of sense because normal people are just not they're used to using the passwords or or Gmail um and it it should be that technology exists to serve people wherever they are whether they're the kind of person that like wants to use

Gmail login or the person who wants to use a seed phrase and cares about self- sovereignty and you know being able to go anywhere and still know their seed phrase and have access to their funds that's one thing I think the other thing is like the chain abstraction movement that near and certain other um ecosystems have been focused on of um having credentials stored on one chain but then being able to effect actions on other chains um through MPC based system um and that's super interesting as well I'm excited about it I think from the perspective of monad we are building core technology that makes the evm really performance

from an execution perspective building this database that um offers really high performance parallel State access and then from the actual execution of transactions perspective parallel execution um optimistically executing many transactions to unlock more power in the CPU and I think I can see that there could be people who have their you know their account balances and their credentials and so on generally on another chain but then through the chain abstraction movement could be you know relaying instructions signatures to um to monad to to Really cheaply much more cheaply interact with certain apps on

monad than they would in their home [Music] environment cartei is your home for app specific rollups at the Forefront of developing new tools and pl platforms that enhance the capabilities of blockchain Technology ctei enables applications that are flexible and built to scale build on a full Linux environment and use traditional software libraries but in blockchain development go to ci. that's cy. to learn more about building your own app chain today yeah I I think that's like generally how the the broader ux gets

better I think I put out a tweet like when when we have an app that you can aggregate all the liquidity from all these chains or when when will we have something where you can kind of use all of what is and so I think that's like kind of getting there in a separate way with like execution but kind of getting us closer um on a different note um you recently were on Bank list doing a debate about Mega E or conversation with uh Lei from Mega eth I'm just curious on your perspective on kind of like how that went what your thoughts are on highly performing l2s uh in comparison to kind of these highly performing l1s um and generally like the trade-off landscape that you see there mhm I think the there's a couple of big

differences um between monad and between the sort of category of high performance l2s that's starting to develop um putting the community aspect aside which I think is actually really big part as well because um for Builders that are deciding where to build um knowing that there's a incredibly passionate Community with a ton of lore and a really strong social layer um that's going to be behind you as the Builder um that's a very powerful motivator as well and I just like mentioned that but then put it to the side um at the end of the day monad is really focused on getting the most performance out of minimal

hardware and we think that's important because although in monad mainnet we expect a couple hundred validators participating directly in consensus um meaning that they're proposing blocks and voting on blocks directly it's a couple hundred nodes in addition to that anyone should be able to run a full node so anyone should be able to run a node that listens to all this traffic and maintains the full State executes all the transactions and trustless verifies what's going on and knows exactly the state of the world and that could be anyone from um a trading firm to a a storekeeper to a bank to an exchange like any of these entities need

to be able to run full nodes and you know if it's really expensive to run that node if it's thousands of dollars a month like tens of thousands of dollars per year to run that node because you know it's the beefiest box that you can get in AWS like that's just not going to be sustainable that person's not going to want to use that technology so then they have to trust someone right but then you get and the whole point is we're trying to avoid to avoid that right and but then but but you get more TPS than on than on like a distributed validator set Chain by centralizing like a sequencer on L2 if you beef up the hardware hard but you're saying the censorship resistance properties are just not worth

the tradeoff censorship resistance is a big part of the reason why we're all here why we're all building what we're building it's existential problem in ethereum now yeah I would say if it's not decentralize what's the point um and with that said I know that you know different um different rollup projects have a road map of how to decentralize the validator and um you know are working toward that which is exciting but if the core premise is the one node is going to be so beefy that it can just like keep everything in memory and like do a whole bunch of work relying on Hardware then when you go to decentralize now all of those nodes have to have that property as well um it's just not not sustainable so yeah

I think that generally the rollup ecosystem has kind of followed the um the Mantra of like reasonable Hardware requirements and work on software to make it so that the validator set can get decentralized and I think that's kind of a prudent uh measured approach like start build the technology and then like um you know then over time like raise the performance rather than just relying on Hardware from the start yeah I think one thing that salana has done and that what mad's going to do to a theum is like pushing the level of the competitive nature at the L1 that needs to compete with these basically upcoming projects that have kind of you know your

your your benefit of building modad now the last couple years is that ethereum was built before you able to kind of take what you want take the best parts and make your version of it and similar for these other l1s and so I feel like um the benefit of building monad now is that you guys have been able to build off of what has been built already evm and other iterations of l1s and and rollups now there's been chattered about ethereum not being able to compete with certain uh or scale right because of this um like slow block times at the L1 do you think ethereum L1 is going to have base layer changes or what do you think is is the state of kind of like scaling the ethereum based layer to improve the rooll of centric kind of vision right it's actually a really good

good um segue I guess because with monad our team is building software so that the hardware requirements don't have to change so you can get more performance if you make architectural improvements um and you know that can allow the L1 to scale without changing the requirements of the um number of nodes that are participating in consensus and so that's that's the first comment that I have is that fun fundamentally you just want you want to you know like it's like you have a remote control and then there's you know the batteries that go in the remote control if I could give you a better battery that just can be 10x more or 20x

or whatever more dense in terms of power you can literally just like use that remote control much longer without changing the the device at all sorry it's a silly analogy because it just popped into my head but um yeah that's that's the point is like just get more out of the same requirements um that said there's also improvements that are being discussed to ethereum that would maybe change the number of nodes that are participating in consensus um currently there's about a million um Val quote unquote validators although most of them are virtual validators like there's about 10,000 nodes representing those million validators so cutting the number of validators down from a million

to 10,000 would obviously drastically reduce the overall overhead of this consensus and aggregating a million BLS signatures is not fun so that those are changes that can happen kind of without a lot of oper some operational change but like probably not a significant change to decentralization at all are you shooting for that scale of like 10,000 or is it more in the like hundreds um we the yes monad is shooting for that in the longer term although on day one M that definitely not 10,000 more like a couple hundred what block times do you expect with I guess do you expect block times to change as you scale that as well um that's a good question we don't expect them to change um just due to the nature of the

consensus mechanism um it's linear communication so um it scales quite well as the number of nodes grows um compared to a quadratic system like uh tender or not Comet bft um but uh yes I think there's it's interesting because monad will be pushing to add more and more validators participating over time and at the same time I personally believe and everyone has their own belief but I believe that ethereum over time will like come down in the number of individual validators um for efficiency and maybe there could even be convergence at some point which I think would be super exciting that's interesting there definitely seems to be a lot of like research momentum of just like let's cut solo stakers like just is

what it is like let's reduce the like size of the network at this point in the ethereum community um you know whether that's the best path or not that's kind of an open question that we could have a long conversation about that but um yeah I think we're good thank you yeah thanks coming through man thank you cheers