How Rollups Will Decentralize Their Sequencer | Josh Bowen, Ben Fisch

Transcript

why do we have kind of sequencers in general It's like because users prefer faster block times and they want those soft commitments and you say well why would we decentralize that well because we still want to remain decentralized this episode of Empire is brought to you by quick node quick node is an end-to-end blockchain development platform that makes building web 3 apps super easy no matter what you want to build you can effortly develop any application by leveraging their elastic apis go to quicknote.com use codeempire you'll get a free month on their feature back build plan that's right go to quicknode.com you'll get a free month to start playing around you'll hear more about quick node later in the show this episode is brought to you by Quinta

the premiere derivatives platform on optimism that offers deep liquidity low fees and up to 50x leverage across 24 different assets you'll hear more about Quinta later in the show all right everyone welcome back to another episode of Empire uh you got song to me today and then we've got Ben SEO of espresso and then with Josh CEO of Austria Ben and uh Josh welcome down pargas thank you yeah you guys are doing the blockworks rounds these days has it uh has it I think two two blockworks pods in two weeks how you doing how you feeling about it it's pretty great it was great to be on here after research good we wanted to warm you guys up because obviously Empire is the best podcast not you know of the blockworks

family but you know so anyways it's great to have you guys on I heard a lot of really good things about what you guys are doing for all of our listeners one of the more important topics that we've been talking about recently is scalability and in that context sort of the L1 L2 we've had the arbitrum guys come on we've had uh star core guys come on and I think all you know a lot of the conversation even the multi-coin guys reference of why dl1 L2 Dynamic would not work as well is because of the sequencer and the idea of decentralizing a sequencer has come over you know has come up a number of times so I think this episode uh would love to touch on that um as well as what you guys building

wise at you know so important so maybe we can start with intro guys you know Josh and uh Ben maybe uh you guys can just give us a little bit of background on on how you got started okay so I'm Josh um CEO co-founder at Austria um so refer to Astra I was at Celestia and kind of my work there um was on kind of like how do we deploy kind of like Roll-Ups more generally on Celestia kind of taking a slightly distinct model from the existing kind of l2s on ethereum and and that kind of existing kind of known Paradigm with like optimism and arbitrum being the primary examples at the time um prior to that worked at Edge and node you know who who runs the graph for a little bit and then before that I spent you know maybe too many years at Google

mostly within the cloud org um so yeah that's that's kind of like my long history there you know kind of broadly what I focused on in my like you know two and a half or so years and crypto is generally around research and scalability more broadly and I still see you know shared sequencers decentralized sequencers there's just like in kind of a continued extension of that general research and I'm Ben I my introduction to uh the industry was initially through academic research um I was doing my PhD at Stanford in applied cryptography and then ended up working um you know pretty much from 2015 through and through the through the current day on you know applications of

cryptography to blockchains and I ended up focusing a lot on questions around not only alternative uh ways of of doing consensus in permissionless networks right alternatives to proof of work proof of stake proof of space Etc but also how to use cryptographic tools to scale the performance of blockchains um and so I I worked in the early days with filecoin with Chia um I worked on problems related to Randomness beacons that ended up being incorporated into the design of uh present-day ethereum and my journey to Espresso systems was uh really just a long-term passion for

how do we scale these blockchains but without compromising on what they're supposed to do right and what their core principles are around decentralization um decentralization and and fault tolerance Ben uh Ben can I pick on you just for almost at the risk of like starting too basic here can you just give us a definition of sequencers and what they look like today and and maybe there's a second part of that question which is like just validators like what they are um and really like what is what is the sequencer yes so a sequencer is a term that has arisen from this now more modular description of blockchains and what they do right so the original concept of a blockchain I

do have a distributed virtual machine and it has to order transactions to a state machine and execute them um as soon as we started shifting to Outsourcing some of these rules to Layer Two namely proving right and execution which is the core of how Roll-Ups actually achieve scalability or you know remove computational bottlenecks in uh in blockchains then we still have all these rules that we need to take care of right if you have a roll up that's uh proving the result of executing some sequence of transactions how did that how do those transactions get ordered do they get ordered by the L1 and just not executed or is there an external system that is handling that ordering right

similar to how now we've separated out uh data availability into Data availability layers all of these are required for for for consensus you need to make the data available you need to make sure that the available data is ordered that's what a sequencer does whether it's a single computer or a decentralized consensus protocol and then you need to execute these transactions that are available in the order that they've been ordered in order to derive the resulting state of the machine and convince all the other clients connecting to the system of that current state and Josh maybe can you just frame this conversation for us a little bit more what like what is the state of how sequencers work on on Roll-Ups today

Roll-Ups today you know generally conflate with I think you know Ben and I would agree with like actually like two components of like you know sequencing it'll be like sequencing and like like validating to some degree right and that there is sequencing which is just ordering the blocks right and defining for a given like Fork of uh chain like what is the canonical ordering of you know this block and then how do we append the block onto that right how do we get this kind of chain and then there is also generating the state route so this is the execution part right of applying a given State machine transition function over an ordered set of blocks on top of the previous um you know State Route at the end of the previous block right um we view sequencing as kind of like purely just the act of taking a set of

transactions in a mempool or however you're choosing to gather these kind of unordered transactions and then producing this ordered block and then attesting to that ordering that's like an important component of that right in the existing state you have the centralized detesters um run by you know orbitrary or optimism right that say Hey here is like um the order of the block and then they will batch that um make a transaction and then submit that to the um call data on the kind of contract they have on the ethereum as their L1 but they will also do a second step which is attesting to a given State Route and kind of like actual State of the State machine for the L2 um and and we view I guess the kind of

key distinction I think of like kind of the shared sequence thing is that we separate that sequencing into just the ordering step whereas right now they're doing both the ordering and the validation and attestation of that given state route okay so today we have basically so three layers you have like the da layer the data availability layer you have like the ordering and then you have the execution layer today is it fair to say that sequencing and then like determining the state and the and and execution are kind of like they're kind of all they're kind of all happening in one layer but in the future those will be those will be like almost owned by different folks who specialize in that thing it's kind of a fluffy way to describe that yeah no that's a that's that's that's a good

high level description I may just add to that that so today most layer one blockchains do all three of those things right like ethereum does all three of those things and also most Roll-Ups that are running on top of ethereum they're maybe they're using ethereum for data availability but then they're taking ownership of and it's actually centralizing both the sequencing and then the execution and proving um so we we I do expect to see that the you know these rules will become more modular that at least the decentralization uh so it's not clear that proving needs to be decentralized because once you've determined The Ordering of transactions

in the state machine then anyone can submit a proof it's not really like a permissioned role it's just you have a correct proof or not or uh you know the same for fraud proofs but the the determination of who gets to be included and in what order you know that that should be Central that shouldn't be centralized if you want to retain the original properties of blockchains um and so the reason why I became centralized is mostly for performance reasons uh and that it was you know too expensive or not good for the user experience to use ethereum as an L1 for both availability and ordering and maybe to this as a follow-up to that how complicated like if you're the arbitrum

team or the optimism team not the picking one or the other but just why is it a fair characterization that they've punted this maybe hoping that someone like you would come in and fix it or is it more like a technical problem that they would hope that the user experience would be vastly you know better that at some point you figure it out like this sort of progressive decentralization that a lot of teams take in crypto right yeah I think almost uh I I can't think of a project that I'm aware of that that doesn't have decentralization somewhere on the roadmap um and it's it's hard to say as a

selling point of a scalability solution that hey we've solved the scalability problem by centralizing the process of you know ordering your data right it's not now it's losing one of the core principles it's losing the credible neutrality of the system it's losing the anti-monopolistic behavior of the system so among others and I think Roll-Ups just see this as like in an iterative process right it's already hard to build a zkvm or an optimistic VM and so they started with centralized sequencers because it's simpler um you can get a product off the ground um but I think either teams are planning on building their own uh decentralization solutions for that sequencing step or they are hoping for other people to solve that problem and

then they can just plug in for from a user perspective what's the worst that can happen in today's environment where it's centralized what are the biggest risks and maybe there is some Nuance between as I understand between arbitrum and optimism one has fraud proves the other ones is not both by and large or centralized sequencers but I'm curious if you could go into like what's the worst that can happen in the current state of these l2s boy I mean that's a and I'll let Josh jump in here too I don't mean to hog the mic but that's like a really deep question because you could you could ask that question about blockchains overall like that the question is what's so bad about a centralized system and what are the advantages of blockchains and so we could probably spend a whole podcast

series talking about that and I think that it's not like there isn't like a an obvious answer to that I think that it's very nuanced right and you can look at the evolution of how applications have been built on blockchains and how the decentralization may or may not have led to that um but some of the things that I like to emphasize about a centralized system versus a decentralized system are one credible neutrality right um uh two I think that from an economic perspective um one of the the most incredible things about blockchains are that they achieve services with network effects but without monopolization right one of the reasons why internet services are so

monopolized is because there are very strong Network effects around internet services it's hard to compete with Facebook it's hard to compete with even the existing banking system right it's difficult to get users to switch to a new system because all the state is in one place all the other users are there all the liquidity is there um in the same vein it's it's hard to compete it's hard for another blockchain to compete with ethereum right um because it has all the liquidity all the users all the applications uh what's amazing about ethereum is that because of the decentralization of its validator set and specifically the set of nodes that get to determine you know what ends up getting included and how it's priced and uh and how it's ordered Etc is decentralized in a way that's did quasi

Fosters competition among the different nodes right decentralization leads to more short short-sighted myopic behavior of participants rather than engaging in long-term strategies to price out users who aren't willing to pay enough right if a blockchain were centralized then you might see pricing that involves keeping it so that only one party can transact who's willing to pay a million dollars the revenue maximizing price might be above what the market clearing prices were supplying meets demand um and so the problem with scalability is like how do we increase the supply side but we don't want to lose the decentralization because if you increase the supply but you lose the decentralization it doesn't matter right you now have a monopolistic system that will just determine sort of a monopolistic strategy of how to allocate

resources Josh would you add to that I mean it sounds like um Ben if I had to almost repeat that back it's like the risks of having a centralized sequencer are censorship uh like risk of reordering risk that it maybe goes down and then that last thing what that you're saying is broadly categorized as like malicious behavior basically well monopolistic if I say malicious it's from an economic perspective right exactly and Joshua feel free to go and answer this but our users funds ever at risk in the sense that you know someone can because I think at some point security becomes important where if if is there a back door can people rug you are your funds are at risk a lot of times we've talked to teams and they say the worst that can

happen is there's a delay but you will always get your funds back because they can't there's not like a an ability for the particular team that's behind the project to kind of you know rug you and take your assets there might be a delay but by and large so I want to make it clear for our listeners if there's that risk today in LT in the way it is I think one key thing right it's like like the only party that is allowed to like append a new block to like the chain is like the centralized party in the centralized sequencer right that's like the fundamental structure of it that doesn't mean that like you know optimism or arbitrum like has access to like your private key and can find a message that moves your fund from your

account to another um they could just like hard Fork the chain right and just like zero out your funds right if they just say hey we're gonna like zero out this address we're all hard Fork the chain that is pretty obviously like detectable in that like you would then go connect to like the RPC and be like oh look my my money's gone and like whether you're ability to like prove that right fraud proof that this kind of verifiable mechanism to actually like prove that like an invalid State transition like it occurred um so it's various kind of things like that I don't want to dive too much into kind of the social question of like could they hard Fork the chain in like an undetectable manner if we like assume that it's kind of out of the scope then like no they can't like steal your funds

from a censorship perspective right they do have what's called like like the escape hatch or whatever you want to turn it right but this you know forced withdrawal transaction to um the L1 by way of submitting a transaction directly through like the L1 smart contract right and then that inherits the um like censorship properties of like ethereums that one which are like very very like good right like it's unlikely that you're going to be centered within ethereum I think the more kind of concerning things right now is like okay you know in like a congested gas time or whatever right if you're censored by the sequencer like the quality of your service degrades and for whatever reason the sequencer says I don't like you and I'm not going to submit your transactions in batches you're going to have to go through the

L1 you know then you have to suffer whatever is like the L1 cost to some degree they're the question of like you know the cost Savings of submitting like a transaction to the L1 versus like through the L2 what is the benefit of using the L2 if you kind of are forced to fall back to that right so it's like you should be assumed to be like like a failure mode right it's a more acceptable failure mode than like your funds are locked forever um you know until like the Mev discussion right which has been like obviously you know very happening lately right like you know there's this question of like either optimism and arbitrum by way of like sequencing or like extracting all of the Mev or none of the Mev but like they're the only party that just kind of allowed to extract this Mev whereas all the other

Mev has like this first come first serve right which is essentially just like this you know probabilistic spamming of like trying to get your transaction in but it's again to like the detectability of these faults I think is one of the big questions of like could you detect if like optimism was like front running every transaction or whatever like probably but like you know again one of these difficulties of like blockchains inherently right is like how do you know if like optimism controls this pool of you know addresses or whatever that happens to have turned into that congesting you know that happen to be front running Etc so there's things like that I think to to Ben's point right it's just credible neutrality it's just kind of hard to verify whether or not it actually is being neutral but like I I do think it's important to note that

like you know in existing like you know optimism arbitrum designs and I'm assuming for the the VK um EVMS as well right your funds can can get out right you have that escape hash mechanism and it's not like the centralized sequencer is capable of signing a transaction with your private key yeah I I think though when it does when it comes to talking about security um it's like easy to oversimplify I think that in some ways even just comparing sunflower systems and decentralized systems um it's an apples to oranges comparison there isn't uh you know one is not clearly more secure than the other we really need to unpack that um and in particular here when we talk about Roll-Ups um

if we just talk about okay let's say you bridge over assets from East you deposit each into the roll-up then can those be stolen right no if there are mechanisms for always like if there's an escape hatch if there's a way of withdrawing if ethereum is always verifying the state of the roll-up and ethereum there's a commitment on an ethereum smart contract to the definition of that virtual machine then know from that very narrow perspective this funds can't be stolen on the other hand if you look at the virtual machine as being defined by the company that's running the virtual machine and they can change the way it works and they can update the smart contract and you look at the security of assets that are not just bridging from

ethereum to the roll-up but the security of transactions and the finality of transactions within the rollup itself then the question becomes more complicated right um yes proofs are being verified by ethereum maybe every few hours but if the rollup is giving you soft confirmations as a centralized sequencer and you're trusting those for finality and then you go and send some Goods to someone then you are at risk of that being reversed right so I think it's a it's a more it's like a pretty nuanced question um so there isn't just like a really easy straightforward answering to it because I've heard of a question just actually okay so there's like three roles of a blockchain right I'm this is I'm gonna I'm still almost struggling to grasp one thing so like three rows of a

blockchain you have a like guaranteeing the availability of the data uh the data availability there then you have um achieving consensus on like transaction ordering and then you have executing the transactions why doesn't L2 or roll up even need a sequencer like why can't you just use an L1 for the first two for both the first two buckets for for ordering the data and the availability of data you can you can absolutely do that I think that's one of the like the points um and this is something that I like it's a great it's great that you're asking this question because I don't think it's like it's I don't think it's obvious to the to the whole to the whole industry like you can absolutely use the L1 you can use ethereum for making the

data available available ordering it not executing it and then um and uh and then just the what is the job of a roll-up uh it's to report what the state execution result is and then either just post that and put a bond to it and wait for someone else to challenge it through a fraud proof or to just prove straight away using uh snarks that it is correct um and so what Roll-Ups really do are just separating ordering from execution that's literally all they do um the the the the the question then becomes like well is is ethereum as a layer one right is that ideal for the making data available and ordering it right or is there room for

improvement um and so um the the other thing is that there are fundamental design trade-offs of both the a layers and consensus protocols for ordering uh you can be dynamically available but then have long latency or you can have uh optimistic responsiveness um and and the potential to give faster confirmations but then not be dynamically available and um and I and that's why you know my perspective today is well you can get the same validator set to essentially run more than one ordering service so that users can choose which one to use and that's that's like the approach we're taking on espresso which is like use eigenlayer to get the ethereum validators to run and

optimistically responsive protocol so that users just have more options but do they can totally use ethereum as well presuming that ethereum improves its uh I mean once dank sharding comes onto the scene and improves it's it's it's its way of handling you know data availability in a more scalable way which is like ethereum today is not really set up to do then it will become a good service for data ordering and availability and and some of the work that other projects in the layer 2 system are doing in the modular blockchain ecosystem like Celestia like us is uh is is just to build systems that are optimized for the availability and ordering roles right with an eye towards the fact that they don't have to do other things like execution and that that's outsourced to a different process okay so so I get all of so I get all of

that um then I guess the second part of that question is like why would an L2 want to use an external sequencer here right like if you have a centralized sequencer it's this honey pot for Mev um and then all the things that you mentioned like censorship resistance and like monopolistic Behavior like those are all things that are really good for the user or that the you you're helping trying to help the user with but if you're the L2 like I mean you're it's actually I don't really get the incentive to use an external sequencer so maybe I could hear both of your guys's take on this because I know you're both obviously those are the two big core things that you're working on yeah uh really good question I'll go quickly and then bump it to you Josh

um so first of all to make uh to you know to to accrue value a robot means users so doing things that are better for users does does lead to mind especially in a competitive environment where there's many different Roll-Ups out there and users get to choose which one to use um I think it is important for Roll-Ups to consider what's it good for users what do users want right um the the the conception that by moving uh you know sequencing to another system whether it's like ethereum L1 or another you know system in the modular stack like Celestia or espresso or Astra etc for um for handling availability of data and ordering right it doesn't mean that

value won't be shared back to the roll-up in fact there's a strong incentive for the for the communities to align right uh a system like celestio or Astra or espresso have and and their stakeholders that have um have a strong incentive to retain Roll-Ups as users Roll-Ups can easily move away if they're not getting their fair share of the value and so it becomes an economic allocation problem which has its own challenges like not just in the blockchain space but it's like if you have all the phone companies using a common infrastructure then how do you price things right how do you allocate Revenue as well um and that's a solvable problem

it's uh and um and and and and and if overall the system is increasing is better for users uh and then and it's more interoperable and thus creates more economic value overall then there's a larger pie to share Josh I'll bump it over to you you know I think I agree with those points I think going back to like kind of the previous question of like you know why why would one like why would you not just use like Ethan one for like your your sequencing right and like fundamentally right it's like a user demand question right like optimism and arbitrum's original design we're like you will post the transactions to the L1 the L1 will then you know just provide availability for them and you'll have this off chain process that gives the state route and kind of a test to like

the validity of these transactions and has a challenge mechanism right but fundamentally like users prefer faster block times right and so one of the reasons I see kind of decentralized keywords there's as like a like a worthy thing is this general idea that like like maybe it's somewhat kind of like like cynical but like users I believe will Trend towards something that like provides like a higher quality user experience in like a like a visual um kind of manner to them and what I mean by that is like you know they will feel that it takes two seconds for um a transaction to go through then 20 seconds for a transaction to go through and they will prefer the two second one what they won't visually see is the trade-off they are making that resulted in one being two seconds versus one

being 20 seconds you know it's one of these General difficult things of cryptography and security kind of things in general is you become aware of them when they fail catastrophically and prior to that everyone just assumes everything is going smoothly and then you know is it too late once the system fails catastrophically to say well you already accepted some trade-offs you weren't aware you were accepting so that's what I see as like why do we have kind of sequencers in general It's like because users prefer faster block times and they want those soft commitments and you say well why would we decentralize that well because we still want to remain decentralized you know to Ben's point right into the modular thesis generally is the idea like you can do one roll or or a smaller set of all of

the roles of a blockchain in a more optimized manner um by just doing that right and so we can say well this thing is providing sequencing it is providing decentralization guarantees not necessarily as strong as ethereum might not have you know that side the validator said it might not have that economic weight but it's giving you this soft commitment um that is stronger or more credibly neutral than what you get from like a centralized provider so it's still an improvement but it's also still giving you the user experience that the users want and what this is fundamentally providing is like an alternative to a user using a centralized system right you know the job fundamentally is providing users with a good enough experience without kind of you know uh

requiring them to sacrifice the decentralization principles to get that better user experience because if the only option available to them for this high quality user experience that you know is 10 times better or whatever you know significant enough for them to kind of move from wherever they are um is centralized then like some percent of users will do so so I think it's important to provide them an option that is still decentralized while providing that good user experience so there's this I've heard this concern that um Roll-Ups running on shared sequencers won't see the same value accrual as Roll-Ups running on their own sequencer but I think it both of your pushback would be like consumers and users will end up preferring d c uh l2s or Roll-Ups that end up decentralizing their

sequencer and therefore they actually will accrue more value because users will will will flow there is that correct that is I think I think that's like maybe an optimistic take I I take a pretty cynical perspective and that like generally I assume users just quite frankly like don't give a damn about decentralization like like at least some batch reviews my view is like you know to Growing the pie question we have you know X tens of thousands or you know millions or whatever ten to Millions like crypto users you know I don't know where that comes into daily active monthly active whatever um but if we want to grow the pie my assumption is that each new user is somewhat less ideologically aligned with like the ethos of crypto than the existing batch of users and so you know

as we move from you know the people using Bitcoin in like 2011 right we have generally gotten on average like less motivated by the decentralized principles of it and so it is somewhat on our on on us as like kind of creators of technology to reinforce those Primitives and provide good user experiences to users who quite frankly don't necessarily care about it being decentralized I'm not convinced that decentralization on its own is like a selling point to users I think you kind of have to do like an active marketing campaign to go say look we believe it is unacceptable for these Roll-Ups to be a point of centralization we think it is normalizing points of centralization as an acceptable kind of thing Within These

overall decentralized systems and it kind of trains users who are just not going to have the time the energy to think about these things as thoroughly to say oh that's actually fine because look they've been doing it for two years if they do it for five years then this is the status quo this is the normal thing so I really do think it's partially a marketing campaign a PR thing to say no this is an unacceptable status quo and we need to change it but you need to do that in such a way that doesn't make the users make these horrible trade-offs in user experience and that's really our job here would you say the regular regulation is the main catalyst here I I think from an exogenous State yeah I think you know like internally we should

be pushing it as like a community we should say we should be decentralized for the sake of being decentralization I think exogenously if you know one of the you know Founders or whatever of arbitrary or optimism you know shows up on TV in handcuffs and goes to jail when we have a whole thing then yeah I think everyone's gonna decentralize their sequencers really really quickly right um but ideally we can just kind of altruistically move towards saying hey these are the ideals of the industry and we can meet them without needing to be you know directly threatened by you know the external kind of governing agencies I I don't I don't fully I just I don't I don't fully agree with that perspective like I respect that perspective but I I

don't I don't think that um users don't care about decentralization or that uh decentralization is solely for the purpose of regulatory Arbitrage um I I would put the thing that I would push back on is that users like and care about the effects that come from decentralization even if they don't say they care about have an opinion about decentralization or not itself users like the fact that all apps on ethereum are composable with all other apps and that comes from the fact that ethereum is a decentralized system they're all sharing the same system they're all interoperable right imagine a centralized you're not going to have a centralized sequencer that all the

Roll-Ups use so of if decentralization is like a precursor to more interoperability as well between the Roll-Ups and users care about that they care about shared liquidity they care about the fact that if you have cash on one system you're not going to be isolated for all other Roll-Ups right you don't have to just buy in to the ZK sync ecosystem and then not be able to pay for anything on other systems and so decentralization as a precursor to more bridging between uh Roll-Ups uh you know more interoperability and then users also care about um the the unique uh services that can be provided to them by block Builders proposer Builder separation does not work with the centralized sequencer there's no incentive for a centralized sequencer to work with the block Builder right it's a

consequence of the myopic behavior of minors in a decentralized system or valid interest in the decentralized system that makes them engage in rather than rather than engaging in longer term strategies right they engage in short-term strategies to build the most valuable block they can and that might be provided by a service like flashbots and flashbots guarantees users that their transactions don't fail right essentially sequencer would like to charge users for failed transactions because it can make more money that way so yeah to be fair though that would compromise the user experience right there there comes a time where if you're interacting in arbitrum and but look both of them have centralized sequencers but if they start getting too greedy then

at some point you're going to realize that some users not all and they'll migrate over to your other L2 flavor of choice so it's a quasi-competitive market I do agree with you that it is still very fragmented and you know once you acquire user and arbitrum then you know they can probably get away with some slack from Mev perspective until it becomes a critical issue and they migrate over to Optimus totally totally I think it is a very interesting question is like is competition among blockchains enough to achieve The Descent like maybe decentralization isn't necessary if blockchains were all perfectly competitive with each other and Solano is a perfect substitute for etherea and then there would be competitive pressure

on miners not to like you know front-run users and but it's I think that that comes back to sort of the core issue which is that internet services are prone naturally to uh to centralization due to network effects and so you do have to decentralize the operation of the internet service if you want to have long-term resilience to these things all right quick break from the show there is this kind of overused cliche saying in crypto but it's true bear markets are building and everyone tells you that everyone knows it what people don't know is that if you're building apps in crypto and building apps in web 3 without using quick node you are building on hard mode so quick note is is this amazing blockchain development platform it

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now tell them we sent you Tom Santi sent you tamiano sent you Tom Empire sent you puenta dot IO hope you guys enjoy yeah so maybe a transition a little bit into the state of your development and you mentioned I mean there's a lot there that you mentioned uh and I want to unpack that in terms of the user experience changing once you decentralize the sequencer maybe start by saying okay where are you guys in this process to make this happen and as a beta how does a user experience get impacted I mean obviously there's a lot of assumptions there that you have to make but is it slow or is it more expensive

maybe can I mean maybe we can start with you Josh yeah so just kind of like giving like a state of kind of like our development internally we don't have anything kind of like publicly available or code is public but like we don't have like a public or anything we have like an internal you know you know developer Network you know we're working on from like a how a user kind of submits a transaction in in our test net you know we've structured things such that um you know it's like roughly similar like they submit transaction because like an RPC endpoint of like an ethereum node that gets included in the shared sequencer and then the ethereum node you know quite frankly like has to be customized right to work with this shared sequencer can pay attention to the shared sequencer and kind of you

know reads when like a block is included and then I can check and say okay hey my transaction that I submitted to the shared sequencer was included and that runs at the Block time of the shared sequencer you know our local devnet that's like you know whatever like half a second right if we run node one node right that's presumably somewhere in the order of like you know one to three seconds or something um you know it depends on your consensus algorithm and how quickly you want to run that and yada trade-offs on Mev timing but roughly that user experience is somewhat similar um I I think fundamentally the trade-offs might be almost a larger like the developer sense and I mean the developer of like the roll-up itself in that you know once you decentralize you fundamentally have kind of a higher

coordination overhead to continue development of something right you know if optimism wants to change something on optimism right they can update that you know if they have the hot fix a patch or whatever right you know they're like all right well we have like one sequencing node that defines like the canonical chain right we'd have to go fix that same as any other centralized service you can roll on a hotfix in you know order of minutes right where if you look at something like you know say the dragonberry exploit on Cosmos it affected you know the general Cosmos SDK and all of the chains impacted there right it was relatively large coordination effort kind of behind the scenes to say okay we have to get a bunch of people to all update their stuff and otherwise all the chains halt but we don't want any of them to leak

this thing so there's various things like that but an end user experience is you know it can be structurally similar I think it will be different than a first come first serve thing and and there's a lot lot of points we could go into on Mev block building PBS how transaction submission Works order flow options but generally it's pretty similar from an end user flow Ben before I go to you just curious who are these sequencers like who are you going out to are these like the same folks that are like uh behind Lido you know that of doing validation are these Enterprises or the your your typical kind of single you know sophisticated Dev out there like I'm curious from a

who who are the these entities yeah these like industrialized validators or these individuals like what yeah is that question for me or for Josh or both Ben maybe you can go and then transition into talking a little bit about right I mean building a decentralized sequencing layer is akin to building a decentralized L1 um and so we I mean we don't have a value or say yeah we're still building uh but that's one of the reasons why we're extraordinarily excited about working with eigenlayer because I think it's brilliant that you already have you know 30 000 validators on ethereum how many of those are actually distinct maybe ten

thousand but or or less but the point is there's already if we take if we start from the premise that there's a decentralized validation set of ethereum and that's ultimately what we're trying to scale right or take any other blockchain let's focus on ethereum for now then there's the protocol you want the system to run on but then there's also the physical set right and two different protocols can share the same physical set so you can get ethereum validators to and in fact it makes complete sense for ethereum validators to take part in operating the protocols that the layer two of ethereum is running on otherwise you may even have you know economic misalignment between the L1 and the L2

um and so eigenlayer or restaking more generally is a I think a really clever way of subsidizing their entry into the system right so if they already have each state they don't have to invest into a new uh token or capital in order to uh in order to participate in a new service and I think it's a brilliant bootstrapping mechanism for for acquiring a decentralized physical set to run your new protocol that now offers a different set of properties from ethereum not to this not to do a change in the set of physical nodes that it's running on but due to a change in how the protocol is operating and what it's optimizing for Ben do you want to give a I know we skipped over your uh overview on what you're working on if you wanna if you

want to do that oh yeah so uh well Josh and I are both working on uh on decentralized sequencing as as as uh as sort of a layer that can be used by rollips whether it's Sovereign Roll-Ups or existing major L2 Roll-Ups um and our our approach is the following um as we discussed at the beginning you can always use the L1 for ordering and availability right you can use ethereum for that and ethereum is working on improving its functionality as a data availability and ordering layer um but ethereum is is sort of wedded to a certain set of uh principles around um you know the trade-offs it makes the

design in the consensus design space one of those is dynamic extreme Dynamic availability so that if only 10 of the nodes are online the system is still alive um that sacrifices on liveness so that's why it has extremely long like minutes long um latency right the 12 second block time is just for one block but you have to wait for multiple blocks to really get confirmation and um and so and so if you if you take the perspective that well part of the reason why users or Roll-Ups have moved to centralized sequencing is that it's users really want that uh they want the the experience that you get from a centralized server which is the opposite of dynamic availability right that if if the one server goes down then the whole

system goes down on the other hand the once the one server has extremely low latency and and and can give you fast confirmations then let's try to build a consensus protocol that that is still decentralized okay and in fact in scale to the same physical set of nodes that ethereum is running on but that optimizes for the features of the centralized sequencer that optimistic responsiveness for example right um and get the ethereum validator set to run that as an alternative and then you may have Roll-Ups that choose one or the other based on what they think their users want right you could run on ethereum's base layer for your sequencing and availability or you could run the protocol that we're designing called Hot Shot which offers the alternative uh

which is optimistic responsiveness but you need all the Hotshot nodes the system only makes progress when when 75 are online hmm guys we're 40 minutes in here I want to almost Zoom back out for anyone who's completely lost now Josh you spend four or five years at Google can can you guys try to make some like analogies to almost like web to land and like how to me what I hear is basically everyone's trying to do everything in-house right now and you see a world where there's specialization and this is almost like paying I don't know Amazon for AWS or something and everyone needs to run their own data centers and eventually we'll live in a world where like there's like AWS and Azure or something probably a broken

analogy but I'm sure there's an analogy to be made there have you guys thought about these analogies like what are they and then maybe where do they break down yeah so we've we've used one you know that I've termed like decentralization of the service and that's because I've worked on you know AWS you know uh gcp whatever you know infrastructure the service platforms as a service you know software as a service right and it generally fits into that category of like you're going and buying something off the shelf I think the analogy is like somewhat you know apt um and that the idea is we want to make it very easy to kind of tie into an existing service if you're a roll-up and you say you know what we really want to avoid is you know the roll up to say okay I'm gonna start I'm gonna make a

roll up I'm gonna be centralized we're going to put decentralization on our roadmap we'll get to that when we burn down every other priority in a very rapidly kind of evolving ecosystem where they're always bumping things above the decentralization right and so we can say okay you can go say we want to be decentralized great we can go get decentralization off the shelf they're obviously trade-offs there are cost to that but like we offer that as an off-the-shelf service and the hope is that we see um you know in my view like a expansion of kind of like Innovation by way of like that problem kind of like being solved and you know one of the benefits I think of a lot of the cloud services which obviously like had trade-offs right there centralizing things you know you're paying you know the margins of you know Amazon or Google or whatever

right um and you get into kind of competitive questions there but fundamentally you can say I can go make a service that focuses on you know all my effort on a smaller portion of the stack while being able to get kind of a high quality experience equivalent to larger players because everyone is sharing kind of similar things right you can have similar uptime to what a Fortune 500 company service has um without having to staff you know 50 infrastructure Engineers to do that yes yes absolutely I think that the AWS analogy um you know Works to some extent uh in the sense that if you're a company and you want to

run a scalable database system transactional database system or analytical database system whatever you you can you know use AWS and then you don't have to build out your own distributed system uh that works here too as an analogy because if you're a roll-up company and you don't want to have to build your own consensus protocol that decentralizes your sequencer then you can use what what I'm building or what or what Josh is building but I think the analogy kind of stops there right and there's I think a much bigger picture here which goes back to like this the whole story of blockchains from the very beginning and and how we've you know I've been in the industry for for a very long time and kind of a lot of the questions we're

asking here sort of we were asking as well when everyone was just developing their own L1 right and then there's a question of why build an app why why not build your own blockchain for your app right rather than just build an app on another blockchain like ethereum and that's where this technology with AWS completely breaks down because people don't use AWS in order to talk to other services that are running on AWS right um when when people stopped just building competitive l1s and realized oh wow I can I can I can build a much more successful product by building an application on ethereum that now plugs in to all the other applications that are running on this shared VM and boom we had D5 right boom we had nfts we had all this

explosion of activity that uh that you know took us away from just like the Ico boom of like minting your own token and and doing and well to some degree people minted to tokens on ethereum but you know we moved away from just everyone building a competitive blockchain to people working with the same blockchain and taking advantage of this shared state which is really one of the reasons why blockchains have brought so much more economic value uh to to our society right and so it's the same exact thing here right if you're if if every roll up runs on its own isolated system and they're not talking to each other it's just like l1's in the early days competing with each other and everyone's just going to build their own custom blockchain for their own custom app I

want to uh I want to put you know music on blockchain so I build my own blockchain I don't build an app on ethereum right that changed and so that's exactly what we're seeing now I think that there's incredible economic value that can come from sharing infrastructure from sharing State and sharing the sequencing layer is one step towards that it's not the complete step but it does greatly facilitate that what are the um economic implications of all of this Josh you've mentioned Mev a couple of times like how does Astra and espresso would love to get both of your takes like plan on plan on addressing this yeah so I guess it's like a deep question that like I don't know how much time we have right but like obviously any Mev discussion can take however much time you have to fill

um but like generally right like the the implications I guess you know we talked about like the centralized sequencers right where right now we're just kind of like trusting that like you are not being front run by optimism or Arboretum using you know whatever like thought puppet account they may or may not have in front of your transactions right we're gonna you know be kind of like like optimistic here right and assume they're not doing so within this kind of like credibly neutral system right you know even if you have 10 you know nodes in like a sequence their Network or whatever that's rotating right any one of these is you know now competing with the other to some degree depending on how you weight it we'll assume it's like roof mistake or whatever right and so it's in their benefits to like be economically like most profitable right

you know you have this competition like intra Network now um and so each validator sequencer or whatever within the network wants to be like the best in return the most profit for you know whether you're getting kind of like a staking or like a delegation stuff like that right um and what that leads to right is kind of like Mev as this way to capture more rewards because fundamentally there is value in transaction ordering the job of the sequencer is to order transactions it is economically in the best interest of whoever gets that role for this slot to extract that value whether they hold that themselves or whether they return that to their delegates um or whatever but it's kind of in their interest to kind of capture that value how that plays out um I think it's like a larger question

right um whether it's you know you have many Roll-Ups and each roll-up is making an argument for hey we are contributing this much economic value to the chain any Meb that gets distracted should be you know returned to like the roll up there's questions over whether it should just you know in my mind at least whether it should be turned to users whether there is it's desirable for you know kind of as Ben points out this kind of network of people within the shared network that have more interoperability do we want to be encouraging kind of you know really strong boundaries between the different Roll-Ups to say well this role look at this life of the pie and this roll-up gets this slice of the pie versus you know you are users of a singular Network and then Roll-Ups are one kind of like sub you know State

machine within this larger Network I think that's like an open question we're going to kind of investigate and like have to kind of evaluate here yeah I think that uh we can start with asking okay well what if every single roll up which is running on the same sequencing layer but uh but we didn't have interoperability or cross-roll-up transactions I don't think it's actually the shared sequencing layer that complicates it's the existence of cross roll-up activity so let's let's start with the world in which everyone is just running the roll up using the sequencing layer as they would use a data availability layer um then you know they're they're paying infrastructure costs for

using the sequencing layer but uh they uh what what whether it's the whether it's the even though if the sequencing layer is actually determining the ordering it's you know easy to see okay transactions for roll up a are isolated from roll-up B so any any value that's extracted um through bids that users are making on ordering preferences which is just what Mev is it's a form of you know fee accrual just it's occurring for for combinatorial preferences and not just simple demand for gas then that value could be given entirely to the roll-up and the role can decide how to allocate that among its stakeholders or proofers Etc um that is a you know an economic contract between the sequencing layer

and and and each roll up where it gets complicated is when rollup starts to take advantage of the fact that they're now running over an infrastructure that makes cross domain activity so much easier right and but that's a thing that users want so it's an inevitability and shared sequencing just makes it easier for that to happen you even if you didn't have shared sequencing but you had bridging right this would become a challenge like now you have you know Bridges handling uh transactions that should only be executed on one or the other right how do you the the act the the um the user would not be transacting if it weren't able to transact on both simultaneously so how do you now divide the the fee that it's paying between the two parties uh and that because that

becomes trickier to figure out in terms of economic allocation um it's a it's a fascinating uh you know economic research question that I'd love to engage everyone on um but I think that this is totally solvable hmm um Nick White had this tweet I think it was yesterday or earlier this week it said the shared sequencer Paradox he said option A extract Mev but be less attractive for Roll-Ups to use option uh that's option a option b don't extract Mev but lose value capture so what what do you do what what do you think about that question or there's probably a micro yeah my view it's like like the to like Ben's point about like the

commentatorial kind of like complications of this right like there's a question of like can you calculate this in real time right like how do you kind of like calculate the counter factual I think one of the big questions is you say you know you have two Roll-Ups right there's like you know with only one roll up being present there is only like the mov on that roll up with only the other roll-up present you know the same thing how much of the kind of like Mev that is extractable is created by the existence of both which of them is contributing which portion of that how do you calculate that that I think is the really messy economic question to the fundamental idea of like what percent of all the Mev would be extracted across like a shared sequencer I think that runs into kind of you know

ideological questions of like you know the arbitrum versus like flashbox divide right do you fundamentally view an auction mechanism for ordering as like an illegitimate kind of like like a moral position um you know and like like I do not but like that is like a moral position like some people have taken and um but if you don't then I do generally think you relatively rapidly accelerate towards like all of the Meb is extracted and the barrier there is really these things like you know Mev share order flow auction things like you know Mev wall by like like James prestwich right of like just give the user more tools to specify their preferences up front such that they are not just kind of you know sending these transactions that have

like enormous slippage limits so that they are getting kind of your front-runner sandwich you're aware to have that Envy extracted and they're kind of negotiation can happen in that market where you say well hey I'm going to submit a transaction with really really low slippage and you say all right well it might take a while for your transaction event included but then you know you will only suffer that slippage right and the user can choose kind of the preferences in that so I guess you know coming back to kind of you know Nick White's point I generally think that the shared sequencer themselves you know once they in state if they in state you know some PBS style um Market um place whether it's you know uh an in protocol PBS or an extra protocol PBS we'll try we extract like the bulk of the Mev available that is like

profitable for Builder Searchers whatever to like find and extract how the revenue gets shared after the fact is probably the larger stickier question hmm then you agree with that yeah especially the last thing that Josh said I don't I don't think that there's uh I don't think that there's really a paradox here I think it's more nuanced to that and it's it's exactly what Josh said I think we can expect um sequence sequencing layers similar to any other discipline system like ethereum to uh to take profit from from users who are paying for their commentatorial preferences that is essentially what Mev is and then the question is how do they allocate that among the the Roll-Ups that have decided

to use them and essentially feed them our Roll-Ups with different block times still composable if they have a shared sequencer so I think that's actually like an important point to note is like and and Ben would love to understand if you have a different perspective because that changes in my view quite a bit but but our view is that like the shared sequencer defines the block time of like the Roll-Ups that use the shared sequencer like the shared sequencer has a Blog time and if you use the shared sequencer your block time is that because they're making these like you know Mega Blocks or meta blocks or whatever you want to call them right then your roll-up is extracting its subset of you know stuff from that block right um that's like my view then if you have a different point no I have exactly the same view however

I I think that like we can look at the Block time of the sequencing layer is just the block time of the sequencing layer right you can build an application on top of it that introduces a different kind of latency you know to some degree um and it's not it let's say that for example you um you know have uh a builder for for a given roll-up that wants to take longer to build a block right it could buy up the uh you know the the slots to process for a certain amount of time and this is just a straw man I think there's a lot of caveats to this particular thing but it's maybe an easier thing to understand

just as a straw man imagine uh there's a builder that you know you auction off the right to to process the next 10 blocks for uh for a given for a given uh you know for a given roll-up that's being sequenced by the sequencer then now that that the Builder is going to take you know 10 10 block periods in order to build like uh a super block and now you have a longer block time for that roll up so it's just a simple way of illustrating how you can always build things on top of the system that gives you some kind of guarantees that put other restrictions because you're trying to do something at the application Level um you can even do this at the application Level right like an application and a smart contract on ethereum could effectively have a longer block time what does it even mean for a

block time it's I think it makes more sense to talk about like the latency of some kind of action that's happening within the application itself we could have like a voting protocol where we all submit votes for a day and we're using ethereum well the application that is running running this election now has the latency of a day you don't get the you don't get the results and you know until a day later um but it could still run on a base you know data and availability and ordering layer that is uh uh that it even has instant finality I mean um the school space guys uh it's it's funny

it's still so early that you guys are still doing podcasts together that's how you know it's a small space you're trying to push this uh clearly push this Narrative of shared sequencers together but eventually what will end up happening is you grow the pie to be large enough and then you guys are obviously competing against each other and you have live products in the market what what is the what is your like working model of of that timeline when do Ben and Josh become uh my friendly spicy questions here I mean you know I I said this in the last podcast but I've uh you know I've been in the industry a while and I think that one of the great things about this industry is that we a lot of builders in this space do tend to have sort of a

positive sum attitude um and uh and I think that these are the early days for the Technologies the early days in particular for like the LT scalability of of of these layer one blockchains um so I think even if ostensibly services that are running out there become competitors they still cooperate on a shared mission of convincing the rest of the world that this is a good idea um they still cooperate on research questions and so it's like a friendly competition in some sense and that's been my experience for the entire time I've been in this industry industry with a lot of different projects and I of course there are some

projects that have sharper elbows and I I don't like that as much and I think it really detracts from the um a community feeling that we have in this space timeline on this yeah I think you know we're targeting kind of you know entry year but like you know that's like a long time frame to give in any kind of like engineering estimate you know the general thing is like anything over like a week if like you know highly um you know skeptical um because a lot of things can happen you know in in a two-week period much less like a six months period but like let you sooner rather than later you know I think one of going back to like one of the really early questions right of like is there like a technical blocker to like you know the existing

centralized sequencers doing that like not really in that like you know to to what Ben said a lot right like this looks very similar to like standing up like a new L1 Network right like you go get like a bunch of validators you know in this case you know the the eigenlayer guys um and you stand up like a new network and you make sure they coordinate and you run the network and you produce blocks of the network like it's not a truly novel problem the kind of specificity of like what that network is doing is novel but like actually setting up a network is not like you know something that hasn't been done before you know how many you know tenement chains launch in like a given year you know a few um so and so in that you know we're targeting like like entry year um to the

competition point you know I know I haven't spent you know that long in this industry you know two and a half years or so but even coming from like big Tech and I was biased I spent a lot of time in open source there you know I do think it is just competitive environment I go to conferences where it would be you know IBM and Google and AWS and Azure you know all presenting at the conference you know one after the other and we're all building you know roughly the same thing um you know just like whatever competitive plug-in we had on whatever open source project or whatever right but it's generally kind of you know having these competing pressures against each other is beneficial for like the industry as a whole right like what we want is to like push forward the like functionality of like crypto and

decentralized networks you know generally um and so if one of us is more competitive then the other than that is a forcing function on the other to say hey look like you got to get your stuff together you know you've got to do a better job to like kind of compete in the market and that kind of forces progress throughout the whole industry and I think that's a beneficial thing and it doesn't need to be you know everyone being at each other throats to do that it just accepts the fact that you are working in like a competitive environment and compete yeah last question here um uh Ben or Josh I don't remember actually who mentioned this in in our Xerox research podcast um but one of you mentioned something that about restaking where you said look restaking super exciting but also has the chance to something will get blown

up because of restaking in the next cycle I I actually don't remember who that was who said that but can can you just expand on like maybe more details there on why you think that because I think yeah that was that was me maybe someone obviously and like you know I'm not like you know hyper bearish on like restaking I think it's like generally good and this is like somewhat of like a hyperball cake right but like fundamentally right like restaking is like rehypothetication of risk right you're saying like we have some amount of like economic stake here and we're going to do multiple things on it and there are now multiple things that could happen that are a failure mode right you know whether they're you know it's the question of like is it a fraud proof or is it a fault proof right and there's

like the ideological question of like okay did they mess up or were they actively malicious in that right to some degree that's like irrelevant but it's like something can go wrong and that can Flash an amount of stake right how many layers of things will we restake with the same amount amount of kind of economic weight to what point of like you know over some long time frame one of those things will go wrong and just generally my view again being a relatively cynical person is that like you will stretch a system to the limits until you find the failure mode and then you will kind of have this pendulum back and forth and so I think we will do a lot of good things with restaking we'll enable a lot of new kind of development with like strong economic guarantees but

like maybe someone's gonna mess up and then we're going to say okay well maybe we went a little bit too far maybe we should you know adjust the parameters on this this is similar to other kind of economic markets right you know you change you know the interest rate such and such you have some you know strong economic engagement because hey look we managed to do a lot more with a given amount of capital and then you have a collapse of some kind and you say okay well we're gonna trust you know adjust what the kind of like deposit ratios are required to be that's my rough thesis on what I think will happen with restaking but I also think to some degree the you know inevitability of a decentralized network is that like no one's allowed to say we're not doing this right like you

can implement it you can put the contract on chain people will use it if it's desirable right and then you know we'll just kind of deal with it as like an ecosystem to see like what are kind of the the push and pull on it yeah I I don't agree with that but I I respect that perspective um I I think it's actually pretty fundamentally different from uh from from being over leveraged in other economic scenarios um uh restaking is subsidizing participation of participants who have already locked up capital for something and it's giving them the right to participate in something else I think that we're sort of conflating a lot of different things here so what is the purse first of all I think the main thing is that is this a personal risk

that's being taken on by an individual validator who is now participating in multiple protocols or is it a systemic risk is there a contagion that can spread from multiple validators experiencing I don't know errors for different protocols and somehow being slashed when they shouldn't be um there's also the fact that slashing is not supposed to be used for things that could be Could Happen by accident right I'm not going to say never right but like that's why we don't slash for liveness like slashing fund mentally should not be used for life because anyone who's talking about doing that it just it's that that is on its own extraordinarily risky slashing is used for safety it's used for preventing nodes who who knowingly deviate from the protocol and double sign messages and

could that happen accidentally I mean a node could be corrupted because it could be compromised or hacked but that's actually something that we do want to slash for right because that's a form of corruption that's not accidental um it's hard to accidentally sign two messages if there's not a corruption so uh and and even if if it is a case like that even still may be something we want the slash for because it increases the incentive for nodes to ensure that that is not something that can happen now are these independent uncorrelated faults across the different systems I don't think so either right I don't I think that if you're if you're um like I don't think that there's an independent probability P that you may like accidentally sign two messages for one of the protocols you're participating in

um there's there's correlation between the measures that you're taking in order to prevent that accident from happening across different uh different systems now but finally I would say that this is a local risk it's not a systemic risk so if a party ends up getting slashed because something accidental happened and they lose their economic state it gets redistributed it doesn't fundamentally change the security properties of the system hmm Josh Ben yeah great chat guys um I think this is a good place to stop got you guys to disagree on something tried to make it spicy in hand so no I I really appreciate this it feels early for the shared sequencer space I feel like you two are both leading the charge so appreciate you guys coming on thank you so much it was really a pleasure if

we were to do a part two when do you guys think would be appropriate in terms of year development cycle and your timeline over the next you know one to two years uh what are we doing April now I think we'd see a lot of things around when it's when it's like ECC like July like somewhere in Circa around like ECC might be like a timeline when we definitely have like guaranteed like significant progress and I think that's a long enough time where we'd see kind of where things are like dynamically than they are now in an optimistic case maybe we'll leave the listeners like chomping a bit an optimistic case uh and it's hard when you use Optimus in this context but anyways no bias when do

you think that we'll see decentralized sequencers if you were to like plant your flag and say we're going to have them by in 12 months time or two years time no I mean we'll definitely have them within a year yeah certainly within a year I think you know more than you know 12 months is like getting pretty pessimistic again it's not that challenging of a technical problem like there's not like that you know wildly unsolved kind of problems it's more of like a prioritization and I think you know the burn down of kind of other priorities you know whether it's through you know you know um espresso or Asteria is kind of shared sequencers or through you know roll-up projects kind of independent decentralization efforts I think we'll certainly see this within 12 months nice I mean I I don't wanna

I I I I don't want to uh to oversimplify I I do think that building any of these systems are really hard I think decentralized systems are hard in general so I don't I don't think I would never say that this is easy I would never say that anything that that never building is easy here um but uh I do think that you know according to our timeline and Josh timeline we will have decentralization of sequencers within a year I think it may take time for the system to fully mature in terms of the after effects of that like are we going to have um a robust like are we going to solve mechanism design for the space within here are we going to um you know are we going to have like fully operational Bridges across all Roll-Ups that are running on shared

decentralized sequencers are going to have you know um proposure Builder separation perfectly solved I don't know that that will happen within a year but it will certainly the first steps will happen that's awesome guys well we'll certainly have to have you guys then within a year or before that so I really appreciate the time it's a it's a very important topic uh so uh you know great having you guys on awesome thank you so much this is really fun foreign [Music]