Interwoven Modular Rollups on Initia

17 Mar 2024 · 10:10

Robbie Klages of The Rollup talks with Initia founders Zon and Stan at Modular Day in Denver about the project's approach to modular rollups. They cover Initia's relationship with Celestia, its rollup-as-a-service model for deploying custom chains with IBC natively embedded, and the user-experience work needed to make that architecture accessible to builders.

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[Music] [Applause] [Music] he boys we're here modular day the excitement is absolutely nuts dude we popping off we are this event's been great the venue is awesome many so many people all the partners are

are pretty cool um we're glad we did this for sure it's probably the Denver event would you say that's a bold claim and I think it works everybody's here so it has to be the event right yep and it's modular of course it's modular I mean if we if we look at this uh this is the module right now and uh we've got Chief modular up on the stage right now standing on a bar that there is someone standing on the bar the energy is absolutely nuts out here um and uh there's plenty plenty of excitement around inisha and all uh I mean all the applications that are part of the ecosystem as well so we are uh we're quite excited and uh would' love to hear

more about the perspective that you hear from from the inside yeah I guess like internally we've just been spending a lot of the last few months get basically getting ready for test net getting ready for main net as well um working with a lot of different partners to launch like some of these L2 mishas so that you know everybody can actually try these on day one instead of having nothing to do when we launch our chain um yeah and then on the Comm side as well as like we just been preparing a lot of stuff with like our partners including the roll out um yeah just getting ready for all the events and all the coms yeah I think our testnet campaign is going to be [ __ ] phenomenal it's a whole lot of fun um and I'm excited to see you check it out

I think one of the things people talk about a lot with new ecosystems and layer ones is solving the cold start problem and I think the reason that existed was firstly getting liquidity into a chain is hard but the biggest reason liquidity doesn't flow is not because you can't use a bridge it's because there's nothing to do with it there right applications um are important and having a bunch of use cases is like what drives liquidity and so I think what we've done is over the course of months on closed test net we've been working with a handful of really Kick-Ass teams to get them ready to go for their layer two projects and launch on our public test net so when public testnet rolls around

there'll be plenty of things to participate in see some of these early applications taking full advantage of the Tex stack um and really understand how inisha is supposed to look and feel and change the way that multi-chain networks should operate yeah yeah and uh user experience is going to be a huge part of this um I think we've already seen the uh user experience uh degrade on on things like ethereum and some of these l1s um so I'm quite excited for uh the user experience improvements that that come with some of these rollup stacks these ecosystems um and there's a few of them out there but I I would love to hear more about how you guys are pushing the envelope for user experience

um and and generally why why you think users are going to enjoy initial yeah so I think like a lot of the existing rollup Solutions like they kind of settle on top of like let's say Legacy systems right and so what we've spent a lot of time doing is like reenvisioning this whole ecosystem from both the L1 and L2 perspective as well as like in general just like from a product perspective like what do the end users want like how are they moving their funds like what is the biggest difficulty in using this application itself um basically just looking at a lot of the existing products and seeing like which areas that we can like improve um and so like our philosophy in some sense is to like basically emulate the Apple ecosystem or iOS ecosystem right like as a developer you should be

able to focus on just building your application itself all like the peripher tooling all the infrastructure is already there for you um day one you shouldn't need to worry about smart contract Bridges you shouldn't need to worry about like token fungibility you shouldn't have have to worry about whether or not you'll have access to Native usdc like all this stuff is solved through like R Tech stack itself um yeah so we spent a lot of time working on those making sure like those types of tooling are ready for basically developers and the teams that we'll be building on top of initia itself yeah I think the product stack is something we focused a lot on so just exactly how it looks to move between different applications on different chains our architecture stack obviously helps power that because there's fun

ability across all of these rollups despite them being in multiple different VMS um but the product stack is where a lot of this stuff really shines good product is built to hide infrastructure right like you shouldn't need to feel like you're explicitly doing these things like bridging to the layer one than having to bridge to a layer two being able to connect to wallets for example even is like a a huge barrier to entry to new out ecosystems on abdos you have to go download a new wallet when you go to salana you have to go download a new wallet when you go to Cosmos down a new wallet and so we've just built some really nice front end tools like for example we have a wallet widget it lets you connect to any evm wallet or any Cosmos wallet or even inapp social logins that just comes out of the box on

every one of these layer 2 applications so you don't need to worry about those problems we want to lower as many barriers to entry for both users but also liquidity so the flows into these rollups and around them we've also built a lot of front end tooling around that so users don't need to think about where they're bridging from or going to the portal front end or the layer zero front end or the ibcf fund skip front end it's just all aggregated through this front- end widget and you can onboard directly into layer 2os and one of the things we've done is just in time gas that essentially solves the problem where you're on a new chain it uses a different type of gas fee than you have in your wallet already um and we essentially due to enshrine liquidity which is our system where we stake LP

tokens directly with validators on the layer one to bootstrap a hub with liquidity um as well as things like skip API when you're on a new chain you don't have the gas fees that can just be routed from any other initial Layer Two or on the layer one swapped the correct token and Bridge to your Layer Two in the same transaction amazing I think uh one last question here um all these U ux improvements are uh going to boost um the excitement when people have they come to the chain they're going to they're going to have something to do and it's going to be easy right what are they going to do let's talk about the the application layer a little bit you know defi gaming like what are you guys particularly

excited about if you can shout out any of the projects that you find like really really captivating um that that are deploying on initia either now or coming soon uh you know Inspire the people a bit yeah I guess like I'm not sure how much we can share but like one of the projects I'm really excited for is this new like prediction market so you'll be able to bet on your favorite new tokens all your shitcoins um all these different type of events right um and like some of the mechanisms that this team has been building on um similar to poly markets and other like bedding type markets um but yeah they've made a lot of improvements to the underlying mechanism it doesn't require as much liquidity in general um yeah so definitely something to look out for as

one of the l2s when you're first joining yeah I think we've been trying to curate interesting applications that take advantage of our Tech stack so aside from that prediction Market there's uh a project that does something called Limitless pools essentially what this is is leverage on any asset as long as there is a liquidity pool and this works across every blockchain so they use their initial layer 2 as kind of a a coordination layer um and so if there's liquidity on any shitcoin or any major asset on any blockchain you can do leverage on it which is phenomenal you probably want to go 10x long on the the latest whiff or something like that

and now you can my degeneracy is itching boy I am so bullish on prediction markets and the fact that a prediction Market with enough liquidity I could potentially take leverage if I combine the two applications that you guys both mentioned wow yeah I think one of the good things about some of these early applications is instead of focusing just on stuff like like like we have we obviously have like lending markets and dexes that are coming up as well but one of the good things about these two is that they don't require a bunch of sitting liquidity they can operate totally fine in low liquidity environments and that's optimal for new chains and new

ecosystems awesome well uh very very excited for what you guys are building um I think this is very early and you guys are very plugged into the modular framework um and and generally positioned to uh capitalize on on quite a bit of the flows that we anticipate coming through the modular landscape so very excited very very glad that you were able to uh participate I know you're yeah there we go it's right here all right where where can the people find you come follow us on Twitter at inisha fdn i n TI a fdn please watch out for scammers um I'm at it's always zie like It's Always Sunny

in Philadelphia but Z and I'm s inisha s so it should be a lot easier to find than Zan's handle boom modular modular