Luis Schliesske & Hilmar Orth: Gelato Network - Web3 Backend Automation & Relay #483

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Frederica hands and today I'm speaking with blueishly Skin tilma Art who are the founders of gelato a project which makes blockchain devs lives easier through Automation and other things we'll talk about this in just a bit um but before we do let me tell you about our sponsor this week Omni is your new favorite multichain Mobile Wallet Omni supports more than 25 protocols so you can manage all of your assets in one place but what's really special about Omni is what you can do um inside the wallet want to get yield Omni allows you to get the best apis

with zero fees and three tabs need to swap Omni Aggregates all major Bridges indexes so you can bridge and swap across all supported networks in one transaction directly in your wallet love nfts Omni offers the broadest nft support of any wallet so you can collect and manage your favorite nfts across all chains all in one place Omni truly is the easiest way to use web3 and is fully self-custodial meaning you never have to trust anyone with your assets other than yourself and they support Ledger give Omni a try at Omni dot app cool it's super nice to have you buy a both on Louis and Hema we go way way back so pretty early on in your web 3 Journey

you guys got a grant from the gnosis ecosystem fund but we'll get to that um so maybe maybe tell us about yourselves and who you were before you know before blockchain and how you guys met oh yeah hi hi Frederica of course first of all thanks for hosting us here excited to finally be on the Effie setup vaultcast um I remember still listening to it when uh in the bear Market times 2017 2018. and of course beyond that so so awesome to be here yeah maybe I can start giving it like a quick background what we actually how we came into this space um and I think as a sort of context what is always interesting for me looking

back is like we are all like post financial crisis sort of generation after 2028 and I think this sort of uh had a quite the impact in how we thought about financial systems um and why we we were very eager when D5 and number three Cameo came around to sort of participate in that and um the reason I we met I think we have like quite the same same Journey uh the two of us so I could maybe speak for the both of us we we met him in high school actually already in the UK and then both studied in London um I I studied uh Finance Lewis politics um he focused more like the game theory

side of things and um yeah we we then went to Berlin uh because we we both had sort of like the the the dream to become um entrepreneurs Founders doing our own project and so we we started to to learn the craft in that sense uh in villain in Berlin and at some point started our master's degree there as well uh and there actually we we met a a colleague of ours who was uh working at MasterCard and he kept talking about blockchain back then in like 20 2016 and so on and it got us quite excited about it and at the same time the Dow started and I read this article about it and was super fascinated by it and yeah we've participated in the Dao and we I

remember we had to buy eth on on a crack for the first time when it was like eight dollars and I was like what is this eat I just want to participate in the Dao and um yeah that sort of got us hooked so so we were like ethereum natives we didn't we kind of skipped the Bitcoin part altogether and yeah from then almost just the the revital wrote Our Master thesis on like crypto I think Lewis you want it on on POS consensus algorithms and um yeah then we we actually uh soon after our Master we we started working at a startup in Berlin that helped projects like big european-based uh projects such as uh Bayer Novartis or others experiments with like uh

blockchains and evm um private networks and they have we helped build those up uh but their private blockchain things where I think a bit early back then and and I got a bit boring and so we decided to just like get out there go back to research learn more the in-depth engineering of everything and participate in hackathons literally went to like three four five different hackathons all around the world it's just starting building and then had this idea about this this stiff application that we wanted to build which was like a landing protocol on top of the Dutch X that we wanted to build and I think the sort of like ties as in very nicely into how we met you and the nurses team and yeah then we remember we sort of started applying for for Grants like the gecko one and yeah this is sort

of and how the whole journey officially started I guess I think you may have been our most successful gecko Grand receiver um you actually um submitted a proposal for something called instant DX and I actually checked it out last night again it's actually it's pretty cool do you still remember what it was about yeah yeah totally um also uh thank you very much uh Frederick for hosting us I think Hillman I completely share um the history of our private and business lives of the last 12 years so I don't have any basically everything I do he does and yeah vice versa so so yeah um

so actually I do remember the instantly X quite well um which is it was humor's in my sort of first uh solidity project other than hackathon projects before and we we basically looked at the Dutch X which was a really cool idea back then as always knows this was very early maybe even too early with with these great Innovations uh and the Dutch X was a decentralized exchange by hypnosis that was based on a reverse Dutch auction mechanism and one of the things there was that um users or participants in the auction would have to wait 20 up to 24 hours I would be for clearance and then they would have to come back and remember to withdraw their proceeds and this of course wasn't very great ux it

was very slow you had to wait you were impatient so we were then thinking okay how can we sort of make this better right and the first idea we had was actually very deep I asked um it was basically having a pool of liquidity to front the process of the auction because you I think you were able to at least by a margin sort of deterministically um have a guarantee of roughly how much a user would get and yeah we would then instantly expose was basically fronting this money so you would be immediately able to withdraw a portion of of your proceeds and and then uh yeah uh that that actually turned as well into thinking about automating the

withdrawals from the auction and that's really when we stumbled upon the great uh problem that is smart contract Automation in the constraints of an evm and that's how we then realized okay actually automating withdrawals and so on is actually quite it's not built into the evm it's not supported natively by ethereum so how how do we do that and then we realized wait a second there's a there's like a whole need here for our generalistic automation protocol to allow a smart contract applications to be automated to have automated processes and that's how we very quickly then stumbled upon gelato I believe we already rebranded from instant DX to gelato in May of 2019 and started the the grant as gelato back then with our first mission to automate withdrawals

from the Dutch X yeah I think it's it's super important to kind of remember that this was four years ago and basically all the things that kind of seem like commonplace now back then they were uh they were cutting edge so as a space we've we've come quite quite a way uh but kind of the fundamental problem or one of the fundamental problems with smart contract automation kind of boils down to the fact that smart contracts don't do anything unless they're poked right so I mean you can't really say if this happens to that then basically if if that has happened someone needs to tear the smart contract hey check again um sort of thing um so can you talk about

um that problem that you're trying to alleviate yeah maybe maybe I can I can start losing feel free to jump in of course um yeah so I think the um foundational problem um that like gelato uh or like the the initial mission that we wanted to solve with my contract automation was that um that the the protected blockchains the processes run on evm blockchains like ethereum are a finite so um if you want to execute a certain business logic which you encode in a smart contract let's say you want to transfer funds to to a friend um let's say every day for example then

these then you define this sort of logic within a smart contract and then the actual business logic of that smart contract is actually only run if someone sends a transaction to it right and so if you think about what automation is automation is sort of okay at very granular intervals I would like like preferably at every block I would like to run this sort of logic that is in the smart contract to then determine whether to send the money to my friend or not um and then there's like two options how you can achieve this on on an evm blockchain uh one is you just send a transaction at every block to that smart contract right which of course uh is not really feasible because we all know

um there's the spam protection mechanism with having to pay gas for it and especially once when we start under ethereum which was completely infeasible because the transaction can cost like 20 if you're unlucky um and so the other um way of doing this is actually to have this sort of off-chain computation Network that does that simulation for you um not on chain but off chain and then once your conditions are met and can be fulfilled on chain it actually will uh execute and set the transaction on your behalf and this is basically what the the the the the base problem was that we wanted to solve but we wanted to solve it in a generalistic way we started with a sort of withdrawal issue but then we

realized hey it's not only the Dutch X it has that problem if you want to do a limit orders on uni swap for example it's the same problem if you want to do liquidations for Lending protocols it's the same problem so we realize that D5 especially in D5 at the beginning is like a the the use case array is just infinite and so that's why we started then building this generalistic solution for it gelato kind of boils down to kind of you know being this Marketplace but in principle you could have also just offered the servers you know as uh as an infrastructure company right I mean there's plenty of those out there who whom you can just contract and they kind

of run you know the devops side of you know you know the blockchain business for you what kind of drove you to kind of um building this very generalistic solution so um basically our mission here was to bring smart contract automation without trading off the core properties of where three like self-custody you know um private keys um so one way to achieve automation is by giving up access to your private Keys giving up access to your crypto assets whatever they be and give them into the

hands of a service server company or something and they then execute transactions for you from your account but that would essentially be like what banks do nowadays right like they control all of your assets or or Facebook controls all of your data and that's how they can actually bring Automation in web 2 which is which brings these very cool web to user experiences so in web 3 the problem was okay how can we have automation whilst not you know forcing users to give up custody over their funds and so on and that's why we started with a smart contract protocol before we even built any servers we first started with a smart contract protocol gelato V1 which had some very uh like I think now functions that have been copied as well

a lot and so on like it sort of set its own standard of smart contract automation with these on-chain functions 10 exec so can I execute here on behalf of a user and then exec and during the onshine execution I use or an application would be able to Define their own business rules into the smart contract which make it so that you know the gelato Bots can first of all they don't need access to your private keys they can execute for you via Smart contract mechanisms and also at the same time these smart contract mechanisms can enforce certain business rules right so that the bot cannot just I know for example in a limit order on uni swap or on pancake swap which uses to large limit orders actually um a user like report abort can only

execute a limit order um to at the right price right like these are very important business rules that are enforced by the smart contract so that a user as a user you don't have to trust the gelato bot to execute at the right price like you know that the smart contract logic protects you and as a bot you are incentivized to execute at the right price because then the transaction will be successful and you will get a small reward for it so so these sort of coding these rules into smart contracts was essentially what we started with and that that was like the first big version of of gelato and interestingly now we are also looking into how we can remove um the Reliance on just smart contracts because smart contracts and blockchain computation is somewhat limited right

like it doesn't work with heavy computation and so on and and now we're also chipping away at the problem of okay how can we have off-chain computation be secured and somewhat like trustless and and yeah so we're working on that as well I want to hear about I want to hear more about this in a little bit that's the the private beta that you just released right the the web 3 functions let's maybe get to the um to to the core of it first so um you just said that basically Bots do stuff for me if I want to automate stuff so who controls the Bots and how do I buy this service from them

so who controls the bot so we have um what we call sort of like gelato gelato notes right and and um from him and and these are basically entities that are running um yeah notes for you they're like like you can think of them as similar as like an ethereum node for example uh just with the difference is that they are not um validating blocks or or proposing blocks and validating them they are um verifying and checking certain tasks on your behalf all the time and then executing them and making sure transactions get included into the blockchain at the right time for you and then getting getting paid for to to do

that job right so I'm not sure how you pay um an ethereum node the transaction fee of of what you what you uh have to pay and and who are running these these notes so so today and this is actually what we uh so at the very beginning we were of course running running the notes ourselves um and this was so like the the bootstrapping phase of gelato and gelato was always designed to be this sort of Unstoppable ethereum-like protocol which tries to get as close as possible to the trust minimization guarantees that ethereum provides um at the very beginning we we started like bootstrapping says okay let's build all the tools first and everything and

then get to that point uh later because the great thing about how we started um with is that the trust Minima the trust assumptions were very little because we could enforce it all on chain and smart contracts right so the only thing gelato could really do for you at the very beginning was not execute your transaction at the right time but we we like we couldn't rag you or something like the limit order would still always execute and you would always get the money or it just wouldn't execute right so so that was the great thing how we could start and also not worry too much about like the decentralization methods as long as we have reliability uptime all right and so we've like sort of perfected that process and now I think we'll go there probably in a second we're moving much more into how can we

offload that computation that is done by smart contracts to enforce certain data Integrity of like okay what price to use to execute the transaction or let's say what route should I use to get the most optimal Price Right these things that are very hard to uh enforce on Shane how can we do that in a trust minimized way off chain and this is where decentralization comes into play and this is where you have to basically build up a network of node operators that has Stakes similar to like in ethereum proof of stake um and and follows a certain protocol that is encoded into the clients that if they break it they will get penalized and if they follow it they get rewarded

and and this is actually what we are started launching last December so so now this is like a major upgrade we'll actually announce pretty soon is already conducted and we already have external node operators running um on this network today uh for example staking facilities they're running lighter nodes and other nodes for other company other projects um and like by the end of the year um yeah it's it's it should be that there there's no like the Reliance on us is very little to none and and yeah this is this is sort of where we are evolving towards as someone who kind of wants to automate a process do I pick one bot provider to kind of do this for me or is it just a

generalized pool to which all of the bot providers can all of the node Runners um can kind of um tab into so you can think of gelato as a marketplace where the demand side is um you or like smart contract applications that need Automation Services and the supply side is the gelato network of nodes and nodes can offer their services on the gelato Network they have to run our client implementation for that um they have to enter their task executions via our smart contract protocol wherein certain rules are enforced like

payouts and so on um but yeah basically you can think of gelato as a module that you can plug in and get access to a decentralized market of notes so it's not just uh like some people know that we have relay apis and they sometimes mistake gelato for a relayer it's it's not just a relayer it is a network of relayers so it is a module that you can plug into your your flow and get X to a decentralized network of free layers similar for smart contract automation yeah so you don't have to pick one you just pick gelato the network and all of the basically what you get out of the box is a coordination mechanism that coordinates amongst a set of notes

okay so um I don't I don't have a personal relationship with anyone uh gelato node provider it's kind of like the network as a whole um does it give me any uh basically what Legacy a business would call slas or is this something that uh how how do I know that if I use uh gelato for my decentralized backhand that it will perform yeah that's a good question so currently there's no such thing as slas also because I mean we are sort of an open web freestyle protocol that you can use currently I suppose the SLA is uh the the Mev that not operators get right so um the way the protocol is designed is

that for successful execution of your transaction um you have to pay a fee to cover the transaction fee and then some profits so um as long as you believe in like you know people like or like node operators wanting to make a profit in this network you should you should be you know you can basically sleep well and know that someone will go and execute your transactions at all time given that the core premise of using gelato Network um the services there is that you have to pay for it right so you have to pay the network for performing these services so so the incentives are designed in such a way that always you know similar to how public Mev works or to how ethereum work works right like why do people keep mining blocks because

they get a block reward a similar in gelato why will always will always be annulled executing your task well because they get a reward for it that's completely fair so let's talk about the people who actually run the nodes do you do you have any idea how many different entities there are are there any um are there any any requirements I need to meet in order to run a node so you said um like staking providers and so on that sounds like very involved I mean there's also things you can kind of do from a depth node or so at home um Can can I run gelato on my depth node and if not what uh what What's the barrier to entry

well I think in in theory yes in theory you need an RPC uh so you need a connection to the blockchain you need like access to a full note maybe and then you need some server uh resources right to run it and this is like the theoretical part of it now um in practice of of course gelato the the sort of like the the client implementation is fairly diverse and and actually complex by now and especially since we started off as okay we have this [Music] node documentation for smart contract automation but since then it expanded quite a bit and I think we have this

very modular microservices like architecture for for gelato clients so you run like running a um running a gelato note comes with like different flavors and you can sort of like opt into certain services that you would like to support because we have this automation service which is completely detached from the the relay service which is um completely detached from our new off-chain computation service that is actually now coming out um and so it sort of like depends on sort of what service you want to run if you want to run like the most simple one which is basically our execution service which is just there to get a transaction and not even do the computation itself just get the transaction and get it

mined for you then I would say in theory yes you can do it in practice um because gelato is also like live on let's say I think over 10 different evm trains today right you need like stable rvcs with most of them of course you could choose to only serve ethereum for example and do that and then like later this year once we go live with our ve 0.1 on staking you could be able to just like buy some gel stake it and then participate in actually actually indecent transactions but then you also have to guarantee some uptime because if you're not up when you're supposed to and if you're not executing transactions that get allocated to you at a certain

time then you will basically no longer receive transactions for us for for like an interval as a punishment so the way there is like this sort of mechanism in place which is we um we incentivize you to stake gel the more you stake the more transactions you will be able to execute but also if you get this executions allocated and you don't execute them then you will also not get uh the next one so it's like a game of more stake and high uptime so as long as you can guarantee that then yes you will definitely be able to to participate you just um kind of uh touched on the fact that um I mean mostly so far we've talked

about automation right uh you also kind of refer to relays just a bit ago can you kind of explain the distinction yeah um I can explain the difference here so um I used to call automation deferred relaying and because automation is also a form of relaying if you will um it's this idea that a message an operation a transaction that a user wants to see executed is relayed on that user's behalf so the user themselves don't have to send this transaction it's every layer that puts it on chain for them and automation is quite interesting because there we

couple this transaction relay to a condition being fulfilled in the future and that could be a deterministic condition like the passage of time right like every day do something for me or it could be a com like condition that is not deterministic like if the price uh you know reaches this then execute for me that might never happen actually or it might so um so automation is this sort of relaying on steroids if you will where you you couple the relaying of a transaction to a arbitrarily user definable condition on chain and now also off chain um yeah and then relaying is really the simple primitive of just sending a transaction and usually that is in the

context of real-time relaying and actually to be honest it's uh it sounds quite simple and so on so that it's literally just saying hey put this transaction for me on chain but it unlocks looks like this much better ux for web free users where now technically you can interact with an application on a blockchain in real time without needing to have crypto funds in your wallet for example this is known as gasless transactions or meta transactions um where where it's great for user onboarding for example you can you can use a relayer um and a user can then come visit your app for the first time and interact with your smart contract already without needing to go to a centralized exchange first do kyc and buy crypto or something to be able to

send a transaction so so yeah that's but but it's a bit more this real-time thing of like hey please do this for me now relaying is also really cool for um not just for for users but also for backend Developers for example that are multi-chain so for example connect has been using gelato relay um for over a year and all basically they're across Chain Bridge and every connect transaction is age a lot relay transaction and for Conex router as they call them it's very beneficial to use our relay apis and relay Network because it makes very easy to get transactions sent reliably on multiple chains at the same time at scale so so the relaying is also for us at least um specializing in

the art of you know um scalable transactions throughput on multiple chains and also decoupling payment like for of native tokens for transactions and removing this need for developers so developers can for example nowadays with our one balance system put usdc on polygon I balance say 10 000 usdc and then go and have uh transactions um in their applications be executed on multiple different chains while only paying from the single balance on one chain so it makes the management the transaction management uh in in the tens of thousands of transactions per day extremely easy when you use every layer like gelato uh yeah and here again like gelato is a network of three layers so you can think of

gelato like as a single entry point for your relay transaction but in the background there's multiple relayers that are competing to execute these transactions before we dive into use cases um a bit deeper um one final question on the automation so as a user of the automation um I don't I only have to pay once it's executed right so can I can I spam the system by kind of um I mean basically because the the the nodes they have to check the conditions at certain cadences um so if I just give them a lot of work um in checking conditions that may never be met or that that I Engineer such that they're never met can I kind of uh can I

bring down the network yes so so what you rightfully said is um what is automation automation consists of two parts it's the off-chain computation that has to be done and then it's the transaction relaying that has to be done at the right time um when the condition is fulfilled right and um you're you're very right if you create let's say like a a hundred thousand tasks or a million tasks they would never execute you could bring down um these sort of networks because yeah there's no there's a lot of cost but there will never be a reward that's why many of like these systems and I think this is sort of how we we started our V1

designer anything or better or Alpha we want to learn of gelato back then which is hey we sort of put this you put the Bounty up and this bounty will then pay for the transaction and then it's I think everyone started to like take it and copy it and now it like it turned into like the standard for contact automation but it's actually not scalable and and it's actually quite flawed and that's why um we we realized also and and this is this is also what is being rolled out right now and and with our newest release of um our basically automate 2.0 or also like web free functions that we'll probably talk about in a moment um we already

um redesigned the system to such an extent that they are basically two payments you have to do and and or like there are two um fees that are being paid and this is the one fee is for the actual computation and there it's very like the analogy is very much basically looking at gelato is like a decentralized AWS or Google Cloud um which is a set of modes uh not one particular data center somewhere but a network of like self also not operators somewhere in the world the way you rent that computation for your decentralized application and they run it at the same they run it all the time as long as you pay them of course and then they execute the transaction at the right time right

and the execution of the transaction for us is actually done by the executor and the network and the uh and the and the actual computation by by another part of of the of the network and there has to be like it's in order to make these systems really sustainable and scalable and work for everything you need this sort of distinction between paying for computation and and so this is actually being rolled out um right now um as we as we speak but the cool thing is um you don't like you don't need to let users deal with that right similar to how users don't pay for the users on Netflix don't pay for the computation of AWS in the background right if you watch a movie there even though they use AWS

similarly like users of um let's say pancake swap or like a decks they they are not using they're not paying for the computation it is done by gelato they are paying pancakes for like a 0.1 fee on each limit order that gets executed and they pay the the computational fee for example right let's kind of change course here let's talk about uh the web 3 functions first before we talk about use cases you already kind of led into it um so how what I mean so now you kind of you have to pay twice or the payment is split between kind of submitting um the automation requests and having it fulfilled any other updates yeah so so what three functions is is I

think something we we have been talking about for for quite some time actually also in our white paper which is okay like smart contracts are like it's cool to automate smart contracts and there's a lot of stuff you can do on chain and we'll see an explosion of use cases which we can talk about in a moment but um the real cool use cases and the real efficiency you can gain is when you move the actual computation from onshine and to to off chain where you can do much more plus if you move the data that can be used to automate your smart contracts from only being Based on on-chain data to then off-chain data and this is I

think where it gets really interesting because now basically what you can think of um about like what three functions is it's like a decentralized cloud function so it's like a decentralized AWS Lambda where you as a developer you go and say hey I need to query a subgraph for example or like some API that returns me a list of all the nfts that that that follow that have a certain criteria and all the nfts that have a certain Rarity for example right and what I want to do is I want to check all these nfts if they can be um cuddled with let's say there's a cuddle function on them right and I have

to check whether they can be cuddled um and I want to check it and then once one of them can be cuddled I want to of course make sure that they get cuddled at the right time right this is like a fun use case and um obviously doing this on chain is impossible you can't just query all the all the nfts that have that sort of property and that sort of Rarity it's like first of all computational far too expensive and secondly mostly impossible because there's no good way of doing it sometimes certain like data's only visit my events for example or let's say they are not even stored on chain like some information you need to get them from API like ipfs maybe the metadata is on ipfs and you need to get it from there right so

um and what what you can do with three functions basically you can write a typescript file like rather than writing a smart contract that encodes the logic that determines what data to use and when to execute transactions you now write a typescript file that you compile and deploy to ipfs now this lives on ipfs or other data availability layers that you can choose or we can we'll probably also expand it to other locations later and you get an ID from ipfs out of it and then you go to to gelato and you send a transaction on chain that says gelato hey pointing to this ipfs fire hey gelato notes please run for me this ipfs file that I just deployed there which determines the logic that I just

described and then execute transactions on my behalf to whatever chain I want to while providing me with certain levels of data Integrity that the data that is being generated that is being used is actually the same and the in the right one right and and yeah this is this is what you can do and you can think about it is um in allowing smart contracts to access Cloud functions with like a transaction and and this is super powerful for these address applications that don't want to like have one company that runs a Google cloud or whatever and if they don't pay their bills so if they get censored or whatever then the whole application goes down that relies on this which many applications do these days and this is basically a way to make them like to

decentralize this process and make them more Unstoppable that's super powerful but what does that do to your trust assumption as like you know a developer who's who uses this that's a good question and and this is also like the evolution and why decentralization for gelato is now becoming very important and I alluded at the beginning that the beginning it it was okay because trust was sort of on shame right now we're moving to a world where uh trust assumptions are higher because gelato nodes are are running computation for you that you cannot verify it on chain and you need to you need to have some sort of trust in it and so this is where uh staking and the decentralization of our Network comes in

hand and um basically how we are envisioning it is that um you can Define you have some sort of comparing this to other Oracle networks because it's some sort of like you can you can refer to it as like partially like a hybrid Oracle Network and um how we are sort of trying to provide users with like a like the flexibility of writing these things is just much greater than what you're used to in other networks but what you can also do is you will be able to Define what sort of um it Integrity you need for that data so for example you can say hey I want to have 50 or 60 percent of the gelato notes that have staked their gel to sign off on that data and only if

they're all signed off of that data um then I then a node can take that transaction and execute it right and so that way you have 60 of the gelato stake that does saying hey I I verified that data and this is actually data that should be used um and then of course if they are maliciously they will be slash and can be can be penalized for this but you can also say let's say my data is not that important right and I don't need that sort of Integrity I don't need six percent of the network to run this computation I only need two nodes to run that computation and you could also Define some some lower thresholds here for you it depends on the use case but basically now staking and having a valid data set becomes very important okay I think that solves a lot of the

problem but is there some sort of escalation mechanism so if I'm not happy with um the execution there's some sort of arbitration protocol that I can run because otherwise what you're incentivizing is um basically someone performs the computation maybe maliciously and other other nodes are not incentivized to rerun the computation but can just piggyback right so basically if everyone agrees um and uh and it's it's it's wrong but no one's penalized then that's kind of uh yeah so can I escalate as a Dev who uses this um Oracle yeah so so for that we have right now the gelato Dao right so we have uh our

Dao right now where users can basically come and and say hey this is uh what was executed um and and this is actually I rerun the computation myself and this is actually what it supposed to return which is not always 100 it it's not easy to make this 100 objective because if you talk about generalistic object computation then it's not only humanistic it's not all deterministic uh right I think for many use cases it actually is especially if you talk about like um subgraph data or data from other chains um there it is deterministic but if you if you think about let's say API price data and it depends on which millisecond

or not query is your price right there you have to like have some sort of um defined aggregation um and and sort of consolidation of that data a process defined and this is what we meant with this hey you can Define your own thresholds let's say you can say hey I want these sort of nodes to to run this and they have to agree that this is in a certain range or this is uh roughly the same in these boundaries and if it's the case then I'm cool with that right and then they have to sign it off and send a transaction right and if you um look back here and you can say head was completely different then you can basically start this escalation process which is um hey I I I want to challenge this and

then there is basically uh the dial doing its job and and validating it um and and making sure but but right now like there is no perfect way of sort of doing it for now which is always deterministic objective no subjectivity involved at all so we are taking this sort of pragmatic approach to this no it's super exciting so when when is this uh when is this gonna be rolled out well actually the beta starts today so we we're rolling on the web free functions beta today we actually also enrolled it yesterday but um today it's it's going Loud live but um it is first of all in like a closed beta so we have around about like 30 projects 30 projects sign up for it now

that will be immediately using it um and a lot of really really cool and amazing use cases that I'm super excited for like nft perpetuals to um to to nft lending to uh decentralized Market making to like a lot of different things so the use case area is really huge and the beta is there because um yeah there's a lot of stake here right and and data Integrity is important and so we are slowly only onboarding new new users uh to to the system to make sure we can scale this up security sufficiently and make it work uh smoothly for everyone um so yeah that's why it will probably still be in a closed beta for at least a

couple of months cool this is a super nice segue to use cases so we've talked about kind of like the the nuts and bolts for the past 40 minutes so kind of hit hit me with what what has been built with it because it's been massively used I mean there's millions of transactions that have been uh that have been sent using gelato so what what are the use cases and what networks are they on um and what are what are you particularly proud of yeah maybe I can give a little history I guess of use cases um and really um what we discovered four years ago was that ethereum and other EVMS need this

generalistic um automation or relay protocol that lives outside of the the the client implementation of of the blockchain um and and really this means that anything can be built on top of this and and we've seen this really happening like there have been use cases that we didn't foresee and they're they're I mean it all started with D5 because we started gelato in 2019 and in 2019 to 2021 I guess there was pretty much everything was D5 right and then eventually nfts happened but but it started with defy and um and there I mean uh the the first use case actually were built by instadapt by the insta-depth team so there are also legendary members of the gelato Club if

you will and they built together with us some extremely complex use cases automated depth refinancing so these were things like I think automatically uh or um for example automatically um moving your other position to compound if compound has better apis or something like this I think this was the number one use case for InStep for a whole while and I know this is one of the things that I used interested for it was just single click and basically it just you know switched everything over it was super neat exactly yeah and they use gelato to automate this um and uh yeah it was it was very heavy on the D5 side it was using flash loans and this

and that and uh all of these things were checked basically like um but all of these things were gelato conditions like what flashlight on to use whether from the ydx uh or from other or whatnot and yeah so so very heavy D5 things were built first um and and then actually one of the first big use cases that we always saw were limit orders um of course for amm so anybody trading on centralized exchanges would usually place a limit order when they want to buy it or sell something right um but on on am it's like uni swap or Kaiba back then even you didn't have this enabled so with gelato uh we built a limit order SDK that was using a smart contract limit order protocol um and uh yeah basically this is how um big amm's like spooky swap on Phantom

and quick swap on polygon and pancake swap on BNB chain or by basically we're able to offer limit orders on their exchange two users which is in the background using gelato Automation and and then from there I mean eventually once we build our um automation UI and interface gelato automate it previously called gelato Ops um we basically then gave developers a sort of nice way of you know self-servicing them and themselves before I was sort of us you know the tech was ready like it could be used but there was a lot of work you as a developer needed to do and we also didn't have that much documentation technically you could have used gelato to build anything but but you know you

know how it is you have to make developers lives easier for for them to actually use it so we built this super nice Pro UI product where you can come app.gelato.network and you can basically start automating your smart contracts with a click of a mouse button basically and that really I mean that sort of opened the floodgates to use cases there were so many things launching without us even knowing uh that suddenly we're using the network um I remember algorithmic stable coins using it um for uh for replacing um many other things I'm sure Hilma will give some more colors soon um and then for for relaying um for relaying uh initially our approach relaying was a

bit more backend focused so really focusing on how can we provide uh back-end projects such as for example connects the crosstrain messaging protocol they're using it with a way to get transactions mined on multiple chains with high throughput like really at scale because that's actually quite hard um building your own relayer sort of to send a couple of transactions uh hundreds of transactions every day is not that hard but going from there to 40 000 transactions 100 000 transactions per day on many different networks reliably that's done really hard and that's production software so we sort of started with that and that has been successfully used by Connect 4 over a year without any problems and and

recently in the last half year or so we also focused a bit more on the UI side of things for relaying so gasless transactions um account abstraction all these things um making it easy to onboard web 2 users and not so much the focus on having I don't know a throughput of 100 000 transaction per day for your backend application but rather having these cool user experiences where as a user you can interact with smart contracts without the need of having crypto on your wallet and so on um so so there um there will be a I think some exciting use cases launching soon um yeah for example and we're talking to a betting site or know this chain who want to make it so that users first time

users first in crypto users can come and place their bet without needing to to have crypto in their wallets for example super cool Emma do you want to add to the landscape of projects building on gelato because if if not um I'd like to talk about account abstraction um but Lewis kind of insinuated that you would that you would want to add some color and as we heard earlier you're kind of basically the same person so I I assume Lewis knows what you want I think Lou's already covered a lot I think uh maybe to add there's like weird things that I personally didn't anticipate are all these nft use case because we are both

from like the D5 world but but suddenly we've seen like tens of thousands or hundred thousands transactions from like nft rentals for example I don't know like I didn't know people rent so many nfts but they had like these entire nft rental marketplaces now where you can get an nfg you can literally get the nft into your wallet let's say like a board uh a for example and then you can do something and then gelato will out of like there's a function in the transfer from function there's like a condition which is gelato can get this nft out of your wallet in seven days again and withdraw it back to the original owner and this is like happening so literally smart contracts are all of the nfts uh I give them to you and then they're drawn back in by gelato and this is happening

every day like tens of thousands of times on polygon and BNB chain and BNB and stuff like that so these are things that Beyond like makeup are using it for like their collateral management and you know like stuff like optimism for topping up sequencer nodes and stuff like that which are use cases we sort of seen very early on these are like ones that did really surprised me personally seeing rent to Monkey yeah I think I think what both film and I were quite happy and proud of is um that we really saw the you know uh one one guy team developer using this up to you know the Blue Chip D5 projects like other maker

um optimism and and uh and so on so so really it's for everyone cool so a current abstraction so I think a lot of our listeners will kind of know this in the context of eip4337 this is actually something that we're working on together so uh not we as epicenter but me as gnosis and uh this is kind of finding an implementation for account abstraction um without protocol level changes just using relayers it's incredibly cool use case and I actually can see um so we are committed to kind of rolling this out on osis chain and I would kind of assume that this um this goes well and kind of is taken

over by other chains as well so can you explain to me how it works yeah um so a constraction really is the concept of trying to move away from having users interact with smart contracts with their externally on the account and rather promoting that they are interacting with a smart contract wallet based or is my contract based account and that these are the two accounts that are available on ethereum one is created by your private key um and then the other one you will have to deploy yourself let's say the noses save is probably the most prominent example of a smart contract wallet um and the cool thing about the smart

contract wallet is uh I like to compare them as one is like an old school door lock where you have like this wooden a key that you get in and then you can can kind of like access web free and then the other ones like this digital um door lock if we have in our office here where you can program people to just like come in for like a day or so or you need multiple pupils to sign off to enter the building for example right and so it's a programmable wallet it's my contract was programmable wallet where you can encode Advanced functionalities for example that you can make transactions be fully gasless on behalf of users without having to change any smart contract code anymore and um this just greatly improves the ux of

of users that are especially getting on board to web3 um and uh yeah that is this whole array of like um feature sets that you want for example gases transactions account recovery but also in wallet automation which I think I'm sort of most bullish on in a college traction um and Yeah we actually sort of experiment and been building a conversation stuff since the very beginning gelato was actually started off as the a module for the noses safe this was our first implementation of gelato and it was it was literally hey you have your smart contract wallet and now you have like an add-on to the smart contract wall to make it really really smart and it could it can automate it

can execute things on your behalf when you're not there this is for me like a smart wallet right um and we actually deployed know the sales on our first uis back then and had like had users interact with our application using their nososafe as a proxy which is exactly what account abstraction wants to achieve um and uh sort of enshrine into uh the protocol a bit further by with this esc-437 for example which basically allows provides people like a public entry point to then to then say hey I want to interact with a certain application and they can Define how they wanted to act how they want to pay for

it for example and then there's this public entry point where you can do so so yeah this is a counter distraction in Russia but it's a very broad topic so there are a lot of different parts you can go into if you want yeah absolutely it's a it's a super big topic and I think in terms of kind of making web 3 usable for numis this is really something that kind of we need to hit um because I mean the current onboarding experience you need to be able to onboard users with an email or similar um even if that means lower trust assumption you you just have to be able to switch it out later the user has to be able to switch it out later but you know this experience where kind of you you download metamask for someone and

then then you say I'm not going to look but you have to write down these 12 words and you can never lose them so replicate them you know in many places but you can also never show them to anyone so replicate them never it's just it's it's a lot of mixed messages and people don't get it it's just this is not how we're gonna onboard like the next hundred million people or so all right and until eip4337 actually comes if it comes I think it'll be an uphill bad better in terms of pretty complex and you know backwards compatibility and such what other things are you excited for so I mean with um the web 3 functions you kind of

you radically enlarge the possibility space of what can be built using gelato so what are the cool things you kind of you foresee and what are you excited for yeah maybe I could start to lose feel free to add stuff and so I think maybe tying it back to the account abstraction if for for me it is all sort of for me I with gelato especially I see all these things converging at some point so right now um to provide users within sort of these Advanced automated services or use cases let's say a limit order on pancake swap or let's say yearn

uh with like hey we always give you the best rate where whatever or other other use cases what you always have to do is you have to build entire smart contract protocols which logic is solely based to provide this sort of automation for users in a way where they can let's say they just have to deposit their assets into like this pool and then from this pool a little order gets executed or from this pool um the the it will be invested in the best yield generating protocol or whatnot and mostly the reason why we have this is because um you can't automate

the transactions from the users what eoa wanted right so other than getting their private key then yeah you basically own their money right so if we can as a community push this concept of a current abstraction and smart contract wallet then what we gain is basically um what I call in wallet automation which is you don't need to build all of these protocols anymore you can just tie your of money or your funds in your wallet to arbitrary off-chain data computation or on-chain verifiable data and computation which gelato for example

and can start getting the best yield everywhere straight out of your wallet you don't have to pool them anywhere you don't have to send them anywhere first just straight out of the wallet they do things think about like games for example right you can build like you can play strategy games where you run a script that interacts with your account on your behalf or with other people's accounts on their behalf and like direct their actions in like a Pokemon world like for me I see NPCs non-player characters all of them will be like a smart contract which will attack you like say a Pokemon game you walk through the grass and suddenly Pokemon attacks

you it is like an attack function there and then a gelato sensor transaction the Pokemon comes attacks you and then it's like a battle and you fight the Pokemon even if you might not be at the machine at the time you define the strategy beforehand and then you can alter it over time so I think there um with account abstraction plus automation especially leveraging data from off chain I think you just full like your 10x or 100x the possibilities that can be built for web free and it all ties very nicely together so I'm super excited about like how this and I already see a couple of use cases and projects building first things like brahmas building basically like a urine but based on those saves using gelato in the background so I think I'm super

excited about these type of use cases and they tie everything very nicely together yeah um one of the big things that I am excited about um is uh basically a whole new web free user experience and we're all wet3 natives here I know I've known you for four years now three weeks so you were definitely very early and probably um you are used to using metamask and so on but but you also mentioned here that it's still very clunky when onboarding new users it's still always like every time I onboard a friend a family member it's I realize how bad it is and that it will never be mainstream because it's way too complex um and one thing

um that we have to hand to web 2 is that the user experiences there are really great A lot of times um and uh and yeah I think we have to achieve parity with that in web 3 um if not even surpass it and uh in web3 we have created these amazing back-end Technologies um that make developer experiences very great right like you can build your own bank you can build whatever like with a bunch of lines of code um but on the front end on the UI level on the mobile app level it still is very immature it's it scares people off it's it's it's clunky it's kind of horrible to be honest so what I'm what I'm really

hoping for now that as we move up the stack a bit and we sort of provide Technologies like the relay apis that we have account abstraction smart contract wallets to front-end developers is that we we finally have a better front end to web3 as well not just a good back end and and here what I'm looking out for hopefully next Bull Run uh is that we don't have these things where you definitely know that this is a web free site where you log in with metamask you connect to some RPC everything is slow you can't do anything because you don't have crypto in your wallet you have to go visit three other places uh now to get crypto to do to configure your wallet to write something on paper and store it in a save or something right like all of this should

be gone and hopefully we can build web free applications where users don't even know that they're interacting with web3 only the developers of that site now because they're using the power of webpage Technologies to build amazing back-ends to build amazing applications um without the need of I don't know web 2 Legacy licensing or so um so so yeah I really like that's what I'm really looking forward to and and here our our basically stake in this game is our set of relay apis you can certainly use automation as well to provide very nice user experiences but but especially with relaying and account abstraction you can build amazing new user experiences where I hope it will simply be like okay we forget completely

about connecting metamask and whatso whatsoever like all of this will be gone it will just be a nice website and you go to clicking buttons again you immediately see data and so on and you don't have to have this extension be connected and so on at all times like it should be very smooth sort of instant feedback as you use a website to interact with crypto that's really what I'm looking forward to me too having web 3 with strictly better user experience than web 2 this is uh those are goals one last question and maybe it's the most important question that I considered leading with what's your favorite flavor of ice cream you don't you don't get to be quite

gelato without you know having a good answer to that that's true and I do look forward to the to the next Defcon and the the gelato booth there again oh yeah the most the the favorite Booth of our depcon attendees where you get gelato uh we literally saw people going there eight times in a single day there was this guy he skipped lunch and everything it was crazy lunch was also I think it vegan or maybe maybe just vegetarian but it was very healthy so basically this was also one of the main complaints about depcon this year that the food was too healthy but

you were there too you were there to you know to to rescue the stuff attention save yours yeah but having having a free ice cream truck is definitely a Dos Factor that's for sure it was yeah we got a grief there um so from for me if for me my personal favorite flavor still is um and this is actually how I what I ordered when I was a child when I I spent all my pocket money on on gelato and um I went to the strata Place uh close by and I ordered eight Scoops I ordered Scoops and I I did it on like like a bi-weekly basis most likely and uh there were

um lemon chocolate chili a lemon chocolate cherry so so the so I like lemon and chocolate and it's specifically just a hinge of chili and some sweetness with the cherry and then you get a uh yeah what about you yeah I think for me it's pistachio and uh by the way I have to plug the amazing ice cream shop that is next to full note in Berlin yes it's it's amazing this is Syrian ice cream there so um yeah it was the perfect place to start gelato in 2019 and have some of the bear Market bitterness be washed away with some nice Sweet Gelato from the shop close by fantastic if people want to find out

more about gelato or use gelato or become uh active in the gelato Community where do we send them and percents so first of all gelato.network is the website there you find all the various resources and links the most active uh channel for us is Discord there if your web free developer you're starting out or you're an advanced person who wants to go deep into gelato just come there and chat with us and then of course follow us on Twitter we are also producing a lot of video content on YouTube so make sure to follow us on YouTube as well we'll probably do some cool Vlogs for each Denver so if you're not there and can participate but still want to experience it make sure to check out our Vlog there and and yeah so this card is is the best

one and Twitter of course fantastic thank you both for coming on this was uh super fun thanks thank you