Magdalena Fichtl - Zero Gas, Infinite Scale: The bullcase for AppChains and how to build them

Transcript

everything is in order so yeah please uh welcome Magdalena to the stage um for a talk yeah and there's a video okay I'll just check all right thanks for joining today's presentation is about zero gas infinite scale the bull case for app chains and how to build them that's me just a different hair color um but yeah I'm doing a commercials at gelato um bit of legal and finance so before we start this presentation let's look at how did web 2

scale so web 2 wasn't as scalable as it is today always and let's take a short trip down a memory lane so web 2 started with local hosting um so if you had a website you were running it most like somewhere down in your basement you had your server there but that obviously had a lot of disadvantages so it's neither really scalable if you had electricity outages your website could be down and if you had users from the other side of the world um they could suffer from really slow loading times So eventually from local hosting we went to Shared hosting um in the mid 90s there were providers like to cities or dream host I

don't remember any of them maybe you do um but what they allowed you is they provided website hosting for you and that was already a great step right but it still had a lot of issues because mostly you shared all the resources and all the bandwith with all the other websites on that server uh which led to constrained scalability and if one website had a lot of traffic um your website could suffer even though it's completely unrelated to uh the original website it's also very inflexible and not really customizable because usually you were bound to specific programming languages so from there mid 2000s AWS Google Cloud there are also others you

most likely know them um we went to Cloud virtual machines so they're not physical anymore they're virtual and that actually led to horizontal scaling so what you could do now is you can spin up instances you SC can scale them up and down as you need them um it's very customizable you can build very powerful applications on on cloud so what's the take away from this uh the internet is not one huge World computer but it's actually a web of interconnected computers and what scaled web 2 were actually asynchronous services so if you were deploying servers instances um and so on you

needed for them to communicate to each other and also to the rest of the internet and for that you used asynchronous communication tools like apis or HTTP so when looking at the evolution of web 3 we can actually draw some parallels and we can actually see that asynchronous cloud services are also scaling web 3 we went from a few monolithic chains to an infinite number of virtual chains in the cloud um so similar slide let's try to draw some parallels to what we've just seen with web two scaling so with the emergence of Bitcoin we had those special purpose layer one validator networks um and that's great right but

uh if you wanted to launch a new use case you needed a specialized blockchain and that always required a bootstraping a validator set which usually required a token because you need to incentivize those validators to join your network which is costly um not that scalable and usually also leads to security concerns like 51% text and on so from there we went to general purpose smart contract platforms ethereum um and that's already great right because now you can have a lot of use cases a lot of applications on the same uh smart contract platform but still and that's very similar to um shared hosting you still share all the resources with all the other applications on that Network so if you

have an nft drop or some mem coin or whatever you can have your gas costs uh Spike and uh the the network is just con congested so not scalable can be expensive and you're restricted to ebm languages so what's the next step here the next step is virtual blockchains on rollup as a service what's a virtual blockchain a virtual blockchain is a rollup what's a rollup it's a blockchain within a blockchain and that blockchain is hosted off Chain by a centralized sequence like to so what is gelato actually doing gelato allows you to deploy and maintain your own rollup and actually have a

scalable environment where you don't share any Resources with anyone else it's very customizable and you can build very powerful applications on gelato um let's maybe start with this one um it's a video can I somehow start this someone knows okay no one knows so actually this is a video um and it's a the gelato platform so if you go on the website um we have a dashboard and you can actually configure your own your own rollup on there but then let's start with the slide so how does it look you usually have a base layer so you need to choose your rollup framework you can choose optimism arbitrum polygon C CK sync

those are the ones that chelato is currently supporting um you also need to choose your data availability layer can be ethereum but that's costly so you can also go go with Alternatives like Celestia IG layer or aail and then you have the base infrastructure but that is not really built for powerful applications so you need a gelato and also a lot of thirdparty web3 service providers so gelato is not only allowing you to deploy your rollup but we also have a bunch of web three infrastructure Services smart contract automation relaying Randomness and so on then uh we heard from Simon you need indexers so the graph you need a block Explorer like

ethos skan cross chain messaging protocols like layer zero oracles a wallet a bridge and so on video not working unfortunately um so let's go a bit more technical but still very high level um what's the in like how does the rollup design actually look like so you have an execution layer that's your modified version of the evm like optimism arbitr on I already said that you have a data availability layer um cheaper options like Celestia igda and so on and then you have your settlement layer which is ethereum that's really important because the crucial thing here is that your

assets still live in smart contracts on ethereum and you just upload them to the rollup for um High execution throughput but so should something ever happen to your roll up you know they're still secured in a smart contract on ethereum so let's expand a bit from there that was the rollup design overall but uh to actually build an application you need some essential infrastructure on top of that um so you need a Blog Explorer to actually you know track visualize all the transactions and you also need a bridge UI or native bridge to bridge to uh your rollup and that is actually the what every rollup as a service provider

would offer to you this is the most minimal thing um that you have or that you need and one thing where gelato really shines is that we package up this offering with all the crucial other services that you actually need to build powerful applications so expanding this even a bit more um we already heard this uh right now with functions in oracles but a lot of functions it's similar to AWS Lambda and what you can for example do with oracles you can stream price feeds to your rollup to actually build very powerful defi applications like perex for example um and on the UI side for example if you want to build an

application that has a great user experience um where you can use for example Google sign in and you don't want your users to deal with metamask or setting gas prices and so on you can use uh gelato relay which provides you with an account abstracted way for users to interact with your blockchain and they don't have to deal with any lowlevel complexities anymore then again indexers so you can visualize your data um we talked about the rest I think here yeah one one important thing interoperability is very important because you don't want to have your rollup be very isolated you want to be able to talk to other chains to tap into other user bases um and so

on so forth and for that you need a liquidity providers and cross to messaging prod calls to actually um make that happen um yeah horizontal scaling a buzzword on there shared sequencing um so the example I'm doing is a bit flawed but like imagine you have three different rollups um let's assume you're building a game and you have three different rollups because for whatever reason you want to segment your user bases by country um so you have one in the US One in Asia one in Europe for example you have three different rollups for that um and they all talk to each other but they do it in an asynchronous way right um and if you want to have a

really great in-game user experience what you want to achieve is that you have those rollups talk to each other in a synchronous an atomic way and for that you would need uh shared sequencing what we're doing at gelato we're currently researching this topic together with espresso whose uh shared sequenc on um but yeah this is still a in research phase and uh not Al yet um and what's the takeaway here the takeaway here as with web 2 is that ethereum is not one huge World computer but it's a web three of interconnected rollups all talking to each other build on gelato um yeah if you want to uh build a rollup you can do all of that uh very

easily on our on our platform um these are projects that are customers of ours so we also have infrastructure Services we work together with more than 400 projects most of these projects on there are using our infrastructure Services um from you know pancake swap Sushi swap optimism save Zora and so on and so forth and yeah so if you're looking for a job we're also currently hiring we have an office in zuk um you can work remotely check out our jobs come talk to me um yeah that's pretty much it thank [Applause] you hello thank you so much any

questions two questions you have one mic coming that way so um we have web 3 infrastructure services and we have rollups business model is pretty similar so for rollups it's a monthly subscription fee and a sequen of Revenue and for Middle ver Services it's also subscription fee that you pay we have another question go yeah hi um two questions first one is really stupid but like let's say for example you connect metamask do you have to select gelato as a separate Network or

you going to connect to optimism to kind of you know get involved in the ecosystem like how is that going to work from like a user interface uh side and the second question is like I wanted to understand a bit more like how you differentiate yourself versus like the likes of Dimension or old layer that obviously have also come up with with this kind of similar service yeah so the first question no you would not connect to gelato as a network so I'm I'm not sure if you're talking middle rollup no I guess rollup so if we're launching a rollup and for example we launched one for rehea for tangible for ASA we're launching a rollup for them and it would be ASA like it would be the rollup you're connecting to but you would not

connect to gelato would that answer the first part of the question and the second part of the question can you that was yeah yeah I think like what I showed like this one slide where I showed this is like the most basic design of a rollup so if you're looking for rollup as a service providers this is usually what you get right that's the bare minimum chain and you get a block Explorer on top but that's pretty much it and I think where gelato really shines and is different from all other Ras providers is that we provide this like comprehensive infrastructure package we package it all together for you and you get all those services and all infrastructure deployed from day one

on your rollup to really be able to build powerful applications thank you any other questions all good I think gelato has one of the best names products because I I feel like eating with gelato after your talk thank you so much welcome