Modular March EP 13: Where Across Fits In The Modular Thesis

Transcript

welcome to modular March I'm handy this is Robbie and we are the rollup modular March is an educational experience about all things Moder [Music] enjoy [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome back to modular march today we

have a episode about interoperability from Hart founder of across and Uma Hart welcome to the show and to ma March thanks guys it's March it's great Springtime yeah it's I've been getting hated on for it not being modul March because the market is red but uh if you have a time preference of over six months then I think it is M of March I think it's green today man it's like people let's be a little less shortsighted let's let's build for at least the medium term here right yeah yeah medium term being at least a couple of days um but anyways yeah Andy Robbie I'm excited to be here uh there's very cool

stuff to talk about I want to go into deep go deep on my views on intense and why I think it's the future of interop um but yeah how should we do this should we just get into it yep Jump On In excited to uh to learn all right um so please do interrupt me let's get the readers let's have you guys asking all the questions that the listeners might uh but the starting statement of what we want here um in the this rollup multi-chain future we want fast cheap secure interop that is so damn seamless you don't even know that you're talking to blockchains we want them ultimately abstracted away and so um the way I kind of wanted

to frame this discussion and where I want you guys to push back is sort of like how people have been thinking about interop and some ideas for how I think we could expand that thinking or maybe course correct it um so so the typical view here is that interoperability should look like TCP IP like the backbone of the internet and here I have a fun clip art of like what the internet is supposed to look like where you have networks and they talk to your internet service provider and then there's backbone routers that send messages from point A to point B and they send those messages very quickly we're we're we're recording this podcast over tcpip uh it's quick and it's

cheap um and I think when people think that way they think bridging should look like tcpip interoperability should function this way because like sending a message should just be as seamless as sending an email or a DM or something like that and so the naive way I think of thinking about how interoperability should work is you have blockchain a blockchain b you send a message between them um but this I don't think think is quite right and the reason here is that um in blockchains we are trustless trying to send value and sending messages in a trustless setting between

blockchains sending them quickly cheaply and securely is incredibly difficult to do in my opinion it's kind of impossible um maybe not impossible impossible but it's very hard and uh this is something people have been trying hard to do and there's trade-offs here basically if you want to send something fast you usually are sacrificing on security or cost and if you want to send something cheap you're also usually sa sacrificing on security and if you want to send something securely you're usually sacrificing on speed or cost in some way um sending sending a trustless message is just not an easy thing to do um oh my my my my clip bar that's

supposed to be an explosion there's a big explosion there um in my presentation but it didn't show up in the GIF here so like the view here that we have at across is basically to stop sending messages it's hard to do don't do it and turns out like we actually can do that for most things and the observation here is that like in tcpip you were sending unique messages from point A to point B um but in blockchains we are mostly not exclusively but we're mostly moving value between these blockchains and value is

fungible like Andy and Robbie you guys like if you're gonna send if I'm gonna venmo you $200 right you don't care which $200 I'm sending you it's not a unique $200 I just got to send you $200 right and so if that fungibility aspect means there are so many other ways we can send that money it doesn't have to be my exact $200 that I have in cash and I like ship it to you via like FedEx or something rather uh somebody else could fill you with the $200 and then I pay them and you guys are happy and you got what happened and that that it it works and this is our mental model

for how interoperability should work for most cases between blockchains where because value is fungible we can have other actors we'll get into this in a second but we can have other actors go and fill the user on their cross-chain transaction with their own funds and then pay them back later and in doing so we step away from having to send messages so here's the here's the diagram so we had this naive way of sending messages of interoperability we're blockchain a is going to send a message to blockchain b in the across world in the intent based bridging world we don't do that we stop we don't send a message at least not initially instead we have a third

party we call them relays other people in the UK system called them solvers market makers Searchers but this offchain actor blockchain a will deposit funds on blockchain a in an escrow account and then this thirdparty actor is going to go and fill the user on blockchain B with their own Capital because value is fungible here and so the user is able to get a quick fill like a really fast fill simply because of this solver filling them with their own money so make sense to you guys it does it does um on the on the point of kind of not having messages or general messages like what are some examples

today of not strictly value trans actions happening cross Shain sending like governance parameters is a good one so let's say I'm Unis swap governance and I'm trying to control the governance parameters of a different chain right and these governance parameters might be like if I screw them up so I'm I'm Unis swap on ethereum and I want to control the governance parameters of Unis swaps deployment on BNB right or on BC on the binance smart chain um okay well if I screw up these parameters maybe there's like billions of dollars at risk that that could get screwed up and so like there I these are

these are specific nonf fungible instructions that I need to send to this other chain and that's an example of something that you can't fill with intents like you need to transfer a message securely um between ethereum where Unis swap voted on what the parameters are and BSC where they're going to get implemented so that would be like a good example of something that is uh that requires uh it can't be done with this approach but right in the other examples where if I'm trying to uh execute a transaction on another chain where all I need to do is pay you know five BNB to do so right that could be done with the intent framework because I can just

transfer the value to pay for that transaction does that make sense yeah it does um is that not enough to to to to to debunk your your thesis is a billion dollar governance vote not enough to kind of prove that General message has a place or you're kind of saying for for the majority of transactions they're value driven we should use intents and then for specific cases trying to figure out a general message passing platform which kind of achieves those three things simultaneously is is the next best thing well okay two two riffs on this there is definitely a place for generalized messaging like we need that um without a

doubt um two arguments though one I don't believe that that General message passing actually needs to be very fast I think it needs to be maximally or necessarily very cheap I think it needs to be very secure so I think in that General message passing we need to be able to send those messages very securely between chains and uh you know that's like again if un SW governance had to pay $5,000 like some big number to securely send the messages from their governance on ethereum to BSC but and they could take two days doing it they'd do that and they would happily pay that that $55,000 and happily take two days if they were

really really sure that that message couldn't get corrupted because there's like billions of dollars at risk on the other end so that makes total sense to me so there is a use for a need for generalized messaging and there's more examples than just this but to to your other point my belief is that 95 to 99% of what we need to do between blockchains is around moving value so most user most user activity is going to be around moving value in some way shape or form um so I think if I'm going to be a little bit spicier yes we need generalized messaging however I think value transfer is like the killer app of generalized

messaging and it's actually where the value is going to get captured it's where it's yeah those don't really compete with this model I mean sometimes we have some issues uh with intent based mechanisms where there's too much demand or fillers aren't filling in on one set of chains and you have some weird waiting times but for the majority of time it's like it's the security cost and speed of an intense based design basically outweighs any sort of value transfer that would be needed to be made on a General message passing call thus making like and from the user perspective it's like a little bit of different but from like a higher level research perspective it almost seems like doing value transfers on G on GMP

based Bridge designs is almost useless you you know the other other example here if we're going to analog analogize this to traditional banking um I don't think I'd want to use ven to send a million dollars seems a little risky right or slow or and they don't let you do it VMO is not designed for that right um but I also don't think I want to send an international wire transfer to send $200 either right so there's a lot a lot a lot of venm mode transactions that go through and relatively few International wire transactions they have different markets here um and I think that's like that's

an so intent-based bridging and I think you can do a lot more than venmo I think you can go to pretty pretty large scale but it's for quick fast and very secure um value transfer of you know sizes sub a million or $2 million let's say and beyond that maybe you look for a different solution okay uh to keep going so this was my slide earlier with cross chain intents we have these thirdparty actors we call them Rel layers um but they fill users with their own Capital quickly and cheaply and then they get repaid later and so if you think about what uh what this kind of our view of the the

stack looks like we have three layers here we have the intent layer where the user specifies what they want to do so Robbie wants to bridge uh 200 usdc from optimism to R arbitrum he writes his his order his intent then we have solvers that compete to Phil Robbie's order and then we have the settlement layer because as we said the solvers fill Robbie with with their own money Robbie's money is actually escrowed on the origin chain and then the settlement layer verifies that intent was re was fulfilled like user gets filled quickly then they don't really care the user doesn't really care about the settlement layer but the settlement layer holds the user funds in escrow and repays the Sal

after we verify that it the intent did in fact get filled can I can I interrupt you there yeah so I when when I submit my intent to the origin layer or the origin chain does that not generate a message whether that message contains value or it's a generic generic message does that not indicate to this or send something to the solers letting them know that I'm trying to get filled on the destination chain so we should be specific here if you submit your intent on the origin chain you've made in the across system you've made a deposit transaction so

you've just done a transaction On the Origin chain which makes sense you got to deposit your money somewhere and in our design all the solvers are listening to the origin chain because it's a decentralized consensus mechanism with like this me pool or centralized sequence or whatever so they're listening to the origin chain and that deposit action is the signal that you Robbie want to move assets from A to B right and so then they race to fill you on the destination chain but there is no cross chain message that gets sent you only did an action on the origin chain got it and then these Watchers that are offchain there's no they they're the

ones that okay I think that I think that makes sense um okay and then I have a a bit of a separate question which is that across is the settlement layer here and if we're settling transactions to cross does that mean a cross has its own Ledger like its own State and if so does that make a cross a rollup or some sort of its own blockchain or like an L depending on the definition if yeah if not why not what like what does it missing to be a blockchain all right so uh remember all the like the annoying crypto Twitter debates about like what is a rollup and like everything's roll up or nothing's roll up or something like that maybe we

could talk about this here too um but what acrosses doing as a settlement layer again is it's escrowing funds and then verifying that the solver did fill the user and then releasing those funds so there is definitely accounting and like State embedded in a cross where we can see okay yeah Robbie's deposit transaction went into the across escrow contract on optimism if that's your origin chain and then we can also see that uh the solver let's make Andy be the solver Andy filled Robbie uh on the destination chain which was in this case arbitrum right and we can see that on the arbitrum blockchain and it routes

through the across contract on the uh arbin blockchain too so between between what we have in the across contract on optimism and in the across contract on arbitrum we can verify that that intent was fulfilled so there's definitely counting in a cross there however um it's not its own roll up because you didn't your deposit transaction was not written to a separate chain it was written to the deposit chain itself so there's sort of a way that you could abstractly think and there's many actually use ful analogies to how you could think about across the settlement layer as something of a rollup but very very in the purest sense of the word

it's absolutely not it's just literally doing accounting on the these deposits and fills between chains yeah um okay so the advantages of intents uh intent one intents can be really fast so so uh here's some of the data we have on a cross versus like other message based Bridges um I'm not picking on Stargate although I sometimes do but Stargate is up here and then um circle cctp is also up here too and these these systems uh send a message between blockchains or do work between

blockchains to to fill users and so across here is much much much faster because solvers actually don't have to wait for finality On the Origin chain to fill users so it's actually worth explaining what I mean by that like um and maybe circle cctp is a is a good example where if you make a deposit on like let's say arbitrum or let's we'll keep going optimism is an origin chain arbitrum is destination chain we'll use that for the the talk um but if I make a deposit on optimism through cctp circle is going to delete that USD usdc and then minted on the other side

and if that deposit transaction gets screwed up in any way Circle might literally just like lose money or delete money it'd be very bad so Circle doesn't want to trust the optimism sequencer when it says this deposit went through it can't afford to do so it all it actually doesn't even want to trust uh uh the first checkpoint it wants to have finality on ethereum that this transaction did in fact go through before it's going to allow the usdc to get minted on arbitrum because otherwise you could like be deleting money part real quick that takes seven days that finality so here's where Circle I think

intelligently doing things they can actually go and recompute and see if there was a a A Fault In optimism and so I think they probably are doing this because they're good at what they do right they can actually see they have all the information to know if the state transitions were valid within like a checkpoint right so they don't need to wait the seven days technically there's a little Nuance there but um they need to at least wait for that that our uh that optimism deposit to be checkpointed into uh ethereum and then for ethereum to achieve finality on that and that's why they take about 20 minutes to do

so um and that's all just int even though the risk of there being a reorg on optimism through there is extremely extremely small they like just can't afford to mess it up if it was like a $5 million transfer um so across is different because we basically have these solvers that are filling users with their own money and they're doing it for a small fee but these solvers if if Andy's the solver here Andy can go and be like yeah you know there hasn't been a three block reorg on ethereum in like forever and uh the risks of that reorg even or actually sorry we're going from optimism Andy

could just be like I trust the optimism sequencer optimism is not going to lie to me on this $10,000 deposit that Robbie made or this $200 deposit Robbie made um the probability of that is basically zero and so Andy can be like as soon as I see the pre-confirmation on optimism I can go and Phil Robbie on Arbitron right and that that ability for relays to take some very small finality risk but like they can take on some finality risks means across can be extremely fast in filling users across chains yeah I mean I've had transactions like e to arbit from like less than 5 seconds I know that that you're saying

now with EIP 444 denune whatever you want to call it it's less than a Cent and sub five seconds transactions um so I've definitely had some really really fast transactions on across which now kind of made me a believer in the intense system um but int intents can also be really slow if the fillers are busy or if the fillers have run out of money or they have other opportunity costs for filling somebody else's uh order with a different kind of better upside so how how why does that happen like why are sometimes fillers busy or they are like what's the what's the motive there or the incentive yeah I mean these are like good questions right so

um this intense system relies on these offchain actors to make user fills quickly um if the after actors don't show up then we have a problem so yeah they having a smoke break yeah now to be clear like users aren't at risk they can get their funds back or they'll get filled a little bit slower right so I actually think it's important to say that the problem here isn't a security problem it's like a speed speed guaranteed problem right and generally speaking like it's not any different than um particularly before the merge trying to have your transaction included on ethereum just on ethereum L1 like if

there was a lot of congestion on the network you either had to pay higher fees or wait a while right it's like okay that happens and so generally speaking the issue is if if a filler or relayer solver is not showing up to to relay these transactions it's because at that time they're not getting paid enough to do so so you got to pay them more or wait a minute and I think that like yeah there'd be something nice if we could always guarantee like a f sub5 second fill that would be really cool but uh I that's I don't think we can I don't think that's possible so instead

what we can do is like 99.9% of the time guarantee a sub5 second fill for modest size and just try to be really transparent with the users which we try to do in the across UI about what they should EXP yeah I mean it definitely is like it's like more than nine times like 95 out of 100 uh if not more um so so just to kind of work it under the hood are these fillers uh is this are they typically running like a like a automated system where like the liquidity is just kind of moved around based on like some program that they have yep um no this is great um anyone listening if you actually want to make some okay returns go to docs.

across. two go to the developer side and look at running a relayer we have the code ready for you to do it you can go and run a relayer it's it's cool um relays are competitive so like they're actually doing really intelligent things to fill users quicker um which is kind of cool right uh but um so it's a competitive business but it's still like reasonably profitable actually quite profitable and anyone can do this and we have like the reference implement mentation of a relayer that anyone can go download and run what are the capital requirements to be competitive as a relayer so this is interesting because like as you guys uh maybe maybe make

sense we didn't necessarily predict this um but there's more competition at smaller size because it requires less Capital to fill users at smaller size um so there's less competition at bigger size but you need to have more Capital to do so kind of makes sense so Capital requirements are not large like I mean you wouldn't really be able to do this with much less than like $10,000 type thing right um but um the capital requirements aren't large um uh it's just you know you're you become Limited in terms of the volume and size of of uh transfers you can fill makes sense okay

um second advantage of intense here here so we'll go like a little bit technical for a second but maybe we'll keep it high level um intense can be really secure and the observation here is if we go back to the tradeoffs between being fast cheap or secure what this whole intense architecture has done is it separated the Urgent part from like the complex part of the interrup problem and so in the Urgent part we just talked about why user wants like a really freaking fast fill and we're able to give that to them because these solvers are competing to Phill users um and they do this without sending any message

whatsoever uh the complex part is how we like securely message between blockchains right that's the hard thing to secure but because like across separated these things because the user already got filled we can actually take our sweet time um and actually spend a lot of money securely verifying that the user was actually filled and this this looks a little bit like General messaging right because now we're saying we're talking between blockchains and looking up and seeing what happened um the way AC cross does it is through some batching that I'm going to go into in a second um but generally speaking the core observation here is that once we've

done this intent thing we're able to kind of break this trilemma we gave the users their fast pills so now we can figure out how to verify that with time with the advantage of time and the ways we can verify this fill are like pretty broad right we could do this by sending messages over the canonical bridges that the rollups have um which are extremely secure because they're canonical uh but if we're coming off of a optimistic rollup it might take seven days um we can secure them with ZK proofs which is becoming more and more realistic although we're like not quite there yet yet uh in terms of every use case and we can also use optimistic systems which is

what across does where we can say hey here's what fill happened or in a cross's case we batch this together here are the set of fills and anyone can disagree with them so across has this like one honest disputer assumption which I think is a really really reasonable trust assumption here um but we can it's it's slow optimistic verification is slow we don't care because we've already filled the user so this is the advantage of like why AC cross is allowed to be really secure the third Advantage is that intense can be really freaking cheap um and this I I don't know if the listeners

or viewers will be able to see the screenshot but here we have average across speeds uh again against Stargate and circle cctp this is all pre uh uh 4844 so now across feeds L2 L2 are literally like one cent it's a two orders made into cheaper um than we're showing here so it's extremely cheap but the reason why uh across is so cheap here is because sending messages with every bridge transaction is expensive it just costs a lot of gas and or security to send messages back and forth and across has this Innovative way of

actually batching this together so we can do 10,000 Bridge transactions where Andy makes 10,000 small loans and then verify that all in one batch and spend all like amortise the cost of verification of those 10,000 Bridge transactions into like one message if you will are you sure Cross isn't a roll no I'm just missing the batching stuff does make it look roll up like so I was going to like Robbie's Point um it it's not a roll up in how it operates but the ability to batch together like the same way l2s batch together transactions and then check them into ethereum that concept

does apply to a cross where we're batching together the verification of these intents and then like uh verifying them in batches and so that part does look it has analogies it's analogous to how rollups work in some sense um the trade off here is that if Andy did in my example Andy did like 10,000 fills um before getting it repaid like he has a a cost there where he made loans on those 10,000 fills um and so like that tradeoff matters but here's where I kind of want

to like go into the the sort of math and the the concepts behind this this um and I'm trying to put a theoretical example that's pretty realistic so like a cross is routinely bridging around 50 million bucks in volume a day um and we're doing that over something like 25,000 Bridge transactions um so like what does this look like in terms of our verification costs well if I make a one hour loan so if on average uh solvers are making a loan for about an hour maybe two um a 1H hour loan at a 10% annualized interest rate on $50 million is $500 it's a small amount of money because it's a small

amount of time and then if I send I'm saying1 15 canonical messages if I do 150 verifications over a day which is this is a bit abstract but this is conceptually kind of what AC cross is doing um I might spend $2,000 in gas and Security on those 150 cross chain messages so my entire kind of security costs for a cross here are like 2500 bucks right whereas if I wanted to if I needed to send a message for each of those 25,000 trusted messages here I'm saying those messages sending those messages cost two bucks post 4844 it's cheaper than that but the

point is it's it's a real cost it's like a there's security cost in sending those m messages I have a much much much higher cost uh for uh sending a message between blockchains every time I I do a bridge transaction so sort of theoretically intense here with the batching concept can just be very cheap relative to Alternative designs I've got a value acrel question y um we brought up like this idea of like where value acrs in the modular stack to tun from Gauntlet which is the video we posted today and I I think we agreed that value ACC Cru to the users

and I think he made the point that it does so through the through tokens um so when we're looking at this this combination of General message passing or canonical message passing at one as the slow path and then uh intent layers as the fast path where do you see value uring do you see it uring to the slow path or do you see it occuring to the fast path or both or neither how do you how do you hash that up so my spicy take is value does not AC crew at the general messaging layer because like literally looking at the

slide instead of sending 25,000 messages I'm sending like 150 or something like that so if I'm saying I'm offering you a better value transfer experience but I'm sending like basically my world is we can have billions of cross-chain transactions happening but we're sending like a few hundred messages between blockchains so I don't think value is going to acre at the general messaging layer um do I think value can acre at this intent-based fast messaging layer I think yes but I I also think it's pretty efficient like I don't think this is the sort of thing where we're going to be ripping users faces off it just won't happen that way right and like generally

speaking guys this is the beautiful thing about blockchains like if you insert too big a moat around anything if you try to charge too much people are going to take their business elsewhere it's like hyper competitive that way um but let me see well this is actually kind of the point I was going to make in next slide but uh if I go to like this this slide if a cross is functioning as a settlement layer that enables these cross chain intents I do think that it's a settlement cheaper is cheaper and more efficient than the other settlement layers out there a cross can charge a modest fee at that layer and pay it to token holders the across token

holders and this is actually how acrosses like token economics are designed they look a lot like Unis swaps where there's like a fee that can get turned on by governance that were would charge a small like a couple bips of the value flowing through this settlement layer and that money could go to uh would go to across token holders um yeah quick question on that which is that like there's an article out there by the founder of Zora and he it's called hyper structures one of the parts of that article is that just the threat of the fee switch is enough to make that protocol valuable even if that fee switch is never turned on um what's your is it cross does it does

it have that Fe switch turned on now and if so why if not why not um so it does have a fe switch uh built into the code it is not turned on uh we haven't turned it on because bridging is competitive and it's still nent um and we want to establish our position better we don't want to be charging fees too early I think that's my view again is actually would be voted on by governance but I think I would personally think it's too early to turn this uh this fee on and so yeah like the the idea I am a little bit more of like a boomer trafi guy in the sense that I think um for things to ACR value they

ultimately have to charge fees um I spent a lot of time thinking about though when they need to charge fees and it might not be for a long time in the future um but like I really do having like studied and been close to the Unis swap team for a long time I think their whole path is right like the uni token for a while there people people have gone back and forth in terms of whether they believe it will acove value and now that they're talking about the fee switch again people are more like that was the 50% up move in the uni token people kind of were reminded oh yeah we could turn on fee here and it'll capture value right so I see both sides of it

cool and to close the loop here um on the value acrel uh Point um yeah I just want to go just to the slide that you were on here yeah yeah the cake uh because this this stack um lays out the it lays it visually lays out the stack here and there's also a lot of discussion around um the fat protocol thesis and the fat application thesis this has kind of like been the been the mode of like this value acrel conversation before modularity so like just to close that Loop do you think there is an acrel like to the to the applications do you think

it flows down the protocol or do you think modularity blows up that mental model and there's really no more like one directional flow of value um I mean but I think the silver layer is going to

be hyper competitive um but it's not like at a loss like it's it's going to the solvers are going to make the money required to run their business with like enough to pay salaries and run their computers right um the settlement layer I think there's also going to be competition of the settlement layer we're not going to be the only one but I think that there can be some degree of of scale some of network effects some degree of like trust too um and some degree of us having our own competitive Advantage at doing that part really well where value can get extracted there so I don't know if that's like in a sense the

settlement layer is sort of like a fat protocol is but because it's doing this like cross chain communication thing efficiently it's kind of hard to replicate right um but I think in this layer every layer is going to have their own value cruel um in proportion to the value they provide to the user got it um okay wait just to where were we so we did the cheap so I was making the point here that um this goes back again to the value CR bit generalized message passing is important

but I am just of the opinion that not that many messages are going to get get sent between blockchains because we're going to be doing this intent thing on top and we're going to batch settle them um so the idea of like like a cross can scale to send a billion dollars between chains by sending 150 messages a day right whereas if you wanted to do that with a a message Centric bridge design you'd be sending like 10 million messages and that sounds extremely expensive to me that sounds like just cost a lot of money so then I just said like our vision here so uh and this is a good recap a little bit of what we were talking about at the intent layer um we

want to help applications build efficient RFQ systems for their intents so they're able to generate here's the user action here's what the user wants to do they're going to run an auction for solvers to compete and they might take a cut they might take a fee the application and we want to like help them do that because I think that's still how applications could capture value and how users are going to get the best fill at the solver layer um we want Max competition at the solver layer um this is just going to be like whoever can deliver this service the best deserves to get paid and one of the things we're working on establishing is a standard

for cross chain intents so that every solver it's easy easy for solvers to join this network because there's a standard for what a cross intent looks like um and and real quick on that one if you don't mind um we talked a lot about basically cheap fast secure Crossing intent cross chain communication between basically a lot of like the big the big chains and across this currently all along with the big rollups and ethereum kind of just to set you up here do believe that we see a future of of like thousands of rollups or at least hundreds and hundreds of different chains something that you like are

bought into I'm bought into it yeah I'm bought I'm bought into the idea that like I don't necessarily and these things yeah yeah yeah I I don't necessarily think that running your own app chain will be like running your own like server I think it it'll be a little bit more involved than that or a little maybe not more work but there'll just be fewer use cases but I do think it's going to be like pointand click deployments for app chains and there will be advantages to running your own environment um and if interop is solved here where it's you know uh not even a a a penny to move

between Chains It's like a 0.001 cents and it takes 200 milliseconds which I think is very possible then there's really no reason why you wouldn't do this so often yeah so um I do think that there will only be a handful of general purpose rollups that exist maybe you know three to 10 general purpose rollups end up being the ones that win and then application specific rollups there will be many many I am a believer in that and this fits with what we're trying to do here right where if we establish the standard for crossing intense we have this deep solver Network it can just sort of be

the infrastructure that like abstracts away sending value between these chains and just makes it happen quickly and beautifully right and I think that's where you're getting to with this Vision obviously intent and the rfqs they're they're quite faster quite cheaper which is kind of what we've established and even more secure than some these other GMP platforms the issue that I'm kind of seeing and that I can't really get over is how are we going to support solvers and market makers needing to add every single new app Civic rollup general purpose rollup how are they gonna add support for all these lay all these new chains

permissionless like without a ton of Dev tool and a ton of BD like like like how does a cross go from where it is now to supporting a thousand chains without freaking you having to get on the phone with every chain and being like hey well no I mean Andy really good push right and it's something we're actively working on but like first of all a standard for intense helps a lot because we're basically like okay solvers like just listen to this right right and then what we also require and what we want to be very fast deployments to any uh rollup ecosystem we know about so if you're a standard op stack deployment or a standard arbit from orbit deployment

you could have a cross like day one that that would that makes sense if you're going to go do a bunch of like custom code and all that that like in your own rollup then yeah it's going to take you longer to get that support but that's probably why people won't want to do that because they're There's real tradeoffs and maybe not a lot of advantages those should be special cases so it's like it's kind of just evolving standards and best practices that then make it really easy for infrastructure to support something day one not dissimilar from like the evm it's like each rollup doesn't have its own execution environment because like there'd be no tooling for it um all these rollups have standardized around

the evm and then it's mostly easy to transport the tooling um to different rollups because they all support a common execution environment so there's a world where like across or the cross chain intent standards which across has has co-created or created amongst other participants is like a part of like rollup Siz of service platforms or is a part of like the standup building platform for a arbit morbit chain or an OP stack L like a base L3 or like even like a ZK sync ZK stack L3 basically hyper chain yes yep yep yep and you don't foresee a lot of Dev work or big trouble or big like cordination to make that happen it's

something that is able to be done potentially quickly and easily and scalable well the dev work is like some of the work we're doing right by building it across in such a way that it makes it no work to turn on another roll up Beauty all right so the bottom layer the settlement layer this we talked about this but in the summary like we want to cross to be this cheap secure efficient settlement layer for crossi intense um and there will be other settlement layers I'm sure but if we can be the cheapest and most efficient way to settle the cross chain intense we think that's of a lot of value to us um so goes back to the slide like what our what our vision for the in op

stack ends up looking like um yeah yeah and that's my that's my talk guys that's awesome I'm feeling I'm feeling bullish on AC cross did I I said across quite a few times I also said intense quite a few times did I pill you how'd I do what's what's the what's the takeaway I'm a cross pill for sure we didn't say modular very many times so maybe I'll I I'll try first and then and then har please jump in like I I think it's really cool I when I think of modular I think of unbundling and I know Andy's got his perspective on modular as well it's about optionality I think it's

really cool to see uh the two uh cross chain functions unbundled like we unbundle the interop into the slow path and the fast path one is for messages one is for Value um and I think that's really cool to see because it means that we can get the best of both worlds which is secure messages um and and fast and cheap uh value transfers across chains I agree with that fully and I mean some of these are new ways that we've even thought about how we concept ize our product but the unbundling the Urgent part of like filling a user ASAP from like the complex part of how do I

trustless transfer between block or TR trustless message between blockchains that that is an unlock for us and so like that unbundling is real so unbundle the value transfer from the generalized messaging and like rbby to go back for a second um you know about a year ago maybe a little bit more now all of these like Bridges were all all trying to talk about generalized arbitrary messaging that was like the move it's like oh how are you doing arbitrary messaging how are you doing like and we actually didn't and I give a lot of credit to uh my team particularly Ryan on our team is kind of the product lead for across he's like we're focusing on value transfer because it's a big enough problem that

we need to do it itself optimally and I think that was a that's been very huge for us where we've focused on uh a an we've unbundled one part of the interop problem and we actually think it is the biggest part of the interop problem and we're trying to do it better than doing the whole stack all at once yep yeah yeah I mean kudos to you guys because like everyone else is thinking like well it's it's number it's zeros and ones right information is valid and you know whether it's value or a message it's the same thing but it's not and you guys thought deeply enough about the

problem to realize that there are nuances differences for the different types of messages the ones that contain value and the ones that don't yeah thanks man appreciate that yeah congratulations on making it through the uh Grill session of modular March you've done great AR and thank you for coming on uh when I'm off the air you guys can score me and like say like yeah you know little underperformance there little did okay there um but no no Andy Robbie um thank you for thank you for doing this thank you for doing modular March thank you for um educating the space and thanks for having me it's really fun cheers buddy