Modular March EP 14: Conservatism in The Modular Ecosystem with Lumio

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] gmgm welcome to modular march today we

have our special guest aljo from Lumia aljo welcome to modular March awesome thank you for having me excited to be here awesome yeah welcome excited to learn about your uh your thesis here about the way that crypto should be uh yeah uh if people can see the slides now uh proof of um it's a little bit tongue and- cheek but we'll go into it why uh I'm relatively bullish or maybe conservatively bullish on proof of stake uh and why it's important to stay humble as we continue building pushing the envelope on what's possible in decentralization and robust systems that uh will form the backbone of the

financial infrastructure for the future so yeah excitic to dive in here and uh you know put a little bit of fun of what we're doing and go into the work that you know hopefully will be adopted by millions if not billions of people awesome let's do it cool yeah so you know I've been a St startup founder uh for a few years uh but really my uh life goal is to be a stand-up comedian uh seems like getting a podcast and a Netflix special might make me Rich before this crypto stuff so just starting to hedge my career and you know these slides and presentation is a good way to get up on a soap box and you know try out some of these jokes so uh kind of like bear with me as we go through

them uh some of them land some of them don't but uh doing it on Zoom I hear is like the worst way to do it because you have no idea there people are laugh for now but hopefully Robbie and and these camera being off might give me a good idea uh but yeah how do we tell a story what's the best way to tell a story I think it's through mics uh right now you know in this moment in time at this point in history we're going through a zeist a Renaissance of memes if you will uh Doge and I would argue Bitcoin was the first one to go through this where a collective Consciousness tapped into a moment that allowed us really to connect with each other and share ideas so maybe broadly defining a meme as an idea but

very narrowly also as a mind virus uh according to Richard Dawkins uh the author of the book The Selfish Gene uh obviously a biologist but one chapter focused very narrowly on this idea of memes being ideas that just self-replicate and spread around like viruses they really don't care whether it's good or not for the host they just spread around and this is what we're seeing right now and it's very interesting uh the Market's pricing the mid at a very high value I think at one point Pepe FL flipped ARB uh arbitrum which is you know one of the major l2s on ethereum uh which you know maybe is a signal of exuberance but maybe it's a signal of something else and at the end of the day I think our Collective belief

that something is worth something is what started this whole ordeal that's what satoshi's Vision was uh after we lost trust in the financial system after 2008 not really knowing how much money was out there having rehypothecation of assets through derivatives uh indefinitely to the point where they just blew up and you know nobody really knew how or why and you know we're still trying pick up the pieces um we came up with this idea of Bitcoin this Collective uh social construct for money which arguably you know all forms of money are but uh how do we know that it's safe how do we know that this stuff will live in perpetuity uh according to satoshi's vision and you know Bitcoin kind of becomes a little bit like a

religion uh part of my background I've been you know following in satoshi's vision for more than 10 years and you know some people call us Maxis or whatever we're still building at the edge of innovation we still want to push the envelope we don't think it's all said and done but the most important thing to think about is how do we keep this stuff safe how do we make sure that it actually can live on uh Beyond us that was satoshi's vision and you know we'll get into that in a little bit and hopefully we can carry that on as we push the envelope on Innovation and what's possible through these decentralized systems so anom who I would say is what modern Dame philosopher on x um posits here that the most dangerous part of making a lot of

money is the ego that comes with it right and what is ego ego is just the thing that connects us to our Humanity to our own self-identity and Consciousness and in order to have ego death we must tap into the collective Consciousness into all of humanity without really thinking of ourselves and the way that we can do this is through again tying it back to the idea of money is the social construct for how do we exchange value on the internet and you know this is something that hadn't really been done before but Satoshi was able to implement it um through proof of work so this is my thesis on why I think memes are probably the only thing

holding this thing together um probably nothing else if the meme dies then probably Bitcoin and everything else dies so it's important to keep the memes going keep them pumping if you will and if not for that it's at least fun that it's still around so we'll go through a little bit of history on blockchain and mimetics through blockchain uh proof of work was the first implementation of this going back to 2008 or 2009 when Satoshi first published their white paper essentially positing that physics or electricity could uh sustain a system of adversarial actors essentially coordinating to sustain a currency again going back to

the idea that money or currency is just a social construct that we agree has value and allows us to transact and collaborate with each other to build great things like you know computers and blockchains and whatnot uh we must ask ourselves like what is actually securing the network what's actually securing the blockchain what is is it our Collective belief that it works um you know if we go outside of of crypto for a really long time we had to collect the belief that gold was valuable uh properties of hard money like uh short fungibility and um essentially uh finite Supply as precious medals have for gold enabled us

to share value in something that couldn't really just be inflated or be you know printed out this is why sea shells for example never really took off his money but gold did um and not too long ago around the 1970s we had um essentially a d dep pegging of the gold standard if you will right this was around the 1970s and we're now going through one of the biggest experiments in humanity of just free floating currencies for thousands of years we were you know essentially pegged to gold and now we're just pegged to I would argue the US dollar or the US hemony so we'll kind of see how that works but uh to satoshi's Vision we must bring back those properties of hard money of gold of uh Finance Supply value that enables

us to just transact with each other without any third party uh just inflating you know coming up with infinite Supply mins or an infinite Supply hack button um so yeah that brings us back to why Bitcoin is valuable um initially you know it was worth it was worthless then it went to 100K pretty quickly um within a few years and you know then it hit a billion and now it's at a trillion and uh our Collective belief on why Bitcoin matters I think is partly what's holding it together but what bootstrapped it really was the physics the math simple math that it takes a certain amount of electricity which translates into money uh and that amount

of electricity which translates into money should equal uh roughly the amount of coins or or mining Rewards or emissions that Bitcoin gives out uh perpetually at least for 150 years or so more um and for whatever reason that that just stuck and when you look at Bitcoin actually a lot of the numbers are arbitrary so why one megabyte uh why 21 million um I really think he was just being relatively arbitrary you know pick the smallest number for Megabyte like a floppy disc isn't even a megabyte um you know pick 21 million the you know 42 million is and the hitch tracker God is like the meaning of life so why not

break it in half but that's all to say like this was just arbitrary just kind of random it doesn't really matter what we could have picked it could have been Doge for example you know started at a higher higher inflation schedule um but the idea is just hey we still need a collective belief that money is money and that we want to transact with each other and that 21 million again as a meme people argue I think Jamie Diamond argued that you know Satoshi could just come back to life and make it you know 100 million if you wanted to but us together as a collective Consciousness controlling Bitcoin won't let that happen right the 21 million is now part of the meme and you know if it ever Forks then that'll probably be Bitcoin classic Bitcoin will continue being 21 million uh but it's important to

remember that it was bootstrapped through physics again electricity is what's sustaining the value in Bitcoin and at least for the time being again I'm a little bit of a Bitcoin Maxi I think this is important to maintain because proof of stake again is a very experimental thing just like free floating currencies are and it might work out uh I really hope that it does because we're betting a lot on ethereum but you know it might not and if it doesn't then you know maybe we go back to ethereum Classic or Bitcoin or whatever um the Bitcoin Renaissance is happening and l2s are coming up so you know even if all the other stuff blows up if ethereum blows up you know we'll still have Bitcoin hopefully um I got a I got a quick question because I've heard some people uh try to try to put a

put a number on bitcoin's value or try to rationalize bitcoin's value and saying that it's a store of electricity and that's kind of what gives it its value you know I I I can see that but I it's still very different from something like a battery where there's literally like electricity in this in this container and then you can use that to power your home or power your car um like do you believe in that thesis do you think there's some truth to that if so why if not why not yeah that's a that's like a really good um metaphor uh I would say maybe a way to evolve that would be it's a store of security and then that security you literally have to expend electricity to

secure it so uh it's a monetary system right it's a internet of money programmable money but in the future it could even be all these applications that are built on ethereum so then the question is what's the cost of securing that and the cost is literally electricity which is you know P to oil peeg to I don't know solar whatever right um and then bitcoin's sole purpose is literally just to ACR more more and more and more security more and more and more electricity and this is like controversial so might say oh you know it's you know got not good for the planet or whatever but like hey if we really care about Bitcoin if we really care about securing Financial infrastructure or maybe like all the infrastructure for applications maybe we'll figure out how to make Bitcoin

more efficient maybe we'll figure out how to make Renewables work so that you know we can continue powering Bitcoin um this sounds a little bit out there but I think Bitcoin will probably enable us to build a Dyson Sphere so a Dyson Sphere is essentially a way to mine the Sun for electricity or power and if you think about it Bitcoin the hardest part of a Dyson Sphere would be sending the electricity right like if you collect this if you put a bunch of solar panels on satellites like how do you send that electricity back to earth like it' be pretty hard right maybe you could like you know Bounce Energy off the moon or whatever but um or you could just literally mine Bitcoin and then send money back to Earth um that's like a way to convert electricity into money again

money is like a way for us to collaborate um so yeah uh to answer your your question specifically I think it's a store of electricity but that's more so a metaphor for security right like it's expensive to bootstrap a bunch of electricity if imagine imagine yeah imagine if uh what was securing the Earth's Financial infrastructure and applications was literally the Dyson Sphere or the sun right that we're mining for the Earth and you know if we think of Bitcoin and perpetuity just AC crewing more and more security more and more electricity I think that's the eventual end goal or you know maybe there's some limit and and Bitcoin doesn't work out but you know that's all theoretical I guess yeah when you when you talk to bitcoin Maxis um it's kind of crazy

because it's the most conservative one but it's the one that as you extrapolate to 100 200 years are like the only ones that are probably thinking that in that time Horizon so uh an interesting uh you know within Bitcoin circles an interesting debate is like will the minor fees be able to like once you have no more inflation or emissions will the minor fees be able to pay for the security or the minor um and like to be to be honest nobody freaking knows right like it may or may not um and then at that point in time like what happens um I guess nobody knows but we could theorize and maybe like maybe run some experiments maybe like run stuff on Litecoin or Doge which are Forks of Bitcoin but um yeah I mean that's all to say that Bitcoin is the most

conservative and hopefully we continue to you know Foster and develop it and really like respected as as the Genesis of all this and um you know at the end of the day we should be pushing the envelope but keeping in mind that you know something like Bitcoin where Satoshi is no longer around there's no Bitcoin Foundation you know that's maintaining this stuff um that it is I mean it is like the backbone of this infrastructure it's like you know the medium of exchange the unit of account most people probably think in BTC more now than actual you know dollars um so yeah we should continue to Foster it and continue pushing innovation there um yeah so that that transitions us into proof of stake um this is where the memes really come into play

because what is a meme again going back to the idea it's a collective belief in something it's an idea and if we all Collective believe that you know the US dollar or Bitcoin or whatever ethereum holds value then we should support it and we should develop it and we should have an inclusive community that continues growing but what happens when that Meme dies right what happens when the idea of religion dies right Christianity and I don't know many other religions are in Decline and those are just memes those are just ideas that for a really long period of time replicated but now are in Decline um and you know obviously we're really early this you know Jesus is

still alive italic is still walking around maybe we still don't know who God is Satoshi never really reveal themselves but you know this religion that we now call crypto is led by real people and it's a it's a it's a cultural project as Alex Stokes here very very sharply says um you know we're just trying to figure out what to do as a community and carry this thing forward and you know we're just using software to coordinate people these are Dows these are blockchains um but at the end of the day the culture or the community is the most important thing if we all collectively Stop Believing in ethereum there's nothing at stake right like ethereum loses value it goes to zero there's nothing securing ethereum and it

just all falls apart so so you know thinly held House of Cards but as long as we all collectively strongly believe in ethereum then it should continue to work theoretically right um and it's very important to note that ethereum didn't get here on its own it bootstrapped through proof of work right not not too long ago we transitioned to proof of stake and this was a huge milestone in the entire ecosystem and without that bootstrapping phase who would have known right like maybe people didn't really believe in this um and proof of work as well has been hacked you know theum classic let's not forget that ethereum classic a bunch some a bunch of people took um I think like Cloud Miners and you know 51% attacked ethereum classic so all this

stuff is still theoretical um there's uh papers out there about ethereum's proof of work potentially being vulnerable to like onethird attacks U so if like onethird of uh validators were able to collude or even I think even a smaller number that um so again this is all still very experimental uh that's all to say you know we should we should continue pushing the envelope there's 200 billion dollars at stake securing this network um but you know if anything goes wrong gu we still have Bitcoin or ethereum classic um but uh again let's let's not forget that proof of stake is literally just proof of memes right proof of proof of coins um and until those memes until that that eth which is a meme has a monetary pre

premium uh you know your thing which is secured by proof of stake is probably not as safe as you know ethereum and this is why I think igen layer uh has been super hyped up because it's essentially just reaking or reusing the existing value that already has in the collective meme the whole ethereum Community which is sustaining the value of ethereum um I think this is also why a lot of the l2s have been you know have been somewhat careful in transitioning to Shared sequencers where potentially they might need a you know another coin to to have essentially like another proof of stake layer on top of proof of stake because yeah I mean if you there's some uh Black Swan event or we all just collectively you know lose faith in that

thing then that thing is no longer secure so um yeah again I think it's important to just you know stay humble and we should continue pushing the Innovation I think if ethereum was able to do it I think others can also reach that escape velocity and become memes that secure networks through proof of stake but we should stay humble and you know just just remember where we came from and maybe not move too quickly because there's there's a lot of money at stake and some of the stuff um yeah so next evolution of the meme is proof of time like what the hell is wifi or whatever Whi um you know again we should respect these memes uh literally yeah Robin Hood one of the major uh brokerages in the US they listed salana but shortly after uh

listed with in less than a year and that's freaking crazy um this means that literally this is breaking through the mainstream the memes themselves are holding value I think it wouldn't be impossible if like one of these meme coins like literally became bigger than the underlying layer one or Layer Two where it's living on and then like the question then gets like what's safer like being secured by the meme or being secured by the coin of the layer one right like imagine theoretically speaking whiff was worth more than salana like would you rather trust your salana at stake with with verus a la at stake with soul um I don't know theoretical maybe it never happens but just how giving how crazy this Market is you know who knows um but yeah

this is all just to say like you know obviously so we we come we've been building on apos uh we have the top amm the top wallet there we definitely want to continue pushing um the boundaries of innovation I think blockchain is still uh relatively unusable ethereum layer one specifically and Bitcoin are are uh boxing out a large large portion of the population like the 15 even like 15 cent gas fees dollar gas fees $4 gas fees $100 gas fees just like impossible to do any form of uh real transaction like imagine if you're paying for the bus and it's like you know 50 cents in your country and you have to pay with Bitcoin or something like it's just not going to work so uh we should definitely be pushing the boundaries I think salana

has done a tremendous job of onboarding a million I think millions of people probably tens of millions of maybe tens of millions of people at this point onto this speculation around memes uh onto just speculation around uh cryptocurrency and the fact that the user experience feels a lot like a Robin Hood right you don't have to wait forever like Bitcoin you literally have to wait 30 minutes to you know buy your nft or you know send the transaction whereas on Solana almost immediately sometimes under a second you're able to get confirmations um and the fees don't really you know are negligible so this is definitely a huge incremental Improvement in where we have and again don't don't get me wrong we should respect this and continue to push Shana to become more like ethereum uh but

again we should be uh conservative in how we move forward things can break you know uh Solana definitely breaks all the time and it's kind of become a meme in itself um even now it's like a little bit unusable uh things you know you're sending duplicate transactions they don't have like a a concept of a memory pool that's you know architectural designs that at the beginning made sense but now in production maybe not and we must remember just like Bitcoin was made by people so was ethereum so was salana and you know we'll hopefully continue iterating on and improving it until it becomes a decentralized backbone for infrastructure similar to bitcoin where Solana Foundation totally can move on you know and and this thing can continue operating in perpetuity without us

because the most important thing for money I think it's just having a credible neutral layer that anybody can trust or you know trust that they don't have to trust anybody um but yeah that I believe that wraps up uh the session on memes what I'll leave with is satoshi's dead and so are you you know we're all going to die as as founders of protocols the centralized protocols we're all going to die at some point and the only way that this thing continues being alive is to keep that Meme alive so um yeah I think it's very important that these memes continue proliferating not just Bitcoin and not just eth but also you know these cultural moments like whiff and Doge and Bon and Dudu and uh yeah I think it just brings people collectively together to think about what's important and if they sustain

enough value then they become a unit of account medium of exchange essentially money and I think that was satoshi's Vision so let's keep that Vision alive um and yeah just kind of how to tie this all into what we're building uh we're trying to create a credibly neutral layer to deploy alternative VM applications onto ethereum uh we're also researching Bitcoin l2s although they're really uh you know I would say far away from being production ready maybe like several years so focusing very narrowly on the virtual machine layer allows us to inherit the security all the work essentially that's been done by teams like arbitrum optimism uh polygon ZK zinc and then just very narrowly focus

on the virtual machine component so that teams that have built on opos salana sui Cosmos can just copy paste their code and deploy onto um essentially the the places where so far has shown to have a Lindy effect of security liquidity and applications building so uh the benefit of this is that you'll be able to as an example uh we built again one of the top applications on apos we can just copy paste their code the pl onto optimism the pl onto arbitrum have eth native liquidity uh have composability with base have composability with OP main net and uh shared liquidity a shared Bridge uh that's uh validated through the prod proofs that maintain optimism and you

know it's it's very very hard to do an L2 um you know a lot of twos are proliferating I'm sure if you talk to those teams they you know some of them uh or will tell you that it's very very hard and even the major l2s that have been working around for a long time are still not there we still have permission fraud proofs for example H that's not to say that this is not maturing and very very soon I believe in M this year we're going to have permissionless fraud proofs we're going to have shared sequencers and then again the vision of of uh a decentralized credibly neutral layer that nobody has to trust because it's trustless will start to come to light and we just want to leave our Mark in ethereum's uh infinite Garden by allowing anyone with any virtual machine with any language to just deploy onto

where they want to deploy um and yeah here just some comparisons of of what you can and the basic architecture is just deploying any with any virtual machine onto these existing l2s where there's already a Lindy effect of security liquidity and composability um just a little bit of background from us we've started building applications with the Libra DM technology even before Aptos and suie were around so uh very familiar with the mve te uh very bullish on it uh it's essentially uh Sam blacksher who uh is literally a a a ling like computer linguist PhD uh took the you know the design implementations of rust the resource and the static type and made a framework essentially for uh

blockchain applications so smart contract so um very very clever uh you know took essentially took the best of solidity and R and just made it into this you know baby that has a native approver built in uh you know so you didn't have to use like third party libraries although you know in ethereum you can definitely do formal verification but you have to pull in N prover has like native upgradeability um so it's just like a just feels right just like you know driving in a you know Bugatti versus a gently used 2001 Honda Civic um which ethereum sometimes feels like uh so yeah you know we've been building when Facebook first came out with this technology we thought this is the next big thing um if you remember DM was

first permissionless then it became permission as regulars were like wait you're trying to make the world's money um so anyway yeah uh we wanted to make the move virtual machine permission list we experimented with the substrate framework for polka dot uh the cosmos framework uh just to be able to deploy if the uh L2 Frameworks like the op stack were mature enough back back then uh you know when we started building this we probably would have started there but just now they're starting to get to the maturity level where uh the l2s are going to look a lot like Cosmos and polka dot that was the vision and has been the vision for a long time so um you know a lot of the work that we did is now very applicable to what we're doing now and and again enabling the virtual machine component and these um

modular uh application Stacks that enable you to build with really you know Choose You Know choose your VM choose your data availability later um even like choose your own settlement layer um so yeah you know we we work with that as Aptos and suei evolve from the DM project uh they each raise $400 million uh we transitioned to building out uh infrastructure on top of Aptos so we built out the top wallet the top amm and uh Aptos I think will continue to grow uh I think right now as salana is being stress tested a lot of the you know kinks are coming out where people are like okay maybe the ux isn't perfect maybe pessimistic concurrency is not as great as optimistic concurrency uh just you know for the viewers

pessimistic concurrency means you need to select the memory that you're going to action on so you need to lock that memory whereas optimistic concurrency you don't have to lock that memory so you get uh better user experience uh you know some performance like some people report on salana things taking several seconds for example um the memory pool they just inherited again conservatively from ethereum so having a fee Market in a memory pool uh so some of the issues we're seeing now of like duplicate transactions don't happen as much so yeah I think Aptos and sui definitely made iterative improvements over salana kind of like the next generation of blockchains and um you know I think they saw potential theoretically even as like we expect Millions if not billions of people to come you know 30,000 100,000 transactions per second are not going to

be able to maintain you know concurrently millions or billions of users so I think it's important to have you know diversity in this and you know we're still bullish on on opos um however we want to go back to our Grassroots you know my my my values and principles are alongside decentralization and following satoshi's Vision so this is why we're building lumio a conservative way to deploy uh alternative VM applications from apto salana uh onto ethereum and yeah excited to you know bring it into Market we're on testing it now with the move implementation we're going to be able to get to mainnet uh pretty soon and uh yeah start to show the world that you don't need to be vendor locked in to the evm on on ethereum how does that that native

prover in the ER more so how does the native upgradeability of move how do you reconcile the the upgradeability with the decentralization and the censorship resistance that is so important yeah for sure I mean uh people should be aware that upgradability is essentially back doors into def5 protocols I think Serum is the best example of this on Solana when nobody knew who had the upgrade keys to zum everybody freaked out and they're like oh my God like who the hell has access to the money um so yes upgradeability is definitely very very very can be very very very um risky but it's still useful in Integrations for example if you're building like trading Bots or um you

know even if you're going towards gradual decentralization you can have upgradeability hopefully people will you know eventually uh you know migrate to immutable but um you know it has its trade-offs immutable you know if you things up like there's literally no going back um so yeah I mean definitely uh it's it's a trade-off uh for example liquid swap is the the immutably and you do have that choice when you deploy the contract to do it immutably or to have it be upgradable um but uh for Integrations for example for trading Bots uh you know market makers Etc a lot of that stuff is still smart contracts and you know it's still fairly centralized and people want to be able to upgrade their code relatively easily um on ethereum what that looks like is through uh Pro proxy contracts which just feels very janky and it's like kind

of hard to manage and and look at and and insect so uh just having it be built in is like pretty nice just feels just feels good gotcha I'm curious what kind of decisions you might make differently than uh other teams who aren't so let's say like libertarian or like so uh deeply rooted in the ethos of crypto like doesn't have to be a direct example but like what what have you seen like like there's there's the angle that you're coming out and there's like different types of builders in the space like how how how do does your ethos impact your your decision- making and yeah just curious more about that yeah I think it's a tradeoff because we're not

able to move as quickly um and offer the performance improvements that a lot of this Cutting Edge technology has so we might be foregoing for example using a new data availability uh layer that enables faster cheaper transactions for something maybe like uh I don't know eel one for a period of time then maybe like Ian right um and I think that comes with trade-offs because you you could be able to offer a better user experience but then the trade-off might be liveness for example if the data availability layer goes down then that's going to impact you know the user experience during those points of downtime um so yeah I mean I think it's a trade-off uh I would

say the most the most conservative we want to be is at the settlement layer and I would love to experiment at the sequencer uh maybe like execution layer uh like I think this is a meta that I'm not sure hasn't taken off yet but I think should I think near is kind of pioneering this but using alternative l1s that already have you know value and at stake securing blockchains to use for data availability uh sequencing Rome is an example of a project that's you know aiming to use salana for decentralized sequencing um and the the sequencer component is already like a socially acceptable centralized component right right now they're all centralized sequencers so if you were to just bootstrap that you know through the

security of existing l1s I think that's like a good trade-off um so I'd say I'm I'm more of like a settlement Maxi you know I think there's definitely trade-offs that you can make um but yeah I mean I think there's there's value in building conservatively in crypto because you know you could hope that nothing goes wrong and if nothing goes wrong that's awesome but when things go wrong it it sucks and there's like no going back yeah so for you guys though if you're going to use ethereum for data availability or I get at some point or other depending on your decision um the the user experience and the fast execution that all happens with the move VM right like that's kind of where that comes from uh so it's all it's all

dependent so the move virtual machine can enable paraliz transaction execution but you're still dependent on ethereum layer one or your data availability layer for cost for example so it definitely it definitely impacts certain components but it's not the all n all be all um like for example uh you know move is has this native prover built in but you can also do formal verification with evm um I think the and similarly you know you can do paralyzed transaction execution uh natively but you can also do block STM on evm and still have paralyzed transaction execution with evm so I think at the end the virtual machine is relatively uh commoditized in terms of like the end user experience I think more importantly for the user experience

I think data availability is probably more important um is likely one for date availability for

a period of time until it's safe enough to use these other ones um so you know we don't have to maintain those components we just benefit from the upgrades that they make um but then again the trade-off is that you know maybe we're not able to explore and push the boundaries as you know other uh you know isolated l2s might be able to yeah um when it comes to uh like the modular stack the modular kind of thesis what is like what is the thing that excites you currently the most of of the of this concept yeah I think it's it's the ability to just have diversity in how you choose the tech stack uh I think again putting all your eggs in one

basket onto just the evm just to move just the salon ofn might be you know not the best thing long term uh similarly on data availability like you want redundancy and the data availability right like if one of these goes down you want to be able to you know have the others so I think it's diversity that it brings to the tech stack um like I think it would probably like Innovation would probably become overly stagnant as it has on bitcoin for example to kind of bring it back um whereas with modularity we're able to test all these ideas put them to the test in production and then you know maybe naturally the the market kind of coalesces towards a shelling point then you also have this diversity that you know continues to Foster more Innovation continues to Foster and push

you know the the edge and boundaries of what's possible what is your thesis on the end result of l2s like recently we heard um Hart from across in umaa his thesis is that there's G to be a handful of winners take most yeah maybe thousands of app chains and app specific robs but a handful of General Bookers ones how do you feel about that and how does that affect your thinking or what is your thesis yeah I think that's that's very much aligned with how we're thinking about it these Technologies so if we look at for example uh search engines or we look at uh you know chips it's a network effect and uh the power law

distribution of this network effect is that the sum of the the tail equals I think it's like half of the the big one and we're seeing this literally in the price of Bitcoin where like the sum of all the other coins equals you know all of Bitcoin yeah exactly yeah and I think similarly here you'll get but not to say like the you know the Google you know could be surpassed or whatever so like Sal very easily overtake ethereum but maybe Bitcoin you know stays as the number one Etc so very similarly here I think we will probably have you know kind of like an aggregation or you know conglomeration of of the top ones that people trust the most that has the most uh Network effects around composability

uh and then there'll be aggregation layers like the shared sequencer maybe validity proofs that enables just the user experience to feel more like a monolithic chain where you have shared security shared liquidity composability um and then you know kind of have like these bubbles around ethereum and uh maybe like rely on Bridges or other forms of like connecting value um yeah I that kind of aligns with my vision too I think you'll probably have a power law distribution of l2s and that's why we're also betting on integrating into the existing ones as opposed to trying to one one analogy uh doy posted this essentially she said that um l2s are like cities and you know they have their own communities their own cultures so

carrying on that analogy I think arbitrum optimism are like San Francisco and New York you know early cities like very cool people very smart people congregating there uh great ideas uh whereas you know the undertaking of starting a new L2 is kind of like okay let's go and bootstrap a new city and like you know the middle of the country or something and like I think that's you know it could definitely play out you could be the next Denver or whatever but very easily you know be be hard to bootstrap or compete against you know the coastal cities good take well Al thanks for coming on modular March and um giving this presentation definitely a unique one and uh it's kind of good to have a refresher on like why we're even here in

the first place you kind of get lost in all in the sauce a bit Yeah so appreciate that amazing thank you yeah thank you for having us and me and and thank you for the opportunity cheers