Modular vs. Monolithic Short Debate with Aptos Co-Founder Avery Ching

Transcript

[Music] [Applause] [Music] he welcome to majer day we're here with Avery the uh co-founder and CTO of aptose and you've got some contrary beliefs so you had a good panel and

you're here at Moder day um so yeah maybe let's unpack that a bit modular versus monolithic I know you're a big move guy um what are these contrary beliefs so I'll say um what we think about when we think you know modular versus say mod integrated stacks one of the key differences is think about cars for example you know if I I might have a Lexus I might have a Range Rover might have a Toyota I can take those pieces together and try to build a Ferrari but it's really really hard right so if I was building a Ferrari out of the box I need special Springs I need special materials I need certain tires that make sense for this particular stack and without being able to kind of change every L of the stack it's really really hard to build a high performance vehicle and that's the kind of I think

the way you think about building app toss all the way from move all around storage we'd be able to change every single piece to optimize for the best user experience for the best performance for the best security for that infrastructure so even using specialized code bases from different um you know different projects and putting them together it'll get it'll get you close to the Ferrari but you're you're saying that to get the full Ferrari H owning your stack is the way to do it but what about what what if people are are going to question your centralization or you're bootstrapping your own economic security and and your validator set and questions about whether you can scale to a billion users or even just a 10

million kind of how do you how do you stack up against kind of these uh more uh modular stacked uh Chains It's a great question so when we think about security actually developing a single stack is much much easier to secure you don't have to test 100 different iterations of pairing this piece with that piece and trying to put together test framework that's very very hard to verify um it allows us to focus as well we have limited you know resources from developer teams I think that's something that's across the board true it also reduces the communication having in a single community of developers uh for the move and apas ecosystem uh there have been more than 400 developers that have contributed to the the code base it can be very decentralized from a developer standpoint it can also be very develop decentralized from a network

standpoint the metrics we care about from decentralization are thinking about things like nooo coefficient liveness coefficient and for those metrics apas is is up there with all the top ones uh so we do believe it's very possible to build those things in a very decentralized fashion with respect to the last piece about scalability um that has to do with the way you design your software stack and being able to produce something that is heavily and highly paralyzable all the way from the top the way you think about the constructs of the language all the way down to the lowle infrastructure and then being able to take the system resources you have whether it's CPU memory um ssds and then spreading that software stock across multiple machines you can actually scale your software support billions of people uh quite easily the same way you think about cloud cloud scale ability so you

guys are fans of the move VM base rups coming out um but have some thoughts of your own and that's the beauty of crypto is you get to play with options and experiments and make your own design choices um and kind of the market lets the winners and the losers and the middle kind of fall into their own respective places so kind of final question here um what are your thoughts with with M VM e VM other VMS like what what is the future of the execution layer um and you know where where are you placing your bets oh great question so Ian what we'd love to see of course is the movm used everywhere across the ecosystem and so we're super excited about teams like mov

and even celesia adopting the movm and making it a core piece of the technology stack um fundamentally what we believe is there has to be a change from the way we think about smart contract development today it's got to be safer from core principles and core design we've done that from the way we think about the language architecture making fewer ways to shoot yourself in the foot we've added things like the move prover which allow you to formally verify security properties of the opos framework which is the base layer as well as your application producing a new paradigm in the way you think about for instance defi imagine a formly verified secure defi stack that changes the way we think about security like all those things you know are are things we're excited about with Boo and we think that other other other languages and VMS will

get there eventually but we can move faster than anybody else in that space yeah I think I I was listening to a panel earlier from a collection of VCS who doing modular and a variety of other um you know kind of sectors and one of the things that not only on the VC front but on the liquid front that that these funds are talking about is they can't deploy Capital into solidity based defi when the yields aren't like outstandingly high to adjust for the risk to reward but the guy specifically mentioned defi in a move VM based system with formal verific baked in allows them to justify the decision to their LPS and to the broader fund with the with the risk structure of taking those kind of

capital allocations so I think that's a that's a good example of of why you're bullish there yeah exactly well thank you Avery pleasure man pleasure as well cheers