The Multi-dimensional Blockchain Developer

Transcript

okay great are this talk being being recorded yes it is okay awesome okay great I guess I'll go ahead and get started so while this talk is specifically talking about uh this approach from igen layer I do believe and I think a lot of people agree with this that this technique and this approach is actually going to be adopted uh elsewhere um you're seeing this approach adopted on bitcoin Time network bar chain monad basically every L1 that um I think will exist with

uh a non-significant amount of um I would say fdv I believe this approach will be picked up across the board and um I layer just so happens to be one of the first examples of this as well as the innovator in this space so while this talk again is specifically um I'm talking about it from the perspective that I have working with igen labs and IG layer I think this is more of a philosophical General um idea that we're starting to see proliferate when you think about developer platforms um you might not consider

things that I consider a developer platform a developer platform which I'm going to dive into in just a moment but when you understand some of these um I would say new paradigms almost and I hate to use the word Paradigm because it's often you know people use that um almost in an outlandish way when in reality um it's nothing that significant I do think that there is something significant for the platforms that I'm going to be talking about in just a moment but when a new developer platform uh comes into comes to existence it unleashes innovation in ways that we don't really know how to uh predict until they become in

existence example cloud cloud is a developer platform that enables 10x 100x uh developer velocity for building out software but also for scaling software so when you come to uh the realization that you want to build a piece of software you want to build an application in the traditional web space you do not go to Best Buy or the internet and buy a server have it shipped to your house and you do not build it on that server for the most part you typically use some type of infrastructure that has already been spun up somewhere this could be herzner hetner could be AWS it could be different variations of this but essentially people are now utilizing

existing infrastructure that exists as opposed to building it from scratch these are different um I would say forms of abstraction that are in this similar category but probably the one that is used the most right now is some form of cloud infrastructure like AWS gcp or Azure and at the very core you have some type of server this could be something um again like a digital Ocean droplet or it could be an ec2 instance and from there you're able to abstract away and not have to deal with managing that infrastructure yourself from scratch you go and you uh build your software there

and AWS deals with all of the what we used to call um undifferentiated heavy lifting let's say you want to have your application be delivered all around the world um very uh near to the user you can spin up something like a cloudfront distribution and then you have all these other services and features that you can implement uh really easily using some type of software as of service on AWS or just utilizing a high performance highr pit database like RDS or Dynamo DB but really uh the whole point of this is like with AWS you don't have to go and build out this cloudfront distribution you don't have to go and manage your server you don't have to go and manage your database all these things are kind

of there for you and you can focus on your core product or service so this developer platform cloud has uh really and allowed a lot of companies and teams and and you know really just Industries innovate over the last couple of decades last 10 or 15 years you could say so really what this is talk is about is around building these sorts of developer platforms but focused on web 3 and decentralized verifiable services so when we think about building out decentralized infrastructure you have a main challenge um in addition to just building out the the product or service itself you also have to bootstrap your Economic Security for that service so when you're

building an application in a smart contract and adap you're inheriting the underlying security for that Salon application or for that ethereum application or for that base app but if you want to build something outside of that service let's say you want to build a specialized Oracle or a specialized AI um verifiable AI uh processor or some type of co-processor or anything that doesn't fit within the constraints of the evm you are on your own or you're having to utilize something that exists already you cannot go and say oh I'm going to go ahead and build out my new decentralized network for this individual feature that I want because if you did do that you now have to build out this entire network from the ground up which often means launching a token

getting people to buy uh use that token to uh to uh run validators and secure your network this is a massive undertaking so um what you typically see are people constrained within the the virtual machine that they're building along with whatever services are available from that ecosystem you know um for example you might utilize something like chain link for your Oracle or things like that but if they don't exist you can't use you can't build the thing that you want so with that taking into consideration let's look at how we might solve this problem and by doing so we're going to go back a step and look at the evolution of blockchain networks at the very beginning the first blockchain was in application specific

blockchain and Bitcoin is very good at doing two things one it offers you the ability to say okay there only going to be x amount of Bitcoin ever there's never going to be um any more than that that's a commitment that this network offers to the user the second commitment that it offers to the user is that you can actually own and transfer your own Bitcoin and you can make um these different transfers and no one can really take that away from you other than that it doesn't really do anything you can't say oh I'm going to go build my application on bitcoin um by deploying an application to bitcoin it's an application specific blockchain it's very coupled you have all these

different pieces the consensus and everything uh is all coupled together um into a single applica into a single application which is Bitcoin so if you wanted to build your own blockchain application before ethereum existed you either had to Fork Bitcoin and make some modifications or for or or build another blockchain from ground from the ground up so we had Bitcoin we had Litecoin we had namecoin all these were slightly different in their own way the next Evolution was the ability to have a smart contract blockchain so ethereum was the first smart contract blockchain and this is really the first developer platform for building blockchain applications because you

could now say okay we have this underlying uh pool of security which is eth and we can now build applications and inherit that security without having to boot shot that security from the ground up right we're just able to write our code deploy it to the network we can literally Fork someone else's contract SM change one line of code and deploy it and we're now inheriting the security so we're kind of abstracting away having to build all that from the ground up and we're now able to write our applications this Unleashed really what web 3 is today so we went from having to build your own uh block BL chain from the ground up to being able to utilize the underlying uh consensus security and execution and just build our

application what came next well um we're going to dive into the rollup um I would say road map of ethereum but this placed ethereum in my opinion and salana and all these blockchains on the same level is some of the more well-known developer platforms that existed before then examples the App Store the app store though isn't just the App Store the app store is the App Store it's xcode it's Objective C it's Swift it's all these tools put together that enable developers to build applications and launch software in this case mobile applications with a lot of guardrails you can't just do whatever you want you

have to abide by certain constraints a lot of constraints but when you do that you're able to actually have distribution you're able to have a programming language you're able to have all these things that enable developers to build whatever they want everything from Uber to a fart app whatever you want like people were doing all kinds of stuff this was really cool wasn't possible before another developer platform that we already talked about was AWS but people are building developer platforms on top of developer platforms so you probably use something like versell which is a developer platform for building deploying and maintaining and having CI and CD for web applications and now web services verell is built on top of AWS you have things like cloudfront I'm sorry Cloud flare as

well these are essentially uh services that enable developers to scale and build web applications and then with the invention of smart contract blockchains we now have developer platforms for building out decentralized applications I have ethereum Bas and salonist of here so beyond that we started realizing that you cannot scale blockchain applications only vertically you now have to actually realize that we are trying to compete with databases like dynb that can manage in the case of Amazon uh.com and Black Friday not Black Friday what was it uh Prime day they were able to manage over or around 100 million

operations per second for a single application and the interesting thing to to underscore there is that this application was not sharing their infrastructure with every other application and every other user on that Network like we do in the blockchain world so what I mean by that is when you build something on salana you're sharing that block space you're sharing that blockchain with every application that's ever been deployed on salana and every user of that application so we are using a shared network no matter how performant salana becomes or Bas or Mega eth or any of these blockchains you're you're essentially having this shared network so therefore we've now kind of

seen the whole app chain thesis of come out of that where developers and teams have realized okay if I want to really really maybe potentially scale in the long run I do want to have the highest throughput and the lowest latency and the lowest cost at the VM and at the actual execution layer but I also might want to have my own block space and have my own blockchain for my application I don't want to share this block space with other people so you have now this rollup road map where um developers and teams are starting to build their own rollups so you have unit swap announced their own rollup you have all these different teams like a and and all this uh talking about building their own blockchains because they want to have their own uh blockchain for whatever

reason some of these are app chained some of them are not we won't go into that but the general idea is like we're scaling both now horizontally as well as vertically we want to make execution as fast as possible but we also want to like expand that block space so this is interesting because we're now adding a new paradigm to the evolution because rollups allow anyone to build a new execution environment on top of this common consensus layer so we now have evolved from being able to deploy your own application to being able to deploy your own execution but we're sharing this underlying consensus and security this is interesting but the supporting infrastructure is uh uh I'm

sorry for rollups allow anyone to build new execution environments on top of the common consensus layer but the supporting infrastructure is unable to inherit that security what does that actually mean well it means that you can build rollups you can build adaps you can build those uh two types of products on top of uh ethereum security but if you want to build an oracle if you want to build a co-processor if you want to build a decentralized sequencer if you want to build uh ZK verification layer if you want to build anything that isn't one of those two things you cannot inherit that ethereum security so what do you see well you see people launching new networks you see um a chain link competitor come and say we're going to

build the next Oracle and they're going to Now launch a token and they're going to bootstrap validators that's a ton of work so the general idea is that how do we solve this problem of validating a new service when you want to have a new service that doesn't fit into either a rollup or a Dap You have to uh bootstrap this validation you have to uh launch a token you have to get people to participate in this whole network stakers operators which in our case are validators so the question that IG uh and shared security and reaking um attempts to answer is this question what if developers could build arbitrary

applications in the programming language of their choice but inherit the same security as a smart contract blockchain meaning what if I could build anything I wanted to in Rust JavaScript go but I could inherit that underlying secur ethereum uh I would say salana whatever uh underlying security that we would like and that's the general idea around shared security reaking and in this case I layer you can deploy any type of arbitrary decentralized infrastructure without having to boot shop that new trust Network you can just inherit the underlying Network so now we're evolving beyond the application specific to the um inheriting the ethereum security for

building within a smart contract to rollups and now we're able to build just basically anything so this new developer platform allows you to build arbitrary Services we're starting to see all the different things that we typically have seen built um from the ground up now being built on IG layers so anything you kind of consider again I kind of talked about oracles and co-processors we're we're starting to see a lot of verifi verifiable AI so we have around 25 different teams building AI related products there so when people think about IG layer they often are talking about reaking they're often talking about um I would say the shared security

but this is only kind of like a means to an end the staking and all that stuff is the means to what I would explain Igan layer is as a platform that enables developers to launch to launch arbitrary decentralized networks faster and more efficiently by inheriting ethereum security and now we're Beyond just ethereum security we're also allowing arbitrary tokens to be to be staked and restak so there are four different network participants for the most part within Igan layer you have the stakers who provide the economic security you have the operators who run the ABS software for the ABS developers ABS is an acronym for actively validated

service this is basically just in the arbitrary Network and then you have the app developers that build for the consumers um we've tried to put together this map of the different categories that we're starting to see being built uh data availability is the core product that we started to validate the fact that you can actually build in this manner so IG da uh is a data availability layer it was launched in April on mainnet and end da at the current moment has the most Economic Security the lowest cost and the highest throughput of any data availability layer and it was built with a fraction of the number of developers of alternate

data availability layers that are on the market today so this validated the idea that you can not only build in this manner but you can actually build more efficiently and you can build a higher performance higher quality product um in a shorter amount of time other categories so we have these categories at the top and then we have subcategories rollup services but in reality you could consider everything kind of a rollup service but core rollup Services might be Bridges and sequencers and things like that we're seeing tons of uh co-processor use cases most of them being around Ai and ZK we're also seeing cryptoeconomic Co processes as well um the things that I'm more interested in though to be honest are essentially higher quality versions of

products that already have product Market fit storage long-term storage permanent storage those sorts of things in databases and um I would say indexing layers because um with this model you can build more rapidly and you also don't have to worry about latency because it's optimistic so when shum first pitched this idea he had all these different categories listed and now I would say since February that I've joined we've now seen pretty much all these categories filled out with real products um with literally tens of billions of dollars and uh value across

all of them so we have espresso building disiz sequencers we have hyperlane Building Bridges we have opacity Network being building ZK TLS we have lrange and a handful of there's buildings in the ZK co-processor space um pretty much anything you can think of people are building right now we're tracking about 500 teams or so building abss I would categorize about 25% of those as real protocols that are actually going to raise money and and be able to get a market Main that uh with a fair fair amount of certainty um this is kind of outdated uh when I when this was put up we had 18 on

Main net 40 on testnet I think we have around 70 something in testnet um around I would say about 125 150 that we consider in Dev that we take seriously around 500 or so that we're total tracking um some of the developer tooling that's available right now we maintain a core rust and go SDK there's also a typescript SDK that's available um authentic is a product that allows you to go to market with abss a lot faster not only do they offer a product but they off also offer support and the team and I think authentic here gave a presentation earlier uh we're tracking around at this point 50 or so reference

architectures that are available on our websites uh on our documentation that we have in just a spreadsheet and I think that I lost my um presentation there it's fine because this is pretty much over okay there we go and then our team is also working on a handful of official reference architectures that are coming from igen labs and then the the reason we're building these reference architectures is because we want to show like a fully fleshed out endtoend product that has slashing and everything built in and those are not ready yet but it's something that we're working on if you want to see what's available right now you can go to .xyz ecosystem and um that's it thank you