How to build your own gasless NFT rollup

Transcript

[Music] Hey everyone, nice to meet you all. Um, I'm Patrick from Gelato. Um, and today I'm going to talk about how to build your own gasless NFT rollup. So, kicking things off, maybe a quick introduction. I'm leading BD at Gelato, also doing partnerships. Feel free to scan this NFT. Um, where you will basically get your own sort of NFT for this talk. Maybe as a quick intro

question to all of you. Um, how many of you already did like mint your own NFT already on like some sort of chain? Maybe quickly raise your hand. Okay. Um because I think that that's like um very important for this talk. That basically sets the stage. Um because thinking about NFTTS in general and for those who of you already did go through the painful process sometimes of minting your own NFT especially on mainet um you can really see why some NFT collections have some problems in like gaining mainstream adoption and two great examples for that have been like

the most recent mint from ISUKI where they basically took a haircut on like their market cap by like 50%. % um just by like creating the same sort of art for their second NFT drop. Um and they did raise a significant amount of EE with that second drop which obviously affected their user base. Um, and the second thing that you can see here are the sort of gas statistics back when there was like the mint from Yuga Labs on the other side on Eve. And there that was like on the height you had to pay for like a normal token swap on UNIV free almost 4K uh USD to to like do a

normal token swap which really basically impacted the whole chain um and made it like unusable for a lot of users since they basically had to pay back then 1.5 E to do like a simple transaction. So the main focus points within the talk will be about like the current state of the NFT markets about like the complexities of user onboarding and why so many NFT projects fail especially in the appear market and then ways of how to improve that sort of user experience that we currently see within the NFT market. So maybe just to talk about like numbers, you can see here like the

average volume on marketplaces and what you can see here with this beige um B here you you can see that there are that with like the launch of Blur there has been like a significant increase in volume on on NFT marketplaces in general. Obviously, they did an airdrop that impacted it, but with Blur, we really saw a real competitor popping up to OpenC. Um, and they're now having like the majority of the market share of NFT volume in general, and they are continuing to grow. But what this really shows is NFT volumes have stabilized.

Even though a lot of people on Twitter are talking about like NFTs are dead, there's still like a steady influx of of new traders and existing traders trading their NFTts which obviously results in volume that can be leveraged for a lot of projects. Looking more into the user experience side of things, I think all of you guys are like quite aware of those sort of screens. You can see that there are like a lot of problems when you do your first transaction. Like even before that, you need to write down a seed phrase. You need to remember 12 words. And if you and if you don't do that, then you basically lose all your money. Um and even then after you did that, after you successfully created your wallet, you still need to figure

out like what are those sort of gas fees? How do they work? How do I like um submit the transaction successfully? and how can I like improve to like not pay as much as as uh I need to but rather like just make an efficient transaction without really needing to care about gas fees. So summarizing the sort of problems that generally are there within like NFTTS but also web 3 in general you you can really see the problem of like self- custody of how like how we onboard users right now that they basically need to figure all of this out themselves.

MetaMask already doing a great job of onboarding their users and educating them, but still it's like very clunky compared to like onboarding on within like web two. Um, and then there's such a thing as ETH that you need like an actual token to like pay for gas fees. So basically users need to figure out like how do I get ETH onto my wallet? remembering when I first like made my first transaction on Eve uh a few years back. I didn't really figure out at first like how much Eve I actually need will need to have for like doing a swap on unis swap. Um so that's like something that on-ramp providers are tackling right now, but that still needs to improve. And then generally speaking about um how to make a transaction and

you also like worrying about gas fees you you actually need to figure out how this whole like gas consumption works, how to submit a transaction and what transaction finality is and that you that your transaction can actually revert after you hit that button. Um as well as then obviously front running you can be exploited even though you don't know it. um doing a swap on unis swap, you basically get it front run, especially on Ethereum. Um and other people are profiting of your like lack of knowledge at the start. Um, and as a result, that basically makes or sets the stage for like web 3 being like right now only accessible for like a few users like in the grand scheme of things

because if you really want to target web two users, you basically need to abstract away all those complexities and you need to make it like easier to to onboard them. But I think the the greater Rearum ecosystem already knows that and there's like a lot of things that are right now in the works to create better infrastructure and create better UX to onboard the next billion users which everybody obviously wants to do. Um and first there's like obviously a big need for like a secure data availability layer which Ethereum can provide and Ethereum by far has outpaced like all the other L1s and other

solutions that were on the market and we are now in the phase where we see a lot of rollups um gaining market share and also exceeding Ethereum in terms of daily transactions which is great because like the theory from Ethereum or their tactic with like scalability through rollups really comes to life right now. And we see that with Arbitum having a very vibrant DeFi ecosystem by now as well as other protocols and and ecosystems um really scaling Ethereum as a whole. And other examples include now app chains basically with first DYDX starting on a different stack, but now

um chains that build on OP stack like for example base that just announced their their mainet as well as Zora who basically build a home for NFTTS on top of OP stack and arbitum is working on arbitum orbit and polygon is having their supernetss. Avalanche has their subnet. CK Sync has their own text stack for app chains and that basically gives us an additional layer of scalability because apps that get too big for L2 can then scale into their own separate L2 or even their L3 depending on which tech stack they use. And we at Gelato, we think about it also to like how can we improve the user experience as a whole.

And some of our products allow you to for example have gasless transactions. And we see this as like a big tendency in the future because f you future projects that are basically deploying on those L2s or L3s will only pay like a fraction of the gas fees that we have today. And we we gelato what we want to do is basically abstract away that sort of complexity from the user and rather let protocols sponsor gas fees which um in any sense doesn't really cost them that much thinking about user acquisition cost because they would probably pay 10 or 100 bucks per month on those L2s or L3s to serve gasless transactions to all their user because

we're talking about an average gas fee from like probably a fraction of a cent especially for additional rollups. And obviously another big catalyst that is coming up is EIP4844 on on Ethereum basically protodank sharding. I won't go into the weeds here because it shouldn't be too technical, but basically it will allow Ethereum to scale further and will also allow to basically have higher throughput as well as lower gas fees, which not just impacts Ethereum, but also obviously impacts the greater rollup ecosystem that is built on top of Ethereum. And that will allow us to have lower gas fees overall um and make like the user experience generally better.

But then we don't really like with lower gas fees. We didn't really solve like the issue we saw before with like MetaMask. Um but we can do that with gas abstraction. And what does that mean? Basically you can do gasless transaction. That is that is an example from Phantom. They're using Gelato. And what they basically did they integrated gelato relay to have gasless transactions. And as you can see here, there were like two MetaMask popups, but on none of them, they actually paid gas fees. They just signed something to authorize the spending. That's like the first uh thing that they need to do. And then they just say, "Hey, I'm okay. I

want to buy this NFT." And then Gelato basically takes care of the rest. And like that, they just need to basically approve the payment to actually buy this NFT. But they never really touched the actual chain as a user. So they really have like in that case they really abstracted away like the blockchain complexities that users normally face. Um maybe to to quickly explain you how this works. Uh basically what we do is we focus on like uh decentralized backend services and with Sheld what you can do you can really think about it as a module on those chains to allow you to access automation offchain computation

or gasless transactions. And in that case that we just saw with Phantom, they basically just took gas's transactions, integrated that into their smart contracts, and now basically users don't really need to care about those sort of low-level blockchain complexities anymore that we see in most DAPs today. Um, and we also do that like in a decentralized fashion. Obviously, we're in web three, we want to do that. Um, and we then taking care of those executions on behalf of the user. So users don't really need to um figure out how gas fees work anymore. They can really rely on Gelato to take care of that. Um in the case of Phantom and also other protocols are are now expanding

into that direction with the notion of something like account abstraction um as well as like with smart contract wallets. There are multiple opportunities for us to improve that user experience. Um that basically summarizes the sort of products um with off-chain um computation um automation and gasless transactions um for protocols that have already integrated at Chelado. Here's like a bigger ecosystem. We we have like all the cool DeFi projects as well as like or including beefy maker synthetics um as well as gaming projects. So if you're a DAP developer and you want to do something like that, just reach out to us on Twitter or just talk to me after the talk here. Um, and that already includes like over 400 projects.

So there was like a small section of the projects that actually integrated with already more than uh 5.1 million transactions executed on all EVM chains. If you're interested, that's like the QR code to the website, not another NFT. Um, so, um, yeah, in case you're interested in building something similar or you're building something for the hackathon later this week, uh, reach out to us and we can help you, uh, creating a cool project. Yeah, that's it. Thanks everyone. [Applause] If there are any questions, just like raise your hand.

Okay, awesome. Cool. Yeah, that's the way to go. Cool. Thanks everybody. [Music]