Unlocking Modular Solana: The End of L2 Tradeoffs? | Anil Kumar

Transcript

hey everyone we all know blockchain is changing the world but who's actually driving it I'm excited to invite you to the sixth edition of Meridian a web 3 conference hosted by the Stellar development foundation in London from October 15th through 17th get early bird tickets at meridian. stellar.org with code blockworks pod special thanks to Stellar for sponsoring us now let's get into today's episode everyone knows there's a massive shortage of top senior marketers in crypto and teams are constantly struggling to get their go to market done right that's why we're excited to have partnered up with Renault Partners the premier go to market advisory firm

for early stage crypto teams get in touch with their team by heading on over to re nud partners.com or giving the co-founder Jeff a follow on X check out the links in the description below this episode is brought to you by Avalanche Avalanche is a leading network of blockchains giving some of the world's largest financial institutions new use cases and business models while leveraging completely customizable infrastructure check them out it's core. apppp slcover you can explore avalanche's subnet ecosystem at core.

appd Discover I was playing around earlier today really cool what's up everyone before we jump into today's episode I'm excited to share Empire's first ever security partner Harpy is the best tool to prevent your your wallet from theft in real time Harpy is not just a security solution they are a peace of mind solution but don't just take our word for it Harpy is the only wallet security solution that protected 100% of its users from attacks like The Ledger one and Q4 which was an offchain signature attack to learn more about Harpy click the link in the show notes or visit Harpy doio Empire welcome back to Empire um we got a lot of really good feedback on the

episode with Sky trade um Santi and I are trying to bring some newer Founders onto the on the Empire as opposed to just the as much as we love you know a and uh Lesner and stonnie and Hayden and and and that crew and kind of the OG Founders we're trying to bring some new people into the fold and so we got a lot of really good feedback on the last episode so we want to bring an Neil from Rome on to Empire uh Anil welcome to the show man oh thank you thank you for having me it's a pleasure to be with you too uh looking forward to yeah yeah excited to have you okay so for background for this episode guys um we did an episode with Josh boen from asria and Ben Fish from espresso back in May of 2023 uh and the title was how rollups

will decentralize their sequencer um Rome has come on to the scene uh they announced some funding recently Santi and I are both investors so we've had kind of a sneak peak at what they've been building it's really really cool I would say my one sentence summary is uh Rome and Anil and the team are basically helping l2s access some of the best parts of salana um so just wanted to have an Neil on so maybe an Neil I think a good place to start because a lot of people might not be familiar with you in Rome can you just give us your background on like how you came to build this and I guess really importantly like why you're building this yes uh so I was involved in crypto like from long time you I I come from a background JP Morgan

banking background but but I was always interested in crypto when Bitcoin first came out I had set up a mining uh server in my basement uh though like everybody else uh I didn't keep track of it uh then continued engagement but I got very seriously engaged in crypto in 2017 18 19 where I was investor uh building some application uh just for my own use uh some application uh were more native in crypto than others some were more web 2 and web 3 combined and then uh I got into looking into balik's road map for uh rollup how the ethereum is going to

be scaled uh we are roll up technology and uh that caught my attention and then started looking around and started poking around what kind of problem I mean some of these problems were very obvious uh defragmentation fragmentation of liquidity fragmentation of composite ility uh how much security and how you're going to secure the l2s in terms of what it executes off chain and how it goes on chain so these were like some of these problems were very obvious and then some of them were not obvious like why would L2 actually use these uh that we are seeing today and uh got engaged in this and started working on looking at the solution what might be the solution and it was very technical in nature I come from a technical

background though have had multiple hats throughout my life from technical to product manager to number of others investors and stuff so I kind of understood the the kind of a road uh for for for the whole integration and then I I also understood the problems that what meaningful way these problems are how meaningful these problems are for different parti spent and so I work with my uh co-founder satk he uh and and came up with number of solution and uh we bounced it off number of folks Josh Nick white other people tarun and and then uh we realized what we really wanted to do

was use Solana which provided all these different properties decentralization uh speed throughput uh uh security of the network uh and along with that it sold a problem that nobody is addressing which is interoperability between different chain yes we can have have layer zero we have Omni chain uh that are solving that uh at a distant level where you are able to do composing of transaction with different chain but not at a very uh joint to the hip nature like Atomic transaction so it provided us an opportunity to at least solve this problem from ethereum and Solana integration point of view that these can

be joined at a hip uh via the sequencer and that's basically was Major impetus for us us to basically use and create Drome to solve that problem is it fair to say that okay so you had ethereum ethereum started to scale then you had this kind of like modular narrative that's popped up and Celestia and all the whole kind of modular ecosystem it feels like you guys are trying to kind of modularize salana is that the right way to describe it that is correct so over a period of time uh we realized what actually we were doing so we started out as a sequencer uh shared sequencer and create more interoperability while solving the

sequencer problem uh what we realize was that Solana is much more than just uh a sequencer for this rollup what we can provide based upon Solana's uh uh properties the some of the best properties which is its consensus layer uh as a set of services for l2s and it is not now limited to ethereum l2s any l2s can use these services and what what we are building is Shar sequencer is one of the services other services are uh that that we are bringing out along with the shared sequencer are uh da uh so you can use Solana as a DA we are also bringing out fast finality layer where you have commitment uh uh via the AVS uh

between confirmed Solana transaction and the finalized Sol transaction so l2s can get much faster commitment of a state uh at the speed of Solana blocks uh we are also bringing ZK co-processor and number of other services that would be helpful for l2s to scale which would provide like the aggregation layer so so they can get interoperability not at the atomic level uh between cross rollup and and with Solana but also with the chains that are outside of this ecosystem uh uh like you have arbitrum optimism ZK sync uh any other chain that lives outside you can get interoperability with these

layer by set of these services that we are creating so now our narrative is more of a modular Solana Services uh for al2 that is what we are creating okay potentially a dumb question here but I think just maybe a good thing to do a reminder for both me personally and maybe for the audience but why does like tell me about this idea of a sequencer and what what a sequencer even does and why it's important to decentralize it and I I know I know Santi Will Roll his eyes because that's such a 101 level question but um maybe just uh let let's go there for a second give me much credit I think yeah I think uh the basic function of a sequencer is at it core is one

single function if it provides that you can call it a sequencer which is ordering of transaction if it can order the transaction it does not have to do anything it does not have to provide commitment of this it can it does not have to execute the transaction so all it has to do is order the transaction and after that it is up to the individual uh rollup to execute those transaction to the straight transition anything that need to be done the sequencer theoretically is not responsible for that but if you are going to be more than just ordering transaction because ordering transaction is like you have no other skin in the game all you are doing is ordering and you can take the me you can do lot of other things so you have lot of power

without doing too much all you are doing is ordering so sequencer need to have little bit more than just ordering so what we do is we provide so in Rome we are more of an executing sequencer so we are not only ordering the transaction we are actually executing the transaction and providing that commitment of ordering and execution uh to the end user and the rollups so that is why it is an important fun uh today we see that most of the sequencer are centralized sequencer and I think there are number of reason for that uh L2 does not want to give up because there is a lot of me that get taken out by the sequencer by

ordering of these sequencer and once you give up your sequencing to third party or shared sequencer or decentralized sequencer that means you have no control of your MV and somebody else some third party is extracting that value as an L2 you would like to keep control of your me because you are providing services to your user and you should theoretically have control of these M so uh so these are some of the problems uh and it is very important in terms of importance of why D centralized sequencer versus centralized sequ centralized sequencer has censorship risk uh it can go out at any time uh you have no we have seen these instances happening in past with

the some of the centralized sequencer and uh so we need to address this problem today if the value of the chain is low I think people are okay we can go along with this if we are going to attract a substantial amount of value to the chain people want to know tomorrow I am not going to be uh left out of uh I will not be S I will still continue to withdraw my money I still would be able to process my transaction the L2 would survive the sequencer to tomorrow government is not going to come after somebody and take over that sequencer uh so you need to have a decentralized sequencer not just from uh your own uh

uh that that the sequencer itself might go wrog but also that third party like government entity can come in and seize the operations it is much harder for government to take control of the decentralized system uh compared to any centralized where a single person is resp responsible so that is why it is important to have a decentralized system that is ordering your transaction rather than a centralized system what's the intuition uh to using salana for the performance of the of the sequencing where you can and why might other teams that Yano alluded to say hey it

kind of you don't kind of need you don't need to go to salana you could just do it as we're doing it in ethereum and like why bother with the extra complexity right so if we look at any sequencer so far in the market uh I find that it has to create a substantial amount of security that that orders the transaction that there is some Force there is some value behind this that uh so all the transaction need to be secur with certain amount of security and that would take a lot of time for a chain to approve that value to be able to get up to a place where it can say if it is taking a transaction of $1 billion I'm

just taking hypothetical and it is secured with the let's say h100 million uh value of the chain Security in terms of ordering a transaction that seems like uh uh you you should equivocate and order it wrongly so that you can extract that1 billion so you want to be able to do a transaction a high value transaction you would only feel confident when it is secured with a substantially higher amount of stake so that is one reason uh uh you can bootstrap a chain and come up with the hundreds of billion dollar worth of value to secure that sequencer so sequencer at the end of the day is an L1 so you would have to come so that is one of thing along with that you need

throughput you need speed and you need well tested system it takes a it takes quite a bit of time for an L1 to uh uh uh to mature it has to go through lot of uh issues bug fixes Sana has seen uh lot of these issue and it has fixed those issues and it is not like it will not see some issues it will see some issues but it is much more mature than any other L1 that you can bring up now as a shared sequencer or a sequencer so that is the intuition behind this that it has existing stake well tested sufficiently decentralized so why not use it has an evm we have built our own Rome evm so

you can run different smart contract you can run different uh uh and you can run it at a very high speed uh so so that basically all lead towards uh that okay all roads lead towards this that okay we need to we can use Solana as a state machine and we can modularize this consensus layer and provide this shared sequencer as a service on Solana yeah what are the um you as salana becomes more and more popular um you know you you had like or for instance that uh you know created a bit of an issue a couple months back in terms of identifying something that you're stress

testing the network like you know fail transactions was was a thing how um how do you think about uh a lot of what we talk about in the podcast is you know the decisions that teams might make of where to build uh from like a bare like L1 kind of standpoint uh no surprise you know we talked about Salon a lot in the podcast we also talk about ethereum l1s l2s l3s and so on so forth um what are some of the things from your Vantage Point that inspired you to consider salana um versus maybe other high throughput chains out there right so we considered a couple of them Su was one first first was like okay find the chain

that are high through put one of the best in in terms of straight machine so Aptos They Come Close uh in some ways they are better in some ways Sana is better uh when it comes down to when we look at the uh the security of the network Solana has much more security than any of these chains in terms of the amount stake in terms of validators number of validator that are participating uh for uh ordering of transaction execution of transaction uh 1500 for Solana it's substantially order of magnitude more than other chains uh so it has sufficiently uh decentralized system maybe not as decentralized as Bitcoin and ethereum but it is still a

sufficiently decentralized system than any other chain that exists with the throughput and plus the road map road map ahead of Solana is much more uh exciting in terms of fire dancer coming in in terms of different uh improvements that are coming in and that so that basically lead to that we can scale along with Solana once we have the sequencer you you you have a great amount of throughput today and it would continue to increase uh as as the time go by so so you are not going to be restricted in terms of future uh how the state machine is evolving and be able to uh address the needs of the elders Anil I have another what I'm sure

is a really really dumb question again I'm going to ask a lot of those this this episode why would you want to hand off if you're like an L2 why would you hand off the the the sequencing to a third party whether that's a Rome or espresso or asria or whoever it may be like why are you handing off kind of the crown jewel Money Maker to to someone else absolutely yeah exactly so I mean I think that is the Crux of the problem uh for the l2s uh uh and rollups they will not simple answer is they will not right why why should they unless their users or system forces them to do that they will not do that they at the end of the day they are losing substantial amount of uh

Capital uh for something their user may or may not be complaining about so that is why we think we have to create this in a capitalistic way uh the system has to be capitalistic way so when we when somebody uses Rome as a sequencer they do not give out me they are in control of their me we do not extract any value we cannot extract any value because the system Rome is designed that way you are in full control of your me so that is why we think we need to solve this problem the sequencer need to solve this problem yes I know there are uh in Industry there are other sequencer who are like okay we would share the me uh between us and uh rollup but this this

becomes very semantic and very operational driven like how do we calculate and stuff like why not build it in such a way that you as a sequencer you are providing service and that service is just for ordering transaction and everything else belong to L2 you provide additional set of services like we do uh in terms of Crossroad because you have to incentivise l2s to use you without disent without taking away anything from them so we do not take away their me rights they have the full right they control that but we provide additional Services which help them in terms of cross rollup Atomic transaction so they can do uh their users or

ecosystem participant there more apps that can come in by using cross rollup Atomic transaction we provide composability with Solana so you have access to Solana liquidity when you go join Rome as as a Shar sequencer you get immediately access to Sana liquidity which is a big boost so it is like a boost bootstrapping a rollup to access Solana's liquidity as they you start using Rome without giving up anything uh they can start using all the services and access to interoperability with Solana and other wups what is the what is the business model of Rome O'Neal like how how do you guys make money right so uh one is transaction fee base so we would take percentage of

transaction action fee that it costs to execute your transaction on Solana second is premium services so we do have premium Services which allows you to uh uh to access the state uh in a premium way you can you can do uh so we are working on uh certain other aspect of how you can execute transaction in a faster way on Solana signature less uh gas less so different ways where you would have uh Rome token or you you would pay premium pricing for these services and we would allow you you would have some templates that you can run uh uh for your trading uh application if you have a certain

template uh between rollup transaction Solana transaction we would store these templates uh on Solana and you are able to just submit the input parameters and these templates would automatically create transaction uh that you have previously stored and execute this transaction so this would make your transaction even faster in terms of taking advantage of whatever discrepancies exist between different role up States and Arbitrage so these are premium services so these are some of the premium Services we are going to bring uh on top of the ecosystem that we are building and all these Services would be accessible uh via R SDK so Rome SDK is our uh M uh one of the main product alongside sequencer Rome evm

fast finality layer aggregation layer ZK C processor Rome SDK allows you to uh access uh rollup State Solana State compose Atomic transaction cross rollup cross chain Atomic transaction uh access this premium Services uh and and basically use uh uh and create application uh much more holistic way uh by accessing the states when you think about the who Rome is competing against what do you think they got right and what do you think they got wrong I think uh so we compete in like different markets uh so we are not just a shared sequencer anymore so I would say we are

a shared sequencer is just one of our services uh we have a r evm so anybody who wants to deploy dab on Solana but still have the uh ethereum daps on son but still have the front end of any ethereum client like op or orbit you can run those client and still access Rome evm you can deploy your Rome evm so that is one of our service so da fast falay so we compete in different uh Spectrum so in sequencer space we are competing with let's say I mean I think espresso is more of a sequencer Network and we would love to participate in their sequencer network uh asria radius uh so these are like uh in terms of Shar

sequencer where we are competing then in terms of uh our fast finality look at nuffle uh those those are the product that we competing in terms of Rome SDK which is more of a composing transaction cross chain and cross rollup that is more of a Omni chain and layer zero kind of space where we are operating so I think we we are uh different components of Rome are competing with different uh uh different projects so I'll I'll I'll I'll go with first taking up with the sequencer space right so I think in the sequential space I think uh uh maybe we were at an advantage because we were

able to see uh what rollup will or will not do what the problem uh would be as opposed to let's say uh espresso who who started like two years ago so we were able to learn uh from some of those things that we saw in the market space happening one was like okay decentralization security of the network throughput uh exist it takes time for a chain to mature and your consensus layer to mature because I see it is mostly about consensus when we are talking about sequencer so espressos consensus layer based on the hot shot so I think these are some of the things that we learned like okay why not use boot step so I think these were some of the things in terms of like l2s what l2s are

willing to do or not willing to do like they are not willing to give me unless their hands are Force so why force their hand let them keep the me and solve the problem of decentralized sequence so in a hindsight we were able to accommodate move uh and be able to adjust uh our our uh sequencer in a way that solves these problems as we saw them so I think in a sequencer space I would say we were uh beneficial of seeing what was happening in the market and adjust ourselves and be able to highlight and accuate these kind of pro uh solution uh to the l2s and the end user well maybe I was jumping to uh head because I know you have a very ambitious

kind of road map an Neil uh like not just sequencing but like there's this broader kind of ability to module our eyes bring on as Yano said in the Prelude like the components that are really good of salana into an environment that like ethereum I wanted to just maybe and Yano cut me off here if this is like going too far ahead but I wanted to understand like your broader kind of vision for okay it starts with sequencing you prove that about what else like what what how can we how do you envision kind of the architecture of blockchain's kind of RIT large of like evolving uh picking and choosing uh you know some of the best components yeah I think I might be crazy in saying and thinking uh thinking what

I'm thinking uh but uh then uh then we are in this world uh that is a changing world uh so so the way I look at it so this is if you look at it uh Solana and ethereum right right combined together you can do uh Atomic transaction with Solana and ethereum rollups and now you can see that ethereum and Solana are kind of joined at a hip now and how is that enabled it is enabled by the set of services Shar sequencer is a one of them and then you have other services that that the modular services so that creates a joint at a hip interoperability what does it do it creates a surface area for application

to be built now people can take best of both world ethereum and Solana and create application single unified ux which is an atomic ux that you can create application now you we take this as one set now you take ethereum and another chain ethereum and another chain replicate the same thing that we are doing with Solana and ethereum do that with all other chains now what you have is kind of a unified blockchain at least with ethereum so that is kind of uh the way I see how you unify all the blockchains maybe using sequencer and creating these

set of uh services and that create at least uh somewhat more uh interoperable world where you can do atomic transaction trustless transaction noncustodial transaction uh so that is the kind of vision I have uh maybe I'm very stupid but that is how I'm I'm thinking about it uh that okay we do this for Sana and maybe somebody else would do it for pick up another chain and create the same kind of solution for some other chain and ethereum hey everyone Jason here just wanted to take a a quick break to talk about something exciting in the world of blockchain the Stellar development foundation is hosting their sixth annual Meridian conference this October 15th

through 17th in London it's a 3-day event where the brightest Minds in web 3 come together to discuss everything from tokenization to defi if you're a developer Builder policy maker or business leader looking to make an impact in transforming Global Systems through blockchain this is your chance to join the conversation you'll get to network with the forward thinkers who are defining the future of this space head over to meridian. stellar.org and use the code blockor pod for early bird pricing now let's get back to today's episode hey everyone we all know that there's a massive shortage of top senior marketers in crypto we've seen it over and over that teams are constantly

struggling to get their go-to Market done right that's why we're excited to have partnered up with Renault Partners the premier goto Market advisory firm for early stage crypto teams they help top Founders tell their stories better and build great non-technical teams they advise Founders on all things marketing including tight brand positioning Community Building social media and building A+ internal teams don't just take it from us they work with some of the top projects across salana monad Bas and many more if you're a founder or a VC looking for support for your teams I highly recommend connecting with them get in touch with their team by heading on over to re nud partners.com or giving the co-founder Jeff a follow on X check

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are all building on Avalanche Evergreen subnets really cool stuff big thanks to Avalanche for sponsoring this episode of Empire go explore Avalanche subnet ecosystem at core. appd Discover that's core C.A slcover thanks again Avalanche for a lot of Empire listeners your crypto is not just another number on a screen it's part of your future I know Santi and myself feel that way our security sponsor of this episode Harpy takes this responsibility seriously and is the only wallet security tool that Shields users from both onchain threats and sneaky offchain signature attacks if you've ever been in that situation where you're moving quickly you approve

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iempire if you want it to be even easier just click the link in the show notes I want to revisit a concept that you said earlier which is you kept saying you keep the me uh listeners should go back in to that discussion that we brought on Kyle from multicoin and we were talking about like what is the most valuable component of blockchains L1 is me there's different types of Meb right malicious toxic hopefully you clear that out stuff like def flow stuff like that you know but still me is going to be a far greater Revenue stream than fees themselves so I guess that's why sequencing becomes so important right The Ordering of the transactions and

maybe I'll just hand it over to you like more so the question is like why is the sequencing kind of that thing that you've decided in this modular kind of Stack to go after is it because if you have because it's like Central to meev and that becomes like the most important thing or is that just to beach head into other stuff right so yeah I mean so MVB is a major problem so we used to have all kind of different so ethereum has put in some rule like okay per block that is the maximum me you can extract so we are putting I I mean I would say uh they're going too far that we are putting bandid uh instead of Sol in the real problem like how do we solve the real problem

right if uh and and when so so what is a bad MV and what is a good M right so let's say bad m is where you are taking a transaction and putting it in such a way and that it get worst execution or bad execution that you are layering it in a way that put it at a disadvantage so that is bad you should not nobody should be allowed to do that if a transaction comes in uh in a in a natural way it comes in at a certain place it should be owner at that place because that is how it ended up being there right so so we all like need to be cognizant of the fact that we do not allow uh system itself

should not allow layering of transaction in a way that it puts it at a disadvantage so like sandwich attack and this kind of attack so so we all know about these I mean these are like old stuff right now what is a good MVB let's say Arbitrage right Arbitrage you can say is a good MVB like cross chain of or between different acts because it creates a better price Discovery it brings the price in harmony across different is and every Everybody benefits from that so Arbitrage I would say if a price of on one Dex is different than another another deck and you want to put that transaction as a Closs Atomic transaction and send it it is a good mvbs I mean it is beneficial

for every financial markets so you you creating tighter spreads more efficient markets you know right so so that is how I look at it if it if it benefits everybody it is good if it is disadvantaging a particular transaction then it is bad so that is uh and and how and that is exactly the way we we are approaching how we have designed our sequencer right so you cannot take a user's transaction and layer it and put it at a disadvantage it is impossible mhm because how the system works it is as the user transaction come in it is picked up by R and it is sent to Solana where it is encrypted and it is executed

by the rules of Solana nobody can see yeah to your it comes in code like it's just no you just get sent in whatever order and your point is more so you're not necessarily solving me per se you're just creating G stronger guarantees that there's no one single party that can manipulate that order flow that cannot the The Ordering of said transactions um you know how those transactions come in might have some me attached to them to your point around solving some like an Arbitrage type of trade or whatever yeah um and that we consider as a good because now you can take okay you see a price on one rollup different or one Dex different than the

other you can take these two transaction put them together as a single Atomic transaction MH and you can send to Sana it is executed as a single transaction either both the transaction going to happen in a trustless manner or neither of them is going to happen yeah so that is a good because it creates a price uh Discovery across the system so that is in our view is a good M and it should be encouraged and allow and people should be able to make profit with this yeah how do you maybe this is a very basic question so the transaction comes in say from an L2 comes in gets routed to salana gets picked up um at that point you're competing on other stuff in

salana right and now there's you know tips and you have uh you know how do you think about that flow especially that last part The Last Mile like once it enter salana um and how it gets uh prioritized if you will or not like you must have some visibility into I'm sure like say that there's like a a lot of activity in salana you know and how do you work through that preemptively or mitigate kind of uh some sort of failure I don't know if the this is actually possible this but I don't know if the question makes sense no it does make sense uh so basically uh uh so rules of Solana

applies to Old transaction so if a user want to send with a higher tip their transaction they can so if they're using let's say Rome SDK and they want to send a transaction with a higher tip so that that get executed yes you can do that then it comes to in terms of uh uh that that uh hotpots right because each L2 is its own smart contract on Solana so the hotspots are all distributed it is not one single uh RAM contract where it would create the hot spot if an L2 so the L2 genuinely may have a loot of activity and it may slow down the processing so same rule would apply that even if the L2 was operating by

itself it and there were a lot of transaction but it is not being clouded or it is not being disadvantaged by some other smart contract so it is applying within it is playing within its own rules without being impacted by others because it is its own smart contract and the hotspot remains within that smart contract that evm rather than it is impacting other EV um I hate to put you on the spot but I'm gonna say it anyway it's you you to deflect the the the answer because it's hard but say we had Ben or someone else from uh you know another shared sequencer do you um how would you think these things

stack up like you go out there you go talk to nl2 and you say listen you ought to use our our solution because yeah what are the key selling points performance security you're leveraging a Lindy chain you know a salana veras is trying to boost your own validator like the others what do you think it matters most for for these teams these like l2s like a arbitrum or a you know whatever pick your L2 of poison to me it seems like uh they should be uh I mean uh it should matter to them that the system is decentralized uh it has high security immutable so that and it is it is that

they're not I think uh they should not feel that they have to give up anything to gain these properties yeah and then running cost and and and that should be comparable I think if they have to pay substantial amount of money to get this access I think they would probably equivocate whether they go with this or not uh so I think that cost has to remain low and and we feel Sana is balance of all these things to provide uh low cost uh immutable decentralized high security ordering of transaction yeah so I I would say like this is what you would get you will not give up M you

would gain interoperability with Solana and other rollup uh and you do you get far more Services uh from the ecosystem fast finality layer aggregation and and you still have the settlement on ethereum so and if you want it to access uh so we are going to announce maybe this is Alpha we are partnering with the salesia uh to provide da layer uh those rollup that want to use salesia for da so so that announcement is going to come out that's more on the cost yeah on the just yeah that's really interesting across those dimensions what do you think resonates the most uh for for teams making that decision uh is it you know is it the the

security the uh I would I would argue that like for others if you're trying to from the ground up build a like decentralized layer of sequencers like that's a that's just less proven right and the security is you know just lower right I mean I guess there could be minimum viable security that you could argue is enough and you get comfortable with that but certainly not going to match salana day one absolutely across Nakamoto consensus stake whatever you wantan to it's not a security is a broad based term that we use constantly in the industry but we don't necessarily agree with right um but Nakamoto consensus for

that's of purposes right yeah I think uh that is absolutely correct it takes a period of time from you start to get a chain to a level where Solana is today or even less than Solana let's say okay we don't really need that kind of security that much security as Solana is providing right it still takes for chain to mature uh to to remove the issues and have enough uh conviction in the market to stake enough money in that chain so that it is securing that Network the security of the network it is not on a day one or even one year later that can create the kind of commitment because if your chain is only 10 billion worth if

your sequencer is only 10 billion worth it is the value that is securing your uh sequencer Network then it would not be possible to have hundred billion do worth of other chain using that as a shared sequencer I think you would have to you have to have at the end of the day look at this in terms of what amount of throughput is going through the sequencer and what is the security of that Network sequencer Network that is securing that through yeah because Rel if there is a chance for somebody to fraud it would fraud we have to go with that that it is possible that if somebody has a control to fraud then they would fraud if there is enough economic incentive is there let's

actually go there because I think um uh you know when l2's first launched like there was this criticism that the sequence Serv centralized and I think this goes to the heart of I'm not so sure people really understand what a sequencer like can and can't do because you mentioned fraud right like the worst case if a if a sequencer is centralized and you know acts maliciously we can talk about what that actually means ultimately if you have fraud proofs you can always go back to the main chain and like recover your money so to speak you can correct me if I'm wrong like you can you can

ultimately go back if you have fraud proofs right you can say hey look it might take a while there's a period And it you that and in that period you might get liquidated a whole host of problems right of liveness uh but you can go back right um and if you don't have fraud proofs that's the main issue right of an L2 is it's a if you don't have fraud proofs then you know the security of that L2 is like non-existent uh you're really trusting that right because then that's problem IC so what is the worst case scenario here for someone that might say look and I'll hear you you're using salana it has far more security than probably you're going to need for a while and the

performance and the cost is going to be there as far as we can see especially with fire dancer what um like is security a an oversell is it something that like it's more so like how you partition the economic gains that are being captured by one entity into hundreds or whatever by decentralizing but from a security standpoint doesn't really matter much it's just like who who captures that fee who captures that right I'm trying to place Devil's Advocate I'm curious if this is a very good question uh so yes with fraud proof uh maybe somebody would pay you uh

somebody should pay you if there was a uh you you provide the fraud but I think the security is not just that uh that you get your money back right security is also censorship somebody can block your transaction right at a sequencer level if it is a centralized sequencer they may not let your transaction go through they may hold it for period of time and then your transaction fail it's a holding hostage problem here yeah so so you and and if your transaction doesn't go through at that time something bad was happening somewhere like say some world was blowing up somewhere and you could not get your transaction through that is a that could be a substantial cost to you

you may be trying to get your eor to ethereum and put it on some saxs and sell it and what not you might eventually be able to bring it back to eum L1 but you're going to be liquidated in the value zero so for purposes practically it's the same exactly I see your point Y let's transition more into more fun stuff so like you've been at it for a while like you know you uh you know when I first met you as soon as you said JP Morgan it's like all right well you know we we we saw I to high then and there I committed on the spot um as someone you know you've been building systems for a long time maybe just more transition of the conversation into like what is your general interpretation of crypto like I feel like a lot of people in might be

listening hearing this video and be like identify with you you know they've been at you know Cisco they've been like Building Systems for a long time and they may or may not be on the fence about crypto they may not like it they may have really strong opinions about you know you know this is just a database and there's no need to kind of work through all of this but like what really like drives you to build in the space what motivates you to come in and do what you do uh when you can be doing so many other things and then the second part of the question is like what have you what has surprised you the most about building in crypto now that you kind of took the Leap Forward you've been at it for a while right so intrinsically I mean I'm uh I'm

attracted towards decentralization uh free market free uh not being controlled by like you can do just like anybody else what they can do right so I think crypto is is kind of a sense of that it is a distributed database of Records right and anybody can participate anybody can build it is a free enterprise not controlled by theoretically at least I mean there are some controls here and there when we look at some things but it is not controlled by anybody can participate like I can come in and I can start building my Enterprise uh on this blockchain on this uh Ledger uh so I

think that kind of like and and it provides uh like it is a Fring so if we look at it right I've been in the corporate world for a long time right where your tunnel vision you are looking at one thing and at the end of the day you feel constrainted you cannot use your uh all your uh Talent your energy uh into into the way you see things but crypto allows that so it kind of free it is a freeing environment it is like a freeing of a human Spirit right where you can come in start doing things without being constrained by anything

right and you can you can you can create it and you would see result you create good you get good you create bad you get bad I mean it is reciprocal it is not that anybody can just uh succeed by doing bad thing right though there can be some instances right so the way I look at it so this is kind of a freeing of a human spirit that is the kind of Vibes I get when I am in crypto when I was outside crypto I saw myself constrained I saw myself like put in a box so so I think there are more application more uh uh thing that are going to come in and it is going to be

more freeing for more people what the challenges are for our industry it is very technical it is very technical even uh for a guy like me who has two master's degree in uh engineering I find it sometimes like okay I need to sit down and think about it for weeks before before I understand certain things right so how do we make it how the knowledge it dissipated so that other people other folks can join in this journey right make it simple get more educational content out get more simplified educational content so I think that kind

of things allow people to like today we have like my uh 11 yearold when when he was seven so he started building games using components blocks uh different things and that he could create games and then play those games so like in Roblox and stuff so we need to make like some of these things in crypto where people can build these application just like that right so people can come in play around and and those kind of so I think that is the kind of thing I see that okay where we have challenges that it requires almost uh uh PhD for you to understand sometime some of the core concept so there need to be more people creating uh easily understandable

contents and and allow people I think the access to the blockchain and everything else is there I think that if we can address I think that would go uh quite a long way in terms of getting more cry people into crypto like ux we talk about then this education how people can simply come in and build application so I think that is where I see and I think more people experiences more freeing they are I think more they will talk about it yeah yeah definitely I I very much agree even though I'm not a builder developer myself that I sort of would push back on this common more recent criticism that there is too much

infra and not enough applications because I still think that there is different parts of the kind of infra cake that still still need to be built uh far more connectivity and interoperability that middleware layer I think is very much unexplored very much still nent and it's sort of makes sense like we didn't we were in talk about modularity a year ago we now that sort of that unbundling of blockchain functions has requires more investment and Innovation at that at that layer right and exploring all these different combinations permutations we might you know rebundle into certain standards and certain best

practices but you know as far as I can tell the tooling is improving not not still not there um you know more languages for support more you know exploration at the you know L you know the the modularity layer in particular is something that an interoperability layer is is I think the areas that that plus like optimizing fees and how you price block chain space is like still requires and will probably require many more years and of experimentation um and so yeah like I think uh this is my two cents absolutely said yeah I mean infrastructure I mean

the criticism is not well founded of like too much infrastructure because infrastructure is needed once infrastructure is there then there is lot of innovation lot of uh ability for creative thinking when the cost of doing things is low that's when people start to do things like okay when the roads are there when the different infrastructure is built when it is cheap people can experiment and create things and and and and it it it it is absolutely I mean I think uh needed and more infrastructure I totally agree on the interoperability part where the infrastructure the the uh the plumbing uh all those things that need to be there so that is where we are

doing our bits our two cents in this piece uh where like okay we provide some uh Atomic composability with Solana and crossa so I mean that is just our half a sent there absolutely well folks I think it's been a fascinating discussion I'm really excited um to see what emerges uh from asano said you know really leveraging some of the best components of salana into uh much needed kind of area of of of infra in in the L2 landscape which is a sequencer and so uh it's something that has been talked about since forever as soon as L1 started to exist and so seeing how these two kind of ecosystems merge together as you're doing it with Rome is pretty fascinating so just just to wrap it up timeline wise when can we expect to see

some I mean you leak some Alpha like what's next in the Horizon and then where can people learn more about the project and get involved if they want to yep yeah so we are uh uh geting up with our devet release uh so uh it can come out uh soon uh hopefully in August itself we would release our devet and are in August yes uh and then uh hopefully we can get our minet out uh early next year okay uh like January February when I say early q1 uh 25 and test net from now to then uh so we were uh actually ready to do our devet but we decided that we needed

a better evm so we created Rome evm in the process and uh so our tet is going to be based on our own evm Ro media fantastic well very exciting Anil uh best way to get a hold of you the project developments Discord Twitter telegram right now it is Twitter so we just got a community because right now we were uh so far we were heads down building it was all Engineers uh building building building so we just got a community manager hired and we are setting up our Discord so that would be out there so right now it just Twitter all right yeah awesome we'll link that in show notes um anal awesome having you on uh I've really enjoyed our private discussions we want to bring that more

to the public space and hope people find this topic interesting and uh one that may not have been as as appreciated but if you talk to builders if you talk to you're in these L2 communities the sequencer is Central and it's a very important component that um is very much being worked on so great to see you guys come on and share your vision so uh we'll we'll definitely be following close s testet and and hopefully uh you know main it launches soon TM yeah thank you for having me it was a pleasure talking to you both thanks hey everyone big thanks for watching today's episode wanted to just quickly remind you about the Stellar development foundation's sixth annual Meridian conference this October 15th

through 17th in London this is an incredible opportunity to network with the forward thinkers who are defining the future of this space head over to meridian. stellar.org and use the code blockworks pod for early bird pricing [Music]