Unveiling Fuel Network's Modular Rollup OS

Transcript

welcome back to the rollup High Roller Community as always nothing on the rollup is to be ConEd as Financial advice we are just an Educators in the defi space toss us a quick like give us a share a repost send it to a friend who may want to watch this and finally give us a sub or a follow it means the world to help support credibly neutral educational content in def5 we're here to educate Empower and enrich you and let's jump in what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup here today alignment with our modular rollup thesis which is using a nonm virtual machine and using an alternative da layer we have Nick from fuel the CEO of fuel labs in OG in the space today to talk about

the rollup OS that fuel is has recently launched so GM Nick welcome good to have you back GM yeah yeah happy to be here yeah thanks for that will we be seeing those fuel hats in E Denver I think uh I think we'll have a lot of fuel mark so yeah we we'll have some we'll have some solid stuff yeah we've got we've got also some um some VM day or sorry execution day March that's pretty great so yeah we're just leaning we're just leaning we're leaning in to the to the execution Day idea so yeah nice love it so I was one of the earliest adopters of kind of optimistic rollups and rollups in general it's quite interesting to me

that you've kind of now came to this idea that well maybe the e M isn't the best thing to scale these rollups to you know Mass adoption or tons of different use cases and so now you've kind of came up with this idea of rollup OS like the operating system for rollups maybe we can kind of unpack a little bit as to you know some of the reasonings behind Fuel and then dive deeper into the uh the nitty-gritty yeah yeah for sure for sure so I think the main the main idea the way that you could think about this and especially in light of the space and how the space is transforming um you can think about it like uh most of the architectures you see most of the stuff you see in the space right now is um not really designed for rollups or it

wasn't uh it wasn't designed for the problems of now basically the the idea that we're embracing rollups and modularity as a way to progress blockchains in a way that we've never seen before and right now we're in a we're in a weird position where a lot of these architectures were designed for monolithic layer ones or they were designed for um you know effectively arbitrary execution right like running video games and stuff on your computer so we have a bunch of different environments and a bunch of different tools that weren't really designed for what we need to use them for now what we actually what the moment demands and so with the rollup OS and what fuel's doing we're basically saying look like what if

you could really have it all what if you could really have the the virtual machine the language the operating system for rollups that you really needed um in order to get both throughput security scale um and all the tools and everything that you're really looking for um when you're building out rollups and you're building out these new kinds of systems and be able to do that really cost effectively and also be able to do that in a way that we've just never seen before in the space and so you know fuel designing itself or setting itself up as sort of the rollup OS is really to say that everything else can't really say that I mean maybe you could say starware and Aztec are somewhat like this in a sense that

they're building for rollups specifically but our architecture is really designed for rollups from the beginning and and I'd also say that um in regard to external da and and also the just the meaning of rollups themselves I'd say that um we we've actually come to a different conclusion about da so for us we're going full ethereum 4844 da and we're I think able to achieve a very high rate of throughput on 4844 da to a point where I don't see us filling it up anytime soon and I think that it is more than enough for now and I think as ethereum expands its sharting road map and gets closer to 16 megabytes uh um you know 16 megabytes per block

something like that I think we're going to see a lot more throughput so so fuel's actually embracing The Blob space and the the 4844 ethos and ethereum Alignment in a deeper way than we ever realized but that being said we do want people to launch fuel rollups with Celestia da with avail da with ianl da I think you want to let people choose you want to let them customize what they want to do with with rollups but I think that um for us and for our rollup that we're going to um roll out this year uh it's going to be 444 da it's going to be e for fees it's going to be any wallet you want um and I mean any wallet just pick a wallet I don't care where it's

from pick a wallet uh and um and have the security and throughput that people are really looking for yeah nice yeah let let's kind of like set the stage for like the the precipice uh of fuel here um like you guys are launching this operating system uh you're gonna let the users and the developers choose their da Solutions and kind of like like open up this design space for rollup developers to to launch with any kind of Da that they like any connect with any wallet that they like and fuel is also going to launch its own rollup that is going to use ethereum's Proto dang sharding so that's what's on on the horizon here for

fuel uh could you talk about like kind of like putting your money where your mouth is and kind of dog fooding your own technology here like when you guys are looking to launch your own rollup with fuel like what are some of the things that are very very key in the operating system that you're carrying over into this rollup that that is built very natively within the fuel ecosystem yeah so I think that um I think that when you're deploying rollups I think arbitrum actually has a pretty good idea now I'm not going to Signal exactly how things are going to go for fuel what we're going to do I'm not going to say anything in particular but I think arbitrum has the right idea with having a core rollup do a lot of things that are probably a lot cheaper than

doing that on ethereum and then having a lot of other kinds of rollups around that and basically I can't speak too much to exactly how this is going to work because we have a lot of really uh great stuff on the horizon in terms of how this is going to actually function um which will deserve its own releases and its own study but I but I'll say that um in terms of rollups I think that people want to be able to launch their own stuff and their with their own ideas they don't want to have to rebuild everything from scratch but they do want to inherit a lot of really great stuff off the off the bat and so unlike a lot of these other architectures um fuel is really designed in many ways to be very extensible such that you can add the op

codes that you're looking for you can add the kinds of feature functionality that you're looking for but not have to rebuild everything not have to retool everything not have to reconstruct everything and um allowing them to interoperate allowing all these different rollups to have an interoperation plan is something that I think people are also really looking for and we're seeing sort of the first conversations with some of the ZK stuff that polygon's doing and I think that fuel is very uniquely positioned in the optimistic space to do this kind of iter operation um which also deserves its own study and its own ideas as well but effectively um maybe that gives you some insight as to kind of what we're rolling out and maybe some of the intuitions and the ideas behind how that would work

yeah yeah and so few fuel at the VM level is a purpose-built virtual machine with paralyzation for transactions and your own kind of custom programming language called sway so let's kind of just unpack what parallelization means for the audience and I'm personally Keen to understand if using kind of ethereum Da is a good tradeoff for fuel VM and the rollup because the VM actually provides a ton of this uh capacity that you know kind of like evm or other structures you know don't and so you can then opt to have effectively a more decentralized you know da solution or if there's other thoughts there so yeah yeah yeah so I would say in regards to the the virtual machine design so in

that sense we wanted a virtual machine that covered a lot of the ground that you see in terms of something that is um maybe slightly lower level from the evm so the evm is like 256 bit this is 64-bit as well you want something that um again can be parallel processed so in that sense we use a technique using utxos that allows us to parallel process everything but still get the same effect and behavior and developer kind of experiences you would get with ethereum so you don't lose anything from ethereum you still have all the same tools at your disposal like general purpose smart contracts and all this sort of stuff so you get everything you're looking for you get a much cleaner VM one that's

designed for again sort of the needs of today but as well one that has other features that are really important like native level natively secured account abstraction um and account signing which again allows you to use any kind of wallet whatever way you like and you can design anything you want inside of those uh as well having this very very sort of high throughput I think I think initially we were a little more hesitant about ethereum da and its roadmap and how far it was going to get but now that 4844 is where it is and we have definable numbers we're very comfortable launching a sort of core rollup on it and allowing other people eventually to launch their own core rollups on it

because um it's enough it's enough da it's enough da for a lot of transactions and uh enough transactions that it would call for having a really parallel process execution environment like Fuel and having one that that has the sort of high performance VM um that we have and then as far asway it's really just you know solidity has had its share of kind of growing pains and issues so over time and I think that while I've basically been a user of solidity since version of like 6 so like almost since the beginning um it's really not been a very fun road to to travel and um you know effectively a lot of devs just end up looking toward much lower level Solutions like Ule or Huff or something

else because it just doesn't feel like you really have good control over the evm and over everything that you really want to do and while we built up a lot of infrastructure around it and while it's Contin to sort of grow as a as an ecosystem I don't think it's going away I think there's a real need for a blockchain language like one that really cleans everything up but that allows me to Target any environment I want so whether it's targeting um fuel or eventually potentially targeting wam or salana or the evm you can use one language you can do everything inside of it it's a very nice design language it incorporates a lot of these newer ideas we have about programming languages that come from rust and other systems but it's flexible enough to also do your

testing to do your indexing to do a lot of different things inside of it and so a Dev can really use it in many different ways and I think it's worth a Dev learning versus a language tied to only one VM with only one use case like just smart contracts um so that's maybe like the headline pitch for kind of the fuel VM way yep are there like developer resources you know like I I would say a good portion of our community is developer oriented and and looking to dive into some of this material um so so what is like the best like path for someone to learn about these new programming languages get exposed to

them and then ultimately start getting their hand sturdy in the ecosystem yeah so I think like and again we're as much as we've been building for many years it's still early days in terms of building with fuel and launching on fuel stuff so like big Prem you know Preface on it's early so just you know uh so watch out but best place is we're you know culminating all of our docs to docs. fuel. network so everything should be there as far as um whether you're learning the language you're learning about fuel you're learning about any aspect of architecture it's all going to be in one place so you don't need to like hop around to many different different docks we're continually trying to push the dock so uh it's going to get a lot

better I think there's going to be a lot more cheat sheets and a lot more stuff that just allows you to get set up a lot faster and as well we'll have Solutions in the future that should make deploying your own systems and rollups like really really streamlined um but the main idea is that uh I would start there and then um forum. fuel. network uh is where you definitely got to ask questions so we try to keep on that as as hard as we can and so it's like you know I think we're like 20 hour response time so pretty good we'll try to like continue to improve that over time but basically like uh those would be the two places as I would go if you just want to get started and and it's really just like you know trying to deploy a smart

contract trying to deploy an app like give us your feedback give us everything we'll we will stay responsive and make changes uh at this stage so if you have feedback like it will affect the whole system like we'll we'll incorporate as much as we can yeah yep yeah there's this interesting kind of dynamic happening in the ruup space now where you've got a lot of teams who are kind of actively trying to be quick and to effectively take as much eth off of L1 as they can into their rollup while the broader rollup space is kind of putting forward this collaborative front in a sense of like composability asynchronous communication Atomic composability we should have a a one ux for all but arbitrum is like rux you guys should

come join ours and optimism is like no no no you guys should come join ours and so like we kind of have this interesting situation where we're still in the early days of rollups where each one is trying to like get this market share but I feel like there's almost been like this lack of like understanding as to why rollups are even like here it's all to kind of scale ethereum and that the infighting or the competition within is like a current like bull market market share capture phenomenon but I think we we see this kind of shift into like broadly scaling ethereum as these kind of more advanced interoperability things come online like shared sequencing Etc curious kind of like how you see fuel fitting in the landscape how you plan to interoperate with other rollups you know and generally kind of your perspective

on rollups today yeah I think um I think everything's very early in the space I think that um the the competition and the infighting and the tribalism and stuff is like very normal and I I've unfortunately seen that the entire time been doing blockchain stuff so to me I'm just like uh that's like my base level acceptance of what behavior I'm seeing is always just like extreme tribalism between the different spaces I think the thing is um I guess the way I see it with fuel is just that um what we're doing is very different it's very Niche uh it's definitely not what a lot of other people are doing um we don't we don't need a thousand copy pass to

projects to launch with us while that might look good and like it might up some num somewhere I think what we want is people that um they have a feeling with the current status quo that it just kind of sucks and that they want to look for something better like they want to look for an improvement something different something that pequs their curiosity with like what is even possible with blockchain but also have a lot of the problems that they probably were run into if they were to design it all from scratch they were to just stop right now design everything from scratch they probably want everything we've included basically and so I think that um what fuel has in terms of a technology and also um you know the kind

of community that we're trying to build is one that um basically can have that really deep curiosity for trying different things and trying to benefit from all the work that we've done in terms of thinking around high performance like parallel environments like as well State growth and state sustainability like interoperability customizability all kinds of different tooling and infrastructure requirements like basically trying to take care of all of that such that you're left with an architecture you feel like will last a long time and will also be really performant for your users um and as well that your users don't need to change anything like for them it's just AAP they don't notice any difference they're using metamask they're signing everything as normal Everything feels

pretty much sort of like what they're used to we don't want users to change at all we want uh the users are fine um we want to support more ways that users can interoperate their stuff um the main thing is just that uh we want to solve all these other big issues right and these These are crippling in terms of evm design and the evm is just so constrained as to what it can actually do and you can add a bunch of special pre-compiled and stuff into it but it's it's really um sort of not designed for 2024 crypto it's just not a good architecture in general and and we can pipeline it and paralyze it and we can do all kinds of things to it but unfortunately it's not going to I think move the needle and fuel will just be so

significantly farther ahead in terms of what a Dev will want that you wouldn't really want to use that and I think as well a problem and maybe a reason why there's so much tribalism in the ethereum rollup space is they're all using the same evm so there's no differentiation like there's no moat really between most of these things there's Nuance between the security differences of different projects there's nuances between what tradeoffs but you know currently the community is maybe a little bored I think with the available solutions that are out there and yes you can do everything in wasum and you can do everything in Risk five and you can go super low level but do you really want to do that do you really want to rebuild asset systems and all

other kinds of things because you have to think about how do you account for everything and how does that gonna how's that going to interoperate with everything else right um so really all the design choices we made and the trade-offs we made Encompass all kinds of different reasoning around how rollup should work and how the future of rollup should work and I think um you know with us it's very early it's a different kind of build it's going to be a different kind of project as well like if you go with us but I think that it'll also be something that you know will allow your project to deeply Advance into what's possible with blockchain much further um and with much less work than what you typically see in the space so um there's always trade-offs everything nothing's

perfect um you go with an evm chain no one's going to blame you uh but at the same time you know uh it's probably not the right it's probably not the right architecture if you really planning for scale and you're really planning for like an incredible user experience I think that with that you have to go a lot further and I think fuel is uniquely positioned to be able to bring a lot of projects into that space and we have more than enough projects that want to deploy their own stuff with us it's really just the question is always is it going to be ready when's it ready and you know that question will be answered so yeah when token as always and I think Rob and I wholeheartedly agree in with regards to the uh VM design you know I just put out a tweet over the weekend

like this is my modular expansion timeline and I think right now and over the last couple of months DA has Cutten all of the hype and you know rightfully so if we can scale theum rollups down costs significantly tons of projects are launching on Celestia ail is going live soon Ian da is coming online near has been online so it's definitely been like the biggest you know kind of like Trend but I think that quickly shifts in like Q2 Q3 of this year uh which is probably going to be aligned in some sense with your timeline in the sense of everything that you're saying from a functionality perspective is so much deeper and more important and more uh uh it's gonna have such a bigger impact than just da and so like I think this like ideation of

innovation on the VM level is gonna just absolutely just boom for lack of better term caman explosion of like possibilities because I think generally it's just it's like a much bigger set of you know onboarding devs of ux of tooling of all these things things and da is just kind of one piece of this pie yeah I mean just generally agree we love Cambrian explosions over here and that's kind of what it feels like it like I think it makes sense and there's a reason that it started with da because like you wouldn't really need all of this extra capacity in your VM if you didn't have anywhere to put it so now that we have abundant block space it's like all right well what how are we going to fill this up and that's where

VMS come in and now they're like so much more colorful and and and vibrant VM Ms because you kind of have the capacity to do a lot more and generally like you guys are pushing that space forward yeah and again I I think even just to speak to that too like we've been planning for that day of having too much block space for a very long time so for us unlike a lot of other environments like fuel is very much ready to use up that da like effectively our design trades off a lot of bandwidth for state which inherently means that again on the front of processing a lot of transactions and doing a lot of volume globally actually having a system that can do that but do it sustainably um that's how we do it I

mean we really we do trade off uh state for bandwidth and it allows us to sort of have this potential and I think that um you know it's it is awesome that there's going to be a lot of Da I think at the same time though that there's still nothing like ethereum secure da uh just because of the amount just like the sheer amount of validation and eyes rpcs everything on it to a point where I think it's going to take a very long time to get better at that or you know better than that I would say in terms of Da so it's not to undervalue I think the existing ethereum blob space which is still a lot um but yes I think for a lot of applications that want to have a

wider creative space and they don't want to have to pay enormous fees for enormous amounts of security I think that the available da solutions that are external are like really going to open the door and I feel like fuel's designed inherently is built for that that moment yeah it's like the perfect storm like like all the da stuff is gonna get established and like is now and then like towards the like the middle end of half this year all the VMS are G to come online and then I don't know 2025 might just be like it might just we just might see a crazy like yeah yeah yeah man I complet I completely agree I think uh I think we're all very excited and um and I think that also just with the way rollups are are working out I

feel like um you know a lot of people are very excited about the way Celestia is developing in terms of you know how different projects are coming to it I mean effectively it's like one giant reoccurring airdrop uh but you know I think that I think that that model plays out well with a lot of projects like I feel like a lot of projects if there was a true model to really emulate I feel like that's not a bad one yeah yeah there's a quite an interesting couple of token distribution things going on right now with nft communities with staking Tia and dimension it's like this never- ending Loop like get an airdrop stake it for more but then again like in fuel's case let's say there's going to be 10

rollups that launch using the fuel VM on top of the stack in 2025 I mean how else do you get exposure to that as a bullish holder right it's like it's these kind of cases of like well we can expand the change so much and get all this new block space at some point you know the part is going to end but for now we're not even at a thousand 10,000 you know chains or rollups so like oh we're and we're just getting started and again every single project that you see in crypto right now will have its own chain it'll want own chain it'll have its own chain because there's a feeling you get when you have your own chain and you have your own sovereignty and it's a feeling that you can't reproduce in any other way and it's a feeling that's very not felt when you

write a smart contract but that is felt when you have your own roll up your own chain and it's uh the feeling of real sovereignty over your project and and as well to be able to set a path for the project that like really will help the users so long as you can make this work right like you have to make it interoperate you have to make it scalable and you have to make it it has to be done a certain way but if it can just be done in a certain way um I think for developers it feels very very empowering probably very similar to how it felt to like spin up your first website you know in early internet days with like God daddy or something like very similar to that in terms of just the flexibility and the creativity that you can apply to it now again there's a

lot of concerns you can't mix them all together and if you br if you bridge them all together and call the assets the same then you've just mixed all the security properties of random rollups together so you can't do that but what you can do is and more excitingly you can bring them together in different ways and I think that um I think people are discovering that this is going to be possible and it's going to be good enough and we have a lot of incredible Solutions on the table to be able to make rollups a really great experience very safe and also um really Dynamic and really creative like far more than a single chain could ever enable basically well I uh I look forward to um doing more of a technical Deep dive in our upcoming modular March kind of some more

of these State bloat conversations I think are particularly interesting as well as the broader prepar legalization I'm glad that you brought up the airdrop concept I never bring it up because Rob always gives me but it's quite funny of a distribution I appreciate your uh your insights and look forward to this modular thesis kind of being cemented and fuel being a big player awesome yeah likewise and uh you know there's a million other things to go go way off the deep end so you know should definitely definitely at some point do that but I think right now uh you know we we can we can keep it you can keep it light yeah yeah that sounds great thanks man thanks for coming on awesome yeah yep

thanks everyone