What Are Epheremal Rollups?

Transcript

what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup today's episode is about a new and Innovative Concept in the world of blockchains called ephemeral rollups today we talk with Andrea from magic block about ephemeral rollups and this is a far-reaching application of blockchain technology that I have not seen a lot about so I was super stoked to talk to Andre about this concept and I'm very very excited to see some of the applications of effect emal blockchains in practice coming soon before we get into it first a word from our sponsors that help make all of this possible [Music] enjoy CI is your home for app specific

rups at the Forefront we're developing new tools and platforms that enhance the capabilities of blockchain Technology cesy enables applications that Flex and buil build on a full Linux environment and traditional library but in blockchain development go to cy. cy. to learn more about building your own AC what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup today's conversation is going to center around ephemeral rollups or eph ephemeral rollups epals uh temporary rollups um something that we've been thinking about for the last couple months so haven't had had the chance to talk to anybody about it so this will be

our first we have Andrea from magic block today um as well as Rob Rob uh GM and uh can you name me a use case of ephemeral rollups fantastic question Andy and GM uh the use case of ephemeral rollups that I use as my uh shining shining light guiding North Star when I think about ephemeral rollups is this idea of like insurance and so uh think about if we want to make a transfer from maybe one blockchain to another blockchain um and I want to get some economic guarantees on just that transaction specifically I could spin up a rollup give it some economic security

from something like igen layer and then have like maybe I want to make a million dollar transfer I can maybe have2 million dollar of Economic Security and use this ephemeral rollup almost as like insurance and if something goes wrong with my transfer I slash the validators or uh the stakers that are securing this ephemeral rollup and reroute the slash back to my transaction and repay anything that goes wrong uh and so therefore the ephemeral rollup Economic Security is used as a form of insurance to pay back anything that might go wrong with my bridge transfer that's the one use case I've heard a lot of good things and not so many bad things so maybe we can talk about what's bad about ephemeral rollups

if anything just to get two sides of the coin but uh but that's the use case that comes to mind when I think about uh these kinds of temporary rollups or rollups that can die uh because not every rollup needs to be unstoppable and immutable for the next Thousand Years uh Andrea welcome to the rollup uh would love to hear your perspective on ephemeral Roll-Ups and maybe we can start with another use case if you have one of ephemeral rollups Jim guys uh thanks for having me and wow I didn't think of that One news case that that sounds cool we should probably build it um but uh yeah so happy to give you my sense on what and and uh firm rups Cod enable um the

reason why so first of all I'm the fer of magiclock magiclock is uh onchain game engine so we basically enable games and fully onchain applications to have the same performances that I would have on traditional multiplayer game server on on traditional server but on chain and so F rollups are kind of a pivotal uh technology that we use to enable this performance while at the same time retaining the composability that we all all know and love about um blockchain and so when I our use case our first use case the main reason why we build a f rollet was to build fully on chain was to enable games that were persistent

that leverage uh the trustless of the virtual machine on which we were operating on we're building on Solana specifically so for anything that involved high stakes um game for um you know Casino for Esports for uh prediction Market anything that doesn't require um or like shouldn't require a centralized party to operate then a blockchain is is a great fit and you're building your game as a smart contract the problem is that then every interaction with that application is a transaction and so it's very very slow um even on SL with half a second for 100 millisecond block time basically every interaction takes half a second to

really get through and so that is a terrible ux for any application let alone with games we typically have some of the highest requirements in terms of latency and therefore we wrote a paper back um last year which by now we have implemented um we call it fem rollups are all you need uh theorizing this idea that you could temporarily move some computation into these just in time on demand uh instances that are very very fast and very lightweight that's kind of the basic idea behind ephemeral rollups so in terms of use cases where real quick real quick could you just help us

understand from your perspective what anir rollup actually is like what does that even mean like it sounds so so so gigabrain but I feel like it's actually kind of a simple understanding like is it just a rollup that you can spin up and then turn off yeah you basically uh the most fundamental level it's a rollup that exists for as long as the use case that it sered and then it disappear so it's sort of an auxiliary layer to something that uh is sort of on running on the Bas layer so in our case the interesting aspect of f rollups is that you can deploy your game

for example on Solana the bser that we're using and then move into the FM rollups only the computation that you need to run faster or with customization at the WR time so you don't need to redeploy your entire game or application into a different ecosystem um and obviously has several implications in terms of composability for example but at the same time you can still manage to access the same uh benefit that you would have if you were to build your own up chain or your own separate rollup so fundamentally yeah an F rollup is just a rollup that is temporary but the implication over what that brings to the table in terms of um design space are

are very very powerful yeah okay so how does that work um you're on so first of all salana is going modular as it's done it's cooked the salana is going modular and Magic yeah I heard that at mod Summit as well so that's happening but H how does that work like uh how do you how do you go from Salon a base layer launch an ephemeral rollup and then get everything you need to like have a fully functioning chain at low cost which makes sense from economic perspective and then just like shut it down like where does the state go like maybe just walk us through an example that's that's that's uh you know in tesate or is launched or uh kind of what

a typical cycle like a life cycle of an epema rollup would look like from like a technical level yeah absolutely so again the interesting the first interesting aspect of f rollups especially on Solana is that you can deploy your smart contract directly on Solana without necessarily having to deploy your programs your smart contract in into a different execution environment then the second aspect that we leverage about the Solan virtual machine is that state and logic is separated which is something very different compared to ebm and that basically allow developers to call an instruction on a program on chain which is the delegation program and what that

delegation program does is it lock that particular State on the base layer and it spin up uh the fem rollup so the fem rollup is basically a Solana validator that we roll from scratch and we customize to make it very very lightweight and very very fast it doesn't have consensus it doesn't have gossip and therefore it can run at faster speed at that point that particular state that you locked on Solana is loaded in the F rollup and it's available to be changed in the F rollup only that particular State and so at that point the basic idea is that you

can send some transaction to modify that state in the FML rollup and some other transaction to modify some other state that is unlocked directly on Solana therefore parallelizing the execution environment between these multiple layers and that is something very kind of maybe difficult to wrap our head around because we're not used to execute in parall between multiple execution environment either you run your transaction on etherum or you run your transaction on optimism either you run your transaction on Solana or you run your transaction on a Solana L2 right but with a f rups what you can do is you can in fact in with multiple execution

environment in parallel at the same time because you're locking some State on the L1 and you are moving that particular State and that state only into the FM rollup so now we are in a phase where that state is locked on Solana but is writable is unlocked in the F rollup and that could be something like the position of a player in a game let's let's take an example like that and so at this point the developers um or I should say the users has to interact with this different execution environment right how do they do that well what we're doing to simplify this whole flow is we're creating a simple RPC router that abstract all of this

complexity away precisely because the state is locked on Solana and we know where you're sending your transaction we can understand where you're interacting when you're sending a transaction and this again is something very particular very peculiar of Solana because of the declarative structure of the transaction I won't go deeper into that but basically you have to always declare in your transaction what state you're accessing and that's what allowed Solana to be part Parable and so given of kind of this way to struct a transaction we know beforehand where you're sending the transaction to and hence we allow you with a single RPC end point to send transaction through multiple layers

through multiple execution environment or F rollups in parallel and at that point it's really up to the developers to decide where when to close that rollup right if you're spinning up a rollup for a play session you might want when your users to move their player position in that FM rollup and maybe you're sharding based on geolocation which is something very common in game uh right you have server instances around the globe because you know no server can basically have millions of players into the same instance and therefore you have servers that are collocated around the globe uh but then it's really up to them to decide okay now I want to close my session I want to roll the state back and at that point

the state div gets written back on the Solon L1 and that state that you originally locked on the L1 gets unlocked and you're able to interact again with that state on the L1 so the life cycle is really I'm looking a state on the L1 I'm loading this state in the F rollup I'm changing that state however I want and then I'm rolling that state back but it works again at the account level account is basically this notion that state and Logic on SOL separated and therefore you can only move some piece of state that you want to interact with faster or with different customization at the execution

environment level hope that was not too technical interesting no no no I have a couple questions for you uh directly on some of the properties of salana being uh more ideal than ethereum for for for these types of setup like uh is the is the is the local fee Market aspect of salana like the like the uh kind of um this paral this parallelization nature that you're speaking of um is that the core of why this design works on for for FM rollups on salana L1 or is it also because of the fast block times and like the way that the transactions are are

fast and cheap because like what I'm getting at is like is this possible on other l1s that are paralyzed but have slower block times or are not paralyzed and have slower block times and you know we can kind of run in different ideas for these l1s but I'm trying to really understand what it is about salon's base layer exactly that makes this possible so the the key feature really of the svm is this separation of state and Logic the fact that some accounts hold the state all the data and some other accounts all the logic how that data is changed right the state transition function and given that there is this separation you can

indeed lock only the accounts that you need only particular State um and load that state into an FM rollup something like an fmr rollup but you can still interact with the rest of your application or programs or state that is unlocked or logic that is available on Solana and so in in a in a paradigm in a in a run time where you don't have these ability to natively detach State and logic um I think it would be hard to you know load only that portion of State in an a different execution environment also because at that point then how can

you interact with these different layers at the same time the other insights and the other feature that Solana have is parallelization by means of always declaring upfront in the transaction which state you're accessing and because you do that that is uh something that the developer has to deal with is something that you know you could argue um increase the burden over the developers of having to specify all these different accounts that goes in the transaction but then what the salana Schuler knows is okay this transaction is hitting these three different states these other transaction is not accessing these other states and therefore you can paralyze that way and that is also the

reason why you can run transaction in parallel between these multiple FM rollups or between Solana and an FM rollup because we always know up front where the transaction is directed where the transaction is going um and so I think these are really the key insights the key unlock that enabled something like f rollups to exist the native separation of state and logic and the declarative the the fact that in the transaction you declare the state upfront and therefore you can parize across multiple execution environment which is something that you typically don't think about when you are thinking about running uh an transaction or R

playing a game or running an application uh this is a fundamentally new way to conceive how application are run you run them in parallel between multiple blockchains basically Okay so so uh is it fair to say that um in order to achieve FM rollups in this design that you have you need some sort of execution layer that or execution L1 that is parallelized at at its core like that's the key breakthrough um and the way that salana does it enables your specific design to work however there could be other designs that as long as there's a parallelized uh settlement layer be it an L2 or an one then this this this idea

could probably be ported over to something like a parallelized evm or like a uh you know I don't know like a move VM or a fuel VM etc those are a little bit more like uh specific ideas but um I'm just trying to understand how this could look in other execution environments as well yeah for sure if you have the separation of state and logic and if you have the ability to basically declare upfront which that you're accessing in your transaction then you can probably build an FM rollup solution for your blockchain those are really the two key unlocks for this technology I mean you could also build an F rollups that uh is just uh as any

other rollup and is as a temporary nature in it but then that would be way less interesting because you know you wouldn't be able to um paralyze across multiple execution environment or you wouldn't be able to uh have these Justus in time nature just for the state that you're interesting in accelerating for example and so that is less interesting to me than than what we're actually building and part part of the nature of these ephemeral rollups as I understand them is that when you are spinning them up you're locking the state on the L1 and then you're you're loading the state onto an ephemeral rollup you can actually parallelize to several degrees like you you don't just you can have like more than one Emeral

rollup operating on the same state right because you lock it and then maybe you load the that locked State onto one two 3 four five ephemeral rollups and then you're you're manipulating the state you're doing transactions on all of those five in parallel my question is how you sync up those five to settle the state diffs back to the L1 and I think this is a this is an this is a a question that applies to like a lot in ethereum land as well because we're talk talking a lot about like shared sequencers and trying to sync up blockchains uh that don't necessarily have the same properties like block time and so how how are you guys doing it specifically on the Solano World syncing

up these properties across different ephemeral rollups yeah it's a great question and it totally depends on the developers um preferences and the use cases if we're talking about a game for example where most likely you want to split your traffic your users based on where they're located in the world and perhaps they're entering into um uh matching room or something like that or maybe you are partitioning them up in a certain way in order for them to be into the same area of the world but without having to deal with bandwidth problem because there's too many players for example into the same area and therefore

you sh those users and you put them into different FM rollups for that particular reason then how you uh resolve that state um basically depends on when the users are exiting that particular partitioning the map and you can do that dynamically and that is one possible condition over basically at that point the F roller will post a commitment of the state diff on Solan on the base layer and that St will be unlocked on the Solana base layer and if they want to uh have a user re-enter into another session for example you can then reload that state into another FML rollup that is something that will require at least

two to Solana transaction but in principle is feasible and given that Solana right now is running at half a second for transaction with fire dancer will probably be closer to 150 millisecond 200 millisecond then it's still a very very reasonable time to do something like that in a game if we're talking about a different use cases that let's take for example a financial protocol uh the condition through which you might want to resolve that state back on chain might be different because if you're building something like I don't know a request for code protocol where biders are submitting their bid into the FML rollups as this kind of isolated ecosystem perhaps to prevent me

ex struction um then the way you want to resolve those uh bids and intents on chain it might be you know with the same price for everybody else and therefore you have to come out with some way to arrange the bid and ask into your fm rollup which could be uh you know first come for serve or could be you know special transaction ordering um and then you resolve on chain and basically you unlock uh some form of liquidity on chain you resolve those intents and you dispatch the liquidity with a transaction that happened directly on the son base there and those condition you know could be potentially completely

different than the first case that we made about the game right because the ordering of the transaction is different because the uh the the way through which you unlock the state and the condition to unlock the state is different right if you if you have to unlock some liquidity on chain based on the transaction ordering in the F rollup obviously you want to make sure that you you know the the biders can submit their bids in in the proper way perhaps you want to have a first com first serve kind of situation um so it's really dependent on the use cases is really dependent on the uh on the developer preferences as well fundamentally what we are providing is the ability to lock

these accounts on the Bas layer to load this state in the fast validator and then to execute those transaction there and then to decide to give you the tool RS to say okay when this condition happens unlock that state or when this condition happens post a commitment or potentially close the rollup all together there's another distinction to be made from commitment to one delegation commitment is when the roller posts that state back on on Solana on the Bas layer and delegation is when the FM roller gets close all together so you could commit but keep the rollup open or you could completely close the rollup what is the right choice depends on the

use case really uh if there's still player in the session you want to obviously keep the roll up going and just to unlock some state for some user but if there's no player left in the room then why do you want to keep the the rup going why are you spending money on running this node you should just close it and you know avoiding spending money on that particular node so it was sort of an un answer but it really depends on the use cases and on the developer preferences got it um I I just want to like zoom out on that particular point and just maybe ask a silly question which is like why should anybody care

about ephemeral rollups like what is the this comes back to the first question when I think I interrupted you about what even e rollup is like like where like like who in their right mind cares about locking State on salana L1 and and uh deploying a Emeral roll up like and then outside of that like I guess this is kind of the same question as like the use cases welcome aboard on our journey into the singularity this is the endgame road map for fracks and FRA the new L2 out of the frax ecosystem that is totally based on fractal scaling fractal is a modular L2 blockchain built by fracks with modular and fractal scaling

in mind fractal scaling is based on the mandal set of fractal images and it explains how l2s become l3s and the entire app chain life cycle goes through its Evolution the fra ecosystem is made of some of the top builders in the space and has stemmed from its OG days of the frax stable coin it is now in the LST space the LRT space and and this frax L2 joins the existing Suite of frax products including fra Swap and fra lend you can see fra fairy the bridge to go from any chain arbitrum optimism or main

net into the fraxel main net Bridge your tokens and bring your frax assets into the fraxel ecosystem join today to get the best out of fraxo you are still early join today take part in our Expedition into the singularity mantle is a layer 2 blockchain with one of the biggest onchain treasuries in all of crypto and they have a 100 day campaign called metamorphosis live now what this is is it it is a campaign for their liquid staked eth token M eth as well as their upcoming liquid reaking token c m eth where you can utilize this token on The Mantel Network in a variety of different

apps some of your favorite restake taking protocols and defi protocols and earn yields in the form of powder which will eventually be turning into a governance token Mantle's been around for a while we like them because they use their own form of Ian da uh they have a good ecosystem and they're growing so check out this 100 day metamorphosis campaign and hope you guys enjoy the rest of this video yeah sure so if you think aside from the general properties that you could get and then we can run through some use cases but latency is the first thing if you log the state into a validator that is running an F rollup session you're

beating the speed of light because you're not bound by consensus and therefore you can always have a better latency than if you were to run that transaction through the hes consensus of the underlying Bas layer so the first reason is for any use case that require you know less than 50 millisecond latency real time latency uh second is to potentially reduce the fees um projects could decide to run their own nodes to run their own eal Obsession acrise the Fe the fees themselves but at the same time the smart contracts remember are always deployed on Solana so that means that you can still keep that sweet composability of the base layer you don't need to move all the

liquidity into your own rollup but still you can benefit from Fe acral or MB extraction if you want the third property is that you can have multiple rollups at the same time and that really allows you to expand the TPS dynamically if your app is being super successful you're onboarding a ton of user then why should you should you not just spin up multiple FM rollups and put those users into these different buckets into these different instances and scale your application that way and the last part is that it gives Solana a way to have up chain or general or like specialized runtime um which salana doesn't have

like salana is a general purpose um runtime and so it's great because you can have access to all of the you know liquidity and user base and developers and network effect but when it comes to specific apps let's take games for example games need Loops they need uh randomness they need you know stuff that you cannot have at the at the at the level of the VM of the Solana virtual machine and so F rollups are potentially a solution to that so with these kind of four principle in mind obviously games fully onchain games are I think a huge huge uh use case for that users will never understand what anfm rollup is for them it will just be like

playing a normal game playing a multiplayer game where the latency is super Snappy uh but that game is built entirely on chain and gives you the ability to interact with tokens the ability to have persistent score the ability to not having to trust a centralized party a studio in order to maintain your game running because there's this Distributing Network that we always make sure that the game is on and therefore you can have games that are unstoppable that could potentially last for 50 years um and then Financial use cases right every use case that requires very ability and the ability to not having to trust a single counterpart for the custody of assets but also for

the execution of those transaction potentially a system like this could give the same performance that um you know offchain Central um centralized exchanges have with a central imit order book that is run in the F rollup but then again with the liquidity on the Bas layer with no fragmentation and without trust assumption um that you will have with a centralized party so those are sort of the you know most interesting use cases at least the most urgent one that we're tackling right now but then potentially it applies to any other application that requires to be built fully on chain so any application that require this verifiability in their

computation any application that wants to tap into the composability aspect of blockchain and any application that wants to be unstoppable and persistent could benefit for something like this great great explanation like I I I do think what what we see now is a lot of these hybrid Solutions where we have a lot of components that are that are being made onchain but then when it comes to uh component or computation of of an application that uh needs really low latency or really low cost we just move that offchain and then we verified onchain and we say like all right that's good enough but these ephemeral rollups because they're much more customizable uh we can lower the cost we can lower

the latency and we can still keep them on chain we just have two different chains and then we sync them up and the chain that we want really high throughput we modify the rules a little bit and I think you mentioned like this is gives us specialization and I think that is something that's like really really important and is like pretty cool that Solana is also adopting this like modular approach now and going into these more like specialized run times because it means that in these ephemeral rollups we can set more more specialized conditions whether that's low latency higher throughput or like the insurance example I gave at the beginning certain slashing conditions right can reorder and consensus can be more specialized

for that particular use case of that rollup and then we can have these like really exotic flavorful combinations that make up our apps where it's not just a single uh execution environment for our app now our app is made up of all of these specialized components each of them have like specialized compartments uh and the app is this combination of all of those and I think it's going to make for like much more exciting much more like uh organic and and apps that resemble things that we actually want to use not things that you know are possible on blockchain and we use them because they're on blockchain no it's like now these these execution environments are at a level where the in the infrastructure is at a level where

it can support the types of applications that people are accustomed to using with all of their different functionalities that are available on something like web to yeah absolutely you touch on two very important points that I want to stress one is verifiability of course every time you move computation into a different execution environment you need to make sure that then you maintain the same trustless Assumption of the underlying Bas layer when it comes to you know etherum or when it comes to Solana any RAB build on top need to have either a ZK a validity proof or a fra proof mechanism implemented um and at the same time on the second part that you mentioned users would need to understand what they're

interacting with we we won't use something just because it's on the blockchain but we use something um just interacting with the thing but leveraging the unique feature that the blockchain will bring and I think one of the most interesting aspect of again going back to games of fully onchain games is that really Leverage The all the properties uh of blockchain in terms of verifiability of compute for resources the ability to permissionless extend an environment without asking for consent to any parties but with this technology we have you have the same performance that you would have with the traditional multiplayer game server which gives user that delightful ux that they they deserve when they're playing a

game right they they don't have to really understand what a transaction is they don't have to understand what they they have to switch RPC to move in to a different um exhibtion environment and obviously it will take time to to get there but like I'm really really excited about the kind of games that we're building and the kind of games that we're supporting and they're building on top of magic block because they go very very close to that reality where users just have to interact with the thing and and don't really think about this different execution environment running on the back yeah it's amazing it's a really cool idea and I I I think that that it's it I I hope it gets tested outside of salana on ethereum and on l2s as l3s and I hope rup as a service

providers also one day offer the idea of uh or the service of being able to launch um temporary rollups and like totally like totally lower the cost of experimentation to nearly zero let Builders spin up rollups test out stuff Break Stuff in in real time with uh in production not just on test net and then just you know call it a day ticketing uh short-term events um gated communities clubs sales on on a uh you know a section of an e-commerce store Etc so um overall and Andre I really appreciate your insights today I think it's a good time to wrap kind of any closing

thoughts on the future of ephemeral rollups and kind of how you see it playing out bullish F rollups if anybody wants to implement something like this on other ecosystem fre to reach out to us and if you are a builder um in the Salan ecosystem and want to kind of Leverage this stack that we build uh feel free to reach out as well even more so because we're excited about um you know what we're building and what kind of applications uh games and consumer application FM worlds can enable most importantly coent is solving the longterm data availability problem where a lot of the data availability providers today in the modu space when you post data to them they actually only hold

that data for about 12 to 16 days and then it's basically they can go into archive note or often times it's just kind of put away into the abyss and what coaling is trying to do is build this long-term data availability solution which can plug into some of these modular data availability providers and provide this longer term Perpetual data solution so what we try to think of this as is when you post transaction data onto Celestial or or any of these modu da Solutions or even ethereum Co is able to provide a long-term data storage and data availability platform for that data after the time period blockchains are Billboards not databases and you know we

need these providers in the space to be able to kind of hold on to the longterm data that is provided from these providers and these blockchain State this is where coent comes in they just had a nice Rebrand check them out on Twitter as well as the website thank you for being here hope you enjoy the rest of the show Everclear is pioneering the clearing layer the clearing layer can almost be thought of as splitwise when you go on a trip with friends but for the blockchain what I mean by that is when users are sending cross chain messages there's often times fillers and solvers who have balances left on different chains that they need to rebalance and reset their positions this is where evercar comes in evercar is

pioneering a collaborative approach to chain abstraction future and they are willing to work with interoperability Partners solvers and other providers in the space to build a interoperable and chain abstraction future check out Everclear ever clear.org and welcome back to the Lup Andre I got one one more quick question for you which is that and this is something that I've asked people but I haven't really gotten a straight answer on I'm curious if ephemeral rollups can kind of like Get Like solve this this question which is that like you know early on a lot of like blockchain value is like we want to bring Financial value on chain but now like more so than ever I I hear projects talking about we want to bring compute

on chain and so I think there's like there's a value proposition where like the verifiability is like more secure than something like a centralized compute but maybe it's not as fast and maybe it's like more expensive because you're paying for security and so I'm curious do you think that verifiable so we need to give these projects an incentive to use onchain like do you think verifiable compute will ever be like at the same throughput as as Cloud compute I think that's the direction where we're going and that's what the vision that we should aspire to I really see blockchain as a computational platform and as kind of the a Next Generation a generational

shift into how we run our application and our um you know games put entially so I really aspire to that Vision where everything is running on chain and you have these different servers these different instances under the hood which are F rollups or any other rollup and really you give users all the computer that they need dynamically on demand when they're joining your app uh and everything is abstracted away under the hood and they don't need to really switch RPC or really understand what is happening but at the same time if they need to conduct a payment uh with Native usdc directly on the Bas layer that payment goes through in 400 millisecond

or less because you still maintain the composability of the Bas layer that's super exciting to me that's the future that we want to build towards and so I I really think that you know in a few years I don't know whether it's going to be five or 10 but that the it will be indistinguishable blockchain will be completely indistinguishable compared to traditional AWS web servers awesome yeah I think we share that Vision uh more more Compu on Shain yeah that's the goal awesome Andrea thanks for coming on man uh this was a pleasure and uh I'm glad that we can Spice in salana uh amongst all the other things that you know we we talk about on on the rollup so thanks for coming on it was absolute

pleasure thanks for having me had a great time cheers man thank you