Where Is The Demand for Data Availability? With EigenDA

Transcript

little ice breaker here Teddy what's your favorite ice cream flavor uh cookies and cream usually my goto I go with cookie though over here yeah I'm I'm going to side with Andy on this yeah Min chocolate Chip's pretty basic the real debate which cookie what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup welcome to a chain abstraction paloa where we just wrapped up an epic one-day marathon in the heart of New York City diving deep into chain abstraction with some of the top teams in crypto trust me this series is packed with insights laughs and a few surprises you won't want to miss shout out to Omni Network for helping to put this together with their upcoming mayet soon targeting the interoperability and ux problem that we're currently facing in the ethereum and majer ecosystem we really enjoyed

this series and looking forward putting all this content out there let's jump right into today's episode after a quick word from some more awesome Partners who make this possible verx Edge is now now live on say Network say users can now trade 50 plus spot and per markets with the unified order book liquidity of vertex Edge across arbitrum blast mantle and S the next 6 weeks 850,000 say tokens will be up for grabs as trading rewards every single week exclusively on say join vertex on say Network now on vertex Edge

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check out this 100 day metamorphosis campaign and hope you guys enjoy the rest of this video it's Wednesday we're in New York City we have teddy here we have Austin from Omni Ian de Teddy what's going on guys welcome welcome in Austin how you feeling today I'm feeling good Teddy how are you doing man I'm doing well little ice breaker here Teddy what's your favorite ice cream flavor uh cookies and cream that's usually my go-to I'd go with cookie dough over here yeah I'm I'm going to side with Andy on this one yeah mint mint chocolate chip is pretty basic the real debate which cookie chocolate chip with salt though on top ah okay well you wanted a a question to warm up and so did I and I think it's been it's the first one of

the of our series here Austin so we'll get warmed up here and let's talk about I da let's talk about your background real quick Teddy how did you get involved with Igan da and uh what's your role there uh so I joined igen about a year ago as an engineer I was working on um integrating IG da into various rollup Frameworks and uh about a month ago I got moved to product so I'm currently doing a lot of protocol work and uh external facing stuff like this and um I guess my background in crypto is by way of engineering um sort of a a story that parallels what Igan da does um I was in

tech in 2015 working on uh stream processing so this is like Kafka or Kinesis these are sort of web 2 technologies that let you uh build systems in a more functional style and it's usually used for you know boring things like advertising or um maybe things that make a lot of money but uh real businesses real businesses exactly and uh and I heard about crypto around 2017 and thought it was probably the logical conclusion of where all this stream processing was going um so I got into crypto more from an angle of uh infrastructure than from Finance or sort of uh uh more libertarian side and uh I

think Ian da is sort of like The Logical you know extension of uh of that that Arc because it turns blockchains into this thing where it act you know it scales horizontally rather than being this thing that is sort of stateful and um often the bottleneck maybe we can actually try to end up in a place where uh we have you know scalable High throughput just transaction processing and yeah that's a bit of background on me I uh I uh would love to hear a bit about your guys's background and yeah I'm I'm actually C I'm definitely the libertarian side but I came into crypto

when I was still in University and I was studing computer science so definitely the like programming side of things appealed to me but at the core it's always been uh more of kind of like a principles and values thing of why I'm in the space I'm Cur I don't think we've ever talked about this yeah I I met Robbie the co-founder of the rollup at the Bitcoin Club in 2017 trading bitrex coins yeah and the values appealed to me and the the idea of like online income and like this trading concept um and then I I stepped away for a while and then came back in like 2019 so end up dropping out of school and crypto was just like it was too good too good of an opportunity to like start something and

and build something so yeah did you uh work at any crypto company before I or did you hop straight into I uh uh yeah yeah yeah I've been in since why that face what happened I mean it would have been nice I's definitely been a great job um I was in uh the cosmos ecosystem for a year and a half before Ian before that I was in the U the validator staking ecosystem okay um yeah uh so I got into crypto around 2021 and uh I guess I could comment on on uh the cosmos which is uh you know are you a cosmos chain is the real kind

of easy to comment on am I a cosmos chain like if I were to characterize myself yeah yeah actually question do you identify do I identify uh I I do not okay I switch sides I transition from Cosmos to ethereum um yeah no I uh I worked in Cosmos because I wasn't completely convinced about the roll of thesis and this was a way to really Force n which is like fully roll of exactly I mean I had to I had to go all the way down into Cosmos sort of app chain pieces to uh to come to that conclusion but I mean what

was at the bottom of that like what flipped your thinking on it's just really expensive to run l1s that's the main thing it's the economics so you had um interchain security and mesh security and Cosmos which uh the startup I was at was called Duality and our original plan was to launch as a interchain secured L1 with the Hub and we would have been like the third or fourth chain to do it and it was a governance vote that decided whether we would sort of suddenly be a responsibility for the operator set of Cosmos Hub to they'd all have to spin up a new node and pay the infrastructure cost yeah and it was

turning into a big political battle about whether Duality would return enough value to these operators to compensate them um and if it wasn't going to launch its own token then like you know where was that value going to come from in the short term so yeah rollups are uh improvement from the perspective of just unit economics and cost um and yeah we hope you know like da extend that I view I lir as a whole as very ethereum aligned and I da as ethereum aligned but there's some people that argue that igen layer is like a competitor to ethereum in a way like as they would other da layers like I'm not going to make that argument now and put

you on the spot for that question but like the bigger question at at hand is if ethereum like is continues down this basically like this da Focus road map like how are you viewing the dynamic of demand and kind of like aligning ethereum but also being like this alternative data availability solution and like are you concerned about 4844 are you concerned about lowu on the L1 like how are you thinking about this from the Igan da perspective now yeah it's a it's a good question I think most days I wake up and I uh I look at this from the crypto perspective like it would make me very happy if we could scale full stop um you know obvious viously I want Igan da to

succeed um but uh the reason I work on IG da is not because I need it to win it's because I think it actually is probably the most realistic path to Victory when it comes to scaling ethereum um the amount of engineering that will have to go into uh dank sharding and expanding 4844 to support the amount of throughput that for example Ian da provides is just massive um it's like um on the on the order of effort of uh transitioning from proof of work to proof of stake like a lot of work and uh there's not one right solution um I mean

obviously uh anan's approach needs to win in the um the battlefield of ideas um but I do think that uh you know time will show that taking an approach that's sort of unified and simpler um and maybe involves modularity a bit more maybe not like in protocol da um will probably work out to be the best way yeah I uh I don't know I personally have had a ton of questions about ethereum's business model lately like you know once we shipped 4844 and the network became inflationary again I feel like the culture kind of shot itself in the foot by creating this ultrasound money meme and now it's no longer ultrasound like it's inflationary again I think that's

caused a lot of people to kind of Wonder like what ethereum L1 is here for but it's still like highly it's still extremely less inflationary than like a like a typical L1 yeah especially like a cosmos chain for sure uh so like the meme still works yeah like like like the supply is still very scarce I think but like in thinking about how I explain eth compared to bitcoin and normies I used to be able to say well not only is there like a finite sply going down we've reached the top and it's going down forever like it's the first profitable Network that decreases Supply and that would hit with people but now I'm like oh well it's like like I kind of struggle because and I'm like I'm still primarily exposed to

ethereum personally um we'll see if that's like a good idea but yeah I don't know I think the like Community uh especially the research Community is kind of grasping on to this like how do we pull functionality back into eth L1 right now yeah yeah I think it's a really interesting question like if you had to to uh put the EF on the spot and say you know what is ethereum about is it about being a settlement layer is it about being a DA layer and a settlement layer uh is there some third thing is there you know uh a place for onchain defi rather than L2 defi y um so uh yeah I mean I I obviously can't

represent um the EF but I do tend towards the idea that ethereum should be a settlement layer first and foremost I think it's fine to frame it as a B2B uh like chain I think that's an okay pivot I don't know what the um the way to solve this dir of applications is I think that's like probably the biggest question when it comes to ethereum right now and it's the reason we see a lot of um I don't know anxiety right now is like everybody's you know talking about infro but where are the users so um yeah I uh I think ethereum will figure it out

but yeah it's always sort of fun being on Twitter and watching the debates rage on a daily basis and I think there's even debates within EF researchers themselves like it's not like the EF has a unified position a bunch of different researchers are saying different things all employed by the EF let alone other people in the community Express welcome aboard on our journey into the singularity this is the endgame road map for frack and fractal the new L2 out of the frax ecosystem that is totally based on fractal scaling fractal is a modular L2 blockchain built by fra with modular and fractal scaling in mind fractal scaling is based on the mandal BR set of

fractal images and it explains how l2s become l3s and the entire app chain life cycle goes through its Evolution the frax 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 this frax L2 joins the existing Suite of fra products including fra swap and frax lend you can see frax fairy the bridge to go from any chain arbitrum optimism or main net into the fraxel main net Bridge your tokens and

bring your FRA assets into the fractal ecosystem join today to get the best out of fraxel you are still early join today take part in our Expedition into the singularity 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

the chain abstraction future and they are willing to work with inoperability Partners solve 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 L up I think one thing on this note about ethereum's business model also applies to like these these alternative data availability models which is you you need demand for the block space like we need to have rollups posting their data to I canba for you know the system to kind of be able to grow its block size and scale and kind of work well right now that's like it's been very very small block posting across all data availability providers

outside of ethereum basically now what's your plans to kind of scale that demand are you know are the rollups like movement Mega eth some other other these larger rups going to play a big part in that um otherwise kind of how are you thinking about getting growing demand for I DA's block space yeah it's a great question I think in general we're taking the startup approach of trying to win within a very small need Niche and grow that Niche and right now that Niche uh unfortunately is just High throughput rollups it shouldn't be that uh profound to to say that um rollups should scale and should build new applications that can scale um but if you look at the list of rollups that exist on l2b or um

conduits rollup WTF uh most of these rolls are just general purpose rollups and are supporting defi applications that aren't um requiring a ton of da throughput um we're working with uh Partners like Mega eth leren um cello to try and um explore new applications Where Da plays a bigger role yeah like super functional onchain games or something or highly expressive databased applications or something like that right yeah exactly I think um we have a bit of a narrative problem within the ethereum L2 and L3 ecosystem especially around Lums and these

optimistic rollups at use da or alt da um because Alda does enable like greater than salana levels of throughput for l2s and l3s yeah I think salana kind of wins The Narrative owns the narrative around High throughput blockchains we think that's going to change especially if you get the evm out of there as well like I love the evm it's been great but you put svm move VM different types of rust based VMS in there with Alda it's like you're just pushing through put exactly improvements in the VM definitely uh unblock things but in general though I don't I don't think the VM has been the bottleneck yeah as much as da um first the first bottleneck is Da uh the second

is compute and probably the third is State growth and if you can sort of figure out those problems that's salana big problem now yeah fuel is doing some cool stuff for State growth uh kind of prevention but those are the three big kind of bottlenecks that that you're seeing and you think that basically the biggest one that is solvable now is buy something like I can da or the da solution yeah I mean you you do want to unblock just the sheer number of uh bits of transactions you can process let's imagine transfer uh transactions the transfer itself is not a terribly computationally expensive thing it's actually mostly IO um it's a you you have a maybe on the order of tens of

bytes that represent a single transaction if you want to get 100,000 TPS um it's going to be da that bottleneck that not compute um so yeah I think uh we're in this era where we have to uh we have to induce the demand by working with applications that are willing to really lean on Alda rather than sort of think of it as a way of future proofing [Music] themselves cartesi is your home for app specific rollups at the Forefront of developing new tools and platforms that

enhance the capabilities of blockchain Technology CI enables applications that are flexible and built to scale build on a full Linux environment and use traditional software libraries but in blockchain development go to cars.io that's cy. to learn more about building your own app chain today Coan 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 it can go into archive note or often times it's just kind of put away

into the abyss and what coant try 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 Veil or any of these modu da Solutions or even ethereum coala is able to provide a longterm 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 we 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 one thing that I'd love to ask you as well is I know you're more focused on the infrastructure and actually building end da um but like imagining IG da is like very widely deployed and it's very easy to spin up a rollup given that we're talking a lot about chain exraction like do you have any thoughts on like in the world where I da is adopted at scale what does that look like from a user experience hopping between all these different rollups and like do they even need to think about hopping across all these different rups or does it kind of just like work out of the box any like and I guess another a

followup question there anything with igen da specific specifically facilitating a nice experience of like migrating between those I know it's a wide question but like Curious to hear your kind of General take on it yeah yeah there have been some ideas around that in general um I tend to be a bit of a um I guess uh I tend to apply aquam razor to it uh or maybe that's an analogy for how I would explain it I don't think DA has much to do with interoperability Beyond um trust assumptions so let's look at optimism super chain they have these uh this concept of in offsets uh where they're going to where you have um multiple rollups that share sequencer in

a settlement contract and system where that enables rollups within that inter opset to uh Bridge really fast between them so they don't have to wait that 7-Day window um the question is does any given inter opset want to adopt the uh the security assumptions of a given da layer so if there's in in opset that uses um ethereum for da if they were to use igen da as well that would be an additional um assumption where the weakest assumption is the one that sort of defines the um you know the security of the system and so it turns more into a

uh security and maybe governance problem of you know which exact da layers are associated which with which inter opets um this is something that other uh role up Stacks are also working on not just optimism um I think that uh is going to be somewhat relevant but my hope is that in the future that while it's abstract away most of this still an infrastructure concern you still have fast Bridges to um you know send fungible assets really fast and I think the the cost for those is going to go down even more so I'm not too worried when so you believe in like this broader vision of abstracting away chains and like different complexities

like gas and bridging and things like you think this is something that's going to happen oh 100% on a certain spectrum of what the user wants right yeah certain users may want to know different things about where their assets are but yeah yeah I think of it like uh you know on the internet we don't really have location like everything is everywhere and there's no concept of locality um but obviously in crypto your assets can be in a specific place um there you know if you're a financial institution you might want to have a very nuanced uh policy for how our assets managed and where they get located and you know exact exactly what security is use for moving them around I think like

consumers and most businesses are probably going to adopt some sort of standard policy around that um and you can use I think in the future intent based um bridging and these wallets that offer a account abstraction and all these sort of batteries included um uh services that make it really simple to use and and and it's just opinionated I've heard it's like the intense can the intense protocols can set certain constraints for what what the users of the like of that solare Network can do and also the apps can set certain par parameters for what the like the users can do or like are willing to do so you can like basically opt in to a set of okay you're going to to this solver

Network who solves across base optimiz and arbitrum because that's only change that you're comfortable with or you can do optim so you can optim the longtail solver networks or kind of like you know more like legitimate solver networks and I think that's a that's a that's interesting take and also particularly how you thinking about it with regards to teams using I da and like the rollup clusters I think there's a lot of alignment there with a lot of people building in the space um and I I just feel it's it feels far away um but speaking to a lot of these teams I I think it's actually like Q3 Q4 here we get some of this chain exraction type stuff coming online so yeah that's interesting I feel like it's more like Q4 this year q1 that we'll see some of the first projects I've been talking a

lot about this like shipping things prod where it's like oh this is a notice this works yeah I don't need to use rabby anymore like I this is awesome yeah yeah one thing that I'm curious to hear from you as well uh given how cheap transactions could be for bullup that are using igda one thing I'm really excited about is the opportunity for just devs to pay gas costs so that people can do stuff on a rollup or a chain and just like through a pay master or some other mechanism just have the gas costs be sponsored um maybe this is gaming maybe this is social or something is this something you and the team like talk about at all as you're like looking at rollup customers because this I think would allow us to actually hit like

fully abstracted like you can just sign in with Google or like face ID or whatever and you don't have to think about gas cost that to me is like pure chain straty gas and and multi-chain I think is the two big ones now yeah yeah I mean if as long as you have some kind of civil resistance you can do that right like yeah like a anti- Spam yeah yeah um I mean from our perspective it's the role of paying us anyway um so how the role of collects fees is sort of up to them but uh yeah that would be awesome I think it would be great and um that's kind of the experience people expect with the internet yeah I think it's a cool opportunity because it's similar to people don't get charged to open a website like the devs pay AWS um

right like sound like the users pay AWS but um yeah any final questions yeah I just wanted to zoom out here a bit outside of the technicals outside of like this modu landscape and just kind of talk about what it's like working in crypto I mean you've been part of crypto for couple years various teams specifically now like Ian l i being like one of the most high-profile teams in the space right like you guys have accomplished quite a bit uh there's been a lot of hype a lot of narrative driven and then recently there's been scrutiny there's always going to be scrutiny what is it like being on a team that's high-profile that deals with these ups and downs and kind of what is it like to work through public scrutiny and this type of experience it's it's been great for the

most part I mean it hasn't been uh it hasn't been um you know too uh arduous from the perspective of um you know the perception of Anan I think um we have great leadership and some some of the best Minds um in crypto research at Anan and um and uh I just love working with them I think I think that uh that crypto does need to continually reinvent itself I mean this is how we're going to succeed I think um and you know to the extent that there's

um you know scrutiny and and uh and accountability in the space I think that's a good thing I mean that's why we claim to be better on a technical level um these sort of open ledgers are better because they let um you know they ensure at least that there's there's no corruption um and uh you know in the case of public blockchains there's you know you can do Audits and things like that um so I I fully support uh uh the idea that igen is sort of held to the exact same standard as everybody else and um I really like uh I really like working at I I would say higher

specifically on the restak deci side the standard is higher because of the of the nature of the project you know like the meme where it's like this project can shape the fabric of society or whatever it's like this project could actually be a big detriment to ethereum consensus if things don't go well right and so the on on that side the level of accountability and responsibility is like is higher right than like you know a like a lending Market or a DEX or something right and so you have to kind of be able to internalize that um with regards to the most recent scrutiny I mean if you don't want to comment you don't have to comment on it but uh is the is the team's morale uh in check and like are you guys you know putting that behind

you and able to move forward uh you know just as you were I probably shouldn't comment um yeah okay that's all my questions thank you for coming it's been a pleasure yeah good to see again man you too thanks guys cool