Why We Should Care About Ethereum's Future

Transcript

GM welcome back to the rollup and today is an episode with Jill from espresso in this episode we are talking about why all the shared sequencers have disappeared no one wants to be a shared sequencer anymore we're going to talk about why we're also going to talk about the current fragmented world of ethereum and how ultimately connecting these rollup clusters is a very important problem to solve all of that and more on today's episode stay tuned first a word from our sponsors enjoy 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 coiling trying to do is build this long-term data availability solution which can plug into some this 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 coal is able to provide a long-term data storage and data availability platform for that data after the time period blockchains are Billboards lot databases and you know we need these providers in the space to be able to kind of hold on to

the long long term 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 what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup today we are going to answer the question for once and all and for all is are we all building the same thing well not exactly but we're going to talk about the wall Gardens of ethereum scaling Jill's going to make ethereum composable again in 42 minutes and Rob's got a lot of questions so looking forward to this rob you survived the hurricane good to see you on the other side GM there're a hurricane online

they're the hurricane in real life just dodging left and right staying dry uh yeah I do I have a bunch of questions um I think we're probably gonna answer a bunch of those but then maybe end up with even more that's usually how these things tend to go uh and so yeah without further Ado Jill uh welcome to the rollup great to be here I'm just trying to survive the hurricane in the markets myself right now yeah aren't we all but this isn't your first rodeo is it Joe I mean this isn't the first hurricane you've seen I was thinking about that this morning I first bought Bitcoin in 2013 I'm like oh my God how like how many how many rodeos do I have to go

through how many cycles do I have to survive you do become numb to it after a while but not completely it's still you know you still wake up with your heart in your chest a little bit Hur in your throat remind yourself why you're still here and and just keep building um it is your first time on the rollup do you want to kind of tell your origin story and introduce yourself a little bit for sure yeah um it is indeed my first rodeo on the rollup so I'm Jill I am head of strategy and a co-founder at a o systems we are working on uh ethereum infrastructure perhaps someday more broadly across l1s to enable better

interoperability better decentralization specifically of rollups um and doing all of that without sacrificing the scale that we've gotten to um before this I worked for a while in Venture Capital uh with a fund called slow Ventures uh running their crypto portfolio and before that I gosh I did a whole bunch of different things I've worked with a number of different l1s in the space um I worked for a while on Enterprise blockchain solutions back in like 2016 kind of era um so lived a lot of different lives in uh in this weird Wild Wonderful ecosystem that we're in prior to all of this I also worked in

trafi so I started out my career as a bond Trader and then eventually ended up spending way more time trading Bitcoin than I was trading bonds that I was supposed to be paying attention to and that was my cue to Pivot what were you doing in 2013 that led you to buy Bitcoin um so I was working on the like Latin American Trading desk at at Goldman in New York um so I was trading Venezuelan debt uh Argentine debt and derivatives um you know all of these economies that still to this day and certainly at the time were're going through all kinds of turmoil uh Capital controls in place to try and stabilize

things in many of these cases um and it was a conversation that I had with a broker who was on uh the ground in Argentina who was trying to get his money offshore uh to evade the capital controls that they had in place more or less and I just remember talking with this guy being like man you work in you know you work in like high Finance surely there's a better way other than this kind of sketchy Bitcoin thing for you to get your money Diversified out of the Argentine peso um Argentina at the time was also going through debt crisis debt restructuring uh default and um things were just kind of wild uh

economically there and he was very insistent to me that no Bitcoin was the way and Bitcoin was the future um and so that that caught my interest and I was like ah okay there's some utility here there must be something to this thing and uh down the rabbit hole I went never looked back coming full circle there's a a popup City from Edge City next month in Buenos areus yes I was looking into that I uh I was tempted to go myself I've spent a little bit of time not merely enough in um in the Latin American kind of crypto and Bitcoin scene uh I actually did research academic research for my Master's Degree back in

2015 uh on the ground in Buenos sides um talking to all of the people there who were using Bitcoin at the time met a lot of the kind of early uh Bitcoin and crypto entrepreneurs uh Diego from rootstock Sebastian from ripio like all of these people were sort of my first foray into the space they were all really uh helpful to me at the time just in terms of understanding what this space was about what was going on um and really still to this day I would say a lot of the products and use cases and just people on the ground using Bitcoin who I got exposed to in that period I

think still really inform the way that I think about it um you know I think that the way that you get into crypto it does kind of determine how you'll go on and for me in particular seeing those use cases of again you know people really kind of using this using Bitcoin as a Lifeline um to to escape from the the bad government policies that were in place that were hurting them it really made me value the fact that okay this is about decentralization censorship resistance and and these are really important qualities that we're not just speaking lip service to or you know we're not just playing into some uh

libertarian ideal like Fantasy Land um you know the it really it really is a core part of the value proposition so yeah I guess that's gone on to inform you know what I'm doing now with espresso like obviously decentralization is a big component of of what we're working towards and also just open systems I know we're going to talk today a lot about interoperability and open systems and all of that and you know so much of trafi whether you know it's more extreme if you're in place like Argentina Capital controls in place but even my experience of trafi is someone privileged enough to live in the United

States and have a US bank account it's just managing assets across all of these different siloed systems so painful um and yeah I really do think a lot of crypto is is about uh an open an open landscape in a way that that we don't have and again in a way that certainly if you're in in a economy with capital controls you definitely don't have access to so that is my rant that is my mission that is how I ended up here on the roll up with you guys today yeah that's the uh the argentines are still still riant on bitcoin to this day and when you walk down there's actually a street in buenosaires called Florida Street yes where um if you go down there

there's a lot of people asking for money transfers and they'll accept Bitcoin sometimes Ripple and sometimes ethereum for uh you know to to to do a transfer if they have cash because you have to use everything in cash there so uh there are new cases I have I have many memories of uh interviewing people on Florida Street for This research that I was doing absolutely as well awesome well you mentioned open systems and I think that was that was really the premise that got us interested in in this conversation today um you know I think to set the stage like we're seeing ethereum scale um off the Bas layer into this this rollups this rollup Centric road map which has led to tons of

different chains launching um and now this kind of concept of these rollup clusters happening you know you've got the super chain optimism has just came out and has really changed their entire position in the market or it's at least trying to from being like we are the L2 the optimism this one chain to know we are this super chain you got arbitrum orbit and Caldera has pushed this metal layer idea um you know even even like newer Innovations like initia outside of the ethere ecosystem they're all everyone's trying to build these uh systems which are somehow siloed again um but are very interoperable inside of this system but perhaps not so

interoperable outside or there's kind of different use cases for uh for being in and out and you know you kind of have put this thread together recently about building wall Gardens and I think that you you set the stage pretty well as to your beliefs so yeah maybe we can just have have a have an open conversation about the state of scaling ethereum as far as these rollup clusters go um and kind of how you're seeing this develop um from your perspective totally yeah I mean I think that there's a a desire or a tendency certainly on my part to be kind of binary about things of okay it's either an open system or a closed system but in reality

all of this is almost fractal in the way that it's playing out right where um you know you have sort of the greater Financial system as a whole and then within that you have blockchains and there's a certain level of interoperability that you get within blockchains and then within blockchains you have you know Bitcoin and ethereum and salana and Cosmos and all of these ecosystems that have a certain degree of composability interoperability within and among them and then also certain frictions and certain risks that you have to take to move across them and the same goes to move from any of these systems back to trafi it used to be the case that within ethereum that was all

one pretty seamlessly composable ecosystem composable unit when I use the word composability I'm referring to this kind of money Legos idea right of being able to have different applications different smart contracts you know be able to interact and call each other seamlessly um without having to rely on Bridges without having to rely on you know large delays or or things like this so it used to be the case that ethereum was one composable ecosystem with again very seamless interoperability across applications um you know you could use any different wallet interface of course

to access what was going on um now of course as we've moved towards the rollup Centric road map which has been great for ethereum it's really you know people often talk about it as kind of the Broadband moment for ethereum and I think that that's very true I think that it's been necessary for us to move this direction in order to achieve the types of scale the types of low cost just the type of overall user experience that user users expect from their digital tools these days but that has created again this fragmentation so moving one more level down on this kind of fractal mind map of the overall Financial system

blockchains ethereum now you're exactly right you know we have the optimism ecosystem the polygon cdk ecosystem the uh ZK sync elastic chain ecosystem um you know I could go on and on starkware and Stark net and the Stark chains uh all of these things um it's it's been difficult as a user to be able to then get used to going from that one seamlessly uh seamless experience of ethereum to get used to having to move between and among I don't even want to show you what my metamask wallet looks like now with the drop down of like all

of these different silos now where have my assets we got to get you on rabby yes that's true that's true you gotta you got to get off the metamask it's time it's time I've just outed myself as a crypto Boomer still still but uh you know it's it's been an adjustment for sure and so a big part of what I think about I think a big part of what the ecosystem as a whole is thinking about is just how do we move back to a more open system within ethereum at least um and then beyond that perhaps you know Crossing into different l1s and being able to create a

more seamless overall blockchain ecosystem experience um and have that be truly an open an open Infinite Garden uh once again without sacrificing the gains that we've made uh in terms of scalability and uh and maintaining of course decentral um so yeah I think that's kind of the state of things at least that's the state of how I've experienced it uh myself as a user yeah I I am really glad that you brought up the def5 money Legos as the illustration for composability because I vividly remember that as a very uh a very vibrant um sort of like

value addition and like like value ad use case for for blockchains Beyond traditional Finance it was like we can all kind of manage rehypothecation and borrows and lend everything could be a little bit more efficient if it's composable and then we've just kind of like lost sight of things as we've gone into like these different silos we've become so much less composable and I think that sort of sets the stage as far as like you know if we kind of see like I think that was a great overview of like the state of things um and now if we look at like where do we go from here it's like well first I think it's helpful to kind of like uh illustrate the destination and then figure out like

how to get there and so when everything was an app on ethereum I think we just kind of called that composability and we were able to stack these def different def5 money Legos on top of one another but when we're talking about composability across these different rollup clusters and these different siloed environments then we have to call it Atomic composability yeah this is why I say it's not binary is that we have all of these different versions of What interoperability can be and can feel like and I mean I'm guilty of this we all tend to talk of just about we're solving you know roll up interoperability and kind of leave it at

that or we go down these sort of hyper technical rabbit holes into the needs of what specifically you know is meant by synchronous Atomic composability which I think is very valuable to get specific on and to have specific definitions on but for me kind of taking a step back I think it's also important to to look at the why of any of this like okay exactly what you're saying what are the sort of use cases or um user experiences and things like this that we're solving for so I mean I'm happy to speak to that with regards to Espresso I'm happy to speak to that just sort of my opinions as a user and and person in the space I

mean I'm I'm generally curious about like like without getting super deep into the engineering details like more so of the incentive structures like yeah ultimately I think composability leads to a more efficient Financial system even if that system is a subset of the greater and I love the fract fractal mental model too I think even just a little subset of that being more efficient is beneficial for the greater whole and so I'm curious like how you see how you see like the incentive structures for for composability and arriving to composability as kind of like the the destination for these rollup clusters yeah so I think if you

know if I think about it as if I am you know the folks over at arbitrum or the folks at optimism or folks as EK sync or starkware or polygon any of these places and I am looking at this ecosystem that I'm creating based on the technology stack that I've developed I would arrive at the same place that all of them have you know I think it's just a realistic fact of the world that you're going to look at the community and the ecosystem that you're building and say oh wow you know we've got a lot of traction here we're building the best technology um you know it's it's the right and natural thing for us to build and

incubate and develop and nurture this Garden I don't think that there any of them are thinking of it as okay we're going to build our own little Walled Garden over here and that's going to take over the world you're just looking at what's in front of you in terms of again the thriving ecosystem that you have and saying okay yeah this is this is happening um you know this is what I need to nurture and develop it's not that dissimilar to the way that ethereum came about I actually I again outing myself as a boomer I remember when ethereum was initially proposed as an idea and of course all of the bit pointers were like this is this is crap like this isn't

going to go anywhere you know why are they building this over here at the time in Bitcoin World there were all different ideas about how to break more programmability to bitcoin these like crazy colored coin ideas things like this um and at the time again it felt like ethereum was building its own sort of siloed ecosystem but you know as it turned out ethereum became this sort of infinite Garden that gave us composability in the first place and so I think that that is probably reflective of the mindset of uh all of these different l2s as they are going about nuring their ecosystems which is the right thing to do now how do we get

those ecosystems to interoperate I think first and foremost you need there to be some kind of pressure from users from Developers for those ecosystems to interoperate again and for that you need a competitor to come in and create basically what ethereum had been offering those developers and users in terms of composability and for that competitor to demonstrate hey look you know if you guys don't figure out a way to offer this to users we're just going to take your users or we're just going to take your developers perhaps in this case I think salana today is broadly playing that role for ethereum and I think that

that's a very good very healthy Dynamic like what salana is doing is in terms of their Market positioning in terms of their Traction in terms of Mind share and developer ship and all of that I think is great for them um I'm a salana believer I'm a salana holder full disclosure um but I also think that it's actually great for ethereum because I think you need someone to be playing that role to create this pressure to make ethereum composable again otherwise the various rollup ecosystems will just continue to build upon themselves and not worry about offering that to users but but I mean you talked to developers

Today app developers and they're really considering three different options right one option is to deploy on a rollup on ethereum um and then they start considering okay but which rollup do I deploy on you know like there's all of these different community and kind of like Vibes based elements of what to choose there's of course incentives uh you know grants monetary incentives around what to choose and then there's just looking at where are the users ver the liquidity but that's that's like a lot of mental overhead if you're an app developer and you're just trying to get an application out in the world and

start testing start getting feedback and all of that the second thing that they're thinking about is well I've heard of these app specific rollups should I become an app specific rollup should I work with a partner like Cera or altl or one of these to help me just deploy the application as its own rollup there are some benefits to that certainly um you know I don't need to tell the modular Kings here it's the the modularity benefits of being able to pick and choose what parts of the stack you want being able to have that sort of sovereignty over your own future there's also benefits in terms of business model of being able to say oh if I'm My Own roll up if I'm My Own chain I get to

keep the sequencer fees associated with uh the users of the pro the products that's a huge part of it but again that's a lot of overhead and a lot to be considering especially for kind of the earlier developers earlier in the life cycle of the product that they're building and bringing to Market and then the third thing they're considering is well there's salana over here that like works pretty well like I've heard some things about downtime but it seems to be broadly okay and um you know there's no fragmented liquidity issues there's like much less complexity in terms of the considerations I have to make around where to deploy maybe I'll just go do that and developers today are doing all

three of these things but again I think the fact that salana is an option as just like this one contiguous composable ecosystem where you're not worried about any of these other Dynamics it does put that competitive pressure on the ethereum rollup community to say okay well what's our answer to that how do we make sure that we're not losing a a big proportion of our potential developer ecosystem over to that competitive set so that's how I think about some of the incentives as they go on today I think it's super relevant to to this tweet especially this last line of like I'm seeing lots of energy and will

to make this happen metallic referring to how quickly cross L2 interoperability problems will stop being problems and we get a smooth user experience and you know I think the pressure from salana is there and I also think this like the community is just kind of getting generally tired of it but I thinkal put this like okay ethereum is going to do this rollup Centric road map he kind of thought it was gonna just be perhaps like it's all going to be under ethereum's brand and like it's going to feel like ethereum perhaps or there was some idea here that this these were all just extend of ethereum I think the original idea was proposed via like sharding but like we haven't seen that we've seen like all these Brands like

kind of go and make their big names for themselves launch their own tokens and there's even been talk about how like ethereum is is cucked as an asset because why you can buy all these different L2 tokens rather than just buying eth and soul you just buy soul or so there's there's a lot of pressure from the community but you know I'm curious about how you're thinking about these these rollups as like extensions of ethereum from like a branding and from like a a market perspective um and and in general you know if you agree with metallic or not mantle is a layer to 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 Stak eth token m e as well as their upcoming liquid reaking token c m e where you can utilize this token on the mantle Network in a variety of different apps some of your favorite reaking 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 Igan 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 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 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 L up I so I mean I do agree with falic there's a ton of energy around all of this I think that what we

as an ecosystem need to get better at is really articulating what parts of this problem space each of us is solving and I think you guys talk about this a lot um on this show and just in your writing and all of this that we're using all of the same terms to mean different things or in some cases inventing new terms when there's already a perfectly good one out there for us to use um and again I mean it gets at the complexity of this as an issue just the fact that there is a spectrum of what we mean by interoperability and so then what we mean by a solution for it um and I think that yeah I would be curious I mean my

followup question to V would be okay like by what definition like what is the problem that you know you're actually talking about in terms of seeing that be solved on a short-term time Horizon that's the question that I get all the time as someone who is helping to run one of the companies who's working on this space um you know is to just get increasingly specific I think about what we mean and what actually gets unlocked for users but broadly I mean having just been at ECC in bruss like it felt like every project I was talking to partly I'm sure due to you know the crowds and the circles I was hanging out in but it felt like every project I was talking to

is working on some component of this I think that the biggest thing is that we all just need to be talking to each other and really coordinating as an ecosystem is one ecosystem around ethereum to solve the problem together and not end up with not only you know 16 different rollup clusters but also hundreds of different solutions or protocols or uh standards for um you know solving other aspects of of the space so that's that's kind of my feeling around it it's something that we're we're trying to do at espresso you

know our collaboration with polygon and the agair um and just the work that we're doing across various different roll up communities and roll up stacks and working with different grass players and all of that like we're really trying to take an inclusive approach because I think just practically speaking that's what's needed um but that said it's it's a challenge for sure um and it does come back to incentives you know everyone everyone wants to see their product succeed everyone wants to see their product become the standard uh and everyone also uh I think this is a beautiful thing about people in crypto and also sometimes our own downfall you know we

we end up with these very expansive road maps where maybe we can do everything someday uh but in reality I think that ethereum as an ecosystem is better served when we're all again kind of coordinating and working together um and uh and I think that competition can be a healthy part of that also for sure it's just having the best uh the best and most well tailored uh ecosystems or Solutions or protocols emerge uh by virtue of the market but coordination is definitely a big part of it as well yeah I know that you agree with some of the takes that we've been sharing with regards to I think like the two big breakthroughs um that that will like

kind of unify ethereum is some sort of very fast composability between rollups whether it be through some sort of shared sequencing mechanism in intent based interoperability something that's like Sub sub you know 500 millisecond transactions 300 millisecond like almost Atomic you know to some extent but maybe not all the way or or fully all the way and then just a wallet a wallet ux that feels like that etherium OG experience where it's just like you're interacting on one chain which I know there's a ton of teams working on you know they call it like chain abstraction kind of Stack there and those two breakthroughs will be like that should put us in a place where I'm going to my one wallet that

has all of my balances across all of my rollups app chains included and I can interact with any application on any chain with the same almost wallet experience as I was just doing on metamask on ethereum L1 Farm sushi in defi summer yeah and I really like the way that you guys break that down in terms of like okay there's the front end issues almost which are not strictly front end I mean there's all kinds of you know standards that will have to be aligned on whether that ends up being through an EIP process or kind of more organically or through markets but regardless there's the kind of user facing element of it and then there's what's running underneath um and of

course I spent much more of my time thinking about what's running underneath um espresso is building really a coordination system for coordinated block building this sometimes gets called shared sequencing of course um that is going to be a necessity like you can't have synchronous composability um or that level of atomic transaction without having some notion of coordinated block building or shared sequencing um so I think that that's going to be really important and of course there's I think that this again is a very positive Dynamic there's a few different sort of competing proposals for how to go about this uh but all of that is not worth it salt if we don't

also have folks working on as you said you know it kind of gets called The Chain abstraction piece I think all of these terms and phrases to be honest are very confusing because it's like well in a way espresso is working on chain abstraction but no not the front end part of it you know not the wallet interface that's what these other guys are doing over here so um yeah yeah I I do think that this is a big part of challenge right now I think that there will be consolidation and as more of these projects Shi to main net it you know it'll shake out sort of what uh what goes where what the standards are what works nicely uh with with other products that that are working towards

the same goals um what maybe is less compatible and all of this so I think that this will resolve itself in the coming months couple of years um but it it is a challenge right now of even just the fragmentation of solutions right it's like for all these different solutions trying to solve the problem with fragmentation it's like the event fragmentation at ECC and other conferences is also like a a a funny knock on effect of like the the capital formation in crypto and then the Inc structures of the individual teams it's kind of a kind of that itself was fractal right of going around to all of

these different fragmented events there in Brussels around what is a bit more Consolidated yeah we'll see yeah I hope so too I mean this again credit to salana for really nailing the counter positioning you saw TW on that great Point conference coming up yeah and they're just like screw it no Side Event panels no yeah like there's going to be two tracks here it's one conference and that I think is they're just nailing the brand marketing right like if their goal is to create this brand and product of course and user experience that is Unified and that's

kind of their big differentiator then yeah what they've done with uh the breakpoint conference is absolutely nailing the brand marketing there and I don't think it's necessarily something that like ethereum needs to take a lesson from like I think that ethereum needs to lean into its differences actually here and just say that like no this is part of a the fact that ethereum is a more mature project and just has been through sort of more cycles of development and um and in some ways is I guess further down its road map I would argue um but also needs to lean into the fact

that ironically the rise of all of these sort of Walled Gardens or you know separate ecosystems within ethereum is a testament to just how open it is for Innovation it's like open systems give rise to capitalism give rise to competitive markets and competitive Dynamics um whereas you know unified or really kind of centrally managed systems don't um and that's not to align these projects with anyone ideology obviously but it is kind of ironically uh a testament to ethereum's openness that

this is the state of it today and I do I do have faith that we're going to work through it and again I think the main thing is just going to be projects shipping to mainnet and uh and having it emerge like what's working where and um and who's really solving these issues and so you kind of alluded to the point that I I think we wanted to to get some clarity on as well I think a a lot of these these kind of shared sequencing projects get lumped together together but the designs are like way way different trying to solve different goals and you know have have impacts um frankly in speaking to VCS and in speaking to uh different teams Al just kind of developing a thesis around it it does seem like this like Atomic

composability shared sequencing esque sector is going to be very uh like Winner Takes most because of this idea of uh kind of it being its own L1 and like trusting and like getting byy from arbitrum and ZK stack and getting this alignment and kind of being like this third party that equally distributes me and there is there's a lot of reasoning or that might just get kind of you know Blown Blown to bits as well it's it's kind of tough to have thesises in crypto because every two years they just somehow change but that's kind of like the state of things as we're seeing now so yeah just just like ispresso sh chiner what is espresso and how are you thinking about this yeah no espresso is

not a shared sequencer we did we did used to talk about it as a shared sequencer that ended up being very confusing and in some ways also just inaccurate you know people talk about a sequencer think of a a sequencer as sort of one single entity who does this function of transaction ordering um and then in the case of rollups today it's obviously uh centralized and so can provide a pre-confirmation on those transactions giving users kind of the fast experience that they're used to um and so when we would talk about espresso as a shared sequencer people viewed us as this kind of like monolith that they

would have to Outsource their sequencing to and that's a very scary thing for rollups which I think gets it your question here Andy of like is this going to be you know in order to achieve uh coordinated block building and therefore achieve synchronous composability again like are rollups going to have to be okay with Outsourcing their sequencing to some other network that is going to take care of it uh and they're going to have to all coordinate to get on board with the same network at the same time in order to have that seamless interoperability what we've realized over the last year is that that's just too hard not from like a technical

perspective honestly the product was in many any way simpler when that was the the approach and the design that we had in mind um but more so from an incentive perspective from like a business perspective just making it make sense to to rollups make it make sense um it it was too hard of an ask to say hey come Outsource all of your sequencing we'll figure out some like Revenue share agreement you know you guys will get some of the sequencing Revenue back like rollups are like no like I'll just I'll continue building as I am and you know I'm I have enough self-belief in our

team and our ecosystem and you know the Dow around it or whatever is going on uh to be able to make it successful on its own and and foro uh the aspects that you're bringing to the table which of course are decentralization and then more importantly interoperability um in taking all of that feedback on board we have shifted our design pretty significantly you guys had my colleague Ellie uh who works on the research and development side of the company she's uh an engineer um and has also done a lot of the sort of design architecture work around our consensus

um you guys had her on the show to talk a little bit more about the espresso Marketplace approach this is very different from thinking of us as just like a shared sequencer Network that's the equivalent of another L1 that is having the sequencing outsourced to it the big breakthroughs from a product perspective I would say that we had that informed this Marketplace design is that number one rollups do not want to have to opt into something in perpetuity when it's as big of a deal to them as their sequencer is um they want to be able to opt in and out of it on more of an ad hoc basis they want to feel confident that it's not a dependency and that it's

crucially not somehow going to take all of their revenue once this thing has substantial Network effect and is in the stronger negotiating position um I would say that the other thing that uh really played into this is that Revenue component of it just the fact that you'd need if you're facilitating cross rollup interoperability you need a way for rollups to feel confident that they are going to get adequately compensated for the value of the transactions and all of the usage and all of that that they're bringing to the table the marketplace solves both of these um we are in the process of implementing the first

version of it and that'll be testing uh over the course of the next couple of months so really excited to see it in action and get our first Integrations with it um but the core idea here is that rollups can effectively opt in and out of it on an adhawk basis as you can do on any kind of marketplace um you know you can pull pull your product off of eBay at any given moment right you don't need anyone's permission to do that you don't have to go through some long process of breaking a contract uh same idea here it's ad hoc opt in and out as you want to and then the other beauty of the Marketplace is again it's an open Fair free market um where rollups will get compensated uh by the

marketplace of sequencers or Builders whatever you want to call them uh who are doing this this block building um so it's just a very different approach to how to bring shared sequencing to Market how to bring synchronous composability to market for rollups um but it's a challenge for sure because again to this point of you know are we all building the same thing like okay we're all building towards the same goals but I would actually argue that pretty much every project in the space is building something totally different or you know having a very different approach or or uh you know different implementation details or what have you than each other I think very few are building literally

the same thing um and that's a challenge that we have for sure like wait but you guys are a shared sequencer and um Not only was that never totally accurate but the product has also evolved quite a bit got it that was a comprehensive answer appreciate that and understanding winded understanding that the like the technical design also helps so we'll drop that we'll drop that link in the description if you guys check that one out it definitely helps so just kind of like sum it all up here like we're what what we're trying to achieve is this is to make ethereum at at the rollup level feel like ethereum in one core uh in almost like a like an integrated or like

like a make ethereum e again yeah like make it ethereum again a as it was you know before gas fees spiked and I feel like balic saying that we're close and I talking to like a ton of chain abstraction teams hosting workshops talking to interoperability teams we already have a cross on just as a basic intent uh based system that is very fast as long as the Sol aren't having a smoke break super quick so like that's like there espresso other other designs that are focused on that that kind of like Atomic aspect will will bring us even closer and then I think these chain abstraction teams in the wallet level at least let alone like eventually like the blockchain level like Ager Etc are like getting closer and closer too so it

really does feel like we're getting there um and and like about to last mile is always the longest though you know the last mile always feels the longest and I think that that's where we are right now so I guess that's kind of my feeling about vitalik's tweet is like oh damn like I know he's right we're close but also as someone who's been working on this stuff for years like God still so far away I know but I we didn't really prep you for this one and I think it it could be one of our last but like let's say we exist in this world where espresso is atomically composing l2s we've got intent Bridges we've got ZK very um proofs you know doing ZK magic and chain abstractions happening and

I've got my one wallet that I've used and I'm all you know tons of different apps what is the next stage of ethereum development that is going to be problematic right for competitive up upbringing or uproar and and and and like how can we prepare for that as a community that's a great one I think it's going to be about um and I don't know if you'd really count this as like core infrastructure because it's a bit more peripheral than that uh but I think it's going to be about on and off ramping I think it's gonna I think the problem is going to remain around silos I think that where the silos are that we're focus on focusing on are just

going to shift um and so I think it's going to be about specifically what I'm talking about is on and off ramping to and from Fiat um I think that you know hopefully once we get to a point where this is solved and ethereum has had its Broadband moment we've made ethereum composable again all of that we're going to see sufficient applications emerge that people really want to onboard and use that onboarding process Still Remains a challenge From ux perspective and so I think that we're going to start to see new companies new products new projects emerge to make that easier that to me is always kind of the Hallmark of

like the true cycle coming is that people are worried about onboarding again um but you know it's not limited to ethereum and trafi I think bridging between different blockchains Remains the challenge that's something that I'm excited to start at some point expanding sort of what espresso is working on to work on uh creating this sort of shared sequencing effect across different l1s um so yeah I think it's I think it's the problem is always going to be about silos I think that if you look at Finance from sort of the beginning of time from when we were using whatever

you know shells and Beads to to exchange I think it's always been about different silos being able to to work seamlessly across each other I think that's to me again why I feel so passionately that ethereum should remain an infinite Garden that we can't have this wal Garden experience for users and I think that we'll just move the goalposts from making ethereum composable again within itself to making ethereum really seamless with other ecosystems including the traditional Legacy Financial EOS [Music] system cartesi is your home for app

specific roller at the Forefront of developing new tools and platforms that enhance the capabilities of blockchain Technology carty 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 cars.io to learn more about building your own app chain today that is a really good answer and I think just to add on to that the the social coordination and Community divides between rollups with like oh we have native yield come deposit here for 60 days we have this app we have like once we get to this world where the

composability is is so much uh greater as as well as the abstraction of the chains I think like the entire shift towards like the applications will like really kind of happen in the sense that the same application sets on different chains will no longer necessarily be that value because that you can access Unis swap across every chain or access an aggregator across every chain totally in the defi sense and then also from a community perspective I think right now l2s are being built from like who can get the biggest TV out the best apps best Builders grow the most Revenue I think that'll completely sh completely shift back to oh we're actually trying to scale ethereum again we're not just

trying to build like the best L2 or Silo we're actually just trying to scale the base layer to build the best ecosystem as a whole because once you kind of break down the ux barriers and the bridging barriers between the gardens if you will then the then the entire Vision shifts from like if user a enters into some app on on this chain they can easily go to a different app that's on a completely different chain with very little barrier but that's benefiting all the other rollups in the space because this one app did really good out of you know top of funnel marketing etc etc and brought them all into the ethereum space Not Just to their rollup and you know that's kind of like the vision that I'm seeing and that's was totally that was one of the most exciting things I thought about shared sequencing as a

whole as well I think a lot I mean as you know I think a lot about wal Gardens and I think a lot about my experience of other internet wal Gardens whether it's the Apple App Store and sort of the monopolistic effects of that um or honestly my early internet experiences using AOL like AOL was the OG wal garden and it was the thing where you'd log into AOL and say welcome You've Got Mail right and you know you'd have just this one screen open and it would be AOL News AOL services like they had an exclusive deal with 1 1800 florists that like if you tried to buy flowers on the internet and you were using AOL it would use 1

1800 florists um you know it had its own messaging application you couldn't use any other messaging application within it like that to me me that is so representative in like a very literal way of what the various wall Gardens within blockchains feel like today and I'm really excited to move towards move back towards a kind of open internet Paradigm that that you're describing and I do think that it it changes everything also just in weird unpredictable ways like I wouldn't been able to imagine when I was sitting at my computer in 2002 logging into AOL what the internet would look

and feel like today in this more open paradig awesome a lot of Boomer takes today Jill yeah you guys don't even remember AOL damn I'm old thank you so much for coming on it's been a pleasure thank you guys so much for uh giving me a boomer platform and um yeah excited to to go keep building the future and um yeah really grateful honestly to you guys for uh what you do in bringing all the different folks across this crazy ethereum and modular ecosystem together to uh to actually be able to coordinate and uh and get straight what we're all working on

different pieces of it it's awesome so great to be here appreciate that thanks for coming on just doing our part in the uh education ux for sure cool