“Unified Ethereum” vs “L2 Ecosystem Competition”: Can we have both? | Devcon SEA

please move to the middle of the seats so that people more coming people that coming later can join us and ladies and gentlemen is the session about UniFi Atrium L2 ecosystem competition let's talk about the FR enemies and how we reduce the fragmented between al2s and together we have Ben Hart Jesse Steven and vitalik Bin let's give them a big hands all right we okay hey guys um I'm har lamber I'm the founder of a cross protocol um I'm going to do a little unconventional introduction to this panel here so um we'll set the stage for for what we're talking about okay so four years ago ethereum had a scaling problem uh you guys probably remember we had 15 transactions per second uh at peak times the cost of doing a Unis swap swap was like 50 bucks it's extremely expensive uh it was slow slow and kind of unusable and uh one of the guys on stage here helped align our ethereum community on this rollup Centric road map uh of what this would look like this was back in October of 2020 um and it turns out this this has actually worked it's worked pretty well um hold on hold on hold your pause hold on hold on hold on so let's let's look at what happened here right so October 2020 rollup road map comes out led by this guy Mr vitalic buan um but then we keep going right then we have um the first uh optimistic rollup permissioned at the time but optimism a few months later comes out one of the co-founders is on stage here Mr Ben Jones right Ben few months after that arbitrum comes out with a permissionless version right here we are with Stephen thank you Stephen um okay Jesse from Bas doesn't get a slide on here um sorry Jesse but I helped with 444 you know we play a little role so we get we get uh March of this year blobs ship 4844 and if you guys remember blobs now made like the l2s cheap like really cheap fractions of a penny to do basic things and so like look at that chart that chart is up and to the right uh we have scaled ethereum uh scaled it by many ORS many to give these guys a round of applause right [Applause] there we go we scaled ethereum like Well Done guys um should have timed that better um okay now like once you solve any good hard problem and like let's go back like ethereum had some negativity on the timeline uh it's turned around a little bit recently but this was the big hairy problem ethereum faced for four years um and we really did solve it as a community with many people on stage here many others in the audience it's it's pretty cool but of course you solve one problem you get another one so what's our what's our new problem we've now fragmented ethereum so what we're going to talk about on stage is how we unify ethereum and that's my unconventional intro and now I want to go in and ask uh ask our our panelists here just to give us um an experience where you've used a theum and had just a bad ux with its many l2s doesn't have to be long but let's just talk about let's submit to the problem um Ben you want to start adding a new chain to interact with on my wallet yep yeah uh same whether it's going from an L2 to an L3 or L1 to a different L2 adding the chain then going trying to figure out how to bridge to that chain like can be quite complicated and uh definitely given me pain in the past I I had to I'm a user of onchain social with forecaster and forecaster core identity contracts live on mainnet but a lot of the transaction activity happens on base and that's where I hold most of my assets I had to renew my forecaster account which you have to do every year uh and I didn't have any gas on optimism and so thus began the long process of moving gas from base to optimism figuring out how to execute the contract there and then making sure I could actually continue transacting very frustrating a while back I lost $100 by yeah screwing up the process of depositing to F poly market and put and and sending coins to the wrong chain I thought we' get a polym market example but yeah all right so we can admit even with the the leaders in the space uh the ux of uh navigating these l2s is is pretty difficult um what about also from the developer experience like I i' would love to get just quick takes on you know many developers in the audience part of the problem now is developers don't even know where they should build do they build on bass do they build on arbitrum do they build on optimism do they build on ZK sync do they Bill and scroll l so just like quick takes uh we're not we're not going to go through everybody all the time but just quick takes on how do you think this how are developers supposed to pick where they build and what are your what are your thoughts on that vitalic developer experience yeah I think uh I mean the challenge is like we have all of these nice uh standardized web 3 apis for doing like things where those things are confined to the same chain right and uh know you can do sends you can do calls like everything is nice and uh standardized they calling one JavaScript function but then as soon as your application requires people to do things on multiple chains like you have to go and figure out your own custom thing and I think that's like both a big pain for developers and we have to remember that uh you know developers are a very very long tail and I think especially as adoption becomes more mainstream is going to inevitably include people who are less and less skilled and like further and further from the discourse that is uh like actually like talking about all of the the core principles and like why all of the adjustments to them are happening right and uh it's also bad for security right because uh from a uh a user's perspective like every single thing that the developer of each application has to do as a thing that the user has to trust them for yeah and I'd say it's not even just programming and kind of like doing function calls one of the other big challenges that we see is there's a large array of assets that are now spread across different chains whether those are nfts or erc20 is um and they're siloed to those local environments and so when Builders want to kind of tap into that liquidity or they want to build experiences on top of that you know culture that's been issued in nfts they actually aren't able to and they're they're kind of stuck again building a little bit of a silo or having to figure out these like wild things that are custom to break out of that and I think that's holding back innovation in space yeah I think also that we see like specialization in different chains um you know arbitrum strengths are Def and and gaming but if you want to build in know other verticals you might choose to go to base and like definitely developers are choosing you know we're seeing clusterization of different types of of um applications but I think also from like a user perspective part of the problem is there's this like deep deep Fascination and awareness of the underlying infrastructure like when I go and order an Uber on my phone I don't think about I wonder if Uber is on AWS or gcp I just think it's an Uber and I think part of us is actually ironic for me to say is us moving a little more into the background and giving users their experience and not like giving them the hyper awareness of all the developer tools yeah depend I guess we'll go down the line I mean to some extent I think the nature of this question is an example of where we need to be improving where like in principle everyone up here is doing evm like equivalent code for a reason and that's so that developers can just go and Deploy on all the places and the reality is that if you're a developer there's a huge overhead to deploy on multiple chains versus on one and you have to like manage deployments and addresses and chain IDs and all these things in reality we should be at the point where developers can just write applications and it's it feels more like a user choosing to install an application on some chain than it does even that the developer has chosen to deploy it there so yeah I don't know I think it's echoing a lot of what folks said but we just have to make Fade Into the background as Stephen said the developers should write applications not apps on a specific State space yeah yeah you and Stephen sounds like you really agree there fade in the background love that um okay so vitalic there's this trade-off in scaling ethereum right we've achieved more scal you can argue there's a trade-off in scaling ethereum we've achieved more scalability with all these l2s and l3s which has kind of led to more fragmentation um more chain to navigate um I'm kind of curious just to get your takes and for the audience of how worried you are about interoperability like from your seat does this scare you and maybe going a little deeper like how worried are you about getting the different l2s to actually cooperate because they they don't they don't necessarily have aligned incentives here yeah I think uh I mean it's definitely one of our top problems right now like I think uh if you think about Delta between the status quo ethereum experience and let's say like the credit card experience right credit card experience has a lot of uh interoperability right you can take a credit card from any Bank pay it on any one of those like insert tap whatever Terminals and like it figures out everything in the back end and like it is for some reason right and you do have to like wait for that Spinning Wheel to like confirm and often for some reason that I haven't quite understood it takes as long as an entire ethereum slot uh but you know it does have like the interoperability piece solved and it feels like you're part of one ecosystem and I think if uh ethereum is uh not like cannot meet that level of experience then it is going to lose to things that do um and in terms of uh how I feel about our ability to solve it I mean I feel like I've actually been impressed by the level of willingness to commit to solving this problem that I've seen from all kinds of ler 2 teams um all kinds of uh wallet teams um all all kinds of uh like like users ecosystem actors um like uh it it feels like there's uh a big willingness to actually get the problem solved and I mean obviously I think the real test right is when you go from words to action right and basically when you say you know are we actually going to see wallets uh incorporate chain specific addresses and incorporate uh you know a a a bridging protocol to like automatically do transfers are we going to actually see like l2s follow the standards that all appear for unchain configs and then including like like like state state verification and like message verification stuff that uh comes after right so I think uh the ultimate test is uh definitely you know like one thing hit hit main net but out of everything that I've been actually able to observe so far I've been like actually impressed by people's willingness to put serious work into it we like that um so maybe you'll ask a the similar question in a slightly spicy way to the rest of you guys um which if we're being real like the three of you are competing for users you're competing for tvl you're competing for mind share at least there's a perspective that you said um and you're competing for for developers and so how do you all think about your own incentive structures here about interoperability and about why like being unified with your competitors uh is is a good thing for for you or not um Stephen sure I don't think fragmentation is good for users and I don't want any user to be on arbitrum because it's difficult or painful for them to be there or to get off and they feel stuck I want users to be able to go seamlessly anywhere in the ethereum ecosystem and the reason that they might choose arbitrum or another chain is because they want to be there they like the developer feutures they like the ecosystem and that's really you know where they want to be so my my basic thought on how we should think about interoperability is we should try to get to not a unified arbitrum ecosystem not a unified you know super chain ecosystem I think we should try to get to a unified ethereum and that should be the vision we set and so much today is like undefined and we don't know how to implement some of our interrupt visions and a lot we do but what that vision is I think is going to be very very uh formative into what we build and the vision that I have is to how do we unite not just two Arbitron chains but how do we unite ethereum now the caveat to that is there are certain technical reasons sometimes where a particular stack um you can unite the chains much more closely and I'm a big believer in like you know if there was a technical reason a technical benefit we can have if there is a reason why two arbitrum chains or two op stack chains can talk together more efficiently we should definitely exploit that but the extent that there's no technical limitation we shouldn't like draw arbitrary lines and say okay we're going to build a structure of arbitrum chains or a structure of op chains unless there's a technical reason all those chains should talk together and I think that's how we get a unified ethereum yeah I mean I'll Echo that I even think the good news here is like you know I think maybe there was like a vibesyoutube pie this is the future that we're all building towards you go ethereum I think the good news is like it is not the case that we have to rely on those vibes to get us there I think like vitalic you brought up the example of interoperability with credit cards like that wasn't because there was some regulation or like vision for credit cards that we had to like socially preserve it was because a credit card where you can pay anywhere is better than a credit card where you can only pay in one country or one state so I think the good news here is that it is in our incentive to do this and as a matter of fact the l2s have already done this it would be a lot easier to build a rollup that you could not Bridge back to ethereum and nobody's out here saying oh why are people l2s are not going to allow you to bridge back to ethereum it's a perverse incentive no the answer is because nobody would come and use the products if they were stuck there permanently and there wasn't a way to get back to the rest of the ecosystem so luckily I think it's like you know there's a vision Vibes the answer to this but there's also just a the best products are going to win and the best products are the one that don't lock people in I I I do wish we didn't have s-day Bridges though that that would be nice but that's a different different thing go ahead Jesse Yeah I'm I'm a plus one to both of those I think base sits in a like somewhat unique position in that we are not a rollup ecosystem we're part of the super chain but we also are really excited about you know making ethereum great again and like connecting us up to everyone including Arbitron and every other layer too and I think that kind of idea of being a bridge Nonni and connecting up to the broader ethereum ecosystem means that when we're thinking about interoperability we're thinking really about like how do we pursue many paths that let us get that ideal user experience and ideal developer experience and I do think there are going to be you know value of more tightly clustered chains you're going to be able to get more interoperability you're going to be able to get higher Capital efficiency because people are going to be willing to opt in slightly higher trust considerations and that has to be a subset of a broad set of interoperability where if you're in ethereum L2 you can have maybe with a slightly lower Capital efficiency the exact same Capital execution um and that's what we're working on with rip 7755 which works across all l2s that's what we're working on in a more kind of trusted way with super train interop I think those things are going to come together to get us to this world where it just works for users and like Ben said like that's the thing that's going to drive us there if we want to get 100 million people a billion people on chain in the next couple years we can't have broken experiences we actually have to have experiences that are 10x better than the web 2 experiences that all of us are used to because if it's good enough for crypto like that's not good enough anymore we just need to be better yeah it's it's a good segue good enough for crypto from four years ago that's not enough that's not enough that's not how we get the next billion people on um and it's a good segue so let's start talking about like Solutions here or like your guys' ideas for Solutions and you know I build an interop protocol I have lots of my own ideas but um if you had a magic wand uh magic wand and you could wave it uh what are your like top one or two things you'd like to see uh solved near-term medium-term around interruptibility like start with vitalic what's your magic W say yeah I mean I think for me the one of the things that's like upstream or of everything else is chain onchain configs right so layer 2 configs being like objects that are registered on chain and that would cover chain IDs uh that would also cover uh like you would have functions uh in that contract that would do things like verifying State proofs and verifying like receipt and uh transaction and event proofs um it would uh mean potentially include all of the uh information that you would need for a wallet to be able to interact with the chain right so right now I think that's basic like chain ID and a couple of other basic things right but I think that set of information is going to expand a lot and then once you have that then that makes it much easier to do like a version of like say ERC 7683 that just works with every chain automatically it makes it easier to do a like make chain specific addresses work it makes it easier to have a universal light client of all l2s which I think is another one of those uh important visions that we have to move toward right we've believed in like llies for a long time but if most uh activity is on ler TS then we're not done unless the like clients support later two as well um so I think uh you know definitely like on chain cfig are one step and then after that uh just easy ways for users to move assets between chains as we've been talking about and I think in parallel it's like a totally different work stream But continuing to work on the like lent stuff yeah and I I think the onchain configs are maybe the enabler of the thing that I'm most focused on um which is the wallet layer you know I think when when users are coming into wallets today they're presented with a ton of different networks a ton of different assets and then these zerx addresses that basically mean nothing and if we just continue to layer on complexity where it's like okay now you you don't only need to deal with a 64 character ZX address you also have to have like a chain identifier next to it and understand what that means and understand the security properties of that I think that's not going to work for everyday people and so I think a lot of what I'm focused on and and and the team is focused on is figuring out how do we take this underlying infrastructure like putting chain configs on chain and then actually bubble that up through the wallet to be able to build better experiences so we replace the zerox addresses with names but those names are now chain aware so if you send to someone's name it just works it's going to go where they want it to and if you have balances across different ethereum networks you can just combine them all and send at one time but I think by building in this infrastructure to a wallet experience that becomes totally seamless to the user this complexity is going to actually fade away and we're not going to be having conversations about like internet tiers today on stage uh I think a few years from now we won't be T having conversations about ethereum tiers it will just work and most people will not know whether they're on layer to they won't know whether they're on base they will just get secure applications that are fast that are cheap that are easy to use I think for de developers there will still be a lot of knowledge there but for everyday people I think it's going to fit into the background yeah I think the F had magic wand the things that people want are you know fast synchronous interop um and I think you know some of the technical ways to to actually you know Implement that magic wand are definitely the things we discussed But ultimately you know there are different levels so to talk about the layers of the stack for one second um there are different layers of the stack that that contribute different pieces But ultimately if they're not packaged together it's like I think part of the problem interop today is there's so so so many different solution paths so like we just shipped a feature called Fast withdrawals that for arbitrum any trust chains takes down the withdrawal period from the 7 days to 15 minutes and like that's fantastic but that's not an end user so that will plug into a solution like a cross But ultimately that also would be great if it bubbled up back into the wallet so I think that we as an ecosystem are doing a great job like shipping exactly this is is what we need interop features on so many different ERS but how to package it up to the user that they're not aware of these layers that all these layers are just working seamlessly for them is going to be the trick that I think the magic wand would be uh helpful for you got anything to add or you you pting me I mean I'll do a quick one do a quick one the bar in my brain is just in hell right now it's so bad so my answer would just be change specific addresses so that it is no longer possible to send funds to an address and them and the recipient go oh snap that's on the wrong chain money is gone yeah okay so I'm going to summarize for you guys so it's like okay we uh the bar is so low that there's very simple things we can do to raise the bar which like look it's a maybe that's a little depressing but hey it means that in a year's time we should be able to make make some wins here so chain specific addresses so I don't black hole my money great vitalic has L2 configs which is sort of this building block that we can permissionless um add new chains understand the security properties chains deploy things without there being a middleman or a blocker um Jesse talking about the wallet level which I think there's a lot to go into there uh if I'm going to give you my vision of what this should look like it's uh I click one button in my unified ethereum experience and it does the action I want to do on that other chain quickly and cheaply and yeah plus one on that and I I think this may be where I have a slightly different perspective at times than vitalic or maybe Ben like I almost feel like the chain specific address showing that to users is is like taking us off the path that we need to get to I think it's a really important piece of infrastructure like being able to configure chain specific addresses is a good piece of infrastructure for developers but I think what we need to be pushing to is a world where we're not showing users addresses like we need to be showing them names and we need to be showing them simple user experiences or buttons that they can click where they can confirm are you doing the right thing without having to understand understand oh here's this really long string here's this thing like I think that pushes us further down this line of complexity which again can be a really really valuable developer tool but for the end user experience like I don't think we want people manually sending to poly Market anymore we want a button that's like deposit $50 to poly market and if you connected your wallet it just works I think that's where we got to push to we'll go off script here for a second because this is a point that I'm actually curious to get vitalic take on because I think there's a difference of opinion in like pure chain abstraction I don't care at all what chain I'm on but ballic I think at some points you're like well we do want to know what security assumptions the the users taking and um I don't know just for a 30- second detour V like what are you what's your updated thinking on this yeah I mean I think so for the uh like like I definitely agree that there's like huge uh set like sets of settings and which we should not be showing addresses at all like for me the poly Market flow is like its worst case as a today the improved thing is if they replaced a copy paste address thing with a chain specific address and then at least it's like a little easier but then the really improved thing is if uh like you have a button you press it and then you have a uh like we extend the web 3 like RPC API and we have a a cross chain payments request and then your wallet just satisfies it in whatever way it can and then we can also get that adopted for Consumer Merchant settings and we also have a QR code version and so MD Dio like all of these uh brilliant phone wallets will'll be able to just send and receive immediately across chain to arbitrary chains so that part is important um on the uh security side I think uh I mean like I do think that uh wallets should somehow make uh either make users aware of like which chain that they're moving funds to when they're when they're depositing I think wallets should probably have opinionated choices about where they store like what what chain or chains they use as like a user's home like where they store the majority of a user's assets so and that could easily mean like also showing warnings when you uh send to some chain that doesn't follow security standards so I think we do need to like keep uh doing those things but at the same time like the process of just uh like sending from one L2 to another L2 it should still like feel like sending yeah okay I mean I think there's a middle ground there that um I think everyone agrees with so if we want this vision of clicking buttons which I agree with Jesse on too it can be domain specific like on my polym market app I trust polym Market polym market.com click a button I I understand what I'm doing there and then you know when it gets uh other domains maybe we're a little bit more security aware um got a lot to talk about there and we'll talk more about what we can do with intents and unifying one-click experiences between chains too but um I I wanted to spend a second just to go uh into the the kind of ecosystem specific interupt techniques some of you all are building here um and let's not let's keep this quick because I want to be aware of time but like Ben tell us a little bit about super chain um super chain native interop and the vision for that um and specifically love to like get the thoughts on how does that help unify ethereum and or just make super chain better give me give me your vision absolutely so super chain interop is all about building a secure message passing protocol that doesn't introduce a fundamentally new set of trusted actors to support bridging within the super chain so basically what you do is you leverage the fact that these chains are on a shared standard with shared governance and the fact that they already have fall proofs and you build a way to pass messages quickly between them using theault proofs that already secure the bridge in the first place so that's the tldr you know 30 second view um in terms of what that enables honestly what we need to do is pair that as a back end with the broader ethereum interrup on the front end so like that improves Capital efficiency and the ability to write applications that span multiple chains within the super chain um and that's really valuable it defragments the super chain and it's a stepping stone towards defragmenting ethereum um and the way to do the balance is you come at it from both directions from the ethereum perspective we have to unify standards that work across all chains and then as the ecosystems on the back end improve we just lower the fees improve the capital efficiency yeah you're you're Shilling my talk like right after this y'all I'm doing a talk on 7683 which is sort of like the standard on the front end uh and I'm going to talk exactly about how on the back end we can plug into different settlement systems um which is then a great segue to go by Stephen where you already talked about fast withdraws briefly but um arbitrum is doing like the fast withdraw stuff I Love From across's perspective I actually put a tweet thread out about why I need to put a tweet thread out about why I love it so much but we'll talk about that separately um fast withdrawals and then chain clusters like give me kind of like what's the the within arbitrum what are you guys doing to make make interop really beautiful there yeah so the first thing is shipping like whatever features we can that will plug into other layers to make their jobs easier so fast withdrawals which I mentioned before takes down for specifically for any trust uh chains takes down the withdrawal time from 7 days to 15 minutes and then again that's not a feature that's the user facing it in of itself but that's going to make something like a cross much more efficient and ultimately uh much more able to add more chains and therefore lead to interrupt but the other thing which we haven't discussed yet is chain clusters so chain clusters is actually you know kind of super chain esque like in terms of the technology but I think the vision that we have and you know um is is slightly different you know correct me if I'm wrong as as I as I sort of try to paraphase the difference but it's a really nice piece of technology so chain clusters or super chain it allows you know different chains to Cluster together closely in a way that they can get really good interop and like synchronous experiences and it's um actually fantastic the problem is is well you might call it a benefit I might call it a problem the fact is that in order to do this you have to like kind of trust your the other the other chains in a in a particular way and therefore you have some shared govern structure if I'm going to join a chain cluster with another chain I have to trust that you know something whack if they're doing something wacky in that chain but we have synchronous interrupt that's faster than settlement time right there's cont contagion uh and something bad there can like get to my chain that's where you lead to the tradeoff I would call of a chain cluster or super chain uh construct is that you have to all uh trust each other and therefore really um approv to each other's governance so what I believe I think this is where we diverge is one for all doesn't really work because I think it stifles Innovation if a thousand different chains from 100 different verticals defi nfts gaming Etc are all in one chain they aren't going to want to innovate in the same way so we have a chain building with us called Phoenix which is adding fhe uh privacy built into the chain using fully homeomorphic encryption like your defi chain is is not going to say hey sure I I'll take that wacky new technology and I'm going to interrupt with that they'll be like rightly saying not in my cluster like not in my super chain and that's why I think that ultimately you'll you know having one for all is uh great for interop but stifles Innovation because it leads more chains to do the vanilla thing because it's frankly going to be hard and for a good reason to get governance approval to do something that's kind of wacky and kind of different but you know the wacky day you know ideas of today could be like the most promising feature of tomorrow so our vision of chain clusters which is again a very similar technology is more self- selecting chain clusters the best example for this are two chains run by the same team they just want to cluster to get a better user experience they trivially trust each other they're trivially governed by the same thing a different example is vertical like structures so you have all the defi chains in one cluster all the nfts in one cluster and you have these clustered Islands within the cluster they'll innovate in the way they'll be aligned and they'll innovate in the way and they'll govern themselves in a way that's unique to their needs the nft changes might be different than defi they'll cluster themselves yes there will be users that want to jump from defi cluster to nft Cluster and that's why we have to build you know great interop for these islands but we think a uh system of self- selecting clusters so we can have both great interop and also um great Innovation yeah I got to say like this is the part where I I love ethereum ecosystem Innovation it's like okay you guys actually have super chain and clean clusters similar ideas expressed in different ways um and like this idea of like yeah many chain clusters doing some Bizarro and random things and innovating On The Fringe is super cool um all right Jesse you you mentioned uh 7755 a second ago um but yeah two two folks on the base team Wilson kusak and Jack chuma and many others um have put together this uh this other standard called Rip 7755 which I look at it kind of like super Innovative nested storage proof type concept um you got a bit of different perspective because like you said you're not an L2 ecosystem uh but coinbase and base are pushing this um why like what's your what's your vision what's the thought process yeah so we're we're part of super chain and we've also been pushing forward interop there and we're really excited about the capital efficiency that can that can get between um all the superch chain chains but I think a little bit to step Point as well um when we're thinking about ethereum we want to make sure that the customers people who are actually coming to base they can transact everywhere even if it's a little bit more expensive to transact everywhere like that's okay the experience has to be seamless and so what we're doing with rip 7755 is we're basically defining a ethereum wide standard that can make it trustless to do cross chain execution and can plug into things like 7683 to make it so that's it's really really seamless and so one way of thinking about it is that 7683 kind of defines this top level intent structure where it defines what does it look like to Define and execute a cross chain transaction but in order to actually settle that transaction I.E move the funds around that can make it happen so when it gets filled the person who filled it gets paid back you need some way of proving that that transaction actually happened and inside of the super chain we can use super chain interop and that's great it plugs in 7683 on top of super chain interop means we're going to get incredibly Capital efficient execution across super chain chains but the second you go outside of the super chain you also need some way of proving that and that needs to not just work inside of the super chain it needs to work across arbitrum it needs to work across all of arbitrum uh chain clusters it needs to work across other l2s that have different configuration and eventually heck it might even need to work across other l1s where that's actually possible and so that's what 7755 does is it basically makes it possible for you to do a trustless proof that an execution happened on another chain and that is designed in such a way that every L2 in the entire ethereum ecosystem can plug into it and so you put that underneath 7 683 and you combine it with these local chain clusters including the super chain and you get either best-in-class incredibly Capital efficient execution inside of these clusters or slightly lower uh Capital efficiency but still really seamless execution outside of those clusters Jesse I mean you oh sorry Ben it's kind of like a mullet we got Universal ethereum wide interop execution in the front chain specific settlement in the back yeah and I did like a V it's not quite a ven diagram it's almost like a concentric circle like you can think about your chain then you can think about your cluster and you use cluster interop there and then you can think about the entire ethereum and use 7755 interupt there and then maybe we expand 7755 interupt to all the l1s including salana and we're actually working on that yeah I I mean I again my talk right after this I I go much deeper in these exact same Concepts so I I I love you articulating that uh I did not include a mullet uh on my talk but I'll have to fix that um next you got to grow that hair fast I'm actually about to buzz my head and go fully bald once Bas crosses 10 billion tvl so maybe I can give you some of my hair let's go let's go um all right vitelic um because you've been quietly listening to these guys talk about their uh ecosystem specific Tech interrupt techniques um which I think are super cool and there's others like we don't have everybody on stage that we'd like um zky has their elastic chain polygon has their egg ler um all these other very cool techniques to make interoperability within a set of chains better um and I mean Jesse kind of feels like the moderating force trying to like connect some of these islands here too but there is this real risk that the incentives to solve interoperability are within ecosystems creating these highly connected islands that are really great interupt between them and then just kind of like uh it's a little bit harder to go between them so yeah I just we've touched touched on some of this already but to really hammer it home like how how much does this worry you and uh how do we how do we solve it yeah and so I think my uh shortterm ideal would be that uh even if things work uh using different underlying protocols within a cluster in between clusters we at least uh use the same interfaces right so you would have some higher level interface standard which is what the applications would use and then uh if you have something happening within one cluster it might use a direct interrupt and then if it happens between clusters it might use some intent based solution um and of course like if you're moving an NFD over then like it would like you can't use intents for that it would have to be direct even if it takes seven days and then if you're using usdc then like you could just use the usdc bridge directly um so it's like you get the best experience uh that you get given the technology that's available but you still follow the same standards so that's shortterm longterm I think uh as we see like which of these Solutions work well within and L2 I think eventually it makes sense to just adopt them across ler one and I don't think that this would re require protocol changes I think uh an ERC would be sufficient to do it right but like fundamentally I think there just is obvious economic value in like having L1 level and Rober in a lot ofas right like one simple example is like proof aggregation right like it's like anytime any proof aggregation happens at all you save gas because I you know instead of paying 500,000 times end gas or if you're starkware 3 million times end gas you get to pay you know 500,000 gas once right and but like and so I think you know shortterm future is like that happening sort of software cluster by software cluster but then long-term future there's a even more value in uh just uh everyone across ethereum land aggregating it like at least once per proof system right and then you or maybe we just use like one proof system and then if we use one proof system we should use the the one that everyone is comfortable with and just use Starks right and uh that way you're just like you are paying like maybe 3 million gas and you're paying it in every single slot but it's only ever being paid once right and that's like an obvious econom gain to every single prit and then at the same time it becomes easy to build on top um you know some of these like native shared Bridge ideas uh potentially some of like some shared sequencing based stuff and like I think all of those things are in the participants interest it's just that we need like a couple more years for the tech and ideas to keep maturing and solidifying so if I'm going to summarize it's like um common interface on the it's the mullet analogy I'm going to start using this all the time we're going to define a common interface up front and then we're just going to have a bunch of innovation on the back end and as that we figure out what works best on the back end we can in enshrine maybe not via an actual protocol jams but can push that forward in the protocol um any of you guys disagree with that or should I keep pushing I mean I think what I would say is that um there's a whole other side to fragmentation of ethereum that is actually unrelated to these kind of capital efficiency problems and it is the like security model problem and I do want to call that out that even if we get really fast bridging between a bunch of different ecosystems and that's doing well we still are introducing inherent risk when it comes to the governance of these systems and like the bridge hack 2.0 governance Edition era could be the next meme of the bull run that I'm really worried about so yeah I think one thing that we really need to do is work towards stage one and stage two decentralization like none of these L2 ecosystems have more than one stage one chain right now shout out base real close oh pardon my language just deployed permissionless fall proofs yeah there we go but we have a responsibility as an industry to keep pushing forward not like the weakest links that we see and I think there's a real risk that we'd keep doing this mullet and it goes really really well but then it turns out the part of the hair in the back actually gets broken in other ways so I don't know that's my yeah yeah I think it's super Fair and like vitalic has been pushing hard on this too and like yeah give give shout outs to arbit from here too they've been pushing real hard on on on on uh their D yeah there we go right yeah right like you guys are a group of people on stage that actually legitimately care about like the decentralization stuff it's not just a meme so like Kudos right um okay so I agree with that um we also have like a wallet problem so and they're kind of correlated right like we want this wallet to we we want to get wallets to adopt a bunch of innovation around chain abstraction um wallets are notoriously a little bit slow to innovate here and for good reason because frankly security right you don't want to mess with user funds I I'll just throw one question out there you guys have any brilliant ideas on how we're going to get the wallets to uh innovate on this chain abstraction World here we're just going to do it I I don't know if everyone in the audience knows but um and I see some faces from the wallet team here I started working more closely with the coinbase wallet team in the last uh month and a half and uh We've started making really fast progress on exactly this issue you know I think our thesis is that we want to be building a wallet that's built open source that's built on Open Standards like 7683 and 7755 and that facilitates open markets because if we can build a wallet that Embraces those things we have have a chance of making it so that the UI layer of ethereum embodies the same values as the chain layer of ethereum and so I think on top of that philosophy what we're going to be able to do is we're actually going to be able to build a wallet that actually moves a lot faster because it's going to be getting all the acceleration from those Open Standards and everyone else building on it and we're going to get all the acceleration from the open source and everyone else contributing to it and so my gut tells me that we are reaching the point where we're actually going to see faster and faster acceleration in terms of wallet development um you forgot the the third item in the list which is uh passing the walkway test and passing the walkway test that two where you can take all of your assets with you or if you decide hey screw this thing we want to go somewhere else totally can well no the walk away test is if you guys decide to go retire and shut down with a a click of a button that users are all safe yes yes 100% we really don't want coinbase to go shut down and retire though well we yeah no I totally agree but we just I mean one thing I'm excited about is base just passed the walkway test so just with fault proofs that we rolled out live in collaboration with optimism as of three weeks ago if all of coinbase shut down users would be able to exit continue doing their thing so deeply committed to that walk away and and thanks for falic for always keeping us honest it it really does matter like I can tell you that um you know there's I forget what event it was at but maybe like three months ago four months ago we've been working towards stage one fall proofs all these things try and get it done and then vitalic was like everyone needs to get to stage one and my whole slack for the whole day was just people sending me that being like what how do we get there faster how do we get there faster how do we get there faster and so I think having leadership from the top in this ecosystem setting that Northstar and pounding the table for decentralization and pounding the table for this future that we're all building of a open global economy that anyone can participate in it makes some impact so thank thanks yeah thank Jesse well said right and it's like vitalic is a consensus Builder he literally builds consensus protocols but uh he keeps the bar High we like we like him keeping the bar High um with that in mind we don't have that much time left and I think we're going to take a couple questions but just you guys are on stage with falic what what would you want him to do to help unify ethereum is there anything like any wish list items we we can kind of corner them on stage here and be like hey can you can you do this yeah I think vitalik's done a fantastic job um despite what the tractors say clearly executing a road map and we've done as an ecosystem a really good job executing on that so I think you know which he's been doing keep executing that road map keep uh keep U you know um mentioning that road map making sure people are aware of it and keep rallying all of us around it and making sure we keep true to it I would say you know the other two things are um keeping us all focused on you know growing the pie rather than red dividing the pie I think is important ultimately we're all here to build a better etherum mucos system and um metallic has been a fantastic leader until now and please stay with us and continue doing that all right we we still got a you guys got anything else d we're GNA roll in a Q&A otherwise don't let Twitter distract you too much good well said yeah um I'm not not sure how we structure Q&A with an audience this big yes uh we're going to do Q&A and would you like to moderate the Q&A I can cross the question if it's already answered sure I'm happy to oh good please all right oh I see how this works okay um wow um this is cool um okay first question what if the SEC were to Target l2s for running an unlicensed exchange since L it's a kind of annoying question guys um we're saying given that they're under a multi- with the team controlling everything I don't think that's true anymore let's talk about this like Jesse you run a you're part of a public company you run an L2 you're not worried uh I mean look the the regulatory envir the the regulatory environment in the United States has been massively unclear and I think that that's created an environment where entrepreneurs at every level are worried about running a foul of laws that are incredibly unclear and so I think that that fear and uncertainty is grounded in a real thing now that said when we launched Bas a year and a half ago um we went to very very very Great Lengths to ensure that the Way That Base was set up even before it had fault proofs was such that there was no single team or single entity that had outsize control such that it would be into kind of like the classic money transmitter license domain that was like a thing we wrote literally a 50 page they call internally they call it the the base Ma mag narta of like why is this thing treated more like an open internet rather than a Money Services business and since then we've only decentralized further we have fault proofs we have a more decentralized Security Council we have checks and balances and so I I think that the the the the question isn't quite spoton and the progress we're making is putting us clearly on the side of this is free internet that's open to everyone yeah Will said I mean you got anything at or should we I think like the the test that want to have is like the gun to head test someone comes says hey you know Stephen shut down arbitrum or Jesse shut down base like what is your response and in my case our response is arbitrum has had live fraud proofs on in production since day one arbitrum Dow controls completely the uh future Technical and financial of the chain and the arbitr from Security Council by the way can be turned off by the Dow at any point and is elected with elections every 6 months and you need nine out of 12 to do so not myself not offchain Labs not the arbit Foundation we don't control this chain and I think that is a really important test and that's what decentralization means yeah I mean I I I think there's a very good point in there you guys are high-profile right if if somebody wants to shut you down they know where to come and be like hey do it um and there's there's some evidence in that that that hasn't happened all right um whoa screen went very white okay vitalic one question vitalic uh seemingly optimistic about interoperative billing solved faster than expected so my goal is like it took us four years to solve scalability I would like interop to be less than four years uh yeah remember Justin Drake's 2029 timeline that's like the timeline for Nirvana that's like the perfect chain that's like platonically beautiful and solves every problem we can like do all the Practical user stuff I think by in 20 within 2026 uh so why am I optimistic about this I think uh the big thing that a lot of people are sleeping on is like just how much Social Capital is being built up in the ecosystem like the rate at which the ethereum L1 is able to implement and execute and spec out on eips is accelerating right and it's like very visibly accelerating the complexity of the EIP is being done as uh accelerating and I think the reason why is because you just have this entire Community that's like getting better and better in this Loop of coordinating with each other specking planning implementing and agreeing on and P and pushing out each set of proposals and every time that happens the whole ecosystem learns together and I expect that the exact same thing is going to happen to the lawyer 2 ecosystem and the wallet ecosystem probably on an even faster schedule strong plus one to that I mean just as an illustration of that two and a half years ago when we started working on base there were probably like less than 10 15 people who were building things on chain and coinbase it's 5,000 person company today we're in the hundreds I expect that that within the next year will'll be in the thousands and so there's this massive effort happening across so many companies in the entire industry who are saying Now's the Time to build because the technolog is finally ready and the more of us that we have coordinating to build this future and the infrastructure required to take us there the faster and faster we're actually be able to move yeah I got to add my own take on this from like a social capital perspective and like um so ERC 7683 which I'm talking about right after this uh we very quickly so across is a co-author with Unis swap we very quickly got like 35 teams on board supporting this including optimism arbitrum Bas ZK sync polygon we'll talk about this all um next but we got all the L2 ecosystems on board and all these other protocols because there is social capital to solve this interoperability problem so I'm I'm bullish too okay um another good question it could be annoying talking about salana but I think it's a good question um do you see Salon as a competitor now well we've all answered questions you've answered zero questions so far so this is for you H okay I I'll answer this salana look I'm not a salana hater at all um I think salana I have a view that salana does ethereum a service of showing the other way right and um we should actually honestly like learn from that and respect it um and compete comp competition is a beautiful thing um and my take here is that um after Denon with with blobs and 4844 any individual L2 is a salana like experience it is fast and cheap as salana and it's beautiful yeah cool how is that right and that's that's these guys that's these guys doing this you guys like Jesse you got a salana and Stephen you got a salana and Ben you got a salana right um uh the problem is there's too many of them now right so like we just got to unify them and so is it a competitor sure but I think uh I think ethereum has way more scale just by the nature of the rollup Centric road map I just want to Echo the competition point I think it works against salana like I'm super happy that Solana exists because I think it really pushes us to the core to say you know how do we get these Fe the good features of salana without compromising the important features we have and that that's always important competition is important I'm super happy that optimism exists CU arbitrum wouldn't be as awesome as it was today if nothing was pushing us uh to be competitive and I'm sure that a two-way street as well so I love competition within the ecosystem and I think we're as ethereum lucky to have competitors but uh we're still better than our competitors here here R of that let's let's cheers them guys like good competitors here right driving Innovation we like that um okay so question here talking about this framing the super chain as a federation which Ben I'm curious if you agree with that or not um and asking if there's some risk of making making ethereum less decentralized by the federations like the super chain emerging the answer quite frankly is I think in many ways yes if I'm holding us accountable as a community the answer is yes and I actually would take it a step further if you look at the history of the internet so much of the vision of what crypto is going to bring to the table was the vision for the internet and capital and capitalism got in the way and turned it and recentralized the living uh out of it so I think that uh quite frankly that risk is there quite frankly that risk exists at every layer of the stack the reality is if 99% of people interacting with ethereum today do th do so through one centralized Gateway of their RPC provider of choice that is a web to business it is a web to control structure and it is what exists the same is true of the application layer the reality is that uh we need to solve these problems if we are not going to repeat the mistakes that the internet made so that's why optimism has funded you know eight figures of public goods to keep ethereum open source because it's not happening naturally there are closed Source elements that are coming into our ecosystem and we must must must reject those so so yeah you you should absolutely look at the super chain as a cabal risk do I think it is the biggest cabal risk that ethereum faces right now absolutely not I think that existed every layer of this sta yeah I think one other thing I want to say about competition is that I think we should not just be thinking about you know competition you know within the blockchain world I think uh you know like sea is competition the credit card system is competition that like new bricks pay thing that got announced like one or two weeks ago is competition right the centralized world is moving forward and uh the the uh like blockchain is cheaper than Bitcoin arguments that were very easy to make back in 202 12 are definitely much harder to make today and and uh at the same time like the rest of the world is moving forward today right the space of things we have to think about the decentralization and privacy of like 10 years ago it was websites and now you know we're talking about Ai and in 20 years we're going to talk about reading our minds right and so you know the world is moving forward and we absolutely have to move forward to keep up all right I was just going to give a strong oh I was just going to give a strong plus one to that offchain is competition on chain we're building together and it's time to build a