# Best of Both Worlds? The Projects Merging Solana and Ethereum

- Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver)
- Date: 2024-10-09
- Duration: 22:38
- Topics: blockchain, web3, ethereum, Entertainment
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-5_H2WpMaWcE
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_H2WpMaWcE

## Description

Neel Somani - Eclipse

Sukanya Parashar - Neon EVM

Keone Hon - Monad

Ajit Tripathi - Polygon

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## Transcript

here testing testing all right perfect so uh everyone welcome we are going to be talking today about the intersection about the intersection of salana and ethereum we have some projects here that are thinking very closely and deeply about how to take what they believe works with ethereum and maybe what they believe doesn't and also take what they believe works and what they what and leave out what doesn't with salana and bring them together into new kinds of of blockchains new platforms that where where developers can take what works from both so uh i' just like to start out today by going down the panel uh everyone if you could just introduce yourselves and talk just for a couple seconds about your perspective uh on this intersection between salana and ethereum thanks Janny um so I'm Neil I'm with eclipse and what we're doing is focusing on building the most performant layer 2 and the way that we're approaching that is we forked the salana layer one which is a high highly performed layer one blockchain and we're turning it into an ethereum layer 2 by adding in fraud proofs ZK proving and other types of verifiability so our take is that we want to take the best parts from different ecosystems ethereum is the king as far as settlement and censorship resistance whereas salana has been optimizing on performance so we want to get the best of both worlds hi everyone I'm sukna I am Senior integration engineer from neon evm uh so neon evm is uh a fully compatible etherium uh solution built on Solana it's basically a an evm uh which is which recites inside Solana's virtual machine and leverages all the Solana's capabilities basically we are making ethereum Dev developers lives easier who wants to migrate or expand their uh like daps to another ecosystem like Solana and leverage all their capabilities hi my name is Ajit tripati and uh I work for polygon on Founder programs uh I have always been interested in this intersection so you know personally I when I was at a I invested in neon I'm also you know an investor in monad so there are lots of cool things going on uh from a polygon perspective we are a ZK Powerhouse right we are very very interested in aggregating the internet of value so we think that there will be lots of different you know layer ones and layer twos which uh bring different app types of applications to the users and you know I think Solana has done a great job of a few things so first of all they have brought a product first culture right so as in if you if you use uh okay I'm going to get shouted at in the ethereum crowd but I'm going to say this anyway uh you know that Solana has this ethereum has a very strong research culture so you know if you read the ethereum protocol specs right it everything is look like mathematically robust the economics of ethereum is incredibly robust uh the protocol specs are incredibly robust I used to work with blad zamir on CBC Casper it's brilliant Solana has a engineering and product culture I think these two things need to come together uh right so where there is this mobile first experience that Solana is delivering so but beyond that I think you know we what we are seeing across l2s and l1s is a fragmentation of users and liquidity so from uh what polygon is working on is the aggregation layer ethereum has we think that ethereum is the global settlement layer and ethereum will be you know is the highest Economic Security chain uh so all of the zero knowledge technology that's being invented by polygon and and our peers will be used to bring unified liquidity uh through the through the proof aggregation technology that we are building hi my name is Keon Han co-founder of monad monad is building the parallel evm and bringing parallelization as well as other optimizations to the ethereum virtual machine um basically delivering a new layer one that is the best of both worlds between ethereum and salana monad is as if ethereum and salana had a baby and so just to talk a little bit more about some of the things that we see uh we can see that the ethereum virtual machine is really the standard for smart contract developers um about 96% of all tvl and defi is in evm applications um and there's a very robust research community in addition to all of the developer community and tooling and libraries there's a really robust research Community around the evm as well um and with monad we have gone really deep in terms of rebuilding the execution and consensus stack from the ground up and looking forward launching monad at the end of this year now uh cuni I don't know if I quite like the image of a child between a vitalic and and a toi but uh we have at least two projects here that are thinking just about that specifically uh with eclipse or maybe not that ex specifically but eclipse and neon really stand out to me is interesting because you you two as we talked a little bit off stage are almost the inverse of each other one project thinking all right well we want to use the svm in the ethereum um in the ethereum ecosystem the other sort of the opposite so I'd love just for the two of you to talk a little bit more about why uh eclipse and neon respectively have made those decisions and Neil let start with you yeah I I think what these projects demonstrate is that ethereum is many things it's a cluster of security properties including censorship resistance it is the evm and then there's also eth programmable money which is the original narrative and we're essentially picking different parts of that where Eclipse Taps into eth it Taps into etherium is a settlement layer but it does not retain the evm whereas neon is the inverse in that it keeps the evm but it's not an entirely different L1 which is salana and actually this is a bit of an alpha leak but we intend on having some neon deployment on eclipse in the coming months so I think that the neon take is essentially that especially when it was first developed it's bringing it is actually a parallel evm it's the original parallel evm in that it the memory model leverages the parallelism of the salon of virtual machine and uh and they essentially want to bring the developers from ethereum over to salana whereas ethere eclipse is trying to continue to tap into ethereum keep the developers on ethereum itself and uh in fact we want to move them away from the evm because we just don't think that the evm is necessarily the most performant VM from a grounds up from a first principal perspective um yeah I totally agree with Neil uh so we are basically we want uh the etherium developers uh to come into the Solana's ecosystem and since Solana has uh the most uh unique feature of uh the parallelism uh so executing transactions in parallel is uh very important in the blockchain space uh like regarding the gas fee hikes which we see uh on ethereum uh like layer ones so to reduce that thing like parallel execution is uh very important in like on any blockchain so that is the reason like we wanted uh like etherium Community which is very large so we wanted something uh to build for the ethereum community so that like they uh like easily can deploy uh their apps existing the apps on Solana and get the Solana's benefits of like high transaction speed low gas fees and of course like parallel execution yeah so you know I go back to 2015 in ethereum used to work for consensus very proud of all the dev tools work we did and you know so when we look at the evm it's a it's it's a it's a whole ecosystem it's not just just the evm but it's also the libraries right it's the open zalian libraries it's tools like hard hat so all of those things are part of the evm ecosystem right so I including the uh including the dep the training materials the ability of developers to learn from each other and become very productive very very quickly so uh but you know ethereum also has given rise to all the other blockchains I mean Ico has produced so many blockchains a lot of good Engineers have come out of eum and gone on to work on Solana and other blockchains uh so at polygon we you know used uh block STM uh the library that Aptos guys had used to do some parallelization work on the posst Chain it had certain benefits but I think you know there is a lot more that needs to be done uh to really get the maximum juice out of evm on a layer one uh and you know that's I think there is a lot of amazing work that Kon and team have done when I looked at it uh a year ago I was like nah this is not going to work but I'm quite Amazed by what you guys have pulled off uh now let's talk a little bit about Community right so the the community of developers I think on ethereum and salana in terms of the two blockchain ecosystems that have the most robust developers that are most dedicated to them I think that th these two are the ones to beat uh now ke when it comes to building on uh foroned how are you thinking about the differences it maybe philosophically or in the focus on what types of things people want to build between ethereum and salana monad is focused on supporting developers with big Ambitions to build applications that can cross the chasm and reach mainstream adoption if we think about what it takes for an app to become number one on the IOS app store um it means having hundreds of thousands or millions of daily active users so if you imagine an app that has 1 million daily active users with let's say 50 transactions per user per day um that's 50 million transactions or uh 500 TPS so it's very clear that we need much more performance in order to support any app that gets to mass user adoption and monad is enabling that level of adoption that level of performance by introducing optimistic parallel execution directly into the evm as well as introducing other optimizations like parallel State access with a custom database that our team has built from scratch um in C++ storing Merkel tree data natively so that that we actually get performant parallel execution um so I think in terms of the kinds of developers that we're excited about um we're we're here to support um it's tough building a startup it's it's tough being an early stage entrepreneur bringing your vision to the world and so we're here for app developers that are building ambitious apps that cross the chasm to mainstream now Suk I've remember hearing about neon for a long time in the the salon ecosystem I remember uh at breakpoint maybe two or three years ago there were some uh demos of what this would one day look like it's been a long time of a long a long effort in bringing neon to the four I'm wondering what are some of the tech challenges that come with bringing the ethereum virtual machine to salana um the Tech challenges are like um definitely like Solana's architecture is uh very different uh than ethereum's uh and uh the Solana's virtual machine has a capability of embedding other virtual machines inside of it and neon evm is an example of that so uh the technical challenges are like for giving the full compatibility to the ethereum developers it's not U we do not uh like we can't have anything like only one smart contract cannot do like all the stuff so we have to have like a complete uh full architecture like we have our own proxy server which uh like wraps the ethereum like transactions unwraps the ethereum like transaction coming in from the user side and then uh like wrapping it into uh Solana like transaction so there are a lot of modules in between uh like to give a full compatibility to the ethereum dev developers so definitely that was a challenge and uh yeah not only that um like we have like own like our own Tracer API in endpoint like to give the full uh compatibility uh like The Ether scan module which we have on our block explorers like uh block Scout and neon scan so there are a lot of things to be built not only the smart contract inside uh Solana's virtual machine but to give the full compatibility we need a lot of stuff so I can add a little bit of context too cuz I I've worked pretty closely with neon just given that were planning on the deployment and then also I was building an evm on Cosmos a long time ago and just for context for the audience in case folks aren't familiar with the neon architecture it's essentially a smart contract on salana and that smart contract is an evm bite code interpreter so you can consider as like one order of magnitude maybe like 10 times overhead over just executing straight op codes and some of the differences in salon's execution model compared to ethereum is that you have to specify what accounts are being read from or ritten to so in order to gather that information the neon team built out this proxy where you submit the transactions they are first it simulates the transaction it identifies which accounts are invoked and then it adds that meta data to the transaction before it is signed and sent to the salana VM so that's a high level on how the neon architecture works now a I think you've been around um longer than many people here in crypto it's a compliment good it's a compliment means get to invest in all these wonderful people but uh you've got a great uh perspective into the development of the two ecosystems and the communities around them I mean uh ethereum had it a lot of trouble in the early days with the Dow hack and stuff like that the salana had its uh time through the ringer uh in the months and just over a year after FTX uh imploded uh but both communities obviously are still very strong and I think growing so if you could just walk us through how you've seen that come about yeah so my former boss Mr Luben was here uh some time back right and the work he he has done uh to get ethereum to this level is incredible absolutely phenomenal so uh so Community is right I think there are two things one is uh we we are going through a a paradigm shift in blockchains I think that's uh the idea of modularity so ethereum uh was layer one was perfect for the time it was built it was a step change on top of all the colored coins we had and you know it created a whole new way of building applic decentralized applications and was it was a breakthrough now people have been working on improving ethereum in multiple ways right I think pokadot did a great job with shared security uh and you know that was also co-founder of ethereum Gavin uh but what consensus was able to do is create this you know this culture uh fund a LED moonshots most of whom didn't work right if you look look back at our Investment Portfolio as consensus most things didn't work uh but then other people came along later on and created an incredible D5 protocols created moonshots created dexes Created games created things that we hadn't really you know we were we dreamed of uh but we were too early right so I think now when better technology becomes available when you know monad or salana or neon or you know eclipse or other platforms create new programming models and and it's not just this right it's also fuel VM it's move it's cartesi it's rzo there is this Cambrian explosion of new programming models there is mid envm lots of people are creating these you know new ways of building applications and and with the availability of new computers right when your computers are more capable then you create applications that you hadn't formerly thought about you give developers a tool to play with and they invent things that you hadn't thought about and that's what happened with ethereum the first few applications were funny right it was locket which is a dow for opening a lock remotely uh and I looked at it and I was like you know what the hell is this and crypto punks guys would come around to ethereal conferences and whatnot and it was like you know what the hell is this I came from Enterprise and and now look at cryptopunks right now look at nfts so so I think what I'm really excited about is that developers using all of these new you know what's possible with monad or what's possible with neon uh or Eclipse will start inventing things that we hav't thought about right they will create uh Central limit order books that are much faster that than that's possible on ethereum so so I think uh once all of these things are get created in a sort of this you know monolithic and modular architectures then we need to bring these things together into some sort of unified liquidity right and that's polygon's Vision so we want to create an internet of value which uh enables and we just continuing on with you know with with Alik Joe and uh and and and everyone else in this space has been envisioning uh we're just standing on the shoulders of giant we want to create an infrastructure to for all of these things to come together and you know work in a trust minimized way where users can flexibly move across the different infrastructures and blockchains and then use this in a in a seamless way right so just like we do on the internet we don't care about whose routers we are using we don't care about whose Lan is behind this right or what servers we are so I think we want to go to that level and IIA is working on chain abstraction aail guys are doing something very cool so so we are all in this together and you know uh but but this stage is where I think a lot of that invention is happening right now yeah I think it's worth mentioning that there's just there's a lot of complexity in the in the stack at this point and with monad our vision is to make it really simple for developers so that they can use the common standard with the evm solidity or Viper or other languages that compile down to evm they can use all the tooling you can use Foundry they can use hard hat um they can use the wallets that they're familiar with and just you know this one system that has implemented optimistic parallel execution and solved some of the lower level problems to help each node be very performant and each node get the most out of the performance of the hardware um that solves a lot of problems for developers who not don't have to worry about all this complexity yeah I have I have a tweet that says if once monard works we should replace the get clients with monard clients I don't know if that's that's going to happen but you know uh yeah there's always possibility of collaboration monad intends to um contribute to the ethereum research community and propose eips that be amazing yep now uh Neil Andia one of the uh biggest criticisms that people Levy against salana is that uh sometimes it doesn't work right it was only a couple weeks ago after a year of working pretty much flawy that the chain unfortunately for it uh didn't work for a little bit right there now how do instances like that affect what you're building if at all the perspective that I think eclipse takes and many other ethereum ler 2s is we're building on a several decade time frame and crypto is very early so blockchain salana and also Layer Two blockchains have outages that's just reality especially when you're pushing the frontier of what's possible to build on chain so to me that's not really a flaw in sana's design it's actually a growing pain that's somewhat inevit and we've seen it for arbitrum and we've seen it for even the eclipse testnet one time our testet validator or test sequencer ran out of uh sepolia eth so things like that happen and I think that's a part of uh making something more battle tested and I I think that From eclipse's perspective when we Fork salana we're removing a lot of the most like I guess the the least formally verified properties such as the consensus for salana is not formally verified in the same way that tender man on Sal on uh cos es and things like that so I feel like we're taking the parts that are relatively uncontroversial which is the performance optimizations of the virtual machine and uh and some of the optimizations of the men pool and then bringing those optimizations to ethereum um yep uh I agree like um the flaws I cannot say that those are flaws like of course um like we are growing like Solana's ecosystem is growing and like every blockchain has some uh like sometimes like they have to go through uh this situation I guess so um I hope like Solana will uh like grow with time of course like we should give time to the technology like it's evolving like every day so these kind of things happen so yeah I hope like Solana guys are like doing really good and they will uh definitely like overcome this situation very soon yeah I have a lot of spicy inter interactions with to and Mt on Twitter so you know uh yeah I think they're great guys they're doing a great job of what they're building and they built a phenomenal Community obviously there is a lot of I I worry about you know Solana's research foundations you know is the is there a consensus is the consensus bft is it mathematically and theoretically robust I don't know the answer to that right so I I don't really know decisively uh as someone who's dabbled in research as to what the theoretical properties of Solana's you know consensus if there is one R so that sometimes worries me a bit but I think on they will they will figure it out totally agree with that yeah the salana research Community is just not as fleshed out as ethereum and it shows in fee markets too there's a lot of things about their fee Market that are just not incentive compatible in the way that you'd expect and there types of proposals that probably would have never been merged into ethereum as an L1 well uh thank you all I I wish we could talk a little bit more about free markets and all that stuff but we got to we got to wrap up move on thank you guys for listening uh make sure to try out both chains if you haven't already for