Defragmenting Ethereum - Interoperability and the Superchain by Karl Floersch | Devcon SEA

[Music] 6 p.m. final slot everyone wants to talk at 6 p.m. and also listen to talks at 6 pm.

all right well hello I am Carl we're going to talk about interoperability for ethereum so defragmenting ethereum we are in let's pick up where we left off so I really measure time based on devc cons it's like one devc con and then two devc cons you know go that's kind of how I measure it and I really think it's kind of legit in that every Devcon there feels like a new sea change that happens all the brains get together and they mash up and I feel like Devcon 5 it was this crazy proliferation or this beginning of like optimistic rollups ZK rollups and then we had next you know the super chain and prolifer of all these op stack chains across ethereum and then boom now we are in a new phase which I like to call interoperation because unfortunately with the proliferation phase you end up with a whole bunch of fragmentation but this is exciting we have a moment where we literally have an unbelievable amount of lwh hanging fruit to bring all of these chains together through open-source interoperability standards across ethereum so nothing is that new by the way this is a PSA people Nothing is that new nothing is that unexpected and Technology marches forward very very slowly in other words we've known about all of these problems since the you know scaling road map for ethereum that vitalic put out way too many years ago and you know sometimes I think of myself as like a little snail moving along like seeing the tech progress go and then and then I whip on my phone and I'm like oh my God what's going on and I'm on the moon but no it's fake news just calm down we're making progress one step at a time so so you know right like we knew that we would have a bunch of chains and we'd fragment the rollups and then we'd you them join them together into a happy Union like that's that's kind of that's been the point um so anyway I want to talk about the the basically my goal for this talk is to show a very large amount of you know lwh hanging fruit that we can all pluck for this interoperability phase and you know before even all of these devc cons I was but a mere Geral developer working on memes of mcraft you know my my absolutely killer application it was incredible you know I had everything that you needed for a killer app in ethereum right you I had a Manifesto I had a i had a team page and I even had an unusable application it was like literally killer app material but I knew that there was one thing that would hold me back and that was my application would never scale to the number of users that I needed I knew the world was going to use memes of mcraft 10 TPS you know 10c latency not going to make it and so I got into the trenches we all got into the trenches and we started building out both the rollup technology and now the interoperability technology to make it possible and so it really is a moment where it has become possible the loow hanging fruit is immense so let's go over kind of like all a smattering a kind of shotgun of all the different things that we need to fix candidly um to make this happen things by the way that are not new like the great thing about this low hanging fruit is that it has been done before for example asynchronous programming paradigms that is the norm in normal application development we can build those in pass Keys thankfully web 2 did us a solid and fix a bunch of our wallet ux for us sessions like session keys for when I log into a website and I do a bunch of interactions without constantly clicking sign transaction over and over and over again there's no reason that this stuff and more can not be used in the crypto space so in order to kind of like make this a little bit more tangible I'm going to go through a user Journey kind of a developer journey and then just like talk more about the tech so let's get into the user Journey what is the user journey of memes of meme craft this incredible application for the masses right we're going to have a login screen the login screen familiar terms we're talking about logging in no seed phrases pass keys I'm sorry I just have to we need decentralization but we just got to make it usable at the same time so both both Mass adoption and decentralization for the world so you know click log in sign in with a pass key user off with face ID boom you're in great now the next stage mint let's we need to of course mint our memes so what do I need to do I need to click on mint no extra signature just like boom transaction succeeded in the background don't worry about it easy now I have my memes and now I'm going to battle them of course what else would you do with your memes so I'm going to matchmake boom I found a battle match person and success I won right great and now of course I'm going to share my battle because that's what we miss about web web two and web 3 the ability to click the share button I've never clicked the share button unfortunately but anyway really I just wanted to talk about composability and that was my little segue into it so simple right like that was like a very normal like honestly incredibly boring user flow unfortunately well no no no it's a great user flow memes and mecraft taken off um but the developer journey is actually kind of immense to make all that happen while preserving the open source decentralized protocols that we all know and love so developer Journey building all these things okay first I'm going to kind of skip past a bunch of the developer Journey because it's not actually just I you know too much but you know imagine we're on a AI code editor and in the browser with auto refresh and all the you know bells and whistles okay so for the login side of things we're going to sign in okay what do we need here well we need easy to use frontend libraries that I can just very easily import start a pass key kind of session smart wallets with sessions or or or even just a temporary wallet that's fine by me a super RPC so that I can actually send transac actions to all of these different chains I don't need to click on that Network switching kind of you know icon all of this built in very seamlessly please give me a very good solution for this all the chains across ethereum you know let's do it so right clicked mint Etc now this this little flow this little flow is actually insanely challenging so what happened here first off I have assets across a whole bunch of chains I clicked mint and I paid for you know gas I paid for the you know the the mint of that Meme and I did not have to worry about any of these silly chains why did I not have to worry because we got things like ERC 7683 the easiest ERC to say and what that is is intense you're able to abstract away and say okay a user has cash on you know one chain one ecosystem there's a really High latency bridge that connects them well happens to be that there's an open protocol for fast liquidity providers that you know they can you can send them your capital on this chain and then boom they will give you the same amount on the destination chain no problem they'll handle rebalancing and this is great it's a win-win for everyone instant user experience for the user and fees for the liquidity providers regardless of the speed of your message passing now this and we can get a good ux for this too you know abstracted into a very simple interface that everyone can use all right so first off that's how we consolidate all the assets into one chain but obviously because my example has this in it the mint function is on a different chain so what did I do well I wrote an asynchronous smart contract so you know we're building out these interoperability protocols if you use a kind of like you know intertwinement based interop protocol then you can achieve 2 second or or really instant interoperability and that is a major unlock because now developers across the ethereum ecosystem it's one thing to build a smart contract that does a kind of you know endtoend two chain flow with you know when you have to wait for like you know even five minutes is a long time but if it's just an instant flow between the chains that's like I don't know I personally experienced it you will too and it's pretty sick um anyway so we can actually build out a whole bunch of asynchronous programming uh you know libraries pretty easily even today right you can you know use common promise syntax that you'll be familiar with if you you know do for example JavaScript um and promise sponsorship you know we are going to be able to reuse all of this intent based infrastructure for General messages and by the way Ben wrote an async you know library and Ben is not even like well he's a physicist he's not he's not some coding he wrote it in three days you know what I mean this is like this is the level of like obvious stuff like you don't have to be smart to be like oh JavaScript has solved this problem this way and it's not solved in my language Let me just do that you know what I mean like that's the kind of problem that I like you know cuz I can't think of smart things generally that's hard um okay so anyway battling right we're going to battle matchmaking boo booop found all right that's that remember that's what happened what happened in the background well what did we do first off we found a low congestion chain because guess what battling is transaction intensive of course got to do a lot of battles um anyway and they're going to be chains that have high liquidity that will always have high fees because there's an incentive if the price moves and you need to arbit and you got a bunch of bots you get a bunch of spam well you need some chains that are explicitly not going to be the mega tvl chains that can do your little battles you know and you also probably want to have subsets of chains that you interact with explicitly for example memes of mcraft actually has two chains and one of them is kind of medium usage and one of them is low and so the front end will automatically just check and see okay the gas fees are very low on this chain let me deploy the batt there speaking of deploying the battler installing contracts this is this is 100% like you know contract deployment should be permissionless by default and then developers can restrict where they want their contracts to live this ecosystem that ecosystem this chain that chain but for a large swath of public good contracts for example you really want to to have that be available as many places as possible and so you know instead of just developers having to like choose where to deploy the front end should just deploy it directly and we can do that with create 2 Factory which is available on like pretty much all the evm chains cool so now on to the bragging section well this is obviously I added this Tac this in because I really wanted to talk about composability and chill a very particular concept that is you know a little crazy but think about it composability is key web 3 composability that is like the magic sauce what is the most analogous you know composable first thing in my opinion it is the web browser the web browser is this amazing Universe where all these websites can link to each other and use each other and all that stuff and what did they do they made this crazy Choice the people who did the the smart things over there in the web browser they decided to literally send code instead of just like binary blobs for over the wire to then display in the browser what did that do this was an intentional Choice by the web browser developers they wanted to make it so that users anyone can rightclick inspect element and read the code that runs and Powers their website kind of sound familiar Well turns out we are doing the same thing all the time we're just going to Ether scan and then getting very frustrated that the contract has not been verified yet and then we're like how do I verify it and it's horrible so anyway I'm just really I think we can like 10x the amount of you know code collaboration and the speed of our feedback Cycles if we have things like onchain package managers or inspect element for smart contract some kind of environment that makes coding with smart contracts more collaborative now obviously you know it maybe it doesn't work for a crazy dii protocol you want to formally verify but I just think smart contract programing can be so fun doesn't need to be a horrible mess and I don't know we just haven't invested so let's invest and make the feedback Cycles fast and make it so that it's easy to learn because there's tons of examples of how people are doing it and we can really Foster an open source culture not just at the protocol layer but also at the Smart contract layer so now that was a kind of developer kind of shotgun of all the tech let me just list it all out in one big list so first off right cross chain reads and messaging I could do a whole talk on this one I'm not going to get into too many Deets but the tldr of like these and by the way this is all open source protocols like there's no this is just this is just a fact of the the universe basically that you can build interoperability protocols which use this kind of optimistic or speculative uh you know output so you're on one chain and you're like okay I think that the chain this other chain is going to resolve to this value so I will optimistically include that value and then move forward and this works for zkp based proofs and te based proofs and all sorts of proofs it's just a literally it's kind of you know how we you know lowered the Lany of l2s by introducing a sequencer and more predict in the ordering before it hits ethereum same kind of same kind of thing so anyway Mark can tell you Proto can tell you more about that and then of course we got intense um that you know there's been many talks shout out to Hart from from before also of course chain specific configs and chain specific addresses all on L1 so that we can deterministically derive all of these different chains from ethereum super important also cross-chain token standard very exciting all of these people we can have interoperable tokens with you know zero slippage liquidity and we've got this is my favorite section because it's the essentials it's obvious we need to build this and it's just it's just badly supported now so like promise libraries that like hook into solidity as it is today or even modifications to Viper solidity that support promises better please please um and then also async contract upgrades is going to be a whole thing oh my God if you want to build the new like open Zeppelin you know thing like man there is going to be you know real patterns that de that develop there and we need to like standardize what those asynchron upgrade patterns look like I already talked about how users should be able to install contracts on chains that is enabled with these like create two deployments you're able to permissionless deploy a contract at a particular address and you know not mess with the figs and pasy wallets we need to solve the we need to solve user experience and so then of course finally the dream section right I just really want this like collaborative coding environment it would be so nice also alt VMS you know shout out to all the alt VMS and you know you know write some rust or whatever oriz everything I want all these RPC requests to come with signatures so that I can like you know use literally just use them for whatever if I'm really horrible I can like grab do an RPC request and use that as a bridge for my horrible degenerate uh you know token Bridge thing um you know don't definitely probably don't do that um missed browser okay no that that one is a little I'm going to get some Flack for that one um but I don't know I just still want to like not have to rely on a central party and load up a decentralized website like fully deterministically um I don't know and obviously the the you know that's kind of the point of the dream section I don't know everything um so you know we are this little slow snail progressing through the technological thing and but sometimes we come upon a tree and a whole bunch of fruit and you know what in those moments those are the moments to capture and just absolutely devour all that lwh hanging fruit because it is I mean it's it's it's easy and I will say that I was last week shout out to Proto shout out to Mark shout out to the interro like peeps they put together this interro devet and I was like playing with it and it really felt like 2016 again I don't know this is such a reminiscing talk for me I don't know why um it felt like 2016 again where like everything is so obvious that needs to be built and yet no one has built it because no one actually I don't know has like I don't know done it yet and it's just it was exciting it was exciting like all the pieces coming together it's like more collaborative because you're because you're not like you know fighting over a tiny little you know slice of a pie you're like oh I'm going to work on this and then you're going to work on that and we can compose together and we'll all win together I mean like that is how we unify ethereum IMO and finally create memes of meme craft so you know this is our this is our timeline but what about Devcon 8 well Devcon 8 we are it is mass adoption time we're going to have 8 billion users ethereum going going to solve the fertility crisis um no can't stop until Global adoption every single person and so obviously you know very very excited for the future but we still got a lot of things to do we got to ship inter up obviously all these standards we got to scale Etha we got to dog food the protocol we got to build all these Dev tools and hopefully either's Phoenix willing you know we'll be able to unify ethereum defra ethereum I guess is what I should have been saying create a retroactive public goods flywheel so that we're funding open source software from now into the future and you know that's why we're building the optimism Collective together we can make impact equals profit and sumon ether Phoenix build the user owned internet thank you very much all right [Applause] Carl you know when I was watching him perform I was a reminder of someone who moves a lot and so much energy and it was such a joy watching you do that presentation when someone is so passionate about something you cannot help but smile and the first and most popular question Carl is how does Carl have so much energy because I'm deeply anxious and I Channel it into excitement what a gently answer I'm deeply anxious okay um anyway moving on to the other questions thank you for that lovely question uh Carl um if if I were to start building a library or framework today to make building horizontally scalable apps as possible what should I build nice okay if you are a solidity nerd then go out compete Ben because you definitely will H just kidding um um and build an async promise Library something like that no um the other thing if you want to just be be I don't know key to my heart I built a horrible like create two based deployer thing I just want to make create two deployments really easy because I don't know I just don't like uh dealing with the I don't know the it's just the tooling is bad you know please please do help me with that um yeah those are two of them and the slides have even more fantastic when will optimism meet become a ZK rollup we already have um so obviously optimism is you know the name we're very optimistic people we obviously love optimistic designs but notably optimism is not a ZK rollup not an optimistic rollup it's actually not really it's a it's a super chain but um the tech the op stack supports all types of proofs and in fact one of our design principles is to be proof agnostic so that we don't need to choose between this proof or that proof and instead we can use them all because to be honest they're all really bad so when you have a lot of bad things you stack them on top of each other and hope that nothing well they they all don't break at the same time um that's called multi prooof by the way it's not just trolling you have got to be the most entertaining speaker I've ever had chance to to mc4 isn't super chain kind of like vendor lockin what would you say to that I mean I think there is a you know definitely an aspect but what are you getting locked into is my question you are getting quote unquote locked into op Source protocols which fund public goods and you know create a flywheel that hopefully we all benefit from and guess what ethereum I don't know okay they should they're going to get mad at me but anyway no I think you can Fork everything you know Fork us and by the way actually Fork friendly is in our Constitution and in everything that we do it is incredibly important that it's open source so that you can if you get vendor locked in in a bad way Fork to a different system by the way oh another thing right uh web 3 the whole point of web 3 is enabling a somewhat more robust right to voice vendor lock in is inevitable in some sense and that is why in web 2 this whole like just exit this platform for the other platform we see it doesn't work instead what we need to do is we need to build systems where governance represents the constituent parties so that's what we're trying to do very good we got one and a half minutes excellent answer one and a half minutes let's see how many questions we can go through which are the key things dream interrupt has to have we want it to be fast trustless and and secure um no uh but okay yes 100% fast honestly yeah fast trustless and secure um but for real fast was my like I honestly undervalued the fast thing until I started using the fast thing I got a little addicted cuz cuz like there's a very big difference if you like have to go like if it's more than a couple seconds then I'm going to click to a different web page and I hate like I can't like I'm never going to go back and so I don't know when I started even when I'm testing it's so much nicer to be able to like do everything real quick so fast really fast Subs scent and subc cheap I guess is the thing I forgot to say all right we got 20 seconds you want to do one more last one what are the biggest mistakes the ethereum equos system risk making as it works on interrup making it work on interrupt risks well okay I don't know what that actually means and I'm not good at reading and so I can't figure it out but what I'm going to say is the biggest risk for ethereum is to forget our values we are building open- Source protocols that will create the world computer there is one world computer we're all building it remember that we can do this together don't you know get too mad at each other it's fine the algorithms don't control us well that was truly the most entertaining Q&A I've ever hosted let's give him a big round of applause Carl