Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
AggLayer and Frens
Recorded: Aug. 29, 2024 Duration: 1:05:59Space Recording
Full Transcription
Do you want to do a little mic check, Justin?
Hopefully you can hear me.
I can hear you. Can you hear me?
Yes, sir. Crystal clear.
Okay, great, great. Input, output. Okay, I'll change this to input.
Check, check. Okay, now can you hear me?
Yes, sir.
All right. Great.
All right, everyone, we'll get started in just a few minutes.
This is just a little ag layer roundtable.
We've been talking a lot about poll, the MagdaPoll migration quite a bit,
but also one of the most important things about poll is how it powers the future of Polygon
as an aggregated network of blockchains.
So we wanted to kind of get this panel together with Nodekit, Celestia, Avail, and Union
just to kind of talk through what's going on with the ag layer because the future of the internet,
the future of finance and Polygon as a blockchain network cannot be built alone.
So we've brought on some of our friends who are helping to collaborate and build.
Let's see. We've got Noah has requested.
Let's get Noah up here.
Amazing.
And then, Noah, once you get up here, we can do a little mic check on you.
We also have Core, who's the CTO of Union up here as well.
Great to see you all.
Great. I don't have my screen up.
Who is that that just did the mic check?
Oh, it was me, Core.
Core.
CTO.
Amazing.
Noah, can we get a little mic check on you too, please?
Okay, Noah, if you're trying to speak, we cannot hear you right now.
Let's see.
We've got Chandler coming up from Avail.
We've got Venito Papacito coming up from Polygon.
Polygon's very own Venito Papacito.
Once we get them up there.
Hey, Chandler, let's do a quick mic check on you, please.
Man, starting in XSpace is like starting a Skype call in 2008.
That's so true.
So, I haven't been able to hear.
Yeah, I've been having like the glitchiest issues with spaces lately.
Noah, adding you back up here.
Osman, getting you up here.
So, we'll see if that helps.
Venito.
Vinny.
Let's do a quick mic check on you too, please, sir.
Bing bong.
Can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Thank you for the bing bong.
And then, who else?
Osman, let's do a mic check on you.
Jill Chandler, getting you back up here.
Ciao, guys.
Can you hear me?
Ciao.
Absolutely.
This is Osman.
Amazing.
Noah and Jill, let's see if mic checks on you too.
Is this working now?
Oh, yeah.
Can you guys hear me?
We got you, Noah.
Amazing.
All right.
Happy to hear it.
Thanks for having me.
Present.
I'm here.
Wow.
That's amazing.
I think we have Celestia actually cannot join us.
Oh, thank you, Chandler.
Great.
Perfect.
We got you too.
All right.
Yeah.
Celestia actually was not able to join us, but that's okay.
That just gives us more time for our other esteemed guests and panelists.
So, we usually start these about five minutes after the start time to give people an opportunity
to get into the crowd, to get situated, relax, do some mic checks.
So, while we wait, I'm just going to go ahead and play some music for everyone's listening
pleasure, and then we'll get started in about three minutes or so.
So, just sit back, relax, and we'll get started shortly.
All right, everyone.
I think it's time to get started.
All right.
Hello, everyone.
Welcome to AgLayer and Friends.
Like I said earlier, if you were here, this is about the AgLayer.
The AgLayer, the future of blockchains, the future of Polygon as an aggregated network of blockchains cannot be built alone.
It is built in a collaboration amongst various parties throughout the crypto space.
And we've got some of the most notable ones right here.
NodeKit, Avail, Union, Espresso.
And we're just going to kind of talk through like what kind of, you know, what are we working on?
What are these projects working on in general?
Just kind of get to know them a little bit more and just highlight their efforts in the AgLayer as well.
And I think a good way to start this off would be through some introductions.
So I'm just kind of looking at my list here.
I think, Chandler, let's start with you.
If you wouldn't mind just giving us an intro, what your role is and what Avail is working on just very briefly.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
I'm Chandler.
I lead the partnerships and BD ecosystem efforts over at Avail.
Avail, very simply, is a data availability solution.
As the first product that we have out in the market, very similar to the other types of solutions out there with some differences.
But the real kind of meat and potatoes as to why we're at this conversation today is our second product, which is called Nexus.
It's a proof aggregation service, very, very similar in conceptual design to AgLayer.
And actually, Avail and AgLayer share a lot of DNA because it's actually a project that was initially incubated within the Polygon ecosystem and then spun out.
And so our founder is also the Polygon founder.
So we're very excited to be here and like share our vision on how we can help interconnect the world, which is very similar to what AgLayer is trying to do.
And yeah, very excited.
So Chandler, you got to tell, I was supposed to, this is like tangent, but I was supposed to go play badminton with Rubble today.
And then I told him we're going on the space.
I told him to join.
So tell him next time to join the space rather than go to badminton.
If you get a chance, Chandler.
That's the best ammunition you've ever given me in this entire world.
I appreciate that more than you know.
Yeah, 100%.
To be fair, badminton is very fun, right?
Like, let's be honest.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I get you, I get you.
Is our host's microphone still working?
Potentially, if not, then we'll just wait till CryptoTexan comes back.
I then think, Chandler, thanks so much for the introduction.
We'll just hand it over to then Noah from Notekit.
Take it from there, my man.
All right, cool.
I'll give CryptoTexan a minute to get back.
I can't tell he's still in the space if he got, like, dropped and it's not showing.
Sometimes that happens in these spaces where it's, like, a silent drop.
Like, you'll see their profiles in it, but they're not in it.
Well, that's unfortunate.
I suppose...
Hello?
We can hear you now.
Yeah, we got you, CryptoTexan.
Yeah, you're back.
Yeah, you're back.
Yeah, you're back.
Cool.
In the meantime, I'm happy to give an intro and then can hand it off to Noah and the others.
I'm Jill.
I'm one of the co-founders of Espresso Systems.
We at Espresso are building infrastructure for chains to be able to better coordinate.
So specifically what that means is that we are building a fast finality layer that can be used.
You can think of it as an engine for very robust, economically secured pre-confirmations.
This enables faster bridging experiences for users and for developers to move across rollups or across chains.
And we are also building a sequencing marketplace where builders can participate and bid to sequence or build blocks for rollups across Ethereum and even beyond.
So, you know, fundamentally, we believe that innovation does best on open platforms.
Ethereum has been that open platform for a very long time.
It's now at risk of becoming more siloed as we move towards a rollup-centric roadmap.
And Espresso is driving towards being able to offer the best of both worlds, which I think is a vision really shared by everyone on this space and certainly shared by the ag layer.
So when ag layer was first announced, we got really excited to see, you know, an ecosystem as big as Polygon getting on board with this vision and this future.
And we're excited to contribute.
I'll just jump in quickly.
I'm also on the Espresso team.
I'm Ben.
I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO.
And Jill gave a great introduction, so I don't have much to add about Espresso.
But I will say that we've been very involved with the Polygon ecosystem lately in helping to design the future of the ag layer and the ability for chains within ag layer to synchronously compose with each other.
And this requires both innovations in, you know, how CK message passing works, but also how that integrates with the kind of coordination that platforms like Espresso enable.
Okay, cool.
I can also introduce myself.
I'm core co-founder and CTO of Union.
So Union is solving this very pressing need in this multi-chain world of having very fast, yet very secure, low-latency interoperability.
We decided to pick by far the leading interoperability standards, which is IBC, which has the most chains connected.
And we are using zero-knowledge cryptography to be able to expand this to more ecosystems, such as parachain, Solidity, but also directly into the ag layer and into rollups.
Okay.
Yeah, so I'm the co-founder of Nodekit.
My name is Noah.
I'm the CEO of Nodekit and one of the co-founders.
And at Nodekit, we're really focusing on enabling synchronous communication for rollups through Javelin, which is our super builder.
What a super builder is, is it's a way of building blocks across multiple chains all at the same time.
So you're able to unlock synchronous composability and really build net new applications as a result.
So we're very excited to be contributing to the ag layer as well and being able to leverage CK proofs alongside this to deliver a better experience and share the quantity as well.
Awesome.
And then I'll give a quick introduction and then hand it off to Osman.
So my name is Benito Pabasito.
I focus on ag layer go-to-market.
What that entails is understanding the set of infrastructure companies like that of Expresso, like that of Nodekit, Abel, and Union, and how they work in the ag layer topology and ecosystem.
Plus bringing other larger chains that can join this ZK Interop solution.
Those exist from OKX to Movement to X, Y, and Z.
And my job is just to help with the general go-to-market with the ag layer all up.
We'll hand it off to Osman now.
Amazing.
Thanks, Vinit.
This is Osman, Wizard of Oz.
I work very – so I'm kind of like a dinosaur at Polygon.
I've been working on all of our protocols from POS to ZK, EVM to CDK.
Now ag layer, obviously, number one focus.
You can think of me and Vinit as the Dwayne Wade, LeBron meme, where Vinit is D-Wade and I'm trying to dunk or other way around.
Doesn't matter.
But basically, Vinit has the ideas and I help and try to make those ideas into a reality.
So I haven't started working with the Nodekit, Union, and Espresso teams yet, but we will be working a lot.
Yeah, so that's me.
I think that was everyone.
Yes.
Vinit, how do you want to go about it?
We have the run of the show.
Do you want to take it over?
Yeah, let me go ahead and take it over.
Thanks, everybody, for the general introductions and explaining exactly what your guest protocol does and how it's extremely unique.
I think what would be somewhat interesting is starting with overviews on some of your guys' projects and how this fits with the ag layer.
And more importantly, providing unified liquidity and scalability plus interoperability across many rollups.
I think it may be good potentially to start with the Espresso team.
So both Jill and Vin, thank you so much for joining.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Jill, if you have anything to add.
But the core objective is seamless interoperability.
There can be many other, of course, benefits of participating in a certain sequencing marketplace.
Benefits from fast finality.
But I'd like to focus today on interoperability since this is also a core objective of ag layer.
And I think focusing on ag layer, in fact, really crystallizes the core value of what we're building here at Espresso.
So what ag layer is going to enable is for contracts on different chains to be able to interact with each other as if they were on the same chain.
And fundamentally, that is impossible without some form of coordination between the block construction on each of these chains.
And it's really, really cool how if you have coordinated building, then the ZK circuits that are involved in ag layer, they don't require you to trust whoever is coordinating that building.
If that coordinated building is done in an incorrect way, then transactions will be rejected.
However, if the coordinated building is done in the correct way, then things proceed smoothly and enable even, you know, the highest forms of synchronous composability, like flash loans or smart contract wallets making limit orders and exchanges on other platforms.
I mean, all of this, of course, benefits as well from the shared liquidity of the, you know, LXLY bridge.
But it comes to this, you know, critical problem of if you have an ecosystem of many independent sovereign chains, then how do you, how do you coordinate their block construction?
If all these chains have to enshrine a super builder that builds for all of them, then they lose their sovereignty.
And so the answer to that question is to run a marketplace where every chain is essentially putting up its block construction for sale and builders can bid for the ability to build for multiple chains at once.
And they will do that based on demand for cross-chain transactions.
So they'll see that there are, oh, there are users who are trying to do some kind of synchronous interaction between different chains within the polygon ecosystem.
So they'll bid for the ability to build blocks in a coordinated way for those two chains together.
And this is the, this is what the Espresso marketplace enables.
So it's, it sits at a higher level than any individual shared sequencer or super builder, but shared sequencers and super builders can participate in this and it maximizes the efficiency of that interaction.
The other thing is that if you have a world where you don't have a fixed sequencer for each chain and that sequencer might be changing all the time based on where the sales go in the marketplace, then you need a, you need a fast way of coming to agreement on who's the sequencer for any given chain.
And, you know, what is, what is the state of any given chain?
Normally we rely on centralized sequencers for fast pre-confirmations today in this world of, you know, a sort of decentralized coordinated building.
We don't have that anymore.
And so that's what the Espresso network provides this fast, common, you know, decentralized pre-confirmation layer for everyone to remain on the same page.
That was super well explained, right?
So in essence, Espresso allows any type of shared sequencer, super builder to work within its marketplace and provide a form of atomic composability alongside the ag layer such that rollups itself have the ability to interoperate with one another relatively well.
And then also be able to interact with these rollups in kind of like an abstracted manner, which I think is like super, super cool and really fits kind of the ag layer ethos and goal of the ag layer as well.
Like the ag layer is this really secure transport layer that allows for asynchronous composability.
But working with something like that of Espresso can allow for atomic composability.
So, Ben, do you mind talking about how Espresso and the ag layer are working together to enable this thing, like atomic composability?
And why is that like super, super significant from your perspective?
Well, it's super significant because I think this is sort of the core of, I mean, the core of Web3 and what differentiates Web3 from Web2.
So, well, it's two things really.
One is trust minimized infrastructure.
And then two is composability of application.
The idea that applications can serve as money Legos, you know, that can serve as just an open, free development platform for building a better financial infrastructure and beyond.
And that, of course, has been fragmented with the scaling roadmap to get scalability.
We needed to have many, many chains.
There's other benefits to having many chains, including, you know, developer sovereignty.
But ag layer plus Espresso together kind of solve that dilemma and enable a world where you have scalable, horizontally scalable sovereign chains, but that are also able to preserve sort of the core, you know, value proposition of Web3, trust minimization, composability.
Yeah, that's amazing.
Jo, you had some thoughts?
Yeah, I would just add on to that, which is that if you can just take a step back from Ethereum and blockchains themselves, it's like financial systems and also the Internet more broadly have been so fragmented for so long.
You know, if you think about moving money across borders, if you think about even doing a wire transfer between two different banks, it's been really hard to innovate on those platforms because they've been so fragmented and siloed.
If you think about, again, if you think about, again, if you think about just more broadly application development, you know, we have all of these walled gardens of whether it's the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.
And we have all of these different siloed ecosystems that have cropped up, again, on the old Internet.
I think that what has made Ethereum, as Ben mentioned, really differentiated and really allowed new forms of innovation to thrive is its openness, its composability, its interoperability.
And that kind of money legos quality in particular to DeFi and financial applications that have been built.
But again, you can extrapolate more broadly.
And, you know, as we've talked about the roll-up centric roadmap, it's necessary for Ethereum to be able to scale to meet the needs of the mainstream, but it risks creating these fragments and these silos again.
And so that's just my kind of broader take on the subject and what I think, again, everyone on this call is really working towards is bringing Ethereum back to being that fully open, unified platform and experience for people.
So, yeah, that is amazing.
That is amazing.
And I think when you look at the Ag Lair, the Ag Lair tries to solve this problem from atomic composability amongst roll-ups to this unified liquidity and asset fungibility aspect as well, all the way to just allowing roll-ups to effectively scale.
And just as a quick round-robin over to NoteKit, you mentioned that you're a superbuilder, which also fits a little bit around this composability process, the first part that the Ag Lair supports.
I'd love to learn a little bit more about what NoteKit is, its superbuilder, and how does the superbuilder potentially work with other of the components on stage here, whether that be the Vail side, the Expresso side, and the Union side?
Yeah, so glad to kind of explore on that side.
So, at NoteKit, we're building out a superbuilder, which really allows all this siloed block space to become composable, because when you're sharing a block builder, you're able to have better interop building, better composability across all these different chains.
And the way that we've kind of developed this system is it's a very simple sidecar, which roll-ups just have to run alongside, and then they can opt into kind of selling their block space to this network of different superbuilders.
And then all payments are essentially paid out through Seek, which is our network as well.
So, we've really built out this system in a way where roll-ups are able to remain sovereign, and one of the great examples of that on our end is we actually recently announced a partnership with Morph over the past couple weeks.
Morph is a roll-up that has their own decentralized sequencer, and they're able to keep that decentralized sequencer while still opting in to leveraging Javelin.
And different Javelin builders can essentially compete to give the best cross-roll-up transactions on top of Morph across any roll-up within the composable network, which is our network of chains.
So, we're really trying to build this system out in a way that is able to support all of these different siloed ecosystems and make them composable.
So, roll-ups can join the Agler, they can join the Espresso marketplace, they can join the superchain, and they can still be composable.
Because at the end of the day, we really don't want to have these walled gardens experiencing, and we want to just build towards a better, brighter future in general on that front.
So, that's kind of how we're thinking about it.
And the way that Agler really fits into this vision is by combining a superbuilder with shared settlement, which is what the Agler is able to provide.
You're able to have shared liquidity, and essentially reach a better level of composability that allows for better applications to be built, where you don't necessarily have to build in mind at first and have to change a lot of your development cycle.
Current state of cross-chain development, for any developers that are on the call, it's really a huge pain if you're trying to do anything beyond kind of the basics.
So, what we're really trying to do is make sure that we can build this software in a way that, yes, it's on the cutting edge, and we're always trying to be on the bleeding edge of innovation, but build software that solves real problems for real users.
And really, we have a fast feedback loop where we're working with roll-ups, we're working with applications, and we're really trying to work to get this technology as widely adopted as possible.
So, I think at the end of the day, if the only use for Composable and the only use for Internet Belt is only bridging of assets, I think that we're kind of missing the long tail of what I view crypto as, which I view crypto as really being this new internet.
And if we're building the new internet, it's not only going to just be the more kind of simple asset bridging.
I think it's going to be much more than that.
And I'm very excited for that future, and I'm excited for the future that both what we're doing at Nodekit and what Polygon's doing with the Agler really uniquely enable on that side.
Yo, Noah, really, really well said.
You see everything from how the Agler is supporting forms of composability, everything by allowing super builders to work with it as a shared filament solution, to all the way to working directly with Expresso in the shared marketplace finality solution, where it allows for atomic composability between roll-ups.
This atomic composability makes these L2s feel like an L1.
And that's like super, super important to allow for a really frictionless internet experience.
But another part of this really frictionless internet experience is this unified liquidity concept that the Agler supports.
And luckily, we have Union on stage, which is really trying to solve liquidity constraints and liquidity transfers and unified liquidity across the Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystem.
So off to you, Cor.
I'd love to learn a little bit more about Union and how you solve this problem and how we work really well together at the Agler side.
Yeah, pleasure being here.
Yeah, so first of all, I think the Agler is extremely cool.
Like this method of using CK to provide interoperability between L2s, like it's fundamentally just really amazing and awesome.
However, there are also other ecosystems, such as like many awesome Cosmos chains, like Stargaze or DYDX, that really would love to also plug into this Ag layer.
So by Union extending IBC, which is the interoperability protocol of all Cosmos chains, so that all of these amazing, like 106 IBC connected chains are able to plug directly into the Ag layer.
Suddenly, they can also enjoy all of those benefits of this really cool ecosystem.
So, yeah, that's what we're really working towards.
We don't want to connect like just some row-ups or like some L2 ecosystems.
We really want to connect all of these ecosystems at a macro scale together.
Like much like for example with Polkadot, there's really cool like interoperability between parachains.
I think the XEM team did an amazing job.
There's really cool interoperability stuff happening there.
But Polkadot must also eventually become connected to the Ag layer.
Because imagine if we had Web 2, but like you could not actually connect every website to every website.
You could only post a link to some websites, not to all of them.
That would just suck, right?
So, yes, I love these concepts like atomic transactionality, which indeed can only happen if you have like some sort of shared block builder.
So, I think that's really cool innovation.
And for chains that want to leverage that, that's completely awesome.
However, I want there to also be a really solid zero-knowledge cryptography-based bridge that connects all of the macro ecosystems with each other.
And that's what we're building.
Amazing, Cor.
Really cool approach.
Connecting not chains, but ecosystems.
Totally makes sense.
And excited to be working with you initially on the Cosmos and Ag layer connection.
I know we have AvailFam in the chat as well, in the spaces as well.
On the topic of interoperability, Chandler, you mentioned that initially you're targeting data availability as your go-to-market.
Do you want to speak a little bit about how does interoperability come into play?
Is there any, like, you know, bridge between your data availability solution and your interoperability strategy?
We'd love to hear a little bit from you.
Yeah.
At a very basic level, when you have a shared data availability solution that works across multiple ecosystems, creating interoperability becomes far easier.
And that's kind of the thought pattern that we had over at Avail.
And that's kind of one of the reasons why we started off with that product very, very specifically.
And, but that's not necessarily a prerequisite.
It's just like a, it's an easier path for teams to start developing towards.
And more, more kind of like on the, on the reason why teams would want to use data availability is it just makes the, the requirements to launch a chain far easier for teams to eventually get to that point.
So like if we truly believe that there's going to be hundreds, if not thousands of, of chains out there, millions, we really need to make it far easier.
And at the end of the day, like that is where the data availability solution sits squarely in, at least in my, in my point of view, is just to make it easier for teams.
So they can focus on the fun stuff, like go to market, marketing the partnerships and ultimately solving users problems at the end of the day.
So like, that's like the basics.
So at the end of the day, like the whole meme, you know, DA is just a commodity really does kind of lean itself into that position.
But then when you get into the interoperability side, having that shared DA layer really allows you to do some like cool things, specifically because like creating, creating these like shared states amongst chains becomes really, really quick and easier.
And like every single one of the teams here are, are looking to do something like that.
Where I think it gets a little bit more challenging is the, the edge cases where it's in, in spaces that aren't on a shared DA.
That's where I think like these interoperability solutions become, you know, like really powerful is, is how easily they can like bring in the, the rest of the ecosystems together.
Because like at the end of the day, like, if you really want to be interoperable, you don't want to tell a chain like, oh, we kind of support your ecosystem.
But or wait like six months until like some adapters get built and audited.
Um, you really want to have something that allows, um, true interoperability, like irrelevant of that ecosystem.
Now, like, you know, whether you think that's going to be EVM, SVM, um, I think some teams might have opinions there, at least at the Vale side, we're very agnostic towards the kind of execution environments that you want to build towards.
And so for us, like DA becomes that ability to like truthfully, like connect multiple ecosystems, um, that may not play so nicely together, um, from their, their initial constructions.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I think, um, you know, also from a very practical perspective, um, getting in the like roadmap of all these chains from a DA play and then, um, you know, broadening your solution scope with your interoperability solution also is like a cool and cool strategy as well.
So it's similar to how, uh, uh, polygon took the app chain stack approach and then, you know, looking into the future, we realized the fragmentation, uh, space and fragmentation, uh, problem will be a pressing one.
So we, you know, went ahead with the Aglier solution.
Um, so it's similar to that.
Um, I just want to kind of, uh, we have, we have around 30 minutes left.
Um, I, while we have you Chandler.
Um, I kind of want to jump into a little bit of more, you know, practical side of things.
Um, what is coming up in your, um, roadmap?
So before, before maybe you answer from, from our perspective at Polygon, we are, uh, getting close to launching a, uh, revamped version of CDK.
Super excited about that.
It will be a much more flexible design, uh, with really cool features like region call, native yield, and things like that.
New CDK, uh, release will also have our, um, app chain, uh, for, uh, have, will have, uh, Aglier compatibility.
So any chain, any chain that leverages the CDK, uh, solution will be able to, you know, attach the Aglier in a very seamless way.
Um, so these are some of like the very, uh, exciting, exciting things that we're really looking forward in the next month and next three months up until DevCon.
Uh, what are some similar things that you can share, uh, Chandler on the avail side?
Uh, what's on your roadmap?
Yeah, the roadmap at the top of the hour.
So that soon is actually a call with your CDK team to figure out how we're going to integrate it.
So very, very like short term.
That's what we're working on.
Funny enough.
Um, so right after this, I'm going to be talking about that, but more generally, uh, soon, soon at, uh, um, uh, before the end of this year, we were looking at trying to launch Nexus, uh, busy planning to go to market around that.
The partners that we want to work with, uh, if any teams are very much interested in wanting to be a part of that, uh, please let us know.
We're very much collaborative on that front and kind of really want to make it like a, an open-ended launch for, for Nexus.
Um, and then tying into like the entire avail thesis, we also, um, have a product that's going to be launching soon after Nexus, uh, called Fusion.
It's our economic restaking layer.
Um, our approach has very much been like, let's build, let's, let's allow chains to build a bunch of, um, chains very quickly.
And, and cheaply with like the DA, um, component, let's connect them all together with Nexus.
And then like, as the capstone piece, um, let's bring in the economic security layer.
Once like, there's a ton of value being built up by that, that ecosystem.
So our roadmap is very much, we're going to be doing everything other than the actual executions.
Um, and so we're excited about that.
Um, get in touch with us if you're interested in Nexus specifically, and then, um, you'll hear a bit more from, from our side.
Um, when we, when we start ramping up, uh, our designs for Fusion.
And just really quickly on the, on the Nexus side, um, who should get in contact with you?
Like, is the, are these like, uh, chains or other info providers?
Uh, how, how should we think about that?
Um, basically everyone on this call, we're actually chatting to some of the teams of folks on this call.
Uh, any teams that are ancillary to those, uh, will be useful, chains themselves, um, at the end of the day, DA providers as well.
Um, so any, any sort of team that, that either requires some sort of interrupt, which I think is a very broad statement, but it's truthfully the, the reflection of what Nexus can, can, can empower.
Um, and then, um, any of the teams that want to build like, like improvements to that.
So, so very similar to how AgLayer is this async, um, composability layer.
So is Nexus, but Nexus and AgLayer will be very composable within each, within each, like with each other and themselves.
But then also there's like faster finality layers that want to build on top of us, um, shared secrecy and co-processing.
Uh, those are all services that we want to be partnering with teams on, um, because just like we want to create composability, we also want to compose with the other composability solutions, which is quite a meta thing to say.
But, um, yeah, we're very much in line with that philosophy.
Excellent.
Sounds like many collaborations are coming.
Um, so on the, on a similar vein core, uh, I think we still have you here.
Um, what is very, what is a very, um, you know, recent thing that you are, you guys are working on, um, maybe like next month or next three months?
What are some of the integrations?
I know the AgLayer one is, uh, on the works, in the works.
Um, what are some of the supported assets as part of that?
That, or, you know, you can answer however you want to answer what's coming from the union side of things in the next few months.
Yeah, absolutely.
Um, so just as an aside, well, I have all of you guys here, like, please stop saying we must support thousands of rollups.
Like, if you really want to succeed, we must support at least millions, right?
Like, there's millions of websites.
Like, we must play the long-term game here and integrate millions of rollups.
Um, that being said, we are working towards this, um, because one of our next innovations will be state lenses, um, which is a really cool research paper that, um, Robert will soon publish.
Um, and it's about how you can look through the lens of one chain state to observe the other chain states in order to have even faster transfers that still follow all of the same, um, security and interoperability guarantees that IPC provides.
So I'm very excited about this.
Um, besides this, many cool Cosmos chains will be joining, um, our test nets in the next weeks.
And of course, within three months, there will also be main nets, which I'm very excited for.
Um, yeah, also, um, Abdullah, one of our, uh, engineers, um, finished the first fully working move integration today.
So that will be awesome.
Um, we will be bringing IPC to movement within the next month on our test nets.
So, yeah, I think it's also going to be amazing.
Um, but yes, more aggregation and more deep integration within the egg layer specifically.
That's excellent.
And, and in terms of like supported assets from different ecosystems, how does that play with, uh, your solution?
I know it's a little bit of a broad question, not maybe unrelated to roadmap, but, um, is that like a challenge for you, uh, integrating with different assets or when you integrate with an ecosystem, the asset integrations also come with it?
Yeah, no.
So, um, this is actually a really nice opportunity to, um, explain IBC in a bit more detail, um, how IBC fundamentally works.
If you don't need to create new assets on different chains, what happens is you send the proof, like the fundamental Merkel inclusion proof that you possess specific assets or data on one chain.
And then the other chain will just simply verify that that state is part of the Merkel root of the cancer party chain.
Therefore, like you are able to have representations of any assets on any chains and use those directly.
So it's like, it's really fundamental to how IBC works, which I think is like an amazing technology.
And also part of why it has been so successful now.
Like there's no like, oh no, there's a new coin, like use DT.
We need to like write special scripts for that.
No, no, no.
It just works as a meta key.
Excellent.
Um, that's really good insight.
Um, so moving on, uh, Noah from note kit, um, anything you want to share?
That's very, uh, that's coming up quite soon in your roadmap.
Yeah, I guess I can give a bit of alpha on RN.
Hopefully my co-founder doesn't get too upset at me for revealing this now, but we are actually going to be coming out of a devnet.
Uh, private, private devnet for developers within the next couple months.
So that if you're a developer and you want to build with composability, we're going to be able to provide that.
So that'll be a devnet that's going to allow people to use atomic bundles on the super builder with a couple different rollups that we're going live with on it.
So we're really excited to get that out there and really allow users to experience this atomic synchronous composability across chains.
So we're really excited about that.
And then later on this year going towards public test net, and then after that, figuring out the exact date on main net as well.
So really just getting after it on that end and really our aim is to provide composability to anything.
And we also want to make it really easy to use for applications as well.
So I think on our end, we're just very excited to get this in the hand of developers and like see how they use it, what new things they want to build on top of it.
And it's been really exciting for us over the past couple of weeks, just starting to talk to developers and see what net new things they're going to kind of build on top of this.
It's going to be an exciting few months for us at NodeGate.
Quick question, Noah, on that.
The atomic composability product, is that going to be like something that the user uses directly or applications and rollups will be integrating with that at the backend and offering their own UI for that?
Yeah, so it really depends on, we essentially have two different paths.
So we have a user-facing path, which is the simple path of, hey, I want to bridge between two different chains and the user just submits a transaction and then they have another transaction that gets generated.
And then both transactions are guaranteed to have atomic execution across different chains.
So that's like the simple path.
But then for developers, what they're usually using with us is this bundle API that we have.
So then you can just build stuff like a cross-chain dex aggregator.
You can build cross-margining solutions, cross-chain name services.
You can really build anything that leverages atomicity.
So anything that has multiple transactions in it is now made to have a better user experience.
And I think it will really open a lot of new innovation around both DeFi and consumer onboarding as well.
I think that that's kind of where we've seen a lot of the early fit for it is people really want to use it either for aggregation or they want to use it for having a better user onboarding experience.
So I think we're going to kind of see a variety of apps, but we're excited to see what it enables.
I think it's always tricky to tell what this new technology enables when you first build it.
I remember hearing about something early on in the internet days, people thought the main use of the internet was going to be essentially like messaging and like almost nothing, essentially.
They thought it was going to be like email and that maybe there was going to be some more stuff later on.
But I think it's very tricky to tell what a new technology will enable until you kind of get it in the hands of developers.
So we're really looking forward to that at Nodekit.
Amazing.
And as someone that works in the infraside of the blockchain industry, I love it when we're talking more about consumers.
I think that's where the whole industry is going.
I mean, everyone is talking about it at the moment, but also that, you know, the more we talk about it, the happier I get.
It gives me chills.
There's been a lot of infra.
And the more we get into the consumer mindset, the better direction we move in.
Lastly, on the roadmap side, Jill and Ben from Espresso, you guys are, you know, undertaking a really solid challenge, similar challenge to what we did with Polygon POS, maybe probably like the next gen version of it.
How are you guys, you know, in terms of your roadmap, I guess a lot of partnerships is key to growing the ecosystem.
How are you guys approaching that?
Any playbooks you have?
Are you talking with any, like, you know, previous POS-type ecosystems?
Just very curious about your strategy here.
So, yeah, we have an upcoming mainnet launch.
I mean, we've been running IntestNet for a very long time.
We have an upcoming mainnet launch.
And we've, I mean, we've been pretty heavily focused on arbitrary ecosystem.
But in terms of just, like, launch partners on that upcoming mainnet.
But what I want to emphasize here, though, is actually that we are working on it together with, you know, Polygon on sort of an integrated roadmap for the ag layer.
And I want to, like, emphasize a few things about the ag layer that I think are really special that I think may be, like, a little bit lost on listeners since, like, Noah's also talking about atomic composability.
Like, there's bridging from IBC.
But there's a few things about the ag layer that are really special and unique.
And they're just, like, they don't exist in any ecosystem yet.
And this atomic, synchronous atomic composability, you know, you can, what Noah was talking about with a super builder, you trust the builder, right?
You trust the builder to, you know, ensure that a bundle of transactions will only succeed altogether across different rollups or not at all.
What ag layer does is ag layer doesn't require trust in a builder to do that.
That is something that is enforced on the chain level.
And that is something extraordinarily powerful.
The other very, very important thing is that you can't fully leverage synchronous composability.
For example, the ability to do, you know, a flash loan between, across different rollups or to have a user use a smart contract wallet on one rollup and engage in, you know, a DAX on another without also shared liquidity, which IBC doesn't have, right?
And a super builder can't provide, but ag layer can provide, and that's through this shared liquidity bridge, where when you move an asset from one chain to another, it's the same fungible underlying asset, right?
When you move ETH from rollup one to rollup two, you don't get a wrapped version of that ETH, you get native ETH on that second rollup.
And so at Espresso, we're contributing to the development of the ag layer itself because we want that powerful capability to be accessible to all chains when they integrate with Espresso and are able to leverage it.
If you combine the power of ag layer with coordinated block building, then you get this holy grail of all chains in the Polygon ecosystem feeling like one unified chain while also retaining their sovereignty.
Totally. And yeah, definitely like we, we, we, we're super excited that Espresso and, and the others, other teams that are here are contributing to ag layer.
It is for the benefit of the whole space. We are really approaching it from that perspective.
Um, so really like excited that, you know, all these teams here in this, in this spaces are actually kind of contributors.
Um, they're not, you know, your classic web two partners.
They're actually involved in the building of, of the ag layer itself.
We do see, you know, um, third party services as part of ag layer as well.
And, uh, for the longest time we had this internal strategy of somehow like, uh,
making these third party, uh, teams, uh, part of Polygon and with ag layer, it's, it's finally happening.
So it's super cool to, you know, hear from, from Espresso and Ben as well.
And, and Ben, you mentioned that, you know, one of the benefits of, uh, one of the key benefits of ag layers that, um, there's not going to be,
you know, uh, wrapped versions of assets.
I think that's, you know, a, a, a big leap for the space from a UX perspective as well.
I personally like have, like, I get like a bad feeling in my stomach when I see a wrapped asset.
So, um, really excited about that.
We already have around like eight, seven, eight, uh, chains that are attached to the first version of ag layer.
And once we, you know, launch the, uh, next version V2 with atomic composability, um, it's,
it's going to be very exciting to see all of these, um, you know, benefits come into play.
Um, with that, I want to kind of like get to the conclusion of the call.
Um, you know, we have, we have listeners here who are, um, interested in the challenges of building,
uh, blockchain, uh, uh, solutions, developer solutions and, and chain solutions.
So I'll actually, uh, ask Ben and Jill, uh, so going from the same order, uh, what is,
you know, a big challenge for you that, you know, would be helpful for other, other listeners
to think about as they're building, um, you know, solutions that interoperability solution
or bridging solutions.
Yeah, sure.
I can hop in.
I think, um, I think we have a tendency as an industry and as all kind of infra builders
on this call to talk about interoperability really generically or on the other side of
it, get like really deep into the weeds, but lose the impact that we're aiming to have for
users.
And so I would just encourage all of us to try to be really specific about where we fit
into the broader vision that, um, that we're trying to build and work towards.
And, you know, for me personally, it's really about making Ethereum feel like one chain again
for users as the starting place.
And then down the line, making all blockchains have that kind of unified quality, um, of
composability.
And again, you know, where Espresso fits into that is that we're working on this fast finality
layer and then also a marketplace for coordinated block building.
Um, and I think that I get a lot of confusion from folks sometimes around like, wait, like
is Espresso a competitor with the ag layer or, you know, with others, perhaps even on
this call.
And I think that in reality, like we're all building complimentary parts of the same ecosystem,
um, that needs to exist to get, get users back to that experience and developers as well.
Totally.
I mean, it's, it's funny that now, like a lot of people are talking about, uh, account
abstract, uh, chain abstraction, and it was never the goal.
And, and I think the, the, the reason why a lot of people are talking about chain abstraction
is, um, you know, it just became a narrative all of a sudden, while it was always a narrative
for, for people on the infraside of things.
And the reason why I'm saying this is like interoperability.
I totally agree very broad term and the most successful teams are the, the most focused
ones.
So I'm totally with you here, uh, Jill.
Um, so going, going, uh, in the, in the same order, Noah, anything that you want to mention?
Like, what is, what is your, what is the challenge that you're solving maybe today after this, um,
call that may inspire builders in this space?
If you, if you want to mention anything like that?
Yeah, I think it's really easy to get really bogged down in the details of like soup builders,
shared sequencer, shared sequencers, because marketplaces, all this different stuff.
And I think what we've really like focused in on over the past few months, especially
at node kit is really talking to developers, getting a fast feedback loop and figuring out
where we can meet our application developers, our role developers, and really figuring out
what are the features that they would like most in these systems and really serving them
best.
Because I think fundamentally infrastructure should exist to serve its users, not the
other way around.
And I think that can be really lost in crypto because sometimes because it's so easy to
get so excited about all this really interesting tech that we're all building.
But I think at the end of the day, focusing on that has really allowed us to really scale
up a lot over the past few months.
And really we've seen a lot of like new applications that want to build with ComposeBullion
in mind.
So I think that for us over the next few months, that's really like a primary focus for
us is not only just expanding out the role-ups which we're supporting and allowing to kind
of opt into this network essentially, but also making sure that we are supporting the
applications that are building on top of them that want to leverage the solutions.
Because at the end of the day, if nobody builds using the technology that you've initially
built, I personally, being a technical background, I would be that as like a failure of the protocol
itself, if only one or two use cases pops out as a result of it.
So we're really like laser focused on getting developers to build these new applications
and build these new things that are uniquely enabled by ComposeBullion across chains.
So that's really like a key focus for us at NerdCut right now.
Totally.
Make things that developers want.
We're trying to replicate similar approach with the ag layer here as well.
A lot of user stories, a lot of use cases being tested by the whole Polygon team.
And we actually want to make some of these more public to get feedback and essentially really
make sure that ag layer is something that solves the problem that we're targeting in the
way that developers want.
Union Core, assuming you're still here, I see you, anything that you want to mention on
the similar vein, challenges, what are you guys, what will you guys be working on to solve
here?
Maybe it's repeating a little bit of the roadmap question, but maybe more from a challenge
perspective.
What's very hard for Union to solve these days?
Yeah, so some of the actual concrete challenges come from differences within the execution
environments.
So when you are supporting Move, for example, Move from a language is so fundamentally different
because there's all of these compel time guarantees of different contract interactions, for example.
So kind of reworking machinery designed for a specific ecosystem to really work well and
feel natively within an entirely different execution environment, yet be opaque to developers.
It's an extremely different challenge and I really love working on this stuff.
So far, it's been going very well.
But yeah, like getting more of that, but also things like tracking different consensus mechanisms
is really fun, I think.
So we'll be launching our scroll integration this week.
So scroll is a ZK-based L2, which again is fundamentally different from an optimistic L2, for example.
Yet for the end developer, you want this interface to really be identical and all of the security
guarantees to also be identical.
So yeah, our live client team is working really hard on being able to track arbitrary types
of consensus.
It's going very well.
Yeah, so there are differences, mostly in vain of abstracting over different kinds of execution
environments or consensus mechanisms, but they are fun challenges and it's going well.
That does sound very difficult, actually.
Yeah, yeah.
I didn't realize when I was asking this again, but like that does sound super difficult.
And I guess that's why union exists in the first place.
Yeah.
So, I mean, to kind of like elaborate, like one of the crazy things is, for example, in
Solidity, right, you're able to just call any possible contract directly.
However, in Move, there's no dynamic dispatching functionality.
So like beforehand, you need to be really clear about dependencies between different smart
contracts.
And this makes it extremely secure, right?
Because you can type check all the possible interactions that your contracts may have.
However, when you're creating a system that must be able to dynamically dispatch to any
possible channel, it's quite an engineering challenge.
But it's been really fun to build creative solutions around that and be able to support
it anyways.
But yeah, the differences are crazy.
Like people don't realize this.
Amazing.
Good luck with that and excited to collaborate on that front, specifically on the ag layer.
And Chandler, you're the last one in the row.
Data availability or data availability solutions seems a little bit mature.
Are there any challenges that you're solving on that front or anything that you want to mention
that could be interesting for the listeners here?
Yeah, I don't think we're going to particularly add anything to what's already been said around the
challenges.
I think like the idea of how you build an interoperability solution is probably one of
the hardest challenges in the space right now.
And it's not particularly easy.
There's going to be multiple designs.
There's going to be multiple approaches.
And at the end of the day, there's also going to be multiple failed attempts.
One thing that we're quite excited about is actually seeing what this will eventually become.
And one of the areas that I think will be like a nice heuristic is at the end of the day,
when chains can launch really quickly, find product market fit, and no one knows any of that
interrupt plumbing that happened.
I think that will be a stage when we're really defined or created and defined what the new
internet looks and feels like.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's many devs that don't even actually know how HTTPS works,
yet they use it every day, right?
So that's really what we must strive for.
Exactly that.
Amazing, guys.
Chandler, super cool insight.
Thanks for that.
But we're kind of at the end of this spaces.
Before we end, anything that you guys want to mention?
Espresso team, NoteKit team, Veil team, Union team, any last notes?
None from us, but thank you so much for hosting this.
It was a really fun discussion.
Hopefully the listeners got something out of it, too.
Indeed.
I took a lot of notes on my side, to be honest with you.
I actually have one final question for the espresso team, if I may.
Yep.
What's your favorite kind of espresso?
I mean, you named your company after espressos.
Like, what's your favorite roast?
Oh, what's a favorite roast?
Or what's a favorite way of drinking it?
I'm partial to Cortado, but I don't think I have a favorite roast.
I think the variety is good.
I don't know about Joe.
To be clear, I don't think the espresso team is any more savvy on coffee than anyone else here.
Just a fun name for a company.
That's very humble of you.
Have you guys ever decided doing an IRL panel like this with some espressos on the side?
Because I had my espresso.
Well, we actually hosted the coffee at Modular Summit, so it's not exactly the same.
But, you know, we are known to also serve espresso drinks at some conferences.
Oh, that's amazing.
So the union team, whenever we have an offsite, all of the engineers are extremely snobby about their espresso.
So they bring their own, like, hands-lever espresso machines.
So there must be, like, a collab here someday.
Love it.
Love it.
Okay.
So on that note, on that bitter, I guess, maybe estresses are bitter.
On that bitter and happy note.
Acidic.
Acidic note.
This is the end of the spaces.
Super fun time.
I'm sure we will be repeating this maybe on a monthly basis to talk about maybe more AgLayer roadmap-specific stuff.
But we're very excited to be working with these core contributor teams.
They definitely make the AgLayer a better solution for developers and for the space,
simplifying the user experience and improving the user experience.
So really great stuff.
And I guess this is the end of the spaces.
Thank you all, sir.
