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Aleph Zero Talks: Across
Recorded: Jan. 13, 2025 Duration: 0:29:42Space Recording
Short Summary
The transcript is a discussion between representatives from ALF0 and Across, focusing on their integration and the innovations brought by Across in the crypto space. The conversation highlights the partnership between ALF0 and Across, emphasizing the bridging capabilities of Across and their mission to tackle Ethereum's fragmentation issue. Across is known for its fast and cost-effective cross-chain interoperability, particularly through its relayer network and the concept of 'intents' (ERC-7683), developed in collaboration with Uniswap. The discussion also touches on the security and decentralization of Across's relayer network, which is open to anyone and designed to mitigate risks associated with single relayer systems.
Full Transcription
I'm going to be
Hello, hello. Let's kick this off, but first maybe some small mic check. So Damien and James, can you check if we can hear you?
Yeah, let me check. Hey, everyone. All good.
Hey, GM, GM, everyone. GM. All right. Loud and clear. So,
All right, let's go.
Just some of...
Just really quick.
Sorry, I know I'm interrupting, but can we bring the across handle up on stage as well?
I just want to make sure our users all get visibility.
Yeah, let me add across as the co-host.
Thank you so much. Sorry.
Sure.
All right, so...
Maybe I send the...
speaking source requests as well, just in case.
All right.
Yeah, so as many of the listeners probably know,
but just in case you didn't know,
ALF0 is integrated with ACROS,
and we're here to dive deeper into what it means
and how ACROS fits into our ecosystem
and how ALF0 fits into the,
uh across ecosystem so let's start with some brief intros from you guys and starting maybe with james what's what's your role in acros and you know how did you end up working with the yeah yeah well first off thank you for having me it's uh i'm really just excited and looking forward to the space um
And I was a big fan of the 11-Zero community.
You guys, I don't know if you'll remember,
but when we made the announcement of the integration,
the community that you all have, like, they know how to show up.
Like, even my own personal tweet, like my own personal tweet blew up.
And then obviously the one that across put out too.
So to all of you listeners who are here and our big AZ fans and community members,
thanks for being here.
And thanks for giving us time to just.
Shill across and what we're doing. I'm the head of marketing here at across, actually
head of marketing for Risk Labs Foundation, which is the foundation that oversees both across
protocol and OMA protocol. And specifically on the across side, like,
As you all know, we've got a lot of things that we're cooking, but our biggest mission right now is tackling the fragmented Ethereum kind of EVM space.
Scalability used to be the biggest issue for Ethereum, and now I think we've all but solved scalability, but we've introduced fragmentation as a kind of collateral or unintended consequence.
And.
That's where we're really what we're tackling.
Before Risk Labs, I was VP of marketing at Rarable, which is an Ft marketplace.
Actually, that was the first time back then when I heard of Aal of Zero when I was at Rarable.
And I've been working in the crypto space since 2021 professionally and have been a crypto trader since 2017, 2018.
So I've been through many bull cycles and many bear cycles where I've made a little money and then maybe lost.
more money than I want to talk about. So yeah, it's a little about me.
That's the specifics of this industry, right?
Okay, so in case the part of the committee that is listening from
across sites, Damien, if you could introduce yourself on your role in other zero.
Yeah, thank you. So I am Damien. I
started working with ALF0 maybe five or even six years ago, almost from the very beginning.
So my background is in computer science. I did my PhD in theoretical computer science.
You could say maybe even math, that would be quite accurate.
So I was doing algorithms and optimization.
And then shortly after I actually started looking into ALF zero.
It got me interested into crypto.
And well, I joined the company.
I worked on the consensus protocol initially, which we then implemented,
and the ALF zero chain is actually using the ALFPFT consensus protocol.
Then I was working many, many different projects within ALF-0, including our own bridge.
So we are quite familiar with bridging technology at ALF-0-2.
So this is another reason why I got interested in this space to talk about bridging, talk about the challenges.
And, well, another thing is that I am not often showing...
on the spaces, but well, I am a technical person
and I have some, I would say, non-political views sometimes,
but yeah, I can honestly
Yeah, talk about across because I like the project a lot.
I think it's super solid.
I, yeah, I've read a lot of documentation on Accross.
Everything is rock solid.
So yeah, I really like being here, like discussing what we can do together.
And yeah, let's start.
Sure. Yeah, and by the way, I'm Matrochensky, the marketing manager of Al-F-Zero. So, yeah, first things first, and let's start with Accros. So, James, what is Accros protocol and exactly what is its key innovation that you guys are offering to the market?
You know, it's actually really fun that you're asking this question. We had our team off-site back in December,
and I asked every team member to share with us what is their elevator pitch for across.
And when you have a team of, you know, almost 40 people, some are engineers, some are products, some are marketing,
you know, we all come from different backgrounds. And I think,
we all then kind of speak a slightly different language or talk about across from different perspectives.
And probably like the easiest and fastest way to think about across today and what we're most known for today is our bridging capabilities.
The work that we do for cross-chain interoperability where
Essentially, if you're moving assets from one EVM chain to another EVM chain, across is
the fastest and cheapest way to do it for 90% of use cases.
And really like, that's a big part of what we do.
But if we zoom out a little bit, and you all will start to see this more,
so maybe it's kind of alpha, I guess, but not really if you've been following along.
We're thinking bigger than bridges.
We're thinking how do we tackle the
the fragmentation issue and you'll see a lot of our messaging that we put out from our brand
but also our whole team it kind of hinges on this concept of unifying ethereum and the whole idea around that is
When you as a user are, let's say you're buying an NFT and the NFT is, it's on A-LF-Zero, it's an A-LF-0
NFT, but maybe you don't have enough funds to buy it and you need to move funds around.
That's where bridging comes in.
Well, what if you didn't have to as a user manually go to a bridge?
What if that was happening on?
under the hood behind the scenes in the same way that like I don't fully know exactly how this Twitter space is hosted, what web servers Elon chooses to use, how we all get audio that's not lagging.
I know some of the basics of that infrastructure, but the average user, we just we just use it.
And as long as it works and it and it makes sense.
that is really the end goal.
And that's sort of the way we're thinking about this as a consumer,
like or the end user for across is we want users to be able to click by NFT and know that their intention behind clicking buy NFT is that they want to pool their funds from various chains and just execute the transaction.
And so when you ask that question, what's our key innovation?
Our key innovation is intense, or as maybe some of us know it, ERC-7683, which is an open
standard that anyone can build on.
We created this in collaboration with the team at UNISWOP.
I love to give them a little shout out because their team is just fantastic and they've
been really just awesome partners to work with.
That's our whole mission is we want to unify Ethereum and we believe that ERC 7683 is one of the biggest puzzle pieces that unlock the ability to make seamless cross-chain experiences possible.
And that's through the power of intense.
Yeah, I love that idea because it's also very much different from what we see in this space.
So that's definitely an industry-wide innovation and it also brings a lot to the space.
And also I just wanted to ask you if you could share the story of how did you guys actually come up with this idea of cross-chain intents and, you know, what was the reason that you guys chose this direction?
I love that. What's fun is I joined the team more recently, and so I wasn't part of kind of the initial inception. But I have heard the story many times from many different team members who were part of it. And the interesting part is that
the team was building the technology and kind of utilizing the concept of intense before
they like the name intense became a popular kind of concept in the space um and i'm not trying to say that like
me I don't want that to come.
You were working on that before it was cool, right?
Yeah, I don't, exactly, exactly.
You hear that a lot from like, you know, people who listen to music or, I've said this to my friend.
My friends, I love Joseer.
Joseer is an incredible artist.
I love what he's done in this generation and his music is often on repeat.
And I've been listening to him for years and recently he's on.
on every like top billboard top 40 he's like constantly putting out incredible music and so
everyone's listening to him and there's part of me that's like but i was first i knew him before you
not that the hipster in you exactly the hipster kind of mindset yeah um and so we don't i don't like
put a stake in the ground and say like yeah we were first but our team was very early in the concept
of intense and
And I think as a person who wasn't part of that initial kind of inception of it,
the way that I would boil it down is this team is really incredible at thinking about the end user
and understanding like what are the needs that the end user has.
Well, what do you do when you go to Amazon.com?
And you have the option to just click one time and that's the purchase.
Like Amazon is kind of fulfilling your intention behind the scenes based on your past purchasing experiences, based on the settings that you've created.
It knows.
Yeah, when you click one time, this is the credit card you use and this is your shipping preference.
And you know if you click one time and it just will show up magically at your door.
We deal with intents all the time as human beings.
Our intentions when we click a mouse or when we...
open a door or or when we have a conversation with someone important with us,
intentions are something that are very innate to the human experience.
And so I think that's what the product and engineering team really like got right.
That's something they got really right early on in saying,
Every user is moving about the blockchain space with intentions.
They have intentions.
They have things in mind.
They have things that they are trying to do when they click, when they sign, when they interact with various contracts.
Their intention is what we're really trying to execute on.
And I think that's what this team got right, and they got it right really early, is that users live and breathe on chain through intents.
Yeah, that's very true.
And this is a key and how did the intense work in case here, them?
I'm really sorry, maybe it's just me, but it broke up there until the last couple words.
Can you say that one more time?
Oh yeah. So I discussed how intense work in someone.
Yeah, how intense work, yeah? Am I hearing that?
Yeah. Yeah, perfect. So the best way to describe it, there's a lot, we can go very tech deep,
but I'm head of marketing and that's not my nature. So I'll keep it maybe kind of high level for
all of our users and listeners today. What's really cool about this is intense are the reason why
we've just dominated on the speed side of thing. Let me explain. So if you want to move
You want to move EF from Mainnet to Aal of Zero, for example.
It would be silly for me to use a different example if we're not, I mean, we're on this space, right?
The way that that works for the user, if you go to our website right now, across dot two, and you click into the app and
and you select your down you know you select the the chain a left zero which by the way you guys
are at the very top and it's just because it's alphabetical order but it's kind of fun for everyone
in here who's a big fan of a live zero and the product that you all are building because you're at
the very top of our list when you come to a cross because you pick the name that starts with a so
kudos to you and the marketing team for that yeah yeah exactly exactly um
And so if I'm in the bridge app and I click ALF zero and I want to move, let's say I want
to move my USDT, my tether USB, and I want to move that over to, I don't know, Ethereum
mainnet, for example, or wherever it is that you're moving to.
What you have is the user is intent, the intention of the user is to move that asset from
one chain to another.
If you're thinking about like US currency, if I hand you a $10 bill and then you hand that $10 bill to the person at the gas station to pay for your gas and that person hands that $10 bill to make a payment, like that $10 bill moves freely.
but none of us ever care what the serial number is on that $10 bill.
All we care about is that we have the value of $10 represented in that piece of paper,
and we know that what is represented is worth $10 when we decide to go to another chain.
In this example, we're doing a very similar thing.
I said another chain.
I mean, when you go to another store, for example.
In this scenario, what we're saying is, if we're moving USDT or if we're moving RAPD, we don't really care.
which if it is. We don't care which USDT it is. We're not it's it's a it's a fungible token like the the serial number on the dollar doesn't matter. All that matters is that we receive the value that we're expecting to receive. And so if you're if you're zoning out come back to me, come back here because I know it's it's a long explanation, but I promise it's about to make sense here.
What we've introduced through the power of intents is our relayer network.
What's a relayer? Well, a relayer is sort of the person who sits between the transaction.
And instead of waiting for absolute finality on chain, what we're able to do is we're able to say, when the user clicks bridge,
in that instant, the relayer network is given the opportunity to fill that order before chain finality.
And so if I said to Damien, hey, I need you to take this $10 and I need you to give it to your friend, let's just say your friend's name is Joe.
If you take that $10 and you put it in your wallet and then you hand a different $10 bill to your friend Joe, Joe doesn't care.
Joe just knows I got $10.
That's what's happening here.
The relayer is filling the order and giving the end user the wrapped EF oftentimes in less than four seconds, five seconds.
It's very, very fast.
And then after the fact, the relayer is being repaid what they've filled through that order.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
I love it.
I love it.
It's fun because as a marketer, I get to like break this down to our average users.
Probably if the engineers were on this call, they would explain it in a little bit more
detail.
But it really is just as simple as.
The user expresses an intent.
They want to move some ETH from one chain to another.
The relayer fills that order faster than it can happen on chain because it's,
you know, the relayer is kind of incentivized monetarily to do this quickly.
And then that relayer gets paid back after the fact.
And by doing that, we can bundle those orders and repay relayers
in a bundle session so that we save on fees,
we save on transaction costs, things like that.
Yeah.
I know that you're also involved in the market,
but could you also explain how ourselves
and that all stay secure if
if we are considering no speed operations cross-chain.
So how do you guys protect against it?
This is my favorite.
Yeah, this is my favorite question to get asked.
Why is this more secure?
And actually, I think what we're getting to in the technology kind of advancements of bridging
is that most bridges are really fast.
And the ones that aren't, they're playing catch up, right?
Like speed is being...
really abstracted away over time where I think these transactions will feel quite instant for most people.
And then you think about bridging costs.
I think that's another thing that is kind of getting abstracted away.
The cost of bridging assets is going down rapidly, and we're making significant improvements on that.
That's a really important piece, speed and cost.
However, the spot that across wins,
and this is something I'm just so proud of this team for,
it's a key piece and it's a pillar of why any of us are even listening on this call today
and why any of us have been building in this space.
It's the concept of decentralization.
So when you ask, why is this secure or how is this secure,
A lot of bridges, I won't name names, but a lot of our competitors, they rely on a single relayer.
And if there's only one relayer, that means that single relayer, if there's a security flaw, if there were a vulnerability, if there were a hack, if there were any sort of bad actor in the space, that single relayer becomes a
like the lynchpin of which all things will either succeed or break on.
What we've done it across is we've decentralized our relator network.
Anyone, and that means all of you who are listening even now,
you could become a relayer.
It takes a bit of technical know-how.
Obviously, you have to have the capital to be able to fill orders,
but anyone can become a relator.
I think as of today, actually, I should have checked this before coming on the call,
but I believe we're north of like 30 different relayers who fill orders on behalf of the user.
What that means is that there's competition.
We've made the relayer process an open network or an open marketplace where anyone can come
and they can claim these orders or bid on these orders, fill the orders, and they get compensated
monetarily.
And those things are happening so quickly on the back end that the marketplace is almost
like this robust, sometimes you can almost like envision it like, like
Like it's a farmer's market and every market vendor is selling different things and it's up to the user to say what I want, but it's happening so quickly that the vendors are just placing and filling these orders so quickly that like the user experience is seamless.
The security comes in and that the relayer is the one who takes on the most risk.
the end user doesn't really face any risk at all because in the three or four seconds that they're waiting,
there's such a short window for any kind of malicious attack or vulnerability to happen.
We all remember the, I won't say their name, but we all remember one of the major bridges
and when they had a massive security issue and lots of people lost lots of funds.
It was a really devastating moment in our space.
what we've said is we want to decentralize that risk.
So the relayer takes on the risk, mostly in that they're just waiting for the order to be refilled on their end or to get,
basically they're waiting for their payment to come back to them.
And so that's really where security comes in is because we are truly decentralized and anyone can create a relayer,
unlike our competition who rely on a single relayer to fill those orders,
that means all the risk is in one relayer and that means every user who's bridging at one point
they really should be holding their breaths because a single relayer becomes a very high risk point.
And we've said we aren't going to put our users in that type of risk situation.
We're going to decentralize the relayer network, make it an open marketplace for these relayers to come in.
And the relays then, in consequence, they kind of inherit the risk protecting the users.
It might just be me. I don't hear any audio if anyone is speaking.
Matt, we might have lost.
Yeah, Matt is not speaking. Matt, we hear us? Are you there still?
Yeah, it seems Matt might have some technical issues, but yeah, I'm sure we can handle together on our own.
Yeah, so yeah, that was a cool summary of a cross.
So we are quite familiar with all the issues which come of bridging.
We are kind of familiar with lots of different designs.
And initially, when we wanted to bridge all of Zerrero to Ethereum, actually our
favorite idea was to use an optimistic bridge similar to across.
That's what we wanted to build.
You know, we start with LF0 is originally a non-EVM chain.
So this is much more tricky than bridging from EVM.
But yeah, well, even though we liked this the most,
we kind of decided to go for a simple approach, guardian-based.
So there are different trade-offs obviously, but it's much easier to build and much easier to maintain across this, you know, great project, but it has some complexities.
Complexity in building it, not complexity in using it. That's the great thing. And that's what we really, really like.
I love that you're differentiating.
Host
Aleph Zero
from
Aleph Zero
