And that's how the future is securing your own,
sorry, bootstrapping your own validator set is very hard
and the security parameters, the underlying security
is very hard to go from zero to one again
with every chain that you have.
And that's how we think and that's how L2s and L3s are.
And that's the future where if you believe
in a multi-chain future, then it is a multi-rollup future
rather than a multi-L1, so to say, future.
And definitely, I have some thoughts on IBC also.
It's definitely one of the most elegant solutions out there.
And I think it's a really good job, like infrastructure
for multiple chains that we are working on.
Thanks for sharing Hamza.
And yeah, just to clarify for our audience here,
the multi-rollup future that you're talking about Hamza
entails L2s that build upon a single zone of sovereignty.
So even though L2s may be considered separate chains,
L2 and rely on data availability
from that same zone of sovereignty.
And so even though you might have one L1
with multiple tools on that,
that's all a single zone of sovereignty,
whereas cross-chain communication between L1s
and between two different L1s
is falls under that cross-chain definition.
So not to get confused here,
but thank you for introducing that concept.
And I'm sure we'll be referring back to it many times
Before going into a deep dive
on the specifics of the pros and cons of each one,
just wanted to circle back to Valentin
to finish off his explanation of IBC,
because that's another trend that's gonna be coming up.
And I wanted to make sure that we were clear on that.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Nico.
I hope my mic is fixed now.
Super interesting, by the way,
to hear the different opinions.
I'm very eager to dive deeper into the discussion.
But yeah, to get the listeners up to speed, IBC.
So imagine if you look at normal bridges, right?
Multisig bridges, trusted bridges, centralized bridges.
It's almost like if you wanna trade between two countries
using a centralized bridge
because you can never actually move a token
between two chains properly.
What using a centralized bridge means
is you essentially have a company that tells you,
oh yeah, we're gonna write you a piece of paper
that's going to tell the country you fly to
that you own this much money in the bank, right?
And then you just hope for the entire duration
of your stay in the other country
that that piece of paper is still valid
and that country still exists, the bank still exists.
And it's a pretty foreign concept
to run an entire economy on just pieces of paper
that have a signature of an entity you barely know,
that at any point, if that entity implodes,
that piece of paper is worthless,
without ever being able to move the actual assets
to the country you're visiting.
IBC is much closer to having
a standardized port infrastructure
where every country decides that the container
should be this specific size
and you can fill the container with information.
And you can send containers from one port to another
as long as it fits into the standard.
You can also use the passport analogy, right?
You always have your, you know,
the password of the country you're from.
So you always have the origin chain.
But if you visit other countries,
they have a way to acknowledge
that this is a proper passport,
you're a proper citizen of a specific country,
even though they assign it their own number
by putting a stamp into your passport, right?
So while in IBC, you have kind of, you know,
a path of which the passport takes
based on the stickers that accumulates,
the underlying passport can be verified
as accurate by all in the chain
as long as they agree to the standard
for the passport should look like.
So IBC really is the only way,
apart from obviously, you know,
just code risk that always exists,
the only way to move assets between chains
with no added security assumptions,
but the chains themselves, right?
If you have a country that has low security on the border,
you know, it may be a risk factor for the passport holder
but that doesn't mean that other countries
that use passwords are implicated by this.
And the exciting thing is that now,
instead of just being able to move the passports,
you're starting to move entire DeFi executions
Not to, you know, go too much of rail,
but we actually, I see we have Yelena and Riley
listening in, founders of Noble and Stride respectively,
what I would consider to be, you know,
where we essentially, all our three products,
are just building on top of the passport system
to add to the countries and to give countries the ability
to benefit from the ability to move between countries, right?
So you can look at this as a bit like if Ethereum
was the United States causes a bit like the European Union
where you have your own countries,
but there's a standard of movement
and a standard of essentially asset transactions
I think we can start to move deeper now
into sort of the technical trade-offs
and we might spend about, you know,
20 or 25 minutes on this section.
And so, yeah, this is fairly open.
No ordering to the speakers here,
but, you know, when trying to build out for your use cases,
how do you evaluate the different trade-offs
and the way they affect, you know,
your application or blockchain in terms of things like,
you know, scalability, being able to reach
as many users as possible, or security,
which is, I think, the primary concern here
when it comes to bridging, as well as, you know,
potentially things like the user experience
that we may not often talk about.
Yeah, well, first of all,
the model that the entire space has been working off of
before is that if you are trying to launch a DAP,
your security is enshrined in whatever DA layer
that you're launching it on.
For example, on the Ethereum Virtual Machine,
you need to rely on the security guarantees
and the underlying gas-feed token
ETH for operating your DAP.
Whereas in Cosmos, it's about whether or not
you could launch your own layer one as a DAP chain, right?
But I think that in the future,
it looks something more of like a hybrid
now that we have Celestia roll-up ecosystem rolling out.
So now, if you know that you don't wanna bootstrap
and you don't necessarily need to run your DAP
through the heavy lifting of a Cosmos SDK app chain,
then you could simply use a DA layer.
And we're at a point where we're at the bleeding edge
of abstracting away the lower settlement layers
like Ethereum, Bitcoin, Celestia, what have you,
to a point where in the future,
you could kind of mix and match DA layers.
So I think that world's gonna be interesting.
And if we realize that world,
then we could see potentially 90% of applications
being built as roll-ups and not as sovereign app chains
or as Solidity Smart Contracts on someone else's hosted VM.
I'd be interested in seeing that.
And when it comes to that point,
the trade-off that you would make as a DAP developer,
you would make significantly less trade-offs
when you had a limited set of options to choose from.
So in the future that you see Chango,
where you can, as you said,
you have this modular stack that gives you access
to a broader set of data availability layers,
which you refer to as DA layers,
in addition to settlement layers
that may not be baked into the DA layer,
whereas Ethereum is monolithic in that sense,
there are certain innovations and cosmos
that let you mix and match, as you mentioned.
What does that all do for,
how do you think about the security trade-offs there?
Does that make it things more secure,
less secure as Ethereum, et cetera?
And I also want to prompt Hamza here
because I know you've probably given this
a lot of thought as well.
So if you want to add anything
to this kind of roll-up centric future,
but not necessarily roll-ups on Ethereum.
Imagine a world where you have something like mesh security.
But I mean, if you look at a monolithic stack,
It's primarily composed of the execution layer,
security layer, and then the DA layer, right?
And so if you're able to mix and match execution
with settlement or security and DA,
what does that world look like?
And if you're able to, I guess,
mesh secure in multiple bilateral agreements
that have their own security premiums,
like with Bitcoin and Ethereum,
then the whole is altogether more secure
than its parts is what I'm trying to get at, right?
In this mesh secured model,
we're talking about a network of mycelium,
like Zaki and Sunny mentioned
in a bankless podcast some time ago.
It's that this cross-chain paradigm
gets to take away the sum of all of the security premium
of the underlying DA layers like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
And if you're able to mix and match,
then it's greater than if you were just
to launch your own app chain
with its own small market cap at the beginning.
Or it could be greater than just
that of the enshrined settlement of one layer one
Because if you could mesh secure with Ethereum
and another chain in a proof of stake world,
then the amount of collateral that's at stake
is going to be more than the amount of collateral
at stake in any one ecosystem.
Hamza, do you have anything to say
when it comes to things like design trade-offs
when thinking about the kinds of products
that Polygon wants to build?
And where do you see Polygon positioning itself
See, like I said earlier,
we definitely believe that this multi-chain future
For sure, there is no doubt about that.
You must have seen even the recent IMX
immutable announcement that went out
and the idea there is that immutable
will become like the gaming layer too
for Ethereum using Polygon tech.
And we are working more on,
we are working on other technologies also in that way
that can have the same impact.
Like you can have your own DeFi chain
and we are working on that side as well.
Like your DeFi L2 rolling up on Ethereum
built on like the same Polygon ZKVM.
And like there'll be like a hundred chains.
There is new bank, which is like a very big,
very big fintech out of LATAM in Brazil.
And they already have their own stable coin
as gas and like as loyalty points in their app
And they are all like using the Polygon
super net infrastructure to build their own chain.
However, what we feel is that,
like building your own chain,
not just chain, but bootstrapping your own security
Like that part is extremely difficult,
extremely difficult to do.
I mean, it's not difficult,
it's difficult to maintain what I mean is like,
it's very difficult to maintain not many apps can do that.
However, it however good it may sound,
it is very, it is, it's not practical.
So yeah, I feel like the rule up way is the way forward
where you inherently depend on the L1 security,
whichever L1 that is, which you like.
When you talk about the difficulty
around bootstrapping security,
what are some of the challenges there?
You need, initially need like apps like this project,
these are all fintechs, right?
Like we are seeing a mass,
mass inflow of fintech of games,
of enterprises and web two companies
that want to run their chain
because they want to either control,
like, you know, native minting of assets
and whitelisting and blacklisting of,
there are multiple reasons
why they want to run their own chain
and they don't want to share data to,
you know, the public information, which is understandable.
So they need to, firstly,
they need to have like a first decentralized validator set,
which is very difficult for a web two company
to bootstrap or even like a gaming company, you know,
to bootstrap where they just want to, you know,
mint $2 or $5 or $10 of gaming assets
over like millions of times.
It's very difficult for them to, you know,
they're not in this business of blockchain maintenance
and blockchain infrastructure.
So it's difficult for them to bootstrap on day one.
And without that, they can't even run their business.
Second thing is getting the stake
not everyone wants to launch a token,
especially in this enterprise and not just enterprise,
but like gaming and FinTech projects,
not everyone is willing to do a token
and ready to, you know, use their token as stake.
So not everyone is ready to do that.
So yeah, like these two, three things are very crucial
Hey, I'm pleasure meeting you.
Super interesting to kind of get, you know, different side.
That's not just, you know, all on the cross chain side,
but I would like to kind of see
if we can find a middle ground because to me,
what I hear between the lines is the argument you're making
is that, you know, web two and like legacy businesses
would like to choose having basically almost wide level
And I don't think I'd necessarily disagree with you,
but to me, I think the biggest kind of disconnect
is that those applications usually don't need to interact
with DeFi and other crypto basis, right?
They use the baseline blockchain for the very easy kind of
for the benefits, but not for engagement in between
in which I would argue that a multi-chain future,
if you don't have sufficient bridging technology,
that's not just an afterthought,
which I feel like it currently very much is,
you are sacrificing a ton of liquidity
and a ton of efficiency of capital
by the fragmentation of such in all different rollups.
I mean, there's so many by now, right?
And there's so many different layer ones and layer twos
that, you know, we had the same issue in Cosmos, right?
Like this is not something that we're calling out,
like I'm calling out that only Ethereum has,
but we kind of are starting to solve this
by building more and more on the infrastructure
that connects us being IBC.
So my argument is anything legacy
and anything that is a state machine by itself,
like a gaming, you know, like a game
would maybe want to go for wide level service,
but anything that wants to interact
with the defined native ecosystem
would prefer to choose a cross-chain solution.
To add to that, just quickly on your validator argument,
I think you're absolutely right.
And I think that the motivations you voiced
in which why those companies want to choose
having that being, you know, done for them
is the reason why we have replicated security
and mesh security coming into Cosmos, right?
Interchain security, for instance, or replicated now,
again, right, we have Riley from Stride here.
It's essentially a plug and play solution
to getting the validator set from Atom,
And I feel like that seems to be a middle ground
or at least our variation of what you guys
seem to be the right approach on Ethereum.
We'd like to hear your thoughts if you agree.
Yeah, for sure, like I'm a big fan of mesh security.
I know I have a lot of friends in the Cosmos space
and like I was, when the paper came last year,
I was sitting down and chatting about it
with some of them about this for sure.
To your, like I definitely, but it's a bit down the line.
So, I mean, we are keeping a close eye on that.
And like we are working, like I said,
we are working on a hub design ourselves
on how to, you know, communicate between multiple chains.
And because you want to keep MATIC token
at the center of it, so that MATIC token generates revenue
from all these hundred chains
that are created using polygon infrastructure,
tomorrow there is like some DeFi chain for this,
whether it is the KVM, whether it is new bank chain
or like whichever FinTech chain it is,
or gaming chains that come,
like we want to make sure that MATIC token becomes a center.
To your point of communication and DeFi liquidity sharing,
I understand, but that cross chain
and having a central hub is important with IBC
and like Osmosis and those kind of things.
However, I still don't understand why,
and I've spoken this before also,
like I don't understand how, you know,
why there are no more DeFi chains in Cosmos.
It's because what I feel is like it's very difficult
to have, I mean, you fragment liquidity, right?
Like you, there will always be some winners,
whereas like liquidity will just like 80-20 rule,
it'll just die down after that.
Yeah, so let me try and, reading between the lines here,
let me try and break down some of the concerns raised
by Hamza and at Valentina it looks like
you have some more stuff to say
and I would love to hear it from you.
Always, always, yeah, but I'll keep it short.
I think that the main issue for me is that
when you say Cosmos does not need more DeFi chains,
I would say it needs less DeFi chains
because DeFi chains are trying to become hubs
and I think that the biggest issue for user experience
in Cosmos is that every chain is trying to become a hub.
And I think that the point is the AppGenesis
allows you to specify a certain use case.
I would argue every certain use case
is the EVM compatibility, right?
That in itself is like a use case.
And so allowing the IBC layer to be the main driver
between engagement of apps makes IBC the DeFi of Cosmos
So I think that looking at Cosmos and like
who will be the hub that wins is a zero-sum argument
and looking at Cosmos as IBC is the connector
between different applications that together
compose DeFi is the multiplier angle.
So yeah, great point, Valentin as well.
To summarize Helms's initial arguments here,
the way I understood it is there's two main axes
for which you must make considerations
for folks who want to launch their own applications,
whether that's as a smart contract built on top
of an existing chain or an app chain itself.
In the app chain case, you have this operational concern
that it's difficult to encourage
a decentralized validator sets to form around
your use case, this application that you want to build.
In addition to that, Helms, you raised concerns around
the fact that some people may not want to
actually launch a token for economic security, right?
In the case of a proof of stake based chain, right?
And in the case that they do, there's no guarantee
that the chain itself will garner
enough of a good enough bonding ratio
in order to maintain the security of the chain, right?
Contrast this to Ethereum that is secured
by billions of dollars worth of bonded staked Ethereum,
I guess is what it's called there.
Now, I guess with that in mind,
Valentin, the points that you raised
is basically that in response to what Helms has said
about, hey, actually, there is this kind of
when it takes all dynamic in DeFi.
What you were saying essentially is that actually
the hub and spoke model is not necessarily
the only model that exists within Cosmos.
And that if I'm to paraphrase a little bit,
you know, the way that I personally like to think about it
is that when people talk about, for example,
TVL is a huge metric in DeFi.
And the way somebody from the Ethereum side would see,
you know, TVL on chain A, let's say osmosis,
is that that is just osmosis TVL
and TVL on Evmos or Injective or Juno
or any other Cosmos chain.
Those are just those independent chains TVL.
But the way you're framing it is that it's not actually
TVL that is restricted to that individual chain.
But in fact, it's the real way to think about it
is this notion of shared TVL
because all this TVL can travel across IBC,
which means that every Cosmos chain has access
to every other Cosmos chains pool
of liquidity simultaneously.
You know, and I think that the kind of the next generation
is specifically those applications that connect that.
I think that is kind of the driving force
Now, I actually wanted to turn to Barney for a second,
but I don't, oh, there you are Barney.
You know, what kind of things did you have to think about
when considering whether to launch Vega
as its own application chain versus, you know,
as a DAP built on top of Ethereum
or even a roll-up built on top of Ethereum?
What went through your team's minds there?
I think there's kind of two orthogonal concepts here.
One is how we move value around between chains,
how we secure applications that operate on chain.
And I'm sort of definitely a fan of the sort of
mesh security model and the idea that actually
what you want to do is sort of, you know,
import security from nodes in the network
rather than from like some particular L1 chain.
But when we're thinking about building Vega, actually,
it starts with user experience
and it starts with how do you build something that can win?
And what I mean by that is, you know,
when I look at DeFi on Ethereum, for instance,
and I look at performance, I look at throughput,
I look at, you know, cost, gas costs and everything else.
And then I think of, you know, all of the systems
that I have used and built in the past
in the traditional centralized finance world
for, you know, trading systems and whatever and exchanges.
And you sort of ask yourself the question,
how do you build something on chain
that could challenge those systems,
that could take liquidity, not from DeFi on Ethereum,
And I think it's absolutely essential to think that way
because much of what happens in DeFi and crypto
is not sort of real world useful.
It's actually, a lot of the time, people experimenting,
people, you know, using crypto
that they were sort of gonna hold anyway
and trying out new things, which is fantastic.
And there's always gonna be the early adopters.
But when we actually take a look at many of these protocols
and services that we've built so far in DeFi,
there's not a clear route to real world adoption,
So we sort of started with the users,
with the user experience,
with the cost, with the capital efficiency.
And we said, what would it take
to build a system that could compete?
And the answer really was, you need an app chain.
The answer was you need to be able to do things like
control how fees work to secure the chain
directly related to the protocol we're building
in order to have a fee model
that makes sense for trading, for instance, for example.
So we started from that point of view
and actually, you know, designed and built, you know,
the idea of an app chain around that.
And then you start to answer questions, well,
how can we secure this chain?
And how can we get value onto this chain?
Because just because we're building a trading chain,
that doesn't mean we think everyone
is gonna suddenly use Vega as the global settlement layer
or as the place to issue their tokens.
So then we start to say, okay,
where does the value come from that's traded on this chain?
And from that perspective,
it's a very pragmatic point of view,
which is we build the app chain,
we build the most pragmatic first version that works.
So in fact, we have, you know,
connectivity into Ethereum, Ethereum bridge,
secured by the validators on our chain.
We have, you know, ERC20 is traded on chain
And we have the security of our validators
with a little bit of sort of imported,
like backstop security, if you like,
because our native tokens are actually in the ERC20.
So there's a few things from the staking point of view
on our chain that actually happen on the Ethereum chain,
rather than on our chain,
which provides a little bit of sort of additional security
But a lot of that's pragmatic.
And what I mean by that is when we look at, you know,
where we were when we started IBC was not ready
and was sort of proposal and papers coming out
But when I look at the future, it's kind of,
we want to see IBC succeed.
We want to connect into IBC.
We want to move value between chains.
We want to have the best possible security assumptions
We want to have the ability to borrow
and import security from other chains
and share security with other nodes
in the global crypto network.
So we want to see all those things happen
and to move towards that well.
But really the starting point for us
with what's the user experience that's necessary?
How does the product need to work?
How do we make it able to be in the sort of medium
to long-term competitive with TradFi?
And then once you've figured out
what's absolutely essential,
you can work out the architect you need to build around that
and build an application there, if that makes sense.
So I'm hearing a brand new trade-off here,
which is basically like this desire to go beyond
what's available on the traditional stack,
on the canonical DA settlement layer,
Maybe you don't want to run the EVM.
Maybe you want to be able to have control
over your gas fees, et cetera.
And that's what necessitates building
a whole new foundation separate from Ethereum,
but still retaining that need to transact
across the security boundaries of each respective chain.
Absolutely, that's exactly right.
And I think the thing that's exciting
about some of the sort of celestial style modular blockchains
is if you change where you put the abstraction layers,
then the ability to build sort of app chains or rollups
or whatever that import the security and data availability,
but they still have a sort of execution layer
working perhaps in a way that's more aligned
with what's needed to build the application.
There's some really exciting stuff there.
Barney, Barney's is an anecdotal evidence
of the lower bound of demand for app chains.
If you look at the development progression
for a lot of apps that have exceeded the scaling needs,
like if you take DoIdx, for example,
like the trajectory is usually,
I'm going to launch my proof of concept on Ethereum
and after I've reached a certain scale,
I need a higher throughput.
I need greater guarantees for my users
and better user experience via more competitive gas fees.
And then they move towards building their own app chain.
So there's always going to be that lower bound of demand
for app chains and it's not going to go anywhere, right?
You never see app chains then pivoting and going,
okay, well, this idea failed
and I'm going to now deploy my app
as a smart contract on Ethereum.
It doesn't go the other way.
And so to provide, to serve the demand side for this,
there needs to be some answer to the cross chain thesis
that will seamlessly integrate
with the multi-chain ecosystem,
but you don't really see evidence
of the multi-chain ecosystem becoming like being the end
all be all answer to applications in the future,
especially not when they need to scale
to hundreds of millions of users.
I mean, we're still in such a nation phase
of the crypto economy where it's still in the toy phase
and not really at the production like scaling phase
to hundreds of millions of users yet.
we do need rollups on DA layers.
We do need app chains and there needs to be
like a TCP IP layer for this entire network right now.
Yeah, I think that's a really great example.
I think DYDX is the thing that's fantastic
about the DYDX example is you can see them go through that.
We're going to build this amazing derivatives profile.
I remember when they first, guys first in their Slack
and E16Z and investor, we're going to build this amazing
derivatives protocol on Ethereum.
And then it's kind of like cooking about grown up,
we're going to do it on stockware.
And then like, okay, we're basically building
the same thing that Vega built
because we've come to the same conclusion,
which is this needs that.
And so, you know, watching someone go through that
that have a lot of users, a lot of money
and watching them go through that
and come to those conclusions,
it sort of is just evidence to me that
if there was a solution on Ethereum
or if there was a solution with just, you know,
Ethereum L2s, they would have found it and done it.
And it really shows that the right move
And I really love that framing of the lower,
what is it, the lower bound for of demand
I haven't heard that framing before,
but it totally makes sense, right?
Like even today you see people despite all of the,
you know, the despite Vitalik's warnings, I guess,
people are still building app chains
because they want that customization.
And so the real question to ask here,
isn't, you know, multi-chain versus cross-chain
because cross-chain is happening
and multi-chain is also happening.
But maybe the real question is,
how do we make cross-chain more secure
given that it's going to happen anyway,
given that developers are going to need additional features
and additional customization
and that they're going to want to build
Yeah, fantastic points made so far.
Folks, a lot of you have talked about exciting innovations
coming to, you know, the cross-chain, multi-chain space,
especially, you know, for security.
I know Changgo and Valentin, you both mentioned,
replicated security, mesh security,
inter-chain security, Hamza, you also chimed in there
and added that Polygon has been looking
at some of these solutions
and working on a ton of innovations themselves.
Curious to know, you know,
if you, if we could take out our crystal ball,
how do you see these innovations
continuing to play out over the rest of 2023
and into 2024, what are you most excited about
as we're coming to a close here?
I think that, I feel like a couple of roll-ups
are going to die and a couple app chains
are going to decide to move to replicated security
or to mesh security as bootstrapping your own value set
as, you know, Hamza's rightfully said is a ton of work.
I think that the biggest overlying meta,
I guess, prediction I would do is that most users
will probably not know what they're interacting with
a couple of years in the future.
I mean, we already started to see that in Cosmos
where most users don't understand
that the apps are using L1s by themselves, right?
And I think that is kind of the point.
Do you really care if the website you're using
is hosted on AWS or Google Cloud?
No, you only care that it's secure,
it loads fast, your data is safe,
and you can, you know, buy what you want to buy.
So my prediction is going to be abstraction away
of the technical side of all of DeFi and crypto
by stronger implementation of IBC beyond Cosmos
into EVM chains and then essentially a smooth user experience
of transferring funds between those app chains.
Anyone else have predictions for 2023, 2024
in terms of the innovations coming to this landscape?
That was quite a bold prediction, by the way, Valentin,
I'm always bold, you know me, I'm always out there.
Some rollups are going to die and transition
into being app chains themselves.
Excited to see how that plays out.
Maybe we'll have a follow-up call at the end of the year
to see if that's happened.
Yeah, one thing which I've always been interested,
although I've never seen anything,
or if people have information,
please would love to read about it,
is that flash loans are a very important part of DeFi,
especially stablecoins being stable,
and volume coming into DEXs, especially stablecoin,
stable stable DEXs, stable stable pools.
That is very important, and I've not seen,
and I've discussed this with many Cosmos people,
and the only piece of article, piece of code,
not even code, it was an idea by Zaki,
I think it was Zaki, around Cinderella tokens,
around like how can you move,
like how can you do cross-chain flash loans?
Because the situation that I see is that
if you borrow from one chain,
you have to close it on the other chain.
That is very difficult without a flash loan,
because I mean, it's not difficult,
it's like economically, it's not difficult.
To keep assets at the same point.
So if you like to ask me,
I would be curious to see how atomic,
sorry, asynchronous composability works across chains.
So yeah, that is some one or two things,
I'll be curious to see what happens.
Barney, Cengo, anything you guys are excited about?
So my brain works in seeing into the future
three to five years in advance.
I'm less of a short term person
and less of a long term, maybe past 10 years,
So in that respect, I actually want,
my brain is on how Celestia is pushing the modular stack
because, and including the mesh security thesis.
So if you blend where those two features are going,
it's in retrospect, if it's 10 years from now,
it's going to be, it looks obvious that these were
the core pieces of infrastructure
that would have enabled the internet of blockchains,
or the interchange rather.
So I'm interested to see that IBC pick up steam
and get adopted as the standardized messaging layer
for all of the ecosystems,
including between roll ups after bridges become obsolete.
And I'm interested to see technology innovate
towards the ability to do mesh secured,
doing like mesh secure and like mesh DA
kind of come to fruition because Eigen DA
is one answer to that and polygon avail,
all of these different previous side chains
and roll ups to Ethereum are now saying,
okay, well, we're going to offer just a simple DA layer
and not just a monolithical one
to kind of speak to that narrative.
So I think that's highly experimental right now,
but it's a thesis that makes total sense to me
the same way that the Cosmos thesis
of multiple app chains made sense to me in 2016.
You know, when the world was talking about,
oh, everything's going to be hosted on Ethereum.
It just doesn't make sense to me in that respect,
but the composability of DA and settlement
And I'd look at that in the future.
That kind of orthogonal argument of, you know,
regardless of whether we go multi chain or cross chain,
there is still this idea of the modular stack
where you can slot things in and out
and replace them as you mentioned.
Yeah, and there's going to be overlap anyway
and not one or the other is what it looks like.
Yeah, I think and probably to sort of expand on that
as sort of their modularity and app chains are in a way,
I think, sort of two sides of a similar coin,
which is a desire to optimize and to build something
that's maybe an order of magnitude better
than what we can do with, you know,
just say an EVM application.
And, you know, with the app chain side of things,
it's like we're building a bunch of stuff
that's very bespoke in order to get an absolutely,
you know, better trade off.
But the other side of that is the modular stack
and the modularity allowing you to select
your data availability layers or other aspects
of the sort of the on-chain environment
to make the right trade offs for any given application.
And, you know, when I think forward, you know,
maybe it's two, three years,
maybe it's a little sooner in some cases,
we've lived in an unbelievably constrained world
of building applications on chain in the, you know,
since the birth of Ethereum
and even before attempting to build things on Bitcoin.
And I think that what the, you know,
the likes of IBC, what the sort of modular stack,
what app chains bring us is probably one or two orders
of magnitude reduction in those constraints.
So basically the constraints
that app developers have been under
that have created some of the kind of on-chain solutions
and trade offs that we have today
with the Ethereum, primarily Ethereum ecosystem.
Those constraints are gonna be lifted considerably
by this new technology and by these things
coming online and becoming mainstream.
And that will just enable a huge sort of flurry
of improvements, additional, you know,
better apps, new types of app,
better experiences, better UX.
And I think it's really exciting to see
how that will enable, you know,
the next phase of whether it's DeFi,
whether it's on-chain gaming, whether it's NFT.
So I'm super excited to see that.
A breakthrough feature like account abstraction
can't currently happen on Ethereum,
at least not in protocol,
but it can be done through, you know, like EIP4337.
And sort of seeing how that can be done
in Cosmos world or in cross-chain world
definitely helps to see how that can be,
that innovation can be brought back into the fold
for Ethereum world as well.
Circling back on one last thing that Hamza mentioned,
which is a final trade-off that we hadn't discussed earlier,
which is like this atomicity slash synchrony property
that you lose when you go cross-chain.
And I think that's important to consider.
And I think there are a few teams.
I think the inter-chain scheduler idea
from the Atom 2.0 paper is somewhat in line with this,
in addition to some of the work that the MEV folks
in Cosmos, both Skip and MechaTech are thinking about also.
So Hamza, if you wanted to dig deeper into that,
I would highly recommend looking into
what those two teams are doing.
Well, folks, I think we're at time,
but I wanted to give you a chance to say some final words.
What is the most important piece of advice
you'd give to builders in the spaces
they think about cross-chain versus the multi-chain debate?
And of course, you know, how can people keep up
with what you're doing, what you're working on,
each of your respective projects?
And since I know you probably need to hop off,
What's your advice there?
I'll keep it super short.
Look at replicated security versus mesh security
versus building on an existing app chain,
And specifically look at which pipelines and liquidity
are you choosing and if those are safe for your users
to engage with after they've bridged over.
You can find me here on the Twitter,
our Quasar account is listening in at quasar.fi.
I loved it and talk to you guys soon.
Chang'o, do you want to give some advice?
So listen to the entertainer fan podcast.
That's not really advice, but a shameless plug,
but we share alpha, like nothing but pure alpha
And look at, if you are currently our delegator
on entertainer fan steak,
be on the lookout for some messaging in the future
as we're gearing up for a drop
before OsmoCon Paris in July.
Hamza, what advice would you give to builders
as they think about cross-chain slash multi-chain trade-offs
and how can people keep up with your work?
Yeah, you can definitely keep up with Polygon
by, of course, with the Polygon website,
Polygon.technology and of course the Discord
and mainly the blog that has update
for those EKVM updates are coming
and there is a major update on the POS chain as well
But yeah, I'm pretty excited about the state of rollups
and I'm pretty excited about the ERC standards as well.
There are few standards that allow very good composability,
multi-chain composability like 4626 vault tokens
and I'm pretty excited about that, how that takes place
and like how you can move yield-bearing assets across chains
and I think that will be a building block
of the very near multi-rollup future.
Yeah, I mean, what advice would you give to builders?
Yeah, the advice I would give is to sort of,
I think we're still at the very beginning
and so whereas in all the time if you're building
and developing things, using tried and tested technology
is a great way to do things
and you're always looking for the cutting edge
is not necessarily the best thing to do.
I think in this space right now where we are,
there's so much coming that's gonna have such a sea change
to the ability of builders to deliver really high value
to their users with great UX that paying attention
to this new stuff that's coming
and getting it up out front of it
is gonna be incredibly valuable and it's really worth doing.
And if you want to keep up with Vega,
check out vega.xyz or check out my Twitter
at Barnaby or at Vega project poll
or check out our Discord, cheers.
And as the age old adage goes, we're so early.
Thank you to all our speakers for chiming in
with their thoughts and to all of our audience members
This was a great panel, great space.
As always, this conversation was kicked off
by an article we put out,
revisiting Vitalik's cross chain versus multi-chain thesis.
So encourage you to give that a read.
It's pinned to the top of this Twitter space.
And also, if you enjoyed the content here,
chime in at Consensus where you'll be able to listen
to more big brains, share their thoughts on this
and other topics at EVM Next,
which is an event focused on the future
of cross-chain smart contracts
and the EVM more generally.
Thanks again to everybody.
We'll have multiple follow-up calls to this one, I'm sure.
And we'll see you next time.