We're going to take another minute or so just to make sure everyone gets up on stage.
Pedro, if you could bring David up and then I think, yeah, another minute or so we can
Yep, David, you should have received the invite already and yeah, I'll add it to everyone else.
So, Rob, how are you doing, man?
I'm living the dream, man.
Just enjoying good weather before we go to Denver, which is supposed to be very, very
Where is your good weather?
I booked it down to Miami and I've been hanging there for a little bit, but where are you?
I am in the Bay Area, so like 30 minutes from SF.
I mean, it's still just a little chilly.
Are you north of SF or south?
I'm in like the same area, too.
I am east, so I live in Haiti, actually, so like, yeah, how about you?
I'm around the Napa area, it's the Sonoma.
But, you know, there we go, we got David in here.
I think we're still waiting on a couple of others, right, do you know?
I don't know, David, is the fuel account joining or Rob, is the movement account joining?
We can probably get started, too.
Okay, let me message that.
I think it's just me from our end.
We can get the ball rolling, then, and then, you know, if they jump on, you could bring
Just wanted to kick this off.
We got a space talking all about next-gen VMs.
We got, you know, me representing Fluent.
We got David from Fuel, to Rob from Movement, and, of course, the main man behind the curtain,
Pedro, in the Modular Media account.
And thank you, everybody in the audience, for being here.
Super pumped to talk about this.
I mean, we want to keep it kind of casual, to be honest.
Like, we're going to start doing more of these spaces where we'll just hop on and jam about
And then, you know, if people have questions or comments, or just, like, specific topics
they want us to dive into, or collectively dive into, you know, just ping one of us,
raise your hand, whatever.
So I guess just to start, we, actually, Movement, one quick note, Movement, Fuel, and Fluent
are all also doing a, the VM Wars podcast.
You guys might have seen some teasers in the past few weeks, and then the most recent,
sorry, the first episode was actually released, you know, no more than a week ago.
And we are going to be, there's a lot of cool stuff in the pipeline.
You're going to, if you're interested in learning about next-gen VMs, I'm just going to take
a second to show that real quick.
We're going to be coming out with a lot of content this year.
From our vantage point, 2024 is the year of the VM, like, we think that there's a tremendous
design space that we're just scratching the surface on, you know, especially on top of
Ethereum, but it does extend beyond that, just general, like, more expressive, boundless
computation environments.
And so we want to create enough space to kind of flesh out that design space and, you know,
like chat about it together.
So without further ado, just want to introduce to Rob and David.
Hey, guys, Rob, you want to want to start just kind of talk, give a little intro that
David will go and I'll set the stage with some questions.
Maybe I met him back when I was at Edge and Node.
But yeah, a little about myself, I was before I got to crypto enterprise, selling software.
And back in 2017, I really wanted to work in crypto because I was like, man, this thing
My first purchase was Ripple.
I've made, you know, I've repented from my sins since then.
And I wanted to get into crypto.
There's only like marketing intern roles back then because it was all devs that said I don't
need I don't need anyone except for devs to make a good product.
Thankfully, the market has matured since then.
I talked to Koop and Rushi, like, actually, I think today is the six month anniversary
of when I joined the team or it's like within a day.
So yeah, it's been crazy how much growth there's been just in the space and like this whole
modular thesis and everything that's happened, you know, talking about next gen VMs.
Like this really wasn't on mainstream cryptos radar, I think six months ago.
That I'm just focused on architecting our ecosystem, you know, making sure that developers
are happy, builders are happy, and that we can create a really exciting environment.
And also like push the the limits of technology.
Now, I'm not the tech guy, as Dino will tell you.
But I understand it from a user perspective, because I'm like a on chain D gen type of
That's how I got into crypto.
And so for me, I'm excited to see how is all this going to work at the end of the day
for my cousin, I think we're far from grandma, everyone says grandma, let's let's leave,
you know, a boiler out for a little bit.
Let's focus on like that cousin that doesn't understand tech.
And once he gets it, you know, that that's what I'm worried that that's what is top of
Like, how is he going to be able to, you know, utilize crypto?
So hopefully, that's a little tiered into like me and movement.
Love it, David, you want to go?
Yeah, my name is David Myhall.
And I've been a builder in the space for a number of years, just mostly in the Ethereum
And, yeah, I mean, I can I got into the space, because I was like, stoked on what you can
build with this technology, and especially like the impact this could have on the world
and kind of built a lot of stuff across, across DeFi, you know, dabbled into some,
some kind of adjacent spaces there.
And yeah, now I'm working at fuel labs, kind of been part of the project since the beginning,
but have been full time for almost a year.
And yeah, I mean, why and I don't know how much I should kind of dive into fuel there.
But I guess I'll just say I'm kind of like, it's called being a part of fuel to kind
of be like the provide like the builder perspective, I think.
And, you know, we're all kind of trying to build platforms for developers to kind of
come build cool stuff, build stuff that wasn't possible before.
And so, you know, I love fuel being a part of, like, getting to build kind of the platform
that I want to build upon that that would be fun for me to build on and, and also it's
been fun just exploring the rest of space, you know, with, with kind of the podcast
that I'm doing with Dino and Rushi and, you know, in some other, just in general, kind
of like exploring these different execution environments and kind of seeing like, which
ones of them are fun to build on which ones offer new things.
So yeah, very excited to keep exploring those ideas with you guys.
So let's start this off by just kind of taking a walk through history and how we got to this
moment in time where next gen VMs are kind of like, you know, starting to blossom.
I'll ask, I'll ask you, David, I'm curious to start from your perspective, like, how
is it played out till now?
Like, why has it been so far, like a few years worth of copy pasting EVM chains and all of
a sudden, I mean, it's been, you know, a number of years and obviously roll ups and
zk and some of the scaling technology is just starting to mature, really.
So maybe that has something to do with it.
But in general, I want to know, how do you think about, like, you know, the path dependency
that that got us here, like, why is now the right time for these next gen VMs?
Yeah, I think it's exactly that you're kind of getting to, like, I think a lot of the
underlying tech has been just reaching maturity, like recently, I mean, if you think about,
you know, the last 10 years kind of since since the theorem, I think the theorem white
paper was 2014, so we're right around 10 years, you know, Ethereum launched with like
saying like, hey, we're going to transition to like proof of stake.
And you know, once Ethereum kind of got like up and running, well, it was like all about
this transition to proof of stake, you had a lot of other projects, like building different
types of consensus mechanisms, you had, you know, Tendermint over in the Cosmos ecosystem,
you got a bunch of other alternatives.
So there's been like a huge focus on just like layer one consensus.
And then, you know, with as like research turned to scalability, like, there was the
work on how do we build just roll ups in general, like, what is how do you build a optimistic
fraud proof, you know, some of that work is still undergoing.
How do you build good, you know, zk proofs that that well, first of all, how could you
build, like, zk proofs that are useful in general, and how do you start to scale that
up to do like really complex computation.
And it seems like we're, you know, we're certainly not done with that.
But like, we've got Arbitrum, you know, and Arbitrum has been live for like a couple years
by now, it's run pretty steady, it's getting pretty mature.
We've got like zk evms, you know, you've got polygon and scroll, well, so polygon and zk
sync kind of coming out there, and then, you know, a few more good zk vms in the pipeline.
It's like, okay, we've, we've solved a lot of like the underlying like infrastructure
So now let's start like, let's start experimenting with the platform layer, like, let's can we
build different virtual machines that have different properties for developers?
Do we want to go very specialized, we want to go very generalized, like, there's a huge
And yeah, I think that's, that's kind of what's been opening up and also, because we're doing
this as roll ups, like, you can kind of experiment a little bit better on top of Ethereum, you
can kind of tap into liquidity, tap into the security, it's not as big of a lift to kind
of like, do something that's quite different than everybody else, whereas in the past,
you would see like, layer ones that tried different things, and they didn't go very
far, because, you know, it was hard to hard to track liquidity, and you've got this massive
Yeah, things seem to be lining up for for these new VMs to take off.
Yeah, no, that's, that's exactly how I see it.
Certainly, I think it was true from Eigen layer who framed it really, really nicely in
classic Sri Ram style, where it's like kind of it kind of goes hand in hand with the modular
movement where you look at like the consensus and social layer, and then you kind of look
at like the the execution layer.
And I think the I think the words that he used was like, starting like, almost like
winning at the consensus layers, like starting a revolution, which is like a totally
different skill set than kind of like novel technology, like design and, and kind of like,
more like technical innovation.
And like, that, that really stuck with me, because I do feel like a lot of the because
the scaling technologies like weren't ready, a lot of that innovation was just kind of
like blended with the the layer ones themselves.
And it's almost like getting escape velocity on the consensus and social layers, like a
prerequisite almost, because you're right, David, like, that's what you attract the
liquidity and network effects.
And then you can kind of like have your the execution layer blossom.
But it seemed like all the old ones that tried to blend those two together, you know,
didn't really solve like the first of those two problems.
So I think the modularity is like a huge, at least from our perspective, like a huge
unlock there. And that goes hand in hand with actually, you know, being able to deploy
this tech and the maturity of ZK and solutions like that.
So not just ZK, obviously, just like the role of technology in general.
I mean, to that point there, I think one of the cool things modularity is like ZK versus
like optimistic versus versus being like a layer one might not even always be the
discussion. You know, right now it's still pretty synonymous.
But like if we're like focusing on the VM, it might not even matter so much like you can
choose kind of which consensus mechanism.
And I kind of think of these like proving mechanisms as as like a type of consensus
mechanism is when you want to read.
It's a great point. Yeah, I mean, I think the lines are obviously starting to blur in a
lot of ways. But no, it's interesting seeing how it played out.
Sorry for the dogs barking in the background.
It looks like Coops just joined us. Coops moves.
How are you doing? Yo, yo, thanks for having me.
It's getting rugged by spaces a little bit earlier.
So happy to have everything sorted and be able to join you.
Love it, man. Why don't you give a little little intro, Coops?
I don't think we've had you on modern media spaces before.
You know, give us give us some context here.
Well, firstly, thank you for having me.
It's a pleasure to be up here with fluent and fuel teams as well and to be
participating within modular media spaces.
So from my side, I was originally building a SPAC DAO vehicle with this fund of funds.
Funnily enough, was building and for during the bull market and then DeFi during the bear.
And so in creating this, you know, for this fund, we wanted for funds within their
network to be able to more frictionlessly raise, deploy capital, as well as create
derivatives markets for these traditionally very illiquid investments in the energy
space by having like a private KYC AML platform.
And the pain point that I experienced in building that was the same pain point that
META experienced in building their Libra project and their private blockchain, which is
that solidity is just not very optimized for these asset oriented use cases.
So from there, when I came across the move language, it was like like fate, if you will.
And so dropped out of college, my co-founder dropped out of college as well for us to be
some of the first move builders taking a big bet on the language, fell in love with it,
like realized that it could completely change the game of how we develop smart contracts within
Web 3. But in building with move, notice this huge pain point with regard to how the
language came to market and that one, launching in a bear market to being after this wave
where there's already 20 different L1s, 50 different L2s, and so very difficult value
proposition, as well as in which not having very much connections to other blockchain
networks meant that bootstrapping was very difficult for the early builders, as well as
there not being as many notably like there wasn't any airdrops, there wasn't anything
incentivizing the builders and the traders to come.
And so that's where modularity is really dear to my heart and really dear to the heart of
every move builder, because we want to be able to build with both the very cutting edge
technology without being cut off from financial and consumer markets within Web 3. And
modularity is what makes that possible. It's also what makes it possible for us to not need
to choose between EVM or move VM, we can have both. And so that's one of the things that
we're pioneering at Movement Lab. So really is an honor to be here.
Amazing. Yeah, so we got these these different types of next gen VMs, kind of all finding
their niches in the in the, you know, emerging ecosystem. And I want to, I want to like dive a
layer deeper, right? So like, how do you guys do we got this, like, total design space of VMs
that we're talking about? And with that, I'm sure comes different ways of kind of evaluating
those VMs and different kind of competitive dimensions. And I mean, in some ways, all these
are competing in some ways, none of them are competing, like you're targeting different
optimizing for different use cases or users. So just like, let's explore that design space a
little bit. Like, what do you what do you guys see, as the different kind of like competitive
dimensions, or, yeah, interesting competitive dimensions? Is it just like, historically,
everyone's focused on TPS? I know you're mentioning language group. Maybe maybe you got
other like, how do you guys think about this? And to Rob, you can even feel free to, you know, look
at this through the lens of a dev, like some of the devs that you talked to and what they're most
interested in. So like, this can upper grabs for anybody. How do you guys think about this?
Yeah, well, one thing I'll say, so the last question you had asked was a little bit about like,
why is it like this whole next gen VM taking off now? And I think part of it is that historically,
like, EVM is like literally a theory of virtual machine, right? And so if you think about the
history of Ethereum, you had all these Bitcoin maxis with laser eyes, like, talking crap, saying
this all bull crap, you know, hating on Ethereum. And so then what happened, you know, and they're
making fun of the transaction speed. And so then all the we'll call them ETH maxis for the sake of
this conversation. They defended it. No, that's not a that's not a bug. That's a feature. We want
it to be slow. And so people had to like had no choice but to defend it. And then now that the
modular thesis has been presented, and that we can actually abstract away like the bad parts of
the EVM, but still like, you know, use a theorem for consensus or settlement. So the ETH people are
still happy. There's still people that have forgotten that they don't have to defend the VM
itself. And so now that that's happening, that's why we're seeing all this innovation. But I still
think that one of the issues that a lot of these teams run into is a lot of the like, wherever
people invest money, things will sprout. Like if you remember, AI was a joke until like recently,
like 10 years ago, people like oh, AI is going to do this. If you remember the Terminator 2 movie,
people were like, yeah, okay, sure. Maybe it'll tell me what kind of milk I like in my latte,
but nothing more than that. But like, when a breakthrough happens, it happens at like lightning
speed, it just hockey sticks. And so I think for the VM space, once we get and we're seeing it now,
like once we get a lot of institutional money, not feeling that they're, you know, committing
treason in their ETH bags that they can now deploy on these next gen VMs and really support
builders and ecosystems, I think that is where we're going to see a lot of growth. And so from the
developer side, if we can bring in a lot of that institutional help, you know, know how and of
course, money and capital, I think that is essentially the final ingredient. It's already
happening. But that's where it is because a lot of these builders have great ideas. And so for
them, being able to actually build a team and deploy and like be able to feed themselves,
I think is step one. And then the other aspect of it is that because this is so new, we don't even
know the use cases, right? Like, everyone's had like been thinking in this little box at EVM and
like all the limitations that it has. And now that you're like, open the box and like, oh, wait,
there's like a blue sky and there's trees. And now it's like, okay, now go build something cool. So
I think a lot of the use cases still have yet to be discovered. Yeah, I think that's like a
important point of like, what's going to make people like use new VMs is going to be the new
use cases that get unlocked. Like, I don't know, like everyone gets kind of frustrated with
solidity. But at the end of the day, like it has so much network effects, like there's so much
tooling, there's so much like you Google a solidity question that people answered it,
there's just like a ton of code, like GPT knows how to write good, good solidity smart contracts. So
you know, it's kind of like the JavaScript of the blockchain world. So I certainly don't think it's
going to go away. But I think what will change is people will start building things that you
couldn't build with the EVM people start like addressing use cases that couldn't be addressed
with with EVM blockchain. So, you know, again, like, arbitrary, you know, works pretty good today.
It's fast, it's not super expensive. But, you know, with with kind of these new VMs,
you know, like, at least as I feel like I'm talking to projects, we're like, hey, like,
we want to build something, we just can't really do it in the EVM, even in like a fast EVM, like
arbitrary or something. So they have to look at, you know, these kind of newer VMs, like, like kind
of fuel and other VMs or, or look at other like all ones like Solana and stuff like that. So that's
I think kind of that's like what's going to like unlock people actually like using this stuff.
Just for the record, I'm not hating on Ethereum. Vitalik is love, Vitalik is life. Okay, I would
just say, you know, in terms of use cases in the future, just to whom it may concern.
Just the lead of the talent. So Rob, I'm still laughing at you saying it's not for Abuela yet,
and it's for your cousin. Does your cousin have a name? I want to address your cousin when we're
talking about this. I have many cousins, brother. They're all the ones that bought like Bitcoin at
the top after they finally listened to me. And then they're pissed off like I knew I shouldn't
have listened to you. But somehow they have Shiba Inu bags, like for some reason, everyone has those
or Elon doge Mars or whatever the hell. I don't even know how they hear about these quotes. I
actually want to learn how the hell do these guys market because I need to learn a thing or two from
these guys. Like how does everyone know what these tokens are? So I don't know. My guilt that
but he's been like diving into the Cardano ecosystem because I just don't get like,
you meet like a normie and they're like, oh, like Cardano seems like it's like the future. And
you know, you can hate it, but there's something working in their marketing. So
you got to cut it. Bro, we all our founders need to ride horses. I think that's the secret.
Yeah, there's something to be said about like the Cardano
base, like very strong, very cohesive. I'm within that. But yeah, I was talking so much about crypto
during the last bull market, like all my friends, all my family, like I pray to God that not everyone
like bought the top. Yes, no, I mean, they're definitely doing something right. Maybe watch some
Netflix miniseries on how to how to start a cult. There's like, there's there's some of that, like
that is just so inherent to crypto and it carries like, it's kind of sustainable. Like it really
does. It's very interesting. And there's actually like some opportunities just to kind of flip that
around and not poke fun, but rather say like, there is there is some of that that carries long
enough that if a project does kind of like get their stuff together and kind of adapt on the
technology side or on like the broader community building side, like it's sometimes it's actually
like a way to bootstrap. It's interesting, but I want to I want to zoom in with to the developers
that we're trying, we're all trying to onboard to these next-gen VMs. And David started to talk a
little bit about, you know, like what the devs are interested in. And I wanted to see, like when you
guys are talking to devs, are there, does it take a lot for them to say, oh, I don't, you know, I'm
going to try something else beyond Solidity or the VM. Is there other types of like just like cognitive
friction? Is it is there no friction? And then it's just a matter of like, okay, I want to I already
know that like sway or move or in our case, like some of the general purpose languages are best for
my application. And then it's just a matter of overcoming the friction to get there. Or is it
some kind of like cognitive friction even before that you have to like convince them to expand
beyond Solidity or the VM.
Okay, I'll take this one and then I'll hand it off because I feel like I've been talking a lot.
But my I always go for the lowest hanging fruit. Like the example I always give is like,
if someone doesn't believe in shirts, I don't want to have to convince them of shirts and then
convince them to buy my shirt, right? I want people who already believe in the concept of shirts.
And in this example, a lot of it is our people who are open minded different languages or that
they already know in our example, let's say move, obviously, you don't need to, you know,
code and move to develop, I mean, to launch on movement. But I there's just so many people that
they they want to build something cool. And they're willing to like, you know, learn a language or
learn a new, you know, like a template or paradigm by which they can deploy. They're open to it. It
just they don't even know. So I think right now there's a huge education problem of like,
and I'm sure this is like part of business development and just marketing and outreach
in general in cryptos. Like, how do we get these builders to know what they can build,
what support systems are already being built for them? Like, you know, like they don't know about
grants, they don't know about like hackathons. Like, how do we get them to understand that we
want them to succeed? And that there are people who are dedicated to their success. So I think
from my side, that's stage number one. And then stage number two is like, hey, maybe, you know,
I know you already know this language, but have you considered learning this other language? So
at least from my side, I don't feel like I've hit the cap of just people who are looking for
support in what they're already building. Now, we're, we're seeing the same thing. I mean, honestly,
the, the overarching idea, I think is just best tool for the job. Like, I don't think any one
language or programming model or whatever, it's going to end up being like the best fit for
every single application. And that's why I think it's as these like newer use cases emerge, it'll
be interesting to see like, what's best for for which thing but on like, kind of macro looking
at it across the board. But if you zoom into like an individual dev, for the most part, they'll
know what's best for their use case. And that's why you're right. You don't know, like they know,
hey, I want to buy like this kind of shirt. And you say, Oh, hey, we were able to offer that kind
of shirt on a shirt on Ethereum now, like, and so we're not really seeing a lot of like cognitive
friction there either. It's just about educating them and showing them like what's now possible.
I'm curious to see on on the field side as well.
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely interesting. I was, when you asked the question, I was like, I'm
curious, like, you know, which developers you guys are talking to. The developers that have kind of
come into our ecosystem, I'd say that there's some that are kind of already coming from the non-EVM
ecosystem, like we've got a couple projects from, like there were Solana builders, and some that
have built on, yeah, like some other types of VM. So those are kind of people who have already
like stepped outside of the status quo, I guess you could say of being like, Oh, like, I'm going
to build Solidity because everyone's just building on Solidity and, you know, building on Solidity
for years. So that's kind of like an easier sell to those people. Those are the people who
you're saying like, you know, best tool for the job, like those are the people who are going to
say like, Hey, I'm going to build something. Let me just go find the best tool for the job.
And yeah, I guess some of the other devs are the ones who are really like running into a wall,
like trying to, they want to build something and they're like, I just can't build this in the
EBM. And I think those are actually some of the coolest ones that are like, they've got some cool
idea. They're like looking into like, you know, how do I, how do I build like an OP stack chain
where I like try to add in my extra logic and do weird things because I'm just trying to get the
EBM to do something it's not meant to do. And then they just kind of realize like, you know,
actually, it's probably easier to like learn a new language in a new stack than like,
trying to like bend the EBM over. So yeah, again, and I think what I'm really excited about is those
type of projects, like when someone comes out with some, some application or some rollup that's like
using, doing something that people haven't seen before. I think that's what's going to like,
open people's mind and say, Oh, man, I want to, I want to build an app like that. That's, you know,
it's just like that, but I want to make like, put my own spin on it. And, you know, to do that,
I'll have to use fuel or movement or fluid or something like that. So once people start seeing
those applications, I think that's what's going to really like, lead to kind of the expansion
of developers in these ecosystems. Yeah. And just to follow up on that, actually,
how do you guys view the future of like the VM landscape? Do you like if we zoom out 10,
20 years from now, do you see the EVM still continuing to dominate market share? Or do you
see like, obviously, you might be biased here, but how do you see like, like the adoption of
next gen VMs playing out? And like, as a follow up, like, how do you envision the adoption of
adoption curve for next gen VMs? Are there specific use cases or industries where you
anticipate seeing early adoption? Like, yeah, just an open question.
I think the EVM is definitely still here in 10 years. Like technology is like just bad at
technology is sticky, especially like things like that are on the platform layer, like the EVM.
I mean, you've got everyone's still using JavaScript, people are still like, look at banks
are still running off like cobalt and stuff like that. So I don't think it's going to go away. I
think it'll definitely shrink in market share, but it'll still be around. But yeah, here's what you
guys think. I mean, I completely agree. It's definitely very hard to zoom out 20 or 30 years,
but just like for the foreseeable future, I don't think it's I don't think salinity or the EVM is
going anywhere. There's there's going to be some type of there's always going to be some type of
dynamic where something is built on EVM. I'm sorry, on the Ethereum L1. And like somebody just thinks
it's, you know, lowest risk to just use like that same code that has kind of lived the effect on
some type of L2. I mean, there's there's going to be that for I think a very long time. So I don't,
I don't think it's going to disappear. And nor do I think that it really like matters just because
maybe I'm just like hyper bullish on like how many applications will end up going on chain and what
chains will be used for. So it's like I do really think that there I think the EVM and
salinity ecosystems will just continue to grow for some for some things. And so will everything else.
Okay, I guess for my side, so like in 10 to 15 years, it's very hard right to think about that
far the future. I'm assuming Taylor Swift will be president. So that's one thing I'm pretty
confident in. But when it comes to the VM stuff, it really depends on how much groundwork we lay,
I think during this next few years, to be honest, because if you look at like, you know, we talked
about institutional players, they're using software from like, you know, you know, early 2000s,
because it's just too painful to like switch it out. And so if you know, if we're able to do a
lot of building, let's call it this bull run or this next wave, then yes, I do think that we're
going to build things that won't be like, move like extracted, like 10, 15 years down the line.
But the question is, is that like, how sticky are these things going to be? And then of course,
there's always like the whole blockbuster blockbuster and Netflix type situation where
something comes out of nowhere. One thing from the EVM side, or at least from the Ethereum side,
that I think everyone has, like, their ears are perking up and they're on high alert,
but no one's really saying it that much is what's going to happen, like, with the whole restaking.
And like, you know, let's say, you know, there's a whole big fear about Lido, like, what happens
if there's a hack in Lido, or are they going to halt the chain? So like, I think there's a lot of
things that we're now like exploring and discovering. It's like untreaded waters type of thing,
uncharted territory, I should say. And so I think if that plays out well, I do think it's going to
be here to stay for the first, like, as long as like foreseeable future. But I think that is a big
test is like, how is all that going to play out? I've got kind of another question to flip this
around a little bit is, what do you guys think the EVM looks like in 10 years? Because, you know,
obviously, like, there's a lot of really cool experimentation happening in all these, you know,
kind of new VMs. And, you know, development of the EVM is super slow, but it does develop. So
how do you guys think the EVM is going to change? And, you know,
what's it going to look like? Or does it just totally stagnate?
It's a good question. I mean, I think you're gonna think we're gonna see, like, a full spectrum
of permutations. Like, I do think that there will always be use cases, like I said before,
where, like, people will want to stay kind of as close as possible to the to how something is
runs on the on Ethereum L1, just to like, just to sleep better at night, like, whether whether
it's well founded or not, I do think like, if you have some code that just like simply has not
changed for for quite a bit of time and an execution environment that has just not changed
for quite a bit of time, like, as the EVM will as the Ethereum L1 will probably ossify more and more,
I think there will be some piece of line there. So I don't know, I would probably say, like,
the super, super EVM compatible environments will end up being like, pretty stagnant over time. But
I think that there will even be a lot of experimentation all along that spectrum towards
like, highly like parallel, like, you can't parallelize the EVM, like, clearly based on
the work that like, Monad is doing. And I've heard plenty of ideas from like, researchers,
even like in the in the core Ethereum ecosystem over the past, like, hey, we could do these
five different things to make it more performant. And like, that should all those things should be
experimented on at L2. And so I really think we'll see like, a blossoming of everything,
we're just getting started with like, that design space, I think it'll be orders of magnitude,
larger of a design space than we're even thinking right now.
I think, you know, if we're talking about applications that are enabled by these next
gen VMs, I mean, do any come to mind? I think there was you who brought it up, David, like,
are there any that you're most excited about or, or if there's nothing that specifically comes to
mind, because you're excited about them all, maybe, maybe I'll ask kind of a second optional
question of like, what do you see is like, the next like right around the corner, that's going
to be unlocked from with some of these next gen VMs, it could just be fuel specifically, but in
general, and then versus the longer time, like, what's going to be unlocked in the next year
versus unlocked in the next five years? Next year, I think is the easier one that,
you know, one of the things that just a lot of these VMs in general are doing, especially
compared to the EVM is bringing performance. So when you bring performance, what does that
unlock? Like, what kind of applications are, you know, priced out of Ethereum layer one right now?
You know, you'll see a lot of like a lot of this innovations already happening in
like the Solana ecosystem, but we'll kind of see these applications, maybe more stuff in gaming,
more stuff in social, in DeFi, just kind of like stuff that takes advantage of like high amounts of
compute and high amounts of speed. Those are the things that are going to take off a bit more.
In the longer term, yeah, it's harder to know. I mean, one area I'm certainly like
interested in is projects that are like going outside the VM and just like modifying
like the node themselves, like modifying the stack to add custom functionality. This is kind
of like the Cosmos vision, I guess, like, you know, build your own chain, like have full control
over it, but like do it in like a high performance way and do it in like on in the modular ecosystem
where you're still like, you know, settling on Ethereum, you know, kind of integrated with the
rest ecosystem. So I think that's kind of that's what that's all I can see for now. But I'm sure
like it's a lot of different directions they can go in. Yeah, what are you guys thinking?
I think you I think literally as you before even said Solana, that's kind of what I was thinking of
was like, dude, like who would have thought that it would become the shit, the shit coin trading,
meme coin trading chain, you know, all this crazy turnover and all this crazy activity.
So I think it's one of those things where like once the once the technology gets built up,
and then the use cases will come, I know we always want like the use case to spearhead the usage. But
I think a lot of times what builders think people care about or founders think people care about,
they don't end up caring about. Or maybe they enter once they reiterate, they're like, Ah,
now that there's the PMF. And so I don't even think like even the most biggest bullish Solana
people like on crypto Twitter and stuff, they weren't talking about like, Oh, wow, this the
chain for like meme coin traders, it just happened. So I think we're going to see a lot of that where
just serendipity of things just kind of happening. Like maybe the NFT chain doesn't even exist yet.
I don't know. You know, I mean, I saw someone, if guy on crypto Twitter say that he can see a world
where Ethereum is just for settlement NFTs. And because it's so expensive that the NFTs are like
the Rolex NFTs, right, like the expensive ones, they live on Ethereum. So like, yeah, that's how
I think about it. We're just like, just keep building. And it will be interesting to see like,
where does gaming fall into this gambling, you know, just meme coin trading, all that type of stuff.
It's a great point. Like I love, you know, totally would talk about how he like envisioned Solana as
like, oh, this chain that they could put the NASDAQ on. And then like, you know, especially last
cycle, it was like the place for like trading like shit NFTs. So you really never know.
It's always a hard thing, I feel like when you're building a platform. I mean, I've even noticed
this in the past life in web two, we're like, you know, building developer platforms and tools,
and like you, you kind of have a hunch that, you know, it might be good for certain use cases. So
in some sense, you want to highlight that and kind of educate people on what's possible,
but you don't want to kind of pigeonhole on the developers, because obviously you,
you can't possibly foresee the kind of like breath of experimentation. And like, you can't
like predict that, you know, the even more creative and novel solutions people will build. So it's
kind of just like a balancing act. Yeah, I guess ultimately, like the VM game is kind of about
giving developers freedom, right? Like, you want to expand the possibilities of what you can do,
you don't really, you can have some ideas about what they're going to do with it. But you ultimately
like, people are gonna like, come up with new ideas that you never, you didn't expect. But yeah,
just just opening up the possibilities for what totally. Alright, so I think I think we could
probably, you know, gear up to wrap. Is there any if there's any questions from the audience, like
we can, we can, you know, consider calling some people up. I want to be respectful in everybody's
time. So maybe we have some some closing out in the next handful of you know, next few minutes.
One last question as we wait for potential requests to speak. How talk about customizations
for each of your respective VMs. Are there any is there any one customization that strikes you as
like most surprising or most interesting or something that most people are just not aware of
right now? I can jump in. I'm not totally sure what you mean by customization. Like,
yeah, so let me let me just, I'll explain further. So maybe it's some type of novel like
precompiled that somebody deployed and you're like, Oh, like, that's actually fascinating. Like,
you might not have thought that that would be configured in this way. And somebody just did it
or, you know, maybe some other type of Yeah, just any kind of customization to like the VM itself or
pretty open ended any deployment that you guys have had.
Yeah, so I was gonna say like, one of the feature that I'm most like,
excited about with fuels, we have this idea of predicates, which is kind of like,
like this, like stateless, stateless, like arbitrary account where you can have like
arbitrary code backing it. And yeah, again, it's we're struggling to like figure out how to
communicate it because it's, it's kind of a tough idea. But it unlocks a lot of like really interesting
things. Like, the most obvious one is it's kind of how account abstraction works on fuel is you can,
you can put like arbitrary code in an account and have it be like any type of wallet. But you can
use it for like people are building order book exchanges out of it, they're building ways for
like, you know, different types of gas payment and stuff like that. So yeah, I don't think I did a
great job of explaining it there. But if anyone's curious, like predicates is, is I think one of
the coolest features in fuel. I will speak in terms of like integrations, like from the BD side,
so like, when I first joined movement, I didn't even know there was a world in which we would have
like an IBC integration where like, cosmos teams could have access to movement. And that makes me
think, what are the future integrations that I had no idea were even possible, right? Because again,
this is a new frontier. But like, you know, those type integrations were like, man, I didn't think
about that, right? Like, you know, thinking about native USDC, right? That's going to be enabled via
noble via the union IBC integration. Like, that wasn't even on my radar until very recently,
right? And so right before we kind of had this conversation. So I'm actually more excited. I'm
very excited about what is the future hold? Like, what are these new, like potential Legos that are
going to be unearthed in the next six months, that maybe all the chains end up just, you know,
using one liquidity hub, and then we all you know, pull from it? I don't know. But yeah, that's,
that's a good question. Yeah, for for us. It was, what's been interesting is seeing how people have
wanted to do things across multiple different programming languages, and even across multiple
different programming models. Like we were we were digging into one use case, and it was like,
almost like a biometrics use case where there was some kind of decay.
Basically, some some like biometric device was like, kind of generating a zk proof of it was
like a proof of personhood thing where they were generating the zk proof, they wanted to be like,
verified in like, arbitrary Rust code. And that would sort of be like an L3, like a verifiable
compute, like L3, no smart contracts, nothing. But that would be communicating with, you know,
a solidity smart contract on our general purpose L2, that would then be kind of like managing the
NFPs and kind of doing the the back end logic. And I honestly, things like that, and kind of
starting to explore how kind of expressive you can get with novel VMs and kind of like new L2
instances, or L3 instances, has kind of started to blow my mind even like even when I'm working on
the thing. I was like, I didn't I didn't think about that beforehand. I mean, I I've just been
so up until this point, consumed in kind of smart contract land, that, you know, exploring
as possible with just verifiable compute and how easy it can make it for developers to build,
interacting with kind of the more kind of crypto native block programming paradigms,
really kind of got my juices flowing. I look and I don't see any hands being raised Pedro,
I don't know if you had any requests, but if not, I think we can we can probably wrap it up. I know
we went to the 45. Yep, no requests so far. But yeah, if anyone has any questions,
go ahead and raise your hands, bring you upstage. Well, I just want to say I'm looking forward to
seeing everyone that's going to Denver in Denver, we will have some movement merch, and I hope to
do like a full Dino, if you're coming with some merch, we're gonna do like a jersey swap where
we hold each other swag up, take a picture, you know, type of thing. Love that. David, same for
you. We will definitely have merch and we can definitely do the jersey swap. Perfect. Looking
forward to it. All right, guys, cool. So I think we can close it out. Thank you. Thank you, Coops,
David, to Rob, Pedro, and a special thanks to everybody in the audience. Really appreciate
you joining us. Feel free to shoot over follow up questions, ideas for future spaces. We want to
start doing this more often and just having like a casual conversation going. And yeah, thank you,
everybody. Thank you. I'm doing everyone. Bye. Bye.