I am joined by Tyler Tarsi, the CTO at Omni Labs and Cooper Madroni who works at Offchain Labs.
Thank you gents for joining.
Let's go over to you guys.
Let's go over to you guys for some brief intros and then we'll kick off the agenda.
Tyler, can you hear me okay?
We may be having a predictable technical difficulties with spaces but we will see here.
Yeah, maybe I can take things off in the meantime.
My name is Cooper Madroni.
My name is Cooper Madroni.
I'm a product manager at Offchain Labs.
I mainly work on the Orbit product which is our solution to let people launch roll ups on the Orbit tech stack.
I also work with our key partners to support their integration into that tech stack and also the ecosystem in general.
Super excited to be in the spaces to talk about our integration with Omni.
I just sent Tyler a message.
Hopefully we can get him.
Great to meet you and thanks for hopping on, Cooper.
I can introduce myself as well while Ryan is figuring out his mic from the Omni account.
I'm one of the co-founders of Omni.
I'm focused on the technical side and we've been working on Omni for about a year and a half now.
I started as DeFi developers.
We had worked with Arbitrum a little bit back then and went through a bit of a journey towards where we are today.
Excited to get into it and talk more about Omni.
Yeah, we're going to have Tyler rejoin very quickly.
This should solve the problem.
This happens pretty much every spaces.
I do not know, but we will deal with it and should have it fixed shortly.
So thank you, everybody, for your patience.
We'll go to Cooper first.
Cooper, I have a question.
Which properties or features make Arbitrum stand out from other roll-ups on the marketplace?
What factors do you think have contributed the most to Arbitrum's success as the leading roll-up by TVL?
Yeah, you know, there's a lot of factors here.
I think they range from kind of the ecosystem level to things that are on the technical level.
So I'll start with what I think people will find most interesting, which are things that are more on the ecosystem and support level, which is I think there's a really great support process that we provide to teams in Arbitrum.
I think our mentality really is that if the team's building an Arbitrum succeeds, then Arbitrum itself succeeds.
So every day, you know, we're looking at our partnerships team that are in telegrams, helping teams make new connections to establish their foothold in the ecosystem.
If you're already an established team, they help expand your reach by getting you to introduce to other opportunities to grow your market.
And then on the technical side, we're often helping these teams build an Arbitrum, which applies to apps and also now a very growing amount of Orbit chains.
So there's a really tight loop between us on basically every level, which includes the marketing, the partnerships.
I think that really helps teams find a home in the ecosystem, whether it's their own app chain or something that they're building on Arbitrum One itself.
I also think that on the technical side, there's a lot of great features that explain why there's been such success in Arbitrum.
The first of which is faster block times.
So one thing that people may not know is that there was some really great research that came out of Uniswap Labs that showed that LPs and other DeFi kind of functions in the ecosystem are a lot more profitable on faster block times.
So Arbitrum is 250 millisecond block times.
There are Orbit chains that can do that, go down to 100 milliseconds.
There are other teams that are going even further, and that really helps the efficiency of DeFi and kind of increases profitability for a lot of participants.
I also think that in general, people see a lot of the hardcore engineering problems that we're solving, and they kind of look at those as breaking the chain into new paradigms.
So Arbitrum was the first chain to have fraud proofs on an optimistic roll up.
So that was a major paradigm shift that helped people feel more secure and actually building an Arbitrum.
Also Stylus, which I'm sure we'll talk about is another paradigm shift, which is a kind of alternative VM that sits alongside the EVM with a lot of performance benefits.
So I think it's really the range of kind of high touch support that everyone gets, also to the kind of technical features and technical prowess that the team develops that really accommodates the kind of massive success of Arbitrum 1 and now a lot of the Orbit chains and apps.
Good stuff. Okay, fingers crossed here that Tyler can hear me.
Tyler, sending out an SOS, can you hear me?
Okay, still no. Okay. So the only way to fix this is maybe to restart the space, but I think we can make it work.
If we just go to Cooper first, and then maybe we'll have Cooper, if you can hand off things to Tyler, that would be awesome.
Because it appears he can hear you, but not me. So we'll make it work. Thank you for your patience, everybody.
Okay, cool. Brian, I can't hear you now. We're good to go.
Oh, awesome. Okay. Yeah, it took a couple tries, but that's the space for you.
Okay. Anyway, Tyler, why did Omni choose to support Arbitrum as one of its first rollups?
Yeah, definitely. All right. So I mentioned that back in the day, we had been working with Arbitrum a little bit when we were working on a DeFi protocol.
And this is actually in 2021, maybe even 2020, back when Arbitrum and Optimism were the only two rollups deployed.
And I actually remember that Arbitrum was the first to get to a billion dollars in TVL.
And a lot of that was Arbanyan. That was a fun saga.
But so yeah, when thinking about where we wanted to deploy, we make most of our product decisions based, almost all of our product decisions based on developer feedback.
And I was talking with DeFi developers, primarily Arbitrum is the platform that most of them are primarily targeting.
In addition to some engineering, Omni engineering decisions, which I think I'll get into a little bit later, but the performance of Arbitrum really helped us stress test the performance of Omni.
And so those are the two big things, developer preferences and then performance.
Gotcha. And for anybody who doesn't know, what was the process like for integrating Arbitrum with Omni? Were there any specific technical features that had to be accounted for?
Yeah, definitely. So this is mostly about performance and block times.
When we were building Omni, we wanted to stress test our messaging layer.
So Omni offers two primary features for developers.
The first is an EVM and the second is a native cross chain messaging protocol.
And when building out the cross chain messaging protocol, we first started out by testing it and stress testing it by running multiple rollups locally.
So we'd send a message from rollup A to rollup B.
And these would just be happening on my laptop, for example.
And then we started sending a bunch of messages between them, you know, sending 100 a second, 200 a second, and really pushing the limits of how many messages we could send.
So after hitting limits there, we wanted to make a pretty major optimization where we were like, okay, well, what happens if Omni is really successful and we are hitting thousands or even millions of messages per second?
And, you know, having our validators attest to every message is not going to scale.
So we re-architected the system.
And instead of attesting to every message, we decided to attest to every block.
So we came up with this idea of a cross chain block.
So for every arbitrum block that is built, Omni creates what we call a cross chain block.
And this is the data that kind of sends along messages to all of the other chains within Omni.
And so now when we're thinking about engineering, we like to think about bottlenecks and what is going to be the next big bottleneck.
And so when we move to this cross chain block structure, the bottleneck becomes block times.
And if there are super fast blocks, what does the performance of the Omni messaging system look like?
And so now we want to stress test block times.
And running with local rollups, if you're familiar with Forge and Foundry from the Paradigm team, we use something called Anvil to run local EVMs.
And you can really push that to about one second block times for testing.
But we wanted to go even faster and we're like, okay, where can we find a block chain that will help us stress test Omni and give us faster than one second block times?
And so we went to Arbitrum because Arbitrum has around 300 millisecond block times and really helped us stress test the performance of Omni.
So that was what the integration looked like.
I mean, it was really the first that we went to because it has such high performance and we knew if Omni works with Arbitrum, it will work with any other rollup.
So, yeah, that's the story.
Great. Really appreciate the insight, Tyler.
Cooper, let's go back to you.
Are there any new features that Offchain Labs is cooking up for the Arbitrum ecosystem?
Yeah, there are a couple of very big ticket items, things that we've been talking about for, you know, I would say over a year now.
And a lot of them are really close to delivery, which is super exciting, which means it's also time to talk about the next things we're building.
And you can kind of look forward to a blog post that might be coming out in the next week or two, which talks about some kind of, you know, never before announced exciting developments for what's ahead on the Arbitrum stack.
But to talk about what is coming pretty soon, the big one is Stylus.
So I referred to Stylus before. Stylus is basically a WASM-based virtual machine that nodes will run alongside the EVM.
And the great thing about having the WASM-VM is that you have all these other languages which can easily compile down to WASM, like Rust or C++.
And by doing so, you tap into a much larger developer market.
So there's really about tens of thousands of Solidity developers.
But for Rust, there's three million developers.
So not only is this a huge increase in the kind of audience of who can build on blockchains, but also these kind of apps and contracts written in these other languages have pretty massive performance benefits.
So some of our benchmarking internally is looking at orders of magnitude improvements, like 10x compute efficiency, 100x memory efficiency on kind of some of these contracts you can make.
So what we see people building with Stylus are apps that are actually not even possible to build in the EVM.
So we're actually increasing the design space of what people can do on blockchains.
And Stylus is going to hit mainnet on Arv1, I think, on September 3rd.
The DAB proposal AIP is already live.
So you can definitely check it out for more details.
There's a lot of great teams that have been building, you know, since the inception of Stylus on testnets.
And they're excited to kind of get those solutions onto mainnet.
Something else that I'll mention is there will be soon a release for a feature called Fast Withdrawals.
So everyone knows that one of the kind of major friction points on an optimistic rollup is having to wait seven days for the challenge period to finish before anyone can withdraw.
And this doesn't just affect users who want to withdraw assets.
This also affects kind of the ability to push cross-chain state anywhere because, you know, a lot of people outside the chain need to wait for finality, which is seven days plus some change for kind of bash posting.
So Fast Withdrawals is a really great feature for Orbit Chain specifically who want to kind of make a trade off by accepting a trust assumption and they can configure withdrawal times all the way down to 15 minutes.
We have some internal testing to see if we can push it even further, say to 15 seconds.
But right now an Orbit Chain can kind of adopt Fast Withdrawals and have 15 minute finality on their chain.
So this is a huge benefit to especially gaming and social chains that want to really offer that, you know, snappy web to UX.
Users can kind of do cross-chain transfers in a much more real and kind of time sensitive way.
So we're really excited for that.
And that's going to be shipping to a lot of chains actually later this month.
And I'll just kind of honorable mention.
Some things just for the sake of time, some other huge developments is Bold, which is kind of a permissionless validation solution.
So right now all optimistic rollups have kind of a permission set of validators.
But Bold is going to launch and actually enable anyone to run a validator and kind of securely contribute to security and decentralization on the chain.
And then the other one would be Timeboost, which is a way for chains to actually, you know, earn revenue from the MEV that is within their blocks.
So that's kind of an alternate revenue source that also kind of leads to better outcomes for users.
So Timeboost prevents users from being front run.
It prevents a lot of the harmful MEV from happening.
So a lot of these are coming in Q3 and Q4 this year.
And then after that, we'll take on some really exciting new engineering problems.
Great, very exciting stuff.
I'm happy you mentioned that these advancements will not only increase efficiency, but really lead to all new types of applications being possible for the first time.
This is something we've thought about a lot at Omni, not just connecting liquidity across rollups, but what that enables in terms of the types of apps that people can build.
And I think it's an underappreciated aspect of all of these advancements being made in the scaling landscape.
Let's go back to Tyler real quick.
Tyler, what are the trade-offs for supporting additional rollups on Omni?
Will Arbitrum Orbit chains be integrated in the future?
Also exciting to hear, Cooper, about the fast withdrawals feature.
And we've been thinking about similar problems, something for a different user base.
In particular, how do we do fast cross-chain messaging for optimistic rollups?
And we've got some cool solutions for that.
But back to the question.
So what is required for integrating a new rollup into Omni?
So one of the important features of Omni is validating the state of rollups and sharing that information with other rollups within the network.
So how do our validators confirm the state of Arbitrum?
And our validators need to run an Arbitrum full node.
So it's exciting to be running Arbitrum full nodes and then participating in the peer-to-peer network.
It also creates a, well, yeah.
So for validators, they need to run full nodes for every rollup that we integrate.
So this is something that scales to, you know, about 30 to 50 rollups.
But realistically, we'll also need to be able to support long tail rollups.
So we have Arbitrum orbit chains, for example, and I want to be able to support rollups as a service.
So with Mainnet V1, the security model is what I mentioned.
However, we're definitely looking into how we scale to the infinite rollup or million rollups thesis.
In particular, sharding our validator set and allowing validators to opt into a testing for a subset of chains.
And this would allow brand new chains, like Arbit chains, to opt in to being part of the Omni messaging layer as well.
So lots of cool engineering to do on that front.
But yeah, these are fun problems to solve.
Yeah, just to kind of spin off that, you know, one of the things I think is really interesting about, you know,
when the infrastructure layer starts to kind of enable these experiences, like let's say fast withdrawals,
you know, enabling faster finality, you kind of motivate, you know, different app experiences that can then later again push the infrastructure to go further.
So one of the things I'm excited for is that, let's say we can get, you know, finality on these optimistic rollups down to, you know, something on the order of minutes.
That's an experience that can be really well abstracted by, let's say, a blockchain game.
And all of a sudden, you have a much more seamless experience on top.
And especially when it relates to, you know, pushing this into a solution like Omni, which is kind of built around this idea of connecting, you know, multiple orbit chains, let's say.
You know, it's a really powerful idea of, you know, how can we drive UX even further?
And how can infer just enable the app experiences that are going to lock in users and make more successful applications?
Yeah, absolutely. That's a good segue into our next topic, which is chain abstraction.
This is probably a term that I'm sure a lot of people have seen thrown around.
I think it's been gaining a lot of prominence, especially over the past, let's say, six to 12 months, I would guess.
I might be a little bit off on that timeline, but essentially the idea that we need to abstract away a lot of these complexities to the end user.
They shouldn't have to worry about which roll up they're using, shouldn't have to switch networks in a wallet and basically just making user experience much, much simpler.
Because I think that's really the key to gaining a lot of users and having them stay is if there's a good user experience.
So for Cooper, as we transition into a chain abstracted future, how do you see the relationship between users and roll ups evolving?
What do you think will stay the same and what might look different?
Yeah, I think chain abstraction is definitely one of the important, you know, words and narratives that the ecosystem is aligning on right now.
I think that it's, you know, it's worth defining. And I think chain abstraction has two main ideas inside of it.
You know, the first which you touched on is that, you know, users will no longer kind of have the experience of being on a blockchain.
And we can all relate to this, you know, as being users of blockchains today.
There's a lot of, you know, kind of interruption that the chain itself has into your experience, whether it's kind of asset management, whether it's adding, you know, chains manually to wallets or having to kind of change the chain that you're on.
I think these are all things we would consider, you know, kind of UX friction relative to what the traditional Web 2 experience is.
So chain abstraction is trying to kind of take that on as a problem and say, how do we get to the gold standard of UX, which really, you know, is well captured by, you know, traditional Web 2 games and platforms.
The other part within chain abstraction is how does the infralayer exist to seamlessly enable that.
And so when you get to that point, you're talking about, you know, wallets existing that can kind of seamlessly switch between chains.
And you're also talking about, you know, solutions solutions like Omni that exist under the hood to kind of simplify the experience and really create a lot of efficiencies and connectivity between the chains themselves.
I think, you know, one of the major trends I would see is kind of this like increasing of a spectrum where, you know, before we're all very familiar with the concept of, you know, chains being very consumer focused.
You know, a chain is typically marketing directly to users and developers.
They're kind of typically directly involved in the community and users have that, you know, very engaged experience.
They know what chain they're on.
So on one end, you always have that because you'll have these really big ecosystems that have, you know, kind of a governance layer that engages users and how they kind of manage the ecosystem.
But I think governance is kind of like the long term home for where users will engage, because on the other end of the spectrum, you'll have something like, you know, a blockchain enabled server, which is, you know, this interesting analogy that people are using when they describe what rollups are.
And when you're on an app on your browser, you typically don't know or care as a user what the server architecture is.
So I think that is the other end where lots of apps will probably just be apps and have blockchain in the back end.
And as a user, you'll just kind of know them for the consumer facing brand, but not necessarily the kind of like technology underneath.
But I think I do want to emphasize that one part of Web3 that makes it unique from traditional servers is that kind of emphasis on the users having some sort of sovereignty.
And so what will always be available regardless of the level of abstraction is the ability to move your assets, to move your data and to move your experience between these platforms with you.
And that's something that is really, you know, also the part that makes it hard to solve a chain abstraction, because we have to move these kind of bare assets or we have to move these kind of cryptographic, you know, proofs of who owns what from chain to chain.
But that's also kind of the major unlock that we'll get, because if we do have chain abstraction, then we have the benefits of sovereignty on the Internet.
And we also have the experience of kind of the best in class Web2.
Great stuff. Thank you, Cooper. I want to take a step back now and just open up the floor to any audience questions.
If you have a question, raise your hand and we're happy to bring you up and address it.
So we'll give everybody a minute to do that. In the meantime, Cooper, can you tell us about anything that's coming in the near future with Arbitrum or off chain labs that you want people to pay attention to?
Yeah, absolutely. I would definitely, you know, watch out for some of these stylus apps that are launching.
Once stylus goes to mainnet, there's going to be some really great experiences.
Like we said, apps that are not possible in the EVM now possible in stylus once it's on mainnet.
And then again, if you're following the main Arbitrum account, you should see a really great blog post coming out over the next week or two that talks about some of the new hard engineering problems that we're taking on as a team.
Awesome. And then from our end, we have our Omega public test net, which we'll be launching in the next few weeks.
I don't want to give an exact timeline, but it'll be pretty soon. And then we should have mainnet not too far after that.
You never know with development timelines. Things are very, very complex, but that's the aim right now. So stay tuned.
Thank you to everybody for joining us. It looks like we do not have any questions, so we will wrap things up again.
Thank you. Have a great weekend, everybody. Tyler and Cooper, thank you so much for speaking. Really appreciate it. And we'll chat with everybody later.
Great. Thanks so much, everyone. Yeah. Thanks, everyone. Bye.