[REDACTED] 2024 | Designing for Modularity The Future of User Defined Crypto Experiences

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1. 0:00

   hi there I'm uh David milor from Sig Network and I'm going to be your moderator today what you guys want if we just go around and everyone introduce themselves talk a bit about what your project does and why it matters sure uh hey I'm toer uh Chief product at the Stell development foundation uh Stellar in case you're new in the space uh has been around for a while since 2014 uh a blockchain that's really focused on real real world utility uh and uh Equitable

2. 0:24

   access um uh has been uh uh you know processing more than a 100 transactions per second for a while uh so yeah my name is uh Ethan although online and on Twitter I use Alias Tabasco um I do develop relations at particle Network that means a lot of different things I do a lot of marketing and you know space and stuff like that um particle uh is essentially what we've been doing for a long time is like user experience related things so how do we sort of make

3. 0:54

   web 3 feel a lot more like web 2 how do we build things that can ease the kind of barrier to entry to web 3 from a user perspective and so what we've been doing for a long time was things like social logins account abstraction and what we've been really focusing on over the past year is chain abstraction so we're lucky enough to be one of the kind of group of some of the original organizations alongside Zion that really started focusing on chain abstraction you know December January and um we've been building out this thing called

4. 1:18

   Universal accounts which essentially gives users a single balance they can use anywhere so if I have 10 us on base and 10 on Arbiter and then I have 20 I can use it collectively um so that's essentially what we're building and that's kind of our position in this space I'm Ash I'm running technology at the burnt Zion chain and yeah we are basically trying to figure out we can't move this industry forward until it's

5. 1:42

   dead simple to use these Technologies for normal people you shouldn't have to know how every aspect of your bank Works how every aspect of a website you use Works in order to use it and what are the tools that we need to put together to make that possible and how can we make it so that every developer does need to reinvent the wheel for those things so this is a panel about modularity and user

6. 2:06

   experience those seem like sort of relatively disperate Concepts on the face of it um so it's are sort of a a challenge which is um when things aren't modular when they're are monolith um how does that affect user experiences and why is modularity important to improving that do you want to start might if I start with you yeah this is an interesting question I think that first to start off as an industry we've been

7. 2:30

   making this pretty like massive transition towards like modularity and now modularity is a lot of time used as a buzzword but it was most often used in the context of things like Celestia allowing blockchains to have things like uh you know swappable da layers and things of this nature to to be honest allow for the idea of like an app chain rollup Centric future and so uh the way that Celestia kind of envisions it and we also tend to align ourselves with

8. 2:54

   this vision is that moving forward we're going to have most applications large applications that use their own app chain and these are typically modular blockchains so you can scale really quickly you can have hundreds thousands of them think even um Nick white he says millions of rollups this is the future that we're moving towards and so from a user experience perspect perspective

9. 3:11

   when you look at the broader ecosystem this isn't this is my opinion but I think that we've moved to a point in web 3 now where it's important to have a lot of like uh you know Sovereign block space distributed block space um and we have to the point now where block space is incredibly abundant and so applications can create um you know enironment where they can scale almost infinitely in isolated environments where it's it's resilient and it's

10. 3:34

    reliable and so when you're looking at creating you know like uh things that can rival or equate to web 2 you need something that is incredibly resilient and that is scalable and we've seen that this is hard to achieve on like you know especially with like massive scaling applications on single generalized like layer Twos for example and so app chains and modular blockchains offer a solution to that some degree and allow you to um

11. 3:58

    you know kind of build this e where we have a thousand app chains and there's these massive applications that are all running their own kind of sovereign blockchains and so there's a lot of really interesting implications of that so the the future that I think we'll see from a user experience perspective is that I'll go and I'll use an application that's built built on an app chain some applications will be built on

12. 4:14

    generalized blockchain some will be built on you know some uh random rollup I mean it doesn't matter developers will choose where to build based on the needs for their application and that in my opinion will probably scale us to thousands of blockchains and so the ideal State and I'm sure we'll get into this later though is that if we have thousands of blockchains users will interact with these without knowing that they're using multiple different chains so they just use web 3 collectively even though they're interacting with you know

13. 4:38

    chain a chain B chain C app chain here generalized blockchain they don't know they're just using the applications and these applications are allowed to scale you know almost to an unlimited degree because of this architectural unlock Stella used to be sort of a little bit of a monolith back in the day I mean you guys have been around so long you've you know it seems a bit unfair to judge you by today's names um but what

14. 5:01

    made you start to think modularity makes sense sure so yeah stell's been around for a while um and uh you know it's quite the horse dog horse Workhorse is what I was looking for um horse dog is an interesting uh it could be that too yeah um yeah so you know it's been processing uh a lot of transactions for a while we've had uh you know we have companies like Franklin templon Like

15. 5:26

    Money Gram like Wisdom Tree all kind of like active on the network um and you know we've been like thinking about scalability for a while now a lot before modular became like the hybo that it is today and you know in the past this used to mean things like payment channels and statement uh and state channels in the old days um and uh um and you know today we actually launched our uh uh smart contract platform earlier this year it's called sorban and when we did that we actually went to a lot of other ecosystems and kind of like

16. 5:58

    ask around Developers um you know about their experience developing for other ecosystems and one thing one recurring theme was that uh modularity is a pain in the ass um and you know especially this is like a near conference and I love near and I think it's amazing but one uh recurring theme with specifically with near developers was that uh cross contract interactions were like so difficult because near is

17. 6:23

    built for for sharding and so you don't have like uh Atomic uh composability and so you know what we realize is that yes modularity is very important uh We've definitely put some building blocks uh for it but I think that for an ecosystem that is struggling for product Market fit and I'm talking about the onchain economy in general we're struggling for product Market fit and I think that

18. 6:47

    making design decisions that make it harder for developers and for users to engage is kind of like the wrong thing to do right now so you know yes eventually we will need um you know super super modular world but I think you know like you said there's so much uh block space available right now cheap block space available in monolith networks that uh I think we're kind of like jumping uh too fast towards the end game uh instead of like really focused on product Market fit right

19. 7:18

    now that makes a little sense um Ash you're trying to sort of smooth the edges a bit between uh burn you're trying to smooth the edges a little bit between all this kind of different stuff can you talk a bit about that and like like how you think it helps user experiences to either how modularity helps or hinders people um when trying to use these sort of various Technologies it's funny because in the

20. 7:40

    web 3 space we've taken a lot of these lessons that we've learned in like the the startup ecosystem for Rapid technology development and just kind of throwing them all away so you know if you went back 10 years you'd see all of these Frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Jango or whatever and they make a lot of you know educated guesses about what the best way to develop an application is

21. 8:06

    but then give you the tools to deviate from that when necessary we've kind of taken the approach of hey let's just throw a bunch of Legos on the ground and assume that developers love being miserable and that they want to put it all together themselves every time and that's nonsense most good developers are trying to launch an actual product and get users to use it if you're really

22. 8:30

    focusing on the intricacies of your stack and that's all you care about you're probably not going to make it and it's not really we shouldn't be optimizing for that kind of developer so part of this like modularity I mean modularity is great it lets you make your own choices but it should be something you can opt into when necessary not something you have to resolve day one before you can actually work on the core competency of your business I find normally uh developers

23. 9:03

    who are doing technology for technology sake love Legos and developers who are doing technology for products sake tend to like things that are a little bit more monolithic sometimes I also love Legos but mostly to kind of turn my brain off from product decisions so so particle you're building a uh modular Block Chain for accounts um how did you guys start doing that um specifically um you know how does it work and what problems you what are the biggest problems you think it

24. 9:35

    solves yeah so you know we uh I I think when we were first kind of deciding how how do we want to Market our chain abstraction solution we made a mistake actually and we we use the um the term blockchain or or layer one to describe the architecture of what we're doing and it is we are actually building a chain that essentially coordinates accounts but what we found is that a lot of people focus on that aspect of what we do a lot whereas really the core product what we build is is uh the account

25. 10:01

    itself and the account itself exists on any evm chain salana stuff like that and so it is coordinated by a chain that we build um and it exists on these external chains and so to take a step back essentially the the problem that we identified you know back in I think we started November December of last year is that like you know assuming that we are continuing to go down the path of like

26. 10:24

    app chains and rollups and stuff like this and more and more blockchains which I think is inevitable only just from an uh you know an incentive standpoint but you know in terms of uh scalability and things of this nature I think that's a path that we're going down if we do go down that path there's this massive unanswered problem from a user experience perspective which is how do I move between these chains how do I use applications on these different chains and so what we expect us to do today is

27. 10:48

    okay I go to an application on chain a I have my balance on chain a and I want to move to an application on chain B so now there's two things I need to do as a user I need to go and manually bridge and I need to cognitively manage the fact that I now have two distinct balances across these different chains and now scale this to 50 applications if I'm managing 50 different balances and bridging between each of these applications this is just a massive issue for end users and this pretty much

28. 11:12

    restricts any sort of like you know future in which we we really have more than like even a few hundred blockchains which I think that that's the path that we're going down but it's not possible until we fix that user experience friction and so our solution to that was something called Universal accounts which is um uh what we call account level chain abstraction a chain abstraction is a big buzz word that's been thrown around recently but the way that we look at it is it is essentially just eliminating the need for users to

29. 11:35

    do manual actions to move between chains so Universal accounts are super simple it just if I have a balance I can use it on any chain that's all they do so if I have five OC on base I can go and use it on arbitr and salana and my balances are collective everywhere and so it's just like as if everything were built on you know ethereum or near whatever you get that same experience um but you know across the the entire landscape and so where the the actual chain that we're

30. 11:58

    building that were're uh which is actually a Cosmos app chain um that falls into it through coordination of these accounts so these are smart accounts and it gets a little bit technical but smart accounts especially under the ERC 437 standard within ethereum um have uh it's difficult to manage State across different chains and so we have something called like a it's akin to a key store rollup if anybody's heard of that term and so we do something similar to this and we can coordinate um both the state of these

31. 12:22

    smart accounts as well as the solvers that move funds across chain so gets a little bit in the weeds of exactly um you know how that all functions but uh it is essentially enabling this functionality of giving you a unified balance that you can use universally across the ecem and so it's a pretty cool experience once you get give it a try it it really does feel like you're just using one chain everywhere that sounds super cool and Stella you what

32. 12:46

    products are you most excited about that touch things that aren't just Stella um sure so um I would like to comment on one thing that was said which is um like I think that a lot of the problem s that we're solving in in these rooms of like crypto conferences uh relate to crypto native users um and I think that as an industry we kind of like need to step away from that for a second and think about uh adoption and what that looks like and uh are these really going to be crypto native users that are you know

33. 13:18

    using multiple chains and need to do like sophisticated interactions across These Chains um I don't think it it's Stellar we don't think that's the case and so um you know a lot of the users in the Stellar ecosystem have no idea that they're using a blockchain they have no idea that they're using um uh Stellar they're just using um you know a wallet that's like built for normies uh they probably don't

34. 13:41

    even hold an asset of like a crypto asset uh from their perspective they're holding like digital dollars or they're holding like a digital uh you know stable coin of like you know Mexican pezo or something like that um and but at the end of the day they are getting the benefits of um you know self and these financial instruments that are across borders right so and this is like

35. 14:04

    at the end of the day uh we still think that um kind of like Financial access Equitable access is the killer product in the world of uh of blockchains and so at the end of the day the people that are using this they don't care about moving between chains they don't care about uh speculation they just care about having access to a regular checking account a regular savings account

36. 14:29

    uh things that like we see for granted in the west but don't necessarily exist in a lot of um um kind of like excluded communities I found it interesting you drew a a stark distinction between crypto users and non-crypto users and you said non- crypto users just want to do things to get on with their day and crypto users just want to have a good time they love around yeah um do you see a situation like what do you think we need to um get serious

37. 15:00

    users trying to do serious things to identify as crypto users because it seems like in the space right now we try and hide the fact that people are using crypto um if they're trying to pay someone across borders and we sort of say they have the benefit of self- custody and self- sovereignty um but what's the what why do we need to hide the benefits from that if you understand what I mean yeah I think it's I think it's complicated I think like this industry is still at a point in time in which we kind of like obsessed over the

38. 15:29

    platform itself um but at the end of the day if you look at something you know as big as like the internet um you know in you know the mid 90s when when I joined the internet yes like being an internet user was like part of your identity right you're like you're you're not you know like the normal people you're an internet user but now it doesn't exist right so I think like at the end of the day there won't be you know crypto will just be another infrastructure layer

39. 15:53

    that exists and you know the same way that um you know people who grow into the world like Tech today they don't have this um notion of like these basic uh technical Primitives like the internet even like a file system is something that's like slowly disappearing from from the knowledge base of like kids and that's like completely okay so the idea of like crypto being something that you need to

40. 16:16

    be a user of hopefully will disappear and anything and everything that matters will just be applications built on top of it and at burnt you guys have really sort of gone in deep for this whole um making cryp crypto for people who don't care about crypto um can you talk a bit about what you did there and kind of what the what do you see in terms of user Behavior that's different from other chains as a result of

41. 16:39

    that oh there's so many ways to go with this we started originally trying to make a consumer application on salana and suffered greatly with the available technology at that time basically we were like okay hey this at the time the nft craze was a thing how can we bring this to you know the masses so that they can you know use their Community raise some money get some engagement you know do what the dream is supposed to be uh and it was almost functionally impossible to

42. 17:11

    build a tooling for us to do it let alone someone who doesn't have a technological background so then we were like all right we have to take a step back here how do we solve these problems how do we make it easier to connect to share to deploy these tools like can we give you pieces to put together and like all right even those are a struggle so now we have to take it back into other layer um one thing that we've kind of noticed

43. 17:41

    is that a lot of our enthusiastic users don't have this crypto self-identification right they're they like the community they like that everybody's excited they're not bragging about how difficult everything is and how their struggle is somehow more valuable like they just want to do the fun part they don't want to you know if we were competing on who's having the most difficult user onboarding we're not

44. 18:13

    going to win so like that that's basically our whole design approach is kind of to take it back to the pre- crypto era how do we cut every 0.1% off of user friction off of onboarding flow like how we need to get more people through because that's how the product works yeah I I just wanted to um to actually ask you a quick question I think um you after everything was said including what you said you know in terms of a lot of Zion users for example

45. 18:45

    being you know not Crypt native or at least they don't identify that way I think it comes down to sort of like how you view how the space is going to evolve if you think that the ecosystem is going to basically consist of a large number of like disparate networks or if it's mostly going to be onboarding into two three four five blockchains I think the ne the necessity for things like chain

46. 19:08

    abstraction or multi-chain changes a lot right do you do you think that you know let's say in 10 years like we can have it be super long term users are going to onboard an the ecosystem collectively as if you know kind of like what I mentioned earlier like thousands of of app chains or are we going to see more of a consolidation into a few blockchains which users go and they use applications that ecosystem and if I want to go use applications different

47. 19:33

    ecosystem then I do that explicitly um how do you think that Dynamic would look like I definitely think that the you know the future is is multi-chain long term um it is a question of like you know how many chains are we talking about thousands are we talking about dozens or or or 10 um I do think that a lot of the value that we're seeing uh especially in the world of like um you

48. 19:56

    know defi which you know like it or not in terms of kind of like Financial Innovation this is a lot of what's interesting in blockchain right now uh does depend on this idea of like Atomic composability it becomes a lot more difficult when you when you move between chains um you know like we're going and this is very long term like you know uh our civilization is going multiplanetary uh just in terms of like synchronization

49. 20:19

    latency we will need to have like multiple chains uh it's you know it's uh like the speed of light um so you know we do have these kind of like physic constraints um but I think for for the immediate future where we are right now uh a lot of a lot of the uh a lot of the multi-chain or the modularity stuff seems to be counterproductive to Bringing value to being product to bring product Market fit right now you talk about atomicity there

50. 20:51

    um web 2 isn't Atomic you know if I interact with a lot of different applications or they call a different server or that kind of stuff why is atomy so much more important for web 3 than it is for web 2 I think this goes back to the question of what what blockchains are good for um I would argue that blockchains are good for financial Innovation uh and in the world of Finance atomicity is extremely important so financial markets don't have

51. 21:22

    atomicity um so any database that uh is being used at a financial institution across their different instruments is a one that supports atomicity but if you try to use uh if I try and Arbitrage between the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and the LSC um that's not going to be an at Atomic action right but this is exactly where blockchain actually brings benefits over the existing markets this

52. 21:45

    ability to uh to trade on a single Avenue with atomicity so we're kind of like and I think this actually touches on a really important point that when we break up chains we're kind of like uh rolling back some of the benefits that we got by introducing them interesting um if we sort of continue in the direction we're going in terms of user experiences and continue in the direction we're going in terms of uh

53. 22:17

    breaking things up or putting them back together in it one year two years 3 years whatever you feel like answering what are the actual tangible benefits going to be for users we talk about the technology of the future but what do the what does the actual user experience look like what does it feel like um what do you hope people are going to be doing they're not doing today uh if you don't want to start with if we believe in the benefits of

54. 22:42

    blockchains and these trustless decentralized asset controls then those benefits should transfer into the applications and the products that are being built so the ability to control digital things you own rep representations that you own those are kind of conceptual benefits that on their own are not products those are things that can be implemented into products to give users benefits whether those users know it or not right like you know back when the inter internet

55. 23:16

    was more nent you know we introduced TLS to make it harder to you know steal information mid-flight for web requests users don't care about that but it keeps them safer which means that there's fewer fraud instances fewer in fewer ways to mess with people which makes the products kind of more polished on their own and like I I feel like we're going to see this kind of in the same way it's going to become this infrastructure

56. 23:45

    layer it's going to kind of fulfill this promise that new types of products can be built on top of but those products aren't going to be mostly marketing the fact that they're blockchain based they're going to be using the benefits of the technology and in a perfect world the user will never know yeah I think to uh there's there's so much to unpa here I was just trying to think like where do I start you in terms of like what this will look like but I think um first of all Ash said it

57. 24:23

    perfectly in terms of like how uh users are going to interact with blockchain the future I agree 100% it's going to be like through major applications where you don't even know that you're using web 3 and they use benefits of blockchain visibly um I think to look at it from another angle specifically to like where we're at today and how we're going to be you know uh how it's going

58. 24:38

    to be evolving over time um I also think another really good point was made in terms of like the fact that today there is a lack of product Market fit in a lot of areas and that uh we're focusing a lot on infrastructure right and and not a lot on like apps and so this is also a big conversation that's in this space is like okay we're investing too much in infrastructure like where are the apps right and so I think this a good point too the way that I see it um and it's from a perspective that is very you know

59. 25:03

    uh kind of based in in the vision that I mentioned a moment ago which is app chains and chain abstraction things like this so it's a little bit biased but I think that we have a a fundamental problem with incentives in the space right now which is that developers because the space has grown to be so fragmented I think if we were all building just on Sal or on one chain this wouldn't be the the case but because we're already at a point where there are hundreds of blockchains incentives are a little bit tricky for

60. 25:27

    developers in this space because if I deploy on base my addressable Market is users is users on base and my competition are adapts on base for the most part I mean sometimes if you grow large enough then sometimes your competition is is other ecos systems but this is because users have to cognitively and manually go into each of these ecems and then use them and move to another ecosystem and use applications in there so it creates these kind of like isolated markets in the space and so I think this has created an environment where it's

61. 25:51

    difficult for applications to capture a lot of value very quickly because there's not like one place to build where they can capture all web through users unless they build something incredible like poly Market which gets people across kind of the the the chain borders so I think that things like chain abstraction as we mentioned a moment ago will help alleviate these problems and allow developers to build

62. 26:08

    anywhere that they want and basically address the entire Market of web 3 with their application without needing people to bridge into the chain that they Deploy on or kind of do something uh manual or whatever like they just deploy in one place and they can address the entire the entire current current market which I think will in the short term allow people to focus more on user

63. 26:25

    Centric experiences and so I think over time what we're going to see is that I really do believe that in a few years there's going to be hundreds maybe thousands of blockchains we're going to have we already have hundreds and so it's just the incentives are there from a scalability standpoint it's important and so I think for most users they're going to onboard to an application which is probably built on an app chain or some rollup or something and again they're not even to know that they're on a blockchain that they go and use

64. 26:48

    another application they don't even know that that's on a different blockchain they just use applications and so this is I think the direction that we're moving in where blockchain becomes uh an infrastructural um like you know choice for developers as they're building their application and it doesn't impede on the user experience it's just a component that allows them to build something

65. 27:04

    unique and so I think that this is the direction that's enabled in large part by Chain attraction modularity things of that nature but isn't in market dynamics that eventually kind of like developers will concentrate around specific ecosystems do you do you actually think that a developer will look at a list of hundreds of blockchains then choose one from from these I mean bitcoin's the biggest blockchain but I'm not going to deploy my social app on it well you can't yeah I think a lot of developers

66. 27:30

    choose it I mean it developers will give you different answers but it comes down to sometimes grants or fees or whatever different you know technological properties with these different chains where they choose to to deploy but I think sometimes it comes down to like where are the users right so if all these users are on Basse or salana then I mean I'm not going to go and Deploy on like dog chain because like why there's no users over there so why would I deploy there and so I think this creates a dynamic where a lot of those decisions

67. 27:54

    are driven by um fragmented and isolated user bases to some degree well thank you very much for taking the time to talk about the subject um really great conversation and appreciate making uh making the effort thank you thanks guys thanks