Layer 1 Stage | Monolithic and Modular

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1. 0:05

   hey everyone my name is Kendall I'm the co-founder of proximity labs and I'm here to talk a little bit about scaling blockchains if I can get it to oh are we there we go scaling blockchains uh and nears approaches to doing this and how we are participating in both a mod monolithic and modular scaling environment okay there we go uh so to understand how we are approaching scaling blockchains let's first touch a little bit on what the bottlenecks are so there's three major things that blockchains do um the first is that they

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   execute transaction there's execute transactions which basically means when you do a Unis swap uh transaction you're swapping from USC to ethereum that computation of the change in your balance is execution the next thing they do is blockchains store the result of these transactions and very importantly they make that new state available when the next round of execution is going to happen and we call that data

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   availability which is probably a term you've heard a lot this week and we'll continue to hear a lot and the final thing they do is they settle these transactions and really what this means is you have like validators coming to consensus and ideally providing some kind of guarantees that the the state will remain the state until the next block comes in and you'll hear a lot about finality as part of this uh so there's two major approaches to scaling

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   blockchains the first is sorry little bit delayed on the uh on the transitions here the first is monolithic scaling uh and that's basically where you have a single layer one that is responsible for everything it's responsible for execution settlement and data availability and this is what n has originally been doing uh it's also what salana is doing um so near does this by sharting which means that you have different sets of validators that are responsible for executing different transactions and

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   storing different parts of state but then they settle into a single blockchain Solana takes a different approach where they essentially use increasingly powerful Hardware to have all of their validators compute execution settlement and and provide data availability um and then the other approach to scaling is modular scaling and this is where you actually split up between potential multiple l1s

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   settlement and data availability and then execution using different layers uh this could be layer twos or even layer 3es um and here are a few of the of the ways this is split up so you have ethereum responsible for settlement and also near you have ethereum and near and now uh Celestia as well responsible for data availability and then you have these layer twos you've probably heard

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   of like arbitrum optimism and polygon who are responsible for execution what's really interesting about near is that it's actually both monolithic and and modular and what we mean by that is that we are a monolithic blockchain but we now have products that we're providing to the modular scaling World um so on the monolithic side and I think what's most interesting is that we're actually the only chain that's full stack what we mean by full stack is that you can

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   actually store both your front end code and your backend code or your smart contract code on the near blockchain this is exciting because it means you can maintain maximum throughput for your application with minimal overhead you don't need to maintain your own validator set you don't need to run your own sequencer that's taken care of for you um and then very importantly this provides you composability across all of

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   the layers of your application this means your front ends are actually composable just like your smart contracts are composable with other protocols so just put up a couple of examples of products that have taken advantage of this metap poool has decentralized their full stack application and the OG um OG application for for boss which is uh near social um now what's really been different about this weekend and what we've been

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    announcing quite a few products in is how we are offering scalability uh to the modular world as well and this is primarily about helping scale ethereum um so here's a little bit of a look at the near scaling stack uh and let's dive in so on the user layer we have boss the vision here is to unite uis for various different chains and Roll-Ups into single user experiences in addition to that we're aiming to make the these experiences extremely accessible and resilient the vision here is to make it so that if you have access

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    to the internet which means that you can access the near blockchain then you can access both the front end and the back end for these applications decentralized and censorship assistant that's the vision and what we recently announced this week as well is this vision of true multi-chain accounts and very excitingly this even includes Bitcoin uh with this account aggregation product you will be able to through your near account maintain sub accounts on any ecdsa

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    supported blockchain which is big Bitcoin most of the evm world including ethereum and even a lot of Cosmos chains moving on to the next layer of the stack the execution layer here is where you probably heard Ilia earlier this week announced the partnership with polygon we're working on taking our web assembly virtual machine and actually proving it and making it more modular so that various different uh settlement and da

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    layers can compose ZK wum into a ZK uh wasum rollup um and of course our vision here has always been mult different options for developers on the execution layer which is why we have the original near web assembly VM and also the near evm uh the the aora team built and even other virtual machines like a a vanilla JavaScript virtual machine this next layer is also a layer that we announced a new product this

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    past week which is the data availability there so the reason we did this is that data availability costs are actually the single largest expense by far for Layer Two Roll-Ups and excitingly nears data availability is 8,000 times cheaper than ethereum data availability which completely changes the game for these rollups they can maintain strong security guarantees by settling to ethereum but they can have much much

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    lower costs for their uh users and this is already live on polygon cdk test net or test net with polygon cdk and op stack and we'll be coming to mainnet soon now we have the most exciting part which is the settlement layer and this is exciting because it's actually the newest product that we've been working on which is this fast finality settlement layer for rollups and we've been building this in partnership with the igen layer

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    team um what exactly is fast finality yeah very exciting great team super excited to work with them so what is fast finality well this is going to be an the ability for rollups to settle to near with Alan layer security guarantees coming from E3 stakers and then settle to ethereum this is exciting because it enables users to transact between layer twos within 3 seconds rather rather than an hours in the case of ZK rollups or a days in the case of optimistic Roll-Ups and extremely importantly it maintains the full

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    ethereum security guarantees and even adds an additional layer with igen layer reaker guarantees and near validator guarantees and it can be used by rollups with either centralized or decentralized sequencers so that it it's actually up to the rollup team to decide how they want to settle to this chain so let's walk through exactly how this is going to work so let's say that we have a polygon cdk roll up and arbitrum that are both using the near

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    fast finality layer so the polygon cdk uh rollup will sequencer will submit like executed transactions to the near blockchain next igen layer resters will execute these transactions to check the work of the the polygon sequencer and they'll get these transactions from the near blockchain so that they don't have to trust the polygon sequencer themselves and they'll choose to either accept or most likely or most likely

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    accept or hopefully not reject those transactions then the arbitr and blockchain will be able to acknowledge that state transition and acknowledge the transaction and then finally from the polygon sequencer the transactions will be finalized however long that takes on the ethereum blockchain um and again the real magic here is that this is going to enable actual very very trust minimized

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    composability between rollups which really opens up an entirely new design space for applications so you can think of things like cross roll ups SWS at the simplest level even things like flash roll flash loans between rollups a little more complicated but viable asset rebalancing if there are you know rates Arbitrage you can do between different versions of a markets and then even entirely new classes of rollup agnostic

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    protocols so to make this a little bit more real we'll go back to this this uh diagram and walk through kind of a real world use case so let's imagine that we have a user who has ethereum on polygon and wants to deposit into a and then borrow usdc and let's say that the the usdc rate is much more favorable on arbitrum so they want to get their eth to arbitrum in some way and then borrow usdc there so they can get the best rate so what they'll first do is they'll send

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    their etherum to a contract probably the a contract on the polygon side then the sequencer from polygon will submit that transaction to near after it's been executed igen leakers will basically recheck the work and then communicate with arbitrum to let that obate contract know that the the usdc should be credited to the user's account there and then excitingly you eventually that transaction will be finalized on ethereum and the user can actually then

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    withdraw the usdc to mainnet from arbitrum if they so choose so the this entire process maintains that ethereum security guarantee and in the unlikely scenario that there was either igen layer resters or or near validators who are sort of computing incorrect State transitions then there'll be slashing events which which disincentivizes that type of behavior and should make that scenario never really happen so zooming

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    out a little bit from all of this you know we talked about the different layers that that near is working to scale how does it all fit together you know how do we put this into kind of one thing of like what is it that near is is aiming to do and and why is it that we're trying to scale blot things this way for me I'd say it's really about this idea of chain abstraction what we're ultimately trying to enable in

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    this very very multi- rollup multi L1 multi whatever layer you want to say type of world is user experiences that are completely agnostic to which underlying chains are used like users just want to use applications on whatever chain has these applications that are fitting their needs they want to get the best rates they want to get the best price execution they want to buy nfts that they that resonate with them whatever it might be and then developers want to be able to create

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    these experiences that are as fluent and and sane and direct as possible so here's how it can work um and this is just a very rudimentary graph but the beginning of of what it is that we're we're trying to do here um closest to the user and and the reason the main reason we have boss is to create this Unified user experience a step below that we have a similar type of solution which is this this account aggregation

27. 11:05

    and fitting all these accounts together letting users have a single near account that lets them control their Bitcoin account their arbitr account polygon near account ethereum whatever it might be a layer below that we have arbitrum and and polygon who are going to need like they're going to need to move this user's assets around so that the user doesn't actually have to think about or or or take on these extremely long settlement times that'll come from

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    optimistic or ZK rollups and that's where we have fast finality so that that experience can be seconds rather than hours or days um and really really interestingly here and I think the most exciting part is that every single layer of this stack is going to be powered by near a user will actually be touching near at multiple different layers of this stack and developers can plug in to whichever layer is solving their direct problem without having necessarily to take on the entire stack we will of

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    course have these fullstack applications like ref and sweat and mint base and we also have applications like maker and a and Unis swap that will be on rollups that will be using the near fast finality layer and maybe using boss so yeah to wrap it all up for us near is about chain abstraction and building and enabling this this layer for developers and users to just access whatever it is on the blockchain wherever it is without having to worry

30. 12:18

    about moving their assets around or creating new accounts um or dealing with any of the complexity that comes with this increasingly fragmented scaling landscape and that's all I have for you guys today thanks everyone