The Rollup

Ethereum's early marketing was focused on building an infinite garden. An open space, for experimentation and innovation of any kind. No walled gardens. No closed systems. No incentive misalignment. That has changed, and its time to talk about how we can adjust our course as a community. Ethereum’s shift towards a rollup-centric roadmap has been imperative for scaling. It’s led to the emergenc...

Chain abstraction is pivotal in shaping the blockchain ecosystem, akin to the early internet's revolutionary HTTP. We explore its role in enhancing interoperability and UX, discussing components like messaging protocols, solvers, and netting processes. We also highlight the potential for seamless coexistence among thousands of blockchains, driven by robust incentives and efficient coordination...

Just a few days after we dropped the chain abstraction market map, we come to you with an in-depth podcast about NEAR's chain signatures, which they recently announced as well. As the crypto space continues to grow, so does the need for better ways to connect different blockchains. Proximity, a project born from the NEAR ecosystem, has been working on a solution that could help simplify these...

Welcome back to another technical deep dive, this time about ephemeral rollups. This idea was originally presented to us a few months back with an idea of "building a chain, launching it, then shutting it down when you're done with it", which was pretty interesting. These 'ephemeral rollups' are designed to be temporary, existing just long enough to handle specific tasks befo...

Ethereum is as divided and fragmented as it has ever been. Between rollups, MEV debates, and the lack of performance at the base layer, we are seeing a lot of discourse around abrupt changes. However, is this really something the community can't rally around and form a solution? We think it is. So, in today's pod we dive into an often-overlooked aspect of Ethereum—its marketing and communi...

Exploring the next steps for creating a better user experience for the rollup-centric roadmap and modular ecosystem. 𝗗𝗜𝗦𝗖𝗟𝗔𝗜𝗠𝗘𝗥: 𝘐𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘤𝘳𝘺𝘱𝘵𝘰𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘋𝘦𝘍𝘪 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘯𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘬𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘭𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘬, 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳, 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮 𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘭𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦. 𝘈𝘵 𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘱𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘭, 𝘸𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘺 𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯 𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘳 𝘧𝘦𝘦 𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘴𝘱𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘰𝘳𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱, 𝘪𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘦 𝘸𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦...

In this livestream we dive into the evolution of the modular blockchain ecosystem, focusing on data availability sampling, high TPS chains, and the rise of Celestia. The discussion explores the future of the modular stack, the push for gigabyte blocks, and the need for better user experience and infrastructure. It also highlights the potential of chain abstraction, rollup clusters, and the critica...

Starknet is coming to Bitcoin with one of the biggest breakthroughs in Bitcoin scaling: STARK verifiers natively on Bitcoin. In a recent conversation with Eli Ben-Sasson from StarkWare, we got a closer look at how they’re working to bring STARK verifiers to Bitcoin, something that hasn’t been possible until now. Our discussion was centered around giving the Bitcoin network new capabilities, thanks...

"Prediction markets are part of phase two of crypto product adoption" - Andrew Young, in today's podcast. If you’ve been following the evolution of DeFi, you know that prediction markets were one of the earliest use cases envisioned for blockchain. But only now, with more robust infrastructure and a larger pool of onchain users, are we beginning to see the full potential of this usec...

There's been an ongoing debate about whether or not we need more L2s. Without getting into too much of where *we* stand, the idea of new, EVM general purpose L2s is certainly in oversupply. But, what about altVM L2s? Like Eclipse and their SVM design? Originally, Eclipse was a strong proponent of modular scaling, advocating for multiple rollups to expand the ecosystem horizontally. But as thei...

Today is the day for Lava Network mainnet, bringing their incentive system of RPC providers to the modular ecosystem. There's been some question marks about the launch strategy, as it was quite different than what the community is used to. We are entering into a new era of token launches and expecting more and more experimentation at the the launch stage. In today's video, we sit down with...

After an epic announcement of a series A raise as well as a rebrand yesterday, Caldera is positioning itself as the go-to modular vending machine for launching new chains. Does that sound funny? Well, we came up with this analogy minutes before the show and are starting to lean into it. Vending machines allow you to pick any snack to cure your hunger. RaaS providers similarly allow you to pick fro...

We've heard all the complaints at ETHCC about no applications and "all infra" in crypto. Where are the apps? To us, this is a bit silly seeing as we have a fully fledged onchain DeFi and NFT ecosystems as well as DAOs operating. The apps are here. The usecase is money. But, whats somewhat problematic to us is the lack of innovation on the DeFi rails since 2021-2022. So, we sat down w...

We've been of the opinion that the Cosmos Hub and Ethereum rollup-centric roadmap are converging. Both of the scaling methodologies are somewhat opposites (appchains at first vs. baselayer L1 then building vertically), however they seem to be converging. The convergence of roadmaps is particularly interesting because of the challenges faced by Cosmos Zones and the need for upgrades via forking...

If you've been listening in for a while you understand the idea behind ZKVMs and where we see them fitting into the modular stack. ZKVMs, from what we understand, are mostly focused on proof generation. However, a lesser known part of the ZK "magic" is directly verifying ZK proofs. We're interested in teams lowering the cost and time to verify. So, we sat down with Rob and John o...

Economic Security within the Initia Ecosystem with JB from MilkyWay at Interwoven Day 2024 hosted by Initia.

A Discussion About Breaking Walled Gardens At Interwoven Day 2024

Debating the user-centric approach to Chain Abstraction with DeanTribble from Agoric.

sync or async? Bryan Pellegrino founder of Layer Zero Labs weighs in on the standards for intra-blockchain communication. Listen here:

A problem we've been fiddling with in the interoperability landscape is this idea behind achieving maximum extensibility with regards to the creation of hundreds of new chains. We know that if there's going to be an overwhelming amount of chains, we need solutions that are permissionless and easy to spin up on new chains. For today's podcast, we sat down with Catalyst CTO Alexander, to...

There's quite a bit of conversation ongoing in the zeitgest of the modular research community. We tend to lean into technical topics more than the flavor of the day, but for this episode we managed to do both. We were joined by Alejo Pinto, one of the founders of Lumio, to discuss their modular VM abstraction framework, enabling developers to build and deploy apps everywhere, as well as the st...

The C.A.K.E framework established that chain abstraction is a collaborative effort, and not a one winner takes all situation. This idea for how the intents and chain abstraction stack works was originally created by Frontier Research and now there is a C.A.K.E working group. Since then, they have also spun off a new project called OneBalance focusing on credible accounts and achieving the chain ab...

The acceleration of ZK is happening at a rapid pace. Last week we covered the collaboration between Succinct and AggLayer on the proof generation side using SP1, a generalized ZKVM. Today, we're excited to share insights from our recent chat with RJ and Mauro from Aligned Layer, the other half to the ZK puzzle focused on verifying proofs. RJ and Mauro have deep roots in engineering and cryptog...

There's been a lot going on in the zeitgest with regards to based rollups, pre-confirmations, MEV, and whether or not based rollups are going to make it in the longer term. We're about to find out. In today's podcast, we were joined by Taiko's founder Daniel Wang, to discuss their "permissionless based rollup" which allows unrestricted block proposals and proofs. One of t...

Is ZK real? Unironically, this was the first question Robbie asked our guests Uma Roy, founder of Succinct & Brendan Farmer, co-founder of Polygon. If you've been following the latest developments in ZK (but not trademarked), you'll know that it is the closest thing to the endgame of crypto. However, you'll also know the progress has been somewhat slow as its not a trivial task to...