The Rollup

Everclear, formerly known as Connext, recently launched with a fresh focus as the Clearing Layer aiming to solve the ever-present modular fragmentation problem. Today we talked with Arjun Bhuptani, about their history coining the term "chain abstraction", building an intents-based bridge, and now working to collaborate with the intents and solver community. With Everclear, they are focus...

Sovereignty or interoperability. Your choice, anon. In the recent zeitgest of crypto builders has been the idea of achieving sovereignty while also keeping interoperability. Today, we’re diving into this with Avi Zurlo, Chief Product Officer of =nil; Foundation. For this conversation, we had a focus on sharding and how =nil; Foundation is approaching this choice. Since its inception, =nil; Foundat...

As large believers and proponents of the modular thesis, we (along with other voices in the space) have identified fragmentation as a kink in the armor of modularity. We think chain abstraction solves a lot, if not _all_ of this subpar user experience. Chain abstraction is all about making the user experience seamless. It is an experience itself. In today’s podcast with Ethan, devrel at Particle N...

For the final episode of our Bitcoin and Beyond series, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Taproot Wizards sorcerer and Bitcoin OG, Tyler Whittle. We took a deep dive into the world of Taproot Wizards and the intriguing OP-CAT mechanism, designed to enhance Bitcoin’s functionality. Taproot Wizards is a community dedicated to "making Bitcoin magical again". They are deeply rooted in...

Cryptoeconomic security has been an extremely hot topic as of recent. With the rise of restaking and the general concept of "extending economic security" to new applications/services, we have seen some of the brightest minds in the space dedicating their career to this idea. In today’s piece, we take a closer look at Babylon Protocol, a protocol that introduces staking to the Bitcoin com...

As we wrap up our Bitcoin and Beyond series this week, we had a chance to sit down with Robert Zaremba of BitCosm. BitCosm is building a Cosmos SDK based appchain that allows for programmable (and native) Bitcoin, leveraging the Bitcoin script and eventually BitVM. Being the same ecosystem as dWallet, BitCosm has a zero trust model, which eliminates the need for bridges and significantly reduces s...

We've been diving heads first into the technical design structure of Bitcoin L2s over the last two weeks with the goal of uncovering what is really happening behind the scenes in this space. Today's video, we did just that with Jagdeep Sindhu. Jag is a seasoned Bitcoin OG and has a strong opinion about the acceptable trust assumptions in Bitcoin scaling designs. Jag's vision is to tran...

Alpen Labs is a project that is making significant strides in the world of ZK rollups. In our conversation with David Seroy, we explore the evolution of Bitcoin scaling solutions and the story of how Bitcoin scaling really started. David and the Alpen Labs team have been pioneering the research around Bitcoin scaling since the earliest of days. We talked about this story and David also shared his...

We're sure you've heard of zero knowledge proofs through our various pieces with industry leaders, but have you heard of zero trust protocols? From what we understand, its a newly coined term to describe the multi party computation tech utilized by the dWallet team. In today's presentation, we take a closer look at the evolution from the "castle and moat" model to zero trust....

No one better to discuss the bull case for Bitcoin L2s than long-time Bitcoin advocate and Stacks founder, Muneeb Ali. In today's video, we explore the competitive landscape of Bitcoin L2s, highlighting Stacks’ first-mover advantage and why Muneeb is extremely bullish on Bitcoin scaling primitives. We discuss the initial use cases for Bitcoin as collateral for yield generation, Bitcoin as a pa...

The Bitcoin ecosystem is leapfrogging the development trajectory put forth by the Ethereum community Today's piece focuses on how potential upgrades to the Bitcoin technologies like BitVM and OPCAT are opening up fresh possibilities for utilizing Bitcoin. Bitcoin has often been viewed as "conservative", but recent advancements suggest it could leapfrog over previous limitations, lear...

Welcome to episode 4 of Bitcoin and Beyond. We all know Bitcoin as the original Proof of Work chain, so how does staking come into play? In today's episode we explore CoreDAO's consensus mechanism, staking offering, and technical bridging architecture. CoreDAO is aiming to separate Bitcoin’s asset value from its transactional rails, enabling higher throughput and lower cost ecosystems. Thi...

One of the best parts about our modular thesis is that it also applies to Bitcoin. We are seeing the same ideas of bringing next-gen VMs to Bitcoin scaling in the same way that we see with with Ethereum rollups. Notably, the tech hurdles to actually get an SVM rollup on bitcoin is much harder. Today we are specifically focusing on integrating the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) onto Bitcoin. This ide...

The trajectory to achieving a "full rollup" on Bitcoin is a gradual process, similar to that of Ethereum rollups gradually implementing fraud proofs/zk technology. Build on Bitcoin (BoB) has taken the approach of building a product (on mainnet now) which resembles more of an hybrid optimistic rollup between Ethereum and Bitcoin L2. They have been quick to market and have built a strong c...

Welcome to the first episode of our Bitcoin and Beyond presentation series. We aim to provide you with technical knowledge about the state of different Bitcoin scaling solutions. Are they sidechains? L2s? True rollups? For the first episode, we're diving into Citrea, a project focused on bringing ZK to Bitcoin with a true rollup design (using Bitcoin for data availability). We sat down with Or...

If you've been following along for sometime, you've likely heard of Fluent as part of our Modular March campaign or in a previous episode. We first met Dino last year, early on in the development of their zkWasm L2, powered by a web assembly virtual machine (for execution). This has long been a part of our modular thesis, so naturally we were extremely interested in their newly launched &q...

We are huge proponents of the modular thesis as our entire brand is centered around this. We often challenge ideas which we have a shared thesis with as part of the channel, as well as welcome new ideas to the the mix. In today's video we got the chance to understand the idea behind the integrated thesis with Movement Labs and Omni have been pushing forward. While we did spend some times talki...

The modular ecosystem is still in its infancy stages. We are at the cusp of an acceleration of sovereign rollups built with Celestia underneath. This idea, while new to many, has been at the root of Celestia's roadmap since inception. In today's video we take you through everything you need to know about sovereign rollups, with a focus on Forma. We discuss how Forma has been carefully desi...

The core properties of blockchains (immutability, transparency, trustlessness) are extremely well suited for intellectual property. Intellectual property is defined as: "A category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect." In today's episode, we talk with Jason Zhao, founder of Story Protocol. Story Protocol is bringing in a new way IP marketplaces are c...

Blockchains, as we know them today, are imperative. This means, we interact with every application needed to achieve a certain outcome onchain…we care about the process in achieving a specified end result. The intent-centric future aims to flip this model on its head and usher in a different way of building and interacting with decentralized systems. At the heart of this shift is the evolution fro...

We believe in a future of verifiable computation. The modular future cannot exist without zk. After last weeks video asking "Will ZK eat the modular stack?" and realizing its all but guaranteed, we have set out to learn more about how zkVMs and ZK will make an impact. Our focus today centers on how RiscZero utilizes zk proofs and how zkVM works. At the core of RiscZero's mission is t...

VCs have been getting a lot of hate recently. The era of high FDV, low float launches may be coming to an end soon...or will it? In today's conversation we sat down with Mads Mathiesen, a long-time crypto researcher and now leading research for an elite crypto VC Maven11. He was writing about data availability and Celestia in 2019-2020, before anyone was really paying attention to modularity....

A big part of our modular thesis this year is the need for extremely high TPS blockchains which create a far better user experience, as well as a better dev experience. You may have heard the terms "altVMs or next-gen VMs" come up on X or in other videos of ours when referring to building L2s/rollups not using EVM. This brings us to the heart of today's discussion with Robert Sasu, a...

Will zk eat the modular stack? Isn’t zk an enhancer for the stack as a whole? Which parts of the stack will be disrupted by zk, and how? Today, we're diving into a thought-provoking interview with Hannes from Equilibrium Labs to get all the answers . Equilibrium Labs specializes in low-level protocol engineering, helping protocols become safer, faster, and more usable. The core idea of "W...

One of our core beliefs is the acceleration of experimentation in crypto. We believe that continuously testing novel incentive designs will lead to better results in the future. That being said, not every mechanism is going to work. Today, we set out to understand what will work in a sustainable way going forward from the perspective of Jordi Alexander. Jordi is the founder of a trading firm Selin...