The Rollup

The modular thesis is growing week by week. We are seeing the rise of new L2s and appchains happening at a rapidly accelerating pace now. Our second podcast as a team featuring Sam Kazemian from Frax Finance is here. Frax started its journey as a decentralized stablecoin and has expanded significantly to include a broader range of DeFi tools and assets, making their modular L2 more appealing from...

LM 💤 🥱 Did you know that Celestia was originally called LazyLedger? The idea behind this laziness stems from Celestia's minimalistic properties. By solely focusing on data availability with minimal smart contracts & execution, Celestia is able to provide cheap and secure data verification while outsourcing execution to other chains. In today's episode, we set out to understand the or...

Horizontal or vertical scaling...which way, western man? In today's discussion, we're taking a closer look at Nil's strategic approach to blockchain scalability, focusing on the integration of horizontal scaling for Ethereum. We discuss the core idea behind Ethereum as the ultimate arbiter of truth for L2s, ensuring that any layer that claims to be an L2 can verify its activities throu...

The general idea and thesis we share is that we will see 1000s of appchains and the frameworks which are building for that future are in a good spot. In addition, we also believe there will be a ton of zkVMs (as introduced to us by Cem during this video) which will power rollups going forward. This is also part of our "we don't need any more traditional EVM, general purpose L2s" thes...

At what point does ideological alignment affect your technological decision making? The essence of Ethereum alignment involves a commitment to its core principles — decentralization, security, permissionlessness, and scalability. This deep-rooted alignment goes beyond the technical, touching on Ethereum’s broader moral compass, which aims to question and redefine the societal and economic impacts...

Rollups as we know them today are more centralized than we'd like. Basically, rollups operate using a secure multi-sig and centralized sequencer for transaction batching and ordering. This isn't good for a multitude of reasons, notably censorship resistance. We are trying to build resilient, long-lasting systems in crypto and to do this effectively these systems need to be sufficiently dec...

Today marks a very special day for many DeFi founders, builders, and power users. Today is the launch of the transferable $SAFE token, for the safe multisig users on Ethereum mainnet. The tokens had to be claimed many months, if not years, ago. Safe has been pioneering the idea of smart accounts and has made many advancements in account abstraction technology. Our discussion with co-founder, Richa...

The evolution of the modular thesis doesn't go without saying Osmosis and the Cosmos ecosystem. Being the hub of liquidity for the modular ecosystem assets (TIA, DYM, OSMO), Osmosis plays an important role for the space. In today's interview with co-founder Sunny Aggarwal, we discuss the recent rise of Celestine Sloths and how features like the Skip API allows for seamless cross-chain tran...

The convergence of AI and crypto is particularly interesting to us. We've been doing research and are really coming around to the idea that AI might be the major unlock for crypto, especially for onchain usage. If you're completely new to the convergence of AI and crypto, this is for you. In today's discussion, we discuss the "AI War" of compute and GPUs. The majority of the...

The spotlight on modularity continues. After Modular March, its been obvious to us to stay heads down building with a strong focus on modular blockchains and the projects leading the way for this sector. Today, we do a technical deep dive into the architecture of Lava Network's RPC network. Basically the issue at hand is its tough to scale RPCs in a secure manner, across dozens of chains. We s...

The future of AI is a divergent path. On one hand, we have the use of AI for the benefit of all and advancement of our society. On the other, there’s a world where the power dynamic between humans and computers becomes imbalanced and we are as a race are put in an dystopian situation. We believe that the intersection of crypto and AI will be pivotal in not only the decentralization of AI, but also...

As we wrap up Modular March, we had one of the early believers in modularity and early angel investor in prominent projects (EigenDA, Avail, and others) to discuss the state of the crypto markets. We discussed the nuanced interplay between technology, ethics, and market dynamics that are at play in crypto now. We discussed the desire for real world applications and why tokens play an interesting p...

Another episode with an Ethereum scaling OG, Nick Dodson, who pioneered the original idea of optimistic rollups before they were the norm. Nick is actually also working on an innovative concept called fast finality optimistic rollups, which we are going to line up another episode for. The team behind Fuel has been working tirelessly for several years to bring their vision to life, and we getting v...

The core innovation of data availability in the modular landscape revolves around minimalism. Due to the minimal smart contract execution capabilities of altDA chains, they can focus solely on providing a specialized service of data verification & publishing. In addition to the design of minimal blocks, these chains are able to perform a unique task of Data Availability Sampling (DAS) which is...

Not sure we need to write too much about this one! We mostly laughed and had a good time while understanding the definitions of some key terms in the space. Togruhl, one of the early Ethereum contributors and Scroll co-founders, gave us a presentation on his mental models for modular and monolithic design structures. What was particularly interesting was the idea which Togruhl posed about the conv...

Finally! Wormhole $W token is here. After a three year journey of shipping filled of ups and downs, Wormhole has announced they are taking the path to decentralizing their community. If you've been navigating the onchain world, you've probably heard the buzz about Wormhole's token, $W (and hopefully qualified for the airdrop). Wormhole has long stood as a critical infrastructure in the...

Typically, you wouldn’t think of Solana having a strong footing in the modular thesis. After all, the design choices they have elegantly pioneered (credit where credit is due) revolve around scaling a single state machine. This simply won’t scale to billions of users, and they will need to modularize. However, the extremely performant and extensible Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) is an effective too...

We really enjoyed this presentation. While we’ve had multiple shared sequencers talks on Modular March, each one has been far different. Today’s deep dive is around the game theory and incentive designs behind creating a rollup ecosystem which feels completely seamless and interoperable. At its core, Espresso leverages a two part system to enforce how transactions are ordered and finalized across...

We’ve heard of the fragmentation problem many times in Modular March, and we’ve came to learn of a variety of solutions like shared sequencing, intents-based interop, and more. Today, in less than 10 minutes, we hear the vision from Avail’s head of product Dan Mills live from Modular Day in ETHDenver. Created in 2020 as part of Polygon, Avail emerged in response to Ethereum's shift toward a ro...

If you are modular-pilled this will be a refreshing short chat. If you want to understand the counterargument to building in a modularized fashion, you’ll enjoy this. Andy sat down with Avery Chang, co-founder of Aptos to discuss his perspective on the modular thesis and understand why he is building Aptos in a more integrated fashion. Avery shared his perspective on the intricate dance between mo...

What an interesting conversation this was. Going way back to the core ethos of cryptoeconomic systems, we took a bit of a journey through PoW, PoS, and now modularity. It was quite a different presentation from the previous Modular March episodes. We sat down with Alejo, a co-founder of Lumio, to discuss the memetic nature of crypto incentive systems with a focus on designing conservative systems...

Again, we find ourselves returning to the interoperability and fragmentation problem of the modular expansion. We’ll keep it real, there is nothing innovative of building hundreds of siloed execution environments. Even if you value sovereignty as much as the rest of us, having reachable allies in the onchain world is a necessity. As new L2s and appchains are launched (which is happening at an alar...

After our episode with Tarun Chitra about value accrual in the modular stack, as well as thinking about it deeper we’ve came to our own conclusions. Josh Bowen, ex-Celestia team, and now founder of Astria blew it all out of the water today. Completely shifted the way we are thinking about RaaS providers, shared sequencers, and how they are approaching the competitive market of sequencing. We first...

The checkered cross-chain past is something you just had to live through to understand. We tend to think the best have survived and the unfortunate events of 2021-2022 have led to a completely different way of thinking about interoperability security for the modular expansion. In today’s piece Rob & Andy sat down with Jon Kol, CEO of Hyperlane, to understand their design choices around permiss...

A core fundamental primitive of blockchain is the unlocking of usecases which are not possibly in any other type of system. We’ve heard a lot of this and we believe the technology stack is being built as we speak which will facilitate an array of “breakout apps” atop of it. In today's piece, we set out to find out what type technological design constraints are present in the current modular ec...