The Rollup

"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...

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...