This afternoon, hosted by MetaStone and Odaily, co-organized by MixMarvel and AWS, and supported by top partners such as CREGIS, Jasmy, HOPE, Souff l3, LD Capital US, ArkStream Capital, SevenX, Jubi, zkMe, etc., "Over the Moon — Zhulang Web3" The summit was held in Hong Kong.
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Q1
Sunil: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I would like to thank all the guests for participating in this roundtable discussion. The theme of this roundtable discussion is "L1 & L2: Exploration and Improvement". First of all, please give a brief self-introduction.
Henry: Hello everyone, I'm Henry, and I'm in charge of developer relations in the Asia Pacific region at Sui Netwrok. I have been engaged in Web3 and cryptocurrency-related work since 2016. Before joining Sui Netwrok, I worked for Moonbeam, a Polkadot ecological parachain project, and was also responsible for developer relations.
Anna: Hello everyone, I am Anna from Solana Foundation New Markets, and I am usually interested in stablecoins and DeFi. I was mainly in the United States before, and now I am doing emerging market development in Asia. It is a pleasure to meet you.
Young: Hello everyone, I am Young, and I am very glad to be invited to share with you. I entered the Crypto field in 2017. I initiated the first student blockchain association in a university in China, and I have been promoting the construction of the National University Blockchain Association during my student period. After graduating in 2019, I joined a well-known public chain project at that time, doing research and ecological construction work. In 2021, by chance, I heard some sharing about ZK and Ethereum expansion by Zhang Ye, the co-founder of Scroll. , and then resolutely joined Scroll. Currently, I am mainly working on developer relations in the Chinese area of Scroll, and will also do some research work. At present, there are more than 12 million transactions on Scroll's Alpha Testnet, which should be quite a lot ahead of its peers, thank you.
Haichao: Hello everyone, my name is Haichao. I probably joined the industry in 2017 and 2018. In the past 5 years, I have worked in 4 L1 projects, including Nervos, Solana, Aptos, and Algorand, mainly doing developer relations.
This year, we founded the Rooch project. Rooch aims to provide better infrastructure for Web3 developers, including two aspects: First, we will provide a modular smart contract execution environment, which will be an off-chain solution , you can use it to do L2 or L3, and you can also do various architectures that require scenarios; on the other hand, we chose Move as the smart contract language. From the perspective of market increment, it will be more powerful than other languages. attraction.
Vision: Hello everyone, today I am the Vision of Metastone, and today I mainly share the content about L1 and L2 with you as a researcher of Metastone. Today Jason from Arbitrum (another guest who was originally scheduled to attend) can’t come due to work, because we have done an exclusive interview with Arbitrum before, interested friends can go to Metastone’s official Twitter to learn about the content of this interview, I Today I will also share some views from Jason.
Q2
Sunil: The guests invited today are all excellent industry infrastructure projects. In fact, from the perspective of the long-term ecological layout, whether as a user or as a developer, there are more choices, so in the eyes of the guests, what is the relationship between L1 and L2? How should ecological developers and users choose? On the other hand, from the perspective of their respective development strategies, how to ensure their own market share and ecological activity?
Henry: I didn't introduce Sui just now. Sui just launched the permanent testnet last week. We will start stress testing the permanent testnet this week, so we are relatively close to the mainnet launch. We have just opened Sui's official WeChat account. If you want to follow us on WeChat, you can search for "Sui Network". We have also started the recruitment of Sui ambassadors. If you want to join, you can also sign up.
To answer the question asked by the host just now, that is, what do we think is the relationship between L1 and L2? I think whether it is Ethereum + Layer 2 or L1 of Sui's new architecture is an exploration of expansion methods and market demand. The main expansion path of Ethereum at the beginning was not Rollup (but sharding), but it turned into an L2-based design in the end.
We think that the encryption market is still relatively early. There are two points that are difficult to see clearly. The first point is that it is difficult to see which type of expansion solution will be more advanced. The second point is that it is difficult to see exactly what the demand for capacity expansion and throughput in the market is. from where. Because it is difficult to see these two issues clearly, many judgments in this area are guesswork. However, I think it is more certain that, from the perspective of smart contracts, there must be demand for the underlying network of the EVM environment and the non-EVM environment.
Sui's strategy is relatively simple. We just want to make the non-EVM compatible underlying network bigger and better. To achieve this, we must find some development requirements that cannot be met by the EVM environment on the demand side. Only by finding these requirements and doing a good job of supporting work can we ensure our foothold. Exploration in this area is still relatively early. We think this part of the demand may come from Web3 games or some type of NFT, but this still needs to be verified.
Anna: From an idealistic point of view, the reason why I chose to work at the Solana Foundation is because the Solana team has been committed to promoting decentralization, which is very important for an L1 ecosystem. From the perspective of maintaining the ecology, we recently launched the storage state compression of NFT, released a mobile phone, and supported many hard-working projects. This is the style of developers in the Solana ecosystem. From the second half of last year to the present, we have maintained the strategy of building a community for developers, which has not changed from beginning to end.
Young: The question raised by the moderator is very good. Everyone has not been very clear about the relationship between L1 and L2. From the perspective of users, after the outbreak of DeFi Summer in 2020, Ethereum gradually became very congested, and the gas was also very high. At this time, Ethereum overflowed a lot of value to some side chains or external L1, but these side chains and However, L1 continues to have security problems, so L2 is very important for the expansion of Ethereum.
To give you an example, we can regard Ethereum's L1 as a test paper, and L2 as a scratch paper. When we go to take an exam, if the teacher only gives you a test paper but not a scratch paper, you will both make a draft and write the result on the test paper, and eventually there is no place to write the answer on the test paper. L2 is equivalent to the teacher sending you a piece of scratch paper. You can write down all the calculation process on the scratch paper, and finally only write the answer on the test paper. This is an excellent case to describe L1 and L2.
In fact, with the current development of the entire L1 track, you can see that Ethereum has proposed many new upgrade solutions, and is developing in a very complicated direction. L2 can be regarded as taking into account the innovative possibilities of Ethereum on L2. , shouldering the mission of innovation.
Scroll is a 100% equivalent EVM that we've been building as open source since day one. We have held many global hackathons, and many developers told us that some new projects have been deployed on Scroll, which feels exactly the same as Ethereum, which is what we have been doing.
Regarding our development strategy, Scroll has been a community-driven team since day one, so we welcome and encourage developers to build on Scroll. You can regard Scroll as a public product, and we will provide a very good, open and open source soil, so that more developers can create more and better applications on Scroll in the future.
Haichao: I think L1 is not just as simple as expanding L1. L2's technical solution guarantees an off-chain smart contract environment. Although it is centralized and licensed, it can be secured by L1. This is our view on Layer 2. From this perspective, L2 is not just an expansion of L1, it is not just an accessory of L1, L2 itself is an important core.
If you think about it from this perspective, you will recognize the modular blockchain attempt that Rooch is doing. The so-called modular blockchain essentially provides an off-chain smart contract execution environment. You can generate Optimistic Rollup or ZK Rollup in this environment. You can put these environments on any L1, of course, it can also be Ethereum. It can also be other.
This kind of thinking will be more meaningful to developers. If you still follow the previous thinking, you will easily fall into a dilemma, that is, the design thinking is not open. Now we also have faster Ethereum, such as Polygon, but everyone can do it. Go or those apps. Therefore, we need to provide developers with a design space to think from the perspective of the application itself rather than the ecology. What Rooch wants to do is to provide a smart contract environment that is user-friendly and can help developers solve various problems. Architecture On the Internet, you can choose to become the L2 of a certain chain, or you can become an L3 like an application chain, or you can do more application scenarios.
The modular blockchain is still a very new track, and there are only two or three projects doing infrastructure in this area, but I believe that this will be the only way to open up the Web3 incremental market in the future.
For us, to build an ecology, we must first ensure that there are better products, such as gas fees, TPS, storage, etc., which cannot be restricted. This is the most important thing; Complex and more Web3 applications, and then see what functions these applications can carry and what experience they can provide.
Vision: Our current understanding of the relationship between L1 and L2 is that Ethereum started as a monolithic blockchain, which carried the data availability layer, execution layer, etc., carrying many functions and purpose, while L2 realizes the expansion of Ethereum by building another execution layer. Of course, some L2s are now moving towards modularization or fine division of labor, but the mainstream direction is still to implement a single execution layer.
There is no fixed model or fixed relationship between L1 and L2. If an L2 wants to use the consensus layer or data availability layer of L1, you can make a sovereign Rollip. If you don’t use it, you can just do it. A worker not a decision maker.
Q3
Sunil: Thank you for your sharing. I would like to ask the guests of Scroll, among all zkEVMs, Scroll is listed by V God as ZK-L2 compatible with EVM Type 1. In addition to a higher degree of compatibility, does Scroll also have an advantage in ZKP generation speed compared to other ZK EVMs such as Starknet? What do you think about the current ZKP hardware constraints?
Young: This question is very good. In addition to using ZK hardware acceleration to generate services, ChatGPT is very popular now. In fact, AI is also very demanding for hardware acceleration.
Back to the question, in fact, Scroll is the first solution provider in the world to propose multi-dimensional hardware acceleration. We proposed a hardware acceleration solution for ZKP very early on, and several articles have been very well included in top journals, and we have very rich experience in this regard. Why is ZKP hardware acceleration so popular? Mainly in the following points.
The first point is that because the proof generation of ZK requires a lot of parallel computing, the demand for prove is very large. We can compare it to the calculation of the Bitcoin network that requires a lot of hashing power. We use these multi-computing power To generate proves, these proves can help L2, L3, and more privacy applications.
The second point is the advantage of Scroll compared with peers. We will build a very decentralized network in the future, and there will be a lot of "miners" participating in this network to help us generate prove. This is a very benign and positive trend. Loop will provide logistical support for prove requirements on Scroll.
The third point is that we will open source the GPU solution this year, and hope that enthusiasts engaged in ZKP hardware acceleration can use our solution. We welcome your suggestions, and we will actively adopt your technical suggestions.
The fourth point is that we are currently doing joint research and development with some domestic and foreign teams that are very strong in hardware acceleration. Therefore, it can be said that Scroll is at the forefront of the entire track in terms of hardware acceleration.
Sunil: Thank you for Scroll's wonderful sharing, because Metastone has also made a first-level investment in Scroll, and we continue to be optimistic about Scroll's solutions in terms of major technical directions. The L2 track will develop further, and it is even possible for L2 to completely surpass L1 in terms of data. We are looking forward to the early launch of the Scroll mainnet.
Next, ask Arbitrum, L2 has many solutions, what are the advantages of Arbitrum? And what is the next step of Arbitrum's current plan? Can you briefly talk about the Roadmap?
Vision: Thanks to the host, I have communicated with Arbitrum’s Jason before, so today I will introduce Arbitrum’s general plan from the testnet to the present to the future on his behalf, and introduce Arbitrum’s ecological incubation Some features, if you listen carefully, you may find some relatively good wealth opportunities.
Arbitrum released the testnet in 2021, and then released Arbitrum Classic in August of the same year, which is their first-generation mainnet. The mainnet actually has compatibility with Ethereum, but it may be because the first Due to the problem of the generation technology stack, the scalability is still not very good.
In June-July 2022, when Arbitrum launched the Odyssey mission, everyone must have interacted with it. There was an extremely high transaction load and gas fees became very high. In August 22, Arbitrum updated the technology stack and replaced Classic with Nitro. Since then, the TPS of the entire network has increased by 7-8 times compared to before.
This is the path that Arbitrum has traveled in the past. As for the roadmap in the future, Arbitrum may launch a new programming environment Stylus in Q3 or Q4 this year or even in 2024. It will support WASM at that time, and traditional developers will be able to Deploying smart contracts with C++ or Rust instead of Solidity may open up the influx of hundreds of millions of developers, which is a drawable advantage of Arbitrum over other L2s.
Sunil: Next, ask L1. Solana has experienced two years of ups and downs. I believe everyone is curious, what will be the next development strategy of Solana? Will there be any hole cards that can return to the top in the market? Technically, is there any new progress in Solana?
Anna: I mentioned mobile phones earlier, which is one of our technological advancements this year.
In addition, we are working with Jump Crypto on a second validator client, Firedancer, which will be based on the C++ programming language and designed to coexist with existing validator clients based on the Rust programming language. In this way, even if the original network has bugs, Firedancer's client can still run normally. At present, in the case of testing, the TPS should be in the tens of thousands.
In addition, we will also have a new Token-2022 Program, which has made some improvements on the original Program, including the anonymous transfer function, and some other very suitable for compliant stablecoins and DeFi on the compliant chain function.
In addition, there are some excellent projects in our ecosystem, such as Neon Labs, an EVM compatible solution, and developers in the community are still innovating continuously. The ups and downs in the past two years have actually exceeded the expectations of most ecological members, but after so many new chains and new ecology come out, they are still willing to stay in Solana and still immerse themselves in innovation here. Having such a loyal community makes us I think Solana will still give birth to many different projects in the future.
Sunil: The Move language department has become popular since the early summer of last year. Some of the Move developers have also transferred from other language departments. I would like to ask Sui, what are the advantages of the Move language compared to other languages such as Solidity? Sui also recently announced that it will launch the mainnet this quarter, so what are the current outstanding projects in the Sui ecosystem?
Henry: Let me briefly introduce Move. Move was originally a relatively safe, asset-oriented smart contract language created by Facebook when Diem was established. Assets using the Move language cannot be held accountable or destroyed at will, which makes it more suitable for displaying assets in life. Sui Move has made some improvements based on the original Diem Move language, creating a safer environment for users to interact with smart contracts. For example, when a user signs a transaction in Sui, the user can clearly know that the transaction needs to be obtained Which objects have permissions, and what kind of operations can be performed on these objects by this transaction. Sui hopes to promote the use of this safer language to the industry, so that the industry can develop in a safer direction.
As for the excellent projects on Sui, I can briefly introduce three projects. The first one is Suiet Wallet, which is a native wallet project born in the community. Suiet Wallet is completely open source and does not record any personal data of users. Many people in the Suiet Wallet team come from BAT, have good product experience, development iterations and ecological cooperation progress are very fast. Moreover, the speed of product development, product iteration, and ecological cooperation is very fast. The second project is a DEX called Cetus, which is an active market-making DEX similar to Uniswap V3, which allows LPs to achieve higher capital efficiency. The third project is called Typus, which is a Real Yield project whose team has a strong traditional financial background.
Q4
Sunil: The last question, we know that the direction of industry development must be to attract more increments into the market. Whether it is lower fees, faster processing speed, more convenient language, richer ecology... Then from the perspective of gaining increment, I would like to ask all professional teachers about your judgment on future industry trends.
Vision: From an incremental point of view, there are mainly two aspects of work. One is to attract traditional developers to the Web3 industry by supporting languages that are more familiar to them. For example, Arbitrum will soon support WASM; on the other hand, it is to improve the convenience of development. The current applications are basically in L2 or L3 However, the convenience and cost of everyone’s construction on L2 or L3 are not very good. If you want to achieve more increments, you need to support developers to build their own application chains, which requires more Multiple SDKs to provide support.
Haichao: I think there are three aspects. First, if you want your application to have no restrictions on TPS, gas, storage, etc., you must choose an off-chain solution; second, if you want your application to have its own ecology, you can choose a modular solution; if you, as a developer, want to To get a better development experience, then you must choose Move. To sum up, it is a modular off-chain development environment that supports the Move language, that is, Rooch.
Young: I also think there are a few points to note.
Number one, security is absolutely paramount. A few days ago, some ETH was accidentally locked in an L2 project due to contract function problems. As long as similar security problems occur, it will often affect the reputation of the project. At Scroll, we do a lot of testing and auditing every time we release a beta version or upgrade to ensure the security and stability of the network.
The second point is that we need to start from the perspective of the community. In addition to building our own projects, we also need to help the entire L1 ecosystem achieve more innovations. Scroll has been promoting the development of the entire Ethereum ecological ZK technology solution. We are not only building Scroll, but also building Ethereum. We attach great importance to the development of the community.
Third, the transition from Web2 to Web3 should be helped during the development process. We have done a lot of educational work, including cooperating with some relatively large technology companies, and hiring some core researchers and developers of Ethereum to do some courses. You can go to Scroll's Youtube channel to have a look. We are the most content output among all ZK and L2 projects. There are a lot of videos there to help you understand L2 and ZK step by step.
We define ourselves as a semi-public goods platform, hoping to allow everyone to build better and create better things.
Anna: I think there are two paths to this problem: top-down and bottom-up.
From top to bottom, it means that capital needs to be willing to invest in better assets in the blockchain world in a sustainable and long-term manner. For example, real world assets (RWA) are a very interesting field. Bottom-up means, for example, although we already have more than 1,600 verification nodes, we have not yet expanded to many countries and regions in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. Therefore, the health of the chain still needs to be improved. From the perspective of actual user education, once we can let them understand how to use blockchains such as Solana to improve their lives, this will be a very long-term and meaningful thing.
Henry: Let me quickly say that from the perspective of increment, I think the most important thing is that the product (including the public chain) needs to find a real demand. If the product does not match the market, all increments will be lost. It is burning money. In addition, judging from the long-term trend of the industry, the winning projects will definitely be decentralized.
Sunil: Thank you for your wonderful sharing, this round table is over here, thank you!
