Bankless - Devcon #6 - The Layer 2 Wars with Bartek Kiepuszewski

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

Bartek is the founder of Layer 2 Beat, finding himself in the middle of what we’re calling the Layer 2 Wars. Previously at MakerDAO, Bartek is pioneering the one-stop platform for the Layer 2 landscape. ------ 📣 Push | Try the Communication Protocol of Web3 https://bankless.cc/Push  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/?utm_source=banklessshowsyt  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across  🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  💠 NEXO | CRYPTO FINANCIAL HUB https://bankless.cc/Nexo  🔐 LEDGER | NANO HARDWARE WALLETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger  ⚡️FUEL | THE MODULAR EXECUTION LAYER https://bankless.cc/Fuelpod  ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 2:30 Bartek in Colombia 4:00 Fixing Layer 2 7:25 Building and Forking 9:45 zkEVM 13:30 EVM Equivalence 14:30 Optimism Bedrock ------ Resources: Bartek Kiepuszewski https://twitter.com/bkiepuszewski  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

Welcome Bankless Nation back to the DevCon 6 experience. I hope you've been enjoying these interviews thus far. I hope they've been making you feel like you were on the ground at DevCon. It was a treat. In this interview, we're talking with Bartek. Bartek is the leader, the founder, co-founder of Layer 2B. He's previously Maker Dau, and he is at the middle of the Layer 2 wars. Layer 2B is this place where all of these layer 2s are indexed and documented about what holes they have,

what they need to work on. And it's been like the sparring ground for all of these layer twos. So I get Bartek's perspective as what it's like to be in the middle of the layer two wars and how he thinks the layer two wars are progressing from here. And overall, are we as an Ethereum ecosystem, Ethereum community members, not critical enough about our own layer twos? Are we hypocrites for critiquing cross layer one bridges, other all layer ones, while also not looking at our own layer twos and seeing the holes and flaws in them as well? I asked them that question and more all about the layer two wars the very very spicy layer two wars so i hope you enjoyed this conversation with bar tech from layer two beat right after we talk to some of these

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And let's go ahead and get right into the interview right now. Bankless Nation, I'm here with Bartek, founder of Layer 2B and also a contributor at Maker Dow. And Bartek has found himself, I think, at the center of these Layer 2 wars. I wish there had been a ton of announcements here at DevCon Bogota. Bartek, thank you so much for coming on and joining me here. It's my pleasure. How have you ever been during Columbia?

Well, so far so good. Yeah, I like the country. It's the first time that I'm in Colombia, like probably most people, at DefCon. And DevCon is always a great opportunity to see other places and cultures. And I really appreciate, you know, the approach of the Human Foundation, where I feel like we're trying to include everybody, right? It's not like just Europe and U.S. and Europe and U.S. like most other conferences, but we actually actually... I've been to Japan, you know, we are here now. I'm truly wondering, you know, what's next?

Well, certainly what's next with, there's so many things that's next in Ethereum, and Layer 2 is definitely one of those things. Like I said, you are the co-founder of Layer 2 Beat, which is this website that we go to to look at how many holes there are in the Layer 2 ecosystem. And Vitalik recently at the Roll Up Day on Monday was giving a presentation as to all these different ways that we need to fix Layer 2s. How do you think that progress is going? And are there any announcements that you've seen here at DevCon Bogota that is working in that direction?

So, well, frankly, for so many people that I talk to that, you know, I don't like attend a lot of sessions. I haven't seen a lot of announcements. Having said that, I think that most teams, they have presented roadmaps, which are fully decentralized. you know, they promise all of us to shed the training wheels. And I think if we were to list on L2B, just pure roll-ups, we probably wouldn't list literally anyone, right? And it would be a very boring website. So right now, you know, as it stands, every single project is very much centralized

and is very much controlled by the team that actually created the roll-ups. but to my knowledge, with almost no exception, each one of them has a roadmap, like a decentralized, decentralization roadmap. And I think right now, you know, we're trying to kind of track the progress, if you like, right? And made them transparent and made them honest. And I think we're getting there, for sure.

And one of the critiques that we've seen outside of the Ethereum space, and sometimes also inside of the Ethereum space, is that we're promoting these layer 2s as if they're the magical, secure solution to scale a chain. But then we're also kind of hiding and pushing under the rug the fact that these have multi-sig bridge contracts

and we're missing fraud proofs. Do you think that the Ethereum community or the Ethereum promoters, maybe me and Ryan are guilty of this, are like hypocritical of the way that we kind of pitch layer 2s? Or do you think there's more nuance here? Well, this is a very loaded question here.

So I'd say that every single team they've got their own agenda and some of them are more, let's say, transparent than the others. Some of them are hiding behind the marketing and whatnot. Everyone seems to be extremely keen at building the community. And, well, we cannot hide the fact that it is a race, right? I wouldn't call you the war. And we don't know exactly how the future of layer two ecosystem on Ethereum will look like. Are we going to see many different roleups? So maybe one will take it all. So that's still an open question in my mind. But if one team sees the other team like launching something which

may have a lot of training wheels, you know, they might actually be pressed to do the same. And the general community, I think they don't see all these nuances because they may not be published widely, right? Sometimes we're not published at all. And this is why, you know, we essentially created this website so that we disclose some of these things. And we just want to make all these teams honest. And we want to make sure that the users actually understand all the security assumptions behind all these systems. You've talked about the roadmap that many of these layers have presented to solve and fix some of these holes. How credible are these roadmaps? Are they legit roadmaps? There's real tech here or is it more just hand-waving?

So that would probably differ. Every single team has a little bit different approach. So if we look at the optimistic roll-ups, for example, we see two major teams putting a lot of work into actually making sure that all these fraud-proof technology is working, and EVM equivalent systems will eventually be deployed. So I'm talking about arbitram and optimism, and we've got some other teams that are falking, mainly optimist code, And they're kind of waiting for optimism to deliver the product of system. So you can see that, you know, some teams are innovating and some teams are trying to sort of, you know, fork the code and maybe try to innovate on the edges. I'm mainly thinking about Boba and Mattis.

So that's optimistic for the ZK. Most of the teams are innovating like crazy. I mean, this is like amazing, really, to see the progress. I think we've all been surprised. I bet all these teams and and well Starknet ZKSync, Aztec, right scroll, I mean it's just

unbelievable polygon as well everyone is like pushing code really hard and every single conference that I go to versus like new announcement right from either one of them so my understanding is that ZK sync will launch very soon

Starknet is just upgrading to version one of Cairo which is like the major upgrade. The first version was very much centralized and wasn't particularly censorship resistant. We've pushed them really, really hard to work on this problem, and I believe that, you know, they listen to the community. And the new version, which is like way more complicated, will actually allow people to force transactions, you know, to their system, right? So they cannot be censored. I remember when I was reporting on ETHCC back in April of earlier this year,

whenever that was. I can't remember how many months ago. Yeah, June, maybe. June something. Yeah. July. I think it was July. Yeah, July.

Yeah, it keeps moving. Right, right, right. It was July. People are joking that the theme of the ECCC was the ZKEVM, because so many people announced their ZKEVM. So it was a test net or launch date or something. That also seems to be the theme of the roll-ups this week as well here at Devcom Bogota where Polygon released their ZKEVM test net, scroll release their ZKEVM test net,

ZK Sync release their layer 3 test net, test net, layer 3 test net, testes. net, and they have their main net in just like 10, 20 days here. And also something that Battalik said in his presentation at Roll Up Day was the ZK teams seem to be like the one part of like crypto building that has been massively accelerated beyond expectations. You know, Ethereum, the merge was slow. Sharding has been slow. But the ZK EVMs are here.

When all of these main nets do come, like how big of it? First off, how big of a deal is that? And like, are they going to come? And is it going to be? as a big of a thing that people are excited for, or is it still going to be like, okay, main net, but users are going to have to wait another, like, I don't know, six months to be able to do something?

Like, overall, what's your take on the trajectory of the ZK ecosystem? Well, right now, we have to be able to sort of differentiate between systems that are ZK equivalent and, let's say, ZK, or EVM equivalent and EVM compatible. So ZK Sync is a good example of ZK Roll-Up that is compatible with VVM, but this is not like equivalent system, right?

And I think we're going to see a very interesting competition between systems that try to emulate VM as close as possible and systems that will prefer to make sure that the proving is optimized for the particular VM, right? And in this category, I would put definitely ZK Sync and StarkNet. So the competition between these two approaches would be very interesting to watch. Having said that, I think end users probably for them, you know, it wouldn't really matter. It might make a small difference for developers. But my thinking about this is that it doesn't matter so much, you know, how friendly this is for developers. I mean, it's important that it's easy to port your code.

It might be important to make sure that your code is secure. But for end users, it's much more important that the system is fast. It's cheap, right? It's got the big ecosystem versus good wallet support. And I think to that end, the account abstraction is super important. And they won't see much of a difference, frankly, right? Even today, when you're using Starknet or Optimism or arbitrarum, I mean, you won't notice much of a difference.

So we're, like, debating the details that most end users won't even notice, right? And, you know, it will come to the edges, I think, if something goes really wrong. Like, if one of these systems will start to censor. Then end users will learn that there's a difference, right? And then they will see that there are some systems that, you know, have working escape hatches, whilst some other systems don't have that facility, and suddenly your funds are stuck. Because the rel-up operators decided to be, I don't know,

of like compliant or whatever, right, pressed by the regulators. So, you know, like for the daily usage, I don't think the users will actually notice much, but I think it's our responsibility to educate them. What are those security assumptions, right? Sure. Do you have your own personal opinion on the debate between ZK or EVM equivalence versus EVM compatibility? Or are you saying both sides have strong arguments, let the best roll-up win? I think both sides presented very strong arguments. You know, I had the pleasure of moderated panel on the roll-up day on that very topic, you know, and I can see passionate statements from both sides. So it will be extremely interesting to watch. and long term, maybe going ZKM equivalent, you know, makes sense.

But, you know, short term, I think, of certain advantages right now to have a VM that's like ZK friendly because it will allow you to do things faster and cheaper. And time to market is likely to be quicker, right? Right. One of the things that has been living rent-free in my brain and the thing I've been trying to learn about the most here at dev-de-con, DevCon, DevCon, that one, not DevConnect, is Optimism Bedrock. And it's interesting to see the modularity of Ethereum find its way also into the Layer 2s. And that's really what Optimism Bedrock is, is a modular Layer 2's in the same way that we have a modular Layer 1 Ethereum. My mind here is that what Optimism Bedrock is doing in the OP stack is that they're reducing the barrier to, forking and producing a new layer two.

And as somebody who has to manage a website that is a registry of all the properties of all these layer twos, I'm slightly worried for you, Bartak, because what happens if you see a Cambrian explosion of optimistic roll-ups, layer threes? Do you see the same future as well? How do you think about managing

all these proliferation of layer twos that might come? Yeah, I mean, most definitely, and even right now, the website is hardly manageable, and I'm sure that there are certain inaccuracies and mistakes. and in future months, you know, the most of the engineering efforts will go into automation. I mean, at the end of the day, everything ends up on chain. And so we, with our monitoring infrastructure, once, you know, it will be developed,

we will actually get all the information automatically from chain, right? There must be some registry of all these roll-ups. There will be a way to sort of read their configuration directly from blockchain, So hopefully if they follow the same cookie-cutter approach and like Fogg and create their own role-up, it will be just a matter of, you know, having our robots to read the data and filling the website. And then it would be a question of how to actually present it to user in a manageable way, right? Which is, I guess, you know, a question for the UI designers.

So I'd say that today it used to be 80% of the effort for the research and to, 20% of the effort for, you know, like presenting all the information, but now it's going to be reversed almost, right? The automation infrastructure behind L2B is going to be actually quite complex. Sure. And tracking all the changes will be possible because, you know, finally we've got some fantastic tooling, like the token for insight. This is the analytical database that tracks every single state. Ethereum in all Ethereum history, right? So we can just watch particular slots

and it will inform us what exactly happened and when it happened and it will trigger warnings essentially, right? So that's how I kind of think about it. I mean, it has to be managed by essentially automation. Sure. And of course, layer two is under the hood are extremely complicated. I don't even know how to code. So when something goes down, I wouldn't know what to do.

And so Bartek, what you're doing at layer 2B, in my mind is just producing user sovereignty and tools that the individuals can use that are non-technical and very, very helpful. So thank you for everything you're doing at Layer 2B, and I hope you have a fantastic rest of view at DevCon. Okay. Thank you very much. Cheers. Bam.