Bankless - Scroll zkEVM Mainnet Launch with Sandy & Toghrul

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

The rollup wars are alive well! Scroll just launched their zkEVM to Ethereum mainnet. We invited Scroll's Co-Founder, Sandy Peng and Scroll's Senior Researcher, Toghrul Toghrul Maharramov on the show.  In today's episode, we discuss why Sroll is exciting, how it is different than other rollups. what’s next, and of course, wen token.  ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT  ------ 📣 Bankless Podcast Survey:  https://forms.gle/Ai5qpCJjQPhAErPr8  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q4  🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ⁠ 🔗 CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo  ----- TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Intro 6:04 Scroll Mainnet Live 6:30 Why Is Scroll Mainnet Unique?  9:25 EVM Equivalence Importance  16:30 Apps Compatibility  17:50 Importance of Scroll Rollup 20:17 Why ZK is the Holy Grail  26:30 What to do on Scroll & Why Scroll 32:47 Stitching L2s Together 39:40 What's Next For Scroll 44:30 Toghrul Disagreements 49:00 Wen Token? 50:00 Closing & Disclosures ----- RESOURCES: Sandy https://twitter.com/SandyPeng1  Toghrul https://twitter.com/toghrulmaharram  ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠  

Hey, Bankless Nation, it is the roll-up wars on today's episode. A new player has entered the chat. Scroll just released their new ZK. Evm to Mainnet. And we've got the co-founder of Scroll and a senior researcher from Squirrel joining us today to tell us what that means. David, what are we talking about? Now, Scroll is a pretty hotly anticipated layer two. It is a ZK. Evm layer two. And so with all of the optimistic roll-ups already deployed and pretty decently along in their maturity, It's time for the ZK EVMs, the ZK rollouts to enter the arena. Scroll is a unique kind of ZK EVM. It's got some extra bells and whistles, some unique properties that make scroll tick. So we're going to ask Sandy and Torgle about the unique properties that make scroll so interesting.

And of course, we'll eventually get to win token at the very end. Speaking of unique properties, you know what has unique properties, David? Tell me. This podcast right here. And also the jacket that we were looking at, Okay, this is a sucajan. Sujikin, sujikin. Oh, okay.

I don't even know. I don't even have one, David. But you do. I do. I got it right here. This is available to a bankless listener who fills out a survey, actually. The call to action is we have a survey and we need people to fill it out. You might get the jacket if you fill out the survey.

But the main thing we're talking about is a survey that we need to fill out. I started with the jacket, but David's starting with the survey. And that's the thing. All you have to do is fill up the survey and you have a chance to win. in that jacket. David, why are we doing this survey? Because we have a new podcast format that we want to bring to the table, an unreleased podcast type of podcast, but we want to make sure that we are actually on target with this. So we're gathering some data about who you are, bankless listener, what kinds of podcasts you listen to, what kinds of bankless podcasts you listen to,

or maybe you listen to all of them, wow, and just kind of a background about yourself. And so if you want the bankless podcast to tune itself to a little bit more towards your desires, or maybe you just want the jacket, fill out the podcast survey. Yeah, it's not about the jacket. It's about improving the podcast, everybody. Do your public duty. Thank you, bankless listeners. Fill this out.

There's a link in the show notes. You want to go check that out. It should take like five minutes of your time. No more than that, I'm sure. David, why are we talking about scroll today? T-up this episode for us a little bit more. So the ZK, EVM roles are kind of off. And, you know, roll-ups in general.

have been climbing up the leaderboard on L2B, so a lot of them are trying to gain market share. What is special about scroll? And why are we bringing them on the episode today? Yeah, so I'm, I think I'm really excited to ask Sandy and Torgle about this. I think there's like a spectrum of difficulty of roll-ups. Optimistic roll-ups are like pretty easy, as in just like, you know, fork and replace the EVM, but now is layer two.

Then we kind of get into the ZK roll-ups, switch it with like Polygon and ZK sync, which are like roll-ups, but ZK. but with scroll we're on entering like a new frontier which is EVM equivalent ZK roll-ups which is a pretty hard thing to achieve yet you get a huge amount of tailwinds if you do get that and so that's going to be I think the main focus of some of my questions is what do you get with a ZK EVM why do we care about scroll what about scroll has set itself apart from its competition so that was that's the thing to pay attention to pay attention to as we go into this episode So guys, before we get into this episode, first we disclose.

David and I are both angel investors in Scroll. We are big fans of many different layer twos out there. And as a reminder, we are long-term investors. We're not journalists. We don't do paid content. There's always a link to all of our disclosures in the show notes, bankless.com slash disclosures. All right, guys, we will be right back with Sandy and Torgle. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible,

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It's a game-changing proposal that's going to bring Sellow's rapidly growing ecosystem home to Ethereum. Vitalik has shared its excitement for the Cello Layer 2 on the Cello Forum. So has Ben Jones from Office. optimism. But why? The cello layer two will bring huge advantages, like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability, and one block finality. What does all that mean? Rock solid security, a trustless bridge to Ethereum, and more real-world use cases for Ethereum without compromise. And real-world adoption is happening. Active addresses on cello have grown over 500% in the last six months. With the cello layer two, gas fees will stay low and you can even pay for gas using ERC20

tokens. But Sello is a community-governed protocol. This means that Sello needs you to wait in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the Selo Forum. Follow at cello org on Twitter and visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. Bankless Nation, I'm so excited to introduce you to Sandy Pang, one of the co-founders of Scroll, the ZK scaling solution that we're talking about today. And also Torgal Marimov, a senior researcher and roll-up sorcerer also at Scroll. Sandy, Torgle, welcome to the banklist. How are you guys doing? Hello, hello. Hey guys, good to be here. Okay, so the news today is that mainnet scroll mainnet is live that's pretty cool congratulations how does it feel sandy how's it

feel they have finally had main net live yeah it feels amazing almost surreal this has been kind of two years in the making and the team has really pulled together for this very big milestone and i think for for any kind of product team like the big product launch is really just the beginning this is the first time we get to really meet our customers and meet the deeps and get real feedback. So everything feels much more tangible. And, you know, just like anything we do, it's just great when you receive feedback and hopefully that will help us iterate more going forward. And Torgle, you've been at scroll for as long as I've known you, but you also pay attention to the entire roll-up landscape and really just crypto at large. Maybe you could just do the

job of articulating why this is significant in the broad landscape of all layer twos, all types of roll-ups. Why is this main net day unique? I think I'm going to come off a bit biased here. I think you're allowed to do that. Yeah, that's permitted. I'm happy to do that. So, so one of the things that we concentrated on since the beginning is maximizing compatibility with Ethereum. And at the time when this was just getting started almost three years ago, this was almost an insane idea. I remember talking to a few people in like 2021 about potentially building a Zika EVM that is EVM equivalent or compatible. And they were like, yeah, those people are just scammers.

It's never going to work. And yeah, it basically started as a wild idea that transformed into something that is finally alive on the main net today. And it's been a long road, a tiring road. I think we all need a sleep, a long, sleep tonight after the launch. but yeah but we're happy that we're finally on the arena playing learning

in the arena yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah but yeah no I remember like yesterday when we first met talk roll I think the team was just eight to ten people and we got introduced on the internet and I think most people thought we were kind of a joke because it was just so far-fetched but Toproll decided to join us after a 30 minutes call. He was just like, yolo.

Yeah. We basically... He's been yolowing ever since. Yeah, we basically signed the papers the next day after I had a call. What was so compelling about that, Torgle? Yeah. I think for me was the idea that the scroll aimed to be as much compatible with Ethereum as possible. And I always thought of roll-ups as a great extension of Ethereum.

And that just made a lot of sense to me. And I always thought of ZK as a more long-term play versus something like optimistic roll-ups, which were more of a viable short-term solution. But long-term, I feel like all of the optimistic roll-ups are going to transform into ZK roll-ups. So it just made it clicked from like the first time I had a call with Sandy. And yeah. Torgo, why is EVM equivalence so important? Like you mentioned this idea of an extension of Ethereum, right?

I know some roll-ups have gone in a completely different direction. They're like, hey, EVM sucks. We'll just settle on Ethereum and call it good. Yeah, but scroll is with strategy. You guys are doubling, tripling down on Ethereum equivalence. Why? So I feel like for me, the argument was always, what's the purpose of rebuilding everything from scratch

and re-educating people and helping them learn a new language and new programming paradigm, etc. Where you can use something that has almost 10 years of documentation, 10 years of tutorial, 10 years of open source code. And it doesn't matter what you want to build. Most of the things already have been, obviously not everything, but like a lot of the building blocks have already been built out by somebody else. And it's easy to learn.

So solidity, you can't even compare solidity to any other smart contracts. programming language because it had such a head start and therefore it just makes sense to reuse something that has been widely adopted versus not only trying to optimize it but also trying to attract people to actually learn and build with you that new VM and the new programming language, which is a very hard job and only a few have succeeded since Ethereum in doing that. One of the compelling things about roll-ups, and you alluded to this, is that it's an extension of Ethereum. And really the maximally mature version of a roll-up is one that has zero compromises with Ethereum. Can you just talk about the value of this and how Scroll is playing in that arena?

Sure. I think some of our initial thesis was that, which we still hold today, is that I think Ethereum is the most decentralized and the most secure layer one. And it has this incredibly strong kind of social layer built around it. And that means many, many very convicted people and idealistic and also creative people, just very strong talents from around the world who are committed to this ecosystem for various reasons. And for us, that was the most attractive thing about the community. And we wanted to build something that meets developer where they are already. We thought it was somewhat unrealistic to kind of.

forced developers to learn something new. And we wanted them to kind of leverage whatever they've built over the last couple of years. Because when protocols are battle tested, when they're used by many, many users, and when brands are established within this arena, these are all things that are valuable. And we want to preserve as much as possible. And I think with these major building blocks, that is also the best jump start for the next iteration or the next innovation to happen. it didn't really make sense to kind of reinvent the whole ecosystem every time there's a new L1.

It's much better to kind of encourage people to be creative and to build the next generation of things through fun and play. And part of Scroll's role is making that whole setup much more accessible. And accessible means a number of things. It means being cheaper. It means being faster. It means faster finality. and it also means maintaining the highest possible security standards.

And so in that effect, I think scroll is somewhat a little bit later to the main launch compared to the other ZKEBMs. But we've been in TestNet for 15 months. And that means a huge number, I think something like 90 million transactions accumulated and something like, I think definitely more than 20 million unique wallet addresses on our test nets. And all of these adds up to a more, you know, a very battle tested, you know, battle tested. And we've conducted full audit with four esteemed audit firms.

And internally, we've always had a red team and blue team set up in order to check the, you know, cross-check our work. Just the amount of precision that goes into building the ZK EVM is absolutely phenomenal. I think one day we'd love to have heightened and, and, and, and, and, and, and, you know, Peter from the engineering team to come and talk about exactly how much detailed and granular work it takes to kind of write ZK wrappers around every single kind of EVM of code. You mentioned the ambitiousness of what it takes to make a ZK EVM that's EVM equivalent to Ethereum. I mean, there's already been a handful of ZK EVMs that have shipped mainly out of ZK Sync and Polygon, but these aren't exactly what scrolls building, scrolls. going, I think kind of doing the hard thing of doing the EVM equivalence with the actual like bytecode equivalence, which is I think where it collapses down to if my technical chops are

serving me well here. And like you alluded to it, that's, that's harder and that's why, you know, scroll's the latest of the three, the last of the three. But to articulate the bull case for like EVM equivalence is that, well, while the Ethereum ecosystem has developed while scroll has spent the hard work of becoming an EVM equivalent, ZK. EVM. scroll gets a right in the tailwinds of all the innovation and development that is going on in parallel. Can you talk about the big important things that scroll is able to repurpose that your typical ZKEVM wouldn't be able to repurpose in its ecosystem? So one of the goals that we had since the beginning was to reuse as much code that has already been built for Ethereum and battle tested as possible. Obviously, there are still a few changes that we introduce here and there to optimize.

things. But the goal was to, instead of building new clients, building new tooling, building everything and then having to audit everything, having to run bug bounties for everything, we just reuse stuff that was already built for Ethereum, modify certain things, optimize certain things, but we have this surface area that is much smaller in terms of new code being introduced on the client side, for example. So in our case, we currently reuse Geth, a slightly modified version. of Geft, but we can also adopt Eragon or Nethermind or any other execution client easily because we're compatible with the execution trace of Ethereum. So that allows us to not worry about that side of things and only worry about the bridge, the prover and the sequencers and the efficiency

of the roll-up and trust and rely on the existing battle-tested code to basically carry on what Ethereum has been doing great in terms of being stable, being secure, and being immune or almost immune to faults and holds, if that makes sense. It does. Is it the case that all of the things, all of the apps that work on Ethereum now kind of work right out of the box on scroll, or is there any kind of modification a dev or a building team needs to do in order to make it compatible with scroll? 99.9999% of the apps will work out of the box.

So the only thing that we currently don't support is self-destruct upcode. And the reason why we don't support it is because Ethereum is planning to deprecate it soon. And there's no point for us to support something that is going to be deprecated, let's say, in half a year or a year. So I think everything works in effect. Yeah. And our main net slogan is called copy, pace, and deploy to... So you guys are encouraging copy paste, huh?

That's not what we mean. What we mean is that whatever you've already built, the deployment process is super easy and seamless. And having that setup, it means there's actually less point in building copy and paste projects because it's so easy for projects are already established to come on scroll. Yeah, that seems like a superpower. So in all of the ancillary infrastructure as well work.

So we're talking about like wallets, you know, like a metamask or block. like an ether scan it all just kind of you know clicks in it works without modification right yeah that's that's really cool so tell us about this roll-up itself so you know why are we doing roll-ups in general right we're trying to scale aetherium okay so what does that mean for something like scroll like how many how do how many atherians is it inside of scroll like how many ethereum main nets are we talking or like what's the transactions per second that scroll can kind of support. I realize these are sort of in precise

types of ways of measuring it, but maybe the question is, how do you measure it? How much scale are we actually getting out of scroll? So I think it's difficult to say the precise number in terms of TPS, but you could easily estimate that if we remove the bottlenecks related to Ethereum, so like data availability, et cetera, et cetera, we can easily do an order of magnitude and probably even more than that without having any issues. There are obviously other things that we need to optimize that we still inherit from Ethereum. So one of the problems that we inherit as every other ZK roll-up does is state growth.

And so essentially at some point, we're still going to have to solve it. But because we don't need to optimize for like Raspberry pies, that's not such a big issue for us as it is for Ethereum. And therefore, we can squeeze out a lot more performance. And because it's done off-chain and the computation is only essentially done by one prover, the cost per user is significantly cheaper because it doesn't translate. You don't have to ensure that it's replicated among thousands or even tens of thousands of full notes. Okay.

So order of magnitude more in terms of scalability then. And then remind us why. And that's the starting point. That's the starting point. Yeah, it's going to get better. Okay. What's it going to be getting better with? Like the next EIP that, you know, allows for blob space on Ethereum,

is that going to help scroll at all? Regardless of Ethereum level upgrades, there are plenty of optimizations that we could be doing. And there are a few low-hanging fruits that we will be getting to in the next three to six months. And I think we can expect scroll to be in order to order to manage your pass in Ethereum, it in its current form within like the next year. Yeah.

It's funny. I know you mentioned at the very beginning. You guys mentioned. I think Targill, you're talking about this where back in 2020, 2020, it seemed like a Ethereum equivalent ZK EVM would be years away. In fact, I remember like a blog post from Vitalik where he talked about how far away it was. Like this would be nice, you know, one day, but it's probably many years away. and he was talking like five to ten years kind of timeline.

And the ability to actually develop a ZK EVM, it felt almost like a sci-fi tech. And it was, I mean, I remember coming away from that post and other conversations about this weird ZK. Evm type thing, thinking that that'll be nice one day and describing almost as like the holy grail of Ethereum scalability. And now here we are. Like we've made it.

Can you refresh us on the, why ZK is the direction, like, why is it referred to as the Holy Grail? What benefits do we get from ZK roll-ups versus, say, you know, our optimistic roll-up cousins there? There are multiple things that benefit from ZK. So one, just to establish the basics here, a lot of people, when they hear ZK, they just automatically think privacy. But in reality, the reason why we use ZK is not for privacy. The reason why we use ZK is that the modern proof systems have this property that we refer to as succinctness, which means that you can verify them much cheaper than what it took to compute them.

So essentially, you can think of a very costly execution. And instead of re-executing that entire execution, you can just verify one proof. And it is essentially equivalent to. to just recomputing that costly execution. And you can see how you can gain a lot by just outsourcing that execution to one or two full nodes that do the execution, then they compute the proof for it, propagate the proof to everybody else, and everybody else can just verify the proof and they're done. They don't need to re-execute anything.

They don't need to verify anything, et cetera, aside from that proof. And on top of that, you gain from the fact that ZK allows you to have faster finality relative to optimistic roll-ups. Because the way optimistic roll-ups work is they assume that you're innocent and they're proven guilty. And the bridge allows a certain period of time for anyone to challenge and to prove that you're guilty. So essentially, the state that you posted isn't correct. And usually that challenge window is measured in days. Whereas for ZK roll-ups, the finality time is measured in minutes because as soon as we compute the proof, we can just publish the proof verify it and that's it. We're done.

We don't need to wait for anything. And therefore, you can see how using ZK we benefit from both outsource by having the computation outsourced to a few large nodes. And also on top of that, we benefit from the fact that you can just do it quickly and you don't have to wait to transact and send messages in between layers. So how do users benefit from this? So if I'm a user on scroll versus a user on an optimistic roll-up, like, will I feel any difference? Will I see any benefit? Or are these kind of like under the covers, you know, hidden benefits? I think for now there's not going to be a lot of differences unless you try to exit to an L1.

If you try to exit from an L2 to an L1, then you'll fill the difference because with a ZK, you're going to have to wait for a maximum of like 30 minutes, whereas with an optimistic roll-up, you'll have to wait for a week. But the thing is, the more that the throughput the roll-up can handle and the more we scale, the more those benefits translate into something tangible for users. So it might not be very noticeable now unless you would draw back to an L1, but it'll be noticeable when we are processing thousands of transactions per second. And that finality time between the layer two to layer one,

well, optimistic roll-ups when I transfer out of an optimistic roll-up, it doesn't take me seven days. It takes the market makers seven days to really do that work for users. But you're talking about users as like, well, the market makers are users too. It'll take them seven days out of an optimistic roll-up and only 30 minutes out of a ZK roll-up like scroll. The way that that translates into the end user is that, well, fees just are much cheaper.

And so, I mean, it's going to be the same speed out of an optimistic role. Because you're not paying a market maker any kind of like, you know, tax to cross the bridge. A much lower tax. Like market making is going to be much more competitive between a ZK roll-up and the layer one versus an optimistic roll-up. That's my intuition. Is that right? To some degree, yeah.

Yes, but what you're talking about specifically is value withdrawals and when you were drawing tokens. But also assume there's going to be a lot of cross-chain messaging, like let's say message from an L2 to an L1 app, then you can't really go through a liquidity bridge. You are dependent on the bridge. So for example, an example that I always bring up the Talley is potentially researching is doing the voting for a doubt on an L2 and then just sending the result back as a message to an L1 saying, yet this was the vote and this was the result that was accepted. And here are the changes that you have to make to the contract or whatever. So in an optimistic roll-ups, you're stuck, you'll have to wait for a week.

Whereas where does you get roll-up, you just wait for whatever, like 10, 20, 30 minutes and you're done. I think the way that I would just express this is that all roll-ups are asynchronous with each other by default. But some roll-ups can sink quicker to global state than others. And that is going to be because of that messaging bridge. I want to ask about just main net launched and what's on the chain? Like what's there to do? Is this kind of like a main net for developers? And now developers need to come in and build the attractions, build the apps.

Users can therefore also bridge on. But is there anything for users to do in this present moment? What does the next like rollout phase look like over the coming days and weeks? So we've had our Genesis block a week ago, and we've kind of opened up the space for infrastructure projects to come on. So the opening of the public bridge UI means users can bridge funds to scroll, and developers can start deploying their apps. So I'm not entirely sure what's been deployed so far. It's only been a few hours, but I've been told there's already a Sandy token, which I promise is... Is that why you came here, Sandy, to chill your Sandy token?

The latest meetful. Oh, my God. That's not what we're here. That's not what we're here. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So the apps will be coming then over the weeks and months to come is really what you think. I expect a lot of apps will be deploying relatively close to the main at launch. And why should they come? Like, what's a pitch for?

an app. So let's say I've got a kind of a cool, you know, Defy app on mainnet's working well. I, you know, gas fees are high. But I got a lot of different roll-ups I could deploy to. Why should I deploy on scroll? I think some daps have a multi-row-up strategy. And so for those types of daps, the main cell is for us, it's about removing friction for them. And that's why we have this copy-paste deploy campaign, because it's so easy for them to self-deploy on scroll. it's kind of like a why not. It removes that why not scenario. And then there's another, there's another pitch for,

for applications that are, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that's a number of ZK applications that are, that are, too, that are trying out really unique things that works uniquely with the scroll, um, ZK, ebm for various reasons. And then there's another type of things that are just, you know, because of the nature of scroll being a little bit cheaper and, you know, hopefully a lot cheaper very soon and also a lot faster. It opens up the design space for something that is a little bit further away from the core financial applications and a little bit more in the arena of fun and maybe frivolous and maybe just kind of like hopefully useful type of stuff. This is kind of like, you know, I think a slightly old analogy that I really like is that whenever the internet or broadband increases throughput by an order of magnitude, it opens up a whole arena. And with each order of magnitude of increase in internet speed, that's when Facebook happened,

and that's when Instagram happened, and that's when TikTok happened, and so on and so forth. So we're at this moment where a new generation of applications are already. The infrastructure support there is ready, but what's going to be appearing is, you know, who knows? And as to why, they would build on scroll, we're hoping to build an environment that is helpful for developers where we're trying to be accessible and we're trying to build a vibe that is like cool and conducive to doing creative stuff. How we do that, that's kind of up to toggle. I'm kidding. No pressure. No pressure. I'll be honest.

Tartle is a tastemaker. So, you know, I actually have made vehicles. I do enjoy the timing of all of these ZK EVMs coming online to be right before EIP 4844. I know we got a number of months before that comes, but not just one order of magnitude with the ZK element, but a second order of magnitude with a 4844 element. Guys, there's a few more questions that I want to get to. Of course, just there's in the other roll-up landscape, there's the conversation of the chain development kit. I want to ask what scroll is strategy around here, but also just, future roadmap. What is next? I mean, we talked about all of the extra juice that's left

to squeeze out of innovations, but I just want to talk about the scroll roadmap. And if there's a token on that roadmap, I'm going to ask you all these questions. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Metamac portfolio is your one-stop shop to navigate the world of defy. And now bridging seamlessly across networks doesn't have to be so daunting anymore. With competitive rates and convenient routes, Metamask Portfolio's bridge feature lets you easily move your tokens from chain to chain, using popular layer one and layer two networks. And all you have to do is select a network you want to bridge from and where you want your tokens to go.

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Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free. We are back talking to Sandy and Torrigal, and we're talking about scroll, just went mainnet this week. So very, very exciting time to go mainnet. ZK. Evm, here we are. So I have a question for you. As I was, during the break, I was scanning through your friends over at Layer 2B. And look at all of these different Layer 2s.

First of all, bullish. Like, oh, my God, bullish. Now we have dozens of layer twos. I feel like soon we'll have hundreds of layer twos. I think from a bankless listener's perspective, they might be asking the question, okay, like, how do all of these things stitch together? How do we prevent fragmentation of the Ethereum ecosystem and Ethereum liquidity? How do we like abstract this for users, right?

I mean, does a user necessarily care what layer two they're on? Do they need to know the difference between scroll and ZK Sync and Arbitrum and optimism and all of these things? Isn't this for like the crypto nerds? So I wanted to ask this question of you. Now we have all of these layer twos, how do we stitch them together? Is there a way to do that? Are the devs working on something here? So it's a bit of a two-face problem.

So there's a theoretical problem of how you actually handle communication. The second problem is how do you improve UX where an average user doesn't really know or care which L2 they're on? And realistically, at least from our opinion, we're building for the developers. And so for us, as long as the developers know where they're deploying, that's the main goal for us. The users are free to think that they're using Ethereum or scroll, but as long as the developers know, that's our goal. And so from the UX perspective, you can always optimize things. You can, for example, define new address types that basically also define which chain you're sending it to, aside from the address itself, et cetera, et cetera.

And on the technical side, the short answer will be ZK. A bit of a longer answer would be, how do we do that with ZK? So one, there's a lot of prover efficiency improvements that are expected to happen in the next year or two. So I feel like within the next two years, we won't be talking about proofs that are taking minutes to compute, but more like proofs that are taking tens of seconds or even seconds to compute. And now we're getting to almost real-time composability, where you can basically compose within a block. And on top of that, there are a few people that are building different tools using ZK that will allow you to compose directly without going through an L1.

So, for example, one of the ideas using storage proofs, which means that you can use ZK to prove that a certain state has been stored in a certain way and directly bridge to another L2 without waiting for the message to be passed through an L1. And so there's a lot of stuff that is being researched on at the moment and is being in a development phase. So I feel like for the next year or maybe two, people are still going to struggle with like, oh, yeah, do I have Eith on this L2?

Oh, how do I get ETH in order to buy this token or whatever? But like, it's not going to be a long-term problem. It's not going to be a long-term problem. Like, that's what I wanted to hear. So it's like, is it, if I'm on scroll, how do I get my assets on some other like ZK layer 2?

to, is there going to be a way to have that bridge be very kind of seamless? Or am I going to have to, like, exit back to main net and then, then, like, go back to another layer two? Like, and is it the same if scroll is connecting to another ZK EVM versus, like, an optimistic roll-up? Like, how is this going to work? I don't think I've, like, we've got all of these different, you know, states of Ethereum, but we don't have, like, our interstate highway yet, I feel like.

And so we've still got a lot of fragmentation. Yeah, there's still no standardization of how the bridges work, et cetera. I feel like it's going to happen at some point. The conversations are already starting about standardizing certain things, not bridges for now because I think it will be quite difficult to standardize such a complex construction, but more simple things. So, for example, there are a few L2 teams that are discussing the possibility of introducing a new L2 specific transaction type that it will allow us to basically easily deal with the fact that we

both have to pay, the user both has to pay for the L2 cost and the L1 cost, which Ethereum doesn't really care about. So the current solutions are very hacky, but they're not very UX friendly. And so I feel like those conversations are going to continue. And at some point, we're going to get to EVM standardization, bridge standardization, et cetera. And with ZK, it's just a question of how fast you can compute the proof. If you can compute the proof within seconds, and even if you go through an L1, it shouldn't take you that long to a bridge from one L2 to another. And on top of that, you can think of things like storage proofs, et cetera, et cetera. And there are still probably things that we haven't come up with that are going to come up in the next year or two that are going to be even better

that what we think is a state of the art right now. I think inside of the roll up industry in In 2020, it's been really a story of chain development kits. The OP stack, of course, absolute gargantuan with the base chain and all the other OP stack forks that have happened. But they're not alone, of course, the ZK stack from ZKSync, Arbitrum Orbit, Polygon, Supernets, scroll, what? Is scroll entering this arena? Well, I think we've just been so heads down building main net.

I think we need to take a minute to help the network stabilize and do a little bit more research about what developers and ecosystem projects actually want. I think there's no point in doing something unless there's real demand. And we're going to focus our efforts on doing research to validate some of the directions that we're going to go to after the main net. Okay. So not coming anytime soon, potentially in the future, just not your focus at the present moment? We're a completely open source project.

So if there's anyone that wants to do it, you know, we're completely, you know. We're happy to help. We're happy to help. It shouldn't be a big lift anyways. But, you know, insofar, this demand for a more standardized products in terms of like a stack X package, I don't think it's a very difficult thing to do from here. Sure, sure, sure. Well, I know Mainette is a very big deal and I don't want to stress you guys out, but what do you guys focus on now? What's next? What are the kind of the next steps for scroll? What do you guys focus on in the weeks and the months? what talk about you're like yeah you just said weeks and i'm thinking to myself we were just spending some time today talking about what scroll is going to look like in five years you can answer either one yeah we we have quite a long road map a lot of it is still up in the air and a lot of it is still an open research problem that we're trying to solve but There are a few things that we're going to focus on. One is optimization.

So there are still a lot of low hanging through fruits in terms of the implementation, et cetera, et cetera, that we can optimize to squeeze out more performance to make that transaction costs less for users, et cetera, et cetera, out of our implementation. Another big, big focus for us is security, because as we all know, most of the roll-ups, I have to, by law, I'm required to say that fuel, we've, the version one, does not have a multi-sig. But aside from that, all the other roll-ups have a multi-sig, and they're upgradable in one way or another. Can I ask you about that at Torgle really quickly? This is something I think bankless listeners will be familiar with on

layer two beat sort of the different stages of how kind of like decentralized they are. And it looks like according to Layer 2B scrolls in review right now. But like, yeah, so what is your plan to collect, you know, all of the stages, all of the layer 2B badges and be kind of fully decentralized? What does that look like while we're here? All pieces of the pie from L2B. Yeah, right now I think arbitrum is maybe in the lead, at least according to layer 2B. If you ignore the gate and fuel V1 arbitram is basically in the lead. Okay. Yeah. So what's scrolls playing for this?

So it's a mostly faceted problem. There are a few things that we need to work on. So one, we currently don't have forced transactions just because of the way the ZK circuit is implemented, but we're working on it and we're going to introduce them. Relatively soon, that will allow us to have censorship resistance that is guaranteed by Ethereum. Another thing that we're working on is a multi-prover and we've been actively working on it. for almost a year at this point, which is also gonna be introduced soon, and that will allow us to basically not rely on the security of our current proof system.

So let's say if our current proof system fails for some reason, there's still another proof system that ensures that somebody cannot steal money if that ever happens for some reason. And then we're also working on decentralization. There's some research going on about sequencers, improvers. There's also, I published an article a few months ago about multi-verifiers, which is more about securing the validating bridges, because one of the main concerns for us,

and I think for any roll-up builder, is how to ensure that your smart contract doesn't have vows. And that's a really big problem. We know how many defy apps have been hacked since 2020, and how many millions have been stolen. And so what multi-verifier allows us to do is to have two identical implementations of the bridge in two different languages, let's say in Solidity and Viper. And then the transaction or the batch is only accepted if both of them agree that the entry to the storage is the same, which means that even if one has a bug in it, the other will catch it and prevent it from allowing people to steal the money. And then with combined data and the multiprover, where essentially we're limiting the attack surface to like a specification bug. So let's

say if we define the protocol in a way that allows people to steal money. But that can be also minimized via formal verification. And that gets us to the point where we can essentially remove upgradeability and be fairly sure that there's not going to be any urgent bug that we need to fix without having delayed upgrade ability that will allow users to exit if, let's say, there's a malicious upgrade initiated by us or by the Security Council or however we decide to for that great ability to work. This is a side question, Torgle, but I'm just curious, like, if we were to zoom out here, I know from what Sandy was saying earlier, you kind of like took the job a day later after your

first conversation, which means you were making a bet not only on your career and kind of this team, but on the technical direction of scroll. And that was very much an Ethereum-aligned modular type of direction. And one thing I appreciate about U.Torgo on Twitter is, you know, you're not afraid to push back on other people's, you know, theses and opinions and that sort of thing. And I think right now, crypto is trying to figure out what the next era really looks like. And there's kind of a question of, does the monolithic vision succeed, something like Solana? They're pursuing a specific direction.

I think they call it kind of integrated where we're not doing this layer two thing. We're just put it all on Solana. We've got Cosmos down here with this kind of like network of chains, independent side chain, city states, as they call it. And then we've got Ethereum over here, which is like this modular vision of the world where we're sectioning out. but we're like kind of settling back on Ethereum. What do you think those other two communities kind of get wrong? What do you disagree with them on the most? And, you know, why have you decided to kind of invest your career and your time

and your mental space and everything in this specific direction? I actually don't think we disagree that much. I actually, I think Anatoly, we had a debate like almost a year ago at this point. and he mentioned that we agree on most of the things. The only thing that we really disagree on are implementational details. And so I feel like we all three communities agree about the values of decentralization, censorship resistance, et cetera, et cetera. It's more about how you approach it.

And I feel like I'm very much aligned with like the original vision of Ethereum or of having this big chain. that can facilitate millions of transactions that can be verified on a Raspberry Pi, for example, or your laptop that doesn't need quite high-end hardware, if not a server, to be verified and run. And with L2s, that allows, that basically translates into reality, that allows us to translate into reality, because we outsource the execution to L2s, they do all the execution that publish the proofs on chain, And we can still verify all of those LQs via the small machine like a Raspberry Pi or let's say your old laptop at home or whatever. And so from that perspective, I'm very much, I would say, aligned with the vision, with the original vision of Ethereum.

But yeah, but there are certain things that I obviously disagree with, but then we all kind of have our personal opinions about certain implementational details here and there. Like what? Like what are the main implementation details that are different here? I feel like one of the things that I feel that a lot of people in the Ethereum community kind of underestimate the importance of people talk a lot about it, but there's not a lot of work being done, estate growth. And realistically, that's the fundamental bottleneck of Ethereum. And it's going to be a fundamental bottleneck for all the ZK roll-ups as well. and roll-ups in general, not just ZK roll-ups. And so I feel like, and myself included, we can put more effort into researching it and actually finding a solution.

There has been some research done, but it's been sporadic and it hasn't been at the same level as, let's say, 484 research or a lot of other subjects that have been quite deeply researched. certainly a rabbit hole for a future bankless podcast episode for sure. State growth has been kind of this looming gargantuan in the background ever since I've always gotten into Ethereum and never really actually seem to have gone head on. So I guess that's exactly what you were articulating Torgle. But that's some deep 120 IQ technical level stuff. I kind of want to zoom back out and ask the stupid question. Win token.

We just launched the main. I was just talking to... That's like a silence of like who's going to jump first on this one. I was just talking to like our Devrell team who travels through a lot of conferences and I was like, finally no more one main net questions. Oh no, there's always a when. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, then you have one token and yeah, I don't know.

I'll let Sam be answers. as Louis Gufman loves to say, I can't answer for legal reasons. Quote Louis here as well. Let's just blame Louis for everything. Well, congratulations, guys. I mean, that it's always a huge day, just not just for scroll, not just for what you guys are building for, but for Ethereum as well.

When something that is the EVM gets extended line item for line item, bite code for bytecode. I don't even know if that's the right way to describe it, but it makes sense to me into a layer two. That makes me pretty excited because this is about scaling trust, right? Scaling cryptography. And this is really why we're all here. And so this is a big day for all of us at Ethereum, I'd say. Yeah, I would implore every, all the bankless listeners to check out our mainette, check out our developer dogs and deploy something fun.

You know, I think my mom's going to deploy a contract that says if I lose every pound I lose, she's going to give me a bit more pocket money. Wow. Thanks, mom. Right, a contract that the tax pay from Paul Girls check every month, every time you're which is going to leave me with no money forever, basically. So we'll everyone to experiment and build lots of fun things. Well, the mom-driven smart contract market is probably an untapped niche for crypto. I'm telling my mom about this one.

Yeah, that's great. New builders and new business. Okay, so where do people go? If they want to check scroll out, where is the place for them to go as we end this podcast, their website? So the place to go is our website, scroll.io, that's s-c-r-o-l-l-l-o. There we go. Into the frontier, a new layer two. This one is Z-K-E-V-M that is equivalent to the EVM on Maynet.

It's an absolutely massive mass-o-line. The most aligned Z-K roll-up that we've done. gotten for all the aligners out there yeah very very aligned that's been a theme this week for sure guys thank you so much for joining bankless and telling us all about it's been absolutely fantastic thank you so much for having us bankless nation you guys have your to-does go check out scroll uh you heard the website uh go explore the frontier as we are every single day of the week at bankless risk and disclaimers of course got to let you know crypto is risky you could lose what you put in that includes layer twos they're hidden risks there but we're

We are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.