The Rollup

After our episode with Tarun Chitra about value accrual in the modular stack, as well as thinking about it deeper we’ve came to our own conclusions. Josh Bowen, ex-Celestia team, and now founder of Astria blew it all out of the water today. Completely shifted the way we are thinking about RaaS providers, shared sequencers, and how they are approaching the competitive market of sequencing. We first dove into the modular architecture of Astria and their relationship with Celestia, and then dove deep into how Josh thinks about early stage tech markets. The vision behind Astria extends beyond facilitation of rollup deployment. Josh aspires to lower barriers to innovation in launching blockchains, in order to create a diverse ecosystem of rollups that transcend the limitations of existing setups. But, is this really possible? Can Astria do what other RaaS providers are doing at a tenth of the cost? Can they actually commoditize RaaS providers? Josh is a straight shooter and did not hold back when he pressed him about his mental models. We left quite impressed.

The checkered cross-chain past is something you just had to live through to understand. We tend to think the best have survived and the unfortunate events of 2021-2022 have led to a completely different way of thinking about interoperability security for the modular expansion. In today’s piece Rob & Andy sat down with Jon Kol, CEO of Hyperlane, to understand their design choices around permissionless. At its core, Hyperlane aims to establish an open framework that enables any blockchain to seamlessly connect with others, creating a interoperable ecosystem without long BD queues and permissioned deployments. But, what does this really mean for security and liveness? Rob and Andy asked Jon about their design choices, security modules, mailboxes, and tried to approach this from a realm of “what could go wrong?” and “how well is this system designed?”. Hyperlane has been a leading part of the Modular Expansion (notably, the team coined the term we believe). We expect them to continue this trajectory as they expand into new verticals like yield routes and other innovative interoperability concepts. We really think the permissionless nature of adding new chains and giving optionality for interoperability partners is a key aspect of their design focused around security.

A core fundamental primitive of blockchain is the unlocking of usecases which are not possibly in any other type of system. We’ve heard a lot of this and we believe the technology stack is being built as we speak which will facilitate an array of “breakout apps” atop of it. In today's piece, we set out to find out what type technological design constraints are present in the current modular ecosystem as well as the necessary solutions. If you’ve been following us for awhile, you know the Lagrange team from our zkAcademy. If you are newer here, you’re in luck. Andy and Rob sat down with Ismael, co-founder of Lagrange, to learn why zk coprocessors are crucial in enabling offchain computation for data queries and processing tasks that are too intensive for standard smart contracts. By creating a decentralized network for ZK proving and prioritizing access to complex onchain information within the modular ecosystem, Lagrange is playing a crucial role in the modular thesis. Let’s have a great week and continue to push forward as part of Modular March.

One of the core issues we heard about awhile back on our podcast with Jon Kol from Hyperlane was the ‘indexing’ problem of the modular expansion. Essentially, if we are going to exist in a world of 1000s of chains, we’ll also need to have a streamlined process for data. This is where yesterdays post with Lava Network fits in the puzzle (RPCs). Staying on the data tooling pattern, today’s post is an interview from ETHDenver with Jack, the founder of Routescan. Andy and Jack discussed Routescan’s journey over the past few months highlighting the growth of their expanding community with over 50,000 users. They also touched on Jack’s approach to embracing modularity by unlocking new block explorers across appchains, rollup frameworks, and subnets. Enjoy this today’s interview live from ETHDenver and Modular March.

Wow. What a day yesterday. Our modular market map absolutely blew up on X. Including in this map, under data tooling, is Lava Network. Lava is modular RPC data access provider for modular chains. Our discussion today is centered around how Lava's modular data access layer is facilitating better connectivity across various blockchain environments. A Remote Procedure Call (RPC), is a vital mechanism for accessing blockchain data. This enables users to perform a wide array of actions, such as checking balances and executing transactions, through effective communication with nodes. The idea here is simple: IF the modular expansion plays out how we think it will, we will have thousands of modular chains which will need RPCs so users can interact onchain. The current solutions are not very extensible and if they are, they lack privacy and/or speed. Lava will take marketshare from the big names of the space who have been monoliths for sometime. Rob sat down at ETHDenver with founders Yair & Gil to discuss where Lava fits in the modular thesis.

Dymension was the second massive modular launch following Celestia. Yesterday, the first RollApp on Dymension, NIM Network announced their genesis rolldrop to $DYM stakers, Pudgy Penguins, $PRIME holders and other communities. Of course, we asked Yishay what he thinks of NIM and other RollApps deploying on Dymension. We have been strong believers of Dymension since the middle of last year and brought on Yishay, the founder, to discuss the progress since inception and the evolution of their rollapps. Dymension is taking a phased deployment approach to their technology to focus on stability, liquidity, and seamless interoperability with their eIBC implementation utilizing an intents based interop solution. Yishay spoke on the importance of scaling in a modular fashion by providing their ecosystem RollApps with grants and other support. As we navigate through Dymension’s architectural evolution from “2D to 4D”, we embrace this new modular ecosystem being built part by part. Watch this video for a catchup into the Dymension ecosystem.

The podcast delves into the rise of modular appchains and Gelato's approach. They discuss how Web3 draws inspiration from Web2 for scaling, zero gas appchains, and modularity benefits for builders. The episode explores asynchronous cloud services in Web3, Relayer-as-a-Service viability, custom VM integration in Gelato, efficiency enhancements with Aglaya layer from Polygon, and interoperability challenges in B2C integration.

In a world of 1000s of rollups and chains, the problem to tackle is unification of these otherwise isolated execution environments. In today’s Modular March presentation, we sit down with NEAR founder Illia to take a look at their data availability layer, account aggregation, and chain abstraction toolkit. We ask Illia about the potential of NEAR DA, how sharding really works for the L1, and his plans to grow adoption for the DA solution compared to others on the market. However, what was particularly interesting to us was this idea of account aggregation whereby enabling a single wallet to participate across multiple crypto experience, NEAR is building a better end user experience. Illia went on to illustrate his larger vision for chain abstraction of the modular future and how he sees this playing out in the near future. NEAR will continue to play an important role in connecting the modular expansion at the user facing level, in today’s presentation you’ll learn how they plan to do this.

We were speaking to a liquid fund in Denver who just wouldn’t deploy capital into DeFi products on EVM because of the risk of re-entrancy bugs and other exploits. However, what they did mention was they wanted to deploy into Movement’s upcoming L2 and they are actively deployed on Aptos, because of the security of the MOVE programming language. When we heard this, we knew our bullish conviction in Movement since summer of last year was going to pay off. In today’s Modular March presentation we speak with Rushi Manche, co-founder of Movement Labs, and ask him “Why Movement?” like, really, why? He took us through why he’s so bullish on M2, along with the MoveVM. Rushi’s energy and ambition is rooted in addressing some of the most pressing issues facing blockchain adoption today: enhancing security, reducing transaction fees, and creating an open framework for developers to build. Initially created by the minds at Facebook for the Diem project, MOVE programming language stands out for its security and robustness… But, is it really the best tech? As you know, we’ve set out in modular march to not be a shillfest, rather to seek the truth amongst the noise and learn alongside you. We do just that in today’s presentation. Enjoy!

The value accrual model in the modular stack is akin to that of the rise of the early internet. According to Tarun, founder of Gauntlet and a prominent angel investor, we will see more and more specialized usecases for applications which are highly expressive. As a result of this, the need for a modular stack becomes more and more apparent. We really enjoyed this conversation which drew inspiration from the evolution of the internet and computing to paint a clearer picture of the modular future. We’ve been quite deep in the technical weeds during Modular March (exactly where we want to be), so it was refreshing to host a discussion that goes beyond technicalities and instead touches on the practical application layer of modular blockchains. Hope you enjoy and feel free share with your friends who are trying to answer the question “why modularity?” & “where does the value accrue in the modular stack?” for the future of blockchain scaling.