State Minimized Layer-2s and Why Ethereum is better than EVM by Nick Dodson | Devcon SEA

[Music] all right um okay so I'm going to be very very fast I have like more than 30 slides and there's 5 minutes so I'm going to have to I'm going to have to make this work um it's fine though a lot of this I can kind of skip So today we're going to be doing State minimization uh and why ethereum is greater than the evm so um oh okay uh so components of a blockchain just to review quickly um you know you have this area of a blockchain node that would be you know you could think of as state state being you know these things that you need to both verify things and propose new blocks into a blockchain then you have things like execution largely what we do with the CPU and RAM sometimes a GPU if you're going to do GPU acceleration then you have data and in this case I'm just calling it data which is just sort of the data you communicate over the internet to basically get everyone else in sync and you know kind of progress things forward uh and ensure that it's actually you know a system we can all we can all use so in many senses uh on the data side we have some Solutions on the execution side uh we also have a lot of Solutions on the state side though you don't really hear about this problem very much and you don't hear about it because a lot of people don't really have any good Solutions so uh that's why this talk is uh you know kind of interesting and also fun so on the execution side we've got all kinds of things coming out uh parallel transa executions becoming more normalized you know you have the spvm you have as well things like stylus you know dropping into wasm stuff like that as well my project fuel VM we have our own virtual machine that that helps with this um you know and there's all kinds of different ways we can uh alleviate execution uh data um has also been somewhat solved as well so we WE Post data now is rollups we can post them over ethereum right on EIP 4844 there all kinds of sharting designs there's all kinds of um different kinds of uh da layers that are coming up so there's lots of Solutions in that camp but um but with State there there isn't really a lot of solutions and so you know when we're talking about State um you kind of have uh a bunch of information that you really need to um you need to store in order if you want to progress things forward right so with Bitcoin you have like the active utxo set the unspent utxos with ethereum you have things like you know the account balances smart contract code um you know smart contract State token balances Etc so there's a lot of a lot of stuff there um and ethereum state system is uh it's quite interesting but it's very very uh what you could say is uh really ult to deal with it's very difficult to optimize around so if you'll see there's there's a lot of different layers to how we're actually both taking this sort of key value store we have with ethereum that we you know call like estor Etc when you're in contracts and how that filters all the way back up to single state Roots uh single uh succinct State routes within block headers and it's it's quite enormous the amount of state that's accured here um so you know when we talk about like scalability and we talk about State uh a lot of people just like blame you know the clients they blame gu they blame you know these kinds of things like why don't we just up the gas and like you know Screw everything let's do it and the thing is like you know Peter's already address this quite well which is effectively that you can't just do this uh and it's not slow because of gu quite frankly it's not slow because of our clients it's slow because we're all actually or some people are very very concerned about the state growth itself right and and the requirements that that uh that puts onto things and you know one way you could even look at State growth here is just like uh I believe this is just the accounts on ethereum but you can just see that like you have a ballooning of information and all of these accounts have to be merized so it's really really intense in terms of the amount of storage that we need to um we need to hold within within ethereum so how can we address State growth uh basically there's a bunch of different solutions for this uh you know we can go go on and on about it but um you know some ones that have been proposed before right State rent uh there's also like statelessness which is like sexy to say but there isn't really a lot of great things underneath the hood for it uh UNM moralizing the state so you just YOLO it like salana does uh as well uh app level compression so doing things at the application Level um you can also just like Let It Grow and maybe we just keep adding hard drives um veral trees uh you also have some nice things here right where they kind of compress a certain amount of State using other techniques but still pretty messy and then we have another option which I'll talk about the end which is uh bandwidth so basically with State rent we've all kind of heard this one before use state you rent it out Etc uh statelessness um just trying to do more things uh just kind of away from ethereum State system un merizing the state it's not really a great approach um as well application Level techniques um you know you can do things more in call data more things uh at the application Level but it's still not a great uh system in general here's toly basically saying I don't know here's a bunch of options but I'm not really sure um here's veral trees and again veral trees not really uh the best solution because there's still a ton of state that gets acred right so alt VMS again toi system not that great fuel State philosophy we go into it like two minutes or like one minute and then we'll go to questions thanks uh so fuel State philosophy is very uh different we actually don't have any Global State trees we also use a system of native assets we use utxos uh we have as well different kinds of models to use state but use it in in the right way we try to move a lot of the state that's typically within Merkel trees into an uh an area which you would consider bandwidth and in bandwidth we actually have a lot more room to play with uh because everything once you've moved it over bandwidth and kind of done the the proving then effectively you can just trim it so there's a lot of really nice things you can do so applications can be designed in a new technique that we have which is called native state rehydration and this really means that across our system we have different techniques to uh basically create applications and different techniques to to um effectively remove state from the system and keep it very lean um these are basically in our system scripts predicates native assets and a transaction model I only have 3 seconds left so I'm just going to skip through this again utxl model is very very powerful in this setting and it provides a lot of different um a lot of different options and this is why in my super crazy lightning talk I hope you guys enjoyed that ethereum fuel is on ethereum it's a layer two and ethereum is much greater than the evm with all these State problems so thank thank you okay cool we have 40 seconds for one question what about State expiry would also keep state in check yeah so kind of but again you you have this sort of intense problem of a massive runup of state and the problem with State expiry is that um it's not so much that you can or can't do it it's that basically once it expires you would need a good system to then refill that state and it it helps but um I would say that there are better techniques where again you can use bandwidth over bandwidth you kind of store things and then once once you've kind of consume that or other people consumed it then they can bring it back only whenever they need it um you could say that's kind of like expire but I think expire is too simple you need a way to both you know kind of use State and then rehydrate State and then and then basically take it away so in fuel we have really nice systems for this and again it's a lot more sustainable by Design so thanks okayy cool thank you so much for your time thanks everyone [Applause]