The Age Of AGGREGATION by Marc Boiron | Devcon SEA

[Music] hello everyone um excited to be here uh I am the CEO of polygon labs for those of you who don't know polygon Labs or specifically who don't know what polygon Labs does because we do many things uh we are a core contributor to the Ager along with many others we've also developed multiple blockchains being polygon POS that pretty much everyone knows as as well as uh polygon zkm so I'm going to go through like a little bit of of History before actually kind of attacking what exactly we mean by aggregation um and specifically when I want to look at and people talk a lot about like not kind of looking at analogies but if we think of like what we want web 3 to be um we really want it to eat as much of web 2 up as possible Right like we should be able to scale web 3 to the size of web too and so the question then becomes well you know how did the internet become the internet and if you think about it the internet actually started very fragmented um it very disconnected with multiple networks unable to communicate and then new protocols came along um and specifically things like TCP IP came along and what you now had what you suddenly had was this diversity in uh what could be built bu on the internet um and the infrastructure underlying it but with some common protocols um and specifically what you get there is tcpip and it's very important to actually understand this because a lot of people say like how are we going to bring together all of web 3 when you've got so much disperate technology in web 3 you've got different Stacks you've got different VMS like everything looks different but we actually have an example of bringing together different technology in a way that like unifies it and actually feels like one so let's talk about like specific problems we see in web 3 and why this is actually very relevant right we've got fragmentation as an issue I think this is an obvious one for everyone scalability security and frankly just poor ux if we look at each of these one by one what do we have right now we've got a bunch of chains uh and liquidity is fragmented across all of these chains we really have no good way of bringing them together at all similarly we've got a scalability problem if we want web 3 to scale to the size of the internet then we should probably compare to like what currently is using the internet and when we look at that what we see things is Mastercard Visa NASDAQ um and I do not believe we actually have a network that can handle the load of any of those I think we've heard many state that they want blockchains to be able to handle um you know a a load like NASDAQ and that is 250,000 transactions per second which no network is even close to being able to handle in any way whatsoever uh I actually just as a little side note I'll give you a few side notes during this presentation but this is a little interesting fact is let's just assume that we could actually scale a blockchain to the size of NASDAQ um NASDAQ can execute transactions with latency of 50 microc seconds um you are not going to execute any transaction on a blockchain in 50 microc seconds so I think our dreams of bringing NASDAQ on chain should probably recognize the fact that there's some things that are actually better in a centralized State and there's some things that are better in a decentralized state obviously this does not mean that we don't want decentralized exchanges it means that there's specific technologies that serve specific purposes and you know we should probably focus on like more longtail assets in a decentralized way when we want perfect performance execution uh and then when we just want censorship resistance then we should probably bring that onchain third one is security right now you know when you look at like many different networks and how they come together you know we talk about concepts of like shared sequencers and intents and bridges and like most of that is not actually very secure even though it actually works decently in in some cases and lastly the ux challenge we've got a a ux problem whether it's cross wallets Bridges and intents chains um basically what you get is this this fragmented feeling um across the board and so then the question becomes what do you do about this um and the first answer that we tried to give or that many do still give is let's just use a monolithic chain salana can solve this for you because something something something um well you know most of the time that something isn't going to be good enough because literally we have seen that we can't even scale to some of the the the smallest networks that are good for payments in the world or the biggest ones uh and so like the idea that like we're going to throw everything on one chain is not happening and so we need to go look at another solution uh the other solution um was why don't we just scale through modular chains right but the problem is modular chains increase fragmentation we see it today you've got you know polygon zkm polygon POS you've got ZK sync era you've got you know arbitrum one you've got open main net you could keep going on and on and like great this is nice like being able to choose how you want to spin up a chain is great it actually solves the scalability issue right because now when you need more block space What do you do you spin up a new chain and with time this is actually going to get easier and easier right like right now people want to sell you on the idea that spinning up a new chain is easy like frankly it's actually not that easy uh but if you fast forward 12 months from now and 24 months from now and 36 months from now you're going to get to a point where spinning up a new chain is actually incredibly easy and when you need to increase um throughput and increase block space then you're going to spin up a new chain to actually be able to do that um and so through like kind of the the modular approach we can actually solve scalability the problem is we still don't have one unified web three if we do that and so the answer to this is just aggregate all the chains and so what does aggregation actually allow for it actually allows us to scale web 3 to the size of the internet what are the things that we need to do this first we need practically infinite scalability and that's what you get when you can spin up new chains very easily when more demand is needed because there's or when there is more demand and so more block space is needed uh and then the second one is you need to be able to like unify State liquidity users and if you really think of like the north star of what we should be targeting we should really want to be able to have a web 3 and an ethereum that scales as much as you need in a unified way making you believe that you are using one chain while you are using 100,000 different chains at any point in time and that that 100,000 chains can become 125,000 chains at any point in time and it still feels like one internet so when we've thought about this problem and how we want to solve this problem exactly um we started thinking about it um and we realized that we needed to create like a neutral platform um and so this is concept of the a layer polygon Labs is a contributor along with many others that I will show you uh a little bit later later but the general idea was that we need some kind of like neutral cross-chain settlement platform that unifies liquidity users and state um and that ultimately has finality on ethereum now very importantly the a layer is actually not intended to scale only ethereum and there's a reason for this which is that as amazing as ethereum is what do people actually value in web 3 they value assets and there's always going to be assets outside of ethereum and we need to be able to get people to come to ethereum and stay on ethereum and the only way to do that is to allow them to use or to receive or send assets to another chain that is not ethereum and the only way to do that is to aggregate those chains along with ethereum and all chains on them and so that is a big part of kind of the Ager is really bringing everything together and ultimately having finality on ethereum maybe let me talk to you about kind of like the different components of the agay really think about it in like four different parts um a lot of times when people hear the agay or anything that has to do with interoperability they immediately default to it's a bridge it's nothing but a bridge and this is simply because when we think of the forms of interoperability that we have had to go cross chain over the last many years we default to Bridges layer zeros the wormholes things like that um and then more recently people start thinking of cross chain transactions as being things driven by intents um but people don't really think holistically about everything that you need to get like safety when fragmenting when there's a fragmented web 3 that you want to bring together so let me talk through kind of these four different components of the a layer uh first one is the pessimistic proof so the most important thing if you want to bring chains together is to ensure that no one chain can rug another chain right like if I have gone to a chain I have decided this is a chain that I trust um or like many frankly haven't paid attention but I'm still assuming Trust on that chain and when I send a transaction cross chain or I'm receiving an asset from another chain I need to be 100% sure that the only thing I am trusting is that chain that I am on and this is basically what the pessimistic proof does what it does is it looks at all assets that come into a chain it looks at all assets that are leaving a chain and we call this chain level accounting and basically what the pessimistic proof does it then ensures that when an asset wants to leave a chain it is not an asset that is in excess of any assets that have come into it so if you've had you know 10 eth come into a chain then you can't have more than 10 eth leave that chain and this is what the pessimistic proof enforces now the interesting thing about this pessimistic proof is that it is not just enforcing uh it is not just enforcing this for chains that have proofs right so so a lot of times people think okay the the layer or that polygon is working on like ZK technology so like you you you look at polygon zkm or exay and you're like hey this uses execution proofs and so the AG requires execution proofs the reality is the AG is actually completely agnostic to that um you could have execution proofs you could have fraud proofs you can have some form of consensus that can be proven or you can straight up have a database pessimistic proof doesn't care it's going to look at what assets came in what assets have left and whether an asset that wants to leave or be be removed from there can and so that's kind of like the guarantee you get the pessimistic proof is that regardless of what it is that a chain like the form of a chain you can prove um facts about that chain and specifically on on something like a a polygon POS that has a validator set you can prove the consensus of polygon POS so that you can confidently actually have transactions go go cross chain uh next one is proof aggregation a lot of people think the proof agation is whatow the interoperability in the all proof agregation is it lowers C of transacting on chains connected to the AG and using the AG specifically what it does is you get a ZK proof and this could be the pessimistic proof or it could be an execution proof on a chain and what it does is it wraps those proofs together and then wraps those proofs together and then wraps those proofs together and then submits them to ethereum if you were to submit each of those proofs to ethereum on their own it would be incredibly expensive and so this is how you're able to lower the cost so that it is incredibly cheap to execute these cross-chain transactions next thing is there's a unified bridge this is a bridge on uh ethereum and that bridge is uh the bridge used to create canonical assets that allows for all transactions going across the agay to be done in fungible assets meaning that you don't have wrapped assets and then unwrapped assets and then lastly there's this concept of fast interupt the a layer with nothing else going between two chains especially two l2s is going to settle at the speed of of you know ethereum settlement and so we're going to be looking at like 15minute um cross chain transactions which isn't good enough and so the goal with fast interrupt is to lower that Lany to just a few seconds rather than minutes so like what are the benefits of this um first of all is you get these native tokens um look I I think Cosmos has done many correct things but when you go and you use Cosmos um the experience of having many many unwrapped tokens uh WRA tokens uh and moving those around and figuring out what these assets are and the same has become true uh within the ethereum ecosystem as well like that is not a good user experience second is we need safe cross-chain transactions you know as of right now when we use bridges that we use like most of the time these are not actually very safe for inter operability and we actually need something to add safety um sometimes we talk about like shared sequencers as providing like Atomic composability again you need something to actually make that safe and trustless and importantly this is where you get the concept of compatibility is the AG layer often is viewed as like competitive with all of these different options that people hear about for interoperability purposes um but it actually really isn't it's a very low-level base layer that is compatible with most of these so if you want to do an asynchronous transaction you use the AG layer but if you want a synchronous transaction then you would actually use a shared sequencer with the added security of the agay um if you want to use intents those are expensive they require capital on two different pools you need to rebalance that Capital rebalancing that Capital has risk and time associated with it you can lower that risk in time allowing for rebalancing much quicker allowing for users to get transactions at a cheaper cost um and so good good experience there and so the goal when when we're thinking about building the Ager with the other contributors is really like how do we make this the best uh experience possible and that includes from a cost perspective when working with other Solutions out there next like the Ager if you think about it is really like an asset first protocol you're actually passing assets from one chain to another and this is different from other interoperability solutions that are generally passing messages but the AG does allow for passing messages as well which is necessary and something that can be done um next is it actually enables the concept of like chain abstraction I think chain abstraction is a very nebulous concept that if you ask 10 people what is chain abstraction 10 people will give you different answers um the way that I often think about it is like the the AG layer allows for um easy use of chain abstraction and like one example of this is a library that we've built that we refer to as bridge and call um and so this is a library that uh allows for uh users to basically execute uh one transaction themselves um but they're actually executing multiple transactions across chain so imagine that you wanted to um Bridge funds from ethereum to polygon Z KVM and then you wanted to swap those assets um into different assets and then transfer them over to X layer and then buy an nft with the bridge and call function you can do that and so you can imagine a wallet that abstracts that all away and basically says hey do you want to do you know this this bridge transfer and then this Swap and then transfer it and then buy this nft click one button and you know it's calling multiple functions in the background and you've abstracted away the entire kind of cross-chain experience um and then lastly it provides for this low interoperability uh low latency in terms of these cross-chain transactions again it doesn't provide synchronous um interoperability that's something that by working with shared sequencers secured by the AG layer you can receive but it's not something that the AG layer gives natively this is the AG layer ecosystem multiple contributors um we're always looking to work with more folks on this one thing you'll notice is the agair is not called the polygon agair uh this is very intentional we've talked to every big team in the ethereum ecosystem and most outside of it goal is to get everybody to contribute so that we can have a non-fragmented web 3 as a whole allowing for ethereum to grow and used without actually needing to to leave ethereum um a very important point is that Ager is not rcking like if you look at a lot of different interoperability Solutions uh and a lot of different of other ecosystems building out interoperability um what you end up seeing is um some form of of fee um that is uh placed on on every transaction uh and it really looks like kind of like a middleman form of rent seeking um the a layer has no fee for joining the a layer there's actually no fee per transaction on the AG layer instead what it is is that chains are going to create uh with as many transactions as they can include um in in their in their consensus or or that's part of like the consensus being satisfied or as part of an execution proof and they're going to submit that to the agare they could choose to submit that once a month they could choose to submit that every two seconds they get to choose how often they actually want to submit a trans a a a proof um to the Ager um and that allows for chains to continue to remain uh Sovereign for example you could think of like a gaming chain gaming chain is going to say hey our users don't actually care how often we finalize this chain or they're going to accept lower security requirements um for some per perod of time and so we're going to submit proofs much less frequently than like a defi chain that's going to say hey I want to submit proofs every 2 seconds uh and so by having this flexibility in the a layer um it allows for um people to be able to execute these transactions basically freely uh and so basically what we see here is that we've solved fragmented liquidity you've got fungible assets across the ecosystem you've solved scalability because you have chains that can be spun up at any point in time you've solved security with the pessimistic proof that you can safely go between chains and you've solved the ux issue because you can now seamlessly interoperate between these chains with some of the kind of greatest Technologies around Shar sequencing and intent that are going to be part of this and what you end up with is really a unified kind of web three allowing for users to stay in ethereum benefit from assets across every ecosystem and what you see is a web 3 that ends up actually being united under some common protocol thank you thank you Mark that was quite insightful uh we do have a few questions here so who will aggregate the aggregators that's a good question um I don't know um we see this all the time of course I I have not been able to have anyone point to me to another team that is actually trying to aggregate um all of web 3 um and so there is nothing that prevents the a layer from um being connected to a chain in the super chain um you will actually see that happen there is nothing that prevents the agair from being connected to a chain on the elastic chain there is nothing that prevents it from connecting to a an orbit chain and so um given that it's a low-level solution you can call it the aggregator of aggregators um and so that's what the AG provides all right and what is the difference with ccip yeah uh that's a good question so I would think of ccip more on the messaging side of things than on the asset transfer side of things um and so specifically like when you think about the the bridges that I was referring to um that's kind of what currently exists is is ccip one of the things that we're actually working on right now on the AG is trying to bring kind of bridge standards within the Ager there's actually nothing that prevents the Ager from using some of the bridge standards that we currently see um and adding to it a level of security that currently doesn't actually exist uh and so the goal is actually to work with um something like ccip rather than um compete with it all right where does Ager run and who are the actors yeah that's a good question so um the AG's going to be live in 3 to 4 weeks and in its current in its its initial form it's run in a centralized way um the nice thing though is that with ZK technology you can be running a centralized system in a trustless manner and that's kind of what the agir is going to look like in its initial form but I fundamentally believe that not withstanding how centralized we're seeing everything in the space right now um pretty much everything is going to decentralize and this is either going to happen because it's going to be forced by some government actors in some way um or it's going to happen because critical issues are going to happen in centralized systems and we're all going to be reminded why it is that we actually have decentralized systems um and so our goal and it's on the road map and it's actually a lot of work is already being done is to decentralize the agal and not keep it in a centralized form all right uh is there any hope of optimistic networks to get aggregated into the Ager their optimistic nature that is waiting periods Etc seems to be fundamentally incompatible with composability yes uh this is a good question and something we spent a lot of time about so I got two answers for you on that um answer number one is all optimistic Roll-Ups will be ZK rollups it's just a matter of time everybody knows it um all optimistic rups are working on that already it's just a question of time um and that frankly is what will create the ideal user experience um another alternative would be to actually just just uh uh prove the fraud proof okay that's the exact question like you can't wait seven days to go across train that's horrible um but what I was also saying is that we don't just need to prove proofs we can prove other things for example um you know the the centralized sequencers that we have right now do reach consensus uh in in a centralized way and you can actually prove that consensus using the uh pessimistic proof that's why I was saying that even in this current state where you've got fraud proofs on chains that we will still see them on the agay because we can protect against the the the risk of any um of anything happening within the fraud proof window using the pessimistic proof all right we only have time for one more question is my understanding correct that existing l2s need to migrate over all their AET strings in the native Bridges to the unified Bridge yeah that is a very good question um it's something we spend a lot of time on so I would say there's um there's the ideal State and there's the less the ideal State as I've mentioned a few times we can currently connect any existing chain and you will see existing chains get connected without migrating assets over to the Ager um and what will happen when that happens is basically you'll start issuing new assets on that canonical that new canonical Bridge being the AG brid bridge for any chains that want the what I'll call Ideal user experience you would actually want to have them migrate all the assets over this is actually something that um you will see happening with polygon POS um we have 6,500 or so assets on polygon POS they will all get migrated over to the unified bridge and there we're going to be the first example of probably one of the biggest chains definitely the biggest chains the world from an assets perspective actually migrating all of those assets over all right thank you again so much can we get a round of applause for Mark please