The Role of L2s in Ethereum’s Enterprise Adoption Arc | Karl Floersch - OP Labs

Hey everybody, welcome back. Uh, moving right along, we've got Custom Carl here to talk about the role of L2s and Ethereum's enterprise adoption arc. We thought that was a little boring though, so we think we remixed it to Custom Carl skits, scats, and Bbops about scaling on the enterprise. Take it away. Anyway, how's it going everyone?

Welcome to the role of L2s in Ethereum's enterprise adoption arc. We are in a new moment for Ethereum. It's a new era and that is the enterprise adoption era. Now, yes, I'm loving the the enthusiastic audience about this, but it has been a long time coming and now it is finally finally here, which is honestly shocking and you wouldn't believe it, but we are GROWING LIKE CRAZY. Look at these incredible stats.

The OP stack is massively adopted across the Ethereum ecosystem, across the crypto ecosystem with, you know, 15% of all transactions. But what if I told you that actually that is incredibly unimpressive in terms of the scale and the opportunity that we have in front of us as a crypto and Ethereum ecosystem. This is an exact ratio of the present adoption and our future potential. It's crazy. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Um, how are we going to get there? The name of the game, customization, Carl, I guess. Um, it's customization we have.

Let me let me go back to tell you why customization is actually so critical. Brief history of layer 2. So layer 2's emerged back many many years ago when we were trying to scale Ethereum. Unfortunately 10 years ago, 10 years of my life. Um, but we are literally so far ahead now because back in the day, every L2 was entirely custom, entirely bespoke.

It was a payments L2 and you toiled away at creating these really contrived contraptions to scale blockchains. And it was a horrible, horrible experience. And let me tell you, I have created more L2s than I care to admit. I have iterated on these things forever. And the old ones, they broke every tool.

They did not. They barely worked. But they did scale. Most of them were very scalable, thousands of transactions per second, but they just didn't do what customers wanted, which was supporting the Ethereum developer ecosystem. And so then fast forward like five, eight years, we finally achieved a massive massive moment which was EVM equivalence.

This was the moment where we realized with optimistic rollups we would be able to support the full capabilities of the EVM. And this is really the beginning of the L2 adoption arc. Previously no one adopted an L2. They were fun things at ETH Denver's to talk about, but this is where you started to see real usage and this was the real moment where the OP stack was born. But now we have graduated because we support the EVM.

We support all of the features that made Ethereum successful in the beginning and now we can go beyond it and that is we can now not only provide an EVM experience but scale beyond that to enable all of these enterprises to build out their particular use cases, bring their particular infrastructure on chain and that is a genuinely massive shift in the layer 2 ecosystem and what does it mean? It means that now customizations are critical. We need to deliver differentiated products. We have an entire industry of with millions, billions of users using the traditional financial infrastructure and each one of those applications are customs suited to whatever those users need. And so if we're going to bring every single user on Earth on chain, which I think we are actually now starting to see begin, we need to make sure that all of those users and all of those institutions can optimize their chains for their particular use cases.

And so it's a lot. There are huge amounts of customizations that need to be supported. Whether it be different proof systems, different compliance infrastructure, whether it be smart contract acceleration, for example, making your chain performant at your particular workloads. All of these things and more are the foundation of creating the actual onchain experience that serves a global population. And so how do we get there?

Well, we are already starting to see the emergence of this world with all of these people using the OP stack of course building out custom solutions for their particular user base. And I just have a couple examples here, right? UniS swap needed fast transaction confirmation so that their exchange experience would be snappy. Coinbase needed really easy onboarding for the massive numbers of users on their chain and world needed to prioritize transactions from human beings. That is their entire mission.

And so what's next for optimism? What is next for the OP stack? Well, it is creating a platform for these customizations and OP enterprise, welcome ladies and gentlemen. It is the easiest way to customize and launch a custom chain. Now, how is this going to be supported technologically?

Well, of course, all of those things that I listed as surface area for customization are things that we are actively building. Whether it be smart contract acceleration so that your chain that does a huge amount of exchange volume can operate at tens of thousands of transactions per second or or more. Whether it be, you know, latency or block building policies that allow you to customize who and what priority ordering you supply. Whether it be proof systems, we just are revamping our proofs to go full in on ZK. But that's not the only proof that we will provide.

Of course, ZK in both optimistic and also validity proving settings, TEES, all of these things are surface area for customization. And of course, as always, it's all MIT open source. Y'all can fork it today and start playing around and no lock in ever. And so within the context of all of these customizations, interoperability becomes incredibly important. And we've also been working on interoperability to specifically support an ecosystem, a crypto ecosystem, which is highly customized and highly differentiated.

And I could give a whole talk, but I have 45 4 minutes and 45 seconds left. And so I'm not going to talk too much about interoperability, but catch me afterwards to talk about it. And so what does this near future look like? Well friends, it is OP enterprise. Your blockchain.

Every enterprise will have their own block space that is customuilt to their needs to onboard their users to reach mass adoption. And it also means your revenue. All of these chains, they're bringing massive user bases on chain. They need control over their economics. And finally, the one thing that every enterprise needs, and that is enterprise guarantees with high uptime, 15-minute support, SLAs's, the real deal.

And that is the future of layer twos. And it is customizations customized Carl and really grateful to be here with y'all today. Thank you so much.