Entering the Cross-Chain Era by Jill Gunter

Great. Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here. As mentioned, my name is Jill. I am a co-founder at a company called Espresso Systems, and I'm going to be talking about how we are entering the crosschain era.

I know some of you may have seen yesterday some news about the Ethereum interoperability layer. I think that we can all agree that interoperability across rollups is one of the biggest problems facing us whether we're infrastructure builders or application builders or even users in the Ethereum ecosystem. I'm happy to share that an Ethereum interoperability layer has been live on mainet in production for over a year. It's now securing hundreds of millions in transactions across many different rollups that you know and love like Cello and Apech Chain and it is called Espresso. So I'll be sharing a little bit about what we've built and some exciting news around new products that are in development and being released very soon.

So the problem that we're facing as an overall industry is that information today flows freely across the world. I can send a 4K video to my friends and family whether they're in Thailand or Cape Town, but I cannot send them money. Our assets return remain trapped by inefficient communication across siloed financial systems which results in high costs, high friction and high weight times. And the vision that we have at Espresso and the vision that we all have building in the Ethereum ecosystem is to build for a world in which liquidity is unified and all applications can interoperate in real time. And the same way that the internet didn't just create efficiencies and bring down costs to transmitting information, but it actually opened up a whole new world of innovation, a whole new world and ecosystem of applications that couldn't have exist before.

So will we, everyone who is building in and on and around Ethereum build an interconnected web of finance. And the problem though that has existed for years in this space is that we have simply in many ways replicated the same issues that existed previously in the old financial system and on the old rails. Today in Ethereum's ecosystem we have hundreds of rollups of L2s of L3s that are siloed and fragmented and cannot communicate frictionlessly and in a decentralized manner. And so what we've built at Espresso is a platform that's intended to unlock frictionless finance first across Ethereum and then across all blockchain networks and bring about this vision again that we all share of truly frictionless finance. We believe that Espresso is a missing piece that blockchains have needed for a long time to fulfill their promise.

And so with Espresso, we believe that we are bringing in a new era of infrastructure. If you think about the evolution of blockchains and the evolution of the industry that we're in, I would say that generation one of blockchains started when Ethereum launched in 2015 and lasted for a good about 5 years. It's 2020. And these were monolithic blockchains. an L1 with a native VM, a native execution environment on which all apps lived.

NFTts, digital digitally native assets, real world assets like stable coins, all of these things lived on one single virtual machine. Now, the problem with this was that it didn't scale very well. I will never forget in 2017 going in to buy a CryptoKitty and being asked to pay $300 or more in gas fees. And this is the problem of the noisy neighbors that you can have if you are all trying to share one execution environment with all applications globally. Furthermore, having all things, all applications and all assets coexist in one environment did not allow for sufficient flexibility and customizability.

The game changed around this with generation 2 in 2020 2021 when arbitum as one of the first major rollups went live and that was a new era the rollup ccentric roadmap as Vitalik called it and with this we've seen an explosion of scaling we no longer face those same issues of high gas fees and noisy neighbors of too many applications fighting for block space we have moved much of that offchain And we can use Ethereum for what it was meant to do as the global settlement system. And I would say that we're about to enter a new era, the crosschain era, which I think will be starting this year and going into the future where we can power now real time communications across rollups and chains. And I think this will again change the game. And so what is Espresso? Espresso's technology provides a unique blends of blend of features and functionality to unlock liquidity across assets and seamless interoperability between different blockchain platforms.

Specifically, L2s is where we've started. So, it offers speed and security. It turns out getting fast finality, fast transaction confirmations is the key to unlock interop across all of these chains and domains. It supports deep customizability. You can use any type of VM.

You can use any rollup stack. You can even use any settlement system. Though again, today we're focused on the Ethereum ecosystem to provide composibility. And of course, again, we're compatible with Ethereum. So, it serves as a real-time source of truth because today rollups rely on slow blockchains which candidly came from previous generations.

You'll recall that Ethereum was not designed initially to support rollups and you know the people at the EF the core developers have done incredible work over the years to evolve it to be able to do so but we're not there yet as even they will tell you we need faster finality for transactions so that they can communicate across chains and domains and so you know in many ways you can think of espresso it is an L1 it's a decentralized proofofstake blockchain platform will be launching permissionless proof ofstake uh next month and like any base layer Espresso can be used for a multitude of purposes and services for the L2s that leverage it. So for the most part they use us for fast finality again fast transaction confirmations to support cross-chain composability but we also have roll-ups who are talking to us about data availability and other services that you could get from any blockchain platform including settlement itself. Unlike many other L1s or base layers though, Espresso is is specifically designed to be used either standalone or in tandem with another settlement layer. Specifically, Ethereum again has been our focus. And so, we're building an ecosystem of interconnected chains.

Again, you'll see many familiar logos up here that are working with us today. We've been lucky to have amazing partners through OffChain Labs who are leaders in the arbitum ecosystem working closely with them on this design over the course of several years. And we've just uh announced that Cello will be our next chain coming to mainet in the upcoming weeks. So stop by our booth in the Cello booth right next door to talk to us more about that. And moreover, we're powering an ecosystem of applications that will go crosschain.

So, we're working with Hyperlane. We're live on mainnet today with Hyperlane's message passing leveraging Espresso's confirmations. We had a recent uh governance proposal go through Stargate that passed. So, we'll soon be powering Stargate as well. We work closely with our friends at Caldera on powering the meta layer, which should be coming soon, and many others across the ecosystem as well.

And this is why I think the future of apps is crosschain. If you're a builder in this space, you should not be entering the space asking what L1 should I build on, okay, who has the best users, who will have the best distribution, what stack should I build with, who will help me the most with ecosystem development to get liquidity. You should be able to deploy and leverage all of the liquidity and all of the users across all chains. And so what I'm excited to share today is one of the very early examples I believe of many, many crosschain apps to come. So who here has ever minted an NFT?

I certainly have. Yes, many of you. And who here has ever had to bridge funds to mint an NFT? Yes, many of you. And I don't know about you, but for me, this has always been a very painful experience.

I have funds on one chain trying to participate in this NFT mint. Maybe there's even time pressure and I need to get my funds over to the other chain in a certain amount of time in order to be able to participate. I got to make sure I've gotten enough gas in the right tokens. I bridge my funds over. Okay, I made it.

I mint the NFT and now I'm left with dust on the chain that I minted the NFT in because I bridge back and there are no good ways to deal with dust today. It shouldn't have to be this hard. If that's if that's the standard of usability and UX that we have in this space, we are not going to make it. And so today instead, we have developed a protocol in Espresso and a an application that can allow you to do a crosschain NFT mint as it says here with no bridges, with no swaps, with no dust, and no problem. And again, this is the first of many applications that will come.

We're in development on a decentralized exchange protocol that will sit across all of the chains in the espresso ecosystem. But NFTTS are where we started because we're very lucky to have partnered deeply with two of the premier NFT platforms in the space through a partnership with Rary Chain and also a partnership with Apech Chain. And today for the first time we bring these two ecosystems together through espresso. So again, the target here is to have seamless composability across all chains. And it's through Espresso's decentralized consensus that Presto, this cross-chain bridgeless NFT minting product, gets secure, instant confirmations so that every transaction can feel native wherever it starts.

And so you can stop by our booth just outside and test it out. It will also be coming to mainet and to every wallet near you in the next two weeks. Uh but you can get a sneak peek today. This is what it will look like. So you will choose what chain you're paying from.

In this case, RARI chain that you can go birectional here as well. And you will choose what chain you're minting the NFT on. This is the flagship collectible NFT design that that we've put forward for this demo. Um and then you will you know accept the price and decide what uh what fees to pay alongside it where to route those fees from what chain what uh what sorts of funds uh you will see things like supply and all of the standard things that you're used to seeing uh in the NFT ecosystem and you will as we call it brew the NFT and this importantly shows something that you are probably not actually used to seeing which is the source of the transaction confirmation and the source of finality. This is the next thing that you'll see on the screen.

Although outside of the demo environment, we will probably abstract this away because the whole idea is to make this simpler for people, not more complicated. But it's important to understand that today when you move across chains, you are either waiting 20 minutes to rely on a very secure Ethereum finality, but again, you're waiting a very long time for that to go through an unacceptably long time. Your users will churn, they will leave you, they will lose interest or you are relying on a centralized sequencer pre-confirmation, which okay, it can happen in seconds, but it's a centralized source of confirmation. And that is what most of the products that move crosschain that move funds crosschain uh any intensebased product for example relies on today. Importantly, Espresso offers finality again in a matter of seconds.

Our most recent internal benchmarks have brought it down to two seconds and soon we're targeting sub-second latency and it will be decentralized. So still in the spirit of everything that we're building here and still sticking to the core principles that make the Ethereum ecosystem what it is. You will see the message being passed and this is all being uh relied upon for the espresso confirmations are being relied upon for that confirmation uh that drives this message passing and then you will get your NFT minted on the destination chain. And so again, we're very lucky to have amazing partners through this. This will be going live on Rarable, so in the Rarable application environment and and on the web through them.

And this was developed in partnership with Apech Chain and Rarity Chain. Again, it's Espresso's fast secure transaction confirmations that power this and empower users to mint NFTts on either chain with funds from any of the Espresso chains. The way that this works a little bit under the hood for the developers in the audience who might be curious is that funds get locked on RAR chain on the source chain. Hyperlane sends a message across to apech chain using the espresso verified confirmations. Hyperlane then uses what we call a calf node, a caffeinated node uh to listen for the new messages on the RAR mailbox and then relay the message to the hyperlane mailbox on apech chain.

Finally, as the last step here, ApChain of course mints the NFT once it receives the verified message. And so from a more kind of schematic or diagram perspective, this is what that looks like. The user hits the apech chain sequencer with its transaction. The apech chain sequencer posts to the espresso network and as soon as it's finalized on that chain. It gets posted to the espresso network broadcast and that can be read again via a full node some full node software that we call a caffeinated node and that then gets relayed to the DAP gets passed back to the sequencer of the rollup chain and then broadcast back to the parent chain in this case arbitum or Ethereum or whatever it might be.

So you can build these types of applications today. Our documentation is live. We'll be sponsoring a bounty at ETH Global this weekend. Uh very excited to see our developer ecosystem continue to build. This will take you to the ETH Global Bounty page and registration link.

We hope to see many of you there building on Espresso. We have a growing developer ecosystem. We host our own hackathon. So you should follow us on Twitter and stay tuned for those. Um these are often global online hackathons.

Out of the last hackathon that we hosted, we had 156 projects submitted with over 90 new rollups posting to Espresso. Out of that various app chains uh supporting many different use cases across payments, across decentralized exchange and across of course the NFT landscape as well. We host an internal accelerator program in which teams that have made sufficient progress are eligible for grants, investor support and other things. And then we also have a guardians program. So this is a team of developers from the outside community who work with us to continue improving our documentation and beyond.

So thank you so much. You can snap here and you can grab our documentation. Also, go to our website and of course, finally, please do stop by the Espresso booth. We've also got great merch that we're giving away and free coffee. Thank you very much.