The Rollup

The convergence of AI and crypto is particularly interesting to us. We've been doing research and are really coming around to the idea that AI might be the major unlock for crypto, especially for onchain usage.

If you're completely new to the convergence of AI and crypto, this is for you.

In today's discussion, we discuss the "AI War" of compute and GPUs. The majority of the current GPU usage is being held in the hands of large big tech companies, we're not fans of this model and its not the ideal path for scaling...

The spotlight on modularity continues.

After Modular March, its been obvious to us to stay heads down building with a strong focus on modular blockchains and the projects leading the way for this sector. Today, we do a technical deep dive into the architecture of Lava Network's RPC network.

Basically the issue at hand is its tough to scale RPCs in a secure manner, across dozens of chains.

We spoke to Lava Network's CTO, Gil Binder, about their chain-agnostic framework and tried to figure out where the real edge lies. Can Lava really...

The future of AI is a divergent path.

On one hand, we have the use of AI for the benefit of all and advancement of our society.

On the other, there’s a world where the power dynamic between humans and computers becomes imbalanced and we are as a race are put in an dystopian situation.

We believe that the intersection of crypto and AI will be pivotal in not only the decentralization of AI, but also the advancement of crypto adoption. We believe that AI is the unique use case needed to ex...

As we wrap up Modular March, we had one of the early believers in modularity and early angel investor in prominent projects (EigenDA, Avail, and others) to discuss the state of the crypto markets.

We discussed the nuanced interplay between technology, ethics, and market dynamics that are at play in crypto now. We discussed the desire for real world applications and why tokens play an interesting part in the way builders create products in crypto. Ajit is a particularly funny personality in crypto, known for his realism and ability to make harsh truths into...

Another episode with an Ethereum scaling OG, Nick Dodson, who pioneered the original idea of optimistic rollups before they were the norm. Nick is actually also working on an innovative concept called fast finality optimistic rollups, which we are going to line up another episode for.

The team behind Fuel has been working tirelessly for several years to bring their vision to life, and we getting very close to mainnet.

In this presentation, we explore the “Rollup OS” of Fuel, powered by the Fuel Virtual Machine (FuelVM), which is notable for its integration of the UTXO...

The core innovation of data availability in the modular landscape revolves around minimalism.

Due to the minimal smart contract execution capabilities of altDA chains, they can focus solely on providing a specialized service of data verification & publishing. In addition to the design of minimal blocks, these chains are able to perform a unique task of Data Availability Sampling (DAS) which is a revolutionary innovation for blockchain scaling.

In today’s presentation, we sit down with John Adler, an Ethereum OG and creator of optimistic rollups. We take a deep, te...

Not sure we need to write too much about this one!

We mostly laughed and had a good time while understanding the definitions of some key terms in the space. Togruhl, one of the early Ethereum contributors and Scroll co-founders, gave us a presentation on his mental models for modular and monolithic design structures.

What was particularly interesting was the idea which Togruhl posed about the convergence of these two ideologies into nearly the same place.

Monolithic chains will modularize. Modular chains will enshrine...

Finally! Wormhole $W token is here. After a three year journey of shipping filled of ups and downs, Wormhole has announced they are taking the path to decentralizing their community.

If you've been navigating the onchain world, you've probably heard the buzz about Wormhole's token, $W (and hopefully qualified for the airdrop).

Wormhole has long stood as a critical infrastructure in the blockchain world, offering a bridge that seamlessly connects over 30 chains across five different runtimes. At its core, $W aims to fortify the bridge between diverse blockchain ecosystems...

Typically, you wouldn’t think of Solana having a strong footing in the modular thesis. After all, the design choices they have elegantly pioneered (credit where credit is due) revolve around scaling a single state machine.

This simply won’t scale to billions of users, and they will need to modularize.

However, the extremely performant and extensible Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) is an effective tool to build an extremely fast rollup atop Ethereum. We can all be friends here, right?

Welcome to today's Modular March presentation, where we take our first dive as a te...

We really enjoyed this presentation.

While we’ve had multiple shared sequencers talks on Modular March, each one has been far different. Today’s deep dive is around the game theory and incentive designs behind creating a rollup ecosystem which feels completely seamless and interoperable.

At its core, Espresso leverages a two part system to enforce how transactions are ordered and finalized across rollups via its sequencer. This system mirrors Ethereum's, but with a twist, aiming to streamline interactions between different rollups and thereby improve user experience significantly.