This is epicenter episode 470 with guest SRI Ram, cannon from
eigen Leia. Welcome to epicenter the show
which talks about the Technologies projects and people
driving decentralisation and the blockchain revolution.
I'm literally qurans. And I'm joined by Felix doj's my
co-host today. And we are speaking with SRI Ram
Cannon, the founder of eigen layer, which is restacking
protocol. And what that means we will get
to in just a minute. But before we speak with SRI
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So, three around. It's a pleasure to have you on.
I recently have moderated a panel at def con where you were
a very contentious that I guess it was incredible neutrality
was. So contentious that we released
it as a special episode and epicenter.
We're talk about credible neutrality and kind of
centralization and looming be centrality centralization.
And I mean a little bit later in the show, but before we kind of
kick it off properly. Tell us how did you get into
crypto? Thank you so much for a very
good. I enjoyed that panel as well.
And you know we could use more Frank candid conversations in
this space and telling a little bit about myself.
I got into Block chains per se in 2018, on January.
But my interest in peer-to-peer system, States far back my PhD
thesis was basically in peer-to-peer and wireless
networks. This is my masters and PhD span
from 2006 to 2011 12. So, I've been thinking about
these systems at that time there.
My interest in Wireless was primarily peer-to-peer Wireless
and ad hoc mesh networks was mainly thinking through
imagining a World where we don't need centralized intermediation
to for me to talk to somebody else.
And we were thinking one of the big use cases for something like
this. Would be Last Mile coverage,
right? Like in developing countries
where there may not be enough Wireless infrastructure but
actually we were pleasantly surprised with the scale of
infrastructure deployment in developing countries around the
world where the the need for something like that, didn't
emerge. So after my PhD I switched out
and was working on computational genomics for several years and
where we were mainly working on things like how do we analyze
data coming from DNA RNA sequencing?
How do genes regulate each other?
All this kind of stuff, totally different from what I do right
now. But in January, 2018 around the
time, my PhD advisor promote, Was now at the Princeton
blockchain Center. So he called me and he said she
only to hear about this thing called Bitcoin and said, I heard
about it, but I don't know much more and he's like, oh the
things that we used to think about a lot.
You know, how to maximize throughput minimize latency in
peer-to-peer type systems. Is what do you know, Bitcoin is
facing? There's a whole bunch of
problems. Do you want to come and work on
it? And as interesting as it was
technically, Lee, I had already been burnt once trying to trying
to do something in the peer-to-peer space and also I
had a kind of intrinsic distrust of financial speculation and I
looked at it at that time and I wanted to see if there is some
more fundamental reason for me to commit to work on that for
like, let's say, attend your time scale.
And initially I was not convinced and it took me three,
four months of like, wandering around and one of my like basic
paradigms which is comes from like Evolution.
And you can ask like what is the kind of evolutionary advantage
of the species Homo sapiens and you know an an immediate guess
would be something like oh we are intelligent and therefore we
can I've taken over this planet, but I think a moment's
examination would suggest that that's probably not true because
if you take one intelligent person and take a gorilla and
then give them an island, you know, who has better survival
there. So the thesis, this is actually,
most clearly articulated by you all Nova Harari in his book
sapiens. That the reason humans have
taken over this planet is because we cooperate flexibly in
large numbers. Because we cooperate flexibly in
large numbers. I really like this thesis and
it's kind of a foundational mental model for me.
And as I think through the thesis and looked at something
like Bitcoin, it became clear that the ability to cooperate is
limited by trust, right? Like I'm going to cooperate with
you if I know I can trust you. And if I can remove the barriers
to trust then I'll the then they'll be more cooperation
flexibly large number. So I saw this as kind of like
upgrading societal infrastructure and even
providing basically an evolutionary Advantage for for
our species, in our ability to cooperate flexibly loss of
words. So that became like a once I saw
that Paradigm, that essentially crypto can play a role in
upgrading our cooperation infrastructure.
I became fascinated with it and over the next, you know, few
months I started diving in deeper and so I would say that
I've gotten deeper and deeper down that rabbit hole in the
last five years. So that's how I got a crypto.
Nice. So yeah, before we talk about, I
glared the project we're here to talk about, I guess one step
before that. Or were you still part of his,
the kind of University of Washington blockchain lab key.
We talked a little bit about what you are, what the goal of
this lab is and what you've been researching there or you're
still researching their Capital if you are.
Yeah. At the time, you know I was
working on like I was saying Traditional genomics, but I was
a professor assistant professor at the University of Washington,
Seattle, and what ended up happening was, as I got more
interested in this, I found that there is a bunch of, like basic
questions which are unanswered, right?
So just looping it back to my thesis, cooperate flexibly, in
large numbers, you know, Bitcoin already showed us that, you
know, you can do. Trustless cooperation, I would
characterize the etherium as having showed us that we can
cooperate flexibly. You know, her Re-Use.
Let flexibly to differentiate from other species which only
cooperate genetically, right? Like army ants cooperate in
large numbers but only genetically.
And you know the way I think about etherium is it enabled
more flexible cooperation because you can program at eyes
you know, applications that can then build on top of this common
process structure. And so, the thing that I thought
was missing at the time is the, in large numbers part, and in
large Numbers basically, to me meant we need a much more
scalable substrate. So most of our research ended up
being thinking about how do we do scalable blockchains and what
are the core features of consensus?
Protocols, how do we get scalability?
How do we get the game theory around this, right?
And so on. So this is, this became the
agenda and this became big enough, you know, to start the
UW blockchain lab. So earlier it was part of my
other Our research, just one one strand and the goal was
basically to understand and create enough Primitives so that
we can have scalable blockchains.
So that was kind of the agenda for the lab and while doing this
one of the things that I ran into was when you're thinking
about how to build new say consensus, protocols or
scalability or any of these things.
There are very few avenues for you to deploy them into
production. So what do I mean by that?
You know, imagine you had a great idea for a distributed
application like a smart contract, then you could then
take it and run it on top of any major smart contract,
blockchains a 3 mm or any of these other changes that came
after that. But if you had a great idea for
how to improve the consensus protocol or scalability or
adding new features, like how to build better oracle's or Or how
to build better data availability or any of these
things. There is no place for you to go
and deploy any of these Innovations.
In fact, every new innovation requires you having to create
yourself a decentralized trust Network.
The way I think about decentralized trust is this like
a unicorn. It's so rare and it know it
barely exists. And so it is completely
untenable to ask like a good distributed systems engineer to
also create Decentralized trust along with each of their
Innovations is appears rather insane to me that this is the
expectation that we have that, like each person who has a good
idea for a consensus protocol, a good idea for a virtual machine
also, go and create a social Revolution, to create
decentralized, trust is just simply untenable.
So, initially, I didn't understand all of this, my
initial thinking was, hey, we have these cool ideas for how to
improve considers protocols. Maybe somebody will take up and
use it and And what I saw was there is a lot of governance
bottleneck and pressure in big systems which rightfully should
exist to you know the next upgrade needs to be made sure
that you know it's it's really, really accurate.
Correct and safe and it's a long process to get that and there is
no place to do rapid experimentation.
So saw that, and I was little bit frustrated with this, this
state of the ecosystem that basically the idea that smart
contract Developers Kind of variety of options for
experimentation, whereas infrastructure Builders, which,
which I thought was the core bottleneck, which was limiting.
The scope of blockchains did not have the same playground for
Innovation. And so this became a little bit
of an obsession trying to figure out, how do we borrow existing
large trust networks to then go and create and let anybody in a
weight on top of a common substrate?
And I would say that was of the seeds for what became eigen.
Layer later, is this Obsession in trying to figure out how do
we leverage existing, trust networks to do new things that
it was not designed to do. So that's, that's a little bit
of Prelude on on what we were doing before and how it led to
this project and a sec. So I can a lets you piggyback of
an existing decentralized trust Network, it does that through
mechanism called He's taking can you explain to us what that is?
Yeah absolutely Federica when you ask this question, How can
we leverage an existing, trust Network, to do other things, it
it begs the following, you know, secondary question, which is,
what is the root of trust of these existing networks and we
can take Athenian as as an example or Bitcoin as another
example. So what is the root of trust
with Bitcoin? The root of trust of Bitcoin is
the proof of work, which Powers, you know, security for this
network and similarly, what is the root of trust for?
Ethereum is the proof of stake That powers.
The secondary for this network. What do we mean by proof of
stake Powers? The security for this network,
people are taking their steak, they eat, and then locking it in
a contract. And then saying that I am
abiding by the conditions of block production of this network
of aetherium. And if I deviate from it, if I
follow it, give me rewards. If I deviate from it, I have
liability that I may lose my eat and this constraints the set of
possible. Here's that participants in the
block production system can exert.
They have to make whether blocks of they make invalid blocks or
double sign blocks. And so on, they are liable to
Costa Rica. So this is the root of trust.
The root of trust with helium is people putting down eat and
committing to both positive and negative incentives.
For actually, making this Vlog in comparison to say Bitcoin
provoked, work where people are buying and investing Eating like
mining equipment and using that to mine Bitcoin blocks and the
space of there is a positive incentive for them.
The positive incentive is that if you continue mining on the
longest chain, you'll get rewards and there is a negative
incentive, which is that if, you know, you don't, you try to
attack the system or whatever, the there's no programmatic
negative incentive, but there's a subjective - in Center, which
is that the Bitcoin to use the price may go.
Down and that adversely impacts the value of your investment,
which is this mining equipment. So that's the economics.
Underpinning, the root of trust in Bitcoin and say the root of
trust in Athenian. What we found was the etherium
root of trust or in general proof of stake.
Root of trust is much more programmable and what do I mean
by that? Is you can take the same stake
and opt-in to additional conditions.
All positive incentives and negative incentives.
Because it's state and steak is programmatically controlled by
the blockchain. But us, you cannot do the same
thing on bitcoin. You cannot take Bitcoin root of
trust and then say that I can also opt into additional
negative incentives because any additional - in centers are have
to translate to bitcoin to USD price movements and that's not
possible for us to modulate. So we found that and and it is
more fundamental than that. Because, you know, the core idea
is you cannot the Bitcoin blockchain cannot go and burn
your mining equipment if you do something wrong.
And that's because that's just there is a digital-to-analog
translation barrier that as you know, your eat is stored in a
contract and you can basically, you know, burn loose transfer,
whatever those that eat. So now having gotten to the root
of trust of proof of stake. We can ask how can we leverage
the same E2 then also secure other things imaginable, we're
all stay kurz, opt-in re steak which is basically put their
steak at commit, their steak two additional Services.
They say that. Hey I'm going to also run this
other data storage Network, this Oracle, or this new chain, any
of these other things and they Say that.
If I do not behave correctly on any of these Services, I'm
liable to lose my eat. And if it turns out that all of
them, all the hundred percent of each takers opt-in, then you
have kind of gotten the same root of trust that that is
underpinning. The etherium blockchain to also
opt into your service so you can think of once you have like
everybody opt-in and everybody restate, then it's almost as if
the ATM protocol upgraded itself to make sure you are basically
this other services being run by everybody who is also running.
They think you're mistaking and you can think of like two
different ways in which trust transfers one is trust arising.
Due to decentralization, each sake is widely distributed and
stay, so that is one dimension. So to just access that
Dimension, it is sufficient. If the same set of eats takers,
also go and run, On this other service.
But to transfer the economic incentives, we need the steak to
be committed programmatically to additional slashing conditions
relevant to each of these services.
So I can layer allows basically is a platform that lets takers
opt in both their like peace and flies trust and economic
security to opt into validating all of these other services to
give a bit of context on the name, eigen layer icon in German
for your own It's we envision a world where anybody can come and
build any new service without having to go find or build their
own decentralized trust Network. They can leverage this, existing
massive trust network of aetherium and then, and then
built this on top. We find the timing to be.
This is the right time to build something like iron layer
because we just went through the merge.
And we are in a fully proof of stake world right now, the
etherium landscape as Also the layer to landscape having
significantly driven technology forward for example, by having
sophisticated fraud proofs and validity proves.
And these may be needed for services to exert slashing.
So if a service, for example, if I'm running a chain and in that
chain, if you double signed a block, or if you signed an
invalid block, it should be transparent on the Athenian
blockchain whether that was correct.
Not and to do that. You need to have either fraud
Pros or validity proofs and the emergence of the layer to
actually helps us in in basically, writing these lashes
and conditions sharply. So that's a kind of quick
overview of iconic. There's tons to unpack here.
Maybe kind of, let's roll up, historically a little bit
before, we kind of dive into the weeds here, there used to be and
the concept of merge mining or I mean the concept of sit around.
It's just there. Doesn't really get talked about
anymore. And so, basically, the idea
behind much mining was that if you improve of work obtained,
the right to build a block, you would be conceded to build the
block on a different chain as well.
So basically, so, so that basically several chains can use
the same proof of work. Is this the proof of steak
equivalent to merge mining? Yeah, absolutely.
I think this is So the wreath taking another way of thinking
about Reese taking is is just merge staking, right?
And I think this is probably one of the reasons why nobody else
came up with it. And we came up with it is
because, you know, all the oh, jeez, who have been around in
encrypt or like, you obviously have looked at this Paradigm of
much Mining, and much mining is the idea like fredericka just
explained that that basically if you mine a block in Bitcoin, you
also kind of minor Block in this altcoin or this new ecosystem
and merge mining had very limited crypto economic
transfer. So what do I mean by that is if
you merge mine Bitcoin and some other chain in some other
altcoin in parallel, Firstly, you need a lot of Bitcoin - to
opt into this other system in order to have any security
transfer. Because even if you had a
majority honest in Bitcoin, if only 5% is much mining your
other coin, then basically, you, you don't have any measurable
security because Mourinho 51% of Bitcoin miners are honest, but
doesn't mean 51% of 5% of Bitcoin miners are honest.
So you need every all the Bitcoin - too often.
So that's number one but even if Bitcoin miner Ops into the other
system, there is still a massive limitation and the limitation is
that Even if hundred percent of Bitcoin miners are mining.
This altcoin if they all coordinated to attack this
altcoin, what happens is the altcoin system doesn't work but
that does not translate into any kind of like a meaningful loss
for them in in the Bitcoin because, you know, they can
continue to use their Bitcoin mining equipment to mine
Bitcoins. So the the end of the day, the
transfer of Economic Security from Bitcoin, to any of these
are all coins, which were merged, mine is very weak and
because it's very weak, these systems did not did not evolve
to the extent that people anticipated early on and these
once these flaws were identified, people kind of gave
up on this Paradigm and I think this is the reason why nobody
really Revisited this Paradigm with you.
Length of staking what we did in OS as kind of not having lived
through all the experiences. We said, oh, yeah, case taking
means that a slashing. And what this means is if you
have like, you know, a twenty billion dollars, take Danny
Theory. Mm, but even a 5% of it like 1
billion dollar gets take then your alternative network if you
misbehave, if you can lose all your eat, write the 1 billion
dollar or wheat. That is a concrete - penalty.
So the transfer of Economic Security is nearly perfect in
merge staking, whereas the transfer of Economic Security in
much mining is very limited or non-existent.
So once we kind of broke the around this and this really
needs two things, it needs proof of stake.
It also needs a powerful general purpose programming, because
otherwise, you cannot have strong programmatic conditions,
which / the Money when you're misbehaving in all these
protocols. So and both of them were kind of
nicely getting well developed in Athenian.
So that's the context for why I think many others who may have
come up with it, missed it because of the trajectory of
much mining which basically didn't work and I think much
tracking works perfect. He I think I've seen you
described also I glare as this programmable slashing protocol.
Right. And I think one thing is
interesting, I guess to some degree.
If you if you think about sharding to right, I guess if
you double side on one, another Shard, it kind of also slashed
on the main charge, which essentially similar, just that.
In this case, may be in our Lair.
You somehow basically have like charts that do like different
tasks. It's permissionless shown
basically if you want to think about it.
Yeah, so it's very interesting concept for sure.
I have to say this one question that I definitely won't ask Why
we're already on the kind of meat of it with the slashing,
which is essentially only theory of right now.
If you are a big enough, like steak, or you have this concept
of correlated slashing, right that if like 33% of the network
that was sign at certain point, you can have 100% slashing.
Now, I guess I'm wondering since, of course, if you add
more risks or more service on top, that can be / more
conditions. And this case might be one of
them you might potentially go like above 100%.
Slashing, is that how do you like deal with that?
Is there some kind of systemic risk there that the system?
Generates and how if there is or like, if how do you think about
it? And how do you limit that this?
This happens? But obviously we don't like to
see. No, no we'd like to see that at
all and we try to minimize the chances for something like that.
But Let's zoom out a little bit and see what we envision.
The main use case of, I can layer to be that way and Wishin.
I can lay it to play. The biggest role, is build
services for the theorem ecosystem.
So if you look at, if you look at what an application like
adapted, a needs, It is paying etherium for, you know,
decentralized trust on block building it, like on block
making and block validation. But there is a whole domain of
other things that are all needed in order to make this
application usable. This could be things, like I
need oracle's, I need Bridges, I need Mev management.
I need data availability, I need, you know, faster or
settlement, whatever the set of other services, you know, in a
modular work. That you may want in order to
actually have the application be trustless.
And if you look at this and when we talk about systemic risk, I
think there is a kind of natural thing that people freak out when
they see, like, oh, you're leveraging.
Trust is going to be like, trigger system Icarus, but
actually, I think I can layer significantly reduce the
systemic risk and I'm going to kind of make a case for that.
And why do I say that? So what is the systemic risk
that we see today? If you're an application and you
consume you know trust services from Atheneum.
But you also consume Trust Services from oracle's from
Bridges from, you know, other things that you all depend on
and in some sense, trust is naturally based on the minimum
bottleneck, right? Like whichever is the bottleneck
trust that Determines like how much less you're getting.
So you have, you know, ecosystem service from aetherium that
basically makes blocks, but you also need all these other
things. So imagine if you had like
twenty billion dollars, take didn't eat on L1 but you have
like 1 billion dollar staked in your Oracle 1 billion dollar in
your bridge and 1 billion dollar in your data availability and
other other things. Now the trust that you're
getting as an application, what is the cost of attacking all
these applications find the least trusted one and take over
that. Thing that is all that is needed
to actually attack the whole system of applications.
And okay. Now, imagine in an eigen layer
world, you are fully over-leveraged, which is what we
are. Kind of worried about what is
over-leveraged mean, like every steak is doing everything, okay?
Every Staker is participating in the Oracle every sticker is
participating in the bridge. Every sticker is participating
in the data available. Only in fact, I'm going to argue
that this is the best possible world can world.
Why is this? Because now to attack any one of
the applications, you have to attack a, either the coral one
or one of these services. And if you're attacked anyone of
these Services, you're going to slash 51% of that service.
So that's the mental model for building on eigenvector is you
should have if the safety of that service famed like then you
should be able to / a majority of the stickers.
So if you take this mental model, then essentially what you
can do is to now attack any one of these Services, you need to
attack like this 20 billion dollar State, you cannot attack
1 billion dollars take and take over the system.
So the cost of corrupting the ecosystem actually increases
under perfectly staking, if you research a so does the reward
know, sort of the reward. The reward doesn't increase,
actually, why? Because you could have already
taken that gained by Start a Kindle.
So the reason the reward doesn't increase is the same set of
daps. So the there is a set of dabs
already living on aetherium. They trust the theory ml 1,
right? And now they were dependent on
all these external non ecosystem Services.
It like oracle's Bridges which are not done by the L1, they
were dependent on all of these and by attacking L1.
Any way you could have attacked these tabs but because, because
it is trust is the Min of many things.
If I trust you You and Felix and somebody else.
And anyway, I'm trusting, let's say frederika with my life.
I might as well trust her with my bag and like other things
instead of like giving those other things to other people,
then you know, my trust exposure actually increases.
But the cost of corruption, doesn't think the profit from
corruption doesn't increase because Frederick, I could have
already taken my life and she just, she's if she doesn't the
same thing is happening with the L1 is basically already.
The daps are trusting the l14 block reduction if you Fine.
If you do any basic issue at the L1, you could have taken away
kind of like value from the Taps, I'm, with you, part of the
argument. So, I mean, obviously, if you
have a system that is composed out of individual components,
the weakest link is what you need to break in order to break
the system, totally with you on this.
But if you have different chains or different applications, you
know, secured by the same. Steak to me, that's not the same
thing. So basically if you have say the
Oracle that would have been Incorporated anyway.
Yeah that's kind of that's still the same system.
So if I look at the theorem now say if you're in the he's you
know, ethers were worth. I'm making this up now. 150
billion give or take but the ecosystem is worth 500 per, you
know, 800 billion whatever. I haven't done the math but
probably by a park correct and that's probably fine.
So basically, but if you have, if you wear to secure like the
entire global economy with 150 billion, this will probably not
be fine, right? So basically to me, the question
is, is there a way to mathematically deduce?
How much you can actually secure economically with the steak that
you're we're talking about here, namely the 150 billion of eats
Yes. So, so first point, I think, you
know what, what you're saying is?
Well, if there were applications that already existed on etherium
today and only they are being served by these additional
Services than yes, the profit from corrupting doesn't increase
because they're already there. But if it does increase the
economy significantly because of like oh actually the same money
is now securing a much bigger economy, then you know, you'd be
under serious trouble. But let me make a Contrapositive
to this. The imagine we had four years
back, okay? And you know, somebody comes and
tells me eat is worth whatever 100 million 200 million today.
And, you know, there is no way that he can secure like a 500
billion dollar worth of an ecosystem and that didn't turn
out to be the case. It is now securing a 500 billion
dollar worth of ecosystem. And you can ask, why is that
Because eat grew in value relative to the ecosystem
securing it. It is securing and this is for
the good, right? Because actually, you know, the
value of flow from the fees, actually, sustains enough value
to actually make sure that it is valuable enough and one could
make the same argument that by making what the theorem secures
a little bit more meta. By making is not only what is
run on the etherium virtual machine.
Basically anything that they didn't trust Network and secure,
you're actually just, you know, increasing the scope of
applications what were what could be built as applications
on evm. This is what could be built
those applications which are natively, you know, new
distributed systems that can then be programmed on top and
you could make the argument that basically eat will grow because
you're receiving fees from not only, you know, block making,
but also from all these other services accrue back to
etherium. But I think there is a The the
separate part of your question which is a more mathematical
kind of a question. And the question is, what are
like exact equations that like calculate and understand this
over leveraging? So to do that, we have to
actually look at what's happening in the ecosystem today
already. And you look at it, you have
twenty billion dollars aside. We 3m's worth 150 billion years.
That's true. But each stake, this worth maybe
less than 20 billion today. But it is securing this.
Find it billion-dollar ecosystem.
Why are we not worried about this over-leveraged?
What is going on, right? Like, what's the underpinnings
of not worrying about this over-leveraged?
And I think there are two things, two ways to look at it.
One is a practical way and then I'll go to the mathematical way.
The practical way is you look at it and you say oh you know you
have twenty billion dollars ticked and if you're an
attacker, firstly, you have to acquire 20 billion dollars.
Or whatever two-thirds of 20 billion dollars.
And because there is a slashing protocol at work, you're going
to guaranteed to lose that six billion, seven billion 13
billion, whatever depending on what type of attack are falling
off. So you're guaranteed to lose a
whole bunch of money, whether you are able to make our way
with a whole bunch of money is anybody's question, right?
Like whether you are, you will be able to run away with more
than 10 billion dollars. From this ecosystem is and is
questionable because because of what?
Because you don't have exchanged liquidity yet that scale, you
don't have, you know, exit points and there is frictions
and Society will Fork you out and all these other things.
That essentially constrain the profit from corruption.
So the cost of corruption, the cost to the attacker is
guaranteed that they have to, they have to take, you know, the
six billion dollars or 13 billion dollar risk.
And the profit that they can make is potentially limited, and
these two together, constrain, the system enough that
practically, we don't see these attacks but you evading my
question, right? So, basically, because I'm
asking was the upper bound and you say it, no, no, no, but it's
lower than the upper bound. Which I am sure it is.
I mean to basically, I totally couldn't see that say, you break
a helium, the maker token is probably where crash.
I mean, totally with you on that but I mean, yeah, I mean it's a
way to have Kate number. Yeah, that's the next part of
the question. That I said, I just answered the
practical way. We can also actually understand
these more mathematically, and to do this, actually, you need
to redesign aetherium a little bit.
And so, for All what you need is.
Okay, well, how do we mathematically understand, like
what is the limits of Leverage and why are we not
over-leveraged today on aetherium, right before we
extend leverage even more to other things that I'm talking
about? We have to understand why we are
not all over yesterday. So the first part was a
practical argument arguing that there is a kind of hardening of
security at a certain scale and that's the argument but the
second part is the more mathematical argument and what?
You can do is you can say that the total amount of transact.
So whenever there is some kind of an event that is either a
social response or other response which happens within a
certain time. And if you can bound the total
value flow within that amount of time.
So if you can bond that you know, you will not be able to
move more than whatever, you know, 6 billion or 7 billion or
something within that time, which is the incidence response
time incidence response time. Be like time to detect a
double-double signed block and then shut down, like further
transfers, it may be the time for like, a community to Fork
out an obvious, like, you know, a fraudulent Fork.
So essentially, what you want to do is you want to bound the
total volume that of transactions within the Event
Horizon. We're like so there's an event
horizon and then there is a total volume that total
transaction volume. And right now, there is no nice
way to do it. Because we don't know how much
Finance transfer, we don't know how much crack and transferred.
We don't know how much some other like mom-and-pop exchange
transferred. We don't know how much somebody
sold the Mercedes-Benz 4 and so on, right.
Like with there's all this activity happening outside and
there is no protocol level monitoring.
And why am I focusing on only exit exit?
Paths is because you can kind of categorize transactions into two
types. One is transactions that are
internally Atomic. I am selling my eat and getting
a an It right? Like, I'm selling my eat and
getting aboard. A this is an atomic transfer
inside the Block Chain, if it reverts both rebirth, right?
I either have the eat or I have the, have the bullet and I'm
kind of fine, both ways but there are transactions which are
not Atomic inside the blockchain, right?
One leg of the transaction is happening on the blockchain and
another leg is happening in the real world, right?
These are the ones that get screwed if you actually have
like, you know, blockchain reversals and we are exam.
Things like that. And what you can start doing is
if you can bound the total value of non-atomic, transactions, per
unit time, then you can actually start saying that actually 20
billion dollars is not a bound on, whatever is the amount steak
does not a bound on the total value at risk.
It is only a bound on the total volume transacted within the
Event Horizon. So that is you can actually
okay, so this is a whole other discussion.
I have a full design for How to actually modulate the etherium
protocol where the slashed funds are used as insurance against
tree Orcs, so you can actually start selling insurance bonds
against the / funds, or at least a portion of the / once even if
half of the funds are burnt, the other half is used for insurance
and anybody who's transacting you know and wants protection
against, you know, these bad events actually takes out an
insurance from the theorem protocol and by doing this what
happens. Is the theorem protocol as
creates common information on the total volume transacted
within, within a unit time because you, you wouldn't
ransacked huge volume without having commensurate insurance.
So, anyway, this is a whole other, like, rabbit hole.
I'm happy to talk more about, but I think you need more
sophisticated systems to actually have mathematically
bound the over-leveraged on on ethereum today and we are
building some of these into part of our protocol.
At least the roadmap of our protocol but we do need more
native support from theorem. What kind of heuristics are you
using for the event horizon and the volume mean, how would you
define the Event Horizon? How long do you think that is on
East to? Okay, so the The Event Horizon
depends on the type of bad event you're worried about.
And I think one important kind of bad event, we should be
worried about is Shocked. I'm real excited.
Claim a block is finalized, right?
And I make a lot of transactions and then like I go and create
another as ass takers. They create another like fork
with another finalized block, which would not happen and is
slashed by the slashing protocol, but, you know, if
there is more money to be made, it could happen.
But with this was East to, that's much more difficult.
No. I mean, so basically, Rio
ganging. I means you can miss a block,
and you can kind of you can You can produce a network split by
submitting a block deliberately late, but you kind of eliminate
most of the of the reorg mess that we had with if you re on
one. No, I mean eliminate to the
extent that it creates an economic damage to the attacker,
but if the economic profit to the attacker is 500 billion and
that's it. So that's that's the thing that
absolutely rely proof of stake. It's flashing and slashing
creates an economic damage. But I may take the economic
damage because my economic profit is higher than the
economic damage. And so, I think that's the thing
that because, you know, put producing invalid blocks is not
a valid attack on full nodes, which can validate the blocks.
So really the only major safety attack is reorganize finalized
blocks, right? And you can reorder paralyzed
blocks. If you have majority stake and
you're willing to lose it. And So the question is, like,
suppose somebody re orgs eat to block right, and at what time
scale, so if they re or God block, which is 10 days old
likely, we will all even if we /, it will continue with the
other Fork, right? Like the fork in which, you
know, which was not 10 days old. But if it was 12 minutes old,
which one will we continue with? I don't know, right.
And so the Event Horizon is, Actually, you know, the time to
detect a reorg attack or the time within which you can
effectively make a reorg attack, which will not be rejected.
And so, that's roughly what I would say.
I mean, it's in the order of basically minutes or hours
rather than, in the order of like months, or weeks, right?
So that's the and so, essentially, you have to just
bound the economic volume traded within that period.
And I think that's why it helium is safe today because of these
reasons and And we can imbue something like I can layer with
the exact same set of conditions but we can even make it more
programmatic because we are building it.
We can say that you can not transact more than a certain
value per unit time and so on. And that's enough to basically
make it very difficult to execute these attacks.
Right. Yeah, thanks for this excursion
and we would love to see the design of the insurance thing.
That actually sounded. Super cool.
I hope we'll learn more about that soon.
I wanted to take it back. Obviously, about the topic.
We also want to talk about like I can layer itself, right?
A little bit, kind of the economics, the participants.
We were talking a little bit about the validators, basically
opting into these other services.
Probably, you could also see, maybe like liquid, staking,
protocols forcing, Essentially to opt in to certain services
and then on the other hand, you have people paying for the,
these eigen layers services that are being provided.
That's, is that correct? And then I guess how, who pays
first of all is the applications.
How do they pay for it? What are kind of like models and
and who, then receives the, I guess that's the validators
again, but maybe you can talk a little bit just about like, how
useful the economy. That is underpinning.
This? So one way we think about the
economy underlying I can layer is to start with first
principles. And the first principle is the
core value proposition of blockchain is decentralized
trust and what how we think of eigen layer is a Marketplace for
decentralized trust. If decentralized trust is such
an important thing in this, this blockchain economy, we need a
marketplace where decent lies trust is bought and sold and
people have recognized this in other ways and One way of
thinking about it was block space as a kind of, like a unit
of decentralized trust, but we think that's not the right level
of abstraction. Recently block space, is not the
right level of abstraction. For the generic nature of decent
lights trust, you may want to run a new distributed system,
you may want to run like a secure multi-party computation
and whatever that was not natively in the protocol, right?
So the right unit is you have this decentralized trust Network
and And you are basically committing to do additional
validation. And the question is, how much
value or you willing to take for it, right?
And so to elucidate this economy a bit.
So there are two sides to this Market.
One side is stickers who are then offering their
decentralized, Trust Services to others, right?
And the other side of the market is we think of them as
middlewares but they could be generic distributed systems
right services that are built. All of this these Services, you
know, just to make, make it concrete, let's think of it.
Think of the data availability service that we're building, you
can think of it just simply as a data storage service is not a
data storage data availability. But just for Simplicity let's
think of it as a. I'm going to take some blob and
throw it into this network and they have to store this blob for
this amount of time. And now you want to do this,
who's paying for this, so Eddie creates this service.
Let's say you know fredericka and Felix wrote the service,
they want to create a data storage service, they wrote it
and then they are tired of like pumping and chilling.
A new token so they say no I'm not going to do it.
I'm just going to run it on. I can layer just throw it on
this distributed Network and they do it and they say, oh, you
know, there's a Frederick on Felix wallet it like so you have
a wallet and you say that anybody who's paying.
So and you also create an economy around it, you say,
anybody who wants to store data on this, Distributed Network
needs to pay $1 per byte or one unit per byte or whatever,
right? One unit per gigabyte, okay?
So yeah, the one eat per gigabyte and now somebody else
who wants to use the service, they come and they have some
interfaces, they store the data on this like decentralized
Network and they pay that one eat per gigabyte to store that
data. And, you know, when fragance
Alex created it, they also created a distribution economy
which said that Yeah, we will take 30% of this, like one eat 4
GB and the remaining 70% goes to the validators and the
validators, look at it and they say it.
Does this make sense for me or not?
And they obtained if it makes sense, if that economy makes
sense for them. And so, every time when somebody
comes and stores data, they collect that one eat.
And that 18.3 it goes into your wallet.
And then the remaining .7 e gets redistributed among all the
stickers. So there is really a third party
like there was originally a service and then there was the
stickers, then there is service users of that service which
could be Roll-Ups which could be applications like distributed
applications. Should be end users who just
want like a drop box type thing to be built on a blockchain.
So that's the economy. The economy is basically the
creator of the service decides how value is apportioned between
the Creator. The innovator.
ER and the service providers, the stickers, right?
So how this economy is distributed, and once they set
forth the set of these conditions, what they actually
do is, you know, a service Creator.
So to delve into this a little bit more, the service creator
also creates a like a container which you can just take her,
should be able to download and run which does this particular
service downloading and and storing the data for this amount
of period, if he has been paid and They also create a smart
contract, the service or middleware creates a smart
contract, which talks to the eigen layers, smart contracts
and establishes, who can participate in the system.
It's takers with whatever. You know at least so much state
or do you allow steak need holders?
What is the entry condition to participate in your particular
service? That's the first part.
The second part is what is the payment condition or it is
actually one? One beat per gigabyte and point
3 goes to the creators and .7 goes to the stickers.
That's the payment conditions are encoded in the smart
contract and finally negative incentives like slashing or also
encoded in the smart contract. It says, oh, if there is a
recall game and then I say that randomly I'm going to recall
some bites and you have to produce it, and if you don't
produce it, you'll get slashed. So some kind of like a negative
incentives. Those are encoded into the smart
contract. Now if your ass taker you and
you're participating in, Can layer, you can go and express
your preference whether you want to opt into this particular
service or not and you go in and like, you know, sign a thing and
say that, yes, I want to opt into this particular service.
Then you're registered for that service which means you're
supposed to be providing it. And if you violate some
conditions stated in the smart contract, then you will get
slashed, but if you don't violate any of those things, you
will continue to receive payments at the encoder tricked.
So that's the core economic Ami of Argan layered.
So to build an angular service, you have to write an off chain
container. That's take us, can download and
run. It can be arbitrary language as
of now. And the, there is a non chain,
slashing contract or on chain contract Service, contractor to
write, which controls gating who, participates positive in
centers and negative incentives. These are all encoded into the
smart contract. And so, when somebody is opting
into a particular eigen their service, they know exactly what
set of things. They're opening it.
How much due diligence does this require from the validators,
right? So basically if I'm a mom and
pop, validator, do I know which things I should be validating
on? If it's too difficult to
discern, which ones are good things to covid, 84?
I might be for going yeard and which might make it economically
unviable to to validate myself. And I mean, this is something
that the network needs, right? So basically, we've seen re
centralization, you know, for other reasons.
So I mean basically people are people just steak with eggs
changes or, you know, there's, you know, like I do and you
know, don't get me started on proposed a builder, separation
and mahfouz, whatever. So basically, I mean we've seen
these that does this with this, add to this.
Entire situation, it adds a little surprise eggs and I'm
going to explain both sides. How much doodle is diligence
does a home Stager need. And what we're trying to do is
to create audit economy around these eigen layer Services,
right? So there is going to be just
like smart contract audits is how like users, trust smart
contracts to do the things that they say in the white paper or
whatever other things. So there is a barrier for a user
to use a Smart contract in the same way.
Now, there is a barrier for Staker to opt into new services.
So there is a attendant or it economy that is needed and we
want to absolutely minimize the amount of diligence that
somebody has to do. And there may be multiple
categories of services, those that are kind of battered by us
and you know, or some other reputed agencies and so on and
And you know and stickers may feel more inclined to opt into
them. And there may be others that
basically for. So you can imagine a world where
a Staker home Stager says, yeah, I know give me Frederick has
curation of services. I only like opt into everything
that frederika says, right? And that should be possible.
And if somebody says no no, actually, I want to be the one
who wants to make the decision that also, you know, something
that is available in this free economy, Okay?
So, There is a bit of barrier on auditing wetting.
Like what the services are. So that is something that, but
it can be kind of delegated, right?
Like just that ability to say that am trusting acts for doing
the delegation, and I'm just following along, and in terms of
missing out on eel, do you know, I think, like everywhere else
there will be a power law. There will be maybe three
services that account for pretty much all of the yield, like, 90%
of the yield in this kind of A platform and the same way like
we have daps and, you know, there are thousands of daps and
maybe three account for pretty much all of the feast today on
aetherium and they'll be a similar thing and we're a
Homestay culture stopped into these three services and
essentially get all of the eat. And so one of our interest is in
making sure that these services are as lightweight as possible
that a home Stager should be able to obtain.
And this is a kind of like a guiding principle for us.
Is actually, we think something is scaling only.
If each node needs to do very little, but the system can do a
lot, right? Like a scalable system,
basically means that each node does little but the system
together does a lot. And that's when decentralization
and scalability or not, in fundamental tension.
And we think that there is, we have, you know, in general, the
ecosystem as an ecosystem, we have understood enough
principles that actually we Know how to build systems with scale.
Horizontally, for example, our data availability service is
built in such a way that each steak or needs like Point 3
megabytes per second in network bandwidth.
But together, the system bandwidth is 15 megabytes per
second. So it is not based on everybody
needing to have a lot of computational infrastructure.
It is based on everybody doing a little but data being
distributed through this network and and tasks.
Achieving scaling. So one part of the answer is
making it easy to do Audits and follow along other people's like
recommendations. Another part of the answer is
there's only a few Services which will matter and we try to
make those Services. Be home.
You know, be easy for home stagers to participate in and I
think there is a third dimension to this answer, which actually
I'm most excited about. So if you look at the whole Mev
and Other things going on and a theory.
Mmm, one thing we'll see is there is a lot of discussion
about how to keep a home stagers decentralized.
And if you just examine the system objectively, there is a
gradient or pressure to centralization, but there is no
gradient or pressure to decentralization system.
Doesn't have it. We only enforce it socially or
religiously, right? Like there is the system by
itself. No pressure.
There is no advantage in being decent less.
There is some advantage in being centralized.
So there is a gradient or pressure to become more
centralized and all we can do. All we are trying to do when we
are doing you know Mev boost or PBS or any other.
Like design consideration is how to minimize the gradient to
centralization. That's all that's being done.
There is no gradient to decentralisation.
It's not that and because these analyzation is not objectively
measurable. It's not possible to make the
Call recognize and incentivize it even though one of the most
critical aspects of building the theorem protocols.
So, we are very excited about the role.
I can layer can play in this. What is this?
So in, I can layer we don't want the platform to exert
subjectivity but we want middlewares or Services
consuming, you know, decent lives trust to exert
subjectivity. What do I mean by that?
For example, imagine Felix is building a service.
Service is based on you know, threshold encryption, okay?
So artificial encryption is is dividing some secret into many,
many chunks and each person, holds a Chung and if they all
don't collude with each other or at least majority of people
don't collude with each other. The secret remains a secret.
Okay, this is an example of something which is not based on
economic security. This is based purely on
decentralisation because people should not be able to To collude
with each other easily if it's just like so there are certain
things certain Services which can absorb trust from economics.
And there are certain Services which only absorb crossed from
decentralization and threshold. Encryption is a great example of
something that only absorbs trust from recent location.
So Felix may come in and say, when building on, I can layer
that he doesn't care about who has how much eat, but he has
some subjective measurement of decentralization.
Maybe he comes in and says, I only want to Can pull stake us
to participate in a system or you only want certain home
stagers to participate in a system?
Or he has an oracle feed that he himself creates and it says,
only people in this like, you know, my whitelist can
participate in this ecosystem because he has somehow
subjectively wet at that. They are actually more
decentralized. So if this happens then what
happens is that you are actually then fell X is paying for
decentralisation. So the decentralized Quorum can
potentially earn earn even more than a centralized Quorum
creating a gradient of pressure to decentralization, because
these centralized trust is. So another way of thinking about
it is, if we all value decentralized trust, why are we
not paying for it because the rich expressive markets to
Value, decentralized, trust don't exist today.
And if you if you allow for Rich expressive markets to Value
decentralized, trust people will pay more for things to be
decentralized in things that you care about.
And we don't know, How the economics is going to play out.
But at least there is a possibility to create a gradient
for decentralization. This is something that I'm super
excited about as a possibility for what I can live.
What kind of services? Do you see?
Building on top of, I can layer a layer.
So basically, what are the biggest use cases?
You see coming on top of like there.
So I mean of course we are building the first service
ourselves which is a data availability service.
And the reason we chose to double down on building a data.
Availability service is of course the ethereum roadmap is
strongly oriented. Birds modular ecosystem, where
Roll-Ups basically write data into Theory.
Mm. And right commitments.
And one of the things that we want to see is a world where
thousands of Roll-Ups can flourish and to do this, you
need much more data bandwidth than available on ethereum today
and even in the foreseeable future including things like
dong shouting. We want to provide 100 x,
thousand X more data bandwidth and what is available.
In the set of techniques, already actually have been
pioneered in the 3mm research community and we can build, you
know, much more flexible engineering modules around these
basic cryptography. Like using the, in all things
like kcg polynomial, commitments.
And how they were used in. Doc sharing, we can take them
and engineer, like many different kinds of systems
around it. So data availability is one
example of what we are building and which could be a very useful
ecosystem. Us.
And we are trying to build it in a way that stagers of all shapes
and forms can participate in it. That's one example, another
example of what could be built on the above, I can layer is a
whole host of Mev Management Services.
Why? What?
A requirement talking about. Mev Management Services is if
you are sticked. If you're staking any Theory.
Mm, but it also reads take Don I can layer.
Then you can start. Making credible commitments
about your behavior you can say. For example, I'm selling you a
portion of my blog space. You're doing an auction but
you're not doing an auction where you're selling the
entirety of locks, which is what is happening in the Mev boost
market today. That is what you could do is,
you could say, yeah, I'm selling most of my blog space, but I
still retain the ability to add stuff at the end of my block
space. This is something that you could
do. In fact, we are designed for
this, we call Mev boost plus plus, which is Tickly saying
you, you are auctioning off the rights to fill, you know, some
portion of the block, but there's still space at the end
of the block where I can add in, as a lot proposal, whatever,
transactions that I want at the end of the block.
So you don't have to make a trade-off between expressing my
preferences as a block proposal, and the economic upside of
having to participate in an MTV Market, I can do both.
So, the one example of what you can build on on our layer as an
TV service. But there's a whole host of
other things. You can start doing things like
multiple block. Builders decentralized block
building. What I do is instead of selling
all my blog space to one person I say oh I'm selling the first
30% of my blog space to Frederick the next thirty
percent fell X and so on. Right, I can start doing more of
these things and what does I go layers particularly enable in
it? The idea that if I don't stand
by my word, if I told fredericka that I am going to include And
of her, you know, transactions in the first portion of the
block, but I don't then I'm /. I could be slashed on Atheneum,
right? So that my could lose my eat and
that gives Federica some trust in me in actually making this
transaction possible. So the ability to make credible
commitments, actually opens up the space for How We Do
transaction ordering priority even things.
Like, I want to build a threshold and Cryptid mental.
So I commit to maybe selling the first 30 Percent of my blog
space and then I say that the remaining 30% or the next study
was and I'm going to use threshold encryption and I
agree. I send a signature saying I'm
going to use the decrypted version of these encrypted
transactions and if I don't include them in the block, then
I'll get slashed. So it opens up the space for
anybody to come in and innovate on Mev Management Services.
So that's, that's one. Huge category.
There are also other things that are things like I want to do
event. An activation, for example, if
Alex is like, hey, you know, whenever my I'm I'm under
collateralized on compound then refill my collateral from my
wallet at this address. And that's just a kind of
standing instruction, even driven instruction that he wants
to give you can do this today. Using this category of, like,
middlewares called Keepers, which, you know, like, gelato
and chain-link has something and there are others building in.
And, but the problem with those services, Has is there is a kind
of non attribute ability problem, whether that node
triggered the transaction and but the transaction was not
included in the block or that note did not record the
transaction and therefore it was not included in the block, this
is not attributable. Whereas on, I can layer if a
block proposal hops into these event-driven conditions.
If a block proposed, Iraq Ops into these event ruined
conditions, then it's uniquely attributable because the block
proposal of course controls block space.
So There's another example, there's all kinds of other
examples, like, whole block, flash loans and, you know, other
like crazy economic objects. You can start building because
block proposes our state, they can kind of opt into covenants
on what they cannot break. So this is one class of
solutions, Mev management questions comments.
Yes, let me move away from the financialized use cases of it.
So in principle, there's lots of things that you would love to
have a trust Network for Or that are non financially,
non-financial eyes and consequently currently crowded
out of the truly credibly neutral blockchain, which is
easier IAM. So, can you kind of make it
viable for them to run on eigen are absolutely.
I think one consequence of like high performance data
availability is, if you have like a huge amount of data
availability bandwidth. Now, you know, you can start
running applications which are simply And actually priced out,
right? And one of the ways we think
about this is, if you look at the current networks, the
operational cost of running the network is far lower than the
capital cost of staking, right? Like I'm putting twenty billion
dollar of staking so I need at least a ten percent seven
percent some epr. So I need at least two billion
dollars annually in return, right?
So that's the capital cost of taking and then there is an
operational cost of like scaling and providing whatever.
Is that you want and actually the operational cost is not at
all dominant, right today, staking cost is dominant so you
can overlay more operations and, and still, you know, not suffer
significant cost. That's one part of it.
The other part of it is actually just by battery engineering, you
can use the same amount of bandwidth much more efficiently.
And that's the part I was talking about in our data
availability is by, actually every note, doing a little, but
together, they do a lot. And by scaling across nodes, you
can actually Provide a huge amount of bandwidth for
applications to consume and this is one of the reasons we
actually built the data availability.
First is is just like opens up the volume of use cases from use
cases, where there was high amount of value, flowing, per
bit of data, to use cases, where you don't need a lot of value
flowing per bit and then open up to the long, you know, use cases
bad. Like there is going to be a lot
of data needed to be transmitted.
To to arrive at still like Leverage.
The Credible, neutral platform, like theorem for line.
Let me Zoom right out. So I mean, if you look at eigen
layer as a concept, its kind of a different Paradigm in scaling.
So I mean, So currently in scaling, we kind of, we have
layer choose. We have like the IBC, you know,
style connected there once and Now, we kind of have this
piggybacking mechanism that is eigen are, can you talk about
how these compare and whether piggybacking often off an
existing economic system has negative externalities for just
that system. So basically does it.
Do anything, does it take away anything from a theorem that
you're using this as well as an economic trust layer?
I think it goes back to mostly The Leverage type questions that
we talked about earlier, right? That's one part.
So I won't go into the same thing again but what other
issues are there? One other issue is the same
stake is committed, now for etherium.
But for also to do these other validation tasks and the one
thing to understand is aetherium is the primary and everything
else is the secondary in this market.
Because your steak do you need and The actual mechanics, which
I didn't go into earlier, is your stake in etherium, and then
you set the withdrawal powers to the eigen layer, smart
contracts. So what happens is it?
Helium have like first dibs at slashing etherium has basically.
So theorem is the primary loan holder.
So to say, everybody else is a secondary on this platform.
So that means actually that Athenian protocol has the
priority on slashing. So I don't think it affects the
core core properties. There's one thing though, which
is no is just temporary and we hope that it will get sorted
out. Eventually is the idea that when
somebody slashed on, I can layer, when does it helium?
Get to know about it, right? Like if there is a huge delay
and like the person is actually completely slashed already, they
don't have anything remaining and, you know, Liam thinks that
they have a lot, but actually, they don't, and this problem can
be minimized by, you know, a feature in etherium called smart
contract, triggered withdrawals. If they didn't, I can laughs my
contract, can immediately Li the way slashing happens.
Is they immediately triggers withdrawal from etherium.
Then basically, you don't have this principle agent type
problem. So that's another, another
dimension that we've discussed with the EF people.
And I think, in general, something like smart contract,
triggered withdrawals helps all kinds of staking protocols.
But, other than that, I don't see any significant other
aspects to do these. What you would always withdraw
the entire Our validator, like, all 32 years for every slashing
I could imagine, like, some slashings being kind of minor to
just kind of discourage you. So one of them.
Yeah, I think one of the principles we using for eigen
layer, slashing is to be as rare as possible, and when it happens
to be, as severe as possible. So as severe as possible,
because we don't flash for things, like up time, only /
when there is like a significant safety failure.
Probably militias action. So I when there's a probably
malicious action we don't need to slash a little.
So a slashing is designed to be very rare and severe when it
actually happens. But this this you mean is this
for your specific service your building or because I guess
that's kind of customizable for something that's right but
that's the recommendation for all these services and we want
to because you know we don't take slashing eat lightly and I
I think it should not be taken lightly by any service either
especially because of this primary secondary type problem
that we talked about and it should only happen when there is
a clearly probable militias action, if I'm /.
Do I have a recourse? So basically if say if say for
instance I'm Eva the ha ha and I built a service on top of eigen
layer. That uses a malicious contract
to slash unsuspecting stake us. Do they have a Course climate.
Can they do something against this?
Absolutely. So this is something we take
very, very seriously and no amount of audited audit and
other things is sufficient to guarantee that there's no like,
Edge case and malicious code base in slashing.
So I think that is a significant problem and in, especially in, I
can layer which couples trust across multiple systems.
You know, it could very well happen that all eats takers opt
into Eureka's like evil contract and like you know they all get
slashed and be like an absolute nightmare.
So the way we deal with this is by requiring or like enabling
what we call a slashing veto, there is a veto for slashing run
by like a reputed committee. The only thing, this committee
can do is basically we to slashings and you can think of
basically slashing needs approval both by the contract
and buy this car. Dean order to actually pass.
So that's the trust model is basically, you're trusting one
of these two to work correctly, to protect against slashing
errors. And if both are malicious, then
that is a problem, okay, but that's currently social
consensus. Right, so basically it, if it's
a pool of known individuals who say, like, clearly, if it occurs
out of her mind, this was not a special Bill fence.
Give back the steak, that's correct.
So this is a sin. This system relies on both
neutral objective algorithm just, you know, smart contract
plus a social layer. So, the things that blockchains
have natively is a social layer to Fork the chain, if something
crazy happened. Sure.
And we are an overlay layer and we don't have the ability to 43.
Mm and some or we don't want to assume the ability to have four
kids helium and something bad happens.
So we are incorporating the social layer into the protocol
and that's a necessary. And so this layer is not run by
like economic committee. We do not think that it's
correct to have a token committee or whatever, you know
Rum Run this thing should be run by like trusted individuals.
Reputed entities in the in the ecosystem.
Yeah that makes sense. Coming back to the second half
of my question. How does this compare and
contrast with other skating solution basically Loosely
meshing, I can layer with They are tools and you know IVC
connected blockchains how does it compare and contrast so I can
layer the is designed for a modular world so it is designed
for the roll-up world so it it doesn't add particularly
anything to the to one part of the role of world which is you
know you want to do zero-knowledge proves or other
like economic games in which you can actually prove that your
execution status correct. Act.
I think that is something that we like a lot and, you know,
it's completely complimentary to what is what I can layer is
offering. So it does offer something to in
terms of our particular Solution on data availability, but also
for the ability for others to build, even better data
availability Solutions on top of eigen layer.
I think that is something that we are quite excited about the
fact that, you know, the area of open Innovation can can be quite
large there. In terms of other services,
other other kind of like Paradigm.
So just to add a little bit more there, on for things, like,
optimistic Roll-Ups, you have a layer of Economic Security,
which is the sequencer is basically making a claim that
what they said is correct. And then you also have a layer
of verification which is that they'll get slashed if if that
doesn't happen correctly you know on things like I can layer
you can reuse a lot of steak and provide more Economic Security
at you know, for for things like optimistic goal.
Oops so that's something interesting.
It adds to the optimistic goal of ecosystem on these EK,
roll-up ecosystem. I think one thing something like
iron their ads is, you know, proof verification on, Atheneum
is still expensive, right? And and it is expensive, because
of some basic fundamental limits, you know, if you use the
theorem blocks only to do like ZK, proof verification, maybe
you can do like 15 to 30 easy Capo verifications for Block.
So that's the current like block.
Plays and gas consumption of these things.
So if you had a world where there are like thousands of
different Roll-Ups then they cannot all right, ZK proves into
theorem every block so that's not possible.
But what they can do is if there was a kind of like restate
Quorum of all the Athenians takers and they all verify, but
the fact is verifying, ZK proofs is very trivial of chain, right?
Like you can you can run it in parallel, you can check on
hundreds of ZK probes in parallel each Of them may take
only like tens of milliseconds and so you can actually verify
thousands of ZK proves so in in a, in a reasonable note.
So the question is like, on on and off chain.
So the, The Proposal could be something, like, you can create
a service on top of, I can layer where all the eat steak as
participate and they verify, like thousands of the gay proves
in parallel, and then they just certify that they have verified
all of this on etherium. So, this could be an example of
a kind of synergy with things like Let's do labs and the one
thing we see in the catalogs today is they wait for a long
time to batch because of the verification cost and you don't
need to do it and you can have a bridge which, which moves data
between the roll-up and etherium every block.
If you had a layer like this, going to your broader question
on things like IBC and the external ecosystem.
I can layer bars, close similarity with what is called
interchange security, right? Which is basically one Jane
providing security to other chains.
I think there are a couple of important differences
interchange security as it is being talked about today is the
the provider chain has to have a governance upgrade to to obtain
to serve this other chain. And, you know, just working in
this space for enough time. Anything that has a governance
upgrade, I'm like, okay, that's that's too slow.
So I like the nature of like, what we are doing with eigen
layer, which is Basically validator level opt-in
permissionless, each validator, make a decision.
An opt-in. I think it reduces frictions
massively. And the second thing is the way
we think about what should be built on.
I can layer which is more of a subjective opinion, but I think
it aligns deeply with the 3M land.
Landscape is to build modules. Each module being secured by the
same stake, rather than to build chains which is what interchange
security is optimizing for. Okay, to add to your last
question about IBC in particular, right?
IBC is enter blockchain. Communication is the standard
for talking between different blockchains.
I think we need a powerful. IBC port for ethereal and be
very excited to see people bills.
Something like that. For example, on, I can layer
because what you can do is once you have stickers opt-in, you
can verify signatures from all these IBC connected chains and
just make an economic certificate saying that, yeah,
we We all know that this is the set of signatures in these other
chains. So, that's an example, for, how,
what can be built on? I can learn Thanks for expanding
so far into it. I think we're also like been at
it for a while. I think we can slowly get to
kind of wrapping up. Maybe for a final question.
We can talk a little bit about where the project is at right
now. I mean we talked a lot about
what is theoretically possible. Maybe we can hear a bit, you
know, where are you at right now?
What's on the roadmap? It like the video yet future the
way we building eigenvector is initially.
Building the first service ourselves and on launch that
will only be the one service, the data availability service,
we are building on top of it and we want to slowly open it up
from being one service platform to a few like partner services
to then to be a self-serve platform on which anybody can
come and build anything that they want.
So we'll see the first service launched hopefully mid-next year
and then we'll have a whole bunch of other services on board
in the months following. So that's the road map, right
now we are internal test net. We have a you know few
Integrations. We are testing inside the
internal test and so that's that's where we are and we will
hope to have a more public facing test net, in the months
between now and and launch. In Castaic we look forward to
that. It's been an absolute pleasure
to have you on SRI Ram. It's I have learned a lot.
This is such an interesting project excited to see where
this takes you. Thank you so much.
For every guy I've had, you know, was really, really enjoyed
talking to you and selects a podcast look forward to be in
touch and future. Quit thank you guys thank you
for Luke's. Thank you for everything.
Thank you. See Rama.
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