Scroll zkEVM Mainnet Launch with Sandy & Toghrul

The rollup wars are alive well! Scroll just launched their zkEVM to Ethereum mainnet. We invited Scroll's Co-Founder, Sandy Peng and Scroll's Senior Researcher, Toghrul Toghrul Maharramov on the show. In today's episode, we discuss why Sroll is exciting, how it is different than other rollups. what’s next, and of course, wen token. ----- 🏹 Airdrop Hunter is HERE, join your first HUNT today https://bankless.cc/JoinYourFirstHUNT ------ 📣 Bankless Podcast Survey: https://forms.gle/Ai5qpCJjQPhAErPr8 ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE ⁠https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q4 https://feeds.flightcast.com/%E2%81%A0https:/k.xyz/bankless-pod-q4 🦊METAMASK PORTFOLIO | MANAGE YOUR WEB3 EVERYTHING ⁠https://bankless.cc/MetaMask https://feeds.flightcast.com/%E2%81%A0https:/bankless.cc/MetaMask ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ⁠ https://feeds.flightcast.com/%E2%81%A0https:/bankless.cc/Arbitrum%C2%A0%20%E2%81%A0 🔗 CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo ----- TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Intro 6:04 Scroll Mainnet Live 6:30 Why Is Scroll Mainnet Unique? 9:25 EVM Equivalence Importance 16:30 Apps Compatibility 17:50 Importance of Scroll Rollup 20:17 Why ZK is the Holy Grail 26:30 What to do on Scroll & Why Scroll 32:47 Stitching L2s Together 39:40 What's Next For Scroll 44:30 Toghrul Disagreements 49:00 Wen Token? 50:00 Closing & Disclosures ----- RESOURCES: Sandy https://twitter.com/SandyPeng1 Toghrul https://twitter.com/toghrulmaharram ----- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ https://www.bankless.com/disclosures%E2%81%A0

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey Bankless Nation, it is the Rollup Wars on today's episode. A new player has entered the chat. Scroll just released their new ZK EVM to mainnet. And we've got the co-founder of Scroll and a senior researcher from Scroll joining us today to tell us what that means. David, what are we talking about?

• 0:30David Hoffman?

  Now Scroll is a pretty hotly anticipated Layer 2. It is a ZK EVM Layer 2. And so with all of the optimistic rollups already deployed and pretty decently along in their maturity, it's time for the ZK EVMs, the ZK rollups, to enter the arena. Scroll is a unique kind of ZK EVM. It's got some extra bells and whistles, some unique properties that make Scroll tick. So we're going to ask Sandy and Torgel about the unique properties that make Scroll so interesting. And of course, we'll eventually get to win token at the very end.

• 1:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Speaking of unique properties, you know what has unique properties, David?

• 1:06David Hoffman?

  Tell me.

• 1:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  This podcast right here. And also the jacket that we were looking at, okay? This is a Sukajan jacket.

• 1:14David Hoffman?

  Sujakin.

• 1:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, I don't even know. I don't even have one, David, but you do.

• 1:18David Hoffman?

  I do, I do, I got it right here.

• 1:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is available to a Bankless listener who fills out a survey, actually.

• 1:27David Hoffman?

  The call to action is we have a survey and we need people to fill it out. You get the, you might get the jacket if you fill out the survey, but the main thing we're talking about is a survey that we need you to fill out.

• 1:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  I started with the jacket, but David's starting with the survey. And that's the thing, all you have to do is fill out the survey and you have a chance to win that jacket. David, why are we doing this survey?

• 1:44David Hoffman?

  Because we have a new podcast format that we want to bring to the table, an unreleased podcast type of podcast, but we want to make sure that we are actually on target with this. So we're gathering some data about who you are, Bankless listener, what kinds of podcasts you listen to, what kinds of Bankless podcasts you listen to, or maybe you listen to all of them, wow, and just kind of your background about yourself. And so if you want the Bankless podcast to tune itself to a little bit more towards Towards your desires, or maybe you just want the jacket, fill out the podcast survey.

• 2:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's not about the jacket. It's about improving the podcast, everybody. Do your, do your public duty. Thank you, Bankless listeners. Fill this out. There's a link in the show notes. You want to go check that out. It should take like five minutes of your time, no more than that, I'm sure. David, why are we talking about Scroll today? Teep this episode for us a little bit more. So the ZK EVM roles are kind of like wars are kind of off. And, you know, rollups in general have been climbing up the leaderboard on L2 beat. So a lot of them are trying to gain market share. What is special about Scroll? And why are we bringing them on the episode today?

• 2:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So I'm, I think I'm really excited to ask Sandy and Torgel about this. I think there's like a spectrum of difficulty of rollups. Optimistic rollups are like pretty easy, as in just like, you know, fork and replace the EVM, but now as the layer two, then we kind of get into the ZK rollups, which with like Polygon and ZK Sync, which are like rollups, but ZK. But with Scroll, we're on entering like a new frontier, which is EVM equivalent ZK rollups, which is a pretty hard thing to achieve, yet you get a huge amount of tailwinds if you do get that. And so that's going to be, I think, the main focus of some of my questions is what do you get with a ZK EVM? Why do we care about Scroll? What about Scroll has set itself apart from its competition? So that was, that's the thing to pay attention to, pay attention to as we go into this episode.

• 3:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  So guys, before we get into this episode, first we disclose, David and I are both angel investors in Scroll. We are big fans of many different layer twos out there. And as a reminder, we are long-term investors. We're not journalists. We don't do paid content. There's always a link to all of our disclosures in the show notes, bankless.com/disclosures. All right, guys, we will be right back with Sandy and Torgel. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including our number one recommended crypto exchange. That's Kraken. If you don't have an account, what are you waiting for? Go create an account.

• 4:11David Hoffman?

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• 4:56David Hoffman?

  It's a game-changing proposal that's going to bring Cello's rapidly-growing ecosystem home to Ethereum. Vitalik has shared his excitement for the Cello Layer 2 on the Cello forum, so has Ben Jones from Optimism. But why? The Cello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages, like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability, and one-block finality. What does all that mean? Rock-solid security, a trustless bridge to Ethereum, and more real-world use cases for Ethereum without compromise. And real-world adoption is happening. Active addresses on Cello have grown over 500% in the last six months. With the Cello Layer 2, gas fees will stay low, and you can even pay for gas using ERC20 tokens. But Cello is a community-governed protocol. This means that Cello needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the Cello forum.

• 5:39David Hoffman?

  Follow @celloorg on Twitter and visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum.

• 5:46David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, I'm so excited to introduce you to Sandy Peng, one of the co-founders of Scroll, the ZK scaling solution that we're talking about today, and also Torgil Marimov, a senior researcher and roll-up sorcerer also at Scroll. Sandy, Torgil, welcome to the Bankless. How are you guys doing? Hello, hello.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Hey, guys. Good to be here.

• 6:04David Hoffman?

  Okay, so the news today is that Scroll mainnet is live. That's pretty cool. Congratulations. How does it feel? Sandy, how's it feel to finally have mainnet live?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel feels amazing, almost surreal. This has been kind of two years in the making and the team has really pulled together for this very big milestone. And I think for for for any kind of product team, like the big product launch is really just the beginning. This is the first time we get to really meet our customers and meet the deep depths and get real feedback. So everything feels much more tangible and you know, just like anything we do, it's just great when you receive um feedback and and and and hopefully that will help us iterate more going forward.

• 6:48David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm. And Torgol, you've been at Scroll for as long as I've known you, but you also pay attention to the entire roll-up landscape and really just crypto at large. Maybe you could um just do the job of articulating why this is significant uh in the in the broad landscape of all layer twos, all types of roll-ups. Uh, why is this mainnet day unique?

• 7:08Speaker 03

  I think I'm gonna come off a bit biased here.

• 7:10David Hoffman?

  I think you're allowed, you're allowed to do that.

• 7:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's permitted.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  I'm happy to do that. So uh, so one of the things that we concentrated on since the beginning is maximizing compatibility with Ethereum. And at the time when this was just getting started, almost three years ago, this was almost an insane idea. I remember talking to a few people in like 2021 about potentially building a ZKVM that is EVM equivalent or compatible. And they were like, yeah, those people are just scammers. It's never gonna work.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  And yeah, it it it basically started as a wild idea that transformed into something that is finally alive on the mainnet today. And it's been a long road, a tiring road. I think we all need a sleep, a long low sleep tonight after the launch. But yeah, but but we're happy that we're finally.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  On the, on the arena, playing, learning.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  It's arena.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  I was wrong with that phrase.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  But yeah, no, I remember like yesterday when we first met Torgol, I think the team was just eight to 10 people and we got introduced on the internet. And, um, and I think most people thought we were kind of a joke because it was just so far fetched, but Torgol decided to join us after a 30 minutes call. He was just like, YOLO.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  We basically.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  He's been YOLOing ever since.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  On Twitter.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  We basically signed the papers the next day after I had a call.

• 8:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  What was, what was so compelling about that, Torgol?

• 8:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Uh, I, I think for me was the idea that, that Scroll aimed to be as much compatible with Ethereum as possible. And I always thought of rollups as a great extension of Ethereum. And that just made a lot of sense to me. And I always thought of ZK as a more long-term play versus something like optimistic rollups, which were more of a viable short-term solution, but long-term, I feel like all, all of the optimistic rollups are gonna transform into ZK rollups. So it just made, it clicked from like the first time I had a call with Sandy and yeah.

• 9:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Torgol, why, wh- why is, uh, EVM equivalents so important? Like you, you mentioned this idea of an extension of Ethereum, right? I, I know some rollups have gone in a completely different direction. They're like, hey, uh, EVM sucks. We're gonna swap it out.

• 9:38David Hoffman?

  We'll just settle on Ethereum and call it good.

• 9:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, but, but, uh, Scroll is with strategy. You guys are doubling, tripling down on Ethereum equivalents, why?

• 9:49Speaker 03

  So I feel like for me, the argument was always, what's the purpose of rebuilding everything from scratch and reeducating people and helping them learn a new language and new programming paradigm, et cetera? Where you can use something that has almost 10 years of documentation, 10 years of tutorial, 10 years of open source code and. Doesn't matter what you want to build, most of the things already have been, obviously not everything, but like a lot of the building blocks have already been built out by somebody else and it's easy to learn. So solidity, you can't even compare solidity to any other smart contract programming language because it had such a head start.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  And therefore, it just makes sense to reuse something that has been widely adopted versus not only trying to optimize it, but also trying to attract people to actually learn and build with you that new VM and the new programming language, which is a very hard job and only a few have succeeded since Ethereum in doing that.

• 10:55David Hoffman?

  One of the compelling things about rollups and you alluded to this is that it's an extension of Ethereum and really the maximum, the maximally mature version of a rollup is one that has zero compromises with Ethereum. Can you just talk about the value of this and how Scroll is playing in that arena?

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Sure, I think some of our initial thesis was that, which we still hold today is that I think Ethereum is the most decentralized and the most secure layer one and it has this incredibly strong, strong kind of social layer built around it and that means many, many very convicted people and idealistic and also creative people, just very strong talents from around the world who are committed to this ecosystem for various reasons. And for us, that was the most attractive thing about the community. And we wanted to build something that meets developer where they are already. We thought it was somewhat unrealistic to kind of force developers to learn something new and we wanted them to kind of leverage

• 11:58Speaker 02

  whatever they've built over the last couple of years. Because when protocols are battle tested, when they're used by many, many users and when brands are established within this arena, these are all things that are valuable and we want to preserve as much as possible. And I think with these major building blocks, that is also the best jumpstart for the next iteration or the next innovation to happen. Um. It didn't really make sense to kind of reinvent the whole ecosystem every time there's a new L one. It's much better to kind of encourage people to be creative and to to to build the next generation of things. Um. Through through fun and play and part of Scroll's role is making that whole setup much more accessible.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  And accessible means a number of things. It means being cheaper. It means being faster. It means faster finality. And it also means maintaining the highest possible security standards. And um. So in in in in that effect, I think Scroll is somewhat a little bit later to the mainnet launch compared to the to the others E K E V M's. But we've been in testnet for fifteen months. And that means a huge number, I think something like nineteen million transactions accumulated. And something like, I think definitely more than twenty million unique wallet addresses on our testnets. And all of these adds up to a more, um, you know, a very battle-tested, uh, you know, battle-tested.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  And um, and we've conducted full audit with um, four esteemed audit firms. And internally, we've always had a red team and blue team set up in order to check the, you know, cross-check our work. Um. Just the amount of precision that goes into building the Z K E V M is absolutely phenomenal. I think one day we'd love to have Hyten and and and Peter from the engineering team to come and and talk about exactly how much like detailed and granular work it takes to kind of write Z K wrappers around every single kind of E V M op code.

• 14:00David Hoffman?

  Um hum. Yeah, you you you mentioned the uh ambitiousness of what it takes to make a Z K E V M that's E V M equivalent to Ethereum. Uh. I mean, there's already been a handful of Z K E V M's that have shipped mainly out of Z K Sync and and Polygon. But these aren't the, aren't exactly what Scroll's building. Scroll's going, I think, kind of doing the hard thing of doing the E V M equivalence with the actual like uh byte code uh equivalence, uh, which is, I think, where it collapses down to if my technical chops are serving me well here. Um. And you, like you alluded to it, that's that's harder. And that's why, you know, Scroll's the the latest of the three, the last of the three.

• 14:37David Hoffman?

  But to articulate the bull case for like E V M equivalence is that, well, while the Ethereum ecosystem has developed, while Scroll has spent the hard work of becoming even an E V M equivalent C K E V M.

• 14:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Scroll gets to ride in the tailwinds of all the innovation and development that is going on in parallel. Can you talk about the like the big important things that Scroll is able to repurpose that your typical ZK EVM wouldn't be able to repurpose in its ecosystem?

• 15:03Speaker 03

  So, one of the goals that we had since the beginning was to reuse as much code that has already been built for Ethereum and battle-tested as possible. Obviously, there are still a few changes that we introduce here and there to optimize things. But the goal was to, instead of building new clients, building new tooling, building everything from scratch and then having to audit everything, having to run bug bounties for everything. We just reuse stuff that was already built for Ethereum, modify certain things, optimize certain things, but we have this surface area that is much smaller in terms of new code being introduced on the client side, for example. So in our case, we currently reuse Geth,

• 15:47Speaker 03

  a slightly modified version of Geth, but we can also adopt Aragon or Nethermind or any other execution client easily because we're compatible with the execution trace of Ethereum. So that allows us to not worry about that side of things and only worry about the bridge, the prover and the sequencers and the efficiency of the rollup. And trust and rely on the existing battle-tested code to basically carry on what Ethereum has been doing great in terms of being stable, being secure and being immune or almost immune to faults and halts, if that makes sense.

• 16:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  It does. Is it the case that all of the things, all of the apps that work on Ethereum now kind of work right out of the box on Scroll? Or is there any kind of modification a dev or a building team needs to do in order to to make it compatible with Scroll?

• 16:47Speaker 03

  Ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent of the apps will work out of the box. So the only thing that we currently don't support is self-destruct op code. And the reason why we don't support it is because Ethereum is planning to deprecate it soon. And there's no point for us to support something that is going to be deprecated, let's say in half a year or a year.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  So I think everything works in effect. And our main net slogan is called copy, paste and deploy.

• 17:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  So you guys are encouraging copy paste, huh?

• 17:19Speaker 02

  That's not what we mean. What we mean is that whatever you've already built, that deployment process is super easy and seamless. And having that setup, it means it's actually less point in building copy and paste projects because it's so easy. But projects are already established to come on scroll.

• 17:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that that seems like a superpower. So in all of the ancillary infrastructure as well work. So we're talking about like wallets, you know, like a MetaMask or block explorers like an EtherScan and all just kind of, you know, clicks in and works without modification.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Correct, yep.

• 17:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's, that's really cool. So tell us about this rollup itself. So, you know, why are we doing rollups in general, right? We're trying to scale Ethereum. Okay, so what does that mean for something like scroll? Like, how many? How do you, how many Etheriums is it inside of a scroll? Like, how many Ethereum mainnets are we talking? Or like, what's the transactions per second that that scroll can kind of support? I realize these are sort of imprecise types of ways of measuring it, but maybe then the question is, how do you measure it? How much scale are we actually getting out of scroll?

• 18:29Speaker 03

  So I think it's difficult to say the precise number in terms of TPS. But you could easily estimate that if we remove the bottlenecks related to Ethereum, so like data availability, etc., etc. We can easily do an order of magnitude and probably even more than that without having any issues. There are obviously other things that we need to optimize that we still inherit from Ethereum. So one of the problems that we inherit, as every other ZK rollup does, is state growth. And so essentially, at some point, we're still gonna have to solve it. But because we don't need to optimize for like Raspberry Pis, that's not such a big issue for us as it is for Ethereum.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  And therefore, we can squeeze out a lot more performance. And because it's done off-chain and it's, the computation is only essentially done by one prover. It's, the cost per user is significantly cheaper because it doesn't, you don't have to ensure that it's replicated amongst thousands or even tens of thousands of full nodes.

• 19:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so order of magnitude more in terms of scalability then and then remind us.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  And that's the starting point.

• 19:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's the starting point.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's gonna get better.

• 19:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, what's it going to be getting better with like the next EIP that you know allows for blob blob space on Ethereum? Is that is that going to help scroll at all?

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Regardless regardless of Ethereum level upgrades, there are plenty of optimizations that we could be doing. And there are a few low hanging fruits that we will be getting to in the next three to six months. And I think we can expect scroll to be in order to organize manage your passive Ethereum in that in its current form within like the next year.

• 20:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's it's funny, I know you mentioned at the very beginning, you guys mentioned, I think Targal, you're talking about this where back in 2020, 2021, it seemed like a Ethereum equivalent ZK EVM would be years away. In fact, I remember like a blog post from Vitalik where he talked about how far away it was like this would be nice. You know, one day, but it's probably many years away and he was talking like five to 10 years kind of timeline. And it the the ability to actually develop a ZK EVM, it felt almost like a sci fi tech. And it was, I mean, I remember coming away from that post and other conversations about this this weird ZK EVM type thing.

• 21:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thinking that that'll be nice one day and describing almost as like the holy grail of Ethereum scalability. And now here we are like we like we've made it. Can you refresh us on the why ZK is the direction? Like, why is it referred to as the the holy grail? What benefits do we get from ZK rollups versus say, you know, our optimistic rollup cousins there?

• 21:29Speaker 03

  There are multiple things that benefit from ZK. So one, just to establish the basics here. A lot of people, when they hear ZK, they just automatically think privacy. But in reality, the reason why we use ZK is not for privacy. The reason why we use ZK is that the modern proof systems have this property that we refer to as succinctness, which means that you can verify them much cheaper than what it took to compute them. So essentially, you can think of like a very costly execution. And instead of re-executing that entire execution, you can just verify one proof. And it is essentially, it is essentially equivalent to just recomputing that costly execution.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  And you can see how you can gain a lot by just outsourcing that execution to one or two full nodes that do the execution, then they compute the proof for it, propagate the proof to everybody else, and everybody else can just verify the proof and they're done. They don't need to re-execute anything. They don't need to verify anything, et cetera, aside from that proof. And on top of that, you gain from the fact that ZK allows you to have faster finality relative to optimistic rollups. Because the way optimistic rollups work is they assume that you're innocent and that you're proven guilty.

• 22:53Speaker 03

  And the bridge allows a certain period of time for anyone to challenge and to prove that you're guilty. So essentially, the state that you posted is incorrect. And usually, that challenge window is measured in days. Whereas for ZK rollups, the finality time is measured in minutes. Because as soon as we compute the proof, we can just publish the proof, verify it, and that's it. We're done. We don't need to wait for anything. And therefore, you can see how using ZK, we benefit from both by having the computation outsourced to a few large nodes. And also on top of that, we benefit from the fact that...

• 23:35Speaker 03

  You can just do it quickly and you don't have to wait to transact and send messages in between layers.

• 23:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  So how do users benefit from this? So if I'm a user on scroll versus a user on an optimistic roll up, what like? Will I feel any difference? Will I, will I see any benefit? Or are these kind of like under the covers, you know, uh, hidden benefits?

• 23:58Speaker 03

  I think for now, there's not going to be a lot of differences unless you try to exit to an L1. If you try to exit from an L2 to an L1, then you'll feel the difference because with a ZK, you're gonna have to wait for a maximum of like 30 minutes, whereas with an optimistic roll up, you roll up, you'll have to wait for a week. And but the thing is, the more that the throughput the roll up can handle and the more we scale, the more those benefits translate into something tangible for users. So it might not be very noticeable now unless you withdraw back to an L1, but it'll be noticeable when we are processing thousands of transactions per second.

• 24:41David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm. And that finality time between the layer two to layer one, uh, well, optimistic roll ups, when I transfer out of an optimistic roll up, it doesn't take me seven days. It takes the market makers seven days to really do that work for users. But you're talking about users as like, well, the market makers are users too. It'll take them seven days out of an optimistic roll up and only 30 minutes out of a ZK roll up like scroll. The way that that translates into the end user is that, well, fees just are much cheaper.

• 25:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 25:09David Hoffman?

  And so, I mean, it's kind of, it's going to be the same speed out of an optimistic.

• 25:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because you're not paying a market maker any kind of like, you know, tax to cross the bridge.

• 25:16David Hoffman?

  A much, a much lower tax, like market making is going to be much more competitive between a ZK roll up and a layer one versus an optimistic roll up. That's my intuition. Is that right?

• 25:25Speaker 03

  Uh, to some degree, yes. And but what you're talking about specifically is value withdrawal. So when you would, we're drawing tokens, but also assume the like, there's going to be a lot of cross chain messaging, like, let's say, message from an L2 to an L1 app, then you can't really go through a liquidity bridge. You are dependent on the bridge. So for example, an example that I always bring up, the, uh, tally is potentially researching is doing the voting for a DAO on an L2 and then just sending the result back as a message to an L1 saying, oh yeah, this was the vote. And this was the result that was accepted. And here are the changes that you have to make to the contract or whatever. So in an optimistic roll up, you you're stuck. You'll have to wait for a week. Whereas where does he get roll up?

• 26:09Speaker 03

  You just wait for whatever, like 10, 20, 30 minutes and you're done.

• 26:14David Hoffman?

  I think the way that I would just express this is that all roll ups are asynchronous with each other by by default. But some roll ups can sync quicker to global state than others. Uh, and that is going to be because of that, that that messaging bridge. I I want to ask about, uh, just main net launched, uh, and what's on the chain? Like what's there to do? Uh, is this kind of like a main net for developers? And now developers need to come in and, you know, build the, build the attractions, build the apps. Uh, users can therefore also bridge on, but is there anything for users to do in this present moment? What does the next like rollout phase look like over the the coming days and weeks?

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Um, so we've had our genesis block a week ago. And, um, we've kind of opened up the space for infrastructure projects to come on. So the the the opening of the public bridge UI means users can bridge funds to scroll and developers can start deploying their apps. So, um, I'm not entirely sure what's been deployed so far. It's only been a few hours, but I've been told there's already a Sandy token, uh, which I promise.

• 27:25David Hoffman?

  Is that why you came here Sandy to show your sand?

• 27:30Speaker 03

  The latest meme.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  That's not.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  That's not why we're here.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  That's not why.

• 27:37David Hoffman?

  Okay, yeah, more exciting things afoot. Okay, what? Yeah, so so the the the apps will be coming then over the weeks and months to come is is really what you think.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  I expect a lot of apps will be, um, deploying relatively close to the main net launch.

• 27:52David Hoffman?

  And why should they come? Like, what's a pitch for an app? So let's say I've got a kind of a cool, you know, DeFi app on main net, it's working well. I I, you know, gas fees are high. I got a lot of different roll ups I could, uh, deploy to. Why should I deploy on scroll?

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Um, I think some DApps have a multi-row-up strategy. And so for those types of DApps, the the main sell is for us is about removing friction for them. And that's why we have this copy, paste, deploy campaign. Because it's so easy for them to self-deploy on scroll. It's kind of like a why not, it removes that why not scenario. And then there's another, um, there's another pitch for, um, for applications that are that, that, that, that only work on scroll. So there's a number of ZK applications that are tool, that are trying out really unique things that works uniquely with the scroll. ZK EVM for various reasons.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  And then there's another type of things that are just, you know, because of the nature of scroll being a little bit cheaper. And, uh, you know, hopefully a lot cheaper very soon and, um, and also a lot faster. Um, it opens up the design space for something that is a little bit further away from the core financial applications. And a little bit more in the arena of fun and maybe frivolous. And maybe just kind of like, hopefully useful type of stuff. This is kind of like, you know, I think a slightly old analogy that I, I really like is that whenever the, um, internet or broadband. Um, increases throughput by an order magnitude, it opens up a whole arena. And, and, you know, with each order of magnitude of increase in internet speed.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  That's when Facebook happened and that's when Instagram happened and that's when TikTok happened and so on and so forth. So we're at this moment where a new generation of applications are, are, are ready. The infrastructure support there is ready, but what's going to be, um, appearing is, you know, who knows? And as to why they would build on scroll, we're hoping the, um, well, we're hoping to build a environment that is helpful for developers. Where we're trying to be accessible and we're trying to build a vibe that is like cool and conducive to doing creative stuff. Um, how we do that, that's kind of up to Targal. I'm kidding.

• 30:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Targal is a tastemaker, so, you know.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  Thanks for pulling me under the bus here.

• 30:19David Hoffman?

  I do enjoy the timing of all of these ZK EVMs coming online to be right before EIP 4844. I know we got a number of months before that comes, but not just one order of magnitude with the ZK element, but a second order of magnitude with a 4844 element. Because there's a few more questions that I want to get to. Of course, just there's in the other roll up landscape, there's the conversation of the the chain development kit. I want to ask what scroll is strategy around here, but also just future future roadmap. What is next? I mean, we talked about all of the extra juice that's left to squeeze out of innovations, but I just want to talk about the scroll may the scroll roadmap. And if there's a token on that roadmap, I'm going to ask you all of these questions. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible.

• 31:05David Hoffman?

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• 31:49David Hoffman?

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• 32:33David Hoffman?

  So visit arbitrum.io where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets and start building your first app with Arbitrum. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap and friction free.

• 32:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  We are back talking to Sandy and Torgel and we're talking about Scroll just went mainnet this week. So very, very exciting time to go mainnet. ZK EVM, here we are. So I have a question for you. As I was, during the break, I was scanning through, you know, our friends over at Layer 2 Beat. And look at all of these different Layer 2s.

• 33:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  First of all, bullish, like, oh my god, bullish. Now we have dozens of Layer 2s. I feel like soon we'll have hundreds of Layer 2s. I think from a Bankless listeners' perspective, they might be asking the question, okay, like, how do all of these things stitch together? How do we prevent fragmentation of the Ethereum ecosystem and Ethereum liquidity? How do we like abstract this for users, right? I mean, does a user necessarily care what Layer 2 they're on? Do they need to know the difference between Scroll and ZK Sync and Arbitrum and Optimism? All of these things, isn't this for like the crypto nerds? So I wanted to ask this question of you, now that we have all of these Layer 2s,

• 33:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  how do we stitch them together? Is there, is there a way to do that? Are the devs working on something here?

• 33:59Speaker 03

  So it's, it's, it's a bit of a two-faced problem. So there's a, so there's like a theoretical problem of how you actually handle communication. And the second problem is, how do you improve UX where an average user doesn't really know or care which L2 they're on? And realistically, at least from our opinion, we're building for the developers. And so for us, as long as the developers know where they're deploying, that's the main goal for us. The users are free to think that they're using Ethereum or Scroll, but, but, but, but as long as the developers know, that's our goal. And so, and so from the UX perspective, you can always optimize things.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  You can, for example, define new address types that basically also define which, which, which chain you're sending it to, aside from the address itself, et cetera, et cetera. And on the technical side, the short answer will be ZK. A bit of a longer answer would be, how do we do that with ZK? So one, there's a lot of- Prover efficiency improvements that are expected to happen in the next year or two. So I feel like within the next two years, we won't be talking about proofs that are taking minutes to compute, but more like proofs that are taking tens of seconds or even seconds to compute. And now we're getting to almost real time composability where you can

• 35:28Speaker 03

  basically compose within a block. And on top of that, there are a few people that are building different tools using ZK that will allow you to compose directly without going through an L1. So for example, one of the ideas using storage proofs, which means that you can use ZK to prove that a certain state has been stored in a certain way and directly bridged to another L2 without waiting for the message to be passed through an L1. And so there's a lot of stuff that is being researched on at the moment and is being in a development phase. So I feel like for the next year or maybe two, people are still going to struggle with like, oh yeah, do I have ETH on this? L2, oh, how do I get ETH in order to buy this token or whatever?

• 36:14Speaker 03

  But like, it's not going to be a long-term problem.

• 36:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's not going to be a long-term problem. Like, that's what I wanted to hear. So it's like, is it? If I'm on Scroll, how do I get my assets on some other like ZK Layer 2? Is there going to be a way to have that bridge be very kind of seamless? Or am I going to have to like exit back to main net and then like go back to another Layer 2? And is it the same if Scroll is connecting to another ZK EVM versus like an optimistic rollup? Like, how's this going to work? I don't think I've, like, we've got all of these different, you know, states of Ethereum, but we don't have like our interstate highway yet, I feel like. And so we've still got a lot of fragmentation.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's still no standardization of how the bridges work, etc. I feel like it's gonna happen at some point. The conversations are already starting about standardizing certain things. Not bridges for now, because I think it'll be quite difficult to standardize such a complex construction, but more simple things. So, for example, there are a few L2 teams that are discussing the possibility of introducing a new L2-specific transaction type that will allow us to basically easily deal with the fact that we both have to pay, the user both has to pay for the L2 cost and the L1 cost, which Ethereum doesn't really care about. So the current solutions are very hacky, but they're not very UX-friendly.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  And so I feel like those conversations are gonna continue. And at some point, we're gonna get to EVM standardization, bridge standardization, etc. And with ZK, it's just a question of how fast you can compute the proof. If you can compute the proof within seconds, and even if you go through an L1, it shouldn't take you that long to bridge from one L2 to another. And on top of that, you can think of things like storage proofs, etc., etc. And there are still probably things that we haven't come up with that are gonna come up in the next year or two that are gonna be even better than what we think is a state of the art right now.

• 38:25David Hoffman?

  I think inside of the roll-up industry in 2023, it's been really a story of chain development kits. The OP stack, of course, absolute gargantuan with the base, base chain, and all the other OP stack forks that have happened. But they're not alone, of course. The ZK stack from ZK Sync, Arbitrum Orbits, Polygon, Supernets, Scroll. What is this? Is Scroll entering this arena?

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Well, I think we've just been so heads-down building mainnet. I think we need to take a minute to help the network stabilize and do a little bit more research about what developers and ecosystem projects actually want. I think there's no point in doing something unless there's real demand. And we're gonna focus our efforts on doing research to validate some of the directions that we're gonna go to after mainnet.

• 39:15David Hoffman?

  Okay, so not not coming anytime soon, potentially in the future, just not your focus at the present moment?

• 39:21Speaker 02

  Um, we're a completely open source project, so if there's anyone that wants to do it, you know, we're completely,

• 39:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're happy to help.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  We're happy to help. Um, it shouldn't be a big lift anyways. Um, but you know, insofar as this demand for a more standardized products in terms of like a a stack X package, um, I don't think it's a very difficult thing to do from here.

• 39:43David Hoffman?

  Sure, sure, sure. Well, I know mainnet is a very big deal and I don't want to stress you guys out, but what do you guys focus on now? What's next? Uh, what are the kind of the next steps for scroll? What do you guys focus on in the weeks and the months?

• 39:57Speaker 02

  Well, let's talk about that.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, you you just said weeks and I'm thinking to myself, we were just spending some time today talking about what scroll is gonna look like in five years.

• 40:10David Hoffman?

  You can answer either one.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, we we we have quite a long road maps. A lot of it is still up in the air and a lot of it is still an open research problem that we're trying to solve. But there are a few things that we're gonna focus on. One is optimization, so there are still a lot of low hanging through fruits in terms of the implementation, etc., etc., that we can optimize to squeeze out more performance to make the transaction cost less for users, etc., etc., out of our implementation. Another big, big focus for us is security because as we all know, most of the rollups, I have to, by law, I'm required to say that few we've the version one

• 40:57Speaker 03

  does not have a multi-sig, but aside from that, all the other rollups have a multi-sig and they're upgradable in one way or another and.

• 41:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can I ask you about that, Torgo, really quickly? This is something I think Bankless listeners will be familiar with on on layer two B, sort of the um, the different stages of, you know, how kind of like decentralized uh they are. And uh, it looks like according to layer two B, um scrolls in review right now. Um, but like, yeah, so what is your plan to collect, you know, all of the stages, all of the layer two B badges? And be be kind of fully decentralized? What does that look like while we're here?

• 41:36Speaker 03

  All pieces of the pie from.

• 41:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. Yeah, right now I think Arbitrum is maybe in the lead, at least according to.

• 41:44Speaker 03

  Arbitrum, if you ignore the gate and.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  And few V1 Arbitrum is basically in the lead.

• 41:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, yeah. So what's Scroll's plan for this?

• 41:58Speaker 03

  So it's a multifaceted problem. There are a few things that we need to work on. So one, we currently don't have forced transactions. Just because of the way the ZK circuit is implemented, but we're working on it or and we're going to introduce them. Relatively soon, that will allow us to have censorship resistance that is guaranteed by Ethereum. Another thing that we're working on is a multi-prover and we've been actively working on it for. Almost a year at this point, which is also going to be introduced soon. And that will allow us to basically not rely on the security of our current proof system. So let's say if. Our current proof systems system fails for some reason. There's still another proof system that.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  Ensures that. Somebody cannot steal money if that ever happens. For some reason. And then we're also working on decentralization. There's some research going on about sequencers and provers. There's also, I published an article a few months ago about multi-verifiers, which is more about securing the validating bridges. Because one of the main concerns for us, and I think for any rollup builder, is how to ensure that your smart contract doesn't have bugs. And that's a really big problem. We know how many. DeFi apps have been hacked since 2020 and how many millions have been stolen? And so what multi verifier allows us to do is to have two identical implementations of the bridge.

• 43:26Speaker 03

  In two different languages, let's say in Solidity and Viper. And then the transaction or the batch is only accepted if both of them agree that. The entry to the storage is the same, which means that even if one has a bug in it. The other will catch it and prevent it from allowing people to steal the money. And then with combining that and the multi-prover, we're essentially, we're limiting the attack surface to like. A specification bug. So let's say if we define the protocol in a way that allows people to steal money. But that can be also minimized via formal verification and that gets us to the point. Where we can essentially remove upgrade ability and be fairly sure that there's not going to be any

• 44:10Speaker 03

  urgent bug that we need to fix without having delayed upgrade ability that will allow users to exit. If let's say there's a malicious upgrade initiated by us or by the security council or however, we decide to for the upgrade ability to work.

• 44:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is a side question, Torgal, but you know, I'm just curious, like if we were to zoom out here. I know from what Sandy was saying earlier, you kind of like took the job a day later after your first conversation, which means you were making a bet not only on your career and kind of this team, but on the the technical direction of a scroll. And that was very much a Ethereum-aligned modular type of a direction. And one thing I appreciate about you, Torgal, on Twitter is, you know, you're not afraid to push back on other people's, you know, theses and opinions and that sort of thing.

• 45:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I think right now crypto is trying to figure out what the the next era really looks like. And there's kind of a, you know, a question of, does the monolithic vision succeed, something like Solana? They're pursuing a specific direction. I think they call it kind of integrated where we're not doing this layer two thing, we're just put it all on Solana. We've got Cosmos down here with this kind of like a network of chains, independent side chain, city-states as they call it. And then we've got Ethereum over here, which is like this this modular vision of the world where we're sectioning out, but we're like kind of settling back on Ethereum. What do you think those other two communities kind of get wrong?

• 45:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you disagree with them on the most? And, you know, why have you decided to kind of invest your career and your time and your mental space and everything in this specific direction?

• 46:06Speaker 03

  Uh, I I actually don't think we disagreed that much. I actually, I think Anatoly, we had a debate like almost a year ago at this point, and he mentioned that we agree on most of the things. The only thing that we really disagree on are implementational details. And so I I feel like we all all three communities agree that about the values of decentralization, censorship resistance, etc., etc. It's more about how you approach it. And I feel like I'm very much aligned with like the original vision of Ethereum or of having this big chain that can facilitate millions of transactions

• 46:51Speaker 03

  that can be verified on a Raspberry Pi, for example, or your laptop that doesn't need quite high-end hardware, if not a server, to be verified and run. And with L2s that allows, that basically translates into reality, that allows us to translate into into reality, because we outsource the execution to L2s. They do all the execution, they publish the proofs on chain, and we can still verify all of those L2s via the small machine like a Raspberry Pi, or let's say your laptop at home, or whatever. And so from that perspective, I'm very much, I would say, aligned with the vision, with the original vision of Ethereum.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  But yeah, but there are certain things that I obviously disagree with, but then we all kinda have our personal opinions about certain implementational details here and there.

• 47:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like what? Like what are the main implementation details that are different here?

• 47:48Speaker 03

  Uh, I I I feel like one of the things that I I feel that a lot of people in the Ethereum community kinda underestimate the importance of, people talk a lot about it, but there's not a lot of work being done, estate growth. And realistically, that's the fundamental bottleneck over Ethereum, and it's going to be a fundamental bottleneck for all the ZK rollups as well. And rollups in general, not just ZK rollups. And so I feel like. And myself included, we can put more effort into researching it and actually finding a solution. There, there has been some research done, but it's been.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  Sporadic and it hasn't been at the same level as let's say 4A44 research or a lot of other subjects has that have been.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  Quite, quite deeply researched.

• 48:42David Hoffman?

  Certainly a rabbit hole for a future Bankless podcast episode for sure. State growth has been. Kind of this like looming gargantuan in the background ever since I've always gotten into Ethereum and. Uh, never really actually seemed to have gone head on. So I, I guess that's exactly what you were articulating Torgal. But that's some like deep 120 IQ technical level stuff. I kind of wanted to zoom back out and ask the stupid question. Um, when token?

• 49:11Speaker 03

  We, we just launched the main that I, I, I was just talking.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  That's like a silence of like, who's gonna chop first on this one?

• 49:19Speaker 03

  I, I was just talking to, to like our DevRel team who travels through a lot of conferences and I was like. Finally, no more when main net questions.

• 49:29David Hoffman?

  Oh no, there's always a when.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Then you have one token and yeah, I don't know. I'll let Sam do your answer. As Louis Goodman loves to say, Akon as are for legal reasons.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Quote Louis here as well.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Let's just blame Louis for everything.

• 49:50David Hoffman?

  Well, congratulations, guys. Main that is always a huge day, just not just for scroll, not just for what you guys are building for, but for Ethereum as well. Um, when something that is, is the EVM gets. Uh, extended by, uh, line item for line item, byte code for byte code. I don't even know if that's the right way to describe it, but it makes sense to me. Uh, into a layer two, uh, that makes me pretty, pretty excited. Uh, cause this is about scaling trust, right? Scaling cryptography. Uh, and this is really why we're all here. Uh, and so this is a big day for all of us at Ethereum, I'd say.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would implore every, all the Bankless listeners to check out our mainnet, check out our developer docs and deploy something fun. You know, I think my mom's going to deploy a contract that says if I lose every pound I lose, she's going to give me a bit more pocket money.

• 50:38David Hoffman?

  Thanks mom.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Write a contract that the thugs pay from Pogos check every month, every time.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Which is going to leave me with no money forever, basically.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  So for everyone to experiment and build lots of fun things.

• 50:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, the, the mom-driven smart contract market is probably an untapped niche for, for crypto. So.

• 51:00David Hoffman?

  I'm telling my mom about this one.

• 51:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  New builders and new.

• 51:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. So where do people go if they want to check Scroll out? Where's the, the place for them to go as we end this podcast? Their website?

• 51:16Speaker 02

  So the place to go is our website, scroll.io. That's S C R O L L dot I O.

• 51:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  There we go. Into the frontier, a new layer two. This one is ZK EVM that is equivalent to the EVM on mainnet. It's a absolutely massive.

• 51:33David Hoffman?

  Super aligned, the most aligned ZK roll up that we've gotten for all the aligners out there.

• 51:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, very, very aligned. That's been a theme this week for sure. Guys, thank you so much for, for joining Bankless and telling us all about it. It's been absolutely fantastic.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having us.

• 51:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, you guys have your to-dos. Go check out Scroll. You heard the website. Go explore the frontier as we are every single day of the week at Bankless. Risks and disclaimers, of course. Got to let you know crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. That includes layer twos. There are hidden risks there. We are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.