Arbitrum’s Stylus with Steven Goldfeder | ETHDenver 2023 Interview #7

Sometimes, the frontier is at a crypto conference. One of the most prestige being, ETHDenver! We’re back with a handful of exclusive interviews with some of the most fascinating minds in crypto. Wish you could make it to all the crypto conferences, but don't have the time? Don't worry, Bankless brings the frontier to you. In this episode, we’re talking to Steven Goldfeder of Arbitrum to discuss Arbitrum’s innovative new Stylus and the ever-evolving L2 wars. Steven also drops some alpha?! Tune in to find out. ------ 📣 RhinoFi | Makes DeFi Frictionless https://bankless.cc/rhino ------ 🚀 JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/subscribe ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap 👻 PHANTOM | #1 SOLANA WALLET https://bankless.cc/phantom-waitlist 🦊METAMASK LEARN | HELPFUL WEB3 RESOURCE https://bankless.cc/MetaMask 🚁 EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 3:51 Arbitrum Stylus 5:16 Stylus Explained 7:40 Prysmatic Labs 9:05 Any Dev Can Build on Arbitrum 9:52 L2 vs. L1 Roadmap Adoption 11:19 Arbitrum Alpha L3 Chains 13:40 How Do Chains Talk to Each Other? 14:52 Closing & Action Items ----- Resources: Steven Goldfeder https://twitter.com/sgoldfed Arbitrum https://twitter.com/arbitrum ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

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

• 0:12David Hoffman?

  We are at the Axolar Interoperability Summit. We're at now, I'm going to talk to Steven Goldfetter of Arbitrum specifically about Stylus, this new thing that is creating what they are calling EVM plus. So if you want to code on solidity on Arbitrum, you still can. But if you also want to code on Arbitrum, you can code with any other language that exists, which I didn't know was possible, but apparently it is now with Arbitrum Stylus. But I also talked to him about the Layer 2 wars, which are getting spicier and spicier these days, especially as Optimism's got their super chain, ZK sync has their hyper chain. What does Arbitrum have in their back pocket? Do they got something? And Steven is going to come right back with his answer about that question, right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

• 0:55David Hoffman?

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• 1:37David Hoffman?

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• 2:21David Hoffman?

  Uniswap's big announcement at ETH Denver is their Uniswap wallet, which is waiting to get released to the public as soon as Apple stops being a big old bully about crypto apps in the App Store. Uniswap is basically on every chain that's relevant in the crypto ecosystem, so if you want to use Uniswap, but with the cheapest possible fees, then use Uniswap on Arbitrum. The Arbitrum Layer 2 is the host of Ethereum's most vibrant DeFi and NFT communities. Arbitrum is already surpassing the ETH Layer 1 in transaction volume, and it's not even close to full capacity. With so many vibrant communities on Arbitrum, Arbitrum is a good place to call home for the era of Layer 2s. Speaking of settling into new homes, the Phantom wallet is now available on both Ethereum and Polygon. That's right, the number one wallet on Solana is expanding into the Ethereum ecosystem.

• 3:03David Hoffman?

  Phantom is the one wallet for everything: displaying NFTs, making NFT trades, swapping tokens, staking tokens. So if you're a multi-chain surfer or an NFT power user, then the Phantom wallet is for you. It also comes in mobile. Check it out at phantom.app. Now, let's get into the interview. Hey, good nation, we are at the Axolar Interop Summit, and I'm talking with Stephen Goldfeder of Arbitrum. Stephen, how's it going, my man?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Great, great to be here.

• 3:25David Hoffman?

  You just came off of a panel, what was that about?

• 3:28Speaker 01

  The panel was about interoperability among rollups, but that was the topic of the panel, but also it of course had the rollup teams talking about what they want to talk about, so it was a fun panel, which we discussed everything rollup, some spice of interoperability.

• 3:40David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I'm sure the Layer 2 wars have, we've been talking about the Layer 2 wars heating up for like 18 months now, and now other people are also starting to say that, so now you know it's really getting spicy these days.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  You guys always have it first.

• 3:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Okay, so the first thing I want to talk about is Stylus, because I kind of get it, and I think it's a very big deal, I'm pretty sure it's a very big deal, but I'd like to hear it from you. What is Stylus and why is it such a big deal?

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Stylus is our, what we call EVM plus, and the idea is that Arbitrum is and will always remain fully EVM compatible, or EVM equivalent you might want to say. But then the question we ask ourselves is, can we do more? Can we be more inclusive? Like, the EVM is a starting point, and a wonderful starting point, but can we make affordances? That are more inclusive and are bringing in more developers. You know, people always talk about they want the next billion users. And my thesis is to get the next billion users, we need the next million developers. And how do we target to those? And like always, our goal is let's move to them rather than asking them to move to us. So what Stylus does is it says, hey, let's add additional language support alongside the EVM, which is why we call it EVM plus, to Arbitrum.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  So now in the initial release of Stylus, you know, the sky's the limit. But the initial release, you'll be able to not only write contracts in Solidity or any other EVM language, but you'll be able to write contracts in Rust, C, and C++. And the coolest thing is that you can talk to each other in these contracts. Or you can even break your contract up and say, I'm going to write that part in Solidity and that part in C++ or that part in Rust or use that Rust library. And by doing so, you'll actually get a 10x. Besides for the developer experience and all that, you'll get a 10x cost benefit as well. So really exciting update for us.

• 5:16David Hoffman?

  Okay, so the main, the TLDR is that developers know languages. Most developers don't know Solidity, but with Stylus, they can still write smart contracting code using Stylus.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Exactly. You know, today it's very much a binary choice. You might say, I want to write contracts in Rust. And you'll have to go to the chain that supports Rust. Or I might want to write contracts in Move. Okay, there are one or two chains that support Move. Our goal is to say, no, no, you want to choose the ecosystem you want to be on. The language shouldn't be the determining factor. So you can build an Arbitrum if you want to be an Arbitrum. And you can use, you know, in the long term, whatever language that you want to use. And by the way, it's also for Solidity developers as well. Because they might say like, hey, I want to use this super cool cryptographic tool, but it's just too expensive in the EVM. Can I create my own precompile in Rust and do that? And the answer with Stylus would be yes, you can. So it's bringing in these new developers and giving tools and scalability options to the existing developers.

• 6:12David Hoffman?

  Okay, this might, the answer to this question might get over my head, but I'm going to ask it anyways. Technically, how does that work? So how does that compile down to smart contract bytecode? How's that work?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Great question. So the key innovation here was with our launch of Arbitrum Nitro, the way we do our fraud proofs changed. So it used to be we had something called the Arbitrum Virtual Machine, which was a custom virtual machine, very similar to the EVM, optimized for proving. And the on-chain proofs were actually running that virtual machine's code. With Nitro, we got rid of all that. And on-chain, we're actually running not our own VM, but WebAssembly or WASM, which is like the VM of the internet. All the web browsers use it. So how do we get EVM support? We compile Geth, which is the Go Ethereum node, the popular Ethereum node, down to WASM. And what's actually happening on-chain is we're not arguing about the EVM directly.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  We're arguing about the state of Geth on this WebAssembly virtual machine. So the cool thing is, and I'm going to gloss over the details, but hopefully I'll give you the idea, is you can now say, we're not limited to Geth, anything that can compile down to this underlying machine. So if you have a WASM compiler for your language, and hey, Rust, C, C++, almost every language does, because WASM is a very mature technology, you can now, with some details, run it on Arbitrum as well.

• 7:37David Hoffman?

  Okay. I actually did follow most of that.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 7:41David Hoffman?

  So I'm kind of proud of myself on that one. Not too long ago, Arbitrum recently acquired Prismatic Labs. Was that talent acquisition part of this story of Silas?

• 7:51Speaker 01

  The Prismatic Labs is, we're integrated very, very well, but fundamentally, as a company, we're very committed to continuing L1 development. We're doing a ton of work for EIP444 and getting that ready. And so their team is, while it's very well-integrated, and we have a meeting of the minds, and we talk about all ideas, both ways, their team is very focused on L1 priorities.

• 8:12David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  And we work together. Again, it's not exclusive, so no, this was not really...

• 8:17David Hoffman?

  So this was already an effort by Arbitrum prior to all of that? This was, and so like, that would backfire, if you will, if that's the right word? That wasn't really about the Silas project?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  It wasn't about the Silas project, but I don't want to actually limit, like, definitely... Really like Raul and others on their team have contributed to Stylist. Like, there is that meaning of the minds, but it wasn't like we're acquiring this talent. It was, you know, it was really an acquisition. We wanted to develop Prism and that's one of our ways that we say, how do we contribute more to the Ethereum community? Having a dedicated funding source for Prism was important to us, but also just the meaning of the minds, right? The conversations that happen between these teams is just incredible.

• 8:53David Hoffman?

  Well, yeah, I remember talking to both Raul and Preston about Stylist and the excitement just exuded from them in my chats with them. So that was really cool.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  And they had, you know, they did contribute a lot to the ideas behind it as well.

• 9:05David Hoffman?

  Certainly. And so like, I'm gonna put my ETH maxi hat on. You talked about like, there's the move language, there's the Rust language. But now you're saying with Stylist, you can bring any language in. Does this kind of just like invalidate the idea of programming-specific blockchain environments? As in like now, any developer from any ecosystem can come and build on Arbitrum?

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Yes, so this basically says, any developer from any ecosystem, again, starting with these three additional languages, but it will be more over time, can develop an Arbitrum. And but the cool thing is, the EVM still has a critical role from our security. This is happening on Layer 2. What's securing us is the EVM on Layer 1. So, you know, it's, we're making the user experience better, but the thing that's making this all possible is Ethereum Layer 1, the EVM contracts we have, and those are still written in EVM.

• 9:52David Hoffman?

  Okay, very, very cool. So like, I remember back in the day, the WASM, WASM was on the roadmap for the Ethereum Layer 1. I think it's since been jettisoned. Is this the Layer 2 of Ethereum, starting to adopt some of the innovation that was previously gonna be on the Layer 1, or is that a different story?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Yes, there was, yeah, it's a really good memory. There was this E-WASM project, which was basically going after a very similar vision that we have that we have today.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  For different reasons, that project was abandoned. But to the point, I don't believe it was because like people like, you know, didn't want it or weren't interested or just, you know, these things are hard, particularly on Layer 1. And that's one of the things, we have the ability to innovate on Layer 2 in ways that, you know, in a system like Ethereum are more difficult. So, this is very much that same vision. It's a bit harder, to be honest. Because you have to make everything work with the fraud proofs.

• 10:42David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  So just if you had, you know, layer one node, it's a bit easier. I'm not saying it's easier to get the consensus around it, but it's easier to implement. And, you know, one thing which I think is possible with this feature and more generally, I think layer twos can become sort of innovation grounds for layer one. So if this turns out to be an off-desired feature and a heavily used feature, there's nothing stopping Ethereum from saying, hey, Arbitrum has proved that there's a good need for this and a good community. Can we do this on layer one as well? That's totally something that's possible to happen. And it wouldn't be a technical challenge, it would be a community consensus challenge.

• 11:18David Hoffman?

  Sure. I want to pivot the conversation a little bit to what I've discovered is like this new meta. I've even been using the meta word quite a lot in all these interviews. This interoperability conference is all about abstraction layers between many, many chains. People are getting chain fatigue, but abstraction layer solves that chain fatigue. And this is something that Optimism is really pushing forward with their superchain. I know ZK Sync has their fractal scaling. So Optimism has superchain, ZK Sync has fractal scaling. Does Arbitrum have something like this in the same pipeline? Are you guys going after that same effort?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  So let me answer that question in two parts.

• 11:51David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Yes, we have, and you know, I'll leak some alpha here. We'll probably be announcing the first one in a week or two. We have layer three chains that are coming to Arbitrum that will have better interoperability than others. But we don't have, we're not branding that as a superchain or as an interoperability solution generally. And let me explain why. It's basically what you said in your question. You know, the Optimism team says, hey, here's our superchain. You know, it's a way that all OP stack chains can work together and you can add ZK proofs. It's a nice theory, but there are so many strong builders in this case, in this space. There's us, there's, you know, you mentioned ZK Sync, you mentioned Starkware, Polygon. This is not something that one team can dictate. You know, even Arbitrum, you know, we're in a very strong position. We don't feel like we can dictate that. We have to really get them to work together because your point is like, you know.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Um, optimism has their super chain, uh, ZK sync has their hyper chain. I think they're calling it now. Um, you know, star, um, but Polygon has, uh, you know, their thing, which is

• 12:47David Hoffman?

  Internet and blockchains, yeah. And Starkware will definitely let you know that they invented the term like layer three, too.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Yes, and, and, and the point is, you know, we, we just end up with the same debate one step further. Right now it's arbitrage optimism, ZK sync, and now it's no, it's R interoperability solution, R interoperability solution, R, so we're not going to enter that space unilaterally. What I want to do, and you know, I've been doing, reach out and I think it's important, is to say, "Hey, all roll up teams, let's think about, not how we make a super chain of chains that build my technology, how do we make a super chain of chains, or whatever the term is, or a hyper chain, or I don't care, I'm agnostic." Chain, chain, chain, chain. There you go. How do we make one that integrates all of our technology? And there are some serious technical challenges here, but I think that can't be dictated by one team. Um, and, and that's not the approach we're going to go, and I'd encourage others to really sit around the big table,

• 13:35Speaker 01

  because otherwise we just have the same debate, one step up the stack, we're all arguing for R interoperability solutions, and we haven't really gone anywhere.

• 13:41David Hoffman?

  Sure. So, again, I feel like I'm about to ask a question that's gonna, the answer's gonna be over my head.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Uh oh.

• 13:46David Hoffman?

  How do all of these layer two chains that have all of their chainy chaininess on top of them, how do those technically all start to talk to each other to talk about that vision you said?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  So, it's, it's a really good question, and, and there are some, you know, a lot of these like super chain things, they brush up over some of the technical details, like, one question is this shared security question. How do we really get shared security if there are different security models?

• 14:05David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Does it just evolve to the lowest security if you're sort of sharing a bridge? Um, there are very hard questions, and, and to be honest, I don't have all the answers, but I think one thing which we can do is to start, you know, it's too early to standardize. You know, half these technologies, they're not even launched yet.

• 14:18David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Um, but I think we can start saying, how do we build in a way that will make standardization easy in the future? So I think it's really that. It's a conversation to say, we all want to work together, because fundamentally, the people that benefit when we work together are the users, and that's the ones we really want to serve, so how do we, you know, put our own brand second and users first? And say, "Hey, I might, you know, think your technology is terrible, or I don't like you, you know, Ethereum's a little more friendly than that, but like fundamentally, how do we work together?" And I think it's a very technical conversation, and, you know, unlike some others, I'm not coming here with an answer. I'm coming here and saying we need to have that conversation.

• 14:52David Hoffman?

  Sure. Uh, Stephen, I think this is great. Is there anything else that I have not asked you about yet that, uh, is worth talking about?

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Nothing else, you know, we're super excited to keep on building the Arbitrum ecosystem. I say "nothing else" then I start talking, so sorry about that. No, that's great, that's perfect. The Arbitrum ecosystem is growing, you know, we're excited about, you know, particularly in DeFi, but also in gaming. We are doing a ton of, you know, volume and a ton of value coming to the chain, and a ton of teams building on the chain. So for anyone out there watching, come build the Arbitrum ecosystem, we're excited to have you. And come build an Ethereum, that's the real goal here. And we'll find a way, whether you're on Arbitrum or not, via cross-chain consensus to work together and make sure we can all build this future together. Steven, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Cheers.