Devcon #6 - The Layer 2 Wars with Bartek Kiepuszewski

Bartek is the founder of Layer 2 Beat, finding himself in the middle of what we’re calling the Layer 2 Wars. Previously at MakerDAO, Bartek is pioneering the one-stop platform for the Layer 2 landscape. ------ 📣 Push | Try the Communication Protocol of Web3 https://bankless.cc/Push ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/?utm_source=banklessshowsyt 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 💠 NEXO | CRYPTO FINANCIAL HUB https://bankless.cc/Nexo 🔐 LEDGER | NANO HARDWARE WALLETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger ⚡️FUEL | THE MODULAR EXECUTION LAYER https://bankless.cc/Fuelpod ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 2:30 Bartek in Colombia 4:00 Fixing Layer 2 7:25 Building and Forking 9:45 zkEVM 13:30 EVM Equivalence 14:30 Optimism Bedrock ------ Resources: Bartek Kiepuszewski https://twitter.com/bkiepuszewski ----- 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.

• 0:03David Hoffman?

  Welcome, Bankless Nation, back to the DevCon 6 experience. I hope you've been enjoying these interviews thus far. I hope they've been making you feel like you're on the ground at DevCon. It was a treat. In this interview, we're talking with Bartek. Bartek is the leader, the founder, co-founder of Layer 2 Beat. He's previously maker DAO and he is at the middle of the Layer 2 wars. Layer 2 Beat is this place where all of these Layer 2s are indexed and documented about what holes they have, what they need to work on. And it's been the sparring ground for all of these Layer 2s. So I get Bartek's perspective as what it's like to be in the middle of the Layer 2 wars and how he thinks the Layer 2 wars are progressing from here. And overall, are we as an Ethereum ecosystem, Ethereum community members,

• 0:47David Hoffman?

  not critical enough about our own Layer 2s? Are we hypocrites for critiquing cross Layer 1 bridges, other alt Layer 1s, while also not looking at our own Layer 2s and seeing the holes and flaws in them as well? I asked him that question and more, all about the Layer 2 wars, the very, very spicy Layer 2 wars. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Bartek from Layer 2 Beat, right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. In all of my years in crypto, I've never been hacked, scammed, or phished. And I owe a large part of that credit to my Ledger hardware wallet, or really my ledgers, like all of them, all five of them, because ledgers hold 99% of my crypto assets. And it makes me feel good about self-custody, private key management. You know what else makes me feel good? Using the Brave browser, the user-first browser for the Web3 age. The Brave browser keeps your digital footprint small,

• 1:32David Hoffman?

  keeping you in the driver's seat while also being a powerful battle station for Web3, letting you access your crypto through its native wallet, or view your NFTs, or just keep up to date with the Web3 communities. And of course, you've heard of Arbitrum. And the Arbitrum ecosystem is really heating up. With their recent launch of Arbitrum Nova, Arbitrum has entered the world of multi-chain Layer 2s. And with their recent acquisition of Prismatic Labs, Arbitrum firepower is bigger than ever. Arbitrum Nitro shipped last month and has made Arbitrum faster and cheaper than ever. So make sure that you experience what Arbitrum has to offer before it's too late. But maybe you're a developer who hates the constraints of the EVM. So check out the Fuel VM from the Fuel Network, which has opened up the world of parallel transaction execution. Breaking the Fuel Network free from the EVM baggage. With Fuel, you can leverage the Rust tooling ecosystem to build stronger apps,

• 2:16David Hoffman?

  all while keeping Ethereum-level security. And maybe you're on Arbitrum, but you want to get to Fuel. You might use something like Akross, the Layer 2 bridge from Uma. Akross is a safe and secure bridge, making it easy to transfer your assets from one Layer 2 to another or back to Ethereum. It's super fast, super cheap, and all secured by Uma's Optimistic Oracle. And our last sponsor, Nexo, which has like five different products, and you're probably going to be interested in at least one of them. First, you can buy crypto instantly with credit, debit, or bank transfer. It's also got an advanced trading platform called Nexo Pro. You can also earn interest on your crypto, your Bitcoin, your Ether, or whatever asset you like. It's also got an instant crypto line of credit with as low as 0% APR and a crypto-backed Mastercard. One of those things is probably what you want. So go check out Nexo, the financial hub for the digital age.

• 3:00David Hoffman?

  And let's go ahead and get right into the interview right now. Thanks, The Nation. I'm here with Bartek, founder of Layer 2 Beat and also a contributor at MakerDAO. And Bartek has found himself, I think, at the center of these Layer 2 wars. I wish there had been a ton of announcements here at DevCon Bogota. Bartek, thank you so much for coming on and joining me here.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  It's my pleasure.

• 3:20David Hoffman?

  How have you been joining Colombia?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Well, so far, so good. Yeah, I like the country. And it's the first time that I'm in Colombia, like probably most people at DevCon. And DevCon is always a great opportunity to see other places and cultures. And I really appreciate the approach of the Human Foundation, where I feel like we're trying to include everybody, right? It's not like just Europe and US and Europe and US, like most other conferences. But we actually have been to Japan. You know, we are here now. I'm sure you're wondering what's next.

• 3:58David Hoffman?

  Well, certainly what's next with... There's so many things that's next in Ethereum, and Layer 2 is definitely is one of those things. Like I said, you are the co-founder of Layer 2 Beat, which is this website that we go to to look at how many holes there are in the Layer 2 ecosystem. And Vitalik recently, at the Rollup Day on Monday, was giving a presentation as to all these different ways that we need to fix Layer 2s. How do you think that progress is going? And are there any announcements that you've seen here at DevCon Bogota that is working in that direction?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  So...

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Well frankly, so many people that I talk to that, you know, I don't like attend a lot of sessions. I haven't seen a lot of announcements. Having said that, I think that most teams, they have presented roadmaps which are fully decentralized. You know, they promise all of us to shed the training wheels. And I think if we were to listen, to list on L2P just pure rollups, we probably wouldn't list literally anyone, right? And it would be a very boring website. So right now, you know, as it stands, every single project is very much centralized

• 5:11Speaker 01

  and is very much controlled by the team that actually created the rollups. But to my knowledge, with almost no exception, each one of them has a roadmap, like a decentralization roadmap. And I think right now, you know, we're trying to kind of track the progress, if you like, right? And make them transparent and make them honest. And I think we're getting there for sure.

• 5:41David Hoffman?

  And one of the critiques that we've seen outside of the Ethereum space, and sometimes also inside of the Ethereum space, is that we're promoting these Layer 2s as if they're the magical, secure solution to scale a chain. But then we're also kind of hiding and pushing under the rug the fact that these have multi-sig bridge contracts and we're missing fraud proofs. Do you think that the Ethereum community or the Ethereum promoters, maybe me and Ryan are guilty of this, are like hypocritical of the way that we kind of pitch Layer 2s? Or do you think there's more nuance here?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Well, this is a very loaded question. So I'd say that, you know, every single team, they've got their own agenda. And some of them are more, let's say, transparent than the others. Some of them are hiding behind the marketing and whatnot. Everyone seems to be extremely keen at building the community. And well, we cannot hide the fact that it is a race, right? I wouldn't call it a war, and we don't know exactly how the future... Of Layer 2 ecosystem and Ethereum will look like. Are we going to see many different rollups? So maybe one will take it all. So that's still an open question in my mind.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  But if one team sees the other team like launching something which may have a lot of training wheels, you know, they might actually be pressed to do the same. And the general community, I think, they don't see all these nuances because they may not be published widely, right? Sometimes we're not published at all. And this is why, you know, we essentially created this website so that we disclose some of these things. And we just want to make all these teams honest. And we want to make sure that the users actually understand all the security assumptions behind all these systems.

• 7:27David Hoffman?

  You've talked about the roadmap that many of these Layer 2 teams have presented to solve and fix some of these holes. How credible are these roadmaps? Are they legit roadmaps? There's real tech here? Or is it more just hand-waving?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  So that would probably differ. Every single team has a little bit different approach. So if we look at the optimistic rollups, for example, we see two major teams putting a lot of work into actually making sure that all these fraud-proof technology is working and EVM equivalent systems will eventually be deployed. So I'm talking about Arbitrum and Optimism. And we've got some other teams that are forking mainly Optimus code and they're kind of waiting for Optimism to deliver the fraud-proof system. So we can see that, you know, some teams are innovating and some teams are trying to sort of, you know, fork the code and maybe try to innovate on the edges.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  I'm mainly thinking about Boba and Metas. So that's optimistic for the ZK. Most of the teams are innovating like crazy. I mean, this is like amazing, really, to see the progress. I think we've all been surprised by all these teams. And, well, Starknet, ZK Sync, Aztec, right? Scroll, I mean, it's just unbelievable. Polygon as well.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Everyone is pushing code really hard and every single conference that I go to there's like new announcements, right?

• 8:57David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  From either one of them. So my understanding is that ZK Sync will launch very soon. Starknet is just upgrading to version one of Cairo, which is like the major upgrade. The first version was very much centralized and wasn't particularly censorship resistant. We've pushed them really, really hard to work on this problem and I believe that they listen to the community. And the new version, which is way more complicated, will actually allow people to force transactions to their system, right? So they cannot be censored.

• 9:33David Hoffman?

  I remember when I was reporting on ETHCC back in April of earlier this year, whenever that was, I can't remember how many months ago.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, June, maybe.

• 9:42David Hoffman?

  June, something, yeah.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Whatever.

• 9:43David Hoffman?

  July, actually, July.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  I think it was July. It keeps moving.

• 9:46David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  It was July.

• 9:48David Hoffman?

  People are joking that the theme of the DCC was the ZK EVM, because so many people announced their ZK EVM, so it was a testnet or launch date or something. That also seems to be the theme of the rollups this week as well, here at DevCon Bogota, where Polygon released their ZK EVM testnet, Scroll released their ZK EVM testnet, ZK Sync released their Layer 3 testnet, and they have their mainnet in just like 10, 20 days here. And also something that Vitalik said in his presentation at Rollup Day was, the ZK teams seem to be like the one part of crypto building that has been massively accelerated beyond expectations, going Ethereum, the merge was slow, sharding's been slow, but the ZK EVMs are here.

• 10:31David Hoffman?

  When all of these mainnets do come, like, how big of a, first off, how big of a deal is that? And are they going to come and is it going to be as big of a thing that people are excited for? Or is it still going to be like, okay, mainnet, but users are going to have to wait another, like, I don't know, six months to be able to do something? Like, overall, what's your take on the trajectory of the ZK ecosystem?

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, right now, we have to be able to sort of differentiate between systems that are ZK equivalent and, let's say, ZK or EVM equivalent and EVM compatible. So ZK Sync is a good example of, you know, ZK Rollup that is compatible with EVM, but this is not like equivalent system, right? And I think we're gonna see a very interesting competition between systems that try to emulate EVM as close as possible and systems that will prefer to make sure that the proving is like optimized for the particular VM, right?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  And in this category, I would put definitely ZK Sync and StarkNet. So the competition between these two approaches would be very interesting to watch.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Having said that, I think end users, probably for them, you know, it wouldn't really matter. It might make a small difference for developers, but my thinking about this is that it doesn't matter so much, you know, how friendly this is for developers. I mean, it's important that, you know, it's easy to port your code. It might be important to make sure that your code is secure, but for end users, it's much more important that the system is fast, it's cheap, right? It's got a big ecosystem versus good wallet support. And I think for to that end, you know, the account abstraction is like super important. And they won't see much of a difference, frankly, right?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Even today, when you're using, you know, StarkNet or Optimism or Arbitrum, I mean, you won't notice much of a difference. So we're like debating the details that most end users won't even notice, right? And, you know, it will come to the edges, I think, if something goes really wrong, like if one of these systems will start to censor. Then end users will learn that there is a difference, right? And then they will see that there are some systems that, you know, have working K-scape patches, whilst some other... The systems don't have that facility and suddenly your funds are stuck.

• 13:07David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Because the, you know, rollup operators decided to be, I don't know, OFIC compliant or whatever, right? Pressed by the regulators. So, you know, like for the daily usage, I don't think the users will actually notice much. But I think it's our responsibility to educate them.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  What are those security assumptions, right?

• 13:30David Hoffman?

  Do you have your own personal opinion on the debate between ZK or EVM equivalence versus EVM compatibility? Or are you saying both sides have strong arguments? Let the best rollup win?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  I think both sides presented very strong arguments, you know? I had the pleasure of moderating the panel on the rollup day on that very topic, you know? And I can see passionate, you know, statements from both sides. So it will be extremely interesting to watch. And long term, maybe going ZK equivalent, you know, makes sense. But, you know, short term, I think of our certain advantages right now to have a VM that's like ZK friendly. Because it will allow you to do things faster and cheaper. And time to market is likely to be quicker, right?

• 14:22David Hoffman?

  Right. One of the things that has been living rent free in my brain, and the thing I've been trying to learn about the most here at DevCon, DevCon, that one, not DevConnect, is Optimism's bedrock. And it's interesting to see the modularity of Ethereum find its way also into the layer twos. And that's really what Optimism bedrock is, is a modular layer twos, in the same way that we have a modular layer one Ethereum. My mind here is that like what Optimism's bedrock is doing in the OP stack is that they're reducing the barrier to forking and producing a new layer two. And as somebody who has to manage a website that is a registry of all the properties of all these layer twos, I'm slightly worried for you, Bartek, because what happens if you see a Cambrian explosion of optimistic rollups,

• 15:07David Hoffman?

  layer threes? Do you see the same future as well? Or how do you think about managing all these proliferation of layer twos that might come?

• 15:13Speaker 01

  I mean, most definitely, and even right now, the website is hardly manageable. And I'm sure that there are certain inaccuracies and mistakes. And in future months, you know, the most of the engineering effort will go into automation. I mean, at the end of the day, everything ends up on chain. And we, with our monitoring infrastructure, once, you know, it will be developed, we will actually get all the information automatically from chain, right? There must be some registry of all these rollups. There will be a way to sort of read their configuration directly from blockchain. So hopefully, if they follow the same cookie cutter approach and like FOG and create their own rollup,

• 15:57Speaker 01

  it will be just a matter of, you know, having our bots to read the data and fill in the website. And then it will be a question of how to actually present it to user in a manageable way, right? Which is, I guess, you know, a question for the UI designers. So I'd say that today, it used to be 80% of the effort for the research and 20% of the effort for, you know, like presenting all the information. But now it's going to be reversed almost, right? The automation infrastructure behind 2B is going to be actually quite complex.

• 16:31David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  And tracking all the changes will be possible because, you know, finally, we've got some fantastic tooling, like the Token Flow Insight. This is the analytical database that tracks every single state death on Ethereum in all Ethereum history, right? So we can just watch particular slots and it will inform us, you know, what exactly happened and when it happened. And it will trigger warnings essentially, right? So that's how I kind of think about it. I mean, it has to be managed by essentially automation.

• 17:07David Hoffman?

  Sure. And of course, Layer 2s under the hood are extremely complicated. I don't even know how to code. So when something goes down, I wouldn't know what to do. And so, Bartek, what you're doing at Layer 2B, in my mind, is just producing user sovereignty and tools that the individuals can use that are non-technical and very, very helpful. So thank you for everything you're doing at Layer 2B. And I hope you have a fantastic rest of your DevCon.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Okay. Thank you very much.

• 17:30David Hoffman?

  Cheers. Bam.