2 Million TPS and Decentralized? Has the Zero Blockchain Cracked Scalability?

So I think one thing is we just had like very deeply understood the scaling approaches that everybody else was trying, like what works and what doesn't work right. Again, we believed early on like oh, like EVM is just slow, it was just common EVM is slow. Once we started working on these other systems, once we went very deep in Aptos, went very deep in Solana, went very deep in the, it's like oh, it's actually like the storage layer is one of the primary things constraining like almost every chain.

Once we had this original insight around QMDB and we made this storage layer that now is, you know, 3 million updates per second.

Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream. Just FYI, we had to pre-record this one.

Before we get started, a quick reminder, nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guest and I may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit unchainedcrypto.com.

Quick note before we get into today's episode. Bits and Bips now has its dedicated feeds. We're spinning off from the Unchained feed and moving to a new podcast and YouTube channel. So, if you want to keep up with our weekly live streams and macro meets, crypto breakdowns, make sure to subscribe to Bits and Bips directly. We won't publish there until March, but subscribe today so you can be ready for launch. Be sure to subscribe to the new feeds at unchainedcrypto.com/bitsandbbits.

Did you know that Figure is giving away $25,000 in USDC? They're a decentralized digital asset platform for earning, borrowing, and lending. Download the Figurearkets app using our link, figures.co/chainedp, deposit into their democratized prime pools and earn about 9% APY paid hourly while you enter. Every dollar you keep in for 25 consecutive days counts as an entry. Again, the link is figurearkets.co/chainedp for full details.

If cryptotaxes feel overwhelming, you are not alone. That's why Cryptotax Girl, a team that's been helping crypto investors since 2017, is offering $100 off on one-on-one cryptotax help. To get $100 off your cryptotax services, go to cryptotaxgirl.com/unchained. Again, that's cryptotaxgirl.com/unchained.

Today's guest is Brian Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO of Layer Zero Labs. Welcome, Brian.

Thank you, Laura. Thanks so much for having me as always.

So Layer Zero has long been a messaging protocol to bridge between different blockchains and today you have a big announcement about a new blockchain that you're launching called Zero. Tell us about it.

Yeah, so Zero really is like this this whole thing started two and a half years ago. We didn't really originally intend to build a blockchain. What happened was Ryan, my co-founder Raz, who's getting extremely frustrated, almost disillusioned with the space of of the way that the space was moving.

Every day he was ranting. Honestly, frankly, every day he was ranting to me about layer 2. He was extremely upset around sort of the Ethereum moving away from sharding, positioning this as their scaling layer and in describing it as inheriting the underlying Base. He thought this was like a like really just like a not true factual statement and that it was being propagated was frustrating to him.

I was so sick of this at the end of sort of six months I said like all right like what would you do and he started to draw out what he viewed as sort of like the long-term architecture and actually over the last two and a half years a bunch of the spaces started to converge to some of these things. There was tons of steps that you have to solve to get down.

What he described really was like the the core problem with any blockchain today is that if you have a million nodes, every single one of those million nodes is reproducing the same exact compute. So you're paying effectively a million times the cost of doing the computation itself.

Clearly what you want is to be able to reduce that factor if you're going to make it compatible competitive with real systems, any system at scale. So it's really how do you actually get core systems that can scale and reduce the amount of replication and so zero was sort of like built around that.

The end result you get we have four 100x breakthroughs that led to this and storage compute network and then in ZK itself in the culmination of those four effectively our 2 million you know scalable up to 2 million transactions per second per zone in the architecture about 1 10,000th of a penny per transaction and the ability to write across any virtual machine or even just compile any Linux binary directly down into an executable. So like a huge transition from the architecture itself.

Okay. So yeah, we'll dive into those details in a little bit, but just explain like a little bit more about why you're launching a new blockchain now and like what problems you think that zero can solve that you don't feel are being addressed by existing chains.

Yeah. Absolutely. So I mean the real promise is or the real premise of the original like at us starting was that nothing can scale right now and the space needs to go in two directions. You can either go one direction which is centralizing so performance blockchain Solana etc. is basically reduce the number of nodes and increase the requirements of the nodes.

So get rid of homestakers nodes cost you know tens of thousands of dollars a month or more to run and have a smaller party but have extremely high performance. That's one way to scale and you get to about, you know, 2,000 3,000 transactions per second. And the other way to scale is really care about decentralization and homestakers.

So keep like ETH1, keep it as, you know, decentralized as humanly possible, but start to scale through, effectively layer 2. So now you're putting out, you know, sort of tens of billions of dollars and changing the trust assumptions into this small set, you know, you have this centralized blockchain that sits on top of a decentralized blockchain and that's the way to scale.

We don't think either of those is the way that you actually want to be able to scale a system long term. So all we really care about, the only thing we care about is decentralized permissionless systems at scale globally for the world. Like that is the thing that we're trying to solve ultimately. Like that is the thing that we care about that we don't view as happening.

Part of this was disillusionment with the existing. I mean we're like even today we're the third largest donator to protocol guild in history. So like we we love the values of Ethereum. We we very clearly like love the direction or like the principles and don't think the direction has been right.

We think the last couple of years has just been continuing to push on a more and more aggressively centralized roadmap has been really limiting and even to all of this all the layer 2 all of Solana everything combined you're at like six 7,000 transactions per second is like just not enough for real world systems.

The thing that we think we're solving or we set out to solve is permissionless values at scale decentralized permissionless censorship resistant like as those above all else scalable to tens of thousands hundreds of thousands hopefully millions of nodes so broad and decentralized as a whole and yet able to do millions of transactions per second at extremely low cost.

Okay. And like basically so you you mentioned earlier that you are going to have the zero knowledge proofs which I assume that's part of how you're scaling but talk a little bit about how you manage to resolve all those issues without compromising on something like decentralization.

Yeah definitely. So again core problem with any system the main primary problem is this cost of replication right you run to two things having every node download all of the transactions and all the data and needing to reproduce the compute across all things so the four breakthroughs that we solved along the way the first was QMDB which is actually a paper we published a year ago it's now being rolled out like through commonware into tempo and some of other chains that are launching now which is basically a change from MPT structure to like a logbased database it is uh you know a thou uh sorry 100x more performant than state-of-the-art uh for database structure for verifiable database that was NOMT which was the most performant prior and it really just allows you to take um it changes the cost of the worst case uh for reads and writes uh and basically makes it just extremely significantly more performance. So now you have like 3 million updates per second. It's actually eclipse that now but that was what we published at.

By doing that, by having a storage layer that is substantially better, then you move on to FAFO, which was our unlock and execution, which there was historically like a belief that the EVM itself was slow. So typically the EVM was slow, but like the SVM was designed to be faster. The EVM was slow, but Aptos can run Chardines and get to like a million transactions per second.

To do that million transactions per second, you had to daisy chain roughly 30 supercomputers colloccated in a data center and each node could actually only get to like 33,000 transactions per second. That's with none of the overhead of the EVM. We published our paper FAFO which shows that you can get a million transactions per second on a single node with the EVM. All of the overhead of the EVM.

QMDB on the storage layer unlocks the ability for you to be able to have significantly better performance at the execution layer and then from there you have to solve a couple of more problems and this was network and ZK. ZK really unlocks this. If you think about I realize this is getting reasonably technical very quickly. So I'm trying to keep it as plain language as possible.

There were two more things. SVID is basically compressing the data on the network and then ZK itself allows you to compress compute. Ultimately what you have is rather than having an architecture where if I need to run some amount of computation some list of transactions I'm going to run it on my node and maybe my node's really small maybe it's like a smartwatch or something right you have a million other nodes in the network all 1 million have to reproduce the same work to come to consensus rather you're going to run that computation once generate a proof and then all the nodes in network only need to validate the proof and val verifying the proof is you know effectively free relative to doing the computation itself right the work is in actually producing the proof.

In this uh so um we've gone and we've taken Jolt which was this research project inside of sort of A16Z crypto research with Justin Thaylor Michael Ju and they were working on this and we took that with them and have like productionized this and so now we have one gigahertz plus prover proving cluster we're able to prove this in real time.

We're going to stand on stage tomorrow and show verifying transactions at a million transactions per second in real time. All of these things are things that we've done. So we spent the last two and a half years in stealth not talking about any of this slowly publishing the papers along the way. This is ultimately the culmination of all of this.

If you look at I think your original question is what are you trying to solve? Who needs another blockchain right? Like what is the point? Our view has always been I mean my personal view is the world has changed very rapidly way faster than I ever expected and yet we got to the last mile and we started making a bunch of really bad compromises when all the institutions wanted to come in that continued to like centralize along the way.

The only reason we got here was because like the whole value of all of the technology was the underlying principles. That is why the institutions who wanted this thing to die industry to die over the last 15 years are now adopting right is because like permissionless global markets have inherent value. There has been I mean tether is most profitable company in the world on a per headcount per employee headcount.

Hyperlid is like the second most you know there these are like unbelievable companies that have generated unbelievable value just through decentralized and permissionless access to some of these instruments. So the world is is like rapidly changing and now we have these systems and this demand that nothing else can meet and what we're doing in order to meet that demand is just make more and more centralized systems.

Stripe had to build their own blockchain, right? that is like a very that's like a very bad outcome is that like nothing is usable enough for them to build user payments that they have to build their own blockchain from scratch. Every other institution is now like rolling their own centralized blockchain that sits on top with the multisig and like that is the way that we're sort of like approaching scaling and you want like if you actually care about what makes the technology interesting as a whole and what actually gives it value as a whole you have to be able to develop a system that can be broadly decentralized at scale and provide these things and so we view global permissionless markets like this is very clear markets are going to move from 75 to 247.

They're going to trade across spot and per trade forex and commodities and crypto and equities and like all of these assets are going to be there and you're going to have access to these things. Like the rest of the world that now has access to the US dollar is going to have access to a lot of things that they just like would never have had access to just a couple of decades ago. But in order to do that, you have to actually be able to scale systems to be able to to do that without being three nodes or a small multi-aver, you know, whatever this is, you have to be able to do that. This is us doing that.

So, one thing that I'm really curious about from what you're saying is it seems to me and again because I'm not technical maybe I didn't understand everything but it seems to me like some portion of the transactions or or the data is going to be offchain and like only a certain No. So, okay. So, explain that.

Yep. So, uh again sup super super super important. So um right now every node downloads every single transaction all of the data and does all the computation in zero right what you don't want is have to have any of this offchain like that's a horrible outcome right so what you actually want is the compute happens in a single place and you generate a transaction commitment and a slice basically of the data and the proof itself and all that the node needs to do to verify 100% that that commits this is like the beauty of zk Okay. Uh is have those things and so actually nodes you're able to verify even a huge amount of transaction something no node today would be able to do with a very small amount of the data and the proof such that you can now do this.

If you say Solana took the approach of really big nodes um you know processing thousands of transactions per second and sequencers are even you know L2 sequencers are even more of this just like one super node that does everything and then post the data back to Ethereum and you have the small nodes in Ethereum zero is that you can actually have that mismatch but the small nodes don't need to trust the big nodes you can have we call it the first ever sort of heterogeneous architecture such that you can have really big beefy sequencers that are rotating set. Anybody can run one. Anyone can do this. They cannot do anything malicious because they must be able to verify this proof. It is bound by the ZK circuit.

These are like right in Ethereum you have proposer builder separation. So you have these big nodes that basically build the blocks. They're searchers. There's this is flash bots and everything. So you have these things that are building all of this and then they have the proof that is generated from that and all you need to do is have the commitment and a slice of the data and the tren in the proof and that is it and you can like fully verify everything.

What you don't want which you have to protect very like religiously against is that any of these larger nodes should not be able to make up fake data. They cannot for you know uh spoof transactions. They can't censor the network. they shouldn't be able to like um make it so that nobody else can actually include their transaction. So in zero there's like force inclusion directly at the base chain. Every one of the small nodes has a direct slot to be able to put transactions in the base chain.

There's all of these things that you need to protect against. We you know we've written a lot on this hopefully it'll be very clear on on how those but like very much we have thought through exactly that and you absolutely do not want any of this to live offchain. There is no point of that if the nodes have to trust some off-chain system or some off-chain piece of data. Everybody must be able to reconstruct it. Everybody must be able to verify exactly what has happened in the state of the network.

Okay. And it's a and it's a proof of stake chain which is okay. Got it.

So it seems like you're you're kind of taking an approach where you're bringing in all these institutional players. You have a bunch of partners from Tradfi. Citadel Securities, DTCC, International Continental, sorry, Intercontinental Exchange. Citadel and ARC are investing. You have an advisory board with Kathy Wood, Michael Balagrund of Intercontinental Exchange, Caroline Butler of BMY Millan, etc. Google Cloud's another partner. just explain you know what your thinking was behind the strategy of including these types of players and of course feel free to mention anybody I didn't.

Yeah. Of course. So for us we think like building that technology is the most important part like in layer zero we built and we built it 100% immutable. It was like we just built to our principles. Nobody most contracts now are not immutable. Almost everything that builds today is upgradeable. We built it 100% immutable. So for us technology was number one. built it in that way but you still have to build like technology for technology sake just doesn't matter you have to build and be adherent to the principles and then you have to go and actually get like real adoption right so when you talk about again I have this very strong belief that you are having for the last 15 years uh you've been on this space just as long as I have right like you've had crypto which is a pool of capital up to even like $3 trillion of capital but it was totally isolated then you had the rest of the world and like even like exchanges kind of played the role of like those two things like money moving from either in or out of the system. But they were really disconnected and rwas have started to change this a little bit.

You have okay you have black rocks issuing bidd and now you have a little bit of treasury build yield. Maybe you have stable coins are trying to offer yield or these things happening but they've never really intersected. I think the recent administration change and everything that's happened on the space clarity bill upcoming like it's just very clear the world is changing and like institutions are going from I'm doing a P over here and like yeah it's cool let me just look at the technology to like actually building systems. So for us we were just super laser focused on like go out.

Actually I should preface this with we are launching zero and again we haven't even dove deep in the architecture. So by the time people listen to this hopefully they have gone and read some of the things but zero is effectively I'll start there. Imagine you have a beacon chain. Ethereum has a beacon chain and on top of that beacon chain there is a single application. That application is the EVM right for Ethereum it is the EVM. The EVM is a thing an application that lives on top of the beacon chain. Zero is effectively that same architecture beacon chain broad decentralized million nodes etc. And on top of that are can be many multiple applications. They can be any um they could be EVM, SVM, move VM or totally agnostic.

It can actually not be a VM because of the zero OS paper we just published with Dan Bonet. You could take the exact code that runs Coinbase or Binance or any of these today, boil it down to a circuit and have that directly on. So it is just an executable environment that lives on top. Zero can have many of them, hundreds. We're launching with three. The three that we're launching with, the first is just a general purpose smart contract zone. Exactly as you think about most chains today. Come deploy your smart contracts, bring developers. The second is global markets. It is what does the world look like when you move from 75 to 247. Trade across all asset classes, trade across all of these things. And the third is payments. We view these right now as the biggest problems in crypto. Like these are the things that crypto just has product market fit for, right? It's markets, it's payments, and it's smart contract development. And so we're launching with those three. general purpose smart contract zone. We're very comfortable with most people sort of understand what that is.

When you talk about global markets and how does the world actually transition from the markets of today to like the markets of tomorrow, like what does that look like? And so we're just super focused on getting the best partners in the world, right? So we went DTC holds a hundred trillion dollars of assets and processes four quadrillion dollars per year in volume. And then like you move up the stack. ICE is the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange which is the largest stock exchange in the world and has 44 trillion dollars of market capitalization. So you have DTCC sits here, ICE sits here and sort of allows trading of those and then you look at who actually is using the system. Citadel Securities is responsible like 40% of all retail cash equities trading on the planet, right? These are like the three single largest institutions across the stack.

As we sort of build out what do these markets like what does this need to have what does this need to look like to be able to facilitate global markets at scale millions of transactions per second. Those were the three partners that we went and said like these are the groups that we need to talk to and work through. And so that is that is what they're there for. Our goal is to like co-build or lean on the expertise of how do you build these systems? they are looking at the technology because I think they had seen almost everything prior and it was like interesting but it can do a thousand TPS 10,000 TPS and now we showed them and something we said hey here's like live in production running this demonet doing millions of transactions per second it's the first time we said oh like you could build nice on a blockchain like that might take a very long time but like you could have a system that looks like that and so that like That is the group that we pulled together to start to build this with. We'll have many more partners moving forwards. I'm sure ton of people sort of interested on the core technology and then on the payment side.

As you're building out payments infrastructure and what do you need to have global payments at scale, millions of transactions per second? What do you need to have like what does privacy need to look like for this to be used broadly for people, for institutions, for everything? What do all of those things look like? Tether is making an investment into layer zero labs and obviously there is no better partner on payments and what that looks like in the world. So we have a sort of a long-standing relationship. USDT0 was this collaboration with us and Everdon Labs that's now done 70 billion dollars of UST0 volume back and forth has created a bunch of AUM for USDT. And now we're sort of strengthening that relationship and going to be able to to spend a lot more time together.

All right. So, in a moment we'll talk a little bit more about the partners and the go to market strategy, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make the show possible. Bits and Bits now has its dedicated feeds. We're spinning off from the Unchained feed and moving to a new podcast and YouTube channel. So, if you want to keep up with our weekly live streams and macro meets crypto breakdowns, make sure to subscribe to Bits and Bips directly. We won't publish there until March, but subscribe today so you can be ready for launch. Be sure to subscribe to the new feeds at unchainedcrypto.com/bitsandbbits.

Want a chance to win $25,000 in USDC? Figure, a platform to earn yield, borrow against crypto, and access lending markets, is running a $25,000 USDC sweep stakes tied to their democratized prime product. Here's how it works. Download the Figurearkets app using our link figurearkets.co/unchainedp. deposit into a democratized prime lending pool and leave your funds there for 25 consecutive days. Every dollar equals one entry, so $1,000 equals 1,000 chances. While your funds stay in the pool, you're also earning around 9% APY paid out hourly. To learn more and enter, go to figurearkets.co/changedp, which is also available in the show notes.

If you're looking for help with crypto taxes, Cryptotax Girl is offering $100 off for Unchained listeners. They provide personalized cryptotax reports and returns and spots before April 15th are limited. Go to cryptotaxgirl.com/chained to save $100. Once again, the link is cryptotaxgirl.com/unchained.

Back to my conversation with Brian. So, we just discussed some of the different partners and you also mentioned that Tether is going to be investing. You talked about sort of the different kind of um features of the blockchain and you're going to be launching mainet in September and as we, you know, kind of alluded to earlier in the conversation, crypto is a very crowded space right now. There's a lot of different blockchains. There's a lot of new ones that, you know, have just recently launched as well. And with these kinds of partners, I don't know if you are already working on, you know, deals similar to that example that you gave of like you could have NY on on a blockchain now or at least you're you're saying that on zero it's possible. So, you know, because you have these big institutions involved, are are there any kind of commitments to putting certain products or services on zero?

Yeah, I mean, I think uh I I will let them speak for themselves. I think all of them are making their own statements over the next little bit but the goal is the goal is listen I think any institution so we've spent a bunch of time uh both from layer zero and now with with tons of the world's largest institutions and I think everybody looks at it through the same lens and one is what can this technology actually do for me again you look at look at tether look at hyperlquid most profitable businesses in the world per headcount right tether's making 10 to 15 billion per year like naturally every institution wants to figure out why is that working and how can I sort of like leverage the underlying technology.

That's one part and then the second part is this is a very disruptive technology globally. You're talking about, you know, centuries of everything in terms of economic mobility and economic freedom being top down, being nation state driven to a world where anybody with access to like cell phone and access to the internet now has access to these financial instruments to these uh you know currencies to all of this and it's completely bottoms up and that's like a totally different world uh and so I think every every institution naturally is at the same time saying where is there risk here in the system for me right like how how can I leverage this, how can I take advantage of it? What can I do that is like impactful and amazing and and helps my business and how can I not be disrupted or like affected by these disrupted disrupting forces. So I think universally every institution is sort of looking through those lens.

I think you will see you know again our focus is just exactly bringing adoption on chain and to to build the systems at scale. I think you will do see them do lots of interesting things which I will let them speak about.

Okay. And then one thing that I realized they didn't fully understand before. So with the ZK proofs, does that mean every transaction is private? Like the whole thing is private or so not no not everything is private. So ZK has a couple of interesting pieces of technology or like applications, right? One is clearly privacy which I think is what it's most known for. The other is that it's compression.

I think compression is by far the most interesting part of the technology because what it does is as ability to again completely remove the the cost or the replication factor in these underlying systems right and so for us most of the core architecture you're talking about ZK is compression not privacy now when you go to payments specifically a very big focus of ours is how do you tie obviously in doing this we built I would argue the best CK team on the on the planet like really have pulled together just an incredible incredible team and I think once we start to be able to announce all of the research and the breakthroughs especially you know already gigahertz plus prover all of these things uh I think there'll be a lot more conversation around this itself but in doing that we obviously have a very strong background in ZK's application to privacy itself and so when we talk about payments you need privacy within payments to be able to to like any form of of corporate payments any form of like payments at scale let alone the sort of like human right like the natural right of privacy itself.

So we'll be very deeply exploring privacy on the payment side of things on global markets on the general purpose smart contract zone. It's not front and center. We're not you know our privacy chain is not privacy as a whole. Privacy is a feature that ideally will be rolled out across all of these systems. But is not the focus for any payment zone.

Okay. So right now it's just about scaling. Um, so you know, obviously you have been working on layer zero since 2021 and I wondered if there would be any way that zero would be connected to layer zero.

Yeah. So of course I mean layer zero connects 165 blockchains today is really just interoperability, right? We have no illusions that all of the chains go away, right? Like that's not even the goal. Actually for us the goal for us is is again we care very very deeply about the core principles like that that is the reason I've spent 15 years of my life here. That is the reason we built layer zero in the way that we did. All we care about is decentralized permissionless censorship resistant systems winning at scale. What we saw in the world in the space we didn't really love. We thought it was going in a a direction that both didn't scale and compromised a bunch of this. Our goal with zero is to bring that forward in the space. And if somebody else does it and those principles win in a whole, great, amazing. Layer zero is still going to connect everything. Zero will be connected to all 165 change. We're still going to be bringing asset issuers everywhere. We're still going to be doing all of the things that you know layer zero did 100 something billion dollars uh last year of flow across it. None of that will change. This is not like a pivot, a shifting of focus or anything. uh zero will be connected to all of these things and it will zero use the ZRO token or it will no new token.

This was a big part of why we actually uh you couldn't talk about it at the time but like why we wanted to reacquire Stargate and go through that whole process was we really just want this consolidation. There's not going to be any net new token. There's not going to be change. We're not launching uh new things just zero is the only asset and it is going to be the underlying uh gas asset and staking asset for proof of stake.

Oh, got it. Okay. Well, out of curiosity, just you know, you've been doing layer zero for a while and you said that you've been working on zero and stealth and I wondered like are there any kind of things that you've learned from doing LAR zero that you you know would apply to zero or yeah just talk a little bit about like um you know what your experience you feel uh would help you with launching zero.

Yeah, I mean so honestly so much like I think we've done more nonems than any other group on the planet. We've had to go we found crits and almost every non-EVM we've ever gone to. We have to go extremely extremely deep and low level into every system to rewrite the endpoint from scratch. So this is everything from how Solana deals with dynamic dispatch and memory allocation to how ton deals with sharding and like their approach to sharding uh and what sort of pain points you have and distance between shards for contracts and like all of these different things uh all the way across the board.

I think one thing is we just had like very deeply understood the scaling approaches that everybody else was trying like what works and what doesn't work right and again we believed early on like oh like EVM is just slow it was just common EVM is slow and then once we start working on these other systems once we went very deep in aptto we went very deep in salon went very deep in the other like oh it's actually like the storage layer is one of the primary things constraining like almost every chain and once we had this original insight around QMDB we made this storage layer that now is you know three million updates per second. It was like oh actually EVM is like very fast like here is a single node EVM doing like a million transactions per second.

I think we really were starting to apply like what are actually the constraining factors? How is everybody else taking these approaches to scaling and like deeply deeply going into the code and understanding like this is exactly how this thing is built. isn't much reason for most people to do that, right? Like uh if you're working on Solana other than like a curious interest on some claim Ton makes or somebody else makes like you're not going to go very like deeply understand the the code in their blockchain. uh and that is just we were forced to do through the nature of layer zero and so I think we built like a very core competence in that but really the main thing was anytime you have a new technology right so zk is like zk has been very apparent for for 10 years a decade it's not it's not a new technology everybody's seen the promise or trajectory of this technology but like with most things in new technology most people take it and they try to retrofit it into existing systems because it was like pretty nent technology was not ready yet and you start to build on top of it you say okay let's take this exist existing chain and like can we add a little ZK layer here? Can we do something here?

We just like totally inverted the question and when I was you know arguing with Ryan and he went and like whiteboarded this architecture was like assume the technology is solved. Just assume it exists. Who knows if it's going to be 5 10 20 years the technology is now solved. What does the world look like? It was like okay like once this component is solved then this is clearly what the architecture is going to look like right like now instead of being super bandwidth constrained on every node all you're doing is verifying a proof and all you're doing is this and then and then you can say