Variant Research Day: Future of Crosschain

Our most recent Variant Research Day covered the Future of Crosschain and featured three conversations with builders and founders.

1. Max Resnick put forward his proposal for multi-proposer on Ethereum. The TLDR reason: censorship-resistance.

2. Ellie Davidson of Espresso Systems joined Cairo to talk all about preconfirmations: what makes them so complex for validators, why they’re hard to price, and whether they represent a winner-take-all market:

3. And Nam Hoai (Hyperlane), Josh Bowen (Astria), and Hart Lambur (Across) formed a panel on interop, which we've written about:

With a proliferation of L1s, L2s, and even L3s—each with its own ecosystem and store of liquidity—interoperability has become one of the hottest areas of infrastructure development.

For our inaugural Variant Research Day, we brought together three experts on interoperability to talk about their approaches. Nam Hoai is the co-founder of Hyperlane, which enables smart contracts to message each other cross-chain. Josh Bowen is the co-founder and CEO of Astria, a shared sequencer network. And Hart Lambur is the co-founder of Across, an intent-based interoperability protocol.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the panel, which was moderated by Variant advisor Austin Adams.

“When we had a single global state machine four years ago,” said Hart, “users [could] in theory just click a button and it does things.” Which, he says, is what users want. So while the Ethereum Roadmap—filled with a diverse set of chains and L2s—is tantalizing from a developer’s perspective, it’s not great from a user perspective. Users want to push a button and have it work. By abstracting away the communication between chains, intents can make that happen.

But where will those buttons get pushed? The hope in web3 circles is that it will be on apps, as more get rolled out. But that begs the question, says Josh: “How should those apps be built?” According to him, Ethereum or EVM-based chains aren’t necessarily the best option: 

“The EVM is good in some ways, but terrible in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of known problems with the EVM. I don’t think we should die on that hill now. We’re a pretty nascent industry. We shouldn’t be like, ‘Ah, well, we’ll live with this forever thing.’ So we [Astria] wanted to have apps that could be different. And it’s like, ‘Okay, what infrastructure is necessary so that people can make things that are not the EVM, without having to build the whole world?’”

Astria’s approach, he says, could be called a rollup framework or app framework, but the main idea is to let people build customizable apps that work with each other.

While liquidity fragmentation is a concern, Josh believes that, among all the chains and L2s, most liquidity will settle in one spot. Shared infrastructure facilitates innovation:

“No one's going to make a new chain with a new state machine or a new design that may be interesting and useful from a technical or UX capacity if they can't get liquidity into it,” says Josh. “So interop is something that's very important to consider when we're actually trying to get adoption of potentially new technical architecture.”

 Ultimately, Hart doesn’t see liquidity fragmentation as the biggest concern for new chains. “New chains,” he says, “generally don’t require a lot of volume.”

What is making adoption difficult, he says, is the rapid proliferation of many new L2s, each with slight differences. The infrastructure as designed can’t keep pace. Adds Austin: “A lot of work has to be done to make sure those little differences are safe for users.” 

Nas was less concerned about liquidity than with permissionlessness so that new projects can tap into the infrastructure that’s being developed. 

“In Hyperlane, we’ve been focusing a lot on what we call permissionless interoperability. So if you launch your L2, your L3, [and] nobody’s ever heard of you, talking to all these different parties can take weeks, months. So, okay, you can launch Hyperlane yourself. But then we realized there’s still a bunch of infrastructure that’s not permissionless.”

He’s hoping that some of his co-panelists are ready to address this. “We think that’s where a lot of the growth will happen.”

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Variant is an investor in Hyperlane.