🔥 Ethereum’s Broadband Moment with RISE Chain ⛓

Conor Svensson: Okay, good to have everyone here. Should we kick things by Sam? Would you like to start by introducing yourself and to tell everyone a bit about who you are and what it is that you do?

Sam: Yeah, sure thing. Thanks for having us on the Space, Conor. I'm SaI'm the CEO of Rise, where we're building a high performance layer two, but I can give a bit of background about myself. So I come from an embedded system, software background, technical founder. I've been in the space since 2023, sorry, 2013. I was mining Dogecoin, of all things back then, spent a few years doing HFT trading on centralized exchanges, and then in 2021, I launched a vault protocol called Robovault, which my co-founder is actually in the space right now. Safety bot. We launched that in 2021, and did quite well. We brought in about $2 million of profits for our users and we hit a $50 million TVL. But the biggest challenge that we had was that anytime the market would move, we needed to land a rebalanced transaction and this proved to be very difficult. Anytime the market moves is usually when there's congestion in the network and it's very, very hard to land transactions when there's congestion in the network. This ultimately led us to wrapping up the protocol in early 2023. We didn't have a token, so we were able to wrap things up pretty elegantly. But that kind of sparked my interest in performance and capacity at the chain level. So I fell down the layer two rabbit hole, discovered there was a massive opportunity to build a very, very high performance layer two. Fast forward to now where we've just closed, a couple months ago, we closed a seed round and we're spinning things up. Essentially what we're trying to do is build the first Giga gas layer two, and, sorry, I'll say based Giga gas layer two, so it's fully EVM compatible. The base component that we're going down, we're decentralizing our stack with base sequencing. And the Gigas component is that we're tackling the toughest challenges in performance for EVM layer twos. And those two major challenges are, execution and state access. So we've got tech tackling both of those things, but we might get into the details later. But, yeah, that's a quick rundown.

Conor Svensson: Awesome. Thank you for that historical context. And I think one of the key things that you mentioned there is gigas, because, and this is something you obviously talk about on the actual docs, on Rise lab themselves. There's been so much talk about tps in the industry and ever growing numbers of tps and catering for that. But from your perspective, I think it’s helpful to unpack for people why TPS can be such a misleading metric and why this giga gas narrative is actually far more apt for the space that we're in.

Sam: Yeah, absolutely. So I can start with gas. So gas is a unit that of measure that we use in ethereum or EVM based blockchains. And it's a measure of complexity. Essentially, it's the measure of overhead that particular operations cost on the network, and that's how we price the transactions. So what that means is that for a very expensive transaction, sorry, a transaction that is very expensive will usually be doing a lot of operations. So it might be storing two to state. It might be doing a bunch of complex calculations, and the users ultimately need to pay gas for that, or pay ethereum for that overhead on the network. But at a high level, say you're doing a simple ethereum transfer that's going to use a very low amount of gas, that's 21,000 gas by default. And ELC 20 transactions aren't a whole lot more than that. But if you're doing something like a Uniswap swap, that's in the order of five or six times as much gas, or some can get even far more complex, like deploying a contract can be very expensive. So that's the reason why, if you're talking about TPS, if you're hearing a chain is going to reach 10,000 tps, so 10,000 transactions per second, and they're not telling you whether or not it's going to be transfers or Uniswap transactions. It's a little bit misleading because 10,000 swaps is very, very different to 10,000 transfers that are about five times different at a best case, sometimes ten times different. So that's really why we've been trying to shift gears and talk about gas. We see that as far more accurate. And today we're in what we call the mega gas era. So blockchains are measured in mega gas, which is millions of gas units per second. So Base is essentially leading the way for the EVM blockchains up close to And they sit around twelve mega gas. They can spike above that. But what we're building is a stack that's going to be able to support well over one giga gas. So we're targeting two orders of magnitude more bandwidth than we currently support today.

Conor Svensson: And the way in which you're accomplishing that, there's this idea of this parallelized EVDo you want to talk a little bit about how that factors in and enables you to in effect execute on this vision?

Sam: Yeah, absolutely. So parallel EVM, it's been a narrative that's been around for a little while. And I think why we haven't seen it flourish in production is because it is actually really hard to get right. So parallel EVM,  the high level idea is that rather than executing transactions sequentially, so essentially say you've got three ERC 20 transfers. Usually in an execution client such as Ref or Geth or the execution clients that we use today, they will just have a single thread that executes those transactions. That works out what the balance updates are. What you have to change to this state to update that transfer and then it will move on to the next one. So it's kind of like a single train that's just running along and each of the carriages is another transaction. What parallelism enables is that we can actually execute those transactions across multiple cores within the same cpu. So say you have a really grunty cpu that might have 32 cores running on an AWS instance. You can then execute transactions across all those 32 cores. So this is quite valuable for Ethereum blocks, but far, far more valuable for very big blocks. so with ethereum you're not pushing through hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, or sorry, tens of thousands. Whereas with where we're going with Rise and where the chains will eventually get to, there's going to be many, many, many transactions. So being able to execute across 32 cores is really important. One area that makes this particularly challenging is because when there are dependencies between the transactions, you still have to execute them sequentially at some point. So what we do at Rise is a bunch of fancy algorithms, essentially that the transactions leading up, we essentially build a dependency graph so we know where those dependencies are going to be. And then on the output during the execution we do some fancy stuff called lazy, lazy updates which allow us to parallel, to execute particular transactions in parallel, like ERC 20s. Might be digging into the weeds a little bit too much there though, Conor, but it's vital for us to be able to use more cores of the cpu. We're going to hit a limit if we try and scale vertically and the systems just get far too expensive. So we have to be able to solve this parallelism problem.

Conor Svensson: And as you say, it does come with a lot of challenges. But I guess one of the burning questions associated with this and especially if we reference say, Solana, which many people talk about in terms of its high performance, albeit the TPS narrative is very strong there, people criticize the centralization of it. So how does Rise plan to avoid falling into that sort of centralization trap, so to speak, with respect to the approach it takes.

Sam: Yeah, so there is definitely a trade off here. And that no matter how. I'll take a step back. So there's options here. One is you take this trade off, we increase the hardware requirements of the systems, which then lead to centralizing effects or you solve key problems, essentially get win win, improvements on the hardware or improvements on the software. The latter is very hard to do. However, there are things that we can do to make that happen. So parallel EVM is an option that enables that. And some of the work we're doing with state access and the DP does lead in that direction to some degree. But yeah, ultimately we are going to have a more centralizing effect than EthereuEthereum's obviously tens of thousands of validators. We're not going to have the same infrastructure at layer two. So the benefit is that we can lean on Ethereum's decentralization. So there's two things here. We get the benefit of having Ethereum's decentralization with the secret, by deploying within EthereuBut we also can increase the hardware requirements of our cpu. Where we're looking right now is where? Somewhere between Ethereum and Solana, but far closer to Solana. Sorry, far closer to Ethereum, because we don't want the form operators to need to run very expensive hardware. But yeah, I think ultimately it's unavoidable and we're being pragmatic. We want to be the broadband moment for EthereuSo we're willing to accept some more centralization factors than the base layer and I think that's important. It's really leaning into the Ethereum accelerationism mindset.

Conor Svensson: And certainly, by positioning yourself and planning to be an ethereum layer 2, as well, it talks to the fact you believe in the underlying decentralization that Ethereum itself gives you. One of the other things that you mentioned there, as well, is that you plan to use based roll ups as well. I think it's helpful for people maybe to talk a little bit about those too because I'm sure a number of people have heard of theBut there are some nuances and differences in terms of what they are and how they work. But we're likely to see more and more of them emerging in the coming months and years.

Sam: Yeah, absolutely. I think I'm pretty excited about the basic ecosysteIn my opinion it's the most exciting emerging ecosystem in Ethereum today. But there are a lot of misconceptions about it and it's very early. A lot of people don't know what base roll ups are. I had a VC the other day who was very confused when I mentioned based roll ups and they thought that meant that we're deploying a layer three on base. So yeah, it's an emerging space. The high level is that.

Conor Svensson: Take a step back.

Sam: So when you're targeting decentralization for a layer two, you've got a few options. You can build a federation, essentially where you have whitelisted participants that can provide the consensus layer for your sequencing. Or you can build out another network and that network would have validators and those validators would be responsible for sequencing your stack. They're kind of the two leading options. This is essentially what Espresso Astoria are doing in the federation model, as I understand is where Arbitrum is headed. But there's another option and that's where you actually leverage ethereum validators to sequence your transactions. That's in simple terms, it gets a bit more complex. You're not actually requiring validators to sequence your transactions. They have the permission to delegate who will sequence your transactions. So the idea is that because we have a look ahead, period, in the ethereum consensus layer, we can see what validators will be responsible for producing blocks in a future epoch. So we have this look ahead. We can say one particular validator in that epoch will have permission to sequence all layer two transactions within the base ecosysteAnd so the benefit of this is that you end up having a network that looks very much like the PBS model where you have a proposal builder separation. It's sort of like a PBS model of proposer based sequence of separation, where you have entities similar to builders today that can sequence your transactions and it can be done in a trustless manner. and one really cool thing about this is that the value that you would have offloaded to building your own network because decentralizing ultimately will cost at some point that value is being directed back to ethereuAnd I think that's quite valuable. And it's not just for this hand wavy ethereum alignment concept. I think it's valuable because you can partner with the EF, and you can work with various people in an incredibly neutral manner by contributing to the same network. So yeah, that's really the kind of fairly technical look at base sequencing. But why we really like it is because it offers an incredibly neutral approach to sequencing. So say for us, we needed to decide how we were going to decentralize our sequencing. We think censorship, resistance and liveliness is ultimately vital for the longevity of Rise. So our options were that we go down, build our own consensus layer, for instance our own sequencing layer or we deploy in say Arbitrum or Optimism, or alternatively we go with Espresso or Astoria and each of those have their pros and cons. Essentially you have to pick a winner, if you can even support that stack. We decided we didn't want to take any of those approaches. and base sequencing looked really promising because it's credibly neutral. That means that if we're going to fall down this decision tree, others are likely going to go down the same decision tree and land on base sequencing. And that makes me really bullish about that being a really strong ecosysteAnd I guess the point that I'm trying to get to here is that right now there's a few strong ecosystems and I think base sequencing is set up to be the strongest ecosystem, the winning ecosystem in Ethereum.

Conor Svensson: And certainly even as you say, it is still very much emerging, but the potential and the interest in it is very significant. Do you envisage, and perhaps it's too early to tell because there are a number of different teams working on this technology. But do you envisage at this point that Rise will actually be creating their own based roll up infrastructure or you'll be working with, partnering with one of the teams that are building add an infrastructure there. Is it simply far too early to tell with this sort of question?

Sam: Yeah, look, it's a really, really good question. I have a vision of what the based ecosystem looks like in the future and I see a space where the infrastructure or the cables that connect the different roll ups is completely open, incredibly neutral, and that's where I'm trying to guide the discussions. So there are teams working in the base sequencing infrastructure space that do agree with this, that's where things should go. So essentially working with them to try and make that happen. However, if we need to build out particular components of that stack, we will do that. We'll invest the resources to make that happen. But also if a team is building something that looks like that, that is a credible, neutral approach to deploying based sequencing and there's not a rent seeker in the stack anywhere, then absolutely we'll use theSo yeah, there are some promising teams working on this, like Spire and Lubin, and a few others working on stacks like this, that are really promising. But you're right, you're dead right. It's super, super early. So one thing to just take note of for our approach is that we're actually going to be launching initially with a centralized sequencer and then shifting towards base sequencing because we want to get to market. We want users to start benefiting from the tech we've built. And base sequencing is just going to take a little bit longer than the performance stack that we're building.

Conor Svensson: And then no doubt with the parallelization as well that to enable the Giga gas, you need to be able to prove out that part of the network as well.

Sam: Yeah, absolutely. We don't want the sequencing stack to become a bottleneck on performance.

Conor Svensson: So one of the other things that you speak about is this idea of web two latency in terms of sub ten milliseconds. Now there's a lot that's obviously been put out over the years in terms of user responsiveness. And this is like a sweet spot for people to not really notice the lag times associated with apps right now. When you're using web three, there's obviously significant lag times because of how long it takes for transactions to actually get put into blocks, although arguably on some of the layer twos it is getting more seamless. But with respect to your goals for Rise in this respect, do you want to just talk a little bit more about that? Because obviously this idea of being able to bring more web two users onto web three is something that a lot of teams talk about. So these sorts of numbers you're quoting here are quite attractive in that respect.

Sam: Yeah, absolutely. I think latency is super important. I think it's going to be very interesting to see what it unlocks. So when we say sub ten millisecond latency, what we're talking about there is the time from when a transaction hits our sequencer and it takes our sequencer to process that and then send it out. There's still an additional latency of how long it takes to get from the user's computer from their browser to our server, or the MeV bots instance in our server, our sequencer. And when we're decentralized, those sequences will be all around the world as well, so it won't be as predictable. So if say I'm in Australia right now and I'm hitting an endpoint in the US that's going to probably have a 300 millisecond loopback and we'll have a ten millisecond component of that sort of 310 millisecond. So we're really getting to the point where the amount of latency the chain actually attributes to the full UX is becoming quite negligible. Then it's really just the limitation of transcending information across the globe. So then the question is what applications do we unlock? Going from a world where you have say 1.5 seconds. So 100- 1500 milliseconds latency down to like 100 to 200 milliseconds full loop for a user, and at the 100 millisecond order of latency that's when you can start having interactive experiences where you could say play pong with your keyboard and it'd feel a little bit laggy, but it's actually not too bad. Like a lot of people play video games with 100 millisecond ping. So I think that's going to be very exciting. The kind of applications that unlock make things feel very, very smooth. Applications say using NFC chips for payments, as people have tried many many times in the past, will feel like they do with web two, that it's simply a tap, you get a confirmation you're good to go. Often it could even be faster. So yeah, I'm pretty excited about that. I think it's going to improve the UX. I don't think it's going to be the hinge pin that is on boards. Web two, though, I think that's the tackle. That challenge is going to be more about the scale that we support, but also the distribution of getting to web twos and web two users and building the apps that attract them.

Conor Svensson: Yeah, this is certainly challenging to understand what is going to be that sort of real inflection point that brings these many, many non web three users onto these platforms. With respect to though, the types of DApps that you are trying to bring onto the network, especially for when you launch, are there specific segments or categories that you're really focusing on here? I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on that front.

Sam: Yeah, we don't want to constrain who we welcome on Rise. It's very much going to be an open network for anyone deploying. We're going to support any team that wants to build on Rise. But I do have some particular verticals that we're pretty excited about and some that we're going to be paying attention to and supporting quite a bit. I think DeFi, I come from a DeFi background. A lot of the team come from the app domain and DeFi background. so we're very bullish on the future of DeFi. It's had essentially a two year lull, but it's like Aave has done well recently. I think it's starting to catch a bit of a bid and I do think it's going to be very, very strong next cycle and we're going to unlock some interesting use cases there. It's one of the only pmfs we've really seen in crypto, so we're going to be supporting DeFi. There will be the Defi applications, you know, and love, like lending platforms and DEXs aggregators, that kind of thing. We've got lined up quite a few projects that are going to be building on Rise. But where I get really excited is applications that need a high performance. One in particular is central limit order books on chain. So what I mean by central limit order books is today on chain, most of the volume goes towards AMMs automaker, automated market makers like Uniswap, where the market making is passive. You essentially deploy your liquidity and you wait for the market to move and traders will trade across your liquidity. Central and order books are an actively managed market making infrastructure. So market makers will essentially open and close hundreds of orders and litter orders throughout the order book, which is essentially what happens on, which is exactly what happens in centralized exchanges today. So in finance, perps or spot have centrally order book based exchanges. I think that's going to be the last unlock that really allows on chain trading to soak up a lot of the volume that's currently off chain. So today off chain volume sits at almost, ten times the amount of volume that we see on chain that fluctuates day to day, can be as low as five times some days, but ultimately, yeah, there's ten times as much volume that we can access that's currently off chain and bringing that on chain. And I think having very, very high performance, essentially not books, is going to be the key unlock because ultimately we can provide a better user experience. We can onboard users with web two, like wallets, there's no KYC, and then we can offer the same high quality liquidity through essentially mid order book once we have the performance for it. So yeah, I quietly think there's a non-zero chance that on chain volume is going to flip off chain volume in 2025 and I'm very confident it'll happen by at least 2026.

Conor Svensson: So on that specific point, a mental model for people with that, it's effectively having the kind of Binance or Coinbase or Kraken type trading experience, but it's happening on chain. So therefore when it comes, the actual transactions and the settlement can happen directly with someone's wallets, they're not having to withdraw funds from like Binance or whatever else to their own wallet following the trades to get at them.

Sam: That's exactly right, yeah. We can build a better UX for trading on chain and it can be open and permissionless. The amount of money that's going towards exchanges today just for listing fees alone is something that's going to get disrupted quite a bit by building the same product, but better, on chain.

Conor Svensson: Certainly when we can use these familiar sorts of interfaces and experiences as well, that's generally better for everyone and adoption overall.

Sam: Absolutely. And I don't think I answered the question directly, though. I realized that. So centrally, model books is one application we're really excited about. Some others and essentially there's two categories here. There's one-  applications that are going to need more performance to scale. And I think DeFi falls under this category. SocialFi does. There's a lot of social apps that can survive in the current infrastructure, but if they scale or they catch a serious bid or get attention, they're just not going to be able to be supported in the current infrastructure. and then web three gaming. There's a lot of bets going into web three gaming that have taken years to build. And if any of them hit the kind of traction that we anticipate they can, they're very quickly going to hit an infrastructure probleSo I think that the need for very high performance chains is going to be very, very obvious as soon as any of these web three games actually start getting some serious retail adoption.

Conor Svensson: So that will no doubt be like a catalyst in the same way that we've seen a lot of people move from like ethereum to the layer twos to perform whatever on chain activity it is. We might actually have a similar sort of exodus down the line to these more high performance chains. We've got a few minutes left, but I think it'd be great to just talk a little bit more about the roadmap in terms of where we are. You mentioned at the start, it was a few months ago that you raised your seed. No doubt you're very busy building at the moment, but just, unpack for the audience, what the current plans are. That'd be great.

Sam: Yeah, awesome. So we have an internal testnet that's live at the moment. we were just doing some, we're doing some testing on that. We're doing over 100 million transactions per day on that just to really, I guess ensure that we have the stability we need and we're going to increase that. So I'm hoping to see tens of millions of transactions per day in our internal test net before it goes. So that's, that's on the tech side. We hope to have a public testnet in the coming months. I won't, I won't put a date on it because I'm an engineer and I know we can't hit deadlines. so that's coming. And then for mainnet, it'll be early next year, is what we're targeting. Early to mid next year. As for, right now we kind of spun up the community about eight weeks ago, we've been having a lot of fun in discord. Somehow this rice meme is caught a bit. You'll see a few rice emojis in the chat. So shout out to Dengue and Slam, some great folks from the community. But yeah, so right now, we're focusing on building, focusing on the community. we're going to be announcing an ambassador programme in the coming weeks, which I'm pretty excited about, and also just working on onboarding builders. So we're likely to have a builders programme that looks very much like an incubator that we'll be announcing in the coming, hopefully weeks, maybe next month. But yeah, that's. That's really what we're focusing on at the moment.

Conor Svensson: I love seeing the rice meme. Now is that, is that a typo there? But like lots of people are giving the rice? right. Rice is good, it seems. Yeah.

Sam: People like rice.

Conor Svensson: Okay, well, I think we're basically at time now, but I think it's a great time to wrap up. Sam, it's been awesome to have a chat and just learn more about the Rise network. It's really exciting to hear about the things that are coming and look forward to following from the sidelines. And you mentioned discord. And of course you are no doubt active on X. Are there any other channels people should check out from the community side or is that where the best place for them to hang out?

Sam: It's mostly discord and X. We will likely spin off a Telegram community. We've got a chat there, but we essentially need some mods to help support us there. But yeah, Telegram, discord and Twitter. But thanks a lot, Conor. It was a pleasure having a chat. Thanks for asking some questions and letting me ramble on for a little bit.

Conor Svensson: So awesome to hear it. Okay, speak soon. Cheers.

Sam: Thanks a lot.