Alpha Leak | The Bull Case for Modular Blockchains

Bangless Nation, welcome to this episode of Alpha Leak, where we are talking about Fuel Network with John Adler. Fuel Network is a layer two on Ethereum, but it's a different kind of layer two. And that's really what I wanted to explore here today. What about fuel is so different? Why is it built in the way that it is? And why does John Adler believe that he is skating to where the puck is going, where every other layer two is focused a little bit too much on the short term? In this episode, you'll learn about why fuel is built in the way that it's built, how it's different from the Ethereum virtual machine, and why the fuel VM, the fuel virtual machine, is new and improved and shiny and super fast and super executable, and is going to be, according to John, the logical conclusion of a layer two. You'll also learn a little bit about the inner workings of fuel beyond the fuel VM, the other parts of the fuel network that make it tick. And overall, just get John's philosophy onto the layer two space. Fuel is a sponsor of the Bankless Podcast, but that is not why we are making this episode. We are making this episode so we can dive all the way down into the details that make fuel tick so we can learn more about it. So without further ado, we'll get into this conversation with John Adler of Fuel, right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that help you go bankless. Welcome, Bankless Nation, to this edition of Alpha League, where we are talking to John Adler about Fuel Network. John, welcome to the show.

Hey David, thanks for having me.

John, you want to introduce yourself a little bit and provide some background on how you got into crypto and and we'll lead into that story all the way through to where we are now with Fuel Network.

Yeah, sure. So currently I am uh I guess most recently, and all and also currently, uh I'm one of the co-founders of Fuel Labs and also Celestia Labs,

which are building two separate components of a modular blockchain stack, uh, which we'll dive into a bit later.

How I got into blockchain, uh

this is a story that I I feel like I tell this every podcast, but basically

my uh old grad school advisor when I was in grad school at UFT was really into blockchain.

Uh he was involved in the early days of Ethereum and and so on. Uh so he's he's been around there for a while.

Uh one thing he likes to show his students is this uh selfie he took with uh Mt. Gox sign guy in Japan.

If you remember those like this guy with the sign like giving back our bit give us back our bitcoins or whatever in in Japan when Mt. Gox happened, and then he has a selfie with that guy.

So he's been around for a while, he kind of introduced the students to blockchain, and then since then, you know,

that's kind of where it got exposure.

Uh after that, uh I guess I went to Consensus to do uh general layer two scalability research, so things like channels, uh plasma, and so on.

That's also where I created the optimistic roll-up design paradigm, or I guess. At the time it was called minimal viable merge consensus because it was intended to be

minimally viable and not the endgame.

Since then, I think we've come up with slightly better constructions such as sovereign roll ups and so on.

Uh but yeah, and then after that I left Consensus to start Fuel Labs and Celeste Labs.

That's kind of the TLDR of my journey.

So you uh created the you said you created the optimistic roll up design structure. Does that mean you created what we now know as optimistic roll-ups? Is that is that what you said?

Yeah, I guess you could say that. Uh there was a bunch of competing and close design architectures floating around at the time, which is which should surprise no one, right? Everyone was kind of in a hodgepodge of

various

ideas with different parameters in terms of data availability, how to do validity, and so on. But I was kind of the first person to at least publicly publish the exact construction that we now know as optimistic rollups, uh, that specifically has certain properties, such as uh it uses fraud proofs for the validity.

Permissionless block production to ensure state liveness

and data availability on the main chain.

So combining these stability properties is something that other people hadn't written about before, which is kind of is kind of odd because if you think about it, it's not exactly a complicated construction, but it's one of those things where it's like it's obvious in retrospect.

Hmm.

But like at the time, people weren't really thinking about uh these kind of constructions.

I think it's because at the time the prevailing narrative was plasma and people

didn't.

Like the idea of posting all the data on chain because they thought it was

like it was a regression compared to the quote unquote infinite scalability of plasmas.

So because of that, people weren't too interested in that particular avenue of research.

Okay, so uh you've been a you started uh as a scalability researcher at Consensus. You said you worked in in state channels, plasma, and then ultimately became uh optimistic rollups, which which means you've seen the full trajectory of Ethereum scaling research since day one. Uh since like we started with like, oh, we're gonna scale Ethereum with state channels, not realizing that that uh is limited um to where we are now with optimistic roll-ups, but but you've taken optimistic roll-ups uh in a slightly different direction than I would say is like the status quo, where the status quo were something like Arbitrum or Optimism, where they are trying to be EVM equivalent. You're gone off in a in a new direction. Can you talk about that philosophy or design choice with fuel uh and how it's uh perhaps different than the optimistic roll ups than most people are familiar with?

Sure. So

first of all, it might be good to kind of give an intro to what Fuel is. The TLDR is that it's the fastest modular execution layer.

Okay.

Fastest because it supports transaction throughputs.

Uh transaction throughput

along you know proportional to the cost to run a full node

uh that is better than any other modular execution layer out there.

Uh and modular execution layer because it's something that's slightly more than just a roll up.

Uh so we could perhaps talk about the

modular execution layer part first,

Sure.

and then go to the fastest part.

Because the fastest part has like it's one word, but it has like a million different con as to why it's like that.

Right.

Uh so the modular execution layer, for those of you who

Uh for those of you who aren't familiar with rollups, uh should I maybe give like a one-minute summary of a rollup?

Yeah, love it.

Okay, so a rollup is a blockchain like any other blockchain. Uh and it's attached, it's attached to some data layer.

Uh and then

A data layer is like a an a layer a layer one, like Ethereum or something else.

yes, it could be Ethereum, it could be Bitcoin Cash if you're in 2017 and you're Vitalic. Uh, it could be Celestia,

it could be eigenlayer if you want. It could be it could be

it.

You could actually have a blockchain that uh is its own data layer, kind of like Ethereum is today or like Solana is.

Right, it's effectively its own data layer.

And we would call that kind of a monolithic.