Autonomous Worlds | Lattice’s Justin Glibert

what's the final stage of any civilization right it's probably to create a universe it's like the final thing you do you know you're like okay we've explored the universe we've conquered the Stars we can use all the energy so now the final thing we'll do is we'll create a universe you know and and we'll let that Universe do whatever it wants and I think the thing that's interesting with all of this cryptography stuff distributed system and all of that is we're going towards this idea of like Hey we're going to be able to create a universe that is real you know it's like truly objective but it's interesting because it goes toward

that agenda of like the final stage of civilization which is let's let's create a universe that goes beyond us welcome to bank list where we explore the frontier of Internet money and internet finance and today on Bank list we are exploring the frontier of onchain universes on ethereum which is actually a real Frontier space is the final frontier of physics and matter but autonomous worlds are the new frontier of digital onchain universes being pioneered by the lattice team of which

Justin is a co-founder of and he is on the show today you might have heard of fully on trained games or autonomous worlds bankless Nation I think this Frontier of crypto is so big and expansive that when it's finally ready for production it will represent the next wave of crypto development in my opinion this is not just something that ethereum is good at but it's actually ethereum's main story arc it's actual main quest line for what ethereum is bringing to the world ethereum is not just just a financial computer but it's

a state route for an infinite number of universes all with their own physics objects players agents and state and like our universe they still continue on with or without our presence dare I say the actual real metaverse Justin from Lattis is going to walk us through the evolution of autonomous worlds starting with their accidental Discovery with this experimental game that we all played in ethereum called Dark Forest back in 2020 to where we are today with lad's software package for building

autonomous worlds and the current set of fully onchain games that are available to play right now to where this is going which is an infinite landscape of Internet universes onchain economies and Endless Possibilities on this episode of bankless bankless Na you are going to get a taste of where the internet has always been pointing towards it just took us a while to get here so let's go ahead and get right into the episode with Justin from Lattis but first a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors bankless Nation I'm happy to introduce to you Justin glibert

who is the co-founder of Lis Justin welcome to the show hey David thanks for having me I think uh lattice and what you guys are doing over there is um probably got a pretty strong cult following of enthusiasts but might not be um pretty familiar with the general bankless uh audience so can you just at a high level explain what you guys are doing over at Lis like what is your guys's scope yeah the scope is to make onchain games real so I feel like uh our origin stems all the way back to good old Dark Forest if

people here remember that was that was a few years ago I worked on it very briefly should not get any credit for it I was not there at the beginning but I got my interest spiked I stayed with the people who were working on it in Mexico and the thing that really blew my mind immediately is like huh why are we not making more things like this you know like we have this this cool multiplayer open computer and you can kind of do whatever you want on it but we just kind of stop short most of the time you know I don't know if you remember early etherum ideas like oh there will be a full node in your lock in your house and

you'll be able to like rent it by the second like that was wild times there were a lot of ideas like this now we're kind of away from that but I think one thing that remain true is that um as long as people didn't take the post financialization idea seriously so the idea of like Hey will do more than Finance on this world on this world computer um they were just not build the ideas and the tools for it so where we got started is it was just a hacker group me and a bunch of other people trying to build this game was first called ziki dungeon and then called

Amber and the idea was like hey let's just build something kind of like Dark Forest you know a different type of game also using zero knowledge proof we didn't realize at that time that the Z proof are not the important part the important part is that you have this kind of like open open game open environment that runs entirely on on on ethereum so we started from hack group and then we kind of grew I think people really started to like get a sense of what we were doing about a year and a half ago when we did op craft which was like a fully onchain Minecraft clone um it's about the same time as when

optimism kind of like branded the op stack you know we were basically the first group that forked their new update Bedrock to make our own chain and then we kind of like met each other in person in New York and they were like wait a minute that's a that's pretty interesting so we kind of like did op craft they were like well you know there this op stack thing we kind of like announced it together and essentially as we we kept going on that Journey there are two very big parallel path we went on one is like let's make the technology real so we first build

games and then we were like okay these games are really hard to build because the tooling is not there so we build this thing called mod it's an open source framework for making onent games many many many games today use it from one person team to kind of like big studios and the other path we took was let's legitimize the idea let's like talk about it with um with an open mind right so like one thing we keep saying when we were doing these small meetups is don't worry about the gas don't worry about making money and it was like always like where we starting from you know just let's just try to make

interesting things um there was an essay that got published uh I think two summers ago called autonomous worlds that came from like our our little our little group that was a that kind of like coined um a term for people to Rally around we organized a bunch of conference at Defcon twice so yeah we took these two path kind of got together um and now it's really exciting because looking back two years there's a pretty interesting ecosystem of people you know like big and small building things

seriously and I think we're finally reached the stage where there's enough people believing that it can be real that if we probably like all disappear tomorrow like all of lisy will continue so that's the one thing I'm like really proud about is the bus factor of onchain games went up by quite a bit so sorry that was not as short as an introduction as I would have liked it to be but we traced it back a little bit Yeah I think that gives it listeners a snapshot of kind of the tone or the vibe of where we're going here I think there's two potential um versions of what this conversation could be and there's one

that I very much want it to be and one one potential version is we could just explain what build games you guys are building at latus why the games are different uh why they're unique and what properties that they have um but I think there's a a higher more elev ated version of this conversation that I want to get to which is explaining the the the rabbit hole that is autonomous worlds like getting people pilled on autonomous worlds which I think is an idea that is beyond lattice I think if we rerolled the idea of like ethereum you would see ethereum be born and then

you would see people arrive at like oh you can build these things called autonomous worlds and that would be rediscovered in any every single resimulation of humanity discovering ethereum and so I want to like kind of actually step back and and approach this conversation from first principles you kind of alluded to this a little bit in the introduction um but like I think the first time I ever heard you pitch this uh you were talking about like well you know we invented Bitcoin and we and Bitcoin became internet gold so that was like a monetary Evolution ethereum was invented and became an internet

Financial system and so now that's a financial Evolution uh but I think you also have a different Vision Beyond just like the financial side of what ethereum really does like Chris Dixon has popularized crypto as like you're adding own onto read write own onto the internet um but I I think you have an different take about like what really what are the properties of ethereum and what that really enables and maybe you can we can start this conversation there with what is that alternative Viewpoint about the affordances of ethereum and what it can bring and bring to the world yeah um so I think the challenge

here is not to go too philosophical too quickly because that's one thing I'm the yeah I'm sadly too good at this so feel free to interrupt and bring me back to Earth whenever that kicks in but so I would say one way to think about this whole thing is that um we're adding a new dimension to digital things digital objects basically it's like there's we've been like since we we got computers going actually since

we since we have math you know like with math we're able to kind of like create these objects that exist in our head and my math objects are the same same as yours they can actually like interoperate with each other but we can't touch them but they still have rules right like I can write a paper and you can then understand it and we don't even have to talk with each other that's still like kind of like a mind-blowing things about math is that math spans a whole universe of stuff the problem with math though is that it's not really multiplayer yet right like you can't really know like what what kind of like math equations people have in their head

or all of that it's still on it's still really in between single player and multiplayer even if it's like fully kind of like outside our Physical Realm and so the thing that's interesting with computers is as soon as we started networking them we we kind of like start being able to to have these like entirely non-physical realities that are not just subjective anymore you know like things like money like from capitalism like religion nation states and all of that in the book sapiens the kind of like the author refers to them as um inter subjective realities so

they're real they're realities but they're still kind of subjective because I mean you and I can love Humanity in very different way it's still pretty subjective even if it's kind of like a shared context between the two of us and the thing with computer is we can kind of start going towards this idea of like inter objective realities so we have these realities that are not physical but they're way more objective now like you and I can log in into World of Warcraft and it's like a very tangible reality like there is no arguing around like did we did we kill this like level 50 boss or not it just we either did or

we didn't right and not just that there's actually like a geometry to the space like there's coordinates in the game there's structures there's visual structures right maybe there's not matter there but it's just close enough to the point where like that does feel like a real space and the thing that's interesting is I would say it might be closing off or maybe it's not like can we get to digital matter you know when people talk about digital matter or all of that stuff they always think about the input output it's like how does our body experience it so it's like oh let's

put like regd VR headsets or let's smell the thing you would smell in a reality but actually it seems that the the input output of the reality is one way we perceive it as more real but another thing is like does it have consequences right does does the these interest objective realities have consequences and one thing you see with with like video games that you see as well with crypto even the financial version is we now have these completely digital system they have very serious consequences

right uh in crypto it's a lot of like well get rich poor get hacked you know and in video games go to jail you know that's like the really really bad outcome but in video games like if you start investing enough time and also it's a relationship with other people you know it's not just a single player experience it's like me and my friends or my foes have like spent a long time getting to this point these realities have consequences right on your mood on what you spend your time on um and the thing that's interesting is it seems that crypto or like blockchains in

general enables us to make these inter objective realities more and more objective to a stage where we could have um a world and it doesn't have to look like this world you know doesn't have it doesn't need XYZ coordinate I would say actually I sometimes say that ethereum is like still the most crazy MMO out there but it's really an MMO you know you have like all of classes that like participate in this computer and they all have like very different game they're playing and this network kind of like defines the rule of this reality

but it's still kind of like still a little bit too loose it's very much like oh programmers can do whatever they want the only real physics is that there's this currency and so approaching it from that perspective it seems that these these these kind of like crypto system um go towards the possibility of making these digital realities like more and more real to a point where in the autonomous worlds essay um they're described as like they could be like Mars like you and I know that Mars is real you know there is like a curiosity R there but how often do you

see Mars no you don't see it like unless you have special instruments but we all kind of agree it's real because when you use the instruments you see the same thing the same way like I don't run a node an ethereum node maybe you do I don't know how often you check it but like the whole ecosystem like believes these things are real because if we use the same instruments we kind of get to the same result right um Mars doesn't care if you don't like it it's going to keep executing its role you know like the constant of gravity you know like Curiosity Rover even if NASA really doesn't want it to stop like the little

nuclear battery inside is going to stop working at some point and it's the equivalent here like we can take these digital realities and make them more and more objective to a point we're like okay actually there's no one that can stop them there's no one that can break the rules and now it's time to get real you know because the consequences are very serious um with crypto with Bitcoin we saw it that the financial consequences are serious but I think we we can extend this seriousness to whatever rues set we want it doesn't have to just be money and I think that was the thing that we got to which is oh

okay fundamentally these are tools to make realities way more objective over time and I mean it was pretty ballsy to have money as your first use case it was like okay out of all of the things we could make more real which one should we start with it's like let's start with like one of the most important thing in like this this kind of like reality we live in which is capitalism but you can very much apply this to anything so I'd say we we can start with that let me know like if there's something you would like to go deeper into yeah right and really just to remind listeners about um uh the the conversation thus far is

we're talking about different ways to perceive ethereum right which is typically perceived as like a revolution in money and finance and I think what you are offering is like well there's a different way to perceive ethereum is like there there's a universe out there called the universe of ethereum uh and it has has state in the same way that like the real world has State and there are objects in ethereum just like there are objects in the real world uh and and we're starting to like flesh out this like structure of this world uh but just it's very like right now primitive it's

just like a bunch of financial apps and financial tokens and financial use cases and then now maybe we're starting to get into like some social stuff uh but I think you have a very clear like direction of where this goes I want to actually go just to really make this really clear for listeners um Lis maybe is um accidentally uh sometimes called like a gaming company like a fully on trained gaming company maybe you guys are um but like maybe we can actually kind of like narrow the scope of the conversation talk about l the gaming company right uh just from that perspective um so like you you talked

about this game Dark Forest uh I don't I'm going to guess that most listeners actually not familiar with dark Forest um so maybe you can talk about like lce as the gaming company and then we'll kind of expand back into like the more higher level stuff after that yeah sure so the tldd on Dark Forest is um so many people were involved in Dark Forest originally the original founder of Dark Forest is goop sheep who kind of like put the first version together got the people to work on it he wrote an essay called the strongest crypto gaming

thesis which really got like onchain games going at that time people didn't really know why nonchain games would be like a good idea but he he really like kind of put it down in very clear terms or at least the first version of these terms and what Dark Forest was is there were games on ethereum before right I don't know maybe you remember fomo 3D we can also explain what fomo 3D was F 3D was I've referenced fomo 3D number times on the podcast it's basically well it's also it's a money game right it's a a p game it's a specifically a specific

economic game but it is meant to be a game exactly it is meant to be a game and there are rules and there are no hacks like the person that won respected the rules everybody was like well you cheated but no these were the rules of the game and and you won right um so dark first was probably not the first game but it was the first game that was like okay let's just treat the ethereum as a computer not as a programmable bank and the idea was like okay um we have we want to be able to make a game where um

the universe which could just be kind of like a map you know it's like a 2day map imagine Google Maps you know and the universe is so simplified that it's just points of interest so imagine there's you there's your house my house there's the bakery and all these three things exist I cannot be between my house and your house there's only three places where things can be and we can send kind of like people and energy between these places so that's really the premise of the game there's a bunch of points of interest on the map and here's a bunch of interesting things first the map is infinite it's procedurally generated so it's like in Minecraft you know you can

kind of keep expanding the map it respects some rules but the one thing that is interesting is you don't know what the map looks like when you start playing the game and that might be a bit strange to people that know a little bit how blockchains work because the point is everything is kind of like supposed to be public right and now you know people talk about more about cryptography your own proofs and all that but at the time it was was very nich and one of the key innovation of dark first was to say the map is the same for everybody but when you start playing the game you don't know what the map is and the only way to explore the map is to do proof of work kind of like

Bitcoin you know you have to spend computational resource to remove the fog of War you can either do it around you because that's useful you know if I start in this universe I kind of want to know what's around me because yeah so so listeners think like a Starcraft or like a game where like you you start out but like the map is unknown to you cuz you literally haven't explored it yet so you in your like local exactly exactly and it's it's a little bit like Solaris or something like they're just planets in space and you start on a tiny planet basically um and you can either explore around you using your computational

power to explor around you or you can explore wherever you want but the thing is if you start exploring really far away you not you don't even know if there are people there you're just kind of like guessing and the the key Innovation is that you were able to use Zer knowledge proof to essentially prove to the game which was a smart contract that the move you're making is valid that is hey I'm moving between my planet and another planet and it's not that far without revealing where the planets are so the really mental experience you would have is you could go on a block Explorer or like write a tool and you

could see that there's all this activity in the universe and you can see the strength of the planet and the forces being moved so you could see like this like player just moved 10 million forces from that planet to that planet but you have no idea where it is so the reason it was called dark it's called Dark FR is because it's based on the second book of the three body problem Trilogy I mean is not way more have I literally have it right here cuz I use it to stabilize my my my my monitor show you on camera yeah exactly that that's new book and and don't want to spoil the book because I guess now many many people are going to

want to know the story given it's on Netflix but one key thing in dark FR is the idea that the universe is dark and you don't know what's going on there right so that was the feeling that was trying to be created you don't know what's going on in the universe you can move between these planets the fun side effect of this though is because all all the game was written on Smart contract and the reason it was written on Smart contracts the The Legend says is because goop sheep and and Co had never really written anything else you know they were like oh we're just going to use Smart contracts because we we at these ethereum workshops and it seems like the

right thing to do you know let's put it on Smart contracts but the side effect of that was that now people were able to build stuff on top of the game so famously like in Dark Forest um there were no marketplaces there were no alliances there was it was really barebone it was just the rules of the universe you can move you you can increase your energy you can build defenses on your planets and players built everything else you know they forked the client they started adding stuff like oh here's a Marketplace we are adding some smart contracts to the game um my favorite one is people build an autonomous Alliance so there's and

because dark FR still exists today like it's smart contract on NOS this chain used to be X die um the creators can't kill it that's one other thing that is interesting with dark FR is the game can never stop it will run forever and there is still today this this kind of like player in the game game that is not a human player it's a smart contract player and you can kind of like it has a score it has an army Etc it's almost like an autonomous NPC that players have added to the game so you can start like as you start kind of like reading about dark FR or playing it you get to the realization that like huh it's not a bug

that the developers only put the rules of the game and they didn't build anything on top of it it's a feature they made a gift to all of us of the rules of the universe and then they're like good luck go build stuff on top and figure it out and that was really the thing that blew my mind because it was like oh okay we have this inter inter objective reality gup sheepen Co have defined what the physics is what the rules of the universe is but now all of us can interact with it the same way like NASA can send a Rover to Mars but if you and I team up together maybe in

20 years we could be there as well and we don't need permission from anyone and we could kind of kind of stroll around respecting the same rules so that's dark for us that's where it all started can I pause and we we let's like uh do some bullets about like really the impactful points about that story that I want to make sure that listener captured um one is that the state of the uh Dark Forest universe is fully onchain you said it was no servers right the server is ethereum it's a procedurally generated universe and there's different planets and because of the leveraging of

cryptography ZK proofs you as a player of the game you would literally go to like the dark forest website you would be dropped into this universe interacting with this smart contract and you would actually only know the state just like how like when you are born you are only aware of your local environments like you don't know what's on the other side of the earth uh so you dropped into this universe and you only know the um the what's around you which is mimics reality uh and so you can start to explore this world uh but you aren't actually disclosing your information to other players because of

the power of zero knowledge cryptography and so this very minimal rule set and this these uh things these properties that mimic real life started to produce this immersion behavior and like you said it's on X um which is a side chain to ethereum So in theory this thing doesn't ever die it's a like no what is ethereum for Unstoppable code what was dark force it was just code on ethereum and so we have this like universe that's created that H mimics some properties of the actual real universe that we inhabit

except it exists full with all of its Logic on chain on ethereum and just perpetuates because it doesn't know not to yeah I think that's that's brilliant and I would say one more thing which is that just like this universe all of us can engineer and do science in it in in in Dark Forest anyone can engineer and do science in Dark Forest you know you can all go and participate in this rule set because the point is the computer is open you know open to anyone to anything AIS and humans alike AIS are not discriminated in Dark Forest they're

first class citizen just like humans MH right okay and so this I think Dark Forest kind really uh open opened up like exploded it was the Big Bang of like autonomous worlds like people are realizing the properties of these things like after the fact that they're created uh and so like where does the story go from here so The Story Goes uh after dark frest nobody really gives a [ __ ] so people really are like wow dark fres is really good and and people like wow man like we we really want more dark fres

rounds but it kind of stopped there you know um and so one thing to know about dark frest is he was a tremendous effort to make dark frest happen right like this was dark frest is at was at the time like a truly insane project I remember the people that were running XY were telling us like hey we we have to spend like a $100,000 a month just in nodes to be able to serve the RPC request to the users because most things out there you know you send like one request to get the price of the pool and then another one to send a transaction when you play Dark fres you're just

you're just like plugged into the blockchain your brain is plugged into the blockchain as you interact with it right so first like from infrastructure perspectives things were not ready second blockchains from a latency perspective have not been optimized for that kind of stuff right so dark FR had to be built in such a way that it was not a pain in the butt to like make a transaction every 12 seconds right third um the amount of tooling you need to make something like there was no tooling for dark fres right so dark fres is this like super crazy complex spaghetti code

app and I remember every single time like we wanted to add a new feature it was like excus CR shingly hard because once again ethereum application the tooling is not there to add things to them to manage a large amount of State usually the state is very minimal people actually try to have the least States possible because you pay for it right whereas here dark FR was kind of like a maxi project it's like let's just have as much State as we want so under an assumption of a complete abundance of block space exactly exactly complete abundance of block space low latency Etc

um so kind of stopped there and when me and and and alvarus the the co-founders of Lis the two of us kind of like ended up um a summer in um with the dark fries Founders and we're like let's try to build another game like this let's just see what it takes it was it was so hard I don't know if you know do you know the game Dungeon Keeper it's like an old kind of like so Dungeon Keeper is an old game from Peter molho but the idea is you're like an evil kind of like dungeon dungeon master and you have to like start digging underground

recruit goblins to kind of like take care of your dungeon and in L you'll either meet some Heroes underground or other people's dungeon and now it's a war you know and you you kind of like grow underground and our idea was let's use the same technology as dark frest to also have this underground world where we start somewhere you don't know what's around you and you have to dig you dig in this tunnel you try to find some gold you expand your resources and at some point you might inevitably dig into someone else's dungeon and that's when all Hills break loose so that was our idea we build it um for like a year

actually it was um build just like it was it was a big project and what I realized after after one year of building is it wasn't fun like this game is not fun it's just like not fun playing and and we looked back was there any way to know like how could we have done this like iterative approach and turns out there was no way to iterate because any change was taking months and months and months to just Implement right so there was really this massive problem it's kind of like computers a long time ago like before Linux before operating systems before libraries before all of that stuff um computers

were batch process systems that were actually mostly used in Banks and in government kind of like reminiscent of early ethereum from from that perspective and and they were batch processing machines that were not interactive you know like like yes the computers the IBM kind of computers back in the days and your MacBook are very similar from a like like from a it's the same system it's just much better from a developer perspective and user perspective and it really felt like that at the time I mean it was getting better it was still pre kind of like rollup scaling and all of that at that time

like we thought we would have to run our own side chain that that that that was where we were at but specifically like the way we talk about it at latus is that ethereum still today actually if you don't take mud into account and we can talk about mud later but you still program ethereum bare metal so bare metal what this means is you have a computer you just write some code and the code just runs on the computer no operating system nothing that means you have to manage your own memory you have to manage your own storage you can't upgrade things you have no databases and all of that and that's really what what what ethereum was like at at that time

right we just had to build this thing bare metal um and so maybe this is a good transition point because after this this Dungeon Keeper game we thought okay what would it look like to build a framework for onchain games it wasn't we were not that sophisticated in our thinking yet but what this led us to over like a year was this realization that like huh why did people build Linux I mean even before that there were other operating system but why are there operating system you know why cons just people write everything bidal Well turns out when you have multiple applications

that need to kind of like need to be added on top of each other they need standards to talk with each other they need to be upgraded you know you have things like databases today if you write a website you don't take the user State and you put it on the dis and you write the code to put on the dis no you use postgress or MySQL or something like that you you let the people with a much longer beard than you take care of storing data and kind of like having it around for the next 10 years so we we thought about it from that like huh okay so the reason why there is no framework for building ethereum application the reason why there is no operating system

for ethereum is because the apps that are on ethereum are so primitive and they're so like kind of like mindful of cost that you don't want an operating system you know like today it's actually glorified for people to go write their code in assembly like you go on Twitter and you go check out the the cool solidity kits they're like I'm just going to write my erc20 in assembly because that's true Chef skiss kind of like ethereum programming and that's for people like me who don't code can you like unpack that take for me cuz I I actually don't understand that so

there's different kind of like levels of abstraction when trying to explain something to computer for it to do it and the lowest level of the computer is Tiny instructions for the CPU that's called assembly right and so you can write this by hand that's what people were doing before we went to the Moon I mean not me I'm not American but I I'll leave it to the Americans as Humanity we as Humanity humanity went to the moon um just with assembly like the whole Ro like Lander and all that was written assembly by Hands by people but so so you're skipping over every single layer of extraction writing it straight to

getting really close to the metal machine Cod machine Cod and the benefits of this at least in the defi context is that your uh contracts are really gas efficient yeah so the idea is a lot of people distrust the solidity compiler being like I'm smarter than the solidity compiler because what the solidity compiler does is you write some code and it turns that into machine code right right but every single errors or whatever exactly and then also it's just like way harder it's just going to take like 100 hours to make the most basic thing in many ways so you have these