Summary of "Deeply Intents - Episode 23: Stop Optimizing Blockchains - Ole Spjeldnæs"
Summary of "Deeply Intents - Episode 23: Stop Optimizing Blockchains - Ole Spjeldnæs"
Key Technological Concepts and Product Features
- Background and Motivation
- Ole Spjeldnæs transitioned from pure mathematics (ETH Zurich) to applied cryptography, particularly zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), attracted by their mathematical beauty and practical potential.
- Initial focus on rollups led Ole to conceive Delta, a novel Layer 1 blockchain architecture designed not as a rollup but as a fundamentally new system.
- Delta Overview
- Delta aims to provide verifiability and shared state without forcing developers to accept the typical blockchain trade-offs (e.g., deterministic code, limited program size, oracle problems).
- It optimizes for the average case rather than the worst-case scenarios (like Bitcoin or Ethereum), focusing on better user experience while maintaining security guarantees for critical aspects (e.g., asset safety).
- The system embraces eventual consistency and partial ordering rather than total ordering, which enables better scalability by removing leader-based bottlenecks common in traditional blockchains.
- Verifiability and Shared State
- Verifiability acts as a digital guardrail akin to air traffic control, reducing friction by ensuring applications behave as promised without requiring trust.
- Shared state enables interoperable economic activity and composability, but Delta takes a pragmatic stance, focusing on domain-specific atomicity rather than global atomic composability.
- The analogy of cross-border payments in West Africa illustrates inefficiencies in current systems lacking shared state, underscoring Delta’s goal to enable neutral, scalable, permissionless economic rails.
- Architecture: Base Layer and Domains
- The base layer is a permissionless validator set that acts as a settlement and data availability layer, verifying proofs submitted by domains.
- Domains are execution environments that can run arbitrarily complex, non-deterministic, event-driven programs with external IO and integration capabilities ("integraability").
- Domains commit to global laws (system-wide constraints like no double-spends, signature verification) and local laws (application-specific guarantees, e.g., order book price constraints).
- Validators verify proofs that domains adhere to these laws without needing to understand domain internals, enabling flexible and scalable execution.
- Integration with Existing Systems
- Domains can connect to existing software stacks, allowing developers to add verifiability and shared state without rewriting their entire systems.
- The concept of controllers (nodes or clusters managing domains) parallels air traffic controllers enforcing shared rules while allowing local autonomy.
- Use Case Example: Encrypted Chat Application
- Delta could verify that messages are encrypted correctly by proving encryption operations via zero-knowledge proofs posted to the base layer.
- Although computationally heavy today, future hardware advancements could make real-time verifiable encryption feasible.
- Consensus and Scalability
- Delta employs leaderless or partial ordering consensus models inspired by academic work (Astro, FastPay, Narwhal), avoiding the bottlenecks of leader-based total ordering.
- This enables validators to scale horizontally by adding workers and handling multiple mempools in parallel.
- The system is designed to be highly parallelizable across domains, bandwidth, and storage, aiming for unbounded scalability sufficient for billions of users.
- Philosophy on Blockchain vs. Verifiable Systems
- Ole emphasizes starting from first principles and focusing on the properties (verifiability, shared state) rather than the blockchain as a fixed concept.
- He critiques the tendency to build blockchain-native applications for ethos alignment rather than actual utility or technical fit (e.g., on-chain gaming).
- Delta is positioned as a new category of verifiable systems distinct from traditional blockchains, optimized for different trade-offs (e.g., no real-time censorship resistance).
- Product and Go-to-Market Strategy
- Delta’s team focuses on problem-driven product development, identifying concrete, pressing problems where their technology applies, rather than broad developer outreach initially.
- They prefer vertical integration by building or partnering on specific domain applications to showcase Delta’s unique capabilities, rather than a pure platform-first approach.
- Balancing long-term vision with short-term customer-driven projects is challenging, especially with limited engineering resources and the need to avoid context switching overload.
- Token and Funding
- Delta will have a token and proof-of-stake consensus, with venture capital funding primarily from crypto-focused investors.
- Despite this, the team aims to explore use cases beyond purely crypto-native applications, including integration with existing enterprise systems.
- Programming Language Preference
- Ole’s favorite programming language
Category
Technology
