Morph, the Consumer Blockchain

GM GM everybody. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell today. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast hosted from the Developer DAO for builders to showcase something they are passionate about or have been building in Web3. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome the co-founder and CEO of Morph, Cecilia Hsueh, as well as DevRel Engineer Abril Zucchi. So they're going to be telling us and showcasing Morph and what it's all about. So Morph, if you didn't know, redefines the Ethereum L2 scaling experience by combining the strengths of optimistic rollups and ZK technology into its rollup. So if you stick around for today's show, you'll learn all about Morph, their approach to being a consumer chain, as well as how you can start building with them. All right, let's get into it.

Hello, hello. Welcome, Abril. Welcome, Cecilia. It is an absolute pleasure to have both of you on. I know it's varying timing for both of you, so appreciate both of you taking the time to come on here today.

Thank you. Thank you. I'm very excited to be here.

Thanks, Narb.

Yeah, likewise. We're all excited to have you on as well. So before we get into the meat of the content you have prepared for us today, perhaps would you like to give a brief introduction about both yourselves?

For sure. Cecilia, or Abril?

Okay. Yeah, cool. So hello everyone. Thank you for having me here. And good morning, good night, good afternoon to everyone. I'm Cecilia. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Morph, the Layer 2 project. So I believe maybe I'm the first one, the first woman CEO of a Layer 2 project you've ever seen. And also someone called me AI-generated CEO. So I think, yeah, I'm here to show how advanced this AI technology is. Yeah. Thanks.

Okay. So it's my turn. So I'm Abril. I'm developer relations at Morph. And also I've been doing some Solidity work before I started to work in crypto in 2020. And I've been really excited about the technology in general because it really helped me. You know, like, I'm from Argentina and so stablecoins and all of this like crypto technology literally saved my financial life. And that's why right now I'm really excited to be building on this technology, on top of this technology. And so, yeah, I'm really excited to be here. Thank you for the invite.

My pleasure. And yes, that's wonderful to hear from both your ends. I guess one other question I have before we get into the meat of the content is Morph's mascot. So it's a koala. What's the history story behind that?

There's no history. Koala is very lazy, is very chilled. Since you know that we are building a blockchain for consumers. So we think that consumers are normally very, you know, lazy because in terms of that, they want everything to be designed pretty well for them. They don't want to have anything complicated. They just want to have the easiest thing, the easiest experience, the most user-friendly experience. So this is exactly what Morph is building. So we want to treat our customers like koala.

Excellent.

I love that koala. I love that koala. I actually never seen one. I think those are in Australia or something, but it's a very nice mascot.

Excellent. Yeah. So I guess in the interest of time, let's get right into the meat of the content. So I believe Cecilia, you were going to share your slides?

Yeah, sure. We can start. So well here you can see our koala mascot, which is very, I think it's every time we talk about Morph, we introduce about this koala whose name is Morphie. So you can see that Morphie really represents the culture of Morph, which is very friendly, very welcoming, very joyful, and also very caring. So this is definitely the culture of Morph's community.

And let me briefly introduce about Morph. So first of all, we are the first Ethereum Layer 2 which combines the OP and ZK rollups. And also we take the best features of both technologies. And second of all, we are backed by top industry players, for example, Dragonfly, Pantera, Bitget, Spartan, and so on. And third of all, we are a blockchain built for consumers.

So let me expand on this a little bit. First of all, I think everybody will ask the same question. There are already so many Layer 2s on the market right now. Probably I think there are like 200. So why should we choose Morph or what is special about Morph? I would say like first of all, we are backed by and also endorsed by most of the the most trustworthy crypto VCs and angel investors. So we closed our seed round fundraising in March and we raised like 20 million in total. And Dragonfly was leading it. Pantera is our second biggest investor. So and also at the early stage, we are actually incubated by Bitget, one of the biggest crypto centralized exchange in the world. So definitely we got a lot of endorsement from the top-top tier investors.

And also I think when people talk about Layer 2s, they prefer to talk about technical features first, right? So also like for Morph, we have three technical features. The first thing is that we use decentralized sequencer, which is already live on our testnet. I believe we are the first one who put a decentralized sequencer live, while the other Layer 2s are talking about the decentralized sequencer on their roadmaps still. And second of all, as I mentioned that we are using the hybrid rollup technology of OP and ZK. So the consequence, the result is that we are much safer than the pure OP rollup and also we are more cost-efficient than the pure ZK rollup at this stage. And third of all, we are using modular designs which allows our developers to be more flexible and much safer to adjust their whole coding structure. Our infrastructure partners are all the leading infra providers in the space which includes Oracles, Bridge, Data Indexer, RPC. But for the tech part, I will definitely leave Abril to talk more about it after my talk.

And also, what I've just mentioned is just a part or a small part of Morph. As I mentioned that I'm a female leader in Layer 2, so I must be building something different than the other male leaders, right? So what is the biggest differentiation between Morph and the others? I would say that from day one, we put ecosystem and users ahead of technology. So if you look into the history of Layer 2s, although we don't have a long history but still different stage of Layer 2s. If you look into Layer 2 1.0, it's always about technology, technology, technology. And then it moves to Layer 2 2.0, then you will find that all the projects are talking about TVL, TVL, TVL. And now if we see Morph as a 3.0 Layer 2, then we are definitely talking about users, users, users. So the reason behind that, why we choose users and ecosystem ahead of instead of technology is because first of all, technology can be replaced. The entry barrier of tech will be lower and lower during the next few years. Everybody can maybe in one or two years or even now, people can start to build up their own rollups without too many too much entry barrier. So if you only focus in technology, one day you will be replaced, right? And second of all, when we talk about Layer 2s, we are saying that Layer 2 is here to solve the trilemma of blockchain, which is safety, decentralization, and scalability. And Layer 2 is here to solve the scalability issues. So if you are talking about scalability, then it means that there are so many users and applications which needs your technology, right? But the fact is that right now we have too much infra. We have too much infra about scalability, but we don't have so many applications, we don't have so many builders, and we don't have use a lot of users. So the journey should be on the other way around. So this is what Morph is building. We provide the technology which is very good, very easy to use, seamless experience. And then we attract builders and users in. And then we talk with them and ask them about what they really need. It's not about we just offer them our technology. It's about that they come to Morph and build on Morph and then we discuss and explore together what kind of technology you need, what kind of requirements, unmet needs you have, so that Morph can help you to solve these technical problems. So this is the journey Morph is taking. It's completely different from the other chains.

So that's why we're here to solve the developers' pain points. If you talk to developers, what are your pain points? I think maybe the audience right now, many of them are developers. I would say many of them won't say it's about money. All of the chains are providing grants right now. So the consequence is that developers are switching between different chains, they don't have any stickiness to brands. It's not that difficult for them to get grants or investment. But after they get the money, they still don't know how to go to the market. They still don't know how to get users. They still don't know how to grow, which is a key to to their journey, right? So what we can offer here, first of all, is the user base. As I mentioned that we are incubated by top-tier centralized exchange. In the whole ecosystem, we already have 30 million users, crypto users. So and also we can access to them easily. We can help to funnel these users to your applications. And also we have a network of 50,000 Web3 influencers which can bring which can help you to bring new users outside of that 30 million users. So these users, they are everyday users. They are like they have the basic concept of blockchain. They have wallets already. They have they are using trading platforms already. They even do the KYC. But instead of beside the crypto wallets and also the trading platform, they cannot find other high-value or yeah, high-value applications they are looking for. So this is the first thing we want to bring you, the users. And second of all, the resources. So as I mentioned that we are in a big ecosystem. Morph is not only a chain, a chain provider. We're more like a big-big ecosystem which provides you with venture capital, accelerator, community, user base, and then last but not least, we can assist you on listing. So this is a whole journey for the for the builders. Back to the question I asked, like what are the pain points of the developers? These are all the pain points. So for every step on the journey, the developers always have difficulties and they need assist and they need resources. So Morph is definitely here to solve these problems for you guys. And third of all, definitely we are also offering the funds. We have a 100 million ecosystem fund to support the long-term builders on Morph.

And also we are the only blockchain for consumers. So if you really want to bring the next billion people on chain, if you want to bring Web3 into mass adoption, we cannot just focusing on DeFi or NFT or meme coin or AI-related applications. It's more like in a very small and degen community in Web3. It's not for everybody. So that's why we're focusing on consumer applications, which is really related to your daily life, whether it's entertainment, gaming, social, loyalty, shopping, e-commerce, lifestyle-related applications. These are applications which are already so mature in Web2 but you cannot find in Web3 at this moment. But these are applications which can create value for people on chain. And this is something we're focusing on right now. And also the next step is to also after bringing these applications on chain, we want to minimize the entry barriers for all these applications on Morph as much as possible. So whether it's like product design, UI design, product logic, or the whole user onboarding process. We want to make it as simple as possible. Users don't need to, don't have to have this experience of Web3 or on-chain technology. They don't need to understand what is on-chain technology behind, they just need to know that this is a application which can create more value than the normal traditional Web2 applications.

So yeah, again to what I back to what I said. We are here to truly deliver value to users and we care about what users think about these applications and the product they want to use on Morph, rather than just imposing products we think are good onto these end users. So for the whole ecosystem mapping, definitely consumer DApps are the vertical we care the most. So SocialFi as mentioned, SocialFi, entertainment, gaming, e-commerce, shopping, lifestyle, travel, loyalty system, etc. And second of all, definitely DeFi is still the foundation of every chain. So DeFi is another big sector for us, whether it's DEX, Perp trading, lending, stake swap. And other than that, we put some efforts also on AI-related DApps. We haven't really thought through like what exactly AI applications can be like what kind of value decentralized can bring AI applications. But definitely there's huge potential and we don't want to miss that trend. So we also put some efforts in the AI-related DApps. And also any other applications which can wow our team is definitely welcomed.

And last but not least, definitely we are talking about what kind of incentive we can bring to our builders. So Morph is offering not only one incentive programs, but we are offering five. We have ecosystem fund, we have a program called Entrepreneur in Residence, we have a grants program, we have a RPGF program, and we also have bounty program. So different programs are designed to for different types of builders and for different stages of builders. You can find more details about all these program designs in the near future on Morph's website. And but in general speaking, we are offering first of all, the biggest incentives we're offering in these programs are first of all, we are going to return the first year 100% sequencer fee profits to all of our builders. And we are going to pay quarterly. And second of all, as I mentioned, we have 100 million ecosystem fund and also up to 100k grants and a share of 30% of the total airdrop allocations to long-term high-quality builders on Morph. And third of all, as I mentioned, it's a whole ecosystem support from fundraising, promotion support, technical and operational support to exchange listing support on Morph.

Basically you can find everything you want on Morph. And talking about our milestones, right now we are on our testnet. We just finished the EIP-4844 integration. And next quarter, we are going to launch our mainnet. And also for Q4, we are going to update our mainnet and also launch our token in Q4. So here are some QR codes of Morph. If you want to learn about Morph, definitely welcome to join us in our Twitter, Discord, or Telegram community. And also definitely welcome to chat with me or Abril directly about Morph's ecosystem and tech part. Thank you guys.

Oh, that was awesome. Abril, were you going to go through some of the little bit more technical stuff?

Yeah, for sure. I want to quickly respond a question of Billy. He asked if he can run his own sequencer. And a lot of people are asking this. So right now we have seven sequencers running on testnet, and we're going to open for partners by the next Q1, so after we launch mainnet, because just security reasons. And also we are waiting for the, I think it's like the EIP-2537, that is like an Ethereum private upgrade that is going to be in Q1. And so because we don't have that yet, we don't want to open the sequencers to public. And so we are going to be running plus 20 sequencers, but slowly opening to partners as we are approaching mainnet. Hope this responded your question.

So I'm going to present... Okay, so we will do the technical overview. This is very high-level because, yeah, we're going to be for an hour talking if not. So this is the technical side. We are made up by three main modules: the decentralized sequencers, as I said right now, we are running our own sequencers, but we are approaching to have decentralized sequencers by Q4-Q1 for our partners. We also have OP rollups that meets ZK rollups as well, and we use a modular framework.

This is our technical achievements. We launch testnet Alpha in September 2023, so we are actually pretty, pretty early. We were in testnet Sepolia in January and we move to Holesky in May. So right now we are in our testnet V2 in Holesky. We also started the production of our sequencers with seven on testnet Alpha and planning more than 20 for mainnet. And we achieved one second non-empty block time, and... yeah, I also want to highlight our seed round that really helped us to grow the team. Right now we hire a lot of really talented people that are helping us with, you know, the growth, the more DevRels. We're actually hiring a DevRel engineer for Morph, so if you know someone who is really passionate about education and developer resources, please let me know. Just want to add that.

And yeah, so let's talk about the decentralized sequencer. So in traditional Layer 1 blockchain, transactions are packaged and processed by miners in Proof of Work systems or validator nodes in Proof of Stake systems. And basically these entities earn the authority to package and sequence and produce all the blocks, either through the tasks of computational mining or staking-based elections. So the main problem here if let's say the centralized sequencer stops working, the transactions from all the Layer 2 users will not be processed and effectively basically bringing down the Layer 2 operations. And also the centralized sequencers have the ability to reject the transactions that the users are submitting, and this can cause like an excessive transaction censorship. And I think we saw this in a chain recently that we're not going to say the name, but yeah, that's the limitations of the centralized sequencer. And so that's why we are working towards the approach of a decentralized sequencer.

So this is how it's going to be working. This is our sequencer network architecture. So you can see this, this is a whole mess. I guess none of you are like even reading this, but basically in simple terms, a decentralized sequencer consists in two parts: basically the sequencer set that this basically forms and builds the core group that provides sequencing services, and then we have the sequencer staking contract. That this is basically how we're going to let the partners run their own sequencers. Basically this contract facilitates the selection of the sequencer set via an election process of staking. Through the sequencer staking contract, members can be elected into the sequencer set when they basically collaborate and they provide services for the Morph network. I would say the election results are synchronized to the Layer 1 rollup contract that you can see here, and this synchronized data is utilized to obtain the BLS aggregate signatures, which by the way is pretty expensive, but that's why we are trying to approach this new Ethereum upgrade by Q1. And basically this data obtains the BLS signature of the sequencer network participants for the comparison and the verification of the data.

Let me move... okay. So here we have given Morph's modular design, as I mentioned before we use a modular design, each sequencer operates a consensus client that runs BFT to communicate with the other sequencers. Following this consensus protocol, the selected sequencers extracts the transactions from the mempool, this constructs the blocks, and this synchronize all of these blocks with the other sequencers to basically complete the verification and the voting. And the end result is the generation of these new Layer 2 blocks. And this is how all of the Layer 2 blocks are generated.

Then I want to introduce something that is pretty new that we use at Morph, everyone always ask me. You know, like, some L2s use fraud proofs with OP and they or they use ZK proofs with validity proofs. But at Morph we use a method called responsive validity proofs. So instead of just like fraud proofs or validity proofs, normally generating the ZK proofs for every transactions can be kind of too demanding, but we work and we are approaching this in a way that it only generates this proof if there's a challenge to the validity of the transaction. So basically we combine optimistic rollups with validity proofs, and all of this uses ZK proofs to verify the correctness of the state. I would say this approach is pretty different from ZK rollups because the ZK proof is only generated when there's a state of the challenge, right? So this method really helps to reduce the high cost of the ZK proof generation, which sometimes can be expensive. And also we know that for example a ZK proof have like a withdrawal period of like seven days, so using this method we kind of like make it shorter. I think it's we make it shorter the withdrawal period, and it can be in two days instead of just a whole week, right? Based on the nature of the validity proofs. So by implementing the ZK proof generation and the verification, we can switch to a complete ZK rollup in the future. So we are really work the engineering team is doing a great job on this by approaching this to mainnet.

So this is the state verification. You can see all of this again all of this messy contracts and diagrams. So basically I will I will make it quite simple. The responsive validity proof applied at Morph basically based on the validators will need to constantly verify the transactions and the new state of the sequencers that are submitted to the Layer 1. So if they find the transactions and let's say the states aren't correct, they can initiate the challenge with the challenge contract that we see there. So if the sequencers need to answer the challenge, they can provide the ZK proofs and they can pass the verification. And if the sequencer cannot finish the verification process during a certain period of time, the fraud behavior is settled. So there is when we use OP rollups. The validators, by the way, will need to stake in order to initiate the challenge.

And yeah, this is like very high level technical overview because we are actually doing a lot of workshops in ETHCC that are going to be recorded. So I don't want to be here talking for an hour, but I would love to for you guys if you're attending ETHCC for you to come to Hack Seasons, L2 Con, Modular Summit. I'm going to be talking about this in more really like detail there. And we are going to stream this, so yeah, it's going to be really helpful for you guys if you want to understand more. And so right now we are in testnet Holesky, like I've said before, we integrate blobs, the Dencun upgrade, and we also upgrade zkEVM. We are approaching mainnet I would say by the end of July or August probably. You know, we can always have delays that's depending on the engineering team. But yeah, we are approaching mainnet by Q3. So really exciting. We are looking forward to see more builders coming to the chain before we approach mainnet so we can work together and we can help them to to achieve whatever they want to achieve. And so we are going to release the Morph staking contract and the AI ecosystem support. So that's why for everyone that is asking if they can run a sequencer for security reasons, we cannot let that happen yet. But we will let partners run their sequencers by all of like the things that I've explained before, that's the whole process of the election process via the staking contract that we will launch by mainnet.

That's amazing. That's amazing. Yeah, and definitely I'm sure there's people here that are very interested in getting started building with Morph, the grants program, and I'm sure there's at least a handful of people who are interested in a DevRel position. So definitely you'll want to get in touch with Abril and Cecilia if you're interested in getting started starting your career in DevRel or continuing your career in DevRel.

We are a little bit over time, but I want to get in a couple of questions from the crowd if you don't mind. So Billy had a follow-up asking about what the block system of the sequencers is going to be like. Is it going to be first-in first-out, or can you reorder? Can you speak on that?

Yeah, sure. So we have the batching contract, so we have the batch processing. So we have the priority-based ordering that basically we will prioritize transactions from, you know, the ones that they were elected. And then the batch processing is basically will batch these transactions and process them in groups allowing for this reordering within each batch basically based on the predefined rules that we will implement based on the staking contract that we will launch by mainnet.

Awesome. Great answer. And then not really question or I guess sort of a question. So in terms of some of the ZK operations, are there any detailed documentation or links on GitHub that could help people if they're stuck?

Yeah, for sure. So let me share right now with you the repo. Let me double check if this is... okay. Yeah. So I will share the GitHub account that we have. For sure. And this information will also be posted on the YouTube description so you can go back and rewatch and traverse to GitHub from there. For sure. I will drop that here just in case. Great question, AVTVA. And then last question from me is what are what are some cool applications some consumer-level applications that you've seen people starting to build with with Morph? I think you mentioned one towards the end from Maria, are there any other ones that kind of caught your eye?

Yeah. So I'm actually in right now I'm working with for example there's Danny, who is from LatAm as well. He's building on Morph, he just joined our incubator program and he's building an educational platform kind of like I would say Duolingo, but for like a lot of stuff. Like can be programming or can be math or can be language but on chain. So it's kind of like a Duolingo for everything related to education on chain that mixes AI as well to to to find more resources and stuff. So it's really great. I've seen that. I've seen also well a lot of like gaming as well. I'm helping to integrate gaming stuff. I love games as well. I'm like Vitalik, I use I used to play World of Warcraft a lot. I stop though because otherwise I would not be working. I would be lazy just like playing World of Warcraft. But I love gaming stuff. Yeah. You didn't get angry enough to drop everything and make your own chain yet. Okay. Yeah, exactly. One day, one day who knows. One day, who knows. But back to your question, I think when we it's also a difficult some kind of difficulty for us to build Morph as a chain for consumer because you don't find so many consumer applications on the market right now. 90% of them are DeFi, NFT, GameFi related. That's because that no ecosystem is supporting them. No one really cares about that part of builders. Or they feel like, okay, it's much easier to build a DeFi protocol because the native people likes to use it. So that's why Morph is here to build a chain only for consumers. And we're here to tell the builders that, okay, here is a ecosystem a new ecosystem for consumers. So we are welcoming everybody to come to discuss with us. We know a lot of consumer applications founders they are not tech background. They are not going to the hacker house or hackathon to compete with each other because they are more business background. So this kind of business background founders or technical founders are all welcome to come to Morph and discuss about what is your idea about building up consumer applications in Web3 and what kind of resources you need. We're always happy to help.

Yeah. And also as I mentioned before, I feel like the main problem right now with a lot of founders or chains they are focusing on the same hundred Web3 developers that are around, you know? And so if we really want to more the next billion users, we actually need to focus on the normal people, the traditional people. So I'm really working towards, you know, make like programs to onboard more Web2 developers to Web3 and like how we can achieve that. It's kind of hard because we have all of these like complicated concepts and like complicated UX. Like it's so hard. It's like I would say like the most difficult challenge right now for a lot of people. So I'm working, we're working towards achieve that and make that happen. And I hope the next five years we can see that that outcome.

Yeah, I'm with both of you. I'm looking forward to the day where we kind of get past this like little small niche community and kind of become more intertwined and like everyday developer activities. But yes, slowly but surely we're making progress. And I love the mission both of you are on with Morph. And I'm looking forward to seeing everybody who was watching today build some cool apps with Morph. And we've dropped the the docs in the chat. And again, I mentioned I will add the docs as part of the YouTube description as well. But yeah, weekend's coming up. Why not start a little hack project with with Morph. With that, unfortunately we have come to to time. Но Abril, Cecilia, I really-really appreciate both of you again coming on today, giving us that excellent overview of Morph. And yeah, happy happy to have you back on sometime later if you have more goodies to share. Perhaps after mainnet launch. Yeah.

For sure. I'll come back soon.

Yeah, excellent. Love it. My pleasure. And just before everybody leaves, I just want to share the QR code for you to scan to be able to claim your NFT, attendee NFT, for watching DevNTell live today. So what you want to do is scan this QR code, fill out the form, and you'll be airdropped a DevNTell attendee NFT within a couple days on the Base network. So again, want to scan this code, fill out the form, and you will be airdropped that NFT. And you'll have about an hour and a half, let's see, yeah, an hour and a half from now to be able to do that before the form closes.

And we finally we finally confirmed that Cecilia is not an AI.

Yeah. There it is. There it is. Right here on DevNTell. Congrats. Yes, those conspiracy theories are not coming up anymore.

Yeah. No more of that nonsense. Thank you. Thank you for Developer DAO to give me this chance to show myself. Thank you so much. A unique unique piece of alpha. Only only found here on DevNTell.

All right y'all. All right y'all. Happy Thursday, happy weekend, and we will catch you back here next week for another great episode of DevNTell.

Thank you. Bye.