 Hey, everyone. Who said hi just now? I didn't hear. All right. Oh, great. Thank you So today I'm gonna share some exciting research that I've been doing. I don't know for the greater part of the last Six months eight months nine months. I don't know most of this year Not that not that this is the only research I've done. It's just the most exciting stuff the stuff that I want to blow your mind with right now, so I Had to cut out a lot of content from the talk So I'm gonna try to go through it quickly and it back in without slides because I don't think I'm gonna make it Let me just take out my notes just in case I get there and then I need a refresher. All right Hey, everyone. So smart transactions sounds great. It is Prophecy of a new paradigm It's basically a prophecy because it's not something like I decided I'm not like imposing this on you guys I'm like making a prediction that you're gonna agree with me is like sort of a sound prediction And then the only thing that might be imposing is accelerating the timeline Which is sort of maybe my fault if I'm accelerating it, but it's not my fault. That's gonna happen. This wasn't me It's like a pair. I'm like the profit here. It's I didn't do it So here's the prophecy Basically a theory of transactions will become smart Which means you already programmable network, but they're gonna become context aware in this way That's like characteristic of smart products that like sort of like you should you know You go you walk beside them and then they start like breathing and like knowing what you're about to do and you know They sort of like acts smart And in a way that's sort of more than just programmable networks, but actually like they're they're reactive to their context and basically That means sort of over their actual impossible futures in this context and also over there Over like this this their context and we'll get into that a little more detail But like today relatively speaking I'm gonna say that transactions are dumb and blind basically Transactions today are not smart and they will become smart in the sense of like smart products, which is like a kind of Kind of research in product design where you try to make products like yeah Program will now worked and reactive to their context in order to you know in order that they act right depending on what's happening to them actually so Basically, Ethereum is and has always already been profoundly disrupted by unexpected semantics of EVM like solidity and the re-entered C or like just all sorts of weird quirks, you know, it takes a lot of time to become a Solidity developer because of the weird ways that behave the three behaves that you wouldn't think and Basically, this has come to a real real head now with MEV where sort of it's much Very much not the expected transaction semantics It's sort of like it ends up being like the worst possible semantics that could be interpreted for that transaction and sort of it ends up being kind of worst-case execution re-intermediation censorship literally And this is actually putting all blockchain communities into crisis into like a deep constitutional crisis So like what is a blockchain even like what is a transaction? What does it mean? What does this transaction mean because like it all the different possible ways it could be executed in different contexts And so especially what does it mean if it's not just sort of included in a block in This sort of natural simple way that we were taught in the white paper and like all the white papers even so basically transactions face an evolutionary pressure due to these changing circumstances and they're basically like in fact The fact of changing semantics even though it's an abstract computer science sense like oh Unless there's a new let's just change to a theory when their semantics aren't changing Actually when people when the transaction pool changes when the way people order them in blocks changes it changes in fact the transaction semantics and so And they're gonna become aware basically at first Slowly and then and then a lot and any of you search where it is Basically, we'll start and is starting out as a sort of really minor Little hacks and it's gonna become sort of much more much more aware. So basically today, you know You might pay out mev in a favorable outcome in the future You'll be much more actively and much less actively interacting with the search in order to get better performance and Sort of a better even understanding of how your transactions being treated during the transactions on validation so That was the prophecy basically like because this insane pressure by mev transactions are gonna become smart The semantics are gonna be totally different than what we recognize today because basically Well, I mean, I'll get I'll get to exactly like how and why that's like a Secured prophecy and not like a speculation. So let's talk about the past like how did we get here? So we have this It's dark forest basically we have I call them ethereal predators in the dark forest because you don't always really know what happened and How this all went down? Worst case performance Freak liquidation is still an arbitrage hijacked hacks. I It's the stuff that we love to read about but also stuff that really hurts people when they transact financially and just in terms of like Imagine you're trying to like be a white-head hacker and then like your white-head hacking gets hacked by some like front-running bot It's sort of dark And basically transactions went into hiding because of this they avoid the mempool they use trusted searchers They they basically try to eliminate their mev in order to avoid this This this treatment and this is like what I consider to be sort of dumb Behavior, I mean it's a little bit smarter than getting wrecked right away, but it could be a lot smarter really So, you know, we have also this concept of good mev Not all mev is bad, right? And I think this originated with mev tips in bundles, but I wasn't around so someone could correct me later that's great and you know, so that sort of distributed power from The sort of big bad minor who is supposed to take all the mev to searchers who are supposed to be like sort of the good guys protecting our transactions and giving them the ability to influence the block outcome without just sort of this pure extractive politics more like You know, we pay for the thing to win as long as we win the auction, you know And we're providing a good bundle that's that's good And then there's also this sort of really really I mean nascent kind of good mev Which is like the saving and out-of-gas exceptions Which is sort of like a really classic thing that like mev was sort of built for from the start We're basically like sort of the space really was for traders who were getting wrecked in this arbitra gas price auction And so a gas price auction became mev and then there was a good mev and mad mev as people sort of, you know Exploited and also try to defend themselves and use it as a sort of lever and basically You know, I really have to power through here. So basically, you know, I I sort of picked up on this research This this year right around I got into the got into the mev space basically when I realized that there's this thing called mev time Which is like sort of the time when the search is happening when the time when the search for this like bundle or block is happening Where you can actually interact with Ethereum transactions in a sort of unconventional way basically rather than sort of only having You know interactions with transactions you can actually interact as the searcher with the transactions directly Basically by you know, the searchers have been adding their own transactions to bundles and interacting with them to like sort of take our profits in the normal way But sort of to directly interface with them via like an IO interface where you just like a load values and they read values Really opens up the Ethereum transactions to incredible sort of semantics by basically letting you interrupt transaction flow Do some stuff and then continue transaction flow as the searcher in a way where you can sort of update oracle values many times within the trace of a Transaction you can do all sorts of operations in the middle of a transaction and sort of in some way violating Adamicity but in some way it's not because of ultimately you still have the same You know bundle of transactions that the bundle was set up in a way where the earlier transactions are put in as a function Or like what happened in the middle of the other ones So it's sort of really just MEV time interaction with transactions really opens up non deterministic semantics of the EVM Now instead of having like you just literally have the EVM choose arbitrarily And then like you're the searcher tells you what you chose and they have like an incentive If you tip them good to choose the right thing and that actually Not just lets you take advantage of these magic Non-deterministic choices that lets you have more information in the transaction than you then you could before you could literally just give them Anything with like an oracle I don't maybe time during the middle of their transaction execution And so this is actually a Tremendous change But however, it's not really secure today because of the way that like bundles and like transactions can be reordered Out of the search result that you find so you imagine you like search for this amazing interaction with the smart contracts Sorry, well with the smart transactions. Oh, excuse me No You and then and then someone else jacks it and changes uses different input values for the same transactions And then you sort of get wrecked on your execution You know, basically like the search is not secure that means that these MEV time interactions are not secure But if they can be secured actually Basically anything a searcher knows can be given to the transaction and they can use it They can become aware of not just their execution on this trace But all the other counterfactual timelines they have many possible presence futures and pasts Because that's sort of like what transactions are like before they're included in a block and finally actually actualize so basically, you know We have a sort of with any time interactions you can transaction can become aware of like sort of this superposition of different possibilities and Counterfactual traces that end up being very very useful and And and basically We need these we need these searches to be secure basically like I was saying earlier And so basically I did a lot of research as a result Into securing this this MEV search like how do we secure the search results that it can't get jacked That the transaction receipts can't change after you sort of like finish the search like those are the ones and they can't change Thankfully, I'm like happy to announce that I did succeed not sharing the solution. I'll share an outline and therefore And therefore I could make this prophecy very very comfortably because basically if it's competitive enough viability is inevitability Basically like it's like strictly dominant over overdone transactions. It's possible We can do it and it's gonna happen because like the competitive pressure is too great And so this sort of this argument. I like to say underwrites my prophecy Sort of signs off on it and and basically It's sort of you have to take it for granted or you have to believe me that I can secure the search But if I can secure the search I can do this MEV time interaction I can inform the transactions of anything basically and then they can sort of do this crazy stuff Of like a lots of like wild magic, which we'll get to very soon So what is the state of the art in smart transactions today? Well, this is sort of the state of the art in my tech research the economics and law and like other research has been sort of There's not enough time for all of it. Unfortunately so basically Smart transaction Infrastructure is basically a story of sort transactions like pulling themselves up by the bootstraps using a little bit of awareness to get a little more awareness to try to get sort of you know a Very secure basis a lot of awareness for the transactions And so I split it up into phases that are designed to be sort of Acceptable to our current normal trust model at first and then deviate a little bit only as necessary and then come back So that like is a minimally politically objective objectionable for everyone So basically in phase one we save gas In this very classic way of like not doing those pesky out of gas transactions Save one and phase one. Sorry We we have semi out of my seat, which means like you can execute the Prefix of a bundle can't choose the suffix or like anything that is into prefix So it's like not not a missy, but you know these you sort of I can restrict using the evm's rules only sort of that You can only do a prefix using this thing. I call cumulative validation sort of like a you know It's gonna invalidate it if anything else invalidated and also it's cumulative mev to sort of say stores up the mev And then pace it only at the end of the bundle kind of story Phase two is the interesting one that deviates from like the current trust model that people have which is basically I'm saying like Oh, you know, we actually need to like essential. It's essential that we trust the proposer for a moment Just for a moment just for like this phase to we trust the proposer and Then in phase three we remove the trust from the proposer by sort of locking down their commitments Making it making them like unable to screw us So basically in phase two we sort of normally are very in comfortable with because like the whole movie space has been set up to defend you I guess the search and against the proposer, but I insist it's necessary There's no way to do bundle protection without this if you try to do without the proposal You won't be able to do it. The proposer is so important. He's they're the they're the they're the signature on the block They make it a block. You can't make a block without the proof of stake validator It's just not a thing like they're important for building the block. There's no such thing as a blockbill There's not a proposer. No offense. I'm sorry. I wasn't even supposed to say that I take it back Basically that today we sort of have as a day we don't trust the proposer But we really got it. We really got it in order to get out of missy full out of missy And then we can lock it down and not trust them anymore and the next phase and then after we have the Admiticity of these of these search results basically and like sort of like the guaranteed like full inclusion of them fully or whatever Then we can open it up to basically all sorts of smart contract development or starts print Sorry, again, oh smart transaction development virtual and the virtual services, which is a very cool concept of sort of to the Mev searcher, they're just extracting value for you to you. You're getting a service from them But sort of like they're not a real service provider. They're just they're extracting value from you From their perspective review for any for your perspective. You're sort of hijacking up in the way that like for example like fruit hijack Fruit eating animals in order to spread their seed That's an example So here's some more tech state of the art stuff So this is an example of formal semantics of what I call smart transitions So smart transitions is sort of like a idea that comes from smart transactions It sort of generalizes it to like all sorts of different computer science. This is like a System for describing Distributed systems that I'm doing all this notation and there's gonna be a paper release about this should have been Today, but it's gonna be like tomorrow or maybe the next day like latest So like look out for this it's gonna be it's gonna help you understand this But basically we have like a labeled state transition message production system V and then I could find another one are which has these special operations duplicate speculate and validate Which is gonna do basically a speculative execution of this other system in order to see in the future Whether the thing that happened was supposed to happen and then validate basically the current transition based on like what happens Many transitions down in the future sort of violating normal transition semantics in a very very interesting way, which I call smart And basically they the idea is like they can sort of look into the future But in general, you know far and wide all over the place So basically here's like the transitions So let's just like go over through them quickly duplicate takes a state creates two copies of the state If you try to duplicate an already duplicated state, it does nothing Speculate basically only works on duplicated states. Otherwise, it does nothing This one is on a duplicated state What it'll do is it'll apply the transition with this label L and this message M to the second state So the original state is left untouched and the second state is updated to the new state and then it outputs like a message In this like little temporary buffer zone from that transition and so like it collects these messages and Updates the state while it's speculating and then you can do a validate transition Which will either do one or two things one of them is it'll it'll delete the speculative execution state or it'll delete the current like Current state like the old state and so that when you do this validate step It's like few transitions later at least one transition later And then based on the validity of that transition you sort of either revert all the previous transitions or you sort of Choose them you sort of collapse this superposition of like the old state and the new state You just get the new state So this sort of is a speculative execution transition system based on like up one transition And basically the amazing thing about this is that you can sort of implement Ethereum out of gas semantics Sort of like just with this basically you charge that account gas you do a bunch of execution Speculatively thinking they won't run out of gas if they run out of gas you throw out all those changes You go back to that just after the charge state and sort of you can use this is like justify Actually that Ethereum transactions are already sort of smart just with respect to the out of gas Exception that is that the block is aware of on this sort of block limit Transaction limit sort of Level I mean the block I mean maybe the validator or something you know And so basically but this idea of like validating based on what happens in the future Sort of it could be done much much more widely than just out of gas You can just sort of refine those validity checks to add whatever constraints you want You know you could you could have you know more than this amount of men of like better than this performance as you revert Etc. And the nice thing about this is sort of okay That was one speculative execution But we do the same thing where we do many many many speculative executions where and then this gets sort of very well encode Mvsearch where basically you're just trying a lot of different possibilities And then you can validate based on the whole search whether you'll do any of those transitions in which one you'll do and That's sort of like extremely powerful semantics But that's just looking forward I mean like in this stuff really can look back and a different alternative presence either also which is sort of it's sort of a Trip and it's sort of really really helped me get intuition for quantum mechanics randomly Anyways, so use cases challenges and implications. There's there's stuff from the slides. I haven't read I'm trying to really rush through this, but some of it is gonna come back up now. I realize so basically, there's a Bunch of stuff this useful for first I'm gonna stress again the infrastructure and the way that it's pulling itself by the boot structure Bootstraps by like using transactions to make transaction infrastructure And then also all all blockchain use cases. I'm trying to say this is that this is like totally dominant paradigm We're basically like no matter what you think of you can do more efficiently with smart transactions Except for maybe a simple send Maybe juries out Probably more efficient with smart transactions anyways, but it's gonna be more like a smart trans smart operation Or something like that. So basically long story short. I mean, here's a bunch of little things. Oh You know, we have these access control lifts lists that don't really work because like you sort of might get outside of them And then you still have to execute the transaction and that you just get it You just get less of a discount if it doesn't work. It's like sort of a weird hack It'd be nice and we can do this to have access control lists that actually work without having to do any code analysis to prove That they work. You just sort of try it and if it doesn't work work It's great validation. It was amazing We can save gas and pay without you. This is sort of like classic stuff for me V But the way that it's done in smart transactions. It's a little more capital efficient Maybe a lot more capital efficient in some cases Rent as expected me V to justify state in RAM. This is sort of interesting thing We have like a long problem in Ethereum about state rent at statelessness and how will people have the state? Why will they know to how will they validate my transaction like now? Like how will they search it and the answer is like, oh, if you have enough if they expect enough Mev they they'll store it and they'll speculate on that in all sorts of ways Maybe they'll even do it in a way that's sort of like public value as opposed to internalized value and so basically Rent actually comes in through the back door not to smart transactions But like mev in general, but I think smart transactions in particular because it's sort of they can be mev They can be rent aware In a way that's sort of like a function of what is happening on the searchers RAM And what the searchers policy is for what they choose to put in their RAM And so it'd be like sort of very specific And very flexible compared to like all meant all the rent proposals so far Automated collective bargaining pretty cool right you have a bunch of transactions with a bunch of people in your little union And you decide hey, we're not gonna transact unless the world treated good very very good very very good stuff You know, we'll get that we'll get those beasts from the dark forest get our mev back Direct economic interventions at all scales is a very very cool You may as well use macro statistics micro statistics mezzo statistics and like just pay for those outcomes In a sort of very direct way that's sort of lacking today in like public policy We're basically like helicopter Ben has a really hard time dropping money on people But like sort of we see all the transactions on all the timelines like collapsed into one and sort of like can pay the searchers to For whatever policy goal we want. It's amazing Just in time liquidity pools. It's pretty cool. Imagine the liquidity follows the different trades within your transaction around just to serve you better Amazing can't happen today because of the transaction timing and the operation timing doesn't allow for it Zero capital zero credit trading. This is very cool where you can do time travel to borrow profits from the future to do your trade now You wouldn't think but totally possible in Ethereum today already But just within the scope of a single transaction and the future it'll be across many transactions Because you know at atomic block happens all at the same time Which means that the end of the block happens the same as the time as the start of the block Which means you can sort of borrow the profit from the end of the block at the start of the block and sort of have it all work out Amazing amazing you can hedge quote-unquote using exactly the cost that incurred at the end of the block It's not even really hedging because you know for sure the cost It's like the most efficient you could possibly be for certain instruments and lots of other stuff, but we have challenges Still Unfortunately, unfortunately, this can be very very computationally expensive Simultaneously searching for all these solutions at the same time for all these transactions, especially if everyone's demanding them You know, there's a lot of them. It can be very hard Who knows how the complexity grows in the search transactions depends on what they're doing I could definitely design smart transactions that do really bad For the searchers and that basically don't have solutions the more you add to them Like, you know, yeah, they might have a solution subtractably for a few But then like the big goes so bad like you had 10 more and then just you can't solve them anymore And this is why this DOS and gas insurance market is so important because like you kind of need to they kind of need to Figure out like is this a DOS attack? Is this a legitimate smart transaction? Is it something that is gonna have a solution or is this something that we're wasting our search on in or because It just computationally very difficult to find all these solutions Also, you know, I mentioned all these can counterfactual stats and claims and things sir The searcher knows that but like why should your transaction trust the searcher to give it the right values? Like there are sort of like challenge challenges with respect to verifying these these inputs Especially efficiently And then there's a multi-block issue which is sort of like actually we wouldn't we don't want in some way transactions to like end in one block to finish to just finish validating everything in one block It's sort of very nice to have multi-block transactions and to do this efficiently is a challenge Especially composes all the other search so rather than all the searches being sort of like this block imagine you have searches on different timelines sort of For different transactions that are executing in different timelines So and also there's a whole search organization problem around this like how do you organize the searchers actually? So basically but like very very interestingly that this sort of has actually a lot of implications beyond the sort of first place of these transactions as sort of you know this mev space where basically, you know You're responding to this mev search Because actually like the smart transaction validation is sort of Very wide. It doesn't need to be validating anything to do with mev and this sort of useful and distributed systems in a broad way In transactional systems in a very broad way. It's actually smart transactions are sort of not just mev Mev is sort of you know, like an economic thing. It's like only one side of the story They also have really amazing computer science innovations. Not that the economic stuff isn't great I mean the risk management that smart transactions to like that hedging that I was talking about earlier amazing basically can really really make things much more economically efficient and then sort of like Legally if you will it's very low liability to hire quote-unquote Or to be a virtual service provider because you're not a real service provider and So you're just extracting money. You're just being sort of a selfish maximizer Which means that you're limited in liability So basically unfortunately out of time This is my concluding slide And they're missing a will there or they do they do actually revolutionize now if they're in this transactional semantics and sort of like that's like sort of You know the prophecy and like sort of like the fact in the future, which is sort of like I guess what a prophecy should do Thank you so much everyone really appreciate it. I have more I have more come come see me later Thank you so much flat Sadly, there's no more time for questions, but I'm sure he's going to answer All your questions over here. Yeah outside the outside. Yeah Thank you