Rollux

Hi everyone, I'm Bradley Stephenson, a board member on the Syscoin Foundation. I first heard of Bitcoin in the early days back around 2011/2012. With my professional background being 20+ years enterprise database development and corporate IT, and having great interest in FOREX, commodities and the problems of central banking, Bitcoin certainly captured my interest. I was able to shift my focus 100% to blockchain tech on a fulltime basis around 2018. Been with Syscoin ever since. The project aligns with my philosophy to keep "Nakamoto ideals" intact while evolving the tech toward viability for global mass adoption... which takes time do to properly.

My role is pretty extensive. Having a development plus IT background I do a lot of DevOps enhancement. I also manage social media as well as answer technical questions when devs are preoccupied. And, I do a lot of interviews. 🙂

I'm also part of SYS Labs, which is a for-profit focused on building unicorn type projects on top of the Syscoin stack through Rollux. So, a lot going on over here.

Being on Syscoin Foundation plus SYS Labs puts me in a good position to serve as a liaison between the two.

For sure

DB development focused primarily on big data management, data warehousing and analytics. Before focusing 100% on blockchain, my last stint with my traditional career was with a Fortune 500, Nuance Communications, tech pioneers of speech interface. During that time I was also involved in commodities and FOREX. Was a precious metals bug before blockchain came along.

Absolutely. Like a duck in a pond.

Yes, they are separate, but there is some overlap. Syscoin serves as the L1 of Rollux. The ideas around Syscoin began in 2013, to make decentralized blockchain tech more useful, particularly for enterprise. "Syscoin" comes from "System Coin", or a blockchain system of systems, the blockchain network being core infrastructure for various applications. This was before Ethereum. Syscoin also released its first mainnet in 2014, prior to Ethereum.

Development-wise, Syscoin v1 included some hardcoded smart contracts for things like "alias" (decentralized identity), "certificates" (NFTs), and a decentralized marketplace (which interesting enough was an idea Satoshi had for Bitcoin, but he removed that from the code prior to releasing Bitcoin). Shortly after v1, the team realized scalability was going to be a very big issue facing all blockchains, so dev focus shifted instead to solving scalability, and making Syscoin the ideal L1 in the modular stack it would evolve into.

So the Syscoin team had a lot of foresight. And still does. We tend to stay on the leading edge of pioneering blockchain tech and finding best use for emerging tech, and architecture is one of our strong points. We're sort of a blockchain for blockchainers, if you will.

To shed some light on PoDA, best to start with our take on rollups. We realized pretty early on that rollups (in one form or another) were part of an ideal solution for solving the scaling challenges associated with decentralized general-purpose computation (EVM specifically).

What we also realized was that Data Availability was going to be very important in order for rollups to fulfill their purpose. Without proper DA, a rollup user has no guarantee of being able to safely EXIT the rollup in a trustless way should they want or need to. We worked-out our own design to solve this... finished the design for our basic PoDA architecture around the same exact time Proto-Danksharding was announced during EthDenver. What was cool about that is there were *a lot* of similarities, so it kind of validated our design and Ethereum's too, but PoDA also has some big differences that we think give it a real edge tech-wise.

First off, PoDA does not require sharding... so it is less subject to that censorship vector of sharding where if half the nodes are taken offline, data becomes unavailable. PoDA also separates the concerns of proving and archiving. So we store proofs of the rollup's raw data on the L1, while storing the full raw data anywhere, typically Filecoin via Lighthouse, or in the cloud. Individual full nodes serve as PoDA clients. They do not shard the data, they can each volunteer to store the data in its entirety where ever they choose. The raw data stays in the L1 mempool for about six hours before being pruned, plenty of time for offchain archiving.

PoDA also has its own existing fee market, and by separating the concerns of archiving and proving, it is incredibly cost-effective. In that regard is it almost on-par with Validiums, but it is on-chain and using Bitcoin's PoW via Syscoin!

So it is via PoDA that Rollux settles on Syscoin. And Rollux also serves as a PoDA relay for Layer 3s, 4s, etc (fractal scaling) resolving their DA needs down to Syscoin

There's a lot more, but I think my wall of text is long enough for now on PoDA!

lol

Blockchain has massive implications for the future of humanity, so I am dedicated to what we're doing with Rollux and Syscoin. and I wake up feeling driven and amazing about what we're doing.

That deserves a separate interview on its own, but yeah, I can summarize. Merged Mining is an important Bitcoin primitive that was introduced into Bitcoin Core by Satoshi in 2010. It has been largely overlooked but now people are beginning to realize its importance. Another case of Satoshi's design being almost prophetic in a way. So merged mining enables Bitcoin miners to mine multiple blockchains at the same time without splitting up their hashrate. Basically they present to another blockchain the proof of the work they already performed on Bitcoin's latest block and that is used by the child chain to mine its blocks, and in return the Bitcoin miner gets rewarded with that chain's block reward. For miners it's basically like "buy one get one free". In that sense it is the most "green" form of PoW achievable because it recycles hash power. Syscoin recognized the importance early on. What a lot of people miss is how Merged Mining will keep Bitcoin decentralized as block rewards diminish and fees are insufficient on their own to keep miners incentivized. As time goes on merge-mined chains will be critical for keeping Bitcoin going by filling the incentive gap.

What Syscoin gets from it is the security and provenance of value that Bitcoin's own network of miners provides. Currently about 20% of Bitcoin's global hashpower supports Syscoin, and more miners are prepping to start merge mining SYS as well.

Syscoin also solved the limitations of merged mining by introducing multi-quorum finality which resists selfish mining and 51% attacks.

So not only does Syscoin provide everything Ethereum aims to provide at a technical level with a modular roadmap, it does all of this while sticking with PoW (the most proven decentralized consensus model), and not just any PoW, but Bitcoin's own

💪

We are strong proponents of PoW at the base layer, because of its resilience against black swans and economic vectors associated w/ hyperinflation of sovereign currencies.

But we feel some aspects of PoS are useful too, but on top, not at the bottom

(PoW secures a network with tangible inputs of industry, while PoS weight is acquired through financial abstractions)

We see it as a fundamental layer for all types of "web3" applications and their end-users, and however those evolve into the future. While the Syscoin L1 exists to secure that activity from the bottom of the stack, Rollux and layers above it are what provide the end-user experience that is capable of competing with (and out-competing) centralized services.

B-DeFi is certainly a big focus for us, but we also think simple value transfer is quite important, and we think AI and blockchain will be synergistic in the near future as AI use cases expand and AI needs a means of transacting and executing contracts that it will recognize as ideal.

SYS Labs is currently building a number of applications on top of Rollux. Mainly these three: SuperDapp (twitter: @SuperDappAI, an AI-driven super app with video chat, web3 wallet, friend-tech type incentives, etc), DAOSYS (sovereign treasury management and liquidity tree serving risk-mitigated deployment of capital), Camada (regulatory compliant DeFi layer, for those who need it). Each of these are killer use cases and they are each unique

Rollux right now is strictly OP Stack! In the future we will incorporate some aspects of Validity rollups. Even once ZK rollups mature, we feel OP Stack will remain quite relevant! e.g., I envision a modular architecture where perhaps Validity/ZK rollups serve as layer 2, and the fractal layers above that (L3, etc) are Optimistic-based.and perhaps those fractal layers can be application specific, if an app has massive adoption and needs its own dedicated rollup. Rollup as a service, basically.. it's a concept served very well by OP Stack tech

Imagine Optimistic rollups settling on a Validity rollup, then forwarded to Bitcoin's PoW via Syscoin. It's an amazing picture

haha, right! And funny enough, we were one of the first forks of Optimism. Rollux OPv1 (our first testnet) was pre-Bedrock.

yeah, we were OP Stack before "OP Stack" was a term

I think we don't get mentioned as much because we are independent from Ethereum's stack! There is a lot of value in Ethereum, so that's the ecosystem where a lot of projects get their bread buttered so to speak. And that's fine. We're blazing our own trail here. and we feel what we are doing is a critical for blockchain We had a lot of early conversations with Optimism team, so they do know about us ;)

Well, initially we had our eyes on Validity rollups, but this was very early on. As part of a research partnership with Polygon/Matic, we had some calls w/ them a couple years ago where our lead core dev expressed some vision about ZK and I believe Polygon team took this to heart and it led to their roadmap w/ Hermez, etc. BUT, we began to see the bottlenecks of ZK that need to be solved before it can really compete. So, we pivoted to Optimistic-based in order to deliver scalability in a timely fashion.

We assessed both Arbitrum and Optimism and decided to adopt what Optimism had going for our basic rollup, and we customized it to work with PoDA and Syscoin. You can see some of the work we put into this here: https://github.com/SYS-Labs/rollux/commit/25a4c94

We just feel Optimism's approach is most mature, for the time being at least. Anyway, we are definitely not just a simple OP Stack fork. We put a lot of work into Rollux and it is unique.

On the ZK side of things I really like Taiko's philosophy but that's another topic

Projections for Rollux really cascade into the projections for decentralized applications, because adoption depends on serving and fulfilling highly relevant use cases which is where SYS Labs comes in as the builder of those for Rollux right now. With the right foresight of new kinds of use cases that will become popular, Rollux can have explosive growth (and most importantly scale to sustain it).

B- Four years is a long time and tech evolves rapidly, so I can't speak with great precision that far out, but I will say in the biggest vision we see modular stacks as the architecture that WILL serve the future financial systems of our planet and perhaps beyond (interplanetary finance is a very fun topic and modularity is the only way we know to fulfill that so far).

This is not investment advice, but Syscoin itself is quite undervalued in my own opinion. And it does seem to participate in every bullrun that has happened since its inception so I don't have any reason to think that won't be the case again, especially given how much the stack has advanced since the last bull.

There are fewer big L1 opportunities out there than there used to be, right, because of the established ones that gained and kept dominance Like Jag says, with L1 you have the biggest risk, but also the biggest potential reward. There is less risk the higher in the stack you go.

So all the basic DeFi primitives, TVL, and whatnot are important, but we want to push Rollux beyond that into new territory. We have a dedicated Biz Dev team that stays very busy

I like to say YES, syscoin is a dinosaur. It is a T-REX with lasers

Huge potential to be tapped in GameFi, yes. But it must be well-thought-out to be achieved. Gamers mainly want to play and have fun and they don't want Web3 getting in the way... so the key is to greatly enhance and improve the gaming experience with Web3 in the background, and we will get there through advancements with account abstraction and rollups. Rollux is the only rollup I know of that offers low enough fees for GameFi (games can have LOTS of transactions), while still being secure, IMO, so we definitely have an important place.

Gaming builders on Rollux include MudAI, ScoreMilk and TuruVerse and we're always talking to more. ScoreMilk is very interesting! They bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3 gaming, and I feel that is a very important place to start when it comes to helping gamers realize the benefits of Web3, and that it is not all just some coin scammers screwing with their games.. lol

Also, on the NFT front, I was involved with Luxy Marketplace and getting that launched. It is the official NFT Marketplace of Rollux. Pretty good design and some unique offerings. I personally also see a lot of use cases for NFTs way beyond generative artwork, extending into mineral rights, real estate, shared ownership of goods/services, etc, tying into decentralized identity.

Here is Luxy Marketplace. You should check it out. https://luxy.io

Yeah! lots of txs.. application layers (L3s, etc) will become important for gaming in the future! But L2 is a big step in the right direction

Sure! Absolutely I do see high potential. We are witnessing the dawning of the age of digital transactions and contracts, so naturally a lot of the old established ways of conducting business can be greatly improved if not replaced. For official business like transacting RWAs, the challenge comes in the form of bridging the gap between existing legal systems and blockchain-based systems. So courts need guidance to understand and recognize them. Also, digital identity is huge here and is a real dependency, so advancements in that are are critical, not just for RWA but extending into compliance and those go hand-in-hand.

We still need courts to settle human disputes. Some people think blockchain can replace courts, but I disagree. As for where Rollux and Syscoin fit re RWAs, we are in a similar position as Ethereum, being the decentralized infrastructure. SYS Labs on the other hand, with its Camada product focused on compliance, can make some interesting things happen for digital RWA, but not just that, it can go into regulated decentralized exchange like making TSLA, IBM or any other stock be able to interact with BTC, SYS, ETH, etc.

Another layer of challenge for digital RWA is achieving "trustless custody"... that is like the new double-spend problem of the future. Perhaps some combination of IoT and DiD, and some novel thinking, will solve it. But in the meantime there is a lot of room for growth for RWA in blockchain. so, as you can tell, the teams behind Syscoin and Rollux do think ahead

We are getting close to making more details about Camada public. I will let you know once we do that.

When SYS Labs attends blockchain events Camada is one of the offerings that gets the most attention from institutional investors and VCs in our one-on-ones.

Our teams are from all over the world, so it's always nice to converge at events. Jag is in British Columbia, some other in Japan, Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Peru, UK. We're pretty diverse. SYS Labs is registered in Dubai UAE, Syscoin Foundation is registered in the Netherlands.

Will you be at DevConnect?

Excellent. Let's make sure the teams meet. Unfortunately I will not be there, I have to attend to things here during that time, but several of our team will be there.

You're welcome! It's fun to talk about my passion.