How Zero Blockchain Cracked 2M TPS Without Sacrificing Decentralization
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I think one thing is we just had, like, very deeply understood the scaling approaches that everybody else was trying. Like, what works and what doesn't work. Right? And again, we believed early on. Like, like, EVM is just slow. It was just common. EVM is slow. And then once we start working on these other systems, once we went very deep in Aptose, we went very deep in Solana, went very deep in the others, it's like, oh, it's actually like the storage layer is one of the primary things constraining almost every chain. And once we had this original insight around QMDB, we made this storage layer
Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this livestream. Just FYI, we had to prerecord this one. Before we get started, a quick reminder. Nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guests and I may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit unchainedcrypto.com. Quick note before we get into today's episode. Bits and Bits now has its dedicated feeds. We're spinning off from the Unchained feed and moving to a new podcast and
Thank you, Laura. Thanks so much for having me as always.
So LayerZero has long been a messaging protocol to bridge between different blockchains. And today, you have a big announcement about a new blockchain that you're launching called Xero. Tell us about it.
Yeah. So Xero really is like, this this whole thing started two and a half years ago. We didn't really originally intend to build a blockchain. What happened was Ryan, my cofounder, Rez, who's getting extremely frustrated, almost disillusioned with the space of of the way that the space was moving, particular every every day he was ranting. Honestly, frankly, every day he was ranting to me about layer twos. He was extremely upset around sort of the Ethereum moving away from sharding, positioning this as their scaling layer, and and describing it as inheriting the underlying base. He thought th
Okay. So, yeah, we'll dive into those details in a little bit, but just explain a little bit more about why you're launching a new blockchain now and what problems you think that Xero can solve that you don't feel are being addressed by existing chains.
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So, I mean, the real promises or the real premise of the original, like, at us starting, was that nothing can scale right now and the space needs to go in two directions. You can either go one direction, which is centralizing. So performance blockchain, Solana, etcetera, is basically reduce the number of nodes and increase the requirements of the nodes. So get rid of home stakers. Nodes cost, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a month or more to run and have a smaller party but have extremely high performance. That's one way to scale, and you get to about, you know,
Okay. And, like, basically so you you mentioned earlier that you are gonna have the zero knowledge proofs, which I assume that's part of how you're scaling. But talk a little bit about how you manage to resolve all those issues without compromising on something like decentralization.
Yeah, definitely. So again, core problem with any system. The main primary problem is this cost of replication. Right? You run up to two things, having every node download all of the transactions and all of the data and needing to reproduce the compute across all of things. So the four breakthroughs that we solved along the way, the first was QMDB, which is actually a paper we published a year ago. I
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