In this Avalanche twitter space, Logan Jastremski speaks with Michael Kaplan, Patrick O’Grady, and Stephen Buttol to discuss Avalanche warp messaging development, how it helps builders and developers, and more.
Read our notes below to learn more.
Avalanche Messaging and Importance of Interoperability
Patrick:
There is a problem, applications cannot communicate or interact with each other
Interoperability in some sense, at least for avalanche, is critical to being able to actually have tons of different interesting subnets because blockchain apps tend to be tightly intertwined.
If you don't have very native and powerful interoperability, you start to really lose the benefit of having one cohesive ecosystem.
Steven:
Avalanche is structured to be in some ways VM (virtual machine) agnostic.
I don't think in general there's going to be one VM that just is the best for everything.
If I have a privacy VM, but I can't actually interact with anything else, then you end up being just that.
Avalanche network has been working to somehow communicate between these potentially different VMs.
What Can Virtual Machines Do?
Average network separates things through the consensus mechanism.
Most developers aren’t familiar with how low level some of the runtime is to do a virtual machine.
If you want to do anything else that is deterministic, you can turn that into a blockchain.
2023 will be a year when we really start to play around more with the virtual machine frameworks and what we can do to help people get started more easily.
How Does Warp Messaging Benefit the Avalanche Ecosystem?
Patrick:
We have a primary network that everyone participates in.
If you really want this diverse VM ecosystem you start to come to the conclusion that you really need some form of any message to have this really expressive and exciting space.
We felt decoupling the ability for tracking and verifying messages from the actual underlying subnets and their ability to transfer information to be able to validate was critical to actually making a high throughput uniform messaging system.
I think it's a really awesome way to scale, assuming that subnets are always talking to each other all the time and you're trying to have massive throughput of that rather than more of a point-to-point system.
Stephen:
Cross subject messaging can't dominate the execution time of these VMs, otherwise you're losing the entire purpose of the separation.
You need to have the cross-subnet communication be efficient enough that it still makes sense to go for that performance gain through the specialization.
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Michael:
Major artifact of the design is when you talk about this interoperability between the two chains.
I think with all of the interoperability exploits and hacks that we've seen this year, it can't be overstated enough that there are no additional trust assumptions that one subnet is making by receiving a message from another subnet other than that a certain threshold of that subnet stake is participating honestly.
Security of Avalanche messaging system
Michael:
When you're on a subnet, that subnet has a set of validators and it could be an open set if it's an elastic subnet.
The more validators, the better the primary networks.
We foresee open elastic subnets growing to large validator sets also.
Patrick:
We try to give virtual machine developers and all sorts of people trying to build blockchain different tools they can use.
When you interact with avalanche work messaging as a subnet, you as the subnet decide who you want to talk to and interact with and what your thresholds where security are and what sort of actions, whatever that message could kick off.
Avalanche messaging allows you to specify which subnets to communicate with.
In this approach, we think that we really give the right people the right control to set up proper safeguards.
Stephen:
You can send assets between different subnets, but the only asset that could be corrupted by a failed peer subnet would be its own native asset.
If one of those networks were to have an issue, it doesn't directly impact the other one past the users of that bridge.
Avalanche Warp Messaging vs Cosmos IBC or Polkadot XCM
Patrick:
All of them have contributed to interesting ideas.
Major difference is how low-level avalanche work messaging is compared to some of these other protocols.
XCM and IBC impose a stricter format on how messages are passed and what those messages can do.
Every Avalanche Go node still has to sync the primary network to properly validate all these word messages.
Cosmos or IBC has a much lower fixed cost, but it has a much higher variable cost.
One big difference is we've (Avalanche messaging) opted more for is a fixed size model or fixed cost model where there's a sub bar that you have to have. And then on top of that, the variable cost is much lower.
Takeaways From Avalanche VM Developer Experience
Stephen:
How flexible and how low level are kind of development environment is.
If you wanted, you could definitely spin up multiple subnets and explicitly pass messages around them as a way of charting your state.
Takeaways from App Developer Standpoint
Michael:
We're going to publish the more messaging protocol implementation within the subnet EVM.
They will just be able to invoke other contracts on other EVM based chains very similarly to how they would on a single chain within solidity.
Our goal there is to make it as easy as possible for the developers to integrate with at the application level if you're not the subnet or VM developer type.
New year plans
Patrick:
Host a lot more open developer workshops and office hours to talk about ways people are using a lot of these technologies.
If you just want to have EVM compatibility, you probably don't need your own wallet.
Decided to make an investment to build out Core and we plan to use that directly with different users, user groups, virtual machines to make as much of the work messaging as seamless as possible.
Things to be excited about with Avalanche Messaging
You could just have a single Oracle integration on one subnet.
You don't have to know the Oracle provider to actually get Oracle data on your blockchain.
The only thing that VM might be doing is publishing these oracle data points that can then be broadcasted to other networks to actually consume.
Oracle provider can much more easily probably manage the risk on a single submit or a single chain, then it can't for every possible chain that could ever be wrong.
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