How Things Work #4: The Quick Merkle Database (QMDB) and Fast Ahead-of-Formation Optimization (FAFO) Today, we discuss how QMDB and FAFO drive (unbelievable) scalability with @ryanzarick, @IsaacN0tNewton, and @Thomas_S_Kim from @LayerZero_Core. A log is all you need 🪄.

2024 was in many ways the centralization cycle. Decentralized primitives lost out to centralized apps across the board. Ethereum decentralization -> L2 multisigs Uniswap immutability -> Jupiter frontends Seaport programmability -> Ordinals offchain orders Metam*sk selfcustody -> Privy app wallets dYdX cosmos chain -> Hyperliquid validator The one beautiful exception to this? LayerZero - immutable protocol with flexible DVNs - clear tokenholder governance and rights - dominating marketshare across bridges - sovereign universal token standard for OFTs - opensourcing better L1 tech than any 11-figure chain In the past few months alone, they've shipped: - QMDB, a better blockchain database which gives you 2.3 million state updates per second - FAFO, a transaction parallelization approach handling storage read/write conflicts that can process 1.1 million transactions per second - vApps, an architecture to fit any Rust application into a universal onchain proof framework Back in 2021 I would joke that the corollary to the blockchain trilemma was the bridge trilemma: if we have at least 3 live crosschain bridges, one of them is about to get hacked. Ronin (625m), Poly (610m), Binance (570m), Wormhole (325m), Nomad (190m), Harmony (100m), Multichain (125m) - all eviscerated user capital. We don't worry about that any more. It's so rare to see the team with the best cryptonative ethos also dominate on both tech and distribution. Kudos to @LayerZero_Core for all the quality opensource shipping.

Suppose we have 100 uniswap pools with high contention. FAFO can make each pool run at 10K TPS.