Thread by @CryptoBlooom

You may have heard about "Modular" blockchains...
What are they?

"The future is modular." - @fuellabs_

🧵 Thread

In this thread, I will go through:
🗣
1️⃣ Modular VS Monolithic.
2️⃣ What Fuellabs is.
3️⃣ The FuelVM.
4️⃣ Parallel transaction Execution.
5️⃣ Sway Language.
6️⃣ The Modularity.
7️⃣ Fuel as a L1.
8️⃣ Fuel as L2.

1️⃣ First: What do "modular" and "monolithic" mean?

🧩 Modular: A flexible arrangement composed of software or hardware modules that can be altered or replaced without affecting the remainder of the system.

🗼Monolithic: Characterized by massiveness, rigidity, or inflexibility.

Modular VS Monolithic:

Modular (L1s) are designed for high bandwidth and can better capitalize on high shared data availability.

Monolithic L1s don't separate execution from consensus, settlement, and data layers, constraining the bandwidth available.

Blockchain technology is moving away from a monolithic design, where consensus, data availability, and execution are tightly coupled.

2️⃣ #Fuellabs is a modularity solution for Eth, which can integrate with L2s.

Execution is separated from data availability and consensus ( tomorrow's #Eth2 or #Celestia).

This separation allows for specialization at the base layer, significantly increasing bandwidth capacity.

3️⃣ So, the #FuelVM is designed to be modular — it can plug in as the execution engine for any blockchain.

📲 Primarily, the FuelVM will be deployed as a #L2 rollup on Ethereum, but in theory, it can be deployed anywhere as an L2 or even as another #L1.

The FuelVM learns from the Ethereum ecosystem, implementing improvements suggested for Ethereum but couldn’t be implemented due to the need to "maintain backward compatibility."

Here are some EIP that have been implemented in the #FuelVM:

So, #Fuel is adding more implementations to its virtual machine (VM) to make it the most secure and fastest execution layer for the modular blockchain stack.

How tho?

4️⃣ 🪐 Parallel transaction execution

The FuelVM uses the UTXO model, which lets transactions run in parallel by using "state access lists" to find transactions that depend on each other.

‍With the EVM you are forced to execute transactions sequentially.

⚡️ Fuel Virtual Machine (#FuelVM)

Reduces the wasteful processing of traditional blockchain virtual machine architectures while increasing the potential design space for devs.

The design learns from the mistakes of the past and insights from years of production blockchains.

5️⃣ 🗣 Sway Language

Fuel provides a powerful and sleek developer experience with the domain-specific language called Sway, and a supportive toolchain, called #Forc.

♢ Retains the benefits of smart contract languages like #Solidity while adopting paradigms introduced in #Rust.

6️⃣ Where the Modularity comes in: - Configure Fuel to your demands

"As a Modular Execution Layer, Fuel can function in any one of these categories. Developers can configure Fuel as needed by switching out a few modules in the client."

7️⃣ 🪃 Fuel as a L1

The Fuel technology includes all the components to run as a complete L1.

These components include consensus, data availability, settlement, and transaction execution, but the broader mission of #Fuel is to enhance existing blockchains such as #Ethereum.

8️⃣ #Fuel as a #Rollup or Layer-2

"Fuel is designed to run a modular execution layer, a configuration similar to what we call rollups or layer-2s on Ethereum today."

Rollups typically use an optimistic or ZK configuration for validity or transaction arbitration.

The Fuel technology is agnostic to either of these and can utilize either as a validity or fraud-proving system.

In summary:

• Parallel transaction execution
• Fuel Virtual Machine (FuelVM)
• Developer tooling with Sway Language and Forc

Ethereum processes transactions sequentially (i.e, one after the other).

Fuel can process multiple transactions at once. (Multi-threaded)

A highly desirable property.

Follow me for deeper Web3 investigations. 🔎

@CryptoBlooom