xDay 2023 Day 3: Runtime And MultiversX Launch ZK Rolloups Backed With NASA Tech

In the next three days, our team at Bitcoinist will cover xDay 2023, an event organized by MultiversX in the Palace of Parliament, Romania. Formerly known as Elrond, the project rebranded in 2022 and focused on the Metaverse, scalability, and global adoption by simplifying users’ access to crypto.

During the event’s final day, security audit firm Runtime Verification announced the launch of PI Squared, a universal ZK Rollup that will run on the MultiversX blockchain. The scaling solution is backed by technology developed by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Grigore Rosu, CEO and President at Runtime Verification presented this solution on the event’s main stage. PI Squared aims to make the MultiversX ecosystem more efficient and attract new developers to ship products on this network by reducing verifying computational claims to verifying mathematical proofs.

According to a press release shared with our team, the scalability solution will use a universal proof check implemented via a custom ZK circuit. PI Squared was developed as a programming language and Virtual Machine (VM) agnostic.

In other words, developers can work on products with any programming language and bring their app to MultiversX more efficiently while maintaining the underlying security and scalability of the MultiversX blockchain.

xDay 2023: Interview With Grigore Rosu, CEO Of Runtime Verification

After the presentation, our team got to speak with Grigore Rosu about his impression of xDay, the sentiment, and what PI Squared represents for MultiversX and the entire space, as the solution can be implemented and leveraged by any developer in any programming language. This is what he told us.

Q: How do you feel here? What do you think about the atmosphere and the people?

A: This is a wonderful conference. It’s unbelievable how many people are here. More than 2000 people. I didn’t expect that. I’ve been at several recent crypto conferences and it was hard to fill the room or even fill the first few rows of seats in the room. But this is just packed with two big amphitheaters and everything is just packed and people are amazing. Discussions are amazing. The MultiversX team is amazing. It’s just wonderful to be here.

Q: What makes the MultiversX ecosystem, and their team, unique and why did you decided to work on this network?

A: I knew them from day zero. I’m an advisor for Multiverses X and I met Beniamin Mincu (Co-founder of MultiversX) before, right after they had a white paper written (…). I really liked them from the beginning and in one word I think is passion. Indeed, they are very passionate about what they do. They believe in it, and when you believe in something, it happens. Self prophecy, they have one of the fastest, most reliable blockchains out there, the lowest fees. And it has never stalled. Like other blockchains, it works as specified, fast, cheap, and also programming language efficient. I think it was a good idea not to use EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) as an execution infrastructure because EVM is a pretty ad hoc language that was invented quickly to serve a specific purpose to launch Ethereum. But everybody who writes programs or audits them knows that EVM has many limitations. So I think it was a smart that they didn’t use EVM. I would say passion and good decisions along the way. That’s what I like the most about.

Q: What does the launch of the PI Square protocol mean for the users?

A: So we had this idea for a while now, it took shape. We have a prototype and we needed a destination chain to launch it as a universal ZK roll-up. Speaker 2 (05:09):

in PI Square, there is no predetermined language, but we need a destination chain because we do not want to have to implement a decentralized network and consensus algorithms right away. We’d like to stage it. You ultimately, we may do that, but we’d like to stage it. So we’d like to first deploy by squared as a universal scale up on a destination chain. And to be honest, I cannot think of any better destination chain than MultiversX for the same reasons I told you before.

It’s cheap. If we do it on Ethereum, for example, we’ll have to pay very high fees to do transactions as we prototype. There is a lot of word prototyping development before you launch and all those translate into transactions, big transactions, very expensive transactions on the destination chain. So think about it this way in one sentence. So PI squared will bring all the programming languages and virtual machines to multiverse X, but without the errors that usually come with compilers or interpreters. Developers will develop programs better faster, and that is expected to increase the number of applications that we’ll see on multiple sec and ultimately more users, happier users.

As of this writing, Bitcoin trades at $29,800 with sideways movement in the last 24 hours.

Cover image from MultiversX, chart from Tradingview