Blockchain Performance, Demystified

web3 with a16z crypto

Andreessen Horowitz

Gaming, Blockchain, Web 3, Blockchains, Open Source, Business, Decentralization, Visual Arts, Computer Science, Ownership, Art, Entrepreneurship, Entertainment, Cypherpunk, Web 3.0, Music, Internet, Cryptography, Crypto, Computing, Web3, Innovation, Distributed Computing, Culture, Public Goods, Creator Economy, Arts, Technology

4.4 • 66 Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What do people really mean when they talk about blockchain performance? Aptos Labs' Head of Research Sasha Spiegelman joins a16z crypto Head of Research Tim Roughgarden and show host Robert Hackett to discuss ways technologists are trying to maximize throughput and minimize latency for blockchains.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Web3 with A16Z. I'm Robert Hackett, and today we're talking about the ins and outs of blockchain performance.
0:10.0	How does the speed of one chain compare to another? What are the tricky ways that people talk about important metrics like throughput and latency?
0:18.8	And how do design choices across things like consensus and execution
0:22.9	result in performance tradeoffs? Our guest today is Aptos Labs' head of research, Sasha Spiegelman,
0:29.8	who is helping build out and develop technologies he originally co-created at Meta. We're also
0:35.5	joined by A16C Crypto head of research and Columbia University
0:39.3	professor Tim Ruffgarten, who specializes in the intersection of computer science and economics,
0:45.4	which is fitting as we dig into technical details throughout. As a reminder, none of the content
0:51.1	should be taken as tax, business, legal, or investment advice.
0:55.0	Please see A16.com slash disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments.
1:04.0	We live in this multi-chain world. There are lots of layer ones out there. You're heading up research at APTOS. What is the differentiation
1:13.9	for APTOS? What sets it apart from all the rest, all the other layer one competition out there?
1:20.2	What's unique about it? There is this constant tension between engineering and research.
1:25.3	It's a positive tension. And the tension is that here in the
1:28.0	research, we try to think further in the future. How do we see things? And then we see from the
1:32.5	engineering point of view, usually, and for a good reason, they think, okay, this is something
1:37.1	I understand. It works. I want to deploy it. I want to deploy it fast. So if you only have one
1:42.6	of the equation, you're missing the big picture.
1:45.9	When we joined Aptos research and when I say we, because Rati, Galashvili and I, we
1:50.0	joined together and we founded the research in Aptos. So we have this vision of doing things
1:55.2	differently because our previous experience was that research is this isolated component in the big company,
2:02.7	and we want to publish research to be completely different.
	...

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