Lastic
Lastic is a blockspace marketplace built on Polkadot’s Coretime Model. Designed with a simplified and friendly user experience, Lastic allows builders, tinkerers, and traders to get and utilize the product of blockchains: blockspace.
A True Blockspace Marketplace
Today, conversations around blockspace marketplaces often revolve around tools used by MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) actors to reorder transactions within a block. But these discussions are confined to the reordering of blockspace, not the blockspace itself. A true blockspace marketplace should empower buyers to wield their purchased blockspace as they see fit. It should grant them the flexibility to reorder transactions, extend EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) execution, offload tasks in Wasm execution, scale up processing power, perform exotic cryptographic calculations, deploy smart contracts, combine workloads for synchronous tasks, and more.
The Lastic Difference
Lastic doesn’t just participate in this dialogue; it reshapes it. We envision a world where blockspace is not a rigid resource but a malleable one. With Lastic, we introduce the flexibility that a diverse range of web3 applications needs. Built on Polkadot’s coretime model, Lastic redefines how blockspace is both composed and exchanged.
Lastic will help Polkadot achieve its vision of fully customizable blockspace.
Tailored Blockspace Access
Polkadot’s coretime model serves as the foundation for Lastic’s innovation. Whether you’re a small-scale project or a sprawling application, Lastic ensures you get the blockspace you require precisely when you need it. Simultaneously, blockspace providers can adapt their offerings to meet the dynamic demands of the market.
Solving Challenges in Blockspace
As expansive and revolutionary it is, the current core allocation model on Polkadot faces limitations. It lacks a dedicated marketplace for buying and selling coretime in flexible chunks. Teams often struggle to obtain cores on-demand or in bulk without ad-hoc requests. Fine-grained spans of coretime will be challenging to acquire. The existing architecture falls short in addressing the needs of parachains to sell excess blockspace, acquire extra blockspace, or acquire fine-grained coretime expansions as they need it.
Lastic’s Comprehensive Solution
Lastic steps in as the comprehensive solution to these challenges. Our marketplace will feature:
- A Marketplace for Coretime: Lastic will act as an exchange where participants can submit bids and asks for coretime, creating a transparent and efficient market unbounded by the limitations discussed in the Polkadot Fellowship RFCs.
- Market-Based Scaling: Elastic scaling for parachains, providing multiple cores when needed without explicit requests, enhances scalability and responsiveness.
- Flexibility Beyond Polkadot: Lastic will enable customizable coretime chunks and variable timeslices, catering to specific requirements and workload fluctuations.
- Wide Array of Pricing Models: Innovative pricing models are in the works for making sure Lastic serves as the bedrock of efficiently trading blockspace.
Inspired by Energy Markets
Blockspace’s unique coupling with time, such as purchasing specific timespans in the future, brings it close to energy markets. Lastic draws inspiration from energy markets’ concepts:
- Real-time Spot Market: Similar to the Instantaneous Coretime functionality, Lastic offers real-time access, insights and analysis.
- Day-Ahead Market: Ensures reliability for buyers looking to secure blockspace for near-future needs.
- Forward Contracts: Lastic’s role mirrors that of forward contracts in an energy market, providing flexible, responsive blockspace agreements.
- Capacity Markets: Encouraging providers to reach agreements with regular blockspace buyers, facilitating long-term commitments to support fluctuations in supply and demand.
Towards a Transparent Future
A user interface providing real-time coretime data is essential for Lastic’s functionality. It’s not just a tool; it’s a conduit for the Lastic team to understand coretime intricacies and share insights with the community.
A Multi-chain Blockspace Marketplace
Looking forward, Lastic aims to become the leading blockspace marketplace across the entire web3 ecosystem. With Polkadot’s versatility, Lastic is poised to validate various VM and chain types, including ZK Rollups and Optimistic Rollups, unlocking a world of possibilities.
Stay tuned as Lastic paves the way for a more flexible, accessible, and dynamic future of blockspace in the world of web3.