The Future of Rollups. An Interview with Chad N., Senior Software Engineer @ Fuel Labs

Web3 Leader Spotlight: Chad Nehemiah

This week, we had the pleasure of chatting with Chad Nehemiah, Senior Software Engineer Fuel Labs. Fuel Labs is an operating system purpose-built for Ethereum rollups, designed to help developers build decentralized economies at scale.

With over 8 years of experience across various computer science disciplines, Chad now focuses on the blockchain space, primarily within the Ethereum ecosystem. He is dedicated to scaling decentralized peer-to-peer networking systems and building the infrastructure to support blockchain applications.

Follow Chad on X at @ChadNehemiah

What initially captivated you about Web3, and how has your journey evolved over the past four years as a Senior Software Engineer in this field?

I discovered Ethereum through my cousin and the concept of "programmable money" immediately resonated with me. Living in Jamaica where over 30% of the population is underbanked, and over $233.4 billion in physical cash in circulation, I saw this is as a silver bullet for financial inclusion, although that dream hasn't materialised yet.

I began by writing smart contracts in my spare time to do a variety of dummy projects, until I eventually landed a job in DeFi Gaming. That was a fantastic experience but I realised I wanted to work in blockchain infrastructure as that's really where I saw my skills making an impact in the communities that were of particular interest to me. I began working on libp2p, which I still help maintain today, and I've also contributed to a variety of Ethereum ecosystem protocols, from clients to scaling solutions.

As I've matured I've come to realise how little I actually do know about the complexities that make this whole system function. However, I think the one thing that has stuck with me throughout this journey is that there may be experts and thought leaders, but there are by no means prescribed ways to solve the major problems we currently face in the space, and to me that's an equalisation factor. There is little that prevents me from making a meaningful contribution to advance the goals of this revolutionary project.

Big congrats on recently joining Fuel Labs through Calyptus, could you shed light on Fuel's distinctive contributions to Ethereum rollup infrastructure?

Thank you! I'm very excited to join the Fuel team as a Senior Engineer. Fuel is in its own category where scaling solutions are concerned. We gave Ethereum its first optimistic rollup and that methodology has proliferated the space now. More importantly, we are building an architecture completely from scratch that will enable parallelization, state-minimised execution and interoperability with other Ethereum rollups. It has traditionally been difficult for rollups to achieve all three goals.

We are confident our team will succeed as we have a team of the best engineers in the space and an ambitious mission to enable blockchain sustainability for long-term growth. One element of scalability that has become a popular discussion point is state growth – our use of predicates and scripts has uniquely positioned us to solve state growth while preserving peak performance. I believe all other existing EVM Rollups and L1s will suffer negatively from the impact of state growth, which will affect not just performance but user experience and the future of the blockchain industry.

What do you believe are the missing gaps in today's Web3 infrastructure that will pave the way to mass adoption?

There are many across the board, from scaling issues to user experience problems, many of which are interrelated. EIP-7702 was recently drafted (in a rather quick manner) and it will fill an important gap in dealing with multiple transactions which need to be reduced to a single transaction in the short term, although I still think Account abstraction through ERC-4337 will be an important step to enable consumers to interact with the Ethereum ecosystem the way they currently do with existing consumer software.

On a whole, I don't think we've begun to really envision what network congestion would look like if we were to grow to mass adoption, of say the level of Visa. For example, one area that I haven't seen discussed significantly is regional latencies. How would network propagation delays lead to temporary inconsistencies in the network's state across regions? Right now we don't have that geographically diverse a distribution of nodes so the resilience here is largely untested, but this of course will have to change if we want to achieve mass adoption.

What advice would you give Software Engineers striving to secure their dream role in blockchain architecture?

I think one habit that has helped me to gain meaningful insights in the age of mass information overload is through reading textbooks. It's important to zone in on a particular topic to be able to solve the problems specific to that domain. There's a lot of research happening in the space right now, which is fantastic, but many of the concepts that are at play have been explored in academia since at least the 1970s.

There's a plethora of textbooks around Distributed Systems, Cryptography, Compilers, Game Theory, Language Design and Computer security, for instance, that examine many of the ideas floating around in the space. Scholars have taken the time to contemplate these ideas without the commercial pressure to ship so I think we can take a step back at times and learn from their thoroughness, diligence and commitment to intellectual rigour, knowing we don't have to reinvent the wheel, it's also a great way to take your eyes off a screen, which can be beneficial for one's health.

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