Analyzing Rollups-as-a-Service Business Models, Economics, and Adoption | Analyst Round Table

Transcript

I was listening to some of the Celestia Dev calls over the weekend yeah I don't know why I was doing that over the weekend I guess that's just the the people we are at heart but the sheer amount of developer mind share that Celestia is attracting and hopping on one of those calls and just listening it back and and hearing people from Adam community ethereum community the Celestia native Community then you got John Adler who in my opinion is one of the biggest brins in all of crypto it's hard to ignore the amount of attention that Celestia is getting what's up everyone welcome back to another episode of zerox research March is just around the corner and I want to make sure to give you a quick reminder to not top tick your prices of your D London tickets if you use codes 0x10 at

checkout you can lock in a 10% discount on your ticket don't miss out on your chance to get ahead of the curve I'll see you in London welcome back to another episode of zerx research today the block Works research team is back to bring you another analyst round table it's Monday January 29th and you have myself Sam and Dan Sam you want want to kick it off with some news and governance updates yeah absolutely so we see the Unis swap Dallas starting to uh discuss the cross chain strategy of their uh decks a little bit more seriously they're looking to incentivize key pools with uni incentives from the treasury on key pools such as eth usdc usdc usdt and other pools that are pretty much critical for the you know smooth functioning of any ecosystem uh on any chain it also mentions existing

chain deployments like ckyc era and scroll where dominance isn't quite is strong as they probably hope but it also mentions chains like monad as uh high growth targets that the chain can Target and essentially continue to capture market share across other chains so found this pretty interesting and tend tangentially to that uh it's pretty busy for UNIS swap right now they have another proposal that passed on January 13th so we actually are a little bit late on this one but it's a Bitcoin sidechain root stock that they're looking to deploy on this proposal is from the Michigan blockchain Club so hat tip to to those students over there that's pretty cool to see them getting active in Unis swap governance I know a lot of blockchain clubs are pretty active in Unis swap already but still

always love to see that um but basically they are looking to deploy on root stock which is a Bitcoin side chain that is leveraging something called merged mining it kind of reminds me of igen laay reaking in that Bitcoin miners can run the same um I guess the the root stock client and redirect some of their hash to secure that side chain so I thought that was kind of neat I'll be honest I don't know a ton about it but nevertheless found it kind of interesting with the parallels between it and enan Lair but that is what's going on in Unis swap do you guys have any thoughts I think it's relatively interesting like Unis swap has historically not paid like that much attention to like other chains even outside of ethereum I know like in the

past half a year or so they started to try out like incentive programs I know G has done a bunch of research for them but they haven't really sort of venture it out to smaller l2s or side chains and and for good reason right I would bet that 90% of users on the sort of the evm ecosystem are on ethereum arbitrum and optimism today so why bother with sort of like the operational cost that it will take to deploy on like a new smaller chain with 1% of the users but I think they're probably at the point where like we want to build our own brand and our own ecosystem and we want to become like the defacto decks across the entirety of crypto right and there's definitely like

a lot of value to building that type of brand and so yeah I think like it's a natural progression for them to start using their incentives and their humongous treasury to start incentivizing some of these deployments on like smaller like chains but you could see it as sort of like a venture BET right like no one knows how monad would do but like if it does well then unisoft deployed on Monet will also do insanely well probably yeah I'm surprised we haven't seen more aggressive pushes like the this out of Unis swap to be honest but at the end of the day I guess it's a lot better to do this during a bull market when the token value goes up and the value of incentives I feel like a broken record I feel like I come on this show every week and talk about incentive

value but nevertheless you're you're definitely going to get more bang for your buck as un swap Dow and on top of that you know that front-end tax is significant and it drives a lot of value back to the Unis swap Foundation uh I believe I'm saying that right correct me if I'm wrong I think it's or maybe it's Unis swab Labs that collect yeah it's Labs not the foundation is significant I think they recently hit over five mil so it's it's not a small number and that's probably in two three months okay gotcha yeah well you'd think uh having a larger presence on some of these newer chains or even the ZK EVMS like it's pretty low hanging fruit for them to to go out and grab so all for it I feel like that's kind of the the push and pull between maybe the the longer thought process

Behind These this incentive program right is you know if we're really getting this world of a million chains you have to pick your shots as a as a protocol and say where are the users going to be and on which chains and then those are obviously the applica or the chains that I want my application to be used on or incentivized use on to kind of make it that core protocol in whatever sector it is kind of generalizing this Beyond Unis swap right is if you're going to be a cross chain app like you need to think carefully about where those incentives flow because you can imagine a world where you incentivize use on you know the 999,000 most used chain and then you've effectively wasted all of those incentives because there's no users there uh so it's just an an

ongoing problem I feel like and I think the the proper approach is wait to see uh I mean I guess it's kind of a gamble right if you if you wait to see too long which chains are are going to be the chains worth having a a large protocol on you know you might miss the the initial early move first mover Advantage um but yeah I think you do need to think critically about which chains are getting incentives in this new paradigm we're in at the same time though it's like if Unis swap doesn't deploy there is someone just going to Fork their code and deploy it themselves and launch a new token alongside with it so it's like you might as well just deployed under the Unis swap brand with minimal incentives so that way you're like kind of the early mover you bootstrap the

liquidity and that can as we've seen in the past kind of develop a mode of sorts but definitely like seeing Unis swap go in this direction but Ren you want to kick us off for the uh the next uh I guess news update we got yeah sure there recently was a temperature check snapshot for Li o da to choose a team to develop the rap Stak de bridge to BNB I think two months ago it was a pretty contentious issue um when L Zer Labs sort of launched their own bridge for rapti div to I think binance Avalanche and scroll and they got a decent amount of pushback and I think this is something that a lot of protocols that are looking to go cross chain whether that's for governance or for their assets issued are sort of like

struggling with what is the best Bridge architecture anyways um the snapshot ended five days ago and Wormhole and axel are won with 81.1 3% of the vote next was chaining ccip with 14.12% and next was L zero with 4.75% of the vote And to clarify Wormhole and axar it's like a joint sort of submission so this rap stake de Bridge would be secured by both Wormhole and axar and I think this is a general Trend that you're seeing in crypto right rather than just trusting the security assumptions of one Bridge you go hey might as well use multiple vigs so that at least there's like a fallback option or sort of like a multile vig right um and unop is

exploring a similar thing for the governance um they did a really in-depth sort of bridge assessment report and they evaluated six different bridges for the governments governance needs and they also came to the conclusion that multi message aggregation is probably the best rout for them and I think they are actively developing something there so it's just interesting to see how the bridge security landscape is evolving given that it's one of the most sort of contentious spaces and sort of hardest to secure to I'm kind of surprised by the results of this one I definitely get the having two different parties kind of like winning the vote over two separate proposals but chain link being such an OG I would have thought that they would

have garnered more votes to be completely honest with ccip yeah I think I feel like ccip has been Rel lackluster though um I don't know whether like a potential Wormhole airdrop may have factored into people's like voting decisions but yeah I feel like ccip has been pretty La cluster so I'm not too surprised to see ccip like pretty down there to be honest was there any discussion around like why B&B was the chain that they're talking about uh bridging to like you know I think there's a couple different reasons why that's interesting but I'm curious if the Forum post detailed that I did not look too much into the for

impulse but I mean like kind of similar to the unisoft thing right if you Lal I would assume that you just want like rap steak de or steak de bridge to like all of these random chains so that like if there's a chance that chain takes off you become like the def facto LST on that Chain versus someone else yeah and I mean and all all of the B&B has all of the Topline traditional like you know arguably questionable user metrics they have great you know they have high transactions a lot of active addresses high tvl high Dex volume um so ultimately like yeah that makes sense to probably get your asset over there whether or not you think it's like a long-term viable chain doesn't harm in bridging over

there yeah definitely agree with that but Dan I know you've got uh some cool updates on our Celestia dashboard so let me add that to the screen if you want to go over that for our listeners yeah yeah obviously the modular thesis has been front and center for quite some time now um and we have seen the a recent rise in some of those rups actually getting pushed live so rups as a service or Rass as it's being dubbed uh you know we it's earlier this year we we actually have an interview with Neil uh from when he was Eclipse was still looking to be like that Ras provider um and it's really cool to see that actually come to hit production and rs actually being

launched to these providers and these providers doing their part in in managing the chains for their users I think it's you know there's questions around the economies of those or the economics of those businesses but uh it's cool to see it live in in production and so we have two main providers posting or creating and launching rollups that use Slash Da Caldera which launched Manta Network and conduit which has launched a series I think they're up to five now we have all five of those tags so if I filter this table here just for the word rollup uh we'll see that there are six rollups now live using Celestia six six launched known and tagged rollups of course there's a series more right like you'll see the con the actual name space that gets used is a hex encoded string uh the

reasoning for that is you don't want collisions in the naming conventions you're using you ideally you'd build a system that uh always has unique naming conventions so what Celestia has done actually is they're using the first 15 digits of Shaw 256 hash uh so the actual name of the network is uh you know a a standard nameing convention that actually details out that oh this is orderly network but then you put it through a hash hash algorithm to actually get uh the name space that you're going to use again to avoid collisions of of of Nam spaces um the pain in the ass part of that is you can't hashes are you know by nature one way so if you if you just see this string of hex coded numbers you

know it doesn't get you anywhere and you don't know what the rollup actually is so there's very manual process and actually getting these names but we do all that hard work for you so as a blocker crear user uh you are able to access this dashboard without the headaches that our team goes through on your behalf um it's cool to see the progression here in Celestia actually getting used so this top left chart here for the viewers is data posted uh in terms of megabytes of data by namespace so again we're still seeing not a ton of usage there's there's no way to go around that for context ethereum gets a about 700 or so megabytes of data posted to it per day with arbitrum and ZK sync kind of leading the data leading the way uh uh leading the pack on the amount of

data posted but nonetheless we are seeing uh this list populate from really just like inscription services that are more of like proof of concept kind of gimmicky uh protocols to something that the long-term Vision actually facilitates right which is rollups uh and so it's very cool to see that come to life orderly Network and Manta are posting the most data of these rollups but we have the options networks in Lyra and avo uh you know live and active and I think it's something like 85% of defi options volume is now uh running on Celestia underneath as they like to say of course the other side of this is you know the fees paid are incredibly minimal and if you'd run the math out uh

Ren our annualize over here as as as he loves to do if you run the math out like even at Max capacity so Celestia has 8 megabyte blocks that run every 15 seconds uh so if you Max those out for the entire year at the current Tia price you're making around four or five million do of fees so you know the fee Revenue isn't that great even at Max Capacity today of course that's not your endstate Max Capacity I think they want to work towards something closer to 100 megabyte blocks so about 12 and a half times more capacity and you know that's about 60 million or so uh in annual annual fee revenue and you know you go again like that's still not a huge number when

you're starting to look at the I think we're at like a 17 or8 billion dollar valuation fully diluted that math just doesn't that math doesn't math and that takes you to the second point I guess which is the modular money idea right the idea that the rollups on top of celesia are going to create demand for the token itself um I don't think you've seen that yet I don't believe any of the rollups that are alive today are using Tia as a gas token um but they don't necessarily need to use it as a gas token I don't think if you had meaningful activity that sucked tea liquidity onto that chain and again created demand for the asset uh as a form of money or the modular money Vision that would be sufficient I think I think that's totally realistic to say that there can be modular the modular

money idea uh can definitely increase the value Beyond just the the raw fees that get generated by the chain I think there's a bit of a circular error there because does it become less desirable money if the there's no fees being generated I kind of want to say Yes um jury is still out on that I think today on this initial onset everybody's just you know the numbers don't matter today and that's very fair then the Chain's three months old nobody takes the revenue numbers of a three-month old startup and uses that as like their investment thesis um I think what you'll probably end up seeing is something along the lines of vertical integration or service offering expansion um you know the do something as I think they're

going to have to cannibalize some of their settlement layers that they're like you know like da and settlement go hand inand so right now they're using like Dimensions basically this settlement like layer uh that is using sesia for da I kind of think they'll have to cannibalize that at one point and get Tia exported more easily to these rollups uh if they really want the the demand to be driven to these rollups for Tia um so I don't know the jury is really still out I am obviously a data fanatic so I think the modular vision is very broken in a lot of ways when you start thinking about the data aspect but I guess I'll pause there on my ramble and I'm curious what you guys think about uh all of that I guess we had one other um I guess news update is that literally 30 minutes

ago before we started recording Stark net announced that they are working on building a blob stream implementation in chyos that way Stark net l3s can leverage Celestia for da and I imagine will open up the door for other da layers like Ian da Avail Etc in the future so that's something again like every single chain in ecosystem L2 in ethereum world is building out a modular strategy it feels like and I think that's too big to be ignored to be quite honest and I was listening to some of the Celestia Dev calls over the weekend yeah I don't know why I was doing that over the weekend I guess that's just the the people we are at heart but nevertheless like something that makes me really

bullish on Celestia like I get all the fundamental value cruel naysay orness I guess but I the the sheer amount of developer mind share that Celestia is attracting and hopping on one of those calls and just listening it back and and hearing people from Adam community ethereum community the celesa native Community then you got John Adler who in my opinion is one of the biggest brins in all of crypto he pretty much helped spin up optimism and the idea of optimistic rollups as a whole like it's hard to ignore the amount of attention that Celestia is getting and I'm also seeing more along lines of like Celestia and ethereum genuinely aren't competing against each other and that's a view I've held for quite some time and maybe I'm getting that wrong

maybe they complement each other really well and because ethereum is so bottlenecked at the da capacity aspect of things that there is room for both of these things to to live and enjoy I guess the benefits of each other and you know growing the sum of all the parts is more important than um a competition in a zero sum game I guess and maybe that's too theoretical for a Monday morning but nevertheless I find it cool I want to say that Celestia has definitely like capitalized on his first move Advantage like really strongly sure there are like other da options out that there are live today but Celestia has done such a good job right it kind of resembles like there was like a one or two month perod like half a year ago

where every other day you would see like this Chain's going to be launching as a open P stack roll up it has similar Vibes to celesa right now and you know every Project's feeling like going modat I think just last week as dad mentioned just there was like AO there Lyra there's order there's plume and it feels like that trend is just going to continue to be honest and sure Igan da is like probably the other larger competitor but it's not live yet right um and IG ner has proposed 15 MB blocks I think versus Celestia 6 mb per second blocks and at that point you know like the cost differential compared to using ethereum as a DA layer is like 99.7% versus

99.9% like it's very marginal and I'm slightly worried for I da about that to be honest I mean sure you can make the argument that searching cost is like probably zero most all as of service providers will integrate igen da into their platform so that you just have to like click a button and you're able to switch from celesio to I da or eum to I da but say that comes out like Q4 2024 right by then probably half the CYO is over half the protocols that want to like deploy as a rollup for like a rollup bid will have done so already and all of them are just going to use C this year over its year and I think it's hard to overcome that to be honest just that

developer mind sh and as s mentioned right star is building out like a celesia blob stream contract I don't know whether a similar mechanism is necessary for I can da whether they need sort of like a blob stream bridge but there is certainly sort of like a developer ecosystem that's also steadly growing for Celestia yeah that's those are really good points Sam you first mentioned the the developer community that coalesces around an idea a concept or a chain I think that is a very understated uh point of value for a chain like if you look at salana right now you have multiple teams working to rebuild and revamp the scheduler you have jump teams coming in and building fire dancer building a new client you

have you know Eugene Chen who's building uh a protocol Ellipsis is the devco behind Phoenix um and he's very involved in like saying hey here's the problems we're facing as a protocol and here's how changing the base layer would help not only us but other protocols and you have this community of developers that are actually like solving the problems that you hit um because even if you're a Gen 2 gen 3 blockchain you're going to hit problems and you need those developers to cols and kind of fix these things and help improve uh the onboarding experience and all these all these things and so that is remarkably invaluable and I do think celesia is dominating at that right now which is a very very uh promising thing to see for the chain Ren one of the interesting things you brought up was the the

switching costs are zero and I I do think that's true like if you play out the idea of a million blockchains then role as a service providers are critical in the infrastructure of that like that's it's probably not going to happen without them if your role up as a service provider has an integration for Igan da near da um Avil da and Celestia da and ethereum da if you want to switch like it is literally a message in a telegram chat that is it that's the switching cost and there's got to be a reason other than cost I feel like because you're right if it's you know if I'm spending $100 a year or $98 a year then that the $2 isn't even worth the time it takes me to

go type that telegram chat um so it I think it will come down to like branding and as much as like the alignment stuff is so dumb it does a it's not about aligning to the protocol there's a lot of games to be played with aligning to a specific narrative and if you're if you're somebody who needs to care about the token price uh for whatever reason that's something you're going to have to care about and factor into your decision-making is aligning to the narrative like we see that every day in this industry um so yeah I I think it is pretty interesting and the last piece here is you mentioned growth so uh I want to just highlight here that you know we do see a lot of potential growth coming online so I mentioned that this is this this namespace structure is like

what you're supposed to do as a celesti uh uh rollup right you can use plain teex strings that makes them much easier to see and interact with uh but they recommend using this shot 256 encoding mechanism and so that's how you see these live you know Avo public goods like these are the role up as a service providers doing you know what's Celestia is asking you to do again this is permissionless you can just you know name your name space my name uh and it'll work but this so to me when I see the technical method being taken this is not some you know BS inscription uh chain that's coming live and being like this this is rollups testing launch that is exactly what this is in my opinion um and so there's about

16 17 18 chains that we have untagged that have you know only posted a few basically like a day's worth of transactions I'm pretty positive that this is an indication that we have another batch of upwards of 20 rollups coming online so this this trend is very much so only getting started and the growth that sesia has lined up for like then honestly just q1 alone is is going to blow some people away I think um and again like I don't love the modular Vision but that doesn't change the fact that I can look at this and say yeah doesn't matter matter if I like it or not it's coming yeah and like you said it's just a like a telegram chat it's like hey like I think we're going to make a migration can you help us make that happen and boom you know you can make

that switch pretty easily but I think another underrated aspect is there's not a lot of tooling probably built out for a lot of this stuff like Celestia is definitely getting the upper hand there in that there's projects who have done the move before run into certain problems can send a telegram chat to you know other developers that they know in the industry because let's be honest it's not that big and boom that's a problem they ran into previously and they made this little fix and they can pass that on to someone else so I think the network effects are are pretty dramatic I was talking with Nick white over telegram who works over at Celestia and I was asking you know if you can't quantify the number of light nodes in order to Signal a safe increase in Block size to increase da throughput like what

are you g to do and you basically came back with that's actually not as much of a concern the bigger concern is the block building process for validators and that's like something I had not consider considered so I'm very interested to see how that plays out because that's ultimately a problem that pretty much every chain faces is is how do you sufficiently decentralize the block building process and if you have these giant blocks that Celestia is going for that's definitely gonna in theory and my at least how it makes sense to me is increase the validator requirements so it's going to be interesting to see how Celestia actually scales once it hits that maximum bound of Da throughput assuming we get 500x the current activity okay I was trying to say that's still like even with you know 20 rollups coming online I don't think we're going to be ballpark close

like uh I recently wrote a a report that touches on this and at the time of writing it was before this recent batch of conduit rups went live uh and shout out to the conduit team I think they're absolutely crushing they're doing things right uh their rups are paying cheap fees relative to some of the other providers out there um they're crushing and uh at the time I wrote that report sorry for the tangent there there was like 0.1% of Celestia's capacity being used and you know when they hit 100% I I think there will be a very strong reason to just simply expand the capacity it's like an arbitrary block size bound um that has to do with the light nodes and the other things you mentioned Sam and the amount of information needs to be gossiped across the the cosmos SDK um

but there will be growth but we're still so far away from that number like I can't even like visual like H it's hard to even reason about how we hit that I think there was the number was like something like 4,000 arbitrum sized rollups that's an insane number yeah that's that's truly mindboggling to be completely honest when you put it in that perspective it definitely seems like a problem that's not going to be a problem for a substantial amount of time but what is keeping someone and maybe you guys don't know the answer to this question but what's keeping someone from attacking a chain by posting blobs to a specific name space like that would essentially be their target attack like if you were trying to like alter the da on within a

name space not even altered just like spamming Celestia under a specific name space Merkel tree oh well you could I mean you could do that right but it costs money and even though it's so cheap it it still costs money but I guess if you just slapped in like an eight megab byte or you know you try to basically fill the block um with Spam is what you're saying yeah I mean the barrier would be just paying the fees really that's interesting I wonder if we'll see that play out at some point in the future I also think that if like the actual Ro up was posting data to its Nam space and someone else was posting data to the same name namespace in the same

block my guess would be that like celesia is staring like both versions of the DA for that block but that's just a guess like it wouldn't just like try to overwrite one with the other I think Sam's just saying like what if I just spam the network with a ton of data um and just to fill the block so other people had to pay more is that right Sam yeah exactly that and I mean that'd be a worthless attack at the end of the day like why would you want to do that but we also see a lot of worthless things go on all the time everywhere in crypto so I could definitely see it happening yeah and ren on your point like you could just filter the for the information posted to a nam Space by a particular signers so like the the actual Celestia

address and that would solve that problem gotcha hm okay well we have uh talked about celesia a lot so let's move on from that one I've got two token unlocks on the news and in governance update uh segment here so we've got op unlocks on January 30th equivalent to two and a half% of the circulating Supply worth about 70 million and dydx unlocks on February 1st worth 87 million which is equivalent to about 10% of the circulating Supply so these are still some of the supply overhangs everyone was super worried about with the dyx unlocks they're continually coming along but we honestly have not seen that make a material impact in the dydx OR op prices for that matter so bullish unlocks maybe time

will tell um we also have Picasso protocol on salana who launched um Soul reaking similar to enan Lair uh launched on January 28th so Sunday yesterday I don't have much of a take here this feels a little bit weird I tried to find their Twitter handle Picasso Network and it seems like like they were like a cosmos project or I stumbled on like the the wrong Twitter handle I don't really know but it just seems like there's a lot going on with Picasso I don't know if either of you guys have looked into this much but any details would be highly appreciated if you have any insight there used to be a uh par chain with oh my God I'm blanking uh with

polka dot um and I think that was oh my Lord like probably two years ago and it seems like they fived to this reaking I don't know Sean thoughts on Picasso itself but I think like the psycho like there just going to be reaking for everything right there's going to be reaking for obviously ethereum reaking for salana and you're seeing reaking for Bitcoin play out like pretty heavily there's a lot of projects that are exploring or I guess not reaking just staking Bitcoin uh for yield um and yeah you generation has always been like very attractive in crypto and now you bring that to like this asset that has a spot Bitcoin a spot ETF I think it's just a natural progression of the space to be

honest I mean like you could even say like polygon's like P token with its whole like sort of like infinite utility or whatever they termed it is a form of reaking yeah I I agree with that I I find it hard to believe that soul restak will get much traction considering the lack of traction that even just plain Liquid Soul staked has has gotten so kind of a nonstarter for me plus it just feels like copy pasta and a last Stitch effort to be completely honest from Picasso which is terrible to say so sorry to Picasso supporters out there but that's just my honest opinion on it yeah um just one last note on Picasso I do like the gamification element that

they're doing they have this like nft collection and you can act as like a vault manager and there's only 100 nfts and you're basically trying to get as many so or as much so deposited into your vote as possible and it's just like fun to see people like gamifying such experiences and I think that's a trend that has already played out and will continue to play out but for the last news update of the week we have Uma and his new product overal so it's basically an oracle update auction um it captures me that is a result of chaining price updates and it's built on top of flash Bots MV share back run auction mechanism uh MB is obviously very widely studied but I think Oracle extracted will value

not so much but you can think of a perex whenever it updates its prices for Traders to trade off or for example as the index price for liquidations there's probably a lot of money to be made given the growth of Peres in the past year and so just a quick rundown of the mechanism at any point anyone can place a bid to use the most recent price most likely a Searcher and these bids or bundles are submitted to one or more oval nodes by Searchers which then act as Proto M share nodes and then when these nodes receive the bundles it places the unlock transaction ahead of it add instructions for how to split the payment and forwards the unlocked bundle to me share that's a lot of fancy words but it

doesn't matter it basically just means that you can pay for the right to be the one to update the transaction and you can include your own transactions after that as a bundle so if you were a liquidator and you don't want anyone else liquidating you would pay to be the want to uh basically update the price feed through chain link and you also include your liquidation transactions as part of like an atomic bundle and it's kind of like similar to when you are submitting a transaction through M share and you run an auction someone back runs you and you get a bit of money but in this case it's likely that these protocols mainly prexes would receive that Oracle extractable value captured back yeah Ren that sounds pretty cool I'll be honest I don't know a ton about it so I'm just going to leave it at that

but uh we will head over to a quick word from Noble thanks to our fantastic sponsor dydx and then we'll get right over to Hot Seat cool Throne this week we have our five minute segment with Yelena the founder of Novo thanks to dydx so thank you so much for coming on Yelena for starters would you mind giving us a quick intro onto what Noble is and why we need a general asset issu issuance chain definitely thank you for having me so Noble is a cosmos chain um purpose built for one specific use case so that's native asset issuance so when uh asset issuers like Circle uh or others sort of consider how to uh natively issue in other ecosystems It's relatively straightforward uh you deploy a smart contract you mint you burn with

those native capabilities in Cosmos it's a lot more uh kind of complicated and difficult um as as you all know uh each Cosmos chain is kind of sovereign from the next there is no one sort of base layer one kind of Monolithic kind of blockchain environment and so Noble was really designed uh and kind of conceptualized to be that acid issuance platform for the entire IBC ecosystem so you can mint you can burn you can redeem you can issue uh something like a USC on on Noble and you could have that be interoperable with every other Cosmos chain you know such as dydx in in a permissionless kind of fashion so we are very proud to uh be bringing native UCC to Cosmos in the last uh four months we've since we went live we've uh issued

about aund million do of native USC DX is obviously a huge uh kind of component of of that demand and that growth um and um in the last 30 days we've done about 350 million uh dollars of USC transfer volume so that's USC kind of being minted on Noble ibcd out to dydx osmosis stargaze if you want to buy an bad kid um and uh kind of many other chains like huira and so on so uh that's Noble and a nutshell awesome thanks for that quick uh quick update and getting the audience up to speed in terms of cctp versus IBC do you expect the primary route in the cosmos ecosystem to remain IBC or you

think cctp will become that over time so cctp is a really interesting kind of uh protocol that does differ uh from IBC in in kind of significant ways so cctp uh stands for the cross-chain transfer protocol uh you could think of it as a kind of circle Bridge so it's a mechanism for me as a user to um transfer for kind of my kind of uscc natively onchain from any cctp uh kind of uh enabled uh or cctp supported chain such as ethereum arbitrum polygon optimism base um for now and have that uscc go to uh be minted on on Noble so again I have let's say in the dydx

example a bunch of usdc on V3 I want to take that to uh V4 which is a cosmos chain I would uh kind of in iate a burn transaction um which would uh call in the cctp protocol that would uh send an attestation request from Circle to say that the user who is kind of burning their USC on on V3 is uh you legitimate and then that would uh send a request for mint on the on the noble side and then you would IBC that out to dydx the user doesn't see all of these kind of steps on the back end including the kind of request for burn the attestation the mint the IBC all they see is a oneclick transaction where their USC is now um uh being uh migrated from V3 to V4 uh kind

of in the cosmos ecosystem so I look at cctp and IBC as very compatible from uh like kind of a use case perspective because if I'm coming outside of the cosmus ecosystem I will want to use cctp but then when I'm in the cosmos ecosystem I'll want to use IBC so these are just different uh kind of messaging protocols uh to enable the same use case which is this cross chain um kind of activity so one of the traditional headaches of interacting with the cosmos ecosystem is the multitude of gas tokens that you need to obtain to use every single chain right and with usdc issued from Noble it seems like there's an opportunity for usdc to be this like generic gas token kind of similar to how

some ethereum l2s are thinking about like gas abstraction account abstraction and having pay masters so I guess the question here is what do you think of us DC as a gas token and do you think that'll become common place for Cosmos chains I mean it's definitely uh a lot easier uh to kind of obtain uscc if you want to sort of uh use it as as as a fee token as a gas token right then there's so many Integrations you know with kind of centralized exchanges on and off ramps it's a lot easier to manage from like a obviously like a price perspective uh you're not using a token that's like you know very volatile or or something like this um and so I definitely see that becoming more and more of a trend in Cosmos um what a lot of ethereum

folks don't know is uh we've actually had this like idea of like chain abstraction or like gas abstraction for forever um so you can use any IBC token as your gas on any Cosmos chain so technically we could use the dydx token as our gas token on Noble I don't think we would want to um but we could and so that uh also enables any Cosmos chain like DDX or stargaze or or osmosis to uh if they want uh use usdc as their native gas token which of course originated from Noble um so it's really um choose your own kind of Adventure so to speak from like a you know fee kind of gas management perspective um but yes this idea of gas abstractions is super

important um I've run into many many headaches of not having enough um you know gas for certain transactions on other chains um having to top up and so on so I definitely see usdc becoming kind of that um kind of gas token yeah for sure as always Cosmos is pretty early with the tech at least much earlier than etherum well yeaha that's about all we have time for today I think that was really great I think you gave the audience a lot of insight into what noo is and sort of the road it plays within the cosmos ecosystem for those that want to find out more about noo or want to just hit you up where can they do so absolutely uh definitely Twitter um I'm or X sorry I'm very uh active there

um and please do kind of keep in touch um we have a telegram channel that where we kind of share like announcements and kind of information um so uh you can definitely check out our Noble announcements Channel and then uh we will be um uh updating our website and pushing that out uh totally new revamped website in the next couple of weeks so make sure to check out Noble assets. XYZ um and thanks so much for having me all right thanks for coming on now moving on our hot seat cool Throne segment all right we are back with some hot seat cool Throne Ren the annualize I actually just noticed that you put that in your name for this episode that is freaking awesome so how would I kick it over to you to start us off this week all right this week the largest event of the week

is probably Jupiter and his air job happening on 31st of January actually which is a slight problem given that this podcast will also come out on 31st of January but anyway our good friend at d Andrew hung made some insane dashboards for Jupiter for you to analyze the data I'll give you a quick rundown um there's 1.5 billion doll these are weekly stats um for like the past week Jupiter has seen $ 1.5 billion dollar in perose volume and bought in $2.2 million in fees its sofs have seen 3.3 billion in volume and brought in $1 million in fees its limit order functionality has seen 81 million in volume and brought in 31k in fees and

it's DCA swaps have seen 56 million in volume and brought in 86k in fees so if you add that together that's roughly 3.3 million a week and of course I'm going to analyze this so that equates to 172.5 million a year and then the next step of annualizing any fee generated is slapping a nice PE multiple on it so in this case I mean I don't really want to be conservative given that it's like salana everyone's really excited about salana uh Jupiter is like really crazy fun and aggregator and so I think I'm going to go with something conservative for crypto at a 50p and that gets us to a 8.62 billion dollar valuation I'm not sure what it's

trading on ail right now but I think this could be really updated to be outdated to be honest but I think it was around a four billion do valuation so like but I don't think anyone's going to care about everything I just say they're just going to see like oh my God jup is making like million in fees that could be so much um and I wouldn't be too surprised to see Jupiter release more products with sort of like the stickiness of the users over time that generate more fees right I mean like the per is a relatively new product that they only released two months ago and it basically generates like more than 60% of their fees in comparison to SS Li orders and DCA softs and I think you're going just going to see that Trend continue I I do

think that there are some problems with their perose product I haven't verified it myself I think like the Oracle updates are slow or something or they're using some Jank Oracle but I don't think anyone's going to care about that to be honest but tldr Jupiter makes a lot of money there is kind of like a fundamental thesis for like uh slightly ridiculous valuation I don't know how much of that fee goes to the Dow or it goes to the Dow or not but it definitely makes money yeah none of the revenue back to the Dow or the token but that was an intentional decision for the near- term I am personally incredibly bullish on that decision if reinvest in growth this is the most high growth industry that

exists on this planet Earth and not reinvesting in future growth is a death sentence in my opinion um I love the idea of tokens being a very interesting way to pass Revenue back to users or profits back to users but that's not how you start as a startup like you have to that's that is an end State you need to build towards uh not an initial launching off point so um yeah I I think I think it's a phenomenal product as well which is the one piece that's like yes it's making a ton of money which is obviously awesome but one of the few apps in crypto where you use it and you're like damn like that felt good I'm I was happy with that experience yeah big agree on that and I love how they're going for per

aggregation as well I assume that's not against their own base of liquidity like I'm almost positive so correct me if I'm wrong there and I assume they're aggregating for different purpose venues in the salana ecosystem but I just find the whole dichotomy of the front end of Jupiter as an aggregator becoming the dominant ontop shop for user activity in the solo ecosystem to be super interesting in contrast to ethereum having like you know really silad liquidity in front ends across all these different decks across all these l2s across all these different pers uh venues like I think it's really cool to have one front end to aggregate all that because ultimately it lets the entire ecosystem grow more instead of it being more of a doggy dog world so Jupiter's per product

is actually their own liquidity they're not um routing it to like various prexes on salana I think they started off with caps at 20 million worth of liquidity but today it's reached I think 86 million is the last number I saw in a and it's like kind of similar to a go constract it's 50% usdc it's a basket of usdc Bitcoin salana and maybe if but it's seemed like relatively impressive volume so far right I think it just reached like 87 million AUM but it's seen 7.3 billion dollar in volume so far and it's currently 47 million in open interest from 11,000 wallets so it's definitely like a very widely used product and if

you look across like most of the stats like December was a huge month for Jupiter got it okay well I stand corrected then but nevertheless perss is a Cash Cow so I have no doubt that that is a place people will trade if they can sufficiently build that out and get some deep liquidity because let's be honest here like the the purpose landscape on salana definitely is in the very very early Innings when compared to any other uh you know mature def ecosystem like arbitrum I think that's also an interesting Dynamic of Sal you know like the whole like OG thesis of salano was that you could build like NASDAQ on the blockchain these limit order books should have taken off but it seems like mostly us still prefer these like sort

of more crypto native products rather than like limit order books such as like grift and Zeta I need to go check the numbers but I wouldn't be too surprised to see TR they doing like a sizeable amount of volume relative to drift and Zeta even though they have a completely different mechanisms one is like a limit order book one is sort of like your standard crypto perex um obviously like for soul markets I think they order books are doing more volume um but yeah I just checked Avo too this thing trading at 0. 6788 which I would guess is a $6.8 billion valuation so you know it's not that far off my annualized number of 8.62 billion um I think the the other side of

yeah sure the tech might be different and not what originally people thought were going to use but I I think people just I think we forgot that people like using good products and again Jupiter is just a killer product so I think that's why it sees the traction it does I think one last interesting thing is that uh the founder of Jupiter say that basically everyone knows that like 40% of the supply is going to be aird dropped to Jupiter like users or like whoever is eligible for aird Dro and that's going to be split into four phases right with the first one's so for sort of like the Jupiter core product I wouldn't be too surprised to see the next one being for like Jupiter's per product but this is going to be a once a

year event so jupit is going to release 10% of the supply in this like Mega airdrop in January of every year if you had asked me and I had like no context I would have thought that that would happen like faster maybe in like half of your Cycles but it's going to be three more years before like Jupiter's last like massive like 10% airdrop and I don't know how that will play into like the timing of various Market Cycles but I just thought it was like an interesting strategy but it also makes sense because stup is founder I don't know how to pronounce his name like meow where meow um has said that like you know he's really focused on growing the product he really doesn't care about like Revenue share and I wouldn't be too surprised to see him wanting to build

out this like crazy brand and crazy ecosystem within the Jupiter platform and so it makes sense to like sort of like spend one year doing the Sprint building out this crazy product until you take like 80 90% of Market sh on salana do a huge air job for it and then Vin and repeat move on to like the next product until you basically dominate the entire like salana defi ecosystem you know perex is probably the next after that I don't know maybe like a b lending platform to sort of destroy all of the other B lending platforms on salana I don't know what the last one will be maybe something M related would you want to see that under the same token or new product new token I think that would be under the

same token it's kind of hard to do a new product new token but that could be a good segue into unibot on salana unless you guys have anything else for Jupiter no that's strictly why I was bringing it up so unibot probably one of the Front Runners for the telegram bot trading meta right they were the first to like one of the first to have a token that token went pretty high um but obviously now it's down pretty bad on ethereum but I think starting from November last year when mem coins really took off on salana you saw all of these telegram trading Bots pop up by most notably Bon bot which was doing like incredible volumes probably more so than like every other

ethereum telegram trading bot combined and so if you're ethereum based telegram trading bot you're like hey I want in on this party it's free money I'm not going to miss out telegram trading Bots are obviously here to stay so unibot did that unibot launched a new product on salana but they recently announced that they are going to release a new token called Unis so so so how this token works is that uni bot holders receive 80% of uniso supply and 50% of revenue from salana trades will go to UNI Bond holders and the other 50% will go to Unis so holders uh so Traders will receive roughly 20% of the Unis Sol air drop but it's important to note that the

unibot ecosystem fund and LP Supply which is roughly 10% of the uni Supply is not eligible for the air jobs but tldr like if you're a uni bot holder you're not getting diluted that much in terms of sort of like the amount of unit so you get it's not like you're getting completely hosed on this new product that's launching on salana you would still make a hefty amount of free Revenue however it's only 50% of the revenue from salana trades right that's going to UNI spot holders and then the other is going to UNI so holders and at that point you can ask like you know this is getting kind of confusing like if univ Launches on and like blockchain is it going to launch

another token and there's a whole host of arguments for why you should launch a new token why you shouldn't launch a new token obviously a new token is probably a new chart it's more money I think there's arguments to be made against it V Drome and aerrow drum paid up pretty bad when they tried to do their whole like new token old token strategy and V Drome sorry Aerodrome ultimately cannibalize V drone pretty heavily I'm not sure you see that same Dynamic play out given that I would guess users between ethereum and salana are pretty isolated between the two ecosystems but I would love to get your thoughts on like what do you think a new token for in the same product on a new chain is a good idea or not they did put out an announcement real quick and and they

said that they're not doing another token I don't know if that was due to community push back or that was always the plan I have no idea but they did they did say that I think that's important here because I'm pretty against the idea of like one product one token because I I definitely get the in like I think the market structure incentives right now today you should launch as many tokens as possible because nothing change trades remotely near any form of a fundamental value and that will lead to more C value capture for you as the deployer now is that like um morally the higher the best road to take or is that like the best thing to do for the future of the industry like probably no to both um but from a pure

incentives Point yeah yeah you should launch as many tokens as possible like that's the market will buy them and you will make money that seems to be the meta um for me it's like what are the analogies that you could make here to some sort of like real like physical world businesses right like think about like Amazon started as selling books right and I don't know the the true history of Amazon but let's just pretend this is true like let's say the next thing Amazon launched is their web services or AWS they used the revenue and profits from the bookstore sales and the online sales to to the R&D to build an a the AWS business right like those things are

very interconnected and imagine if they instead of like keeping the bookstore an online business only under the initial Amazon equity and then they launched an AWS Equity right they built a whole new entity with a whole new company and put that public like does that make sense no that does not make makes sense they're they're the same company managed by the same person there is one they're one company they're just two products within the same umbrella um and I think you could probably make an argument where yeah but you as an investor you know if I only believed in the AWS business now I could bet on that and I don't have to have take exposure to their Online Marketplace I I kind of sympathize with that but at the same time like they're just not that separate in reality the

the the profits of One Fund the creation of the other and vice versa or when online sales are down and AWS is high you end up with like a break even Revenue right like these are the examples I can think of that creates some sort of analogy here and I just think it's it doesn't make sense and then we chatted about this earlier in the day and you know I think it was Sam you mentioned it would make a lot of sense if they were uh like basically if the revenue share made sense because it's two different change and you have to like the cross trained communication and value transfer between salana and ethereum isn't that great today so maybe it just makes sense and they're reducing the complexity in the system by all the value that gets created on salana goes to this salana

token but that's not true right 50% is still going back to the unibot token and so you're still have like you're just introducing more complexity so that I I I don't think that that was really the solution here and I'm trying to like rack my brain for reasons you would do this uh other than you know the incentives to launch a token lead to more money and like I'm struggling I really am like it doesn't it doesn't make a ton of sense to I think as far as the fee distribution complexity point at first I was like okay yeah that's going to be pretty complicated but how unibot is doing this is that everyone that holds unibot on ethereum I think gets a chance to fit in the form and you basically give them your salana address right so if everyone does that then it seems like you could

probably do that for like a few distribution from salana you don't need like this whole new token that ACC Cruise value but yeah I think you made a great point that the way the market is designed today and the participants that are in the market it makes sense to launch a new token for this new chain for the similar product just because like if salano goes like uniso will definitely go up independent of unibot yeah I think this is also a part of the problem here is like Revenue share for a startup doesn't make a ton of sense and now they're trying to like force that into this scenario when you should probably just be taking the profits for the team and building more products and better products and you know improving your web app and expanding Beyond just a

telegram trading bot and and offering more products and services and being live on more chains like that would make way more sense than trying to like launch a second Token build this rev share mechanism that makes sense like I don't know to me it just feels like undo complexity back to your more trfy analogies Dan there is Brookfield Corporation if you've heard of them I think they're a big Canadian company and they have like Brookfield Asset Management Brookfield infrastructure Brookfield like like energy like all of these different entities that trade as independent tickers on stock exchanges so that's like kind of a Counterpoint to that but at the same time like to your point like returning Revenue in a startup like what what are we doing here

like this is like a company that was probably you know founded in in the 1900s if if I'm being honest and this is unibot which just popped up into months ago months ago yeah so I I don't know I don't get it either I guess just like camaraderie and having a a chain or a token on each chain so that way you can build independent communities because that is the tribalism in crypto like I understand that but it does feel a little bit precarious I suppose I think there's one more pretty valid point that unot wasn't exactly shy from talking about it says specifically for salana the low total supply for unibot creates unit bias which is tenable for driving

more attention unibot I haven't looked at the chart but I'm guessing it's at $50 today that's disgusting first of all what are we what are we doing here it's in comparison to you know like with Bon which are 0.00000000 Z something I mean you can't really blame them it's it's the industry participants that have enabled this behavior and I mean they say that like 80 84% of users that use trading Bots or trading on salana and 80% of the total volume traded on tegram Bots is on salana given that sort of unprecedented opportunity I think it makes sense to give it everything you have rather than try to deal with like an old token that has like oo economics like baggage to

deal with but I do think that there are questions that people will ask for example unibot X their sort of centralized exchange interface rather than like a telegram interface if that has significant revenue and like fee ACR right who does that go go to you split it like Pro R between like the amount of like Soul tokens being uh swapped on unibot X or do you split it like just half half like it's it's a hard question to deal with I can add on to that too while you're forking that Dan like I used Alfred which is uh Stef St Stefan Jesus uh from flash Bots like telegram AI agent project so I was like

okay like I'm going to try this out I'm pretty bullish on that guy builds good um terrible experience on ethereum Main net I mean you're paying it's solely because of the gas fees but in my opinion telegram Bots make so much more sense on salana for sa unibot to um come into salana and to actually like dominate market share over there and see it DWF its ethereum Vol volumes does not surprise me in any way completely agree I think it was a very good business move um that they went to salana like that is where the volume is happening look at this chart when there is in back in uh the beginning of November you know there was about $20 million of trading bot volume happening all of which was on ethereum WE fast forward to you know the

last few days we're seeing you know closer above 60 million 65 million uh and 56 million of that was on salana so there's been a clear shift in where this activity is happening uh now the interesting thing is when you break this down by the actual trading Bots themselves the majority of volume is happening of course on salana but then even more so on Bon bot the Bon bot is this gray bar on this chart if you're if you're watching they did about 38 million uh in they do about 38 million in Revenue whereas Bon bot which is the ethereum version I believe I actually don't know if this chart doesn't look like it uh breaks out the salon of

volume for Bon bot um but nonetheless Bon bot did 7.7 million versus the 38 of Bon bot did 38 versus the 7.7 million of unibot apologies there and the users themselves are the same story right again Bon bought in the 20,000 20 to 30,000 range of of active users and that's of the about 50,000 total active users for all Bots nobody's anywhere on their playing field which is very very interesting um now I want to quickly this is made by whale Hunter he's an absolute beast when it comes to the bot uh the bot market and and all of the trading Bots but I'm curious if they broke out Unis soul unisols the soul bot is still so new I don't know if that's

happened yet um but look at that here's a great chart so this is unibots volume the orange here is salana the blue is uh ethereum that is crazy and like you know you're looking at between four to six million is of daily salana volume versus one to two million of ethereum volume like of course this was a good business decision um but again taking this back to the original point of should that be under one token or two is is is it's one is the answer in my opinion I have a super quick idea for anybody that's building a telegram trading bot basically build most probably have limit order systems but

then build out like something Coincidence of wants kind of like cof and then turn on the Fe for that just look at kol they're exploring four different Fe models you can copy one of them and it'll work for you and you'll probably print if only we could code man we we we would have made it by now what's up everyone March is approaching fast and I want to give you another reminder not to miss out on Das London it is coming it's right around the corner and it's in March from the 18th to the 20th we have three full days of content this is your chance to bump shoulders with some of the world's top Executives and have open dialogue with both attendees and speakers we're going to be focusing on a range of topics that I'll let Ren discuss for you first on the list we

have Bitcoin Catalyst the Haring and spot ETF next we have a view from the buy side from investors on things like strategy portfolio allocation and more we also have a topic on Aras tokenization and stable coins which I think we can all agree are going to pay large vot in crypto future we'll also talk about global regulatory Frameworks like compliance best practices and the evolution of global standards that are shaping the global investment landscape we'll also have someone from the institutional front to talk about infrastructure such as Banking and payments with financial giants like visa and JP Morgan and last on the list they macro case for digital assets so don't miss out on this Monumental event seats are limited so be sure to register today by hitting the link in the description and using the promo code 0x10 to save

10% on tickets see you in London but uh well let's Zoom through these last couple Hot Seat cool Thrones I've got um polygon on the cool Throne today they just released a blog post last week on the aggregation layer basically a thesis saying that you know user mind share liquidity activity is super fragmented amongst ethereum l2s and that there needs to be a solution for that the aggregation layer or the AG layer as they're calling it is a decentralized protocol that does two things it Aggregates ZK proofs from all connected chains and it ensures safety for near instant Atomic cross chain transactions so if this sounds familiar it's because it is this is kind of just different lingo for something else that every other L2 ecosystem is working on but the

difference here in my opinion is that V1 for polygon is actually launching next month in February so within 30 days and V1 will feature a unified Bridge contract and a common proof aggregator for uh chains that opt in and V2 is expected later this year and it's supposed to support async cross chain coms so expect that sometime within 2024 I just kind of like madic right now because everyone seems to absolutely hate it if you look at that onee chart it's pretty much the only token that started higher and ended lower so I mean that just naturally makes me a little bit more Curious it's been down only against basically every other major in the top 15 having slipped from you know at one point being number seven all the

way down to 14 by circulating market cap so I find just through my own personal bias and maybe this is you know U not true but I've talked with a lot of different people in the industry and I always ask them you know what do you think about the different ZK teams working in the space and polygon's team is always on that list when I'm talking to developers so I think that speaks you know volumes and uh I think that polygon has gotten a little bit too much hate over the last six to 12 months so I I kind of think uh maddox's gonna have a little comeback run here in 2024 the aggregation layer stuff is very very cool I definitely agree that um you know this is not they're not the only

person building towards this Vision this has kind of been the endgame but the key as you rightly called out is the the timing right I think zky is is building a very very similar thing right and it's going to be interesting to see how the competition between the two plays out because yes competition is very important and It ultimately creates better products more secure systems and that is crucial but if you look at it strictly from the point of view of ethereum as the base layer if everybody is on the same proof system life will be so much easier and Sam and I were lucky enough to watch U Alex from ZK sync and Jordy from uh polygon have a whiteboard session where they discussed the logistics of

this when we were at eth Paris and the I mean basically it breaks down into you need to have the same shared Bridge contract uh and then the same improving circuits and like you can blindly trust the other chains within the aggregation layer and they're all get proved together uh you get richer bridging if you will where uh you still async bridging but as soon as a proof is posted you can you know trust that the data on the other chain is true uh and valid and then you can swap assets between chains again because you're using the same shared Bridge contract so the assets are already in the same contract on the L1 uh it gets very very interesting what you can do and uh part of me does wish that all of the this would coales around one system

from the start but the reality is it's not going to and it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out because you get all of this like induced friction where if like the two most popular rollups are on different aggregation systems right so if one's on ZK sync as a hyper chain and the other one's built on the polygon cdk you you won't get the benefits of communicating between the two and so I'm a little bit torn on how this plays out to be honest and it's just kind of like the Pains of the modular growth system is that you know yes you have these things that will work and really reduce friction but there's like constellations and if you're in different constellations the communication between the two will be very challenging I very much agree with all

that Dan I I still just can't wrap my head around technically the trade-offs you're going to get between let's say an L2 that's using the same proof system as polygon but an alternative da layer you know because this is ultimately for like the modular world the aggregation in the modular world so clearly polygon is thinking about that and it sounds like they think they have good ideas around solving some of those I guess security sacrifices that you make but at a technical level I still just don't truly understand how this is going to work in practice I think there's also a lot of unanswered questions I mean sure it's really cool you get like asynchronous Atomic composability but you know there's questions of like execution I don't think it's Atomic

though I think it's just async I think for polygon's aggregation there it's Atomic really that's interesting okay but not synchronous Atomic and inclusion I don't know about um but yeah I think there's like a bunch of questions between like proving cost latency like I think maybe for like transactions that want to be like executed or included like minutes within each other within like one sort of like roll of Stack that's fine but I think like there's this future in which like researchers nerd out on is like everything's like hft and like milliseconds I can like swap on this chain and post as collateral on chain B

and then do something with that on like chain C and that's all of like synchronous and atomic whatever like other bus wordss there I think even though I don't think like we need that future we're still really far from that future all right round us out Dan who you got yeah for sure for sure um I'm actually putting sui in Su in the in the uh the cool Throne this week I think they've seen some very interesting growth in those you know again those Topline fancy metrics that people like to talk about right tvl is up Forex over the last three months in dollar terms that's the most growth on a percentage basis of any chain over the last six months um in sweet terms the so kind of moving the price growth out of this it's

up about 2x currently it's at about $400 million of tvl and interestingly this is right about where salana was before it started its run up from $30 to I think it's trading around 100 today um so was at a$1 18 billion doll market cap at this point with a again with a $400 million tvl squeeze at about one and a half billion uh kind of an interesting comparison there there's a lot more that goes into that comparison than just tvl but um Dex volume is also up about 7x over the last three months again this is the most growth of all chains on a percentage basis over the last six months cedus is the main Dex onu and its token up is up about 100 100% over the last three months but only sitting

around a n10 million do market cap with an fdv about 100 million so to me Solana kind of proved with with it its price action ironically proved that the high throughput L1 narrative is here to stay and their attention will not leave that narrative for the rest of this cycle um the jto airdrop proved that you know these smaller chains can have very interesting wealth effects with uh some of their airdrops when they protocols that do you know meaningful work for the chain uh so aftermath is another liquid staking provider on there's rumors to be you know they're kind of going to be doing this a very

similar thing with their airdrop to their early users so there getting some early attention around that as well um there is one interesting Catalyst which I think there's probably debate around whether this is bullish or bearish in terms of token price uh token unlocks s has an unlock coming of about 75% of the an increase of about 75% um of the circulating Supply in April and these unlocks are from the series a and series B investor allocation so some people look at that and be like oh there's token unlocks coming they're dumping I'm not going to be interested in that I think the the more like malicious view or pessimistic view is there's token unlocks coming from

original locked up investors they've never had a better time now than to start talking about the chain to gain attraction before these unlocks hit I think that's a sad reality of parts of this indust and I'm not saying that's s specific I'm saying that's like investor mindset is you their job is to invest and sell tokens like that's literally their job of course they want to make money um and then overall like why I find S interesting I've kind of gone down the rabbit hole ever since picachio put uhu into our 2024 Theses report and it is the idea of the Gen 3 chains kind of coming to life and fixing all of the pain points uh uh that we've experienced

over the last 10 years in in crypto conceptually makes a lot of sense practically there's a lot of hurdles to to implementing that uh but you know it's it's implemented narwhal and bullshark into its consensus mechanism which is the top top of the Crim Deli Crim of consensus mechanism design right now um it's got object-oriented smart Contracting language with move and the entire chain is built to be objectoriented unlike some of the other move chains and that should greatly the idea is that will greatly improve the developer experience I know the soul lend team a lending protocol on salana uh is building their implementation foru I don't know if that's launched yet but one of their developers was tweeting

about how the the like the the ux of actually developing this application onui was just such an improvement from that of salana that he was just fired up and you know that's kind of proof that uh some of these optimizations they made at the VM level and the the actual language uh has really made everybody's life a lot easier now what I find to be some of the more interesting things uh at the on the Chain tech level is we are desperate for things that make onboarding new users easier and they enshrine those into the core protocol with ZK login uh which basically allows I don't I haven't fully grasped the technical aspects of this yet uh so apologies here I'm still kind of doing my research and talking in

real time but what effectively what it does is is enables you to control a wallet with your Gmail account so obviously there's security concerns there right that's like much different than owning your own Keys uh and you know having your own wallet and self cussing your assets and you know if someone hacks your Gmail and using ZK login like they can probably move around your funds um so maybe it's less in interesting for deep rooted Financial applications but things like social media and gaming having somebody need to set up a web browser wallet is a barrier to entry that I think we really really under weight in this industry like it'd be an embarrassing process for me to go to one of my Normie friends and be like oh yeah come use this new social media site like you just have to set up this

web browser wallet and like it's it's just not going to happen it's actually not going to happen and something like ZK login where you don't even know that your email address is attached to this hex encoded uh you know blockchain address that is a beautiful unlock that I I can't believe I haven't seen more of this being discussed because that will change the on boarding experience and that will bring more people on chain assuming that meaningful applications get built on Suite another thing there is they have native account abstraction basically right so they have this this concept of sponsored transactions where the user can send a transaction and anybody else can pay the gas for it uh when that transaction hits a smart contract like the trans the smart contract isn't even aware that someone

else is paying the gas beautiful Design This is literally what ethereum and the whole eth and L2 Community is trying to build with account abstraction and has thus far gotten no traction on it it's still complicated it's clunky it's being added on after the fact like this is what gen3 blockchains are supposed to solve and they're like this is a great example of it actually happening and being implemented and working uh and then lastly here the thing I want to call out is there are transaction blocks versus traditional transactions in the ethereum world so basically they allow composable transactions where you can have like different pieces of your transactions so think like piece one is approve contract and then piece two is transfer assets

and make a swap right like that's a painful twep process when you're using ethereum mainnet or ne2 and you have to go to UD swap to make a trade like first you approve the tokens and then you make the swap EIP I think it's 3074 um is working to fix this where you can like make eoas great again and they can actually like batch these transactions together doesn't exist today gen 3 blockchain has this on day one um and with all the recent exploits we've seen across crypto uh another interesting thing here is revoking contract addresses sucks if anyone has ever done that it's just a painful process like yes there's great ways to see the available contracts that you uh have approvals out to but it's you have to go one by one and like revoke them

all down the list and it sucks especially with a wallet that has a ton of history and a good example of why transaction blocks would be interesting is like you could batch all of those together in one transaction and the user sees one thing vokes all access like it's it's it makes a lot of sense and the one thing that they're missing and we hit on this earlier is just the rich history you get with being a longer tenure chain when you get that strong developer community that is passionate about putting pushing your product forward uh because it benefits them again I think salana has absolutely crushed at this recently you've seen it come into fruition with multiple teams building multiple things on the poor core protocol level um and that's just something you get with age like you you

just need to keep grinding without that and and being I think Miss and Labs is a pretty strong team and they're the ones behind this pushing it Forward today but that's a good measure of success is like what does that look like six months from now three months from now a year from now yeah I think the the right curve take here is like okay well there's only so many developers in crypto who's actually building onu um but I mean if you just zoom out like there is definitely someone especially in lie of the US ETF spot Bitcoin approval like there's an new person probably dozens of people following down the crypto Rabbit Hole every single day and for me personally it took me probably 6 to 12 months before I fell further down the risk curve after fully understanding Bitcoin so I get that this cycle already

played out with alt l1's last last you know two three years ago and people today are probably thinking nah like that that definitely can't happen again we already saw that it it really doesn't work super super well like we don't have room for another generation of new chains but I do think that people are going to come across these things and they're going to try them and whatever provides the best user experience like you're going to be surprised at what can actually gain Traction in a in a raging bull market so I agree I think sque's a good call out I'm personally on the Chain you know playing around with aftermath as well so um you know bag BU as side it was a pretty good uh pretty good experience pretty easy felt a lot like salana yeah I do think that new shiny chain effect will always be there

and then you mentioned like a lot of like technological improvements and I think it's definitely like debatable from like a core blockchain architecture like what is the better Tech what's the better VM what's the better like consensus mechanism and there definitely are like sort of objective features such as like the ZK login which are really a strong benefit to the user experience but I think crypto has also shown that like ver Tech doesn't always win there's a lot of other factors is consider right there's like liquidity there's Network effects there's playing the BD game whether you're doing that correctly there's how much of a develop for ecosystem can you build and do better for support and like it's it's just a lot of factors to consider and whether you want like exposure to a CH X or not

that's like the very mid curve take the hold on I want to I want to respond to that because I briefly mentioned narwhal and bullshark as like you know the latest and greatest in consensus design but the other things I mentioned was intentionally not to do with like you know they have a cool conf consensus fast path that no other chain has today um but I I only mentioned things on the ux Improvement specifically because this just makes it easier to use the chain uh and that stuff I find just so damn interesting like if you were a builder and you didn't care about what you were building on you just wanted something that was like the easiest platform for a user to engage with the product You're Building like I don't even just the one

thing with ZK login like that is that isn't that feels like a such a major unlock to me like once I I again I still want to dive into the technical side to like figure out like okay like you know am I just putting my email on the blockchain like that's probably not great I wouldn't like that I think the answer there is no and that's the whole ZK piece um but again like if it's as good as it sounds on paper like dude like IH who it's hard to be bet against that for me I think on the ethereum ecosystem if you had the ability to like approve and Swap and revoke all in one transaction itm users would have probably saved at easily 50 million 100 million in the past like four years on Hacks right I feel like that in and of

itself is like a pretty big unlock and obviously like move base uh programming languages or like smart contracts have a whole other like also of benefits including not being v v to vency attacks yeah yeah I think that's just the natural progression though like you know even on salana like this the same story like uh they they improved on that as well um and I've never like I'm not a smart contract developer right so when someone says we built a language around like being objectoriented since that's ultimately what you're doing and trading assets like that only makes so much sense to my mind like I get it like if you erc20 is like you don't have actual tokens in your wallet you just have an

entry on a ledger that says you know Sam owns 10 usdc uh versus the object model you actually do like holding the assets they're tradeable they're movable um so conceptually I like that kind of makes sense uh but net net I think the takeaway there is like it's purpose built for smart contracts and blockchains and making developers lives easier and then we do have a sample size of one with the soul end guys being like no this was good like the ux was great I loved building onui nevertheless worth worth bridging over and uh trying it out right I mean if you don't try experiment yeah I'm I'm totally with that but all right well this has been a lot longer than it honestly normally is which I'm surprised because it's only three of us we weren't

able to raggle a another blockworks research channel is on so we'll be sure to bring back next week with four but Dan Ren talk to you guys next week thanks for coming on appreciate it everyone bye bye hey everyone thanks for watching today's zerox research episode I wanted to take a second and remind you about an upcoming 2024 digital asset Summit in London this March seats are limited so hit the link in the description and use the promo code 0x10 to save 10% on tickets see you in London [Music]