Angel Investing, Incentive Designs, And Modularity with Ajit Tripathi

Transcript

welcome back to modular march today we have a special guest Ajit from how um wow I'm going to blow that how do you say the name again AIT hron yeah hron it's a yeah some people mispronounce it as Hardon but it's not it's hron hron is the founders Community you know in the polygon ecosystem so be building it around the world for Builders who want to build with polygon and the agler the cdk and you know lots of cool things so we have uh it's it's it's a global community of founders with we have two physical locations New York and Dubai and you know we run uh programs and events for Founders around the world

especially a lot of you know Founders come from either Creator backgrounds like artists and you know musicians and so on or they come from core engineering backgrounds right like uh or or they come from scammer backgrounds but we are not interested in those uh you know so so so with the engineers and creators it's more uh so we are interested in kind of you know helping them connect with other Founders uh uh you know Founders learn a lot from each other so no it's a very lonely job to be a Founder so just connect with each other learn from each other but then also have access to all of the resources of you know the polygon ecosystem such as Venture funds everyone needs money especially Founders uh then you know people who have been through the Journey

people like sandip Zaki you know sham a lot of ogs who kind of gone through this journey multiple times uh rousi Fu all you know they don't have to be uh like huge but they have to have some experience that's relevant to Founders so we tried to working on creating a community around the world so for founder Founders to feel as productive as possible when they are you know part of our programs and uh and kind of build you know the community for the Ager that way M what what is your background yeah so I I come from trpy you know and uh I'm not ashamed of it anymore so actually had a lot of fun at Goldman it

was actually pretty cool uh and then I went to work with cons PWC where I was thrown into blockchain because no one else wanted to do it and uh you know there was no money in it so they said he why don't you do it so okay and then I went to consensus because I told Joe luin that whatever he was doing with coins was a bad idea and he should focus on Enterprise and never been more wrong in my life uh you at least financially speaking uh and then I went to work with a Stan Heir me to talk to all of trpi and you know and then last two years I've been with polygon as an adviser and you know supporter mostly like an intern in the founders

office oh she ship poster and you've been one of the louder modular Bulls at least in on in my uh tweets yeah yeah so see I'm I can be confusing for people because you know a lot of people in are religious right so so they essentially take a position that ethereum is God's own own coin and you have to take a like this uh conviction position on on technology and say look oh yeah I believe in Celestia right or I believe in ail or I believe in ethereum or I believe in salana and if you're a scientist or an engineer right you don't spend that much time believing sure you have conviction and a vision and and

where you want the future to go but you don't become you know as tribal or as religious as POS suddenly right now crypto is fundamentally internet culture right so we are internet tribes uh tribes have identity tribes have money so blockchains are have this major social media aspect so some tribalism is is obviously you know inevitable but I don't take a very strong position that you know ethereum is the only way to build blockchains or salana is the only way to build blockchains or or whatever Mustafa and you know Nick are saying is the only way to build blockchains I think uh there are some elements of modularity which are

inevitable right so for example you know uh consensus computers uh which blockchains are you know these are stateful you know distributed uh databases uh that have shared State inevitably and that limits you know how we can scale them so as sham you know sham I'm I'm a big fan of you know I sham s and I think he's he's one of the deepest thinkers in this space as tun says finally we have a you know finally we have a Founder who is actually smart uh I don't think tun is trying to offend people but you know there is smart and then there is like like another level of smart so I think sham research and some of his thought process is quite incredible uh Mustafa these guys are in

that league right so uh so what what sham says is that look if you're going to linearly Cloud scale linearly right so you add one more node in a stateless computer distributed computer like a cloud then you have more horizontal scalability right as long as you adjust for bandwidth and sort of data throughput considerations now with blockchains you don't have that because you know as you add more nodes the whole thing becomes slower right so so modularity is important because no uh distri Ed consensus database can essentially Meet The Whole World's needs whether it's Solana or ethereum so that thesis I believe in right I think even Solana guys and I starting to talk about layer tws and this and that and so on so

so that is absolutely correct now then there is this other extremist side of modularity right which is uh oh yeah let's create one more component and launch a token so you know which is right there is no better way to put it that oh yeah I got one more shared sequencer here you know token bro let's go right I I think that's that's I'm sorry that's so so so modularity should have a purpose right as in sure okay now ethereum doesn't meet our need so we're going to do layer twos that makes sense right okay now we have another problem so uh you know we need data availability because ethereum has limited data availability that makes sense right now Solana has is crawling because everyone is trading monkey on it or you know mean on so I I don't believe in engineering

without a purpose and I think modularity has gone to a point where you know Nick and Mustafa said yeah build whatever but bro you don't build whatever I mean think before you build you know so I mean because these are these are computers for money right so and and and we can you know talk endlessly about trust assumptions but the one trust assumption I want is that my money is not going to be rug right so so I think uh being a bit more thoughtful about about why we are engineering what we are engineering like people do in the real world where we not you know arbitrarily funded by pumpy tokens listed on binance you know so in most of the world people think about why they're building what they're building right crypto is weird because there's a token so yeah whatever right build whatever so

so I don't think that's the right approach to modularity people should think about why they're building what they're building right and kind of have a real user or some something a bit more sensible in mind as opposed to doing research in Mount zalu and you know just coming up with that no one needs so I don't think that's the right approach to modularity you what what do what does trafi need like you guys you spent some time at Goldman Sachs you spent some time talking to Trad five people when you were at a you probably talked to enough people where you figured out like some common threads like what is what is it that that they need right and then and then we'll figure out like what how we can build what we'll accomplish that but yeah but we not we not trying to meet the needs of yeah so sorry go ahead

no no that I think you you understand the question yeah yeah I understand the question so I used to do Enterprise blockchain and then I've never done I have never done something more us less than that right so focusing on Enterprise blockchain and trying to sell disruptive brand new technology to existing ways of building companies that's the that's the biggest waste of time you know and and and and I'm sort of you know I I I think this shrooms are better than this right I think you can do a lot of stupid but but selling new technology to to existing ways of building corporations and Enterprises and businesses is just the worst thing you can come up with so

uh so I think I think this technology is fundamentally different right I think Bitcoin obviously had a had a lot of clarity in their Vision as to what they were trying to build right so started with a problem statement peer-to-peer electronic cash and then they build it so I think we should think about consumers and apps not you know what Goldman Sachs needs I really don't care what Goldman Sachs needs right what I care about is uh is there a better way to do what we do today right so or is there a better way to do things we don't do today so un swap for example right it has it's also a problem I mean it's more censorship resistant than binance because you know I don't have to send my passport to CZ and you know and then I don't have to kind of get liquidated by

CZ or whatever so then I have kind of more transparency and visibility of what's actually going on with my money so so so unof sols a problem a sols a problem right so we disintermediating certain things and that's a real problem because a bank can always close my account so it has some relevance to someone's life right like these are real real life problems now we end up creating new problems around me and you know rug pulls and and all that so we solve them right that's engineering that's the nature of you build a car the car crashes you build a plane the plane comes down you know some people die which is sad but then you fix it right that's the nature of engineering that's how civilization progresses so so so I really don't care what banks need you know I think that's someone else's job

uh the question is you know what sort of apps can we build either there are existing apps that we can you know that have real problems and we can build them in a fundamentally new ways or we can build entirely new apps that weren't possible before like you know completely disintermediate sort of relatively disintermediate money like Bitcoin so so I think that's how we should think about it and you know or or can we build banks in entirely new ways right so bankless as much as I'm critical and have fun with bankless their idea is fundamentally sound right which is can we build Financial systems in fundamentally new ways where you know we not at the mercy of and and those are the people we were building this for right so like you know sex workers and uh you know people at

the fringes of the society poit political dissidents immigrants so so I think having that and and we only remember that in bare markets so every time the number goes down then we start thinking about Venezuela when pumps then it's like you know yeah who cares man let's launch a token right so so I think that's that's unfortunate but uh but that's where we are right but at the end of the day I think the question is you know we find an application like lens or farcaster or you know uh or or a or Unis Swap and then we we run into new problems it's never a finished job right so we solve those problems so we say look ethereum is too expensive and now we have two different solutions so we have salana which is a lot cheaper but you know and and then we have you know

modular blockchain so we have polygon zkm or you know optimism super chain architecture or whatever and these things kind of start to offer solutions to the problems and then we run into new problems and we say okay let's take the data off and we put it on validum in in a validum configuration on you know on on Celestia or aale or I and you know we take that away now we have other problems because now we have you know we making a security tradeoff so engineering is all about tradeoffs right tokens are all about I don't know man nothing particularly too intelligent I'm sorry well they have a biological role you know like money is biological that creates greed and fear and and that that's there is a tribalism

to it you know coins we identify ourselves by the currency GBP identity and money are kind of directly related so all that stuff is very important on the internet but if you take that away right for a second all the all the token and tribal yeah okay why my number go down and his number go up all that stuff then it's all about engineering and then you have to ask yourself you know why modularity but why right and a researcher doesn't have to ask that question like Mustafa doesn't have to answer the ask that question you know because his job is to Envision fundamentally new ways but when Mustafa wrote his paper on data availability sampling right the data availability which started this whole thing then there was a very specific problem they

were trying to solve right so ethereum was going looking at scaling ethereum was looking at how they need to sort of separate consensus and execution layer and in that process a lot of thinking was going on so Mustafa has struck upon something very very important which is maybe we can separate all of these things and create fundamental new ways of building blockchains then we can you know and it's amazing because as a researcher that's the way to go as an engineer you know you have to say Okay what product are people trying to build and what trade-offs do I need to make along this entire stream of possibilities right which Mustafa has now and with Alik have now created right so so now we can combine anything with anything execution layer data availability layer just pick and choose and suddenly you have these Ras

Frameworks right and you say okay I do this on the cloud stuff all the time so maybe I can come combine these things like pick and choose and create these Ras Frameworks okay now I need a sequencer because what I've done is I fragmented you know so I need a shared sequencer because now liquidity has got fragmented right and and and thankfully Solana exists so the best thing that happened to ethereum is Solana you know and I'm going to say this out loud because if salana didn't exist then people would just do research in in an ivory Tower and build that no one needs right so so because salana exists and people are trading dog coins and cash coins so so everyone on the modular research side is also thinking bro I mean how do I make this cheaper right so so Solana to to their credit have done

modularity a lot of good because they have this phenomenal product culture right and they're always thinking they have people like Armani who are thinking okay now with backpack right how do I minimize how do how do I minimize the number of clicks how do I make it easy to bridge on so those are the types of things that you know product people need to think about and ethereum has a very strong research culture right so salana that's where all the modular movement came out of a lot of the ideas in Solana came out of there uh and and and so so so you need a bit of both you need product right which is the human touch as in why the what are we actually doing why are we doing it engineering how the do we do it right and then the the research side which is envisioning

entirely new ways right that's the science part so you have science you have engineering and then you have this you know product and commerce right so you need all of those and uh so so unfortunately tokens completely distorted incentives so people you know just want to launch that they know no one will ever use and probably you know run out of cocaine and stuff like that on on Twitter so no comment on that right I saw your TW that's just life I I saw your Tweet about how bullish you are on I guess this three this stack of three things happening that we've just kind of dove into but so bearish on the incentive structures um you know that are that are apparent right so it's like what's here is so great like it's so

it's it's moving the needle forward right yeah and then you got of shenanigans so like is think is this staka like staking dim py Penguins bad kids Air drops like is that is that bad is that like what's your like what's what are your thoughts on that so look I I I'm you know I speak to Sham and often and S often and I think I'm like this 20-year-old guy who is physically 48 year old I spend a lot of time on chain and I'm quite degenerate with a lot of stuff so going to be this judgmental Uncle kind of guy who says you know okay this is wrong and that is wrong I don't think that's the idea in fact in fact the casino is what what

funds a lot of cool research right if uh if we didn't have this crypto casinos then zero knowledge technology would not have come this far a lot of the work that we have seen on distributed computing and cryptography would not have come this far I mean you know because people would expect Roi right people would say Where is the revenue and with this type of disruptive bleeding edge technology often there is no Revenue in fact in early days of AI you know I mean neural networks what Revenue what what the hell are you talking about right all you have is kind of a vague problem statement like self-driving cars and then you're work on it and you work on it and eventually you come up with something but it's taken 30 40 years to get here so so yeah casino is very important right venture

capital is all Caso I mean you make a long-term bet either on a Founder because you think they've got some crazy problem with their mind and you they can't stop till they they actually solve it they have this you know mental problem and that's that's the sort of founder you should look for which wouldn't stop can't stop this compulsion to actually ship that you know would be very hard for a normal person like with alic and you know so so those are the kind of people who change the world and you have to bet on them right that's a casino hamster racing I mean and then you know there are Technologies you bet on before they have any because you you know you almost have to be on shoms to to have that sort of world computer vision right I mean 10 years

ahead and but we come a long way uh so so so casino is very important casino is what finances is is the core of American you know uh scientific and technological progress and that's why the country does so well because big people make big YOLO bets right and so we need that we need the casino let's just you know stock market is a casino we need the casino now it's the question of incentives right how do you tune the incentive so the problem with crypto is that uh you know tokens Can succeed so in in the normal word right most of the times except for weer if if a business fails or the product fails the founder also fails right that's how it should be you know you make big YOLO bets you do the

California Gold Rush you don't find gold you ra you die in a ditch right it's that's how it should be not in crypto in crypto your product can fail your business can fail so we've soled but the token works and founder gets very rich you know and and that's right so that's that's clearly a misalignment of incentives and uh that's that has at some point has to change uh but at the same time we' have solved the open source funding problem now if you want to raise money for you know the 45th ZK evm or ZK VM with this extra sauce in there you know with in memory Compu like Vala or something it's possible right so there's funding available and we've solved the open source funding problem but we have soled is what we have

unfortunately done is now you don't actually have to ship you know you just get a binance listing or okay you know the C coin listing or something and then you tell a big nice story and you know narrative and everyone is betting on Ono and real world assets this week and AI into crypto bit tensor and you look at bit tensor and you say bro what do you actually do and the answer is with AI and it's like you know we do staking we do air drops where is the AI in that you know so but wait wait in 10 years we'll do that right but this thing is already $4 billion so so why the will you even do it if it's already $4 billion right so I think that's the problem with crypto and and that's where we see a lot of you know modular things also go wrong

because you know I think Celestia Nick and Mustafa and now also you know sham an all these guys have done a phenomenal job of kind of communicating the value proposition so now people are building the 45th shared sequencer and you know and there are too many crypto vs mom and dad are also crypto so if I miss the first one I'll go into the second one because that category on coin gecko is hot right so I think there is fundamental incentive problem with crypto and V Alik has also spoken about it but it's going to take some time to sort it out so if you're a if you're launching a new coin for a modular project who are you airdropping to how are you building a community via this marketing

expense yeah yeah so so this is the thing right that's another one of my sad Jokes which makes less employable uh it's I think it's you know a stock goes up when you when people pay you and token goes up when you pay people so uh so yeah so so you do need that right and there are multiple levels of community so my favorite example is I right so so if you look at how I Community has been built up you know it's a gaban project I read the paper and I like this this is great right and that was like about 18 months ago or something and uh so so sham didn't go out and you know align all kinds of you know token community and this and that so the First Community he got was the researchers

right people who think about you know the Deep stuff right so which is what can I build on this and what are the implications of doing this as opposed to some the same thing with Mustafa and Celestia right so this is like deep thought stuff and then you go from that researcher people who are thinking ahead people who are thinking 10 years ahead and are not really you know everyone wants money but that's not their primary focus those those types of people then you go into the circle of you know Builders and Founders right which is people who actually want to take those research ideas and then convert them into an A or a unisab and then from then on you go into you know uh sort of other uh contributors and supporters like investors whose primary motivation is

obviously money because that's their job right they're investors but there're also you know people who are kind of thinking ahead in terms of where the future will go and how why that will result in any profit and the then you sort of go out and out and then you you know what happens is once you get those investors then a lot of the then the next class of money people start getting coming around you know which is uh the the the crypto influencers and you know I mean there are all kinds right there is like this there are many many classes of you know uh no no comment on that right there are some very ones and there are some really legit ones also so you then you start building those Circle and

then the last air droppers and token holder and all that you know those are all important right because we all are in all of those at the same time I mean we want the tokens we want the money we want you know the research so so I I tend to span a lot of these words uh right so because of having spent so much time in this industry and and being on chain a lot but I think that's the right order of service if you want to build something truly truly Val Val right you start from the people who are supposed to think ahead and know better right people who are not are in it for the money everyone is in for but not primarily right who are motivated by a bit more than that and who have this intellectual depth and then you kind of

spin out into Builders and you know investors and crypto a lot of times what happens is people go the other way now right and and and people do what they are capable of at the end of the day as in if you're not a a 10x engineer or a product person a researcher what are you going to do you got to make quick money so you know so so those people are also welcome it's it's an open permissionless libertarian system uh but I think I is a case study on exactly how to do this right right I mean and exsa too I think there's a lot aale is doing I'm an investor in aale so you know and they're doing a phenomenal job of some of the stuff in ZK as well so so that's kind that's I think that's how Community should be built right I think monad is

doing is not modular in the in in that sense but I think they're kind of building it Solana did a pretty good job right uh I think they went through this journey uh of building a community polygon have done a phenomenal job of you know bringing a lot of mainstream Enterprises and Defi and this and that so lots of people are doing lots of cool things but uh I think I is a pretty good case study on you know how to build something really valuable inside out from like Giga brains on to you know inclusive points I mean I points was they not to like like I'm always points so yeah you need all of that it makes sense it makes sense and

it makes sense intellectually yeah exactly well yeah but you just can't start there or else your project is just kind of like no exactly you have to start at the intellectual Elite for for lack of better term um if you're building something fundamentally new yes right I mean if you're building the 6 Fork of unisoft then you know there's a place for everybody right you should do what you want to do I mean I don't think we are in a position to judge but but in terms of you how I think about it as an investor I look for things that are you know new differentiated and we'll make a dent as much as possible because then you then it's fun to spend time on them right because money is one thing but but it's a lot more a lot of fun to work

with and that's something we'll try to bring into hron as well right which is uh like umai is doing with sp1 or R we're doing I mean the really big ones come from you know doing something fundamentally new even Solana is in that category right so y yeah what what do you think like the latest ZK research from like succinct and like you know there's a lot of speculation that that's going to take the interoperability and the throughput to like this this new level that we haven't seen before because we we'll get um we'll get like State proofs or consensus proofs we'll get like ZK proofs in practice um like H how do you see the incentives like pushing that

forward in in a sense that like it'll actually make a difference and be useful in the real world yeah yeah so I think uh see there is a you know if you look at what uh uh generally the modular folks are trying to do is they're trying to push light clients onto the browser right uh and uh so so for example your wallet instead of going to infura because infura is a point of centralization right or alemy which is a point of centralization you essentially try to load the like clients on your browser and then you know you don't need in for anymore right so so I think uh that's a very powerful idea and and that's only

possible with you know data availability sampling because now like clients can rely on uh have you know a very efficient way of making sure that data is available right so transaction data is available so so so uh so a lot of this stuff needs uh proofs right so you can avoid now so data availability layers essentially solve the transaction ordering problem and you know there are many ways of IG will secure using that transaction ordering using restate Deeds Cs and ail will secure using their own you know token and then ail's uh a is doing something similar to what IG is also doing because they want to bring in like shared security ideas from both Babylon so you can essentially stake

your Bitcoin and E to to further secure that uh your transaction ordering that is in the large in the Big Blocks right so now now you say okay do I need a settlement layer right that's the most disruptive idea in all of this and that's why M keeps talking about why Celestia is a is the is a much bigger comparator to ethereum and he's right so Solana is not as big a threat to ethereum as let's say you know Celestia is or even some of the other data availability layers Stacks are going to be because now you say look okay what are we actually doing with ethereum right we bridging to ethereum we are posting proofs right uh and there is a verification thing running on ethereum and that's all we're doing you know

so at best maybe we are if you're not relying on ethereum state then what exactly are we doing with ethereum right so I think that becomes a very interesting question in which case you say okay why don't we just essentially run you know verifications on the client side so you know so where you essentially send a proof of uh you know data availability or transaction ordering onto the client and then on the client you have a verifier right so and that says yeah okay man this this actually is correct right now everything is sorted why do you actually need a settlement layer so so I think ethereum guys are very aware and uh you know Celestia guys also won't talk talk out loud about it because they don't want eth guys to attack them on Twitter you

know you know how it works or foraster for that matter but this is a real thing you know so if you look at dim and some of the other ideas but I think the long term on this is client side verification right uh and uh uh so sucin I mean now what we and and so this whole setup right with ZK uh ZK rollups and what I think the long-term of Celestia and ail is is that you essentially you know if you're going to a lot of client side verifications and a lot of proof generation uh then you need something that generates those proofs very efficiently and then you need what I think fed is doing with a line layer to you know run to verify a very large

number of proofs very efficiently right people are building Pro marketplaces because there is this hypothesis that if you end up with lots of modular blockchains then and you know lots of uh proofs either in the classical GK rollup type of configuration or with you know client side verifications we'll end up with uh you know lots of proofs and lots of verifications in which case we need right so so so the problem with today's Z rollups whether it's you know scroll ZK sync polygon zkm I to be careful what I say about polygon because I still you know I'm funed polyon but yeah yeah I gotta be careful so not really I'm joking but you know so the thing is these are hyper optimized for you know these are hyper optimized uh proof

generators for the EVN right when you hyper optimize something it becomes hard to maintain and hard to you know debug and it ends up you have to be careful about security and so on so forth right so instead of that you say look we'll just write the re client right and that's a rust EV e e client we'll just throw it on something that generates you know ZK proofs for arbitrary computation return and rust which is you know it's RIS Z or sp1 and if it's fast enough right then we don't have to write these hyper optimized you know multiple versions of polygon Z KVM uh scroll Z KVM zking Z KVM all of which might have their own bugs and you know

maintainability issues and this and that right so so clean code uh thrown on a general purpose zvm is a phenomenally brilliant idea I think and and what Uma has done you know riro started that category they did a great job I'm an investor in riro full disclosure and Uma has done a great job of combining different ideas from that uh from Daniel lao's work on Bida right like some of the inory architecture that laber has put together his polygon co-founder and you know some of the other optimizations from planky 3 which uh you know Brendan and Daniel have been working on again polygon guys right so um combined a lot of different ideas with her bestern class team to really you know build the

fastest general purpose uh today's fastest ZK VM like general purpose uh VM for proving arbitrary RIS computation is it fast enough I don't know right so probably not fast enough still right I haven't seen the benchmarks lately but it's faster than rero today Riso will catch up because they will also combine those open source ideas and then you know then there's this race between these two guys which is phenomenal uh very entertaining and I know which side this one because an investor for my bags obviously so you know but then yeah polygon doesn't have that which is my personal view so uh so that brings us to the next point right which is this is still slow after all these software

optimizations is still slow so now we get into a space where you know Telos ingonyama all these guys are now doing some very cool stuff with the Justin Drake there was this tweet by Justin Drake and he posted this you know ZK Pro Asic right uh and uh that's where the world is going to go because eventually we can to have the same kind of ZK farming that you know we do with uh like with Bitcoin we do proof of work and with the we'll have like these Asic Farms that generate ZK proof so at some point when these architectures are mature enough we'll run like entire racks of you know uh ZK farms and and that's those things will run as6 or you

know fpgas or you know Inon architecture machines to really generate and that's why I think Telos are doing something very interesting John L and toos are doing this Hardware software Cod design of their zkm they're starting with polygon zkm and and you know uh doing something very very cool with as6 uh so so so the question is you know as engineering so I used to be an engineer right so I wasn't always a a so uh I used to be a proper engineer uh so so so I think you kind of you know start to take all these things right can we have clean design are we solving a real problem what's the product right and then is it cleanly architect is and then you start to bring in all the beautiful

things about software engineering we don't see enough in blockchain right which is maintainability flexibility extensibility and not just performance because just maximizing optimizing software for performance it is is because you end up with a lot of shitty code that causes all sorts of problems right so I think the future is something like what um is doing and rero doing combined with Hardware software code design so if you look at continuations in Roso right they they kind of thought about scaling over gpus because gpus are everywhere now and they're getting cheaper and cheaper right so so so I think all of these things start to come together and then we end up with the uh I think then the question is what what am I going to do with my eat bags so we need to scale ethereum layer one

don't we do you think we ever get to a point where we get light clients sorry yeah oh do you think we ever get to Cent side verification right so like Z yeah ZK verification on the client side to truly achieve satoshi's vision yeah yeah yeah yeah it's happening it's happening bro this happens faster than right I didn't expect Tuma to ship but she shipped this year it was completely out of the blue I mean I was looking at valida and I like you know when are these guys going to start raising and all that stuff but I wasn't expecting um to combine all these things so quickly it's remarkable it's just phenomenal that she's pulled off yeah so so I think it's happening and this

happens a lot faster than we think Sor spe of ethereum is the evm cooked is like SPM move VM is ZK was is like is are we supposed to be this bullish on this alt VM narrative or is Da the big unlock here yeah so so there is you know narratives are for tokens engineering is for people right so our product so so I think uh we should be bullish on whatever the hell people want to buy whether it's you know bit tensor or you know God knows what man I mean what do you call it SL Jo bow you know yeah whatever and goler is my favorite speaking of it so we should be bullish on whatever people want to buy right I

think coin nalism is a real thing in Bull markets and I think there is some rational rationality to it but in terms of engineering right I think the problems that are interesting yes all PMS are very interesting because evm is a 2015 creature right and er c20s have no very well-known problems uh like approve and all that right and we are still doing bad ways of account abstraction like 4337 inad 3074 that's a whole episode you should have with someone else who knows more uh so so you know evm is like patches patches patches patches patches right I think the whole ethereum stack is very patchy now because you know we keep patching it to solve one problem like 4844 then it creates new problems then you go solve

that and so ethereum has a has has the problem of any other you know Legacy banking system or whatever where you I used to work in Banks right so so what happens is you like secdb right phenomenal machine phenomenal phenomenal computer right it's like they be amazing Goldman Sachs made so much money on that but uh you know it becomes its own thing and then you keep fixing it and patching it and you keep patching it on multiple layers and it becomes even harder to maintain and now you have client diversity so you have to do this thing across multiple clients so dank Shing takes five years to ship or whatever you know and and in the meantime the world is not going to wait right so so I don't want to fight ethereum because you know I hope because my financial materially

depend on it uh but at the end of the day all existing systems go through this problem right so where you end up with so much so much mass built on top of that that it's very hard to change right so ethereum has that problem so in the meantime these parall like competing architectures like you know Celestia or Ps like aale with you know additional concepts of shared security like Bitcoin staking and you know reaking all these things come along and that creates some very very interesting you know possibilities where now engineers who are not necessarily married to bags can start thinking about what's the best way to build the product and systems they're trying to build right so and and when ethereum is the Monopoly and everybody thinks ethereum has already won then then life is good right then I mean then

you don't care and you build something on ethereum whether it makes sense or not but now if there is competition and you know salana is getting traction and Celestia is getting traction and other things are getting traction then Engineers start thinking bro what's the right place to build this system what I'm trying to build right and and then they they have more choice so I'm a I'm a big believer in choice I think I layer creates choice right so where people can say look ethereum is hard to change it's very expensive to run and deploy so I'm going to build a whole new architecture which is you know like I'll build avss which are very quick to build and deploy and test compared to anything I deploy on ethereum right and I'm still using ethereum so ethereum guys are happy because you know there's now they still

do reaking and their tokens are still being used and they collect some rent and air drops and all that and that includes me by the way just to be clear so you know so everyone is happy and that's one competing architecture you know in the meantime you have salana which is which now starts to deal you know solve one problem but deal with their own problems of Monolithic architectures Celestia and aale and these guys right so they start dealing with problems of modularity which is this you know sheer interconnect modular systems have their own problems right because uh monolithic systems like iPhones everything works together it's beautiful you can't do with it right you can't open it you can't change the software on it you can't do anything you can just install apps Android oh

I'll boot you know like break it I'll change it I'll probably change the Linux version on it right so that's now you end up with a lot of security brittleness problems and all that right so but at the end of the day we are here to play Engineers become engineers at least good Engineers become engineers because they like to play right except in Asia where we become engineers because mom and dad asked us uh [Music] okay or in India where you have no choice anyway so so I think uh just just so the beauty of modularity and to be you know to give all the credit to Mustafa for it it's just choice now we can Design Systems according to the

tradeoffs we are solving for which is how we build modern systems in the real world outs when then we don't have to worry about bags right so so I think I think modularity is phenomenal but hopefully people think before theying cap on and understand incentives and not narratives and and understand why so as Youk bull market things will be bull market things you know so of course that's right a pleasure the biggest expansion I think might even come in in the bear for more critical thinking so we appreciate we need we need that clean up right we get the bubble we get the cleanup then we get the bubble we get it's been happening in AI why shouldn't it happen to us it'll be fun thank you so

much thank you sir