Arjun Bhuptani: Connext – Speeding Up Secure Bridges Between Chains #447

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about technologies projects and people driving decentralization and blockchain revolution i'm frederick ants and today i'm speaking with arjun bhuptani who is the founder of connex connext is a bridge project and we will talk about this in detail in just a bit but let me tell you about our sponsors today um our first one says tally ho telly ho is redefining the wallet as a public good you can think of it as a community owned alternative to metamask with teddy ho you can enter the metaverse with the web3 wallet that's fully community owned and operated and it's the first wallet that is also a dao telly ho's commitment to community ownership and public goods stretches

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so this is visit pariswap to learn more at pariswab.io epicenter arjun it's uh so good to have you on thank you so much for having me agin um tell us about yourself how did you get your start in this industry yeah uh so i started being interested in i started building on top of ethereum in 2016. i was always kind of like tangentially interested in crypto because i was uh involved with a lot of the like pr p2p community in like the irc days um but i ended up missing the boat on bitcoin for some reason i was just i was personally just not very interested in it for some reason uh and then

it wasn't until ethereum came along and i kind of discovered it in 2016 that it clicked for me that you could use this technology to build public goods like truly public uh non-sovereign non-corporate goods that are similar to the internet that can be like globally accessible um and can we can be this like big equalizing force um in in the in the world economy after that so i i started uh playing around with the technology in 2016 um built some infrastructure and worked with a couple of projects at the time um i started the ethereum sf ethereum developers meetup which was pretty awesome because i was one of the first like communities that was like actively building on top of on top of ethereum um and then in 2017 uh i ended

up starting connext because uh i sort of had a lot of conviction on the technolon like ethereum as a broader technology and on this decentralization movement um and my goal was just how can we bring this technology to a billion people as fast as possible cool so before we actually dive into next and you were also one of the summoners of the molok dao right yes um yeah so i helped design the molek dao alongside amin sulaimani um and then helped build it with my current co-founders uh lane uh heber and rahul setram and then one of the co-founders of spank chain at the time uh james young uh along with amin uh and uh and then

yeah i guess the idea at the time was um we were really interested in solving this like coordination problem that that we we kind of felt that we had around uh you know working collaborating with bank chain on on building scalability infrastructure um and also was just like a broader coordination problem that we saw in the space and and in the world more generally um and the idea was that like we wanted to create some sort of like public resource for uh organizing a like like community action around public goods without necessarily having like basically having that be a public resource itself um and the that idea kind of became the moloch out the first really really the first like dao framework that actually

ended up getting traction um uh which is pretty awesome i mean we didn't we didn't really like ever expect that to be the case we were just kind of playing around with the ideas um um and the the goal behind it was never like here is the solution to coordination it was like here is a process by which like here is an initial step and then a process and a meme by which we can eventually hope to solve coordination more generally uh but the the idea was always like it won't necessarily happen it might not even necessarily happen as a molecule but hopefully this could be the catalyst to start people thinking about this problem or more generally oh yeah i mean what it was definitely a right time right place moment and i mean basically the narrative behind it was

just compelling in in in the light of the perceived weakness of the ethereum foundation and basically building uh things for for the community so yeah i uh i think this was uh it was uh a great launch so tell us about connect survey connects actually started off as a state channels um protocol right yes um so yeah when we when we started connext uh like i mentioned earlier like the the key goal was always this technology ethereum uh specifically and i guess like decentralized systems um uh has the capacity to really improve to to meaningfully rewrite the way that

human beings coordinate at a global scale um to move away from public infrastructure that is owned by governments or you know large-scale infrastructure that is owned by like operated by corporations um and and towards making that infrastructure part of the commons uh globally accessible in the same way that the internet is globally accessible um and uh and it comes from this like shared belief that the team had or at least the founders had that like things like you know google search things like uh money things like uh coordination tooling like voting and things like that are are should be accessible to everyone uh in a fair and egalitarian way regardless of where they live which is not currently true for the majority of the world

and so the goal was always like let's take this this technology and let's find a way to scale it to the world and of course that pretty quickly led us to scalability research because i was like one of the biggest kind of blockers to being able to have many many potentially a billion people's people use this use uh use ethereum in 2018 when we started looking at this uh and it started doing like scalability research there wasn't really a lot out there um the this most of the research had been at that point it's focused on state channels um and like raiden was kind of like the the leading project on that at the time um and then uh there was new research that was being done about plasma we of course ended up jumping into state channels because to us it seemed like

the lowest hanging fruit use case was actually going to be payments um and this is just a hypothesis that we came up with based on like what we saw in the space at the time which was projects like spank chain and others who were doing you know some form of payments and then and then of course like you know plasma research continued over the course of the next few years we kind of like expanded our understanding of state travels and things like that um and we also moved towards like building uh you know roll-ups as like a more generalized scalability solution which has less scalability but is like can be used for any kind of like arbitrary smart contracting one thing that we found and this is the reason that we ended up moving away from state channels is just like a lot of our our you know we we were

largely an r d org for a very long time we we like had a very very small team that was very very lean and very hungry and like uh extremely careful about like the things that we built and about making sure that we only built the most minimal possible solutions one of the things that we consistently found though was that while there was a lot of interest in payments and around scaling payments as a market there were actually very few use cases that's scaled associated with payments more generally um and you can actually if you look out at the space right now you can actually it's pretty easy to tell that like payments actually hasn't taken off crypto payments surprisingly despite the fact that many people have had a thesis about it for like almost a decade now for some reason payments haven't

actually achieved a lot of market penetration in the broader audience compared to things like defy and governance and so we we ended up realizing that like the solution that we were building the technology that we were building and researching was not necessarily a technology that was mapping very well to the real needs of users and and at the same time what we realized this is actually very fortuitous but in 2020 we we um there was the i don't know if you remember this but there was a there was a a bake off that reddit created it was like a scalability break off between like the different l2 solutions yeah yeah i totally remember that yeah um so we actually this was actually the time when we were having this kind of like question these questions around payments and around like payment related use cases

and one thing that we saw was like in this bake-off this was sort of like a quintessential example of like a decentralized ecosystem that wanted to build on top of a scalability solution and what we found was like all like looking out at all the other submissions that have been put in place almost all of them operated like chains um and we didn't we had like we basically would have to would have had to go and build a very custom piece of infrastructure for reddit specifically designed for their use case and even then they would have been like gotchas and things like that that we had to worry about whereas you know which is nowhere near as like nice as just deploying the exact same contracts that you have onto optimism arbitration right um and and i think what that helped us realize was that maybe maybe we were

just on the wrong track right like if we if we're trying to compete with rollups as a state channel network to try to scale something that is not payments we're not going to succeed because we would have had to do a ton of custom work but at the same time the the secondary problem that we saw uh and this was actually just really really lucky we just sort of said okay well you know there's all of these projects have this like big uh drawback which is you know once you're loc once you're on one of these solutions it's really difficult to get in and out of it it's really hard to get between these different solutions why don't we just reappropriate our exact state channel infrastructure and use it to allow people to send community points right at community points between these different options and that's what we did we actually

submitted uh an alternative solution to the scalability bank off we obviously didn't win because we didn't even we didn't even technically participate um but we actually did get a lot of attention both from the community and also for reddit uh where people looked at and and also from all the scalability solutions because people realized oh wait you can use state channels to use other kinds of technology to to allow for seamless bridging seamless communication between at the time it was like optimism arbitrary x-di polygon scale and a bunch of other test nets uh so yeah it was kind of cool that actually we we sort of did it as a like let's not play a game that we know that we won't win thing uh and you know we

kind of felt like we had to submit something but we didn't really know what uh so we we did this instead and it turned into us stumbling upon this really really big really really interesting market that at the time no one else had really even thought about yeah i i mean let's talk about the history of interoperability in the history of bridges in in just a little bit um just as an aside why do you think payments has never really taken off because it seems like it's such a low hanging fruit right yeah um yeah that's a really really good question um i think that's a there's a lot of reasons um the first the first and main reason is

that the payments market itself is just incredibly complex and there's like these really really deep entrenched network effects um associated with uh the existing structure of like like like payment facilitating banks uh payment processors visa mastercard and other like payment systems that makes it really really difficult to break into this market in like a functional way outside of outside of like places where that are just like completely unbanked and i think i think that made it quite difficult at the time because like we just had a really hard time finding markets of users that actually cared about crypto payments um you know we we ran a bunch of experiments in like gaming we ran a bunch of experiments in

content we ran a bunch of experiments in like uh countries where there were a large percentage of people unbanked and like we kept running into these like problems associated with like people being like okay well you know you're having to go through all of this additional friction to get crypto in the first place what is the benefit of doing this versus like finding some other mechanism to pay and like why not just use mobile payments or why not just use like in-game payments things like that um so i think i think the the real reason is really just that like it's the same reason why we can't just like fully replace all voting with crypto voting right there's some of these there's some of these like really obvious use cases that people always talk about like oh well someone should just build a voting system on top of

blockchains and then like we can just use that everywhere as an alternative to existing voting and it gives transparency and things like that and it would but it would only work if like it's like not intrinsically a 10x improvement against what exists right now and and because there are these entrenched network effects with what exists right now i don't think that we'll be able to get to the point where it's like worthwhile to make that kind of upgrade for any user unless they already are onboarded into crypto so you know i think for that reason things like d5 are a much better like initial onboarding mechanism because it's a 10x improvement against what exists currently because as a user you're you have access to like being able to earn a lot more money online than you would have ever been able to in

the past right um like defy has onboarded large parts of southeast asia uh you know after like sub-saharan africa latin america because in a lot of those places like contributing to different ecosystems or participating in air drops and things like that actually means life-changing money like that's that's an access that you would never have had before whereas participating in like getting on board into a payment system uh or into a voting system isn't necessarily going to be as big of a change to you would you venture a guess uh when we will see the first large-scale crypto based payment system i mean technically that it already

exists right technically there are some mecha some instances of like large scale crypto based payment systems uh the graph is a good example uh like we worked really closely with them when we were doing state channel stuff because they're like i think they're the single largest operator of like a micro payment network in the world right now um i believe uh i mean depends how you classify micropayments but at least at the scale that they're doing it and uh and then similar to you know similarly like saya filecoin and many others are also like working on building out their own bespoke like say channel implementations if they haven't already i think i already has one and and so i think i think it exists it's just like it's just like been a much slower burn um i would expect that this would happen

for micro payments it'll basically happen when the like web 3 infrastructure boom of like different kinds of web 3 protocols computing networks and resource networks scales it hasn't scaled yet but it's starting to get there um and then i would think for like consumer payments it's not going to happen until like everybody has a crypto wallet yeah i think that's a fair guess so let's talk about the history of interoperability because basically that that's been one of those arenas of web 3 that have actually gathered a lot more attraction than initially thought right so basically back in the day kind of the idea of um different blockchains uh kind of talking

to each other and having like trusted bridges and stuff this seemed like magic and i remember even even hearing about um you know jay's ivc vision back in the day they seemed like i asked myself this is actually feasible i mean obviously it is feasible and it is clear to to us now um but kind of let's let's talk about um let's talk about the history so basically i mean if if if we kind of look back the very first kind of bridges so to say we had you know the the wrapped acid specific bridges right so things like rap bitcoin and so on

well technically the earliest ones were actually the atomic swaps so like you know btc ltc atomic swaps and things like that yeah fair point the acid specific ones do you remember them taking off kinda so like technically shapeshift took off um the shapeshift is is in theory an atomic swap system atomic swap-like system um they do some other stuff but you know there that was like the idea behind it um there were of course a lot of like proposals around using lightning and then extending lightning to things like stellar and like litecoin um to do swaps there um and then and then once ethereum came along the idea of like oh you can have like i think ethereum when ethereum came

along that was like when there was a bit of a transformation because people started thinking about like instead of just okay let's swap btc for eth which has a whole host of problems associated with things like you know front running and free riders um or a free option sorry uh the instead the the conversation turned to okay how can we have a representation of btc on ethereum that can then be used um and that's i think part of when things got a lot more interesting as well i think the earliest projects there were things like btc relay um and a couple of others uh and like it's pretty interesting because like the things that have really taken off are like wbtc which is of course like a fully custodial

uh btc bridge representation by bitco i think a part of the reason why a lot of these things didn't take off is because the need for them wasn't actually as strong at the time you know like the the idea was always like okay well you can swap btc for something else like between these like you know account uh like between these like utxo style chains where uh there isn't any like broader functionality but the but that that functionality was always like fully encompassed inside of a centralized exchange anyway and so if you were unless like there was like the novelty of like okay i could do this in a trust minimized way but the the fact that you could always use in exchange for it was also like just made it so that there wasn't like a

huge improvement against that to begin with um i think what's changed in recent times is that is the explosive growth of the ethereum ecosystem and like how that has resulted in this like fragmentation across multiple ethereum like chains um and of course now moving to like non-ethereum like chains like selena and and like starkware and things like that as well but um largely it is all evm compatible at the moment i think the the like that has instigated this like question of okay well should common protocols uh especially like blue chip d5 protocols should they just be deployed everywhere and i think most of them just said yes that should absolutely happen and once you do that now you have this problem where it's

like okay you have different rates for these different protocols and different chains users now want to optimize the returns that they're getting users now want to use applications that run in many ecosystems all at once and now you've created this like huge problem around where do users go how do users actually do that um the other piece of it is also which i think is actually a little bit unintuitive is is that a lot of the conversation at least like in the earliest days of this big bridging growth that happened which is really it like in like january and february of 2020 what we saw was that the vast majority of people that were bridging were not like ethereum l1 users uh surprisingly uh it was not people who were already using these chains it was

new users coming into crypto because you know there was just a massive growth of of like end users at the time it was new users that were onboarding finding that ethereum l1 was too expensive for them and so they were onboarding directly into like vsc through finance and then going to polygon uh or onboarding directly into polygon and going to xdi or something like that and so what we found was like and this is still the case actually it's like the polygon bsc gnosis chain combo is actually by far the most used set of chains that people bridge between and uh and you know even a lot of the node operators in our network are actually surprised by this because they're like well we would if we would have thought that tons of people would

be bridging in and out of ethereum but that actually doesn't appear to be the case at all it seems like most of the people that have their funds on ethereum are just like not touching them as much as they possibly can do you think that's just because every time you touch them you incur horrendous gas fees or why do you think that is i think that's a big part of it and i think the other part of it is also that like one of the things that made ethereum so interesting interesting and exciting in the early days was just that it was like it was very experimental and like so there was a lot of room for people to go and just build things and like try new things and even if those things were not gas optimized or were really poorly built or had like problems it didn't

really matter that much right people were just like playing around um there is like a fun there's just so much like it is so much fun for developers uh builders to be able to like play with things and i think that element was lost when when prices the price of everything on ethereum escalated significantly and what we found was that a lot of the new developers that were coming in the ecosystem that wanted to do the same thing that early developers did on ethel one which is just play have a good time like play with building things they all were doing this on polygon and psc all of them and so what we found was like it was really just like a lot of completely new people like we most of the the support requests that we had in our ecosystem

were actually associated with how do you speed up transactions in metamask not anything related to like bridging itself yeah super interesting when you think about like the the different bridges that you can have can we look at them kind of by um the thing that they bridge right i mean so basically there's there's uh yeah i see 20 tokens uh yeah 721s 1155s um there's message bridges so how do you think about that just from you know zoology kind of point of view yeah um yeah that's a really good question

so the most general primitive is just like arbitrary message passing right it's like how do i get some data from one chain to another chain ideally trustlessly uh which basically means ideally without introducing additional trust assumptions against those that exist on the underlying chains and of course that is an extremely difficult thing to do and like there are really very few if or perhaps no constructions that fully achieve this um but because that is like the base layer you do sort of end up in a situation unless and i want to carve out an exception here which is atomic swaps which are like a very special case scenario but for anything else the idea is like you sort of need to have this ability to like pass around data to begin with before you can do anything else now on top of that so that's that's kind of like the

message passing layer now on top of that what you'll use usually have is like um you know other layers for other kinds of bridging so you know you could allow for uh some wrapper around the arbitrary message passing that allows you to mint and burn nfts and now that becomes an nft bridge you can allow doing the same thing with the rc20s and now that becomes like a token bridge and that that specifically is a token bridge that allows you to like mint and burn wrapped representations of that token and then uh and then the last piece that kind of like potentially sits on top of all of this is like the liquidity piece so uh and this is this is a big part of what connects does and and you know we'll talk a little bit about like connext and and nomad which is the like

arbitrary message passing network that we sit on top of um but um uh you know the liquidity specifically refers to how do you ensure that the user gets the correct asset on the like that they need uh on a given chain um especially given that in many cases that correct asset may be different than the minted representation that you create through an arbitrary message passing bridge and and that is something that requires you know things like liquidity pools uh in order to make sure that you bootstrap liquidity in the asset that you need to like transmit to the user that there's a lot to unpack here so maybe just to rewind just to to make sure this is absolutely clear so

basically when i um take an asset say from uh from polygon to bse um via a specific bridge um that that um asset that is de facto minted at that point in time on um bse um is um basically is that acid uh this that acid underscore the bridge that it came over and it's not fungible with that asset that lives on that chain natively or came uh by means of another bridge right exactly so the the problem here is basically like when you have an asset representation on

on a given chain if it's the canonical asset um what makes first of all there's this bigger question of like what makes this asset the canonical acid generally what we say is like okay it's the most widely adopted acid it may be it may be like in polygons case it may be the acid that's coming over the polygon pos bridge in other cases it may just be the asset that happened to get the most traction so like on avalanche it's like usdce which is like the representation of usdc that everybody everybody just started using and now it's the canonical one the second piece there is a second question there is like who actually owns the authority the the permissions to create more of this canonical representation um so typically this will be like in polygons case will be like the the like chain

sponsored bridge right the polygon pos bridge um and avalanches the avalanche ridge um in roll-ups it'll be the roll-up bridge and so the roll-ups actually have like an easier time with this because they already have a truss minimized bridge that is the canonical one and nobody can ever dispute that but uh if you if you don't have one dedicated uh bridge that is minting like a canonical token you don't have necessarily a canonical token begin with things get a lot more confusing so what happens if for example you have another bridge like nomad for instance that is like minting an acid on polygon the minted acid like that nomad will likely not have the permissions to increase the supply of the polygon pos usdc representation uh and so instead what nomad would do is they would have

to create their own representation which is a pointer to wherever those tokens were first locked on whatever chain and and now you have an asset that is nomad wrapped polygon usdc and then you have another asset that is polygon pos usdc the polygon pos you see usdc is the canonical one because it is used widely across all of the d5 applications on polygon um and so as a user you now have this like user experience problem of i have this asset how do i get to the correct asset because i can't actually use this asset anywhere it sounds like a mess it's definitely a huge headache how do how do you go about it yeah

so what we do is wherever possible we try to swap the user into the like the canonical acid the most widely used asset um uh and so this kind of gets into a little bit of the technical details of like how nomad works and things like that and how connects fits into it which you can definitely get into in more depth but um at a high level with how connects works currently we just basically swap into liquidity pools of whatever asset is like the most widely used and in the future what we'll be doing is we would use uh so rather than swapping directly between chains just as a mechanism to improve the usability of k'next and the the experience of running a node in conext um we will mint a nomad representative asset uh that goes across chains

um this will be like the the sort of default asset uh that is used in our system but then at the the exit point when the user is about to receive their liquidity that will be swapped for some local asset if needed using a stable swap so the construction here is a little bit similar to something like hop where uh you know hop basically utilizes the arbitrary messaging bridges on rollups to create h tokens which are their own representation and then they swap them at the end into like the the the roll-ups token if needed how do you make sure you have sufficient liquidity um when people try to move across large sums of money or even tokens that

you ha i mean you need to onboard tokens right so you can't offer this for just any token you kind of need to know which tokens are coming in advance yes um yeah that's definitely a challenge um i think this is something that we're still trying to understand the best sort of user experience around uh it's a developer experience around because it's complicated and it seems to really change based on use case um what we have right now is the ability to set like slippage tolerance in these transactions so you can you can at least like be sure that as a user you're not going to get completely wrecked by slippage because there wasn't enough liquidity um and then in failure modes what we do is we we just like um allow the developer to basically like exit the user's funds on to exit funds

onto like a given chain and then have the developer actually be responsible for figuring out how to handle the error case themselves um and over the long term the idea is like we're going to try to build a better taxonomy of use cases and and the way that those are handled from an error perspective or from a like failure mode perspective and then find like default mechanisms to handle those failure modes but at this stage it's like early enough it's too early for us to really be able to say definitively that like every kind of use case of x-type needs to be handled in this way because we just we just don't know yet yeah i mean the complexity behind kind of having all these different flavors of more or less the same acid um this is actually really mind-boggling um so in a

way you kind of need someone who behind behind the scenes i mean it's kind of like having this this massive ball of yarn right and someone behind the scenes kind of needs to you know con you know perpetually kind of order it and unwind it and make sure that kind of it doesn't tangle too badly and it actually gets worse too so like on chains you know there's there's been like several waves of chain launches um in a lot of the earlier chains like polygon bse avalanche uh there were already like chain built canonical bridges right and like the chains themselves were like you know had lead time to have those canonical bridges be kind of publicly used before other bridges came and started like

building creating their own like representative assets but a lot of the newer chains that have launched in this like second wave of l1 uh like l1 releases have uh things like moonbeam and atmos things are a lot more messy so like for example on moonbeam and atmos connects to no matter technically the the default bridge we're technically the official officially supported bridge but that that hasn't really meant anything because like there's these are permissionless systems it's possible for a lot of other projects to come and deploy on these systems and that's actually a good thing if they do um but what that means is like now on moonbeam for instance there are also like uh multi-chain uh like representative tokens so any tokens uh there are seller representative tokens there are synonyms

representative tokens wormhole representative tokens uh and uh and now it's an extremely confusing problem for the user and there's no there's no you know even if the moon beam team says okay xyz tokens are the canonical representation it ultimately isn't even really up to them like they they it really is up to uh the network effects of the applications that are running on top of this in this ecosystem so uh we have yet to figure out a good way to solve this mess um there are definitely a lot of proposals out there to do things like allow multiple bridges to mint the same token but then that just increases risk massively across the entire space so we're generally pushing back against things like that but yeah it's it's a very big

very hairy problem that at the moment doesn't really have a solution i i want to talk about security um a little bit later but kind of let's let's talk about this for for a little while longer so i mean basically we've seen a similar version of this problem across texas right so basically the arbitrage opportunities that you have between different taxes i mean and the way that the market has solved that but is by kind of um having market makers who kind of i mean in in a negative reading they're arbitragers but in a positive reading kind of they make the market more efficient because you

can kind of trade across because the price of of different assets kind of normalizes across different taxes right do you think um having such a radically uh decentralized approach to to the bridge problem would be a good solution or do you think it has drawbacks yeah so basically the question is like is it a good idea to just offload the balancing between these different kind of bridge options and and moving basically moving between these different assets to just liquidity providers and market makers who can ensure that users will get the right asset and like as a result of that we we can still maintain like a good user

experience uh while having multiple bridges i think so i mean i think that's regardless of whether or not it's a good solution uh which i i think it is i mean i think it is in the sense that like it's there really is no other option um so i i do think that like we are headed in that direction regardless which is that like there will likely be a lot of stable swaps and all these on all of these chains that will allow you to move between these different representative assets and i think eventually long term all of these projects will eventually just like plug directly into the stable swap so that the user is just getting the right asset on a given chain but i think i think that core problem of like how do you even determine what the right asset is is is just

at the moment just a huge mess uh it's just like an open field right now where like you know we and other bridges are actively like you know chains like moonbeam are are actively battlegrounds where we and other bridges are fighting for market share and trying to work towards uh having our version be like the canonical representation um and of course like on our end it's not the worst situation in the world if that doesn't happen because we can we can just allow for swapping into the right one but at the same time you know if our whole model is we want to make sure that users are like a big part of what we care about is like a globally trust minimized option um you know we really feel strongly that like

the inherent risks associated with bridging and with like cross-chain interoperability are much higher than even just like chains themselves uh there are systemic problems associated with that and a lot of the systemic problems are also arise from um like potential economic failures right not just um you know the bridge gets hacked or there's an implementation bug or like a like a security vulnerability but instead uh there is economic risk where uh markets uh or like the the economics of bridges could be manipulated to attack them um and this is simple this is basically what happened you know with terror for instance where uh you know markets uh terror markets were manipulated to exploit a vulnerable economic vulnerability in the way in

entire entire system in the usd system and and the idea is that like long term if we want this ecosystem to be sustainable we have to build systems that remain invulnerable to those kinds of attacks you know because those kinds of attacks will happen uh either from you know uh theoretically shady wall street organizations or perhaps governments or perhaps large-scale corporations or billionaires that want to find ways to extract value um and so my concern is like i don't you know on the one hand it would be it doesn't really matter that much if we end up in a world where like you know you're utilizing nomad to go across nomad and connects to go across

chains and then at the at the at the exit we're swapping into like any usdc or something like that the but at the same time that of course means that users are now holding any usdc in their wallets and so now they are still subject always permanently subject to the risk of any swap or multi-chain yeah i i have um so many questions about security and basically how security guarantees kind of transfer from but i kind of i want to save them because first i i want to hear about um nomad and connects and basically who does what and how they interplay and how this partnership came about so i can start with how the partnership came about um so we you know we've been

researchers in the space for a really long time uh working with a lot of like key research teams that are out there so you know we work super closely with like and we have worked super closely with like you know the optimism founders the arbitrary founders aka sync founders et cetera et cetera et cetera um and and that i think a lot of people don't realize that that community is actually really small so like even though it seems like a lot of these projects are competitive with one another we all like share notes we all talk to each other constantly uh we all present at the same conferences research conferences um because ultimately you know there is like of course there is competition but at the same time like we sort of all recognize that the market for this is so massive that at this stage it's like

pretty positive some uh in for us uh you know early on uh one of our key advisors around this interoperability piece was always james prestwich uh because he is just like one of the foremost people who has been thinking about bridging for many many years longer than anyone else that has at all in the space yeah we had him on for summer probably like four years ago or so and basically he had just launched the the bitcoin ethereum uh auction yeah james is awesome and uh and he's been thinking about this like very very deeply for quite a long time for a good reason um and he has like pretty nuanced opinions on this stuff it's not you know he understands that there are like very

big trade-offs and understands that there is like a uh there is room for multiple different kinds of solutions out there um and so i think a lot of a lot of the reason that we ended up working with nomad was just because of our very deep relationship with james um and uh and as as a result of that also like the the very strong cultural similarities between the connects team and the nomad team which is that like we're all just very kind of uh we are all people that have been very very uh focused on like producing value in the space and around research and around like building these sustainable public goods that are actually trust minimized and actually trying to do something good um and we are also all both like teams that

care about the same kinds of things that like have the same kinds of attitudes towards like building communities and and like being sustainable organizations but then beyond that i think i think there's also just there was just like a natural fit as well so like we um what we found was that over time you know connects historically had been focused on atomic swaps uh because we were really interested in just solving the like liquidity piece first before expanding to other things um now of course our are we really do think that the holy grail is to be able to do any kind of arbitrary messaging and also have liquidity built in and uh and that was something that we were struggling for a while because uh struggling with for a while because what we found was that there was just no really good way to do that um out there

uh and this is this kind of gets into like the interoperability trilemma piece which uh which which i wrote which which uh which basically breaks down uh the trade-off space around bridges and and shows that it's actually really difficult to have uh any system that simultaneously is deployable to many different chains is supports arbitrary message passing so it's generalized and then also is trust minimized and as we were looking out in this space what we found was like we wanted to find create some sort of either create or work with some sort of mechanism to do this and the only mechanism that we found that actually had acceptable trade-offs was nomad uh so we we were we became involved pretty early uh you know we were been we're collaborating closely with the team for quite a long time

um and at this stage the way that the relationship works is that like um we sort of think of ourselves as as the shared stack we actually call it the module interoperability stack um which is this thesis that like it is impossible similar to like the scalability trilemma and modular blockchains as a solution to the scalability trauma there is because there is this interoperability trade-off space it is not possible for us to just have a single solution that solves everything associated with bridging an interop instead we need to find ways to split out the responsibilities and build a stack of protocols that can work with each other in a limited way uh with with kind of like fixed interfaces and delete fixed delineation of responsibilities

um that can then provide a solution that actually is as close to ideal as possible uh so the way that the the delineation of responsibilities works is that nomad provides this like base layer of message passing nomad allows you to do generalized uh communication between blockchains with very reasonable fair very trust minimized assumptions uh like security assumptions and and then but with the trade-off of needing 30 minutes to do to pass messages between trains um and that 30 minutes is the amount of time needed to like instigate a dispute if if something if fraud occurs within nomad so that's because it's it's it's inherently optimistic that's why you

need the okay so basically exactly so like nomad in in nomads model uh the assumption is not like in something like ibc where you know in ibc you have what is called a validity proof where you have uh one chain like the the validators of one chain are like verifying the consensus of another chain um and they're doing this for every single message that that goes between chains but of course the downside of validity proofs and this is this is mirrored onto like ck rollers for instance is that you are for every single transaction or batch of transactions you're having to do this proof and so the cost overhead of it is quite high the complexity of is quite high the the like cryptographic and like you know consensus dependencies of this are quite high because you have to kind of figure this out for every single

chain whereas on noma in nomad it's the other the other end of the spectrum similar to optimistic rollups where you actually say okay well we're not actually going to validate anything unless something actually goes wrong and so you don't validate like you don't submit proofs that any given state transition or any given update is valid instead you just say let's just assume it's valid and then wait 30 minutes or wait a certain amount of time for someone to say oh they have a problem with this but this kind of this is predicated on the assumption that there's enough people kind of watching this stuff right so basically and this is something that i mean if if you look at the past six months or so with what what has gone wrong with bridges i mean i mean the ronin project no one even

noticed for like five days and i mean it's like i mean do we have um enough analytics to be alerted to things how many how many uh how many uh you call them watches right how many watches do you have on these kind of uh uh bridges so right now the watcher set nomad is permissioned um the reason for this is just that it's like a stepping stone a progressive decentralization process um it's the same reason why like optimistic roll-ups for instance don't actually implement fraud proofs so technically they're sort of custodial but like obviously people recognize that the

model itself makes sense and recognize that it's a process to get there what nomad is actually working on right now is expanding that watcher set um so to move away from just like them running a bunch of watchers to to like allowing other people to run watchers it'll still be permissioned at the moment but it will be much larger and one of the key goals there is to move towards like unlike with many other systems in nomad's case there are already a bunch of actors that are watching the chain and looking for fraud a good example of this is connex nodes so like um uh i guess like one one kind of piece that's missing here perhaps this context is like if nomad is providing this like messaging layer connex is providing liquidity there that sits on top of it and what we do is we short circuit the

30 minute nomad latency in certain cases where it's safe to do so in those cases are cases where our nodes are willing to front capital for transactions they have the permission to execute the transaction on the receiving chain so basically like it's a it's an unpermissioned call so like something like a unit swap swap rather than something like a token myth um and then lastly and most importantly they do so only when they recognize that their fraud hasn't actually occurred because they are the ones that are taking on the risk and what's interesting there is that they are actually already performing the function of a watcher all we have to do is add a little bit more code for them to to like start a dispute on chain um but any all of the like resource overhead of them watching for fraud has

already occurred um and we have i think 131 uh routers on our test net for the next upgrade that includes nomad so that's already 131 watchers that could go live pretty much immediately uh which already you know if you assume i think if you assume like a 10 like an 80 percent uptime uh for watchers i think the odds of all of the watchers being offline at the same time then becomes like in the 10 to -20 range or something like that which is pretty awesome that's slow yeah um as a final point here this actually there is a live system where this works and it's been shown to work so like the ronin bridge hack is a is a great counter example of like why multi-stick bridges don't work and

why you need to make sure that you have like this is like it was like the first example of like a root of trust compromise uh for for a bridge um and shows like the the risk of of having like you know this like permission based bridging mechanism where you have keys that have the ability to arbitrary element funds on other chains versus a revocation-based bridging mechanism like nomad where you can dispute if if anyone can dispute if something occurred um and but you're totally right that like it wasn't noticed um and i think that that was definitely like a huge failure uh in like the that ecosystems part that like there weren't better analytics around this but a counter example is like the the rainbow bridge hack that happened recently

um so uh for for context the rainbow bridge is a bridge that exists between nir and ethereum it is a fully trust minimized bridge um and the way that it works is that uh in in one direction it is a fully native bridge similar to ibc where i think the near ecosystem is running a likelihood of ethereum and then in the other direction it is an optimistic bridge and the optimistic direction was attacked and the watchers of the rainbow bridge actually actually successfully detected that an attack had occurred um the attack wasn't even like fraud uh from like the the bridge updater but was instead a hack of the contracts themselves the watchers successfully detected the hack and

paused the bridge uh so basically stopped any sort of fallout as a result of uh of uh of like the hack occurring unlike with ronin or wormhole or others so how um how do you incentivize the watchers right because basically if you don't incentivize them basically they can just haul the chain and grief everyone without any cost to themselves right so in that way you kind of you would you would actually end up um trading security for liveness um that is actually the main research question and optimizing that process is the main research question that remains to be able to make watchers

permissionless um the general idea is that uh you can use a combination of things like token incentives uh and then also like uh bonds and slashing of those bonds to be able to ensure that you know updaters are penalized for fraud and then watchers are penalized for false reports of fraud um and because the the like there's no real like material like financial upside for for a watcher to do this other than like the griefing vector of dosing um and so as long as the the downside risk for a watcher of hey i'm going to lose xyz amount of funds if i've like fraudulently you know stopped this bridge is as long as that's the case you can be

reasonably certain that it doesn't really make a lot of sense for like watchers to do that now there's there's there's definitely a lot of like research that is currently in progress around this to figure out what are the bounds around that like how can we be sure that like the penalties for this are high enough for watchers to be uh to be disincentivized from like you know dossing um and then similarly uh how do you ensure that the the rewards are high enough for watchers to be incentivized to actually like attempt transactions and how do you make sure for instance that like if there are rewards uh it is not possible to front run those for like you know mev bots to front run those rewards in the mempool um which is which happened in the near rainbow bridge case which is quite

interesting uh so these are the kinds of questions that that i think like nomads researchers are dealing with at the moment that uh are the the main blockers to being able to completely open the system up cool yeah super exciting for what it's worth by the way these are also the same same research questions that exist in optimistic rollups around incentivizing watchers so basically seeing that uh connects basically offers liquidity or liquidity underwriting on top of on top of the bridge um how do you deal with how do you think about re-oaks and probabilistic finality right because basically if if something happens on the chain that you send

something from and basically it reals then and you have already paid out the money on the other chain i mean is that kind of priced in or do you do you have uh it can you somehow mitigate that danger this is a part of the risk of running routers in connext um and this is the this is the risk that we try to mitigate it's like the the risk as a router basically what you're doing is you're saying i see that there is this slow 30-minute transaction that's coming over nomad i see that it is possible for me to complete this transaction faster and i see that i have enough liquidity to do so and i can earn a small amount of fees by doing that um and so we we sort of like mitigate the the latency trade-off

of nomad we also ensure that the user gets the right asset that they need um and we make sure that uh and and like the only kind of the the i guess the the trade-off or not not necessarily the trade-off but at least like the the decision matrix around doing that is then based on what is the risk to the router that is actually making this happen um and that that risk profile is based on you know how how likely is it that fraud has occurred in nomad uh what is the risk of some sort of like chain event like a reorg or a 51 attack and uh what is the risk of like some sort of failure like some sort of failure mode on the receiving chain that results in like me as a router not being paid out in the rior case

at the moment what we just do is wait we just wait for enough locks um we've done a lot of like statistical analysis over the course of the last year and a half uh to just like just because we've we've been live for that long to be able to understand how many blocks we need to wait on each chain um and and generally what we found is like the reorg risk is really only biggest on uh like fast chains that are have like very very low fees like bsc and polygon uh where you can see like deeper yorks uh and on most other chains that isn't as much of a concern so usually waiting about two minutes everywhere it appears to work quite well what we'd like to do is move towards a model where we actually don't need to wait for rear

risk but that's quite difficult so some things that have been talked about in our community for instance are the possibility of building some sort of reorg insurance where you actually just like have users underwrite the risk of the reorg risk of a router and like because you can detect like reorg's in on chain within a contract you could actually uh uh deterministically pay out that insurance bond to a router if really occurs um but the again like the this is something that's been like talked about in theoretical terms but like the economics of it are something that we'd need to figure out like basically what is the likelihood of reorgs uh what does that scale of risk versus reward look like and what kind of fees would you need to charge as an insurance provider in order to to

mitigate the the massive additional risk that you might have on some other chains yeah i mean as soon as as soon as uh ethereum and possibly a lot of other evm based chains move to proof of stake uh i mean the real risk uh i mean it doesn't fully go away but it it reduces greatly right so reduces yeah and we've been working with like we've been working closely with the polygon team for instance on on on this problem to try to talk to them about like what are ways to think about this i know that this is like a huge priority for them as well that like they are trying to work on improving their own consensus mechanisms in the way that like nodes operate in their network to be able to reduce the rate and depth of reorgs as

much as possible but yeah it's it's definitely it is definitely a problem right now with problem finality and the the solution the problem is just for us to wait longer um for routers to wait longer long enough that they are comfortable good so how do you guys think about capital efficiency so basically if you if you move um if you're kind of liquidity underwriter this kind of entails having capital at hand to kind of pay people out so how do you think about not having too much um on any one stockpile capital efficiency is a really interesting question and problem um like the ideal sort of scenario which is what we had originally tried to optimize for was

like you have a certain amount of uh liquidity available on each chain and then you're just like utilizing that pool of liquidity to do transactions and there's no additional liquidity that's required and there's no lockups of liquidity that's required um and so our existing system uh you know the kind of v1 of our interoperability network uh does this thing where like you you know you send transactions to a router and through an atomic swap it the router receives funds on one chain and then they give you funds on another chain and in theory this is the most like capital efficient option but what's interesting is that there's a capital efficiency and then there's capital utilization um what's interesting is that like the utilization is actually not that great even though even if the efficiency is great and the reason for this is that

while the liquidity you know say you're transacting like currently there's a lot of people that are you know transacting getting out of ftm and going to other chains so say you're going from ftm to polygon while the uh the liquidity that a user sends on ftm is immediately usable uh by the router to send a transaction the opposite direction what we found is that in many in most cases the the movement of funds between chains and the the patterns by which people tend to rotate between chains are unidirectional um uh week to week so you know the chain may change but like everybody will flood to a given chain or fly away from a given chain in a given week and uh and the difficulty with this is that now you end up at least with what

exists currently you end up with like liquidity actually just piling up in a given on a given in a given place so like for instance uh you know tons of liquidity piles up on ftm because everybody's trying to exit that chain and in order to fix that in order to make sure that that capital you know while that capital is usable by someone who's going into ftm because the demand for going into ftm is low we want to we then need to have this like secondary problem of how do we get liquidity off of ftm and to somewhere else where it's more likely to be used um it's a utilization of that capital ends up being quite low uh what we ultimately came to the conclusion of was like it's actually better for instead of you know it's better for us to actually take a hit

with capital efficiency if we can increase utilization um and what we decided was to move towards this model where uh routers in our network send and receive capital on the same network uh so they descend and receive capital on the same chain so that they don't have to deal with this process of rebalancing and and the the process of running a router becomes like as pas as passive as possible they can they can just like sort of turn it on put it put liquidity in and then just like let it happen um and this results in the best utilization because routers don't have to think about you you don't have liquidity piling up on chains that are not being used and uh the trade-off here is that now there is a capital efficiency problem so uh or not really a problem but you have

a slightly reduced capital efficiency so now what happens in our network is like you have this the the base layer of this whole process is is the transaction that happens across chains with nomad um where you burn a nomad representative acid on one chain and then mint another no bad represent acid on another chain uh in order to make that process happen faster uh the router needs to you know and basically like avoid the 30 minutes of waiting for the user the router now needs to take on that 30 minute lockup so the router now has their capital efficiency reduced because they are their their capital is is locked up for 30 minutes every time they use it and then sec and then in addition to that you now also need user provided kind of passively provided liquidity on each

chain in a stable swap that that uh where if needed you are swapping from the nomad representative asset to the canonical asset on that chain that said i think because of the new mechanism we actually will end up with much better uh capital availability and utilization and also probably much better pricing and the reason for this is just that um the price curve for like basically the incentive to rebalance the system uh in this case what rebalancing means is basically swapping assets back into nomad flavored acids and sending them in the opposite direction to another chain uh to basically generate more nomadic gradient there the incentive to do that is now

concentrated in uh the stable swaps on each chain so the pricing is concentrated which means that you have the best possible pricing the least amount of slippage uh versus having you know each router have their own pricing curve and things like that um and then in addition to that uh while there is a lockup of funds um that lockup is actually relatively small compared to the amount of the possible utilization of those funds and the frequency with which you could rebalance it in the past so for example say you know pessimistically say like the nomad lockup takes a full hour in case we decide to do batching or things like that which we're not at the moment but say we do that in the future even if you do even if it takes a full hour

if the network has uh say the network has 10 100 million dollars of liquidity or currently we have about you know uh 40 million dollars of liquidity so say the network has 40 million dollars of liquidity uh that is that is locked up for a maximum of one hour uh every time it is utilized that means with 40 million dollars of liquidity you can do over a billion dollars of daily volume uh so that's far more capital efficient than many other things in this space anyway so at that point we're like okay this this is this makes sense from uh from a efficiency and utilization perspective what what's the fee you take in terms of basis points yeah there's uh there's several

different kinds of fees in the network there is a fee that routers take for the lockup of liquidity and that is five basis points um over time that may reduce or increase depending on like the network dynamics and things of that we haven't quite figured out yet but we have found that five basis points is like usually about 10x cheaper than most other options out there um and uh and even if it isn't it is definitely significantly cheaper uh it is definitely the cheapest option by far out there at the moment uh and then in addition to that there are two other kinds of fees so there is uh there are the lp fees for the stable swaps uh and we don't quite know exactly what those will be yet but that will be like a small fee that is paid uh that out to the the passive lps of

the stable swap and then in addition to that of course like the slippage in that stable swap uh generally we expect these to be fairly tight because these are all using you know stable swap amms they're highly optimized for this um and uh and generally speaking this is passive liquidity so we expect that users it's like much easier it's easier for us to bootstrap the query when users are able to passively lp the last kind of fee is gas fees so uh users need to pay the gas of the transactions that they do on both the sending and receiving chains um they pay this all of this in the sending chain asset uh sending chain like native asset and the the idea behind this is that like we realized in the past we we have users

pay gas fees from you know the transacted assets so like usdc for instance if it's going across chains what we realized is that like if we end up having long tail assets uh it may not be the case that you know relayers and other other like service providers are willing to accept fees in xyz longtail asset chitcoin that doesn't even have like a market price and so what we decided was that the the most acceptable form of asset that we can be sure the users will have and that relays and other service writers will be willing to accept will always be the sending chain native asset and the user experience of this is kind of nice as well because and developer experience is kind of nice as well because all users are doing is that they're just paying some additional gas fees on top of the gas fees that they

would already paying to do a transaction on that chain and similarly similarly as a developer you are just you know making sure that the user pays this additional fee and then monitoring and bumping that fee if if needed you know if you need the transaction to go through faster or something like that on the receiving chain but i mean that sounds like really good business model though so i mean basically if you i mean i'm talking about the five basis points for uh the liquidity provision for the half hour right so basically if if you kind of um if you had like perfect capital utilization and you um that meant you could kind of have a billion dollars of

volume a day um and basically you you got your uh your risk management right so that basically you wouldn't be paying a lot for that that that's like five basis points on a billion dollars is like a half a million a day right uh yeah there's a it's it is a really lucrative model um and it is extremely low risk so this is a way for people to run infrastructure and get an extremely low risk like potentially i mean of course it's demand driven and i think like the demand of the network ultimately is going to be what results in returns for the router operators and basically the ratio of the demand in the network to like the amount of liquidity provided um by router operators but at the same

time like in a demand driven scenario like you can easily get like 50 plus percent on any asset that you're providing liquidity on api apr api sorry that's crazy actually it would be apr so it's actually even more apy wow um so let's talk about we we're kind of over time already but there's one thing i really want to cover so let's talk about um the user experience so i mean ultimately what you want is the user shouldn't have to know which chain they're on so um i mean so basically if i want i should go to a dab and it should just work and um i mean especially

with um the d5 primitives we've kind of seen in the past how is composability um of those d5 primitives or other primitives to be honest um and bridges how's that gonna come together because it seems like two difficult problems is this attractive a problem yeah that's a good question um i think what we're experiencing right now is like the like basically what we need to go through is this transition from application like decentralized application development going from being like a something that you do in like the synchronous model where everything runs on a single chain and uh and like you can be sure that

like you have results within the same block uh for anything that you build versus moving to an asynchronous model that is more similar to how web applications are built more broadly um and uh and i think the difficult part will be figuring out how to make that transition happen with whilst uh making sure that the developer experience and user experience remains as similar to what exists as possible um i definitely think that like i definitely like our thesis has always been that most users end users especially are not going to really care at all about what chain they're on they don't want to and like really they're just going to want to use an application and so if if you if you're operating under those assumptions then um it should just be possible it you should move towards a world where if you're

building an application that application to be able to like accept transactions from any chain and should be able to potentially even have like liquidity pools on multiple chains that are connected to each other uh i think that's possible but it will involve like a transition that we are trying to make happen right now which is that um developers are going to have to move to a mental model where they are not necessarily receiving the results from a given transaction immediately they're instead having to do what you currently do when like building an application with javascript for instance where you make an asynchronous transaction or asynchronous call to another function that's just another process of living somewhere else on the internet and you don't know when you're going to get response you don't know if you're going to get a response and so now you need to

have handlers for this you need to have an error handler that handles what happens if you you don't get a response you get an error and then you also need to have a callback that or at least a callback handler that basically is executed when the return data comes back from another chain which may be at some may you know uh given nomad latency be like 30 minutes or so in the future but yeah it's it's a good question um i think like it's gonna be quite interesting to see how this stuff plays out generally from our perspective what we've seen is that like uh most if not all user-facing interactions can be short-circuited by k'next um and so those can happen in under two minutes and so what that means is like if you're

a user that's like trying to use you to swap on another chain or you're trying to just like get the best say for example you are using paraswap and you want to get the best rate across all chains um uh paraswap can actually ins like create transactions that go through connect that aggregate all of their liquidity on multiple chains altogether and that can happen in two minutes because the the you know the the dex calls on each chain are unpermissioned um and given that that's the case like we expect generally that that's going to be an acceptable user experience for for most users who are used to like using web applications and dealing with that kind of latency and uh and we think there are ways to kind of like house that latency like at least the latency increase from being like zero seconds to two minutes uh in a

way that makes sense for users you can show them like transparency you can show them like connect scan which are network explorer to show like track the transaction lifecycle um and if something goes wrong you could surface that really accurately cool so arjun tell us what's what's next for connext so what what what do you plan to get done um within the next year or so yeah um the two biggest team things the team is focusing on right now are the the launch of the mark upgrade which is the upgrade that incorporates nomad and moves towards this like generalized messaging pattern um we already have that upgrade on testnet or i guess there's three big things that we're focusing so we already have this upgrade on testnet um there

are a lot of people already building against it i think we announced the testament publicly last week and uh since then we've already had 131 routers set up on the test net and then about 15 000 transactions which is incredible it's mind blowing that so many people have been interested in building on it and experimenting with it um so we're super excited about getting that live as fast as possible and we uh we have audits scheduled to begin uh starting in about i think about a week now um so it should be like first like second week of june and then running until like the start of july um and uh we should go live shortly after the other two main pieces uh so that's that's a big part of the focus of like the engineering team and and protocol

team at the moment and then the other two big pieces are uh we have a contributor program that is ongoing uh this is a way for people to start getting involved with working with the connected ecosystem and uh and a big part of it of this is that we want to take existing processes around you know running the router ecosystem and like growing it uh running the community and growing it and things like that um and and spin them out to the community entirely um uh you know like uh we want it to be the case that like our community is self operating we want it to be the case that like um you know uh routers are self-organizing to to apply for grants they are working internally to improve the experience of operating a router and like onboarding new routers um and uh versus the core team doing

everything um and uh and so that has already kicked off uh there are there's absolutely room for people to participate so if you are a person outside of the us and you are interested in working with connext or at least just interested in participating and being involved um you can sign up at contribute.connect.network and and earn tokens to to uh to basically work on helping us build this ecosystem and then lastly uh the last main main focus is of course our token launch so we announced about a month ago that we are we are heading towards uh releasing the next token which is going to be a governance and sticking token in our network um there are also other kind of token mechanisms that we've been experimenting with and thinking about but we we want to be like very conservative with the way that we

implement them because it's it's really hard to take back a token model once you've implemented it if that token model isn't correct and and we really want to make sure that there's a lot of like community input once the dow goes live on it but uh we're currently expecting that to go live within the next like uh month or so uh we're we're currently working on like finalizing uh things like airdrop allocations finalizing things like uh you know the fine like the la remaining legal pieces and things like that uh and like the rollout of the token itself and how it will be distributed um and of course given market conditions and things like that we're thinking really carefully about how like making sure that we uh that you know community members are like treated fairly and that uh that you

know people are getting materially uh rewarded for their work or materially uh like compensated for for things that they do in the ecosystem both now and after the dow goes live uh as much as possible given that you know the the market you know may end up we may end up heading towards a bear market or things like that in the future arjun sounds like um exciting times looking forward to see none of us are sleeping what comes out of connects over the next couple of months yeah and it's been a pleasure to have you on thank you so much i really appreciate it