Bringing web2 languages to Ethereum with Fluent

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web 3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm jbird and I believe that lir 2 rollups are going to change the world that's why I'm carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3 today on the show we have Dino one of the co-founders of fluent Labs joining us now you might not have heard of affluent because they're a newer company in the web 3 space but they're somebody to pay attention to fluid is a layer 2 rollup platform that enables scalable application development using popular programming languages from

the web to world so you can use rust typescript solidity and others to build on chain this is a whole new paradigm really that focuses on improving accessibility for developers one of the biggest problems we have on chain right now is we do not have enough developers in this episode Dino does a great job of telling us how many developers we have in web two and how many we have in web 3 and there is a massive Gap and if we're going to get to the point where we have as many people on chain as we do online we're going to need a lot more developers and that is what fluent is

all about is helping more developers build on Chain by making it easier for them to do now the fluent platform emphasis emphasizes ease of use scalability compatibility and flexibility all well catering to a Community Builders that are focused on a more free and a more open web this is the early stages of what is going to get us to having great games and great consumer apps and great social apps that are built on chain we need to make it easier for devs to understand how to build on chain and to use the languages that they are familiar with this is such an important conversation because if

it's not for the developers we're never going to get to the end result and the end goal that we all have in mind for where we think the web 3 world can go and Dino is just such a great guest to break down the current problems and challenges and why he was so inspired to start fluent and where he thinks fluent and the future of onchain will go as a result of really modular blockchains which make it easier to build things in ways that are faster more scalable and more Innovative so get ready for a great episode with Dino before we jump in we're just going to take a minute to hear from our sponsor modern newsletters

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part of those building in web 3 and here we are you've been building in web 3B building fluid which we're going to dive into today and you've been building alongside the web3 academy community and now we've got you on the show uh because you guys are launching some big things so yeah really really excited to have you on the show today's going to be an interesting conversation because we're gonna dive into the state of developers and web3 it's not something we do a lot at web3 Academy mainly because we we've been so excited by the consumer applications what's going on in Social fi what's going on in the sort of frontend facing side of blockchain but if we ever want to make it to a billion

users we're going to have to get a lot more developers in the space and so it's important that we takes take some time to talk about the state of developers so I just want to start off the conversation today Dino with in your mind what's the current landscape of developers in web 2 and maybe you want to compare that to the current state of developers in web three yeah for sure so I guess to set the state age people have for the past couple years have been talking about how to get a billion users on chain and at least the way we see things to get a billion users on chain you have to get a million developers on chain I mean developers are the ones who are building these 10x better apps and then users are the ones who are opting

to to use them and we just think that we have a long ways to go to actually get a million developers on chain but there is a path there so just to contract contrast it we there's probably in the the most recent Electric Capital kind of developer report there were like 20,000 developers on chain and there's like 20 thou there's like 20 million developers in the world so how do we bridge that Gap at least that fluent we think that we need to create 10x better developer experiences to actually make a meaningful debt that's what we're working on so Okay so we've got I me there a huge gap we've got 20,000 onchain developers about that right somewhere in that range tough to know the exact number and then we've got about 20 million total developers in the

world most of those OB viously 99% working on web to what's the roadblock or what do we need to do what's required in order for us to get more developers into web 3 and developing onchain it's just to ground it I mean everyone at this point is aware of ethereum right and they're aware of you know all the benefits of building of something on ethereum well not all the benefits but the the kind of some of the core attributes of building on ethereum it's clearly known to be like a desirable destination it's a well-known brand at this point it say they'd call it like an infinite Garden so it's like how do you get into this Garden like how do you get developers building on it I think there's been kind of two general

roadblocks one has been throughput and then the other has been accessibility and I think that the throughput is is clear we've been focusing on it with scaling Solutions and l2s I know you guys talk some about that on this pod and that mostly affects kind of like performance and cost and you know we're solving those problems I think that there are a ton of really amazing rollup teams they're doing really great work there and now we're at a point where we do have kind of an abundance of block space but the thing is a lot of that block space especially since most of the the rollups so far have been evm rollups which is basically for those not aware taking kind of like the same execution environment in the same way to program in the same languages on from the ethereum L1 and kind of just like

copying that onto rollups or L2 which is great for existing developers and existing applications on ethereum and kind of moving them up in a more performant way but it's not necessarily solving kind of broader problems for Less crypto native developers so the millions of developers that were're talking about so then what's the other piece accessibility obviously there's accessibility problems for kind of end users too which obviously we're not going to talk too much about moment but there's a lot of work being done there and that's clearly a very important piece just to segment kind of the developer part of it I don't think current rollups have really done as good of a job solving the access the developer accessibility portion so what does that actually mean well right now developers to build on ethereum or ethereum rollups they have to learn

blockchain specific languages like for example solidity is a blockchain specific thing like that doesn't ex it's new because blockchain's relatively new that hasn't existed it doesn't exist outside of the blockchain space so it's like just an extra thing somebody has to learn it's very specific and it's not necessarily you know tailored for all the different types of use cases and contrast that with kind of the general purpose languages that exist in the world not only are people familiar with them already from web 2 they've been around for years and years and years and years but there's also like 10 to 20 common ones and developers understand very clearly that they pick up different tool there's just tools and you pick up different tools to solve different tasks and developers get that so it's very

constrained currently in the blockchain world even with rollups in terms of like developer experience I mean even the languages part is probably only probably less than 50% of the the real challenge I mean the bigger developer learning curve is actually learning how to program for smart contracts and blockchains I mean these are this is kind of like a very esoteric thing and over time you know I think we can abstract more and more things away for certain use cases but no we have ways to go yeah it's such a good reminder it's so easy to forget what is what has happened so far and when ethereum was built there wasn't nfts nobody even had the concept of nfts so dick there's a very simple example of something that we discovered over time and then you have a

whole bunch of developers who are like okay now I'm going to build something using nfts and people have to learn how to do that because we don't know we don't know so it's very difficult it's sort of like a big chicken and egg problem like we all talk about we want a billion users but it's like well if we don't have I I think your your estimate is we need a million developers who got a long way to go we don't have a million developers then we're not going to get a billion users because we're not going to have the apps the necessary use cases to attract those people in and the developers aren't going to come because it's too difficult like it's really hard for them to learn like you said they got to learn a whole new language when you mention languages just so yeah I I am

not a developer by any means so forgive my uh ignorance here are all onchain languages new and unique to onchain or do some languages crossover between web two and web 3 that's a good question so there's been both just AC Ross a bunch of different like fragmented ecosystems right so like within the ethereum ecosystem it's really just been the blockchain specific stuff so like the blockchain specific execution environment of the evm which has types of constraints and makes certain types of tradeoffs it's good for some things but not for other things and then blockchain specific languages there's a couple of them like Viper Etc but people know solidity and that's the one that everybody uses but again certain types of trade-offs for certain types of use cases and not as good for other things

so to to us it's all about developer choice so yeah to answer your question there there has been other ecosystems that have built using more general purpose languages like some of the other l1s over the course of the past five 10 years have experimented with more kind of general purpose languages like rust and typescript and C++ and things like that but that's again that's only one half one piece of the puzzle right like I mean a lot of those ecosystems never really reached like escape velocity on like their core blockchain thing itself so it's if you don't reach that escape velocity it's it's kind of hard to that's almost like a prerequisite and really only like Bitcoin and ethereum and you know maybe salana that's emerging as has really got to that point

so I think it has been tried in a number of different places but it just makes more sense to do that on top of a blockchain that has already you know reach escape velocity and that people want to use right right maybe one thing that would be helpful to just sort of ground this conversation is you've been building for a while now web 2 before for web 3 can you give us an idea of how do builders in the web 2 world how do they build how do they select tools what are the implications when they are deciding what to build with uh maybe we can use an example there to understand okay this is how developers are used to building so then how does that impact the way that

they would build in web three sure yeah let me put this in in context from you know with how things played out over time in the web to space right so you know at the beginning of when the the cloud started becoming a thing people built in very monolithic design so you hear probably a lot of talk these days about modular versus monolithic and and now I'm putting in that web two context but what does that actually mean right so okay you have Amazon right in the early 2000s and they'll build their their you know OG website and they got their search function and then they got their payments function and then they got their reviews and ratings function or something like that and the monolithic approach to building this application which how they did it originally is to put it in one big fat

like blob of code and like in a way that seems easier oh it's just one big thing but then when you actually come to scale it gets much more difficult and what Amazon found and what I'm using Amazon as an example but this actually took over the entire you know mobile Cloud industry this is how backends are built today it transitioned from them building this like monolithic code base to build this you taking each of those functions the core functions and kind of like separating them to be iterated on experimented with updated trouble shot independently and scaled independently so it it was way easier for Amazon and a lot of the other kind of like you know Cloud scale companies to scale their businesses and scale their applications this way and that

ended up just taking over the design space and then that's what you would Now call kind of like a modular architecture in the cloud they'll call it microservices because each of those little things are like tiny little services that are like working in collab ation with each other that's how apps are built on the back end today and then what that also enables is from on the developer side of things it makes the developers can just kind of pick the best tools for each job right so like we talked a little bit about the languages but it extends all the way down the stack like developer can kind of take the database that's like best suited for them the developer can take you know a number of different tools and kind of like Stitch them all together I mean if you're uber you don't have to build you

know the text messaging function when you're just getting started you can use twio you just plug it your app so even though a lot of people will will look at Uber and be like oh that's one app these things are built in a very modular way on the back end and so ultimately that ends up being much better for developers because you can you know take the best tool for what you need to do and make the best possible experience for your users right yeah and so does that mean that web 3 is following the same sort of path of we also on chain sort of started monolithic because we just didn't have all of these modular tools built out yet in the beginning there was only ethereum

and it had to do all everything on that and then over time as more people built more systems and more functions then there's more pieces built that allow you to pick and choose which piece you want like is that a is that path the same thing happening in web 3 is that just a natural path of sort of the evolution of software I think so I think so yeah I mean I definitely think that we're learning from kind of the best of web 2 I mean it's just like a better I think that we've learned that it's just like a better way to kind of build complicated systems I mean if you think about it even like you know the systems that we experience in everyday life like your your brain is modular right they're like whatever like 10 to 20 different like components that each specialize in their

own thing and they work in Tandem and there's just a lot of examples of like big complicated systems and the best way we as like humans have learned to build these things is with specialization and collaboration and that's certainly a lesson that we've we've learned over all these years in the cloud and yes so absolutely we're taking the best of that right okay so in the Amazon example it made sense to go more modular because it enabled them to scale it enabled them to I guess innovate faster they didn't have to build all the tools themselves they could just pick off the shelf tools as needed when we talk about modular blockchains in the web 3 context now what s do they solve why do we need

modular blockchains yep so yeah it comes down to to specialization again but let's just let's try to make that as concrete as possible without getting like two in the technical weeds so one interesting module in that in the modular stack are Roll-Ups right you've talked about rollups you've talked about l2s so it's like why would you you know what what's up with all these l2s that are emerging why are there so many being created why did why did flip cart just say that they wanted to build their own L2 like what does that mean what value is that actually provided to people well it still just comes back to enabling developers to build the best possible to make the tradeoffs that lead to the best possible and user experience or even just experience or benefits for their company or whatever it might be but like

this customization specialization and so you know why would you build for example like an app specific rollup instead of deploy on like a general purpose rollup you might do that for a number of reasons so maybe you're a business and you're trying to build a certain app and you want the fees to be more predict right if your application ends up being just like a smart contract on a shared environment whether that's a theory about one or a general purpose role up you're competing for fees with all the other things on there and maybe it's more important for your business rather than the the extra composability of being because there's benefits too right instead of the composability benefits of being on those shared environments it's more important for your business to have like the better control over costs of being in an isolated environment so you

lose a little bit of the the ease of use of composing with other things but you gain in the predictability of cost there same thing goes for predictability of performance or just a certain type of performance characteristics let's just say you're building some type of game or experience where you need it to be like super high throughput if you deploy as a smart contract on ethereum L1 certainly but even on like an OP mainnet or a scroll or even like general purpose fluent you don't get to control the exact performance characteristics so I think it's really you know that's kind of like the base case for why you would what you would want to customize but it also the design space is huge I think it's going to get very very interesting it's going to get very very weird very very fast like a pretty cool way because

you know you can also incentivize different actions on your own rollup right like you can have you know a decentralized set of whatever I'm going to say sequences I want to get too tactical but like you can basically have kind of like the rewards for the people ordering the transactions to be distributed to incentivize certain actions or certain participants in the network or you can subsidize fees for users maybe it's for there to really be minimal fees for users you can basically take some of those you know rewards that are generated and use that to kind of subsidize gas so there's all different types of things that you can do and just depending on what's most valuable to you as a developer and obviously that is because it's most valuable to your business right right okay there's so

much to unpack there I want to pause and explain modular blockchains in layman's terms for everybody I think everybody understands blockchains and probably knows more about it than they think they do to be honest but you've written great articles about this could you just sort of give us what are the modules you mentioned rollups being one what are the modules in a modular blockchain that we all can kind of conceptualize yeah so I mentioned rollups before rollups can be considered one of the four main modules in modular blockchains so rollups are one flavor of the execution layer right so let's think about these things in

terms of these modules as as layers just because that's how people seem to talk about them so there's the execution layer that's rollups and other things like rollups there's the settlement layer there's the data availability layer and then there's the consensus layer so just in this try I'll try to put it in like the simplest terms possible so the execution layer is where things where the actual transactions get processed and where the state that the users are interacting with so you know if somebody has X number of coins coins versus y number of coins or a certain application maybe it's a social application you know you have five Twitter follower you five onchain Twitter followers so that's sitting in the state of the execution layer so that's what users are interacting with then just to ensure that the execution

layer is as secure as possible it uses a settlement layer which means the rollup or whatever you hear ZK rollups or optimistic rollups they're posting these proofs either zero knowledge proofs or fraud proofs to then get checked somewhere else and so the place that does the checking to make sure there wasn't fraud or to make sure that you know everything is being done correctly on the rollup or the L2 that is being done in the settlement layer often that's ethereum so people just like post the L2 posts thing onto ethereum the data availability layer is really just to ensure that the data was published it should probably be called the data publication layer but basically the the blockchain can't keep on progressing forward if it doesn't know the state of things so it needs to be able to see

that the data was posted all the nodes need to be able to say okay the data was posted so now I can compute it and then get the next date for the whole thing to keep chugging along and then the consensus layer is basically The Ordering of these transactions at the very bottom of the stack so it in this case you know it would be ethereum that's doing the final set of ordering at the end of the day which basically everything else kind of like rolls up into and so in the beginning ethereum played all of these roles and now over time ethereum is slowly being pushed just down the consensus layer longterm do you think it'll only be theorem will just be the consensus layer and then

other tools will be the ones that enable these other layers yeah so I think in the long term ethereum ends up uh providing M like mostly two of those functions two or three of those functions so it's not entirely it's not Outsourcing all of them so I think ethereum will end up being a really good data availability layer and it'll end up being a really good consensus later it's already a really good consensus later layer it'll be a good data availability layer with the addition of like 4844 which you guys might have talked about with not yeah Proto dank sharting a little bit we haven't gone too deep into the

technicalities but you can quickly explain yeah what that's going to enable so right now ethereum is a really good con ensus layer right like because there's High Economic Security it's really hard to like change the final ordering of the transaction because you need a ton of money so it makes it making it a really good consensus layer so it's already that it's going to stay that it's not a very good data availability layer right now because to actually post the transaction data on ethereum it just costs a lot of money which is why you start to see people posting the transaction data other places like Celestia and igen lay and all this stuff which are also really good but we we you know I can I can unpack those if if you want to but basically like ethereum is really expensive to put the data but it has to

go somewhere over time ethereum ends up being a really good data availability layer because of like what we just said Proto sharting dank sharting and all that really means is you know the data is getting cheaper and cheaper to put on ethereum because it's getting kind of like split up into these chunks and distributed basically getting sharded if that's like a term people know and then it it ends up being a really good settlement layer obviously because you know it can verify you you trust it to verify those proofs I I think it keeps those three main functions over time and ends up being really good at those three main functions but that said there's always similar to with kind of Internet bandwidth like people are always pushing the boundaries of what's possible and so you know even if ethereum can scale the

data and like you know get data availability to a massive degree in my opinion developers will end up just keep pushing it they'll just keep dumping more things on there to a point where it does fill up and then you do still need to always use something like for certain use cases like a Celestia or an Nan I I see it being very good at those three things but that doesn't mean you you know certain use cases aren't going to make different trade-offs right right and I really like the way you keep using the word tradeoffs because we talk so much about scale and I think everybody understands that because they experience it right when there's a lot of activity on chain gaskets very expensive and you realize pretty quickly that we could

never have users paying you know $10 just to do a simple transaction right we'll never get a billion people at that rate we need that but it's not just about scale here it's also about the tradeoffs of what you are trying to build and enabling that to happen in the way that you want it to happen and I think it's important to see it from both those perspectives now I want to start to talk about fluent but before we do I know you were inspired by Celestia and you you brought Celestia up why were you inspired by Celestia why did that lead you to start fluent with your co-founder it's interesting because the way I got

into this space I was never uh so much of like a d gen like I've come from the cloud infrastructure space I've done some stuff in like you know ml machine learning inference I've done some stuff in these microservices and kind of like Cloud developer tooling like I've been talking about and so I started to kind of dabble in in crypto maybe in web 3 maybe you know four years ago and the first thing I did kind of cling on to is this Paradigm of like Mo like modular blockchains people who were really talking about it were the the Celestia folks and they just really at that time before modular became like the meme that it has today and the movement that it has today like they really understood at like a very fundamental level that like you know this specialization was going to be important and so like what they've

built and it's been you know I've gotten to know the Celestia sheim really well and they're all really great and what they've built is kind of like the the first modular blockchain that only does the data availability part and it just showed what's possible like and I think has inspired kind of like a whole next wave of specialization for each different function I just think that that ends up in the long run creating this crazy rate of innovation that never would be possible in the monolithic design so I I was definitely very inspired by that it resembled kind of the experience that I had coming into the space it just clicked and I wouldn't necessarily say that that is the kind of like reason we started fluent per se but it it pushed me right down the modular

rabbit hole which got me more involved than rollups which kind of did end up fluent so okay so let's lead into so why why did you found fluent what is the sort of the mission and the vision of fluent so kind of like we started the the episode with I mean we really do think that 10x better 10x to 100x better developer experiences are just needed are required to actually make a dent and get us to a million developers and and a billion users and our vision is to make e you know programming for ethereum as similar as possible to just programming for the web today and I think that that starts with what we're doing right now which is enabling kind of general purpose programming languages and making

it easier for devs to just start building on chain but I I think that the design space is for l2s and l3s is vast and I think we're just as an industry starting to scratch the surface on it and I think over we can get to a point with fluent where for certain types of use cases it almost feels like a I don't know this might be like developer like nomenclature but just like a serverless type experience like where you basically just take your code you don't have to learn much anything blockchain specific or much new things and you just kind of throw it over the wall and and in web to the word serverless means kind of throw it over the wall to AWS on server but in blockchain that means you know the experience would be throwing it over onto ethereum and just like having a

true web 2 native developer experience while getting all the benefits under the hood of of ethereum and blockchain right that's kind of where we see things going for a lot of different for a lot of different use cases yeah okay awesome I've never heard the term throw it over the wall before so thank you for uh bringing me up to speed on some Dev talk so we've been talking about what you're building at fluent and enabling more devs to get into the space we we haven't really explained fluent yet so let's let's take a pause here what's the mission and vision of fluent yep so the mission and vision of fluent is to make programming for ethereum as easy as programming for just the web today right and the way we're

doing that is with something called Web assembly which we don't need to get too into the details but basically there's this technology that has been transformative in the web 2 space for developers and we're just taking that and moving it into blockchain and putting it on ethereum to hopefully provide similar effects so what basically what web assembly or wasm and short did for web 2 um was enable developers to use all different type of languages in the browser so previously what you had to do if you wanted to build something like a web app in the browser is write in JavaScript one language and javascript's often very easy to use but it's not the best for all different types of applications or

or use cases and so what is that doing that's making kind of developers compromise in the experience so this thing called Web assembly came along wasm for short and it made it so you can basically run practically any programming language in the browser even the really really performant ones that developers again know is best for their use case so what did that actually look like what effect did it have one decent example was actually figma so figma has you know everybody knows figma it had you know became whatever2 billion product from being like very very performant and it kind of like showed what's you know something that's possible in the browser that was never possible before which is like an interactive design tool and the way they're able to do that is because the

actual thing the the app is written in C which you need something like a wasum to be able to run a c based really performing program in the browser so is this like transformative thing that you know made figma kind of just take off and and create this way better experience for users and at the end of the day that's kind of wasm under the hood that's enabling it so you can see how that starts to Ry with the kind of the ethereum analogy we're were talking about before right so ethereum similar to the browser in my example is this platform that everybody wants to build on but it has certain constraints and so what we're doing is we're taking that wasum technology and we're putting it onto ethereum so that people can take

all these different languages similar to figma and kind of like optimize for their use case and you can kind of Intuit it that it makes new things possible that weren't available before that's kind of our General Vision it's to kind of take the best of web 2 and you know use it to transform building up web 3 I I love that so could a web 2 developer without knowing any web 3 smart contract or solidity could they come in and use fluent and build on chain right away there's a couple different things the first thing that we're starting off with is is kind of the general purpose smart contract environment and that is you would in fact have to I mean it's easier because you get to program in these

general purpose languages but you still do have to program via Smart contracts like that programming model so in the near term no you still need to learn a thing or two in the longer term like we're also developing a rollup framework so you can customize your app specific rollups for certain needs and part of that if you want to you know everything comes with a trade-off obviously but if if you want to you can abstract away the smart contract and kind of like actual blockchain programming model and for that type of use case develop an environment where yeah you know people don't even need to kind of like learn those blockchain specific details at all and that's kind of where the serverless experience type thing comes into play so it's it's a spectrum I think a flu it we want to make it so you know people can

use anything along that trade-off space that makes sense for them you can deploy on the fluent L2 if you just want kind of a general purpose environment and you can you know customize anything you want with our framework wow yeah okay it's so so exciting to to hear the focus on building tools like this which is just going to make it so much easier for devs to ENT enter the space key you mentioned some categories that you're excited about gaming social consumer apps when you say that you're excited about these categories I assume that's in the context of what you're building at fluent why do these categories need fluent what does fluent enable for these

different categories and you can pick one or talk about all of them if you'd like y so yeah the categories that I we might have been talking about offline were like gaming social consumer type experiences I think that these are very fascinating categories because number one I think we're technically ready for them so previously you know what we've Sol what we're solving right now is kind of like the the scalability and throughput and you know those apps those types of apps typically need much higher scalability and throughput they're low Stakes right they're like high performance low risk when you look at it that way like if you you know if we jump from kind of defi degens to high stakes institutional like rwa and stuff like that which is all which is all really

cool but the stakes are much higher and you know what what's interesting about kind of social gaming consumer is you know it pushes the boundaries of what's possible techn technologically but the stakes are much lower and so I think that this is just like a nice sweet spot to focus on right now and a lot of people are just very excited about these use cases and they're coming to fluent and they're saying hey like I want to be able to you know build I want to build in in rust on ethereum I want a build in typescript on ethereum everybody knows that kind of like rollups are here and they want to kind of burst open the design space of what what they can build on it on ethereum you mentioned earlier in the show recent news that flip cart is launching their own L2 using polygon

cdk so an L2 on the um and it brings up a very interesting conversation around are we going to see apps all launch their own L2 are all companies going to have their own L2 why would they have their own L2 like why did flip cart launch their own L2 can you talk a little bit about what is made possible by having your own L2 and why you might want to control that part of the experience the reason you might want want to do that is as you said to control different parts so like maybe one thing that you want to control would be the like the cost so maybe you have an application that really needs like

the lowest possible fees well if you're on a shared environment with just your one smart contract among thousands of mar contracts that are all competing for Block space well you can't really control the fees it's a market they are what they are and so you're a business and you want to better control those fees either because you just need them to be really low or because for your own business needs you need them to be predictable I mean either of these could apply or both and so that's why you might do it from a cost standpoint kind of same thing goes for for performance where you you know you might need something that's very highly performant I mean I I don't know what flip cart actually plans on on building but you know you might be some type of gaming studio and you might need to you might

want to build a very highly performing game in Rust that needs to move really really fast because if it doesn't move really really fast then maybe it's a it's a poor experience for your users often games work that way there's just a much bigger design space as well like I mean you can subsidize things like gas fees you can incentivize certain types of actions or certain types of app or certain types of developers you can turn all of these knobs and customize for your use case in particular which is really nice yeah well in the case of the flip cart I I don't have a ton of details but my understanding is the main reason flip cart just for everybody who doesn't know flip cart is the largest e-commerce uh website in India they're

basically the Amazon of India it's a market place you can go you can buy literally anything it's bigger than Amazon is in India their largest uh shareholder I think is Walmart so massive company $38 billion in annual revenue sorry valued at $ 38 billion not revenue of 38 billion and they recently launched a loyalty program on chain and so that is the reason I think that they are watching their own L2 is because when you think about onchain loyalty you need to totally abstract blockchain like loyalty is not about financial transaction right you're not trying to you know somebody's not gonna pay you to receive their points if they're getting some s some sort of loyalty from you

right so you got to remove gas fees and you also need probably a lot of transactions because loyalty gets into like much higher scale of transactions not quite as high as social you bring up Social right like you think about social you need that high scale so I don't know if that sort of tweaks your mind as to why flip cart might have might be launching an L2 but I think again it really comes back down to what are they trying to do on chain and so far what most people have been building for on chain is finan defi right like that has been the biggest thing so far and stable coins right a lot around stable coins we've had lots of building in the other

categories that you mentioned gaming social and consumer apps but we haven't really had any apps take off in that space I mean gaming every month I swear I'm like this is the month that there's going to be a game that goes big still haven't had it social starting to have it lens forecaster Doo but none of them have really reached any meaningful scale yet in terms of user and consumer apps yeah okay starting to see it friendch but friendtech was really most just DG Reddit maybe you could argue on the consumer app side Nike Starbucks although those are still in beta so when you think about it we really don't have

any onchain apps or sites that have reached this scale yet but if they're going to reach the scale that we want them to of you know Millions hundreds of millions billions of users they're going to need to control that experience in multiple ways and and as I say this out loud like it Paints the picture for why you would need your own to control your own piece of the of these modular blockchains yeah I mean I think there's a whole there's a whole Spectrum right I mean there's on one side of the spectrum composability and the other side of the spectrum uh is control and I definitely think for some of these use cases even in Social and gaming and and consumer for some things social um composability will be more

important for other things control will be more important so I mean if you're building something where you want people to be able to like EX in the most easy seamless way kind of extend your game or extend your social experience you might still go with kind of a general purpose environment especially if it's something that doesn't really have that much performance let's just say like it's a certain game that you know where where somebody only takes takes a move like every once in a while and there's just not much data going on like I think that you can definitely still kind of put that on a general purpose environment but yeah I think for the for a lot of different use cases that are going to emerge especially in the context of you know I know your audience is a lot of like business Fook so in the context of

like companies I think that the app specific design will be like especially interesting I think one of the things that stands out to me is you know there's obviously always the the question of profit and loss right and so I think it is becoming cheaper to build your own rollup your own Layer Two because it was I me it was very expensive it was very hard to do before and I'm guessing that that cost is only going to continue to go down over time and there will be more tools that make it easier to do these things so we will see more apps taking that step because it's possible to do this whereas before

it just wasn't possible because it was like oh well you're gonna have to go hire a full engineering te and that's going to cost you so much money and you don't even have the profit to do that yeah no absolutely I mean that that's another thing that's really cool about modularity right because like the more you can kind of layer things and the more you can abstract things each layer that you go up the easier it gets and like the lower cost it gets for for people to innovate like you could get to a point even describing kind of like that serverless type Vision that I was explaining before you get to a point where you know a Dev at a company or a Dev who doesn't even like know much about blockchain can kind of just come throw up some code and technically they

they built on Jane they built on ethereum and so I think when you dramatically lower the cost in terms of time or money or effort to build on chain I I think that you do end up getting an explosion of kind of Creative Energy and then just like way way better apps so I'm I'm definitely excited to see and I think that it'll just it'll just keep going in that direction it'll get easier and easier and easier I love it I love it okay before we wrap up here for those listeners out there who want to participate in this explosion of onchain building how can they get involved with fluent how can they connect with you on X formerly Twitter I feel like that's a that's a pretty good spot so you can follow us at fluent XYZ

you can follow me I'm sure there's going to be a link but zerox dinox yeah definitely reach out I'm on there way more than I should be so Happ slide in the DMS if you want to like you know ask any questions about what we talked to talked about today or you know learn about fluent or just jam on thanks amazing awesome okay quick speedr to wrap up here what's an nft never sell oh my tiny dinos man my my avatar that's right tell for those those who don't know about the tiny Dino because I'm sure most people don't know that nft collection can you give some background on it I like the art I don't know man I've always liked the really like pixelated things and and that one was one of the

first like truly CCO ones and I thought it was cool and just got it and it just kind of stuck and then your name became Dino except everybody pronounces it Dino know so the evolution of your brand is uh very very interesting yeah yeah I didn't even like necessarily care that much of uh about being pseudonymous but it ended up just being people started to know me by that and just kind of rolled with it but yeah so now I I can't change the picture now I love it other than following you and floid on X or Twitter who else should our listeners follow who else do you find yourself learning a lot from o i I learn a lot from shiram Canan from Igan ler he has a really amazing way of kind

of taking some of these like really complicated like more infrastructure type Concepts and making them super simple cool that's a great suggestion yeah he's a such an incredible leader in space okay last question what's a must-read book that you find yourself recommending to friends and family friends and family oh maybe you know what maybe that's actually maybe it's not friends and family that you recommend it to too yeah favorite book honestly for what I'm working on obviously that's that's a lot of what I spend my time learning about and thinking about read architects of the web it walks through kind of like the the 90s and how kind of the internet the consumer internet and web developed and I think that if you're somebody

who's trying to understand like what's happening especially obviously in the L2 space which is what I'm playing in it is just there's so many parallels it's so insightful amazing love it Dino thanks so much for the time thanks for joining the show today very excited to follow fluent and to see all the developers that I'm sure are going to flock to you guys because who doesn't want to build on chain right now and you are making it easier and more accessible for everybody love it man well thank you for having me thanks for listening and everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web through Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoy this

episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3 make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one