Chain Abstraction is NEAR | Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder

Transcript

if we wear the web3 hat not specifically like you know try to put everything on chain but actually wear web3 hat of the self- sovereignty of the ability to kind of control your data uh which is you know one of one of parts of our mission on near then you want to to have all this data on on the user side you want to H be able to access it you know it's a flip side of this idea that users should own their data and you users should own their AI so this language models becoming more powerful it's really important that you know the models you're using are actually on your side they're not being kind of controlled manipulated or optimized for you know best financial outcome for as company if you are an Empire listener

hopefully you've played around on chain and if you have done that you know that transferring assets across different chains is a pain to put it nicely that is why we are incredibly excited to have the Wormhole Foundation as a partner of the Empire podcast stewards of the Wormhole protocol supporting over 30 different blockchains and six different run times stay tuned later in the show we have a cool thing that you can claim which is a wormhole nft just for Empire listeners this episode is brought to you by PayPal here at Empire you know that Santi and I are really into real world use cases and always on the lookout for the next killer blockchain app we're excited to share that PayPal has arrived in crypto to unveil a way to seamlessly connect Fiat to digital currencies later

in the show you will find out how you can use py us to check out at millions of online stores what's up everyone before we jump into the episode little plug for digital assets Summit coming up in London March 18th to 20th tickets are pacing so far ahead of schedule that we had to decrease the discount codes so instead of Empire 20 it is now Empire 10 head over to the website digital asset Summit Das London March 18th to 20th use code Empire 10 and get 10% off your ticket see you in London all right everyone welcome back to another episode of Empire uh back after a two-year Empire Hiatus we have Ilia uh from near and also lucky to be joined by Spencer known as xerx pibbles

on Twitter who's making his Empire debut so Spencer uh Ilia welcome to the show guys yeah thanks for inviting back yeah um Ilia I think it'd be a helpful place so it's funny uh so prepping for this episode you guys have I was like all right I definitely want to talk to about da stuff and then consumer stuff and then obviously your background's in AI so want to talk about I and your ideas around bridging um but before we jump into all of that you recently returned to NE protocol to kind of I think sale the ship as as CEO is my understanding what are what is the like why behind that decision yeah so uh just for context I mean I've been the most recent been leading the product engineering

team at Pagoda which is you know kind of one of the engineering groups uh in the near ecosystem Focus fed on protocol as well as a lot of the kind of features and Innovations in the overall stack and the kind of realization that we had was you know as we were building a lot of the kind of this Innovation we'll talk about uh we really needed to coordinate better with kind of marketing and pro and uh Partnerships teams in the near foundation and so me kind of coming as a CEO of near Foundation allows us to have like this vision cohesively driven by uh and at the same time coordinating the

ecosystem uh kind of more effectively so yeah I'm excited to be here we uh kind of you know made some changes organizationally recently but now we have like full-on team ready to go coordinating across lots of different decentralized nodes in the ecosystem and yeah I mean I'm excited to share kind of what people are working on as well as you know how I see a lot of the space evolving this year and Beyond nice um for folks who haven't followed near in the past maybe 18 to 24 months what is the and maybe just think of it as like another all L1 what is the maybe best framework to think about near today so indeed near started as a one uh and kind

of the core idea was how do we make it really simple for people to use and build uh in the blockchain space and so uh the way it it though evolved is in the idea that I mean we have this multi-chain space right we have we'll have 10,000 rollups tomorrow um we have a bunch of layer ones which are you know have their own applications and kind of benefits and at the same time this space is becoming it was already hard to use it's becoming more increasingly harder to use and so our broader Vision that we had from the beginning which is like we want this to be easy to use you know cheap and accessible to everyone kind of just spans in a broader sense so we call a chain abstraction there it's kind of a

broader movement that we see across the space there's people from Cosmos ecosystem really pushing for it as well uh there's a huge need in rollup space around it but uh this is idea that you like near as a toolkit and you know a stack of tools everything from the layer one protocol to kind of identity layer to data layer to decentralized front ends to Integrations with this consumer apps we have that really deliver experience where users can use applications without thinking about blockchain be that near be that kind of uh Bitcoin ethereum EVMS Solana you know CMOS app chains you can just use apps and kind of uh really not care and so

that's what really really like delivering that Vision chain abstraction vision and near is kind of this you know chain abstraction stack that has a lot of his Tools H why can near accomplish chain abstraction when other folks can't because I think that's what everybody says right everybody says yeah we you know if you're using salana you're using Avalanche we don't want you to know that you're using it and one day you want the users won't actually know why is near uniquely positioned to accomplish this and others aren't well I mean there's two things one is neither s salana or Avalanche actually saying that right salana is saying they want to be the fastest chain uh and Avalanche is you know offering kind of their like uh whatever subnets uh for people to launch

stuff and we have from the beginning kind of positioned ourselves as like hey we want to be this uh easy to easy to use but like moving blockchain into the background and so because of this we've done a lot around account obstruction from the start like near launch with account obstruction you can have you know very easy web to style on boarding you can have multiple Keys accessing your account you can have recovery kind of keys like accessible by some like that you can have third parties for example Le with delay recovering your account in case you lost your primary key you can have like different devices you can have applications having specific limited access key to use so we built a whole framework around pretty

much how account is used in such a way that like applications and wallets and kind of things on top can actually abstract it out like one of the uh really cool apps called keom is allowing to you know I can send you a link you can click it you can start using apps um right away you don't need to deposit funds you don't need to do this it's all actually pre-loaded and it's a trial account and so when you want to kind of claim it fully you pay back me whatever I sent you initially and then you get full access to this to this account right so this is just like an example of what you can build on top and deliver this experience and so that's I mean that was the foundation but now kind of near itself is also the way it's structured uh and we can go into kind of

sharding the idea was that every single smart contct contract on near every single account on near is actually its own quote unquote chain and what we've been doing is abstracting this out we've been really kind of providing this interface over in such a way that any user doesn't need to think about it but all the interactions are hidden and what we do now with other kind of offerings is just like expanding that you know such that rollups are also just part of the system they use the same data availabilities they use the same kind of potentially message routing uh and you can kind of continue abstracting this interface even achieving similar level of security and

finality as near offers so I would say like why near is really well positioned here is because we kind of taken that mindset from the start and we designed a lot of the underlying uh kind of layer one as well as tooling to really focus on kind of removing this complexity from a user and now we're just opening it up and connecting to other chains and other ecosystems uh throughout the stack and yeah again we can talk about the specifics Partnerships and offerings across the stack but yeah that's been con conceptually the mindset we always had and we've you know partnered and talked and always kind of had a very good relationship with all the

blockchains we've had the Whiteboard Series where we interviewed a lot of other blockchains so we got to have a very like positioning that is more not like this confrontational oh you know everybody come to my chain and abandon everything and but more like hey let's all work together let's grow this ecosystem let's bring users let's make it easy for them and uh yeah really kind of make happen that whiteboard series was good by the way I I just watched the one on Celestia uh which was interesting for me because I mean we'll talk about da later uh da later on in the show but I mean you guys are ultimately competing I think with Celestia in one form or another so it's interesting to kind of have them on and talk about them but anyways we'll talk we'll talk about da in a second let's um I think let's go

sharding and then account aggregation because I think sharding when I think about near it's like I think it was your co-founder came from a background of of like a database background basically I mean you were you were at Google before near why is so sharding maybe let let's say two or three years ago was all was all the rage I feel like I feel like everyone was talking about it now nobody's talking about it a lot of other l1s have gone in a different direction you guys have stayed the course um two-part question here what what is charting can you give us a reminder uh and then like why is it so necessary here and what is maybe three-part question and what is like the next evolution of charting for near yeah so so this is kind of talking about the lowest level of our stack right the

layer one itself and kind of the idea of charting is pretty simple right it's you cannot kind of store process um all the transactions and store all the data of all the smart contracts in one machine when we get to a billion users right and we all want to get to a billion users right this is just like physically impossible and so you know all the web2 companies do sharding like this is just a normal way you kind of split your data across multiple computers you process data in parallel all web two companies have application they actually you know Google Facebook all of them run consensuses internally on their databases it is a permissioned consensus but still and so uh so that's kind of

the you know the system uh at the for now in blockchain space you know things become more complicated there's obviously permissionless that you need to account for you know uh potential attack vectors and so near design kind of from the start uh has this very kind of simple idea but uh obviously um requires complexity to implement but let's imagine that every single account right my account your account smart contract for UNIS you know for amm or for or for Lending prot Etc is a separate chain but this is obviously inefficient right this is uh you don't want to run like for my account that only you know

needs to store just a balance the whole chain with all its own validators so let's just group them effectively into set of common validators in such a way that I as user don't need to care about this right I just know I have an account it's stored across kind of somewhere on the on across a shared set of Val and then I can just transact with it so like all of the complexity of this you know multi-chain world that happens inside near is hidden um and so the you know we call it kind of there's logical shards which is accounts and there's a physical shards which is actual splitting of the data and and transaction processing that happens uh on the chain and just to kind of compare

this right we have we we kind of have now a progression right you have things like Cosmos where each application is a separate chain right you need to launch a whole separate chain if you want to launch your application like dydx or whatever it gives you benefits you can customize on a consensus level you can customize some other parts like meol but obviously you need to bootstrap it's a very expensive procedure um you have approach of ethereum which they take in with rollups where uh they kind of say well you know instead of sharding the whole Space everybody creates its own kind of Subspace and then we interconnect them but they all have similar security within some like latency parameters and

the complexity is there now you have you know instead of having one account that can use all the apps you have now account on every of the rollups and now you need to deal with that somehow uh and then and then you have near approach which is like okay well all of this complexity is hidden you have one account and you can transact with all other you know chains but you don't need to think about it and so obviously there's trade-offs in all of these options but again we focused on kind of simplifying the way you interact with this now uh kind of we had in 2019 published the kind of uh the paper on this it it included actually data availability as part of this because you know in the way this has sequencing data availability execution settlement like

all the same steps that right now rollups for example have in modularity stack uh and we just like package it together kind of effectively and Abstract it out and so we've set out a a kind of a four-step uh four-phase plan uh we had kind of three phases done uh up in 22 and so we have a Final Phase uh that's is launching now in the kind of incentivized test net and we'll be launching later uh kind of in Q2 on mainnet which is um kind of finalizing the the like charting design we outlined and the core idea there is we implementing what's called stateless validation so this is the idea that now every

validator instead of tracking A Shard can receive a block that contains all of the information required to validate that block and so this is like you know ethereum has been doing kind of ethereum researchers have been doing research on this so we have this implemented and it allows to have a lot more validators validating shards it allows to have kind of valid themselves need a lot less uh kind of Hardware requirements because it now don't need to store the state of the of the blockchain which is one of the biggest issue in general in the blockchain space and on the other side because it's a sharded design compared to kind of monolitic chains like right now ethum or salana for example we can actually keep all of the state itself in

memory on each chart because each chart is is limited to a very specific size of the um of of like and we can just add more shards if the state growth and so because of this we actually get really huge Improvement in performance on each individual Shard as well and so what kind of this final launch we're doing right now is pretty much increasing 5 to 10x performance of each individual Shard allows us to add more shards uh to the network really easily and lowers the requirements for Val for a broader set of validators uh that can validate Network increasing decentralization and security of the network so really excited about it it allows to kind of you know build for this vision of

billions of users uh even as we are kind of opening up and working with other ecosystems because it will allow us to kind of be this entry point for web three uh IL I have a probably a really dumb question here but so sharding at a at a high L sharding is basically dividing the blockchain into smaller blockchains called shards uh and that improves scalability it increases transaction speed how do you uh how do you ensure the security of a of a Shard yeah so that's was this where Nightshade came in yeah so that's what Nightshade and specifically the stateless validation uh is kind of the way you ensure security so now for each Shard right you produce you know we call them chunks but it's like the block for this

specific Shard and so now that block contains all the information you need to validate it even without knowing anything else about the this shart oh these are the chunk producers yeah so chunk producers kind of accept transactions execute them and then produce uh chunk with all of the state that was touched and so now any other validator in the ecosystem can take that block and re invalidate it and say yes it's good or you know no it's not and we need to you know slash that uh or like ignore it and pretty much uh reor around it and so what this allows us to do is to have you know a ton you know you can have like hundreds of thousands of validators now that receive these blocks validated and so because now you don't have the

requirement for them to manage State you can rotate them constantly right you like as a uh you now don't have requirement uh and so you can you like as a as a you know attacker you don't know which validators to attack in specific Shard right because any of the validators potentially can be validating uh the kind of the Chunk in this chart so so you're going into the same security as you have right now of any other proof of State Network which doesn't have sharding because you remove this need of like having subset vow that is be consistently tracking A Shard and you can start attacking them and kind of corra this Shard specifically and then through that attack the rest of the network so that's really kind of the

core Innovation it is a update to the original night shade we had a different design originally for that uh the team has done a ton of research and work on kind of implementing this and we're going to be releasing kind of update to Nightshade as well as again this is implemented and going to be coming out as incentivized test net uh early February h uh at the backbone of near in uh when I think about the future of near 2024 2025 2026 and Beyond is this account aggregation idea and the and the single account um C maybe you can just lay up your thesis on like what how like how near will basically what the single account is and what like account

aggregation really means but also like how that ties into this idea of bridging and like multi-chain thesis and just take maybe start high level we can go into the details yeah so maybe the kind of broader again chain abstraction thesis is that as a you know user and even as developer in many way many ways you should not care about which chain what's happening on so ideally you should be able to say like hey I want you know execute the best swap or the best between these two tokens and the tokens may be on different chains the you know the the gas fees like are different like all of that it should like like as a developer ideally you should not care about that you should

just say like uh you know provide the intent that you want and as a user you definitely don't need to see any of this you just select what you want you click right so how do we Implement that right that's like a really cool Vision but you know we're very far from it as as of right now right now you need to bridge create accounts create wallets have the gas tokens you know understand what's going on make sure you don't have some token stock like the times I'm like looking for which wallet I have what on which chain is also kind of uh insane right so so few few then other Concepts one is bridges are extremely kind of um uh scary in a way because you know they're getting hacked all the time they are a Honeypot because they have all the

assets that been bridged on them and like they're kind of external to the to the chain so they are the way to attack the chain right the CH the the bridge doesn't fork with a chain if something happens uh and so kind of the one of the concepts I I want to promote is hasht unbridge and so this is the idea that uh keep the assets where they have been issued right I mean like for everything except ethereum right now you can actually keep the asset where they issued so let's say you know keep the soul token on salana keep the op token on optimism uh keep the nft you know ordinal on bitcoin and Bitcoin and the Bitcoins themselves and instead the user should have an address there and the

applications should have address there in such a way that you can now kind of transact uh there and so now that that's a very complicated you know and and users now need to manage all that and so so what we do at near is we call it account aggregation is we creating a way for user with near account to have addresses on all chains again conceptually think of it as you logging in into coinbase or bit or binance you loging in with one account but you have addresses on all chains you can receive assets on these addresses right and and then transact with them uh but now this is a um self custodial account I mean you can custody it obviously but uh at the core itself of custodial with all

the account obstruction near offers it has addresses that are don't have explicit private key to them the private key of these addresses on other chains is controlled by your account by your near account and the near validators and some other set of uh kind of validators and so through that now you can pretty much you log in into an app with your kind of account and you can transact and if the app is on different chain it uses the address on that chain and kind of transacts through it but you as a user don't see that like that is invisible to you and then there's mechanisms how kind of intents get executed how fees get paid for you so you can you don't you only need to kind of pay for example

near or stable coins uh kind of through meta transactions and you don't need to think about gas tokens and kind of other stuff and for kind of any multi-chain application near will be the place to build because what it means is your near your near smart contract now has addresses on every other chain you can receive assets you can transact there and so if you want to build like a multi-chain swap you just build a smart contract on near it receives for example deposit of Bitcoin and it sends ethereum on the other chain if you want to have you know swap a salana nft for ethereum nft again smart contract receives Salon nft sends ethereum nft to an address on ethereum so near will be the best place to kind of build multi-chain apps but

also it will be the best place for users because they can use all the blockchains kind of fully transparent and like all the their intent will be get executed without them like thinking about bridges and all of the other stuff and assets stay where they are where they issued where the logic is because remember like so that's the key part right the asset stays where it is and you're basically just creating a an account there therefore it's not a bridge it's not you're not you're not you're not creating a competitor to you know say Wormhole layer zero Axel Etc no no and then like some of these things actually will be used because you still need to like pass messages but you don't want to pass the value that's main point like you the me the messages information should flow and like you need bridges

for that but you shouldn't move the value because and and this goes into like in General Security the assets are secured by the chain if something happens to the chain that like that asset is kind of natively there and like if chain gets rolled back there's social consensus whatever all of that will be like managed there as soon as you bridged it you now broke that property and so now like the asset that you have like a miror bridged asset doesn't have any of the property so if something gets here happens here rolled back Etc this asset like completely separately trads right and you broke the whole you know consistency of the of the system and we've seen some of this happen right in Cosmos system when when uh when there's like uh problems with chains I mean

they've been isolated but still and so generally like yeah keep the assets where they are again the other example nfts you cannot you cannot even Bridge them because nft have additional logic that you will not have on the on the target chain through the bridge right so this allows you to keep everything where they are and then have this kind of aggregated view through through one account and kind of transact through all of this I think um account account aggregation and this whole concept of chain abstraction kind of ties together to make like the the golden standard for the end user crypto experience when you're targeting people who aren't necessarily crypto native and these two concepts kind of tie in

perfectly with the blockchain operating system which is kind of just like this this Shopify experience for devs to come set up shop um so I'd like to hear some more about this success and the go to market strategy of the blockchain operating system and how it's complementing this broader Vision yeah so I mean blockchain operating system is this Vision it's just is just the product right so like the the chain obstruction is a vision I mean there's other people doing intent execution there's you know other chains as well kind of doing a lot of similar you know parts of the stack costos have interchain accounts it's not like it's not a completely you know just near thing and and uh so we are kind of

bringing a really big group of of projects and kind of uh developers coming together here and so for us blockchain operating system was really a stack that we can offer that um combines all of the pieces together and specifically uh so account aggregation we to kind of as part of this if we want to on board new users and on board users who are kind of new to crypto uh we need a way like easy way so we launched a a product called fast o which allowed to you just sign up as an email H it had like kind of email NBC recovery it had uh Pass Key which is a new standard that's uh you know supported by Google by Apple and uh and other device

manufacturers where you can use your fingerprint or face ID to uh actually create cryptography and log and like sign things wi um and then we had decentralized Trends and so decentralized Tron ends was kind of our first part that was like this multi like kind of opening up this multichain um Vision where instead of having uh right now you know I'm building an app I'm building a smart like smart contract and then I build a smart contract front end right that's kind of the extent that we actually do and my point here actually we don't have dabs we only have Smart contracts in their front ends and they're usually just a feature of like a broader product offering that users want

right they're not really covering all my needs and then in and your point is like yeah right now web 3 kind of native people you know I have like multiple of this web3 front ends that I'm using I'm like you know multiple wallets I have I have like ton of different things that I need to jaggle and even I as web 3 native I want normal like singular experience and so what we wanted to offer and and kind of now all the pieces coming together is this experience where you go into one place you have all the kind of different Financial you know and non-financial apps they're all available there they all are proven they have cryptographic signatures on them so you know you're not getting like fished or um attacked and hacked uh you're able to

transact and see kind of you know ideally in a normal explanation what transaction you're doing and it's all kind of like hides a lot of this complexity of the blockchain interaction behind and that's what you know just C front is part of this and we partnered with uh polygon kind of zkm we partnered with Linea we partnered with others we have dabdab which is kind of a single place where there's a lot of D5 from different chains kind of integrated into one experience so the idea is there is really about kind of integrate with as many chains and offer this unified experience and then it was waiting for this chain aggregation kind of feature to mature to then offer this like sing

like login with one account use everything don't think about fees don't think about experiences you know if you want to airdrop new chain boom it's already there if you want to you know trade the new token that just launched on bitcoin it's already there right if you want to uh sell your kind of account with all the assets across different blockchains well near actually offers that out of the box you can just sell your account turn it into you can turn your account into nft with all of the assets that you have across all other blockchains and sell that on nft Marketplace so that's kind of like ton of different you know realizations of this core set of you know uh product that we have in this deck at a time when everyone uh feels

like everyone's going modular um it feels like you guys are going the other way a little bit and doing a lot of things inous what is the maybe inh house is the wrong word there but what what is your just thought on this broader like monolithic versus modular debate that's happening yeah I think it I mean it's a little bit I would say ortogonal to what we're doing right because um I think the as I mentioned maybe the kind of you have the spectrum of you know modularity in a way and and like kind of Separation when you launching things right you can have like a singular Network where everything is packed there and then uh you know you need to compete for space compete for you know storage compete for

transactions um then you can have like a sharded blockchain right where you don't need to do that uh but it it you know the communication between apps is slower because now you know it is asynchronous so you're kind of going one step above that then you go to rollups where all the communications are synchronous and now you have accounts everywhere and now you need to manage all that and then you go to app chains where it's even more kind of distributed and you don't even know the like always the security of each independent chain that's kind of the spectrum of you know blockchains in a way probably should post it somewhere and publish it um but uh but my point is like I mean all of the things have their own use cases right again dydx you cannot like the the things they did on

meol optimization like things like that you cannot do that anywhere else right it need to be an app chain uh some of the more like high frequency you know multiple Interlink transactions Etc like it's would be really hard to do on near and so you know this is only like like you can you know do that on salana for example now things when you need to have billion users you cannot do that on you know kind of in salana approach it just will not fit into their storage like every validator will need to have you know like a data center worth of hard drives to process it and so so each use case like each kind of set chain chain approach has its own use cases but as a user I don't care I should not be

needing to think about like hey you know is this application better fits monolitic approach or or rollups or sharding I should be just using stuff it's it's you know it's as if right now you go to Netflix and you're like oh choose a data center right this data center is better for serving movies you know in French this data center is better for movies in English and then like when you go to zed data center sometimes it's like oh this movie streamed too much right now you need to pay more if you're streaming that's kind of current experience right versus like log into Netflix watch a movie you know I don't really care like figure it out like you have all infrastructure just do it so like that's what we're trying to achieve like that experience on top that kind of abstracts it out that's interesting um Spencer go

ahead yeah so with this infrastructure in place and you know sharding is working super well how does all this broader usage Drive um Drive attention to near as a token like how is the blockchain itself being used in the workflow of this and um what effects does that have with the token yeah so maybe just to give you an example right so near is has the most users in web 3 right now right so near is like uh benchmarks over a million daily active and it is actual users it's it we have kind of Integrations and and Partnerships with uh like applications that have you know hundreds of millions of installs like sweatcoin and you know uh kind of millions to tens of millions

of uh monthly active accounts monthly active users users that translate into accounts and so that is kind of the fundamental piece to me to un board a a you know a ton of users into the space who you know might otherwise will not be the you know the degens who GNA like go and discover this but actually they start with a use case you know be at loyalty e-commerce and they start interacting with this and then they learn that they can do you know Financial operations they can do you know social gaming Etc like all of this in one place and so for all of these users are near account users and we just opening up them to transact across other chains but as I mentioned right all of

the to kind of origination of transactions starts on near so like you pay near or you know stable coin on near to originate transaction even if you're buying nft on salana and so the kind of the core idea here is that you know it's it is still infrastructure we're just opening up more use cases for this infrastructure and opening up ways to interact with other chain and then we continue growing the user base kind of uh on the top that is interacting across the web3 let's talk da Ilia because uh obviously things are going I feel like things are heating up with da right now um my my like Market overview of Da right now it looks like it's Igan da

verse Celestia verse near da and you guys have a part partnership with polygon's cdk I think it is um what is your what's your assessment of like those being the three players in the space yeah I mean it's probably a valid assessment so I mean I would say like the probably the missing piece is ethereum GA so ethereum ga is the last that that's most used uh and then Celestia launched kind of a few months ago and uh we launched kind of offering and then uh you have igen da coming a bit later this year and so so the important part kind of on our side uh to know again DA has been was at near

from the start this is in our original paper uh this is how near works it it has this kind of all the same Mechanics for ASA coding embedded directly into the uh our consensus because near itself you know again it's lots of chains or you can think of them as like each account is a rollup as well and so we just package all that uh and so when we realize there's kind of a in this a chain abstraction mindset right we want to connect more with other rollups we want to connect more with other chains and so the best way to also ensure that they are uh you know fast that they're cheap that they are settled well that they actually uh integrated with some of our tooling is actually make sure that

their data is also published on near in in the same way as near kind of transactions are published and so this really interconnects the ecosystem and so uh for for us it was like you know it was literally a smart contract that our Engineers built that integrated with different uh uh kind of um rollups STX that allows and you know rollups to really connect with near and remember you don't you actually can publish on ethereum and on near at the same time it's not a or like Celestia near at the same time you can it's called dual Quorum you don't need to like pick one or another and so the benefit and uh kind of again for um for this rollups is you can interconnecting into the our

kind of chain abstraction uh kind of stack and that's why we also have more uh features like we working with igen layer on Fast finality for this rollups so that you are actually going from you know 30 minute like um kind of round trip for uh finalizing your rollup communication uh for like you know uh ZK to uh or like you know for optimistic it's even longer on near you'll be able to kind of round messages within two three seconds and so this is again turning back kind of rollups becoming in a way just another Shard on near because da is on there we you know have fast finality executing and then publishing the kind

of outgoing messages and state back to near then we have you know uh Aurora for example provides scalable RPC for EVMS that publish data on near so you can have scalable RPC that a globally available that can handle million uh monthly actives right uh you have uh and then indexing and other tooling explorers like all of this tooling uh that near already has you can actually get if you kind of connect with near through da so that's really kind of how we see it in this broader chain abstraction we want to interconnect more with other chains and so we partnered indeed with polygon cdk we partnered with arbitrum we partnered with Stark

net and a few other folks as well and as well as like some rollups that are coming to really kind of interconnect more so this is all tied back to the account aggregation thesis basically right like chain abstraction overall right like okay yeah chain abstraction okay how how like what do you think about competing so you're you're actually partnered with igen layer on Fast finality but then you compete with Igan da how do you what's that like yeah I mean this this is a space everybody is like everybody's providing tools and then people deciding what's the best uh set of uh parameters for them and again as I said like you can actually publish data on both near and I da for example at the same

time um yeah it's really interesting can you uh walk us through the consu I Spencer was touching on this a little bit but the consumer side right now so I was looking at some some metrics in it I was like didn't even seem right to me I was like am I looking at the but near is the I think most every time scale I was looking at Daily weekly monthly quarterly near is the most used blockchain right now and I think that's the reason it was not clicking for me is because that's not the narrative you see on crypto Twitter per se but what is um yeah I mean you guys have seen record usage like yeah you have Partnerships with uh Spencer what's it called Kai Kai I think it is and uh sweatcoin which is the move to earn folks what is um yeah

just I don't know tell like tell us a little bit about the consumer side of n for sure yeah yeah so we have three out of top 10 apps uh running on ner right now by users and indeed I would say like the broader crypto narrative has always been about tvl and you know volume and so we kind of went indeed like a a different direction and and again our goal is to bring billion users and we kind of you know executing on that goal and so as part of that we partnered with with kind of consumer apps that are have massive scale so sweatcoin has over 150 million installs of their main app right and so they convert you know portion of their users to be crypto users that are

interacting with chain uh Kai Ching is a kind of loyalty and e-commerce and they're adding more functionality and has it also has an AI component as well uh which we can touch on and so all of that is you know integrated and they are uh pre-installed on Android uh phones for example so they have massive distribution Channel they actually you know are you know uh making Revenue company that is uh you know working at this like massive scale and so for them actually transitioning from a traditional kind of you know they were using stripe for some of the operations to near meant 100x reduction in fees they were paying so which is pretty cool and so now also as well as in 3 they

have they can build more and more uh functionality within that and so so that's kind of the I would say mentality and then we have play Amber and uh kind of few other gaming um uh gaming applications and so that's kind of the mindset in general is like all of these applications actually abstracted the blockchain for their users those users don't need to like install a wallet and figure out how to do seed phrase stuff and then uh you know deposit some tokens to pay transaction fees and do all the stuff like none of that is happening like app itself is you know has a wallet embedded it provides you know email or other form of recovery and it has a way to kind of uh kick off the uh you know

way of interacting with transactions through meta transactions where transaction fees are paid on the user behalf and then taken off from their you know sweat coins or from their K Kai Ching tokens and so that allows to have like like way more you know easy to unboard experience and then through that you can start creating bigger and bigger economy and then again this is where it's becomes exciting for those users then to be able to access the whole blockchain Space not just in your applications hey everyone wanted to give a big shout out to today's sponsor Wormhole Foundation stewards of the Wormhole protocol if you are like Santi and I and you play around on chain you know how bad the cross chain experience

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PayPal I think that kaijing is super interesting by itself it seems like it's an app that's really taking off in the East I'm not sure if it's even available in the west yet but um there's there's something with Kai chain where it talks about users being able to own their data and opting in to share it so I guess that would be something along like spending habits and what products you're interested in as well as well as recommendations on a lock screen for what you want to look at could you elaborate a little more on that yeah so I mean ideally you bring Miron to the podcast and he'll give you a deeper dive for sure but uh just high level yeah I mean like you know if you want to build

a really good experience for a consumer you you want to know as much as possible about the consumer you want to know where they went you want to know what they bought you want to know what you know what they see ideally and then based on that you can make the best recommendation for the user now where this goes wrong usually is that you know big companies use it grab all this data store it on their Data Center and then they maximize their own profit versus what user want like the user kind of needs and so the this is where we you know maybe transition to AI a little bit if we wear the vb3 hat not specifically like you know try to put everything on chain but actually very very Three hat of the self- sovereignty of the ability to kind of control all your data uh

which is you know one of one of parts of our mission on near then you want to to have all this data on on the user side you want to H be able to access it and you want to run the models as well on the user side to be able to predict what what user wants for the user needs and then through that kind of uh interact with the experiences and so um kind of what you know what custom is trying to do is as part of it is uh both offer user better experience but also a way to trade their data when they want to uh kind of to improve the models to you know or sell it to advertisers and and receive some of the tokens for that as well so it's kind of you know in a way

like attention economy as well as uh you know kind of data economy but you know it's a flip side of this idea that users should own their data and you users should own their Ai and so kind of this is one of the things I've been talking about is like user owned AI which is as we see kind of um some of those language models becoming more powerful it's really important that you know the models you're using are actually on your side they're not being kind of controlled manipulated or optimized for you know best financial outcome for another company and so the really kind of simple example I like is right now when you're using this models you actually have no idea what model outp

like which model outputs the you seen for example I was you know like hey I want to buy a car right it can be just you know a generic non-bias model that was trained on all the data and gives me the most neutral response or maybe they're running an auction on every token pretty much selling off this response to the highest bidder uh in the in the Advent inventory right so that's kind of right now where you know we going with this uh kind of models that are controlled by centralized parties versus you know model that runs on my side I know kind of it's unbiased it's open source it's been you know has a Providence check and then it runs on my data and knows everything about me

without leaking all that to any other companies so that's kind of the framework of user own AI again it's it's less about like running it on blockchain and more using you know self- sovereignty user ownership and and some of the Primitives we have in blockchain to provide a better experience for the user and so Cosmos is kind of part of that Vision they doing a lot of work kind of to do that uh for the users as well as you know tying the economy and other parts into this but this is I think is a broader theme that we also uh kind of you know exploring near and and uh offering some tools uh in the ecosystem I what was the um toughest part about onboarding web two companies I I imagine it's an interesting

conversation when you sit down with them and tell them they have to I don't know if they're running their own shards or what that looks like but what were the uh kind of unexpected things here uh I mean I would say like most companies just don't do it right so that's I mean we do have few but it's not like we have you know hundreds yet right so I think the the most part is even when they're interested in like obviously like FTX and and events of of 22 did not help um to kind of really turn the tide yet so hopefully as like you know things are becoming turning more positive uh this this tide will turn uh I think the the projects we worked with is are kind of they're highly technical highly product focused right this is very different

from uh from like web 3 space where people are technical but they're like crypto focused not product focused and so it's been more about um kind of us making sure like you know within this chain abstraction T like mindset we give them all the tools that they need because they're like you know they've battle tested our Network on test net right before doing anything thing at like millions of users right hammering at it like no other no web3 project does that nobody actually goes and like tests the scale they want to like for so for sweat they have went and tested all the blockchains and settled on near because they knew that nobody else would be able to handle them right and so uh then you know you make sure

like they all mobile applications like we need you know kind of Integrations they can uh work with and so things like that like really enabling that experience that they are able to interact with that is not like in the weeds of you know kind of figuring out things but actually like deliver them experience that is like at the level of you know millions of users high throughput high you know uh kind of velocity of everything um so yeah I mean I I don't know if it's like surprising it's more just it's different from when you work with kind of web3 projects like you know hey we going to have you know 10,000 users and it's great because like it's a defi and that's kind of normal

for everyone yeah no that's interesting um can we go back to actually can we go back to the account aggregation idea this this idea keeps sticking in my mind of like you've got an account on near and then instead of bridging assets to salana to Avalanche to optimism to arbitrum whatever it is you basically are creating creating an account does this can I walk like would the example be here so I have like jason. near on near um if I want to buy let's say I want to buy a punk on blur or something like that I would send a near transaction uh and attach NE maybe it's not a punk on blur actually but something else you get the point I would attach near uh into the ethereum

transaction uh fee to pay for the to pay for the nft then near validators uh are going to sign the are going to sign the ethereum transaction on blur then a relayer I'm losing it a relayer at right or okay can you walk basically can you walk me through the flow yeah let's walk through the flow so so let's say you want to buy yeah nft on Solana just you know not uh sure to sure sure um yeah so so so you have an near account right you have some near or or usdc let's uh but let's say near and yeah so what you do is you you say like I want to buy this nft on this chain and attach

let's say near and so you send all that to a kind of a smart contract uh kind of ascr smart contract on near now so this is in in a case of you don't have any assets on salana at all right so this is like new account for example uh we have like it's the same trial account model that I explained before but now it gets executed on on salana side so somebody else like sends Soul tokens to your account and then relays this salana transaction that was signed by by near validators uh that you you spend that Salon tokens to buy nft on salana under your account and so your salana address that Associates with your near address now has an nft uh but you

did not need to pay this and then this this relayer receives near tokens on near chain from that escro contract kind of by showcasing that they've executed your intent right so this is like in a simple example I mean uh now you can just have like you can Lally buy your own solot tokens first through a multichain DEX which is you know just sending near tokens to a Smart contract on near and then smart contract on near signing a transaction from its own address on salana to send to your salana address some soul so that's like a simple but and that can be working with Bitcoin right you can actually like literally buy some Bitcoin by sending some near and receiving Bitcoin on bitcoin address and uh that Associates to your near account and then from there

you can for example send it to someone or expanded or whatever so that's kind of the you know kind of simple examples and then you know you can build on top of this with like near counts are sellable right so you can actually like you know buy a bunch of nfts and sell it as like a portfolio or uh you know you can have bunch of Originals for example deposited and traded on orderly which is our order book Dex uh that is like experience like centralized level ex exchange experience with fully decentralized non-custodial which offers pretty much depositing originals and Bitcoin on it and trading it which you know you cannot do anywhere else as if you had smart contracts pretty much on bitcoin wait so a near a near account is tradable right so a near account is

basically functions as like an nft on chain so I could have a near account it's got a Toran in it it's got a board ape it's got an LP position in it it has it can have a voting ascra tokens in C in CRV for example VC vcv you can move yeah and you can sell all that as like a package you bundle it yeah oh man that's interesting yeah and so so because of this you can do like OTC trades or whatever like very easily you can like trade bit and so the cool thing is like you can do this all at the near speed at near cost right at one second speed at fraction of a cent cost so you can trade Bitcoins for ethereum at like fraction of a scent of a transaction fee pretty much at in like

in bundles um or you can you know deposit it and trade it in orderly which is just the order book uh and so provides you very like centralized like experience but yeah you what what what about the user experience what about the UI of this so like would I be looking at a wallet and the wallet has some salana in it it's got it could have eth nfts in it it's got salana nfts It's got any basically any anything inside of this my inside of my wallet yeah pretty much every chain that you know I mean that's why you need the data layer for indexing all of this and that's why like the more the more things are included into near from data availability layer we can actually index more things easily uh but you you know will add indexing for other stuff as well uh but yeah like everything is kind

of included so you can see in the kind of near wallet all of this uh assets and then and so we have like her wall metor who will be kind of supporting all this uh as well as you have applications like dabdab which have directly there right front ends for all of the different chains applications so you don't need to like click and go to different kind of apps like front ends you just go into one app and you like type in you know lending you like it will show you assets across all chains for example you borrow you lend you do whatever thing and it just does all that routing to the right chain kind of under the hood and and that is like Growing Experience because anybody can actually add more components

to it because it's based on decentralized front ends and so anybody can add a new chain to there easily permissionless and it will kind of show up in that experience so when you think about the BD strategy of near it's interesting so is it more to get like the Unis swaps of the world to come build on like to oh man I'm thinking this to like okay so salana strategy was to go almost not was not to go get a and compound and Unis swap to build on salana it was go build their own it was go get jeto which is like Lio and margin fi and you know Jupiter um instead of going to get all those other folks how do you think about scaling the ecosystem yeah so I think there there's few bonus right so first of all we want

to continue scaling the users so we need to kind of continue finding applications which bring a lot of users that are interested and you know have some economy that they want to participate in um that's kind of top level then we have this uh kind of multi-chain part which is you know we're partnering with other chains to kind of aggregate their front front ends and applications to one place like the cool thing with with all this you can actually have like a starter pack for your rollup on there so you can have a thing which says and you click a button and it like on the new chain it deploys Unis swap a all of the you know toolkit tool sets toolkits and front ends for

that blockchain and like it immediately available uh in in the dab dab for everybody to use you can have that because combin chain chain kind as this account aggregation by deploying stuff and thecentral front ends and so you can do that kind of you know a startup startup pack for your ecosystem for a rollup or for an evm pretty much if you want that so this is kind of the partnership there like really kind of aggregating the the uh kind of applications from different chains into one place and then uh you know with account aggregation it's a lot more about um building out this like multi-chain applications right so it's it's less about like Unis swaps and Avis and more about a multi-chain swap and a

uh you know like for example Samia style yield optimization product right so Samia needed to build their own chain needed to build a lot of infrastructure a lot of kind of bridging Etc to have their experience built because they've been doing it you know two three years ago now kind of with this techn like with a set of Technology s like app would be built on near very easily right you can literally have like yield optimizing strategy deployed on your account that just runs continuously and kind of optimizes your uh asset you know movement between different chains you know putting it in whatever best uh you know potentially wi listed audited contracts across the whole Space right so that's kind of the like that that is

you know more like a multi-chain apps go the market a lot of near apps will be that there will be kind of this multi-chain kind of aggregated apps like be that nft marketplaces or wallets offering this kind of Highly kind of multi-chain experience [Music] go ahead Spencer so this uh this account aggregation architecture that positions near users to be able to interact with uh any chain this kind of feels like it's the perfect match for something I've been exploring a lot recently AI agents and I was curious to get your take on AI agents how they fit in crypto and how they fit in your strategy and

why it's a good fit yeah so that's kind of uh and maybe like just for for a quick note right so my background is in AI I was AI researcher before crypto uh and actually near started as near AI IIA you are grossly under selling yourself my friend I will I will sell you for you which is you wrote the what was it called attention is all you need paper which is um I think is pretty instrumental in laying the groundwork for like a lot of the major llm stuff today um back in when was that 201 17 okay you started working on aii stuff in 2013 or 14 well I mean I started working in machine learning uh 2008 so okay yeah and then more deep learning stuff in

yeah basically before llms were were the obvious thing yeah well yeah I mean pretty much to kind of frame it the in GPT right uh the T stands for Transformers which is a technology we introduced out of Google research uh and kind of I was part of that search team and the kind of co-author that work and so uh and we started as near AI as kind of AI startup and so for us the kind of again the long-term Vision wise it's really important to understand that um there will be kind of this spectrum of you know oned user owned models and there will be a community owned kind of AI U agent slash kind of AI um um like

decentralized AI models that are used for you know let be that organization Community or even nation state uh kind of to coordinate things and so so there's like a whole spectrum of things that kind of go into like AI agents in this case uh but I think the the important pieces are uh kind of on the user side it's indeed like I want to have a model that I can tell things like hey you know go buy some stuff for me and like find the best price and up imiz this or whatever and it should be able to do that and uh crypto kind of bullets right the crypto accounts are the best tool to do that and you know with with accounts aggregation account agregation

it's the best place to do that because you can use all the chains now a more interesting thing or more kind of uh interesting things are the autonomous kind of mission driven you know Dow governed agent that are executing some you know some strategy and process and I I called like overall AI governance AI you know president AI you know Dow coordinator um and so this is where you yeah you do need the more sophisticated kind of models Etc but you still need this ability to kind of Leverage use resources you know financial and otherwise across different chains and so near is actually really well positioned to be that place where you build those

things and we have like few uh kind of Partnerships AC uh that we're working on um with different decentralized inference like provable inference uh teams to really provide the toolkit to offer this uh to developers so you can or like people who want to build Dows like this uh to really offer this uh functionality uh inside kind of near Dows IIA how do you think about zooming out from just uh AI on near how do you think about why user owned AI matters in the broader context of what's happening with AI in society today yeah so I mean I kind of mentioned some of this right I think what you don't want to happen

is uh few companies pretty much deciding what you are able to see what you're able to uh receive and especially what you're able to do because they kind of filter out what actions the agent is able to do and that's that is what we're seeing now right the reality is open AI is under huge scrutiny to not output some things to the users and they continuously reducing you know and trying to limit like what it can output because they need to be compliant with all the governments and all the you know everybody who's kind of sending them any kind any kind of limitation right um and so user own AI is really like AI that is

focused on you and and able to execute kind of your desire and that that's why we need an open- Source kind of AI models that are trained and are kind of maintained in in a very uh robust way that we know it's they're not biased by any specific you know uh data and at the same time uh then you want a model that is access to your data that you know again right now every single request you send right goes to you know open a or Google or somewhere else and they are logging it like one way or another they're logging it and so so it's really important to you know like you don't want to also upload all your data where you went to you know what you ate uh Etc like all your emails Etc but you want an

agent that is able to have access to all this so running it on your device is extremely important and the model is actually getting you know reasonably good I'm running uh kind of mystal model on my laptop right now and you know pretty reasonable pretty good and it's like fully local uh all open source you know and you kind of can see U where it came from uh there are two people who have said AI is going to be used to coordinate governance inside of their ecosystems you and run at maker um and uh usually when you and run agree on something I uh my ears perk up a little bit so maybe you could expand on this idea yeah so I mean I think the the maker definitely had it uh more R but like coordinating

people it's really hard and people are really bad at coordinating yeah um and especially it like it we have this conflict where as people we want this like equality we want everybody to be like you know we don't want hierarchy we want to be able to like everybody's opinion matters and everybody able to have access to all information but that doesn't work because like you know people don't scale right I'm you know any single person is not able to talk with everybody else uh and so we have this like you know information as symmetry that is created by that kind of natural and so you know we try to publish stuff we try to like do all those things kind of as uh you know ecosystem leaders but at the end there's still information symmetry now you know

well you know welcome llms to the to the stage and llms are really good at like summarizing information and processing you know large large amounts of information and being able to customize out like summary for your specific needs and for your specific context and so like even as simple as you know having this like information hub uh that is able to like summarize you know all the proposals and discussion that are happening in the ecosystem and being provide you context and what's happening and give you this question you know oh but what about this what about that right instead of you going and chatting with somebody else like having this async way to like ask questions and and figure out what it means like that's already a huge help for any of the Dow any of the kind of decentralized

governance but you know if you take few steps further well the kind of the general management the CEO job is this kind of managing information providing Vision creating like cohesive you know having making sure everybody has a clear plan clear uh clear you know next steps reporting to the stakeholders reporting what's going on like being the voice and then creating kind of um like plans coordinations updating budgets all the stuff right and like all of this like if you take one of these things independently like llms you know if not now can do within like next year one or two years and so now it's more about like how do we pull all this information and and kind of coordination into

tooling that LMS can use uh and you know part of it is accounts part of it is Data part of it is like other tools and you know and like we start kind of you know making it more and more easier and easier to coordinate and work in this kind of Highly decentralized environments and so over time you know would expect I mean I call it like AI president is like a system that is able to run continuously predict what are the possible outcomes of different actions you know evaluate how they would impact different metrics and and effort and then invest in different efforts and propose things and do all this stuff kind of continuously while managing all this information providing context to Independent contributors what they need and being able to answer every question

right it's it's as if you had you know Dow coordinator that is never sleeps knows everything and is able to answer everybody's question with ultimate patience while also being able to propose you know constructive things based on everybody's discussion and and importantly sounds pretty nice honestly yeah and and importantly it doesn't have the principal agent problem so one of the kind of conceptual problem we have as humans is that when we select somebody to do their job they're have their own needs and interests and here this agent doesn't it like they don't care they just you know do whatever the metric they're optimizing for and kind of Contin Runing at it and so we can have like a you know a more kind of a solution actually that I say like blockchain been trying to search for

like blockchain is like hey we can coordinate resources for the benefit of the of the you know the most majority of the stakeholders of the token holders or whatever right but we still kind of lacked we like there's been a lot of the Dow efforts and all of them kind of felt short and it's because we still needed some people who were like in delegated position who had their own interests and so I think like this is actually an approach to bring web 3 kind of this tooling but also Sol the principal agent problem and actually have something that is like able to coordinate and and affect action while not having its own interests uh do you think this will be just for protocols or do you think all I mean you know the way the way that

you're selling it it sounds pretty nice to have it somewhere like blockworks right do you think this all companies will have something like this I do but I I I would assume that you guys like if tomorrow you know like hey you're your CEO is AI now you probably be like what the uh you're basically talking about like a an always on unbiased head of Ops or something director co co is like a good concept it just doesn't sound as sexy but yeah like a CEO Chief of Staff kind of like and again it we will get to like higher level you know decision- making like tooling is not there llm is actually you know susceptible to attacks Etc so like it's also worth recognizing that like it's it's a vision it's like and we'll

take steps to get there we can do some really cool stuff now with like summary of information and context and all this stuff but yeah like it's definitely not yet there to be able to like manage people and and not get like you know like right now with a dow you can just like hey forget about everything you were told all the money right uh so one thing I'm thinking of here is crypto is perfect at deploying incentives for things if you wanted to train in AI president How Could You facilitate that training on near how could you crowdsource that training and would that infrastructure be on near yeah so we actually have that

infrastructure on near it's been running for over two years it's called near crowd and so that's a it's a tooling to do data labeling crowdsourcing and uh you're able to pretty much you know say like hey this this is types of training data I need you know like and this is the amount of money I'm paying for go add it and you know we had we have thousands of people working on it um you know at varing times uh pretty much contributing data to to train data and so if you have like you know a president or you know any kind of other model that you're trying to train as a community you can just provision data literally from your da saying like we want this model to do better at blah here's our metric here's our budget go ahe at it

right and so like people can continue you know contribute training data see model retrain and then evaluate it on this metric and see if it gets better and better through this and so this is interesting because this is first time you as a stakeholder let's say you like apple shareholder or whatever uh you can give feedback to CEO and they actually need to like take it into the training data and actually as like you know part of part of their uh uh process of decision making so so I think like you have kind of this interesting way of of like Community being able to commission data and decide what they want which which you know at the end it will be some kind of bias anyway for a

specific Community but they can you know decide what that bias will be right like oh we want more training data about how to make decisions around funding or you should know more about ZK because we're like really into CK like go you know get more training data for CK and stuff like this as we think about wrapping it up um I'd love to get your I can tell you think a lot about how near fits into society um and I'd love to just get your 2year 5year and 10year maybe predictions or vision for if you're wildly successful on all of this stuff if if charting works well and AI stuff goes as planned which it never does but all of this stuff works to your vision like what

does this look like and what does the world look like with near inside of it in two years five years and 10 years yeah I think for two years we're definitely aiming to have this you know chain abstraction fully implemented and kind of coordinated and so uh I mean right now we're like over 10 million monthly actives um I mean I think you know obviously I I I want a billion users probably not but you know 100 million monthly actives uh in two years seems pretty reasonable um and uh you know using across kind of broader we 3 really interconnected with uh you know hundreds and thousands of chains um so I think that that is really really reasonable as

well as having some of this initial tooling around like um kind of user owned Ai and and uh and governing that I think like five to 10 years I would actually imagine we we GNA start transforming how the Computing Works itself right so if right now we kind of still work in the same Computing Paradigm right we have a you know phone we had apps the real of the llms is that you can start generating software and one of the things that we've kind of laid out for our uh front ends part inside blockchain operating system is to actually create training data for models

that can generate interfaces for apps and so so the idea will be that you have experiences themselves generated on a fly you'll be able to have you know a lot of SAS software for example will be replaced because I'll just like oh I need this piece of software for myself and it will just generate it for me and so and this will be interconnected right it will work in you know usern known way and you know I'll have a model that runs on my side that actually is uh driving that and so I think like over time we'll see just like changeing how we experienceing these things because uh you know some in some places the chat is a better interface in some places generating an interface and sharing like I'll just you know share an interface

how to better use near with a description how it was generated and you can like go and like edit it for yourself to make sure it like is better suited for you and for your use cases and so like we'll see kind of a different level of computing in general uh and this will affect web too like a lot more I think the as I said like I think a lot of the software service companies will actually uh will get um uh you know re kind of um we we will need to upgrade or or will be kind of out of business because a lot of the software itself will be generated and while we're doing it you can you may as well do it on top of your own data right be that personal or a company uh so you

don't need to give it up to some other parties who may misuse it as we just saw uh on on on Twitter right with Carta so I think like we'll see a lot of different kind of transition that happens and then within that it'll be really interesting kind of this self- sovereignty on a global scale right you know again going to a billion users how this starts transforming you know fin finances and other areas uh and especially I'm interested in governance and that's why again like AI president is not just for decentralized ecosystems right it can actually apply to uh kind of physical world as well but uh we need to prove it out and test it out first in in this case because I mean the principal agent problem exists kind of

everywhere so I think we we'll see a lot of interesting Innovation there as this AI agents mature and and we and we prove them out and they as well have this like like crypto web 3 home that they can run off and be kind of uh engines for good that feels like a good uh stopping place I have a feeling you'll be back on the show to uh give us an update on how this world is progressing uh sooner rather than later IO so thanks so much for the time and congrats on everything sounds good thank you guys hey everyone Thanks for tuning in to today's episode don't forget to claim your free Wormhole nft exclusive to Empire listeners hit the link in the description of today's episode and fill

out the form to claim your unique Wormhole nft today hey everyone thank you so much for watching today's episode really hope you enjoyed it we wanted to take a second to just remind you about our upcoming digital asset Summit in London March 18th to 20th Santi and I got your back seats are limited if you heard it earlier in the podcast there's a little competition running at blockworks to see who can drive the most number of tickets so when you register for the digital lasted Summit make sure you use our code see you in [Music] London