Chainlink CCIP Bomb, UniswapX, & Synthetix upgrades explained | Roundup

Transcript

[Music] all right everyone welcome back to another episode of Empire and bell curve if you are uh we have a special little crossover up today crossover Roundup if you're listening on Empire we are joined by our friend at uh framework Ventures Michael and if you are listening on bell curve Vance and mippo are both in Paris so we got Santi joining us for this one welcome to the crossover Gents great to be here great to be here we got the we got the black hoodie gang technically blue but sure I feel like you don't like what I ever call your hoodies black I just I just don't wear black dude I I don't I'm not like the Steve Jobs kind of [ __ ]

thing no but listen speaking about hoodies there's been a lot of Hoodie activity in the park don't kill these people like five hoodies and then resold them and some of them have been uh selling for like uh you know one of them so for like the lowest I think in a while but there's been a lot of Hoodie uh trades uh recently going back to that episode we recorded on punks Santi do you know that um so we recorded like we've been talking about punks a lot on Empire and uh after those big trades happened I got like five different messages being like this you this year I was like I'm so glad that you guys the listeners think that I have half a million dollars to go spend on a punk I really I really do appreciate that but uh it even like

it sounds exactly the kind of thing that someone who did buy would say so this is pure science I'm not I'm not buying that for sure it's not you um right yeah exactly Punk's ripping though um you guys have any CC fomo seems like a pretty good event been hearing reports that it has been a lot of fun uh I I was on vacation the last two weeks so Vance decided to uh go uh to represent framework and uh yeah it's it's only been good things so far from what I've heard from them about the conference itself I think the other thing that is definitely the case is it seems like you know this is the year uh or this is the time of the year when

everybody just comes out with their big announcements you know all of all the blue chips are coming out with you know major changes updates new products um it kind of reminds me of like what happens with WWDC with apple where it's like oh you wait until early June and that's when you see what they're working on and then it comes out later in the year and it feels like that type of cadence is you know three years going at this point maybe even four um ECC kind of becomes that announcement platform um for everybody who has been working on really cool stuff for the last you know six to 12 months yeah I think that's the way that the industry is going to progress by the way I'm reading this um book called I think it's just called build by Tony Fidel the guy who built nest and the iPhone and

yeah and he talks about um basically product cadences and like new Industries and in new companies that you just kind of share things you just kind of push things out the door but that that eventually becomes too exhausting for your company and actually eventually too exhausting for your customers so where I think the industry is going is like what we're starting to see develop is these basically like Ebbs and flows of product releases and everyone kind of getting on the same page um about when about when things will get released so I have a feeling you will see like maybe and I think there'll be probably centered around big conferences I think probably two or three times a year you'll see like big product announcements around ECC permissionless and then I would assume uh individual companies as they get bigger start

hosting their own events like you know Salesforce has theirs Apple has theirs HubSpot has theirs those kind of things yeah it's a good call out I feel like there's been a couple big trends that have come out of ECC um account abstraction right vitalik had a big talk on account abstraction he kind of I don't know if you guys watched it or saw any highlights or talked to Vance at all but it I mean he kind of very clearly sees a future where all crypto users migrate these externally owned account wallets to the smart contract based wallets um and and talk about two things he said um uh uh bad wallet and interoperability ux are the two major factors holding crypto from gaining more adoption um and that crypto wallet

verticalization is long overdue and is very welcomed and that I think his his like closing line or something uh near the end of this features that wallet Evolution can be called to success when managing a wallet becomes as easy as using an email account I thought that was a good kind of like North Star for us to be working towards yeah yeah the ux is only going to improve at the counter abstraction and I think that's when we've talked about this ad nauseam on Bell turvian I'm sure on Empire but that's been one of the biggest uh elements of this industry that we've been holding ourselves back with I think it's actually served us well in a lot of reason you know for a lot of reasons but as we move to scale as we move to get to be table Stakes feature parity with C5 that's gonna be

something that has to change and you know we can talk about it as well but it does actually dovetail nicely into you know what the synthetic team in Kane announced with infinix which is literally a off-chain sign up email password we created we created an account on the back end you fund it you don't ever have to really interact with it but uh I think we're moving in that direction not just on the protocol level but also on the application Level too yeah it's funny because Kane called me and said Hey listen like I'm really tired of of there's very few users like defy in and of itself I know it's been like two two years of plus a bear market and rightfully so I mean the criticism is like like there's very few users there's just a number of power users but

um I think Kane has always been at the Forefront he's always ahead six months to a year and he's he's just whenever he calls and he's been sort of in a height as and came back and said Hey listen I think I think now is the time to focus on ux to your point Michael like I think like if you were to focus like if account abstraction came like I don't know two years ago I don't think it would have been as impactful difficult to say but I just feel like there's a time to invest in infrastructure and I think now we sort of are if you think about probably infrastructure is can support so many more users and activity and so I think now is really the time to focus on on front-facing kind of you know consumer applications uh which will come

you know we've talked a lot on Empire I'm sure bell curve like gaming and nfts and and defy I mean just the stable coins are a a uh are the killer product of of crypto yeah it's cool to see Kane and synthetics kind of leading the way for this next potential defy bull market it's cool to uh it's cool to see it yeah infinix is cool so my understanding of infinix maybe Michael you can fill us in a little more is that um is there a couple big protocol announcements that I want to talk about so there's uh synthetics announced infinix uh you you just swap announced you just swap X um chain link announced tcip so maybe we can run through all of those real quick so uh on Friday synthetics announced infinix which is basically my

understanding is it's uh a derivatives front end to synthetics so synthetics has this kind of on-chain trading infrastructure um it's a protocol for for on-chain trading they are putting a uh like a centralized ex or a new exchange that aims to take on centralized exchanges on the front end it's a very very very easy to use like optimized for the ux and the UI and the user um sign up with an email and a password and that's just the front end but it leverages synthetics uh the trading protocol on the back end uh I think it's governed by this uh by snx which is the native token of synthetics um platforms revenues are used to accumulate back to the Token that's kind of my understanding but would love to

hear your thoughts on like big deal not a big deal thoughts on infinix so yeah one one caveat I would say is the the way the current system for synthetics works is what I would call like in what they call the v2x state which is you have all of the things that were existing in the last year year and a half two years but I'd say what what infinix and frankly like what is um required for launching infinix is the move towards V3 which is more about creating new markets and new forms of liquidity um and new ecosystems to trade and so it's more of it's going to start off as semi permission to eventually move to permissionless but if you have a new idea for a financial product if you have a new idea for you know trading

apparatus or a mechanism uh like that uh that's really what the new protocol upgrades within V3 which some of which are already on Main net I think the rest of it is supposed to come out by the end of the year um and then infinix to your point you know is is really just a consumer friendly way of accessing those markets that doesn't require you to really be a defy native and trust you know having all of your assets either in Hardware wallet on metamask and you know going through the the written role that we've all uh become accustomed to over the last few years it is really an effort to bring in new users to defy um so I think you know to your point Kane is always ahead um and uh really smart and and

calculated about when the right time is to do that um I think you know recognizing that the infrastructure is frankly ready um we have a lot of the the tools in place to be able to accomplish the the growth and scalability that we think we all um should be having in defy right now the ux has been you know holding things back the other thing I think that infinix recognizes is that it's not just going to be happening on optimism where you know all trading activity is currently happening with with synthetics the protocol it can happen across chain and that's a huge element as well where you don't have to just be relying on the liquidity that exists in a certain ecosystem right now now you should be trading on Avalanche or arbitrum or

optimism eventually and and I think you know infinix would also be an abstraction layer on top of that too that's great that's really cool the my favorite part of this is that I feel like everywhere 18 months into the bear Market everyone right now is so focused on infrastructure and I think that was one of the main themes at ECC like building kind of flat infrastructure nobody's focused on consumer products nobody's focused on the front end and Kane just comes out and just like look the infrastructure's here let's stop let's stop focusing so much on the infrastructure it's time to build better front ends so I love the contrarian take care kind of dovetails into uniswap so you just I don't know if you guys are following Utah uh revealed unit swap X did you guys see this yep so uh my I think the high level take

was so uniswap revealed uniform X which is this permission list Open Source auction based protocol for trading across amms and other liquidity sources um my understanding is it's an aggregator that outsources routing to this kind of open network of competing fillers that fill the swaps at the best prices through Dutch Oxford Dutch auctions and um I think this so minus like getting into the details a little is like the swaps are gas free from a user's perspective uh because the swappers are actually signing off chain orders not on chain the fillers then submit them on chain and to finalize the transactions the filler cover the gas fees um I think right now it's opt-in beta and then later this year this cross chain update will be launched which

combines swapping and bridging into one auction if you feels like a it feels like this is unit swap going kind of the opposite route of Kane Kane is saying like we need to have synthetic start focusing on the front end start focusing on the user experience uniswap is here saying look everyone knows you to swap for the for the front end experience we need to start becoming like this kind of base layer infrastructure for building amms on top of I'm curious what you think of that I mean my quick take is I think it's actually very similar um and it goes back to what we were talking about with the kind of account abstraction where uh account abstraction really enables so that the end user is not the one who has to like think about

okay what's the price of eth am I going to wait for gas prices that go down you know have to play that game and and really they can just put an order out on chain they can specify how long they want the Dutch option to run and I think it's like something from 10 blocks to 10 days so you really have a long period of time where like these orders are live and and can get filled by a filler I think it also just invites a new opportunity for a new player in this ecosystem which is a filler and you know historically in traditional financial markets like that is how most of the volume for retail flow actually gets filled and and I think I I think if you can aggregate liquidity on that side and get some real serious players involved like this this could be you know the new

place that spot markets are transacting in in a very serious this way but I think it goes back to the same principles of we need to optimize for growth this is going to make it a lot easier for people who aren't necessarily uniswap customers already to be able to interact with uniswap or any of the different unit swap pools it will eventually become cross-chain in the same recognition that we can't just rely on one single ecosystem for all of our liquidity and maybe people want to be transacting in different places so I think you know from a principal's basis it's it's very similar it definitely is promoting and entrenching a lot of the unit swap specific protocols um but in the same way that uniswap has a lot of the the spot liquidity I think you know infinix is going to be doing

after a lot of the perps liquidity um and and so they kind of are a lot of the same in my mind at least that was my read interesting that's a really good point yeah I guess what you're getting here is you're seeing two D5 protocols go try to really compete with with centralized exchanges in this next market like I guess what you're building with unison X here is you have access to tokens from a bunch of different chains you have no gas fees much simpler ux than a lot of like remember signing up for just centralized exchanges you have to send send a picture of yourself send them the license like it's like a 15-step process so you've got like much simpler ux than these kind of old school crypto exchanges and then um I think my understanding too is like for non-fat Fiat transactions there's you you don't

need to do kyc AML so it's much quicker onboarding right so if you combine those things like access to tokens from a bunch of different chains no gas fees simpler ux quicker onboarding then you've got what synthetics is building Kane's building you got two pretty damn good uh decentralized exchanges that are gonna I think go head-to-head with these centralized exchanges in the next Market yeah I I think that that was also the like the explicit goal too like I know Kane said that I I'm pretty sure I heard Hayden say that as well but like once again um we've seen everything that has happened in the last 12 months from a centralized entity perspective in crypto and I think this is a recognition that it's time and we now have the tools to be able to have defy you know take up the the reins and run with it

you know it's um we discussed this uh so yesterday I record a podcast with Rebecca and Jake um a regulatory pod and of course the the the key word here now is programmatic right on the Ripple case specifically of course it talks nothing about defy and my question to them was hey what about dex's like is that a programmatic sale because in my mind I mean yeah like it's uh it's even actually more I would think that it would fit that criteria but of course they were like well we don't know right and so I think uh of course there's still pending regulation to clarify that stuff but but imagine a world where it is you could see a lot of flow I mean like I still remember in the early days of Divi

there were so many people that were skeptical of this amm model because if you come from traditional Finance right everyone was like this is not going to work I mean order books are just better right and I think defy um the smartest people in defy you know Kane Hayden even vitalik and a bunch of folks like it requires a a new level of thinking of what these new tools allow for um not just copying it like you know exactly what is traditional Finance but innovating and creating kind of you know flat thing about flashlights think about like amms and the consumer preference that'll you know everyone could be a market maker what I'm trying to say with all this is it was pretty shocking I think a lot of the Skeptics really got behind the idea of D5 when they saw how efficient and

cost effective it was to trade stable coins in a protocol like curve because it was cheaper and it still is than going through a traditional centralized exchange so like I just like to remind listeners that like Defy is highly efficient which is a lot of times like there's a critical point of of crypto which is anytime you try to decentralize stuff you lose efficiency and you know centralized parties are just better the reality is like no and you minimize counterparty risk so I think like Defy is of course has been like now chatter over the last kind of month month or so that has been percolating around like the Resurgence of D5 and people talk about real world assets and maker um but I think D5 is is is kind of Forgotten and I think it will really

catch people off guard when they see how a nice ux plug-in into all the kind of the pipes that are already there in Super Battle tested and how quickly it will gain traction um so I'm pretty excited about uh cane building in this direction yeah 100 degree yeah great Michael you want to give us the overview on chain link uh ccip before before I say this I I gotta say like my first uh when I first learned about uh framework it was um I if someone described like yeah these guys are like deep in chain link uh and of course like chain link was like doing all these gymnastics at Google and it was like ripping like the link Marines

were like everything yeah that was my first um that was my first interaction framework and then I learned that they were like super deep into synthetics as well so anyways just for for people that might not appreciate Michael's perspective on chain like none of this illegal Financial advice but you know yeah no this is uh this is someone that has been deep in chain link for a while Marines like Anon account are you like one of the big ones uh I've been accused of that many times um but no I I'm not um again something that if you were a true Linker yeah yeah yeah um yeah I mean Vance and I uh got to

know the lean team actually like six years ago it was like summer of 2017 um and we yeah like participate in the ecosystem basically before uh two years before we started uh framework even um and so yeah chain link is something that we've been following for you know the better part of a decade at this point I would say the in insanely incredible thing that um chardier has been able to do is he's been able to stick to the same exact thesis uh of where the industry is moving for that entire period of time and even before so I mean he he was a part of a smart contract platform and Company prior to chain link

um and it's it's more if it's changed like there's been new products um but but the thesis has remained the exact same which is really kind of what I would say ccip embodies which is the internet of smart contracts and the enablement of creating these communications protocols uh or or a unifying Communications protocol that connects everything I think is the representation of of where this industry is going we've talked about it from an infinix perspective we talked about it from um uh unit swap acts perspective but you know cross chain is something that I think is just inevitable at this point in the last couple of years we've taught there were there were a lot of efforts and and I think Kane would even admit

this to basically have everybody build on optimism or everybody build an arbitrum or everybody built on whatever it may be um and I think that what we're starting to see is the need to be able to have the complete trust and and verifiability to be able to move assets across platform because there's just inherently going to be that in the same way that we saw with the internet too it's not like one operating system or one ego system was the dominant and end-all winner you have to be able to have um you know the the interactability between different applications across platforms so ccip has been worked on for I I don't even know how many years at this point maybe two or three

um it's been a long time coming but um it really does uh I think reinvigorate a lot of the stuff that we're talking about which is improvements in ux the cross-train portability of liquidity cross-chain functionality um and there already are a number of cross-chain communications protocols and um ones that are working in scaling right now and I think it's going to be an interesting question as to see like what are the differentiating factors what are the technical specifications you know which one's better in those respects because I think ultimately that wins but also who gets the most distribution and who's going to be able to plug in um to be that cross-chain transport layer um but chain link is starting off with a huge list of existing Partners

um and so being able to have this on mainnet I think is a huge thing it really um it definitely does breathe a lot more air into the sales of chain link which I'd say over the last year has been sort of a question as to when there's always been a question of when is this coming two weeks TM um but it is is really fun to see it live um and yeah hats off to the team for a huge accomplishment yeah and Michael for like someone who may not really appreciate the nuancer like what is this kind of enable or Empower right because you have all the we talk a lot about there's multiple l1's there's multiple l2s and so what is this kind of chain link fabric connectivity fabric like innate that is not possible today yeah so I I think um well one of the

things that it hopefully gets rid of in a lot of ways is bridging and uh Bridges as anybody in the industry knows have been one of the biggest honey pots for hacks or losses of assets and funds um so hopefully this is a mid again towards moving in uh just a better technical Direction um where instead of having a bridge facilitate assets where you send it to the bridge you verify that the assets are there and then you mint basically a placeholder asset on another platform where the original asset actually stays on the previous platform that model actually changes where you can have native minting and burning on both chains that is just a much better

technical model and and what is required is you have to have this abstraction layer above both of those platforms or below depending on how you think of the stack um which facilitates the native actions on both of those chains and has the trusted verifiability and and mandate to do it um so all of that I'd say is probably the biggest thing but from a ux perspective what this could mean is um you know as we're talking about in the case of like uniswap X for instance where I don't know if they're going to use ccip but you can imagine the concept where somebody's making a swap on one end they put assets up in this uh you know format where the order exists on let's say you know optimism but the actual person who's feeling it lives on

arbitrum and instead of actually having someone have to send assets across to be able to fill the order you would have the verifiability of the assets on one chain which then would release the assets on the other chain and only when the order is filled on the previous chain would you release them on the other chain and so all of the messaging that is required to be able to facilitate that like multi-step transaction that would be facilitated by something like this so I I think that's probably the best example and of course we talk about like trust assumptions that you're making when you're using a bridge um or even an L2 in this case you there is a trust being placed in in chain link and their ecosystem

of partners that has been pretty battle tested at this point but maybe if you could just touch on on that on the trust assumptions that you're making while using this yeah so I think there's implicit trust in just what you said Sante with you know chain link has been you know the dominant Oracle provider and uh batch stopping I don't know how many billions of tvl at this point but you know the the Oracle solution to be able to enable that I'd say there's also a direct um a trust assumption in that anyone who's facilitating these transactions and and I don't know exactly I don't think they've gone totally into the token model yet but there is an implicit stake that you have to put up to be someone who's facilitating these transactions and therefore earning the

fees for facilitating the transactions and and so you know to have the transactions it's not like these are just free messages that are being passed you have to pay a fee either in the form of Link or another asset to the to the the operator who is facilitating the transactions but then that operator also has to have some stake to be able to know that if they were you know found out to be malicious or or made a mistake for instance there is a potential slashing yeah um and so in the same way that ethereum has the you know slashing elements for validator nodes you know this is the same thing it's it's interesting we go always back to synthetics because synthetics was one of the first to really adopt chain link and I think at one point was the number

one you fee payer or was subsidized but it was it was pretty much like really in the early days of defy uh Kane I still remember we were having dinner and he said listen you need a Switzerland you need like a uh because they were like they had like a pretty adversarial kind of there was a there was an incident where like the Korean Peg just went out of whack and like they're like we just 44 trillion dollars was minted or something like that and and it was interesting to me that was the first you know because of course chain link had done all these announcements of like with Google and a bunch of like created a really nice ecosystem but like you're in the midst of a bear market and you're tired of announcements you're like you know whatever you know but that was for me

the first time that I realized okay there is definitely a need to have an independent third party that is that is the Oracle here um and and synthetics really was kind of the first protocol and and the experience that they had to go through of realizing that that the hard way to me it was pretty insightful so anyways all this to say is uh synthetics has just been one of those protocols it's been through the fire and his back and tested a lot of these Solutions like it was pretty impressive to see like how they really engineer token Econo I mean this is not a Shale of synthetics anyway shape or form but I was just super close to them as well and so it was they really a lot of people credit like D5 summer to compound and certainly like it triggered like yield farming but a lot

of those elements were borrowed from synthetics like token economics and staking and then you had um you know that obviously chain link and then uh you know uh yeah the synthetics optimism I mean they've you know but as it relates to public goods I mean they were just instrumental in like a layer twos because it was so expensive to interact and claim that snx on a weekly basis so it's it's pretty fascinating to see how different protocols contribute back to the ecosystem yep and it's funny enough I actually met Kane for the first time at a chain link and Friends dinner at the web 3 Summit in Berlin there you go um you know it's all it's all part of the same family yeah yeah Santa you're an investor in layer zero as well is it

fair to say that there's this like kind of ccip versus layer zero like is that the kind of big like layer zero or you know uh cross-chain battle that we're gonna see play out over the next couple of you know in the same way that maybe arbitrum and optimism are battling or 2021 it was our Avalanche for Solana is that kind of like the new thing that we're going to see develop is maybe layer Zero versus chain link CCP uh it certainly feels that way uh like how directly competitive or complementary like I'm still processing like trying to learn about what channel but but yeah like when I first learned about chain link it's like yeah I mean this is what layer zero is attempting to do is there a place for having multiple messaging services

You could argue maybe maybe not I mean there's one standard really and if you look at the web 2 stack like there's really kind of one one standard is HTTP like https or some of these so I don't know I mean it's an interesting question like Michael or Yana I don't know if you guys have a strong view on but um like you know if you have multiple messaging providers like does that create confusion or is there some sort of standard that the industry needs to align with and how do these two say in a world where you have layer zero and chain link like you know at the end of the day whoever the user is is not going to care I think you just kind of use the one that is the safest the most efficient the most

reliable so yeah I don't know it's a good question too early to tell in my mind but I'd be curious Michael if you have a strong view on it definitely too early to tell as well um there already are a number of others um even in addition to layer zero and chain link so it's it's you know it does seem like those are the two biggest at this point um I think layer zero has come out and said that um you will have to use zro or whatever the the token is as a form of payment um which architecturally is the same as ccip um so it feels like it to santi's point maybe there's a world where everybody

has to maintain you know some zro and some link tokens to be able to facilitate payments on behalf of these transactions um maybe there's some easy way of making that happen I think then there's also the question of like how easy is it to integrate into these messaging protocols and is it possible to maintain those Integrations for multiple if you need to um so all of these are Big open-ended questions and and definitely agree it's it's way too early to tell I mean regardless I mean these two attempts are a step in the right direction because the current architecture Bridges is just a bit broken I think we've seen that just in practice there have been different flavors of bridges like both you guys and I'm an investor in a number of bridges look it's worth trying these

things but ultimately I think the more elegant solution is something like ccip or what layer 0 is trying to do um so you know I think we're moving the right direction and competition is exactly yeah yeah I mean all we're seeing here is just these like we're just abstract abstracting the networks away from the user level so either whether you're using layer 0 or ccip at the end of the day it's better for the user so um Santa you uh you recorded a policy episode policy and regulation episode this week with Jake and Rebecca that you mentioned earlier I wasn't able to join you but I saw I saw that we put that live on Thursday our um any any highlights takeaways from that that we we missed last week when we were talking

about you know things like the Ripple case and other stuff any any unique takeaways there I'll spend like 30 seconds to a minute I think the biggest one was Jake was very much in the camp of like you know this case like Ripple is not a security now and I think historically he said tokens are not like his point is very strong around tokens are not Securities the manner in which you sell them can have implications but like the token itself is not a security and that has very strong implications around something like like the coinbase case right because they've been strong around this idea that we're not listing securities and I think he agreed in both Rebecca and Jake Reed the biggest winner here are exchanges someone like coinbase because you know they're clearly the the

court uh was ruling very positively in the nature of those transactions um so so yeah both of them said look this might be the most important piece of like like just ruling that we've had since they both joined the industry which is really encouraging to hear candidly um and so both of them seem to think that there might be some penalty that ripple at some point is pace for because I told them look the biggest questions in my mind that I wanted to get their perspective on is so what does this mean for the rest of the industry like because there is a nature by which you know I explained as both of you guys know but I'll just explain you quickly there's usually a equity round that has some warrant attached to if there's ever

a token event and that sequence and like model has been pretty much a standard coming out of the 2018 Ico boom like we've all kind of moved in the direction of having like a safe plus warrants and then at some point there's a token generation event some of the investors and the company gets tokens and there's airdrops and the community got some stuff um and so the the biggest Point here is uh both of them said look it's just the programmatic nature of it uh certainly feels like for companies that are gonna for token issuers today and down the road going through exchanges is is going to be you're going to see more of that and there will be just of course there's like Nuance around like for the investor

piece right if you're an investor in the company you get tokens the key here is on a case-by-case basis of course do you have lockups you have like what is normally what traditionally like uh if if you're like an investor in the company IPL is like you have a year lockup of sorts you know and so these things are important so anyways those were like the biggest um points that we touched on I would encourage people to go listen to that and um but yeah in summary both of them felt really bullish of course in in in this type of ruling and then we touched on like the what is it the McKendree Thompson bill and the legis the stablecoin bill both of which are there's going to be markups on both coming up so that will be interesting to

see and um so yeah a lot going on I feel like this is like the the golden age for uh lawyers in crypto um I mean it's always been pretty lucrative to be a lawyer yeah from a visibility perspective like they're they're like like the most popular Fallout accounts now because they're you know like impressively so like you know a16z Paradigm you guys I mean there's been a lot of hires um and a big coordinated effort of going on the offense here and and I think it's really uh encouraging to see that kindly 100 agree only thing I'd also add to that is like hats off to the boxing

Association and all the work that they've been doing um coin Center as well like it's a lot of the same sentiment and and principles that we as the industry have thought about and been pushing for years and it's it's I would say really nice to see the recognition um I I would also add and I haven't listened to the episode yet but um I would say this is definitely like at least our take is um this is definitely really positive for the industry like I said but what I think the most positive outcome could be is that this just forces a more reasonable conversation from a from a regulatory perspective from a policy perspective um and in lieu of just going down the regulatory path and it taking another

couple of decades for us to settle all of these lawsuits and and you know situations through the court system um so I like we're really hopeful that this lights a fire under policymakers to to you know find something that works for the industry hey everyone we've got a great episode here but before we do I just wanted to give a quick shout out to permissionless this is the biggest and best conference in all of defy it's the one that we do with bankless who's a great partner for us last year we had almost 7 000 people there in West Palm Beach we are moving this year to Austin Texas from September 11th through the 13th and if you're a listener of bell curve any of these last five seasons this conference is basically custom made for you we're going to be talking about liquid staking

the theme of this season we've got a bunch of great panels on Mev if you listen to the app chain thesis we've got a bunch of Cosmos folks out there in full force we're talking about the converging architecture of Solana the roll-up space in eth and Cosmos so I would love to see all of you there and to reward you for being such great listeners to bell curve you get a special 30 off code it's bell curve 30 that'll get you 30 off tickets click the link in the show notes and then head over to the permissionless site and make sure that you get your ticket today again that is bell curve 30 click the link in the show notes yeah we got some breaking news coming in coindesk just got bought for 100 125 million

um by uh Matt rosak and Peter vesnis this is it was a um I don't know if you guys know Matt rosak but he's been putting this deal together for actually quite a while now um he's been kind of the leading there were a couple uh so backstory is dcg uh for those who don't know so dcg is the parent company of coindesk dcg owns a lot of kind of tier one Assets in crypto or what used to be tier one assets coindesk uh grayscale Genesis trade block um another another crypto company I'm forgetting the name of they obviously once everything blew up um specifically Genesis needed some cash and they put coindesk on the market a couple months ago the there were a

couple of kind of bigger bidders that came in but I don't think Barry wanted to sell to some of those bigger bidders for like reputation reasons and uh Matt rozek emerged as the leading bidder about a month or two ago uh rosak is the founder of a crypto company called block he's the he's very like crypto OG he you know if you look up if you Google Matt rozak you'll see you know he gave Clinton Bill Clinton his first Bitcoin Richard Branson their first Bitcoins back in like 2013 or 2014 and then he also partnered with Peter bestness who um if you guys remember the uh the Dow hack from 2016 your vastness was kind of the first one to identify that like he was very early Bitcoin miner then he

was I think the first one to identify that there's this huge security vulnerability and uh and like in the Dow uh he founded coin lab which was the first venture-backed Bitcoin company in 2012. um they're both just kind of like Bitcoin and crypto OG's and so uh yeah from one Billionaire's hands to another uh buried to to Peter and Peter and Matt yeah ah block with a Q yeah I know that company yeah it was Atlanta base or something yeah yeah never got much for Action I think but yep yeah um you know now it's time to turn the Pod uh over questioning over to you what do you think I think it's great I'm very happy that

this deal got done I think that uh I think that competition in media is a good thing and that um crypto as an industry has not had great journalism in the past and that's one of the reasons that um I mean we launched our news arm in January of 2021 and uh I think that like having competition in journalism and in media is a really really good thing and so I'm happy that this deal went through and I'm happy that like coindustan get killed nice we've talked about this before but at some point obviously look it's no surprise both framework and myself invested in the latest round along the 10 10t uh because we're super excited about I mean we sit here every week and

so it just made sense um so now we gotta we gotta interview both uh you and Mike um to just talk about the story of uh blockworks and stuff so yeah exactly yeah we'll do that soon speaking of another breaking news transitioning a bit uh there was a big shake up at Sequoia I think they fired everyone that uh the entire crypto team we had Michelle I think at some point uh we interviewed Michelle's gone yeah Michelle and then uh I think you're most senior guy there who is uh no surprising you left Mike ignorance is out yeah well he's technically like out of the Venture team but he's transitioning to like their Heritage which is like their

family office from the office yeah he's not fire no but the other the the relevant for this discussion the crypto teams just out oh well Michelle yeah holy [ __ ] I missed this yeah they played FTX and so I think that was a big egg in the face for them I yeah I I would say the bigger thing too is um just the sentiment shift it seems they are actively not going to be investing in crypto going forward it seems yeah that that's generally true I mean Sukhoi has been funny enough I was uh at the time I was working at a renter font called sageview and I went to Sequoia and I got pretty foreign like because I want to join their team and they they

usually like their hiring process is really funky they're just like come in and like pitch us some ideas and literally my memo was just by crypto like it was Bitcoin at some point I'll probably publish it and this was like the last round or it's one of the last rounds before meeting like uh I guess like you know dog and a few of the other more senior guys and this is the SAS team and they're like so guys you invest in Dropbox I usually invest in store J this is like before before file coin there's like storage a like block era like made safe and stuff all right so just buy Bitcoin stuff and and they're like uh they're like you know what man like just no like we're not really interested in this and then it was funny enough because I saw them years later they were one of the early

backers of paradigm right I mean Matt came from right uh Sequoia right and they contributed I think in kind a bunch of Bitcoin at the low to paradigm um and then they did a few Investments but yeah it's uh I would say that the Sequoia shift is also happening in other major funds I mean of course like tiger you have triple point I mean just a bunch of traditional funds it came in late uh maybe didn't dedicate enough resources um have uh you know moved uh away from crypto in a very drastic way right I mean I think it's really just the crypto native firms that uh

remain um both Vance and I a couple months ago went to one of our large LPS uh annual meeting and um they run I mean a a multi-strategy approach to all of their LP relationships and you've got you know private Equity growth Equity you've got traditional Venture you've got and then also crypto and they have a dedicated blockchain Venture fund as well and it was walking out of that conference I mean there was an entire day dedicated to blockchain blockchain GPS um and of which you know we both presented on different panels but it is very clear that there is such a stark difference between traditional Venture

and blockchain adventure and even they were saying it's just you know you could ask one of the traditional Venture guys hey what do you think about blockchain technology where are we in the cycle and it's just you know you know fumbling over themselves to try and you know put some cogent argument together and you know meanwhile you've got an entire day dedicated to blockchain I think what we're going to see is a really huge separation even further than what we've had so far um where you look at it almost from like a from from the traditional guys perspective it's like okay we don't see any value in this we don't understand it now we have an excuse like before the last two years you really you didn't have an excuse from your LPS as to why you weren't doing it right now you have every excuse as to why you can't do it

and and I think that that you know as we continue down this path and you know we're starting to see the green shoots of what this next leg up and and that's kind of narrative will be what was everything we're talking about with D5 and all the narratives that you know everybody's excited about but I I think that they're just going to be even further left in the in the back um I I think that's also kind of what happened with sequoia's over the last two years they tried to play catch up real fast and that happened at very Tippy tops of the market cycle and you know they got burned um so now now they're out yeah I mean like if if you're I mean surprisingly and to give credit a16c is still here oh absolutely and they've they've opening a London office they've

hired another uh you know person from cfdc I think or regulator like look so kudos to them you know because look we all there's always going to be a media story that says uh oh look they're marking down their portfolio drastically and people don't really appreciate one how you mark up these positions which is incredibly difficult in Venture now is come even to the nth degree because Venture plus crypto is just a weird animal um but they're still here right and and I think I really respect that because sometimes when you're when you have like a a behemoth of an Empire and crypto is one very small piece of it uh that can have a lot of reputational damage uh

like Sequoia probably did the math it was like we run so many other fonts super big fonts and like why would we even consider like pissing off some rlps and like jeopardizing our position as a premier preeminent Venture fund now granted they've done a lot of restructuring like they left China and then they left India and then they've left Brazil so they're pretty they've done a lot of restructuring over the years I think um which I think and I don't want to read too much into this but like Michael this is a point uh that you perhaps were saying is I mean if you look at the returns of Venture as an asset class and even hedge funds but like just Venture itself like tier one it's pretty it's going through a pretty pretty bad moment I mean it just historically returns of compressed pretty dramatically

um for a number of reasons this is more competitive there's way more Capital flowing into space a lot of these guys like push the valuations to the extreme uh you know paying like 20 times 30 times forward ARR and just that that combined with like companies not ipoing in 10 plus years it makes it really difficult right and so I think Michael I'd be curious you guys raised the fund obviously what was I think really good timing and I think you have a lot of uh you know cash to deploy but like when you think about competition and crypto like polychain just raised another 200 million dollar Venture fund so there's there's folks out there like Katie Han Ventures I'm

sure she hasn't called all the capital but there's decent amount of dry powder uh but it feels like it's just back to crypto native funds um and so from a competition and return perspective if the big if if the traditional Venture guys are not showing up like how are you thinking about just competition and investing in crypto when you go in and look at these rounds you know early stage like how competitive is it now versus what it was like a year or two three years which just felt like you know things were just being bit up to yeah well first thing I'll say is I think if you look at the long Arc Adventure um performance has even at the top you know uh top quartile top decile

performance has definitely come down but also I think is highly correlated with Fun Size going up um and Fun Size really does dictate your business strategy and when you have you know a billion dollars or multi-billion dollar funds you have to return multiples of that which means that you know you're 5 10 15 20 ownership needs to be at levels that are tens of billions of dollars to be able to get you know a fund returning investment and and yeah we we definitely I think timed our last fundraise pretty well I think it was about three weeks before Luna blew up is when we announced it um and it was a 400 it is a 400 million VA tool we feel like we can be a very strong player at the seed in series a and and a

lot of those um and the font size will help you know return many multiples of the fund and and that's kind of the strategy that you have to be playing for if you're in the Venture business and you want to be in the Venture business long term if you're in the asset management business like maybe the Tigers of the world where they're looking for an irr return um it's just a different ball game and so seeing a lot of those players come out um decreases the amount of valuation drift as well as the level of competition in a lot of really positive ways I think you know in in some ways you can get the intermediate marks of you did the seed round or the series a and the entire comes in and throws a 50 million dollar check at your portfolio company and you're like oh wow I'm a

genius but in reality that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to return anything it just means that somebody else has bought it for a higher value um and so I think that you know you have to be sober in in the ways that you think about what is real value and tanfall value which ultimately is returning multiples of the fund um in regards to you know what's competition like these days I think um well two things are going on one there's absolutely less competition it's crypto natives basically only there are a couple of upstart funds that are doing you know on their first or second fund that are you know competing at the you know seed series a ish level um I think frankly it's going to be really hard for any fund that doesn't have

distributions in the next fundraising cycle to be able to go and continue on polychain you know look at them 200 million dollar fund I think their last fund was 700. so this is this is definitely a step down from that um I think they're also raising this at probably you know one of the most difficult times in last decade to raise a venture fund so and this is probably a first close and not a final close um but yeah I mean the the landscape is changing quickly um and I think the other thing that's going on the second variable that's going on is there's just not as many people coming into the industry as you saw in 2021 so there's just not as many opportunities but the quality of the

opportunities that you are seeing is much higher so that's probably more form fit for the industry that we have now of investors where you know it's crypto natives who understand this stuff we can really dig in and help out from a crypto native perspective and you're just not having to go chase things because you know the deal flow is 5X what you're seeing now um so I think it's really positive for the industry yeah yeah and now like of course like some of the non-crypto Native funds historically have just stuck to like deals like an FTX right where they end up raising 50 100 million like that's that's something they can easily do right they love these Equity deals

what they haven't done historically even at the peak of last cycle which is doing on-chain stuff and really kind of yield farming and doing other strategies and just staking and like just holding Ethan staking and just being which to me is where the real Alpha like can be generated um and so you know not every even not uh some of the crypto native funds um that are just purely kind of venture don't do this stuff which is I don't know pretty but it very what I'm trying to say very few funds uh are active as you guys are on chain and you know you can do a number of things and how easy

is it for for a fun like you to to convince your LPS that you're able to do all these things right because they all want to either think you're either a I remember people always want to know are you a hedge fund or are you a venture fund and like what is this bucket like I just need to know which bucket I'm allocating from and how do you how do you kind of have that conversation with LPS yeah the distinction that we think about is are you an open-ended fund or are you close-ended fund and and what that really means is you know do you have the ability to withdraw and manage everything in a liquid basis as you would with an open-ended fund or are you the kind of typical Venture closed-ended 10-year vehicle um we managed closed-ended funds so we

consider ourselves to be you know Venture thesis in the ways that we invest where we're monotically focused on ownership um we want to be the the lead partner for whatever deal we're in um you know it's something where we want to have a long-term relationship with anyone that we back and and that mentality and that investment philosophy I think is the same philosophy as what you would see from a traditional Venture partner uh traditional Venture fund where we're different to your point is you know you get access to you know according to the Ripple case this new form of asset class called the digital asset earlier than you would with any other uh Venture investment where it's private equity and being able to participate with that use that asset participate in governance stake it you

know help out the ecosystem maybe run validator nodes like whatever is necessary I think that's not necessarily that hard of a sell from an LP perspective because that's what these protocols need and it's it's part of the part of the package that you get when you get an investment from framework is you know we're going to be participatory in any way we possibly can um and and so I think that's becoming very common or commonly understood for from the lp world is like if you're not doing that you're not really crypto native and you may be buying Equity but you also you know really think that the token is going to be worthwhile well that's really kind of where the value will accrue um so I I think that's probably the distinction that I would make between

you know traditional and crypto native Michael what are the main questions that if you think about um you know all of your port code maybe founders of your report codes what are the main questions that they're coming to you with and what what do they need advice on is it kind of tactical like sales marketing or is it like more esoteric like hiring and people management or is it very crypto native like launching tokens token economics it's literally all of the above I think it really just depends on when um you know you make an investment into a seed Stage Company and they've got seven people working there and they're like how do we hire someone who can help us with X Y or Z or how do we find our head of research it's like okay well here's our recruiting partners and like let's dig in and

um or it might be like we're about to launch how do we you know get in front of blockworks or coindesk or you know how do we get our messaging out or how do we craft our messaging like okay talk to Adam on our team he's our comms partner and he's going to help you do that and um I think once you launch The Things become more tactical in nature to what we're talking about where you're staking you're providing governance assistance you're running nodes so like earliest stages look and feel a lot like a typical um startup where you're just helping with like the blocking and tackling of whatever you need to do I'd say the other thing too is like there's just a ton of you know co-founder um you know discussions where you know the other aspect here is if

you're successful in a traditional startup you are you're gonna like try and absorb the world in in terms of power and influence and resources whereas if you're a founder of a protocol you're turning over the keys to the kingdom in a few years and that is a very fundamental shift from a Founder philosophy perspective where you're still going to be pushing things but it's going to be governed by people who you may not even know and you're still going to be like you still have the north star or maybe somebody else takes up the raids and has the North Star in Louisville and that's kind of their goal that transition that different mentality I think is a is another just huge difference um you know I think about like Mark Zuckerberg versus like a Hayden or a

cane like they are fundamentally different in their philosophy on entrepreneurship um and it just it has to be for you to run a protocol versus a company I'll tell you two things that most recently have been top of mind like if I systematically look at like I get pinged by all my portfolio companies it's like the two most frequent things that I'm getting pinged on is one what is macro in the fundraising environment look like for a following because I am running out of capital within three to nine months or 12. and what's your appetite to put more money and who else is out there giving like leading rounds it's very tough fundraising environment um

which brings us like people should go and listen to the discussions we were recorded with avicho and haseeb which the question is would you rather invest in something new or do follow-on some funds just don't do follow ones so I I sometimes do do follow-ups because if you can get out of the same valuation reasonable valuation is much more de-risk like just you know why wouldn't you write um so that's probably the most important one like there's a lot of I think people are fairly nervous of what the fundraising environment is going to look like over the next year or two and your ability to survive um and the second one is um like help me get in front of these l2s that have big Grand programs like they a lot of times they want to

understand where should we deploy which gets us back to like the chain link thing is how important it is because it may not be today it's super important oh should I deploy an optimism or arbitrum or Solana or Avalanche what have you um or polygon and and I think over time that would be less of a relevant I mean it's still going to be an important decision like where should you plant your flag first but I think that will be come less and less important over the next couple of years as it just doesn't really matter where you deploy maybe it's just where whoever gives you the most amount of incentives right or where they use I think that's a great Point Santi one

thing that's very clear right now too is like whatever L1 you choose to build on you're kind of like that type of project you know like you're kind of that type of team in that type of app like if you are building on Solana like that tells me a lot about your character and like who you are if you build on polygon you are a very type different type of person than someone who goes and builds on Solana I wonder if that people talk about culture a lot I mean it's like in my mind culture is something that's way overused and like not properly understood it's like uh going back to like I think it was Mike moritz's book or no it's been hordes it's like culture is what you do not what you say and like yeah okay if you deploy in Salina like I don't read too

much into that candidly like I actually respect the Solana Community a lot it's going through something that the youth Community went uh and not that we need to talk about in this episode but I've just talked to Ben um this week and uh I mean as a result of neon launching and this is neon's like an evm um kind of thing so basically allows you to like run an evm and connect with Solana very easily so again more connectivity among chains is a key narrative and theme um but yeah the Solana Community I've seen some projects leave Solana and then have more success because they deployed in an L2 and ethereum and an evm chain and but I I don't think um if you were to think about how the pendulum has

swung Solano was all the rage when like you know like they had their conference in Lisbon and two years in a row and like of course the FDX kind of um you know gravitas certainly helped it but um and now it's like it just swings in the totally opposite direction which is like this is a dead protocol and it's not going anywhere and it's just uh um but uh look The Saga phone is is is really interesting um I think the D5 ecosystem there is has you know shows signs of resurgence and so you know uh the problem with crypto is people once once you're scarred by something or like you have a say you held Seoul from like whatever it was the all-time high

now it's like down to nine and sold it you don't want to ever like look at it you're even like you get annoyed if you look at the chart and and I think like sometimes like people just really shut themselves out to stop learning about what's happening there and I it's just a I've done it I've fallen in this trap before because it sucks to like constantly like it's like salting your wounds but um yeah all this to say I think we should have another episode talking about the the Solana ecosystem and how these two worlds can converge because you know I know a lot of people just have a very strong view on on not touching Solana and culturally and all this stuff but I'm more pragmatic and I think there's very interesting Innovation there and and the team is

hasn't given up and I think that kind of stuff I Look to that as the most important thing I mean they they've actually taken a lot and Anatoly we've had him on the pot and he said listen I actually welcome a lot of the criticism from the ethereum community because that has allowed us to innovate for instance on on the gas fee model and making it Dynamic and so you know I think um it would be very different if you had someone like Anatoly like not even entertain criticism and just turn a blind eye or even sue people that are like an odds on Twitter which other Protocols are doing but Solana is is open like I think that sort of ethos is also very much the ethereum camp which is it's so early we're gonna have to innovate over time

and if at some point we become rigid in our thinking then someone else is going to innovate out innovate us and out execute us and so I respect that one question's Aussie on that point something that we talk about internally is um or for both of you guys is just like what do you think the overarching overarching um characteristic is that forces one decision to a chain versus another is it the technical is it the cultural is it the financial like I think it depends personally I think it depends on who the who the the developer is and what they're what they're looking for but um it is interesting that all three of those can become the dominant Factor uh depending yeah I would say

um it it depends on the type of protocol um like gaming versus uh just D5 yeah historically it's probably like well in the days of FTX and whatnot like it was a lot of D5 protocols like were deploying on Solana because it was like uh what is the language that they use uh rust right yeah a lot of like you saw new developers that were not like solidity coders just joined the industry because they're really excited you know you heard the narrative and the salon is back by FDX and Jane Street and all that all that stuff kind of like mattered today is different I think um candidly

most people just Deploy on ethereum because that's where most of the activity is most of the users are like there's just a lot of excitement in l2s bass um you know which we haven't really seen the full extent of that but they're they just kind of was it this week that just came out with like uh I was about to say that's the other announcement out of ECC or same timing at least is uh you know based his base I think is available for devnet yeah so that's that cat I think when when you see that when you have bass when you have arbitrome you have optimism and all there's just so much Innovation happening there that candidly nine out of ten just look at that and developers and say we want to be here because this is where the it's buzzing right there's just so much

innovation today right the cultural side yeah yeah and the users too I mean that's where like most of the activity is right it's just a combination of things there have been two things that like in conversations with developers two main things that I feel like people want one is a longevity so you want to be able to build something if you build on a protocol you want that protocol to be around in five ten years from now so that's one thing like one of the big questions I think when people are debating building on arbitrum versus Alana is is arbitrum going to be here in five years is Solana going to be here in five years are these ecosystems that are supported and have longevity and have Lindy and then the next thing is um uh customizability right I think that was the first pre some of these l2s like

that was one of the frustrating things with maybe building on ethl1 is like if you're a developer it feels like some of these key decisions about how you should build your protocol or your exchange or your wallet it feels like some of them have had already been made for you whereas if you built in something like Solana there was more of like an open playground to play in um I think that'll probably change um as you get more like customizability with someone like the op stack and things like that but I think that yeah that was something else and then I think the third bucket is Simplicity right like if you build on again pre like op stack and arbitrim and things like that it was um very complex to build on eth right it's very very complex whereas building building on something like Solana was I mean even though rust is

very difficult programming language it was just easier to to to get started and to hit the ground running I think that changes that bass on op stack I mean Michael lab turn around um two questions maybe one have you ever looked at an investment and learned that the founder is very much gung-ho in deploying in a protocol that you didn't have as much of an interest not just Salon it could be definitely Avalanche whatever did that like tick you off to not make the investment because you read too much internet the quality in the caliber of the founder and two of your entire portfolio what percentage is ethereum-centric hmm

well the first question 100 and not to say that like that is the only Factor but I think to your point it does give you some understanding of the psychology of the founding team um and so if it's already sort of a question of are they crypto native are they you know really understanding the trade-offs here and then you go and choose uh you know out there you know not very widely used protocol then or blockchain then absolutely it just furthers the point but I wouldn't say that we've had anything where I'd say the one thing that we also do is like or have seen is a number of like we're building this on that blockchain which frankly I think that just never really works and historically hasn't you

know been a a real valuable asset um the second question um yeah I mean I think probably if I'm really thinking about it probably like two-thirds ethereum one-third uh maybe like 75 ethereum 25 Solana um and yeah I'd say historically that's been like almost 100 ethereum and and it's definitely changing over time I would say there's also in respect to the like games you know those don't necessarily have uh as

much of a blockchain interaction as you would necessarily need because you know ideally the usages just happen like that's where I think an example of the technology is the overriding factor and not necessarily the cultural side because games have this intention of being net new users or at least I think the really good games have an intention of like we don't we're not going after like the web 3 natives as like our core customer base we're going to hopefully attract some of them but blockchain is really what enables our ownership economy in this game ecosystem it's not something where we need the liquidity the assets everything that you would see with a D5 protocol for instance so games are a little bit different and and definitely have seen more games on Solana um so that's that's where that you know one third one half one quarter comes

from yeah that's just such a good point because some some of my investments like super early stages are agnostic they're like we just don't know we'll make that decision correct down the road when we are ready to pick a partner but for now we're just going to go deep and build the gameplay and the lore and all this stuff um but yeah some of them are even considering launching their own L1 like which is is going to be we've talked about this narrative uh emerging over time but you're going to see more and more of that I think protocols particularly games wanting to own uh the entire stack to you know so but especially especially if you have the connectivity fiber like like with the ccip or layer zero just bring it back to

that then it's just the fact that we're discussing this like we're probably going to look at this and laugh it's like how relevant was this discussion you know certainly from security it does make sense which is why I've decided for something like D5 I think it matters a lot and and you read into why visa for instance chose ethereum like we go back to this I'm not going to read like so much into that but I think security begets liquidity which improves security and in that virtuous cycle is what has made ethereum D5 just just the most battle tested and um and when you're you need you need the Lindy of of ethereum um to just feel comfortable transacting in in a defy environment right if you're

a game then I understand like you're you're a consumer application where you can loosen some of these constraints but with defy I think uh for me it's just it's hard to to make investments like Solana yeah but like even then like I think just ethereum is just so far in a way just proven and battle tested that it just makes the case for the the interaction that you have the composability that you get I mean all those things just do matter a lot right what one additional fact and actually you know now that I think about it there's definitely applications that we've invested in that haven't launched yet I would say that the way that that percentage will change is that Avalanche

will be kind of the third um and in a lot of ways um the way that those applications in particular will interact is that they're by default going to be multi-chain just for different aspects of the application where like a matching engine or something that's more computationally intensive is going to live on the Avalanche platform but the actual assets themselves will live on ethereum and frankly a lot of those are also Reliant upon the eventual launch of ccip and have been for the last two years so like that's another case in point for why you know ccip becomes powerful is because you don't necessarily have to just be wedded a single application doesn't have to be wedded to a single blockchain um if you know the the vision of layer 0

or ccip is realized where you can have the user experience on one chain and you know you can leverage other abilities technical abilities or or cultural abilities of a blockchain to do other aspects of it yeah what else on the Block Yano to talk about I mean there's just a couple of notches the last thing I found interesting I mean very related to this conversation was uh cello so Cello's in L1 and they announced that they were um yeah proposal to convert into an ethereum L2 which is I think um I think a pretty interesting strategy that I think is you'll probably see more of right I

think whether there's a bunch of different reasons to do it but I think at the end of the day like you talk to some of these l1s and they they come to realize that securing a network of nodes is really freaking hard and capital intensive and time consuming and just not worth the mental bandwidth to focus on so instead like they're turning to ethereum right which is like Santi mentioned like the most Lindy and the most robust option and it offers ethereum is basically becoming like security as a service for all of these for them to post call data and to settle value to and I think uh I think it makes a lot of sense for cello [Music] um look I mean I still remember having a lot of these discussions and when you saw the the L1 kind of crop up like popcorn

and it was just one of those things where it felt like the incentives were there and I understand to go and launch your L1 competing L1 it was just it it just is there like uh and we talk about incentives a lot in crypto but like if you're a developer there's a lot of big incentives to just launcher L1 just the nature of the game and ethereum for a while it really sucked to see that because you're like all this brain power and it's distracting but you sort of take a look it's open competition it's open source like it's just you got to let it run its course and eventually I think you're coming back to this realization where projects realize like yeah it's really tough like there's

crickets and all these l1s and so any chance of getting remote activities this is to bring come back to ethereum um so it's just sort of um but for a while it just felt like you know everyone and their mother was launching an L1 because it was like you know just more financially lucrative to do that than work at the ethereum foundation I mean it's just it is what it is right I mean I'm just going to call it as I see it like it it just made if you're not to pick on any particular competing L1 but yeah do you think that that'll continue with an equivalent popcorn of l2s yeah yeah oh yeah big time I I literally uh every

week I get pitch another L2 which is not a bad thing I mean like look I'm I'm a big believer in free markets and open competition and I think it sucks from the perspective of uh entrepreneur because a lot of times it just fork and do your stuff but look the op stack I think they're pretty open from a philosophical standpoint I mean it's like okay like you know I I respect that and I think um you just sort of Welcome ruthless competition um now maybe question to you Michael is like are you does that bother you that there's like a world where there's like hundreds of l2s does it even matter if you have good connectivity between them well I I think what you're assuming is

that you're completing on you're competing on the same plane uh with every other L2 which would be an execution environment whereas I think that there's an element of if you have a differentiated product or service an L2 strategy is really just becoming your new business strategy and and so I I think we're talking about execution environments it's gonna be really hard to displace the existing incumbents unless you have an existing or differentiated existing user base or differentiated Edge what I do think is the case is you know you've got a truly differentiated product or service instead of building this as a smart contract platform on top of an in execution environment it may make sense to have your own L2 maybe not your own L1 in that you know middle of the stack

is probably a better fit but so that yeah I'd say you know L2 has a business strategy for things that are differentiated is probably where we would gravitate towards but if it's just going to be the same plane of competition it's going to be tough yeah but let me ask you a question because I'm not as technically well versed to think about this but I I'll ask the question because and then I'll think about it but it's sort of what are the design [Music] choices that allow like if you're launching your L2 say that you're a game right or whatever dydx before it went to Cosmos like if you want to launch your L2 like why what's a trade-off from a Founder's

perspective saying I'm going to deploy an arbitrum versus no I want to launch my own like Fork of optimism like what are the [Music] like what's the benefit of launching your own L2 versus deploying on arbitrary or optimism or base well validator set right yep think about decentralizing the sequencer but like yeah look there's espresso and a bunch of other folks that you can partner with me but it's it's more of a technical like you then have to from an internal team resource perspective you have to expend energy in thinking about all of that versus just focusing on your core product and competency totally

um I think what you enable are a couple of things yes it's it's much more heavy heavy lifting you have to be able to build the technology and the infrastructure to where you're supporting not only just an application set but a validator set to secure and manage that entire ecosystem what you get to control is a lot of the economy of that digital asset um which I think has a lot of really strong elements especially when it comes to infrastructure services so computational Services I think is a prime example of this if you're building sort of an application I don't think it necessarily makes sense for you to to be your own L2 now for instance if you're you know a game and you've got three or four different games and you've got a

bunch of Technology that's underpinning that game that's native to the damn ecosystem maybe it does make sense but so I would say being able to control the economy being able to control the the technology it comes with pros and cons but I would say that's probably the biggest architectural difference um you just have to have a justifiable reason why you need to control those aspects otherwise it just feels like you're launching an L2 to have a token yeah that's a good point Jens good chat yeah it was pretty good yeah Michael uh well a question any of you guys uh have managed or have are going to see

openheimer or Barbie and in what order I've got uh back to back oh same day same day my my uh my girlfriend has a has a knack for falling asleep in movies so we're gonna go see Oppenheimer at like 10 30 in the morning and then uh Barbie after that is that is that a bear Market thing because I heard tickets before noon are cheaper man like [Laughter] I love this philosophy okay so Oppenheimer in the morning and then bars in the afternoon I mean listen I think

Rotten Tomatoes solo you'll be going to another movie alone I'm assuming dude it's like impossible but sure you think um it's hear me dead I think Oppenheimer got 96 on Rotten Tomatoes and Barbie has 93 so Hollywood is back I gotta say there was like two years during covet where you needed it the most there was like no good movies now mission mission impossible was pretty good like you know I yeah I hate to break it to you Santi but it always has like a one to two year time lag but we're about to hit another dead spot with this uh with the strike well hopefully by then crypto will

deliver it's yeah we'll be okay from the markets in 2014 and 2015. that'll be good yeah by then the FDX movie will come out you know it's like oh man well that's the other thing did you know that Michael Lewis is set to launch his book uh two days before the FTX uh uh SPF uh trial is supposed to be yeah oh really yeah genius wow Bradley Dale uh launched his his book I I got it I haven't gone to it but uh yeah that's gonna be exciting that was a crazy quick turnaround for that book I was like I was like uh he must have been working on some background information I mean he was

traveling with him I know and but he must have been riding simultaneously but to get a book published in like nine months is that I didn't think that was probably changed the title of the book and the things like oh wait a minute the last last couple chapters are new yeah amended yeah guys great discussion you guys did well all right all right thanks for listening folks see you guys next week [Music]