Accelerating Interoperability: Unleashing the Power of Speed in Cross-Chain Swaps

Transcript

[Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you hello okay cool thank you uh thank you everyone for coming today I'm going to be talking about speed more specifically about speed for cross train um but I'm going to detour a little bit first because speed is a pretty interesting topic and very important in this incredibly instant world that we live in so first of all my name is Christina I'm one of the co-founders of squid

um and here we go so when I first started going to conferences in 2018 there was this huge thing everyone was always talking about which was the trilemma it's like how do we solve for scalable fast and secure systems and to this day and age like we've done a pretty good job at it the problem is is that we've solved for it in different ways and by that we've created a new problem so we have secure systems but they're not necessarily that good at talking to each other in a fast way but we're we're getting close we're getting pretty close especially with what we've built but I'll get to that later so before I get into speed I'm going to

do a swift detour so most of you probably heard about Swift so what Swift really is it's a messaging Network that connects all the financial or most of the financial institutions in the world um 11 000 of them in fact and it processes one point well I wrote it here 1.7 trillion um in US dollar value every day on average of course it's like greatly various but what's pretty crazy is that it's a EU compliant Network that is governed by the majority of the western central banks and it holds the power to censor and control entire National economies

individuals and institutions which really is like the epitome of um censorship so just a little note on financial censorship before we go into speed and no so what I was going to say as well is that even though this holds this much power they're still not able to do anything faster than one to five business days unless you are incredibly Capital intensive player with a trusted counterparty so it goes without saying how that works so back to back to crypto which of course is a fantastic tool to to counteract a player like this

um and why is it so hard for us to create fast or like not create speed but do things that are really really fast well it's because it comes at the cost of security so blockchains are not designed to be fast they're designed to be secure and the more players and the more stakeholders arguably the more validators you have it gets hard to do things fast you know you always have the ability to do something fast if you just reduce the amount of um we reduce the amount of players for example you can have five validators or you know what someone will call a server and it's very easy to do things fast but as you've all probably seen this comes

at the cost of security and time on time on time people compromise on this because there is so much Capital there's so many users to be one and it's just not a long-term solution for obvious reasons and like I said earlier you can also enable this by having trusted counterparties and yeah just not having um design principles that are not on par with what we're trying to build but overall you guys have probably tried to use the early bridging Solutions and it's like when does your funds arrive you don't really know it could be an hour could be never um time will tell but overall the

uncertainty that that introduces may be okay for some hardcore Believers but if we're going to reach the adoption that we want and need like you can't have those kind of delay times it's completely insane um and also for businesses the opportunity cost of capital and individuals of course is incredibly important to think about if we're going to build for sophisticated use cases um you can't take more than like milliseconds really but we'll get to that so just a little note on the state of speed typically the more secure um the longer it takes right so to this right now so squid for example we're

connected to 44 chains and the average is around 20 minutes but that is before Squid's speed boost so squid speed boost is a new feature that we've developed alongside axler um and it gets all transactions down to less than 20 seconds we do have some transactions down to one second and we are working on the ability to actually get them even lower than that but on average it's around 11. and importantly as well this all happens in one click which is a huge ux Improvement and super exciting so how this actually works so first of all it's an overlay to axler's General message passing which squid uses

and it consists of smart contracts and a off-chain relay service so when you as a user um you want to do a swap from source and destination chain when your swap is picked up there is a back-end relayer service that fulfills a transaction on your behalf on the destination chain it's really cool because that means that they also take on the risk and it's even more secure meaning that we've achieved Speed without compromising on security and if for some reason which you know there can be plenty this fails it will just go back to the normal and standard process so we've just launched this and initially it's built with one service

provider that's white listed but this can be expanded over time and decentralized further so this actually means on average that it's a 60x Improvement in some instances it's a thousand X Improvement and I think this really opens the door for um not just innovating on what we've already done but like a lot of new use cases um as you guys probably can imagine if you're on Twitter and it takes 10 minutes for your Tweet to upload or even for someone to see someone else's tweet you're never going to open that up ever again so this will not only lead to new users but

hopefully more attention and overall percent a really big ux unlock to commemorate this fantastic thing we've just launched the squid boost squid speed boost Grand Prix which is a two-week competition where we are going to Crown the fastest Whopper the swapper that has saved the most time the one on the leaderboard right now is already saved five days and in total we've save like 520 days which is amazing um and everyone can join and you can win merch money and that's it and here's my Twitter our Discord and the link to the speed boost grand for you

thank you so much [Applause] anybody has a question very clear yep um just a quick question about the reliability of the speed you said less than 20 seconds does that mean for all you or there's some fringes that are longer because I think we discussed just just earlier how hard it is when there's like very little on the upper bound do you have like a cap on this so it's always less than 20 seconds because that's dependent on the smart contracts and and the service provider and they

can always fulfill it in less than 20. and that's the Max and on average it's 10 to 12. thank you foreign [Music]