Cross-Chain Composable Apps with Arjun Bhuptani of Connext

Transcript

what's up and we're live welcome to the interop this show is all about exploring the decentralized economic networks that make up the inner chain and my hope is that my listeners will gain a better understanding of the topology of these networks the technologies that make them possible and the opportunities that provides to investors and developers on step 3.0 today I'm with Arjun bhuptani who's the Project Lead at connectst hey are you thanks thanks for having me Seth how you doing good good it's great to have you on it's great to connect again uh before we get started though I'd like to say you know if you'd like to stay up to date and get alerted with each new live stream that do we do here on the interop make sure to subscribe and be sure to hit the like button because that makes me happy also

if you'd like to support this podcast you can stake with interop we're currently live on evmos and we're adding new validators soon and you'll find links to that down in the show notes with that out of the way uh yeah thanks for coming on and I'm really excited to talk about connects um you know I think when we last met it was in Amsterdam we're at a dinner and I was like I want to get you on the podcast and I want to get like all the other Bridges and so far I think we've had three so we're on our way to getting to you know having like all the bridges uh on the podcast but um having to get you on uh uh now so we can talk about uh connects and how how it's Unique sort of in this you know in

this broader Bridge landscape absolutely cool so yeah you know for for listeners are not familiar uh uh tell us a bit about your background and like how you became to be Project Lead at connect yeah um uh let's see um I have a background in physics uh I started in crypto at specifically building on top like infrastructure on top of ethereum in like 2016. um I was just really interested at the time in like um basically public infrastructure building infrastructure like the internet that is not like owned by companies or owned by governments um but it's still like globally accessible to everybody um I think ethereum was like the first instance that I've ever seen of like a

platform that enabled that and I thought that that I still think that that's like an incredibly powerful primitive um that will help to just like radically change the way that the types of like power structures that exist in the world today um uh and uh and I ended up starting connects because and you know as a result of working in the space for like a year and just uh mostly just in 20 of 2016 so nobody really had any uh anything real at the time it was basically just like all theoretical stuff and people experimenting it was a really really exciting time um and as a result of that time I kind of got a lot of conviction around ethereum and uh and around blockchains in general and um and became convinced that like really like I needed to do something in this space and and so we we

started connecting with this idea of like let's figure out how to build bring this technology to a billion users um very broad Mission um uh but very it's interesting because that broad Mission led us to a very very specific problem pretty much immediately which was scalability uh because like the number one thing that we would hit whenever we talked of anybody in the space was just like oh it cost forty dollars to admit this like nft ticket and like and you know that's obviously never going to work for any user um and so we uh connection ended up becoming one of the first like layer two projects on ethereum we built the first we actually built the first actual Layer Two on ethereum um it was a state child network in partnership with bank chain um we were one of the first like r d

teams working on scalability alongside folks like Matic um Loom at the time which is another plasma project um uh omisego uh and and all the people spun out from that and ended up starting optimism um and and uh like a handful of other researchers that were just around early and really curious about these problems um we've obviously come a long way since then and we've also pivoted a little bit from scalability to interrupt you're dropping some mad 2017 ethereum names here you know like spank chain and uh and all these projects that um you know sort of have fizzled out of I think like the the Limelight of Limelight yeah of ethereum

um no that's cool I didn't realize that you know you guys have been working on this stuff so you know so so for so long and that connects at you know this uh this history that spanned back to the the last uh the last uh cycle um you know it when it comes to you know the ethereum space and you know the the expansion of that ecosystem in the last couple years you know with like all these Roll-Ups and now like all these evm chains I was looking at the connects Bridge website earlier and just scrolling through like the list of all these evm chains um yo can you can you describe what this

means to you in terms of like the maturity of the ecosystem is it are we going towards an ecosystem that will have tons of EVMS or is this a trend that will eventually end up shrinking back to maybe like a few core uh chains or you know or do you think this is heading more in the long term yeah that's a really good question um so back in 2020 we developed we pivoted into bridging because we developed this hypothesis that there were just too many too many of our friends that were like research teams were building Roll-Ups like optimism arbitrones guitar and they were they were all extremely extremely high quality teams that were backed by

extremely extremely high quality investors and like it just to us it seemed like absolutely impossible that we just didn't end up with heterogeneity and fragmentation right and uh and honestly that made sense like it it's like having everything happen on a single roll-up or a single execution layer just doesn't make sense for the scalability of ethereum um and uh and it doesn't make sense for the scalability of blockchains in general um I think what we've the ecosystem is sort of heading towards now is this is this idea of like modular blockchain so basically separating out the core pieces of the of like what comprises a blockchain into the individual kind of layers of of value um uh and and modularizing them and packaging up them up and kind of making

them interoperable and swappable with each other so you have things like data availability layers like you know Celestia polygon Avail Etc sediment layers like ethereum and then execution layers like optimism arbitrum Etc um I think right now like you know over the course of the the bull market obviously there was just like a ton of people that entered into the space and and so we saw this like rapid expansion and it became really like it was a very easy Playbook uh if you were starting a project there was like a period of golden window where it was a very easy Playbook to just like start a change because the like it was polygon had gone and like already figured out exactly the right way to do that you could just copy paste their model and as long as you

executed well you could scale like an ecosystem on top of your chain and then that would accrue a lot of value to your token and I think a lot of people realize like okay we can actually move to this kind of world now of course you know uh everything is down uh like usage in this entire space is drunk like nobody's really using any applications anymore and that's that's to be expected because it's a bear market and capital is drunk but like because of that I think um we're starting to see a little bit of a consolidation so a lot of the ones a lot of the chains that didn't end up like kind of hitting that exit velocity have now sort of are starting to like fizzle out or probably will fizzle out eventually but I don't think that that idea is gone and I think like what this

Market has sort of shown us is like there is a need for moving to multiple different execution environments like we need that from a scalability perspective and this is obviously a core part of the cosmos thesis too and then in addition to that we we also probably now need to do a better job of making sure like people people sort of now need to do a better job of like understanding like which chains are actually high value which ones are low value which ones are going to actually have the staying power my thesis is every single major roll-up brand or chain brand is going to self-fragment into many many different chains they're all going to build their own modular layers um so like ZK sync is going to be a build a DA layer starkware is going to build a DNA layer polygon is building a

DA layer arbitrary and optimism we're going to do the exact same thing and then they are all going to roll out multiple execution environments because ultimately it's their brand that matters right and like the defensibility around building a single Roll Up is really just not very high um so yes I think the ultimate outcome is like we'll end up in kind of a hybrid state where it's like we'll have a lot of different chains a lot of you know different chain like experiences that'll be out there and they'll be heterogeneous it'll be kind of cool but the number of Brands may not actually be as high as as people think like there will be like a set of arbitrary change a set of optimism change instead of Z casing chains Etc yeah I I have a similar I guess my view like where the ecosystem is going in the

next few years is a similar one where I think that you know there was a proliferation say oh the last the last um cycle was a proliferation in defy experimentation mostly on ethereum and now what we're seeing is like a proliferation of uh chains um with their own ecosystems only the core difference and how things were done previously and how things were done now is now every ecosystem will be a data availability layer and um Sovereign Roll-Ups will uh will you know that um verify the state uh back on on that date available there and that I think

that's really the play for the next cycle and at the end of the cycle we'll see who um you know have become sort of the winners of that uh of that competition and yeah obviously like ethereum has and you know ethereum after the merge like has a strong chance of of being one of the strong players there you know we have platforms like Celestia are also playing in this in this field then there's things that are a little bit uh not so clear right because it's like I mean it's it's like a different uh Paradigm and it's it's difficult to see how it'll interplay with that so things like like Bitcoin right like how will

Bitcoin you know fit in this broader paradigm should it actually fit with it um things like Solana right yeah I think they're sort of on the out on the periphery of like this vision and then to some extent you know the Sovereign Cosmos SDK chain right like any any Sovereign Cosmos the CK chain that operates with its own validator set will that design the protocol design stack and security um uh design um continue to be relevant and continue to work into the future where uh you know they'll be competing against you know daily High data availability uh protocols so yeah it's yeah it's gonna

be as soon as you help like that over the next couple years but one thing that is certain is that like interoperability between all of these things is going to be super super important and that brings you you know that brings us to our conversation here um you know one of the things I wanted to ask you is you know on your website it says that you're building the internet of ethereum uh which I thought was interesting because you know in in Cosmos we always talk about the internet of blockchains so what is the internet of ethereum and how is it different from like the internet of blockchains uh Cosmos it's really not I think it's uh it's basically just a it's like a mental model that we've seen like kind of resonated with a lot of people like

you know building on top of interacting with ethereum based blockchains that like um makes sense and to be honest I really think like the cosmos internet or blockchain vision is the right Vision right it's and like I think like multiple different organizations and projects have approached it from different directions and like we're trying to approach it from our own direction as well now of course that's the sentence right there is going to make a great clip by the way yeah I I mean I think it's like it is it's when you have a bunch of different individual teams like you know an organizations the institutions like ecosystems finding like the same solution from different directions that means it's the right solution right like we are we are heading towards the global optimal which will be something cosmos-like right that like you know everybody initially

thought was going to be either a monolithic chain or something that was basically like a bunch of shards that were cross-linking but really it's going to be like a bunch of modular execution layers that are going to end up interacting with each other in very similar way to like how Cosmos Works um and uh and so I think like I think it makes sense um I I think like we've specified ethereum just because at the moment we're focused on evm chains um that's a matter of just like pragmatism it's we don't want to stretch ourselves too thin and like we we want to like try to corner a market that make like really we know well and we we already operate in but we have a I personally have like a lot of love for Cosmos I have always thought it was a very very amazing

ecosystem and like you know my goal is to to work with a cosmos ecosystem eventually no matter what so um yeah I think eventually like we will have this like heterogeneous network of chains that will be uh that will be its own kind of Internet yeah I think I think we're relying on that um and not not surprisingly um what's what's unique about building bridges on evm chains I think like a lot of people that are listening to this podcast perhaps are more familiar with like the particularities of Cosmos and the um yeah things IBC work yeah and so what is particular about building on evm

chains and you know I think in that question is what is particular about building bridges to and from version one ethereum um yeah yeah um so I think um maybe before jumping into that let me give it a little bit of a just like a quick overview of the different kinds of bridges that are out there so in that way people get an understanding of like what options were even on the table to begin with so so like uh and like what the trade-offs are of those different options like how they work the way that they work why they work the way that they work um I think the one that I most people are very very familiar with now and and is still absolutely terrifying to me is multisig Bridges so some sort of like M of n mechanism where you have um you know at the worst case it's like

a single custodial actor that is relaying data across chains um and then you know can kind of be like a multi-sig NPC system that is like a sub like five of seven or whatever um and then scale up to something like axlr which has like a you know like a permissionless uh Cosmos chain and like that validator set is now like relaying data um and of course these things have like incrementally more more security but there are still like upper theoretical Opera limitations to like the security that you get out of that because um you know you're you're effectively trusting the security of some intermediate set of actors and like that intermediate set of actors has not just the ability like unlike with the blockchain where you can you you know if you have a controlling stake you could censor the chain

um or you could Fork it but you can't actually like steal people's funds people just Fork away um with with the with a bridge like that bridge is effectively an oracle between two systems right so if you if you control a majority stake you can produce invalid updates and those invalid updates can be used to steal funds so to us it seems like even if you can say all right like the economic security provided by you know a permissionless validator set is is pretty awesome because you know it works for Cosmos and like for a bunch of Cosmos chains and it works for ethereum and a bunch of ethereum chains we think that the added risk of the fact that you can actually steal fronts from the system simply by being that middle middle actor makes those kinds of bridges more trusted right there's a trust assumption there

um but of course they're easier to build way easier to build way easier to deploy places and they let you do basically whatever you want right you could send any kind of message through them um now the the other ones are ones that I think people are less familiar with so so IBC is probably like extremely well known in Cosmos because it is a fantastic um option and fantastic ecosystem IVC relies on like client header verification so what you do is you basically have two chains uh verify the consensus of each other and because they're verifying the consensus of each other you know that an update is valid because the uh the entire uh validator set of this chain came to consensus that the consensus of the other chain was correct um so it's a way for chains to natively

talk to each other it's extremely extremely powerful tool um of course it's also very very trust minimized because you know in order to fool the system you have to actually compromise an entire chain um and so like you're not adding any additional assumptions beyond the ones that you'd already be making however the downside to something like IBC is IBC works really really well between chains that are exactly the same and I have the same consensus mechanism IBC is balloons in complexity when you start dealing with things that have different kinds of consensus mechanisms and in many cases you actually can't prove consensus on chain so like for example um you know ethereum epow is extremely I mean you can you can kind of do it with their own entrepreneurs it's still extremely expensive it is

extraordinarily expensive to try to prove ethereum l1's consensus on chain right now and that's because blockchains went through this really annoying phase where like they try to be memory hard basically have like memory hard consensus algorithms in order to have basic resistance it didn't work at all it's a terrible idea but as a result of that it's very very different difficult to build like clients of ethereum right now um and so because it's difficult to build like flights of ethereum it's very it's even more difficult to put those like clients on chain and then it gets even weirder after that so it's like you know that's that's how you can think about something like ethereum but then what about Roll-Ups running on top of ethereum um how do you prove how do you build a like client to a ZK roll up that is sitting on another chain it's a kind of

an open question um how do you have like client-based communication between optimistic rollups well you can't because with an optimistic rollup you have rollback risk so now there is a you know you could send a message across chains but there is a risk that at some point within the next seven days that that entire roll-up is going to be rolled back and then like everything that was in that message is completely wrong um so I think the the kind of key issue that comes into play with like clients outside of Cosmos is that the surface area that you now have to think about the complexity of implementation that you don't have to think about is much higher you have to go build custom implementations for every new kind of consensus consensus algorithm not only is that a ton of engineering effort and research effort but also it massively

increases your likelihood of actually having a bug right because you're having to write a [ __ ] ton more code and audit a [ __ ] ton more code all the time and one bug anywhere in that system can Ripple out to other chains very very easily because of like the inherent contagion risk of bridges um no I I have a uh I've talked a bit about like locally verified systems that's things like Atomic swaps but I'm starting to to think more and more that those don't really count as like Bridges because what they're effectively doing is like swapping assets on one chain for another right you're not actually having like native communication um and so if we if we kind of lead that to the side for now the only the last type of bridge is optimistic Bridges um and that's that's kind of what Nomad had

been working on and now I think a lot of other projects have gotten optimistic Bridge peeled because we've been chilling them a lot um and so they're pivoting into the optimistic model as well and optimistic bridges are like very like similar kind of core concept it's they're sort of like you can think of like light clients as like ZK roll ups um and other validity proof systems and then optimistic Bridges is like optimistic Roll-Ups um we're in an optimistic Bridge you know you you it lives entirely on top of the execution layers really really easy to build um it's fairly trust minimized very actually very trust and wise it gives you pretty good very very like good trust assumptions uh in practice but uh the trade-off is there's latency because you you send a message across chains and now you have a set of Watchers that are

like watching to see if fraud has occurred and so every message takes 30 minutes so the the kind of takeaway here is like there is trade-offs to every approach um and uh and the the the trade-offs are magnified in ethereum because on ethereum it's just already become this very like heterogeneous muddled uh ecosystem where there's a lot of different kinds of chains and different kinds of execution environments yeah no I think that about sums it up and I wanted to come back to to the the different types of bridges and you guys have a great post on your on your blog where you walk through like this natively verified uh which you which you described earlier and is what IBC does where you have like one chain verifying

another chain externally verified where you have uh essentially you know a group of actors that is um through a multi-sig or through some sort of like orchestration mechanism verifying each chain and then passing messages so like a simple example of this would be a multi-cig a a more complex example would be a set of validators something like axlr um and then we have locally verified and the connects falls into this category but I I guess when I was reading the post like it wasn't it's obvious obvious to me how natively verified and locally verified actually are are different at a practical level so like yeah went on

chain what is actually happening and what is performing the verification yeah so this is one of the reasons why I was kind of saying I I sort of moving away from the model where I consider locally verified systems Bridges rather than just like liquidity networks um and like mechanisms to get tokens across chains um and the reason is that it so what's happening in a locally verified systems examples of this are like Atomic swaps or things like hop right where what you have is you have an actor that has liquidity on one chain uh and and liquidity on another chain and like you send liquidity over here and then they send the query over here and that can happen through whatever mechanism but you can actually keep that fairly trust minimized what you're doing as a user is you have a one-to-one relationship with this actor and because

you have a one-to-one relationship you can swap assets with them without ever interacting with the rest of the chains the rest of the chain doesn't even really need to care that this happened they're just like oh this person just sent a transaction from the perspective of the chain is just like a normal transfer right um this is of course different than a like client-based system because in a like client-based system you actually have like fully expressive communication you're not just like oh I'm it's not just like oh I'm interacting with a counterparty to do like something where the counterparty and I can just just like negotiate some agreement to do something um there's an entire different set of use cases which are generalized and I can get into those in a second but an entirely different set of use cases which are generalized that can only be

done if like one chain is actually able to prove messages to another chain um and that's kind of outside of the scope of locally verified systems because you're sort of saying we don't need to prove anything if like you and I can just negotiate something between the two of us now where does that difference lie that's actually really really interesting thing that like I think we have explored quite a bit because we really want to like push the limits of of locally verified systems as much as we could um and I don't think a lot of people have as good of an intuition about um and what we found is like if you take like a range of use cases right so for example let's say you are this is an ethereum based example but I guess it can work on osmosis too so say

you want to like swap on osmosis um and but Urus are another chain that can happen in using a locally verified system and the reason that that can happen is because you know what I can do with usab is I can you know you want to swap um usdc to osmo I can basically just pay you I can I can put up some funds and say here is a hundred dollars worth of usdc if you go swap 97 worth of usdc into osmo and send the osmo to me and that 100 100 usdc is locked in escrow until you actually send that transaction to me and what I've basically done is I've done cross chain communication right like I have off chain interacted that you negotiated this agreement you have done this transaction on my behalf and paid me the reason that that works is because the swap function on osmosis

is on permission it's basically an unauthenticated function anybody can call that anybody can do a swap and so it's totally okay for some service provider to do it on your behalf and you can encode on chain that they do this in a way that's like where you can enforce that they will actually pay out the funds to you however let's take a slightly different use case say osmosis needs to go through a governance upgrade um and so now this is a function this is something that is happening as part of Osmosis System that only governance can actually enact it can only be enacted through a certain set of permissioned actors and now imagine I mean I guess this isn't exactly this is kind of where the analogy breaks down and works a lot better with you as well but say for example like this permission function is

uh is actually being enacted by a group of actors that are on a different chain so like some group of five multi-sig owners are the ones that are making this update on on osmosis and um and they need to make it they need to send a cross chain message from whatever chain they're on to osmosis to upgrade the system um how do how do the osmosis how does the osmosis chain know that the message came from those five actors um because this is an authenticated call they need to prove that it came from those five actors and the only way to do that is to actually prove that that was included in the in the other chain um you could there's no possible way for those five actors to pay a service provider to do it on their behalf

because if they paid a service right or do it on their behalf that service writer could just do an upgrade whenever they wanted and there's no also no way for the Five actors to I mean maybe they could have like a ring signature or something like that collectively like sign a threshold signature but it's a little bit of like a custom use case imagine if you scale this up to like a you know a governance system of tens of thousands of participants obviously at that point there's no way for them to come up with any kind of cryptographic proof that would actually prove across chains that this was supposed to happen um so that's actually where all of this stuff hinges on like the the core thing that any bridge is trying to do is is to figure out a way to have one chain prove

to another chain that something happened and that's it easy easy right it's very difficult to do in practice but yeah just yeah we can just hire some guy to do it yeah yeah if chains could sign messages themselves this would not be a problem like if if we had the cryptography if we could just invent the cryptography to do this bridging would just disappear overnight yeah what what makes so so um I guess for like I I I I I mean I feel like there's a a little bit of um Bridge bridges are getting a bad rap you know um you know and we're in the trough of disillusion meant for Bridges right now

yeah there's um so anything that well I think there's so a few things one is what is what is what what a bridge is I think gets just uh put under one umbrella right so all these different Technologies sort of get put under the same like this is a bridge right without this without um uh differentiating what is natively verified externally verified what's a multi-sig what's just some guidance basement and like what's locally verified Etc uh optimistic Etc um then what happens is you know Bridges get hacked as has been the case and you know most recently we'll talk about like Nomad was hacked

um and people lost funds I lost funds uh yeah and so um and then there's like this mistrust of anything that gets labeled a bridge so how can people make better decisions about what technologies to use and I guess you know one big question that I'm sure you guys have thought about this is how do you instill trust in people to use your Tech when no one most people that use it I guess maybe don't know how it works or you know like most people using Axel are like probably have no idea no idea how it actually works right

yeah I mean to be fair I think most people are using the next how it works yeah exactly yeah um yeah I mean I think um it's it's difficult so I think you're totally right we're like in a period right now where we've I think we've like we're getting close to hitting like bottom sentiment Four Bridges and I think it's been like a series of ever increasingly like just ever increasing amount of tax right like uh you know like when the 300 million dollar Wormhole hack happened I was like all right [ __ ] this is this is it like this is this is basically like people are just gonna hate Bridges now and then and then we topped that with the like 650 million Ronin hack and like the funds weren't even returned from that so it was just like it was like

that was already just such a bad thing and I think the one thing that was kind of like pushing helping the bridge narrative along was this idea that like okay well we can have safe Bridges like here is Nomad as an example of a really really safe bridge and then Nomad got hacked too and like I think it just goes to show that like this stuff is really [ __ ] hard it is um like blockchains themselves are really really difficult to build but if you think about it every single blockchain like basically every single blockchain that has been built has has has effectively at some point like at least like intellectually been a fork of Bitcoin right so we've had like Bitcoin like created blueprint and then people just Fork the [ __ ] out of it and then it's like evolved over time and like every

every change has been like incremental on top of something that already existed whereas with Bridges it's it's not like that at all it's like fully from scratch we are trying to figure out how how to think about these problems from the get-go without any sort of context on like the right way to do them and and build them right so you the the scope of risk is higher in addition to that I think like there's also like a big difference like of course there's like the economic security Bridges so you have you know the the economic security out of a five out of seven multisig is obviously really [ __ ] terrible right um The Economic Security of you know uh layer Zero's relay Oracle system is really really really not great um but at the same time the you also

have implementation security and that's that's the other piece that I think is like really really under underestimated and appreciated which is like the vast majority of bridge hacks are not happening I mean they will eventually happen because of like economic attacks and stuff like that but right now they're happening because of like bugs in the code um and unlike with you know a chain in you know in a chain like you'll have like a like cons like a consensus failure but you can restart the chain you can roll back and restart the chain you can't do that with a bridge like once once a bridge gets hacked attacked there's nothing you can really do about it um so I think the stakes are just far far higher um yeah now how do we actually get to the point where people trust this stuff I think in general there needs to be a

much much larger conversation about security for Bridges um we are now trying to we're we've done a bunch of analysis on this and we're about we're like trying to publish a lot of this work that we've been doing um Lane one of my co-founders gave a talk at um at Stanford last week um about Bridge security which just like breaks down the different kinds of like basically like the security surface area of cross-train communication in general um and and then also talks about like well why do we even why do we even need this in the first place right like do we do we actually need this stuff and the reality is we do like there's no way for us to if we want this this ecosystem to succeed we have to figure this problem out we have to like there's like single blockchains just don't scale they just

don't um and there's no point in having a bunch of single blockchains that don't talk to each other um and so and then and so like I think I think the answer is going to come down to a bunch of different things there's going to be the economic security pieces which we've been harping on a lot um I think in general British are going to have to start holding themselves to a much higher standard in terms of Economic Security like no more like five out of seven multi-cigs no more situations where like you are storing a bunch of keys on a server somewhere that can get hacked that's [ __ ] terrible like it just cannot happen like if you if you're like an early stage Bridge like it it might make sense but if you have hundreds of millions of dollars that is like you wouldn't put hundreds

of millions of dollars into like a five out of seven multi-sig that like you're putting like on your own computer that doesn't make any sense either like where the keys are just like stored on your computer um that's terrifying um and so it doesn't make sense to have that be like the mo for Bridges and uh and I think like optimistic bridges are still like the right way to move forward there because you can turn any multi-sig Bridge into an optimistic Bridge very very easily and like it's not it's like in any like obviously that provides competition for us when you do that but I'm advocating for it because it's just better for the industry um and then beyond that there's like the implementation risk and I think like implementation wise every single bridge now needs to move towards a pattern where they just Implement like a set of

standards that we're actually trying we're like um thinking about doing this we've talked to a few people about it polygon has also expressed interest in doing this but basically building like a bridge security framework that is just a set of libraries on in on ethereum um that every single Bridge can inherit and then maybe porting that over to other ecosystems too and those libraries are like heavily heavily audited very standardized and they just provide some core functionality that every single Bridge needs for security and that will be things like rate limits right uh it should not be possible to exit more than like let's say five ten percent of the funds on a bridge of sufficient size within a certain number of blocks that just doesn't make sense right like if if that's happening it's probably a hack and you should just halt immediately so

any situation where that happens the bridge should just halt um having Watchers even if you're not an optimistic Bridge just having a system where like you can have a decentralized set of actors just stop the system because they saw something go wrong um having like even just basic like disconnections um like being able to like limit contagion Risk by basically saying like Okay this chain has gotten hacked you know a chained off 51 attack let's uh cordon off that Chain by disconnecting all the bridges that interact with it so now at least there's like no outflow of funds from there and having that be built into every bridge system because a lot of systems don't even have that right now they can't they don't have the granular control to say okay this system is just going to get shut off or this chain is just chain

support it's just going to get shut off yeah um I think those kinds of steps are what's needed at this point like we need those like circuit breakers basically yeah and I think like practically that makes sense I think there if I'm playing devil ex advocate here there's definitely a case to be made for well there's there's definitely a a fear that circuit breakers can be used to censor if not sufficiently decentralized or where yeah um you know having a multi-sig that implements a circuit breaker you know like is not yeah I think for a lot of people that doesn't pass the the bar of like uh a system being fully decentralized so yeah I agree that this is not easy because like once you start

getting into a sufficient scale there's a hack going on you know you're not gonna wait five days for a governance proposal to go through to turn off yeah it doesn't make sense to turn off a chain or a comfort Bridge or like corn off like a blockchain or like you said um yeah I'd like to talk about that I think I think they're automated rate limits is really the big one like I think I'm like the more I think about it the more I think having just like automated rate limits on Bridges is is just makes sense right like it just doesn't make sense for if like any bridge that has a bunch of liquidity in it like Nomad for instance right it doesn't make sense realistically speaking like you know maybe maybe 10 isn't enough like you know as if you're like a relatively smaller Bridge or

something like that but you could you could just scale that with time um and set like caps and basically continue to increase the Caps over time as like you get better and better security um that's actually what we're doing now we we have our our new security model we're going to be like publishing a blog post on our security framework but it's just we were just like after everything happened we were like wow yeah we just need to like really go be as astoundingly pedantic and so we're just like setting caps and like where you'll only be able to put a certain amount of according to the bridge and then we'll keep increasing the Caps as we do like formal verification and basically have rate limits and then as the rate limit size goes down the cap limits the cap limits the linkers so and vice versa so

like you know you have a billion dollar Bridge five percent you know or something like that you say five percent of the liquidity should not just disappear overnight that's obviously a really really big concern yeah yeah I think this makes sense like if you can have these rate limits and then they get reevalued awaited over time like through governance proposals and things like that that's probably probably a good solution at least in the interim um yeah well I'd like to talk about the stack a little bit um because I you know I've used I've used connects uh to move funds across evm chains um I I was looking at some of the documentation and stuff and I noticed you were talking about IBC and um xcmp which are these you know trust

minimized um a natively verified protocols and I see that in your stack and I'm like how does that fit in there so you know what what's like the future estate of of connects and how does that you know how do things like IBC fit into um the more long-term connects division yeah um so I mean I I don't think IBC is going anywhere I think IBC is incredibly powerful system and protocol I mean it's a framework right it's a framework for doing caution communication with like pluggable proving systems and the main proving system is like clients um I think in some cases IBC and and light

client-based IVC is like is just too heavyweight for certain types of systems but that doesn't mean that it's like a bad system it just means it's not like a it's not a one like it's not like a one size fits-all solution and realistically there just isn't going to be a one-size-fits-all solution um that actually I think is my biggest takeaway from a lot of this is like in the long run it's probably going to be the case that like just like the internet self there will be like a bunch of heterogeneous different networks and like we'll have ways for those networks to like communicate with each other you'll have basically like the blockchain slash Bridge version of bgp which is the Border Gateway protocol which like lets you communicate between networks that are speaking different languages um and uh and I think that that's I

think that makes a lot of sense because like in in in trying to scale a bridge protocol to do everything it becomes bad anything um and uh and uh so my my kind of thesis is like um bridges are going to go in the same direction that blockchains are they're going to become really modular um uh we are already kind of doing this we have kind of started repositioning ourselves as like a liquidity layer um and then we you know like we we have we especially like when we're working with Nomad like we were we were positioning ourselves as like the liquidity layer and then Nomad was the messaging layer so like when you uh you you any interaction that like any time developers in integration that was interconnect and like connects with like kickoff transactions and then we would pass messages down to Nomad and then

they would all of that would kind of go across chains together um and so it gives you like this full stack experience and it makes sense to do that because you know there is going to be instances where you'll need to like swap these things out I think realistically in the long term so um the reason that things like IBC and xcmp have been in our docs for a while is because like a part of our thesis has been that like you know IBC will provide incredibly good communication amongst Cosmos chains so instead of trying to like beat IBC it's at its own game um it makes sense to have just a consistent interface and I think like composable a couple of other projects are thinking about things in the same way uh basically have a consistent interface across all chains and like uh have like underlying routing to get to

the right kind of bridge Network um so like the messaging layer can kind of pull in this category where like of having like a consistent interface that and then I guess to talk to all the different um all the different protocols yeah I mean I think it makes sense um now on on our end I think like the liquidity layer piece is is another piece like that where it's like you know it may make like the network effects of liquidity layers may make it more of a like less sort of like fragmented it may it may actually end up be getting a more kind of um uh long tail distribution rather than a fragmented one um but I I I'm absolutely certain that there's like there's no way like you know I'm there a lot of our competitors

are are just they're they're not gonna like die like you know we will compete with them uh even if we win more market share even if they win more market share like we're all going to continue existing because this Market is growing so much so like by the time it becomes competitive enough that uh you know we're we're now like competing to take each other's market share and like competing to take each other's users rather than just like growing along with the market um it's going to be far down the line and and I'm sure but like all the core teams will by that point have just like exited the community anyway so I think like for now it's just it's going to be a heterogeneous ecosystem for sure yeah so so is is this the in your stack like you have this nxtp which is like the next uh next protocol

is that right yeah that's basically um that's like the liquidity layer that we have okay that's that's the kind of like locally verified system that allows you to send uh basically swap tokens across swap tokens and do some type of like limited types of calls across chains um now the idea was like to layer that on top of a messaging layer like Nomad because then we don't need to so this is one of the kind of like downsides of what exists currently is like we we use signatures as a mechanism to verify like two parties interacting across chains right um needing to go and actually sign additional transactions and stuff is just a giant painful user so like abstracting that away involves sending those messages through the chain itself through some other bridging mechanism or through some messaging there

um and Nomad Nomad was playing that role like we we would basically like Fast execute transactions on top of nomad they would happen immediately instead of in 30 minutes and then afterwards there would be like a Reconciliation that happens once the message goes over the Nomad Bridge yeah um and that model Works across the ecosystem like it works with rollups it works with you know like the polygon POS bridge where works with it will work with IBC as well okay so so the idea is to like Leverage this liquidity layer and to then work with like Roll-Ups uh protocols like IBC other Bridge protocols that might exist you know in in ecosystems like uh XC MP and and so on and

yeah I I guess to come back to this idea of you know trust um you know when it com when it comes down to it though like connects being a liquidity protocol there's always a risk that those contracts can can get hacked like that is that's a non-zero risk um you know are they like are these rate limits and the these sorts of um mechanisms to help prevent you know massive liquidity being exited from the system um you know are are these the things that you would that you would um be a promo proponent of implementing

here at this level are there like other things that yeah we can do here yeah yeah I mean we are implementing these things right away right like we have caps and stuff that will be going live with our system very very soon um we have uh we we think that everybody should be doing it immediately because it's just like it's just it's like this whole Space can't move forward until Bridges stop getting hacked it's just you know it's like and this this happens and it happened for instance with D5 there was a period in defy where like there were just a ton of hacks and it was just because like you know people hadn't figured out what to do yet like we didn't have great practices in that place and like there were a lot of scams there was a lot of like random [ __ ] being built that just

had no right to be to be built and it was being shipped off to to mainnet without an audit and like people were aping tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars according to it and then it was getting hacked um the difference is that the scale of those hacks is a lot smaller right like with Bridges you know it's you're you're not just talking about like oh this is a single application that had like you know 10 million dollars in it or 50 million dollars or whatever it's like this bridge is now the gate Point Gateway to an entire blockchain or sometimes several entire blockchains right and like if that bridge disappears that entire Chain's ecosystem is [ __ ] like every single person on that chain is now holding unbacked assets it's it's a nightmare scenario right like the the

stakes are just so so much higher and so I think like the as a result of the security practices need to be so much higher right we need to we as a collective need to do a much better job of like being careful and focusing on doing it the right way rather than I mean it's so hard because everybody wants to scale uh but we need to focus I think like if we need we I think we need to really really consider like okay if there is 100 million dollars in this bridge like that needs to be an extraordinarily robust system yeah yeah I mean I think coming coming to the consensus around good security practices is certainly something that the industry

needs to do I think there's also a higher level amount of consensus that needs to happen around what are the technologies that are best suited for usability security and compatibility uh across the board and you know I like I think I think IBC has a lot going for it in terms of being able to um aggregate a lot of um a lot of use across ecosystems like Beyond just like the standard Cosmos SDK chain um but it feels like it feels like the crypto industry is

I mean look other Industries have have been through this before like we have standards that exist in all sorts of domains so from things like videoing encryption and compression standards to like MPEG and things like that or um [ __ ] plugs man like wall outlets right like I mean these standards have been around for a really long time um but standards exist and and like in in computer science and like whether it's Hardware or software there's like tons of standards that exist that have been adopted and that are like where there's some dominant standards and the way that Industries have done that is like consortiums

um organizations like uh the w3c right uh have have working groups and they work for years to come to standards you know things like HTML and CSS and like all these web technologies that we use and then you have like IEEE and they work on other types of standards and I I'd love to see these sorts of government bodies um gain Traction in crypto and one of the things that like seems obvious is like a starting problem is bridging and interoperability um but you know I think the trade-off there is that then you just have capture by Massive companies so who sits at the w3c will Google Apple Firefox like Mozilla um and and some universities of course

but like not the individual developer or the individual web user or at least not to my knowledge or so so there's definitely a trade-off to growing as an industry and moving down this route is that you know the millions of people who use crypto and who think they have sort of like a stake uh in in um in the way these Technologies get developed suddenly you know have less or at least less less apparent um you know um say in how like these things end up being implemented yeah yeah I mean it's definitely a huge challenge because it's like you know

um with situations like the WT w3c like you know you have these very very large organizations that are like sort of competing with each other but they're also large enough that it you know if they're in a position where like they're Frenemies right like they work together and simultaneously work together and compete each other I mean like like Google was larger than nation states like it's just ridiculous um and and I think like the other difference here is like you have a bunch of startups right like um uh small small to mid-sized organizations that are just like trying to find product Market bid and trying to make sure that they like survive and so they're the incentives are also kind of difficult um I mean we've I've been in this situation before like when I was working on like Connex is working on state

channels for a while and there was a huge like push to try to do a lot of standardization around State channels um and it there was always this like big question of like okay well Bitcoin has done it right like everybody every everyone in Bitcoin is just like following the same interface around lightning like why can't we do the same thing in with State channels why are there so many different organizations with like completely different implementations and I I think the answer to that is because like lightning is kind of a monopoly right like it was basically one monopolized sort of like mental model that um hasn't really like changed at all um and I mean it's it's still kind of being I mean obviously there's like multiple different organizations and different people like contributing to it but it's not it's not a bunch of

different ideas around uh around doing scalable payments on bitcoin it's like one single idea and people argue the teacher said on bitcoin sort of makes it difficult I think to other Solutions on how to do this right you already you're already like in a very restrained environment and so like one good solution is probably the only like the only song yeah the solution yeah yeah yeah I mean I think like the other piece of this is of course like For Better or For Worse I think a big part of the way that standards have been set in the space is basically just like projects winning dominant market share and then just setting something and then it ends up being something that everybody adopts right like it just sort of becomes a colloquial thing yeah um and I I mean it doesn't not work

yeah it has led us to a bunch of shitty standards but it doesn't not work yeah um or it's arbitrary right like 18 decimal points in ethereum erc20 tokens kind of ridiculous decision doesn't it doesn't really make any sense 18 decimal points it's a lot of decimal points it's a lot of precision for why does it make sense yeah and I think I think avmos maybe has a different standard there I think they don't have 18 decimal points or something um for some reason I don't know I have to ask but I uh yeah and uh and I think the other piece of this is also going to be that like the the challenges that each ecosystem has around things like bridging are also going to be slightly different right so

like for example like the biggest a lot of the big challenges around like bridging in ethereum ecosystem is going to be around like the security of the bridge um whereas in Cosmos it's kind of a solved problem it's pretty awesome however Cosmo says another problem and IBC has this problem which is like uh IBC lets you do like point-to-point communication between all these different chains but it doesn't necessarily like discriminate between the security models of the chains themselves so like if you you can have a extremely secure chain connected via IBC to a chain that only has like a handful of validators and people go in a 51 attack this chain and then they can use that and IBC to then go attack this chain that that is also itself a problem it is a problem but I see it as less of a problem and like the analogy that I

have here is you know you can be in a city and use a bridge to go to the bad side of town you do that in your of your own volition and knowing that you're going to a part of town that's like maybe not the best part of town but at least you know you're not gonna like the bridge is not gonna fall under your feet you know right but I think in this case the difference is like the bad part of town can there's no sort of like mechanism on the bridge to start I mean I don't this is a bad analogy um but I think that I think the issue is because you go to the bad side of town you can have enough or like you can get mugged right no no but also everybody from that side can come to the good side

of town and do whatever the hell they want there's nothing stopping them that's the issue and the the the problem is like in this yeah the problem is basically like you have you have this um uh like for example like the big sort of thing that everybody pushed back on with like the rodent bridge and everybody's really upset about was like it's a five out of seven multi-sick right now imagine if you so and like that was the issue now what was happening with Ronan was like it was not only the fact that the bridge was a five hour seven multi it wasn't it was basically like the the entire chain was reading the state of ethereum right it was it was actually like a trustless bridge going the direction of of Ronan the problem was the Ronin there was only seven Ronin validators to begin with like the five

out of seven was five out of the seven Ronin validators the same exact problem exists in IDC and Cosmos right you could have a you could have like the the cosmos Hub chain connected to a another Cosmos chain with seven validators that has a five out of seven threshold for for making updates that will have and and you're communicating using IBC when you do that the fact that you're using IBC will make zero difference that will have the exact same security as the Ronin 5 out of seven multiple and that's a problem right like that's that's an intrinsic issue that I think a lot of people don't realize and it exists I mean it exists everywhere but it ends up being more of a concern on something like in in the cosmos ecosystem and for a cosmos related

bridging than for like ethereum related bridging which has happening on roll up so you don't have this problem at all yeah yeah I see what you mean but I still feel like yeah maybe yeah I mean I I feel like as long here like when you move tokens over over IBC if you're moving your tokens over to somewhere that has good security your tokens are not getting lost in the in that in that transfer transaction if you're moving your tokens to somewhere that has bad security then that's that's a risk that you're that you're taking and now do we need to have you know secure chains and maybe like some some sort of community vetting around what I what um uh which IBC channels sort of get

pushed to the top or which are uh which IBC channels are sort of notified as okay like this chain is not passing a certain security threshold like that's that's a that's more of a like a social problem than a technology problem and like we've we've solved that in some sense with like web Technologies right now I'm like looking at a website that's got a little lock on it I know it's a secure connection because that's like a user experience thing that we've developed and we've come to consensus around how to do that I think we can probably and we'll probably end up with the same thing with blockchains where you'll have chains that pass some sort of security um or like trust threshold and yeah those can be sort of like labeled or you

know somehow like indicated in user user interfaces to users well not just using interfaces also on-chain Integrations like for example as an application or a chain that is connected via IBC to other chains you will not be able to accept connections from chains with below a certain level of security because if you do like for example say you have a uh you know say you have a cosmos chain that has like the bank module installed right and like that bank module is connected to like three other chains connected IBC so like say your Osmos is right you're connected yeah via three to three other chains um and two of those chains are totally fine right they have a high amount of security one of them doesn't um the problem is that one chain with a

low security can not only attack osmosis it can also through osmosis attack every single other chain and they could do that basically and it could it could even if unless you had a check to stop this that chain that that like the the the osmosis Bank module is connected to can basically go and mint an arbitrary number of tokens on osmosis can do this because it can come up come to consensus independently that oh there are a bunch of funds going through the system even though there aren't um that can be used to Mint funds on osmosis and then those funds can then be effectively like laundered out to every other chain um and it spreads right that's that's the Contagion mint funds they could mint funds of their own chain like they could make their own token but not they could basically just pretend as though funds were sent over

the bridge even though they weren't uh okay and so therefore you have a problem like with fungibility you know so from the perspective of the osmosis Bank module yeah osmosis is believing messages that come over IBC because it thinks whatever is coming over this is corresponding to something that happened on the other chain and what this message is telling me that there were you know 100 million dollars of tokens were burned on that chain one million dollars of usdc was burned on that chain and so I'm I get to Mint 100 million dollars of usdc here but and and this can happen without compromising IBC whatsoever that chain could just 51 be 51 attacked to pretend to Mint those tokens and not actually

limit them to begin with I think that's basically this sounds really similar to the issue that fmos had with their there was a bug in in evmos early on where they had to um yeah I mean this was the this was sort of like the bug that that halted ethmus to begin with right is like that there was a way to create arbitrary chains and then send IBC transactions pretending that yeah two yeah I mean I have to go back and look at but it sounds like a similar sort of attack yeah um there was a post that was written by vitalik on this exact attack called multi-chain not crosstalk I mean I I don't I think the conclusions of the post are the conclusion of the post is that bridging is terrible but I I don't I don't agree with that conclusion I

think there are ways to curtail the risk of this but it is something to be concerned about for sure yeah so we sort of talked about this throughout the conversation but uh sort of like peppered through and like I could see here in the chat that a lot of people are asking about um about the Nomad hack so how did the Nomad hack affect uh connects and connect connects to users and um you know I should probably get their team to come back on the podcast but you know what what's you know can you talk to us what the status is there about um how they're progressing to either like get the funds back or you know more importantly you know survive long term as a team as a project um so I think like I mean I think the

first thing to say here is like so we're super close to the Nomad team um you know we've we were obviously extremely closely partnered with them on a technical basis but even even more generally like uh James is like one of the first people I knew in the space and like uh I had basically knew him because I like randomly emailed him to ask him for advice when he was working at storage back in like 2016 or 2017. um and he was the only he was like one of the few people that I had emailed out of like 50 60 people who was nice enough to reply and like actually have a conversation with me um and uh and and I think like in general the team is just a bunch of people who really really actually give a [ __ ] about this space and really like

want to push bridging forward they wanted to like build something that mattered and actually helps helps the ecosystem um and and they I think like you know we're doing a lot of this for the right reasons right they wanted to like make bridges more secure um using optimistic systems so what happened was was not only I mean unlucky because I guess it's just like it could this is something that could have should have been caught but it just wasn't um not only were they like unlucky but it was this is also just like extremely devastating extremely unfortunate that it happened to a team that really like has been trying to do the right thing for so long um I think um one of the things that was unique about

this attack compared to any other hack that's happened in the space is like it was less of a hack and more of like a decentralized looting like um you know we we've we when it was happening we we spent time like trying to figure out like in the early days trying to figure out like what actually happened and things like that and it seems like a lot of the a lot of the transactions that were made were made basically by mistake right it was basically like the initial set of transactions that was made by people who sort of just happened to discover that this this was a vulnerability but they they clearly whoever started it didn't even realize that it was a vulnerability because they didn't take all the funds they just submitted a transaction and then what ended up happening was that that from the perspective of uh like

mempools on ethereum and like bots in those mempools this was a front runnable transaction this was a profitable transaction that they could Mev Snipes So they were just like generalized front running Bots that were just like oh this is cool I'm gonna I'm seeing this as a profitable transaction I'm just gonna copy paste the transaction with a lot more gas and I'm just going to keep like and they all started doing that and so the entire mental filled up and that's actually how it was discovered and once it was discovered it was posted on Twitter and then it went viral um and it's it's interesting because the funds from the Nomad hack ended up at like 300 different addresses not just a handful of like not just like oh this was a hacking group it was like yeah so many people ended up with buns

names watermelon watermelon watermelon not Eve yeah yeah these guys uh the goat um but yeah there was a lot of like I think it's just like fascinating what happened and obviously horrifying from the perspective of nomad because this was like a hack that happened over an extended period of time and watching the kind of numbers go down and trying to rescue what you could is obviously it's such a difficult task um I think like because the funds are spread out over so many different addresses the complexity of dealing with this hack is just so much higher than anything else that's happened right normally what happens when a hack occurs is like you know like like teams will work to figure

out exactly what happened right away and then like the first thing that they will do is like submit um uh you know just like submit like an on-chain transaction with a message to the to the hacker saying like Okay great well done like can you please give give us the money back you can keep like 10 to 20 whatever and because that happens quickly and because that is in most cases it is like extremely difficult to launder very very sizable amounts of money most hackers will actually just take that deal and so you teams will get back the funds immediately in nomad's case it's not exactly possible to do that I mean they they offered a bounty and things like that but like there's just so many people involved in this that like figuring out where all of these funds went is just a much much bigger

Challenge and the other piece of this is like paid back like I think it's about 20 or maybe maybe it's more now actually I haven't checked uh recently um yeah yeah um it's somewhere between 20 and 30. um but yeah I think like the the other thing that made this more complex is that because this wasn't actually like an explicit hack it was more just like a thing that happened accidentally a lot of the addresses are doxed like a lot like the majority of them are doxed um and so I think like Nomad has had to take a very sort of pedantic and pragmatic approach to work with like chain analysis and work with authorities to figure out like okay like how can we track down these addresses link them to

Exchange accounts now once once that process gets started it just becomes complex right like you're you're not dealing with a bunch of people on crypto who like move at the speed of light you're dealing with like organizations that are used to operating on like year-long time with time scales right like I'm not saying that that's actually the time scale that where everything is going to transpire but like the the rate of change is much much slower I think um you know I think like The Nomad team is still working day and night to try to figure this out um they're still like in contact with authorities they're still trying to they're trying to Target um you know specific accounts and get in touch with them directly to see if they can offer bounties and negotiate deals to get funds back and they're also

working on plans for not only like restarting the bridge so like to be able to allow people to exit funds but also to like find alternate potentially other creative mechanisms to like reimburse users and I think they feel extremely extremely strongly that this is like a big thing that they need to make sure of is like right for people and and I have a lot of faith in that because like they are fundamentally very good people it's just like it's hard to balance the needs of everybody especially when everyone is like yelling at you in public all the time um and when you also have like have to kind of like interact with like institutional actors like investors and uh uh chains and and authorities and chain analysis and things like that and balance their needs as well

are they going to recover I don't know I'm still in extremely close contact with Renee I still I have a lot of faith in the team I think they are top-notch I think they I think that they're going to do the right thing no matter what um and I think that they are going to try their best to recover um I just think it's going to take time that's the big thing is like I think in general we and I think that nobody can really expect any like a lot of material change on this probably for the next like three to six months it's just going to take a lot of time before they get back to it yeah I I I think that that I would I would multiply that timeline by two at least it just feels I I mean no I think the

biggest challenge that this that they're gonna have is a reputational a challenge and getting people's trust back and having people trust The Nomad brand and the team behind it and um you know for you know rational uh folks who like you know know them and know the sort of behind the scenes of um how they're implementing things to prevent this from happening yeah sure those folks might want to use that again but for the average person I think it's going to be difficult to get that trust back yeah it is yeah and that's one of the big challenges now is like it's really unfortunate I mean it's and it's one of the huge challenges right it's like Nomad didn't you know isn't like an

organization like you know I mean like Wormhole for instance like that this risk existed with Wormhole and the Wormhole hack happened right where it could have just been like an entire debugging of like most of the salon ecosystem that would have been incredibly horrifying for Solana and and jump immediately backstopped it because they realized what happened and like that happened for Wormhole because I mean Wormhole is Zone by jump and like it's they have a huge incentive they have such huge bags and everything else in that ecosystem that like not doing that would have meant like torching a bunch of their own like their own Capital um and so it was just like a good cost benefit analysis um yeah that that doesn't necessarily exist with Nomad because it's not like the same they're not they don't have they're not like 100 owned by a large-scale market maker

which is I mean it's a good thing right like that's a big part of of what made Nomad fantastic was like they were very like like pragmatic team that was very independent trying to like actually become a public good um so yeah it's it's difficult and I think like we'll sort of have to see how things progress um on our end with connects we are still like we still love The Nomad team we're still trying to support them however we can we understand that right now like I think one of the best ways to support them is just to give them space and like let them have the time to figure this out um and so we've we've kind of shifted our we actually it came up with an alternative mechanism for like messaging as like a temporary solution that lets us still go live with like about a month

one month's delay to our timeline so um that'll roughly be like at the start of October um and uh and we basically get to do exactly have exactly the same functionality we did before but we're using existing Bridges as transport so things like roll-up Bridges polygon POS Etc so you're not taking on any additional trust assumptions beyond the underlying chains themselves um and uh and it it has like some trade-offs there'll be like some fixed gas costs overhead that the team we will subsidize um um there will be some like added latency for the slow path of transfers but uh it's a good interim solution and then in six months we're going to like you know see what happens like if you know if nomad's able to recover if where the market where the market is um and and try to figure it out from

there okay yeah well I wish you guys all the best with that and uh certainly like wish them um the best as well and hopefully they recover from this otherwise I mean like you know Market will decide if uh if um if that's a public good that they want to keep supporting and if there's a void there I'm sure someone else will fill it so uh before we wrap up here one next token yeah yeah um so we we've um we so for those of you that know we had announced um that we had announced the next token a while back um in Amsterdam yeah I was extremely

unfortunate at timed because it was like immediately prior to everything like it was like a little bit before everything crashing we were actually very very close to launching the token when everything crashed um and we just decided to make we like made the decision of like okay there's a lot going on right now we can't even figure out the economics of how to how to launch this thing like it just it's like every every week we were coming up with a plan for like how things should work like how the airdrop should be designed how you know how like how much token should be going out in the airdrop things like that and it was based off of a certain like launch evaluation or certain estimates for like what we thought like this thing might be valued at whatever um and then like the next week

everything would like half in price and we were like okay well we're gonna have to restart all the work again and then it would do it would do it again and so we were just like okay this is and while the market is in this situation it just doesn't make a lot of sense for us to do this like let's just table for the next six months and come back to it um and I think the other thing was that we were also we we had also kind of put a lot onto our table at once we were both trying to ship the amarok upgrade and then also the token at the same time which is doing two things as an organization ever is is just a terrible idea it was that was a mistake um and now what we've done is we've now laser focused on shipping our upgrade

and nothing and nothing else um yeah so upgrade uh is now slated for um October as I mentioned we're going to try to basically like probably do like Alpha releases as I mentioned kind of have like low caps and then increase those caps over time so we'll do like uh an alpha with you know an audit and then like uh with very very low cap and then do another audit and then increase the cap and then do formal verification increase of capital et cetera et cetera um um so that process might take like a month or so or two um and then um in in I guess in at the same time uh once once the upgrade goes live the next item on the docket is the token uh so the rest of the team is going to be focused really really hard on on making

sure that happens okay um yeah I I really I mean it's it's a challenge and I hate giving like timelines for things like this because it you always end up disappointing people um I mean we we had like wanted to launch a year ago like um but launching a token is token is an extremely difficult thing um and uh and there's a lot of moving pieces and then when you when it when things get delayed by a few months you end up having to like scrap a bunch of stuff that you did and then restart all of it again so it takes even more time so it's hard to tell but our our goal is as soon as possible after this upgrade okay and we didn't talk about the the amarok upgrade but yeah maybe you're just a brief word on that and what it

entails yeah um so yeah so I mean you know where Connex is right now is like uh it's largely used for transfers of value um for with like the connects bridge and then also by like a few integrators that have like uh basically put this put this experience as part of their application so things like leafy which is a very aggregator layer swap which is like letting you do car payments to any chain Etc um one key thing that we have tried to focus on and we've always been like a very developer focused organization one thing that we've tried to focus on now with this upgrade is like moving towards a world where we have fully trust minimized generalizable communication between chains um so our thesis and you know this is similar to like the Axel

our thesis and layer zerothesis and stuff like that and it's been that way for a while but our thesis is that like the future is going to be a bunch of applications that actually probably interact with multiple simultaneously like either either users will be interacting with them across chains or the apps themselves will just live on multiple chains at the same time um I think this makes sense because it's actually how the internet works today right like when you are building a web application you're interacting with resources asynchronously that are around the world via apis and like that's that's like a normal part of how you think about application development and that's actually exactly what we're building now is like um the anmark upgrade is introduces this new primitive called x-call um it maps in solidity there's a lower

level function called call which is basically just how you like interact with another contract you just call the function um and uh and we we've created x-call as a as a function that kind of maps to maps to call and what it does is it allows you to do like an asynchronous call that goes across chains and not only can you do an async call you can also specify a callback so like in JavaScript you can uh go and get something from another chain uh specify a callback so when that data comes back that callback automatically gets executed um and uh and you can have like this asynchronous programming environment on top of on top of blockchains that that your that developers are already kind of familiar with um yeah I think it's gonna be a really really interesting primitive and we're

really excited to see what people build with it very cool well um looking forward to when Zach when's the upgrade um so we're targeting october-ish yeah okay well we'll look forward to that and uh yeah so I mean thank you so much for all your time here it's been great diving deep uh into uh into connects and just I think just talking about bridging is just so interesting because it's such a such an interesting space that has all the drama that you would expect and love and then also like lots of interesting technical challenges and um so yeah I love it and um looking forward to seeing where our um you know all these like the amarok operate and everything and what people will be building with that as well so thank you so much for coming absolutely

yeah thanks so much for having me appreciate it talk to you soon cheers