DeFi by Design EP#73: Cross-Chain Infrastructure w Router Protocol

Transcript

welcome to d5 by design where we talk all things blockchain and cryptocurrency while striving to educate empower and enrich it's your boy andy and welcome back to the defy slate youtube channel smash the like button on this video that really helps us out and sit back and enjoy the content thank you very much what is going on d5 slate fam welcome back to the d5 slate youtube channel this is d5 by design number 73 and we are super stoked to be talking with the lads behind router protocol today shubhan and rami um i hope i i said you guys names right it's romani you can call me rum it's easy rob all right rom and uh

shabam so um sweet yeah thanks for coming on guys uh we're we're stoked to talk about what you guys are building over at router um really the the bridging protocol i mean the the infrastructure is so necessary to the ecosystem as you know more chains um expand into kind of like this app specific uh chain world you know we'll have all these isolated chains that we want to get interconnected um and you guys are the ones you know really making it happen so uh it's a pleasure to have you guys on and i'll let you introduce yourself and how you guys get started yeah sure i mean i can uh i get the ball rolling uh serrano protocol has been around for

at least 18 months now uh we've been the team behind router spin and defy crypto for uh i would say since 2014 almost been building a bunch of products through the cycles uh router was born uh from the need uh for interoperab interoperability that we saw uh fairly early on when d5 summers started in q1 2020 and you know we were looking at a lot of uh opportunities yield farming opportunities etc that we personally invested in and what we saw was you know the ethiopian

congestion in the ethereum network sort of was a big blocker to a lot of folks actually taking advantage of these opportunities and that of course led to the rise of all the other uh laven competitors evm as well as morningview options right and then so um we were actually working on a dex uh on polygon and it was really cool a property on polygon called define and then you know it's amazing especially if you come from uni suave uh you know it's just fast transactions it's much much cheaper than ubisoft extra then we realized not too many folks were actually coming onto the platform and def and schwab and i were sort of thinking about what we could do

i mean it's like you build a nice uh restaurant or a club uh just off brooklyn bridge and then you take off brooklyn but there's no brooklyn bachelorette so how do folks from new york city come to your venue so that was the sort of the analogy that we used all the time with the city's analogy right so that was the genesis behind router that got us thinking on how we could sort of you know set up this uh get these uh uh chains to talk to each other and then communicate to each other and you know if you think about it in the cities and how they have those infra links between them that uh facilitate the movement of liquidity and messages and all the ideas and all that so that was i guess the overall

genesis behind uh awesome and getting involved in 2014 you know that that actually predates ethereum uh all these layer ones and all all of the uh new applications that were built on top of uh the ethereum you know protocol um so could you kind of you know give us a quick overview of the evolution of the product that you've built over time kind of you know starting at 2014 uh what was the sequence of products that you guys built that ultimately stacked up into router oh absolutely so um just to give you some context you know i

i come from traditional finance i i went to uh engineering school in india and then like a lot of indians ended up in the us in a technology company uh and then i i did an mba in the u.s and then i ended up in wall street in research and banking in investments et cetera i spent almost 10 years between 05 and 2014 in in that in traditional finance if you will and the way i stumbled into crypto was while i was doing a lot of the traditional market making for free ipo securities a lot all these unlisted shares airbnb and alibaba and all these names right and and then there's a pretty

interesting time where you know i would sort of get these securities the shares from from investors in the valley who wanted to exit before the ipo and i would find buyers for them in asia and uh there's been a bonnet around how we could build a product around this right so this was i guess eventually this became security security tokens and securitization and all those things that we sort of later became familiar with but that was actually my entry point into crypto right so i actually built a platform uh on the bitcoin on a bitcoin side chain that would securitize these uh tokens all these private uh tech companies uh this is 2014.

um 2015 i would say uh and then uh it's a point uh subum shubham came on board and then we ended up building we actually built a bunch of really cool projects that ended up not taking off various reasons some of them were regulatory some of them were just product market fit right for instance we built uh possibly around the time twice was big in the u.s we were sort of building a similar product out of asia india and singapore and uh and we are tied with the big uh stock exchange in india nsc and you know have been pretty big but just before we went live the indian central bank said you know what cryptos are not really legal so we don't really have a

framework so you can't do that right then uh um shum actually had this idea of building a uh stablecoin text so we actually built the world's first table context way before curve right this was on 0x using the zero extra layer framework again uh we're back in 2018 and uh we were competing with uh para swap and radar relay these were pretty big names in the valley in 2018 the only difference was these guys are all funded for 15 30 million dollars and here we were in bangalore trying to and explain to investors why crips was a big thing and you know why they should invest in us and so on and so forth so uh but you know the experience is amazing right early to

the game we understood the value behind ethereum and that got us you know the ability to sort of get in front of really cool developers uh goddess relationships with folks like folks like pauling for instance right there a big ecosystem from india um models have we built we built and then for a bunch of time for for a fair bit of time we were actually uh doing yes we built uh crypto derivatives i have to think for cbots time right and then we started doing uh tepee so we started exploring what our challenges are there with unisof v2 identifying what we can do with

gas gas cost is very cheap right how we color our inconvenience to the user so then we started working on meta transactions gasless transactions we deployed it on polygon and then we added gasless transactions to that so users could really use a product without having any gas right so those were early days challenges that we faced with pulp and one of that was like again not able to port funds or latency while porting funds back and forth so then we thought of a solution like what if this can be improved what if

your blog publishing mechanism can be separate from your bridging mechanism right that's how we landed with router setting up a standard where one blockchain can talk to other blockchain because we all know right so the base idea of a blockchain is it it can't unexist so it can't be stopped right so saying that a new solution to solve a blockchain for all sort of categories like polkadot won't won't take down ethereum for sure right then you need to have some standards between these chains and same as you have in web 2 tcp

then we started working on these standards how how could one movement look like between chains how could data movements actions events those could look like but we changed that that's how we landed with charge first right awesome yeah and and the communication protocol is becoming even more important as the amount of chains grows and i'm curious if there's uh any any communication between um let's say you know ethereum and non-evm chains since that's one of the gaps that is currently kind of in the market now

is it a communication protocol that takes things from one blockchain you know kind of puts them in an off-chain silo and then takes that and communicates it to the other chain or is it is it you know really two block chains communicating with one another and uh you know what are the implications of connecting uh evm compatible chains with with non-evm chains so so yeah i'll give you my perspective first and then i'll let you sort of deep dive into some of the technical details involved right so um you know our approach is we are looking at a liquidity super mesh in the sense that you know most bridges when you look at how they designed right uh

you have bridge j and bridge b sorry blockchain a and blockchain b and then you have a blockchain c coming in typically the way we see the design blockchain c ends up building a bridge to blockchain a and then a blockchain b right that's not too bad you have two bridges right and then you imagine a blockchain d that needs to be added to the whole equation so now we have three bridges right d to a due to b d to c now we extend that so it increasingly gets pretty complex right so what are the key design uh patterns or one of the things that's sort of embedded into our ethos you know the scalability of this thing so what we call the liquidity super mesh right so you can add you know you can have chain

one and then chain two and then chain three chain four and then when chain four comes in the liquidity from chain four instantly available to chains one two and three and vice versa it's not like an individual bridging thing so the skill will be super important right so within that framework so at the moment we're focusing on evm chains but going forward i think uh terra is going to be the first non-abm chair and then solana and then algorithm is also in the mix right so uh pretty much every non-every major non-evm chain can be integrated as well right so uh all of them are on the roadmap yeah so again that's wrong told right so to build

adapters cross-chain adapters which are compatible with helium and non-immune chains it's not an easy job because language that ethereum understands and the language that thera understands are very different now it's like you're trying to do some mediation between two different countries we which doesn't rely on same language and the information travel becomes very hard so then then we uh we have to certainly rewrite our whole adapters to me compatible with uh tera but the beauty of this is so let's say we are able to deploy a data adapter in our in our protocol so the

moment that adapter is deployed tera will be able to communicate between all the changes that we support either evm or non-em so our main focus is to make adapter compatible with the protocol rather than with the chain that it's going to transact so once that is done transactions can happen between all the nodes and that in that protocol yeah also so yeah a few more times that we are so few things in work to be honest so like what we are exploring interior is right now it's all about fun transfers

victor we are thinking of delegating instructions so for example you have usd or ustc right so usd on [Music] ethereum you want to stake it on anchor right so right now it's a three to four step process you move your fonts using some bridge you go to tera you create a wallet then if you have usd perfectly fine if you don't you have to swap it and then put it in anchor like we can make it a one step process you have usdc we'll stop it wherever we get the best rate it can be intera or in ethereum we convert it to usd we transfer the use usd and then stick it in anchor

that base starter like you are also exposing all the protocols on terra to be interacted with all sort of layers on different chains now developers can think of crosston applications and not restricted to evm at all right i mean at the end of the day if you look at i mean probably dates me a little bit but uh you know i i started my career on the web 2 you know right and early on if you had a word file in your microsoft arm device or and then this was before ios i guess but if you're a one device an apple and then

linux or unix or whatever they are pretty much incompatible like if somebody sent you a word doc from their sun solaris terminal i mean the format be so messed up you couldn't open that up on your microsoft word microsoft operating system right so eventually the idea is that blockchains will get there i mean all the complexity around you know why should be put out of the way why should you as an end user be worried about if your trade is going to get the best execution in solana or whatever right that's all complexity that should be you know not visible to the end user the other analogy that i love using is when you book a airline ticket you go expedia and you say you want to go from new york to

london or florida to wherever bahamas let's say right and uh you specify your fill details which is going to want a business class or whatever that's it and then what the engine does on the background is it goes through various booking engines and figures out what's the best deal for you and then gives you the list of options right so why can't you do the same thing in the blockchain space i mean you want to swap from ethereum to let's say bitcoin [Music] let the engine behind do the complexity of you know are you getting the best fellow solana or unisoft error or that's the whole idea and eventually

we'll get there and that's where i think router is sort of and other interoperability projects sort of play an important role and abstracting out the underlying complexity and giving the use of a seamless use of experience yeah yeah the the interoperability is critical to the health of the ecosystem and you mentioned the the communication layer i and i i'm kind of thinking i i really like the analogy that shabam used where it's kind of like two countries communicating with each other yeah they're kind of like cross chain formats right and there's there's new protocols developing this

like data availability layer that creates uh essential i you know the the uh the storage for all that data and my understanding of router is the data availability someone could whether it's an individual or a blockchain could grab the data from this availability layer and utilize router to communicate that data to a different a different endpoint yes yeah and and how do you see that that um interconnectivity playing out where you know we have different cross-chain applications and and there's more chains

that are connected to this one central data availability layer how does router uh supply data i guess you know what what are kind of the the implications that are unlocked when router is fully fully mature with a data availability layer and the communication that can send data between different chains yeah so what i'd assume right so when things are really mature things are really mature you you could really achieve something like atomic swaps across chains you don't have liquidity on one chain perfectly fine it will be settled from different chain you are trying to sell

your multi-con ethereum chain which doesn't have enough flexibility of matrix it will be transported to market and failed paid back to you on ethereum without you knowing anything about that so similarly you will have you will have access to all the tabs on a different chain without moving to that chain for example are we we could really grow to a state where avid doesn't have to deploy their protocol on three different or five different chains but from all those five different chains we have access to all the data that ave has and we could trigger all the contract cause of without literally moving our funds for actually in in at least from user's perspective right i

could earn away i could land borrow participate in governance all the things without moving to that chain and that doesn't only happens with asset side that happens with data some sort of data that you need you would want to move some sort of information some thinking has to happen between chains so similar product that we have we have it actually and we are conducting a hackathon on that product which allows you to do that so it synchronizes data between two contracts across chains without user knowing about that but for sure it's with users consent so

now you can build utilities like cross chain tornado utilities like crosstain dye where diet can be minted across chains right now diet complimented across years right even though diet is in all the genes sorry yeah i think we were i think we were on the same on the same thread like so i could lock up uh ethereum on one chain in a vault and make her dad would mint die on a different chain yeah yes yes yeah you'll be sharp to be having prototype with this to be honest that's right and we did it with router yeah so we actually that's it's interesting

so what's happening right yes so what happens you know when we when we looked at how we could grow router i mean there's a lot of other competitors who just focus on the cross chain asset transfer use cases a bunch of them will get one asset from a to b very fast i mean i mean that's that's an interesting game but that's a very easy game to get crack and it's going to be super commoditized so we went back to the drawing board and looked at what is router's real mission right i mean enabling true cross chain interoperability and enabling caution messaging that's a far uh that's a super set of the specific problem of question as a transfer right so so what we then did was sort of engineer the system architect the system around

that around that framework right so um what we're now doing is all of us have gathered actually in dubai this week and we got a bunch of external hackers and external developers internal developers we're all hacking out some really cool ideas from crosstalk as a transfer you know crosstalk international cash cross chain harvey crossing texas really cool ideas have come out and and a bunch of teams have sort of identified a bunch of developers that reached out and wanted to work with us and some of our leading developers spell internally and they're all just working on some really cool stuff and so by the end of next i i guess in the next few days unleash some of these into the wild and some of these are going to be standalone projects like in the terror ecosystem yeah yeah my imagination is running wild

with you know when when someone can click a button on a front end and it triggers a contract call on two different chains that that really unlocks a lot of possibilities and then like you're saying you know blockchain c my my one uh click you know makes a contract call here and there and then based on those those transactions it triggered some some uh transaction on blockchain c and i mean this has this has implications you know from uh like risk benefits where you know if there's cascading liquidations maybe someone can trigger a stop loss or some some backstop to prevent liquidation so there's different liquidity and trading

implications as well as i think some of the cross-chain nft applications are really interesting as well when you know if you stake your nfc on this chain you get some benefit on another chain and you kind of have like these these different like these worlds start to collide when you have the the cross chain functionality that can combine applications from different chains and you have these games that can start to interact and intersect with one another that that that's really interesting and it hasn't really been unpacked um i think the one protocol that we saw kind of uh dip their toes into it was the

layer zero uh and the stargate protocol um and how they started to combine some crosstalk liquidity programs there it hasn't quite been uh developed the extent that that router is doing yeah no i agree i keep telling folks i mean would you want to talk about the idea that we are working on so basically one more not too much one cool stuff that one of the team in the hackathon is working on is so as you name the product right so can you do something with that product where i have two different chains where different yields are there can i move my collateral without interacting with the second chain while being on one chain i

can't do that right i can build that with router and team is building that with routers so you can really optimize that protocol by using route so you can move their yield from polygon to bsc if wheels are high on bsc without going to bsi yeah so their solution is not a crosstown solution it's a multi-chain solution if it could have been a cross-chain solution i i should be able to manage my whole portfolio while being on one chain i need not go and basically find them on avalon yeah and what is your what is your take on uh you know any uh

cross chain versus multi-chain there was a thread that ethereum that vitalik posted you know he pointed to some security vulnerabilities and cross-chain transfers and and really supported a multi-chain thesis do you guys align or did you see any gaps in his reasoning that that you guys would like to fill so to be honest like so we first thing is where we want to be with decentralization and what all we want to solve with decentralization right what i feel is right now decentralization is trying to tackle only one aspect and that's funds and i'm very confident that it will grow to a state where it would try to tackle requests right it would try to tackle

media and that will be the state where you would need interoperability right it need not be that secure but you would need some connection between these decentralized systems right if the bridge is decentralized at its own level perfectly fine if chain is decentralized with its own frequency perfectly fine but then you would need some connectivity between these you would so there can't be a single chain which can handle data plus transactions right security plus scalability so then you would need some some bridge between those so i honestly feel assuming that we would not need bridges and we would not need interoperability

that to to be to be a fair it's not valid argument so you then then you can't grow to a vision where you would want to decentralize twitter for sure right because you can't really scale a decentralized twitter if you don't have interoperability you can't scale to a decentralized ecommerce right and then the ultimate vision of decentralized internet that's not viable at all if you don't have interoperability because then also you'd want your funds to be handled by most secure chain and your data to be handled by more scalable chain right and then if you want to connect your consumer and your payment services you would want to interact with all both of

these chains and then some linking is required right so even if that linking is a bit less secure than the main team we would need that link bridges are not robust as robust as the land but then you would need bridges right right the overall infrared throughout the town is very robust right in other towns it's also very robust does that qualify to say that we don't need bridges we don't need linking between these two towns all right i mean look at what's happening right you have all these chains that have some really smart folks working on them there's not a smart capital riding on these chains right i mean you look at

ethereum of course but solana avalanche terra al grand aurora phantom i mean this is going to go away i mean it's like new york london san francisco singapore dubai you know all of these cities are changed will have their own fans and venues and adherence and community and energy and so on and so forth right now if we accept that you need to have flights between these cities right and you know the first atoms by the wright brothers a lot of them failed right 300 meters 500 meters right and then a lot of folks died and look that's the equivalent to the bridges getting hacked but you see what's happening even when the bridges get hacked these large

there's so much capital there's so much interest in the space right i mean when um who did jump capital backstrom i think wormhole got hacked jump capital and terror the whole system came right ronan got hacked uh i think finance and a bunch of guys got hacked so the smart money is betting that you know the benefits of this is breeding edge technology there's going to be the early guys are the entrepreneurs that the you know the pioneers are going to sort of pay you know they're exploring they're taking risk and therefore there's a stance that they will fail but i think the ecosystem is mature enough to understand that you know this experimentation is worth it right and that's how technology moves forward right and then you see that playing on

the bridging space as well given that we have all these blockchains we will need bridging solutions because folks are going to sort of even if it's risky people are going to use that i mean um i mean i cannot not again uh beat our own drum but i mean every pretty all star gate or you know all these other guys out there i mean none of them have upgradeable contracts i mean somebody said why does the router charge slightly higher and then because because we have upgradeable contracts so if there's any security flaw we can instantly upgrade the contracts but any of our other pureplay bridges not the communication place where they all are fundamentally bridges all these guys have a long way to go but the good thing is there's a

lot of capital backing the sector and there's a realization that ultimately we will need interoperability which it's a key theme honestly feel it's too big of a challenge to be ignored to be honest saying we don't need croatian solutions right i don't know how valid that is right when when there's a ton of liquidity in all the chains and then all the users of that chain is seeking for some alpha on different chain right you are restricting your ethereum users to not expose solana they'll find a way to explore solana for sure and that's the centralized exchange exchanges and is that exit better than the solution that we

are pitching no that's even further centralized i'm not talking about completely decentralizing a solution at least partial decentralization or somewhat low security than the whole chain but it's still far better than the solution out there it's far better than the centralized exchange exit options right there you don't have custody of your farms right right and uh we see that frequently like um the the most recent example and there might be you know conversation here about the decentralized social media aspect of it um was the uh the the purchase of twitter right about

elam buying twitter so approaching this from the angle of like you're saying you know not your keys not your coins and if you're on a centralized exchange you don't have your keys you know i had a question with for a friend of mine that i work with and it was it was you know what what if i own twitter stock when when this purchase goes through it essentially means that i don't own twitter stock anymore because without my permission elon came and he bought my twitter stuff so i don't i don't own the twitter stock you know even though it's in there sitting in a brokerage account you know with my name on it it doesn't it's not my keys i don't i don't own it that's right and the the smart contract benefit of this really

enables you know you don't retain custody of your tokens no matter where where they are whether it's you know on this decentralized uh rails right or if it's going from you know one city to the next and you're taking a flight you still you still hold ownership of of those coins um and it's not put into someone else's hands where they can they can sell it without your permission um there is proper penalty being put onto the system right now ethereum is also maturing to a state where they would want to do a proof of state rather than proof of work right then then if you implement same same level of security with some blend of

npcs that's your signatures and then clustering mpc having partial on-chain consensus and oxygen consensus you can come come up with a somewhat decent solution far more better solution than the centralized exchanges right right yeah and the other thing is you know these flavors are going to exist right you know if you look at the ethereum uh diehard ethereum fans are going to say you know bse is not centralized or solana is not robust enough for terra is a big ponzi scheme i mean these are all stuff that you know we see and you open up twitter there's like multiple viewpoints everybody's an opinion at the end of the day i mean it's it's a web three is the beauty of ft is completely democratic

and so you between the whole trial mother why telling described scalability security and decentralization you have ethereum that is high on the decentralization access you have banana smart chain for instance it's very high in the scalability access right and then again very high scalability not so much in decentralization so and you know there are various folks that want various things some people love bsc some people have solana and you know presumably going forward there'll be some apps that sort of prefer salamana be some apps that prefer some apps that will continue to use ethereum right so it's not like this one chain that's going to sort of be around all the time yeah yeah absolutely there's uh there's reasons to be on

uh any any one of those three points on the scalability trilemma yeah some prefer security yeah some are going to prefer speed and then others decentralization um and we're seeing you know different different market participants kind of float to those those corners and some some chains have really embraced you know one of those corners uh you know you mentioned vsc they are really going after speed yeah and scalability and not too focused on decentralization right uh whereas ethereum is more at the center and and you know they're looking to bring more uh scalability alongside the security model that that has you know worked for them over the over the course of a few

years and as as this transition to proof of stake plays out um you know we're gonna start we're gonna see even more chains and they're probably gonna look like roll-ups and then the the uh the l2 uh race if you will or the l2 models uh where you know these different these different layer twos are starting to compete for users starting to compete for liquidity and they're all interconnected through something like router uh so i'm curious how does router kind of communicate well we talked about it right like the communication between these different layer twos that uh someone could execute a transaction on one so on one roll up uh on one l2 and then it

triggers another transaction on a different l2 and kind of bringing bringing this together where you have these the communication protocol to connect each of these different l2s i'm curious how it reshapes the the experience you had in traditional finance where you were going and market making on you know some of these exchanges uh with this level of scalability and throughput what what does the ipo process look like when someone wants to launch a new token you know do you see interconnectivity between traditional markets and decentralized markets or you know does the software really eat

the rest of the traditional world how do you see the the interconnectivity between crypto and the fiat system working out all right so i think you know this is fascinating right there's so many so many different uh layers to that i mean one thing you mentioned of course is your spot on right i mean with something like router a new project can come in and you know you can immediately launch on every chain right and then still have the ability for every user to sort of interact with the dap from their favorite chain right now uh in terms of what that means for the user experience i think we sort of touched upon that earlier uh you know

ultimately a lot of these things are going to be a lot of the complexities could be abstracted out uh the user just worries about how we sort of get the best trade the best yield or the best uh way to achieve the question governance problem that he's going to solve or you know what would that solve for and then it all comes in a nice front and a smartphone or whatever and then you don't worry about you know okay i go to metamask i change my rpc and i improve the solana i use the bridge to move all my funds all that is done i mean people won't have won't have to worry about that most likely in the next year or so it's going to be commonplace right um and the third question is around i was going to change traditional finance

right i mean that's a loaded question so what what are we seeing what we're seeing right now is a lot of folks trying to come in i mean the most common i've seen remember six pitches in the last six months around you know let's raise money from traditional markets promise of 10 to 12 yield and invest all that in terra and anchor and get the 19.5 yield right i mean but that's i see a lot of those players and i think you know specifically that might be you know depending on whether you're on the wrist threshold may not be a good idea for everything in one protocol but i mean uh you know going forward we'll see a lot of those interesting place where you know you already you know you see ftx lets you sort of trade traditional market

equities and then there are plays that are sort of plugging into the bond market etc and i think a lot of these challenges are not because of technology i think a lot of it is because of regulatory uh sort of constraints that they have you know barriers right but like this bond market have a lot of u.s regulatory issues equities have a lot of regulatory issues that they're content with so the problem is more regulatory than rather than i mean the other market that's right for uh disruption is this the betting of the gambling market right i mean uh if you if you would let the let the the open up completely the playing field you'll see

a bunch of decentralized protocols addressing the whole gambling problem in a far more efficient manner than right now right auctions are another interesting problem that these markets can solve and i think gnosis sort of did the v1 but i think obviously there are far more evolved solutions now right so um a lot of these things are going to be regulatory not technical that's my sense yeah the the regulatory landscape is uh is a blocker for for innovation for sure you have all this open source technology out there and it's you know it's kind of stifling innovation by by preventing people from developing the projects that already already proven demand um

and it's the regulatory uh uh obstacle that's kind of breaking um i mean it's it's br breaking up this this pace of innovation um you know when when there's a an inclination to develop something that you know would would kind of provide value uh but there's this permission like you gotta you know get permission from the government uh in order to in order to actually deploy that project whereas in this in this landscape that we're familiar with and decentralized yeah it's all permission lists right and you know it's really moved fast and great things you can deploy really you know the project that you're looking uh to add value with

um yeah and and you mentioned on ftx right like the the stocks and the traditional markets side by side with the crypto markets the lines are really starting to blur yes between yeah yeah like a like a stock that's on a brokerage and then for example a synthetic token that might be minted from synthetics and track a similar price work yep um you know ultimately it's a it's a it's a an inefficiency right to have like these the the stocks uh and traditional equities markets uh like liquidity isolated away from the synthetic token and that liquidity market if we could bring this together ultimately i mean it would create a more

system and that translates into less fees more opportunities and so on and so forth i mean yeah if you look at regulators right i mean they have a tough job right i mean they don't have the whole picture they're looking at you know infra coal oil and gas health care and all that and then the one thing among the 10 other things levens is looking crypto regulation and they look at okay who are my constituencies who do i need to keep happy okay these big banks write checks for me the big billionaires they want access to d5 they don't care you know let them have it and okay the small guys let's stop them from it addressing accessing coinbase investing in b5 and why because there'll be 10 guys who make money but there's

one guy who might lose money and sue the company and that's going to sort of reflect badly on me right and it's sort of and i'm not being libertarian or hardcore republican or something here in the american context right but i think the whole decision making also reflects the fact that you have folks that are making decisions uh without complete information and also with sort of skewed incentives misaligned incentives there's a conflict of interest there clearly right i mean why would you let the large banks play crypto and not have the average joe schmo have the same opportunity to sort of change his life by investing just because there's one french case where somebody's going to get chipped

off as money or whatever i mean again there are scamsters out there this you know we've all seen a lot of these camps but i think it's going to be balanced you can't just go one way or the other it's got to be contextual it's got to be balanced it's got to be nuanced yeah yeah it's an assumption on behalf of the regulators to assume that someone with less money is less sophisticated in the industry and and can't point out as a scam yeah i i'm uh you know i'm eager to see like a world where you know the the banks and the contracts and we're starting to get there where it's not really the the funds that really make the difference in this like new play to earn economy it's kind of like if you contribute your time yeah

then that is your currency and you know it's not like there's no elite uh you know whales that are out there where where you know the the new new uh financial platforms are you know pulling their their liquidity it's more uh contribution of time um and if and if you are you know spending spending your effort and your resources on a specific chain you know that might be that might be singing a song in the meta in you know sandbox like you know if you're if you're there and you're kind of like you know providing value to that ecosystem and i it might not be financial value it might be entertainment or information or data transfer or you know some some filling some gap somewhere

um the the the focus you know for for liquidity in this case really the i guess the the maker break like what what makes someone you know more important to one of these uh platforms is gonna be what they're providing that platform and we're seeing all of these applications expand beyond the financial application uh it's more of these entertainment and and information yeah yeah and the other exciting area that that's really interesting is you know proof of physical work right i mean helium for instance right i mean you set up a router and within a broader mesh network and it's not a big router that a big telecom company has set up

it's be something that you operate in your living room or a bedroom and then that becomes part of an overall network and depending on how much traffic you facilitate through that network right you sort of participate in the economy and get helium tokens and i think that's gonna be a huge wave i mean i saw i saw a project out there that just you know incidencing folks to exercise and there's an nft angle and a number of steps and all that right i mean it's fascinating how that's going to change because you can think of that as almost like gamifying a lot of things that need to be done i mean in a country like india where more of us right now we're not in india but i mean a lot of us go back to india and there's a lot of poverty a lot of opportunity a lot of

guys who want to make some you know do some hard work and make money in this like philippines and axe infinity what what happened there right if you look at the um i call the global south uh not the developer but developing world in africa uh india southeast asia parts of south asia the huge opportunity for a lot of folks to contribute and sort of enhance sort of their lives significantly uh through some of their emerging models like proven physical work so i think just the early days i mean it's like we're sitting in 2002 and thinking about what's going to happen when vector really hits the ground i think very very early days but that was that's what makes it so exciting yeah yeah the realm of possibilities is

limitless really the the you know monetization uh strategy for these web 2 companies was watch an ad you know you got to spend your attention and watch the ad and we'll pay you to watch the ad you'll get something for free or you know we'll pay or whatever now it opens up this world of possibilities where uh physical physical labor your heart rate you can monetize all these different you know any piece of data that you're looking to optimize you can now monetize with cryptocurrency and then you add in the self-server and identity where it's just the data that you want to reveal that is being disclosed it's not your whole birth history and health history and everything that's up on facebook right i mean it's it's so that also adds an essential layer of privacy so that your

critical influence your private yeah yeah i see i see uh you know innovations and uh in the insurance industry as well if you just you know get if you can you know incentivize people to be healthier yeah insurance premiums should go way down yeah we'll we'll see maybe there's uh there's an application too oh absolutely we were joking right i mean that the biggest uh one of the biggest guys in india is the the reliance group or it was a bunch of these relations or you know in the us elon musk or whatever tomorrow let's say elon musk decides you know i'm going to give away free dna test to everybody who signs up right and then can you imagine he's going to get a lot of traction everybody's going to sign up i mean not everybody but a ton of people are

going to sign up and here's my dna interval sign up for perpetuity right and then well they're not realizing he's going to sort of use that and send that to the pharma companies insurance companies and other corporations and that's going to lock up these guys forever i mean it's going to affect their carriers the jobs they get the insurance rates they get the i mean it's just pretty crazy right and then this can be misused as well so that's a lot of absolutely i mean meta you know facebook with mark zuckerberg chose 20 data economy and uh i'm i'm realistically or i guess you know cautiously hopeful that evon takes a more decentralized route right uh than than facebook did and uh

cool guys this was an absolute pleasure we have a one one parting question and then any closing thoughts are absolutely welcome uh we we you know i ask everyone that comes on the podcast if you were to explain uh blockchain and crypto in general and and more specifically router to anyone in the world dead or alive who who do you choose to explain it to and why wow that's a good one i didn't get the last part exactly what was that so who am i if you could explain uh yeah if you were to shill your bags to anyone in the world who would you uh who would you choose it'd probably be

a bunch of really smart school kids we just sort of you know it's great if 12 13 14 just getting interested in technology coding and you know thinking about the carriers and programming or whatever right so we want to go and tell these folks right you know why is decentralization important why is blockchain important and then you know again why router important sort of follows from that products like router but i guess that's that's bill gates we hear elon musk we hear you know uh you know you name it we haven't heard you know teenagers school kids are that are you know starting to think about these concepts um they ask really good questions so

they're the future right they have what they call the buddha mind right i mean they come with an open mind and they ask the serious but the deepest questions yeah yeah yeah yeah you require some fundamental thinking to be honest so things are very very hardly defined right now in crypto blockchain linear architecture again you would want to send things something else like right sparse architecture why only linearly so those questions i guess someone who is starting fresh would make more sense because you're not too close to the problem you can think without adding much more bias to that

the students are very we are will be very very cool big for that some researchers maybe yeah some some brains you know they disruption always is orthogonal i mean folks in an industry rarely disrupt the industry i mean the guy sadly he sort of died in the fire i mean uh the the vapors the shoe website i mean he's doing something else right in the credit issue website that was that was right the shoe's website right yeah yeah and then even elon musk right i mean crazy freak of nature and i mean he did nothing about rockets he

disrupting that industry but i guess he's probably not the right analogy but i mean typically you know you see an industry that gets disrupted by somebody coming automatically something from outside the industry a lot of the specialities or the other attunes them like even uh d5 is going to disrupt finance big time but d5 has been built by programmers not finance guys so the way it's software it's the world yes it's handling finance but it's all done yeah yeah yeah no i thought this was the concept of farming in traditional systems that's right no one even thought of utility tokens farming and as a concept but then we have fire

yeah and uh the the con the combinatorics of that those applications combined with really all the other ones we talked about today are uh our endless super super cool super exciting um thanks for coming on guys it was a pleasure where can our audience uh where can they find you twitter discord yeah discord routerprotocol.com handlers router protocol uh i think telegram is again not a protocol yeah and uh shubham is what's it it's sensei eth sensei yeah and i'm a crypto man underscore ram just yeah it's uh yeah so thanks

we'll get your handles uh down there in the description sweet guys thanks we'll see you again soon thank you so much