Interoperability Fireside Chat

Transcript

all right excited to be here this works yeah works works cool um yeah excited to be here with you Adrian today um quick intros I'm Nick Hill um I lead product at the Wormhole Foundation um yeah I'm Adrien I'm one of the co-founders of anoma great um and yeah this is just going to be a quick conversation on interoperability enoma intense uh unifying the ethereum and crypto ecosystem and so to kick us off Adrian would love to just get a quick overview what is anoma yeah absolutely um the easiest way to think of anoma is anoma is a distributed operating system it is

a way to defragment liquidity to defragment State between sort of the E theor main chain all the different rollups that exist in the ecosystem Now by giving developers a unified stack that they can develop against um so that is a developer user don't have to make the choice do I go to x do I go to Y do I go to the main chain this is much rather now becoming a choice of what does a specific user want to do at runtime um but at the same time it means that as a user I can say well today actually I don't mind I'd like to be on arbitrum or optimism or the ethereum main chain just give me whatever is the quickest fastest yeah thanks for the overview and I'm curious is someone who is building anoma Who's involved in this stuff every

day um when you look at the high level what you know why are intense protocols really valuable what are the main challenges in the crypto ecosystem that uh you're aiming to solve or that they can solve yeah that's actually very good question um I think intents have been all around us for a long time just no one thinks of them as intense because fundamentally what an intent is Right an intent is a partial State transition it is I have a for B and I do not yet know uh what who has B for a um and this could also mean there's one counterparty there's multiple counterparties there's maybe a thousand counterparties maybe a pool involved maybe a number of other chains but fundamentally most of the activity on all of our systems right now

is about decentralized cop Discovery like I have a partial thing and I'd like to find someone else that can like help me fulfill what I want to for example trade um and so but even a rollup is a very good example of an intent Centric system uh because when you think of what is a rollup well it's like users have individual State transitions partial State transitions that get combined into whole compute that then get settled somewhere else right so intents have always been around I think until now we've just been lacking generalized intent infrastructure the noral really is with your noral resource machine the first generalized intent infrastructure so that you can build whatever and all these intents are just composable whether you want to build a multi abstraction something like no to safe or you want to build a trading protocol

intents are just always going to be the right abstraction here and by having a generalized intent framework you get this like composability um the other aspect is that especially with ZK a lot of State moves to Edge devices and all of a sudden for Edge devices intents are just the right abstraction because currently we live in this world where transaction update some amount of global state that all lives in the middle and we all share um but with Zer knowledge proofs State moves to Edge devices and all of a sudden you need to have the ability to make partial State updates part you need to be able to like Express partial State updates over data on your Edge device and so I I think intend like this inevitable abstraction um that is just going to come to all these syst systems because it's just an easier way

to represent what users actually have at the moment very cool intense are everywhere and intense are inevitable inevitable um and you mentioned the anoma resource machine um I'm curious if you could dive into that a little bit more what is the armm how does it integrate with the evm maybe what are some differences similarities could you talk about that yeah so right now we live in the world of VMS like everything is VM Centric right um and so for example the evm is a great example of a virtual machine and these are sort of imperative compute uh that executes

transaction sequentially and then intent machines do not replace virtual machines right like the normal resource machine or the armm does not replace the V the evm it is fundamentally something that runs on top of the evm that sort of like the intent machine the anoma the anoral resource machine is really the first generalized intent machine and so the armm is deployed on top of the evbm in order to expose the abstraction to developers of like that is like an operating system where you have a bunch of operating system apis that you can use to build applications in terms of intents um and this then gets combined with the a normal P2P stack um that and sort of hooks together all these separate deployments of the arm whether they live on optimism on arbitr on eor

main chain right and I think this is sort of the important thing to understand the other thing here with the anoma resource machine and anoma as a whole there's no anoma chain that you must interact with um if you want to use aoma just on ethereum you can just use a P2P stack it's permissionless infrastructure um you never have to touch sort of any other system even though aoma is deployed there you can just use intense generalize intense on a theorum using aoma yeah that makes sense and then that's also kind of a smooth transition into something else I want to talk about is you also touched on the experience of integrating with anoma right and whenever there's new tech um a couple things are top of mind one of the things that's top of mind is what does the developer experience for the new tech

look like um how are you thinking about the developer experience for anoma building on anoma um and maybe if you could touch on also what are some of the hurdles to adoption that you you're going to face yeah so I think the first big uh notion that people need to understand is like it's not building on AA it's you're building with AA it's not like this is not another intermediary that stries to extract rent from sort of like being an intermediary that you must send things to right like you're building weaa hopefully this is an improvement on sort of like the dev you actually use ax um I I think one of the big challenges with anything new is you need to be where the valuable status right and like right now fundamentally

um like 95% of most valuable state is on ethereum so like how can you be backwards compatible with existing valuable state in our existing ecosystem it is very difficult to say like even rollups don't actually solve this to a large extent because you still like you have to move state from like the main chain to a rollup so I think a big challenge is how do you bring valuable Tech to where the use like where the valuable State already is um and I think we definitely saw this in the past with the L1 Wars where it's like well come to my new shiny thing and bring you valuable state with that's a very difficult proposition to developers because the state is actually like the valuable State that's like the fundamental core proposition it's not

like where the contracts live it's where the state lives and where the state is secured um so it's really about bringing a Noma to developers where the state is where the valuable State already exists rather than having to say well like let's try this new thing and like move all the valuable state to my new shiny thing the other aspect is also if you have to move all valuable State you end up in a world where you have have like really hard times to run network effects because you need to convince a lot of valuable state to move over and this is one of the very nice things with the Noma it's like it's just a better abstraction or like an easier to use abstraction for you where your state already is um and I think yeah this is really the main challenge around um a lot of this like deployment

Tech it's like and I think to some extent it's a shame it's like we should be like thinking about how how do we collaboratively collaboratively make our industry a better like developer experience kind of put them in into a better future rather than like oh comp might shiny new thing like and like building in these like weird silos yeah and that's also another good transition into the other kind of thing that I think is usually top of mind for whenever you build new tech which is um how does it compose with everything else that's already out there in crypto um how does it compose with the rest of the ecosystem how do you think about composability while building AA I'm also curious you know um talking about

intents how you're thinking about composing with existing interoperability protocols you know like Wormhole for example yeah so okay there's a couple of things to this right um so the first thing is composability sort of at the application at the machine layer um and anom has two levels of composability it has the intent level composability where as a user you don't necess have to say anymore well I want to trade against Unis swop you can just say I want to trade I don't care on which specific Market this gets executed which specific uh application on E this gets executed on that's level one composability and then level two composability is that you can treat all deployments of aoma across the ecosystem as one unified intent machine that as a user you can even say well I don't not only do I not care

which specific application I trade against I don't actually even care which specific chain I'm getting settled on so like I can go you know today optimism arit theum main chain just give me the quickest fastest thing and these are s of the two and honestly this is I think going to be the single biggest unlock since sort of like we mooved from Bitcoin to ethereum in terms of enabling truly scalable composability and like we'll probably see like a 10x Improvement in both liquidity efficiency here uh just because all of a sudden lot of these systems become and applications aren't siloed anymore but can rather compose with each other I think the other aspect that you mentioned around sort of like the multi-chain ecosystem um how does wormal fit in how doability systems fit in um anoma is very agnostic to this right like whether someone wants

to use Wormhole to Route uh assets from ethereum to salana this is really fundamentally user choice and like if all users want to make this Choice great they should do this an nor is very agnostic to this this an is very agnostic to saying You must use this specific interoperability interoperability stack um I I think I have personal opinions around this on sort of like trust minimized bridging and so on uh that I think hopefully will get to long term um but fundamentally like with a Nora it's a user Choice do they want to use Wormhole do they want to use something like IBC whatever is available on these systems user uh developers and users can use makes sense um Switching gears a little bit I'm curious to to know from

you what are maybe some of the exciting apps that you want to see built on anoma what are some of the um major use cases of intents that that you think are out there that that are low hanging fruit um or or not low hanging fruit just things you want to see solved yeah so this is an interesting question like the realistic perspective of like what does the industry currently do versus sort of like what do I want to see in the future right um I think what I would really like to see is especially with aoma how can we Sol like how can we leverage AA to Sol solve shed sequencing between all the like our Rob up ecosystem I think this is a incredibly Big Challenge that right now fragments a LW of liquidity and law of Dev attention and so I think

this is sort of like on the infrastructure layer if aoma can do its part to defragment the liquidity to provide very good compos ibility across many of these different l2s and l1s in the ecosystem that' be a big win to me um specifically in terms of an very practical application what I'd like to see is privacy preserving Auto CH aob book exchanges that are actually decentralized right like right now everything is running mostly in someone else's server um like when you look at a lot of the rollups like there's always a central coordination point at the moment and I'd like to see us move away from this going forward um so I'm very excited also having the ability to privately trade that like with anoma you have the ability to have information flow control so users can decide well I want to attach a zero knowledge proof to

my trade or my intent you don't want to do this you want to attach PL Tech signature those two things are still composable so you can build very scalable sort of like cross L2 cross L1 dexas that are going to be incredibly liquid and I think at that point you actually can start competing sort of with the centralized exchanges that we have at the moment um long term I'd like to see scale through money I think scale for money is a cool economics experiment of like everyone issues their own local token that represents their economic Trust graph and then we can have like these incredibly complex webs of economic interactions but they will map much better into the actual economic realities because like I don't want to see my environment polluted where I locally live so I can price this into the asset I'm issuing right and so all

of a sudden with scale free money this is fundamentally something that needs this like hetrogeneous trust model that anoma has um and the intent model and so I I hope to see scale for money I think it will take a couple of years to get there um but eventually this will get very cool I super cool um okay we have a couple minutes left um I want to also ask you you know as a founder of multiple different things um you know what are some of the biggest learnings you've had just generally working in this industry um bringing these Visions to life um what are some of the biggest challenges you face learnings you've had um a lot of people don't like to read That's is sort of like the biggest learning um really like

if you want to get ahead spend the next three months just reading and you'll be at like the top 1% uh it's ridiculous even like especially in the distributed systems area um like how a lot of people in the space like to think that the distributed systems engineers and like they really haven't caught up with like the research literature that's like was pumped out in the last 30 years out of universities uh so I think this is the most surprising thing to me like I like to read and it's like I think people should read more read specifically distributed systems even like blog posts like just like get three month like deeply trying to understand by reading six hours a day on like what is the state of the field um and you'll be at the top 1% because most people currently get the content from like 10

threat long Twitter threats like that's it um like this is like you're missing a lot of depth there I think um so that's I think one thing um so I can recommend everyone in the space like just like build prototypes read things and you'll bee pretty quickly um the other thing um I I think we like we move in these Cycles where it's like every once in a while um the marketing gets ahead of sort of like what's technically realistic um and like just be aware of this right like uh don't try to chase like the latest narrative uh really like deeply think about the problems you're trying to solve um because only if you actually solve meaningful Pro problems can we make meaningful progress to like make

something better um and I think even especially right now a lot of attention gets absorbed by sort of like Patchwork Solutions because people go like well I want to have something at works in the next three months it's like that's good but every once in a while you also got like okay like what's the fundamental unlock and I mean this is like to a large extent what happened with ethereum after Bitcoins like what's the like let's not have another Patchwork thing here but like let's do the fundamental unlock thing to enable a new set of use cases and I think this is also very much something that we've been trying to achieve with anomo thanks read and don't chase narratives um thanks Adrian we're right on the DOT uh enjoy this conversation um yeah so who's going first you go first all right thank you

so much you test it out yeah all right thank you another round of applause please oh yeah you can all right yeah yeah it actually is pretty steep uh drum roll please oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey all right Nick oh my God

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