The Epilogue

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome back to the strange waterer podcast thank you for joining us for the last time 6 years ago I left my job at anheiser Bush inbev sure of where I was going but sure that I did not fit into the corporate world for a long time I was truly a drift in strange Waters that is until May 2021 when I heard Hayden Adams explain Unis Swap and a theum on the Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast since that day I've been

captured although it took a couple years I eventually realized that this was not a fluke that podcasts have a special power last year I started my very own podcast this one for me strange water has become so much more than just a podcast it is by far the most important way that I stay ahead of the Deluge of research and ideas that come out of this ecosystem over the last year strange water has become my professional identity in this space and so I could not be more thrilled to announce that the strange water podcast is being acquired by

blockworks although this news comes with the sad announcement that we will be sunsetting strange water it is far overshadowed by the incredibly exciting launch of the expansion podcast expansion will be everything strange water was and more backed by an incredible co-host No Sleep John and the formidable brand resources and experience of block works I couldn't be more excited to join blockworks I had the incredible Fortune to visit the offices and meet the team over the last few months and I'm utterly floored there are few moments in life when you walk into a room and you realize that you're the dumbest person

in the room those are the moments that you should Chase because those are the moments that you found the right room to be in and that's what I experience being at blockworks today we have our final episode of strange water a lovely transition into a very exciting Journey you're about to hear an interview between myself no sleep John and the co-founders of blockworks Mike iolo and Jason yanowitz thank you Mike and Jason for everything you've built and for everything that you've done for me and for strange water I could not be more excited for this next chapter and so for the last time let's

get started with strange water expansion was kickstarted by a grant from the Celestia Foundation nothing said on expansion is a recommendation to buy or sell Securities or tokens this podcast is for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions not Financial advice Rex John and our guests May hold positions in the company's funds or projects [Music] discussed all right everyone welcome back to another this is a special episode actually this is a mashup of bell curve and Empire and we've got a

special announcement for everyone today because we are formally welcoming the newest member to the blockworks podcast drum W please ASMR expansion this is our newest podcast focus on the module ecosystem it's hosted by uh Rex Rex CH and no sleep John fellas welcome welcome awesome man thank you was a beautiful uh little you know we have like will do that now for us would you believe it that I had lived all that you get with expansion you get sound effects you get thought out introductions it's the worst exactly full nine yards here uh full nine yards all right guys so yeah I uh maybe I

could put um you know the two of you on the spot U maybe no sleep if you want to give us like a little bit of an an overview of what the expansion pod is yeah so like expansion is going to be a podcast on the modular ecosystem so we're talking about um like modular blockchain Celestia anything in that vein um I don't know if you guys seen like modular expansion on Twitter or X these days modu expansion is like this idea of this design choice of BU building blockchains and crypto with different modules and different combining them with different pieces together to build something way better um so there's going to be like unique

rollups and products launching super fast with a modular stack and there's this opening for a modular Focus podcast and that's what expansion is um there's a lot of leaders and thought leaders in the mod ecosystem that we want to elevate um we don't want to do another academic podcast we don't want to do another podcast like rehashing the data availability problem so we want something that can Elevate Builders while introducing like a new idea to to people on the podcast yeah awesome and I think like from my perspective especially as like behind the scenes here a little bit we've like thought forward a lot of episodes and done a lot of research already um it is just becoming so clear to me that the endgame of all

blockchains looks like a lot more similar than it does different and so um I think like it's a really cool opportunity to be able to tell the story of like what is blockchain what's the purpose what do these architectures look like but through the lens of like this specific path which is you know the modular path let's like create as many Lego pieces as possible and let people build as opposed to the more monolithic or I guess if you're on that team we're calling it integrated now but that path of like let's maximize the capabilities and then let's figure out how to make it uh more modular after I uh again I I see these things as like the the same result but um there's so much about like the story to get there and the modular story

that um is going to provide a lot of awesome content yeah I think the the thing that's cool about this particular moment in time in crypto when you look out at these different architectures is you know modular is like a very it's a it's a design choice in philosophy and you know no sleep I know you mentioned that it's sort of associated with Celestia which it which it was in my mind as well but also is much broader than that like you can look out into different EOS like the ethereum you know sort of modular e rollup uh scale is is a great example of that now you've got Bitcoin l2s um you've got even down to some of the work that George Jo is doing with wreath like the very clients themselves you're

starting to build in these sorts of you know interchangeable modules and it's it's really bigger than any one ecosystem I would say and I think it also is very cool because I know Jason you were actually the one that called my attention to this but you guys might be interested to know that modular versus integrated was a debate that they had in the internet back in the day and it's actually very cool that this uh this sort of moment in time when people are considering these different ways of building blockchains actually rhymes with the way that they built the underlying infrastructure for the internet which I find fascinating you know now it's funny that you mentioned that modular is bigger than Celestia because when rex rex told me that when

he first joined this podcast like buil starting this project he was under the impression that ethereum was modular and like he didn't really know about Celestia yet um so it's pretty funny that you mentioned that Rex if you okay let me rephrase that jump in Rex Rex I uh look like I think that like what celesti is doing is like really incredible and I agree with everyone that Celestia has created and like modular meme on which a lot of energy is like moving towards and I think that's totally awesome but for me like when I heard modular this brought me back to like cards on the table I'm class of 2021 right this brought me back to a

bankless episode that I heard while I was still being like crypto pilled where um Ryan and um just sorry Ryan and David David you can see how uh out of practice I am but Ryan and David were talking about um basically salana versus ethereum in this monolithic versus modular and how I understood in 2021 what modular meant was okay like we're realizing that in order to scale ethereum one option is just to increase the Computing capabilities this is the same as the Block Wars of Bitcoin or instead of like rerunning that entire conflict in the entire play Let's look for opportunities to take things out of

the core decentralized protocol that don't need to be de Iz and trustless and let's build modules that give us back that capability but without putting like all the onus on like this hopefully super decentralized low powerered Computing Network and so um you know that's always the frame that I've understood modular to be which is like we understand what we're trying to do with blockchain we are trying to create a credibly neutral space upon which we can build identity and property but like the way to get there is like you can make the space just as performant as POS possible you can make this space Dynamic and modular and like maybe siloed so people can do different experiments there's all sorts of different ways and uh for me like modular like yes maybe

back then was attributed to ethereum these days it's attributed to Celestia and like next cycle will be attributed to um whatever crazy like company like takes Center Stage but uh for me exactly to your point Mike and I guess your point uh Yano before that which is like this is not blockchain this is not a blockchain conversation this is a computer science conversation and like always phase one is like build a system and phase two is like how do we modularize it so that different people can work on different parts of the stack I actually come at it from a different angle like modular I think it's like a design principle like like Rex said it's a way of building using like mod different smaller pieces or modules but I think in crypto especially

it's becoming something bigger it's almost like a cultural movement um it's becoming synonymous with Celestia and this way of design it's like a way of thinking it's become modular is becoming almost like a noun it's like a culture and ecosystem it's a new form of collaboration across the blockchain stack it's accelerating experimentation new use cases it's an Avenue for app developers to achieve sovereignty on their on on the entire blockchain stack and it's growing really fast so expansion is the idea no Nole and Rex have you guys ever dug into the the 1990s the pre pre- crypto stuff the monolithic versus modular debates of the as the web was getting created in the Netscape Mark

andreon days I mean what's funny is that like I'm very familiar with the his like the 90s histories of the internet um and like that specific frame like wasn't on my radar until this conversation and now that we're talking about it makes a lot of sense I will say that just like my degree was in computer science and like literally like the first class is about like how uh object-oriented programming and that is like essentially we need to program modularly and not like uh just like allinone like code dump right and so again like I John I hear what you're saying and like I do believe that we that a movement is building on top of like these very basic computer science

design principles but um to me this is just like we're talking okay like what's the right way to build a car like oh use assembly line like that's what mod means to me yeah I actually if you go back and read from the 90s it's you're both I think both of you are right there's a technical decision and then there was also like like no I couldn't agree with no sleep more like it was a religious movement like if you look at so like the monolithic arguments uh in the 90s was like early arpanet protocols like NCP uh like the web applications were all built in this like monolithic way and then like the integrated development environments like the idees like that was like one frame of belief it was like the same people who believed that like

AOL would create you know maybe 10 years later like the people who' that believe that AOL could create this beautiful Walled Garden and that that was totally fine and then there was like the modular examples would be like tcpip worldwide web which was like HTML and HTTP and the browser and then like on the architecture side like the microservices and I think Tech from a tech perspective that went out but from a religious and like cult-like movement that also went out so I think it'll be interesting to see how you guys explore and tying it all back to this podcast like there's a tech argument here and then there's like a cultural argument here as well yeah especially in like crypto where everything's a cult every single blockchain ecosystem is a cult like salana Bitcoin ethereum like

everything's Ault really so everybody's up to this up to like past up to like last year has been like very focused on this monolithic way of thinking for building blockchains and there's like a small pocket of Cosmos people that have been ahead like four years of their time with the app chain and super modular blockchain stack with like Cosmos SDK um but only recently did it really break into the mainstream of crypto thought with like this Rebrand of app chains into modular and sovereignty like these different principles here um so yeah like this way of thinking is something that we're going to explore in the podcast very excited about I think the uh the Technic the way that the technical architecture of these blockchains and the religious feror f

that like builds around them they're related because it's a very small number of people in the world that actually do understand these technical tradeoffs but because of the way that blockchains work with forks you need a lot of people to buy into one particular architecture and so you tend to get these arguments that stem from very specific technical trade-offs that evolve into these broad this like it's like modular integrated or it's Big Blocks or small blocks and and that it becomes this like religious sort of movement when it's actually we're really arguing about something very specific here uh and I think basically almost every big argument in blockchain you

could trace back to the block siiz war like we've we've spent all all the time that we've spent building infrastructure has been solving the fundamental trade-off that uh the big versus small block scaling approaches have introduced so yeah I think getting into that and teasing that apart on this podcast is going to be super interesting and to that end I think the if you f if you fast forward the clock from 2017 when the block siiz war was occurring the tech looks really different now than it did back then right like the early early tradeoffs of the of uh the block size War were really rough and like Bitcoin cash was kind of just like hey what if we just made these

blocks way bigger with with no you know no way to obviate any of the negative trade-offs there we have a lot of stuff that we didn't have back then we have things like data availability sampling right we've got zero knowledge like ZK Tech um we've got frankly like rollups were a zero to one innovation in terms of extending security from uh different types of across different types of blockchains so maybe we could get into some of the you know I think this Technical and cultural argument is going to be something that we're going to dig into and explore on the podcast but what are some of the you know the sort of um sector um or Tech changes that have impacted the world of modular over the last couple years and like what are we going

to give us a little bit of a flavor of what we're going to be digging into on the Pod that well Mike I'm a little concerned about having this conversation because I don't think I can afford the royalty fees required to talk about photography yes shots fired shots fired the ZK trademark uh yeah we're not gonna gotta be careful with that yeah yeah okay so we'll uh yeah we'll we'll settle up afterwards but um yeah I do think look like one one just to like to draw like the to put a bow on the point about the block size Wars it was either today or yesterday vitalic just wrote a blog post on like reflecting on the

Block siiz Wars and it's like pretty interesting to read that and from vitalic butan like one of our uh you know like one of the few guys who could understand any of this and then is like a treates on like basically giant egos and Community Dynamics and like things that are really unrelated to like the underlying technical reasons and I think that you know there there's something like pretty profound in that and that like you can you can argue until you're bleue in the face all day about like the technology stuff and like that's not really what is like driving what's happening in this industry and especially like when you look back in retrospect there's just like so much more happening offchain than on that um

that's like where your attention needs to be um and by the way like the reason mod in my opinion the reason the modular internet one out over like the monolithic internet is like it's super simple like one is explicitly saying we are inclusive come build on us come add to us and the other one's saying come pay come pay to use it and so like the one that just says like hey not only can you use this but like you can create your own fortune off it like that's just going to win in the long term um Rex I Rex can I poke with that though because yeah for sure what the if you actually look at the way that the internet looks today it actually does look a little bit more monolithic in terms of the entities that ended up winning out right it is Google and it's

Facebook and it's uh you know Amazon and it's the it is these sort of web Giants that have taken this reminds me of that quote that all of business is just bundling and unbundling uh over and over again and it kind of started out as this you know uh Cambrian EXP expion of these open protocols that there were tons of different websites and Innovation and now it is kind of like REM monitized um over time if that's a word so I don't know what would you say to that I take your point especially like at the business application layer of the internet um I don't think we're anywhere near that in terms of our analogy in blockchain and like let me throw this back at you where it's like do I think

the internet is decentralized yes and why is that because I think there's one way to measure decentralization is there any one man woman or entity on this planet that can decide that they don't want something to exist on that platform and then make it happen and so like yeah you can get things dindex from Google like yeah you can maybe like get registar to not uh host like specific uh websites or something but like based on the incredibly horrifying that you can find on the dark web like Yeah The Internet's decentralized and like that's kind of what I'm gesturing too well said man yeah I don't really have much yeah that I think that's actually a really strong litmus test for

uh for decentralization and one of the things that i' maybe to be a little bit selfish about um and talk about why blockworks is really excited about this podcast like putting on my blockworks hat is like it's honestly it's a combination of in a in a way there's a this is the most interesting cultural and uh technical argument that's happening in crypto right now so like here's like putting on my blockworks selfish hat blockworks looks for parts of crypto that um like un underserved audiences and when you look at something like modular like the the cross ecosystem aspect to it is super appealing right because okay like clearly you know no sleep you're a little bit more excited about Celestia Rex you're more in ethereum Salon is

leaning into l2s Bitcoin has l2s something about this like design philosophy just makes people say I'm part of this uh and it's a huge huge almost like invisible really underserved ecosystem and the cultural component to me is fascinating on the technical side I think it's uh yeah I like relate a lot back to the the block size Wars and the two different ways of scaling blockchains which is to make the boxes bigger or to move the compute onto other boxes uh or in another Computing environment and I actually I would say I'd be curious what both you guys would think about this I think both of those are still open questions because Salon has kind of taken the bigger boxes route but eventually like you run into the problem of okay you're successful enough that you bring on enough demand and then

you make the boxes so big it isn't centralized and then in the modular approach like kind of a theum land okay we kept these this one set of boxes small the validator boxes but then we just made other bigger boxes sequencer boxes relay boxes so is that even worth the tradeoff and so I I think both of these are unanswered questions so man it's just a really healthy mix of the cultural stuff the technical arguments that's why I'm like like jumping out of my seat for this I'm super talked about it I think like a underd discussed part of the modu thesis is the sovereignty aspect so you can decide all those design choices like you don't have to go either or you don't have to do like super Big Blocks super small blocks like you don't have to decide you don't you

get to decide which side or like where in between you want to be so like with the modro stack you can own the full stack you can control the direction of your chain which upgrades you want which optimiz ations at the execution environment level um you can add like compliance you can add permissions monetization elements all that can be added there in your own rollup or your own chain with the modu stack because it's so much easier to build it this way or like build it with these modules that are like really easy to swap out in and out um and you get you get decide all this because it's because you're Sovereign it's modular um that's like the big idea here yeah and I think you know my joke

aside right like I do think the answer here is ZK right like I think that that it Mike I just heard you on bell curve this morning um and talking to the framework guys about like the promise of ZK has been like in front of us for like half a decade now and if you believed it back then like you missed a lot of good stuff and like I hear that for sure but like also the actual science and the mathematics and the tech technology is like it is moving so fast that it's like unbelievable to people that are even in the tech industry and like I I can tell you so many stories about like professors who are like inventing this saying like I've I've been in technology for 40 years and I've never

experienced anything like how quickly an idea turns into a company or I've never seen the amount of uh just like advancements we've made in such a short amount of time but for everyone who like doesn't really understand why this is such a big deal like the reality of what ZK is bringing us is the ability to do like arbitrarily complex amount of compute like on these huge boxes that you're talking about Mike like on super centralized servers on AWS whatever and then just by like putting that proof onto a blockchain you're if that proof verifies you're essentially able to like project the Computing from that centralized Place into this new

blockchain environment so like I think what the the rollup Centric road map but like all of this is really pointing to is like we need to create one base layer or maybe one per ecosystem right but one base layer of cryptoeconomic security and like that means different things to different people ethereum it looks one thing like looks one way salono looks another but it's about how do we create this like trustless trust and then how do we use ZK to just Jam as much functionality into those boxes through the power of cryptography rather than through the power of like actual compute and so I'm complet you know what I'm very curious to see Rex is what you know what

we haven't seen quite so much in crypto thus far is Tech moves really fast and every once in a while it makes something Obsolete and I think ZK makes some of the stuff that we have been working on in crypto thus far somewhat obsolete here's an example that I'll give you the way that I'm very interested in what's going on I've always seen a lot of similarity between Bitcoin and Celestia as uh ecosystems because it's very kind of the the the Bas layer is very dumb right it's it's not a settlement layer there's no smart contract logic that lives there um it's very simple and the big difference is Big versus small blocks but both of those ecosystems are saying hey with this ZK uh you can have these ZK accounts on the Bas layer and exactly what you just described these

big computers can do things off of the base layer but then Pro it to this thing down here and that looks a lot like the eth rollup version of things right which is like hey I've got these small boxes on layer one and I've got this other kind of mechanism which is called a rollup and it's a trusted bridge and that's how I you know talk to this other big sequencer box but it's the same thing and so I'm very curious to see what ZK when it gets fully rolled out and implemented what it disrupts and changes in terms of the architect of these different blockchains like that is going to be very interesting to me you want here's my hot take I think all blockchain VMS are about to become

obsolete like obsolete spicy take and like let me let me put it this way it's been almost a year and a half since risk zero created the the created um like the substrate so that somebody ran the first version of Linux where every single thing you did it pro it came with with a proof and like the thought like of course no one's going to run Linux on blockchain like that's so unnecessary but if you can run Linux that means you can run every single piece of Enterprise consumer like whatever software with ZK proofs and with ZK proofs that means you can project it into the to ethereum right and so my question is like why would we

care about any of like even the move VM which is supposed to solve all the problems of the evm still for developers to go into this like incredibly bizarre Paradigm of like accounts and smart contracts and logic and gas like all of that's nonsense and like with ZK we can finally like express it enough with trustless enough that like we can move on past all of this it's a super interesting oh sorry no sleep what you guys say I was just gonna say like you guys are giving us some great episode ideas here dude I yeah I that's that would be I haven't seen that idea Rex honestly I've never heard that I like like I think it makes a ton of sense

because yeah these that that's what you hear it's like the chewing glass experience of devs and you have to onboard these devs it takes forever and you know what's a cool example of this in suie is the way that you get on board it's very easy they've got a uh ZK email login for a bunch of their stuff um right and it just is supery there's like a proof that gets submitted and the user onboarding flow is like butter uh so really small example of what you're describing but um but yeah I think that's like is that like built into the blockchain logic or however that works execution I honestly don't know you're not supposed to ask these these complex questions no more

questions like these well here let me take us a step forward so you can understand this is that like I was talking to um Omri Kumar from alt layer I said okay like how are blockchains going to develop and what he said is like think about like let's say you're on a dydx right and right now so you pay a fee to dydx to be like a market maker take or whatever right to do your trade and then you also pay a fee for gas and like that makes sense to us like we all get it right but like if you're not crypto pilled and you don't understand this stuff why are you paying two fees why like why shouldn't we be creating blockchain that not only like

abstract away the concept of gas they literally don't have it and whatever fees that need to be paid back to the L1 to do the proving cost just include that in your protoc in your app fee right like that's the way the entire world works not blockchain it 100% I sorry you what you say no I I keep seeing all of this in like I'm uh I just keep seeing all this in like the context of the the '90s rise because I've been reading too much about it and so I'll just like go back to it but like every time you introduce something new like there's this whole bunch of things that people have been working on for years and sometimes decades that just quickly become

obsolete so the thing I was reading about earlier this week was um like as soon as you got the Open Standards like HTTP HTML DNS like all of the other uh a lot of those other protocols and standards that people have been working on for like 15 years immediately went away like they just weren't relevant anymore and uh there was thousands of people working on these things and uh so I don't know just yeah I don't know I keep seeing things in that light but you know what Rex also something that you just maybe predicted there maybe I'm reading too much into it but one thing that might another thing that I feel like tends to happen around new technologies is there's a little bit of a fight around the way to monetize it

this this was originally the criticism of the internet how are we ever going to monetize this thing isn't it just funny cat jpegs and yeah you get eyeballs on it but how do you ever make money and then Google acquired double click and the rest was history it's was like oh we sell them ads and and we haven't evolved that much in the business model of the web since then and the the fee discussion I I would be really curious as you know we build out these different infrastructure layers of I think it's still an open question of how we're going to monetize any of this stuff and maybe another hot take would be that all these blockchain fees should eventually go to zero because you have to find another way event like people will like the whoever is providing the infrastructure for these blockchain networks will find a

way to extract value but the way is not to just charge for compute resources you probably can't do that that is all going to get commoditized or or you could do it but the user doesn't pay it's the application on top it's the application thats yeah you know yeah like I I don't pay AWS when I use a Squarespace website like Squarespace pays AWS for that website yeah this is like a big debate in modular right now like where does value acrew on the modular stack is it in the da layer is in execution is it in like interop is it in like what ZK now there's a bunch of other pieces in the mod like the modular stack like where where does this all go and like originally people thought it was da now people are less sure about that is it in

execution because that's where all the community and the apps are like where does this um where does the value ACW does it can I reframe that question like I I hear everyone talk about like where does value acrew I think a maybe a better way to think about that is like who has leverage in the stack that's where the value ultimately AC because people are like so where does value ACR like does that mean where does token price go up where does where do fees come back to where who generates the revenue um and it's this like broad question where but I think it really comes down to like who has the leverage in the in the entire stack um and if you look at yeah like that that's where I think it that's where I think it gets

really interesting it's like who's got the leverage in this modular stack that we're building yeah I mean honestly like that's one of the things about like love uh talking about it and doing a podcast on it but if I was like building a company in the modular space like I would be pretty nervous right because the same thing that we're saying is so awesome about like ease of integration and plug-and playay and all this stuff is also exactly how easy it is to rip your stuff out of your customers right and so like I hear all of these these conversations about how like oh you can use Celestia for data availability and then like maybe Igan Da comes along and they're cheaper so you can switch to them or maybe like whatever but first of all my question is like if we're able to

rotate like these pieces like like data availability through all these different systems one like are we does data availability even mean anything anymore like what's even happening here but two like when you're building a business like the things that make the system great also just make you so so vulnerable to disruption I agree I think I I agree with that wait let me I also think I think that's also why composability is overrated as a narrative because this is already happening what what you're describing is this is a business challenge which is you hear this all the time in the context of interop why don't we just make these damn things interoperable um you mean why don't I

make it easier to churn my customers like that's how that's how these ecosystems hear that question why would I do that that doesn't make any sense and that's why you see more business source licenses that's why you see daps moving off of Main chains like that's the the the competitive pressure from the standpoint of these protocols my ecosystem baby you know so that's the sorry no sleep I didn't mean interrupt you that yeah no worries wait like so something like I'm not gonna show ini thisa but like their approach to this argument is actually very interesting because they've they're they're coming at this as in like they're going to own the full user stack so all these rollups built on the initia

stack are going to be interoperable to the in the sense that you have one UI that you get to use all these apps with and all the underlying infrastructure they also integrate into their platform so they own the full stack and they can eventually if their Community gets big enough all these users will move with them wherever they um whatever part of this whichever stack they want to move to their users go with them so that's like an interesting idea like we're going to talk about later in a future episode I I really like the initia design may maybe a theme if I could suggest anything for the show but one thing I'd be curious may you guys could dig into is like this idea of first mover versus second mover advantages in blockchain ecosystems and I think the

l1's if I like the first generation blockchain let's call it like Bitcoin ethereum I guess Sal is like right on the edge but the way that I see the the advantage that they have is that they have a huge market cap they have a ton of Crypton native wealth and developers want to go and build things because the people with Crypton native wealth will do things on that ecosystem the challenge that they have is these l1s had to make a lot of decisions in the early days about where they were going to draw the line around the L1 versus what they were going to export either to another layer or allow offchain infrastructure to up around and some of those decisions weren't 100% right and so it's interesting to watch some of these nextg blockchains that the advantage they have is that they can

build they can learn from some of the mistakes that ethereum or salana or whatever made but the the the tradeoff that they don't have is uh is they don't have all this Crypton native wealth and the users um and I think that one of the things that Cosmos missed on was they prioritized the end game product like this sovereignty principle that I think at the end is like one of the defining characteristics of what this system is going to look like but they systematically deprioritize distribution and so far I think distribution is trouncing product is like the first time vers second time founder thing um yeah and that's why I think ethereum has done so well so I don't know I'd be curious

uh digging into that yeah like the cosmos like I think the cosmos Hub failing um is like a pretty good lesson for the module ecosystem right now because all these rollups are doing like app specific ideas they're doing like they bunch of get bunch of sovereign rollups coming out with their own ideas they want to build but where does what's like this shelling point for the ecosystem is it Celestia is it the execution layer is it like the initia stack or whatever optimism rollup stack super chain where is what's the sh shelling point because with Cosmos the Mind share got so fragmented then no one even knew where to look for direction for the cosmos SDK stack um what why does the Hub exist

there's like so many questions there all that mind got fragmented and that momentum kind of died out because it got so fragmented so how do we keep this momentum in the module ecosystem going and taking those lessons from Cosmos how do we learn from that I I would phrase that uh let me ask that question to both you guys CU I think that's a challenge that other modularly designed ecosystems are starting to I think Cosmos ran this they were the first ones to run into this problem right they had extremely this The Sovereign full stack chain has been the vision from the beginning supported by the cosmos SDK and you know tendermint and IBC and all that stuff but now ethereum as it's growing and it's adopting this like I saw vitalic wrote this post about pluralism and multiple different rollups it's

fragmenting liquidity and attention also so how do you guys think that modular ecosystems trade off some of the benefits that you get the scalability and the customizability and all that kind of stuff with the sort of fragmentation and loss of a shared shelling Point like what do we think the way is to uh solve that yeah I mean I think um it's tough like anyone building in this space and anything that like could be remotely called modular like understands that everything that's cool about this by definition also puts users in W Gardens that just make everything that's cool about crypto worse and so I don't know

like welcome to life like everything sucks more than it should like we'll figure it out but um I just I don't I'm like pretty skeptical on a look I don't think like the interesting thing about any of this is the technology right like if we were interested in building like good fast Computing like we should stop as to my point earlier stop messing around with all these like weird VM stuff and just like go build Financial applications on a WS right like what is interesting here is that we have created a credibly neutral shared space like I think we can all agree that Bitcoin ethereum and depending on where you're standing

salana but like maybe maybe not right but like that is achieved this very delicate idea of credible neutrality and like to me what's exciting about modular is modular is the realization that like with this credible neutrality we can continue adding more Tech technology and more features onto it without disturbing like the thing that's sacred the thing that we're here to protect and to build and to grow with things like initia right like John you said you're not here to shill their bags I'm not here to like uh on their bags right but like I I just anytime you're like okay like all these cool things we learned in ethereum and

Bitcoin and Sal like we're going to take them we're going to upgrade them but we're just going to start over and build a new ecosystem to me is like completely missing the point of crypto and like the point of crypto is about the shared trustless space that you can't just like get a bunch of kids that are really smart and have really good memes in a room and like regenerate that and so I like when I hear things like Sovereign rollups like to me what that is like okay by definition a rollup is supposed to settle to a different chain and like if it's not on if it's not on ethereum I don't think it's a rollup what is a sovereign rollup I think that just an ALT L1 like that for some reason has decided to use

Celestia why Beyond me right but so like I do think that for me like mind North Star is the trustless space and not how do we create a new one but how do we grow the one that we have and um like the technology comes secondary to that to Credible neutrality and not we don't create credible neutrality by building better technology it's the other way around yeah I'm curious I don't know no sleep if you're gonna respond there but I've got I I actually I've got some I got some push back for your Rex so I actually view it uh almost opposite to that so I view each of these I think the interesting thing about crypto to your point is not just the technical architecture I think if you boil it down

if you were just looking at efficiency they should all just live on one box 100% I think the thing that's interesting about it is when you expand it to multiple boxes and you accept some amount of decentralization and a surrendering of a central control you open up different use cases that wouldn't otherwise make sense if it was on one box I think frankly like the biggest one of the biggest use cases I'm kind of coming back around to the bitcoiner point of view is the money like that makes a lot ofense like you can I can very easily honestly say if Google issued money tomorrow I wouldn't trust it why because it's freaking company and they're a for-profit company and that's not the kind of entity that you want issuing your money and so I think there are other use cases like that

and what these what these different blockchain ecosystems are are have uh how they've organized is around uh different values and principles and I think it's been helpful to tackle different actual technical design decisions so Bitcoin solved that first one right which is I want to create money um I need a super decentralized environment for that how do we do that and they got the very first version of working version of consensus with proof of work right then eventually we're like this is a pretty cool architecture what if there were other things that we could build with these decentralized boxes and that's when ethereum came right it's like okay we want to keep roughly that same level of decentralization um and and and then a a separate cultural uh Zeitgeist grew up

around that it's like we don't want to be like these Doomer Bitcoin people right we want to be like these optimistic people but then it was like oh actually in addition to just reconstructing our conception of the base layer we need this to go fast boxes need to be a little bit bigger like we need the we need the throughput here and we need a little bit more focus on this execution layer enter salana and so I actually view each of these things as having organized to solve different parts of this incredibly challenging computer science uh currency markets equation I I see all of these things rebundle uh like starting to become more similar but I think they're probably going to stay separate forever um and I

view that as a good thing because just like it's such a cheap easy example I've used this a couple times and people always like you're so American but I'm going to give it anyway I love America I think America is the best country in the world my parents grew up telling me it was the best country in the world it's awesome but I also don't want it to be the only country in the world I think it's really nice that there are other cultures that exist which have optimized for different values and standards and I actually think there being different cultural ecosystems all around makes makes this one little ecosystem that I'm in better so that that's been my view on blockchains for a little while I think that's the that's how I like them well I love that that was that was so good yeah

like Bitcoin has like that um the money like the Doomer money cult and then ethereum has like the super optimistic uh decentralization folks and then like salana has like the engineering focused engineering product focused people right that culture so Mike what's your view mod oh yeah go ahead go ahead go ahead yeah I guess like with modular like um this modular native ecosystem is has like a different energy this time as well it's very interesting like the way people collaborate across different Stacks like I work in it I work in the mro space so I see how everybody works together it's very different than how like these different all l1s work together well they don't really um so that's really interesting like this

different vibe is coming out of modular and that's like that cultural shift I want to talk about on this podcast that we mentioned earlier U modular is a culture now and we really wanted to get that here one thing that's going to be interesting no sleep is seeing how that culture develops when modular I feel like inevitably becomes quite successful like if you look at ethereum how ethereum developed it was like a very Like Us Versus them and everyone in who was building an ethereum was very together and everyone was like you know in Brooklyn in Williamsburg at the Ethereal Summit they're still in Brooklyn still in Brooklyn haven't let no they've moved to Soho the successful ones have moved to Soho they have William now they've all they've all G to Soho if they've raised enough money but

um New York's going modular the soo Williamsburg barbell they were all very rah rah and like we're building an ethereum together and even though we compete we're we're together but now that they've all raised a lot of money and they're competing for the same users like optimism vers arbitrum are not so rah rah we're building this together anymore they are staunchly competing and modular really feels like kind of early ethereum where it's like we're all doing this together and you've got all these awesome companies and we're all doing it together and we're all hanging at the modular Summit and we're all listening to the expansion pod and all that kind of stuff but if people but it but it's like a self-fulfilling Pro it's if if if it's if you guys are if the modular

ecosystem ends up being really successful there's going to be the same thing that happened in ethereum probably where there's some pretty intense competition yeah yeah it'll be interesting to see how that impacts the culture I think it also depends like how fast crypto as a whole grows like if some someone build something really sick and modular like with a modular blockchain and it onboards a bunch of people and we get a bunch of users in the ecosystem like we're not competing for like a shrinking pie which is like kind of what ethereum is doing during the bare Market everybody was fighting for like the same users if the ecosystem is growing fast enough then you're not you don't have to fight against each other so that's just like a that's like a really vague way of saying if we grow fast enough it's not a problem

eventually once like growth slows down like yeah it's going to be some PVP but I think for the next like two to three years there's really good momentum behind this ecosystem and if we break through to like that next uh like let's say like 100 million users in crypto with this modular stack and modular modular building thesis then we might not have that like PVP as much that makes sense yeah I agree fellas well look I think um hopefully this gave uh listeners a little bit of a flavor of what expansion the show is going to be guys I am just so pumped for this one um and Rex I I got a shout out here Rex is a uh he's joining us here at blockworks and actually Rex is a I will announce

this separately as well people already be aware of this by the time they're listening on this episode but Rex has been hosting a podcast that blockworks acquired the uh strange water podcast which is one of my favorite uh pods and actually how we found uh Rex so very excited to be doing this with you buddy and noly you know we've got to know you through this process um it's been great to get to know you've been a longtime follower on Twitter and yeah the two of you guys uh this is we love all of our shows like children but yeah I am super pumped for this one which I hope came across on this uh if folks want to follow you guys um and just uh we're gonna link by the way for folks who are listening take this as a as a minute here go down into the show notes of B

crover Empire where you're hearing this um and there's going to be a link to expansion the RSS feed uh the Twitter and the YouTube so uh go make sure you follow that and we're also going to link no sleep and Rex's uh personal twitters as well so definitely go follow them and you can get any any and all updates there um but yeah man and I just I want to turn this back at you guys and just say thank you for giving us this platform and as someone who's been doing a podcast for a year um I know and now that John has been working on it like this is not easy work and um like one it's just like awesome to like be part of such like an amazing like fun optimistic company but two man like that everyone on this call already knows this

but like the guest that we're getting and the content that we're producing is there's never been a podcast releas opening like this this is going to be insane and mental and like it wouldn't have been possible without the support and the brand and everything so um just thank you thank you and so excited and like welcome to a new era of podcast boom good place to end go follow expansion listen to it Rex no sleeper pumped n