ETHCC Convos: Rhino Fi Bear Market Pivots To Bridging and Thoughts From An OG

Transcript

foreign protocol that lets you build crushing applications and experiences in a secure way Rob and I really enjoyed their Tech because they don't add any new security assumptions on top of the connected change as they don't rely on an external validator set or an oracle security is definitely Paramount in D5 so we're excited to work with connects hope you enjoy this video come on guys live from ECC day two here with my buddy Ross been uh been talking to Ross for maybe two two years now or so so it's been it's been good coming back just had a really good interview with Jordy from polygons

EK VM did a really deep dive into the polygon 2.0 architecture and what's going on at ZK VM gonna dive in here with Ross about rhino-fy I just want to give you guys a quick update on connects um and their chain abstraction toolkit this is great for dapps who want to allow their users to interact with the DAP on any chain and connects does not use any external trust assumptions it doesn't use any validator sets strictly just the native architecture and the native Bridges within the ecosystem so without further Ado we're hyped today to have Ross here from rhino5 Ross is a D5 OG so um yeah Ross what are you cooking

up these days yeah thanks for um inviting me on the up on the podcast um I think this is a really good time to have a catch up because it was this time last year that we caught up uh just as uh the Rebrand happened uh and our pivot and you've also pivoted as well so A lot's happened in the past year uh maybe I could cover a little bit about that and what we've been up to so this time last year so before the last year we were the first order book Decks that was decentralized built on Stark X um we gave people aggregated liquidity for the top defy markets and we were getting like good volumes during the bull market uh you know 20 million dollars a day of spot volume and we'll be like well we can do more with this technology like the world's changed now

it's not just about order book dexes there's a you know amms liquidity pools there's this explosion of multiple Chains d5's Got a thousand times more complicated than what it was back in 2019 um so we were like well why didn't we use the basis of our technology but really build on this so about this time last year we announced a Rebrand and that cemented our move towards becoming a what we're calling antifa aggregator so Ryan fi is all about allowing you to access the best of D5 from one place so you can go to run if I deposit your crypto you've got one wallet that controls uh your runify account so you can connect with like metamask or Ledger and then from your rhinify account which

is on Stark X and completely non-custodial you can access the best bolts you can access staked you can access Somalia real yield opportunities for Bitcoin and eth you can access bridging so you can Bridge your funds to different blockchains you can access audible trading you can access amms so really the whole lot you could View at nfts at the bunch so we're really creating this One-Stop shop um this is a this is really cool because we think during the next a big wave of adoption you need this abstraction layer for D5 because you're not going to get uh you know your mom and dad uh fighting smart contract and bridging all around the you know around the 50 different chains without a bit of help to begin with so that's what that's our aim

that's our goal and so you know where what have we actually done in the past year uh well we've added all these extra volts to run a fire so you can do one click access to all these volts and strategies um but really where we're seeing the kind of bigger success story at the moment is with the launch of all these layer twos and bridging so back a year ago we had one bridge to polygon because we were using it as an onboarding tool to get people from uh you know from wherever they hold their funds into Rhino without having to pay gas when gas was like a thousand way um but we've now got Bridges to as you kissing era uh polygons e KVM arbitrum optimism and we're seeing these Bridges do like thousands of transactions a day and we really seem to have hit this spot

uh with with people um so we offer super fast bridging um so you can go from any one of these chains to any other chain in about like 10 seconds so we're very much focused on that you've got a job to be done you need to do it quickly you need to move your funds quickly whether it be for exploring a new Z5 Frontier exploring new vaults uh or airdrop hunting or whatever you can come to Rhino fire and you can just go from one change to the other super quick and that's where we're at the moment and that's what we're kind of leaning into so we've gone from in the first three years of Rhino-Fire existence we had 70 000 customers as of but yesterday we've now gone to 250 2 000 customers so this like massive jump uh based on all these bridges that we're

launching is really cool to see yeah I mean the bear Market is such a good time to Pivot I mean it's like you're faced with some tough times and you have to make you know choices with people and with your product and you have to look at things and be very honest with yourself about what is actually being built here what value is being provided uh you know what are we trying to achieve in the coming years how are we going to prepare for this next cycle and it kind of seemed like you you guys similar to us have kind of made it you know made it made a choice and it's turned out to be a good one I think an old Mentor of mine has always kind of told me in life you just have to make decisions you're going to make some good

ones and you're going to make bad ones but you just have to make choices and keep moving or else you just kind of sit there and you're stagnated so um kind of off of the old old guy wisdom conversation back into D5 um as far as your uh your bridge in in infrastructure and your mental model towards what you guys are building I'd love to kind of unpack that a bit as well yeah I think it's really cool what you mentioned there about like pivoting um veronify is really cool because it's got like five different things that it can do it's a One-Stop shop right so ultimately we're all about giving uh users access to D5 the best of D5 that's that's the goal that's what we want to do we want to get you know a billion users into D5 using Rhino as their place

that they go to do everything they need to do um at the moment Layer Two launches are really hot and it's awesome to see The Innovation that's going on there and we are connecting to those bridges to allow people to explore these New Frontiers as all these new use cases pop up on all these new chains we allow people to seamlessly move across there but then it could be in six months time that there's a fantastic yield opportunity you know at the moment we're seeing uh State teeth as being the biggest uh staking opportunity that is just going from strength to strength like 20 billion dollars now of beef staking in the beacon chain I'm probably more um that's continues to grow who knows what it could be in six months it could be restaking with eigen layer it could be some new cool real yield opportunity and

we want to bring that to our users um right now people are bridging that's what they want to do they want to go explore so that's what we're doing um so going back to your question around what we're thinking around bridging um so we've taken this approach so we are running fire is very much like a product company we want to rely on other people's infrastructure to do all the heavy lifting we want to like own the customer and have that customer experience which is why we're putting so much effort into the UI and the ux and the account abstraction and the wallet connectivity and all that lovely stuff so what we've done is we've launched the bridge using our own technology which is very very quick very easy to use it's all controlled by us uses our own collateral to collateralize the bridges so we've got our own companies eth usdc

usdc and the smart contracts so there's no risk to use the funds because you know if if something was to go wrong it would be our own funds that were lost not the users funds or LPS funds and that's what we're going for so we are getting feedback as we roll these Bridges out to different chains on what people want and our sort of unique or proposition I guess is the speed if you want to move 10 million dollars from arbitrus auctionism grantify is not the bridge for you you would go and use something like connects or not multi-chain anymore yeah [Laughter] um or the bridge for example with the bridge doing some amazing work but if you want to come and move anything from

a couple of dollars uh up to you know a hundred thousand dollars you come and do with Ryan if I you could do it in five seconds which is really cool but we are investigating lots of really amazing technology providers who are building some really cool infrastructure like connect fantastic team just got integrated in metamask so you can do all your bridging through metamask by connects which is awesome another team for a long time they're one of the original proponents of State channels back in like 2017 so it's really cool to see um the bridge really like what the bridge is doing that building I heard of the bridge like the British got a really cool um yeah not gonna talk about them too much on the podcast but it's easy to look into it yeah they've got this cool thing where you they have like a maker

taker system so you as a Bridger you would uh say like I want to move like a million dollars from eth to Arbitrage and then they have like solvers on the other side so market makers compete in auctions to try and take your liquidity so they don't need to centralize the pool right but it's really cool yeah they do it in you know you can move funds in a minute or two basically yeah the security model is just is is done through the makers and takers which is quite interesting yeah cool um well I I I'd love to keep going but I think we're running a little bit low here on on Time what do we expect from Rhino-Fire in the coming months yep absolutely oh so much man so much uh if I had to pull something out so what am I really excited about four Trends this

year um the growth of layers the growth of real world assets crypto gaming and stable coins um so we're very much uh focused on the growth of layer twos at the moment you know we were one of the first layer twos to launch on Stark X back in 2000 whatever it was 2020 2020. so we love layer twos and all of the the stuff that's going on there so you've got you know base launching linear launching scroll launching zika era ramping up stock and they're ramping up we want to be that place you go to where you can move all your funds between all these places support the teams that are building on these new chains in any way that we possibly can so that's what I'm super excited about so you come to run into bridge but also if you're a project on one of these new chains and you want

an easy way for people to onboard onto your the app then come to us because we can we can work with you to make that happen yeah fantastic yeah those Trends are all these the ones that I've been hearing about as well that are getting rapid tvl growth like if you go on D5 llama layer two's crazy TBR growth um rwa's tvl growth crazy and then stable coins which are backed by um stake teeth are getting a lot of growth as as well so that's been interesting to to kind of see play out as like almost like maker competitors I mean yeah maker doesn't care but like they're just you know there's it's just it's just cool to see more Innovations with uh

steak teeth I think on the stablecoin point like you just said the space is huge there is only really die at the moment but there's a massive space there yeah and I think these ones that aren't called like usdt and usdc are gonna be like a raft shout out to Raft like R I think it's a cool name for a stable corner you know I think like um getting away from this idea like sure it's going to be pegged to the like a dollar or it's going to be inherently worth one value of a dollar whether you measure that in Euros Yen or or you know SATs but like yeah getting away from the USD terms I think is a good call yeah and rock being um potential like a stable coin of stock that maybe eventually could be really cool we could

see different stable coins having different uh chains that they base themselves on that'd be crazy we've got the Stark knit shirt weapons today guys yes gets darknet CC coming up that's going to be a good one yeah nice all right um yeah I guess I mean there's nobody coming in so um you're pretty early on affiliated with starkware and kind of Stark X um what's your thoughts on that on that kind of uh and just kind of Enlighten us on Stark X is like specifically more like ABS specific Roll-Ups and then Stark Wares basically what powers start net um so kind of yeah yeah yeah so the stockx was the one of the first scaling Technologies uh it's the equivalent of what they call like an app chain now so

it's our own instance of a roll-up that is run by um yes what's called Stark X it's also the technology that power is so rare dydx before they move to Cosmos and immutable X and there's others now like I think Apex and uh one more called Brian so that's app specific fantastic uh doing a couple of very specific jobs like trading swapping at ridiculous scale you can get like the 7 000 transactions per second and stock we've done this really cool thing which not many people know about which is called uh sharp which is a shared proving system between Stark Stark net and all the stark X instances so back in defy summer when we were putting our batch on

chain to update the state of our roll up it was costing us like a thousand dollars a day in gas just to do that which was not sustainable but now all of the Roll-Ups are sharing that gas cost so it costs a few you know a few dollars now to put a batch update a state update on chain who want to launch yeah and I was going to just jump in with what Jordy was just telling me about um polygon 2.0 and and there's the case stack that they're building similarly basically there's going to be there's a there's going to be a shared prover for like let's say it's already described it as a constellation of of ZK Roll-Ups where uh they actually can actually also share the liquidity on the different execution environments so let's say roll up a has

a bunch of liquidity for like you know chain link USD pair on on a decks and then roll up B has a bunch of liquidity for other kind of pairs you can be on roll up B still access roll ups a like basically access that liquidity with effectively like an instant Bridge Swap and instant Bridge swap back or some sort of form like that which wouldn't really be possible on optimistic roles because of the seven day fraud proof and so that he was just he was basically explaining you could have to the nth power of Roll-Ups with infinite scale tons of applications shared security shared liquidity and a shared prover and it almost operates as as one system in this kind of constellation or Hub and spoke model and basically is the same

thing that starkware is kind of trying to get at yeah and I think this led to this is the next Frontier at the moment we're very much focused on the the base layer of layer 2's you have a layer two based on uh ethereum but on that layer two you're then going to be able to have layer threes and even more you can have app chains on the layer 2 which means you could publish a state update on the layer to every couple of seconds if you wanted to for super cheap and all these use cases are gonna be fantastic um just been to talk uh with co-founder will on ZK Tech and all these amazing use cases we could incorporate a privacy preserving app chains on top of layer twos yeah um and then yeah going back to a point roll up three layer threes and I think

um you know to go back to Stark now what stock Net's doing uh you know amazing fantastic there's the stock Nets the open equivalent of taking all the stuff that was learned from Stark X but making it open built in Cairo so they've gone down the route of different programming language which makes everything much more efficient so there's a high barrier to entry to deploy on that on that ecosystem but once you're there the use cases uh the things like account abstraction much more higher TPS you can do things like um payroll Masters so you can abstract the gas away from people just generally this computation that you can do on starknet is much more than any other evm roll up and it's also really cool because just from a D5 perspective very

selfishly I don't think we're going to see a lot of the Bad actors that you see on like other chains because there's so much more friction to deploying deploying on these things you need to really care about it so I think the teams that are deploying on there are really good Nostra and zks yeah because I mean why would you spend all that time to learn Cairo yeah just you could just go on the evm chains right and try to do things you know bad actions interesting yeah so um I had a couple things first Will's still doing well yeah those were ready to hear um next tons of Stark net air drops and Alpha coming Q3 Q4 like that ecosystem

is about to blow up yeah I think the the really cool thing with stockinette was the technology uh was that and they're doing great work but as of a couple of days ago it really became usable uh with their massive prover upgrade um so that's amazing all built in Rust much faster and that's only part of a phased rollout that's happening over the next couple of months where uh there's a fee market for transactions on Stark net um so fees will be reduced as well so right now you can do a transaction and it takes like less than a second it's very fast amazing right if anything everything else you're waiting for it to catch up like the red explorers um but then in a couple of months you'll see the cheese go as well so that that really unblocks a lot of the use cases

which yeah it's basically unusable for like the last couple months which is unfortunate but it's almost better in a sense like it gives it gave the teams time to build you know it gives them time to really understand what they're trying to do what projects what product they're trying to build and like just kind of come to their own terms so interesting to see and then as far as Rhino-Fire the focus on abstracting away this kind of complexity I think it's super bullish do you think that kind of concept came from just the teams being experienced in D5 or kind of your experience with account abstraction with Stark decks and starkware kind of understanding that how how important that is because generally speaking I mean I think that's probably one of the most bullish things you guys can do is just kind of abstract all that

complexity away um yeah yeah I think I didn't even realize when we launched stockx how powerful that was going to be to us because it was the first thing around it was just normal that essentially the role-up provider pays the gas so we settle the battery on chain we don't charge customers any gas once you're on run if I it's just in the native fee of whatever you pay to do a swap or whatever that is account abstraction and we didn't really realize it you create a vault on stockx as a user that's controlled by your wallet uh it's in the smart contract you're not paying any gas it's like the purest instance of a kind of structure that you can get so seeing that replicated on general purpose uh Roll-Ups is really cool to see and I think particularly I think this time last year I was at the Stark net event

talked to lots of get games Builders and especially with um with Gamers their users just do not want to pay any gas unless you're like launching a crypto native game that you're targeting crypto people but if you're trying to build for web 2 on a web 3 layer people don't want gas at all which is why so rare has done really well because so res built on stockx but you really don't know that you're you're on Stark X at all you know you log in with a pass with an email address and you deposit some Ethan that's about as far as awesome yeah thanks Ross thanks for coming on and sharing some really quality and valuable insights it's always a pleasure thank you yeah thanks for having me that's true