HOP DROP! Hop Protocol AIRDROP and DAO Launch! 🟣_🟣

Transcript

welcome bankless nation to a very special episode a live stream that we got to do just because this is what happens when the news breaks we have the hop drop on our hands the hop protocol uh the bridging protocol between ethereum layer 1 ethereum layer twos and other chains did a token and and of course they're launching a dow so we were talking all about these things today on the bankless live stream because apparently that's what you do when you launch a dow you come to bankless and we live stream about it it's a ton of fun the community shows up they're all in the youtube comments right now i'm really going to enjoy this one for those that don't know we've also had chris winfrey on before chris winfrey of course has been with hop protocol for a very long time he will be

joining me and unpacking the hop drop and the launch of hop protocol dao uh some uh some of the typical questions that you would expect as well as the unique things about hot protocol because a hop as a system as an org as a dao got spun up with a unique genesis story that lends itself to the to the long arc of what hop is and what our a lot what hop will become as well so of course what is the token responsible for how much responsibility did we just receive uh the air drop details and the distribution of course there is a new hop foundation there's hop labs there's the dao how do these things all interface uh and uh where is the hop protocol going and then of course like chris has been in this space for a while so i just want to pick his

brain about uh the coming layer two two two this is the second layer two related token to come out in the last two weeks uh and there are definitely more on the horizon so what happens next when more of these tokens come out and about and it reinvigorates excitement back into d5 back into layer twos all these conversations are coming up next right after we talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible garbage drum is an ethereum layer two scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use device and nfts over 300 projects have already deployed to arbestrum and the d5 and nft ecosystems are growing rapidly some of the coolest and newest nft collections have chosen arbitrarily as their home all the wild d-fire protocols continue to see increased usage and liquidity using arbitrary has never been easier

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twitter at maker dow and learn from the oldest and most resilient down existence [Music] all right bankless nation let's go ahead and get right into the show i'm joined with chris winfrey of hop protocol uh and chris uh exciting news man welcome to the show thanks david it's great to be back on the show it's definitely been a crazy week but yeah super excited to be here yeah uh all of a sudden oh there you go camera just became uh in focus again wonderful okay cool let's get into it man but like there's so many things to discover and so many things to talk about like of course all the airdrop details the distribution all the all the things that people would expect but of course we need to actually talk about what we are talking about so what is hop protocol and what does it do and why do

people use it yeah so so hop protocol is a cross-chain bridge we're very much focused on the ethereum ecosystem so we we have a hub and spoke model where ethereum is the hub and then we support uh layer two networks like arbitrary optimism we support other l1s that that you know are close to the ethereum ecosystem like uh polygon and gnosis chain um and ultimately we can support any chain that has a message bridge with ethereum so you know we will be expanding um and connecting ethereum with kind of the broader uh crypto ecosystem um but we you know keep ethereum at the center of it and and this allows us to have this really

secure bridge model where we can put these stop gaps between each network so if any one network were to fail the users on uh the other networks are safe so that way users on arbitrom and optimism can enjoy you know trustless uh you know enjoy the full uh security of ethereum uh but then you can still jump you know straight over to to another chain like polygon and and um you know enjoy the the low fees and and so on right okay and of course just asking the very basic questions why do we need bridges why are bridges necessary yeah so you know within the ethereum ecosystem you know we're seeing this movement from layer one ethereum to layer two um and with the kind of rollup

centric ethereum roadmap uh scaling roadmap um you know usage is moving to to this you know very diverse layer two ecosystem so right now you know we have arbitrage we have optimism um you know we have we have some uh starkware rollups that are application specific but you know they're going to be launching their own role up uh zk sync uh is live their v2 is coming very soon um and and so we just have like all these different solutions they all have different use cases different trade-offs but ultimately for regular users layer 1 is super super expensive so if you want to be using ethereum you actually want to just be this layer 2 native citizen where you jump from one layer two to the next and

never have to touch the uh base uh layer of ethereum um and then also you know if you want to jump to outside the ethereum ecosystem you also need a bridge to kind of get your assets over there okay of course of course right we are going into a multi-chain world whether you think it's a multi-layer two world a multi-layer one world but we're going to need bridges around these things but each each different layer two has its own canonical bridge right can you help uh help the listeners unpack the difference between the layer two bridges that are built by the layer twos themselves like the layer two optimism bridge and the layer two arbitrary bridge and things like hop and connects can you differentiate between these things yeah absolutely so um you know like you said each each of the layer twos as well

as kind of these like um ethereum side chains like uh polygon and gnosis chain have um a asset and a message bridge with ethereum so uh this lets you you know like one contract can talk to each other and then also if you just want to move your assets over you can um with specifically with optimism or optimistic roll-ups uh this message bridge takes a full week to get back to ethereum and this is enough time for any kind of uh fraud detection to play out on chain uh make sure that all the assets on the you know those networks are secure um and then also all of these bridges are just between the networks and ethereum

um and so what hop does is we basically leverage these bridges uh specifically the message bridges um to create this the broader kind of cross chain bridge so that you cannot just go from like polygon to ethereum or optimism to ethereum or arbitrary to ethereum but you can actually go directly between each of these um and the way that we do this is we uh bundle messages on one chain so we get you know thousands of messages that are sending from say you know polygon to arbitrarily uh we we pack those up and then we send them through uh layer one ethereum to to the destination but that's you know very small package and then we can unpack them over there and this creates this you know very uh

scalable way to get a message from uh one you know non-ethereum chain to the next by using ethereum as hub certainly and without these cross layer two bridges if you were on polygon and wanted to get to arbitram you would have to go down to the ethereum layer one and then send your money over to the arbitrom bridge and then up to arbitrum and then if you wanted to go to optimism you would go back down that would take seven days uh and then you could go over to arbitrarily or optimism then up to optimism and then getting off of optimism would take another seven days but with these cross layer two bridges uh we can just go and hop from layer two to layer two to layer two without any of that time delay one of the cool things about this whole thing is that we knew

that this was a problem for layer twos like from a long way off this whole seven day like withdrawal thing it's just not going to be tenable for users and so like products like hop and connect started getting built even before the layer twos had launched and so it's one of the cool instances of problems being solved before they were even coming into existence and that brings me to my my next question about the genesis of hop how did hop come to beat uh where did it come from because of course now that it is turning into a dao i think it's important to understand the genesis of this whole thing so where did how did uh hop come to be in the first place who created it yeah so you know our team has been around the space for uh a long time now

and so previously we're working on a contract-based account uh wallet called authorium and so this was you know targeted towards regular users that just wanted to kind of log in with the username and password but we you know stuck to kind of the core ethereum ethos where it was like non-custodial uh you know you could access it on your own and but it still made it like very easy to onboard um but you know defy summer hit we saw started to see a lot of these users just get completely priced out of mainnet ethereum because unless you're dealing with you know tens of thousands of dollars if you're paying hundreds of dollars of transaction fees like you're just getting your yield cut it you know it stops making sense very very fast and so what we did with ethereum is we

started integrating with different layer twos um at the time it was like diversify uh and uh loop ring uh and you know so primarily application specific layer twos to focus on exchanges or being exchanges and we saw our users they would kind of move to these layer twos they'd make a few transactions and then they moved back and by the time they they paid the bridging costs you know they deployed their layer one account uh they might as well have just used uniswap on layer one like they weren't really saving uh money and so and and meanwhile we are you know seeing like our onboarding flow just get destroyed by fees because now all these new users

that have this smooth onboarding flow now have to pay you know 100 200 just to deploy their account and get started which was just like a deal breaker for for most regular people so we were we knew that okay we need to onboard users directly to layer two and then just let them hop around from one layer two to the next never touch layer one never have to deploy that contract based account and yeah started to think about um different ways we could do this and yeah so we came up with uh hop protocol it's a you know very unique um design uh we put the white paper out uh towards the beginning of 2021 uh just to the research community um and then yeah not too long after vitalik released his paper on the roll-up centric uh

scaling roadmap and that post actually called for exactly what we were building like we need to do um you know we need to be better about uh transferring assets from one roll to the next so we got super super excited uh just kind of went heads down built the thing as fast as we possibly could uh you know went through a bunch of audits made sure everything was secure released it uh last july um and then yeah then growing it since oh man that is a cool story so how many people who are working on the original ethereum project uh were rotated into the hop project yeah so so it's uh the three founders um yeah that's three so three guys okay uh great and then and then how has the hop

community grown since then um i mean in terms of the the team uh we we have uh lido on our team as well um so it's you know shane miguel myself uh and lito and you know we're going to be growing the team uh pretty aggressively coming up so you know if you're interested in in uh you know building a bridge and you know helping us scale ethereum uh definitely reach out um and then as far as the community goes like that that's been one of the coolest things to see is you know we've really seen a lot of people step up um you know take charge whether it's like mods in the discord or people building uh dune dashboards or uh twitter bots and and all kinds of stuff just like making

small contributions um yeah and i think this makes for a really unique story out of hop protocol where uh you you guys saw a need ahead of time based off of what you were building it's like well this is a problem for our current product uh and then you had like this a nice immaculate just like vitalik paper saying hey this is gonna be a problem coming forward and you guys were like oh we already knew that let's keep on building it was like the vitalik validation uh but then like you wrote uh rotated ethereum into hop protocol a way ahead of the curve before the role us the the like roll up centric mode roadmap was even well understood by the broader ethereum community but you guys never actually took any additional vc funding from uh from anyone before after

the rotation from ethereum into hot protocol is that correct so so we we did do the round with ethereum like you said um and then uh we did actually do a very small round just to get um a few uh d5 founders and so you know we brought on uh kane and stani uh from uh synthetics and ave and then as well as stefan um from gnosis and then a key a few key individuals but this was just you know a very very very small allocation just to kind of keep us going and get these folks involved so yeah we've really kept um funding to a minimum and you know i've been like super lean with with you know how we built out um but that's allowed us to give you

know just a ton uh to the community and make sure that that the the dow has like a bunch of firepower in the treasury and and uh yeah really happy with the way everything turned out yeah and where the the current state of crypto right now is that uh seed funding and seed rounds are just like going bonkers and valuations in the private markets and hop never really engaged with that so you guys had the the one round with ethereum years ago uh and then i think and then what you just said just with a few key more people just to keep keep a gas in the gas tank but it never really seemed to be about like how much can we raise from from vcs can you talk about just the ethos and the vibes that that you guys have tried to uh make in into

the whole hop entire in into the hop ecosystem yeah i mean that that's exactly right like we we truly believe in in decentralization and um you know ultimately if the the company behind uh or that like initially develops the product has like you know all the funding then then you know the community only has so much uh control and so what we want is really for hop to be community truly community-led um and so the you know the community will own the treasury uh and you know there might be opportunities for investors to to get a piece of that treasury if they decide um but we as as kind of the initial development team uh are now kind of transitioning to being a

service provider for the dow and so in terms of like our budget and and you know that's all gonna have to be requested uh from us to the community saying you know here's what we're providing what we're bringing to the table and what we're asking to kind of like keep ourselves going okay so and one final question before we get into the fun stuff the token stuff how many full-time hoppers are there how many full-time people like work work for the hop protocol so there's four of us four of us okay cool yeah that's not that many not that many but you know like i said we're gonna be growing the team uh pretty aggressively so uh hopefully we'll we'll have a bunch more hoppers here um pretty soon how much like bottom-up community involvement has

there been um there's been a lot you know we've seen um you know definitely people have picked up you know like i said uh dune dashboards uh twitter bots um you know someone did a gnosis safe integration uh we've seen tons of like integrations across different um products in in the crypto space um like david mihal with crypto fees has been uh pretty cool and and yeah you know definitely seeing the community start to pick up anything they can amazing i'm just reminded of how uh lean and simple not not necessarily simple but just like it doesn't take a whole lot to make a whole lot of value out of this base like uniswap doing as

much volume as coinbase only had like 20 to 30 employees and now we're seeing entire cross across layer two bridges come out with just four people and a community uh i would imagine that community is about to get a lot bigger coming up soon here yeah and you know the three of us founders are all super technical we all still are writing code you know are in the weeds and then you know lito is just incredible on the marketing side and growth side so um yeah feel good you know even though we're smart small team we can um you know definitely pack a punch and and get stuff out there amazing okay let's go into the details of the hop drop itself what were the criteria for for getting the the air drop and how was that criteria decided yeah so so with our airdrop um the the

goal was to one you know reward early uh participants of the network so you know if you provided liquidity um then we wanted to basically like reward uh for that contribution um and then beyond that we we targeted uh achieving as broad of the distribution as possible so you know like i've been talking about we really want hop to be truly community-led uh and you know truly decentralized and and so in order to do that you know we need to have like a very healthy distribution of tokens across you know a broad set this has become an incredibly hard problem to do and uh just like i don't think people really realize the scale of um people uh farming air drops like it is

truly an industry uh i you know i would guess that over the past year you know billions of dollars of tokens have been given away and these farms are making you know probably hundreds of millions of dollars and so you can imagine like if they're scaling things up they they're hiring people they are you know it really is a massive scale it's not just like uh joe schmo over there kind of spinning up 20 accounts and and claiming 20 airdrops and you know so these folks have uh discord accounts they have twitter accounts they have ems names they're spending millions of dollars in transaction fees like the the going into this we were like mind blown uh once we started digging into uh the

different transactions and so with hops specifically uh we saw that you know a lot of these um air drop farmers were kind of like on on the low end where they would send you know 50 cents back and forth back and forth a bunch of times with a bunch of accounts um and then we we saw everything from that to like you know much more sophisticated uh where you know uh farmers where they they actually have uh you know millions of dollars like you know they're making hundreds of thousands of dollars of volume um you know really solid the full spectrum and and so what this creates is like really hard problems it's like we want to give hop to the community that's the goal but how do we sort out our actual community

from uh you know one these large-scale bot farmers two people who see kind of the air drop as the product themselves they don't care about the bridge they just really want to get the airdrop and then bounce on to the next thing uh and then there's like our actual community um and so we tried a bunch of techniques uh what we landed on was like creating these like initial criteria where it's like hey you know we can't uh sort out the box if we just look at everybody but if we create this like initial criteria most of the bots will fall under it and then we'll be able to actually manually go through and uh you know both programmatically and manually go through and find our actual

users and get them hop token um so what we did is we we set the initial criteria uh this moved around a little bit and we set it as low as we possibly could at two transfers in a thousand dollars of volume um so you know an average of five hundred dollars if you're just doing two transfers if you're only working with a hundred dollars you could still make ten transfers and you'll still uh be included um and so this kind of gave us our initial set of addresses and then what we did is we we ran this you know algorithm that that actually tracked every single transfer that that these addresses have made every single uh bridge transaction that these these addresses have made and then we uh filtered out all the exchanges all

the contracts all anything that that might have interacted with multiple individuals and uh split up the interactions and and so this kind of like allowed us to isolate these groups of addresses that that we could identify as being individuals all that it's done programmatically spits out a list of groups and then we actually manually went through every single group and said hey you know this group they all are doing this exact same transaction at this exact same time looks like a bot farm eliminated or this group you know looks like a bunch of nft uh users that are all friends with each other sending each other money but you know they're still included they're getting hot token uh and that kind of led to uh where we landed so we you know

out of 40 000 addresses that met the criteria we eliminated 10 000 of them uh and now the community is is kind of helping um to eliminate a bunch more i don't know if you want to get into that already yeah no we we certainly will i think this is really cool and just it kind of illustrates the changing meta of airdrop dynamics uniswap had this just immaculate blessing of not having to worry about this because they invented the whole concept of a retroactive airdrop and so no one was farming the uniswap airdrop because that wasn't a thing to do but they were the only people that were able to do that whoever was going to do the retroactive airdrop first had the blessing of like cool you get to do it first and it's pure that

way following that every single app was like ooh retractive airdrop retroactive airdrop and it's starting to become gamed and now it seems to be like there's this arms race of air droppers versus airdrop farmers like who can get more creative in trying to figure out the mechanisms to farm the airdrop versus which teams can figure out how to uh mitigate against uh these these retroactive airdrop farmers how would you if you had to like rate your efforts your guys's efforts as in like give your guys a scorecard of like how well you did in achieving your goals of mitigating the farmers how well would you how strongly would you rate yourself i i think we did really well you know there was we spent three months uh

trying to figure this problem out and you know the whole time we're so jealous of unit swap just kind of being able to put it out there and there's no expectations and um but yeah we we knew people you know had expectations and we we really wanted to get get not just do like a plutocratic airdrop where we give to just the liquidity providers or just based on volume like stuff that can't be gained but it was such a hard problem to to figure out but yeah i think we did really well i think you know there's there are um more bots that that you know may still be there but i think that you know we've already seen some really promising submissions from the community and so what we've done is uh said that hey if

you submit a group of uh addresses with very solid proof we don't ever want to accidentally eliminate a legitimate user um so it has to be like you know super tight and but if you do you get 25 percent of the tokens that that would have gone to this civil attacker and then also if you are a civil attacker you can report yourself so if you are scared that you are going to get caught by the community which you know they likely will there's a huge incentive to do it you can just report yourself and and you will get 25 of the tokens that you otherwise uh would have gotten or you can wait and get nothing and so i'm super excited

that's amazing that's that's such a chad move because like it's game theoretical rational to just turn yourself in because like you still get the you still are farming the air drop but you're mitigated by by 75 percent so you like you still like congrats like you you got something but like you're you're still getting knee capped in the total supply of what you're getting that is genius it's a little little tip from the irs [Laughter] oh my god that's too funny and so also what you're doing with allowing people to report this uh report the the farmers that the airdrop farmers is like you're allowing other people to farm the farmers uh and so like it's it's you're putting this out into the market and

you're allowing just raw financial incentives to uh reduce the distribution of tokens into the hands of people that shouldn't have gotten it in the first place this is really cool that's exactly it yeah and so is this is this like you do you think going to be like the standard mechanism going forward i i feel like all future airdrops would probably use some sort of like mechanism like this i do i do um and i but like you said like i think it is an arms race and ultimately it comes down to solving civil resistance and you know you've seen people work on it for years like like notably bitcoin has been working on it for a long time it's a really hard problem i i don't

know if it's solvable so i you know i do think people will use this if they try to do civil resistant air drops but uh we might see this be one of the last civil resistant air drops because the incentives are just too big for the farmers and it's too easy for them to hide well this is going to be an involving story as we go forward of course okay i actually want to go into the actual distribution uh and so uh chris you're not seeing it because i'm i'm uh live streaming my screen but i'm i'm showing the hop distribution pie chart we got the treasury we got the airdrop we got the investors we got the team we also have the future team uh and so i kind of want to just go through these one by one starting with the actual treasury uh so typically i think

you see i've seen the treasury uh for like typical dallas gets spun up at just 50 percent seems to be like the shelling point uh but you guys have chosen point five percent uh is there any just like grammar reason into how that number got decided yeah i mean it's a symptom of like how lean we've been able to stay and get the protocol out there so you know we we think of like insiders as both team and investors and um the typical slice uh for insiders in a uh dow is is like 40 to 50 percent uh and for us it's you know right around uh 30 percent and so that that's what has allowed us to give an extra 10 of firepower to the doubt fantastic fantastic okay and then also i

should also start with there's a one billion hop supply correct so that makes it uh what is that 650 605 million tokens of hop tokens are in the treasury and there's no other there's no plans for those right they're just in the treasury right yeah it's going to be up to the community okay so i i i'm not sure if there's consensus on this but i want you to check this take of mine if it's in the treasury it's basically tokens that aren't in circulation but are minted but like when it comes to like the trading like volume and also the market cap of this thing they basically count as like unminted tokens and so i actually consider the 605 million hop tokens to not actually exist

because they're in the treasury right and also does the treasury have a lock up i think that's a fair take and the treasury doesn't have a lock up um so the community can kind of uh spend them as as they see fit okay so if you if you take my take uh there's actually really just about 400 million hop tokens out there the the 605 million from the treasury will slowly make themselves relevant over time so this is why we call fully diluted valuation um but if we're talking about like today the air drop and what people are going to be clamoring about as soon as this token starts trading for those purposes like these tokens just don't exist um but also there there are some other categories where that falls into the same uh same category as well so we'll talk about that airdrop at eight

percent uh eight percent of the total supply so what is that 80 million uh hop tokens how did you guys decide on eight percent um so so we really wanted to um get a lot of hand or tokens into the hands of the community but you know like giving too much to bots was a concern and then also uh the bridging space is incredibly competitive right now and um liquidity mining plays a huge role uh in in this so what we imagine the community will do uh you know soon after the dow uh launches is set up like a liquidity binding to get um you know more liquidity into the pools that's going to allow larger transfers and

cheaper transfers um through the bridge and so we we do imagine that a large portion of the treasury is going to be distributed um you know over the next year over the next two years and and uh moving forward yeah and i definitely want to talk about the yield opportunities that layer two bridges present but we'll save that for the second half of the show um investors six point two five percent you talked about those it's the people that invested in ethereum back in the day and also some select angels how long what's the lock up on those people um so for both team and investors we we have a three-year lock-up um with a one-year cliff um so uh both the team and the investors will have zero voting share uh in the doubt

it's really going to be the bridge users and the liquidity providers who are in control for the the first year okay um 22.45 percent for the team that's the four founding members of the team correct yeah just just three founder of spacex excuse me uh and then also 2.8 for the future team uh which also will lead into a topic here in a second uh but i would imagine the same lock up on those as well uh for a future team it will likely be a you know standard four-year vesting schedule the reason we did three years is because we've already been you know the founding team's been work here working on this for three years uh if you count on ethereum and yeah we've all been doing it at least one year yeah okay well definitely congratulations on this event uh this is probably been a

long time coming to have a token out and about so this is probably pretty exciting for you thanks yeah it definitely is uh there's one other part of the uh the announcement post that we'll have linked in the show notes as soon as this live stream is over uh it's the hop foundation plus the hop labs and of course the post itself is talking about the hop dao so there's three entities now the foundation labs the dao can you just talk about all these entities and how they relate to each other and what each one does sure um so uh hop labs is kind of this initial uh entity it's a usn you know delaware c corp um we you know developed top protocol um and this is uh you know who employs us um and so now that you know we're turning

into a dow uh we uh you know the foundation is spun up in the cayman islands and so this kind of acts as like a legal layer for the dow because there's a lot of uh stuff still figuring being figured out as far as like how to treat dallas legally and and you know what that looks like you know how taxes are paid and so on um and so that this you know helps kind of uh limit liability and give like an entity for regulatory bodies to interact with if necessary uh but ultimately it's controlled by the doubt you know the the the foundation uh is beholden to the token holders uh the token holders can add and remove um

board members of the foundation uh the entire treasury is actually held you know in uh the you know governance contract so it's not like the the foundation has like large amounts of funds or anything um so yeah it really it just acts as like a legal layer uh for the doubt and then you know us as as hop labs now that that you know that once the dow is out there we become a service provider to the doubt so you know we've stayed super lean we don't have like a massive treasury uh or a huge budget or anything um and so what what you know you'll see moving forward is that we will actually request funds from the dow from the get-go i know lots of other projects are going to do this eventually but you know

they still have a long runway of vc funding to burn through before they really need to to make the ask um but you know we want we we think it's important to uh you know actually you know be beholden to the the community and and this is one way to do it where if they don't like what we're doing or or you know we're not providing the services promised like we you know our funding relies on it yeah you guys get asked just like anybody else yeah okay cool and then just uh one uh last few set of questions before we go to the second half of the show which i think will be uh very very fun um of course what does the token do what sort of responsibility does the dow have what are the powers of the token what does it govern over yeah

so so right now um it is very much a like purely governance token um so uh but we do have like a bunch of uh key parts of v1 op that need governance um so you know one like top of mind one is is uh incentives for the amms so we do imagine the community will choose to uh set up incentives uh you know get a lot more liquidity make you know transactions cheaper um and then we have this like active liquidity provider role called the bonder and v1 of hop has this constraint uh where we you know we can't just open up the bonder uh to be a completely parish in this role uh because they they you know

with v1 like bonders might step on each other's toes and and it has to be like a little bit more coordinated so we have a bond or white list uh and ultimately the community will be able to choose uh which bonders are kind of running for for each asset until we get to v2 uh where we completely remove the white list uh the bonder is like a fully permissionless role anyone can spin one up like they would spin up like e2 note in their living room um and yeah so that that's the um bond or white list piece um and then you know we'd love to see the community set up like grants programs you know like a lot like um other dows have done

and then you know obviously uh manage the treasury funds it would it like likely make sense to diversify a little bit make sure that that hop uh can survive a bear market um but then also you know is like competitive with um you know a lot a lot of these other bridges that that have like massive massive treasuries uh to to you know spend on various things and then um lastly like i said you know our own funding it needs to come from the hop down itself so the community will be in control of like uh you know what that looks like and and you know what they they ask from us and i'm uh now cognizant that i forgot to ask the very important question of uh this is not an air drop that you can

claim at this present moment there will be a claim date in the future this is the the period of time where all the siblers can get identified and all of that shenanigans but when does the token actually go live when will actually be able to be claimed by the uh the airdrop recipients um so so we're gonna give the community at least two weeks to uh make reports of of any kind of like civil attacker groups um depending if we're seeing like super high quality group uh groups being reported still after that two week period we might extend it a bit um but yeah so i think we're looking about two to three weeks that you'll be able to claim your tokens and then um you know hop will will be in the community's hands so it's like the timing of a

microwave popcorn bag if you still hear the pops going off we're going to wait and until we don't hear the pops going off anymore exactly yeah that's a good way to put it amazing okay cool uh chris i want to just pick your brain about layer twos there's a bunch of like yield opportunities with layer twos especially as volume picks up over layer two summer and overall you talked about how competitive the cross chain layer two bridge landscape is going to get so i also wanna pick your brain on that and overall just your takes on the layer 2 ecosystem the the l222 movement and whether you subscribe to that idea or not so all those conversations are coming up in the second half of the show right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible if you're trying to grow and preserve

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for liquidity mining incentives so i want to talk about just the yield opportunities for cross train layer two bridges and how yield farming might begin in this whole entire paradigm like how much yield is out there like how much shield is they available to capture and when these when the competition for these layered layer twos really heats up like how how big of a deal do you think this is going to get yeah i think it should be really interesting like you know we're super excited about optimism's token launch um you know you know we'll see what else happens from there um and then you know with with the hop token out there um you know if the community lines up incentives there like things could definitely get really juicy um i think already you know with hop you know you're seeing uh

double digit returns um for for stable tokens on some of the pools that are are already incentivized like the polygon and and dosa spools um and yeah so there's yeah tons of opportunities and then i i think like what what you want to get into is is like you know once we do see like these layer twos warring with each other it's gonna be tough to to uh win you know liquidity and and so you know we we might see uh you know the returns start to get really really nice as uh you know gets more and more competitive to see like who's gonna attract the most um tbl and so if we're looking to be liquidity providers for uh for hop and i think the the crossed

layer two bridging liquidity providing ecosystem is actually uh unique and different and like more attractive to me personally than just like liquidity or uh yield uh liquidity providing in uniswap right because if i want to liquidity provide my eath and you to swap i kind of have to do it with like stable coins which means i have to cut my eth position in half and turn it into 50 stable coins but like i'm way more bullish on each than just holding a 50 supply of stable coins so like with with a cross layer 2 bridge like hopper connects or something i can provide ether only and get ether fees uh and provide liquidity that way so i get to hold my eath hold my eth position but also getting eat fees and also potentially yield

farming hop tokens along the way so question to you is like what are the volumes that our people are seeing is it a largely ether uh being transferred over or is it stable coins like what's the distribution of uh uh fees that are being collected by the protocol yeah but by far um ether is our biggest bridge and so you know liquidity providers can definitely um you know uh provide liquidity with ethan h so you know pretty much no risk of impermanent loss uh because you can always claim your heath on layer one for the underlying eath um so yeah it's a great way to just get straight yields on eath without having to like expose yourself to like a permanent loss that that you know if goes up you'll end up with just

a bunch of stable tokens um and then you know second is usdc uh uscc is like a hugely dominant asset um and yeah most of the stable coin volume is is from there um and you know usdt and dye are a little bit uh smaller um but yeah i mean i it should be interesting what the yields look like after the the token is out i think uh right now there's a you know big chunk of liquidity in the pools uh i think a lot of that was uh folks kind of like uh hoping for for this airdrop um but now that it's out you know that there's gonna be need to be some incentives if the community wants to like keep these uh lps around and do you know the rates that people are getting

for supplying eth is there i don't know if there's like maybe a dune dashboard or an analytics that we could look at but is there like a um what's like the average yield that people are getting on there on their eth yes so you can see it right on our site you know hop exchange um when you go to lp it will it will show you um the trading fees and then also uh if there's a staking pool set up it will show you the additional staking rewards um and right now you know because there was um you know folks like like hoping for the airdrop the yields aren't like super attractive uh but um that's because there is a lot of liquidity uh there's outsized amount of liquidity for just the trading fees uh

but that's going to change really fast once what you know if the community decides to um add some additional incentives there now that this token's already out do you think all these like disgruntled farmers that got cut out are they just gonna like migrate to connex which hasn't done their air drop yet and so they're just gonna go and retroactively farm like the next layer two bridge it's possible but you know we're going to be pretty um or you know we'll we'll see but like i'd imagine the the incentives will will be there fast and and um you know people uh i don't think we'll move too fast and one thing i forgot to say is the the eath rewards on polygon and gnosis chain those are both incentivized right now

and and uh i do believe that the yields are pretty juicy lovely lovely all right well we'll get some links in the show notes so people can check out those yields uh and then uh of course as uh layer two season progresses like optimism token came out hot protocol token came out connects has explicitly stated their token is coming uh and like i can only guess arbitrarily's token is coming out like just zooming out over the broader like ethereum ecosystem do you subscribe to this being like the major catalyst needed to instigate a l222 layer 222 yeah i think so you know i i think um like especially like the optimistic world teams were super concerned when they uh were launching because

like people were so desperate for cheaper fees and like what they were bringing to the table but uh from a security standpoint that i think there was a lot of concerns about like just having a flood of of uh you know liquidity uh move over and you know before things like got really battle tested and played out um but i do think the teams are feeling super a lot more comfortable than when they launch and and uh you know like obviously optimism is ready to incentivize things already and and yeah like there's just so many flywheel effects here like like if optimism starts really uh creating juicy incentives on on their chain and we see like others do the same

thing and those are are competing with each other and then we see a lot of activity move to layer two and so now if you're on layer one you're competing with uh you're competing on block space with other layer twos and layer twos can use block space so much more efficiently uh so now you're like even more likely you're potentially more likely to get priced out of player one and and you know even more incentives to move to layer two and that flywheel uh plays out so i i really do believe it um and and this is the incentive that will kick it off yeah and a a nuance here that's important to unpack is that back in 2020 or in 2021 layer twos were just not ready their infrastructure was not refined yet and and really just the

story of 2021 was alternative layer ones beating layer twos to the punch because layer two tech wasn't really developed yet would you say that the state of layer 2 tech is ready to onboard a bunch of liquidity a bunch of users a bunch of transaction volume uh without having any like major hiccups like is there any sort of insights you know about what's going on with the layer 2 teams yeah i think so you know um you know as far as security goes like i think they've they've done a good job um you know like there hasn't been a hack of you know the optimistic roll-ups um and you know i do think that there is um still progress being made as far as like uh

decentralization and and fraud proofs and uh you know which is like kind of allows you to not trust uh what's known as like the sequencer who who's kind of moving stuff along um but you know knowing the teams like they're they're you know all super committed to to like being truly decentralized being you know really uh not having any trust involved um so you know beyond that the user experience is amazing like like i i you know if you haven't messed with with one of the optimistic roll-ups like just going from layer one ethereum where you make a transaction you're waiting 10 minutes you're trying to guess at the gas you want to use you go to layer 2 you make a transaction it's just a set fee you

don't have to think about it and it gets confirmed immediately it's like almost like a web 2 experience where you make a transaction you see the effects and and um yeah i i can't imagine um going back to player one after after moving over yeah if you have not used a layer two which i imagine a lot of the viewers have because uh you know that's what hop deposits you on uh still though if you have not yet used one you got to do it it is pure magic uh chris i'm sure you're a busy guy your airdrop just got launched i'm sure your discord is just a in just a very like energetic place to be right now so i want to let you get back to the very very busy life of a post airdrop team but first some final questions for you what's next for hop like what do

what do you think uh what are you gonna have to go do like right now after this live stream ends and then what do you guys focus on over the next few months yeah so so right after this podcast you know we're focused on kind of reviewing the the reports that are being submitted getting ready to actually you know get the dow live get the tokens live allow people to claim um and then yeah you know turn it over to the community uh that that's gonna be super interesting see people kind of step up uh we're um you know taking delegates right now so if you're interested in uh you know participating in hop governance and want people to kind of delegate their voting share to you uh please apply on our forum um and you know we'll help promote you and everything

and um yeah beyond that you know we're you know excited to see where the community takes it we have some thoughts as far as like um next iterations of hop that could be really interesting um yeah just just uh excited to see where it goes from here amazing chris well i do believe that layer 222 is on the horizon and it's because air drop season is back on the menu uh so thank you for being the number two layer two token layer two related token to come to the table i'm really excited about this coming revolution of the layer two ethereum uh and of course uh i'm gonna go do some hopping myself after right after this so chris thank you for coming on and explaining the the the launch of the hopped out for us

thanks for having me david and yeah super excited as well should be a fun year cheers all right bankless nation you know you know what to do and you know what you're about to hear crypto is risky d fire is risky layer twos are also risky and so are bridges we know bridges are risky you can lose what you put in we're this is the frontier we are headed west but we are and we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence we recommend joining our daily newsletter podcast and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bankless experience

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