Interoperability For The Modular Future

Transcript

[Music] what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup today's live stream stacked with a bunch of super cool peeps talking about modular interoperability um and how we are going to reach the endgame with the various different ideas that each of these guys and girls are building um so we're g to start with some brief intros and then jump right into the conversation so let's start with Carol Lane and then Jay Cole and then we'll finish him off H thanks Andy happy to be here I'm

Carell systems engineer by backgrounds and founder of Union where a permissionless and trustless CK interoperability protocol uh that's fully IBC compatible right now in audit and hopefully live end of Q2 cool uh I'm lean I'm one of the founders of connects we have been building infrastructure for interrup Ability since 2020 uh and yeah it's got some exciting stuff on the road map but yeah I'm John the founder at um hyperlane appn if you've uh heard about it is a open framework for interoperability focusing a ton on the

modular ecosystem and connecting the new SL Sno of rollups and chains going on year six uh in crypto professionally and feeling increasingly old by the day and then we have Hart and philli as well hey guys I'm I'm hard I'm one of the founders of across uh we are across Chain Bridge um that's focused on an intent based architecture which I'm sure we're going to talk about too hey I'm Philip one of the co-founders of Lei we are a multi-chain trading API essentially aggregating and abstracting away anything that moves or swaps assets tax aggregators Bridges the

people that are here in this uh call all of that is aggregated and as such we serve like meam Master Phantom and um other large wallets and um Trading awesome welcome everybody I uh I want to start us off just get right into it like I I want to know like when when we ultimately achieve interoperability like is there an end goal like we've achieved it if so what does that look like or is this like an a NeverEnding Road what do what do you guys think anyone that that's open for anyone just up for grabs yeah it's not it's not a NeverEnding Road right like there is is an end the end is you

don't care what like you don't know where the hosting environment is the same way that like we don't know which like AWS Enclave this uh live stream is being you know hosted on like we have no idea no one here is going to investigate that no one who's viewing is going to Care to investigate that and uh so think of like what people talk about with account abstraction and like a single chain context there's no reason why that shouldn't be extrapolated into an interchain context like one where you're not going to end up with six digits worth of different chains and rollups but people having to know and keep track

of well where am I right now do I have the right token to pay for this computational unit that I'm about to exert I think that is like the conceptual end game and I'm sure people have different views too John I don't have a different view I like that but I've got maybe a slightly more maybe a slightly different take so I like the analogy of like you know you don't know if the website you're going to is hosted by AWS or like Google cloud like that makes sense to me but I do Wonder at times if the right analogy might be more like which bank you pick um so US dollars are supposed to be pervasive and a US dollar is the same wherever they

are but that's also kind of not true right like your US dollar at the Federal Reserve is one thing your US dollar at JP Morgan is another thing your US dollar at Silicon Valley Bank is yet a different thing and sometimes I wonder if this vision for seamless interop is actually more like the US dollar system where you mostly don't care it's mostly the same but every so often you actually really really do care yeah yeah that's probably more accurate that's probably much more accurate because because there was going to right like because of the security implications so unless those are figured out now we have a we have like two levers for figuring that out then there's one of like okay so we

could have a totally call it like IBC like trustless transfer but hey if the chain that you're going to or from sucks you're still in trouble and so that's like the bank level that's you know that's the bank of the Pacific basically defaulted but they two two different use here right like like that one one perspective is the consumer perspective and for the consumer perspective like like the maximum amount of fragmentation that person should encounter is the one that hard stated here right my dollar at bank a is different than my dollar at bank B um so this is like the maximum of fragmentation I would say a consumer

should encounter um another question would be like how fragmented um are these Solutions on a on a tech techological standard like will we have a future where we all agree on a certain communication standard like tcpip or https um or um I mean there are different different solutions as well right there's quick Bly and other like compression algorithms and other protocols that allow for cheaper and faster transfers but those are all just new standards to the very same thing and no consumer would ever care um or do you see a future where we have many different inability standards um driven by by by multichain assets Norms like um like ofs from layer zero for example um

and then I'm curious how you see that uh especially um yeah um I think U hyperlane like it's a very modular system right when it comes to verification mechanisms um similar to what layer zero is doing soon as well um and then Union you probably have very um unique perspective on this as well so I'm super curious about about that one yeah we kind of take a stance here where we don't really do like pick your security level I very much think like do everything SSL don't think like this website requires no security this the highest level just do everything over the highest that you can possibly do as it turns out like computationally um that's cheaper or just as expensive as multiple levels if you do lifetime based

and ZK based uh going back to like I see for like the interet and future at least you see from the users perspective yeah maybe you choose between like five different banks and you want to allow transfers there but for us it's really about like make sure that developers can choose to build their app specific l2s their app chains and provide the same ux when they combine them as they do in a monolithic stack right like the real objective is make asynchronous composability as good as synchronous in the end I think with dydx saw how well they went for their new product right and the ux that they can provide and also the value that they manag to extract by not paying L1 gas fees over all of their users and then with like the rise of Celestia and I think like shared settlement and

execution proofs we also removed that whole issue of perhaps One Bank being shitty right so the future of inup to me at least is like everything is just as secure as everything else because there's shared security and execution proof ordering is completely deterministic and then hopefully we have some interupt standards to connect all of that very cool so you guys are thinking of different chains as different banks here and almost like uh the infrastructure to connect these Banks is the interoperability between these chains is that the is that a right illustration I I don't like I think the difference here so I like the analogy of

saying we're trying to make tcip for blockchains um but I I do think the Nuance here is in tcip and like on the internet we're moving messages we're moving bits right we're not moving money and when you're moving money I'm not sure it's quite the same like this is what you know I'm still trying to figure out and what we're all discussing but when you're moving money your trust assumptions on how that money is moved might be different and there might just be different strategies for how that works in the same way that like moving money over venmo works very differently venmo being us-centric we'll have like non- us users but it's like a fintech

app private company that sends money moving money over venmo is very different than moving money over like the us fedwire or like Swift Network or something like that and yeah do you think that choice will be like surfaced to the users in a way whe they'll have like the autonomy and information to make an accurate Choice there I mean hell no like users with that right um in the in again in the same way that you go to your bank and you think it's just your bank you got your US Dollars there right so I'm only pointing out that like uh I think we can all agree that it will look completely seamless to the user most of the time um and I I think that like is the goal but

I'm just not like again this is where you know there hasn't been a standard like tcip for moving US dollars because there is different kind of trust assumptions um amongst how you move dollars between in different ways and I I am maybe optimistic that it can be different when we have like ZK proofs and all this like Cool Tech maybe we actually can have a standard that looks more like tcip for interop but it's just because the kind of the risks are higher I'm not sure the path there is like nearly as obvious as it was with the internet yeah I think one of the you know nuances from your point that might like have gotten a little lost is um that maybe you know maybe it's you know

something when whenever heart and I sit down for a talk always seems to come up like something about people who traded bonds the you know like the with the bank part it it works very well start saying most of the time and that most might be like five NES worth of the time and in some different uh Paradigm it might be like you know 97% of the time doesn't really matter but like every so often as we've seen you know start with March of last year very recently again with like US Bank Corp these things don't become as obvious in in the blockchain context it's like well there's nothing that you could do ultimately to ensure that something like

a 51 attack or something that makes the fundamental substrate of where your money is at insecure and so like hey your bank has a collateral ratio and if they don't know how to manage like if they don't know how to manage their deposits and how much they're lending out they can get in trouble similarly like the chains that you're connecting might get in trouble every so often doe to things that are or outside of their control and that's why I really like I've never thought about this uh Bank point but I'm going to use it more and more now I really like it because it is like it's most of the time you know that I don't think it can um can become all of the time unless everyone agrees to

use exactly the same architecture and I think you know so many years into the crypto experiment we have enough evidence to know like that's just not going to happen people like being able to do their own thing and someone's always going to be incentivized to do something different and that's what led to the explosion in certainly new l1s but also like new VMS yeah I think those Dynamics actually contribute a lot more to being uncertain about what the end game looks like but like everybody here is very certain about like what it should feel like yeah and Lane on that point right the stuff that I think we'd all agree with is like most of the time you want to click a button right and your action

whatever you wanted to do on some blockchain happens and you don't even know what blockchain it happened on it just happened right and most of the time you don't want to know or care whether you have funds on all these different chains or funds in one place like you just wanted to look like one set of funds right yeah um and so maybe I'd actually ask all you all two do you think from like a kind of Market structure perspective do you all imagine that users mostly have like one I'll call it home chain where their assets live and when they're using other blockchains um they're spending money out of that home chain and actions are happening on other blockchains or do you

think that users will have their funds on maybe a handful of chains maybe that's the other middle option or that users will have their funds on tons of chains and just from their perspective they look at it like it's just one spot because I don't have that figured out yeah I think it's hyper dependent on the type of user that you're talking about like the the average Bridge user is like so in nondescript is to be kind of like meaningless right like there's Dows who want to move their do an action across chains those are people who like have a home chain for sure for sure and then there's airdrop Hunters who like maybe have a home chain but it's a brief relationship and they're moving Capital pretty quickly and then you have people who are

like more long-term invested in a variety of different ecosystems so like a rollup enjoyer right and they maybe have a pile of funds on arbitrum optimism and ZK sync or whatever so I think it's really hard to kind of pin down the entire Market in that way I want to add something to this I think it also really depends on like which kind of tokens or assets we talking about and it also depends on if you're a person or institution how did you get onboard in the first place I think what we're seeing right now is all these big bangs trying to get into that reward asset game and for them they're going to launch their permission chains um just to make sure that they are compliant with they start with so I think there will be a natural very

organic way how things remain fragmented um for a very long time and then then you have like an optimal State against economic interests and control because that won't go away right you want to keep like like there will be a time where then people want to keep assets on their chain where they can then make money through transaction costs and whatever like I think fragmentation is just a very natural U interest um which we have seen Web 2.0 like everyone wants to keep the user data for themselves and so on and and uh in the future future people are going to they they will want to have um want to keep transactions for themselves if I

onboard one of my existing consumers I want to keep transactions uh where where I have control about where I can monetize this and and and partake in in in um any economic value exchange yeah and Philip I actually think that plays well in it like the kind of the bank analogy right like Banks don't want your money at other Banks they very much want your money at their bank right and they fight tooth and nail to get your funds on their bank and that to me further like does very lay out clearly where I think the fragmentation will lie like you're you're once you bring in GP Morgan chain or like Black Rock chain this is very

clear like Black Rock wants all your money as as much of your share of wallet as they can on their chain and I it it does seem to me that the all the um kind of like being closest to the user here it devolves into having the most of the user's money and there's a natural fragmentation that that happens there however your question again was multi-layered right because there is one thing to to to question will we have assets distributed across multiple chains as an individual um and or do we actually have to move these assets across chain or will Z knowledge proof be enough do we will we have a standard where I can improve I have my reward

assets on my permission JP Morgan Bank I want I want to use it as a collateral um at my Goldman sex on the government sex chain to take out a loan and and finance another business whatever uh right and so again like two questions um like I would separate the discussion um so there much yeah will we move so the question might maybe rephrase to will we move assets across chain as you talk about inter Mobility or will we have a future where all we need is a multi-chain awareness of which assets I own at which places and then I all I need is a z knowledge proof to interact with these with different protocols and

the assets I have I think it also depends on if you see an asset as potentially having multiple homes as a chain and truly traveling between them or if really all we're doing is minting debt tokens on other chains and if an asset really only has one canonical home where it sits in invol um and these Deb tokens during Hax uh get unbacked I think right now there's really only one asset that has multiple clal homes right and that's usdc which is minted and burned by Circle and I think for correct me if I'm wrong almost every other asset we're technically just minting debt tokens which is very similar to just doing a zero knowledge proof and proving that you have control over an original asset on ethereum for example yeah think a part of it is uh is

Market structure too right because right now the most interaction like the reason that we have those debt tokens is because the way most systems are architected on the other side they need to accept something that looks generally like an ERC token that's where that thing fits and so I'm inclined to think you know nowart you got me with this mind virus of the bank thing so most most of us probably have one bank account you know if you look at like classes of individuals by wealth there's probably some like correlation between increasing wealth and an increasing number of accounts and uh if there is a you know technical requirement really for if we want to interact with say an

app that's on a distant chain if it is expecting to receive something that looks like an ERC uh you know just call it some token versus looking to receive like a data point then that's going to have to be transferred so if we want to have this model where like I can have one account on one chain and then have things kind of be routed for me who is the actor in the middle who is like the market maker so to speak or or you know who is the connects in this example that then allows me to move the liquidity around so like I would say in this more crypto native Market structure it feels like across connects you guys play uh an enabling role in me being able to keep all my funds in like in One

Bank on one chain and then being able to tap things on the and uh and not have to store my like not to have multiple bank accounts just because I want to uh transact with people who are you know customers of those other Banks it's like what's the The Exchange layer what's the market maker how do things move around uh and crypto Market structure is developing in a pretty interesting way relative to well John maybe maybe the right way ways to sort of bifurcate it where um maybe what you have is like let's make it kind of like today's world so you're

right most people have one bank account but then people also have their like retirement account for their investment funds and maybe they have their Robin Hood account um and so you have a few accounts that have your financial assets that are meant to be like your savings and investment stuff um and so that makes sense that that money's fragmented and those financial companies are competing to have as much of your assets as they can on their platform right platform equals chain here but then if we play crypto forward and we're saying okay we're going to use crypto for micro payments to pay for all these other services and you have like your YouTube subscription and you have your New York Times account and you have whatever else like you don't want to put money there

you just want to be able to like pay for the thing you have access to right and so maybe the right bifurcation is there's going to be financi applications and financial chains that are very much competing to have big store of your actual assets on them and then separately you're gonna have like your venmo chain that is um your little account that you make micro payments to to all these other services like your crypto game maybe there's like I like the example of like poker chain like on poker chain I don't really want to send a bunch of money to Poker chain I just want to like send money from my VMO account quickly and like click a button and I made my bet and I anti up and like I played my hand and all that and maybe

that's the right bifurcation where there's going to be this long tail of kind of app um consumer applications that don't require my money to live there they live somewhere else and there's like Financial chains that really want huge chunks of my wallet yeah but then this how do those apps get your money when it's time I view that as like like something like an something like a cross is playing the role making that transfer because at the end of the day they're going to need like somebody's going to come collect and so when it's time to make those collections like I don't want to have you know the same way like I don't have a deposit account with Amazon when I go buy something I don't want to like keep a balance of Bezos bucks I just want them to charge and so Visa Network

basically plays in in this existing like e-commerce Market structure Visa is basically the thing that takes stuff from my bank account to the merchant if the merchant in this case is uh any of these apps that we're talking about right like poker chain U and the bank let's say is ethereum something like a connector across plays that Visa role maybe in conjunction with something like a hyperlane an XLR a union whatever it is like something has to be in the middle so that at the end of the day Merchant or pooc chain like can pay the bills yeah I I agree there's an tent layer that's like connect across right you knew it was coming right intent

layers the new debit cards there you go it's it's just as catchy too it's like oh oh man where's my where's my where's my intent myt card I got it but there is something that's enabling a sub 200 millisecond cheap payment um for all of these little things that lets you get to other blockchains there has to be um so yeah end of podcast right yeah I also I also think like this is like the one thing we have learned in e-commerce was the faster and and and shorter I can make the payment process

the more people are going to spend and that goes end to end right like Amazon heavily increased the revenue just by reducing like the the the the page load time um and it goes down to like the oneclick purchase ability to uh anything we can do to reduce the amount of information I have to put into a payment process uh like the waiting time between adding my information and actually having the payment process all of that impacts how much I'm going to spend that very much day um and it it has to come down to at least what we have in Web 2.0 if not even faster and we shouldn't forget like Web 2.0 is improving while we are building this I read a tweet yesterday which said um we are in the floppy dis

era of blockchain um I I kind of found that accurate 10 more years yeah yeah yeah definitely like the actual floppy one before they actually had the hard plastic cover John John no one no one listening knows the actual five and a quarter inch FL you know what it is I know but no one else here knows they only know the three and a half half inch hard plastic right it's like the first time in five years I felt young in [Laughter] crypto well I have so early yeah I kind of have a question for you guys since we

all kind of agree on what this should feel like what do you think are the most important and like achievable standards to align on to get there a standard for Crush in intense like but what part of it um all right like just because I think it's interesting and L I think this is a really interesting thing to talk to to you about too so um if we agree that there's at least a a a long tale of applications that we want to click a button and have an action on another blockchain happen like quickly and seemlessly I think the general architecture for what that looks like um has like three layers it has the um

order flow so the user generates their order which is the intent of what they want to do on the other blockchain and that costs some money that that money could just be gas fees or it could be gas fees plus my bet on poker chain and like some information so there's an intent here and that probably gets auctioned off I think there's like some sort of auction where people compete to fill that intent and then there's a middle layer that I'm going to call the solver layer solver relayer filler Market maker whatever you want to call it but it's the offchain actor that goes and fulfills that intent and in my world they actually fulfill it with their own Capital which is how it gets to be fast

and cheap and Le I think you guys roughly agree um and then there's the bottom layer that I'm going to call the settlement layer which is where user funds are actually escrowed um and they're released to the solver after we verify that intent was fulfilled um and so I think establishing a standard by which uh solvers can all compete to fill these intents is kind of like um it's a positive sum outcome where we we can kind of align the whole crypto ecosystem around a common way of specifying this user order user intent user action thing such that we have maximum competition um to fulfill it quickly right like a

shared indexing layer for solers to compete on yeah yeah yeah I actually don't think I think that's important but I think that's important for like me and you I don't know if that's so much important for the consumers and like what interop should feel like and I actually think one of the areas that is going to be really important to kind of have seamless handling is kind on more on the execution layer and how to handle errors and that's where I think we have actually have like a lot of differences across all of the different Stacks across all of the the different applications that and like until we kind of get more Consolidated on what that feels like people just won't always feel comfortable using interoperability

Solutions yeah I personally think um actually error handling is part of the security story as well say opinion is um if a protocol can't refund in case of no execution and has to rely on like an offchain party to do that refunds then you haven't really done to trustless interrupt so even that portion of the stack needs to be kind of folded in communicate it backwards automatically somehow for me at least I think it's going to divide very much into light line based bridging or hard intent I think kind of everything in between for me as a developer doesn't have very strong guarantees there's a lot of overhead to think about these edge cases what will the protocol do like intense because everything is out of protocol basically right like the market maker

the solver fulfills um that's the the guarantee that you get as a user or fully trustless you know it's all in smart contract all of the edge cases are handled only kind of the pure rigorous correctness is going to fulfill it something in between where for part of the protocol you still need to rely on an oracle or a multi sick that never made a lot of sense to me if you want to abstract and generalize a lot you touch you touch spas on a very important topic here which uh for for for companies for clients of all of ours is important it's like the monitoring of transactions and debuggability and the ability to provide transparency to their end consumers right like why are things stuck especially if you think about

bridging that it often involves two transactions one on the source chain one on the destination chain these things um just make it hard for anyone and uh so you do not only end up integrating multiple Solutions you also have to build like a debugging monitoring system around all of that this is kind of what we are focusing with Lei this is like one of the major pains people don't see in the first place just once they've started implementing multiple Solutions they're like oh our customer support has a big problem here because you cannot neglect customer support you cannot neglect providing transparency to the user where are my funds all right um so yeah very important topic you touch base on and often we don't talk enough about that so I'm I'm also advocating for we need to talk about meta standards

like standards on error codes standards on like we have that for the web right like we need standards around uh around communication from a technical perspective um this is really something we should all sit sit together and and think about what are the different edge cases we have and uh can we can we give can we can we agree on a standardized um um yeah on a standardized approach on how to treat certain errors yeah I think what you're talking about fail is uh observability right like I want to know what's going on in the periods between I click this button and then the thing that I wanted to happen happens and it's very unnervous

uh it really like it it has nothing to do just with crypto right like what's Domino's probably like biggest success of the last 10 years the order tracker it's not even real it's not actually monitoring the delivery guide but people love thinking that it does and it gives you a lot of comfort and so there's two ways to get around this and give people that additional Comfort one is to just actually have like better observability and monitoring such that hey when I click that button something pops back and I have a sense of you know pretty much every uh in our protocol involves an offchain component what's happening while that offchain component is in play what's happened after my transaction got

included on the Block the next block of the first chain in between then and it being included on the destination um the other thing you can actually do which is lever the N enough people think about is like the more you reduce that time the less there is a chance for something to go wrong so if people like only have an 8 to 10 second window that they're waiting it's not even enough time for you know anxiety to develop make that window 35 minutes 40 minutes now people start freaking out and you know we have firsthand experience about it because you see it just you see people's act you know what Phil mentioned about like customer support no one's asking like ah where's my transaction when it's taking 30

seconds when it's taking 10 seconds you're again just not enough time turn that time up to 20 minutes they have a whole lot more questions um and when so far as Lane saying like hey the user experience is really what's going to matter this is I think like one of the biggest determinant on user experience is like knowing what the hell is going on reminds me of a monetization strategy for Bridges which is to show ads while the tokens are getting sent from one place to another which actually could reduce the anxiety that needs your SK if they're watching a video or a commercial as they're BR against that like everybody's insta

spam filters like oh what did I just connect my metam no no no you're thinking too small let's make long optimistic transfers Partnerships with streaming services and now it's like oh how long does this take this is just enough time for episode six of True Detective night country hell yeah yeah Robbie Robbie's just trolling us he's just trolling us I love this or or giving us indispensable strategy nuggets and um you know Robie if we manage to get farter frames into this somehow during the ads then we right now for this like we could close end of the

week yeah how can I Bridge with a frame and get served an ad inside the same frame I don't even have to worry about what's happening in my transac I'm so distracted by tied detergent bulbs and a little popup that lets you order a pizza jum um um still muted oh never mind no back okay sorry uh we were actually actually exploring ads on jumpo Exchange um to pay for Action C that you can opt in to that option and consume ads and we pay for your transaction cost that we got that idea multiple times out of the community and I bet some people are

willing to pay for it and actually watch it um I mean advertising will be around it will always be a thing wherever we go um so it will naturally organically find its way into crypto as well pretty certain yeah but also I me we joke but I actually don't think it's a terrible idea I think it's this is a pretty cool uh there's something here I to think about anym crypto i' rather I'd rather spend that energy though just making 200 millisecond Bridge times right I was gonna say or we could just make it faster guys got bring us back to a ZK as6 yeah I saw some on foraster some guy

was posting zk6 and then getting hate from the ethereum community about it because they thought it was about proof of work but anyhow that site is uh has been a lot of fun to explore kind of bringing us back to the modular interrup um conversation I think one of the big things about this whole modular kind of Realm is like build build um a ton of block space um give apps their ability to have their own execution environments um so kind of a general question is in a world of ever expanding chains in the immediate term one to three years I know that we touched on a lot of like the longer rwas and kind of like General user experience but but for the people who are in in the community now um you know people are tired of bridging people

are tired of waiting for having to use different Bridges with different liquidity people want to be able to go on rabby and go on different apps on different chains across all different execution environments and dozens of chains and be able to just interact freely uh without the thought of kind of these uh complexity so how are you guys looking at abstracting these away in the in the next you know couple years for the current kind of power user Community those who are using defi nfts on chain those who are willing to go and explore new chains and um you know is that any different than the kind of General conversation with regards to kind of mass adoption and and greater usage yeah I have a pretty strong opinion about this obviously as like a meta aggregator by now we simply say we

are a multichain trading API because trading can mean lots of things swapping assets moving assets exchanging assets across multiple chains on the same chain whatever and as you said like it is a big problem for a Robin Hood to look at that multichain environment and be like well uh we have multiple Dex aggregators they actually do perform differently depending on chain and and trade pair um and then on top of that you have the solver system that are even better um like we have been testing this we have been implementing solver systems recently like propeller heads Ando and more advanced Dex aggregators like odos they have more complex strategies um and they out competing one in which like a year ago was supposed to be still like

the best and they are getting serious competition from solver systems and more modern Dex aggregators we also see again like we just saw floor I think floor being funded like in New Dex aggregator getting funded in this environment right also a year ago I thought like we kind of done with the bridging stuff hopefully in the recent in the past two three month at least three four different new models on Bridges I mean people are reaching out to us very often um like quite early right like we we like Lei has a decent amount of distribution Power by now based on we have over 200 B2B Integrations um and um more and more Enterprise ones by now so uh we get these people very early on knocking at our door hey integrate us we

are going to go live then and then right um so I'm so I'm I'm I'm surprised how much more Innovation there is actually uh things we haven't thought about really um so there's more to come and someone has to aggregate all of that and abstracted Away um we have been focusing on solely that we won't build our own infrastructure piece in in in the next 10 years um so we will just keep on uh simplifying a crypto adoption you like and there's no way around like with rollups as a service and all these new l2s coming up and even with new R&D that has to be productized in form of chains like upos sui right if we invest into research uh it has to be product sized at some point and and this creates

economic incentives to Simply spin up the next L1 um and it's good because that Innovation should not stop um so but again it creates a problem for crypto adoption um and we focus on we we really focus on Paving the way for Mass adoption from a B2B perspective and this will ultimately Drive millions of consumers into the space yeah I think you have the uh realists approach there's a 30 competing 100 competing protocols and you guys have the uh job of needing to Aggregate and support all of them and I think J I kind of have the idealist approach where we want to see a future where at the lowest layer there is actually just one protocol very like engineering approach where if we get that level of Purity that's almost the dream right uh where there is like

one standard to kind kind of rule them all as the base layer itself I think and that's still like a couple of years away and uh it's going to be a a bit of a fight between the different interrupt standards out there but uh hopefully at least for me as a Dev like that would be kind of the unlock for the like thousand app chain 10,000 app specific L2 thesis Carol do you think do you think this will be resolved by establishing a standard sorry sorry do you think this is going to be established by a stand by by an ERC by EIP or do you think it's going to be one Winner Takes It All I think it's going to be uh everyone slowly working together to reach the same standards I

think most drop like either Intense or it's going to be light cine based and so there you already go to a certain standard once you have light cine based you could do header aggregation or you just have the same circuits and so you all arrive kind of the same view of the different chains the next logical step then is just API compatibility right like if we already talk about exactly the same data we do some type of storage Miracle inclusion proof under the hoods then let's just all settle on the exact same interface to do these operations and I think like as certain protocols will grow like we're going to basically be pushed by guys like you to settle on a certain standard or hopefully get a bit of like a Grassroots movement I think with the internet as well you saw like large internet firms try to set

certain standards and in the end what one out kind of the protocols designed by devs in their EIC hacking around on NX and search I think inup is going to go the same road what I say is um uh sorry the where I actually disagree a little bit is I don't think you know it would be nice to have one thing like at the lowest layer but I think crypto is different uh I think it's different than how just other technology forums and really just other markets have evolved because there is um there's this like filial affiliation that people feel with the systems that they use because For

the First Time there is a there is something that might dictate someone's decision uh to use something or even change how they feel about something that is completely irrespective of the underlying technology and that is genuinely not the case in most like people's usage of say like tcpip probably was less influenced by factors like this maybe other human factors because allly we're still like human in the loop um and so that's why I think like we're probably you know ethereum is not going to be like the sole settlement layer that matters um there not there's not going to be you

know like one say shared sequencer that matters I think you have kind of a proliferation of uh standards and approaches just because of the way these systems work and their incorporation of what ultimately is en answered with like Financial characteristics that's involved in the mix and so now people like want to get that they get that then they that becomes part of how they operate their own business and that kind of throws a monkey wrench into it and why I could see you know something that really should have a winner take all Dynamic being uh several winners take most kind of dynamic uh as people's like

well you know what maybe we were you know maybe we weren't going to use axlr but actually like through our usage of XLR and like through our partners like we have this affiliation with the token and so we've decided to use that at our lowest layer and I think that's actually a huge benefit for folks like Phil I have a question for you guys especially uh J Lane har while you are shaping a product road map have you ever engaged with Kasa like chain agnostic Improvement prop um chain agnostic standard Alliance um and the standards they're trying to establish especially driven by Pedro from what connect for

example um but have you taken are you aware and have like do you align with any of that yeah definitely aware of the standards I think it's like a difficult tradeoff because any standard needs kind of like a jump start and adoption before it can really like be a viable option so a lot of the you know a lot of the messaging layers right now don't adopt which makes it difficult for us to work with and I'm sure for you to work with uh but I think that like that it's a really great organization and we probably should invest more there like as we go forward with different

implementations but but why do you need anyone else to adopt the standard in order for you to adopt the standard yeah actually don't right because then what's the point of the standard if it's just one person who does it why don't I just do it the way that works best with my [Applause] databases so I mean like I want to kind of separate two things because I really do think there's two things going on here there is like how do you send messages between blockchains um and that I I kind of am with John I think there's going to be a few winners there there's going to be a few ways that you can do that um and establishing standards there is hard because you have so many people

competing for how you should send messages between blockchains but then if we believe that users want really fast transactions I'm going to go back to my intent thing this intent thing where users get filled without a message getting sent is that's like a pretty major advantage that's a pretty major speed advantage and so now if you think okay if users want that what you're establishing as a standard for intense now looks more like just specifying an a an order ticket it's a it's a pretty kind of obvious thing that I think developers are going to end up demanding because developers are going to be like

look I don't want to like I I I just literally want to say here's my action tokens in tokens out tokens in on chain a tokens out on chain B and an execution of this transaction go right it's it's a pretty obvious kind of thing that they want to have create and then if this order ticket becomes standardized and it might even become Loosely done by there just being a killer app that kind of uses this and everybody else starts adopting it um then like Philip like you said you just have this solver infrastructure that's just competing to fill this really simple order as efficiently as possible and then underneath that the solvers are filling

out how to verify their intent using these different message passing systems but like they can get much more sophisticated about which messaging system they use um but I go back and be like if you want a developer to build an application easily on their new rollup chain they need an easy way of getting people to quickly interact with it from other chains and they don't have to want to have to even think about all this other and I don't know that's kind of where my mind goes think one counter argument against that is in a world where all chains have single slot finality a solver observes the order just as quickly as that it can be settled with a proof on other chain so

if you think like 5 10 years in the future with ckic and such really like there is no advantage on doing it just purely over intense and then you also don't need to have the liquidity available as a solare right then you're in a fully proof based world where you can just mint it immediately think before ethereum has single slot finality like five to 10 years is a optimistic uh time estimate yeah why don't we Carol why don't we go into that just so like the audience understands what what you mean better because actually agree with you so what you're saying let actually let me try and you can tell me if I got it right but you're saying okay um if we have like very quick finality single slot we'll call it immediate call

immediate immediate finality um and we also have really cheap ZK proof generation it doesn't cost much at all to make a ZK proof then all I can do is like I do an action on one chain generate the ZK proof that that happened take it to another chain verify that ZK proof almost immediately that happens in close to real time and I have no need for a solver to front capital or anything like that and it all works I I get do you agree with that is that what you're exactly yeah that's that's the dream system at least right like that's that I think you couldn't out compete such a system yeah and and I also think that that I actually tend to believe

that that will be possible but but it's premised on single s finality like very quick finality times and very very cheap ZK proof generation yeah and just so like the audience understands why we can't do that today is ZK proofs are not that fast um and they're kind of expensive and then blockchains also aren't that fast so instead if you want a fast experience you've got to like fill the Gap and and the way you can fill the Gap is you introduce a third- party actor a solver relayer filler whatever you want to call them that then goes and fronts money they take risk they front the money and fill the user

with their own capital and then they can then we can do the ZK proof generation and also like what across does is batch together a bunch of relayer payments to make it cheaper then we can do the generation slower and pay back the solvers so this intent this cross chain intent thing where you have have this third party actor front in capital it's designed to emulate the end State you're talking about um but with like the Technologies we have now yeah yeah exactly slowly getting there in the ZK space like uh depending on like what consensus you're tracking it's in the minute range sub minute range um for our version we can do it in six seconds but that has some severe modifications to

the consensus um but I'm kind of like bullish on this especially if we kind of get General Z S6 that actually the proving will be solved before we manage to change the ethereum protocol to SSL the SSL one the single slot thing I mean it kind of reminds me of uh the problem of database locking in high traffic environments right um do you think this is going to be solved in in in short term it still is a problem for databases and when databases as like you know single class databases still um I still innovating and evolving all that we we have seen more and more new database systems like kdb dragonfly DB click house and so on that they have

become faster at taking in like like handly concurrency um in the blockchain environment it's even a bigger problem because like we we need a shared state right and we need composability and we need to like I don't see that being solved in the next 10 years to be honest like we are still we are still struggling on database level I mean it's a slightly different issue t do it right uh has single so finality ethereum has much larger validator set than the average cosos chain so like getting a degree that 23ds has signed it and and generating proof for that is a bit more difficult there's Network traffic going on Etc and but I think right now the consensus kind of is that the BLS approach since the merge actually very

performant and that those improvements can actually be added on top think Al there much nicer guarantees for the end user right like no more block reworks happening once a transaction gets in you just know it succeeded which I think for everyone is a amazing property to have for your products but it will add delays right like on in a he on high traffic it would like is there more information about that I haven't managed to to to look it up yet but but how is yeah there's currently one downside to it right now ethereum can stop finalizing but still proceed with execution so even though reworks can happen if the beacon Chase goes down user still uh can interact with apps if you combine the two into SSO if finalization stops execution stops and then you get what you see with Solana

that just like it stops working all together and so finding a solution that kind of preserves execution continuing is is hard this is awesome and it felt like super productive too like a lot of times this is just like we're just like I don't know kind of shitposting and trolling around in these live streams but this actually felt like a working group of sorts so um Rob is trolling you guys so hard today I'm I'm saying this felt produc anyway I think we have some people that have a hard stop at the top of the hour which is four minutes so um we'll just kind of go around the horn and and everyone can uh give some closing thoughts and we'll wrap it

up um Kaiser Carol you wanna you want to start uh yeah very productive guys I've did meet some of you before so very happy with this uh for me art the future is like provable we're going to get to this like perfect end state where everything finalizes in 100 milliseconds and we can prove it in a millisecond uh that that to me is what I want to see and what the dream is for crypto and do it cheaply and cheaply yeah fingers crossed but you know I I'll just end with one of my dad's phrases like you know everybody's dad's has a few phrases but his is timing isn't a an important thing it's the only thing so we'll kind of see how

the proving lines up but I as fast as crypto moves some of those things end up taking longer than I expect yeah look it's going to be a fun ride but I think uh we'll see you all in gell is the way I like to think about it like yeah I guess Carol what I'll add is like I H I am spending more and more time thinking about how fundamental ZK the succinctness property of ZK is is to um being this glue for interop like being able to prove the state uh in linear time of another blockchain is a wild way to connect these disparate

systems and like that really wasn't a concept that anybody thought was possible three years ago at all um and so I think that there is a lot of reason to be really excited about like the ZK stuff however I really do think we got to solve the thing now and we can get really good and really efficient by learning a lot from the types of like highly competitive architectures we see in like hft space where you really can have offchain actors competing to fill users with their balance sheet very effectively and we're calling this crushing intense so yeah I'm not against your future I like it but I think uh we gotta like glane said I got to solve it for now so I'm an intense maximalist um

in the short term I mean I I we believe that consolidation in form of standardization or a fix o goalie pulley um and all of that will take much more time than we expect um we we seen there's just too much Innovation on all these layers and and levels um and many of them will get a decent amount of market share and they're well funded so uh it will take longer than expected um but uh yeah like at Lei we are watching all of you and we super excited about it like you're taking a deep look into all of these things writing down our thoughts we we're going to continue writing deep Dives um and comparison Frameworks and all of that so it's it's

very exciting it's like a bottomless pit it's just so much happening it's incredible but very excited about this very excited y pleasure thanks for hosting yeah thank you for coming on if you guys got to go feel free to go rob and I are going to stay on for a little longer um thank you everybody for coming on um and uh for accepting the trolls yeah and you and Rob are just gonna sit around and troll us for a bit now this is news feel free to stay on if you like but if you got to go no worries just need a little uh a little uh recap and summary um very exciting stuff very much glad that we that we were able to kind

of push this forward-looking approach um you know and and kind of inspire some future collaborations hopefully um I think Hart a lot of stuff that you're saying solves kind of like the the here and now and then somewhat challenged by Carell's longer term kind of thought process all in then Carell takes about kind of one system one ZK this pure kind of system and then jcole is like well no we have all these different incentive mechanisms right there's going to be a kind of a a host of of of options um and so kind of putting these pieces together um for us D us us happily 50 transactions per day on chain users we are we are quite happy to uh see the interoperability Solutions

be built from the ground up appreciate you guys having us it's been great fun thanks thanks everyone guys bye bye nice yeah man what a uh what a stream huh so what did you learn today Robert dude so for about I mean first off I I I I this was such a fun group like everyone here was like able to to pick it up and run with it I mean for one that makes our job so much easier and then two it makes it more enjoyable for us because then we can just sit back and learn so um what

did I learn my power my power went out for about three minutes there I had to run be club and uh and uh yeah exactly and now I've got um yeah I'm back in action but yeah what did you learn I I've got a bunch to write up after this this was um this is epic so like the first two questions the first like 30 minutes or so I was just sitting here reading about TCP IP because like everyone in interrup keeps referring to these standards and I didn't really know what they were but TCP stands for um transmission control protocol and IP stands for Internet Protocol and these

are um like like they they're like a set of rules and procedures um that like route and switch between different uh different uh like channels and then right there's like a standard for breaking down these uh messages into packets and then these packets get transported through these channels and and they get spun up on the other side and that's how you like go from one one website to another so I I do definitely see the the parallels between sending packets and sending value I think that is like there's almost a onetoone

matching between a token and a packet and when you're when you have like an order like a cross-chain swap or AC cross chin lend or something like that there's maybe multiple tokens that are that are made up in one of these orders so I could definitely see how like a bulk order or a bridge transaction packages a bunch of these together breaks them down into the individual packets or tokens and then send those through the channels that's like I think that's the TCP IP approach the fact that all of the internet was able to agree on that one standard like this was something that Chia Wang was mentioning in our podcast which is that like this is like very path dependent so it may have just been that the internet

was so early and so small at the time that that there was a bunch of developers just sitting in a room and they said we're going to use tcpip and then all the developers that came after that just built on top of it so I think an interrupt maybe we're too far gone maybe there's like too much activity and too many developers and too much value now that it's too late to implement those standards but that's the thing that J jcole was saying like was like um because of the of the of the differential in incentives basically because of tokens and tokenizing everything um we it's likely not just going to be one one base layer one standard one one core thing because of

these incentives with like Partnerships um basically because of cryptoeconomic incentives the the the uh the landscape of inup is not going to mimic that of tcip Ip or or of Banks and I thought that the point that Mark made with regards to the banks that really got them thinking um basically like about kind of like how you can think about the future of people on chain how it relates to the current setup of like having different accounts and how those kind of work with each other um I I know I dropped off at that point but definitely got some key takeaways what what were your kind of key takeaways for the uh like the broader kind of Bank yeah overall I I I definitely hear him

as far as like uh like the way that like the majority of people have their accounts set up like you have like your checking account your savings account your investment account your broker account and then maybe you have like a hot wallet on venmo or cash app or something and I think that makes a lot of sense to kind of like replicate that in in the onchain world um the other thing that so so I just broadly agree with that I don't really have anything like as far as how interop works because that's where the conversation got it's like all right well are we so it seems like everyone's going to kind of like have everything spread out like they do now um so in that in that case like when you need a transfer between your checking account and your broker account

like that's where the conversation started to get to after that point right like not needing to go and use your Bezos bucks on Amazon you can just simply use your card um yeah and it it basically came down to to to the reality that like people aren't going to people aren't going to want to change their habits that they operate with on the internet for e-commerce right now so whatever way that we can create a similar Loop for people with blockchains is going to be the most adopted Manner and it came down to basically 200 millisecond bridging intense ZK ZK in the long intense in the short run and ZK in the long run yeah yeah

I yeah I I I definitely agree man I think um I think har hit it like with the short-term intense approach I think Carol is definitely on to something with the long-term ZK approach um he mentioned like the two prerequisites being uh like s like the one one of them being single slot final finality and then kind of like the downstream effects of that means that proofs are cheap and they're fast and that that would be the two pre prerequisites um um definitely agree with your point here about like consumers not changing their behavior the the person who introduced that concept to me was uh the the woman from FIS Global I think her name was Mina um

and she's on a like multinational conglomerate scale like she she has a good grasp on on consumer behavior and I think that's totally accurate and I think as I think adoption that you just mentioned now is the key word there because right now people think of like blockchain and Bitcoin as like one ginormous account it's their dgen account right so right now you have your checking account your savings account at your bank your breakage account and then you have your djen account which is just this massive just just cluster of like metamask accounts but people think of them as like one dgen like like interface but I think as ux gets payments it's like it's like it's not

exactly like uh it's not exactly like something that you're using in your day-to-day you're you're going to log into your accounts for one reason it's to operate in the financial markets nfts gaming like not exactly something that you're doing it's like this it's I think a lot of it was around like these microservices day-to-day payments and that's why I kind of tried to get them to go into like the Here and Now of like modular like launching all these different chains and rollups and um you know it was quite interesting to kind of hear their take on that as well so I think as adoption and ux like continue to to increase um I think people will start to see different chains as different accounts and we'll start to see the parallels where like you know

and I saw you tweet about this the other day like a young person someone growing up now is GNA launch you know they're gonna have a metamask or a blockchain account before they have a bank account potentially and that's only gonna incre like that the likelihood of that happening is only going to increase that that people get uh onchain accounts before they get offchain accounts or or Fiat bank accounts I think the other thing that could really Propel adoption and and replicate the current uh like Financial Dem like topology of accounts in like the current space and then what what could accelerate that is if we do get like like JP Morgan chain and like Black Rock chain and like TD chain and

Bank Bank of America chain because then you have the trusted brand that was the other thing dude like it brand loyalty is huge doesn't matter if they have an onchain account or an offchain account if you bank with Bank of America you associate like that brand with money and you're you're gonna trust your money with that brand whether it's onchain or offchain one thing that that I kind of struggled to understand still was like this idea of will users care about which chain they're on or no will they just be interacting with the specific application layer and I feel like I not sure we got a a succinct answer but like to me part of the future is like having all these different apps where users have almost no idea what chain they're

even on but they just like these applications similar like Facebook similar like Twitter like like you know YouTube and Etc apps to use on a daily basis you you know one could be on one rollup one could be on the other rollup and you know how do we interact how do we make sure that users have funds wherever they want to be on the application layer without necessarily having to like go through a bridge we kind of got some answer standards and some things but that's one thing that that I'm still curious to really like see like how do we inter how do we integrate interoperability Solutions under pinning the application layer where users don't have to use bridges yeah I

mean I I think the answer is very different like in Mass adoption and now I think now like it doesn't really like people use Bridges and like if you look at the people who are on chain now and you look at their uh like their monetary velocity there's so many transfers like if you're on chain now you're transferring here you're transferring there there's so many transactions that you're doing on a daily basis if you look at 90% of the people on the planet like their monetary velocity is much much lower it's much slower they're doing only one maybe they're doing a transaction maybe they're you know swiping their card five times a day right for breakfast lunch

and dinner and maybe going to the grocery store and I don't know getting a coffee or something they're not transferring from bank to bank from bank to brokerage checking to savings on a daily basis so I think a lot of those Bridge transactions are not like like you're gonna have to have those like channels but like maybe they don't have to be super fast or super cheap because you don't do them very often but that V a card channel that you know poker like that like payment Channel or interrupt solution whoever does that that's going to have to be super super quick super cheap and be be able to handle a lot of throughput it's all it seems definitely

case dependent and the use case dependent as well um I think we could uh take it here call it a session yeah pleasure to uh pleasure to be on a panel with you and not do much talk and just do a lot of listening thank you to the people here stay tuned for modular March it's coming so soon two weeks away thank you for being here follow Rob robore rollup follow me and a Andy with three wi Vibes are up we're gonna be in Denver soon doing tons of stuff and uh it's beautiful day it's a beautiful day