Introducing Grove: POKT Network Announces Transition to Ethereum-based L2 Rollup

Transcript

[Music] welcome back to the rollup um Michael eror uh founder CEO of pocket Network and now Grove so tell us a little bit about Grove um why you why you chose to uh take pocket in this direction absolutely yeah so um yeah we incorporated pocket Network Inc in and in 17 uh not really knowing better would evolv into or anything like that and in effect uh the company acted as both foundation and the being building the protocol and then now building the business on top of the protocol showing

other people how to do it and in January this year we formally separated the foundation from the company they're doing an amazing job and uh rebranding pocket Network Inc uh into Grove uh is a really important step in the direction of uh decentralizing the demand side of the protocol uh we've done an incredible job of getting an a super diverse and supportive supply side of the network and uh now that we're uh uh ramping up on our V1 efforts uh it's really important to to to to not take away from all the other potential gateways that we're building that we can build on the network itself uh so one of the big things about what grev is doing is uh

we're going to be open sourcing our portal uh uh infrastructure uh uh sometime later this year maybe maybe early next year and what that does is every it allows people to build Sovereign portal businesses on top of pocket and that's kind of the idea behind Grove too is that each another portal adds kind of another tree to The Grove if you will I'm big on um the solar Punk kind of meme if you will and um it's really building this kind of Supply or this demand side Community within uh that that ultimately everything settles on on pocket Network so tell us a little bit more about the supply side and then the demand side I think this is something that is core to economics and that's

almost what we're building here at mainnet is like alternative economies that are spun up on all these networks um and yeah that I think it's a helpful mental model to to build so maybe tell us a little bit more about the supply side and the demand side I pocket yeah I was actually just on a on a deepin panel uh with helium and and live pier and demo and it's interesting how we're all kind of solving similar problems just just in different ways uh but uh really getting the demand side um uh uh really kicked off is what really completes the flywheel for a network like pocket um we've seen uh so many different contributions and everyone really incentivized to improve the network on the supply side but up until now it's really just been Ro actually driving

demand to the network and of course we're heavily incentivized to improve the protocol and do things but um at the end of the day you have this uh two-sided Market Place on the supply demand where uh uh you have many many Gateway providers providing the Core Business uh not just to the protocol but also to the end users which are um you know different dap developers and that sort of thing uh so for me the really important part about this is that we're actually going to be able to have an ecosystem that uh compounds and and grows because we've got um uh the whole side the whole Marketplace kind of complete in that respect know we made it easy to run a node fantastic now let's make it really easy to run a Gateway such that a team of one to three people can take a package install it on their

server and all of a sudden start generating RPC end points for customers right so I think there's going to be lots of different types of gateways that'll end up kind of uh uh going into different nich niches uh this could be Regional gateways like if I'm in Bangalore India uh maybe I will uh sell to everyone kind of in my region right or in South America right I think there's going to be a lot of support for people building gateways like that I think we're going to see lots of different uh kind of app specific gateways um things like you know repackaging like account abstraction services that uh allows them to kind of upsell the IPC for example uh there may be uh types of apps that you know want to do rollups as a service for example and provide the end points for that um I

think we'll see functional or vertical uh specific gateways so maybe I cater to defi or gamei or social or uh uh other types of infrastructure networks for example because the problem is that there's a literally an infinite number of solutions that people people can build to cater to developers and the problem today with centralized providers is that they have to make trade-offs with what they want to support and at the end of the day what they do is they end up supporting you know the biggest or most profitable use case uh but some people might see a really big opportunity for for them and uh Now with uh open sourcing the portal they'll be able to service that super quickly and easily because it's a huge pain to you know build the first stack Gateway with running the nose and fiding the

infrastructure and and then taking all the learnings that we've done we've had over the last two years um in terms of uh uh having worldclass quality of service at scale with the network with one to two billion with West we feel like now we can take that take it take it a nice package make it really easy for people to have 100% confidence that they're going to have the same old class quality of service that we do and then be able to go sell and build their businesses on top of of pocket and that for me uh particularly when it comes to the longevity and the sustainability of the protocol uh particularly when we talk about the economics of the protocol uh uh that's what's going to uh really create this kind of compounding ywh effect which is just incredibly exciting

for me so that's kind of the whole Grove uh kind of thinking is that like we're we're able to to to to provide a service uh uh without the traditional trade-offs that you would have to do with like what two and this sort of thing and it's kind of like uh building in the shade if you will a nice quiet place place where people can focus and and focus on what they really should be focusing on on their applications at the end of the day yeah and and open source Tech is so important for for that so that they have the access to all of the infrastructure that they may need to incorporate into their stack depending on what they want to build whether it's a warp as a service or if it's another piece of infrastructure um and now you mentioned that you have kind of the tools for

these developers to uh build what they want to build TR uh trustless permissionless they can uh they can start to use the uh pocket Network and grow uh to build additional gateways um and we talk a lot about the like rollups right we are the rollups we talk a lot about these modular rollups um there's there's quite a few technology stacks and I think the terminology that you use is is maybe unique to pocket and grow like there's a lot of gateways and portals so for kind of building like this understanding and and maybe like like drawing parallels with the the rollups and the blockchain the network layer and then the app layer on top how

can we how can we think about gateways and portals in a similar sense that that we think about networks and apps yeah yeah so think about it like um you know you've got websites like uh Squarespace or Wix right and there's a whole set of middleware infrastructure that allows people to build their website super easily right uh basically we're part of that critical infrastructure such that uh uh people can launch their own rollups super easily right and there'll be pieces of the middle War sack that people decide to use not use but at the end of the day all these things are going to uh fit together kind of like a puzzle and enable uh uh people to to Really build novel and unique businesses of protocols uh uh leveraging this this

this infrastructure uh uh technology so it's it's it's it's pretty pretty exciting you've recently Incorporated a new piece kind of like this mysterious piece said I'm looking to demystify with you here which is Celestia and the data availability piece of that middleware stack so I'm curious how how do you gr Grove fit together with Celestia and then how can developers also leverage uh Grove and Celestia together in that in that infrastructure um unit and then and then start to build on top when they they have data availability and they have the infrastructure all built in already and then they can focus on what they want to do uh and that's ultimately reach users yeah it's a for us it's a question of focus um uh for the first

time uh you know we we just to backtrack a little bit we uh launched our spec for V1 last year and at the time there were no rollups uh Celestia wasn't close to being launched uh all we really had was was tender um and and at the time uh that wasn't quite sufficient for what we needed so we opted to say hey let's build our own blockchain uh uh which which has gotten us to where we are today and uh more recently uh we've been able to to uh do some research and basically across the entire R landscape because now you know we have optimism we have arbitrum we have Bedrock you've got you know SES launching soon I've got all these different options now of of what you can build on uh uh and rather than having you know a 10p person protocol

team working on peer-to-peer on consensus on persistence and utility layer we're able to uh lessen the amount of software that we maintain and really focus on what makes pocket pocket which is at the end of the day utility layer so we uh uh are planning to uh move off of tender and actually Launch Pocket as a rollup on top of last year this is exciting because now we don't have to worry about um the da the data Avail the data availability layer or the settlement layer uh uh we can let them who are really purely focused on that focus on improving that side of the stack and allow us to really um uh uh improve pocket more quickly and more rapidly uh yeah yeah I just want to comment on that because it it's one of

the these uh Tendencies as an ecosystem tends to mature you're able to specialize and then you can focus on what you do best and it opens up kind of a divide and conquer approach Celestia is best at data Avail availability uh and they they can focus on that and they can specialize and do it really really well um and now pocket is able to focus on what what pocket does best at the utility level and provide these infrastructure tools for developers to come build um build on top of this this new modular rollup uh from pocket and and leverage those infrastructure tools to hopefully develop applications that have Mass Appeal um so I'm curious like what are you most excited about uh with

some of the projects that you've been talking to at at mainnet um kind of on your tour across those different conferences like who did you most enjoy speaking to like who is very excited about pocket and then who are you most excited about uh building with yeah yeah I mean like I said earlier I was I was I was on this uh dpin panel uh and and we're kind of solving the same problems in in different ways um and these guys are all uh uh many of them are going to kind of a more consumer like market like like helium with their kind of 5G Network or DMO with the with the with with the driving of the cars and I just you know talk to them before and after the panel and during the panel you're just like wow these are the things that

actually separates from kind of this self-referential let's call it a a def rabbit hole and it's actually people solving real world problems such that you know you know if I'm a the helium 5G user for example uh I can go and tell my parents or my family and my cousins hey $5 sales service that's really good right that's completely you know outside of the traditional Circle and people being onboard and someone made a comment that I thought was really interesting was that all four of our networks that were on that panel have onboarded people that were not actually in crypto before many of us were actually People's First experience into crypto at least on the supply infrastructure side and for me people building these products and going

to Market uh and I think in the in many ways the right uh the right way um uh it's it's just very exciting for me to see the actual uh uh world that we touch expand uh through infrastructure but also uh uh uh uh through kind of the more consumer market and you know we all are you know it's it's a hard problem because we have to build the protocol we have to build uh the product and we have to show people with the structure so that other people can work on the same product and it's just a very uh difficult thing to do especially if no one's ever done it before uh so it's uh for me really exciting to see other people not only going through the same things that we are but also seeing real success in adoption uh uh outside of

kind of the um uh the tail uh the snake eating its own tail uh that we see that we see a lot today and it it was part of the reason we rebranded from defi slate but because we don't want to just stick to like the same 10 people that are you know trading against each it's like we want to expand our Horizons um and and now we're the roll up and we incorporate hopefully technology and infrastructure that can appeal to the masses like we we want to on board the normals we want to on board people that don't really care about crypto but you know ultimately the people in this room have thought a lot about disintermediating and decentralization and even if someone doesn't realize that they're using crypto and blockchain underneath the hood it's still important that they do

so that we can we can take this industry in a direction and take a lot of like technology in a Direction that's more open more trustless um and doesn't rely on some of these these same providers that turn into monopolies and then and then rent seek and and take all the profit that could get passed on to the normies themselves yeah I mean as these uh as this technology improves um and as we start to learn the different Frameworks for uh uh the economics of these protocols and the governance of these protocols I really fundament to believe we're going to live in a world with thousands tens of thousands of of different blockchains or rollups depending on how you define it I think uh uh uh it's going to be very easy for people to experiment and it's frankly

part of human nature um and as technology continues to improve for example we didn't have all the ZK technology that uh exists today you know five years ago for example right and we're going to keep having improvements is going to be keep there's going to continue we're going to continue having reasons for people to make iterative improvements and not only iterative improvements but truly like zero to one improvements by being able to put things together in different ways so as that starts to mature I fully expect us to see a massive explosion of um of rups you know l1s app chains and and these sorts of things so for me you know that's what's exciting for me uh uh you know I'm hoping pocket can uh pocket and Grove can can can support all of that uh given uh given where we sit in the

middle of the stack part probably what's most exciting is just kind of the imagination of it off it's like we don't know what's going to come back we don't know what's going to on board all these people but everyone here like has this feeling that like there's something coming um I have it too and and it sounds like you have it like that's why why why we build all this infrastructure is because someone's going to come along and they're going to build something that uh really capitalizes and and strikes a nerve and takes um it it takes a mind share of people and I think I think we all kind of feel like that's coming um and it's just it it's pretty exciting to think about like what that could be yeah yeah know the meal the mental models on how to build these things are improving um

you know in our case and I think the entire kind of deepend space it's not necessarily you know hundreds of thousands of users or millions of users but it's hundreds of companies that can leverage a framework or some set of software that allows them to kind of build their business independently and uh that for me you know whether it's regionally or you know jurisdictionally or or or functional specific I think we're just going to see an explosion of entrepreneurs building on protocols like like pocket at the end of the day yeah well said I think that's a great great place to capitalize and cap off so thanks for coming on the L up again it's always a pleasure and uh hopefully we can we can do this again regularly so we can keep uh keep up to date on all the projects at pocket yeah yeah know thanks

uh thanks for having me good good to be here yeah always likewise man seriously