Make Crypto Apps Expressive

Transcript

really excited to be here present our evolution. Okay. What is layer? Some of you may have heard of layer as a restaking protocol. A protocol where you can stake on Ethereum and but today I'm going to unveil our evolution. So when you think about how application development works in crypto and how application development worked in web applications, let's say back in 1995, if you are building a web application, you have to build your own server, you have to build your own identity stack, you have to build your own payment stack, you have to build your own databases, you have to do all of these things. In 2025, if you're

building a web application, you absolutely don't do any of those things. You go use a public cloud like the Amazon Web Services. You go use a software as a service like Octa, like MongoDB, like Stripe, like PayPal to fulfill each one of your utilities. So when you think about the cloud, what did cloud do? Cloud made it possible to build web servers really easy to made make it possible to build web applications really easy. The goal of IGEN layer as the verifiable cloud.

What does verifiable mean? All of the crypto economy is differentiated and know we think of it normally as oh it's decentralized but really the fundamental value proposition is that crypto is the verifiable economy. When you operate with Bitcoin you know you have 21 there are only 21 million coins. You know you own your coin. That's what it means by the verifiable economy. And we think of layer as this verifiable cloud. So what does it enable? It enables you to build new decentralized protocols really easily. If you were to build a decentralized protocol in the absence of wagon layer, what you have to do is you have to go find your own community. You have to find your own issue your own token, have them stake that token, find

a group of operators who then like opt in and run that protocol uh and build the whole stack to build a layer 1. What we do with layer is let you build specific useful productive services on top of a common framework. So that's what I layer enables. That's why we think of this as the verifiable cloud. If you want to build a decentralized protocol just like the cloud you can write a code and ship it to the cloud and make it run everything on the cloud. With IG layer you can write write a decent list protocol just upload it to IGEN layer and there is a group of stakers operators who pick it up and run it for you. So cloud provided the physical infra layer provides the verifiability and the trust infra for

anybody to build new and interesting decentralized services. A in Amazon the public cloud they're called Amazon web services. In layer we call them autonomous verifiable services. autonomous because they run on their own. What do you mean they run on their own? They're permissionless for anybody to stake and keep these services running. So they run on their own. They're verifiable. If you don't run the service correctly, then they will be penalized and on layer. So the underlying infra is in in a cloud it's data centers. In layer it is stakers and operators who actually stake and run the system. So what is the state of the union where are we today on stake layer invented this concept called reststaking

which is you know if you're staked in Ethereum you should be able to participate in layer and provide services to a variety of other protocols here is our curve for TVL and you'd see it's oscillating around 4 to 5 million ETH depending on ETH price you know that you know 8 8 billion today it fluctuates operators we have operators all over the spectrum from homestakers and operators to crypto you know giants like Coinbase to web two giants like Google cloud running first party operators on layer so you have nodes which can come and service any protocol you want on top of layer okay what is happening with all this stuff you have the stakers and

operators I know many people know of us only as restaking or staking but staking is just an input to produce some outputs the outputs are new powerful expressive services. So that's what AVSS are autonomous verifiable services. These services that anybody can build on top of layer. And so today we have 40 plus of these services on mainet 100 plus on testn net. So when you think about each one of these services, they're as complex as a new layer 1 blockchain, a new different kind of layer 1 blockchain because each of them don't do the same thing. They're not all just ordering transactions and giving you like a blockchain. They do very unique new

things. Each one of these services really, really hard to build, but hundreds of them are getting built today. Something we did not expect when we got started. And the category of AVSS spans from lots of homegrown breakthrough innovations to giants like Infura which is the leading RPC provider building a decentralized infrastructure network on layer to layer zero the leading bridge building on a layer. So just some examples there but we have a lot of adoption on this category of autonomous verifiable services and this was a category map like what are these services? uh we had this was a category map we created saying oh you know you can ser you can create services like a sequencer or bridge or me monitoring or

AI inference run a Linux box you know prove that your location is correct prove that you're running inside an cryptographically encrypted enclave all these very complex cryptographic services all running in layer you know the electric capital developer report rated us as the top growing eco ecosystem, developer ecosystem in crypto. Okay, so this is what's happening. A lot of this stuff is you know we got the stakers, we got the operators, we have these powerful services now but for most people for many of you here this will come as a surprise like I thought is not doing anything and the reason is it's all

underground. What do I mean by underground? When I'm a user and I come into a blockchain, I don't see all the infrastructure services and stuff. They're all like underground. What I see is I interact as a user with applications. That's what most users do. They interact with applications and applications is at this like out, you know, is what is accessible and under the ground we've built all this complex infrastructure. So we are now evolving from focusing on these underlying pieces of how do I get stakers, how do I get operators, how do I get services to actually thinking about what are these new applications, how do we empower this new grade of applications that is simply

not possible in the absence of these powerful services. So that's where we're going and I layer is a very exciting uh evolution for us because layer itself is a very complex multi-sided marketplace. You have stakers, you have operators, you have services, now you have apps. And so we're just moving forward into this uh direction. So let me just give you like an analogy to peg you to like what this thing looks like. When you look like when you look at a public cloud like the Amazon web services what's happening is underneath everything there's shad infrastructure data centers which power the cloud and on top of the data centers Amazon has

built AWS has built some very powerful services you know EC2 is a computation service S3 is a storage service Dynamob is a processing service there all these different kinds of services that are built on top of AWS AWS has built some of these services themselves. On top of these services, other people built lots and lots of third party services, you know, uh major companies built on top like Snowflake, you know, worth, you know, maybe hundred billion dollars. So, you have this category of third party services built on top of AWS and then applications like Uber, Netflix, everything built on top. And so what we are trying to do at IGEN is to create an

equivalent of the cloud on verifiable uh premise. So the idea is at the base layer of layer is at the base layer of the verifiable cloud is layer which is shad infrastructure right. So shad infrastructure for what? for staking operating but we're not just building iggon layer which is just this one piece we're building all kinds of powerful primitives on top you know DA is a data availability service that's built on top what is a data availability service when you want to write data into a blockchain you want to publish it so that anybody can access it and IDA is the highest throughput data service available in all

of blockchains so six months back we did an experiment where we crawled all the blockchains that exist including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, everything else and wrote the data to IGNA. And when we write it to IGNA, there is still 50% more space left. That's how much through throughput IDA has. So we have some really powerful new blockchains being built on top of IDA. Mega ETH is one example of a blockchain that you may have heard of, but many many powerful unlocks coming up once you scale the underlying infrastructure. So I as a first-party service we are now building other more powerful services that go along with it. Not going to be talking

about them. But on top of these services we have these aliases which actually build third party services which anybody else can then use. And then on top of this we have applications and applications which can then take these and then build powerful useful things. Uh I'll just highlight one application today. Uh on the left you see Earnify. Earnify is the top paid finance application in the app store. It's the top paid finance app in the app store.

If you go and look at it, you wouldn't know it's a crypto application. You would just think it's a regular application. What it does is it's a payroll loan. When you go to your, you know, imagine I'm working at the Cheesecake Factory and I want to take a loan against my payroll. And how do I prove to the lender that I actually am solvent that I actually receive this, you know, $4,000 $5,000 a month in my account and I just want to borrow against that. How do you prove to a counterparty this kind of a fact? You could log into your Cheesecake Factory employee login and then show to the blockchain that you are actually a bonafide employee and you've received your previous pay stubs. All of these things can be validated. But to validate this the the layer that actually helps

us do this is a a service built on layer called opacity. Opacity is a zkls network. It's a complicated acronym but what it does is it lets you prove as a user of any system what is the information under your login. Imagine I can log into my bank and then prove to the blockchain that I have a certain bank balance. I can prove to a blockchain that I have a certain driver rating on Uber. I can prove to a bank that I have a social security number, you know, and I'm a unique person. All of these things can be proven using this one layer called opacity. And the the level of expressivity and innovation that we're going to see because of these

foundational unlocks is mind-boggling. We're just getting started. Okay. So how do we contextualize this in terms of everything else that's happening in crypto? You think of these two axis. One axis is verifiability. Blockchains are built to be verifiable, right? So they're very very verifiable. So you see this on on the top. They're highly verifiable because anybody can download and run the blockchain and verify that it runs correctly. But is it expressive? What do I mean by expressive? What sets of programs and logic can you express inside of blockchains? It's very limited today. It's mostly financial transactions. I send you money. That's the level. Or you say like, oh, is this

guy collateralized enough? And this kind of simple foundational logic is executed very robustly on top of blockchains. But what we want to do is anything that you can program today in a web application on top of the public cloud, you should be able to just simply do this on top of blockchains. And that's our goal is to make crypto highly expressive, highly powerful so that when you build an application, any logic that you can express in on the cloud, you can express inside a blockchain or you can take the cloud and say that hey, I'm going to make the entire cloud verifiable. So that's what we're aspiring to at IGEN. And so what this does, how does it fit in with the

rest of what we've been doing till now? We've been focused on the first part of this flywheel called the shad security flywheel. The more security that is there on layer, the more als that are built on layer, the more fees that exist and therefore the more security comes. But as what we're doing is moving from security as the main thing that is built on layer to the main thing that's built on layer is shad distribution. We want to create a flywheel where applications use IGEN to integrate and with all these powerful services. So we're building a lot of powerful tooling for application developers to come and mix and match

these services. Hey, I want to use this storage service. I want to use this AI inference service. I want to use this um authentication service. And you can mix and match them to build very powerful apps. So you know here is a picture of what might be these powerful apps. What are the categories? These are just like a small smattering of examples. Let already I talked about Ernify. So let me talk about medical insurance as an example. You know when you think about what is the scope of blockchains, you know, most people like I said think about blockchains as being able to do transactions correctly. But think of medical insurance. U the the fundamental things blockchain offer is this new trust paradigm. Right? So recently you know we

had uh an unfortunate episode with the United Healthcare where you know people are really frustrated with how medical insurance claims are adjudicated and what you do normally is you say like hey this company is adjudicating the claims. Instead how instead of trusting a company and there is very little trust in these companies today. Instead of trusting a company, what if you could take a AI protocol and put it on top of a blockchain? Whenever you submit a claim, a AI protocol adjudicates and administers your claims. To do this, you need to be able to run AI inference inside a blockchain just like you're running smart contracts. And this is not possible today in any any blockchain. So

when people say oh this blockchain has more throughput than the other blockchain they're all still talking about transactions per second is financial transactions but what you need the level of logic you need to express an AI inference on chain is completely different just doesn't exist today and this is what we are trying to solve at IEN is to give this superpower to any blockchain any application can now integrate with IGEN and then be able to do bring inference on chain bring privacy on chain, bring randomness on chain, you know, have compliance filters, have AI filtering for transactions, all kinds of things. One particular category we are very excited about in this large scope of what kinds

of applications can be built on top is AI and AI agents. And so when you think about uh an AI agent today, what most of the AI agents in the crypto land look like is, hey, here's an agent. It holds a wallet, a crypto wallet. That's what they look like. And they're mostly highly centralized. Not mostly, pretty much all of them are centralized. There's a single node which basically is an agent and then it interacts with the chain. This is not very different from giving an AI agent a stripe API or a you know PayPal API. They can you know you can just do the same thing with existing web to rails. So we don't find this interesting or unique in in terms of

what blockchains can do. They're fully centralized. They're not unstoppable. They're not verifiable. So the relative value proposition of these agents very small. But our vision for what verifiable agents look like is very different. How different is it? Imagine you can take a smart contract. You know, a really cool thing about a smart contract is it's a piece of code that owns a piece of property. It owns a digital asset. So that's what a smart contract is. Imagine you can take an AI agent and then just put it inside a smart contract. Today you can't do it.

None of the blockchains this is possible. You can't take an AI agent and put it on top of blockchain. And if you can't do it at this grade of verifiability and security, nobody's going to trust these agents with their money and uh and DVL. So that's the superpower of what is possible. But it is not practical. There's no blockchain in which you can do it today. Iggon layer makes verifiable agents practical. Not just possible but practical because what you can do is you can actually build a smart contract on top of a blockchain and tether it with an IGEN AS. So what this AS does is it brings verifiable inference. Nodes run this inference. They stake money. They

promise that they're running it correctly and they're adjudicated back on chain. And once this inference runs, you can take that result and then bring it back to actually make onchain actions. This makes these agents as powerful as verifiable as a smart contract. So this is a new paradigm shift in what blockchains can be capable of. And when you think about AI agents is not just inference. It's a broad category of all kinds of things that are needed. An AI agent needs inference, training, data, GPU markets, internet oracles. All of these exist as services on IGEN. So you can actually build very powerful full supply chain verified AI agents on a layer. Finally, AI bringing

AI on chain not just accelerate the it also accelerates the foundations of how crypto works. When you think about how you sign a transaction, how DeFi works, how governance works, all of these things can be massively accelerated using AI onchain. So with that, I'll stop with a call for developers. Come build highly expressive crypto apps on IGEN verifiable agents and make smart contracts smarter. Thank you so much.