Optimism Base Superchain 🔵_🔴 with Ben Jones, Karl Floersch, & Jing Wang

Transcript

it's a big week we've got plenty of bonus content for you today David we're going to talk about optimism Bass the super chain all of these Concepts this is based on news from yesterday that coinbase is releasing a layer 2 Chain called base that that chain is now in testnet it's going to go to production what in the next couple of months I say weeks to months uh and now we yesterday we spent some time with Jesse we got the coinbase reaction to this and the news this time who do we have on and what are we going to talk about David we are bringing on the three co-founders of optimism Carl Jing and Ben and you got a lot of questions for them uh we got the news yesterday like you said about uh

opt uh the coinbase side of things uh why they want to build base what does it mean for coinbase to have their own layer too but I think people still have a lot of questions for what this means on the optimism side of things what does it mean to be building on the op stack their coinbase isn't building based on optimism they're building on on the op stack what are the differences between these two things what is this super chain Vision uh where are we in this super chain Vision what does that mean for the world and really what are all the all the other implications between this optimism coinbase collaboration because uh Jesse and coinbase are now the second core development team of the op stack what are the implications of that I think people are still learning how to wrap their heads around

this myself included and so I've got a bunch of questions and we've got the optimism team on the show today to go directly to the source yeah I'm super excited for this episode and the Triad of optimism co-founders is always so enthusiastic and so um love catching if you will yes so optimistic I should have used that word and uh disclosure before we get in David and I do disclosures at the beginning of every bankless episode whenever they're necessary David and I are advisors in the optimism project We Believe wholeheartedly in the layer 2 Vision uh we also own some eth uh I I think that covers it Banks yeah flash disclosures for all of that info guys we're gonna get right to the episode with the

optimism Founders but before we do we want to take a moment to tell you about these tools to help you go bankless including Kraken which is our number one recommended exchange for 2023 and the gateway to crypto Kraken has been a leader in the crypto industry for the last 12 years dedicated to accelerating the global adoption of crypto Kraken puts an emphasis on security transparency and client support which is why over 9 million clients have come to love kraken's products whether you're a beginner or a pro the Kraken ux is simple intuitive and frictionless making the kraken app a great place for all to get involved and learn about crypto for those with experience the redesigned Kraken Pro app and web experience is

completely customizable to your trading needs integrating key trading features into one seamless interface Kraken has a 24 7 365 client support team that is globally recognized Kraken support is available Wherever Whenever you need them by phone chat or email and for all of you nfters out there the brand new Kraken nft beta platform gives you the best nft trading experience possible Rarity rankings no gas fees and the ability to buy an nft straight with cash does your crypto exchange prioritize its customers the way that Kraken does and if not sign up with Kraken at kraken.com com slash bankless arbitrim1 is pioneering the world of secure ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the web 3 landscape hundreds

of projects have already deployed on arbitrum 1 producing flourishing defy and nft ecosystems with a recent addition of arbitrum Nova gaming and social adapts like Reddit are also now calling arbitrim home both arbitrim1 and Nova leverage the security and decentralization of ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive familiar and fully evm compatible on arbitrum both Builders and users will experience faster transaction speeds with significantly lower gas fees with arboretum's recent migration to arbitrine Nitro it's also now 10 times faster than before visit arbitrim.io where you can join the community dive into the developer docs Bridge your assets and start building your first app with arbitrum experience web 3 development the way it was meant to be

secure fast cheap and friction free how many total airdrops have you gotten this last bull market had a ton of them did you get them all maybe you this one so here's what you should do go to earnify and plug in your ethereum wallet and earn if I will tell you if you have any unclaimed air drops that you can get and it also does poapps and mintable nfts any kind of money that your wallet can claim earnify will tell you about it and you should probably do it now because some airdrops expire and if you sign up for earnify they'll email you anytime one of your wallets has a new airdrop for it to make sure that you never lose an airdrop ever again you can also upgrade to earnify premium to unlock access to airdrops that are beyond the basics and are able to set reminders for

more wallets and for just under 21 a month it probably pays for itself with just one airdrop so plug in your wallets at earnify and see what you get that's e-a-r-n-i dot f i and make sure you never lose another airdrop station we are back with the three co-founders of optimism we got Carl the CTO at op Labs the internal Optimist is Jing the executive director of the optimism foundation and Ben the chief scientist also of the optimism Foundation got it uh welcome I I always love interviewing you guys because you guys are always in the same spot uh and so we also have the

anti-glare technology in the background as well so thank you for setting that up for the optimized uh glare technology oh my God so first off you guys just absolutely huge congrats on the news this is some of the biggest news that I think has dropped in a very long time and also some of the first very big positive news that's dropped in a long time so thank you for Shifting The Meta into something more optimistic than what we've seen in 2022. so uh I just want just to reflect on this news um how does how does this feel like what sentiment like over at optimism okay pretty [ __ ] cool it's um we're unifying um it's the thing about announcements

though is that uh it's about all the work yet to be done so there's a sentiment of like Focus um and motivation on the enormous pile of work we have ahead of us well it's pretty high I'm feeling pretty optimistic optimistic joke in the in the in the interesting it was too easy it's too easy yeah so so guys where should we really start on this conversation because there's so many different ways that we could take this like coinbase building a layer two coinbase building on the op stack the the super chain there's a bunch of really big things to talk about and we're definitely going to talk about all

of them but I just want to throw this one to you guys where should we start like in your guys's opinions what's the biggest deal about this whole bit of news to you guys to optimism couple Goods contributing back to public goods funding um and public goods experimentation we think this is really important because I mean the three of us have been working together for six years on scaling ethereum from various different angles um we started off as Grant funded then as a non-profit well I guess that's also Grant funded and so public goods has been a super Core theme to everything that we're doing and I think until now um it hasn't been super clear externally

how public goods plays into the winning strategy it seems like uh feel good fuzzy wuzzy type thing but it's genuinely not it's all about the neutrality of the cortex in order for something to be truly decentralized um you can't just have the technical architecture be decentralized DNS is architecturally decentralized but the US owns 11 out of 13 root zones and like anyway sorry not to go on that tangent but sources of funding the execution of work the governance of it also all have to be decentralized in order for the architecture to you know uphold its decentralizedness so

go into the details between the mechanism that uh is is taking coinbase to contributing to public goods like what what is that bridge how is that happening yeah so in general there's um two big ways one is a commitment to a percentage of the base revenues back to the collective the collective treasury transaction fees like the gas fees of Base that's right the other the other piece of this is that coinbase is joining op Labs as the second core contributor to the op stack which is huge I mean that's what it's all about is having multiple teams working towards the same standards and the same end States yeah so that's there's a lot there's a lot more that goes into it than that obviously just like exposure you know to the masses and

people understanding what an L2 is will definitely go up as a result of this but those are the two big direct ones for so for the non-technical minded what does it mean to have a second core contributor to uh like a repository like is it is that the perhaps the right word what does it mean to have somebody else who's not optimism being a core contributor to this uh stack of Technologies why is that such a big deal for people who don't understand these uh the significance of this all right well really ethereum pioneered this whole concept of having many different core contributors and many different client implementations the thing there are two things that are really important about this the first one is that we're building an open

protocol that means that it can't have a bus Factor where if one team were to stop working on the protocol the whole thing just stagnates you need to make sure that this is something that is open decentralized and being contributed to by a community that is the first thing and that's what like you know a lot if you don't rely on a fundamentally decentralized contributor base then you can't really call yourself truly decentralized Long Haul baby Long Haul exactly and so we have to start building up that process in Layer Two If Layer Two is going to be decentralized anyway the next thing is security it is absolutely critical to have multiple

parallel implementations of the protocol in order to ensure that when there is a failure a bug in one implementation it does not take down the entire network this is kind of security through redundancy of the client software and so we're getting both of those things and you know it's just the beginning it's not just going to be you know coinbase it's going to be a bunch of other contributors as time goes on but it is really exciting that we're getting like started on this soon because this is one of the least talked about yet most important components to actually decentralizing a layer 2 protocol and let's talk about later too in

relationship to ethereum because uh with the the roll-up Centric roadmap of ethereum that that we're now on basically layer 2's become kind of as the future yeah I mean they're the future execution layer of of ethereum right so it's very important that this future execution layer is funded uh is completely open source is as credibly neutral as possible and has multiple client teams and is continuously building I was pretty blown away that um Jesse said there were like over 120 coinbase employees that have been working on this project in in one way or another like that's absolutely massive and I think I had forgotten like

um always I know and and and so I one thing I think I think I'd forgotten as well which Jesse reminded me of uh coinbase has actually been active in uh EIP um four eight four four thanks David why do I always forget four eight four four which is like the EIP 515. I know I know oh no I can't remember come on there's only people we need to remember um yeah so uh they they've already been developing for public goods and this was what was so exciting to me about this one thing I'd add and I'd get kind of your response on this is um to me it's not just public good Goods it's um the way coinbase went through the selection process it feels like and they

ended up selecting a credibly neutral technology that would not give coinbase more power in in the network right it's very very different than sort of a side chain where you kind of own the validator set they like um purposely I think made it such that they are not in the driver's seat that they're developing incredibly neutral technology and to me that was so because it's always been you know part of part of bankless um is this idea of course of like the corruption of the banks centralized Banks can can bring uh corruption and we'd always wondered where will some of the crypto Banks the crypto exchanges fall on the Spectrum well they turn evil will they go a little bit JP Morgan uh

or will they Embrace crypto values with us and so that's why um this made me particularly optimistic that coinbase decided to not only Embrace public goods but Embrace credible neutrality and develop along with us anyway that's why people have asked like why is this such a big deal I'm like that's why it's a freaking big deal like we we have a coinbase level of resources on our side and they chose to go with public goods and credible neutrality uh that was a statement more than a question but do you guys have any Reflections on this yeah I mean it definitely doesn't pattern match to the other flavors of Fortune 500 blockchains this is a pretty

web3 native move um I think that says a lot about what coinbase's intentions are um I don't think this is some like you know side science project they are contributing real resources in a bear Market when resources are tight to pushing for decentralization and core contributions means they're committing engineering Firepower to writing code for fault proverbers multi-clients um it's crazy yeah I'll I'll build on that 100 agree I'll build on that a little

bit David to say which it's also I think just as awesome to be continuing to use this as a shared standard so you can you can totally see a world in like uh you know a Fortune 500 environment especially where they see the op stack as a public good and they're saying okay this can form the basis for a technology because it's you know just the best way to build a roll-up but it doesn't mean that they're that they have to also not just take that code and run with it in their own Direction and custom fit it to their needs so they get that it's not just about bass it's about the other chains that are going to end up interoperating with them you know I'm sure we'll get into that more later on but but it's also just as important to be building on the same standard as

other Roll-Ups so that's what we're very excited about yeah precisely okay so I think I'm starting to to wrap my my head around this uh and so maybe the to answer to ask a question it's like why did coinbase choose uh the optimism technology instead of like the arbitrum or polygon technology and I think the answer is what you guys are saying is that like the optimism op stack is this MIT open source uh uh technology stack of software that allows coinbase to not create its own Like Jesse used this term coinbase wants to Braille Bridges not Islands so like they could have made their own client for their own Layer Two and run off in their own Direction and built base with their own technology stack but that's not really what they're interested in they're interested in

joining ranks with other groups to be co-contributors to the same technology stack and then the idea is that that becomes a third group of people or a fourth group of people so it's not just op labs and coinbase it's oplabs coinbase uh third fourth fifth and so they they wanted to pick a technology where they could work together and it's even stronger than that because the op stack is a public good like part of the reasons for choosing um the op stack is certainly it's licensing and being a public good it's also just a darn good code base but because it's a public good you can take that darn good code base and run with it in whatever Direction you want but the problem with doing that is if everybody does that we're going to have a lot of l2s a lot of fraction there's gonna be a lot of

issues so building towards the shame shared standard like not a fork of even the public good super super important help people understand this too so um is base a competitor to the existing optimism evm chain that's out there in the market like are you guys like shooting yourselves in the foot is basically going to come cannibalize the existing up uh optimistic roll up like the the one that you you have out there right now I've heard that that question on Twitter and what would you guys say to that yeah I mean that's definitely from our perspective the naive but clear take that you know that immediately comes to mind when you talk about this we think it misses a few key things

obviously one of them is that positive some outcomes are critical in this game and the reality is that yes while there are going to be some change that maybe have numbers and you can probably construct a narrative that this is a race and compare the two numbers between these chains right the reality is that that ignores the fact that the entire pie is getting bigger when more people do this and quite frankly the truth of the matter is while we have saved our users something like 2.7 I think it's 2.69 when we wrote our article billion dollars in fees there is the reality is that including ourselves nobody has scaled ethereum yet because one chain is not going to cut it if we're going to take this to global scale so the reality

is it's inevitable and it's a short-sighted view in our opinion to be looking at you know some like exciting crypto Twitter fueling Feud you know poll making you know angle on this because it's so much more I I also think that the way people think right now is a little too chain oriented the reality is that right now when we access the internet we don't give a [ __ ] what ISP we're accessing it through or what Hardware or whatever and um chains have been like the sexy thing for people to invest in and talk about some help protocol research is like a really hot thing you know so we talk about chains a lot but the reality is that it shouldn't matter where you're deployed and so far the applications

that have been built in crypto have also been very chain oriented because that's where the funding has been that's where the go to market strategies have been centered around what we're trying to get to collaboratively with coinbase is the super chain interconnectedness which users interact with similar to the way that they interact with the internet it doesn't matter what ISP provider you're on it doesn't you don't it doesn't matter what state space your application is deployed to um applications that require Atomic composability have it and you're just accessing the application you don't have to think about what's happening there is an awkward transition phase between where we are now the chaininess and then where we're headed the chain

agnosticness and so in that period of time um there are things that could be perceived as competition there are choices that applications may have to make before they're re-architected and before a lot of this composability tooling exists should I deploy on optimism mainnet or base or some other EDM change should I deploy everywhere and ultimately it's um gonna be different for every single application a lot of applications should probably start deploying their own chains let us know we've got a SQL chain intake form on our website Optimus superchain wait wait give that URL again optimism.io super chain

i o slash jobs you only get a third link to show in every bankless episode so uh use that third one wisely um okay so slash super chain do people have to like apply to be a super chain or can they just be a super chain like there's no permission required right I could just Fork the code my permission required there will be no permission required to Jake's Point obviously like this is a rollout stage process and so right now it makes sense for folks to get in touch with us and start coordinating together right okay I want to go back to this Jing's idea because um I think we're going to talk

about the the super chain obviously that that was a decent in the title here but but uh Jing's idea that we are in this weird awkward like puberty phase of uh crypto where there's too much chaininess going on and I I wanted to do that for years like we're still yeah we're in this weird awkward phase so okay so I think maybe there's two reasons for this here's an idea for you and I was thinking about this while you're talking saying one is kind of a technical reason why we have these chain borders right and that is because when you're on one chain it's hard to get to another chain and your security assumptions change it's very much like you know like I go from the US to Canada and I have to you know my path it feels like a different country right even though maybe it's

culturally similar uh whatever so there's that there's kind of the technical and security type border uh the other reason is because we have tokens for all of these chains and and I think that that uh kind of breeds some tribalness sometimes it's just like well my token's better than your token and like look at this we can compare you know how fast the tokens are growing and price and you know like the red token I like the blue token yeah I like I like the purple token yeah it's very like you know starbellic Sneetches of us like we're just kind of like we like to separate into tribes based on a team color or you know something like this uh what was really neat about the base token or the base chain as well

token no token like they're using so that's very cool anyway I'm going to test those those assumptions uh Jing it's like so is that why we're chaining us it's because all the chains have tokens and so we organize and token based tribes and also because there's technical limitations right now in that it really does feel like there is a border it's hard to go from one chain to another is that why we're in this current state yeah I think all of those are um like components of the fracture of Mind share liquidity energy in the ecosystem at large and the existence of a token kind of ossifies that fracture and

um makes the time to like Converge on a single standard take longer because their financial incentives not to especially if that token is required to run the chain like most of the l1's out there yeah I think the core thing with the like composability and the atomicity is um message passing between different state spaces so like you know chain B receives data from chain a and there's a process by which that the validity of that data is verified like that whole thing that whole standard we need to coalesce on a single one of those things and that's what the super chain is is all coalescing on a single message passing standard and a bridge standard in order to enable the type of ux

between chains that imitates the ux of being in a single state space I was just gonna say that like yeah there is there are technological limitations that have resulted in this fracturing and the solutions to the fracturing oftentimes actually introduce new technology which then further fractures the developer base the thing it's like oh build on this new language built on this new you know like all this kind of fracturing on fracturing on fracturing yeah exactly it's going crazy and so I'm just gonna I mean I started

out with my multi-client my standards rant but I just want to like double click and just say like this is so important from a community building perspective not only the technology becoming standardized but the process by which we come to what the technology is as in the standards bodies the people contributors Building Together working together on this that is another key critical element to ensure that we do not result in Crazy developer fragmentation like it is so nice that all the browsers can load up the same websites and display the same things that was not a given for many many years right until people realize hey why are

we building out incompatible features for our browser software let's work together so that is like what we're going to start to see in the ethereum space for the op stack and this is It's really exciting to see the snowball like just beginning to to grow and this is really the long-term Arc at least for what I see of the optimism project and the optimism like philosophy is that like every time that we have you guys on you guys have made one more Innovation further down the stack that keeps ever all the developers cohered into the same Tech stack and so like this whole idea of like evm equivalents and making sure that optimism is equivalent to ethereum

means that we can imbue ethereum's technology into the optimism technology and now with its op stack it's just every time we talk to you guys it's just the technology is one step further along in making sure that all the developers are on the same page and we're reusing and recycling all of the the developer Technologies and tooling that need to be leveraged in order to build a coherent ecosystem yes and I will even build on that a tiny bit because not only are we trying to push forward the actual technology and the actual you know things evm equivalents whatever the you know op stack what we're also trying to do is build an incentive system right that enables people to continuously

contribute in perpetuity without having a centralized dictator governing body that's like giving out money or some corporate you know control right so this is actually I want to like I wish if I could I would love to like give a click moment for like literally everyone which is just like let's retroactive public goods funding which we've talked about on other things you can go look it up retroactive public goods funding a funding source for public goods that is absolutely the like you know complement the puzzle piece that enables the op stack to grow and be great in other words what we're doing is we're not only building out the open Source protocols and technologies that will become the

standards for how we use blockchains how we use the internet generally well we're also building out the funding source that funds that development and guess what else I'm sorry I just can't stop but base and optimism mainnet all of and and all the further chains within the super chain the the cycle is those the usage of those platforms go back into retroactive publicist funding which then goes back and funds the development of the op stack making it better and better right like this is going to be a crazy decentralized standards development like No One's Gonna own it and it's still gonna happen anyway it's it's it'll be a

very wild ride yeah see this is the bank list listeners can tell why I call Carl the internal Optimist uh and so just a relationship drive this point home we've got the op stack technology which is designed to be be an equivalent extension of the ethereum technology stack to allow for all of the same shared standards and just like text act to be expanded and scaled across many organizations and which is the story of base and coinbase building on the op stack and also the retroactive public goods funding and the op Collective is also a uh economy a system of recirculating funds to support and further development in a way that doesn't need a central coordinator of

those funds so that's always been the optimism vision and the fact that we are now having a second huge core contributor to the op stack is a huge vote of confidence in that vision and having that and having that mechanism that Carl was just talking about just to type exactly what Carl said back to what we were talking about before that is what prevents the fragmentation and the fracturing because you're totally right right and so often fracturing occurs from people trying to get a business model behind something that fundamentally that they're doing is just building a public good that's some software right so having that funding mechanism is is how you keep this thing cohesive yeah yeah and that's also why it's so important that some percentage of the base transaction fees goes to the

op Collective that's like to add energy into that flywheel guys okay so uh we've been talking about the super chain we also want to talk about fraud proofs as well like we want to hear about the optimism fraud proofs trajectory but also we've been teasing the super chain and I want to dive into that what is that Vision uh because it's very very sci-fi uh and I kind of want to understand it a little bit more so we're going to talk about those two main subjects uh as soon as we get back from some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible is the largest on-chain Marketplace for self-custody digital assets uniswap is of course a decentralized exchange but you know this because you've been listening to bankless but did you know that the uniswap web app has a shiny new Fiat on-ramp now you could go directly

from Fiat in your bank to tokens in defy inside of uniswap not only that but polygon arbitrum and optimism layer twos are supported right out of the gate but that's just D5 uniswap is also an nft aggregator letting you find more listings for the best prices across the nft world with uniswap you can sweep floors on multiple nfts and uniswap's Universal router will optimize your gas fees for you uniswap is making it as easy as possible to go from bank account to bankless assets across ethereum and we couldn't be more thankful for having them as a sponsor so go to app.uniswap.org today to buy sell or swap tokens and nfts the Phantom wallet is coming to ethereum

the number one wallet on Solana is bringing its millions of users and beloved ux to ethereum and polygon if you haven't used Phantom before you've been missing out Phantom was one of the first wallets to Pioneer Solana staking inside the wallet and will be offering similar staking features for ethereum and polygon but that's just staking Phantom is also the best home for your nfts Phantom has a complete set of features to optimize your nft experience pin your favorites hide the Uglies remove the spam and also manage your nft sale listings from inside the wallet Phantom is of course a multi-chain wallet but it makes chain management easy displaying your transactions in a human readable format with automatic warnings for malicious transactions or fishing websites Phantom has already saved over 20 000 users from getting

scammed or hacked so get on the Phantom waitlist and be one of the first to access the multi-chain beta there's a link in the show notes or you can go to Phantom dot app waitlist to get access in late February hey bankless Nation if you're listening to this it's because you're on the free bankless RSS did you know that there is an ad-free version of Bank list that comes with the bankless premium subscription no ads just straight to the content but that's just one of many things that a premium subscription gets you there's also the token report a monthly bullish bearish neutral report on the hottest tokens of the month and the regular updates from the token report go into the token Bible your first stop shop for every token worth investigating in crypto bankless premium also gets you a 30 discount to

the permissionless conference which means it basically just pays for itself there's also the airdrop guide to make sure you don't miss A Drop in 2023 but really the best part about bankless premium is hanging out with me Ryan and the rest of the bankless team in the Inner Circle Discord only for premium members want the alpha check out Ben the analyst Degen pit where you can ask him questions about the token report got a question I've got my own q a room for any questions that you might have at banklist we have huge things planned for 2023 including a new website with login with your ethereum address capabilities and we're super excited to ship what we are calling banklist 2.0 soon TM so if you want extra help exploring the frontier subscribe to bankless premium it's under 50 cents a day and provides a

wealth of knowledge and support on your journey West I'll see you in the Discord all right Bank location we are back with the optimism team and now we're going to dive into the Super chain because what the hell is a super chain uh so there's a Ryan is showing uh the link that you guys talked about earlier uh optimism.io superchain is that is that where we go you gotta click super chain up at the top Super chain okay look at this I'm here I'm in the super chain so no I know what a blockchain is I know what a layer two chain is what is a super chain it's a chain that's super it's a super Japan Carl all right a super chain is a network of chains which share security

decentralization all built on a standard technology stack the op stack and the key Insight of this is that by creating a shared set of chains that all conform to the same properties what you do is you make it so that each one of these chains can work together interoperate and you can use them as interchangeable resources so today we think oh what chain am I going to deploy to I need to look at all the custom features I need to understand the custom trade-offs that I'm making and then I deploy my app well what if there was a network of chains where you could have the exact same security features across all of them

well now I don't need to learn about every one of these chains that I'm deploying to I literally write my application and boom deploy all to all the chains what this enables is not only develop developers to kind of abstract away the underlying chains it allows users and wallets to also do the same so you get the crypto experience that we really need which is super scalable low fees and you don't have to worry about what network on you're on you're just secure happy and getting your application on okay it doesn't exist okay okay let's fast forward to a future state that is something more incremental that that we

can imagine right so now we have this base thing and then we also have the optimism chain over here so we have two chains and let's assume that they are in the Super chain right now okay and so I'm a user I got metamask open uh what chain do I set it to it is it just like a a box that's a super super one so I set my settings in metamask for super chain and then um let's say I want to do something with the version of uniswap on base and then also like can I does would that unit swap tie into liquidity over on the optimism chain like how does this work see this the super chain is such a new

new model and this is to Jing your point earlier we're so used to even as users of like the chaininess of the feeling oh if I want to go from this place to this place I have to like change my settings change my you know RPC connection and then I move to another chain how does this work in the super chain as a user yeah this is like the puberty phase that we were talking about and also like speaks to the enormity of the work it's not just about a single application or wallets like block explorers like what the [ __ ] are we gonna do with block explorers there's just so many different mindset and Paradigm shifts that need to happen um it's a collaboration and so we're talking to a number of other

applications that are also deploying their own op chains um similar to base and so it's something we're actively figuring out right now how are messages passed what does the user experience look like yeah yeah I was just gonna say one really easy mental model that is not here yet but that we are working towards is you can kind of think of chains as like powerful smart contracts and so imagine your question about uniswab you know imagine you had two liquidity pools two smart contracts with the same token pair right but they're both different liquidity pools for some reason now you can have the uniswap front end find you the best price across both of these and you know

maybe a trades on one then it migrates to the other and buys on the other that kind of thing becomes possible um so we're trying to make it so that there is an API a easy to deploy interface where you can spin up a new chain very very seamlessly yeah but Carl so yeah uh there's a uniswap on optimism there's a unit swap on polygon there's a you've been swap on arbitrum and there's also cross-chain like aggregators of these things which are doing a similar job to what you just said but I'm guessing if it's two chains on the op stack and with that shared standard is that job of a cross-chain DEX aggregator just becomes a lot easier and fluid and fast yes it becomes so much easier and also I think that the key unlock that's really

going to take it to the next level is the problem with all of these bespoke chains that have all these different standards is that as a application developer or like an aggregation developer I need to write a custom converter for each one of these chains which does not scale if all of these chains are using the exact same standard then I literally it could be a thousand of these chains it'll be a million it could be a million a billion anyway sorry um there could be tons of these chains and I can immediately aggregate across all of them so it's really it's really night and day like it it that kind of shift in developer productivity fundamentally changes what is possible because before you're investing months

in implementing something that becomes minutes yeah okay so like the idea with that is like uh if you have this like cross chain unit swap aggregator and a new version of a do new layer two crops up you have to manually uh make that chain supported by your deck your aggregation software if it's on the op stack it's like automatic like there are so many things that are natively supported out of the box by in nature of the fact that it was built using the op stack in the first place that's the idea yeah totally and look to James Point Gene is very right to bring the caveat this will take a collective this is the mission of the optimism Collective is summoning the super chain but it's not going to happen overnight right but what we're talking

about here is a very logical I think comparison to exactly what we saw in the internet you know I think probably and if you were in the early days of the internet right in like the late 80s you know you're like what do you mean I don't have to like enter the IP address of the University that I'm not going to connect you next it's just gonna disappear right it's gonna the IP is gonna be the same for all of them right and and obviously that ux like improves slowly over time right and it took many years and now everybody has a not you know probably 10 IP addresses and you know all this stuff so you know it's gonna take a while for us to get here it's the point of building together but it won't happen without a shared standard and it certainly won't happen

if we just keep fragmenting these things as opposed to coming together I I wonder if you could uh reinforce this piece about kind of the the super chain idea right and what you're trying to summon what you're what you're manifesting into reality here and this is concept of security um so I will say the whole internet of chains model sounds really cool but it scares the cosmos mommy yeah the model right the atom model it because if we have all sorts of chains with independent validator sets an independent security assumptions and then we have Bridges trying to tie them all together with their own set of security assumptions right how many

Bridge hacks did we we see last year I mean hundreds of millions of dollars North Korea ended up this money probably yes and and and so like that scares the crap out of me about sort of the the whole idea of all sorts of Internet of chains that have different security assumptions now with the super chain my understanding is you have the same underlying ethereum level fraud proof security assumptions as every other chain inside of the super chain Network that's why you're calling it a super chain it's because it's one big like fluffy blanket of shared security wrapping its arms around all of these

chains and ecosystems inside of the super chain right um can you reflect on that or power of L2 yeah because I I think sometimes in crypto like we're just um we forget about the long tail of the security risks here until it just like hits Us in the face and there's you know uh you know massive hack that happens can you guys talk about this security aspect to the super chain I think honestly that's probably that's a very good call out um Ryan because I think it's something that we take for granted because for six years now we've been working on Layer Two scaling yeah and what is the entire point of layer 2 scaling it's to inherit the security of the layer one and make a layer two that gives you more scalability but keeps the

same security model right at least as close as you can get and yeah so I guess we kind of take that for granted but that's a very important thing to say yes it's absolutely the case that all the super chain ultimately is all secured into ethereum and this is how you can get a shared security standard so that's super super important for sure and it comes from the nature of layer two technologies which can inherit that credible neutrality of ethereum um in a way that scales and by the way I wanna also say that the uh this point is not just about like oh I'm like super security conscious like I don't want to use an asset that's bridged over no the thing is that the compounding risk of having multiple chains and I bridge to

this chain then this chain then this chain and any one of these chains can fail that weakest link security that actually limits the total number of chains that you can possibly have because the more change you introduce to the system the more existential risk you introduce to the system so in order to ensure that we're able to actually horizontally scale the super chain and scale the number of chains in the network you need to have homogeneous security across all of them so that the core assets are always secured and that actually in in a weird way that security enables scalability I I'm a quote from Elon Musk comes to mind which is that all user inputs are

an error and I feel like applying this that like philosophy here is like all bridges are a patchwork of incomplete technology like if you have to bridge like if the technology isn't done yet then because like the idea is to get rid of all bridges right bridges are hacks bridgeless bridgeless oh my God if you have a layer two uh podcasts have been off it should be absolutely called bridgeless go buy it now dude uh I want to um ask um a question that maybe Carl kind of alluded to earlier about this this idea of standards and so my understanding of of the super chain is of course optimism has its version of a super chain with all of the the chains

that use the op stack that kind of thing and that's great so we got the security blanket over this we also have other Layer Two Two ecosystems you know uh the matter lab ZK sync the polygon the scroll the arbitrum all of these other Layer Two ecosystems are they going to have their set a separate like super chain and how do we run it um how do we make sure we don't fall into the uh XKCD scenario of like look we you know situation it says there are 14 competing standards and then somebody says 14 ridiculous we need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases yeah soon situation now there are 15 competing standards how do we avoid that problem of having just a whole bunch of super chains that

aren't interoperable with with one another is there some way to do that you know if if all of these layer twos are settling on ethereum is there some hope here yeah I think that um I mean we are creating a new standard and there are other standards out there um I guess we believe our standard is a better standard because we're not because it's ethereum maybe exactly we're not trying to create um coercive lock-in we're not trying to create like a fundamentally new way to develop smart contracts and that new thing you have to learn we're not trying to create a closed ecosystem where once you're onboarded it's very hard to leave what we're trying to do is create an

ecosystem that's as easy to onboard to as possible and to create non-coercive lock-in by providing value at the application layer so if the platform is super easy to develop on and the tools are easy to use and open source and easy to build then we believe that that will make it easier for applications to build and so we're trying to create lock-in non-coercively at the application layer by providing real value to users yeah that's 100 let me give you guys a few examples of where this shows have been practiced early example was our evm equivalence upgrade right in the early days of what we were building we absolutely had introduced a

new standard we called it the ovm there was the ovm compiler the ovm byte code specific write all these things at the end of the day what it meant was that application developers had to go and do something different to deploy onto optimism mainnet right evm equivalence was a huge milestone for us that completely removed that we we just said okay look we are doing the xkcd thing right now we can't do that we must comply with the ethereum standards so we went evm equivalent what one and a half two years ago now the another great example of this is the big release of the op stack um that is upon us called Bedrock um shout out David for having the dot Bedrock put dot bedrock in your Twitter yo um one of the

incredible things that we use in Bedrock is something called the engine API have you guys heard of that no I have yeah it's it's a fancy name for the merge API so think about this here's something that's really incredible to think about a layer one uh it when you're building a layer two the layer one is kind of like the source of truth because it's where the security comes from and you sort of look at the layer one and the batch is submitted by the sequencer and these sorts of things to figure out the state of your layer too right that is the exact same relationship between the beacon chain and the old like guess like execution

client the consensus layer and the execution layer in the merge so what's fascinating is that every L2 pretty much out there has to choose some way to implement basically what the merge what the engine API does and what they did with the consensus layer and the whole pandas you know doing their thing the op stack uses that exact same API with like a few lines modified precisely for the reason that we can't be going about and creating a new standard so every standard that we see we're using there are you know to Jing's point there are going to be some new standards that are going to have to be created because ethereum wasn't built with a multi-chain standard in mind and certainly we're going to have to do that

very carefully and in a community you know Community Driven collaborative way um so it's it's absolutely a concern we think that the way to solve it is to always go with ethereum when you can and be very careful when you are absolutely sure you can what's up Carl and I just wanted to say that you noticed that we said the word we a bunch of times now I want to remind people because this is a very hard habit to break out but it is remember that when we say we we are talking about us as in everyone like all of these people this is a decentralized project these are public goods that we are creating this is open source software the software that is produced by you know my hands and other people's

hands who don't work nearly close with me those things are public goods that are now available to the public AKA everyone and so the way to in you know make sure that the fracturing doesn't occur and we don't have a bajillion different standards is not by having some people sitting in their Ivory Tower we're giving you know down the the laying down the law of how the tech should be built but instead it's about building consensus in the community that we are all a part of and building out those standards in a joint together fashion and this is going to be more and more important as time goes on as the

project grows as more core contributors come back and I'm back to the multi-clients um I'm sorry yeah this is go ahead Jing uh uh wanted to create something that benefited all roll ups including our competitors not just us because it's generally important that the ecosystem moves forward um I think that in creating the standard and creating the super chain it would be really sick to have other ecosystems zero knowledge or fault proofers running

in the super chain um we're not we're not trying to only run the code that's outputted by the existing core team we're genuinely trying to coalesce around A single standard and hopefully they'll work on 4844 speaks to the cooperativeness that we operate with and it's not just in 444 but more generally we're very interested in collaborating with other ecosystems oh that's that's really great to hear uh guys um you've kind of taken us uh all through this and I think people we we started talking about bass and and the value of that and it public goods incredible neutrality and preserving

these crypto values and that's fantastic we talked about the super chain and how that allows us basically to uh scale ethereum um one last kind of question on my mind I think maybe in the minds of of some of the listeners I certainly saw some of this conversation on Twitter which was uh about the ability of bass to decentralize so when we talked to Jesse yesterday um you know bass is not going to launchfully decentralize like coinbase will be the sole uh sequencer my understanding is it won't launch with fraud proofs either um can you talk about this how long will it take a base so a new chain in the super chain ecosystem to become fully decentralized and what is what is

optimism's path on that as well with respect to things like like fraud proofs and anything else you think it will require to get to this state of full decentralization oh man if only op Labs had recently posted under the official decentralization update okay I guess that was my cue okay um decentralization is literally the point that is like all that we have been talking about now the reality is that software takes an enormous amount of time to get right and especially software like fault proofs which there's no there's no fallback entity because if there's a fallback

entity for your fall proof that's a bank yeah that's a bit Yeah like there's no there's you're not actually using pulp proofs right you're not actually getting the benefits from vulpers so in order for fault groups to work we need to have multiple clients it's not this kind of uh uh it's the thing that I was talking about in the beginning which I for some reason have been going back to over and over in this podcast um is that in order to have make sure that the clients will never fail the way that ethereum does it and the way that we are following in ethereum's footsteps is that we have multiple implementations of the Fall proof all running in parallel and ensure that that if any one of those go wrong we are able to continue the system now building one

fall proof is really hard and we've like you know gone quite far in Canon and you can take a look and contribute but building multiple fall proofs is even harder but in order to ensure that we have safe secure execution that is decentralized we need it so that's the fault proof kind of side there's another side to decentralization that we haven't talked about very much that was in the blog post and that is the decentralization of the upgrade keys and the decentralization of the bridge we are working to make a you know Security Council style upgrade system which is still you know in progress but that is another key component where we need to

make sure that not only are there fault proofs but the people who are upgrading and doing you know managing the software those people are community members from everywhere so anyway we're firing on all cylinders it's it's coming yeah and like you know brass tax wise we just haven't announced yesterday that there are some of the best you know engineers at one of the largest companies in the world contributing to the same shared standard yeah all this that are very very interested in that the other thing that I'll say and honestly this is a shout out I don't know how the heck we have not made this but the Bedrock release of the op stack is coming the mainnet upgrade vote is like there was a big huge unlock moment that we got to earlier this year which was basically

competing the BET completing the Bedrock release because I'll be honest with you Ryan previous versions of that code base were not up to the par of utilizing existing standards that we were willing to go out like public goods funding we're finally doing our second round of retro pgf shout outs to um David for being at bachelor in that to for us to get to that point honestly required that we go sit down from first principles and say okay what is the most neutral what is the most code minimized what is the most existing standards leveraging way to write a roll-up and that and a chain more generally and that is what the Bedrock release has been so that is a huge unlocker that we've been really pushing on as a priority to unlock the

rest of the multi-client and all this stuff now it is time to really focus our attention on DC was it you guys did you guys write the uh the blog post with the analogy of it's just like uh the centralization is like the ring of power and at some point every role has to you know throw it in the fire yeah it's fantastic all right so so where are we on the quest to throw the ring into to Mount Doom we're outside of the Shire now right are we like are we approaching the black gates are we near Mordor where are we in this Gondor I think Gondor okay Gondor all right so movie three David got like all of the dominoes are right there you know what I'm saying anyway it's pretty sick we just caught I mean the answer yesterday it's kind of like we just

called in the room here I'm um thank you thank you I just needed this that's Yeah final question and that's how we can close David guys it's a lot of fun having you congrats on the success with this massive release uh this is uh super huge for uh all of crypto for the ecosystems yeah super chain that's right now you have one last link to Shell please Choose Wisely we talked about super chain link the jobs link give us another link before we close out here what's the op stack link stack.optimism.io got it while we have a major second um core developer you know joining the ranks with OP labs this is going to be

done as a very large effort by a very large number of people and we finally have some of the initial docs in place to really show you how to do the crazy stuff with the op stack that is going to blow people's minds that we always can't focus our priorities on for the reasons that we just talked about um so come contribute and build the op stack with us that's awesome all right we'll end it there and guys thank you for joining us thanks for setting up the tent background uh getting the lighting working it's uh very good the makings of an early Studio I can tell bankless Nation will include some links of course in the show notes as always gotta end with this risks and disclaimers Theory Miss rescue somewhere layer twos all of crypto is when you think about it you could lose what you put in but we are

headed west this is the frontier I think layer twos are the new frontier it's it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bank list Journey thanks a lot thank you bye y'all