The Rollup TV: Friday, August 8th

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>> It's 8 a.m. >> 8 a.m. GM. Happy Friday. >> It's good to have you back again, man. >> Feels like we're good and we're there and then we're here and then we're back. There's been a lot of trials and tribulations all throughout the the rollup world these last few weeks and uh I think I think a return to normal uh is is welcomed. >> Yeah. Tell us about your tweet, man. You had a heartfelt tweet. That was like your first tweet in six months. was based. >> I mean, I think that was just kind of like where the where the organization is at these days. Like, you know, we uh we're a very close-knit team. Uh I think we're at, you know, probably a half dozen full-time. And you know, these

guys are literally family, like, you know, a couple brothers on the team. Um, and there's been a lot of uh a lot of trials and tribulations, personal family matters and I feel like I feel like especially on crypto Twitter, like things get so jaded. There's such a detachment from like reality, things that kind of really matter. >> I think a lot of times, uh, >> you know, especially going to conferences, meeting people like you know, we we see these people, they're they're real people. But I think people lose that on Twitter too much. You get, you know, this this avatar, this profile picture, and don't really have a a understanding of, you know, there's a

real person behind that. >> Um, but with that being said, I mean, you you know where we're at. You know, we've had uh a lot of the team deal with some pretty heavy family uh family situations. And so because we're such a close team, we've been together for five years, we talk on the daily, like you know, these guys, you know, it feels like we're all I feel like people say that, but like I don't know, that's that's kind of trit to say is like we're we're you know, more than co-workers. We're family. But it really feels like uh you know, we go way back. We go way back, you know, you and I, right? Like back to 2017 in college. Like we were we were friends before we were we were

co-founders. And so I can honestly say that, you know, if we were to stop the rollup, a lot of the people that we work with and we have on the team would continue I would would continue to be friends with. Um, and so it just means that like when you know when one of us, you know, is is hurt, we pick each other up. Uh, I think that's what makes a good team. Um, and so yeah, it's just been it's been a heavy few weeks as you know and uh now the rest of our network knows and uh yeah, I think everyone on the team is is uh picking each other up and that that's why you know we have a resilient and we have an incredible team. I think I think we have an incredible team and we're gonna we're gonna make it through and we're going to

be even even stronger as a result of some of the uh some of those trials and tribulations now. So, it's a lot to uh a lot to unpack, but I'm I am very excited to get back into the swing of things. Obviously, the market is on an incredible tear. We've got thoughts and opinions on that. A lot of our partners are going through really, really successful launches. We'll have Pay Link, who just launched uh Tap to Pay debit card. They're doing some really cool things with private crypto or excuse me, private stable coin transactions. I was just in SBC last week. um the commissioner of the SEC, Hester Pierce, put a phenomenal speech on uh kind of brought up a story of her own grandfather eating peanut butter and

watermelon and like why do those two things go together? Just like why do private privacy and stable coins go together? >> Yeah. >> Um >> and so there's there's uh you know there's a lot of exciting things happening. It's just been I just just to kind of close this monologue. It's been a very conflicting few weeks because and I try to I tried to convey this but we've had you know such a successful stint and stretch in our business over the last few months the industry us included uh you know we've had such a such a successful stretch. Um but that is in contrast to you know some of the some of the more uh trying uh personal matters. And so I'm I'm looking for kind

of these two these two things to sort of converge again uh and us to kind of return to uh kind of a a mean reversion if you will on both fronts and and uh continue on the upward momentum that we had going into that and and now coming out of it. How are you feeling? You know you you've been going through you know things yourself. The team has been going thing through things. You're you know just as close to this as I am. what uh you know what is your your head and your heart saying? >> Dude, I'm cruising, man. I am in Hawaii. It is 8 a.m. and I'm We have a big swell coming this weekend. I'm going to surf my brains out today. Um and the market's ripping, dude. I mean, that

was a great intro. Um, I think that uh, you know, I've I've processed all of these situations in my own way, but dude, I'm full steam ahead. We're uh, we're we're cruising and and the market's ripping and things are good. So, I uh, I don't want to show any weakness, man. Uh, there's a lot of there's a lot of competition in this live stream space now. It's it's not easy being the first movers. Now, we have to innovate and adapt, which I think there's a lot of cool things coming. That's what I was I was teasing some of the people when I was in in Sweden, I think, doing the streams about what we have coming. And so, yeah, I'm pretty stoked on that. So, uh, that amongst other things is where my head's

at. And, uh, yeah, man. Eat 4046, up almost 4% today. Uh, the whole market looks great. So, I'm pretty bullish. I'm pretty stoked to be here. We got Sid from Pay. We got Preston the Gigabrain from Sovereign Labs. And we got um Shiv from Boundless to verify the signal. So should be a banger stream. I'm stoked on it. I think we get Sid up here immediately next and uh and get started. So yeah, Rob, let's uh let's hear about this uh new Visa card they just launched. Got a ton of views, >> full steam ahead, >> a lot of engagement on Twitter. So pretty stoked on that.

>> And um >> yeah, we'll hear what what it's all about. We'll hear some of the pros and cons, learn about that, learn what they're what Sid's seeing in stable coins, and we'll move to Preston and then to shift. So, somewhat of a technical vibe today, but we have a half hour after Sid to talk markets. >> So, yeah, that's where we're at. Uh, that's how I'm feeling. That's how I'm doing. Uh, we're back at the Rollup TV. Um, and it's good to be here. So, yeah, man. >> Yeah, we'll get sit up here in just a moment. uh full steam ahead sounds like the right approach, the right mindset as well. It's basically like look, you know, we have all of this momentum. It's time to embrace and capitalize on that

momentum. And I think there's layers to that. I think, you know, we are ready to capitalize on multiple levels. Um so that being said, we're going to get Sid in here. A successful launch goes a long, long way. Sid, congrats, man. Congrats on the successful launch of the tap to pay the card, the pay link. It's uh it's exciting times private stable coin transactions. What's your like how are you feeling after a successful launch? It just kind of you probably have the sense of relief but also the sense of like okay job not finished, we're just getting started.

What is what has been the reaction and how how are you feeling? >> Uh I think the reaction has been like absolutely tremendous. I mean, I think we've been when you when you've been building something for so long kind of quietly and you know that it's like so massive and then you launch it and then you get that confirmation like I've just been absolutely over the moon. We've gotten tons of inbound uh tons of users like and some like real engagement like sometimes you know like on on crypto Twitter you see some posts and like they're have like a million views and then it's just like GMs like in the replies and like I think what was really cool about this was that like there was people posting screenshots of like their their pay card there's people posting

videos of them using it like it was so real and I think that's that is what I wanted to get across even our launch video was just like shots of like, you know, someone using the pay card at a terminal. Like that's what it was supposed to be, like not overproduced, super real. And I think that that came through and people saw that. >> Dude, the announcement slapped. That was >> had like 400k views, bro. >> Yeah. And it was like 400k really good views. >> Dude, I got to ask though, why did you use the the the uh hyphen or like the dash? I feel like everyone nowadays is is is like, "Yo, man, if you're using these dashes, it's like uh AI generated." PE people are like allergic

to these dashes now, man. >> Dude, I've been using So, they're called EM dashes, right? So, they're the length, like if you know typography, they're the length of an M. That's like the type typographical standard. There's also EN dashes. N is in Nancy, which is like the length of an N. >> So, I've been using EM dashes for like 10 years, bro. So, like I can't stop using them. >> Ishotted your uh your entire writing style bro. >> I guess chat chat GPT was training on my Reddit post. So, like, yeah. >> Um, dude, so so how did you guys come up with the idea? Talk to me about this lightup feature. What why did you guys choose to make that up a a reality with

the pay card? How does that even happen? So like all the way back like in January when we were like starting to discuss building pay card and actually I'd already taken some steps like implementing it. Um, I had this really strong feeling that if we just launched yet another crypto card, like it would just be like, okay, cool. They're saying it has some privacy in it, but like it's just another crypto card, right? And and and now six months, like seven months down the line, we see that like there are like a thousand crypto cards and I feel like every week someone's launching a crypto card, right? So, I had this really deep feeling that like if we didn't make it really special in some

way, like there's the value side of special. It's like the right curve of like ah, it's like ZK shielded and like all this crazy [ __ ] we did, but there has to be a left curve special as well. And originally, I wanted to do a glow-in-the-dark cart. So, like you you go to like a bar or a club and it glows. And uh it's actually really annoying because you have to like charge, you know, if you you've used glow-in-the-dark stuff before, you have to like charge it in the sun. >> Yeah. >> And I was like, well, it's going to be in people's wallets. Like, no one's going to charge it in the sun. That's lame. >> Then I found these guys building this card with a literal OLED screen embedded in it. And so the pay card, the physical pay card, like I have one here, right?

So it like in here it has an OLED screen and it harvests the energy from the NFC when you tap to pay to light to to light up the OLED screen momentarily. So there's no like battery or charging or anything like that. >> What harvest? Okay. When you say harvesting the energy, I'm like >> that how does that do you have any like because NFC is not even they don't even touch, right? Like >> how do you har do you draw the energy out of something without even like there's no connection whatsoever? You're just you're just near it.

>> Yeah. You're just near it. >> So you have to go into like electrical engineering a little bit. So radio waves, right? Like right like when you're listening to the radio, right? Like no one does that, but like when you when you do that, what radio waves actually carry electromagnetic energy >> and all your like little radio box does is it actually amplifies the existing signal. So like if you had like ultra superhuman hearing, you could actually hear radio waves like that like like they they exist and they have energy.

>> Infrared for light like it's outside our our purview. Okay. >> Exactly. exactly that. Um, yeah, radio waves are like, you know, far far way further away on the spectrum of visible light, but um, yeah, and so what what this does is the there's a chip inside that harvest that like tiny little bit of energy from the NFC and the POS system and it and it uses that to power the OLED screen. Like obviously this is really hard like >> hard tech stuff. So like yeah it's I mean yeah it's absolutely crazy and it's cool that it works.

Yeah, I mean we don't we don't get into the hardware side of things too much, especially on the like we've been getting a little bit into the AI, the robotic side of things. We talked about hardware a little bit, but yeah, I mean, drawing energy from radio waves is something that we haven't we haven't quite scratched and and so you just happened upon these guys kind of doing some product research, trying to see like what some some card types were out there you happen to come into contact and then it was like, okay, yeah, that's what this needs. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's a kind of a relationship that like kind of bloomed over time. Like they showed me like a demo on like this, you know, blank card.

And I was like, but you're telling me like we can ship this and they're like, "Yeah, it's going to take like a couple months to get into production." I was like, "Great. That's like works for our timeline." And like everything came together, dude. Like, >> yeah. >> So, uh, Sid, talk to us about some of the, um, stable coin aspect of this, right? Stable coins are growing. Everybody wants a part of this pie. People are bullish on stable coins. Obviously, we had the Circle IPO a couple uh I think it was about a couple months ago, huge IPO. Um Ripple's got a stable coin out. Heather's absolutely booming. Um is there a world where pay launches a stable coin? I think we talked about this pre previously, but

talk to us about the privacy aspect. Why is this so important to you guys from an ethos perspective, but really also why is this so important from like a end consumer perspective? like why do I as a user who has been used to having privacy in payments why do I expect that when it comes to blockchain why did you guys prioritize us talk to us about kind of like the thought process around that entire uh objective >> yeah totally so answer your first question is pay going to launch a stablecoin I don't know so far uh USDC has been like a great partner like circle is a partner of ours we're in one their like um kind of like programs like acceler accelerator programs or whatever

and like I met some great people there. I met Jeremy like two weeks ago like you know I was talking to him about what we're doing. I met Cash, their chief product officer as well. Like they're super hyped. And what I will say is the way we think about it is like stable coins are one part of the infrastructure of like what we want to build, right? Which is an onchain bank. And stable coins like form a pillar of like the saving aspect of a bank. Um saving safely, saving in a stable, secure way.

>> Yeah. Um, if there's some features that we want in the future out of that stability or like out of the stable coin that don't exist today, we might do it, right? But so far like we we've seen that like existing stables are actually pretty good. I'm doing pretty well. And one of the key aspects is being able to on and off ramp with high liquidity and low fees. And USDC is definitely up there in terms of everything that you need. >> Yeah, I mean I I think it's top. I think like Tether obviously has a much bigger um market cap, but like I think in terms of >> uh liquidity from legitimate on and off ramping providers uh and especially in

the US um USDC circle is like king there. >> Yeah. Well, then this is where the the magical ZK comes in because USDC as we know it is an ERC20 token. It is fully transparent auditable trackable freezable, even onchain. Uh, which is by design, which is by design of of the openness of these uh, you know, of blockchain systems. Uh, but you guys are pushing this to another level by actually having privacy. So, you know, let's talk about the the why first and then let's get into the how. So, so why pay private payments? Why is it so important for adoption of payments as a use case for crypto and and for blockchain? And then how, you know, do

you actually make this happen? >> Yeah, totally. I mean, it's kind of funny that we have to talk about this and the reason why is like, >> dude, am I crazy that like all of these cards are launching, all these like onchain banks or savings accounts are launching. Nosis Safe has been around for a long time trying to be that onchain bank account. Like, am I am I [ __ ] crazy? Because all of this stuff is public. >> Yeah, I know. It's nuts. And it's not just like it's not just public, it's public forever.

>> Yeah. Like >> Yeah. Like even like >> forever. Forever. >> Like an early stage project just texted us yesterday and was like, "Yo, does the rollup have like a multi-IG?" And and they were like, "Do you mind sharing the address?" And I just thought that whole like conversation, they're probably going to like be like, "Oh, thanks for all the help that you've done in in the past. Here's some tokens." But even just like like the mind [ __ ] of like oh like now they know what we hold when we get paid. Like it's just like it's just such a weird conundrum of like thought process that you just you're just not used to that in you know traditional banking or whatever.

>> It's it's absolutely insane. And to be honest like I you've been reading all the news same as me like all these institutions supposedly coming on chain and doing payments on chain. Uh obviously like Ripple is like you know they they do press releases pretty much every two hours on like some of you like using them and like all this stuff and I'm like do do these banks or institutions know that like >> all of those funds all of those payments are like traceable you know I was at I was at um the Robin Hood event in Khan >> uh at the launch right and they launched the Robin Hood chain uh you know Vlad was launching like perks and Robin Hood chain all this stuff and then I was like Wait, wait. Do they understand that when

they launch the the Robin Hood chain and they put user funds or tokens or whatever on that chain now everybody in the world knows how much Robin Hood customers have, how much they're buying and selling uh what they're holding and and I'm sure maybe they have a solution around this, but they're building on the Arbent stack. Arbitrum doesn't have any semblance of private. just like kind of raw EVM type of type of environment like yeah it doesn't make sense to me one bit.

>> Yeah. >> So do you think like there are use cases in which like to me you know we've we know the stories of of Robin Hood freezing you know and halting pairs and you know kind of selling payment for order flow and like that making up a significant part of their business. And now with that being onchain, is that just is that now just a free market that financial order flow information is open for all? And so maybe like stable coins, it makes total sense to be private, but some onchain financial activity makes more sense to be public. Like is is there kind of a some a use case specific way to think about this or or if not like why do you expect every every app

to basically eventually go into this more private direction? That's a good question. Um, I mean, let's think about the the TRDFI market and like what things are public and what things are private, right? Uh, pretty much everything's private. There are some useful parts of like public disclosures. Like for example, we would love it if the government budget and spending was somehow like auditable and transparent by the regular person, right? By a citizen of the United States. That would be pretty cool. Um, the cool thing is like what we're building is not pure absolute privacy, right? This is not like this is not Monero, this is not Zcash, this is not

tornado cache. This is the fact that the data exists for each payment uh via like a UTXO note. That data is just stored on the client side. So today on like your iPhone when you're making a payment now, everyone has the ability to selectively disclose things about their data. So they can disclose all the data, right? Like we could we could we could build a wallet on pay network that was fully public. You can do that. You would just publish all the UTXO data and now people can see all the payments.

>> Uh we could uh and this is like in our docs in our white paper as well. we can build um uh ZK proofs on top of that data. So pretty much anything that you would want to prove about that data, balances, times, um you know, lineage, like whatever you want, you can run a proof on that and now you can publish a proof and now you have cryptographic proof. So what example would that be in this like government spending use case? It would be like uh x amount of budget was sent to this wallet and you know that wallet belongs to >> I don't know agency or >> social security administration or like whatever.

>> Um exactly and then you could actually continue tracing that. So so you could prove that like this government contractor got these funds and it came from Yeah. You could like run proofs on that. Like that's that's doable today. Um, and so yeah, that's that's kind of what like I think that like selective privacy disclosure is it it's optional. >> Yeah, that makes a lot of And so what you're saying is that there are use cases where look, you know, we don't if it's a government and we're we're looking at a government payment system. We may not want that to be entirely private. We may want some insight into how that money is flowing amongst the government. But I think to your point and you know the way consumers behave and are accustomed to behaving with

their banking info and their payments, we we just take privacy as the standard and that's the way it should be. And so I I'd imagine that a lot of stable coin standards, a lot more payments providers that are happening onchain are going to go and follow suit because this is the consumer behavior that they've come to expect. >> Yeah. And look, I mean, if we're going to expand outside like the, you know, few people that really use crypto like in their daily lives, um, it's just not going to work because like everyone's already up in arms about online data privacy, >> right? And this is just like some cookies and some, you know, email tracking and like, you know, maybe some like social media posts like this. Yeah, it's it sucks that everyone's tracking

this, but like imagine if people were tracking your paycheck, where you were spending money, and who you were spending money to, right? That's like 10x, maybe 100x worse. Um, and I know for a fact that there's companies already uh correlating blockchain transactions, so like EVM addresses for example, or or Solana addresses to IP addresses. That's actually pretty trivial if you think about how wallets work. Your wallet knows your address. Your wallet has analytics tools inside of it. No matter what wallet you use, like it's going to have some analytics tools running inside of it. And it knows uh your IP address because it's running off your phone or your laptop.

>> Like you would you would have to be really like it's not surprising if people are selling that data. Like this is just what happens. So like yeah, I mean it's it's crazy. Sid, I I got a question about like kind of how the the point of sale works. When you actually go to use the pay card, are you spending stable coins in the in the pay app that you have or like the cash in the pay app that you have and then it's like being sold and then processed by Visa into the payment for the for the coffee. How how does it work when you actually have uh you know USDC on the pay app?

>> Yeah. So this is also something unique that we do and it took us like a very long time to to to build this which is every tap swipe you know insert of a chip that you do with pay card or Apple pay using pay card actually does an authorization call from Visa's network to pay network in real time. Now if you're like a deep credit card like infra nerd you know that you have about like 3 seconds to respond to that authorization call. This is just like how Visa Network works. Uh they just give you three because you want the UX on the user side to be good. Yeah. You don't want to tap and stand there for 10 seconds.

user is good to purchase it. If they don't have enough funds, we'll respond with a decline. >> Most other crypto cards uh just basically hold a balance like on the side. That's why you have to top up. >> Yes. You've ever noticed like other cards you have to like top up from your wallet into like another thing and it basically just uses that as like collateral and then it settles later because >> it's just an easy way to do it, right? >> Yeah. >> Uh but like like we just Yeah. We we kind of just take the hard road on everything.

>> What do you use? What like technology do you use? Like do you use like chain link to connect Visa to pay blockchain? Like how does that how do they talk to each other? >> Yeah. So um right now we've just built our own uh service and then there's like one or two providers in between as well. Okay. >> Uh that help with some of that settlement and visa code uh processing and and issuing and stuff like that. >> But yeah, basically like the API call comes in. >> Um and we we receive it on like pay network servers. >> Uh this part is centralized. Like here's the thing people don't realize like all of that. Yeah. So all of TRDFI like has to be centralized. like anything interfacing with trifi has to be centralized. Um and like you know your

RPC provider is centralized like chain link is uh well I don't know how many people use their decentralized like actual decentralized oracles but >> like it's it's mostly not from what I understand these days um because it's just faster and it's it's just better and people are fine with it. Um anyways yeah so and then that comes into pay network where we run uh multiple provers um which are yeah just like our validator nodes uh and we run all of those in-house today uh there's obviously plans to decentralize that and for other people to run it but uh we publish proofs publicly which means anyone can see if we're doing something wrong. Yeah, Sid, I was going to ask you

the ZK question kind of so you're generating those proofs internally yourself. You're running your own provers now. What went into the decision? Was it essentially like look, we can we can do this and it's quickest and easiest for us to do it rather than outsource that. How do you how do you think about making that transition? Because I think there are several other crypto protocols that would like some elements of privacy uh using ZK and they're kind of weighing this. All right. Do we run our own provers? Do we outsource? If we outsource, who do we outsource to? How do you What's your train of thought when it comes to that?

>> Yeah, it's it's interesting. I mean, I think right now we run our own provers and our like the whole stack is just us like from the wallet to the to the network to like the provers to like the proofs. Everything is in-house because that's the only way we could have built this experience. And and to be honest, like no one else is going to be able to build this experience without like the kind of two years of like really hard work that we did. Uh and so we're going to be opening up Pay Network for others to build on top of. And so that's kind of the long-term vision for us is like uh Pay Network is the blockchain. It does private and compliant stable coin transactions. You can have multiple different kinds of stable coins. Um, and uh, it also includes uh, basically what

I call enshrined fiat ramps. And so like unlike every other chain where like you have like tons of different fiat ramps and if you're a wallet you have to like go sign contracts with different fiat ramps like moon pay for example or bridge.xyz um, in pay network those are kind of enshrined and built into the network and the protocol itself. Um, and so you get those for free. So, if you're building, let's say you want to build a business payments processing tool, uh, or a merchant payments tool or a a POSOS system on top of pay network, you guys probably saw Tim Robinson from Blueyard building free pay.

>> So, they built like a Visa Visa terminal replacement using crypto. We were chatting actually for a little bit and he wanted to use Pay Network, but we it wasn't we didn't have an SDK at that time. um like you you could build that on top of pay network and now you have all these fiat on and off ramps uh KYC from users can be shared because we do self-s sovereign KYC so the KYC data lives on the phone so you can actually share that between pay accounts if you have other apps so that's kind of the the vision and and the answer is like yeah I mean I think if you want to build a privacy experience that like actually works today um like yeah we'd love to chat uh we we're definitely going to be looking for design partners um in the coming

months and yeah like I think it'd be really cool. >> Sid, last thing for you. Is there plans to add more features into the pay app so I can borrow against my cash or my crypto and then use that money to spend or I can earn yield on my stables that are on the pay app and then use that money to spend. How are you going to make it better for me as a user from a financial perspective uh to want to use Pay App and uh get basically have features that uh you know traditional traditional accounts don't allow which is like you know it's not like you're earning much in your checking account before you spend it or uh it's not like you you have that in credit card feature. So what's your what's the uh

what's the roadmap to to kind of bring more yield and more opportunity for people to uh leverage on pay? >> Uh yeah, so yield is like the single like most requested feature right now. So we're working on it. Um I think the question always is like what kind of yield and how and how are we going to implement that? What what yield source are we going to use? How many intermediaries it passes through? Like I think yeah it's easy. we could just slot in some yield bearing stable and like call it a day, right? But I think the way we think about it is like a little bit more nuanced than that. We think about the long term like you know how how do we want to to message this to the user in the app, right? Because saying yield bearing stable like you know like

besides if you're in crypto like you get that maybe but outside of that like you have no idea what that means. Um or like if you even put the name of the yieldbearing stable coin right uh that means nothing to most people. So I think yeah that's that's kind of what we're thinking about so we can build the best like safest most understandable experience for people. >> Got it. >> Awesome. >> Most requested. >> That makes sense. I feel like a lot of people want yield >> but a lot of people want yield with no risk which is uh not a possibility. >> You know >> the genius act ought to make it a little bit easier if they can generate some interest on those stables start passing it back to to pay customers. I think in the Genius Act they explicitly excluded

yieldbearing stables. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. I I s there are uh I think the yieldbearing stables directly that was a carveout for the banks and so I think there's some caveat for the banks to provide that interest on the stables. Um but >> right but but to but to the provider to like like the banks will provide that interest to circle >> or or circle can hold treasuries themselves or whatever they're doing but you can't give yield back to people to to to the holders of the token because then it start then it then it becomes like an investment contract like maybe

it's an ass like an asset situation. >> Yes. And and my understanding is that the the banking lobby was like this is not going through unless you stipulate that. >> Yeah. >> And I >> look, I might be speculating here, but my hypothesis is that, you know, that was so important because the banks want to launch the stable coins themselves, and once they come along and they launch the stable coins, they want to be the ones to provide the yield on it. >> And so that may be where the yield comes from. >> That's interesting. I mean, banks aren't aren't known for sharing yield. I think I I think we all received about 0.02% for like 20 years when when like the NASDAQ was going up like I don't know 20

30% every year or something. >> Yeah. Yeah, >> man. When when we were hanging in New York a couple months ago, uh you were talking about the pay card and uh you didn't really you you you couldn't tell me what it was. So, I'm glad that you rolled this out and uh and uh Cheers, man. Congrats. >> Yeah. Thanks, thanks for having me on, guys. Robbie and Andy. Really appreciate it.

>> Yeah, man. Thanks for Thanks for coming on. Congrats. >> All right. Bye. >> Bye, bro. All righty, guys. That's Sid. Great guy. Uh, you know, he was uh he was down. He was down almost going to quit and uh restructured, repositioned, and launched pay a couple maybe like two years ago. They were in a rough spot. and he's done a lot of market research on the ground like actually like going into uh different countries and like speaking to people, speaking to vendors, speaking to uh proof of uh point of sale system providers. So yeah, I had a really good pub with him. You guys should check it out. It's on the YouTube uh still. But yeah, Rob, that was sick. We got some

time here to talk markets and everything else. >> Uh I think we're going to bring Preston up. I think Preston's gonna come up a little bit quicker uh than maybe we think. So uh why don't we get him up here and uh we can talk about Sovereign's big bet and I'm very very excited to hear more about it. Preston is our resident Gigabrain for the day. Preston, welcome to the show. >> He is our he is our resident gigabrain. We're going to get him up here in a second. Um, for for for what it's worth, Preston has a lot of conversations and deep dives in the past on in the Cosmos ecosystem, in the kind of modular space, etc. U, so he's in now. Welcome,

Preston. First time on the rollup, man. What's up, man? How are you >> doing? Great. Thanks for having me on. >> Hell yeah, man. Where are you calling from? >> Uh, I'm in Nashville, Tennessee right now. >> Oh, dang. Big big weekend ahead, huh? You know, I actually live here, so probably nothing too crazy. A lot of a lot of code to write this weekend, I'm afraid, but it should be good. >> Mostly vibe coding. >> Vibe codings. What are your favorite AI tools to help you vibe code it? Try out uh GPT5 yet. >> I haven't played with GPD5 yet. Probably probably over the weekend I'll get a little bit in. Uh I mostly use Cloud Code these days, although I also have Cursor. Um but I found Cloud to be the best at least lately.

I used GPT5 yesterday to build a flyer for a party invite. It was pretty sick. It was really, really fast. That was my first. Yeah, >> it was really silly. It was like I I told it what to do like exact text and it misspelled three words four times. I had to send the same prompt four times to get the right text. It was really weird. Um, >> that's really funny. Early days, I guess. All right, Preston, quick background on yourself, man. Would love to understand like who you are, where you come from, how you got into the space, some of the stuff that you're most passionate about, your general thesis on on the space, just like broadly, first time on the show.

Introduce yourself to our audience. I'm sure a lot of them know you kind of through uh mutuals, etc., but Rob and I don't, so um yeah, would love to start there. >> Perfect. Yeah. Um so, yeah, I'm Preston Evans. I'm the CTO at Sovereign Labs, um, where I've been for the past three and a half years or so. Uh, before that I was over at Amazon Web Services doing some of their crypto stuff. Uh, and before that I was in school and doing some open source work in my spare time. Um, so I've been kind of broadly in the crypto space for forever. Uh, I always tell people I probably heard about Bitcoin back in like I don't know 2013 or so. Uh, and was always like vaguely interested in it. I was still, you know, in middle school or high school at the

time, so didn't do that much with it, but sort of became technical through learning about Bitcoin. And I remember watching Ethereum launch, watching the Dow hack, all that stuff. Um, so what I'm really interested in is kind of pushing the frontiers of what's possible on chain. Um, from the very early days, it's kind of been obvious to a lot of the cypher punk people that if you can make everything in the world go on chain naturally. If you could fit anything you wanted on chain, then there's lots of room to make a better world. Um, but the question has always been like, okay, but how do we actually do that? You know, Bitcoin does seven transactions per second or something like that.

Ethereum's in that same ballpark, low tens of tens of transactions per second. And so at those rates, you're just never going to bring useful things on chain, right? For beyond very core financial applications. So I've always been interested in like how can we bring other stuff on chain and just have a less intermediated world, let people interact more directly with the people around them. >> And are you uh are are you like are you consider yourself a libertarian or not really? >> Uh I would say I'm maybe more libertarian than average, but not a hardcore libertarian. Uh I definitely think there's lots of room for government to do useful things in society. Uh but I would also love to see like lower taxes, more freedom for individuals to choose their you know

what they want to do, all those sorts of things. Um but one of the things I love about crypto is that it sort of works well regardless of your political philosophy like like >> crypto is really like it's okay in the states. It does some good things for us here in the States, but where it really matters is like if you don't have a functional government. And so um you know if you're in Tanzania or Uganda or any of these countries where on any given day like anything about your your built environment could change the legal system may work great for a while or may fall completely apart depending on what happened in all sorts of places you know close by or far away. So anyway I'm excited about being able to just like you can build a system that just works and then anybody can opt into it and

that's really really powerful where right now you can't really opt into a different government. This is the network state model >> a little bit. Yeah, I think those ideas have been floating around in the ether for a long time. Um, you know, apologies may be a little bit more like he wants to build a real physical state as well or at least like an elomeration of people. I think thinking of this as a state is maybe the wrong model for for what I think crypto's most exciting promises, right? We don't need to have everybody in the world be totally subordinate to crypto. It's just like WhatsApp, you know, like you wouldn't say WhatsApp is a state. WhatsApp is just a useful tool, but like anybody can use it. It kind of just works and it works great even in, you know, all these countries where you have very limited

bandwidth. You don't have super great infrastructure. Crypto will be the same thing for sort of legal infrastructure for financial rails, for some forms of contracts. Um, and then for some forms of trust as well. uh if you can move some identity primitives on chain, there's a lot of room to sort of make it easier to interact with somebody that you don't know well without having the back stop of a totally trustworthy legal system like we mostly have here in the states. >> Yeah, definitely. Uh I mean I follow this guy on YouTube. He's like nomadic capital. He has this saying where it's like go where you're treated best. Um, and I think that like obviously you can't just escape your government or escape your country that easily, but I

don't know there is some there is something to be said about uh existing in places where you're treated better and things are better than in others. But obviously this is like a kind of like a first world privilege more than anything I suppose. Um, but I, you know, I just think that, yeah, I mean, I I think Rob and I are with you on the on the on the ability for this kind of online internet currency, let's call it, or money, uh, and the all the properties that comes with it. Uh, being able to kind of give you more freedom and, uh, allow you to opt out or opt in. And so, you know, these types of things are important and I think are often understated in the speculative technologydriven kind of uh uh cycles, if you will. Uh,

speaking of which, Preston, I know that you guys just announced some of the sovereign stack, and we'll get into that. Um, but my question for you today is if you were to ask or if you were to build an app right now in crypto, where would you launch it or how would you build it? What like would you launch it on Salana? Would you launch it on base Ethereum mainet? Would you launch your own chain? How like would you do a special chain? Would you do like how would you launch an application in crypto today? Where would you build? >> Well, boy, that's a tough question. U because really my whole thought is that you shouldn't care where you launch.

Like your users won't care. crypto native people sort of do care today, but that's like an artifact of this this weird sort of jank of history where we have this like really hardcore group of true believers who have been in crypto for like seven to 10 years and really feel strongly that like Ethereum has the best values or Salana is the most pragmatic and will ship the fastest. But like normies don't care at all. They have no clue what Bass or Salana is. And so we want to get to a world where it's like, you know, okay, I couldn't tell you if WhatsApp runs on Laravel or if it runs on Nex.js. I have no clue. I don't care if I go work there. I'll care for a while, but like that's just not something that users should care about.

If users don't care, then we shouldn't care. It should just be a means to an end. So that's the the future I'm excited about. Um that's actually sort of one of the core goals of sovereign SDK to let you deploy wherever you want and just, you know, don't think about your back end. Your back end's just going to work and then build a feature that your that your users want. >> Um all that being said, I think there's there's some obvious winners in the last couple of years. Salana has been very pragmatic and that's really paid off in terms of you know really the core problem in crypto to date has been there's not enough throughput and so apps get popular and then they drive away all their users because they you know fees go crazy or you can't land transactions and Salana has done the

best job so far of navigating those dynamics. So if I was you know if I couldn't use the sovereign SDK I would probably look at Salana first. Um but depending on the app there's you know there's really valid trade-offs. There's great reasons to be on Ethereum. Um there's great reasons to be on base. There's, you know, there's lots of good chains out there, but hopefully chains become a lot less important over time. >> Maybe it's worthwhile unpacking the sovereign stack for us, like you know, what are some of the components to it? Uh why did you build it in the way that you did generally? You know, what what's kind of the elevator pitch for the sovereign stack?

>> Yeah. So, the goal of sovereign SDK is to do two things. Number one is to give builders enough scale that they can have their app actually work. So I vividly remember like watching CryptoKitties back in the day. And it got really popular by crypto standards when it was doing like I don't know 10 20 30 transactions every second and everything just exploded, right? The whole thing didn't work at all. Uh and so then as an app developer, it's like well why the heck would I ever try to use crypto? If my app gets even moderately popular, then it's going to blow up and it's going to go down and I lose all my profits and it just doesn't work, right?

So scale has been the single thing that holds back crypto the most so far. So at Sovereign, we want to fix that, right? We want to give you enough scale that like you can actually build a reasonable app. You can get users and you don't have to worry that you'll go down because some competitor of yours or some neighbor of yours got really popular or that you'll go down because you got really popular. Both of those are terrible and both of those happen all the time in crypto today. there's a hot NFT drop and suddenly like you can't land a transaction anywhere. All of your users are losing money and it's it's a nightmare. So number one, we wanted to solve like get you reasonable dedicated throughput so that if your app gets popular, it can survive and it doesn't get taken down randomly. Number two, we

really wanted to see users or sorry builders be able to focus much more on building the features that their users really want. And on an existing L1, that's just really hard, right? So, like think of, you know, the most basic stuff in crypto, like there's been hacks for the last 10 years like clockwork every six months to year, big high-profile hacks. And a ton of that comes down to the fact that we just don't have very solid basic security infrastructure, right? Like account abstraction is in its infancy. For most of history, there has been no account abstraction, which means that basically you're trusting users with like, hey, here's this USB stick that's got a million dollars on it. you've got to decide like do I keep this plugged into my computer and then hackers can basically get at it whenever

they want or do I not keep it and then every time I want to like send 10 bucks to a friend I've got to go upstairs get it out of my safe deposit box you know whatever. Um so basically there's just no way to experiment as a builder. Uh you you have no control over the primitives and to be honest like the primitives are one of the things that matters the most. And so I'd love to see a world where we ran all sorts of crazy experiments like okay maybe we do social recovery wallets maybe we um you know now we're starting to get these like uh MPC based multiig solutions all this fancy stuff but it's taken years and years because nobody has control over the chain's roadmap and so like as a developer I can't just go in and be like hey going to build this cool new wallet

it's going to work great or if it doesn't work then like we'll shut down the company we'll try again another year right um sovereign is really built to give you control where you can run all these experiments you're not locked into some existing chain, you can control anything you want about the chain. And hopefully that means that you can build much more differentiated user experiences. You can, you know, get rid of the twoclick like we're all driven nuts by the twoclick process. To do anything on chain, you've got to approve first and then trans. >> Oh my gosh, dude. >> Nobody would live with two clicks in the web two world, but we're stuck with it because that's that's part of the chain. >> Sorry, I think you're muted, Andy. Or maybe my maybe my headphones died.

>> Oh, gotcha. Um, yeah. Yeah. I think I I think I'm firing now. Um, Preston, could you talk to us like a bit a bit a bit more of like some of the tech like the actual uh like like um uh you know tech choices that you guys made on execution, on like transaction logic, on sequencing, on just like I I saw this bullet list of these things that you guys really prioritize and I just like to go through it and understand it just just a bit better. Sure. Yeah, I'm more than happy to. Um, so what we've done is we've built a whole new stack completely from the ground up. We don't we basically don't reuse any code from any of their blockchains. Um, that's not strictly true. There's there's some components

that like we have a whole Ethereum stack for compatibility, so you can use your Ethereum wallet, but like Ethereum's not really a first class citizen. We just provide compatibility for you. So everything's tailor made from the ground up to give you a a totally reimagined experience building a blockchain. Um, so some things that means number one, you can deploy your rollup on top of basically any base blockchain. So you can deploy on Celestia, you can deploy on Ethereum, you can deploy on Salana, you can deploy even on Bitcoin. Um, now not all of those are fully production ready today. In fact, I think only one or two of them are, but but in principle, you can do all of them and we have proofs of concepts for many of those chains already uh and more in the works. So as a builder basically you can

go where your users are or you can pick the chain that makes the best technical trade-offs for you and not be locked into a particular DA layer particular whatever. Um and then we do the same thing with our proof system. We support risk zero. We support SP1. Uh we'll have support for a couple of others coming down the pipe pretty soon here. Um so basically we're a super super configurable you know framework for for building rollups. But then the the core piece of the rollup is maybe the thing we've invested the most in. So we sort of took a step back and we said like what do I actually want if I'm building a blockchain?

And people have said for years that the thing that's important is decentralization. We think they're wrong. We think that what you want is what decentralization gets you, which is censorship resistance and verifiability. And so we went with a roll-up focused architecture because roll-ups let you have some of the best things about decentralization. You can get censorship resistance and you can get verifiability but then also some of the best pieces of centralization where you can have you know some weekly trusted server that sits between you and the rollup and like then you don't have to download hundreds of gigabytes of random full node data to interact with the thing. Um you can get real web two like latencies. So what we have is basically a sequencer that can accept uh you know

a couple thousand transactions per second today. Hopefully that'll five to 10x in the coming months or year. Um and it can respond to you within 10 milliseconds pretty much pretty much universally. Um so what that means is as a developer like everything feels incredibly snappy. You know if you're on Ethereum typical latencies are six to 10 seconds. Like that means you need a spinner on your home screen to like wait while the transaction loads and goes through and gets processed. for us. You you know exactly what happened within 10 milliseconds. That's not just like your transaction was accepted. We can tell you exactly what happened with your trade on unis swap. What was the price?

What was your slippage? All that stuff. Um you know exactly what it was within 10 milliseconds. Um but Preston is is that even that important because I think our reaction time is like 200 milliseconds or 250, right? >> Um yeah. Why is 10 milliseconds so important for you guys? Is is it just from a pure like latency gaming perspective of people trying to you know front run and and operate like onchain with like uh algorithmically programmed uh trading strategies basically or or kind of what why are you so fixated on this speed?

>> Yeah, so it's a really good point. Um frankly we might make it slower in the future because yeah humans don't care beyond 200 milliseconds or so like you said. Um on the other hand there's lots of other components that do add latency like the front end needs some time. So shorter shorter is usually better. But we also care a lot about being able to bring financial markets on chain and for those you need super low latency because of HFT. So you've got your market maker who's sort of like, hey, I'm always willing to trade with anybody at the go, you know, whatever the going rate is. And so he'll like say like, hey, I'm willing to sell, you know, a million dollars worth of ETH at $3,000 today.

And then if the price moves, like he's still happy to trade with you, but he wants to trade at the new price. And so he needs to cancel that order quickly. And if if you beat him to the punch, like if you know the price moved and you get your order in before he did, then he loses money. So one of my friends compares it to picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer, like if you're slow getting your order in, then somebody takes you for $100,000, a million dollars. If you're fast, then like maybe you made a couple bucks trading with some random normie who's, you know, wanting to pay their ETH or something or something, right? >> So market makers care a ton about being able to reliably get their order in before HFT does. Um, and so for that, latency is super super important.

Okay. So then let's use a practical example, right? Like bullet is using is built on sovereign stack. Um they're like effectively like a L2 on Salana, a network extension, whatever you kind of want to call it. Um how is Bullet's use case, which is effectively what you're talking about right now. How is that enabled by Sovereign stack? What do you enable for them? You know, why did they choose Sovereign to build what they're building? >> Yeah. So there's a few core components that are super super important. Number one is latency. Um as far as we know, we are the fastest chain. In fact, according to our internal benchmarks, uh we're actually faster than Binance in most cases. Um so that's a huge thing.

Binance, apparently in the exchange world, like crypto exchanges aren't thought of in the same category as sort of real exchanges. And so market makers actually want better performance than you can get from Binance. So we're hopeful that we can provide that. We're in the early days, so I'm sure there will be, you know, there'll be hiccups along the way, but the architecture can get us there, and we've spent a lot of work sort of getting to the point where we can compete with Binance and and all these other centralized exchanges. So, that's one huge thing, latency. A second huge thing is throughput. You know, Hyperlid does 12,000 transactions per per second, something like that. Um, and if you're on Salana, like that's three or four Salana's worth of capacity. If you're on Ethereum, that's like whatever 100 Ethereum's worth of capacity, something like that. Uh, so there was

just nobody who was even in the ballpark of that. You've got these new chains, Mega E, Monet, that may get you somewhere close to that. But, uh, but that's, you know, for a single app, that's just for like one exchange and you want lots and lots of apps. So, we were the only team that could give them the latency and the throughput, I think, that they needed. Uh, but then we also we really take advantage of being able to give them control. So they have a super Salana native feeling experience. We let them use Salana addresses and Salana wallets to control all the actions on the rollup. So you're not, you know, if you're on Hyperlid, you might feel like you're switching to a different ecosystem, right? If you're coming from Salana, then you got to get an Ethereum wallet, Ethereum addresses, learn all the EVM stuff to interact with

Hype EVM or whatever. Um, for for Bullet, we can give them a super Salana native feeling experience. No new wallets, none of that stuff. Um, and then, uh, yeah, we also like let them configure some speed bumps. So, that's one of Hyperlid's killer features is being able to, you know, help market makers out by slowing down HFT just a little bit. We can do that. That'd be basically impossible to do on top of Ethereum today. You just don't have that kind of control over the protocol. Um, so, you know, those are the main reasons really. Like as far as we know, we're kind of the only stack that gets out of your way and just lets you build the things that your users want because we're not designed to be like an existing chain first. We just, you know, okay, if somebody needs configuration on

this thing, we add a configuration option. Uh you get full control over your stack and you can decide whatever you want. >> Yeah. And that there's power in that flexibility because then you're you're kind of embracing your community's creativity and opening up the world to them. And so I'm curious, like you guys are intimately familiar with your own technology, right? Uh you don't have all the time and the bandwidth in order to go build out all these cool apps that are enabled by your technology. If you were to kind of put a call to action out there, what do you think are some applications uh maybe they're in the machine economy, botto, you know, in uh they're maybe they're non-financial use cases. What do you think are some some apps that are uniquely enabled by

sovereign stack that you know app developers if they're looking for some inspiration you know the these are some good ideas for the sovereign stack? >> Yeah. Um so I mean the the big one the obvious one is exchanges. We think we're the the first stack that really can let you build a competitive exchange experience but onchain. So that's a no-brainer. Um we're also pretty excited about a lot of like the stable coin use cases. Um, you know, right now if if you want to provide a payment provider, again, like you're going to be super bottlenecked by throughput. If you get popular, you're in huge trouble.

Sovereign gives you enough throughput and good enough latency that like, you know, your customers won't be waiting at the ATM while their payment is processed. There's no noticeable legs and all that stuff. So, payments are another big one. Um, and then I'm excited about like there's a whole category of kind of developer tooling, more boring stuff that that would benefit from having an immutable record of when it happened. Think even of like tweets, right? We've all seen the like this tweet has been deleted screenshot of of tweets. And in that case, it's really hard to know like is this a real tweet that the guy actually deleted or is this a fake tweet somebody generated with chat GPT, right? It'd be really great if like if putting stuff on chain was cheap enough like just put all your

tweets on chain and then you can prove like hey actually I never tweeted that here you go here's the log of that block it's not in there or here you go it is in that block it's you know whatever um so you know thinking of blockchain just as like a whatever we want a record of actually happening put it on the chain it's cheap now it's almost free now um and so really get creative with it yeah >> president if you were if you were to build a one What would you build? Like what is a what would be a passion project of of yours? >> Oh, that's a good one. Um, I'm really excited about a lot of the privacy stuff that's coming down the pipe.

>> Um, >> okay. >> So, >> so yeah, I would probably work on some privacy oriented stuff. Um, maybe financial, but also maybe non-financial, like some of the the more identification stuff. Um, it's kind of a hot topic right now with like all of the, you know, the UK has their new online privacy or online like security law that's, you know, targeted at whatever protecting kids. Um, having some age verification that is not every website I ever visit, seeing, you know, my full name sounds really great right now. Like, you know, uh, >> you could easily generate a CK proof that like, hey, I really do have a government ID that shows I'm over 18 or over 21 or whatever. Um, And then you can use that credential rather than

rather than actually um having to KYC at every website because we've seen how that ends, right? I'm sure you guys all saw the T app fiasco a couple weeks ago where like all of the driver's license they collected got leaked online and now >> your real name with like the random mean tweet you sent about some guy. >> Rob, did you see that? >> It feels like that h that kind of thing happens every two weeks. Every two weeks specific tea one >> the tea app the Yeah. Yeah. You've seen that, right? I think so. What What was special about that one? >> It was just like this like uh reputation system for dating for women for rating guys basically. And then they just leaked all these guys information >> just and it's created by a gay guy as well. It's super funny story, dude. It's

super funny. Um listen, so you mentioned trading uh for for exchanges. Um, hyperlquid is is a cool example of this kind of like club example, right? Centralized limit order book. These have been popular on the NASDAQ, on the right. I'm curious from your perspective, is there one p uh precise way that you think is the best uh in terms of assessing the trade-off spectrum for building a club? like is there a best practice right now today with the given tools we have to build a club in order to like achieve maximum uh viability on the spectrum of like speed, security, decentralization effectively

or whatever the kind of trilmma is. >> Yeah, I mean I think if you want to build a club there's a couple of like absolutely musthaves. There's no point in building a club basically if you're going to be slower than a couple hundred milliseconds. like market makers just can't make money and so you will never get price discovery on there and that's what we've seen over and over again with all these all these exchanges. So I think like basically don't waste your time building something that's going to be too slow or that's not going to have enough throughput to provide whatever you think your target market is. And not everybody needs thousands of TPS. you know, maybe you're trading like longtail, you know, NFTTS or or altcoins or whatever and you only need a few, you know, tens or hundreds of transactions per second, but you got to look at

what's the maximum latency we can accept. What's the minimum throughput we can accept. Beyond that, you obviously want more battle tested. And to be honest, like this is where Stubborn SDK, you know, is going to come out worse in the rankings. We're brand new. We've got our first people going to production in a couple of weeks here. And so, like, you know, I want to be honest, we think we've done everything we can to to make it solid. we've got audits, all those sorts of things, but like okay, as a builder, you've got to be really pragmatic about the risks you're taking as well. So, um, so, you know, I would look seriously at sovereign SDK for sure because we give you throughput, we give you the latency you need. But if you don't think you need those things, if you think you can get away with Salana

or Aptos or one of these high throughput chains, you know, um, definitely think about it. What I would say though is that sovereign SDK should be way cheaper, way faster, way more secure than building your own thing. um unless you are like an incredibly well-funded deeply technical team. Like maybe maybe if you've got three years and an army of PhDs, um it's worth building your own chain. But in the vast majority of cases, we can give you 90% of what you could get from that, but in a much more battle tested, you know, a stack that already exists and is a little more tested and proven.

>> So, okay. So then with that thought then >> yeah just one last followup Rob uh do you think Salana's value prop is being like cannibalized by something like Hyperlid or just these very or like a mega ETH that can just like that is much more optimized for CLBs in the current state like if Salon can only do like two or 3K TPS right now obviously it's climbing it looks strong like it's you know up and to the right but you know you need a certain amount of throughput for uh these these exchanges to actually work like like how do you see the how do you see like Salana and like the hyperlquid kind of like battle play out like you know maybe bullet you know helps Salana's value prop here kind of in the same way that L2s help Ethereum

like how do you see Salana's role in this uh kind of like uh high throughput club like 10 20 50k TPS world that it seems like we're rapidly getting to >> yeah I mean to start off like Salana is an incredibly impressive chain is a great founder and Natolian Raj. So like never fade Salana. I don't think I would count Salana out probably ever. Um that being said, they have a much much harder task ahead of them if they want to compete in this world than Hyperlid does where Hyperlid got a chance to design from scratch knowing exactly what they wanted to go after and learning from all the mistakes that Ethereum and Salana and all the others made along the way.

Whereas Salana has been deployed for years, they've got all of these other applications that they really can't break, right? You can't break Jupiter. You don't want to break all you know pumped up fun all these other things that are going on on chain and so you can't make as aggressive you know decisions around hard forking all those things as hyperlquid can hyperl is fairly centralized it sounds like they control a quorum of validators that they can upgrade whatever they want and that isn't enough on its own to hard fork the chain and so if they want to ship a feature they can do so very very aggressively salana doesn't have that advantage um what salana does have is is really good developer mind share Um, and then like an incredible killer team of engineers working on the protocol. Um,

so, you know, I I wouldn't count Salana out by any means, but I think Salana in a straight head-to-head versus Hyperlid for exchange use cases is going to have a hard time. You know, if they manage to pull that off, that'll be like an incredible win. Uh, and it's testament to how strong they are, but Hyperlid definitely has it easier. >> Yeah. I mean, okay. So then yeah Robin I know that you you have a question but I guess like the the the decision becomes like it is building the endgame club like the most valuable thing to do on blockchain infrastructure today like is that what's going to generate the the most fees the most revenue you know the most uh the best tool and product to rival that of a centralized exchange or

like NASDAQ a and like if that's the if that's if the answer is yes that then it seem like a lot of these kind of high throughput L1s would want to be restructuring their kind of agenda towards and kind of roadmap towards achieving that outcome. Um but but yeah, I don't Yeah. Yeah. >> I'll just I'll just kind of build on that because my my question was somewhat similar like why do we need more than one club? What is there such a thing as an endgame club where all the liquidity coaleses? you know, if clubs are the killer, exchanges are the killer use case of sovereign, like why is it important that we have some diverse ecosystem of exchanges rather than just one killer?

Yeah, I mean I think there's a handful of reasons you might want that. So, one thing you could do is like look at traditional financial markets. Um, and we've got like NASDAQ, we've got NYC, and then we've also got like, you know, other products. There's the, you know, futures exchange in Chicago. Um, and then like, you know, Forex happens in a different spot. There's you've got markets in London. you've got markets in Singapore or in, you know, Hong Kong, whatever. Um, so we see that like different geographies want different kinds of markets, different regulatory environments, different kinds of products need different kinds of things. And it's very, very hard for one team to specialize in all of those things at once. And so we just in practice have never seen one team totally run away with all financial exchange. Um, in particular in crypto, you know, we

talk to teams all the time who are building exchanges and there's a million different kinds of things. So there's perfs, there's spot exchanges, um, but then there's like much more niche like, okay, I only want to exchange stable coins with other stable coins. That probably has some architectural differences that you want to do. Then there's like, you know, real real world assets. There's uh sort of like the all the NFTs, all the not strictly financial assets, but that you may still want to provide liquidity for. So there's this massive range of different designs to be explored and you know maybe we'll get some big winners down the road in a lot of these categories but right now like most of them are wide open. There's not even a single big player in most categories that people care about I think. Got it. Makes total sense. I mean

there's there's going to be different winners for different categories, different regional markets, different asset classes. And then we're going to connect all of these with the various infrastructure plumbing bridges tunnels, technologies, uh, to bridge all this liquidity together and get get really good price discovery. Probably hopefully better than traditional financial price discovery. >> Preston, thanks so much for uh, for I'm not done yet. I don't know if Preston if you have some more time. I just have some more like some more thoughts here. >> Yeah, sure. Fire away.

>> Okay. So, so um when you've been when you've been building out uh the stack, what is it that the builders have valued the most uh about sovereign stack or like what are their like what are their main needs? Let's use bullet with Tristan as an example. And I'm like, what is something that you built out, you know, on the contrary that you thought that these that these teams would really really need and want, but you're you're not yet seeing the demand for that specific service or or part of of of the stack quite yet. That's a bit that's kind of like throwing you off guard a bit.

>> Yeah, sure. Um, so I think the the big thing that people have really said they like about the stack so far is actually how easy it is to build. If you want to build an exchange on Salana, you've got to deal with all these contract size limits, all these transaction size limits that are very, very painful to work around. And so, you can't just naturally express your business logic. Um, with sovereign SDK, we hope to be like an order of magnitude better on that. We can get rid of all the size limits and just make it much more natural. It feels a lot more like you're writing like um I don't know, just regular old code but verifiable. Um, so that's a big one that people have liked a lot so far. Obviously latency is another huge one that honestly wasn't a focus of ours in the very early days. We

were we were building base rollups way back in the day that had sort of six second block times and uh that was like there was incredibly strong customer demand for lower latency. So we really pushed on that. Um on the other side you know some stuff that that we've built there's been a lot of things that we've built over the years that uh hasn't made it to market or or isn't fully yet ready yet. Um, so one big one we thought we would need more block exploring infrastructure. It turns out a lot of people don't want that much from their block explorer. Like they they're building an app chain and so their front end is kind of in place at the block explorer and they may have like some sort of primitive thing but typically there's not a lot of demand for like ether scan style block explorers. Um,

another big one is uh sort of fully proofbased bridging. We thought that was going to be a huge a huge value ad for customers and for the most part they aren't too concerned about you know operating a a more trusted hyperlane style bridge for now. Uh so we'll see if that changes that that could uh pick up you know pretty soon here but but yeah so far there hasn't really been a lot of demand for that >> and of innovation just real quick like when it comes to multi-chain and app chains like you know you guys are pushing boundaries yeah maybe it's a little bit more trusted of a bridge setup but you have 10 millisecond lat like there are things that you guys are pushing the boundaries of and you know maybe there's there's compromises but ultimately

there's there's a particular particular design space that you guys have have embraced and and there's a lot of opportunity there because we haven't seen projects and and infrastructure quite at this at this limit. >> Yeah, that's what we hope. We hope it's >> um Preston, what is the business model of Sovereign? How are you guys going to be able to make money and to uh you know fit in this revenue meta, bro? Because if you're not making revenue, you're not going to make it. You know, that's what they're saying these days. I don't know if I buy it, but what's the what's the sustainability path for for you guys here?

>> Yeah, we we completely agree with that. Actually, we think if you don't have revenue, you're not going to make it. The 2017 meta of like tokens with no revenue having a huge premium is long gone and should be. Um, so, you know, we haven't thought about launching a token because we don't have a coherent story around how it would actually acrue long-term cash flows from our business. Uh but if we get to the point where we think that makes sense, we we might consider it, right? Um so the the business model is just a revenue share. Uh if you use we've got some some components that are uh that are not proprietary, but we have some components like the very low latency sequencer. If you want to use those components and you use them to build a killer app, then we take a revenue share off of that app. Um

it's totally permissionless. You can deploy without talking to us. Uh, and then there's just a fe switch built in that we can toggle um if you you know, so you sort of agree with that in the license, but you're you're free to deploy and we won't take anything on day one. >> Got it. >> Just had a uh a a five jet uh fly. >> Almost like I was at at at the Super Bowl here. It's pretty insane. Um, Preston, do you uh do you imagine that the revenue that you'll be able to get from teams like Bullet and others uh to be uh significant enough to like, you know, even out costs eventually be profitable, then turn then kind of turn that into uh

thoughts around token or like how are you guys thinking about like the early stage that you're at now into like profitability and then into like uh community ownership like like what does that look like in your mind for Sovereign? >> Yeah. So yeah, if if Bullet were to do well, that would absolutely be enough to make us profitable. Um, you know, that's one great thing about our model is we're very incentive aligned with our customers. Like we really want to make sure you're successful, which is not the case for necessarily all of the other rollup frameworks that charge kind of a flat fee or whatever. Um, so so yeah, that's absolutely would be enough to make us profitable. Um, and to be honest, we haven't thought too much about like since we don't have a token, how we would how we would incorporate one or anything like that. Um,

you know, there are interesting questions about like, okay, if if this becomes successful and there's uh broader interest in the software, how do we sort of transition ownership more into the community and out of the hands of the of the company um to make sure that sticks around well beyond our, you know, our company lifetime. Um, but for now, you know, we're kind of in the early days and enjoying that fact. We we get to run as a regular business and just try to focus on helping customers make a great product. Um, yeah. So, >> yes. So, we'll see, I guess. >> Yes, brother. Thank you for your time, Preston. I appreciate you, man. Rob, you got anything else?

>> We're good. I mean, that was that was great stuff. I I I uh I'm very excited to see the ecosystem flourish on on Sovereign. Best of luck, guys. >> And congrats on the announcement. I I I know it's been a lot of time shipping with with not with no hype, so it's uh it's bullish. >> Thanks a ton. Yeah, it's been a grind. Uh but yeah, I really appreciate you guys having me on. Hope to be back sometime soon. Yeah, nice to meet you, man. We'll we'll we'll catch up in a couple months, see where you guys are at. >> Sounds great. >> All right, buddy. Thanks, >> Cheers, man. >> All righty, dude. That was insane. I mean, Nick, there was literally five jets. I saw them in the horizon. So, if you're just tuning in, I'm in Hawaii.

It's a obviously Air Force military bases and stuff. And so, I see these jets out here and and they just they're coming. They're coming in there and boom. Whoa. They must have only been uh 100 yards, you know, higher than my building. Like it it was insane. >> So you saw them and then you heard them. You got the sonic boom. >> Oh yeah. Full sonic boom. My roommate ran into the like into the back. I was just sitting here like taking it all in. Anyway, Preston was great.

>> That's what's about to happen in the market. About a sonic boom. >> Yeah. Yeah, let's talk markets, man. Um, all right. So, let's do a quick price check up ETH 4047, BTC 1166. Um, soul 177. >> I think the prominent thing here is the ETH outperformance of Bitcoin that the ETH BTC numbers look pretty good. So look, man, uh there there's been there's a lot of uh there's a lot of ideas being passed around as to like how this goes, what happens here, >> but we're very clearly in in the in like the meat of the bull market, right? In the sense that ETH starting to outperform. Why will these treasury companies just keep buying? I put out a

tweet the other day. There's 13 treasury company uh there's 13 assets which have treasury companies in crypto today. Uh so that's happening. Um so you know I think a lot of this buying is just happening from the treasury companies. They keep that their nav higher than the you know they they have a premium on on their nav. They're then able to then recycle that for common like issue more common shares to buy more crypto. Um yeah. So that's kind of happening on ETH. Hasn't really trickled down yet into some of the other uh kind of tokens, but I think that's probably what's coming next. Um, yeah, man. I mean, definitely full 180 on ETH sentiment. You just think like three

three months ago, ETH was around, 1500, 1,800, plummeting down. Um, it was really bad sentiment. And it changed quickly, very quickly. Um, like scary quickly. So, yeah, that's the state of things. I I don't really have much like analysis necessarily other than I just feel like a lot of people are probably pretty long ETH and are I still think a lot of people are stuck in alts waiting for alt performance but it just has not happened yet. I think maybe Ray cuts is a trigger there.

>> But if the institutional wave is real, then ETH is the alt. But if you're on crypto Twitter all day and you're too zoomed in, you know, you might be in in coins in like the 200 to 500 market cap range and that's that's what you're getting. But we haven't seen and maybe that's the last step, right? you go back to secrets of crypto, the, you know, fourth part out of four is when all of these other like alt altcoins start to outperform ETH and Bitcoin and you get that micro cap boost far and beyond, you know, the majors.

[Music] I I saw Lumar put out a tweet saying like they really taught everybody about cycles and then supercycled it. >> But how do you feel about that? >> I mean what he's say he's saying this is a super cycle. But what does that really even mean? Because I mean maybe that's the case if Bitcoin just I mean it's the year after the having and every year after the having you hit an all-time high right? >> And like we're still around alltime high. So it feels like this is just the regular part of the cycle. It's about what comes next to think to think that it could be the super

cycle or not would have to mean that you know two years after the having when it's typically a bull market if you're paying you know paying credit to the fouryear cycle thesis you know a year from now we're going to be even higher but and that would that would mean that it's a super cycle but to to call it a super cycle now seems too early right because we're at year four out of four on the cycles. >> Yeah, I just mean that I think like the institutional adoption maybe is where that kind of thought comes from. Um, >> look man, as long as these DATs keep raising capital and are able to keep issuing shares and keep uh keep their entire kind of situation rolling, you know, I don't see a reason for this to

slow down. I think like the key metric that's going to be to watch this this period is going to be like when does the premium to the nav of sharplink gaming of micro strategy of bit mine of these larger of of metanet when do these like when if these start to uh compress you're not going to get forced selling because they don't need to sell now maybe if it goes way under premium as a discount then they could sell some of their crypto to buy some of their common share to like kind of arbit it back. So that could be a reality, but like I think what's more likely is that they stop buying and that retail is chasing but doesn't have enough ump to

really push it higher and so you're just going to get this natural kind of like chop or downward movement, you know, a as as these DACO, you know, lose their premium. From my view, it's like any like watching the premiums where I think Blockwork has a decent dashboard on this. Wherever you can watch the premiums for these larger DAC codes, I think is going to be the biggest signal for the market because like the ETFs are just following it. Like the ETFs are just like kind of like following like the ETFs are just pure retail. >> They're also spot. They're also spot ETFs where whereas the DATs are are leveraged. And what brings down necessarily uh they're not leveraged in the sense that you think of >> leverage

>> I mean maybe I'm just taking strategy right and and not all of them are like that but strategy raises capital based on the Bitcoin that they buy and then >> it's more like Yeah exactly but it's more just like as long as there's a premium they can raise more cap they can sell more common shares. >> Yeah. or issue more common shares to buy more Bitcoin effectively or whatever it is, right? Um, so yeah, they're they're different, but my point is that ETFs aren't driving the flows that hard. Like, you know, you'll get like a $300 million inflow day on ETH. Two weeks in a row, we had a pretty insane inflow.

So, maybe that drove it a bit, but it's really these DAC codes just like absolutely throwing capital into it. So, I I think like DACA goes first. follow the follow the uh treasury and or the or the NAV and and and the premium to the net asset value holdings of this crypto. As that compresses, you'll see the ETFs kind of follow and retail kind of pile in and we'll see how we're able to kind of like keep this keep the price stable at higher levels. I So, I don't know if we get like a full parabola, but we'll see.

>> I'm I'm I'm with you on price to nav. uh being an indicator of how overheated the market is. Um and um as a result of this, I mean, we've been talking about, you know, about like the market conditions and the right way to play this and uh you know, there's been there's been some interesting commentary on this uh as far as like sizing kind of like the right equilibrium to play this in the current late stages if you you know, if you if you see it that way, the late stages of the bull market. And so, you know, there's some very also with the maturation of the of the market, there's some really interesting plays out there to kind of get creative if you want to

take some more concentrated bets. So, I >> I had some notes obviously. >> Yeah. I mean, our our our producers sitting here listening to us wondering why he didn't full net full net worth for his family into Bitcoin at 70K when we told him six months ago, but uh you know, I think he's going to be a bit upset at 200k. So hopefully he doesn't buy the top. We'll have to make sure that our uh our our lab Marcelo here is uh is being financially careful. >> I'd like to hear from Marcel what he has to say about the current market conditions.

>> Yeah. Can we get a producer call in here please? >> There we go. So, next show we'll have the producer callins. We'll uh we're gonna start It'd be cool to get a a a call-in feature. Uh, call a number. Boom. And uh, somebody kick >> and route it in. Yeah. >> Why don't we >> Why don't we sidestep the market conversation just just real quick? No, no, no. We're gonna come back to I do I do, but we're gonna come back to that.

>> Very ex and and this is kind of circling back to the opening monologue, but we have some very exciting things coming up. And we're not going to share too much about those things right now, but we're going to be launching things over the next couple weeks. There's going to be functionality. There's going to be um an increase in output. And this is just a little bit of an Easter egg for anyone who's watching this live. Probably won't clip this, but you know, if you're a real one, you know, we're we're an hour and a half into the show and you're still you're sitting listen to us chop it up. We have some really really exciting things coming up. Um and we're going to be rolling those out over the next couple weeks. Uh so producer callin is just the tip of the iceberg when it

comes to some of that. We'll be testing some of these things over the next couple weeks and and I'm I'm particularly excited back to the market things. What I was Yeah. What I was what I was getting to is that, you know, when it comes to some of these more concentrated bets, you know, if we want to if we want to kind of kind of participate in the strategy that we've been talking about and we get more creative with how we're going to get exposure, um, you know, there's different ways to do that. I saw like three or four days ago before we started the most recent rise volatility was at like a very local low. And so one way to get exposure in a non-typical way and just you know hold spot like a pleb would be to long

volatility through something like the B viv from Volmex which I think is a tradable token. Um other other things that include like >> you go long volatility man. Go ahead. You go do that. I'm gonna go for a surf. options shorts like Andy, what's your what's your take on short >> when it comes to go short? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to go surf. You you you short. Let me know. Short ETH. Let me know how that plays out for you. >> Are you Are you in the business of calling tops? What's your strategy here?

>> I'm bullish, man. Look, I don't I I don't really see a a I I No, no. Is is there any more market thoughts that you had written down? Cuz like that would if that was it, we're we're screwed. >> Oh, you got you got twisted a little bit there. >> If that was all you got, I don't know what I don't know. I don't know how we're going to survive. >> Uh yeah, I've got more market thoughts. >> I thought you were supposed to go go find a girlfriend last night, but all you did was spam my phone with market commentary, so nothing else is new.

>> Dude, I went to a singles event last night. It was grimy. >> Yeah. Let's get some market commentary from our from our producer Marcel. >> We're going to bring our producer Marcelo up while we're waiting for our next guest. And we're just going to have a conversation about crypto. Marcelo's on air. >> Marcelo, you've been helping us with the show for a while. Welcome in. Just quick intro, man. let tell us about what what you've been doing and let's uh let's have a a a open conversation about crypto investing.

>> Sure. Well, uh and Marcelo here, one of the founders of Streuru, we started helping companies like you and people like you to go live with higher quality than traditional uh video conferences. You know, these other software that people use that will be fine to create content. Uh but ideally this is a really high quality broadcast live production that we're running here for, you know, a few months now and uh yeah, helping you guys to really look like CNN without CNN.

>> Yeah, >> there you go. >> Marcel, you've had you've had a little bit of experience in crypto. you kind of meandered your way through, you know, hearing about things, maybe even working with a couple pro like maybe not like closely working with crypto projects, but kind of, you know, helping some some other teams us out like us. Like what, you know, when it comes to to buying, what is your like what do you have kind of like a like something that when you're when you're approaching the market, when you're approaching Bitcoin and some of these other coins, like are you just like crypto? That's a bunch of like BS. I'm not going to touch that with a 10- foot pole or like Bitcoin's okay. What is your reaction, you know, when when you kind of when it comes to putting some some stake in the game?

>> I think it matters about, you know, the project and what it's meant to be. Uh, one of the things that I believe though is that it should be easier for people to understand and that's one of the main issues that I think crypto projects have. nobody understands what they do and they have to be if you have to explain a lot what you do then it's complicated for your you know your investors or people that will actually trust in the project. I am not u an average user you know I've been around since 2014 in this market and looking at things and how projects go back and forth but yeah I believe uh when things are simple to understand and you will go and and do and face it right I also

think like in America right where we are uh it's hard to predict these type of things there's like you're we are so used to yeah markets been nice and smooth with like NASDAQ and the regular markets. And when you go to the crypto world, you know that there are waves of things happening and you know things go super high and then everything goes down and and then you seen Bitcoin crashes and then everything else crashes after that. You know, it's kind of like very weird. But outside of the US, I think there's a lot of projects and economies that needs really this technology to survive. And that's kind of like where things are at.

uh I'm seeing the world getting much more aware of that and of course the US right now I think it's moving towards being that superpower of hey let's do it this properly because it there's there's a future there so I think that the projects like you said uh Rob are coming in getting better getting more clear you know I think that there's maybe a service right there right to just help people explain what they're doing and why these things will benefit somebody and you That's a core feature for me. When I see that, then I may trust that. No financial advice, right?

>> No financial advice. >> But for your children, I think your your children I I believe that you have like some young young children. I think in 10 years they will be much more acclimated to this type of thing, you know, things like chat GPT, things like crypto uh than like you know, even us Robbie and myself and then of course you and your generation are. And so I I I think that like over time this is just going to become more and more like embedded into in into the world. Um and >> oh yeah >> yeah I mean I don't know if you're >> I don't know if like how you think about that but I just feel like it's a time thing and like as you get more aware of it as it gets bigger it becomes less risky especially Bitcoin just itself.

>> Yeah for sure. and and kids they if you think about that I have 14 12 and 11 year old boys right just think about that take that off and you're like okay so 2014 they born they were born there wow right like just when Bitcoin got released you know what I mean I mean not just then but you you get the idea so 2014 it's like 10 years in the making and these guys are like very used to AI like they don't care it's all good it's part of their world, right? And and you know, Apple devices, iPads, these like things that you just grab and they just play with them and you can see that they're super like my son the other day he saw me doing this with you guys,

cutting cameras and stuff and he says, "Hey, can I do it?" Like he was going to come and do it. He's 14 and I'm like, "Yeah, not not ready yet, but we will." But my point is it's getting there. But >> I think there's a lot going on there. Uh kids are consuming a lot of content. That's something that I'm worried about as well, right? We need to get more tools to filter that stuff. I know I'm not going out of subject here, but thinking about kids growing and the influence that they can get by watching things and stuff like that. You know, I saw that YouTube made a new filter with AI to detect if you're a teenager.

I don't know how they've done it or how that works. But if it's in terms of really detecting somebody that is, you know, children that they want to filter content because if you think about it, you know, YouTube has its own ways. It's very cool for many things, but for others not that great. So yeah, that's uh my kids are going to be looking at these markets and things when they just become teenagers and turn 18. You can imagine what they what the world will look like. And so Maro, when you're looking at the markets now, like are you >> do you have Bitcoin? Like are you like mostly in equities like what is just because Andy and I have been zoomed in on this market for so long like going on 10 years at this point, right? We are

more familiar with crypto markets than traditional financial markets. >> What what is your like portfolio construction having been kind of through both of these worlds? Actually, I never got into the crypto space in terms of Bitcoin, for example. I always saw it from the outside in that regard. I do have other things that I'm not able to disclose, but ideally I trusted in uh tokenization of assets, real estate assets. I would say that, right? It's not uh a boom yet, but if you see that this year right now, it's getting really hot and hotter. Uh I think that that's has a lot of future. Uh I think I told

you about that. You know, there's a this real estate tokenization platform that is very cool. I'm not going to mention this right now, but we will check that out and see if we can release that info. that this is something that I saw in 2017 and I was helping to grow that back then and it it's pretty remarkable what they're doing right now. So, and that's kind of like a completely different mindset. I I see, you know, real estate investments is like a realw world thing. How do we make that more democratized for anybody that needs to access to that without buying the entire property?

Right? And then there's a lot of things going on over there. But that's one of the things that I was looking into for the past few years. I But to be honest, I'm more like a viewer of the markets than an active investor in the latest things. But I should maybe switch my strategy and say, "Yeah, let's go, you know, with a role." I mean, usually I do the, you know, uh, classic NASDAQ and that sort of stuff, which what everybody does, right? The index funds and stuff like that, but I'm more looking into these other and new, uh, ways. And I think there's a lot of things going on, but a

lot of noise as well. Like I said, it's a lot of, you know, new things every single day. It goes faster. I think just like AI, right? AI is going like super fast every single day. Everybody's like talking about it and I think that the crypto world will be colliding there a lot too. It's exciting times, you know. >> Maybe just grab the Phantom wallet on on the app store. You got the uh you have you have your phone there? >> I do. I do. >> Yeah. It's called Phantom. Ph. >> Yeah, I I I got it. I installed it once. So, >> go ahead and drop us your ETH address, your soul address. We'll get you set up, man. Don't >> All right. Yeah, >> don't you worry.

>> We'll get you dialed in. You can you can show your kids the meme coins that we send you and they'll you can you can tell us what they respond if it's good or bad and that'll judge what if we think that their performance will be good in the long term. >> All right, we can do that test for sure. >> Yeah, >> I have I have an idea of what I think uh what meme coin we're going to start out with. What I think Andy might be dropping. Marcelo, this is the sound that Marcelo's kids are gonna make when he sees the coin. >> Oh, wow. Okay. Okay, that's good.

>> All right. So, I think we got the next guest getting ready. So, I'm going to go back >> beautiful >> backstage again and let's prep this. >> Let's do it. And he's going to send you some fart coin. We're gonna we're gonna keep this rolling. >> Yeah. I'm going to put the title. Look at that. We could talk. >> I think we got Shiv ready in the back, guys. Let's get him set up. Marcel, lovely to have you, brother. And uh we'll see you on the back end. I'm uh running on no headphones by the way, so I'm special setup, but that should be all good. See you in a bit. >> Yep. Be right back. >> Yeah, interesting time. So, I think we can get creative. Um that's probably the best way to play these uh these upcoming months here. But, you know, even even

whether this is a super cycler or not, you know, it's like things are going to come and go. Liquidity cycles are going to come and go. Maybe they print a lot of money. Maybe it pumps the markets. Maybe that means that uh you know once they take liquidity out it's going to crash. But >> these things aren't going anywhere. Like the the companies that are building these projects now are so much more credible, experienced, and wellunded than they were last cycle. >> Yeah. >> And I mean, think about the ICOs. Think about Dentacoin and Bitconnect. You know, those were destined to fail anyway whether they were this cycle or last cycle. But the quality of founders back then, it was like >> anyone with a laptop was going to raise

an ICO and just move move to an island >> and that was that. Now there's a lot more investor protections >> and uh funding. That's I think that is one of the benefits of the VCs. You're on mute by the way. >> Yeah, that's Yeah, for sure. No, I just I'm running on no headphones. I'm just kind of moving and grooving. But all right, so we got Shiv coming up. Shiv is gonna they are running verify the signal. We ran the signal stream uh couple weeks back. I was in Sweden. We're gonna get Shiv on. We're gonna talk about verifying the signal, what this means. Boundless launch coming very soon. Should be good. Um last guest of the day.

>> Uh got some more calls. I I I know it's a little bit later over there before finish up the week strong. >> Um yeah, and we're gonna signal with Shift. So that's what's coming up. uh you should be joining us shortly and and yeah Rob. Yo yo my cool nice uh yeah before shiv comes on you think it's fair game to talk about the succinct launch proof should bring that up uh boundless coming up very very soon

also the zk wave Um, so we are going to get Shiv on in just a moment, but uh we asked the spicy questions. We don't hold back here at the rollup. We're uh we're bringing we're bringing it face to face. We're bringing you face to face with the smartest, brightest minds in crypto and beyond. ZK heavy episode fly >> sovereign obviously >> last one of the day >> verify the signal >> vibes are high >> and uh >> we got to get Andy a pair of headphones because this guy's just mute

>> left and right pretty ZK heavy day pretty stable coin and payments heavy day as well with pay um we've got Shiv coming on in just a moment here he's in the background I caught up with a couple of a boundless personnel over in SBC, very technical conference, learned a lot. Uh I I learned even more about the proof marketplace and the way that these proofs are constructed and the way that incentives are spread in this marketplace amongst the producers of these proofs. Very very cool market dynamics. Uh a lot more decentralized than some ZK counterparts. Uh we've got CEO Shiv of Boundless coming on in right

now. Welcome, Shiff. >> Thanks for having me, Robin, Andy. How are you guys doing? Uh, happy Friday. >> Happy Friday. Yeah, welcome on. Uh, I unfortunately missed the signal. Uh, it was very wellreceived. I heard it was a great broadcast and I think we're actually cooking up a highlight video. Uh, but today we're going to be talking about verifying the signal, which comes after the signal. Now, it's time to verify it. And so I'm very curious especially after you know maybe not getting the full effect of the signal. What does it mean? What are we doing?

What does it mean to verify the signal? >> Yeah. So our our campaign actually has three components. It's um uh boost, prove and verify. Um and it sort of mimics the life cycle of a proof generally. Um you kind of say like hey this is the price point at which I'm willing to pay for like proof. So this one I want to prove. Then you actually prove it. Um but that's just step two. Then you actually need to verify the proof which finalizes that like hey the proof's done it's now in a useful state and you can use it in your application. Um part of like our mainet beta objectives is of course to show uh boundless show the power of the tokconomics show that we can handle these gigantic proofs at scale with add

so many provers permissionlessly. not just talk about decentralization and permissionlessness but actually show it in production but also educate everybody who wants to participate right part of my u job description which I wrote myself uh is to educate the populace about ZK through the same journey that I went through as well um I'm a technologist my background is in database systems um I'm fairly literate in computer science um but even to me ZK is moon math it's like what do you do I don't I don't really understand what's going on here. It is a maybe a humbling thing for the CEO of a cryptography company to admit but it is important that not that we don't get stuck in the cryptography but also see the

applications and how do you actually utilize them and I want more and more people to understand that that's the verify stage really what we allow you to do is to verify these proofs on your browser there's a button on on you know boundlist.xyz XYZ that go to uh the signal page and sort of verify these proofs. Um the key learning for people who are doing this is to understand that it takes machines and a proven network to submit the proofs but it's unbelievably straightforward and simple and lightweight to verify a proof. That is the power of ZK. Um I can do a you know number crunch in the background and give you this tiny tiny proof that you can just verify and you're golden. Um if you verify enough, you might be lucky

enough to verify a uh signal proof uh which is of course like a proof of um full Ethereum consensus. It's a gigantic proof. Takes like an hour or so to do. It's like 50 billion cycles, some enormous amount of money, uh enormous amount of like cycles and you can verify it instantly and you don't even notice that there is a difference between proving a large proof and a small proof or or a proof of a large computation or a small computation because ZKit tends to mask all of that. Um so really just want like you know have the retail users get a taste of that um understand that internalize that concept because um you know they might be doing that in in their applications soon. Um, so yeah, >> feel feels like a like a golden ticket,

like an Easter egg. Like if I'm if I'm running a verifier, I happen to run like a verification for a signal proof, it's like I've discovered this entire the entire Ethereum consensus right there in that one golden proof. Is there any anything ext like what what I I mean it's just kind of like a badge of honor, I guess, right? If I discover one of these proofs. >> Yeah, 100%. It it is um uh the good thing is like there'll be quite a lot of these proofs. So unlike the golden ticket which only there's like five of them if I remember right um and you don't need to eat like a ton of chocolate um um you can you can like see these proofs and um you know utilize them and you're right each of these verifications of these like Ethereum proofs what it actually unlocks is the

entire state of Ethereum in that proof you you have a checkpoint on the entire state of Ethereum that is mindboggling that you can just carry that and verify and validate information anywhere on other chains and other applications in your smart contract wherever you want that really is the power of signal and ZK um something that we want to highlight through mainet beta um I think we spoke about this like earlier as well like and I keep getting asked this question is like it's not a test net like no it's not because we're using live funds um to actually um u facilitate these transactions now the interesting thing is um I just got notified like just before I got on this call that like um the community has rallied around and raised over a million dollars now to prove the next cycle in

these small $10 increments a million dollars has been collected for the next chain and the next and we are going to keep doing this. Um my real hope is that boundless definitely has a revenue model and like you know customers and we grow in that uh domain but we also focus on building these uh public goods um that are useful and applicable to everybody. This is something that we want to double down on for sure uh mostly because we are in a unique position to be the ones building it. I don't have a stake in like one L1 or the other one or we're not playing favorites. We're building the bridge across these L1s, these um these uh state machines. Um that actually solves so many problems.

There's a lot of liquidity fragmentation one which leads to UX fragmentation or UX discomfort or poor UX. Apart from that, it also costs money when you have to move [ __ ] around when you need like to like trust information from one chain to another. Um there's like so much money involved. It again like demotivates people trying to build applications and so on. The ability to we've shown our ability to build these applications. Now I think it's slowly turning into a moral obligation to like keep investing in these things. Uh we're going to of course work with um you know these L1s, our partners as well in building this infrastructure. Um especially partners who benefit from it.

Um uh the ability to do ZK bridging elevates companies that work in bridging right now. they can move up the stack, offer more complicated products, more complex products um to its customers. We want to keep doing things like this. This is why I got up in the morning. Um yeah, >> hell yeah, Chev. Um, one thing that we talked about was uh proving so so on the signal we talked a lot about proving Ethereum's uh consensus and we talked a lot about interoperability as one amazing uh kind of uh second order consequence if you will of or you know outcome as a result of this uh verification happening uh that being with other chains right we had Thomas from Stellar on we had Robinson from

Wormhole right and we just kind of talked about that component I'm curious over the last couple weeks as as you guys have been iterating throughout this uh you know and congrats on raising the million. I think last time I checked it was around 400k so more than doubled there. Um as you guys have iterated on this you know and kind of gotten more teams interested what has there been any new uh kind of like unique use cases or angles or ideas that have been shared externally or kind of discussed internally that you can share. just kind of like interested in understanding the evolution as you guys have kind of taken this from like an uh you know idea phase into full experimentation into you know execution you know what has changed what

kind of thought processes have came up that maybe weren't uh present when you first started just kind of curious what uh what new ideas have been uh you know you know kind of have sprouted as a result of actually putting this to to practice >> yeah so I'm a markets guy uh my background is engineering but as a sort of executive quote unquote. Uh most of my career is in like launching right share markets, digital services, physical goods, Amazon, Coinbase, Lyft, Grab, that's that's really my bread and butter or you know um uh how I sort of constructed my career. I have been blown away by the velocity of this marketplace like there is nothing I have ever seen in my life evolve so quickly. Let me

give you some context here. So when we launched grabb in like multiple countries, multiple cities um I used to run the driver incentive pricing and customer onboarding team. So pricing which is like full e full economics it's the main lever through which you control right share and the way we used to make adjustments was you would have the market launch then like people would um sort of um you know process the information provide it to us and then after that uh you'd process it again and like come up with conclusions executives would sign off and you'd evolve the market absolutely crazy takes takes four five weeks but we thought we were the [ __ ] we were like this is so quick Uber can't keep up is struggling against us.

This is amazing. Like we're we're we're awesome. Once we have a public market like this, I've never opened a market where not only is the code open, how we function, the tokconomics, the software, everything is open. Everybody started tearing us apart and going like, "Oh, this is what the base basic system does. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to improve how I do my bids. I'm going to improve how I manage my um jobs. I'm going to improve how I manage my cluster. I'm going to have every single aspect of it started getting better. People started betting on who's going to complete a job, who's not going to complete a job, who's going to get ahead of a job. So many different things. The market has evolved so much that we actually have a high schooler who's

dominating the leaderboard right now. I don't know his name. Stay anan friend. I I I really, you know, really really love what he's doing. Um, >> how do you know he's a high schooler? >> Uh, I think Jacob, our our PM, is in touch with him. Um but like I think he wanted to be a nod and I'm like yeah okay that that makes sense. No one needs to know who you are. We will however know if if there is a high schooler driving around a Ferrari but um but but it is interesting that people with smaller rigs putting in the time can like make this go bur. So that to me tells me that the marketplace is functioning. A people are innovating too. The third thing that has caught me by surprise is nearly all the proofs are $0.

Basically, the subsidy effect of the token is so strong that everybody is willing to just take payment in the emissions of the tokens and not charge customers anything. I don't think this will be the case forever. Can't possibly be the case forever. Um, but what it does suggest is that the discount factor due to the token, the subsidy effect is going to be extremely high. thereby proofs on boundless are going to be unbelievably cheap which is fantastic news for everybody. That is the bet that to be honest like a lot of us had made about building a marketplace. Um that we have to be at least cheaper than running [ __ ] on AWS but we are orders of magnitude cheaper than anything. Um currently it's zero so infinitely cheaper but you know uh if you are 150th

the price 120th the price that's amazing right? If I told you AWS cost went down by 95%, you'd be like, "Holy [ __ ] that just means I'm going to get like 40 times the application that I already had. People are going to build more stuff or my apps are going to, you know, you know, have more more applica applications are going to have more features. There's going to be lots of things I can do because AWS infrastructure cost just went down. So that's really what we're seeing. Um, and apart from that like this also helped us fine-tune a lot of our tokconomics. Um, assumptions that we had made are being validated. So we are strengthening them.

The next two three weeks for us is going to be about like um publishing our tokconomics, making sure everybody understands what they are um why it works. I know Rob you like spoke to our team in SBC. Uh you spoke to the guy who who who loves talking about tokconomics. Um so u that's amazing. We want to make sure everybody understands where we're headed with this. Um a lot of teams are decentralized in name only. Um I call them dinos. Um but uh we really really really value decentralization. We wanted to be decentralized and permissionless from day one. It is not a um

talking point for us. If you actually observe the industry, if you stay, you know, take a 100 foot view of the industry, the chains, the protocols, the networks that survive the longest are the ones that belong to the community in in in a very real sense. Bitcoin is is is one such network that will exist forever. Ethereum is getting there and some of the other chains are also trying to get there as well. Uh you need to be completely decentralized and owned by the community. Then there shouldn't be a centralized figure. I actually tell my team this as well. For our token, for our token and our network to actually succeed, for us to achieve our mission, I need to vanish. And I have no qualms about doing that. Um, in like five, six

years, like you know, I'm running my competitor podcast. Um, the validity roll up with Ship. Um, but >> the rollup's going to be stage two long before that happens. [Laughter] Oh, we have we have an we have an offer for that as well. Offering for that as well, but um it's it's important that the team is able to move away. And here's the most important thing. For periods of time, long periods of time, days on end, Boundless and Risio were not proving on the network. We pulled all our machines out. We're not there >> and the network just performs fine.

We're doing 20 trillion cycles plus. Um so that to me is the ultimate sort of thing that I wanted to see which is like oh and in fact today is actually a recharge day at uh Boundless. Uh everybody started looking uh a little bit tired and I was like okay guys how about uh take the Friday off. I I have some podcast and stuff. I I I'll be fine but you can take off. And the reason I I'm very comfortable doing that is like the network's got it. There's other provers. They'll do whatever is necessary. if something goes wrong, someone's going to tell me. This is the state that we want to hit. Um, so we're very happy we're there.

>> Well, you sound very comfortable, which is an un uh is an unusual position that from from pre-TGE kind of gearing up to TGE, this is not the state that founders are typically in. If you look at all their charts and now you look at your contrarian signaling pre-TGE, I'm bullish. Um, but I I am curious just, you know, kind of as we wrap up here the the next few minutes, we want we want to get make sure that you can recharge today as well. What comes next? Like if the network's got it, provers are proving, verifiers are verifying, everything's cooking. What you guys just You don't just recharge forever. I know you [ __ ] but you don't just recharge like what what what's coming up next?

What do you have in the pipeline? >> I mean, I'm from Seattle, ex Amazon. We don't we don't we don't rest. There is no rest. It's always day one. Uh I know Coinbase likes saying that but it's like a Amazon lingo actually. Um I'm also former Coinbase so it's day one everywhere. Um but for us like it's about ramping up more and more demand. U we're doing Ethereum proofs. We want to prove other chains as well. We're already in talks with like a bunch of them. Um the community is actually proving on what the next chain should be. Um we'd like like to start doing you know that ramping up more and more demand. And as we do that, we're going to find that um and I'm honestly going to admit this. Like some prover will fall over. It'll be like, "Yo, like I maxed out. Something broke. I don't know

what's going on. I got my um you know, my stack into like a weird state. Like can you help me unblock it?" All that is fine. In fact, I wake up every day at 5 a.m. mostly to debug uh clients in uh the other half of the world because they're usually like, "Hey, I have 400 machines. How come I'm not crushing this? Why is there a high schooler crushing me? What's going on here?" um and you know helping them debug like scale up. I want to do all of that because it's going to be a double double-sided game now. Um we are a supply driven market but we have shown through tokconomics and our early success that the supply is already there and it's coming in like huge droves which is fantastic news. So the drivers are there. We want to make sure now that

demand catches up then supply catches up demand catches up. That's how you build a market. If you overinvest on one side um you get an such a huge imbalance that it knocks you out. You don't want that. You don't want supply or demand shocks. You want to make it rise. Um I also want to there's lots of um business processes that need to be set in place such that I can get early indicator indication of more demand coming, more supply coming, how to manage that. All of that stuff needs to be set in place. That's the management side u which to be honest I I don't want to gloat but like I've done it a couple of times. I can I know I can just like whip it up pretty quickly and we have a very experienced team. The technical side is going to get

interesting. Um, so folks who are very familiar with AWS, if you go to buy EC2, you don't buy EC2. EC2 has like 700 SKs under it. What are the different SKs for us? Um, how do you segment our market? Um, like these are things that like I know I know you guys are great friends with Jacob, but like these are the questions I pose him on a daily basis. It's like if you were like, you know, if you had 20 years of experience, your next question is segment the market. Product market fit is first step. Next step is segment it. You want to see who are your who are the people demanding all these proofs. Why are they coming here? What do they expect? What are they not getting? Who's getting turned off?

Who are we losing? Onboarding, retention, get the cycle all done. So, there is a intense amount of work left. Um the reason why maybe I'm a little bit more chilled out is because I trust my team. Um I am uh I I say this on on on Twitter and like every other chance I get is like I don't deserve such a good team yet. I am not a good enough CEO yet. I have to work really hard to like deserve a team that is willing to spend so many hours focus on what's important uh learn so quickly teach as well like not um not all of us you know um observe crypto Twitter so closely or like manage every trend it's a it's a two dual-sided process Jacob teaches me a lot I teach I hopefully I teach him something as well

um and it's similar with everybody else as well um I've worked with like billion dollar budgets for marketing but I've never done marketing on CT for um so I need like you know my marketing guys to keep me in check but I can also like tell them a little bit about like what happens when you have a billion dollars and you have to do onboarding on Lyft um so there's like interesting uh things here so all the challenges of running a good business um but it is a good business so I am I am happy for that >> yeah yeah I mean sh the the the question that the audience wants to know is is is you know when when does balm become its system. When do we get the token incentive flywheel coming? What is the

immediate future for Balamus? Wrap us up here and then we'll we'll close out. >> It's in the order of weeks and not months, uh is my answer. Um so you don't have to wait too long. Um uh my birthday is on October 21st. Um and then I turn too old. Um so we're going to launch before that is what I'll say. We're definitely launching before that. Um, I want to enjoy my birthday by myself. >> Thank you, man. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for being a part of uh Verifying the Signal. Enjoy the rest of your recharge. It's always a pleasure, man.

>> Sounds good. >> Thanks. >> Thanks, Shiff. See you. >> Best podcast voice. I gotta say, Shiv has got a great podcast voice. He's uh he he's still in the audience, so he heard me say that, but I I would tell it straight to his faces, too. Um, >> well did there, bud. >> I'd love to have him back on uh either, you know, when when the token launches or for his birthday or whichever comes first. So, we'll uh we'll see Shiv again sometime soon. Interesting times in the ZK world.

Andy, >> happy Friday, Rob. It's time to rest and recharge. Got a bit more work to do. Great stream. We're back. Next week, we get rolling. Thanks for being here, guys. Thank you, Rob. Thank you to your dogs. Thank you to the Jets that flew over to Marcelo for the special guest segment. To all the guests and the learnings and the laughs and the fun times today. See you guys next week. Andy, thank you for keeping it real. Have a good weekend, buddy.