Rollup TV Live from Devconnect Day 3

Transcript

[music] I'm the back [music] the back. [music] [music] >> [music] >> I don't want the [music] [music] >> [music]

[music] >> We threw down two days live stream, little happy hour, little dinner. We got an event planned Q4. [music] Stay tuned. We're going into the events business. Robbie Andy the boys that shout out three straight days [music] live stream straight from permission list to roll up TV number one spot all the way up [music] [music] [music] [music]

the back >> [music] [music] >> Hop up above the [music] [music] buckle. [music] >> [music] >> I'm [music] the [music]

I'm hoping. [music] [music] [music] We'll [music] see you around the timeline. Feels good to be back. Welcome to World TV. We are live on Friday, November 21st. We are at the Lambda House in Buonoses. Rob, how we doing man?

>> I'm good, man. Uh, it's been a long week, that's for sure. [laughter] >> It's Friday. Uh, we're going to chat with our friend Lane from Near. Near's been great partners on the AI Super. >> Guys, welcome to episode 11 of the AI Super Cycle. We are live from Buenos. We will get jump right in with Near. Um >> I'm particularly excited for this one because privacy is hot and near is building are hot. >> Private AI and near your intents are especially hot. So >> all right guys, we're going to jump right into it. Uh we'll be right back for a quick sec and we'll go.

>> Not your keys, not your coins. from the team that pioneered cold storage. Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. [music] Get a treasure at treasure.io. [music] Wait. Hell yeah, guys. [laughter] So good to be here. What a day we had today, guys. Just teleported >> finally.

>> Most exciting lead up to an interview ever. >> How's the city treating you? >> Uh I love BA. I've been here before. You know, my first time here was in 2018, very early in my crypto journey. I started an Ethereum in 2017. Uh you guys probably know as an Ethereum core developer back then and I've always found Buenosire and like Argentines to just be like the smartest people in the world when it comes to crypto. Like they just woke up to it. They got it early on and they've been like holding our hands and teaching the rest of us since then. Um the the my Bitcoin prophet, the guy who like held my hand and walked me on my personal journey down the crypto rabbit hole. Uh gentleman named Santi Siri. He's Argentine. I was able to catch up with him here. So I feel like

I'm back in like the motherland. [laughter] >> Yes. >> Where it all started. >> 100% 100%. >> Very cool, dude. Privacy is very hot. Privacy is hot. Me and Intense are very hot. Zcash is hot. Uh Zashy the Zcash wallet. >> You guys had a chance to try it, man. It's sick. Incredible. Um you guys have just or they just announced the ability to actually shield within the >> like 24 hours ago. Just over few days ago just happened. Yeah, >> literally. And so that's powered by Near Intense. >> Um man, this journey of kind of like revival of this entire privacy category.

I know you guys are coming at this from the agentic side too. What has this been like from the from the protocol perspective to see this growth? I mean, it's been like I think there's over almost $10 million in intense fees generated over the last like call month or two. It's really it's really growing. How how are you feeling about this all from a protocol perspective? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Um, I think from a I mean, first and foremost, from a personal perspective, it's been really exciting. It's like look, it's been I've been doing this for like going on nine years right now. It's been a roller coaster ride and we've all had like moments in our career, especially when you've been doing this as long as I have when you're kind of like you're hitting pause and you're like, "What are we here for? Is any of this working?"

You know, product market fit, you know, like, you know, meme coins and all this kind of stuff. Where's the like really important applications, the ones that going to like improve lives for everyday people, people places like like Latin America, like like Argentina. Um, and so I think that this like privacy explosion that's happened recently, it's just like a very long time coming. I mean, dude, so much love, so much respect to the Zcash team. They have been crushing it. They've been grinding longer than I have, longer than Near has, you know, they're like as as old as Ethereum, right? They're coming up in 10 years. Um, really well deserved and just like it's so from a personal perspective, it's just given me a massive like influx of energy and passion for what we're doing. As an infrastructure builder, it can be hard too, right? We're we're

grinding and building infrastructure that uh is kind of invisible a lot of the time. So, man, this this this near intense story, this came out of nowhere. >> I I'd love to say that we like orchestrated this. I mean, >> there's always collaboration. There's always conversations going on. There's always, you know, some degree of kind of bisdev happening. So, not that like Ne didn't have any hand in this, but it's organic. It really is like this is just a thing. It's just like a technology that was just in the right place at the right time. It found product market fit or product market fit found us. Uh, and to be able to support projects like Zcash and and privacy and stuff. Um, I I just couldn't be more excited. From protocol perspective, that's a bit harder to say. Like to be honest, we're still figuring it out what this means

for Near as a protocol. I'm very focused on governance of near and like one of the things we need to figure out how to govern is like the fee switch on near intense if we decide to turn that on at some point right um but it doesn't change anything in the core near protocol I think near's been building towards this since the beginning really so am I mistaken about the fees then >> I think the fees are going the fees are going the fees are going to the solvers like there's no protocol fee switch yet correct >> what's your reaction to some of the other fee switches that are currently floating around in governance forums are being turned on meta >> yeah I I'm super boring when it comes to this stuff Like I know I know the whole you know the joke that we've been making

for years about how like you don't want to have any revenue, right? Because then like your valuation is more like you made up number and it's harder to raise money once you turn the P switch on. But like I want to I again I think it's just my my my crypto grandpa status. I've been doing this for so long. I want to see protocols and projects that are sustainable, you know, that's more than just magic internet money. Uh and like I was so excited when Hyperledger uh sorry when Hyperlid like pulled this off and like showed what was possible, right? So I think we're like following in their footsteps. So 100% like I want to see sustainable economics. So if he switches, I'm all for them. >> Yeah. And the that's probably the front half of uh complete uh community value acral mechanism. The front half is

turning on the fee switch. The back half is what you do with the fees, right? Product market fit has found you guys, right? And so uh there's thankfully there is fees that are coming in you know if it were to go turned on because uh the product is being used by the market. Um, but the back half, how do you determine what the right place to send those fees are? What is the current governance structure on year? And then what could that process if it were to go to shareholders? What would that process look like? >> Yeah, excellent, excellent question. This is exactly what I've been focused on. So, it's it's interesting that to to note that years later protocols like Unis swap are still struggling with this question, right? I mean, they they're a drop is 2020 if I remember correctly, right? Five years later, they're still

figuring this out with the governance token and everything. It just shows how hard governance is and how we're still like learning every day. Uh and yeah, the reason we haven't turned on a fee switch or even really had a really serious conversation about that yet is because if we do make that decision, we have to make sure number one that it uh is a communitydriven decision, right? Led by decentralized governance for a whole bunch of reasons. It's just the right thing to do and number two that we know what to do with the funding, right? Um so we started a year ago to create a new governance initiative for near foundation near protocol called uh house of stake. That's the name of the project and the stake is is a hold over from a previous governance initiative but it just refers to the fact that it's stated

building. So very common to what other folks are doing. Um and the idea like house of stake right now um is doing some pretty big economic changes. We launched a month ago. We've already we actually just few days ago passed our first two proposals which is really exciting. They uh are economics things that involve kind of like incentives and rewards and things for validators and for people who are participating in governance. You guys are probably aware Near like a week ago, 10 days ago or something, we just cut our issuance in half, right? Uh which is a really exciting thing. So I think there's like a recognition on the part of not just Near but a lot of proof ofstake projects that look the honest thing cuz I was I wasn't in the room in year but I was in the room in Ethereum when we were

designing you know the the rollup sorry the the merge right like the Ethereum proof ofstake system back in the day and I can tell you that like it kind of looked like this. It's like core developers sticking their finger in the air saying okay 10 it's like a find a goldilock spot 10% is insurance feels too high you know 1 2% feels too low let's take 5% 7% 8% whatever it is but here we are 5 years later and we're like all right like >> we have real economists in the room now we like know that uh we can do better so that's kind of what motivated the near you know switch is talking about it is talking about it they all are um I haven't answered your question like as for what we do with those with those fees I mean they should be invested in

the ecosystem >> right what that means is a question that's going to you know get a different answer in each ecosystem In the case of Near, um, we are very focused on product. >> Yeah, we've had this massive kind of pivot, this, I think this wake up moment a few months ago where we realized that >> we're not against grants. We're not against sponsoring events and things like that. Near's done a lot of those things in the past, but they haven't always produced the ROI that, you know, we wanted them to. And so, we just feel that like the right thing to do is really double down on product. We hired a bunch of amazing product people from Silicon Valley lately. You know, we're focused on a lot of the near AI kind of product related work. So, I personally would like to see a lot of those funds

flow into product. And so to double click on that, right, you invested in product. This is the AI super cycle show. And so naturally you guys are building AI and you're here on the show. And so what what would in >> flowing the the value from the fee switch into an AI product? What what could that look like? Is it paying people paying to train models? Is it incentivizing certain usage of the models? Generally, what what do you think could be an incentive mechanism that that would help to bolster the the AI product? >> I think it's all the above. I think it's everything you said more. Um, and again, just full transparency, we're still figuring this out. I don't think we have like really solid answers here. I know you guys have spoken to Ilia, um, you know, as well, and he shared a bit about

his vision for this thing called DCML, right? Decentralized confidential machine learning. It's a bit of a mouthful, but it's just kind of like a a catch-all term for like all of the AI decentralized AI infrastructure that NI is investing in and building. Um, and very much a big part of that vision is we need things like um, so it's confidentiality verifiability privacy right? at at the center of it, but it's also verifiability in things like model training, right? So, we want to be able to run model and Ilia spoke about like sleeper aids and things like that. We want to like know how the sausage is made and have like verifiable proofs of that. But one of the nice things you get when you have verifiability in both inference as well as in model training is you can actually have like content creators, people like you guys or anyone

putting out content out there um actually be given a proof that the thing that they poured their energy and their, you know, their financial capital, their sweat equity, etc. into into building into putting out in the world like is included in this model verifiably provably right and then further you can say and also inference that's performed upon it right and so to the extent that you have applications that are built on AI that are revenue positive right you have this chain of uh of custody so to speak right where you can trace back and say that actually there was this set of content creators this content that went into it right that was monetized profits were earned and so a piece of that should flow back to the original content creators right I think that that's a place I would like to see those revenues

flow in the beginning and just come up with a more sustainable model because the like AI has broken the content creation model of breaking it, right? >> Yeah, it definitely has kind of switching gears into the privacy kind of realm from the from the roots that you came into the space and why does privacy matter to you? >> Man, that's such a great question. Um, why does privacy matter to me? And look, I think what we need to understand and and it's look, we're 10 years into this journey now in the case of actually almost 10 and a half years in the case of Ethereum. Uh, how many years, you know, How many years has Bitcoin been around? Uh 15 years something like 15 16 years. Yeah. Uh so it's we're beginning to forget the message is getting a little bit diluted but actually like

>> Bitcoin I'll start with Bitcoin because it was the first m right like it emerged in a particular place in a particular time. It was a particular kind of socioeconomic situation. Uh obviously there was a response to like the global financial crisis, right? Um but it was also came out of the the cyberpunk movement and it's I was actually just because I was at the cyber punk congress here a couple days ago. I don't know if you guys had a chance to check that out. That event was was epic. Um really just this massive revitalization of of energy and into kind of the just reminding people why we started, what cyber punk values are. Um right. Cyber punks were were a movement in, you know, kind of the '9s, you know, into the 2000s. Um a group of people who were deeply mistrustful and suspicious of governance

and governments who deeply believed in privacy and the right for for everyone to kind of communicate privacy, have like financial transactional privacy, that kind of thing. Um and personal responsibility, right? And those are values that you know really like again that's just a cultural millu in which Bitcoin was born. Um I think it's just important to remember where we come from and and Ethereum inherited those values from um from Bitcoin. But again, you know, over time they've kind of come a little bit a little bit distilled, a little bit kind of watered down, right? Uh we're kind of on the third or fourth generation of projects now. It's just important to have events like the Cyber Punk Congress to remind us of that. And I'll just throw out there personal reason as well. Um, you know, my father's a Holocaust survivor and, uh, I think a big part of my life story is

kind of, um, you know, how do we build better human systems, better human institutions to kind of prevent, you know, government overreach, things like that from happening again. Uh, so I think I share the cyber punk's kind of mistrust of like strong centralized systems and centralized governments. It's I realized this, took a while to realize this, but this big part of my motivation for why privacy matters so much to me. >> Hey, man, we let you go, man. We appreciate >> we'll do it again. [laughter] Good. It's been a hell of a day so far. >> For sure. >> Thank you, man. >> So good. So good. Thanks for having me here. >> Cheers, man. Thanks for coming on. Of course. Anytime. Appreciate it. >> All right, guys. [snorts] Let's take a quick break and say, >> is built for big moments, the most fun

you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. >> [music] >> We have Matt, the CTO of Dune. What a week. Dune Con was a success. Great to have you on, man. H how are you feeling about the whole week? It's been a it's been a journey. >> Yeah, thanks for having me first and foremost. It's amazing to be in Argentina. Um I'm actually happy to be here to practice my Spanish. >> I used to live in in Spain for a couple of years, so it's I don't have a lot of opportunities to practice these days.

>> Love it. Did you Did you learn it in Spain or did you practice before or >> Well, I basically learned in Spain. >> Yes. So, >> at a basic level, but yeah, it's it's amazing. I think it's an awesome uh location for uh a crypto conference. Like obviously Argentina is a huge market for crypto. >> Yeah. And congrats on the success with Dune. You guys have I remember we had Fred on uh in 2020 in like one of our first podcasts ever. Um, and Dune was this tiny company, you know, a handful of employees getting the dashboards out. Defi Llama, Dune, and Defi Yield.info, I think, was like the whole like the yield farming trifecta. Um, you know, since has obviously grown into this massive operation. Fred has left his home

country, has made an entire personal brand around this idea of being an entrepreneur, going where they treat you well. Now, obviously, you guys are hosting your own events. You've made some big headlines this week. maybe you can talk to us about the growth of Dune and kind of what this week has meant for you guys as well as just the last couple years. >> For sure. Yeah. Um yeah, it's been 5 years since 2020. I think uh Dune sort of came almost came to be and came to like Dune the what you know of Dune today came to existence in 2020 with DeFi summer really like June sort of exploded and went from nothing to >> to something basically everybody has a relationship to Dune through dashboards or X or whatever today um it's been a

long road I think like today we uh this week we announced like a bunch of stuff that brings student more into like critical workflows post and less of dashboards. >> So with our uh like suite of connectors, uh we're really trying to be more um more important to businesses like instead of just powering a dashboard, you power a workflow, you power an application, >> you power an agent, stuff like that. That's really the journey we're on right now. >> Cool. Very very cool. So basically this this idea of going from you know let's have these public you know verifiable onchain dashboards to now let's take this information and this data and actually use it as part of a broader workflow for either aentic commerce for

onchain uh actions just basically getting your data more integrated on with specific protocols on chain. >> Exactly. So the user generated dashboards aren't going anywhere. They're you know amazing. you can uh go from nothing to basically yeah uh full on live updated dashboard of anything that goes on on chain across like I think 120 blockchains on the today. So it's really really powerful and the thing that we're excited about is that there's this dual uh need for data. One is uh a protocol or a chain or or a business has a need to uh communicate [snorts] with data externally but also have a lot of internal needs. So for June to be like

that one-stop shop for for all those data needs is >> and you're effectively turning this data programmable and so now there's certain triggers that can be generated or performed actions taken out on chain. What are some of the ones you're most excited about? You mentioned AI. Um where do you think there's currently a gap in the market for this? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So one thing that we've seen is uh like the fact that there are 100 chains today makes it actually very complicated to support them at the application level not just for like AI or or wallets but also you know at the DeFi layer at the app layer. So we're really trying to like abstract away a lot of this complexity because we're already sort of ingesting all of this data already

making data models that make sense across them. So um that's one area that where we've done a lot of work across Dune but also our developer platform SIP. >> Yeah. So you guys have this Dune agents. Now it kind of it's uh reminiscent of like Microsoft Copilot if you if you've seen that. >> Um is this the first step into getting actually like a you know an agent assistant operating on chain with me? How do you guys kind of see that playing out? >> Yeah, that's a good question. So I think Dune like many other companies are sort of experimenting and trying to understand how AI will impact both the product and the business model and just the future really. I guess where my head is that now is that um we we just

announced this week the upcoming like model context protocol for Dune. So maybe the AI is actually will live more in your operating system but it will know how to use Dune because you know we we exposed the tools >> it'll be trained on Doom. >> Yeah. So that I think is basically the direction that AI is is taking. It's like less embedded into the app and more at the like user or operating system level. >> Um so we're we're trying to like um essentially figure out where it makes the most sense. Um but I'm really excited about like personally like I all the code I write is AI assisted, right?

Why would SQL be any different? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Have you guys thought about launching your own blockchain? We well we've we've toyed with the idea but never really gotten to a place where it would make sense. >> Makes sense. >> Um with this agent and and you know generally the the abundance of data that you have on Dune everyone's looking at Dune dashboards and they're thinking okay you know TVL these are you know se activity throughput all these things make up sort of the performance of a blockchain and and you know stats that the industry is keeping tabs on. What what are some metrics that you guys keep tabs on internally to make sure okay you know is it number of dashboards is it the amount of requests how are you tracking the growth of Dune and what are you seeing in your own internal metrics

>> yeah that's a great question so we we track a lot of the underlying let's call it like uh infrastructure usage so we care less about um like how many people visit the site or look at dashboards we care a lot about how many people are basically powering ing um like apps or workflows via the API. >> So when we're trying to figure out if something is uh like a particular chain integration or something is successful, we look at you know how many people are actually building something on top of this. Um but on top of that there are also metrics like the number number of queries, the number of dashboards, the number of visitors like you can really uh yeah I think you can basically proxy

the market cap of chains through the page views on view in a sense like you can really see the >> the same tread so to speak. Yeah. >> Are there pro programs or uh connections that you currently have in production that are running uh or as a result of this announcement this week? Are there any that you have planned uh that you'll come out with over the next few weeks to months? >> So the big one that we're really excited about is our DBT connect connector. It's a little technical, but essentially it means that you can use Dune as your own data warehouse to like import data, transform it, and use it alongside all the crypto data that's already on the platform. which means that Dune essentially goes from being, you know, um more of a tool where you play with

pre-made data to something that you can make your own. It becomes like a almost like a competitive tool to like a snowflake or a data bricks essentially. >> Yeah. Um you guys have been doing a lot of data for prediction markets lately. I've seen so many dashboards for different prediction markets. >> What is your personal stance on on prediction markets being this new news? How do you feel about kind of like Koshi Poly Market, their growth? um you know there's so much there's so much activity on um both of them and you can see the the growth on Dune what's kind of your personal stance on prediction markets and how does that correlate to Dune and kind of like what percentage of the traffic like are a lot of people interested in that and like curious from

your personal as well as from Dune's perspective >> yeah I mean I think it's clear that crypto is very narrative driven right we mentioned DeFi summer when when Dune came into existence then there was NFTs then there meme coins and then I think like uh stable coins and prediction markets are like the current thing. Uh well actually we have like L2s and roll-ups and chains for a while as well. I mean it's still a thing but um sorry prediction markets is a is a huge narrative right now. We we have like Google basically go out and say we're going to integrate this into search results. Uh which is really really interesting. I'm bummed because I bet uh a few hundred dollars on June actually winning the Uni Cup on Sunday this week, but we didn't we didn't make it. Um but personally like I don't know. I think it

makes total sense. There's a liquidity. The only thing is like we need a lot of liquidity, right, in order for it to be super useful and like accurate. >> Yeah. >> Um >> but yeah. >> Yeah. >> Awesome. Well, I don't have much else for you, Nath. I know we Yeah. >> I mean, just any any reflections on um Yeah. Buenosaris this week, Dune, just where you guys headed next. >> Um reflections on on Buenosidis. I think it's been an amazing week. There's I think 25,000 people here, which is >> um my reflection is when I got started in crypto in 2018, you know, we were 200 people at, you know, now you go to an event, it's 25,000. It's a whole different industry. Um, we have, you

know, players like Stripe and other fintex institutions that are making real uh entries into crypto. I think that is an incredibly bullish time to to be a crypto. >> Yeah, it is incredible. Thank you so much for coming on, man. >> Thanks for having me. Pleasure. Yeah. Cheers. See you next time. >> All right, guys. We'll be right back. >> [music] >> Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now.

How's >> amazing? Yeah, loving it here. This is great. Weather is amazing. You know, it's much nicer than London. Um, your first time? >> It is my first time. Yeah. came here. >> So yeah, it's cool. >> I've uh I brought a friend from England to Brazil for the first time. South Brazil's place close by here and he's since completely left London and >> Oh, really? moved to >> blame it. I'm considering it already. This is amazing. >> I love it. >> Yeah. Everyone wants to know when the metam [laughter] technical, nothing else.

>> Rumor mill says Q2 2026 airdrop. Is that what the poly market says? >> We'll have to double check. Yeah, >> Poly Market knows best. I don't know. [laughter] >> Man, Ethereum has shifted towards this massive product focused mindset. The EF has completely changed it stance on on you know just supporting builders gone from kind of like this like very like kind of autonomous or organization to more like this top down like trying to create uh a structure. How has that, you know, been from the consensus perspective, from a window perspective? What is the shift from the EF? What does that mean for Ethereum, for consensus? How does this, you know, how has this kind of played out from your perspective?

>> Yeah. Uh, I think it's incredibly positive. You know, I think, uh, I think I put a tweet out the other day and I was thinking, you know, back maybe a year ago, right, you had like John Shar saying, you know, Ethereum is missing its north star. And I remember responding into being like Ethereum is just missing a product manager, right? like someone just to like kind of take the reins and say like here's the product direction, here's our users, like our target customers, here's the problems they're facing and here's like how Ethereum can actually like work for them and solve those problems. And I think you know since the kind of changes of the EF over the last 6 to 12 months, you've seen that shift right from a a sort of technology mindset of like let's just build the coolest thing to a like

product focused mindset. And I think it's been great for Ethereum, it's been great for Linear because you know we're we're a layer 2. We are a customer of Ethereum. Um so yeah super positive and yeah from a consensus perspective obviously consensus mission is to make you know Ethereum trustwware meet global scale of uh of everyone in the world and I think uh Ethereum foundation being a key part of that is obviously super great. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Um we have an abundance of LTS all of them you know purpose driven some of them general purpose. Uh with the expansion it seems like we got a new a new rollup you know pretty consistently.

How does Lineia stand out? How does it differentiate itself? Yeah. So I actually have a bit of a thesis, right? I think there's a there's a new era of layer twos. >> Okay. >> So I think we had the first era, right? It was all about like building the rails, you know, just proving that we could extend Ethereum, not replace it. Like 5 years ago, >> we [clears throat] then entered like what I like to call the scaling era. It was all about being faster, cheaper, more efficient. That efficiency has a ceiling, right? When everyone's fast and cheap, what's your differentiation? >> And we're now going into this new era. And I don't know what to call it, but I think of it as like the sovereign era. And basically it's like less about infrastructure and more about L2s being economies you know network states where

the economics work. >> So when you look at it like from a P&L perspective like onchain revenues need to meet like exceed onchain expenditures >> and I think the L2s that are going to survive uh are the ones where they're thinking about like how to grow as like a sort of you know a network state with like real income and the citizens themselves are actually getting productive capital. This is one of the reasons that L2s are incredibly great from like an architecture because if you look at the alter alternative at layer ones, you know, they're earning less than like $100 in fees in 24 hours >> and they're spending millions of dollars to to validate to secure secure the network. L2's P&L looks much much better than that.

>> And so we're really differentiated because from that mindset, right, like what's what's linear revenue stream? So obviously there's transaction fees and MV you know we actually have this unique feature called um native yield right so on the the deposits in the ETH bridge that ETH gets staked the yield generated is income to the to the network uh we have a native stable coin the meta mask stable coin MUSD obviously the T bill yield these days I mean that's one of the biggest like revenue generators in crypto uh you know enterprise license fees from people using the linear stack so there's like all these like there's many more as well but all these sources of income are like great because the extra economy has a positive like GDP and on the expenditure side again linear is the only like L2 like from a token perspective it doesn't have a sort of

supply overhang right there's no 40 50% going to the team or VCs which creates this constant supply sort of uh like like uh price pressure um we have none of that so if you look at it the expenditures are very low it's just core protocol development and ecosystem incentives that positive ROI and all this revenue stream is coming in so the L2s are going to thrive in this next era basically the ones who have really nailed down their like economics. >> Once again, we hear about the revenue meta. >> It it just continues to pop up and up. >> I'm curious how you balance this perspective of like the actual economics and building a profitable business and this kind of mindset with the technical goals which would be effectively for all L2s to move stage zero, stage one, stage two in kind of the L2B ranking world.

How important is is is that compared to the kind of economic side? and perhaps you can kind of clue us in as to the latest developments on the technical side. >> Yeah, it's a good question. It it all comes down to prioritization, right? >> Right. There's a reason, for example, the the L2s, you know, go back 3 years. I remember there was a bit of a push to like have decentralized L2s. Correct. >> And everyone pretty much unanimously said, right, we're going to dep prioritize that performance because that's what the market was screaming, right? Users were telling us they wanted performance. We don't want decentralization. Now, obviously, the market evolves over time and like now you're having things like privacy, right? Which, you know, I've been working. Yeah, I've been working on privacy for years. Like we built a privacy roll up in 2022 before building

linear. Like we actually built um >> it's a bit of a side tangent, but I think it's interesting. Like we built a version of Tornado Cache that was regulated. This is in 2022 now. We didn't launch it because I was worried about like you know getting sued by the SEC at the time. There's all these kind of things, but um that technology is there, but no one really kind of screamed for the need. Uh so we kind of just had to balance like product roadmap moving to like stage one and stage two with obviously these things that are going to help Lineia be successful because again like Ethereum, right? It's all great having like values and and ethos, but like if you don't have customers in the business, it's all all to waste anyway.

>> So again, we prioritize this feature called native yield very recently because that's going to make Linear stand out. >> And then there's other things like, you know, stage two, for example, linear is actually one of the only stacks that is going to be very easily made as a native roller because of the approach we took to the ZKVM. So, one of the unique things about the tech that's probably worth visiting is like >> we're still the only ones that actually directly arratize the EVM for the ZKVM. Everyone else is like risk five, ZKVM abstraction. >> The difference there is like, you know, I like to say if you're um if you're doing like a you know, open heart surgery, right? Like there's two things.

You could have like a high precision scalpel which is kind of like linear or you could have like a Swiss Army knife which is like a ZKVN, right? >> Now, if you're in like the woods and you want to go camping, like you want the Swiss Army knife. It's good for lots of stuff. you don't want a high precision scale, but if you want to just prove the EVM, like that's what we focused on and we're really good at it. >> Um, so from a technology perspective, we we also are very aligned with like the EVM spec and can be a native roll up. And I think that's kind of like a skipping, you can basically skip yourself to stage two just from being a native rollup >> and and that's a really exciting transition that I think a lot of rollups are thinking about. They're weighing

some of the positive, the negatives. Um, give us your thesis on native roll-ups. Why did you choose to build in this direction? have have obviously embraced you know building d uh this directly into the linear protocol. Um what what about native rollups made it so exciting that you chose this direction? Yeah, I mean we we actually kind of made the decision years ago that we were just going to build as close as we could to the EVM. Like again, this has been like a fivey year, six year bet for us. You know, we said right there's the EVM, everyone's building a different, you know, there's optimistic rollups. There was nonem ZK rollups. We just said we're going to build the best CK EVM and we've been doing that for 5, six years. And one of the reasons for that is that we want to be as close to the L1 as possible. Kind

of in many ways anticipating what I think is happening now, which is this reconsolidation back to Ethereum. It was inevitable, right? And I think our positioning was again as part of consensus, right? Like if Ethereum could scale on its own without L2s, we wouldn't build L2. We don't care. We just want to see Ethereum successful. We think L has a core part to play in that. Um and native rollups have kind of been a like happen stance, right? I mean, we were talking about these kind of creep and pulse years ago and EIP as well. I think Vitalic proposed something like, you know, 3 four years ago to the lik of native rollup. EVM and EVM was always like an understanding, but um but yeah, again, it's all about us being as close as you can to L1 because Ethereum is what makes L2's great. So, kind of going

in two different directions is not going to help. >> And before we move off native rolls, could you just remind our audience because we've been in New York, been talking to the suits, we've been talking about a lot of financial concepts and clarity act and all these things. >> You know, we talked about native roll-ups. actually had a big native roll-ups live stream a little while ago, but remind our audience what is it? What are native roll-ups at a high level and and what value do they do they provide? >> Yeah, so when you think of a like an L2, you can break it down. There's the sequencing of transactions, there's the execution of those transactions, how they actually get executed like on the blockchain itself. Uh you also have data availability and for you true roll-ups, they use the Ethereum DA layer itself.

And then you have settlement and at least for basically what you're doing with a native rollup is the execution part. Today it happens like on the L2 itself >> with a native roll up there's a new pre-ompile it's called the execute pre-ompile. It's still being worked on so there's lots to kind of figure out >> but that basically takes the execution of the rollup and does it inside the layer one. Right? So now the layer 1 Ethereum is the one that executing the order transactions. And that is really interesting because it's almost like a modular approach to like a computer. Right? The sequencing can be a base roll up. It can be a decentralized L2. It could be a centralized L2. The execution is what's happening inside the EVM on layer 1. And that's really cool because all of a sudden, you know, you don't

have to have um separate upgrades to the Ethereum itself. You don't have to have security councils, which is a kind of, you know, attack vector. So, when you're talking about institutions, right? >> Mhm. >> They love the EVM, right? Whenever I talk to them, like for them, this is 10 years of billions of dollars of R&D. Great. Give me the EVM. Vanilla is what you can. Then they see all these things around like you know trust assumptions to security council. So to be able to say right Ethereum's executing your transactions uh and there's no like you know security council like a bunch of people who might be anonymous might not um that's also really attractive for them. So just removing as much trust as you can >> and one one more followup if if you know we're moving execution from L2s back to the L1

>> won't we see congestion if we see you know a lot of activity all at once and all of that is occurring on L1 uh even through native rollups why won't that spike gas or or cause a lot of congestion on the network >> yeah I mean it's a good question like there definitely could be again bottlenecks like from that design for sure I think it depends on how many native rollups there are like how much throughput's coming. I I tend to not worry about that. Like if we have that problem, it's a good problem to have. I think the the more like pressing issue is like actually finding valuable things for people to do on chain that it's sustainable. Um so yeah, I think if we if we do have native rollups and they're causing like you know like bottlenecks, then uh we'll kind of cross that bridge

when it comes to it. >> Got it. Man, um we're running really short time windows here. Last thing for you. We've, you know, we're kind of like juxtaposing the, you know, two weeks ago in New York City at SmartCon, Chainlink event, it was literally like JP Morgan, DCC, Fed, White House, and then, you know, here at Dev Connect, it's like hard tech. It's very much builder oriented. What is what is kind of Lineia's role in terms of integrating these two worlds, right? Like we see like Chainley is succeeding successfully in a massive way right now because they're kind of standing in between like both worlds and really bringing them together. what is uh what is your stance with Lineia and Consensus in this realm?

>> Yeah, so we've been anticipating this for a while. We're actually probably one of the other organizations that are best positioned to do this. The brand of consensus is known and trusted by all of these institutions. We're talking to all these institutions. Everything we actually did even with Linear, right? If you look if you look back, you can see those design decisions, right? Linear is not a DAO, right? Because enterprises, they don't like Dows, right? Linear is a consortium. It's something that enterprises understand. it connects to the crypto native world because you can still have accountability and speed and transparency, but you also have this like model that's very familiar with institutions. Um, so yeah, we're we're doing a great job right now like educating and bringing those like big corporations on chain. I will say there's probably like a window right now where if we're not careful and we're

complacent, Ethereum could still lose, >> right? That's the reality. Um there's decisions being made probably in the next six to 12 months that are going to >> decide the future of the space enormously potentially forever. I think there's probably a one-way door happening right now because again you you spoke about the likes of >> DTCC like Euro clear swift these kind of entities right where they decide to put their blockchain operations whether that's on L2 on Ethereum >> or build their own >> or build their own that is going to be like >> believe it or not yeah again there's probably three or four companies organizations protocols that really drive the existing world and I think yeah making sure they land in a crypto native way that aligns with the ethos of like again what we believe is part of Ethereum is super important. Yeah,

>> thanks for your time. >> Appreciate you, man. Appreciate it. >> Have a great week. >> Cheers. >> See you next time. >> Yeah, I'm I'm enjoying it. I like the tech. I like the technical talk. >> It's that intersection, not the focus. It is that intersection of >> it is the smart. It is the suits. It is the institutions and it is the >> but it's it's where the suits land because it feels like it feels like you know they they've been flying you know into this into this hurricane into this world for you know years. They've been doing research and now it's finally time for for them to pick where they're going to uh put their roots and and establish themselves on >> being set.

>> Yeah, exactly. And everyone's entering the room and and taking their seat. So, we'll we'll see where everyone shakes up. Let's do a quick commercial break uh before coming back with our next guest. >> Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his Rio upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable [music] coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. [music] >> Guys, welcome to uh Bossarus.

>> Thank you. >> Great. I mean, you know, I've been walking around uh feels very like safe around here. You know, all these trees near the park. Um went for like a nice run in the morning down near the water. Nice. >> Yeah. So definitely the coffee is great. >> Did you see the animals just outside? >> Patagonian maras. >> They look like happy maras. They look like really big bunnies. >> Before you guys out of here, definitely check them out. Just outside there in the wild. >> Wow. Let's go take a look after.

>> Nice. >> Well, I think it's your first time on the show. >> It is. >> Yeah. So would love to get a quick intro about yourself, what you do with Mark and the super chain and just >> Yeah, cool. Uh I'm Eli. I'm I lead half the product team protocol lead. Uh relatively small team of PMs. We basically divide ourselves chain level and below is what my team focuses on and then our uh ecosystem team focuses more like application layer, asset layer. So a lot of things I work on especially with Mark are around interoperability, scalability, fee markets, proof systems. Basically, how do we enable all of applications on the chain to be fast, cheap, and offer great user experiences?

>> Beautiful. Beautiful. I saw your tweet mark. It was like, I think if we spend less time talking about the values of of Ethereum and more time talking about the value proposition of Ethereum, we'd get farther. You've been known to have these types of tweets smart. Um, it's been it's may have been a year since you've six months. Uh, maybe just catch us up to speed, guys. What's what's the latest on the super chain? Obviously, we've seen tons of success from some chains there. Um, and we're also seeing different developments happening in terms of narratives and in terms of the mindset of Ethereum. It feels like it's kind of coming back to the L1 in many ways. People are really kind of rallying behind this kind of like synchronization. Um, you know, catch us up here.

>> Totally. You know, time is definitely a pendulum. you know these narratives they come and they go and you know there were times where you know everyone was trying to build on L1 and then we saw the fees spike it's pretty crazy we haven't seen fees really spike >> at all >> it's been weird >> a little bit during 1010 but it really didn't spike as much as what we were used to 2020 days >> my hypothesis there is that it has to do with you know the block times >> like we need to like make shorter block times because everyone at this point is just so used to you you know, milliseconds like what Salana gives you.

You know, like you know, with Optack, we have flash blocks. So, you know, inspire a little bit >> by Salana trying to stream transaction confirmation back to the users. >> But, you know, the narratives, they come and they go and it's really important to stay convicted in long-term vision like we believe in scaling Ethereum. We believe that we can bring everyone in the world on chain. Um we think that we can do this with the OP stack. Um obviously it's a lot of work but we have learned a lot. um you know running a blockchain in production is a lot more difficult than you would expect just like upgrading it you know coordinating with L1 you know constantly um having

you know alerting running and like having your monitoring and runbooks and yeah it's been a really exciting ride um really defining the product and really understanding who the users are and you know understanding how we go from where we are and coming up with like a great plan to try to bring the world on chain. >> Yeah. >> So I I think there's two kind of like juxtaposed forces happening right now in the Ethereum world. You've got the one side which is what you're saying work.

It's the users, it's the products, it's the uh you know kind of revenue, it's the economic side of like making you know making this make sense, right? you know, you got these proof ofstake L1's that are cutting their inflation down. They're realizing that, well, we don't really need to spend this much this much capital on security. It's kind of a meme yada yada. So, that whole thing is happening. L2s have a big advantage compared to L1's. Um, but still trying to figure out what that consistent revenue is, who what that onchain business is. There's neo banks, there's kind of more like hyper gambling stuff, there's stable coins, there's there's art everywhere kind of yields. So, all of that is happening and like is a big focus. And then you've got the whole like, all right, let's get to stage one and to stage two and like build these

like hyper resilient systems. So I'm I'm curious from both your perspectives how how you guys kind of balance these two forces. What is the prioritization schedule like for optimism for superchain um and just generally how you're thinking about these two uh ideas? >> Yeah, I think at a high level ultimately goes back to who the users are and what the use cases are. And while there are critically important things around building robust resilient systems, getting to stage two over time, doing that for the sake of doing that just fundamentally does not make sense for many many different use cases. So it's really a question of sort of like what is the right balance? What is the right progression here? How do we sort of start where we are today and slowly but surely move in a direction where we're simultaneously solving user problems and customer problems while also building

this robust resilient world that we are all hoping to get to eventually. If you just sort of like launch chains at stage two and say, "Hey, you can come via stage two totally trust us roll up, but it's super expensive. It's slow. You can't scale your chain." Like great, you build a perfectly decentralized chain that no one can actually use. And it's really a matter of finding a balance between these two things. Investing in the right technical areas, working with the right technical partners to make sure that as these chains do continue to scale, we're not just recentralizing everything and we can approach sort of both of them uh in the most efficient way. that that was fuel v1. Fuel v1 was a stage two rollout, but no one used it because it wasn't a value proposition for you to use it, right? Um and and so

you know that that's certainly what the right way to think about it is. How do you navigate that? How how do you pick and choose you know this these are the things that we're going to prioritize at a certain time. >> It's ultimately a matter of listening to our customers and in this perspective a lot of our customers are we're talking about chains here. So for various different reasons, Bass has perspectives on things, uni chain has perspectives on things, world has perspectives on things, and it's a matter of just like talking to them, really understanding what their motivations are, why they care about these things, what they're hearing from their users, who are application builders, who are asset issuers, who are whales, who are retail users, and finding the right balance uh of how we can uh help them move their businesses forward and solve their

problems. I think a lot of people forget that some of the most successful rollups are on the super chain like mentioned base and world and uh uni chain. What is the relationship with these customers now? How are they using super chain and generally how is the the progression of these rollups evolved from when they first started using the super chain up until now? >> Take it. >> Yeah. So um they are all our paying customers. >> Yeah, you can [laughter] look on chain, right? The data is all on chain. That's what I love about this industry is that you can just go poke around and see what's happening. Just look on chain.

Everything is there. Don't listen to what everyone's talking about on X. Look on chain. That's where the real alpha is. >> So yeah, I mean there are paying customers and we work very closely with them. We help them solve problems. Um we are trying to build out the most compelling um blockchain um you know platform for people that want to launch chains in all of crypto. That's our goal. >> Yeah. >> But I think you do point out a great thing is everyone knows these names but they don't necessarily associate them with optimism and the super chain. And this is something that we know is a problem internally and it's something that we're focused on helping to like build more of that brand association so that uh

companies that are looking to launch chains, they see what B is doing, they see what Uni Chain is doing, they associate that with the OP stack, they want to come work with us. And really the fundamental reason that we care about this obviously revenue, but one of the major benefits of being an open source uh project is that things that Bass is doing in the protocol layer value to every other chain in the super chain. So more of these big customers that we have all building on the super chain, it's a very much like a positive some uh protocol improvement and it just improves uh the networks for everyone. >> So how excited are you guys about the upcoming Ethereum uh upgrade? I know that a lot of chain uh chains are very you say Ethereum alliance use Ethereum for DA and it's you know it's it's

scaling. Um how how important is that for you guys? >> It's very important. Um, blobs. More blobs are good. We're going to be getting lots of blobs coming Q4 um into early next year. We're going to be ramping up the number of blobs that Ethereum provides. So, yeah, this is going to unlock the ability to scale more and, you know, process more transactions on L2. So, very excited about that. Um, yeah, and I think, you know, it's still early because there's still a lot of features that we need to ship on L2. There's still a lot of features that need to be shipped in L1.

Um, you know, I've been following along a little bit with like lean Ethereum. >> Um, take on that. >> The promise of shorter slot times like is very faster finality is very appealing. um would really love to have the Ethereum Foundation, someone from their product team to reach out to us to ask us what our problems are and how they can solve them. That's my one ask. >> Yeah, we have Ethereum people coming on over the next, you know, this this whole week. We >> what are your problems?

>> What are your problems? We'll relay them. We need faster finality >> for interrupt or for >> um I mean interop is just a cherry on top but generally um our customers um are choosing to go with all L1's one of the major reasons is faster finality right and obviously everything is tradeoffs >> but um if Ethereum could offer some faster finality mechanism even if it's like a softer faster finality um that would be a huge win for winning more all L1's to L2.

>> Um because the reality is is a lot of these um potential chain customers, they don't really understand the trade-offs and they need to be educated. >> And just like the meme of fast finality is so strong that you can't really be like, "Oh, but if it was World War II, like the network would progress and they're under a network partition." Like like they're going to be like, "What?" Yeah. And and so from the use case perspective of something like like BERS or something like that is a highly financialized important information uh or you know uh asset transfers etc. these institutions or these customers they're looking for that that instant confirmation

non-reversible uh kind of like aspect of fast finality. They don't even want this kind of like reorg window. They just want like the guarantee uh as fast as possible. Yeah, I mean we should aim to replicate the experience that they have today >> um and make it better. >> And um I think about when I use a payment network like I click the button and then it sends and you know like that's what we need to get to where um we shouldn't be displaying to the user that like oh this hasn't finalized yet and stuff like that. like let the infrastructure layer under the hood handle that let them be exposed to the

risk like the solvers like that's their job and then um above that to the humans to the users they just get like a nice you know instant confirmation >> ultimately if we want to bring the world on chain we have to make it so unbelievably easy that they don't even think about these things they don't have to know what a confirmation is they click buttons in a UI like they do today they gain all of the advantage of doing it in decentralized systems and onchain but they don't need to know all of the technical details all of the terminology around this >> 100% and uh the other thing that the Ethereum kind of foundation has announced this week is this privacy effort. How do you guys kind of uh again these narratives become they go right? I mean it's just like take us back to 2015

and and then Zcash is pumping now. Everyone's like privacy and you know I think this is very very uh integrated with what you guys are saying these institutions these folks they want privacy because that's that's what we're all used to >> right so how are you guys what's your take on this from Ethereum how you guys think about this from the super chain >> yeah I love it I talked to banks fintex payment companies every single one of them asks about privacy what our privacy solutions are how this differs from their infrastructure today you start to ask a couple probing questions what do you need to be private it, what are your compliance obligations? They don't really have answers to this. And because it's fundamentally such a different mental model for them from operating in a centralized hosted service running on AWS where everything is by default

private than to move to a fully public transparent chain. I think it's going to take us a little while to like really understand what the fundamental requirements around privacy are. But at the same time, the Ethereum Foundation pushing to do privacy means that the two of these things are happening together as we're really refining those requirements for customers to understand what they mean by privacy. all of the technical pieces are also being built at the same time that allow us to start to to put these two things together and really start to on board more of these uh these institutions and fintex. >> One interesting thing to just call out very explicitly is um with privacy people are getting confused about who the user is. So there's um you know more like OG people in the space they want

privacy in the sense where literally no one else in the universe can know except for them >> and whereas um you know a lot of these institutions they want to have a back door and I would make the claim that both of these are privacy and I think it's perfectly fine to build both of them and I think that there's like a lot of um controversy like going on for example example, privacy pools has like this layer where it's a compliance layer in front of it. And you know, I think that's great because it's going to increase adoption. Um, and but at the same time, if you're building something that is immutable, like you know, trustless, completely hardcore, um, I

think that's great, too. But, um, there's just like this tradeoff in the user experience. And ultimately the goal is to get crypto adoption. >> Yeah. >> And um a lot of people in the space they build for worstc case scenarios >> and we definitely need that. Um but at the same time um some people are building for average case >> right >> and I think that's going to be like the big distinction in a lot of networks and applications over the coming years.

Ethereum is always building for the worst case >> right >> and you know that's why it's a lot slower than say other networks. >> Um so >> yeah I'm excited to see what sort of you know cool apps there are to use you know in in the future. >> Eli and Mark last for you. We're on a on a tight time here. I'm sure you you guys are slammed. What is the you know 2026 road map for the super chain for optimism? What what is the big goal? What what swings are you thinking? >> You want to go first? >> You take it.

>> I think there's a couple things. Unlock near infinite horizontal scalability for chains where you have a single chain or a single branded chain. They're able to horizontally scale to tens of giga gas by launching multiple. Think of them as shards. user experience, single chain, everything just kind of works behind the scenes, all enabled by a protocol level interop on the OP stack. That's one. Second big one is starting to onboard many more of these institutions uh and hundreds of millions of consumers through those institutions. What that probably starts to look like is users are earning yield for balances held in their existing fintech applications.

Maybe they know it's on chain, maybe they don't know it's on chain, but they're off they're receiving unique value props that are only enabled by doing things on chain. Hopefully we'll have three, four, five, 10 uh of those types of customers rolling out uh in the next year. Maybe they're doing this on open mainet existing chains, maybe they're launching their own chains. I think it's a lot of different ways that can uh play out. And I think maybe the the biggest question here is not just what can the superchain do for Ethereum uh or the role of the superchain in Ethereum, but how can the super chain and the opt help Ethereum expand sort of its role in the world. We're not living in a world where Ethereum has already won. There are all L1's launching.

There's Salana. How does the super chain and the OP stack help Ethereum really to grow the entire ecosystem? >> Yeah. >> And Mark, what what are you most excited about 2026? >> Yeah, I mean I am most excited about um you know it seems like it might be a bare market. Yeah. So, I'm kind of excited about like things to calm down a little bit and, you know, getting getting rid of all the noise and being able to really focus on building the things that drive the next, you know, bubble.

>> That's how it always plays out. >> You mean like Tom Lance CBC or you mean like coin or Trump? >> All this all this. All this and above. Yeah. And you know when um the market settles you know everyone leaves crypto then you know we'll be here we'll be building and you know the goal is to um build the most compelling blockchain framework so that the next killer apps launch in the super chain. Right? Why did Hyperlid not launch on Ethereum like this as an Ethereum person? this really bothers me. Yeah.

>> You know, but at the same time, I'm not gonna sit here and complain that, oh, obviously Ethereum was the place to launch. It's like, no. >> Like, every person that says that, >> they need to be kicked out of Ethereum or like they need to not have a platform because we need to be paranoid. We need to remember that we have not won. We need to keep working. We need to like focus. >> Competition is tough out there. Um, you know, so we need to build the platform >> that allows for the killer app of 2027.

>> Yeah. >> To be built in the super chain. >> Yeah. >> Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. Cheers. >> Thanks. See you next time. Thanks, >> guys. We'll keep it rolling. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Couple hours in. Um, >> yeah. L2s and uh horizontally with infinite scalability. >> Up next, I think we'll have Mike here from Talis. We'll take a quick commercial break and get up to it. [music] KHI is the world's largest [music] prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today.

>> [music] >> We are back from commercial >> with Mike. >> How's it going, guys? >> How you enjoying uh VA? I'm sure you've been here before. >> Yeah, I've been here. Languages welcoming, you know, speaking Spanish, just good food, good people. >> It's a nice place. >> Spending time in Panama. >> Yeah, I've been spending most of the time there recently this area and then traveling, you know, every conference. So, it's been quite a ride recently. >> Like, a lot of the things that you were talking about six months to a year ago have started to pan out. AI prediction markets, a lot of these things. What uh what have the last few months been like?

>> It's been crazy, man. I think just the uptick in how we've seen people just integrate AI systems into their workflows or even just start thinking about making DeFi protocols have AI in them, which is I think we discussed this back in February, March of last year even. So, it's been quite crazy to ride that wave. And you know, we're just capitalizing for what's coming up next. >> Yeah. So, you guys are uh getting ready to launch your token, getting ready to kind of take the next step as a network. Um you >> also great great ticker.

>> You like it? [laughter] >> America. It's also uh it's also like a very together community feeling. And it's the end of so uh >> it's the end of Talis, but it's also the beginning token product. What is the what is the kind of like uh state of the agentic workflows within Telus? Um you know what sectors are you guys most focused on implementing right now? You know catch us up and our audience a bit about progress. >> Yeah of course as our core our technology is a decentralized automation framework. You could think about it as an N8N or Zapier but on web 3 rails. The idea is they could put in multiple tools to work together whether they're onchain services like any type of smart contract

or even off-chain services like Twitter, Stripe, Discord, Telegram, whatever you might want to do. And the overall idea is to bring the workflow execution of the agents onchain. So as a developer, you could come you could piece all these building blocks together and then just run a workflow have it run in decentralized uh rails, you know, continuously. we saw today uh cloudflare went down all these like services went down chat GBT was down so it's another reason of like why we want to have AI in decentralized systems and just run indefinitely with guarantees in terms of what we're focusing on workflows >> we have always been heavy in DeFi we think that you know automation and DeFi as more assets come on chain it's going to be more and more prominent then we

also have been thinking a lot in terms of AI entertainment and how you can put agent versus agent competitions and how people you know, get entertained by seeing agents interact and even just speculate on the outcomes of these games. >> Yeah. >> Um, we've had automation for a while, right? Uh, Talis is, uh, using this, but also using AI agents. Uh, we had Dune on earlier that, you know, was similarly talking about making some of the data programmable and also implementing this into agents. Um, how are you planning on extending this? What role do prediction markets potentially play? Uh, generally, what's the value proposition here that you want to communicate to end users?

Yeah. So the the prediction market component comes from our application that we're incubating where I was talking about agent versus agent gaming and markets where you could have agents compete against one another in structured competitions that developers or anybody could come and devel develop in the platform and then >> people and humans or even other agents can speculate on the outcomes and these games get resolved in prediction markets. So I think it's a novel use case of how you could leverage attent the attention economy within AI and yeah that's that's mostly it in terms of this PMs and how we're approaching it as you know our application and the go to market scene and we've you know gotten a lot of traction on that a lot of people IP brands are excited about seeing this come together and you know we're building games with them making sure

that we have an ecosystem of builders that will eventually bring network effects to our underlying framework and infrastructure. >> Yeah. So, so this nexus uh kind of like platform that you guys are using for all these agents, what is the kind of partnership side of things or who you need to collaborate with to make this kind of fulfilling your vision? Who is the who are the partners that you're working with? >> So, it's interesting because a lot of people just build infrastructure and they hope partners will come. We we took a different approach where we said, "Okay, probably nobody's going to know how to build something on our tech better than us. So, we're going to build it ourselves. want to show people how it's built and then you know eventually this will have network effects and ultim and acrewue value to our underlying platform. So on the say consumer side of

things we are partnering with gaming brands IP brands that want to bring monetization to their IP or even you know existing assets and then in terms of the infrastructure itself we're also talking to multiple projects on the sui ecosystem like not uh like zo who want to build defi augmented protocols you know you have a pool that needs to be rebalanced with AI but you want this to be decentralized and have transparency for users so we're actually making sure that you know they can have decentralization end to end on our platform Yeah. And you guys are using the Walrus the Walrus platform. Is that correct? To store some of the data or train data or >> Yeah. So Walrus is a decentralized uh data storage solution. Uh we because we're mostly sui native. Our smart

contracts are on sui our tokens going to be on sui. We're definitely going to have a lot of interoperability with this overall sui ecosystem. So we're leveraging walrus to store all this agent metadata, agent brains or even outputs that are going to be expensive to store anywhere anywhere else. Traditionally blockchains are not built for storage mostly for transactionbased assets and we definitely want to see agents go beyond that and actually create content, store this content for later use, share content, monetize it and so forth and that is all enabled by walrus.

>> Yeah, got it. So, host token, what is the kind of objective for Talos, right? Obviously, uh you know, that's kind of a milestone in in of itself, what does 2026 look like for you guys? How do you plan to kind of reignite the community, reignite the product, keep shipping? Like what does that actually look like? >> So, first things first, like shipping number one, you know, making sure that we're always shipping, always making sure that we get things out the door. I if I would have to summarize what I envision 2026 to be like in one word is adoption. You know token is the end of the word talent but it's the beginning of the growth of the ecosystem and you know launching the platform making sure that we can showcase our technology making sure that developers and other

wider audiences can really understand and come and build. So we could create these network effects and actually have a platform that gets adopted that could be meaningful for users that can drive revenue for the protocol and ultimately to benefit the token holders. >> Last thing from us, if you have to give one message to the community today about uh the future of AI crypto, this entire sector, what it's like to be a builder in there, investor in there, what would you tell them? What are things to watch out for? uh what the most exciting parts of the sector is where the value is going to increase and give us a message about this sector uh that we haven't heard before.

>> So first things first I wouldn't pay attention to the market. I think it's very easy to get distracted and seeing token prices go down and I'm not an expert. I always try to focus on on building and thinking long term. So you know ultimately the market's going to be there ultimately it's going to go up. So just if you keep your mind into surviving this whole wave you're going to be well off. I do think that another thing to keep an eye out is the execution layer of agents. We've seen compute, we've seen data storage, we've seen uh what else like different types of models, but ultimately the value occurs in the execution side of things where you know you're going to be able to pay an agent to execute something or just do your homework or just run any

type of workflow. That's where people are going to be spending money on and that's what we're trying to capitalize. So, you know, I I always like to think and explain that, you know, agents are going to be the holy grail and it's not Yeah, models are going to be smart and they're going to keep getting smarter, but ultimately you're going to have agents that will run with tools that will, you know, actually execute your workflows that will make your life easier and so forth. >> Awesome. Thanks so much, man. Absolute pleasure. >> Have a great likewise, guys. Great seeing you. Cheers. See you again soon. >> All right, guys. We're going to take another quick break. See you in a sec. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private, and here today. Visit near.ai

to have a fully private chat experience. >> Well, it was a absolute pleasure at SmartCon a couple weeks ago. >> Oh, man. I'm glad glad you guys were there. Did you miss it? >> Oh, uh, no. I was there. It It was a great time. >> I didn't see You must have been There was tremendous meetings in the back every single half hour. >> Man, it was a blur. It really was. There was people everywhere. There was like what, three different floors of things going on. Gave a couple panels. So, it was a great time, >> man. I think like what what Shake has done so well is actually like bring together the like the DeFi native world and befriend some of the largest institutions and like push an

educational effort there while also securing the DeFi world. Um, >> you know, talk to us a bit about the strategy here. I know that you're focused more on kind of like the institutional side of things. Um, how does that kind of uh coales with this, you know, DeFi world here at Dev Connect? It's very kind of developer and builder oriented. >> Yeah, for sure. and and like um I've been in this industry for about 8 years, so I'm pretty defi native. Um but kind of bridging bridging the gap, so to speak, and bringing the institutional players over. Um you know, I would say SmartCon this year was a great example of of actually seeing this happen and play out in real time. We actually had institutional players talking about tokenization and working with DeFi players that have been building these,

you know, vital pieces of infra infrastructure for years. Um and then you see things like um our partners over at A, you know, and their their recent launch with A Horizon. They're working with, you know, very large asset issuers out there and institutional players and like really bringing this value on chain like we've always envisioned and planned for. So I really see the the convergence just kind of naturally happening now. I think there's a couple factors of why that why that is now, but um you know, it's really exciting to be kind of part of that that uh that process and maturity.

>> Yeah. Why do you think it's happening now of all times? Is it regulation? Is it technology engineering? >> I think yeah, it's it's a bit of both. So, um obviously there's been some positive changes in regulation specifically in the states that have kind of uh eased people's minds and uh maybe um accelerated the competitive uh you know aspects of it. So, you know, especially in the states, you really want to be first in business, get that that first to market edge. Um, and now that the the tensions have eased a bit, this is kind of really kind of calmed some minds, open some doors on top of, you know, these institutions, it's not like just because regulation was kind of something in their way. It's not like they haven't been exploring, they

haven't been testing things out, they haven't been talking, they they certainly have, they've been putting the years of effort and study in. >> Um, they've been, you know, looking at all different types of options and infrastructure. They've been putting together proof of concepts, but now it's actually time to to go live, go on prod. >> Yeah. Um, we spoke to Sergey. It was a tremendous conversation. Uh, he was really fired up about confidential compute. Yes. >> Uh, CR as well. Um, what do these new launches bring to these institutions because and and we've talked about it, we did, you know, a couple weeks ago as well. you really are approaching it from both sides and and the benefit of that is that whether you're coming at it from the DeFi angle or the institutional angle, you end up finding chain link as the gateway to the other side. And so

I'm just curious about uh what these new additions are going to bring to the entire chain link stack. >> Yeah. No, great call out. And you know, I'll just touch on CR or chain link runtime environment uh for full. And you know, folks often look at this as a new product launch, but actually it really isn't. This is the next iteration of chain link architecture and what it allows folks to do is to build those type of compliance tooling. Build that the aspects of confidential compute really have those bells and whistles that the institutional players need >> to, you know, hit their compliance check boxes, you know, have the privacy of their of their user base on chain and still kind of, you know, actually play within the regulatory environments uh

appropriately. Um you know previously if you needed something with chain link you had to come to chain link labs to have that developed now CR chain link runtime environment these developers at the institutions they have a CLI they jump right in they're start they're they're actually coding chain link oracles themselves now so this is like a much more open development platform and a more true form envision of what chain links always aimed to be >> yeah and how do you think about uh actually solving the problems that the institutions face, right? So, you know, there's a lot of uh talk here >> in the in Bonosarus about privacy, about lean Ethereum, about scaling um you know

you know building onchain onchain um actual businesses and companies and really kind of creating this new economy but but you know the old economy or the current economy it it firmly exists and it firmly is trying to come on on chain. what problems are you trying to solve for these institutions like like maybe better ask what is the real use cases that they are after and what is kind of fugazi on the headlines. >> Sure. So in terms of real use cases and you know folks talk about interoperability a lot right and we you know of course we have our our CCIP crosschain interoperability protocol connects blockchains but when institutions to your point this legacy tech is these are behemoths they they

actually power finance in the world today these aren't something that you change with a flip of the switch now so what there you know and I've had these discussions with CTO's you know uh csos CEOs across these organizations they asked like so do I rebuild my entire tech stack >> cuz that's going to take a really long time to do but instead if you use something like chain link runtime environment you actually get that interoperability where their current legacy systems can be translated and operated and come out to blockchain events >> so you can really start having these orchestrated workflows and that's what they really want. They want to be able to orchestrate their current business and expand to onchain. And then it's

going to be, at least from my perspective, a gradual progression where more and more of their businesses come on chain. And in terms of like what's legitimate, what do they actually need? They need those compliance check boxes. I'll give you an example. Um especially institutions doing um transactions globally. Um you're now looking at regulatory environments and compliance hurdles that are in two completely different regions. sometimes even three, four, five different regions. You know, if you're a bank in the United States and you're operating your own maybe private chain or even a public chain like Ethereum, you have your compliance needs that are in the states. If you're going to do business with a bank out in Hong Kong, you also need to make make sure you can have the compliance and

regulatory aspects considered for in Hong Kong as well as communicate to those systems as well as have external data inputs. And that's where Chainlink can really orchestrate all of that to make it a reality. >> Well, what's it like working with Sergey? >> It's for Sergey. >> Oh, yeah. It's a lot of fun. Uh and it's it's definitely uh it's a lot of fun. >> It's look um you know they call us uh the chain link Marines for a reason. Yeah. >> Uh externally and we we operate as a militant unit internally as well. We have very clear Yeah. We have very clear guidelines. Uh we have very clear aspects of ownership and focus. Uh we have very open and clear lines of

communication and dialogue internally. We talk about what's preventing success from happening and how do we tackle that as a unit to make a success happen and actually change the world. When you sit with Sergey and you you have meetings with him, he'll be very very clear and direct. We're here to build worldchanging technology and if that's what you want to do, then you come work at Chain Link. >> Yeah. How how long have you been at Chainlink? >> I've been at Chain Link five years now. >> Five years. >> Yeah. >> Um you've seen a lot >> since you've been there. Uh >> the organization is 700 plus people now.

How has it evolved? >> You know, when when you came in, how many people and you've obviously seen it grow both in terms of internal team, external partners. Um has the culture remained the same. How have you been able to instill like that crypton native vibe that chain link really has at its core with all the people coming in with all the external partners? How do you how do you maintain the original ethos? >> Yeah, of course. Great great question. Yeah, I did come in we were probably like I don't know a few dozen uh folks when when I first arrived. We were on two blockchains and we had one product that was price feeds. Um so you expand out today we're on I don't know 60 70 plus blockchains. We have eight different product lines and to your

point we've we've 10xed in the size. Now how do we keep that focus uh mindset startup culture? >> We we break out into small units uh internally that keep that kind of dedicated ferocity that you would find at at a startup. And we have some core principles. One of it like the very top line is ownership. if there is a very clear owner of anything that we're working on at any given time. Okay? >> So, you know, you know exactly who to go to, you know who exactly is working on that problem, you know exactly what they're focused on uh when it comes to that aspect of what we're trying to achieve. So, you try to expand that as best you can um and make sure your information silos don't uh you know kind

of overdevelop and that's how you pro progress with a ship this size. >> Awesome. >> Well, thanks for your time. Congrats on the success. It's been awesome to watch from afar and be a part of it. And thank you for boarding the entire world. >> Appreciate you coming out and also appreciate you having us and the whole Chainlink team having us the last couple weeks. >> Oh, for sure. Thank you guys. I really love what you guys do here. So, thank you for having an honor. >> We'll see you again soon. Cheers, >> guys. We'll be right back. Quick commercial break. We've got Adel up next. >> [music] >> Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with [music] Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start

trading today. [music] >> All right, we're live. We got with us. >> Welcome. We're in your home country, in your home city. How does it feel to have 20,000 people from Ethereum in your home country? Honestly, it's crazy because I've been trying to advocate for this since I definitely I basically started in crypto, which was like in 2021, and finally they decided to do it here. So, it's incredible to see that. >> Yeah, it's really cool.

>> There's been quite the engagement hack on Twitter where if you post something about what beautiful photos, did you see that? >> All of the art in 10 like people are are it's like hitting their algorithm. >> Thousands of likes. I did have that like 5K, 4K likes. I'm like, >> why doesn't Tutor grow the strategy? [laughter] >> Seriously, honestly, I found out in like 4 days I posted a picture of this uh space and I was like roasting this event. You got like 500 likes. I was like, where did that come from? >> No, it's crazy. >> So, there's clearly like a a Twitter population.

There's like 20 million people maybe 15 million something like that. Um, so kind of just building on this, I'd love a little history lesson like given that this is your home country, we've seen a lot of from afar, we've seen Argent Argentina's relationship with money and inflation. It's very real and I think that's why there's a lot of very strong alignment with the cryptocurrency community. I think it's no surprise that there is a lot of uh symbiosis between Argentina people. We're seeing the engagement on Twitter, the cryptocurrency community, all of these things are coming together at the same time. Can you just kind of take us back in time like what happened? How did we get here?

>> Yes, for sure. I can tell you a little bit about my story and probably millions of Argentinians story as well. >> Um, so basically in back in 2020, we had 211% of inflation annually if I don't remember um wrong. And you know, if you were getting paid in pesos like me, I was working as a front-end developer. I was getting paid literally $100 because I was just starting $100 but in pesos, right? So it was like >> I was losing value every day basically like I was getting paid and tomorrow it was devalued basically. So I was wondering how can I access to dollars?

It was impossible. I was 17 and if you wanted to access to to buy dollars in a legal way >> in a in a bank the limit per month was $200. >> Wow. >> Which is crazy. I mean if you wanted to buy more it was impossible, right? even if you had everything on place, bank account, etc., you could you could never do that. >> So, I discovered USDT. USDT is very big here, especially on Tron. I don't know why. Don't ask me why, but it's very big. Um, so basically, I discovered that and I started to put as soon as I get paid to put all my money on USCT.

>> And then as soon as I uh scaled my career, I was getting paid in stable coins. And so something that I always say is I never had to buy crypto. I always earn it, >> right? Like I always just like, you know, got paid in crypto. And that kind of like, you know, built like people were kind of like feeling that that was the only way to hold value. >> And so I literally morted my grandma into it. Like literally I I started to send money to my family in USCT and they started to hold different crypto. And I think it started to grow over the years and now we're here. Right now it's it's big and I think after Dev Connect we're going to see a new wave of people that are going to get on boarded for sure.

>> Yeah. So we're here at the Lambda House. FedE and their team have done so much work in the in the government here and with policy makers. >> Uh it seems like the core idea still comes back down to like the basic fundamentals of like storing value with stable coins, sending money. Um and just kind of having a alternative to the government regime. This goes for Turkey, this goes for, it goes for >> every emerging market. Yeah, for sure. >> But it even goes for the US, it goes for the euros, it's for the pound. It it it just comes back to like wanting to hold that value. How do you think that we onboard more and more people uh into stable coins in Argentina? Is it just a marketing thing? Is it an education?

like what what would you want to see from the Ethereum community uh to onboard more more people here? >> I think this is a great start. Um we definitely need more events hosted by big companies like Ethereum. I think Avalanche did um the Avalanche Summit last year. Um I think right now it's actually our first um approach with abstract in Latin America. So again it's it's something that companies needs to start doing in order to on board. But I think this is a great start. But also I think schools I literally was walking in in the main conference and I saw a bunch of high school people like the uniforms and I was like wow. So this means that high schools are literally bringing the

students over here. >> It's crazy. I've never seen that in other in another conference. So I think that's that's a big start. Um and also what I do in in my personal experience I do storytelling a lot. That's my way to approach. That's my personal brand. >> Yeah. These all just kind of >> relatable. Literally, I've I went to SF a couple weeks ago. I talked to this like very Silicon Valley AI people. They were like, "Crypto is [ __ ] I don't believe it. This gambling." I literally just like, "Okay, this is my story." And they were like, "Wow, a real you changed my mind." You know, now I see it. Now I see the use case. That's exactly what we need. We need to just tell >> a story. And I feel like that kind of like changes your mind because there it's true that there's a lot of, you

know, >> [ __ ] in the industry, but I feel like here we can see the the value of it. >> Yeah, certainly can. And and you you gave us a great uh beginning of the story as to how we got here and and talked about the inflation in Argentina, how a lot of uh Argentinians are now storing their wealth, preserving it via stable coins. But where do we go from here? And and I'm curious about abstract because now we've gotten >> some uh critical mass of people that have stable coins and they're accustomed to holding these stable coins in a wallet. >> Now it's about how they can go and spend. Right? You talk about earning stable coins. Now I think what's coming next is spending stable coins >> or spending any cryptocurrency for that matter. What do you think are some of

the most important value propositions of onchain applications? What are you seeing on abstract? How are you seeing people come on? What is their onchain activity? what are they spending on? >> Yeah, for sure. So with abstract initially when I joined something that really captured my attention is the approach of accountraction a better UX consumer crypto. I feel like Ethereum for example >> didn't do a good job for many years on like you know explaining very technical things to to you know people that don't know anything about crypto. I feel like with abstract we try to make you know we build a portal people can just go play games use things on chain and they don't even realize that it's onchain because

we try to make the of course we're still working on it right it's it's like a long-term game we're playing long-term games but I think the main approach is was you know to improve the UX and something that I'm working on on the eye side for example >> is agents with stable coins I'm trying to find the use case around it I've been writing a lot of articles on it and I'm trying to see the use case on it because I told you the story of the the use case with stable coins. I wonder if there is a use case where we can see the combination of agents literally doing things for you like imagine like you you know we have all of these like developments like 804 x 402 I think as it keeps growing we can see a world

let's say Argentina where people can literally give access to agents to do things for them to I don't know just move money around to keep things in stable coins and I'm wondering how we can make that happen with abstract And that's what I've been working on basically. >> Yeah. I'm I'm curious if the people in Argentina that you've uh you've helped on board, friends, family, are they interested solely in holding USDT in their wallet to kind of preserve their value or are they also interested in yield? Are they interested in Bitcoin? Are they interested in like NFTTS? Like what is the spectrum of like uh users?

Because if you're going to try to, you know, embed agents, onboard them to abstract, etc. Like are they interested in that? Do they just want one thing? What's kind of like the spectrum that you've seen? >> Yeah. Yeah. Good question. I wonder if we can make these Asians run DeFi strategies for my grandma, right? >> That's what I mean. Like, does grandma want to make 4% happy with just, you know, keeping the >> same? So, um, a lot of Argentinians are actually scared because we we had a very volatile currency, right? And we know that crypto is very volatile. So, they're scared and putting their money in something that, you know, it's basically a roller coaster. But there is definitely an interest of like, okay, I'm going to take the risk. I feel Argentinians take a lot of risks, especially in financial stuff.

>> Um, and so yeah, I actually like my grandma was like, hey, do you think I could make money putting some money uh pulling some dollars on ETH and I was like, I think in the long term you will definitely make money and it's a good, you know, it's at least a little bit. And she took the risk and put some money on ETH and and Bitcoin. And I feel like a lot of Argentinians are definitely open to it and that's why I'm curious about the use case of agents running as you say like yield defy strategies staking. >> So yeah. >> Okay.

>> Well, yeah. >> My last thing is what is your call to action to the Ethereum community for uh Argentina for onboarding? What do you have to say to the audience about your country and about what this means to you? What I'll say, and there's a lot of people that know already this, there's so many talented people. Um, companies should hire more Argentinians. >> Companies should invest more in running these kind of events here, in hiring Argentinians, in in funding Argentinian companies. Um, a lot of people are focused on Asia and, you know, like the US. There's so much opportunity if you actually want to make a change in the

industry. so much opportunity here. Um so I will say you any company that is watching this and is trying to find talent and find re real use case and talent um go to Argentina or or even Brazil, Colombia. >> Yeah. >> Um all the emerging markets are are you know full with with this valuable use cases and it's worth taking a look at that. >> Absolutely. Adver thanks so much for coming on. It was a pleasure. >> Thank you so much. all the people here. Yeah, it's been it's been awesome weeks. So, >> yeah, for sure.

>> Yeah, >> we'll see you next time. >> Bye. >> All right, guys. We take a quick break and we will be right back. [music] [music] Looking for yield that stands out? Infinifi gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinifi is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. >> Great weather.

>> Yeah, weather's sick. Traffic's not terrible. It's like pretty good city. >> Yeah, it's not bad. Food's good, >> guys. Um, Arbitrum one, Metro Orbit. I mean it's just we're all coming back home to the theme. I think one big trend of of this conference is kind of coming back to the L1 in many ways. Uh we've kind of seen this you know expansion of L2s and then you know kind of now reorienting around the L1 from the arbitration perspective. Curious just kind of your takes on the privacy announcement on the upcoming upgrade for Ethereum just like generally holistically how are you guys been about the progress of the L1 with the lean Ethereum talk as well from Dustin Drake.

Um, from the Armstrong perspective, where are we at? >> I think we're in an absolutely fantastic place. Uh, upcoming Fusaka upgrade. We actually play two sides of this coin. We have Prism at Offchain Labs where we're literally the team like the client team has been pushing pods from the very beginning. And we're also the one of the biggest consumers of arbitrum and I think they're to your question like back to the L1 L1 L2. These two things travel in tandem and we make a better a better L1 guess a better L2. when you add lane to a highway, we we just we just need more capacity and they're all going to be full. And uh I think we're making absolutely great progress on the rollup road map and that includes a strong Ethereum, cheaper data availability, more L2s, but more interesting L2s.

>> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Um earlier we had uh uh Mark uh suggesting uh lean Ethereum, right? Um, and because you guys are consumers and customers of Ethereum and Arbitum is, um, I'm curious if you were, you know, speaking to the decision makers in Ethereum, I'm sure you have these conversations as well. What would you ask of them? Just greater capacity, is there certain, uh, more specific aspects of Ethereum that you would like to see uh, improved? What what are what are you looking for out of Ethereum these days? >> Um, okay, I'll start less technical, but >> sure.

The biggest refreshing change with Ethereum is this like hunger to win. >> Yeah. >> And like all these things, whether it's technology, whether it's enterprise adoption, whether it's like t we work really closely with like the Ethereum enterprise team. We, you know, >> how do we just make sure we're all winning, right? And winning reflects in who you're targeting, whe reflects in setting narratives as opposed to like digesting narratives. And winning also reflects in like how ambitious you are with the technology. I think one of the biggest shifts is like you know I remember last year like you know Bangkok everyone's like oh what like the 2030 road map it's like no we're shipping now >> right there's this like desire to ship now is a desire to win now the L1 L2 relationships I think have never been stronger very symbiotic like again

>> just because we add more capacity to the L1 the whole world is not going to live on a single chain question is how do we make this experience for users unified secured censorship resistant keep those values flowing in a way that the L2s can push the boundaries like one of the things like that we think like stylus is this huge unlock for the Ethereum ecosystem right enterprise is they're all going to learn solidity right we want them all to be able to come on chain use Ethereum under the hood and that's like that's how we think about it that's what we play on the arbitrum side so I think like the thing I want from Ethereum is just keep this focus mentality across enterprise institutional adoption privacy product technology just focus keep that this winning energy >> because it's it's it's contagious and

It's really enthusiastic. >> It is. So kind of on the on the two forces happening, I'd say two kind of major themes of this event and just generally this year. One being this, you know, onchain businesses. This okay guys, let's have a look at the P&L. Let's have clear, transparent accounting. Let's build onchain businesses that are real. You know, we we had you on last maybe a couple months ago, Adrian. You you were speaking about the dynamic between L1's, L2s. We saw Near just cut their inflation by 50%. Salana is going to do it now that it starts, you know, going down, you know.

So, it's it's very clear that the L2 chain model has worked in terms of the uh expenditure versus the kind of sequencer fees and other revenue models. So, that's kind of like the economic side that is progressing as an industry. We're going through a bit of a maturation phase there. And on the tech side it's all about okay stage zero stage one stage two permissionlessness censorship resistance the this kind of core idea to really fulfill the role centric road map. How do you guys feel about this kind of like jua position about prioritization of which side what's most important to you guys generally like with with these two themes at large where where does arbitum stand >> I'll start on the business side then you can talk about stage one and getting to

stage two maybe. I mean, our Richmond had its best month in gross profit on chain ever last month, which was awesome. November is about to be the same. So, highest TPS, we did about 80 million transactions on chain in October. We're about to, I think, cross hopefully 90 it looks like in November. And again like you were saying the the biggest thing that Ethereum should be doing to tell everyone why they should launch LTS whether it's arbitr obviously I want it to be arbitrum is if you're not if your core business is not building blockchains you don't want to put yourself in a position where you have a fixed cost variable that's tens of millions of dollars irrespective of adoption no business does that with vendor contracts >> right so if you think about how L2s

operate it's about a 95 plus% gross profit margin business with a very low upfront fixed cost. You can run a chain that's like in maintenance mode for like $100 a month if you wanted to, right? So you can get the product the chain to be a part of the product. Scales your revenues. If you decide to dep prioritize the chain, you want to move and pivot to launching primarily on a public chain. Much easier to spin down much less risk of being stuck with a lemon. Right? So these are like the core principles. I don't view the question of stage one and stage two. talk technology in a second to be in any way in contradiction with this from my perspective you know and you could launch in theory and Stephen will talk about like where the steps for arbit we want to think before you could launch a

stage two arbitum roll up tomorrow if you wanted to >> right there's reasons you might not want in terms of upgradability maturity of the of the technology stack in terms of wanting to have that flexibility >> but the more we can get confidence in the stack the more we can get confidence in what can enable the higher our revenues are going to be right all of the onchain revenue flows to the Dow anyways whether it's stage one, stage two, stage, you know, doesn't matter. So I think about this is like how do we think about the trade-offs of continuing to improve the product, making as performant as possible, making the business as sustainable as possible within this like system that we have with obviously trying to make sure that the we're defending and protecting users from what might be early stage. I don't know if you want to talk about that a

little bit more on the stage two side. >> Yeah, I mean I I think that like AJ said, you could launch a stage two rollup today. um it doesn't mean it would be actually the responsible decision. That's actually one of the reasons and I discussed the vital before like the criteria for stage two shouldn't just be like that there's no uh you know that these uh controls I'll say aren't there. It's that they're not there and that's a responsible decision to make. >> And the truth is if you like look at like L1 versus L2 you can have extremely centralized L1s. In fact most of the alt L1s are certainly on a spectrum when you compare them to Ethereum and you can have extremely decentralized L2. I put arbitrum at the far end of the L2 decentralization spectrum today and

that's sort of um there's a lot of confusion there and the reason there's confusion there kind of back to your first question in AJ's answer is the L1's have one thing going for them they're centralized and they have a centralized narrative and a centralized marketing machine and often a centralized policy engine that's pushing a narrative around L2s that's false and I think the thing that we need for Ethereum to win is not to feed into that right when Ethereum uh many of the chains that are considering they're not considering Ethereum layer 1 or something else. They're considering do I launch my own layer 1, >> right?

>> Or do I launch my layer 2 on Ethereum and we as the entirety of Ethereum need to realize that for many particularly institutional chains that like step one is they're having their own chain. The way to win those is via layer 2. So we need to have a unified front and uh make sure that we have a unified narrative because Ethereum's superpower is its diversity but it's also the thing that can kill it if we have to keep our diversity here, >> right? and then come out with a unified front. >> I must say there is far less uh infighting vibe going on in Ethereum at this conference than previous. >> Absolutely. And I think that's really really uh it means we're maturing and a very good thing.

>> Yeah. Yeah. So two two uh big topics that I'd like to perks and institutions where you start do you have a preference? uh variational coming up uh it's in this uh kind of like private beta moving into this more public stage obviously GMX hyperlid kind of thing through arbitrum big big uh kind of it's the thing this year it's very thing what is arbitrum's stance on per um you orbit one you know can arbitrum one really be sufficient for clubs for per do they need to launch in orbit chain how do you think about uh per on arbitrary why is arbitrum the

home of the best per in >> so we have I'll start but then you fill in with some more uh specifics we have this uh this tagline now which is arbitum everywhere and I think the best way to see that applied is in per and what we mean by that is if you want to build a perex arbit really took off on arbitr right so GMX gains like you know some of the earliest and best per protocol on arbitrum we have the best platform to support that by the way stylus uh will support even more efficient per arbitum once the perplexes begin to uh take advantage of that for scaling. Um but if you want to don't want to build an arbitrum, you want to build your own standalone uh layer 1 like hyperlid, we also have something very strong to offer you and that's what

arbitr everywhere means. Whereas we're not trying to you know force the same solution on everyone and by the way it's the same thing uh for should you have your own chain. Most of our competitors, they'll either say yes to everyone or no to everyone. But we actually have a dual product in which we have a top blockchain and a top chain stack. So some people belong having their own chain. Some people belong not to. And we're okay saying that. But I think the idea is that we will support the perplexes where they're at. Arbitum is a fantastic home for them. Um but it's not necessarily for everyone. But that doesn't mean arbitum can't play a big role uh in them.

>> Yeah. I add is some of this is culture, right? Like >> you know the last 2 years before like I would say hyperlquids air drops I guess like 3 years ago to one year ago basically no one was talking about per >> and except arbitral >> right our whole thesis has been we are going to take the best def primitives find the best defers and match them as trady comes on chain with liquidity and users and that's always been our goal it's why we partnered with Robin Hood it's part of our broader strategy right so if you look at hyperlid they're sourcing liquidity from arbitum zk lighter which is a zk rollup I think don't quote me on this I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure most of the liquidity flows in from arbitum oium variational GMX gains vertex all start

in their homes on arbitrum and we're going to continue to see more and more of this and a lot of this is the flexibility of our stack right so like you know like Stephen said like we want to support you everywhere so if you're Ethereal you want to use USD and you need your own chain in order to really have that be the native assets of the ecosystem right great launch layer 3 on arbitr have easy onboarding right for all of your users. If you want to be in a public market like sort of a GMX style model, Oium style model like great we have incredible amounts of liquidity, diversity and the right partners to help you grow and also the culture to help you grow. Like this is a priority for us. This isn't like oh per having a moment let's get a team together. This

is like >> we've been breathing this for the last 5 years, right? So when I speak to builders particularly in this category, they're like, "We know you're going to have our back for many years to come. We know you're going to be supportive. We know you understand our needs." And that's just been kind of like, you know, our thesis all the way through. >> And and like you said, you you've been rotate these narratives rotate. You guys have been here for such a long time. You've done this. You've been thinking about these things for a long time. So when that narrative does come back around, you've already got the team built. Um I I'm curious a little bit more about some of the things that are starting to emerge from Ethereum on the tech side. ACE rollups seem to be coming back a little bit. Um native rollups are

coming coming to fruition. Um and Stephen, you famously said on our show, look, you're not a maximalist. Like even this is, you know, when optimistic roll-ups, there was this big optimistic ZK thing and Armor was one of the biggest optimistic roll-ups. You said, you know, if ZK becomes feasible and practical, we'll go ZK. >> And we're doing that today, by the way. >> There we go. >> It's succinct. >> Yeah. So tell us a little bit about some of the more recent developments and also where your head is at as you're thinking ahead about um where you think Ethereum is going, where you think the rest of this industry is going. >> So definitely not a maximist and in fact actually if you look at the earliest arbitrum paper 2018 paper you'd probably call that a base rollup because it didn't have a sequencer at the time.

>> Um slightly different than the rollup state with pre-confirmations but fundamentally it was a based rollup in that sense. There was a sequencer. The sequencer was done by the chain. So, a lot of again similar to what you were saying, a lot of these ideas rotate and come around and based on we're having a moment. The thing is, and you can actually go back in Twitter and find me like saying the worst possible things about a sequencer. Like, if you go back long enough, but like, you know, we come around and like I always like to say, competition is one of the best things we have in the space because we influence each other's ideas. And the truth of the matter is is that um over a decade in from the initial buildings of arbitrip, we've learned a lot. And the way that we build arbitration today with the

sequencer actually um is the best way to build a rollup. And there are a lot of reasons for that around batching predictability and some of these things are being addressed and technically you know Kusaka is going to have these like uh look ahead uh you can now look ahead to so that will help some of these but the idea is that >> the technology works quite well today and the thing that I'd like to see uh from Ethereum the Ethereum foundation first of all I'm happy with everyone experimenting like I said you know nothing wrong with that great but like we have a pretty good idea after building in production for years of you know we made these decisions for a reason and in fact we actually went through some of these cycles But what I'd like to see is Ethereum say how can we actually bring uh more rollups the

existing roll-ups into the into the folder. There are things that we can do to sort of you know quasi enshrine successful rollups in ways that uh we offer some of these services that people are excited about uh when you know and actually bring the L1 L2 together without sort of saying let's start again from from square one. when it comes to native rollups uh you know my most important thing and this is what I've discussed I discussed with the Vitalic also is we have to not limit diversity I'm afraid that a lot of the current talk on native rollups is going to limit the diversity and and quasi enshrine a particular uh VM whether it's you know EVM or even something more constrained than that a particular rollup type Ethereum strength is the diversity and

that's not just arbitrum we have silus um you know in Cairo from start where you have uh so many different rollups experimenting all over the stack and the idea that we should somehow limit that is not is not a good idea. I think the thing we can do is kind of have is there a nucleus that we can share is are there some op codes we can add to the chain for say EVM improvement that everyone will benefit from but that only works for the context of and then you can actually extend it and build the rest of your roll up from there. If we're going to sort out of trying to limit diversity, uh that's anti- everything in my opinion that's made Ethereum successful.

>> Ed, anything to add just kind of roadmap, you know, 2026, what's on your mind? >> Yeah, I mean on on the arbitrum side, we're we're the two things that we've been very consistent on are um customiz customizability and uh scalability. So our whole thesis with like our chain product in particular like a lot of people were like trying to get interop uniform chains. We never thought that was the core thing. We think there's going to be like one, two, three, five core public economic hubs, let's say of L2s. You're starting to see those form out. And then people who want their own chain, a lot of them are going to want customizations. And this goes back to what you were saying earlier about institutions.

even like the institutions that want compliance. So they want a regulatory compliant roll up that might look different in Argentina than it's going to look in the United States and it's going to look different than it's going to look in Singapore and Hong Kong. Everyone has their own sandbox and everyone has their own regulations and we want the archum stack to be as flexible as possible. So you know we're looking at ZK, we're looking at privacy, we're looking at compliance functions and we're looking how do we all bake this all into an SDK that you can toggle between features, toggle between things and you can use arbitrum chains as part of your product. Yeah. >> So that's how we always think like when Stephen was saying earlier when somebody comes and says we want to see how we can use arbitrum. I don't say launch a

chain. I don't say launch on arbitrum one. I say what are you actually trying to do? What is the business use case you're trying to solve for and how do I have one of our products make it as easy as possible for you to use that product be the thing that solves it. And um scalability is critical. I think stylus is a huge unlock for that. It's still really early right. So like the thing here is is that you know arbitrum has you know I know almost 20 billion in TVL but like these like it's so early >> and the technology we always think we're like oh yeah we finally solve scalability now it's going to be customizations then when we solve customizations for that scalability it's going to be more scalability. We're always trying and I think that's sort of maybe been our brand is like staying

ahead of the curve on these things >> and also being principled about it. Like stylist is not the popular narrative today, but we believe it. Per wasn't the popular narrative when we started pushing it. And the idea is if you believe in something, not that we're always right, but we have conviction in it. We'll keep building it and the narrative will often come around. But if you're constantly chasing the current narrative, by the time you've caught up to it, it's already moved on to the next one. >> You got that right. Stephen, AJ, guys, have a great week. >> Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> It's been incredible to watch you guys grow. Um the product team's came a long way. The team has grown, I'm sure, a ton. Um guys, >> thank you.

>> Cheers. Appreciate it. >> Good to see you. >> Thanks. >> Yeah. >> All righty, guys. We'll be right back. Quick commercial break. >> Open, stable, borderless. FRA [music] is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit fra.com to learn more today. [music] >> We're running on uh running on fumes here. Peter, how are you, man?

>> I'm doing pretty good. Yeah, >> thanks for uh coming by. It's been uh it's been an absolute journey. >> We're at Lambda House. >> We're at Lambda House. Yeah, these guys are clutch. Um, Peter, you guys have had a meteoric rise in the interop landscape, seemingly from nowhere a year or two ago to some of one of the best bridges, if not the fastest, cheapest execution for crosschain in L2s and just generally near intense is starting to give you a run for your money now with their crosschain multivvm capabilities. Talk about this rise like how did this happen? What did the team do successfully to really, you know, explode in user demand growth? just kind of like what's the story here?

>> Yeah, you know, one of those overnight successes of many years in the making. Um, but yeah, I don't know how many people know, but previously we were this NFT aggregator called Reservoir. And and so from building that, we were pretty early in seeing the proliferation of new chains. And I think the other thing that was really interesting was we were seeing this need for doing, you know, one of our early customers was Zora and they wanted to buy 30 cent NFTs crosschain and nothing was fast enough, nothing was cheap enough, nothing was on weird L2s like Azora L2 and so we basically designed relay kind of for this more consumer lowcost fast use cases. So we had this like unique perspective of it that I think nothing at the time existed and and yeah I think

we also had a lot of relationships with wallets from and you know from building the NFT stuff and kind of went from there and and just like took this strategy of just saying yes to every chain and being everywhere um and and even just like designing it so that we could go to every chain like a lot of things just like that they want to be on every chain but it's actually architecturally hard maybe you need a Dow vote to like add a new chain and so we kind of thought about it early, how can we just be everywhere and reduce the friction as much as possible? >> I'm curious how this technical solution works. Um because h how what do you change in the architecture to optimize for smaller transactions, more chains, you you essentially make it more

extensible, right? And so maybe you lose out on on the larger size volumes, but you make it a lot more performant for what everyday users are are using in their bridge transactions more normally. What do you change inside of the tech to optimize for that? >> Yes. So, I mean, we're just really sensitive to gas costs. Okay. Um, and so, for example, like a t typical intent bridge will have a user deposit on the origin, a solver fills on the destination and then maybe directly proves that they filled back to the origin. So, everything's happening on the origin and destination and and you're even saving in state or maybe emitting events around, you know, the payment and proving that the fill happened. All of that's happening on the origin and destination chains. Um, and so our goal was like, how can we ship as

much of that offchain? And so really get it down to maybe just a transfer of like 21,000 gas but plus maybe like an ID that's hidden in the call data on the origin and on the destination similar just like a transfer to Phil and then take kind of off the kind of origin and destination chains and do the settlement kind of offchain and like retroactively look back um and kind of prove that those things happened and then yeah as much as possible do things like batching and and by the way that that kind of model of retroactively looking back rather than proving that things happened at the time allows us to go to places like Bitcoin where there isn't this kind of like on smart contract functionality and even things like Hyperlid is even

less uh programmable than Bitcoin like with Bitcoin we can stick ids in like a memo field hyperlid has nothing like that so we have to get really creative about like using the nons to like hide information in there uh so yeah I think that like that sort of design of like shift as much off the chains where the activity is happening because e even though L2s are cheaper. Um, you know, anything you can shave off the kind of wholesale cost that you're paying to the chain, you can either return to the user as a cheaper price or return to the kind of solvers who are providing the liquidity or the applications, you know, more margin for Phantom or whoever to kind of for FOMO or something like that to have a fee. So, just like the kind of fanatical reduction of gas cost, I think

is like >> played a big part. >> Yeah. Peter, I I got to ask there was some controversy with L2B researchers on Twitter about the exact bridge design. Um, you know, I guess in a pointed fashion. Why does L2 beat have a problem with Relay or what is the technical uh what is the technical explanation required as to why relay is um able to do what it's doing but is not a honeypot or is not a a a a recipe for another bridge hack? what what is kind of that uh overall uh conversation?

>> Yes, I've actually got a panel with the LTB guys tomorrow. So, if anyone wants to see it, should be fun. I'm joking. It's unclear if it's a panel or an intervention, but uh we'll see. But yeah, I mean, first of all, I think there's like a really big difference between bridges and relay. So, relay is effectively crosschain swaps. Uh, and what that means is the user is engaging in this swap, but as soon as the swap is done, you know, they just have their token versus maybe if you're holding a stable coin and you bridge that. Um, and let's say that that stable coin has crosschain bridging and it wants to go as fast as possible. So they're minting the the kind of me setting the mint messages uh maybe faster than is like you know before the L2 finalizes or whatever it is then there's kind of risk

that the you know you overmint and the total supply of the you know changes or even like a lot of the bridge hacks uh kind of where money has been completely lost. So I think the first thing to point out is that because relay is crosschain swaps you know we're actually not a bridge we offer a bridge-like UX by allowing you to swap between the kind of two tokens on either side. Um but we are never the bridge and so there's not that kind of like ongoing risk of just by holding a token relay uh kind of you know you're getting some risk from relay at the same time. You know we've taken this approach where we're a little bit more centralized and we kind of have this road map to get more decentralized but in many ways we started kind of building the product first and the

protocol lagging a little bit behind that. And we've actually, you know, there's also, you know, we've done a poor job of kind of communicating some of the things we've done on the protocol. So like initially we had this model where users would send straight to the solver and like the optics of that aren't great and there was like this whole model for how that can be secure, but it just kind of seems weird. And we've since migrated to a model where there's this depository kind of escrow contract and so and we're we're kind of rolling things out in the protocol, but we've we've not done a great job of communicating it. And so yeah, I think the L2B is, you know, rightly putting some pressure on us to maybe prioritize some of the kind of protocol pieces and increase the decentralization of it which I think is

fair like there's a balance of for a long time it was just unclear if anyone wanted this if it was technically possible and so we've you know we've taken this approach of of product first and and kind of like you know part of the problem is we also get a ton of demand for a new chain or a new feature and so yeah there's like this balance of like building out the kind of security and decentralization of the protocol versus focusing on the product features. Um, and so it's just about finding that balance and uh, yeah, I think uh, a bit of pressure is good for us.

>> It it it's a result of you guys garnering enough enough activity and attention to to to have the likes of LTV take a look at you, >> right? You know, it's like uh, it's worse. We're on the radar now. >> Exactly. >> And, you know, I think that also >> is an increased responsibility on us to kind of lead by example as well. So yeah, I think there's a middle ground, but I think it's yeah, like I said, it's good it's good for some of that pressure on, you know, the leaders. >> The uh interup interop landscape is cutthroat, man. We've had, you know, several interop providers come on the show. Um and and mostly in response to solving Ethereum's fragmentation.

>> Um and that's where the the intent bridge design was born. >> Yeah. >> Um give us a sense of what you've had to navigate when it comes to the interop landscape. you guys launched um but you know there there's kind of the incumbents of the of the interop space um and you've really you know kind of came uh came up and and you know ma made a name for relay like you said you're on the radar now um what's your what's your sense of competition how do you you know how do how do you how do you think about competition in the interop space >> yeah I mean I think there's fundamentally two different layers there is the core bridges so your layer zeros and hyperlinks and wormholes that uh and and and actually the L2s themselves that has the kind of canonical bridges they

are you know the ones that are the actual bridges that allow you to burn on one chain and mint elsewhere and we see ourselves as a layer on top that can provide the fast interop um so in many ways very complimentary to the core interop and I think we're getting that message across that if you're a new chain or you're a stable coin you actually need both um because you don't want the core interop to go too fast because that that kind of creates global risk if you take too much risk there and Actually, one of the ways we position relay is if relay is available and solves some of the UX challenges, then you could go slower and be more safe at the core layer. But then there are also others kind of within the fast interrupt layer. You know, OG's like across which

you know we very much like >> we're able to see that and think about okay like how would we improve on that. I think also we are unique in that we really focus on swaps. So not just you know intents in order to to bridge but allowing people to go anything to anything and like >> we basically combine the kind of crosschain routes that are like our unique piece with a dex route uh maybe on the origin and on the destination. So you can do anything to anything. And so we like very early kind of had this like really good developer experience of any input token any output token like doesn't matter what it is we'll find some route for it and then you can also

optionally have core data to buy an NFT deposit into a vault or something like that and so I think you just very early focused on developer experience but also swaps and and that's kind of really where relay is going is that we are more of a crosschain exchange >> and a bridge and you know especially as you have an abundance of stable coins. people need to move between the different stable coins and I'd say that's a big focus for us and so we almost see ourselves like going more in the direction of you know a liquidity hub and and then you start to compete more with like Jupiter or unis swap with uni chain like that's actually who we think about and we just think about holistically people are going to want to swap between any two tokens

>> and doesn't matter if there's a direct path like with a bridge >> we are kind of trying to solve that problem for people Um, so yeah, like everyone competes with everyone on a long enough time horizon. And so we're just kind of really focused on, you know, this like hyper what is the absolute best UX? What is really solving the pain points of the biggest apps? Um, not just apps, but other, you know, developers that are building like payment rails, like uh, you know, like maybe they focus on one chain or you have like a stable coin chain. It's like, oh, wait, but like people actually have their money elsewhere. Yeah. And so we want to kind of be the the like the last mile for everyone building kind of whether it's on-ramps or whatever it is.

We can just do kind of swapping anything to anything um and help you build a really nice UX >> and what does that look like going forward for 2026 the road map and just generally kind of where your you know product road map is as well as your personal vision for the space. How does that kind of come together? Yeah, I think the biggest thing is you know we are this intent model that has you know this idea of solvers filling with their own capital and where we want to take that like the kind of like classic mind you know way to maybe solve that is just to have more solvers >> but we want to push in a direction of actually unbundling what a solver is like they're really you know they're take they're doing a few things they are

taking a kind of risk on the origin like when the user pays on the origin. It hasn't finalized yet, but the solver is the one that takes the risk and potentially loses money if that reorgs. So, a they're taking risk, b they're executing transactions on every chain. So, we we're actually the number one transaction executor on base and kind of up there on Ethereum as well and a bunch of other chains. Like that's pretty hard and we're like we're at the limit of nonses and all of this sort of stuff. And then you need money. Um, and so like if you can unbundle those things, a you can allow anyone to provide the liquidity and place it in pools across every chain for solvers to leverage. And then what a solver has to do is like becomes like narrower. They're really just executing transactions. And so

maybe other actors are more able to step in whether that's you know RPC and RAS providers uh just like you know someone who wants you know even the chain operator is able to maybe like spin it up and and kind of just do that smaller role on their chain. So I think that's the big piece uh for next year is kind of scaling and scaling by kind of unbundling what it is to be a solver and kind of open liquidity provision is is the goal. >> Modularity is back. >> Oh yeah has been >> un unbundling. It really always has been the direction to build uh as far as the most scalable trajectory of this industry. So Peter man appreciate you sharing the road map with us.

>> Have a great week. It's going to be hectic. Um appreciate you joining us. Is it your first time here? >> First time. Yeah. >> Very cool. Enjoy. Appreciate you coming on the show. >> We have empanadas for you, man. So, hope you can have one of those. Also have a nice shirt for you here. >> Uh what size are you? >> I think I'm a medium. >> You're a medium. >> All right. We'll get you a medium here. >> It's our uh it's our return to fundamentals t-shirt. That's for you, buddy. Make sure you grill those L2B guys. All right.

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[music] World TV. Last one of the day. We've got Parker. Big news from Framework today along with Sky. Stable coin supercycles firmly on. Um, Parker, what's going on? >> Well, first of all, guys, I I'm going to try to do Michael justice because I know that they they do an awesome job here each week, but uh yeah, we just announced OEX, which is our stable coin incubator, $37 million raise alongside a $2.5 billion allocation from Sky um to go back institutional grade stable coin protocols. And um yeah, I mean, for anybody that's not familiar with framework, I mean, we were pretty early investors in DeFi and and stable coins in general. Um we're known for being super hands-on with our founders and I

think we're gonna continue that trend with this with this uh with this incubator. >> So you guys are very involved with Sky. Also Grove has had this huge growth um you know these kind of like uh these two pillars USDS is now I I believe as of today top three stable coin buy outstanding supply when you say stable coin focused institutional projects or you know that realm what does that really mean? What are the sectors? What are the categories? what types of business models are you looking to invest in uh specifically within this sector? >> It's a great question. You know, I think we're seeing a new type of founder right now in this space. I think we're seeing people that are coming from more traditional finance backgrounds that are trying to build specializ specialty specialty uh lending protocols. You know, we're really focused right now on

energy finance. Um also, just for some context, I actually built an energy fintech for two years before joining Framework. >> Very cool. And so I think we're looking for people that quite frankly are just super deep in their domain. Um also backed USDA >> a couple months ago. Um I think that's another really great example of you know computebacked financing. Then we're also um you know incubating a team at the moment. This will be our almost like first incubation focused on structured credit. >> Okay. >> Um and so yeah I mean look there's a ton of founders right now that are coming from Crowdfly that >> we can bridge that gap. is the way that we're looking at this and there's no better way to do that than than with Sky and I mean you just mentioned it.

>> Uh their their balance sheet is is going to be quite helpful. >> Yeah. So, so we have um Sam from Fraction on the show a lot and talks about the two different types of stable coins. about these kind of like genius compliant very much onetoone backed like >> you know very little chance of deep pegging if any at all right like almost like like just very very clear this like yield bearing kind of more esoteric uh yield generating different types of uh mechanisms a bit more risky but you get this kind of yield baked in uh in this in this uh interview with Quendes Vance said that he's very very excited about the fast moving pace of the yield bearing nature so would you say that you guys are are trying to apply this capital to accelerate that kind of uh half of the stable coin bucket, you

know, if so, maybe talk a bit about what the problem space is that you guys are looking to solve. >> So, yeah, I think you hit it right on the nose. There's, you know, two types of stable coins. One is obviously going to be basically I would I would just say like two use cases. One is payments and remittances. The other one is quite quite frankly capital formation and also lending. Um, yeah, Vance did a really good job highlighting this in the Coindesk article, but what we're unlocking here through Obex is scale. Um, there's been a lot of people that have attempted many different types of call it more institutional grade uh, stablecoin protocols, but the scale just hasn't been there. Um, I think now for the first time, we're really seeing institutional adoption both on the

investment side and also um, just a totally different type of opportunity that is coming on chain. I mean this is why quite frankly we were super excited about this $2 half billion dollar you know allocation from Sky is >> is we can bootstrap these projects on day one and allow them to go compete in sectors that quite frankly banks and credit funds have dominated for >> you know centuries um and I think we're going to see a pretty big boom here in the in the next six months. So there's a 12-week program. Early stage teams, they have to it's kind of like Hunger Games.

The the winners of this, you know, three months will go on and be able to have more funding and kind of more active involvement. How many teams are you looking to uh incubate or is there a is there a quantity? Is there a time period to establish the teams outside of this or, you know, prior to this 12-week window? What is kind of like like the next step now that this has hit the wire? Um you know what what what comes next? Yeah, I mean we're going to release a bunch more details here on, you know, the exact date of when the batches start and how many teams we're going to look to incubate. I think um we're looking for teams that both are, you know, allocating capital as well as originating new yield. Uh as you alluded to, you know, it's going to be it's a

12-week program in San Francisco. Um >> cool. And yeah, we're I mean you're going to have the full support of both, you know, the Sky ecosystem, our team here at Framework, and then also uh layer zero is a part of this as well. Um and they're they're a great partner. Uh I would say that there's going to be a ramp up period here, but once once this gets going, I do believe that this is going to be the best place for founders to go build. >> Beautiful. >> And what are you hoping comes out of this incubator in terms of the products, in terms of the projects? Um obviously you're looking to deploy capital via frameworks. Uh Sky is looking to deploy its balance sheet. Um we're generally looking for stable coins to provide more diverse yield sources. Um

>> with this this incubator in particular, what is it? What are you hoping to see almost a call to action to the builders that are thinking about applying? >> That's great. Um look, I want I want to be able to back the founders that are deeply integrated in the spaces that they're deploying into. Quite frankly, the people that are best at underwriting, I think, are going to be the best originators um at scale. And the call to action is if you're a founder that is super deep in your domain and you're looking to go, you know, spin up a DeFi protocol or a stablecoin project, um there is no better place to get bootstrapped and get started than quite frankly through OEX.

Um, I would also argue, you know, obviously I'm biased. I'm a part of the firmware team, but, uh, Michael and Vance have a pretty long track record of supporting founders >> at the earliest stages. So, um, I think we're going to be perfectly equipped to go kind of bridge that gap between a founder that's maybe just like poking into DeFi, but that has deep crowdfi experience or maybe like the more DeFi native founder that is looking to do um, you know, more lending on chain. I think I think we're perfectly equipped to do both. Margaret, how are you enjoying uh Argentina?

>> It's so good, guys. Um it's it's amazing. I uh I I lived in Mexico. Um at one point, and it's always good to be able to practice a little bit of Spanish. >> Yeah, for sure. >> Um food is great. Uh I would say the vibes are pretty high here. >> Yeah. >> Um obviously with this announcement, it's been a crazy day, but uh we're excited to excited to keep it going. >> Congrats on, >> of course, man. >> Yes. Thank you so much. >> We'll see you next time. Okay, Parker. >> All right, guys. I think that about wraps up World TV Marathon. Go Parker, Robbie, the boys.

>> Let's go. >> We did it, guys. We'll see you soon. Cheers. [music]