Sreeram Speaks on the EigenLayer Airdrop Saga

Transcript

so trying to make the whole uh process much more transparent and legible I think is a big thrust for us going forward and I agree with you Mike that as you know crypto ascends into the global stage we need to be held to a higher standard as an ecosystem and I I feel in a micro way that's also true for us at Ian ler hey everyone this episode is brought to you by namada the shielded asset Hub rewarding you to protect the multi-chain so not only can you protect your own data across any asset and any chain but you also get shielding rewards for strengthening data privacy protections for everyone so you can check them out at n.net and follow the domain net launch stick around you're

going to be hearing all about them later in the program all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve before we jump in quick disclaimer the views expressed by my co-host today are their personal views and they do not represent the views of any organization with which the co-hosts are associated with nothing in the episode is construed or relied upon as Financial technical tax legal or other advice you know the deal now let's jump into the episode all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve uh this is a special episode I've got my uh my co-founder Jason joining me and today we are talking to shiram hey Jason hi Mike thank you so much uh excited to be here yeah we are excited to have you and

excited to speak um so this is a big episode uh obviously it's been an an interesting last couple of weeks for Igan laay and you know we're g going to be spending some time talking about the the couple of coindesk articles that came out um and that's going to be sort of the first half of this and just give you a chance to sort of respond publicly so Ian L's already put out a blog post um which will link in the show notes and you know we can feel free to go through every hash but just wanted to give you the opportunity to you know answer you know just address publicly and answer some of the questions that Twitter and the ecosystem has uh and then I actually want to spend you know the the last half of this episode talking about some of the cool stuff that ien lay has done

recently and then what's coming up on the road map um you know I I I don't want to the last couple weeks to distract too much from all the cool stuff that igen lers doing including the Rio acquisition and actually the interest of conflict of interest Jason and I were investors there so now we're small igen bag holders ourselves um but you've got your token launch you did the raise with a16z and there's a bunch of stuff coming up on the protocol side so just want to uh you know finish the episode by talking about all the cool stuff that you guys have on the road map so maybe maybe just to to set the seen here um and then I'll just turn it over to Yu real but you know there have been two articles that came out from coindesk um over the last week or so you know one

in which they talked about a list of igen labs employees that was getting passed around to solicit airdrops from potential um Partners in the ecosystem and then there was an article about uh igen Executives claiming airdrops uh that were barred for us residents so you know without I just want to kind of turn it over to you and and get your what's your high level response to to all of this yeah thank you for giving me the Forum to talk about this um I I think like there are many uh false or erroneous implications people are drawing from these articles for example uh one uh thing seem to be that people thinks oh I Labs or i l is csing ecosystem Pro

projects into add dropping tokens to you know to I Labs or to other ecosystem Partners the other one is that people are thinking maybe that some of the employees have done something wrong or you know gate kept the list or things like that I think the truth truth is very different from what is painted by this article and all the other Downstream things that people are thinking um to I'll set the context of what and when this happened so it's early this year we had cestia launch we had few other projects which had launched uh you know just before that and and uh there was this add drop meta like hey you know you participate in one

of these ecosystems you're going to get an add drop all these kind of things going on in the ecosystem and uh we got approached by first one than two of our ecosystem Partners who were actually doing their own you know uh adop distribution to to think about how should we do this add drop that reaches the igen ler ecosystem not I labs but the ion ecosystem and uh you know some of the other you know modular projects for example had chosen to choose GitHub uh you know Gibs of developers as the main vehicle to do these distributions you know for example Celestia did the thing where it's all modular you know ecosystem repositories

including ien layer was chosen to do the distribution so some of our employees got the Celestia drop we looked at this pattern and this pattern actually uh creates more conflict because you don't know who the employees are in any of these ecosystem projects who received these add drops and the other one we were seeing with GitHub distributions is that when you distribute to GitHub you are prone to Sibling you're prone to new Bots coming up and then fixing typos so that you have n number of pulled requests that can actually you know um so that they can earn these add drops so we didn't think that as a recurring

mechanism for an ecosystem doing distributions V get were actually appropriate so we were thinking about what options exist and one option was hey these teams exist and we understand you know there we can actually have Team sourced lists so you go to I Labs you can give you the list and there are 30 ecosystem projects which you know some of our team members went and collected lists separately from each of these 30 ecosystem projects and the idea was this is kind of like hey you know here is some information if you were were considering doing a you know distribution to this ecosystem here's some information you can use and this was specifically sourced on request

for you know the first couple of these projects and then you know some of our employees thought okay you know if this is happening maybe there are other teams who are actually do thinking of doing the same thing and would go the other way which is do the GitHub or other distribution instead you know if if they were interested we could send them this and maybe they talk to a few other projects and I think this is basically all that happened basically there's a comprehensive list of these 30 plus projects that was shared and uh which was specifically created on request and each project when you know could do what they wanted with this list rejected choose a subset choose a superet way

different projects differently we saw all kinds of these things happen uh and as far as we know there has been three projects which did the distribution and you know I Labs employees were included in one which did the distribution and you know nobody claimed so that's the facts of what uh what the matter are every drop that included I Labs included many other projects you know as an example alt layer included a distribution to 39 projects one of which was agon Labs teams from 39 projects um so we've continued to work very closely with 100 plus Partners whether they use this method or some other method or

didn't do an add drop whatever the consequences were so that is the um the approach the other one is inside the list unlike you know in a GitHub distribution where only the few developers who made edits on the GitHub are rewarded in in this method basically all employees were included I personally chose not to participate in any of these ad drops you know but that was basically the mechanism um this this is the facts of what happened and so there is no gatekeeping there is no coercion um yeah so that's the the state of the universe back in April May this

year and and on looking at this mechanism because we thought this is actually like significantly better than GitHub distributions we we took this seriously so we didn't think that this is the best final idea but actually this was you know in some sense better than previous methods so we continued to improve on it we created this system we call the igon ecosystem Network which is already on GitHub where you know once this information you know these lists either it's our team and other teams all this information is public and transparent anybody who wants to use it can use it and one other thing we did in the when we created the Aon ecosystem network is made it so that each team instead of having you know list just puts in the team wallet address and this

could basically be a complex smart contract that has splits and downstream division to their own team members kind of like what protocol Guild does but each and you know each each person who's doing a distribution can actually use these lists at their discretion so we continue to believe those mechanisms actually Superior to other mechanisms of contributor rewards and builds positive sum Network effects inside the ecosystem so that's I think the actual story we have this 30 plus teams that we uh created a list for distributed based on specifically on request there is no employee or company malons involved anywhere I'm proud to

stand by the team that we build at I labs and consider it a privilege to read them we're very happy to receive honest criticism but we do not think this constitutes that uh um the story hinges on one Anonymous team feeling pressure feeling pressured we do not have any evidence to believe this from the many many teams we surveyed and the many who have publicly stated that their experience is the opposite however if any team was pressured if any team was pressured I want them to feel free to DM me I want to personally make sure firstly this never happens second will'll make sure that any such add drop is absolutely

returned and the project continues to be teetered as a valued ecosystem partner but we have no evidence to believe that that is uh any of this happening so so sure sham the way the way that coindesk painted the story and and um uh Danny and I think it was Sam over there they said uh the team behind igen lay quietly worked to earn employees big paydays from Air drops raising cont conflict of interest concerns at least one team felt pressured to pay up a risk consequences so you just covered the the feeling pressured part but what what do you think about this um idea that like you got that there were there were people internally at igen that were like you know maybe they it wasn't part of

their job but they they were I mean seeing a big pot of gold at the end of this uh list like what what do you think about that uh I think if if it was that they would receive the add drops kind of personally as opposed to it goes to a list which includes all employees this theory is believable but uh we have neither evidence to believe this thing that any employee went out and sought something for themselves uh yeah so as I said the teams approached us with with a request and that's what you know our teammates were responding to um so again no evidence to believe this particular theory that uh some people were trying

to kind of fish for our drops for themselves or anything like that I think one thing that uh I want to say is you know as a team that went from you know nobody or very few people knew about us to Suddenly at the center of action in March April maybe the teammates didn't perceive like oh when you say something you're you're being treated as like oh you know if you don't do this you're no they're just like talking like they used to talk like six months back with their friends in BD ecosystem and you know suddenly that the fact that the perception is reversed and they're being treated as oh you are at the you know you're controlling the gates of the uh

to the you know golden Trasher or something like it I I think it was genuinely just uh you know uh miscommunication somewhere yeah shre up can we can we talk about that actually because you know tracing the I I think it's fair to say like the meteoric rise of Anan lir over the course of the last even 12 months or so you know I I I totally understand that right you're especially when you're in the early days of a startup everything is so Scrappy you don't have a lot of processes you're just trying to you know kind of hack it and survive right and then you know the select few amount of startups are lucky enough to kind of experience this you know meteoric rise and I could totally imagine that right from the perspective of you know agan is still a relatively small team and you know it used to be

kind of okay we're trying this crazy reaking thing and now the perception is oh uh you know Ian lay you know 13 billion tvl Pro protocol and you know this idea of being kind of like a gatekeeper a more important you know player in the ecosystem I would say and so you know I want to get a sense from you like I mean even just looking at how much is that sort of growth and maybe like the natural growing paints of being a startup um a part of the story and then you know you definitely responded to the um you know to the coercion uh claims just strongly refuting that is is what I heard from you but how do you think about this idea that you know now that Igan lir is maybe a more important player in the ecosystem and being very influential that you you kind of have to

scale into you know you know being held to a slightly higher standard and being under a microscope and how do you think about all that stuff yeah no um I I totally feel that thing that you just said like you know 12 months back let's say August 2023 if you uh um rewinded we had just launched on mainnet uh maybe one month back you know last year and uh we had maybe $25 million in deposits on on a contract which just had staking like that's where we were one year back at this time and even March of this year when you know March April this year when some

of these events happened our BD team had like five people and like that's that's all we had and we had you know so many sides of the marketplace we have stakers we have operators we have avss we have rollups all all this managed by basically four or five people so the Fe were basically not ready to be a project at the center of some large ecosystem so this is reflected in so many ways this is I would say one of the examples but so many ways for example when we did when we launched our mainnet uh in the the version of minet in uh April this year where like abss went

live several of of The Operators were scrambling to you know launch together with the main net because we were like in standard startup fashion saying oh next week we're going live with the with the AVS mainnet it's it's a go ready and like operators are like you give me four days notice to actually show up on your main what are you guys smoking and it's a very fair criticism we are not like we were not processing this like oh there are 200 operators and like you know 20 avss and all these other participants who are rushing to come to main that we were procing this like it's a startup we we don't know when we're ready to launch we've been

trying to hit launch like in January February March now we ready let's hit launch and it's so this is this is what happened as an example uh and then several things like when we upgraded our contracts many of the downstream lrts were not aware of how to integrate into those contracts these contracts were on testnet for example but we hadn't specifically taken time to ensure that all our Downstream dependencies upgrade as we upgrade like you know again not perceiving our own centrality in an ecosystem still following exactly the same like processes we had maybe six months back so I would say around like March April May we started seeing

problems in all kinds of different spaces of a maturing startup a startup that's went from oh you know yeah you can I trate and nobody really cares about how you're I trading on your processes to something that oh now tens of teams are impacted so we should be thoughtful we should communicate better we should have better processes be held to higher standards absolutely all of this stuff or you know basically over the last few months hey everyone this episode is brought to you by namada the shielded asset Hub protect ing the future of the multichain the ma is a chain that's near and dear to my heart because in previous seasons of bell curve we've talked about how the Cardinal original sin of most blockchains is not thinking about

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the show notes I think the main grievance at just seeing people on Twitter sham is that coindesk had to call this out instead of Ian layer being up like upfront and honest about it and it's something that Santiago and I have been talking about for Empire podcast with like Angel Investing it's like like investing is not the problem it's not disclosing something if you have like someone on so like we you know we try to be very upfront on on that kind of stuff did you guys ever think about kind of just being public and upfront about the list or you just never thought it would be a problem no that was the ion ecosystem network was basically a transition from hey you know this was sent to like a couple of parties to we now actually want to create a system which is public and

transparent and in terms of these existing add drops aler was the first one it specifically calls out like igen labs and or igen layer and 39 teams in its website it's in the blog post yeah it's on the blog post it's you know many of our employees claimed with their public enss addresses this is not a some secret Scandal this is actually exactly how all add drops happen that you know a team decides who who are all the ecosystem projects that they're contributing either they use several of the processes we've talked about they use Twitter like mentions they use Discord they use uh GitHub but instead in this one they were like you know using one additional metric which is actually teams that contributed to the

ecosystem so that's how we thought about it but we realized that we can actually like we don't have to make a call or somebody doesn't have to call us to get a list like this this should be public and trans the igon ecosystem Network GitHub was created in June way before any of this stuff so absolutely on the same page we have to be much much more public and transparent on everything we do and uh you know but there's a difference between when you get approached first time to do something and then you do it everything is not like some uh great pre-planned event it's just hey we got an email we need to respond to this this sounds really interesting let's do it and press and then you know so that's but I I I I think I I resonate with Mike

on you know as your kind of prominence or importance in the ecosystem grows it's worth not doing the hit send it's worth thinking carefully it's worth escalating everything you know getting inputs from you know the board the team all of that and we're maturing into those better processes yeah maybe maybe this is like an extension of Mike's question but I guess what do you think about this proc like we're talking about igen Lair specifically here but like just zooming out and talking about like the whole industry like no no matter who you are like just what do you think about you know air drops are a weird thing right because in one sense it's like yeah it's great because you're actually being able to incentivize and and and not just incentivized but reward people who have helped you out on the

other hand there's the obvious conflict of interest so like you know when I saw I think one of the three companies that did the air drop for you guys was ethery and I'm like okay well like if I'm like Renzo or swell or someone else I'm like well damn do do we need to be paying Ian layer 2 here so I guess how do you just think about this in general not even related to only Ian yeah I I think it is uh complex um so in terms of conflicts of interest we've seen this arise not only you know with this this story about Aon Labs but also with a previous story with Aon Le and the ethereum foundation uh with uh oh you know EF people getting advisor ships at an this was the Justin

Drake and dank dtin Drake and danr and you know basically that was the story is Justin and donr and I think uh again that was such an in interesting story in how it was presented versus what actually happened so maybe it's worth covering that and then I'll go one level meta and talk about still it so you know we've been working closely with ef researchers for you know several years like at I remember February 2022 e Denver went up to donrad and said hey you know we have this uh new like thing you can stake and

then restake and then like you can do this and then like d took a second and is like this this is crazy this should not happen and then he thought thought a little bit more and oh this is bound to happen somebody's going to build this thing now that you said it so if somebody's going to build it we want to make sure that people who care about the ecosystem Builder and uh he started asking me a lot of questions like you know why you doing this what do you want what what's the expected outcome what you know and I ran through various things I explained like okay you know if you can build all kinds of features for ethereum without

actually having the core Dev to do it uh and you know as long as enough people stti you can actually you know get similar trust guarantees and we drilled into various things for example what if you know for example in Ian da uh nodes participate and nodes uh nod stay and participate but they don't actually make the data available then what happens and then my assumption you know this is February 22 was that how ethereum will Fork around such Falls and then rra just like no oh ethereum doesn't fork for anybody else I mean of course ether you know who knows what ethereum will fork for but e of research will not be supportive of these kind of ideas so you should not

think about it so this is a good one and a half years before vitalic wrote to not overload consensus article so we were like uh very close with many of the etherum res myself a researcher we've been talking to them from day zero on all these ideas and as I got the feedback from D I'm like oh okay we cannot build AA assuming ethereum is going to fork for us what else can we do and then what other problems exist like oh you know is is it overloading the economic consensus of ethereum because you know you have only so much economic stake and it's being also used for other things how do we think about that how do you measure economic leverage so we invented this mechanism called Stak sh

which actually solves that problem and you know today vitalic in in in some disc between Mega and mega and monad posted oh you know you can use take show to solve this problem as an example of thinking about how to use how to solve economic leverage so there was the social uh overloading which is you know when you have uh some event happen on IG ler how does this affect Downstream so we can solve that using the igen token and forking so we invented a solution to solve it and then there's computational overloading which is if the same stakers and operators are running hundreds of EOS you know hundreds of networks then that's you know that can be centralizing because now you have to run hundreds of

networks rather than just run one ethereum network so igen da horizontal scaling was a solution to this problem of course you know all of these things rrad and Justin and vitalik and many others actually contributed generously without you know a lot of useful inputs without being advisor or anything else and so this is the history so we've known them for a long time we've they've been very helpful and you know uh so when we were going to do the token we felt it is natural to actually contri you know bring some of them as advisers so we talked to Justin and danrad and uh they said oh we have to talk to the ethereum

foundation and to other people before we sign on this and and they did and they came back with a request saying you should not use this on any public publicity material because you know there is a risk there for ethereum foundation saying hey you know you you go and say put on my website Ian layer advised by Justin Drake like you know rather than like actually them giving very important inputs in correcting How We Do various things for example uh we announced a policy that no LRT can exceed you know 33% if it exceeds 33% your rewards will be capped at 33% this is something we discussed very closely

with the ethereum foundation I don't care about like you know if I remove that cap I'll have way more St St on ION L you know I I can say I don't care but we care because we care about ethereum so we want to take these inputs in shaping how this system is built we got approached by every other chain in the world you know chains which are connected to exchanges which have hundreds of millions of wallets right like and they want to build come to us and say hey build layer on on that we say no we're building on ethereum because we believe in these values and we are contributing back so building this thing requires us to have you know inputs from the etherum foundation on

various things whether it is like you know decisions that we are making as I mentioned so now we mve to permissionless assets on igen layer is is this something we should support who do we talk to like you know is it net net positive ethereum is it like something that we should do or we should not do so we were very careful in how do we build this to be positive some for ethereum for E how do we make sure you know it doesn't affect the me pipeline how does how do we make sure there are 100 angles here to actually like consider and it takes a lot of time from several of these people to actually come uh you know advisers on this and so that's that's the context of this story

is basically and what what they had said and you know is that they will announce it from the uh you know ethereum side the researchers themselves will announce it in in a way that is actually uh not marketing but actually holding us to a higher standard they're they're not like regular advisor we call them decentralization Advocate because they're basically like every time we go they're not telling us hey you know what what you guys are doing is fine they're trying to find problems in everything we do and say hey you should not be doing ABCD our ecosystem in general the crypto ecosystem has a problem in having clear conflicts of interest policy whether it's the right policy for ethereum or

not I don't know and it's up to the ethereum foundation to decide but we had to put a lot of thought into our own conflict of interest policy after like you know both the add drop and this stuff back in May and we've we put together a very strong conflict of interest policy which precludes employees from obtaining new sign ific an Financial interests that's crypto people already have existing financial interest those need to be declared but new ones we capped at $110,000 like per project so each project has to decide what is the conflict of interest policy what are we doing here and how do we make sure that these policies reflect uh you know whatever the values of the project are

the other thing I want to add is on the ethereum side we've been in discussion with you know the other question that we got was you know know hey why are you doing like a couple of researches rather than the whole protocol Guild there's a big protocol Guild announcement coming up which we've been like in in in in uh discussions for now six months so you know and and the other complaint people had were why are you not transparent with it that I thought was the most the biggest complaint and you know at that time already Jason had put put up this as a answer on his ARB and it was coming up in seven days all of that so you know this is just ing the narrow window between like when when something happens and in less than a month when there was

going to be a formal proper announcement so that's the story there so I I I think a lot again I would attribute a lot of this to also our own Growing Pains like not having a proper process to think about all kind of second order third order fourth order consequences of each of these things but uh you know in as an industry I think we need to think a lot more about like conflicts of interest so I agree with that as a principle I would I so that's what I think as well just like even zooming out of this you know specific situation I think that it's it's it's very difficult in the world of crypto to completely avoid conflict of interest I I tend to uh think that probably the best way to deal with this

is just disclosure just improving your disclosure policy um and uh you know just for not even for Igan but you know everyone who's listening to this and uh you know I I think that that's everything from you know if you act as an adviser as like a side hustle to companies or you receive aird drops or whatever it is I mean I think just you know it's it's kind of like the it feels like there's a perception like the cover up is worse than the crime and if you're just really upfront there is no crime it's just like you're just um so yeah I sort of feel like just uh you know conflict of interest disclosure is probably the answer here um and now even in the case of like Justin Drake and Don crra like I don't actually think that's probably on Igan there probably more of

an EF question and and how they want to deal with that so you know I think it was also you know what do you want to disclose and then you know which is the organization that's responsible for doing it I think are the takeaways and questions that CL working crypto I think everyone should just be asking um I guess last thing for you TR here is you know I know that actually you know in reading the blog post uh you know it looks like you guys actually spun something up you were alluding to this a little bit earlier but in June you actually created something called the IG layer ecosystem Network which was inspired by the protocol Guild so I just wanted to you know give you a chance to you know since this has come out or even before when you realize like Hey we're

in this more prominent place we might you know we're being held to a higher standard here what are some of the the changes internally at ion layer that this has um you know catalyzed yeah I I think the igon ecosystem network is basically like a mechanism to make all of this transparent and public so you have basically a list of so the original thing that we did was collect these list of 30 ecosystem projects and like the questions would be who are these 30 in each of these projects who who are these people that are actually participating in it instead just create a public GitHub repository where you know each team can put up their team address whatever that address is and uh you know they can issue pull requests to actually

up update the GitHub repository to you know as new teams come up in the ecosystem and when a new project comes up and maybe each of the teams if they want it they can use their company's wallet address which is what we recommend big teams to do but there'll be small projects which are a couple of people coming together and hacking an ABS or whatever and they might just put like split the thing into their own addresses whatever and so this is just a public information repository for anybody who wants to do a distribution they could look at some of this and and channel it to the to whichever subset of uh the ecosystem Partners they want to do it for um internally we uh created a policy to disallow uh our uh receiving

add drops which as I mentioned uh you know in instead of having individuals you just have it go to the company if there is if at all there is anything and so that's one one change in the in the company's policy um the the igen uh ecosystem networks uh was tweeted out by the igen foundation I can give you a link to put it in show notes and so that's something that you know if you're an ecosystem project please feel free to go and like add yourself into this list and I think one of the things I think about is we are uh as a crypto ecosystem one of the really uh strong things that crypto

invented is incentive alignment so this goes up and down the protocol it goes to the protocol it goes to the people who are participating in the protocol it goes through all kinds of Downstream consequences and uh I think as an ecosystem we should be iterating and trying to find systems that work well for all the participants so that's that this is an attempt at taking an idea that kind of worked but had some flaws and remove it try to make it better I'm sure this is not perfect I'm sure we're going to come up with another iteration in like a few months but that's the that's the process like the ability to like take these ideas and iterate and each new one hopefully we get better so I think we're almost you know we can

sort of uh move past this portion but I also I realize we we've spent most of the time uh talking about this one the the first article here on the uh the sort of list of air drops and I just want to give you a chance to respond to this sort of second article that came out about you know certain igen labs and employees claiming airdrops and a as a company we uh we have policies for what uh you know for example when the igon foundation created its adrop it as policies for who can receive it and each of these add drops have terms of servers on who can receive these add drops and it's up to each of these individuals claiming these add drops to claim you know to comply with it so comply with the terms of service and uh as I mentioned I've not

been participating in any of these Al drops so I it's out of my my decision but each employees supposed to be complying with it whether they are in us we have employees not in the US we have employees traveling outside the US whatever the context is you know it's too fine grain for me to get into here but uh or to even know and so I would say you know as a crypto ecosystem instead of talking about this thing we should be talking about how to make crypto welcome in America like that's the real topic to me instead of saying that uh uh instead of talking about all the things we are doing to complete

with laws in the US as a company and individuals trying to find ways to access products that they are you know um interested in but not allowed as us residents so I I I think that's the bigger story and we all know this story as participants in the crypto ecosystem so I you know in some sense I'm surprised this is this is an article sure I I actually want to get into uh you know h i I'm some of the some of the upcoming developments um that Igan lir is working on and you know I mean we've been talking about Igan lir as this uh you know kind of growing from this seedling Scrappy startup into you know a very important protocol in the ethereum

ecosystem and I think the idea of of reaking you know even on velur we've talked about did a whole season on reaking and talked about how it's uh it's sort of changing and I want to get a sense from you on you know some of the updates um just in terms of igen lay as a company um you know we did this Rio acquisition that you guys talked about um uh that we talked about at the beginning and uh you guys also raised a big round from Andre and Horowitz so I guess on these themes of kind of like scaling a startup um you know growing into some more of these processes and and you know some of the changes on the company level like talk to us about what's going on from an igen layer sort of Team perspective yeah um the um we have uh

grown quite a bit you know to you know stify employees at igen labs and you know uh couple of dozen at aan foundation so as as a team we've had to scale and the uh amount of talent that we have kind of collected in the team I'm really um excited about I think very few people know uh you know what's behind the scenes beyond the more publicly phasing either Business Development or like you know strategy people in the team but we've put together an absolutely ins uh engineering team uh you know uh people bringing a wide variety

of experience uh you know Way Beyond crypto for example our coo Bel the uh was founder uh and CEO for the largest third party app store outside of Apple and Google back in the day reaching more than a billion phones you know his name is Chris durri we have um uh we people with experience you know building some of the most important startups in web 1 Web Two all these kinds of things back in the day you know um somebody who was Chief Architect at epion which was one of the kind of hottest startups back in web one um you know the amount of talent density we'

have accumulated in igen Labs I'm really really excited about uh you know the the set of things we can build and deliver um in terms of concrete you know milestones and uh accomplishments um last 6 months um there's been a lot you know you mentioned the a16z round which you know uh we we raise some Capital to go have uh enough buffer to go build this kind of a team we um we did the season one stake Drop Like The non-transferable Token launch uh which happened earlier in this year uh in in terms of talent acquisition we acquired

uh Rio which was a liquid reaking protocol Rio was one of the teams that indexed very heavily on let's get people with a lot of experience in crypto like you know eight years many people in the team have seven eight seven plus eight plus years in the crypto ecosystem and really excited to have them join us and you know you know I think of like our team as trying to blend all kinds of Interest elements people with deep crypto experience people with deep like engineering experience around like the whole uh ecosystem we have researchers and you know uh we also have like super kids these bis kids that you know we are

fond of in crypto we have gajes we have one more you know who who's kind of a lead lead developer for us he joined us when he was in his high school and uh you know he now leads most of the development his name is gam so we have all these different elements of DNA and we try to put them together and make it make it work and you know Jason and and I were just talking before the show you know as as you go from 2530 to like 7580 like you you go through this face transition where you have to like rework all these processes how the team works together and all of that and we're uh we're doing that and and finding like the new correct equilibrium for us so that's on the team side uh on the

protocol side I know the obvious number everybody focuses on is tvl because it's like single number and it's easy to understand so we have around like five million e and here's you know one one thing I find like funny about some of the uh media reporting is they say oh ion layer TV drop by 20% and then you go and look at it and it's like it's exactly the same 5 million e e price dropped and now it's a story that I let TV and I find this very consistently happening so I don't know like you guys have friends maybe tell them don't don't do this um but uh the um so but that's

the one simple thing everybody focuses on and I would say to some extent we've we know we have like you know e Supply to actually like Supply to to protocols that actually want use it so our focus is shifted from that into how do we create useful protocols how do we Empower useful protocols to actually come and build on top of the ecosystem so we have the Staker side operator side again operators we we're really glad to have all the top operators participate in our protocol uh so the AVS is we have I think 15 plus abss on Main net 20 on test net and

I would say at least you know another 50 building in various stages it does take time to build an AVS today it's not a simple matter of like hey go and click a button and then you can launch an ABS there are other people building these kinds of mechanisms on top of won layer for example alt layer has this package called the restake rollup where you can actually create an ABS which which does transaction ordering and finalization for your rollup and that's just like a rollup that's that's a New Abs instance you can just go and spin up so there are people building this but uh from our point of view um the building an ABS is still pretty difficult so and it takes

like six months to one year so many projects are on the on various steps in that Horizon uh we are making important Partnerships with key players in the ecosystem where you know they either use some feature in I layer as an ABS to actually uh Power something in the in their protocol uh so all of that is happening and Igan da launched on mainnet Igan da being one of uh I would say built specially to scale throughput for the ethereum ecosystem uh running today on Main net at 10 megabytes per second I think people don't really understand what 10

megabytes per second is it's like several hundred times more than what ethereum's 4844 is which is still not being fully utilized so the big problem for us there is what are the new use cases that are throughput hungry and what can we Empower using this kind of massive throughput so so that's that's a thing that we're doing we're doing an experiment of trying to crawl all the blockchains and you know show that you have enough throughput on I to write all of these blockchains we have a road map to scale this we don't think 10 megabytes per second is enough we have a road map to scale this you know over the next six months our goal is to get to 100

megabytes per second so I da is you know again we have an absolutely insane team uh for a DA building this uh this product so we have that and then we did the igen token announcement the token white paper uh which I think concept actually to explain simply the igen token uh what is it doing if you think about what makes a blockchain trust minimized you know uh normally you know as an academic one of the models we used to study is if the majority of validators are honest then you can prove some properties about the blockchain

irrespective of what the other validators do because you're taking consensus and as long as the majority are honest you can get certain properties but what makes a blockchain really powerful is not that it's depending on a majority of validators but it is the correctness of these blockchains are independent even of a majority of validators being honest because you have the superpower of forking so if the majority of validators go Rogue you know you are uh you can Fork the system you know taking a meta view we think of these as self enforcing coordination system so if you think of the blockchain as a coordination system who is enforcing it is it enforced by an Authority is it enforced by a committee is it enforced by a majority of validators no it's

actually self enforcing so we call these self enforcing coordination systems the reason it's self enforcing is because blockchains have forking like if the majority goes wrong you can Fork around that fault and this forking is not capricious and hey let's meet in a Discord Channel or let's meet on Telegram and discuss I'm going to Fork Jason out because I don't like him but it is you're forking on self evident things that are pre-agreed on self-evident events that are pre-agreed what is an example on ethereum if like the block was invalid right according to the state transition like you know protocol if the next block is invalid even if it's signed by a majority notes

should not accept it and you should Fork around it so there's is self-evident that it is invalid and it is pre-agreed that you never accept an invalid block so this is what forking is and the main observation is forking is if forking is the superpower of blockchains which is what makes it not dependent on an authority or a committee or a majority applications don't have access to forking applications built on a blockchain don't have access to forking so to me this is a major failing in the architecture of blockchains itself forking is the superpower of blockchains but it's only access to L1 but not to other things built on top other things built on top are suffering as a consequence of not having this access

and so what we want to do is to enable applications to access the superpower of 4K and that's what the igen token is a step towards so the igen token is a mechanism for applications to punish stakers or even a majority of stakers go Rogue the token can Fork around it and then like throw those guys out and make it possible for applications to penalize stakers who are doing something wrong even uh uh without having to trust an authority a committee or a majority so that's the I token you know you can think of it as folking is a super power of blockchains but it is trapped inside the L1 and I'm just giving access to it

all through the ecosystem like whether you're a rollup whether you're an application built on top of the rollup all of all of us have this have an access to this superpower so it's flipping basically do not overload forking or do not overload social consensus of ethereum and saying hey can I create like a meta mechanism that actually offers social consensus Fork ability as a service so that's the kind of paradigm shift that the igon token created and again going back to kind of the whole talking to EF and EF researchers this is very very important input to us that oh actually forking we're not forking is on ethereum is designed only for L1 core events like uh safety or livess violations not for all

kinds of things built on top so that L us to create this containerized system which can supply forking to everything built on top so that's the power of the igen token that's why we called it the universal inter subjective work token inter subjective a word that was Meed widely I like things that are Meed widely praking was Meed rightly but an subjective was basically a new word for social consensus we thought social consensus had become kind of corrupted by the connotation of hey we we're going to come on Discord or Twitter and Shout at somebody and then like you know Fork them out and we just think this is very distasteful and like it's worse than all kinds of other

systems that we have so our idea is you only fork in for in inter subjective forking basically means you only fork on self-evident things that are pre-agreed so that's the ien token a little bit of what we did there I I can talk about some of the other other things we we're doing and are coming up yeah I I I guess the two that stood out for me shiram were uh you know I'm I saw that coming soon you're enabling permissionless uh token support so not just eth is reaking but any token and that actually a big theme of the last season of of B curve which was just like what is that ratio ultimately going to look like and what is the preference for abs going to be you know purchasing e denominated stake or their own or usdc

or some other token or whatever it is and then the other thing yeah you mentioned that there was a there's a big debate going on we love to debate semantics on on crypto Twitter and I saw there was some back and forth in between Mega eth and uh monad on um not only just the definition of a full node actually but then uh Stak Shure ended up becoming a big part of that conversation as well so that maybe we can end on those two things and just uh just want to get your your you know what's coming down the pipeline in terms of being able to support U multiple different types of tokens and you know how do you think that's going to impact abs' security preferences and then we can close on Stak sh yeah um well I I'll get into these these two things in detail I'll

just give like a quick uh list of all the things that we've launched and all the things that are coming uh and then I'll dive into the permission L support and and the other thing um AVS rewards launched on mainnet so the original uh launch of like abss on did not have the ability for avss to reward the stakers and operators as well as uh Slash them so but AVS rewards launched on Main so excited about like abss starting to participate as a as our own in in-house ABS end da you know started giving a little bit of rewards using eth you know uh I think it's 10 eth a month right now so this is basically to start the whole

process of testing and verifying that the reward system is working correctly uh this is separate from any kind of ion native incentives that will go to uh stakers and operators of the uh ion ecosystem um so all these things happened and then like what's coming down the pike is we have an up protocol upgrade called Pepe people doing native reaking noticed that the cost of like claiming their like weekly rewards from ethereum going through the ion uh you know layer native reaking system is expensive so we invented a mechanism called Pepe which actually reduces the cost quite a bit so you you don't have to claim each time when you get get an update from eum you

can batch them into like several weeks and then so you only pay the cost one time but you know with one extra cost you can kind of like amortize over several of the partial withdrawals is what it's called in ethereum so that's Pepe basically make R native reaking cheap like so that that's the theme there so that's going live I don't know in the next couple weeks programmatic incentives that's a really huge deal we in innovated and designed a new mechanism for uh stakers and operators to be rewarded for opting in and serving many avss as well as creating a mechanism for avss to want to pay fees because you know we

want to have price Discovery for Economic Security that's the thing that again like you guys have talked a lot in the reaking series what is the price of Economic Security and of course we know early early in the E early in the game the price is going to be low and it is going to go up and so we want to enable like a really good mechanism for Price Discovery so the way programmatic incentives work is based on rewards matching so the igen rewards that are directed the igen rewards only go to stakers and operators and when they go to stakers and operators they're directed based on their participation in abss but if you participated in abss that paid a higher fee you will get a higher fraction of the igen emissions so this incentivizes abss to want to pay

fee depending on how much Economic Security they want but their fee doesn't cover really the cost of staking the ion emissions will cover the cost of staking initially but because different AVS avss will be competing to acquire more of the stakers and operators to optain so you have this very interesting flywheel so we want to kick off the rewards flywheel and so to do that we we introduce this new igen programmatic incenters I think that is it's it's a very intricate an interesting mechanism you know we can do a whole podcast on but I'll defer it for the future uh the Mike any comments no no no no I was just uh smiling at the thought

of doing a whole podcast on programing programmatic incentives but um sorry no no no it's cool it's there's a lot of interesting economics that vent behind actually how how we designed it um the other things that are coming up are governance for the a layer ecosystem I think you know our our vision is to build Humanities coordination engine which means we need to think not only about like you know things that are natively in protocol things like forking that I talked about earlier but also how the protocol itself is governed so the so we're innovating a lot on the governance side as well so we'll have announcements coming up um you know uh

new features on the slashing you know is coming up in Q4 and the slashing release has broken major ground and solving a whole bunch of problems in accounting like how do AVS if right now if you look at our dashboards every avss says they have like I don't know several billion dollars of stake and like this means we're overcounting each ABS is over counting because the same stake counted across all these avss and so we want to create a mechanism where Stak is not overcounted but counted precisely you know in some sense you can think of blockchains are just like next Generation accounting systems so you want to have a precise accounting of how much each ABS is drawing from this

common pole of security so we have a new primitive called unique security and and like going live with slashing we also solved some of the core problems that we were kind of struggling with earlier for example the slashing veto committee we don't need an nrin slashing V veto committee with the new slashing design so we'll have a lot of information coming up on that and uh you know finally the igen forking which was a core protocol feature now being connected to abss to then like have access to Fork ability so that's another feature that's coming up so these are all the kind of major things coming up also another uh subfeature called operator sets which basically

lets in inside an AVS you may want to wait all the operators either based on s or just each operator is weighted 1X or whatever these kinds of Quorum configurations and you know operator sets is a mechanism for avss to express these Corum configurations quite carefully so that's all the all the things coming up in the next six to nine months so we're very excited about all of this and you know of course I I didn't mention the uh stake drop we did season one of the stake drop season two and you know unlock and all these token Milestones also coming up in parallel so excited about all of this for the community and we will be ramping up our own coms to the community because I

think one thing we realized during a lot of this episode is we're doing so much and from the outside it's not transparent or clear that we're doing all these things so one of the things we want to do is to improve that significantly you know we brought in a new head of marketing Chief marketing officer at the foundation and and improving like our comps to the communities so that's so now that I've given an overview of all the Milestones coming up I'll speak to Mike's question on permissionless tokens so permissionless tokens is this idea that I know after we launched some other like reaking projects came and they're like hey you know you can you know use any token and you know you go back to the

original design we actually like it's the design was pretty clear that it's arbitary rc20 we're just whitelisting which tokens are on boarded the main reason for wh listing is we don't want people to stake arbitary tokens and expect rewards for all of them while you know um while uh you know we may not be able to fulfill it so that's the main reason the rewards are like you know designed primarily to go to E and you know whenever Ian scking goes live uh those two permission list allows you know avss to actually stake their own token in in in their uh for their ecosystem uh there may be other like

major tokens that show up like USD or BTC that may become big and the way I think about which what is the right denomination of Economic Security is cross volatility cross volatility between what is the unit of risk imagine I'm transacting Bard apes and board apes are priced in E and I'm sending a board AP from one CH to the other might as well get insurance or you know Economic Security in E because it's price risk is priced in eath but if I'm transacting something which is priced in USD so my risk is in USD I would might as well use USD as a unit of

stake and if I'm using something which is priced in BTC then I would want to use BTC as the unit of uh collateral so I think this is is a very interesting Dynamic that the unit of Economic Security matches the unit of money because you know everything is denominated in the unit of money and so there's a cross Network effect between like what you can stake and what the risk is denominated in and this is one of our thesis for why we chose eth because it's the only money that can also be used securely as collateral right like you know all the other things if it's BTC you're taking bridg risk or counterparty risk if it is

USD or of course depending on the custodian this is the only token that potentially could become money and or is money already to some extent and is also used could be used as economic collateral so this was part of the thesis of us choosing eth as the kind of primary source to fuel this ecosystem but you know it's it's clear that there are at the minimum we already had things like uh special quorums even in Igan DS so this theory of like allowing arbitrary tokens is not just at the igen layer level we've like moved it up into Igan da in Igan da we have this ability if I'm using aan da for my rollup I can get

e or I or whatever stakers sign off on it but I also have my own rollup token stakers sign off on data availability so this is a core feature of end da so when somebody comes up and says oh we doing permission list to taking it's it's there we've just you know o opening up every step you know this is our protocol here is we want to open up one step at a time and so that's we excited to see permissionless token go live and you know see who who will use it whether it's avss using to pay their own stakers like this is really useful because you know when you're paying your own token stakers you're paying them done as

opposed to give giving dividend like objects so that that's something that I think will be attractive to a lot of avss lot of rollups they can just integrate with ag da and then use their rollup token to secure their own network yeah well sure I mean I uh I'm very interested to see when that ends up getting rolled out and yeah you guys clearly have a lot um you know on the docket for the next 12 months or so and you know and maybe as we start to wind down here we can just uh you know kind of tie off and put a bow um on this whole conversation but you know just uh just in thinking about this I think uh you know at least my core takeaway and then um I'll I'll give you a chance just just close us down here sham is is just

just the need for more uh disclosure in general in in like the crypto space um I do think that the airdrop like airdrops and token incentives are a dynamic that doesn't really quite exist in other ecosystems as much um and you know we're a young industry in a lot of ways like a very idealistic industry but you know crypto has kind of grown from it's still this kind of nerdy Wild West thing but we've also ascended to the global stage right we crypto is a a key issue in the US presidential election which blows my mind right and with all the positives that comes along with that there are also some some drawbacks as well which is basically that we're on a much bigger stage and you know we're going to start getting held to a a higher standard of

account uh and that doesn't necessarily mean there probably was some not great stuff going on before but just means that you know as as we get a get onto the bigger stage they just going to be more eyeballs on us in general so you know for me I think a huge part of this is just basically disclosures um but yeah sh just want to give you like a final chance to you know TYB and you know what you learned from all this and and yeah I I I think uh you know I I would go even one level meta and I'd say legibility I think legibility is basically this idea that you know whatever we're doing is clear and and and perceivable by the community and that includes things like you know conflicts or Al drops but it also includes what are we doing to actually

try to build and improve the ecosystem uh it it includes like giving advanced notice to the ecosystem on new upgrades coming up you know including them in key conversations so trying to make the whole uh process much more transparent and legible I think is a big thrust for us going forward and I agree with you Mike that as you know crypto um ascends into the global stage we need to be held to a higher standard as an ecosystem and I I feel in a micro way that's also true for us at Ian layer as we go from like a a startup that you know some nerds care about to like

something which is more Central we absolutely need to improve a lot of our processes and we're here for it so I'm excited to to look at the next phase our road map and ambition is quite large we want to build Humanities coordination engine and you know uh we we're marching ahead on that mission and really excited for the community that's here with us and look forward to improving you know buttoning down uh and going ahead well Shon thank you for coming on today and uh speaking to us and answering you know my questions for

you so thank you sir yeah do it again sometime thank you so much Jason thank you Mike really uh appreciate you giving this forum yeah good to see you talk to soon hey everyone hope you all enjoyed today's episode wanted to give a final shout out to namada again a team that is near and dear to my heart they are building the shielded asset Hub which is protecting the future multi-chain talked a little bit about how that works in the mid roll but for now what I would highly recommend that you do is go go check them out they're in their main net launch phades you can follow along with everything at n.net you can start rewarding Yourself by shielding your actions and strengthening data privacy for all across the multichain so thanks again to Mada for all the great work that you're doing