Superchain 2025 Economic Outlook with Mark Tyneway

Transcript

perhaps the super chain is too ethereum aligned and too focused on security and not focused enough on performance is it important to just continuously you know strive for more and more validators therefore more and more decentralized therefore more and more secure there's two main reasons why you would want to use blobs over say Alda are you a big BAGI fan of network states welcome back to the rollup your home for technical talks and open conversations that shape the modular future nothing Today's Show is to be construed as Financial advice you can see our full disclosures list at the roll up.co Ventures sit back relax and enjoy today's episode after a quick word from some of our awesome Partners Redstone is def's modular

Oracle supporting over 100 clients on over 50 chains offering 1,000 assets Redstone is the leader for Bitcoin staking and yield bearing assets they offer the most robust customizable feeds available in any model join the Redstone exhibition [Music] today what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup today's episode we have Mark tanway of optimism super chain and many more roles chief of objective decentralization metrics and other ethereum progression metrics here today I had a really good conversation with

Mark in um Bangkok I think at the E theum intop form uh for like two hours or so and this kind of like a follow-up conversation from that so Mark thanks for thanks for joining us today and welcome to the show awesome thank you so much for having me Andy and um yeah excited to you know follow up on on our conversation in Bangkok we're at the ethereum inops Forum you know everyone keeps complaining that ethereum is too fragmented and you know we're trying to combat this by unifying ethereum so ethereum inter out forum is this uh basically a tiger team to push interupt standards across all l2s so that we can

have a unified user experience across all of ethereum yep and Mark A lot of times it's easier for people to you know continuously shout the problems ethereum is too slow ethereum's too expensive ethereum's fragmented the l2s are parasitic and it's more difficult to think about the solutions and come to some objective measurements how we can bring our bring some of the people working on these things together um and and ultimately achieve some of these Solutions so how have you found the the solutions amongst all of these problems how have you been able to

identify that and and then ultimately what do you think is the path to reaching those Solutions yeah I think that one major problem is everyone is speaking past each other right now um everybody is demanding for decentralization which I get it right we're trying to build a new aot that you know fixes a lot of the problems in the current Internet and we're trying to you know um build solutions that don't trap users we're trying to bring power give power back to users but I think that optimizing for decentralization that is the wrong goal

people might think that's absolutely insane to say they're going to be like oh what to sellout this person's compromising on the crypto ideals but I don't think that's true at all I think that if the goal is decentralization then we are making a subjective goal and if we're trying to coordinate a group of people towards a subjective goal you're just going to have a bad time everyone is going to have a different opinion of what decentralization is and it's going to be really difficult to get everyone to move in the same direction this is why as an industry we need to stop optimizing for decentralization and we need to break

decentralization down into objective quantifiable and achievable goals and accomplish those one by one and in doing so we can get everything that we want out of decentralization much faster and more effectively yeah and so I think that like we right now we oftentimes use things like uh L2 beat or things like these like uh data analytics platforms to effectively help us um kind of coales around re like ideas of decentralization and I think most notably are these stage

one stage two type of rollups but like I honestly think that that the rollups today are kind of kind of not even like close to what the end state is and so we're trying to we're trying to optimize for decentralization and these types of ideas when like frankly I don't even think the performance and the execution capabilities and the applications that are built on these Stacks are like even close to where they really need to be so like are we are we optimizing for decentralization at the wrong time or are we thinking or like like should our efforts go to more towards building higher performant rollups or like what

is what is your view on the focus points for scaling ethereum as we have it today yeah that's a very partial um it's kind of a scary topic because you never know when you will need the security uh you really only learn when it's too late um with ethereum for example some people question oh we're overpaying for security um but you don't really know the exact point at which you're paying the appr appropriate amount until there's some sort of attack so there's one world where um you know we start decreasing security AB bunch

and we focus on user experience things you know increasing throughput and we're fine um and we're able to scale then there's another world where you know there ends up being an attack and it's catastrophic and given the rollup centered road map all the different teams have a choice and I would imagine over a long enough time frame there probably will be some roll outs that you know make a decision to compromise on security too much and end up paying for it Mark could you break down uh and decentralization oftentimes kind of

becomes synonymous with security um could you break down decentralization into some of its sub subc components maybe especially some more of its objective subcomponents so that we can start to coales around those as as North Stars yeah that's a great Point um so let's talk about um with rollups one um point that is well studied with the decentralization of RS is L2 beats stages so like stage zero stage one and stage two and um l2b has objective measures that say and define

the properties of system that require it to be stage one or stage two and the problem is um so biology he tried to Define um decentralization like years ago and I believe he calls it the Nakamoto coefficient where basically his definition is you know you have to look at all the pieces of the system there's lots of pieces and then you have to kind of uh the system is only as decentralized as the least decentralized component so the problem with talking

about decentralization as this concept is often times there's parts of the system that are not being considered in that particular conversation and one person might be considering different things in their definition and another person might be saying something else so I think some ways to make decentralization more um specific or around um censorship resistance um upgradeability um liveness um these properties are all things that can be measured and

Quantified and contribute to dis centralization in some way and but our Scopes in a way that's quantifiable yeah I think that's the I mean that is what ltbd is trying to do but it it keeps bringing me back to to this point that like the rollups today are just so uh like we're just barely scratching the surface and what's possible that I just I'm not I like like I'm not sure that that that even in in its final form any of the rollups on the super chain right now are are what are even close to what our end state of scaling is going to be and so like we are I just I I just sometimes feel that

we're just we're just tripping over ourselves instead of just maxing out throughput maxing out performance and just trying to actually build something that like can compete with like you know something of the of the salana of the hyper liquid of that of that kind of caliber and so you know the rollups on on uh super chain are I I would say very ethereum aligned like as much ethereum aligned as possible um to to to the extent that you guys basically uh have some sort of uh requirement or I like a recommendation that all the rollups should use blobs um or that they you know they they can they should and they

will and you can probably kind of like fill me in there um but but I'm not seeing how we're going to get to a world of maximally performant rollups using blobs on the super chain like we're going to be stuck with like lower TPS chains tripping over ourselves on decentralized ation when there's going to be other chains out there that care less use alt da or or you know juice their sequencer with some sort of like collocation mechanisms and um basically run circles around rollups that are stage two that are like screaming about their decentralization and so your point is kind of like well you know you don't really know the cost of security until

you need it and that's true um but but but I'm not even sure this conversation really really is that important until we actually just maximize what what's in front of us um so I don't know maybe you can fill in some holes in that thinking there but uh like perhaps the super chain is too ethereum aligned and and too focused on security and not focused enough on performance but you know I don't know yeah I mean those are all great points um I think that if we look at the data today you know a majority the L2 transactions are happening on the super chain and this shows that there is some

degree of product Market fit for you know this um evm L2 in Blob space so um you know people want that product um to my knowledge there is not um major major usage of any rollup that is using da um on ethereum I do know that if you look at um conduits website um there are some um l3s that do use LTA that are very popular um I think that those that's like a different sort of product than say like an an L2 like roller so um I think it really depends

on the application and what their needs are when it comes to these but I personally am very bullish on scaling ethereum I believe that we will be able to have massive blob throughput and we will be able to scale the L2 product just as much as any of these altas while not compromising on the levels of security that you would expect from etheron yeah um and I think I I think the data supports that

um there's still I just looked up def llamas 54% of all tvl across every blockchain is still on ethereum the slow expensive L1 ethereum and so I think the market prioritizes safety more than some of these other metrics that are available on on rollups um and so to double click on the on the blob's perspective because we have had a lot of conversations with uh da providers and there's there's a v a scale there's a vision of scale uh that is really Grand it has a lot of a lot of bandwidth and

so you know of course blobs are the ethereum da product and why do you think you know these rollups not only on the super chain but all rollups maybe are going are are most incentivized to use blobs and end up using blobs what is what is the use case what is the bull case there yeah so there's two main reasons why you would want to use blobs over say Alda um one is credible neutrality if you want the least amount of governance in your system the most credible neutral system um then you are going to not want

to introduce another dependency if you want um basically the the problem is that adding another dependency to your system they may be less credibly neutral than ethereum right and when I say cred credible neutrality what that means is equal opportunity of usage or non-discrimination of us right so every time you add a new component to your system with a new governance model then you're going to impact the credible neutrality of the system right in rups today um you know they have the governing system of

ethereum and then they also have the governance system of their multi-c that upgrades them right and as we move towards stage two that multisig will continue to be um removed its ability to influence the system will be diminished over time and it will be more and more credibly neutral closer to what ethereum is today right so the other reason why you would want to use blabs over Alda is because it will impact the security of the system so what is security security is safety and

livess safety is this idea that the your funds will not magically disappear or they won't um be taken away from you without your consent it's your property rights as a user uh the other part is livess this basically means the chain will continue you'll have the right to send a transaction and you'll be able to continue to read you know uh data from the chain to like know that your assets are there right so adding in all all da to your system adds another part of the system that can

fail with regards to safety or with security sorry yeah exactly in and secur or safety is kind of an underpinning of that along with liveness um which which sounds which sounds great in practice um and I think that we're in reality we're at a similar position we're also like pushing up against that throughput threshold on blobs 80% 90% on on ethereum I think are filled getting closer um so like then what you know we have pcture coming up right so that's good uh I think we get we we double The Blob uh limit uh which should happen this year which is going

to be massive uh for uh scaling ethereum's da um but once we get over that blob limit consistently like I mean I think we've seen just little tiny pieces of that but I think like the market is kind of instantly or relatively quickly corrected back down as as fees have have gone up um but do you feel that ethereum and the kind of implementation speed of Petra as well as further upgrades to blobs will be able to match the the growing pace of the super chain of base of these other kind of high perform or high in demand chains yeah that's a great question so basically ethereum is increasing the its

blob throughput in Petra like you said um this is really good because there's a bunch more Chings coming online there's un chain coming online soon there's sonum coming online soon there's Inc Inc just came online they're you know starting to rev up um all of these chains are part of the super chain and you know I expect them to be going really hard this year on vering new users and you know using blobs so it is really important to increase the blob capacity of ethereum and ethereum can only upgrade every so often

it's a lot of work to ship an upgrade to ethereum so there is a legitimate question if ethereum can scale fast enough for you know all these chains to continue to grow and I can't tell you exactly what will happen when push comes to shove it kind of sounds like an ethereum Civil War almost you know people are upset that it's not scaling fast enough um they're threatening to leave you know it could cause a lot of drama um but in my opinion we should focus on helping the core devs increase the throughput I think that with ethereum we've made it this far I think it would

be a very bad look to weave ethereum just because it's not shipping fast enough to me that feels a bit parasitic what we should be doing is we should be helping out the L1 core developers more in making sure that they're able to ship the blob increases and I know that there's a lot of good research going on with pure Das the next step towards dank charting which is kind of the Holy Growl of scalability of blobs for ethereum and so PS it's kind of like a baby step towards

think Shing and people are really hopeful that it will be able to ship in Q4 of this year and that should be able to increase the blob throughput um I think that there's a lot of low Hing FR with Petra um we were able to increase the blob limit because we were able to identify optimization and basically fix these uh these these problems that were C that were wasting bandwidth so that it's safe to increase the blob limit and when I say that what

I mean is we never want to upgrade ethereum in a way where it massively increases the hard run requirements of running a validator that would be really bad because it would result in instability of the network because a bunch of validators would instantly go offline and no longer be able to participate so every time that we push an update to ethereum we need to make sure that the validators have the appropriate Hardware requirements one major problem that the ethereum community has had was there was

no definition of what the hardware requirements actually were and everyone would argue about oh we want to make this change to ethereum and some people would say oh we can't do that because we need to keep the resource requirements low for validators recently someone from the EF published the standard Hardware requirements for a validator this is amazing because now we have an objective measure that we can all coordinate around and now we will no longer speak past each other we can all point to the document and say this

$1,000 machine this is the minimum Hardware requirements for a validator and every single Network upgrade can be tested against that specific hardware and as Hardware improves we we can improve those standard Hardware requirements keep the costs the same and you know scale ethereum and does that mean we we ought to Leap Frog up to like the most capacity that these Hardware requirements can handle you know maybe there's some offline the validators that would go offline but you know now that we've we've defined that can we kind of push that capacity as much as as much as

possible um um and I have a follow-up question but I think I I'll pause there and then then ask my followup yeah we definitely should um we should all now that these um are published we should just make sure everyone's bought in on it and then there are so many optimizations that can be made um just we there's a lot of lwh hang fruit um especially in the P2P layer um you know reducing bandwidth it's like really important for validators to be able to communicate over the P2P Network um their signatures and everything and like gossiping the blobs um so now that we have this like these Hardware requirements we can um

measure everything against them and we can optimize for them specifically awesome and then the followup was a little bit more abstract but would you say that there is a target number of validators that we ought to have online at any given time is there such a thing as too many should we is it is it important to just continuously you know strive for more and more validators therefore more and more decentralized therefore more and more secure is that the right train of thought or is there a an Optimum somewhere in the middle that you know we can as long as we have 10,000 validators that's sufficient and we can just you you know stick with that

and then maximize performance as much as possible yeah that's a great question I think with everything there's tradeoffs and I'm sure that there's different prevailing philosophies on this um you know some of the upgrades that ethereum has been talking about um especially related to like single slot finality has been around trying to reduce um the number of validators that are you know participating consensus um and then that would kind of allow for like this like faster finality and um you know this kind of comes back to what we were talking about before it's unclear um how much security is actually required until it's too late so

we don't want to dramatically reduce the number of validators even though um the consensus ethereum would operate much more um effectively uh if there were less validators because it would use less overall resources uh but everything things to tradeoff so um I imagine that this conversation will continue into the future and as we burn and experience new things you know it'll evolve but I definitely can't say that there's like one best path today yeah that that makes sense and that that's why we're suggesting incremental changes we reduce the uh excuse me we we raise the performance a

bit um and we expect some validators drop off and we raise it again some more validators drop off but as we do so incrementally we don't leave room for outages because we can kind of go on a test test case basis raise raise performance incrementally and we shouldn't we shouldn't shock the system dramatically to the extent that we would drop below some critical mass of validators um is that the idea yeah definitely yeah and there's a lot of um eips and research going on that I think can squeeze a lot of performance out of ethereum um you know I think this year

is going to be a big focus on scalon L1 I'm hoping that we're able to you know ship pure d a blob increase you know by the end of 2025 and then also people are really passionate about scaling the execution there there's you know EF um eof is like an improvement to the evm and you know some benchmarks have shown that um smart contracts that are written using the eof version of the E evm are um sometimes 25% faster than um contracts using the Legacy style evm so really you know that is also a scalability throughput to

ethereum because now contracts are using less gas meaning you know more transactions can fit in a block and that's a a change that impacts ethereum wide right so I think maybe what some some people fail to realize sometimes is that improvements to the L1 especially as we we load up the L1 with transactions that originate on l2s some of these performance increases you know ultimately translate to l2s as well and so increasing performance on the L1 you know you know does indirectly benefit the l2s as well how given that you know most of the tvl still exists on

L1 how important do you think it is that we we focus on the L1 and we continue to to prioritize users and and execution on the L1 yeah I mean I think it's really important to continue to focus on the L1 um everyone a lot of people disagree about this because the whole Road mapap of of ethereum is kind of like oh we're gonna do the rollup Center to run back and focus on rollups but you know it's turned out to be much more difficult than we all thought to build a stage two plus rollup um right now a lot of people ask

oh L2 should be focusing on these sorts of Scali improvements but the reality is that we're trying to focus on getting to stage two and it's a lot of work to do that and it's hard to make specific improvements to improve the scalability at the same time as trying to ship stage two so I think that once stage two is commoditized then rollup teams will be able to have the bandwidth to take the Reign on these sorts of scalability improvements in these evm improvements but for now stve Shar is

just a higher priority um my my curveball is if somebody made the argument that they think that salana or alt l1s in general helped ethereum in the short term to help scale uh like just basically a a single base layer for Defi and kind of like nfts and just overall usage and that Celestia Avil or other kind of alt da layers helped ethereum in the immediate term scale by by just offloading some of the extra throughput but are long-term competitive would you agree with that or or do you see it differently imagine if the world's GDP moved on chain guys say GM to safet the newest protocol by safe

isn't a blockchain and it's not a new layer 2 it's a transaction processing Network built to send money any and swap anything on thousands of layer twos from a single Universal balance in sub 500 milliseconds it's fast it's smooth and it's simple and it's built with safe multi-sig level security in mind safet unlocks smart accounts across multiple chains allowing users to supercharge security scalability and speed so get started today at net. safe. Global and remember to follow at safe onx welcome aboard on our journey into the singularity this is the endgame road map for fra and FRA the new L2 out of the

fra ecosystem that is totally based on fractal scaling fractal is a modular L2 blockchain built by fracks with modular and fractal scaling in mind fractal scaling is based on the mandal BR set of fractal images and it explains how l2s become l3s and the entire app chain life cycle goes through its Evolution the FRX ecosystem is made of some of the top builders in the space and has stemmed from its OG days of the fra stable coin it is now in the LST space the LRT space and this fraxel L2 joins the existing

Suite of fra products including Frack Swap and fra lend you can see frack fairy the bridge to go from any chain arbitrum optimism or main net into the fra main net Bridge your tokens and bring your FRA assets into the fractal ecosystem join today to get the best out of fraxel you are still early join today take part in our Expedition into the singularity yeah that's a great question I mean I think everything is realistically competitive to some degree um there's a degree of competitiveness and a degree of cooperation and um at the most

fundamental level everything is competitive for attention um you know everything from Netflix to YouTube um to video games you know to crypto right people have limited attention so what can be filled what whatever can fill your attention that's where you know companies are able to build products that are able to like capture value and so if you think about it from the most fundamental level everything is competing for your attention and under that framing you know l2s are definitely competing with ethereum um but at the same time um there's a degree of cooperation with

everything so um ethereum and say salana they are both working together to um you know onl more people into the crypto ecosystem and spread overall awareness to crypto and you know even though they're different base layers they're different assets they're still getting more people into the ecosystem and you know the developers are building more tools that put cryptography in the hands of people you know I think that is such an amazing thing putting the protography at the hands of people because now people can you know custody value and people can

custody their identity and there's no intermediary for uh in between you and these like core Primitives that are required to be part of civilization right like we have to remember that um as the entire crypto ecosystem We're In It Together to you know give power back to the people so um from that perspective you know a lot of the crypto EOS system is you know working together to give power to people and you know dis intermediate and break down these worldall Gardens that are just extracting from us and upating

capitalism yeah yeah and so it with that lens in mind a follow-up curve ball is going to be then how do you think about like elastic chain ZK sync stack Ager arbit from orbit and super chain like you guys are all competing for the same deals I imagine super chain clearly is getting a lot of the bigger deals uni chain CRA uh Inc uh Sony some of these larger ones ZK syc I think just got like deuts Bank um I know arbitrum has got a really good Tech stack and has done some cool stuff AG's kind of been like in the middle but I feel like AG is kind of just now being like all right you guys fight it out I'll connect all you guys

and this kind of gets into like this interrupt conversation but maybe we can talk about how you look at these other like clusters um and then also just like how do we yeah how do we bring this together uh within the super chain and within the super chain and these other clusters and just like broadly ethereum scaling yeah that's a great Point um there's all these different Tech Stacks all these different teams that are all kind of competing for you know the same deals the same users um obviously you know I work on optimism um I've been working on the op stack for like over four years at this point um you know and I believe that the

op stack is the best tech stack for Roo today and into the future and you know we're continuing to have features um it's like extremely reliable it's powering based which is the chain with the most throughput right now the the L2 with the most throughput um so we we know the op stack is is um battle tested and Harden in high quality um with all these other these other stocks you know definitely rooting for them um they're you know Landing deals there are launching chains

and yeah I think you know in a world where the pie is not growing then it's very Zero Sum because every ecosystem is fighting over the same set of deals and the same set of users when the pie is growing then it's a little bit easier because you know everyone can kind of specialize and you know land different deals and everyone's on boarding new people so yeah I think one of the good things about ethereum is that you know it does have so many different teams working with it and if one fails then all of ethereum doesn't fail another team can just you take their spot and continue

scaling ethereum one thing on the uh growing the pie I I've been gr I've having this thesis that like once we get to more of a chain abstracted experience for especially for new users um I just don't think the the ideologies that we all have today are going to exist and so like once a new user onto Bas equates to a potential new user onto like abstract chain when they go live which equates to a potential new user on proof of play because they just go from app to app and not like bridging and these types of things uh to me it becomes very clear that the pie is growing and that the this kind of like infighting of fighting over the the same pie the same users

isn't really going to be nearly as prevalent so I I I see a snowballing towards this and and am excited for it but you know generally kind of agree with uh with with with your takes Rob did you have something there yeah um because you know we were talking about blobs a little bit earlier in this conversation and I think the most common way to think about interop is through these clusters that people tend to talk about super chain orbit elastic chain agare are like you know the more more prominent ones is there and the answer might just be no but I'm curious is there any interrup benefit of using similar da for instance you know a

rollup on super chain uses blobs and a roll up on arbitrum orbit uses blobs do they have any shared interop capabilities yeah it's a great question so there's a whole giant design space here and how introp work on between different Tex Stacks or within the same Tex stack and usually the term cluster um the term cluster is used when it's describing chains that have some sort of native lower level sort of integration of interoperability with them and um is usually used to describe chains that are all used in the same

text stack and they form this cluster and there's this um cohesive user experience between these chains then there's like another sort of interrup which is happens more at the application layer and this can happen between clusters or just between arbitrary chains and there's trade-offs between these two designs and there's giant trade-offs even within the designs uh so let's talk about clusters a little bit this is basically what I've spent the last year thinking about we're building native interoperability into the op stack and the design is

essentially a cluster where all of the chams um can pass messages between each other at a low latency a lower latency than going through L1 and to the other L2 that that is the fundamental problem that we're trying to solve with introp is we don't want to have to use L1 as a hug uh for an optimistic role that's very slow that is seven days to withdraw and then finally your message will be sent to the other chain for uh a ZK Bridge or like a ZK R uh quick aside um there's no such thing

as uh ZK R up or an optimist BL up it's really a ztap bridge or optimistic Bridge um but you know we need to get everyone on board with that you know the whole John chb article around the brides ne roic how I recommend you go read that everyone's listening please um okay so um basically um interop solves the problem of not needing to go back to L1 before you go to the other L2 and when you're in a cluster you can go between two chains that are in the

cluster uh very very quickly um with less risk and um some high degree of security if you are going if you're doing that same action um between two chains that are not within te cluster there's some sort of trade-off that you're making where somebody is taking on risk and um an example of how this can play out is um you know let's think about the user story of sending eth from arbitrum to

opet right they're not the same cluster the way that one way to quickly send eth between Arbitron and op inet would basically um use a intermediary that kind of is like a loan provider right so they can basically say if you give me eth on arbitr I will give you e on op banley and this works well but it's constrained by liquidity because if everyone starts trying to bridge really quickly in One Direction

then they will uh the loan provider will run out of the ability to like give out more loans on the one side of the trade and so this is like liquidity constraint um the problem with this is that uh they the the loan provider needs to rebalance their assets to ensure there's like liquidity that can be used to facilitate these Crossing transfers and during that time they're exposed to the the risk of the bridges right we all know that Bridges can be hacked they're one of the scariest things to work on in the blockchain space because you know millions and

millions of dollars have been hacked from Bridges to date and you know so yeah there's there's there's risk during that time period um and basically with Native and Trum um we're trying to build something where that risk is taken away where you don't need to worry about um rebalancing uh the like the the interoperability is built directly into the protocol and you don't need to you know compromise on any security when you're sending the aets between chains within the same

cluster yeah and so C can we go so what you just described sounds a lot like an intense based design is is that more or less what you're describing 100% okay so like the the key native interrupt for super chain is effectively going to be around an intense based design that's why you've been doing a lot of research on oh I mean in like in pen BAS designs can easily plug into it okay um but the idea with Native interop in the op stock is to um provide low latency and high security yeah um with the message passing and then developers can use that core primitive to build any sort of application that they would

like yeah I mean I think like the the the thing that that um you guys got right early on along with just a couple other teams was like op mainnet or extrapolate to whatever else is not just going to be the roll up it's like no like there's it's very clear that there's going to be a lot of these chains um and so so so so then you know you guys have to spend time thinking about how to bring that all together and then for I'm a builder that you know coming to build into one of these clusters is far more appealing than having to go in out and try it on on your own or just launch your own chain somewhere in the abyss with no no instant access to users liquidity Network effects Etc um and and so I

think that you guys you guys did that well but maybe too well like like now op mainat is like less metrics than bass less users than bass Etc but maybe that was by Design so like what maybe this interrupt conversation how does the interrupt conversation tie into like the the super chain economic conversation and like you know you're building out a really really great native interrupt for the super chain um but it almost feels like it almost feels like you're shooting yourself in the foot with with OP Main and I know that's not how it actually is but like how do you how do you reconcile like native interrupt as a means to allow anybody to build chains

within the super chain be a part of super chain e economics but maybe not necessarily there be like one best chain or two best chains or or just kind of like like yeah like like how have you thought about this Evolution since like op Manet into kind of where where we are now yeah I think the market is gonna evolve a lot over the years yeah um you know we launched op man a while ago it's kind of the original op stack chain and then base launched and then you know Inc from cracken launched you know World chain launched and um celum and uni chain they're on the way and basically

the idea is that we want to create um an ecosystem that incentivizes positive some games so like the idea is that when there is one chain that is onboarding new users you want to build a thing where everybody that is part of the super chain gets those new users and and that way when any one chain is doing work to onboard you know new people then it rises the tides for everyone and we believe that um Native interop is going to make this uh this user experience very cohesive and it's G

to make it really feel like one chain one of the North Stars of the super chain is to make it so that uh as a developer your application scales automatically with each additional chain that is added to the super chain this might sound a little crazy because you know apps aren't necessarily designed in that way today but we have a lot of conviction that will'll be able to figure out the design patterns that are required to enable this and this will allow users to like seamlessly migrate between chains in the super chain and everyone kind of working

together to improve the shared standard that is the op stack and onboard and tap into a growing set of users yeah I think that was the that that vision is exactly what I share within the op stack and then within the entire ethereum scaling space like everyone new you like we should we should be thinking about this from the lens of like every one new user even just extrapolate this the crypto that's why I kind of asked about the whole salana Celestia Veil other ones like every new user into any of these chains should be able to go to any of these other ecosystems and be a net win for them as well we're so close it feels like but somehow still so far um in

terms of like all the ux and the different execution environments and the bridging and the interrup A and and yeah I mean sometimes I question if this whole like modular idea was the right path for a theem I actually was to like the Empire had a really good podcast with the hack VC team about you know is was ethereum's modular BET right and hack VC was like yes it was you know over a multitude of different metrics um you know but but bringing it all together in that positive some way I think it's easier for you guys to do within op stack obviously but it starts there and then it starts from expanding that out into each of these clusters doing it each of these kind of cohorts of chains and then we we kind of you know know group up it and try to figure

out how to make that a possibility for for kind of everybody on on boarding and so yeah I mean I I think we share that same vision and uh it we're definitely closer than ever but like I said still like it's out of arms length in some way yeah yeah yeah I agree and it'll probably start within like within cluster that that's most certainly easier um for people to see and then I think you know it extends uh between clusters from there and I'm I'm curious to see like what you know when when you think about like user acquisition yeah you know making transactions on chain is

one form of acquiring that user I tend to think that assets are also kind of a a a like a a point of cluster if you will that to you know I don't I don't want to reuse that term incorrectly but like a point people can coales and so I think one net new unit of liquidity ends up benefiting all um and even if it's just by virtue of like being you know more liquid onchain versus offchain or if it's more you know uh flows into a particular asset and I I I bring you know this part of the conversation up because I I'd love to touch on op the token if if that's okay and just talk

through what the economics are as we build positive sum games in the super chain and as there there are network effects that compound between the rollups in the super chain how does that lead to value acral in the op token yeah so the op token is a governance token um it's meant to govern you know the super chain and the way that value flows through a super chain is um all the chains that are part of it pay a part of their revenue back the collective you know we call like the

optimism Collective it's kind of the the maintainers of the super chain um and the idea is to kind of collect that money and it can almost be thought of like taxes to like a country and as like a country you know collects taxes they can you know redistribute redistribute that money back into the ecosystem and um we are interested in this idea of retroactive funding um it's an experimental Capital allocation mechanism and we don't think that it's the only Capital allocation mechanism that's required for an ecosystem we

think that it fills gaps that you know other Capital allocation mechanisms may not fill so theide idea is that value um you know accumulates back to the collective and then the collective is able to you know reallocate that value back into the ecosystem through rro funding or through grants and in a way um it fits pretty well to the analogy of taxes in a country yeah and it's I think it's fitting you mentioned BAGI earlier in this because he's been one of the prominent uh uh people that have have talked about Network States and I think

if we were to to look at you know what online communities have been able to to formalize a network State you know ethereum certainly but I think of the rollups that are out there you know optimism has done one of the best jobs at uh kind of articulating their Network state in their community of people um so yeah kudos to to building you know a a great a great Network state that uh it's a pleasure to exist in yeah Mark do you believe in that like are you a big are you a big bellagi fan of network States like this is way right field from this convo but we're we're kind of wrapping up here and so like yeah like is Network stat are these gonna happen like are you

a Believer are you a part of any or like or like what is this I'm a big believer in the idea of network States um you know like some people don't like the term Networks State uh I kind of interpret it in a more General way like the less like specific definition that biology gives um yeah I'm a big believer in you know people that have shared values um on the internet um coming and living together and creating their own culture and you know um like I think that is like a met good for the world um you know I've been um going to zeu events for some time and yeah I'm I'm I'm definitely a big believer um my goal

is to grow retr funding to a point where it basically eclipses the crypto ecosystem and is able to fund actual physical things like roads education systems um you know like Gardens um like clean water clean air like I think all these things are trying to be funded retroactively um because there isn't like an immediate um business model tied directly to them always what is the exit velocity from uh crypto onchain rails because that part

is very intuitive I think you know you retroactively fund some initiative onchain it benefits the chain and it stimulates more activity on the Chain pays Fe etc etc you got a flywheel there what is the the the escape hatch or the you know the zero to one to then incentivize some offchain action clean water I think is a great example right what is the loop back to the collective to to you know recoup that value and then continue spinning that flywheel yeah that's a great question I mean if I had the exact answer I'd just be going doing it right now yeah you wouldn't be here today yeah yeah yeah um but I mean I think that there's there's going to be

some point where um we need to break out of these self-referential loops and you know really impact the real world and you know I think maybe one opportunity is with natural disaster relief you could imagine um a very practical use of retr funding is somebody posts on Twitter that they did a ton of work during the natural disaster and then all of a sudden a community kind of comes together and retroactively funds this person and then that right there um just gets the idea out there that retr funding is possible and really what we need is we need a

oneclick experience to create um an endend retof funding pipeline that's extremely simple that everyday people can understand right now it's just create meme coin send some to vitalic hope it pumps and then vitalic donates it yeah oh man the the ux behind that isn't exactly perfect Mark I got one one last one for you putting in the spot a bit here what are some of your predictions for 2025 and it if no predictions then just I mean goals as well for yourself personally yeah great question oh okay so I mean

okay prediction number one and this is actually a goal I mean it's you know shipping native interop to production in the op stock you know really making the super chain be a thing um I think that you know in 2025 we'll have in production and people will you know natively be able to send transactions between you know countes and the super charm on you know other predictions I think you know ethereum will ship Petra uh I think that will um you know go alive I think [Music] um yeah I mean I think I'll leave it at

those two predictions cool I have one more I think optimism the optimism Collective will retroactively fund at least one good deed offchain maybe it already has that'd be cool I mean you know I'm down to do that right after this uh this podcast wraps up yeah seriously well Mark thank you so much for joining uh it's been a it's been a pleasure to be a part of the super chain in the past and just learn you know we've we've we've grown our own views about scaling a theum about scaling the space o over time as we've learned it became more Technical and uh have some in agreement some conflicting really appreciate your

perspectives uh and your your willingness to commit your life's work to scaling ethereum and crypto so uh hope to have more fun technical conversations at conferences in the future let's do it yeah thank you so much for having me today it was a lot of fun is man same here thanks Mark