Unmasking ChainLinkGod: Zach Rynes' Crypto Journey

Transcript

[Music] all right everyone welcome back to Empire we have uh I actually don't even know what to call you today I was going to say we have uh the person formerly known as chain link God on the show so uh CLG welcome to the show man thanks for having me on yeah appreciate being here big day for you huh so this we're recording this um on uh Thursday but this is this will go live on Monday and so uh folks will be hearing this on Monday big big day for you yeah it's I feel like it's been a long time coming maybe it's a bit of a to some people but it it feels like the Natural Evolution of CG or Zack now I guess that's great so uh okay so for people who don't know you are chain link God on Twitter and you are doxing today

um maybe give us the yeah I mean why why are you doing this right now like what is the you're so your name is Zack ryes I see by this thing like why why what what are you what are you doing here what's the reason for this yeah I I feel like pseudonyms in crypto are very common everyone has a different reason for using pon pseudonyms in the chaning community a lot of people come from forchan or Biz like that was like the roots of the community so like being anonymous was always the natural state of things being a frog on Twitter is like that's a way of signaling that you're a link Marine you're in the chain the community but now that I see the crypto industry is maturing and just rapidly accelerating um Bitcoin I think the Bitcoin ETFs are significantly legitimizing our industry and Chan links

working with these huge institutions I felt like it was natural to evolve the ID identity because it opens up a lot of opportunities and a lot of doors because I always see my account and what I do is just fundamentally education educating people about chain link about the industry why people should care about smart contracts and there's certain venues like speaking at conferences or going to different inperson events or going on podcasts like these where being a an and frog is not necessarily the best way to represent myself all the time and people have preconceived notions about what Pepe and frogs are whether um you know it could be misguided but in general this just opens many more doors and many more opportunities so this is like it's an acceleration of what I've been doing

and I think that that's exactly what an industry needs as we see so many people start to step in this bull cycle nice so so who is uh Zach ryes like where where are do you live where do you live like do you have a job do you work in crypto is chain link God your full-time thing yeah so I live on like the West Coast in in the US and I was originally actually going to school for computer science uh when I got when I first joined the crypto ecosystem like early 2018 so that's that's more of my background and how I looked at crypto in the first place but over the years and really when covid hits the quality of the education just fell off a cliff and I started diving more and more into crypto like more and more fulltime and I was

learning way more in crypto just being in the middle of the Arena so to speak and I didn't feel like I was getting a whole lot out of what I was doing in my like traditional career path which is just going to end at like some death job of Computer Engineering which is fine if that's what you enjoy but for me crypto is just such an entertaining entertaining and very interesting and very just like intellectually interesting industry to be in that uh I just started Living in crypto full-time so I'm historically I've been a community Ambassador with chain link now I'm more of a community lays on which effectively just means I'm a bridge between the chain link Labs team and the community I've contributed content to chain link like on the chain link blog itself but like educating about chain link and educating about our industry is

effectively what I spend the vast majority of my time on now what are the for the I I'd love to hear like the origin story of chain link god um when when did because actually I have a my story with chain link just to fill you in is actually I was uh pre-block Works days I was sitting next to this guy named Mike at work was a uh on he was on the sales team at this company called ciens where I worked before blockworks and he was he would spend Taiwan forchan and uh he was the first one I was like into Bitcoin stuff but he would he was the one who kind of got me into like the whole Ico crazy 2017 and he's like there's this thing called chain link and it's going crazy on 4chan it's like everyone is talking about it and that

was kind of my entry into into chain link and so I'd love to hear both like your personal story in in in the chain link Community but also like how chain link God kind of kind of came to be yeah so I I stumbled on crypto like early 2018 and that was through I saw GPU prices were just crazy at the time and I discovered you can run a program on your computer that basically spits out money and I thought well that's really interesting I have to figure out how this works so I I got orange pilled with Bitcoin at that point uh I looked into coin market cap and I saw that every token that exists basically was on ethereum I'm like okay that's interesting what's ethereum so I started diving into smart contracts and at that

point it clicked for me why smart contracts are a better format for every digital agreement but what didn't click for me was how smart contracts are supposed to be useful for any real world use case uh if you needed to connect to external resources which smart contracts can't do natively so I intuitively felt like I didn't have a name for it at the time I didn't dive deep up at then but like I knew there was this Oracle problem I have a mortgage agreement tokenized how does it know what the house is worth where it is the condition of it like all all that metadata property and so at the time I got a lot of my crypto info from Reddit which was not a good location for crypto info same with me actually yeah in hindsight uh but I heard that forchan had a business

and finance board I'm like oh forchan and crypto like that's got to be good a good story and actually the first day that I went on there there was this thread discussion about the institutional use case of smart contracts basically explaining uh you need connectivity to backend systems you need these data inputs you need to be able to connect all these chains together and it was basically explaining what the role of chain link was and back then chain link was just a white paper U and the team at the time didn't do any marketing so it was just this community community of frogs talking about this this project this recent U token called chain link and it immediately clicked for me at that time like okay this if the if crypto is gonna really change the way Society works it needs CH like it

needs these connections to the external World it needs to connect all these chains together it needs all it just needs this connectivity uh and so all of like 2018 I was just absorbing information basically on biz on Twitter and all these different locations of like chain link uh was created by a company called smart contract and smart contract has actually been operating since about 2014 and they were building centralized oracles back then and they did different proof of concepts with Swift with uh Microsoft and they had like connections to docy science all these like breadcrumbs that people were digging up of like who are these guys like they don't even market and they're been working with these huge huge institutions so uh early 2019 I started to step into the crypto Twitter land which at the time at least in the

chaining community on crypto Twitter it was just a few dozen green frogs really it was a very tight-knit Community very passionate very smart dedicated people but it was a few dozen frogs and I saw that within the broader crypto Community people did not understand oracles like people know blockchains they've been around for a long time they generally understand that model but Oracle networks and especially like decentralized oracles nobody really understood it so I basically took the Reigns or decided like okay I'm going to educate people on what oracles are so I started doing tweet threads I started writing blogs I started writing this content and when chain link launched on Main Nets and then D5 summer happened the year after chain link started getting on the radar of a lot of people and there was just so much fud and

misinformation about chain because people did not understand oracles so I I tried to to dispel as much information as as much uh misguided context about chain lck and oracles as much as I could um but it was like a whole Community effort of people but I was just like one of the many frogs just educating people at the time but eventually I got this this following over time of people listening to me and I kind of just absorbed and made it my whole life effectively so it's really a journey of Education what is the for people who have not spent time on crypto Twitter much uh the link Marines are probably the strongest Community I would say of any of any community in crypto um I mean you like post post any chain link fud and you will have about a thousand

replies uh with within an hour what does how does this community like how do you guys mobilize like what are the secrets kind of of what's the behind the scenes Zach of how this community came to be and like how you guys stayed so so strong I think the main thing for a lot of people when they saw chain link they saw something like a project that was going to continue to exist in 10 years and was going to be a p like a pillar of how crypto operates so everyone has this like longer term Vision they know that chain Link's a fundamentally important technology so A and A lot of people are passionate about that because they see the weird crazy things that go on in crypto all the time but they know that Chain Lake is going to be this Cornerstone protocol and project and so

like when the community was created like I mentioned like the team didn't do any communication or like Marketing in 2018 they were just they were heads down building the code itself and so the community so like self-organized and came up with these narratives and just in general how like forchain and Biz operates like it's a very chaotic a very noisy environment they basically assume every Project's a scam unless proven otherwise so chainin kind of went through this Gauntlet of fire effectively and yet came out the other side and people like when you try to tear a project apart and you like discover it's more important than you thought it was you start to get like really strong conviction in that project itself so a lot of people see chain link as this I call it like the golden Trio of Bitcoin ethereum chain link protocols

that provide arguably more value and more tangible uh utility to the ecosystem any other project and people just naturally have a strong conviction so there's not really like a like a centrally coordinated aspect to the community it's very decentralized where like m and ideas will spread and the ones that are sticky will continue to replicate over time and like whether U you know the names are um at times can be can be off-putting to people at times and those are the ones I I don't like leaning into so much but in general it's just everyone has this super strong conviction in chain link and they propagate these ideas through memes and I think a lot of people know the chain link community Through like the mematic power the mtic power that the the community itself has so it's very like

self-organized there not like a central place for it when you look across the whole industry what do you think if um what do you think of like one or two other communities who have just done a phenomenal job I I think the ethereum community is very interesting because they just put everything out in the open like everything good everything bad everyone develops out in the open there's not one team there's like this collection of different client teams working together everyone it's like a very decentralized Community like similar to chain like everyone has their own memes that they come up with whether it's like ultrasound money or something else but I feel like that's always a good shining example of a solid Community I think Bitcoin that one's

like a very controversial Community since obviously you have like the Bitcoin maximist but they have just extreme conviction and they have their approach of uh just they know that Bitcoin is going to be like the predominant asset within crypto itself and they're going to do everything to make sure that other people see that Vision itself so I think those two are like the examples probably within the industry but I think there's other very tight-knit very Niche communities I think like the arbin community is very like I've talked to a lot of developers within the arbin community and they're very like they work very closely with one another and it's the communities that are very collaborative with one another are usually the most effective if everyone's just focused on like uh like Shilling or promoting a token price then those communities just they don't they don't last because Market Cycles

usually shake them out over time so every Community has like some energy to it but I don't I don't see any other community that's it's so driven towards the truth like the chain Community is and so passionate and so loud um it's uh it's honestly been very very cool to see how the chain link community's evolved to so many people at this point over time how do you think the chain link Community has for folks who are not um maybe as in in the community as you are like how has the community evolved over time yeah there was uh like a lot of it's was like I mentioned like a lot of it was born within the biz forms itself but most of it has transitioned over to crypto Twitter itself but I've seen a lot of people shift more more towards basically trying to get people

to see why institutions would be onboarded through Chain Lake itself uh like defi is always like a Cornerstone for Chain Lake itself and a lot it's powered most of the defi ecosystem but I think for a lot of the community they know that when institutions start to step in chain link is going to be the predominate um protocol that they're going to be used on boarding whether connect their backend system whether to connect different data imps so that their tokenized assets would be useful but in general I still even as years later I feel like people get into chain L for the same reason that Chan is working with the largest institutions it's arguably the most useful technology within the entire ecosystem in space itself and over the long term there's a real value capture opportunity to be the

ultimate connectivity or interoperability layer between all these layers so even though the memes have evolved there's way more people in the community the shift the focus has shift a little bit more towards institutions and tokenize asset adoption it's still the same fundamental reasons why people care about chain link and they know that this is going to be a long-term project that's not going to go away any time soon so A lot's changed but at the same time fundamentally not not a lot either yeah um yeah that's interesting what um I guess going back to your doc Zach like what do you think the what were the toughest parts of being an I guess what were the pros and cons of being an an anonymous person of being Anon I mean the

pros people usually stick to the ideas you say versus the person you are um like they don't dig into your background necessarily as much my sense is for most people by default you should probably be anonymous or have a have a pseudonym like there's not unless you have a good reason to be people by default should be anonimous within crypto Twitter I think so yeah unless you're trying to thing is like it really just comes down to people stick to your ideas versus your identity itself like your background identity really shouldn't matter if your ideas themselves are good unless you're trying to go speak on stage or you're trying to create like a brand or trying to create more of like an educational campaign um

for people but if you're just trying to absorb information then there's not really a great reason why you should be doxed in the first place I feel like by by default it's usually just I guess it's I mean my take on that would be it lends credibility like in a space where there's so many scams and so much like um I don't know just like bad stuff out there I feel like because it's um there's like you know inherently it's a it's a new industry but then money has money has also entered the scene and new Industries are inherently kind of crazy and speculative and and filled with scams and stuff but now when you add money into the layer like it's it's even worse in crypto sometimes and when you have a real like a you know real person I'm putting quotes around this like with

an actual face um like a doxed person then it kind of lends a little bit of credibility to like what that person is saying but I don't know maybe you haven't found that yeah and there's a degree of accountability where what you say and what you do is going to be sticking with your true identity over time you can't just like uh can't just delete the account and then you're basically gone forever but at the same time some of the biggest like Bad actors in the industry have been docs people like s SPF and like 3C and like a lot of these other entities but in general yeah if you're going to be doing something sketchy then you might be inclined to be more an in itself but I think the vast majority of people who get into crypto they're not trying to they're not trying to be

sketchy they're just trying to invest or they're trying to learn about projects and in that sense I feel like there's a whole another aspect of like when you're pit Anonymous you can kind of brand yourself around a certain project and signal that you're aligned with a certain project so like within the chandlet community that's like hexagons that's H cubes that's like frogs so it's like a really easy way to signal that like you're in this click you're in this community itself and I see that across a lot of different EOS systems but ultimately like it's a personal decision whether you want to dox or or not like each one of them is going to have have trade-offs if you want to tie your your real world identity to what you're doing and I feel like I'm at a stage where I've always been passionate about chain lick and it

seems like it's the right stage to uh just be able to speak at other venues and I can't do that if I'm Anon so that that was like really the forcing function for me sense to move towards um reaching more people and reaching people more broadly I've always thought the best way to grow an audience on Twitter like if I were starting new I would say start as an I would actually start as an anonymous person as an Anon and I would basically try to own a super specific Niche right I'd be like the person who just tweets about arbitrum developers better than anybody else in the world or the person who tweets about uh reaking better than anyone else in the world and grow that account to like I don't know 50 100 thousand followers and then once it's time to actually like maybe I don't

know you want to go start a company or something then you docks so I think you've done a pretty good job at that other thing I would add is it's kind of a oneway door if you start Anon you can go dock if you're dock you can't really go Anon so like if you prefer that type of optionality yeah it's like a Natural Evolution you can't really go the other way another option though is you could have two like a lot I think a lot of big D5 Founders um I don't really know many investors who have this but a lot of the big def5 Founders have like you know kind of posting Anon accounts as well with tens of thousands of followers and people just don't know that that Anon account is you know insert founder so yeah that's it's not super surprising like once you reach a certain status you

can't be posting on Maine exactly at a certain point um anything else on the docks that you I'd be curious like how long you were thinking about this and maybe the you know we asked about I asked about pros and cons of being an Anon like what are the pros and cons of being Zack ryes instead of being chain link God yeah I mean obviously people are going to know who I am and they may dig into my background is what it is like that's just kind of something you have to accept I have thought about it for quite a while and was thinking about what the right time would be and it seems natur just everything I've seen in crypto accelerating what I've seen with chain link accelerating with institutions I don't necessarily want to see like the first entry points into the community to

be like an an and frog at least for me personally I feel like it's more natural to just see like a like a quote unquote brand ambassador to be like a human and somebody you can connect with and hop on a call with and and talk with as a human that got kind of seemed like a natural point for me but there's probably like more unknown unknowns like you never truly know what's going to happen until you just rip off the Band-Aid and and you make the shift over yeah but for me it seemed like a very logical time and a logical decision for me to make at this time but ultimately it'll be interesting to be like the dox person within a community where a lot of people are Anonymous I'm not saying other people need to dox like people who want to stay

pseud Anonymous that's perfectly fine with me uh but in general I think it'll be it'll be interesting to see uh if other people make the shift at the same time I think there's been other people who have also moved from being docs to undocks but I don't know if that's a super common theme within our industry uh for the most part at least maybe there's other examples but I haven't seen that happen so often so there wasn't a whole lot of other examples for me to really look at to see what happens yeah um do you do you know do you like are you in the community of all the other big uh Anon people and you guys have all like you know a telegram group together and you kind of know who they are but no one else is doxed there there's people I've met in person like

uh at smarton last year I met some people in the community like they're like they're fantastic they're awesome people uh but there there's like different group channels there's different like telegram groups different Twitter groups like there's not necessarily one group there's a bunch of different groups but uh like some people I've connected with in the chandley community over like a number of years and so we've met up in person like very very tight-knit but on Twitter like I'm not gonna dox them right and like it's up to them to make their decision and they don't have to make that move if they don't want to make that move so yeah but when you connect with people over the years you just naturally meet um awesome man anything else on on the docs that you want to share I want to talk about chain link as well obviously

yeah I mean I'm happy to chain talk about chain link as well I think the only other thing is I still feel like I mean people know blockchains very intuitively very well and not so much oracles and I I've never seen myself as like the only educator within the chaining Community itself there's a lot of good people at a lot lot of education and you don't have to move towards being docs if you want to educate people on chain link like doing tweet threads doing podcasts doing blog posts like you don't have the identity behind that doesn't necessarily matter what matters is the information itself I just see like me revealing my identity as an opportunity to go to other venues and start expanding my my my the the breath of information that I can share and where I can share that information but

like I I encourage everybody to share not even necessarily just about chain like whatever project you're passion in educate people as much as possible because as this bull bull market starts to ramp up which I feel like it will there's going to be so many more people entering our ecosystem who's just not going to know all the nuances that people have been here for years have picked up over time so I like I would just recommend everybody educate about the projects you're passionate about because it'll pay dividends for that Community for sure what do you think of uh what does the Oracle landscape look like today because I feel like basically chain link people don't like using the word monopoly but like chain link kind of owned the whole Market I would say in oracles and this year there's been or the last 12 months there's been kind of

a rise of some other oracles have come onto the scene right people like um Chronicle uh people like pith I'd be curious how you see like the state of kind of the Oracle market today yeah a l a lot of people know oracles because of price feeds that was that was like the initial product Market fit of oracles chain lck launch uh price feeds back in 2019 and that eventually led to to defi summer accelerating as it did but I think we're we're at this stage where I think people are looking at what else can oracles be used for because fundamentally oracles are just middleware they connect systems together so connecting Financial Market data onto blockchains that's that's like the first use case even though it's a very challenging uh it sounds simple you just

pull the price and put it on chain but what is the price of an asset where do you get that how do you filter it how do you aggregate it is actually a pretty nuanced problem so I I there's interesting different approaches of doing that there's uh like the traditional push Bas feed that Chain Lake has always done uh where data is pumped on chain every so often uh to update this reference contract people can pull from there's been interesting approaches taken with poll based oracles where you make that data available offchain and users can pull it and put onchain themselves whenever they want so you get the freshest data I've seen different Oracle platforms move toward move towards that model but I feel like a lot of projects are still trying to focus on price feeds a lot of the oracles are just how do we do price

feeds but tweak this small thing how do we do price feeds but we're on this Network or we do this data set that uh other oracles don't and I feel like that's there's areas for Innovation but that's not super interesting to me right what I see is interesting is Oracles expanding out to doing offchain computation or doing cross chain interoperability because even like cross chain bridges in my mind they're just Oracle networks where a blockchain's the data source they're like they're just Oracle networks so really the whole cross chain space is also within the Oracle space itself even even if people don't see that and there's a whole lot of innovation happening in the cross chain space but I think where people get tied up like when they compare like how does chain link compare to pith or how does it compare to gelato or how does it

compared to to Chronicle whoever I think the core difference with chain link is that chain link is trying to become a platform of different services so you have things like price feeds you have verifiable Randomness you have proof reserves automation you have cross chain with ccip like it's trying to be this decentralized AWS platform where you have all these services that you can compose together into one application regardless of the chain you're on and honestly I don't see anyone else taking the same approach as chain lck in that regard so like chain Link's an oracle but I feel like using that term has like preconceived notions of like price data or just data in general but really it's just this um complimentary computation layer that attaches on the blockchains

to make smart contracts more useful and more connected to these external resources so I feel like price feeds are interesting but what's really interesting is just the platform that you can create and then once you start bridging with people beyond the def ecosystem is when like you start really playing with fire honestly think chain link is one of the best kept secrets in crypto in terms of like how good of a business model they have right like if you look at uh how much some of the l2s are paying chain link it is a remarkable amount of money right it's well into the tens of millions a year um and uh at least from I've never talked to the chain link team about this I've never verified those numbers on both sides but if you know some of the L2 Founders I've

spoken with say that they're paying chain link you know 20 25 30 35 million dollars a year um because they need to get the apps and the products to come build on them and if chain link isn't there it's just not like then the app is just going to choose somewhere else so it's a it's a pretty remarkable business that they've been able to build yeah and I don't think anyone else is trying to take the same Approach at all but there is the case like if you don't have chain link on your blockchain then yeah you can't really have lending applications you can't have derivatives you can't have these applications and I feel like there will be other protocols that try to do the same thing and they'll they'll move faster and they'll be cheaper but ultimately like why protocols use chain link is not just

because it's the standard and it's what everyone uses but because like when you choose to integrate with chain link you know it's going to work so like you can cheap out and go with a cheaper solution but if it ends up breaking and it kills your whole ecosystem than saving the amount of money that you could have paid to chain link to get an integration probably not worth it like just like examples in terms of bridges like when um multichain and these other Bridges got hacked it wrecked blockchains like it it really hurt those blockchains and stunted their growth for a really long time which is like a really awful situation but I think that that's like with chain link you're effectively paying for the quality and you're paying for the premium that if you're going to integrate chain link you're not going to regret that later because your system is

going to keep operating its design your ecosystem has all the secure access to these resources that that you know that developers need at the end of the day but ultimately I I still feel like defi is like a case study for what's actually going to happen with institutions when they start tokenize assets and bringing those on chain they'll use the same infrastructure they they'll know it works because it was already proven in defi but then when they tokenize different bonds different Equity different stocks or whatever assets they basically hot swap those into these protocols maybe with more permissions and these other additional layers uh that they need for compliance but I think that's like the end case and I think that's ultimately what chain Lick's building for while making sure

that the EA ecosystem in its current state continues to thrive and continues to grow itself Zach completely off topic has anyone ever told you you look like Serge is it the beard or is it the flannel I don't know I'm getting I get very surgey vibes from you actually uh I didn't know if you guys were related or anything no no I'm not I'm not Serge son are you uh are you inspired by the the flannel or the beard I honestly I I always used to wear flannels but the beard I grew within like the past couple years but I it's not because of surge it's not because of surge all right it's not nice um I just had to ask uh what is the role of Link in so so the way I understand the way

you describe it is like okay people used to see chain link as like nice Oracle service providing data to a bunch of you know the biggest daps and um I mean most most staps that people use like the price data Supply apped by chain link in one way or another I think that's how people used to think of like or think of the old chain link the way I understand it in your mind is or basically chain link has evolved to become this platform for data for compute for cross chain we can talk about ccip as well obviously um what is the role of like the link token in in this whole network yeah I I'll set some context because I think one thing to also answer is like why why does why does decentralized infrastructure even need a token in the first place like we just

use cash or everything fundamentally like when you create a new decentralized network you have the users on one side and then you have the infrastructure on the other but nodes aren't going to join a network if it's not profitable for them to join the network and users aren't going to pay to use a network if they're aren't already nodes operating in that Network so you kind of have this cold start problem where you have you have no usage you no infrastructure how do you boot shop that and the cool thing with tokens is that they trade on the market and so you can use tokens to subsidize the supply side create this network of nodes that are individually profitable to attract the users and the users start paying fees and then eventually over time the goal is that you can actually reduce that inflation to nodes so it's just fees

going from users to infrastructure and you have you have this whole sustainable ecosystem so fundamentally like blockchains Oracle networks decentralized infrastructure it cannot exist without having a token in the first place because it can't even be bootstrapped into existence it's like fundamentally you need a token but that doesn't necessarily mean the token is AC Cruise value and so that's kind of the other aspect with link where I think of it really in two prongs one it's the payment token so similar to ethon ethereum you pay with link to use to consume the services uh chain Link's building towards something called payment attraction where you can actually pay with non-link like eth or B&B or Matic and these other tokens that go into the system and eventually get converted to link and then paid out to

the service providers so as a developer you don't even have to like touch or even know that the link token exists which is really good for developer adoption and for institutions who want to pay in like stable coins and traditional assets um and ultimately like paying with that token means those service providers have a financial incentive to be honest because they're paid in that Network's native token if the Network's malicious or gets corrupted the token not only can be slashed I'll get that into a second but it can be devalued and so what these nodes get paid in and what they hold is tied to the health of the network itself so that's why if you launch a new independent L1 blockchain you're not going to necessarily use eth as like the core currency for everything not only because you can't issue more eth to pay and subsidize nodes but if

your network gets corrupted eth won't get devalued because of that but the other side is staking where this is still being fleshed out more and more but that's just node operators putting up link as collateral to back their services and getting slashed if they're malicious um the like the theory really is like eventually over time every Oracle note operator will basically be the same performance security reliability wise so how do they differentiate each other and that comes down to how much St collateral that they can offer either themselves or it's uh like through delegation models that's like a differentiating factor and as chany becomes more and more of like a self-service build your own Oracle network uh easier to consume Marketplace then that becomes a very easy way to choose note operators it's like historical metrics uh what jobs they

support can they even do what you want them to do and how much collateral how much skin in the game that do they have skin in the game both like can they be slashed and just they own the token so they have like their incentive is aligned with the network itself and so I feel like people get why tokens are used in blockchains because they pay for gasing them and they have to use them chain link is infrastructure that's used by developers so if I go use a I don't need to go get link to use a so it seems like the token's not used even if in the background the services like ccip still use Link uh even if it's converted from other value itself so there's like a bit of a knowledge Gap there uh the economics is still like it's being fleshed out more and more and

not everything's necessarily super easy to track the flows but Chan's working on like building more and more this unified billing where uh every service has like a unified billing interface and so you can consume any service with like a single balance itself but that's something that's like still being fleshed out worked out over time can you just expand on ccip yeah so I mean we've I think everyone's seen how brutal Bridge Hecks have been over the years 2.8 billion uh I believe the number is lost in total which is just absolutely horrific for an industry so ccip really exists to solve that problem and operates not only at the highest level security but operate

with features like Risk Management Network where CCP isn't actually like a single Network for cross chain interoperability but it's actually multiple networks connecting each the chains plus an independent risk management Network that basically monitors all the activity and can shut down the network if any abnormal activity uh happens but I feel like most people look at Bridges and they think like I can move shitcoins from chain a to chain B which is useful I also need to move my shitcoins from chain a to chain B but I think really it really just comes back to institutions for me is it's not only the interoperability of being able to connect all the defi like all the public blockchains together and being able to connect all the private chains together once we're able to connect those two worlds together into one ecosystem you really need standards

on both sides because they will be built in silos initially just because the regulations and other business factors but if each side is using the same standard they can easily interoperate with one another Plus I don't think a lot of people realize but with ccip uh you actually have this capability of using ccip as like an abstraction layer so if an institution wants to connect to 100 chains they don't want to connect to 100 chains individually that's just extremely complicated costly and you have to manage so many different gas tokens on so many different chains but if they integrate chain link once they can actually interact with smart contracts on any blockchain just through ccip itself so like that's something that institutions have signaled and said like that's a huge feature true for them of of ccip and the chaining platform itself

it's just the ability to connect to every blockchain and use their existing backend systems and existing messaging standards like Swift messaging they don't have to replace their backend system they just connect to ccip and be able to either Bridge assets between different chains or be able to just interact with any chain that they want itself so like there's a whole a whole like defi segment of ccip and there's a whole like institutional tokenized asset segment of ccip and you know eventually they'll merge over time is like that's like the ultimate goal of of the protocol what's the counterargument for all this Zach like if if if chain link didn't work why would that be if crypto did work but chain link didn't make it what's the reason for

that I mean fundamentally it would be some other platform that does what chain link does but 10 times better like in every regard because if you have a like an alternative Solution that's slightly better is slightly different usually the switching costs aren't worth it but so it's really just having a different platform that's like fundamentally better it's it's cheaper it's faster it's more secure that feels like a very tall order to me just given how much of a head start chain link has had but like no protocol is invaluable like if chain link stopped developing today and just had the services it had forever and never changed it yeah it would eventually get overtaken by a competitor but chain Link's not going to stop building either they're going to keep building new products and improving the products based on feedback so like in my mind the trajectory of where chain lck

is going would have to like fundamentally chain and change and like ignore what user feedback is or uh something to like seriously break but like I I don't feel like that's super likely but obviously no protocol is like going to be like I don't I don't think anyone right now can declare themselves to be the definitive winner we're still so like we're so early I wouldn't even say Bitcoin is a definitive winner yet I think it's getting there I think it's very clear like for institutions that are stepping in now but like every protocol cannot rest on their Laurels just because they were successful they need to continue to keep innovating they need to continue improving their service so it's like it's not we're not at the end game just yet so I think that that would be like like a failure case scenario for chain link

yeah Zach what percentage of your net worth is held in link probably an amount that would make most people uncomfortable actually going into a at the top of 20 you remember when chain link had that crazy run up from like $3 to 15 to like 30 to 60 you remember that so PR defi summer even the yeah the link that I had bought when I was sitting next to that guy Mike um I had just put it in some Ledger and like just forgotten about it and all the other things I bought then like had gone to it was like omo and Civic and all these other randomiz bloom they' all they all zeroed out and so I

just had forgotten about The Ledger and then link started to go from like 20 cents two bucks 20 bucks I was like told my wife I was like we stop everything we have to find this Ledger like turn the whole house upside down uh but uh and yeah anyways I I'm uh I I have a I have a soft spot in my heart for the for the link Marines just from like the early my early days of of Link experience so that's cool man that's very cool anything else that you're really excited about outside of chain link it feels like I mean we just saw the denune upgrade on ethereum with rollups yeah yeah that that was pretty massive like it's like Subs transactions on rollups for now it'll like the usage will even out over time but I I've

always been super interesting like I've been following Roll-Ups for a long time back before like they were even really called rollups like I was following plasma as well which they weren't Roll-Ups but that was like the precursor to rollups themselves that's always been a very interesting ecosystem to watch like now now we're just seeing it accelerate now we have da layers with Celestia and Igan da you have like these settlement rollups for other rollups to settle upon like it's getting very complicated very quickly now I have roll up as a service providers to try to abstract away all that complexity that ecosystem has always been very interesting to me there's always a place in my heart for like a salon style approach of just let's just do a single chain let's just scale that one chain make it as high throughput as possible but it feels like the most intuitive

approach is to take the module approach everyone specializes and you comp compose together different parts of the tech stack from execution settlement consensus and you could pose it all together into one blockchain that has always seemed like a very intuitive approach to me uh and I'm I'm really like I'm very tired of paying extremely high ethereum gas costs for so long so I'm happy to be more of an L2 um user and now we're seeing like people looking into doing rollups on bitcoin Bitcoin l2s as well uh which I think they're like a few years behind what ethereum is doing but that's always been like infrastructure wise super interesting um like tokenize assets I've seen different projects do like they're tokenizing t- bills that's always been like a super

popular use case yield bearing stable coins like Athena is interesting but I'm also very cautious about its design just in terms of the assumptions it makes about H markets and um like I know it's not custody. centralized exchanges but it to me it just feels like that's not a model that can necessarily scale super large but like I I don't want it's not it's not teral Luna style but I'm always cautious of a stable coin becoming huge and then you know winding down in extremely Reckless and and disastrous way uh I feel very similar about the reaking and that whole LRT ecosystem that's a whole like another Rabbit Hole where like there's clearly a lot of interest in doing reaking but at the same time I can't

help but feel very unnerved by the rehypothecation and using lrts and defi itself like it's there's a right way to do it but I'm like I've seen how things play out in crypto before get it just gets Deen you want to make money in it does it does um Zach man I'm excited for you to for you to doxs so so we're releasing this on Monday So the plan is so you'll have doxed today what do you think the um what do you think I don't know like have you thought about the kind of second order implications of doing this and what this what this means for like your life I guess yeah I mean things that I have more private maybe not become as private before I think most people would be like I feel like most people would be pretty

accepting of it there's always going to be like trolls and whatnot but I've I mean I have thick skin I've dealt with that over many years on over the Internet itself um I think really just comes down to like partitioning my time uh like what I want to scale more into is speaking more at like conferences and ideally that's a door that opens up significantly for me and doing other podcasts and doing like um more educational platforms but you know I don't know until I rip off rip off the Band-Aid and then you know see how people ultimately react to it cool well I'm excited for you man anything else that you uh really want to cover today uh I mean I think one thing like I've seen different people talk about the ecosystem being either it's going to be multi-

chain or it's G to be cross chain to me it feels like it's inevitable that the whole ecosystem is going to just converge towards being cross chain itself just in terms of the ux itself like one one of the primary issues that I've always seen within the space has just been uh the friction of using crypto like the ux of crypto like I have huge gripes with metamask just in terms of the ux that it offers but like there's going to be a million different chains out there and there's gonna be million different gas tokens out there and people are going to want to bridge between those different chains itself so like there needs to be abstraction Solutions out there and I feel like ccip is a major abstraction solution uh you just interact with ccip and you can move both tokens and data to other

blockchains and you can like if you're on arbitrum you can move your tokens over to uh to optimism and stake them and then generate yield and then Bridge them back to you as like a wrapped format like you could do all these really cool things uh with ccip and chain then you have things like account abstraction so people don't even have to actually touch gas tokens and they can just interact with like stable coins and then they pay through and it gets converted on the back end so it feels like the whole industry is moving towards abstraction and that's always been my thesis of chain link itself like the end state is that most people would be using smart contracts and chain link without actually even realizing they're using chain link or smart contracts themselves it would all be abstracted in the background um it's

kind of like if you use like Netflix or streaming services you don't ask like what cloud service is this running on like am I using am I using AWS or like I can only use a like right nobody nobody cares about that so people are very tribalistic about what chains they use I don't think the vast majority of users will ultimately care really just you got to be blockchain agnostic yeah at the end of they just support that whole ecosystem yeah Zach man formerly known as chain link God appreciate you I'm excited for your uh for your big doc day and uh yeah rooting for you man absolutely thanks for having me on I'm always happy to talk about talk about chain looking different [Music] things