Unpacking The Implications of Axelar ITS on Crypto Interoperability

Transcript

welcome back to the rollup High Roller Community as always nothing on the rollup is to be construed as Financial advice we are just an Educators in the defi space toss us a quick like give us a share a repost send it to a friend who may want to watch this and finally give us a sub or a follow it means the world to help support credibly neutral educational content in def5 we're here to educate Empower and enrich you and let's jump in what's going on guys welcome back to the rollup we did a a really cool interoperability live stream a bit ago and following up on that conversation today with regards to some of the topics of Standards interoperability for the modular future um Axel has been one of the prominent

kind of IBC and evm connectivity layers over the years um and recently has pushed forward this idea of an interchain token standard or service um its so we'll be learning more about that from Jason and also just some of of your thoughts on the landscape of interoperability um as we head into this kind of modular feature so definitely excited to to to learn more Jason uh coming live from uh the the European landscape and GM gmgm everyone thanks for having me today yes sir head of defi head of degens at Axel over

here you're not supposed to tell everyone my secret what is your pfp again uh it's actually uh a custom one from the wrecked wolves collection I just felt like that collection resonated with me after I got wrecked last year but that feels like a distant memory now we're we're back in the pin actually when penguin Axel Penguins for everybody soon soon soon so Jason how has um how has well what is head of defi what what does that entail yeah you know other than being a fancy title I think it just means that you know we work with all of the D5

protocols and see what their cross stre road map looks like and how axler can help to power some of that yeah gotcha one one of which being squid right squid is like kind of like a very uh there's a very tight partnership it's one of the leading projects that's utilized Axel in the back end like could you talk about like how you guys have worked with squid and and helped them achieve this cross chain road map that that they set out to achieve yeah for sure so you know taking a step back right like in oura we work with like two types of projects we have existing projects that might you know already be live for a while on a single

chain and they have you know C cross-chain functions or needs that they want to achieve and we're here to help them and then there was these category what we call like natively interchain projects such as squid where you know from very right from the get-go they were built to be like chain agnostic and you know working on multiple chains using like a cross chain technology like axler so squid was really one of the projects that came from the first batch of our grants program and you know I think they launched on mainnet just over a year ago now and you know they were looking to solve like the crossing swap situation which is really giving users like any native asset across you know different chains and you know delivering that in a way where you don't need

liquidity you can tap into existing liquidity at dexes to give you know users the most favorable rates so squid is you know now probably one of the most well-known applications built on top of Axel but we have like you know I think over 50 other cross chain applications that has been building for you know over a year now that many of them are going live um some of the other well-known projects are like you know Prime protocol or mow who's building like cross-chain lending and cross chain nft uh launch pads you you mentioned these two groups like the ones that kind of set out to uh build these interoperability Solutions and then these the other group is these applications that have their home on one

chain but are looking to tap into users and liquidity on multiple chains I think what we learned from this interoperability space that Andy mentioned at the top of the call is that these two groups converge at this higher level concept we call chain abstraction so could could you talk a little bit about chain abstraction and I'd love to like attack it from two angles one being the user experience angle and like what does chain abstraction look like from a user's perspective and then from the other angle being like on the back end how do we achieve something like that is able to seamlessly move liquidity across these different chains to achieve this like uh ideal end state for for

users yeah for sure I think it's important to like talk about like the evolution of intro ability in Cross chain right and how did we get here I mean I think even if you fast forward like two three years ago there was only a handful of blockchains right and it back in those world like every every application only launched on one chain you were either on ethereum or you were on like salana or Avalanche and they were for the the most part like completely disconnected worlds right and they had different communities they had different like their own like liquidity they were essentially like their own tribes but what's happened in the last you know year or two years is that we now have so many more chains we have a new chain being launched every single

day whether it's like an app chain whether it's a rollup but what's for sure true is that fragmentation of users and liquidity is more prevalent today than ever before and the this trend only seems to be accelerating as we see the proliferation of like rollup as a service or you know more standardized like app chain Stacks right so now if you speak to a team a developer launching a project it's no longer oh I'm going to launch on this chain it is certainly going to be oh I'm going to launch on you know chains x y and Zed or I'm going to launch on chain x with plans to expand to chains Y and Z you know very quickly so the need for cross-chain infrastructure such as Accel

has never been greater right and in this kind of fragmented world the need to be on multiple chains has never been greater because otherwise you are just so siloed from a big chunk of like liquidity and users and that's really like you know where things are at and from an aor standpoint our mission has always been to provide coverage to you know all kinds of blockchains EVMS and non-ms and to provide a developer experience that's so seamless for Builders that they don't really have to you know worry about a lot of the the different blockchains and to me that's really what chain abstraction is Right enabling developers to be able to build like on any chain without worrying about like the the nuances such as like the you know the

different consensus mechanism what language it's written in and chain abstraction from like an end user standpoint I think kind of has always stayed the same I think as an end user you never really cared so much about what chain was something was built on like if you wanted to do a swap or go from this asset to that asset I don't think you ever really cared whether that Dex was built on Salon or ethereum you just wanted that asset right it was due to like a technical limitation that you ended up you know caring so much about what blockchain it's on but we you know look towards the future with better inop technology like Axel as a user you'll care less less and less you'll know less and less about like what chain it's being uh run on yeah and so and so that's kind of

like the this idea behind aar's its so maybe we can like unpack that a bit so we've kind of laid the landscape here with regards to the vision and kind of what this looks like for for users in the future for protocols for Builders um and so you guys then came up with this idea uh to have these these these kind of uh this thing happening behind the scenes where users have almost no idea that that it's happening but that they're using Axel's um its so perhaps we can unpack kind of whats is and how how this Vision that you've just laid out uh is aligned with with what you guys have built yeah absolutely Andy so you know

for us we think there's like two primary like use cases when it comes to inability right you have like asset transfers where what people call as like bridging and you have what's known as message passing the ability to like pass any payload commands across different chains we think the future is going to be primarily like driven by you know these applications using message passing which they can abstract away a lot of the the complexities today and build these one-click user experiences right and that ties in with what we just discussed about with like chain abration but right now what we're still noticing is that for majority of people moving a token from one chain to another like

asset transfers is a primary demand for for cross chain so you know we looked at the problem and said like you know what are some of the areas that we can really address and improve and you know to us there's a few things right first of all like bridging today is still like not in not the safest there's still many centralized token Bridges out there where like it's like a black box like you don't know what's happening in the back end you just know you're getting some asset on the destination chain and and maybe you paid a fee so we definitely wanted to make it more decentralized more transparent and safer for users the second thing is we wanted that the process to be permissionless like today if a lot of people might not

know is if a project wanted to bridge a token they usually have to go reach out to some Bridge provider intro provider and say hey can you add my token to you know your bridge for me to bridge it right and a lot of times is for smaller projects like they just don't even get access to be able to brige their token because these teams are focusing their resource engineering work on like the larger tokens which we think is is just you know against the ethos is crypto right it needs to be decent it needs to be permissionless so everyone has access to these services and lastly we wanted to you know make it a code-free solution so that anyone can launch a token we think like tokens are really like at the heart of crypto right it's the critical piece

of so many things and you know yet today if you don't if you're not a software engineer it's very hard to actually like launch a token like the amount of times I personally wanted to create a meme coin and you know play around with it but it's just like it's it's it's always on my mind right and so having this like lower the barriers of entry and having like a no code solution we thought would be really powerful so the interchain token service really combines like all of these elements which we believe creates truly Innovative and transformative transformative product right both for like Crypton native application and for many of the large Enterprises that we're working with you know what we're hearing like day-to-day now like is tokenization right even

Black Rock L is talking about it but tokenization is very meaningless on a single chain in this broad like cross-chain context where we have you know hundreds if not thousands of chains so the interchain token service is really a code-free tokenization solution that lets anyone permission creates a token but also has this bridg and capability built in it supports right now all of the evm chains that axler supports which is over like 15 chains but very soon later in the year it will support support non evm chains as well so it gives everyone a solution that allows people to expand to really any chain down the line given that Axel's Mission will be to connect all chains yeah Co and so do does does

anybody else have to adopt this this like this like I this token standard for it to work or because it's it's all function it's it's powered by Axel with the interchain token service like wherever Axel is this token these tokens can be right is that kind of how it works like like like I I don't need to have chain a b and c and roll up c d and e all except that this is a like standard or this is a type of token that is functional on my chain as long as Axel is there uh and it's w with its uh you know its bridging layer and it's uh kind of interrupt layer then then my token can also be there is that true that's true so as long as Axel supports

that chain and I just want to note that axler today already supports the most number of chains 56 chains with evm and and non EVMS but yeah as long as axler supports the chain you'll be able to use its um how I think about it is that there's really like three types of scenarios right you're either someone who currently has a token on one chain and wants to make this token available and bridged uh able to be bridged to many chains you can use I you simply cop paste the address into the portal the the its portal will find all the token information and then you literally toggle which other chains you want to deploy the token on and within minutes Axel will send a message to these

destination chain register that token for you and now you can use a portal to bridge of tokens you know one to one you can also get the tokens Whit listed on squid so you have a ready built front end which also gives you distribution to all of the applications and wallets that's already added squid to their product which I think is a very cool feature then there's a second scenario right which is you have you don't have a token yet and you can use an it to register that token on all all of the chains at once right and one of the cool benefits of being able to you deploy a token through itss on all of the chains is that you're able to have the same token address across all of the chains because you're registering them at the same time

and that from like a user experience standpoint is like awesome right like nobody really remembers uh token addresses even on a single chain so if you have different address on on like you know 15 20 Chains It's it's just impossible so I think having like the same address is like a really uh cool feature as part of it that I don't think a lot of people know about and then lastly you have the last scenario which is rare but it does happen is that a project might already be on multiple chains and they've actually already natively minted that token on each of these chains so then we can still enable inability and brid for these natively different natively Meed tokens on different chains but you wouldn't be able to use the portal what you'd have

to do is you have to use the its contract we have a a a repo called you know the token manager that essentially can link these two different tokens or or more so that you can still Bridge them like one to one via a lock and a lock and unlock mechanism in the back end this uh permissionless nature of this is is It's So Meta like it's so important because you mentioned the fragmentation like the there's going to be so many rollups and so many applications that it's as head of defi your entire Business Development Department at axar is not GNA know what to do with them so there's gonna be so many rollups it's gonna be rollup coin on every AAR chain the rollup token stay

tuned yeah we'll we'll edit that out but um but uh like the per permissionless is so so important because um it it allows this to scale like with ease right um whereas there's gate if there was Gatekeepers it'd be much more difficult so I'm curious like how you see this landscape evolving you also mentioned like on the other end of the spectrum tokenization and black rock and like these these players coming into the game like it's not I don't think it's too far out to expect that like we'll see black Rock chain and JP Morgan chain right those things are already in research and

development how do you anticipate interoperability happening and like what do you think interoperability looks like between you know be chain and like you know this crazy like meme rollup with like JP Morgan chain or Black Rock chain how do you how do you anticipate those you know interacting with one another in the bridge landscape in the liquidity landscape yeah that's a fantastic question Obby so you know just on what double click on what you said in the beginning right is that its right now is fully permissions to to create a token right on on these different chains but to connect a new blockchain this process is not permissioned and permissionless

yet so this is actually this other thing that Axel has been working on for now over a year is the Axel virtual machine so what Axel virtual machine is now scheduled to be you know launching end of this quarter early in Q2 and this is essentially a smart uh smart contract layer on top of Axel blockchain I think some of the things we didn't mention is a only Axel is uniquely built as a proof of sake chain in the in in the interrup infrastructure space and because of that we're able to build on this programmable layer right and the implication of launching the ax VM is like twofolds the first thing is as you mentioned blockchain foundations themselves will be able to more permissionless Le like

build out the Gateway contract relay and connect to the network and this is a GameChanger for the introp space because today all of the engineering work is done by these you know intro players whether it's Axel layer zero chain link CCI or warm so on but what that ultimately means is there's a capacity issue you know some teams might be able to add four or five chaines a quarter the other one might be at like two or three but that's also the reason why if you look at the solution everyone supports the same chains the big popular ones right there's loads of these like medium small siiz chains that are sitting there like little islands with no access to users no access to liquidity and that's just not scalable to your point the only way like we can connect all chains is through a fully

permissionless self- serve type of way and the way to do so is you need to have some kind of programmability and automation built in right and this is where a axel is uniquely positioned to enable this because only Axel is built as a proof of stake chain um so we're really excited about about about that because as you can imagine now we have a way to scale to like thousands of blockchains in a permissionless way and as a as a product underneath that its will then allow anyone to be able to launch a token on any of these chains and and and I think that's just going to be a real GameChanger for the crypto industry but to the second part your part of your question which I think you know flows into this very well is it's

no secret that many of these leading Enterprises and Banks are building their own private blockchains right fully permissioned chains and that's also only going to accelerate and continue but they themselves acknowledge the needs tap into like public chains and public liquidity so they're also thinking of inability like everyone else the only difference here is that it's going to be a gated chain right so we're working very closely with the MasterCard team who has been working on their own private chain called MTN and MTM is is you know last time I checked on on test net I know they're scheduled to launch publicly on mayet this year but it will be a fully permissioned chain so on MTN they they they're issuing something known as like

tokenized deposits right which is essentially like tokenized like GBP British uh like British pound or US dollar that directly has access to the banking rails where you can um withdraw these like tokenized deposit one to one with you know British pound or US dollar right in your bank account so therefore for anyone to access the chain they must make sure that that party has passed all of the kyc AML regulation of UK US Banks and that's what they're going to do right if how it's going to work is if you want to use their network access directly to these to the banking rails then you need to be a fully like uh you know kyc party that fulfills all of the regulatory requirements of a regular you

know banking partner so they're going to look at it address by address to see who gets to use it but it doesn't really affect Too Much from the introp standpoint you can think of Axel as the as a highway connecting all of the chain we're still going to have the highway connection it's just that when you get to you know a private permission chain whether you get to use it or not you're gonna run into a toll you're you're gonna have to pull up to the toll booth they're gonna not only they're gonna take a little Bridge fee they're gonna they're gonna ask for your name your ID you're GNA have to give them your social security number to get into black rockchain but that's not you guys you know you guys permission ly connect all these chains it's up to the blockchain is what is what you're saying

to to kind of mandate kyc on a on a Case by case basis yeah I yeah if you have a a response to that no no no you're you're exactly right I I don't know what that ends up looking like you know like when I I think it it is pretty easy to picture like uh you know what just a simple transfer if I want to take liquidity or some ass assets from you know a public chain and I want to go to a permission chain I can picture like a landing page that it gets my kyc information to unless I already I've already done that and my address is already on the list but to use like some defi applications you know that kind of

like now that we're getting like a lot of these Omni chain liquidity like liquidity lending markets a lot of these like cross chain swap markets it'll be really really interesting to see if if there are applications that combine public and permission liquidity into one layer like one application that that you can tap into both and and not only just liquidity to do swaps between both but like some of these more colorful like you know defi applications and and Primitives like take you know take one one off the market just anything like a like a like one of these ethereum loans these ethereal bonds that are popping up or I

I think they're called Athena just any one of these like stable coin yielding products all of these are like kind of like a mish mash of different liquidity in the back end that is using you know swap fees or something to generate yield so we I I think it'll be really really I don't know fascinating to see like the convergence of public liquidity and permission liquidity what do you guys think just in general yeah I think it's going to be really interesting to see like how it plays out I mean my personal guess would be you already have these like players like such as Ando or Mountain you know these Ru AET issuers that's already like you know fully licensed fully regulated so these are the type of like um parties that I think will get access to these

permission chains first right because they already meet all the requirements and if something goes wrong they also know like you know whether it's Mastercard or J they know exactly who they like chase after so they're not going to like the counterparty risk there is is like very minimal right with a lot of the more like def experimental stuff I think that's gonna you know come much slower and frankly I think it might be like a two-step process you might like have like an application Dex or whatever that's all this crazy stuff is happening there and then they might be transferred to you know the the liquidity gets transferred to a more regulated part regulated party whether it's like Ono or someone else and then they can then work go access these permission chains it's probably going to

be some kind of a funnel process in in that respect well I it's just like you know we've got the Bitcoin ETF the ethereum ETF feels like it's right around the corner you know like this summer or something like that like it's just like it feels like these institutions just can't stay away like the Genie's out of the bottle at this point it's just a matter of time before they're leveraging up their Bitcoin or they're borrowing against it and they're going to start to do that in the private markets and then slowly ease their way into like the more public markets total speculation on my just putting it out there but as head of defi I appreciate your

opinion yeah yeah I mean i' I've always been very bullish on crypto right I think like with this kind of true disruption it will take time right and it has taken a ton of time but you know from the very beginning nobody could deny the unique value proposition that that crypto brings right there are efficiencies to be had there are you know benefit just true pure technological benefits in using blockchain technology and I really do believe we're now you know past Tipping Point yeah speaking more about the uh the the Here and Now with with its we did a really fun um space with some of the launch partners and I'm I'm curious about uh kind of how some of these

launch Partners plan to use its and and some specific use cases for different types of applications so we've got fra is like obviously a really cool defi project and is launching their own L2 with their own token not really sure what the plans are there xdy um daaki swap um and and and a couple others so it would be I'd be interested to understand how each of these different types of projects wallet L2 deck and you know other types are each in their own respective way using its yeah totally so you know I'll go through each of them like one by one but you know as I mentioned earlier like a token is the heart of every project

right and of every token will have different use cases different tokenomics but being in crypto like the ability to you know expand your token make it cross chain is is just is just key and you'll see through these different example so with fra as you mentioned they're launching their own L2 fraxel they do have their own like native Bridge called frax fairy but it can only Bridge frax assets so you know when lots of these other projects that are launching a fractal from an existing chain you know whether it's like curve or like cheow or some of these other names you might be familiar with when they want to launch on fractal they want to bring their token with them right and then they need a solution to be able to

bridge their token or make it cross chain on fra so as we talked about before like with its they don't have to use any Tech work they don't need to like you know speak to Axel even they can just use the technology deploy their token off fraxel in minutes and and that's going to be like a really cool thing I think a lot of these existing projects expanding to fractal will be leveraging uh I and I think that will really set the president for how projects expand to to new chains moving forward with xdy um you know their wallet but they want to be able to expand to additional chains to tap on tap into new liquidity new users so you know a project of their scale for

them it's it's no-brainer and and its is just again like a really easy solution that supports the chain that they want you know it's something that's very secure that they can trust and and working with Axel uh is a no-brainer since we've been working with them on various other initiatives you know lastly you have like dexi swap a DEX that's expanding to to other chains their token is used as U incentives to to drive liquidity grow liquidity for their pools so they of course need their token on the new chains that where they launch their decks and they just need a quick and diry way of expanding there and IPS was a perfect fit so what I'm trying to say is you know whether you

need to go to a new chain because you need you need it for like liquidity incentives or cross governance or it's just simply tapping into like new users its is the easiest most permissionless solution out there um and you know I'm so bullish that I think by the end of the year probably a good chunk if not the majority of tokens being launched will be using it as a way to expand yeah and just to to play Devil's Advocate um layer zero's ofs are very familiar um is is is a key distinction is it is is it fair to say that it's easier to launch uh its just from like a development

perspective yeah I think like you know factually it is just much faster right because with oft they still have you know quite a bit of contract work to do and you know speaking of some teams that launch with of you know it ranges from you know a few days work to even few weeks to few months of work depending on on the kind of contract changes they're looking at versus with its we've had teams where you know they deployed a token on 15 chains literally in like under 30 minutes and had and created like a website of front end using like Swit in under hours so you can go from like deploying token having a having like a ready to go bridging front end in hours I just don't think it's possibly to get faster than that um and you know

while we're comparing like to oft I think the other key part to this is that Axel is fully decentralized and it uses proof of stake security right versus layer Zero's Oracle and relayer setup has been well documented that is it's more centralized so there's very different security assumptions there as well and with ofs is that after you you know create the token that's just you know one part of the journey for most developers you want to be able for people to like you know actually have a front end to bridge it and use it so the its portal itself acts as a front end where people can you know transfer the tokens back and forth and anyone can access it as long as they have the link but for a more userfriendly experience they can actually get the tokens whitelist on squid router and

because squid as itself is a building block for most teams that you know you probably have seen squid yourself in many of like applications Dees and wallets this just gives gives that instant distribution for these new tokens uh very quickly right and I think that's an incredibly value part of the of the solution as well yeah I think the uh the the easier setup and just kind of like quicker deployment is pretty important overall and then of course like the focus on just kind of like security and decentralization is like the key primitive as to why we're even here so um yeah I just wanted to kind of CLE clear that up because that's kind of the first thing that that came to my mind um outside of that like Connex has xcc2 but that's quite different um in terms

of of of of a setup because basically like I said earlier and just to further confirm nobody else has to like agree that this is a standard or or this is a a a a token that is valuable or that that is legitimate on any of these 15 chains or you know more in the future as long as Axel is there these tokens are there regard regardless backed by the technology from axar and that's kind of like you know that's it like there like you know there doesn't have to be an acceptance of these standards across the board as long as these chains accept Axel they accept IC based tokens which I think that's pretty cool yeah for sure and something else I want to highlight is that you know if if someone is really like worried about

something like vendor lockin we can transfer the the it the ownership the it as contracts to the teams right and when you have ownership of contracts you can even switch sh out the messaging layer if in the future whatever reason you're not happy with Axel this is really just meant to be a really easy tool for people to you know launch tokens cross chain um so there is no vendor lock in like you can you can use a like of course Axel is a default messaging layer but if in the future you wanted to have more control over your contracts and transfer to someone else that's completely up to you yeah and remind us uh from a Semite technical level a vendor lock in that's pretty much just as straightforward as it sounds yeah so you know a concern in the

inability space is oftentimes people are worried that if they use you know one Bridge or cross provider it'll be very hard or impossible to switch to another one so you know you know philosophically with Axel we always wanted people to use Axel because we believe we have the most decentralized and best tech not like you know lock people in through like economic incentives or or something like that so that's really the Spirit of how we like designed this tool right and to give you an example of this concern is recently when Lio was looking for a bridging solution to take like Stak e rap stake e to the different l1s like B&B and so on they explicitly was you know looked for a multi Bridge solution that had no no vendor lock in so Axel

actually worked with Wormhole to design a multi Bridge solution which the lto community ended up you know voting in and this solution not only starts with Axel and wormhole as you know with two messaging Solutions but you can actually add in and switch out additional messaging layers as you want in the future um so you know we can go into the details of like you know what are the trade-offs of a solution like that but that's just you know an example of uh of this concern being you know brought up and how we worked to address it yeah I am curious like what you know if you don't lock in right you're kind of like uh foregoing intentionally foregoing potential Revenue by like

continuing to have that partner so like you're giving that up right but for the sake of decentralization and lower trust assumptions like H how do you how do you tend to balance that that tradeoff and when you're kind of considering these Bridge designs yeah so you know like I think there's a few things there right like a lot of times now like especially with xc20 there's this proposal that you should be using like a multi Bridge solution or like you know using multiple like messaging layers and I just don't think that's a one-size fits-all for uh for most people because with that design you're sending multiple messages and and basically you're afterwards you're

comparing the results of those messages and saying oh is it the same so what that means is the users pays you know more gas like twice or however amount more the gas is because you're sending m messages and also you have to take on additional like liveness assumptions right like if for example you know when axler and Wormhole are both sending a message but for some reason the the Wormhole message didn't arrive because the relayer went down then you have to pause the entire project right just to kind of go investigate and see what happens so there are those additional like like liveness concerns I think you know for Lio it might work well because there's not a ton of messages being sent and they're and they're not as price sensitive so I think this kind of

multipur design works right but for your average project you don't need to like you don't want to be sending like multiple messages creating very high gas costs for your users and taking on additional like operational challenges right like just with a decentralized you know proof of stake security with the permissions valid validators like set like Axel that security is more than enough for most people right and it and people just want to work with something that's like secure you know battle tested and TurnKey that's what we see in in most scenario I I think it's important we distinguish one thing that I think you're you're putting down here which is that on a lot of these aggregator setups it's like you're only picking one Bridge right so

when we think of a multi-party or a multi a multi- bridge solution a lot of times it's just one that you're that you end up using but you're just kind of looking at all of them whereas in this Lio example Axel and Wormhole are like almost like a two out of two type of thing you have to have both of them them relay the same message and those two messages uh agree with one another and are are consistent in order for the bridge transaction to to happen is that is that how the Lio case works exactly right and in the future we can add on a third or fourth provider as needed and security is Paramount for for that bridge design whereas it maybe you know for other Bridge it's not very cool and

then is does that become a world where if there's like two of three or something does it almost then function as like a multisig in a sense in case something like one of the bridges goes down or there's some like key error with one of the partners does it then kind of like fall back into the others or how kind of does that work I mean you can design it and however you like right you can of course say you know you can have three brid three messages being sent and as long as two of them are correct that's fine that's that's of course like a possible design um you know I think the industry is still very much figuring out like what is the best design I think so far if anyone's curious go look at the LI of proposal that axer and worm

will put forth is really like Leading Edge and we address a lot of these different edge cases there but I want to touch back on one of the things you mentioned Robbie which is I think we've gotone to the point that when it comes to asset transfers and bridging you know many people rely on aggregators right and I think the user experience is definitely better but what people don't often think about is what is all of the risk behind the scenes right because when you aggregate all the different Bridges underneath you're also aggregating all of the different risk and as we talked about earlier in in the show not all all not all bridges are made equal some are more centralized than others and often times that centralization is what's giving people the ability to offer you know better prices better speed because it's just

like a black box in the end right we already seen this happen with multichain you know back in the day they were the biggest bridging provider when it comes to asset transfers everyone was using them because it was cheap and it was fast but you know for for years we always said multichain is very centralized and dangerous but people didn't care because as a a user it's easy and tempting to just focus on speed and price and I think with an aggregator approach again like that just creates that bias and it misleads users and thinking that the security assumptions everything is the same and you're simply just getting the best price what a wild story that is multi-chain that one had a had a bunch of twists in turns as it went down yeah

um but Jason I think with the aggregators it's about user Choice like it's not about what's better or more secure from a a ethos perspective I think it's the reason why they exist is because they give users the choice to choose I'm sure if you surveyed like out of a 100 people like what do they choose I'm sure 99% 99 of them will say I just clicked on the one that was that literally said prefer because it's the cheapest or the fastest yeah yeah AI fast like I usually Aver yeah for sure the average a is not like going to go you know do detail due diligence on a highly technical subject on understanding you know what are the trade-offs and what are the security assumptions of each bridge and neither

should they have to right it's really up to us as developer as a developer or project to kind of do that for do that for the user right like we can't expect every it's it's like when you're buying a car you don't expect that you know everything about like the trade of the car right you kind of expect that the the brand or the dealer has already like done the due diligence for you um you know I think long story short I don't I'm sure there will be another multi-chain incident in the future I think that we still have all kinds of centralized Bridges with all kinds of security risk and I do think you know the bridge aggregation approach is not the best approach when it comes to like asset transfers because of this um you know because that is is aggregating the

risk right for example with the squid design it's a very different design right it's saying it's giving you it's still allowing users to swap any asset to to anything by tapping into Dex liquidity which oftentimes actually have better rates than just Bridges but then they're using only Axel as you know the cross chain messaging uh layer because a they've decided that Axel is the most decentralized and secure so I think when it comes to bridging it is not just about price and speed you want to be using the most secure and most decentralized solution and it's up to you know the these different applications to kind of do their homework and do that because otherwise if you're just presenting to

the end user oh here's the cheapest and here's the fastest Security will be the element that that gets traded off well said yeah Jason this was an absolute blast man I I think uh interoperability is something that you know we continue to hear about and it's because um all these new rollups coming out um the the problem of interoperability only continues to get harder and harder to solve um so it's very cool to see tons of players like like axar and yourself tackle this with with Elegance uh in the solution so thanks so much for for talking interop with us and uh yeah man thanks for coming on the rollup thanks so much for having me guys

this has been awesome yeah cheers Jason