What developers should build to onboard a billion people

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet I'm Kyrie dead and I believe that web3 is going to change world and that's why we're carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web3 and make sure that you don't get caught in the hype cycle now we do a lot talking about web3 and how it's going to onboard the next billion people well in this episode we're going to talk about what needs to be built in order for that to actually happen it turns out that if we were to allow web3 apps to you know work connect in with let's say meta or Tick Tock or whatever the biggest apps in the world in onboard billions of people all at once it's more than likely that almost

all of this Tech would actually break it just wouldn't work we don't have the scalable systems that we need for web3 to onboard the billions of people like we always talk about on this podcast and so that's why today's episode is actually looking at what do we still need to build what's is left what are the kind of things that developers and businesses need to be working on to enable this technology to enable web 3 self-custing decentralization all the things that we love about the space to actually enable it to function and work in scale for the billions of people that we know are going to be migrating from the online world to the on-chain world in the coming years and so no better person to do this than Noam hurwitz the product engineer at Alchemy Alchemy is

one of the most powerful set of web3 development tools to help you build and scale your dapps with ease they also the Alchemy University which is educating developers into the web 3 space and really he comes with you know two and a half years over at Alchemy and Alchemy has grown since at least when Noam started with about five developers their team now is over 100 across their entire team so they've been growing and they've been doing this and hiring through the bear market so it's really cool to see certain companies in this space that can continue to grow even through tough time times and when you're building something as important as what they are it all makes sense but knowam previous to is web 3 Endeavors previously being in alchemy he used to work at quebe and Google and so he's uh he knows a thing

or two about scaling technology and again that's the focus of this discussion today is just talking about what we need to do to scale looking at blockchains different types different solutions to scale and other areas just to make the ux better for users for developers and also to make it more secure for users and again for developers and so we talk things about account abstraction we talk about user intents erc6900 and erc4337 a bunch of different protocols we do our best to to explain this in a more simple fashion for those who are not developers and are not Tech related but otherwise it's a just a great episode to kind of realize how early we are right we want these applications that onboard the billions

and I think we're too early it's coming and the developers are building and as we learn from this episode develop are growing still which is great it's exactly what we need to see and you know we just got to continue to push forward continue to keep building as per usual and I think it's inevitable it's going to happen we just got to keep building and make sure that we are building and working together to make all this happen so that's what we're going to talk about today but before we get into that let's just take a quick second to hear from our sponsors the future of social media is here and that future lives in web 3 on top of lens protocol web 2 social platforms are broken and right for disruption you see the epicenter of social media is the creators and yet they are the most neglected web 2

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crypto they also offer awesome rewards allowing you to earn up to twenty eight hundred dollars for completing easy tasks like setting up two-factor authentication and verifying your identity if you're eager to get into the market get started with buy defy Now by visiting bydify.com that's bydfi.com or clicking the link in the description below gnome welcome to the web3 academy podcast it's great to have you here thanks man it's gonna be on I've been following Alchemy actually for while so I'm excited to have have you on and have a conversation here I think we've got lots to talk about but for the listeners who may not know who Alchemy is let's start there why don't you just give us a bit of a background of what Alchemy is how long you guys been around for and what you guys are up to so

Alchemy is the leading web 3 developer platform and for anyone who's trying to build this space you're probably familiar that there's a lot of idiosyncrasies with building applications on blockchains and blockchain protocols and so Alchemy aims to be that platform layer to kind of provide standardized tooling and interfaces to enable developers to build applications that'll onboard a billion people to crypto billion people it's what we all want and are these tools for all types of blockchains is this just evm is it just ethereum or what's the kind of toolkit there so we currently support I want to say eight or nine blockchains including Solana which is an evm and Stark net which is an ethereum layer 2 but is not actually ebm itself so we now are multi-vm Although our Origins started with just ethereum okay cool and how long has Alchemy been

around like in the space for Alchemy has been around in some form for over four years a little known fact is they actually started out as a hedge fund analytics platform and while they were building their product in the space realized how hard the infrastructure problem is and so started moving more and more to that before releasing our infrastructure as it's done today in a self serve format at the beginning of 2021 very interesting I was not expecting that transition but that's pretty cool I mean I think obviously helping developers in this space build is probably the the most important thing that we need right now which let's talk about that a little bit let's talk about sort of the the state of web3 in your mind we'll talk about devs in a second but just more in general the state of web 3 where do you see like what stage

we're at what's the Focus right now what do we need to be doing like just kind of walk us through your vision of that it's a bit cliched but it's obviously early and you can tell it's early kind of based off the caliber of the user experience I don't want to overly use this analogy but like reminisce back to the early days of the internet there were all these like weird new businesses with weird unorthodox business models and poor ux's and a lot of consumer facing scams and they had a harder time kind of addressing older segments of the population because there are these new technological paradigms that were difficult to onboard to and a lot of that kind of died away pretty quickly but there was a kernel there that's kind of become revolutionary to the point that today every company is an internet

company and like Saudi aramco has stockton.com and there's whole companies predicated based off just giving value online I think blockchain is very much in an early day right now where there's these like weird businesses with unorthodox business models and it very much caters towards younger segments of the population and there's obviously been like headwinds with like consumer scams but there's still a really strong kernel there and I think we're at the stage now where there's a lot of momentum into this kernel and especially now during the bear Market a lot of really really smart people building on really hard long roadmaps that get us to a state where down the road every company provides value to its users on chain as well as online um to me at least and this is something we explain in the podcast all the time is there's so many use cases for this

Tech right and it solves so many business problems and so like it's obvious to me that this is coming and that so many users are going to be using this and you know you said a billion people to me it seems obvious the problem is even when we have the good use cases it's still just very hard for people to wrap their heads around and very hard for people to use and so the state I see Brad is like we're still in a very much a build phase because we need to get this technology up to the standards of a typical average like internet user right like it doesn't matter how good this stuff is my mom's not using it right now and she's just I think we're still a way soft for her to use any of this kind of stuff we just need more devs building in this space to

make that happen I guess talk about that for a second I know Alchemy is kind of a leader in the dev world what are you guys seeing are we getting more devs right now are the devs you know really starting to build out in this space or is it slowed down maybe with the bear Market or kind of what are you seeing in that yeah a hundred percent and I think like to your point of getting kind of my mom on chain it's there's a lot of people building in the space right now but I would describe it as very highly in parallel and all moving very slowly where we need like the convergence of all of these threads to get to a final solution where the ux's address the scalability's address the Securities address the Education address and there's enough Primitives and support for anyone to go on board to on-chain

applications and so we're seeing a lot of these core pillars being developed and pushed forward there's just a lot of these pillars that need to land before we do this end State for the second part of the question around like what we're seeing in teams is like we have this internal new metric around like how we label team quality so we have this team quality score and we're seeing now that like the highest quality teams are still like the team count is increasing still throughout this fair market kind of signaling that like the people building like the high caliber long-term projects are growing and getting momentum and there's more and more of them coming into space right but the the tail end I guess are starting to fall off the like less quality nft projects let's call it things like that there's a lot less

building going on in that yeah we've actually still seen pretty strong numbers over the past two quarters but I think the yeah to your point like lower quality teams a lot of those will come in and experiment with some things like nft drops or building drops or iterating or just finding product Market fit whereas this kind of team quality score more indicates teams that have some longer term roadmap or some sort of product Market Fit already you have any numbers around I mean I see a lot of different reports and things I think a16c had a report and a few others on dev numbers do you guys have is this something you guys calculated or something you're keeping track of as well yeah so we published a quarterly developer report I'm sure we can link the last one we published in the show notes again that kind of captures a lot

but I just said they're still pretty strong Tailwinds in terms of like developer growth but we're seeing a lot of activity especially on layer twos so like now that all the layer twos have kind of reached operational maturity scaling is less of a problem transaction costs a set of hot friend users and we're seeing more and more end users onboard directly to Layer Two to the point that the cumulative sum of transactions on Layer Two is like far surpasses that available on ethereum at this point can you just walk me through maybe we can do this with your journey into web3 and your journey into Alchemy I mean there's a lot of devs out there in the world not a lot of them are in web 3 yet I think we're in like the tens of thousands ish somewhere around there from from the numbers that I've seen it

was 20 000 ish and we need more and I guess maybe just walk me through you know why aren't we getting exponentially more just yet maybe AI is taking all of our devs in the last couple months I'm not sure and really what do we need to get there and if that contrasted all well with your journey it would be great to hear hear your story as well yeah I would say the numbers of deaths in the space are probably substantially higher than the 10 to 20K you quoted based off of okay what we see at Alchemy so we do see a lot of trash in the space I think part of it is just enabling them with like higher level developer tooling where if you ask me to go build an application like an internet application using barebones TCP right now I'd be like moving pretty slowly and get

frustrated pretty quickly whereas now like you just give me a modern web framework I set up my server I sign up my website you can like do these things with no code Solutions even and get like a is this great application up and running in minutes and like these kind of parallels are still missing them up three where I would say that the ethereum log is the web3 analogy of the web 2 TCP where it's like a very low level concept it's pretty idiosyncratic it's Unique to a particular platform technology and like most developers just kind of want higher level building blocks so that's been a lot of our focus at Alchemy is kind of packaging and bundling these low level Primitives into high level 30 blocks and kind of abstracting away the underlying technology the underlying platform from the application experience that that's a

lot of power interesting and in your journey you want to walk us just through a little bit of your journey into web3 and and also to Alchemy yeah for sure in a web three I probably got exposed to Bitcoin mining like in right around 2010 like very very early and I was like Wow pretty skeptical of like oh why do we need internet money this is silly like I can just go use a credit card or buy things with dollars the thing that was missing for me is like I'm a technologist I kind of understood the technology Byzantine John was probably like it's a very elegant solution to that but for me what was missing is like the game theoretic socioeconomic almost philosophical reason of like why these types of solutions that are sensitive resistant and trustless Incredibly neutral platforms and that didn't really hit me until like end of 2020 really

where I was listening to a podcast about stable coins and the whole idea of kind of payments on blockchain kind of really came into life for me and from that point it was a one month window of me listening to that podcast to me working at Alchemy and kind of filling out the future infrastructure on ethereum that's a quick rabbit hole that used that you would tell what did you do previous to Alchemy so I've been attacked for a while I worked at Google for a few years scaling system so it works on Google Drive where we're rewriting a system for over a billion monthly active users and that's kind of giving me like a good perspective on like what designing systems for been people who looks like right after that I did a quick stint at a startup called quitty I don't know if

you heard about them but they were the streaming service that raised two billion dollars in full in about eight months so it was a pretty spectacular failure kind of gave me the four to two to come in and uh ride it through web 3 bear markets right right yeah this is something you're used to then interesting well that's a great story and lesson shift this over to kind of what devs are all working on which is as you said onboarding a billion people on chain walk me through that what do we think we need to get to what do we have to do like I don't know how you kind of frame this or how you think about this but whether it's technically what do we need to achieve to make this happen or in terms of like use cases and applications what do you think we need

to get out there in order for the seven but how do we get those those billion users on chain yeah that's a great question I think from an infrastructure perspective the way I frame this is like if you take a company like meta that has something like four billion monthly users or some really high number and said okay all four billion of your users have to act on crypto rails today what breaks and the answer is like everything breaks really right like right there's not enough block space like the ux is poor like interoperability is not sufficient to handle multiple blockchains there's an education problem and so I think everything that breaks there is kind of an opportunity for Builders to come in and provide solution for and add value to ecosystem and so all of that is kind of what we're focusing on Alchemy and we have Alchemy

University geared at addressing some of the education problems and we have now A Team working on account abstraction Solutions which are aiming to address some of these ux problems and I'm happy to dive into that a little bit more in a bit but we're seeing a lot of teams kind of addressing like the blog space problem the interoperability problem the security problem and it's going to be the convergence of all these threads at once that enable the apps like The Meadows of the world to onboard launching right so we got a lot of problems and we need to fix a lot of different things in order for the staff and it's essentially what you're saying I mean we've talked a lot about account abstraction on the podcast but I think every time we talk to someone we get a little bit of a different answer as to what it is and

what it entails and I guess what it means for the users which is great because it helps us think of different use cases and different scenarios for it so I kind of like to continuously repeat that so why don't you walk us through your idea of account abstraction and I guess maybe how you guys are seeing it at Alchemy and what you think that's going to offer for the space great question I think the reason for that confusion stems from the term account abstraction in the first place where it's pretty confusing term and like what it means everything in web history is confusing in terms of the yeah this I don't know who comes up with these things but they are just wild like dank sharding yeah it's a it's a bit of a tangent but a lot of in Terms have also like they've been invented before in web

2 right where like I don't know if you've read vitalik soul-bound nfts blog posts it's like a really cool concept of an nft that's not transferable and is permanently attached to an account and there's like been Decades of research in web 2 around like identity and digital identity and decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials and like you can just think of a soul-bound token as a verifiable credential but no one really calls it that even though that's you know there's been a lot of thought being put into that space right so yeah naming's definitely not been our strong suit so far but to that point yeah account abstraction the way we see it is it's an unlock for smart contract accounts and like the term account abstraction stems from the protocols perspective in that there are two like separate account types there's externally owned accounts which is your

traditional ethereum private key and then there's these smart contract accounts and from the produce calls perspective you're abstracting away support for both of these accounts so that the protocol like it like natively supports smart countrycast IT supports EOS you have to make protocol changes to do so and so on ethereum historically it's only ever supported externally owned accounts and with erc4337 we now have off-chain infrastructure supporting smart contract accounts and in general the reason that we're very excited about smart contract accounts like we do think they are one of these needed build building blocks to get the metas of the world or a billion people on chain in general and that like externally owned accounts have a lot of limitations for one is there's this whole Key Management problem where you lose your private seed phrase and you lose your account or if

that gets fished you get entirely rugged so just to clarify for these is the externally managed accounts this is like your metamask your coinbase wallet this is what you're talking about about externally managed accountants okay externally undercast exactly it's it's your private key and it corresponds to a public address on ethereum and that private key is essentially your account and with smart contract accounts you're decoupling this private key from your account so you have your account and that's deployed as a contract on the blockchain and then you can have any number of keys with any number of rules who are acting as signers on this account so an example of that is like I can give my landlord a signer that says you have permission to draft 3000 usdc exactly once per month right and then they can use that to automate meet drafting rent for my account so now you

have a model of poll payments instead of push payments whereas eoas the only way that you can issue payments are with push payments so with account abstraction it sounds like the better security right because you can kind of control I guess what people can do with your assets and then ideally it's better ux as well it's kind of abstracting away a lot of what's going on especially in terms of not needing a seed phrase that kind of stuff but the way that you've explained it it sounds like this is in terms of the of the developers they can do a lot with it but will the average person also benefit from account attraction like will they be creating these like you just said that you can create a what's called a permissions what was the term you use a permission something authorization I guess Banner

yeah signer like will the average person be able to do that or is this like just those that are building applications so I think at the end of the day the ultimate goal here is to entirely abstract away the crypto rails from the end user we're like the end user's like oh like I want to enable my landlord to pay like to draft rent for my account once per month I'll like follow these instructions online and then issue that transaction but they don't necessarily need to know that they're issuing a transaction they don't need to know what blockchain this is happening on they don't need to know what address their contracts deployed at but they do need to know that they're able to send four thousand or three thousand dollars once per month right so we want to enable developers to build these experiences in

a way that entirely abstracts away crypto from end users right so from the ux standpoint of a user it's going to look just like a web 2 app you're just going to tell it that you want it to do this thing and then just underneath all the stuff is happening in terms of how that's going to work on the blockchain what wallets that's going to Etc but it's essentially just putting that all away and it feels like a web 2 experience it's kind of I mean we always say the web 3 mullet which I think is exactly what this offers here is I mean bankless term this with the D5 years ago but we see this happening with kind of everything in the internet where blockchain is kind of the underlying infrastructure that enables everything to happen in terms of value but we don't really see it or we don't really touch

it it's more a web 2 like experience up above and then it has the the web 3 at the back because uh you would say that kind of abstraction is basically going to enable that that's exactly right I will say like the main difference with like account abstraction and like the coinbase defy mullet for example is the coinbase D5 mullet still offers these Services through like a web 2 intermediary right so like you can go use I'm not familiar with the latest but from my understanding you could go use like lending protocols through coinbase for example but in this case like you really are getting this web 2 experience with all the web 3 ethos and like value props of decentralization you're managing right right exactly you're managing your accounts you just like don't really know that you're doing so when we're providing developers and

tools to enable end users to do that in like a safe way for example like using things like the secure Enclave on your phone to manage Keys instead of writing them down on a piece of paper it's like one way that you can abstract away keys from user while still giving them a secure environment to manage these keys and yeah this is the thing I try to help a lot of people wrap their heads around is because a lot of people are trying to build businesses or tools to make you know web3 easier for those that are coming in but I think a lot of people are building it right now for the way that you know we use blockchain and the way that we use blockchain I think is not how we're going to use it in the future for most people right right now

it's this weird way where we've got to sign all these transactions we've got to you know go in our wallet and decide which blockchain we're on and we've got to bridge things across and I think eventually and I don't know how long this will take but all that will just happen under the hood we won't be thinking about bridging and swapping and all that stuff it'll just happen as we go to interact with whatever application it is and I think again accounts attraction is going to be probably one of the main tools that kind of enables that for us what else are you seeing with this that account attraction is going to enable so you gave a couple like ideas already is there any like if you can kind of zoom out a little bit and just talk about how the internet is going to function or things that we

typically do on the internet I'm talking like social media obviously payments is a big one that we do Commerce do you see this changing a lot of what we do on the internet and if so kind of walk me through some use cases of how yeah that's a great question I think there's going to be a lot that I'm missing but some of the big ones you mentioned are like Commerce and payments like I think from Day Zero like blockchain's one of the biggest promises have been like payment rails and and financial rails and like we're seeing maybe more advanced institutions move some applications on to blockchain rails but like from the end user's perspective it's still largely infeasible to use this on a day-to-day basis so I think that's what I promised the thing social I think is another really interesting one where you have like attestations and

like provenance of like who created what and when and like from what account and like who signed to attest to this is an interesting one I think gaming is a big one where I grew up playing RuneScape personally which was like okay this MMORPG and there's a grand exchange and everyone's like are being assets on the grand exchange that just to me is like a very one-to-one parallel with like what's kind of going on with web 3 gaming and like interoperability across all these games and the ability to like create like Financial models on top of these in-game assets here's a question I know this is going to be a difficult one to answer but we talk about this all the time Webster gaming being you know web3 social like all payments like all the stuff that's coming to crypto to web3 and I think you know year over year

these things are coming more and more and they're getting closer and closer and it's all exciting but I'm just curious in your I guess your best estimate how far are we away from this stuff actually being mainstream and like in terms of not like when everyone adopted but more just like when is the tech gonna actually be ready for that right like we're still working on the very underlying like ethereum the core infrastructure is still being built and then we've got the l2s that we've got a lot of work to do then account abstraction and then the actual apps themselves and so like in my opinion there's probably still a lot of work to do and this is probably going to take a lot of time you're more in the weeds of this stuff of seeing like the progress of it all when do you think we have our

first like mainstream app that goes real big and it's all powered by crypto and it's self-custody and it's decentralized et cetera like how far are we away from this Tech actually giving what we what do you all want that's a great question I would argue there's maybe one existing mainstream app on comp already and that's stable coins and if you look at the value you transmitted it over stable coins like it's pretty compelling to say like okay that's gone product Market fit and there's a lot of adoption but kind of looking forward beyond that from a technological perspective just like systems today can't handle like social media bandwidth of like an Instagram or a Snapchat right now and so there's a lot of groundwork that needs to be laid before we can even think about those types of scale and those types of frictionless experiences my like

optimistic bet would be on like a three-year timeline and I think it could land anywhere between like three and ten years and I wouldn't be overly surprised interesting so you said we just can't handle the bandwidth what is it we need to improve is it like scalability of transactions you mean or is there something else there's more to it that I'm like as a non-technical person that I'm just unaware of yeah exactly so like if you imagine these things as a global computer and then you like look at okay social media at Peak probably does on the order of like 100 000 transactions per second and like Visa at Peak probably that's in the order of like 20 000 transactions per second and they're all Now using these same shared reason services and there's all these other applications also contending for these resources like we just need a very high

throughput system and then the way like it's a lot in ethereum are kind of taking different approaches of this where Solana is building this like really really powerful hyper performant hyper optimized single like monolithic system and they're able to get like incredibly good results right now and they have some clients like the junk fire dancer coming through that will like really push them to like very high transaction per second limits and then the ethereum model is more of like a modular architecture where it's role-up Centric and we're seeing these like layer twos on ethereum and now we're seeing the emergence of what's called like an application specific chain so like an example is that is like dydx has their own chain using the cosmos SDK and that now has its own like independent set of like block space and like governance rules and like met of capture

rules and everything else but when you start moving into this like app chain space now the question also becomes interoperability where if I have thousands of app chains how do I the end user like know or how do I developer like provide end users a way to just like interact on chain without having to be prescriptive of like what chain I'm on or or like oh man my assets are stuck on Arbor trim and I want to use them on dydx like how do I get them over so there's just like more and more problems that kind of recursively solve up as you you fix each underlying layer so I know this is getting a little bit off subject from what we're meant to be talking about but between the two sort of solutions of you know Solana as a monolithic chain and then you have

ethereum and l2s and that specific chains is kind of the modular chain do they both exist in the future is there one that's better than the other like what are you thinking on this yeah it's I think just frankly way too early to say on this I think both models are quite compelling and frankly both will probably have some use cases that they're more optimal for okay but as of now they're both policy models they're both very early fire dancers not live in production most of the modular roadmap isn't really live in production either you can see where they're both going but it's truly to say right now when you talk about account abstraction most of this I hear about is on ethereum does this translate over Solana because Solana is built in a different code it's rust whereas ethereum is solidity does this transfer over or is this like kind

of like you said where everyone's kind of building their own things right now and it's not sort of intermeshed together yet what do you see with that yeah the general concept of account abstraction is not polishing specific writers just enabling smart option accounts Alchemy specific offerings right now are in the evm so they're implemented for ethereum and it's layer twos you're right and that it would require a slightly different approach and also generalizing that to extend to Solana although that is something that we eventually do want to consider right okay cool talk to me a little bit about alchemy University so our listeners I think we have about 20 25 are developers and so I know many of them are either learning to develop a lot of them are new and some of them are have been around for a while what's Alchemy University and give you a little bit of

background on what that is so we mentioned this a couple times already but education is probably one of the bigger barriers to entry in the space both for end users but especially for developers and Alchemy University is designed to enable developers to ramp up quickly to web3 and become like productive web 3 developers and it actually started out as this team called chainshot that was running kind of education boot camps and we're doing fantastic job like they're awesome they're replacing smart contract engineers at the top protocols after they graduated from chainshop we started working with them and they are now powering Alchemy University which is a lot of the same courses that chainshot initially ran but made publicly available for free so that like any developer can use these resources that were placing Engineers as smart contract engineers at these thought firms and like use them to ramp themselves up on

like the latest and greatest Concepts in what we development for those that are wanting to get in the world of web 3 they're wanting to be a developer and building the space whether they're want to build their own projects that they want to work at at a certain company where do you think are like the the main needs that people developers need to be focused on right now I mean I'm assuming account attraction because that's what most this episode has been about but in terms of like where people should be focusing on what they should be building any Frameworks you have for that that you could help a newer developer kind of raptor hetera yeah it's a good question I think taking a step back given to be a good web free developer you have to be a good developer period right and that means like we're designing systems that

are intended to scale for a billion people it's not like a highly available globally available shared computer and ethereum and these other blockchains and you have to be able to apply engineering best practices and a lot of upfront rigor and designing and building applications from a systems perspective from a security perspective from a ux perspective and these are all characteristics that like are applied to engineering generally not just webview engineering and having a strong foundations and like distributed systems security being comfortable writing code being comfortable prototyping testing your code also go a long way to on ramping towards web 3 and web3 I think yeah there's a lot of really interesting areas being looked at I think the account abstraction ecosystem is really interesting there's a lot going on right now with privacy too and kind of

applying like ZK proofs both for scaling and for privacy there's the whole scaling roadmap where a lot of the layer twos on ethereum so arbitrum and optimism they're actually what's called a smart contract roll-up and there's equal components of like running the layer two and its network of nodes but then also does designing the smart contract that this eventually rolls down to on layer one so I think there's a ton of very interesting threads going on and wouldn't encourage folks to check them all out pique their interest and follow whichever one they think is most interesting absolutely I guess in terms of where the tech is at or where it's going to be in the coming like let's say a year or two what do you think of the use cases that are best suited for this Tech currently so again if an entrepreneur who's a developer wants to

build up something like obviously there's you know everything's gonna be built on this 10 years from now but like you said it's not quite ready for a lot of that but there are some businesses and there are some use cases that work great right now like you said stable coins anything in terms of the use cases that you'd say stand out at the moment or that you're like is a great opportunity that someone should be building I think D5 is generally there on a lot of angles where like Ave is like a very hardened well understood protocol that provides a lot of users a lot of value and I think it's obviously very difficult to go build an Ave but there are a lot of just like Financial Primitives offered on chain that do provide users value I mentioned gaming a few times where I think this is a good

example of something that could use its own app chain for now to get its own dedicated block space build out something like a custom execution environments to better accommodate its in-game rules and then use that like powered by interoperable digital assets I think the whole payment infrastructure of like if you imagine right now checking out on Amazon on mobile with like a metamask it's like go to Amazon you could check out you search the metamask you select your network you go back to Amazon see you confirm it's just a metamask you like approve token you should have it it's like just a terrible flow like what's the real practical flow for e-commerce on digital assets and like what's needed to power that I think what excites me the most is just like you have a fully programmable machine here and like people have proven to be

in this space just incredibly creative and I'm really excited to see kind of what comes out of the next absolutely I'm going to give you a second to just share a little bit more about alchemy for those developers that are interested that are you know trying to learn more or they want some of the tools that you guys have give us a little background of you know a little bit more specific on what you guys are doing where they can find this stuff in case they want to do the universe City or they want to use your tools give us a little bit more details there a little bit more in detail about alchemy so as I mentioned we're a leading blockchain developer platform what that means is that we offer core access to several blockchains so ethereum optimism arbitrum starknet polygon polygon dkvm Salata probably one

or two more a star and in the polka dot U System and that's kind of our core starting point but like as I mentioned earlier with the TCP IP analogy pure node access is probably not going to be enough to enable developers to build applications for the next billion users so how we provide them like the right level abstractions the right level building blocks to go and focus on application so to that point we have a couple focuses on like aggregating and combining these building blocks so we have things like our nft API which provides structured schemas on nfts and pull off chain data so that you can build nft Centric applications without having to scrape the whole blockchain and scrape PFS for metadata and generally jump through a bunch of Hoops to power them we have things like transaction simulation to enable wallets to build safer user flows by showing the

users the before and after of a transaction before it's executed and now we have a large team focused on a cat traction so we're powering both the off chain infrastructure as defined in eip4337 which enables account abstraction on ethereum and we're also working on some open source initiatives so another one of those is EIP 6900 which is a standard for modular smart contract accounts the idea there is that we want to enable developers to build account plugins and minimize vendor lock-in on any account implementation so that if I'm a developer and I write an account plugin it would work with gnosis it'll work with Argent it would work with zero Dev it will work with any account implementation out there interesting okay okay so before we get into into a speed round how we always end our episodes I just want to know is

there anything that we missed on anything you want to touch on more that we just didn't get a chance to in this episode great question there's always so much more to cover here I think we covered on a lot of it I guess like one parting thought we didn't touch much on is there's been a lot of discussion recently on like intent based architectures and just like really quickly covering that I think we need to get into a state and blockchain where users can be intent based and what I mean by that is like if I'm swapping from usdc to eth I say okay I want to swap 2000 uscc for eth I just want to get the most amount of ease what I don't want is like I don't want to be like on arbitrum using this unit swap pool with like this slippage fee and being very

prescriptive and imperative about how that flop happens so ideally we provide these systems to enable developers to move to this more intent based model where they can just allow the users to be like okay like here's what I want to happen and the developers provide a system of constraints to do that optimally so it just takes out I mean that is a pain right when you're using your wall and it's like like slippage and all this stuff like you got to think that it can just do it for you right it can just make the decision for you that's kind of what you're saying is basically the developers will just build it in such a way that it'll figure that out for you and probably do what's maybe it's not the always the most optimal but it's like one of the best options at the

time I guess is that the idea yeah exactly I feel like I put my mom on blast a lot of this episode but like my mom's not dealing with slippage on arbitrive right right she like maybe swap digital assets but she's not going to be prescriptive about the network the criteria like the reversion criteria at pretty much everything else like which pool is being used and so moving away from like the underlying step-by-step execution of how the transaction happens and moving higher up to the more like user intent focused approach here right absolutely cool I love that we need that so let's uh let's get more devs into to start building those out because that will just make the ux of this whole Space so much so much easier no thanks so much for joining in and sharing this I want to do a quick uh

speed round if you don't mind and uh so we've got three questions for you the first is what is an nft that you own that you will never sell going back a little bit but I have a citizen Dao nft that entitles me to be a citizen of this Sovereign plot of land in Wyoming and the whole idea was this Dow is going to be put together to like develop the city I don't think it's come very far but I think it's like a very early indicator but type of things that will eventually be enabled on blockchains so it's kind of a piece of history that I commemorate right now nice love that what is something that you've bought for under 100 that gives you Joy and again does not have to be anything to do with web3 it doesn't have to be a token or any of

that kind of stuff a more recent one so I was recently under the weather so I bought an Apple TV subscription and watched season three of Ted lasso which I won't say it made me cry but made my eyes most so highly recommend so that's a good show absolutely love it I was like every Wednesday like I usually don't watch things in the days that they come out Ted lasso though it was like Wednesdays I was so pumped sometimes I'd watch it the morning before I'd start work it's like I just want to get that in so good all right last question then if you had a billboard that a billion people were going to see what would you write on it it's a great question off the cuff it would be something along the lines of be aware of local Optimum and I think especially in crypto right now

there's just so many threads converging in parallel that like it's very easy to go very deep on your rabbit hole and try to find like an optimal solution with a very very narrow set of constraints but it's also very helpful to take a step back like we did in the show and like be a little bit more forward-looking and think about the customers and the use cases and like what's the big picture and what all has to kind of materialize for this to be viable instead of just hyper optimizing a local problem so I think high probability of these problems is increasingly important as we're ironing out the infrastructure to set the backbone here but we also do need to occasionally take us up and make sure that like what we're building makes sense in that it's for the right people and for the right reasons interesting

very nice what was the term local Optimum is that you said yeah exactly okay for the non-devs we're gonna need a definition underneath that I think on the billboard yeah but that's great I think we need to Workshop the phrasing a bit yeah good awesome well known thanks again so much it was great to have you on and uh really appreciate everything you guys do in the Alchemy we talk every day about web3 and about how we need to improve the ux and obviously that starts the devs right it starts with the tech and so we just need more people educated on how to actually do that and how to play around on this and build so we really appreciate you guys for educating and for you know providing tools for those to build the next applications that we hope billions are all going to use on

chain so again thanks so much and wish you guys all the best at Alchemy yeah appreciate that thank you for having me on thank you for listening to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for a free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web doing insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3. make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one