What Went Wrong with Multichain Crypto | Stan & Zon, Initia

Transcript

our layer 2s can support evm move VM or wasm VM this module which lives in the cosmos SDK part works with any of those VMS by default which means as soon as you launch your app chain you have IBC you have cctp you also have full layer zero support so you can essentially onboard from any chain anywhere um just from day one we're just trying to figure out ways to create alignment within the ecosystem we're really trying to like make modular monolithic again to a sense like putting all the these different pieces back together in a way that's cohesive for everyone the polygon Community grants program was launched with 1 billion tokens all four polygon

Builders season 1 is live right now and features 35 million in Matic to support the next generation of polygon products builders on polygon these grants are for you join the aggregated future today by applying at polygon.net set on zerox Research is a recommendation to buy or sell Securities or tokens this podcast is for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions not Financial advice Pacho Ryan and our guests May hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed what's up guys welcome back to another episode of ZX research today I'm joined by Stan and Zan from inisha thanks for coming on guys thanks for having

us before we get started do you want to tell us a little bit about what you're building over at in sure thing um so my name is z um I'm one of the co-founders of inisha um essentially inisha is a network for interwoven Roll-Ups um and what that means is we are holistically trying to rebuild how multi-chain networks should look feel and operate along the architecture stack the product stack as well as the economic Stacks that bring these things together um one of the advantages of this is essentially we're building a layer one a layer two solution as well as um like the optimistic rollup framework and the communication channels that work between them all um and so we have the benefit

of seeing the rise of things like the cosmos ecosystem the way that rollups has developed on ethereum and then essentially building a solution um that takes all those pieces into play and builds what we think the longterm solution should be for a multi-chain world perfect that makes a lot of sense and um what inspire you guys to build Ana how did you get started what were the problems that I mean you discussed them a bit but what were some of the I guess the more overarching issues that you were specifically looking to build for yes so I think Zan and I are obviously heavy users in like the evm ecosystem and um also the cosmos ecosystems itself um yeah I think like

just look going through some of our like d gen activities defi activities we share a wallet that we like Farm different things on as well um just kind of looking at like how assets move as well as like how users interact with different applications especially when they live on different chains we just have not had like a really good experience to it and like to this day there's quite a few solutions that kind of try to you know improve this experience but there's not really been a single solution that kind of unifies every aspect of the stack itself um and so you know having Z and I having experience in the cosmos building in the cosmos ecosystem we kind of looked at some of the existing tools such as like the cosmos SDK right which allows for users to build super modular super um flexible and customizable infrastructure

and we kind of also took some inspiration from you know the evm places as well to allow teams to build rollups right basically removing the pro problems of like running your own app chain running the validator set bootstrapping liquidity boost trapping security um and try to really bind all of this into one cohesive I guess like solution for not only the developers themselves but also the end users that are looking to interact with different applications on different chains yeah I think we've seen like an overload lately of like generic evm layer 2s with slight changes on the way that we prove those layer twos um and I think yeah I mean that's awesome in long term we're all going to move towards ZK but um the problem is that there's no apps um and

all these layer twos are exactly the same thing and so what was always interesting about the cosmos SDK was that it's just this crazy flexible stack to build something unique at um and that's true today like there are so many unique Cosmos chains that like change the way that transactions are actually processed that change maybe the way that transactions are ordered you have things like Celestia and be chain and dydx V4 that all live there but it's just a pain in the ass to actually build a cosmos chain most notably you have to build a layer one you have to deal with the validator set you have to inflate your token Supply you have to deal with the pairwise dependency problems of IB C you have to run all this peripheral

infrastructure and with inisha you have essentially the most lightweight way to launch a full-fledge cosmos chain because our rollups are essentially full Cosmos chains where you rip out some parts of the stack like the validator set you plug in our optimistic rollup framework and then through the layer one you're given literally everything you need whether that be instant bridging over IBC and layer zero um Native usdc and cctp access um fungibility across every one of these rollups so you don't have three different usdc or three different eths uh you have the same token that can go across all of them and then a whole bunch of ux that kind of binds these things together so what does it look and

feel like for end users to interact with this application or that one what does it look like to actually Bridge around these layer twos um and just really building all those pieces uh cohesively so that even when we we do have thousands of rollups in the future we have a very simple user experience for newcomers as well as people who know the space already perfect I um I want to get more into what type of rollups you guys Envision building on initia but before that one thing you guys mentioned is interwoven rollups interwoven rollups and I kind of want to understand what that is exactly and what I guess differentiates it from regular rollups

yes I guess zon touched a little bit about this earlier um so initia I guess l2s we call them initial for mini initial um they are optimistic rollups themselves and so one of the big problems with rollups in general is basically liquidity fragmentation and as well as like end user fragmentation right if you bridge some tokens through like the optimistic Bridge you have to wait usually seven days or whatever the challenge period is to bring it back out um and interact with like another L2 or maybe even the L1 itself um and so like I think one of things that we really focused on or Tred to hone in on while we were building this like like full comprehensive Tex stack is to make sure that users are able to almost in inmediately um interact with different

chains with different assets even though these assets are living on some of the l2s themselves um so what does it look like to be able to get instant liquidity instant bridging um how do you really get for example usdc from different chains right so a lot of the l2s themselves they don't immediately support cctp on day one um and they probably will likely never support cctp if it's not like a large chain similar to like arbitr optimism and so how do we enable some of these projects that are building presumably app chains in the future actually get access direct access to some of these toolings whether it's Oracle access native usdc Bridges things like that and so all of these come out of the box in the ecosystem itself and so from day one if you launch your little app chain or like minisha itself

you're able to get connected with the rest of the greater inisha ecosystem yeah one other really cool thing about that is we last week announced a project that we've been working on with the layer zero team um so together over the past few months we built out a cosmos SDK module um that supports basically a layer zero endpoint and so because it's a cosmos SDK module it can come out of the box on basically every single one of our layer tws by default and since on inisha um our layer twos can support evm mve VM or wasm VM this module which lives in the cosmos SDK part works with any of those VMS by default which means

as soon as you launch your app chain you have IBC you have cctp you also have full layer zero support so you can essentially onboard from any chain anywhere um just from day one I think interen also speaks a lot about the ecosystem that we're building so when you launch a rollup on ethereum um generally I think that you are fighting for yourself um it's like one versus all and you have to do a lot of work when it comes to like Integrations other people to work with like Partners to have but uh in my opinion when you build a rooll up on Anisha um the ecosystem is very tightly coupled in the sense that there are plenty of applications and teams

that just want to work with each other that want to help each other win that is our whole goal with like building an Isa like how can help layer twos win um and how can we make sure that everyone is fighting together so that we can grow the brand I think that's one of the big things that Cosmos also faced there's essentially nothing that unites any Cosmos chain and so it's basically Game of Thrones out there um but some of the mechanism designed that we've been fiddling around with with something called inisha VIP essentially um tries to unite the entire ecosystem with the init token um and I think that'll go long way into creating like one big cohesive ecosystem that has thousands of

different chains that still all care about like growing together very cool and you know you mentioned this briefly Zan about the various different virtual machines that initia sort of supports so you know what does uh what does your team sort of Envision in terms of the types of rollups that we be launching on top of initia uh whether this is you know different virtual machine rollups or even different classifications like your general purpose rollups app specific consumer love to get a little bit of an idea on how you guys you know sort of foresee the different types of rollups coming on top of initia and is there any active effort on curating like a different variety since as you mentioned in the ethereum ecosystem there was a pretty high density of like general purpose rollups and it is exactly like a Game of Thrones out there

so we love to see how are you guys cating that landscape yeah so firstly on the virtual machine side um so our opinion is that virtual machines are tools like this should not be the main show point of a layer two rather it's like use whatever VM you care about what works best for you in your application if you really care about security or if you're a new developer or game developer maybe move is the best for you um if you like rust and you also care about something that's strongly typed maybe Cosmos is the best for you if you want something with a lot of access to developer tools or you're forking a project from somewhere else and editing it maybe solidity is the best

but really it's up to you and whatever you think your application will work best with when it comes to like what types of rollups we really Envision application specific rollups happening um I think general purpose ones are fine as well um but application specific rollups can take advantage of the cosmos SDK underneath to really change the way that their app chain um behaves to advance like the user experience as well as just the technical experience of that rollup like you look at dydx or any of the other Cosmos chains like osmosis or some of the lending markets like there's been a lot of tweaks to how the transactions are processed or the ways the transactions are ordered um it's a

lot more unique than being able to just change the way that your gas token um is used and I think that's what's interesting about Cosmos compared to other rollups right when you launch a rollup right now on ethereum you get the exact same copy paste Fork um no matter where go and so having that flexibility is just an entire game Cher and so we're starting to see application specific rollups um across all the different VMS that we support um and I've been working really closely with about nine teams um over the past three four months to curate basically a day one ecosystem that will be live it's already mostly live on testnet right now and will be

live day one on mainnet so that when initial launches there's already a suite of applications that have unique interesting value propositions that can drive users in rather than you know farming a lending Market with points for the 10th time um but really just seeing like reasons to actually use these products that you can't do elsewhere nice no that's really cool and you know you mentioned which I completely agree that virtual machines are more or less a tool for the actual developer itself uh a means to an end uh but but kind of going off of that point there you know you're starting to see a lot of things in the ecosystem like Mega eth Labs trying to paralyze the evm you've got the ref team uh trying to bring this to

the ethereum ecosystem you got l1s as well like monad and whatnot that are trying to pursue this uh how is the initial ecosystem looking like like are there any interesting rollups that are looking to bring some of that high throughput framework to developing rollups in Anisha and how do you see that affecting the you know initia ecosystem as well yeah so I think uh by default rollups on Anisha have about 10,000 TPS and 500 millisecond block times so they're already pretty fast and because their application specific um you know throughput and demand is split naturally amongst the app chains so congestion shouldn't be as big of a problem because we don't have one Global shared State I think Global shared state is like the ultimate endgame I'd love if

monad or Mega eth was the solution but I just naturally think we're going to hit uh demand in the future and crypto will grow enough where we're going to need tens or hundreds of monads or Mega eats and so we're starting from the opinion that there will be thousands of chains let's ensure that they're all connected by default and this is a very um similar to how web 2 evolved right like we had these big monolithic services and then we realized okay we need to go to microservices everything needs to be on a different machine and they need to talk to each other well and I think web 3 is going to follow the same way like there's no way we can put everything on one chain probably inshah um and so I think um yeah basically all

these applications will have their own chains they'll be able to retain their value and they'll build something unique there no completely agree with that as well I mean you don't want like Facebook's uh you know volume or activity to impact like some small business just because they're taking up a bunch of activity and you know with what you mentioned about the world potentially having a thousand chains or thousand rollups what is anisha's plan for for making that happen for onboarding some of these rollups onto inisha what is the general process look like and is there a general like go to market strategy that you guys are looking at for you know bringing the world's rollups onto an istia yeah so I think Z briefly mentioned this a second ago um basically a Goen Market or like General ecosystem strategy is to start

with a core set of really interesting Unique Products something that's not like your typical Fork from another chain right um if you kind of look at like other ecosystems that have done really well for example arbitrum optimism Etc um basically these ecosystems really started to get off the ground when a few core products did really well right so for Arbitron was like GMX and maybe treasured out um for optimism it was V Drome as well as synthetics um for other chains it's usually one or two types of projects right so we kind of Envision a similar type of um I guess like ecosystem strategy you want to make sure that these initial let's say our nine group a group of nine initial projects kind of sets the Cornerstone or like the pillars of the ecosystems themselves and then

you have a bunch of teams combining these types of pro protocols themselves or you know building something on top of these protocols so that's how we kind of initially imagin um I guess like growing the early ecosystem itself um and then as we start to shift into you know where we're a little bit larger where there's quite a few more projects where it's like for example not humanly possible for us to talk with every individual team right and that's kind of the world we kind of Imagine um we kind of expect some of these initial teams to BAS Bally work very closely right so if you're like a payments team or you know doing something related to cards or like consumer type applications maybe you talk to one of the existing teams that are already building something there um and so we do have a team that's for

example focusing on building like consumer products as well as like a payment processor type of M show as well yeah if you look at some of the launches of recent l1s not the ones that Stan mentioned you'll see uh quite a few fumbles actually and I think that's because two things one is is saying that you have like thousands of applications or like hundreds of applications that are ready to deploy and then mayet comes along and you know you get maybe 15 uni V2 Forks um and nothing else and that's just fumble number one because when users come to bridge in there's really nothing to do and I think a second fumble that we've seen a lot is cannibalization of early Builders and

the early ecosystem so bringing in external teams that have kind of a household name within defi like pancake or sushi swap um and then having them basically eat tvl away from native applications um and have early users Farm These tokens like sushi that really don't have a lot of upside potential left um I think it's really important to have early ecosystem users get exposure to applications and Native things that are being built in the ecosystem to have the opportunity for those wealth effects to exist and crypto like that is just one of the best ways to grow ecosystems and Brands is exposing early users to

these types of applications and that's something that we've focused on so we've been working with these nine teams that are going to launch their own tokens their own products they're novel they're new they're not from other ecosystems um and it's been a pretty difficult process just because we're all working with a new Tex deack here we're all trying to figure this thing out together but I think in the long term it'll be a lot more beneficial than bringing over existing projects I think that makes sense yeah the best way to i' say onboard more users is to just give them something to do and then have them have be natively be native how much help are you guys providing these nine

rollups like what are some Frameworks that you give them so they can onboard users so there's quite a few things that we do um I'd say we do all sorts of things when it comes to the tech sides so spinning up the rollup like working with them when it comes to building contracts um figuring out ways to change the cosmos SDK clients um front end help design help uh we give a lot of ux tools as well so like our block Explorer comes out of the box for all these rollups um the way that you connect to any evm wallet Cosmos wallet inapp wallets that's all something that we provide like the bridge interfaces to move around all these rollups we also provide those um and and also when it comes to like go to market how should we frame

this project how should we Orient it um how do we do the comms for them um how should all this stuff kind of come to light some of them are totally capable of doing it themselves some need a few pointers we're just here to help to bounce ideas off of um and hopefully help each other win and so aside from that I think we're also doing something called initia VIP um that is stands for vested interest program it's like a multi-chain economic framework that we've built that will hopefully um help bring users to applications and create a long form system of retention as well as generally push the init token into all of the layer twos on inisha to create

that hardness of money um that you kind of see with eth on ethereum right now every single roll up on ethereum uses eth as the gas token it's like the canonical coin that you put in a lending Market or on a DEX and if you look at other multi-chain systems like Cosmos um adom is nowhere like no one cares at all about that token and so how do we create a similar phenomenon that helps these layer twos is totally value positive um and also creates that kind of hardness of money for the in it token and that's where we came up with initia VIP which stands for bested interest program and the quick abbreviated version of how

that works is essentially there is a large um sub percent of the initial token Supply that's allocated as rewards for layer twos um there is a governance vote on the layer one that allocates these rewards so it says uh okay 30% of this month's rewards go to this layer two 30% to this one 40% to this last one and then on every one of those layer tws they can set a kpi for themselves so something that they care about incentivizing within their ecosystem whether that is uh volume on a perpetuals market or borrows on a lending Market it is up to the layer two to set it themselves and then there is a

second distribution parameter which is init balances on that chain so whether it's in your smart contract system or the wallets of your users and the initial layer one essentially distributes init tokens two users of your Layer Two based on those two parameters the kpi as well as init balances um and does so through a special vesting system through escro and it that essentially requires users to maintain their usage or engagement on the layer 2 over time to unlock those rewards and so we do this is basically like a programmatic grant system but also as a long-term way to encourage

engagement just using the applications that you would use already but also earning these additional rewards and creating new use cases for the init token across all the layer twos um you know we're in the business of building block space here so we can't be relying on in it for gas to do anything I think burning tokens typically doesn't work when it comes to like actually creating strong deflationary effects and so use cases is one of the most interesting things that we can try and essentially Force into the ecosystem oh it makes a lot of sense and you know you see different ecosystems that have this like with salana souls used obviously for mem

coins you know with arbitrum it's you have defi you you got pockets like treasure down whatnot where you have like nice syncs there avalanch it's Enterprise and gaming so with Anisha for example and using the init token what are some standout use cases that you've seen like you gave some of the examples on of like how other ecosystems are doing but like how are uh some of the initial role pullups creating those very like specific ways that the IND the token can be utilized for for example are you guys seeing like you know hey payments are going to be really big on Anisha because of all the high throughput is it going to be gaming what are the specific things that really set up uh some of the rollups that are on top of Anisha set them apart from all the other ones the thousands of them

that will be coming uh you know throughout the various different Cycles yeah so I think as a product category in itself defi or like Financial related products is always the biggest right in like a very Financial type of product Financial World um yeah so like I think a large portion of our products themselves also you know fall under that category I think there's some interesting products in the sense that they have very different mechanisms recently poly markets been a really big thing general interest in different types of prediction markets with different mechanisms um how you can apply those to like potentially even order book like structures in general like prediction markets or even amms are not the perfect solution for like prediction markets right or like vice versa um due to like liquidity mation like just general liquidity

ineffectiveness with the regards to like how much you're actually able to trade or bet versus like the underlying liquidity itself um so we have a team that's called Contra um that is building something that they call a glab which is a gradual limit order book kind of slows down time um kind of also prevents like front running as well as just like General liquidity sniping of users who are providing liquidity and kind of allows users to make a market on a specific item they're interested about whether or not you know a presidential candidate would drop out of a debate or like some sports betting or whatever it is um it's similar to poly markets I think like one of the big downsides of poly markets is just the general liquidity provision and like Whoever has the greatest amount of information

available to them at a given time they're able to take advantage of like the underlying LP right so if you know for example an hour Biden or whoever is going to drop out of the race you're you have much more I guess like you can take much more advantage of the underlying liquidity um whereas like this is not possible in like a glob like structure and so I think that will help retail much better and you'll be able to make very interesting um use that as like a very interesting D5 primitive to build other things on top similar to how how kind of like unisoft introduced like the lp token itself like liquidity provision and that really basically brought in a Renaissance for like dii yeah there's another product called Blackwing which is pretty awesome they're building a move Layer Two um that is focused on

trading but what they do is they use this concept called um Limitless pools which essentially collateralize any LP token anywhere to perform leverage on the assets and they use their chain as basically an intent Hub so that you can basically perform leverage long or short on any asset on any chain all through their front end and you know user flow which is basically like the end game of trading and perfect for the meme coin cycle that we're in right now like any coin makes it off pumps fun on terium now you can perform leverage on it if any token on Thruster on blast is there now you can perform leverage on it and the same applies to any of the other

dexes or things within inisha or the cosmos world you can just perform leverage on basically any asset and that is like the biggest unlock for any Trader um and it's all on chain there's a product called Milky Way they are the first um and largest staking and LST platform for celestial on the modular ecosystem and they're moving into a reaking platform um through their initial layer to so they're building out uh restak um services for basically anything within the modular landscape so things like Sovereign rollups those don't have the biggest security guarantees being able to provide security for them using the underlying

token of Celestia um as well as adding things like in it in there as well um there's a product called cisha they have basically built an onchain Perpetual Monopoly game um that requires coordination of people to basically sabotage um other landmarks or like buildup landmarks it's really cool um the team's awesome and they've just been building this pretty fun onchain game that I think is going to be really good for a bit of the consumer angle when we hit main net um especially with all the social Integrations that come out of the box um you can see like this TW Twitter person or these groups are forming alliances to basically take down this

country or that um and I think that's going to be great there is a team called Zar they have been building um some of them are from redacted cartel and they've been basically building the nft hub for the modu ecosystem one of the biggest problems within Cosmos or multichain worlds is that it's kind of difficult to deal it's already difficult to deal with fungible tokens what happens when these are non-fungible it's going to be a bigger pain in the ass and so they've been doing a lot of work on like cleaning up that ux making sure that people can trade nfts from anywhere um as well as some other um prediction stuff I was trying to avoid a certain word um and then there's

a team called lunch they are building basically a payment platform that stand mentioned as well as like a full mobile app that you can basically do anything in defi with which is great for for new users who are touching crypto for the first time um yeah those are some of the main ones there's a couple others um that I'll happily sh if you want but uh happy day you have some other questions too hey guys permissionless the event for crypto natives is heading west to Salt Lake City and we're bringing the biggest names in crypto together for an incredible campas event join me on the rest of blockworks on October 9th to hear for more than 200 Industry Titans including Nick white from Celestia shiram from Igan and Keon from Mona the

conversations at permission list will be covering the hottest themes in crypto including modularity reaking the Bitcoin and Solon ecosystems Ai and crypto rollups l2s institutional adoption and of course the November election that will be right around the cor we couldn't be more excited about this event and it's happening in one of the most beautiful places in the US ticket prices will be increasing towards the end of June so get your ticket today make sure to use the code so I get some credit and bragging rights from the rest of the team uh use ZX10 for 10% off on your ticket one more thing we're also hosting the permissionless fre hacka Fon in collaboration with bbx the theme this year is a multi-chain future to build a better cross chain experience so I don't have to have a heart attack every time I

BRD to a new CH all hacka found participants will receive a free ticket to attend permissions so if you're a developer come join us in Salt Lake City team up with fellow devs and build the multi-chain future polygon Labs is developing the next generation of Open Source Z Tech to aggregate crypto liquidity and user bases empowering developers to grow in a unified web of interoperable chains with the a layer the a layer is a machine for Network effect don't worry about bootstrapping liquidity just build anywhere in the a layer to tap the liquidity and users everywhere to support the aggregated future and boost scrap quality project the polygon Community grants program was launched with 1 billion tokens All For polygon Builders season one of the

community grants program is live right now and features 35 million in madic to support the next generation of polygon projects for Builders on polygon or projects interested in migrating these grants are for you join the aggregated future and feel empowered to grow in an infinite web of unified interoperable chains apply today at polygon.net honest um if they set their own keep kpis how does that how are you guys approaching that yeah so basic basically the layer two is every Epoch or like every voting period they submit like a criteria on chain and so this comes in the form of a proxy contract that they submit on the L1 um everybody

is able to view this it's completely transparent um and so if you deem like you know this proxy contract to be not consistent with like the kpis that they actually sent um anybody's a able to actually challenge this proxy contract or challenge this input um and then it gets thrown to over to basically L1 governance decide whether or not this is the correct calculation if it isn't then the new person submits like the new version and act for the VIP if it is correct then it proceeds onto the basically the voting period slash um reward distribution period perfect that makes sense um Z one thing you mentioned was uh making in it money like um I think that's like the goal for all

modular ecosystems and you also kind of talked about what you don't want to be like which is the cosmos Hub which makes a lot of sense uh and what you do want to be like which is um I know we already kind of discussed this and like you kind of run over it but I just I feel like this is the biggest topic if you're a modular guess I don't want to say provider but provider how did you guys exactly like start thinking about this how did you approach it what is like what were some of the options that you considered before the VIP and before like everything else that you guys designed are there any like very clear tradeoffs that you I guess went through yeah so I guess like we do want to be the cosmos Hub in some sense I think

like the original Vision I think the implementation was whoa whoa whoa whoa crazy I think the in the initial like Vision to have like this Hub that connects all these chains together these different products together is like a very interesting vision and I think it's like an ideal Vision I think what was bad is it introduced more fragmentation than like the amount of connectivity it was supposed to actually bring into the space itself right like nobody everybody kind of wants to live in their own little island fight for their own liquidity like we don't like you Etc there's like a lot of politics involved um and so that basically kind of ruined that Vision itself or like the implementation of it um and if you look in modular ecosystem itself like the whole idea of modellismo by chains you're also

splitting like the underlying techn infrastructure stack itself and so we kind of thought about it like I think it's very good to split these different types of different parts of the text stack itself and kind of like optimize each individual section separately and have teams that are best at doing for example data Avail availability execution Etc um the biggest problem is now you have these disjoint parts so how can we really connect these parts together and that's kind of where it started with the text stack itself um and we kind of built like this architecture that would kind of basically unify all this different types of technology as well as like different ecosystems itself um and so like the last step in general after looking at like both the product and the underlying infrastructure is like how can you bring the users together right like I think a

lot of the reason why if you take a look at the US currency for example people use the US dollar or like are willing to accept the US dollar in places where it's where your own home country currency is not stable is because everybody accepts it right everybody understands that you'll be able to redeem value for it and it's the same for like BTC or usdc usdt and some of these countries as well and so how can we kind of replicate some of these characteristics right like make it a store value make it used as like the underlying denominator for different types of debt or like different types of use use cases itself um and to do so you kind of have to get this into the hands of everybody who's invested in your ecosystem so this is why we call it like vested interest program right we want

everybody to have a vested interest in the success of the L1 or like initia itself in order to do so you have to have some sort of financial incentive that's tied to basically this interest right um and so yeah we want to make sure that you know reserve a large portion of the supply to the actual end users who are using these applications making sure that the ecosystem is suceeding right in a lot of cases if you look at like Grant incentive programs that are given by foundations what happens is you know some of these projects are given an art is token Grant um but this token Grant never actually ends up going to the end users that use these products itself right they kind of just go into the the project treasuries and they're never released to the users or like the project teams may try to

sell these token incentives for eth or something else like that right um and so we want to cut out a lot of that middleman problem that comes with some of these inefficient Grant processes and so that's why we Tred decided to build like an onchain mechanism for a way to distribute grants or like a way to distribute incentives to not only the teams that are building these awesome products themselves but also the users who are making sure that these products stay alive and have actual incentive to use them even aside from the you know monetary incentives that are given um yeah so that's like kind of how VIP started and then we kind of slowly built up the mechanism over time how can we ensure that you know there are no weird edge cases where users are trying to game the system what happens if you know

there's like a malicious Mantia who submits the wrong kpis as you asked earlier um basically looking at all the different types of cases and really looking at this problem in like a principle agent manner yeah I think we're just trying to figure out ways to create alignment within the ecosystem we're really trying to like make modular monolithic again to a sense like putting all the these different pieces back together in a way that's cohesive for everyone and so that's the financial alignment SE section VIP then the other piece was product alignment so what does the block Explorer look like what does Connect into wallets look like what does moving around these chains look like we built all of those as Anisha to kind of

create this like cohesive experience over thousands of chains and then of course there is also architecture alignment so everyone is using basically the same minisha stack uh you can obviously change different parts of the cosmos SDK side but they're all still Cosmos SDK which means that there is a thread of underlying infrastructure that allows all of these layer twos to naturally communicate with each other through IBC there is the layer zero module that naturally connects them as well and then there's also the initia layer one and we've also built something on the initia layer one called enshrine liquidity um this is basically one of the ways that we remove this problem for layer twos that are trying to make sure that they have access to liquidity and

so not only can you use IBC or layer zero but we basically baked a hub of liquidity into the layer one itself so that it is directly accessible for these layer twos but also acts as a multi-chain router so on our layer one we basically built a DEX into the chain um and you can stake in it X LP tokens directly with validators so things like init usdc in it e in AA whatever we want that gets whitelisted and this basically can be a multi-chain router as well so you can send usdc from one rollup and get eth on another because there's this massive liquidity pool that can facilitate those swaps as those flows

are going through nice very cool I like the line that you also said about making modular monolithic in some ways uh it's kind of like in cloud services as well where you know before with uh with different sort of like Cloud compute machines face Faceook was kind of running their own stuff a lot of other companies were running their own stuff and it was very modular and like AWS gcp Microsoft Azure kind of rebundle a lot of these different services so I can see inisha kind of being like that for a lot of modular stuff which is very cool but going into the stack a little bit uh from from mantias I think you Zan you briefly touched on this but there's already you know many different virtual machines that are supported you know ranging from cos swom solidity move are there any plans to support more in the

future like of course we're seeing a lot of mcoin trading activity on the salon of virtual machine you see eclipse coming to the ethereum ecosystem uh any ideas there on like expanding the sort of VM support that um you know Nisha has yeah so essentially any VM that works on top of Cosmos SDK we can support because uh what's technically happening is that for all these VMS and their tokens and their date it's all being stored on the cosmos side and these VMS are kind of like execution environments right and so if you are sending a cw20 Cosmos coin to a move funable asset on a different initia rollup they're actually turning into Cosmos coins getting sent and then

turning back into whatever virtual machine coin it is um so theoretically we could put whatever VM that works on Cosmos at the moment though we're not seeing demand for other VMS I think the svm is very popular right now but that's mostly because people like building on Solana they like the ecosystem there they like the users they like the liquidity I've never heard anyone say I like the svm specifically like the svm damn that's a good language and framework to build with it's more so yeah we just like Salam so if that demand shows up I think we'll work towards adding it right now I think we are seeing specific demand uh between Cosmo aom solidity and move and it's

very tangible why so if you think about move you only have two places to build Aptos and SU um I wouldn't say either of those are very web three onlined um and neither of them even have native usdc support yet you also can't use metamask like I don't think their target audience is uh the onchain defi users and so if you are building a product that wants to take advantage of the move stack you don't really have a home and so by building your own stack and your own chain within inisha you can do that and you can onboard from anywhere and you can use use whatever want the same goes for cosmism basically anyone that wants to that builds in Cosmos kind of wants to build their own

chain but it's still difficult to do so now here's the most lightweight way to do it and then solidity we've seen people build evm l2s for the past you know three years um but now here's a way to do it while staying connected to everything um and being able to have more flexibility than ever before I also think that's kind of like why we really get a lot of thought to the architecture itself and like it's like completely modulized or like in some sense Plug and Play right like if in the future we kind of see demand for sbm or a whole new type of VM like we can Al always replace it right or like add on that as an extra optionality for us developers who do want to build in that VM in same same vein like right now I think the majority

of liquidity probably lies on optimistic rollups right if we suddenly see a much more advanced version of like a ZK rollup and there seems to be a lot of interest and a lot of Demand by both not only developers and us users we can always Implement that into our architecture so I think like one of the things that we really try to consider for is not to necessarily support everything at once um we kind of want to build an architecture that is future proof in some sense um you can kind of fit in the things that are needed when it is needed at the right time it's also one of the main reasons we focus so much on like the product and economic pieces as well like the point of those and good product and good ecosystems is to hide the architecture no one actually cares

about the infrastructure we just want to work and so as long as we can add new stuff change that around the product stays the same no users are affected like these economic Frameworks are well thought out I think we're in an awesome place for the next five 10 years 100% yeah we just need more apps uh but uh you know kind of follow up to uh Stan you briefly mentioned uh sort of ZK rollups so I know that minisha are are optimistic are there any plans to support ZK rollups going forward obviously polygon you know they're sort of uh with they agir they're really trying to hammer home that they want polygon cdks to be uh utilizing ZK proofs um you know ZK sync as well with

their hyper chains they really want to go down that path as well so kind of curious on how you guys are thinking about that as well U if they any plans there yeah I think it's similar to supporting like the svm itself we can always do it when the time comes when there's an sufficient demand for by not only the users and developers s we're not like a very strong like a team that does ZK research for example right that's like not our main um core competency or strength um so yeah like when there's demand and when you know it's at a stage where we think it's like sufficiently usable in some sense what whatever level of ZK that is then we will be able to incorporate into our system or we will look into exploring incorporating into the underlying tech

tech stack our goal was just get this thing production ready and out as soon as possible and so optimistic rollups have just been studied they work everything is good with them let's use that and then we can always put in ZK in the future once it's ready 100% that makes sense most of the L2 activity anyways to date are on like optimistic based rollups as well so that makes a lot of sense uh I know that you guys for for like da layers primarily are supporting Celestia feels like there's a new DA layer popping up uh you know uh every week you know besides excluding Igan da you've got like nuff Labs which is like popping out near da you've got like people rumoring that

other major l1s will start to just rule out their own you know base layer as a DA solution as well so is there any plan that you know as this da landscape becomes more and more broader is there any plan to support other da layers besides Celestia or is it kind of the same question where like if the demand is there if somebody asks sure but if there's no demand then no need oh you guys didn't know about initia da I'm joking um basically I think da as like it's pretty fungible right like all these da layers they do a good job at what they're supposed to do um I'd say the main reason to pick one da layer over another is like have they done an air drop yet or not um and so our

opinion more so is like we are trying to build this system that works right and so we don't care for Choice overload existing like we're not going to have 10 Bridge providers we're not going to have 10 Oracle Services we're not going to have five different da layers we're going to pick one hopefully the best one integrate them very well and deeply into the teex stack and then that's it like we don't have to deal with it again so at the moment we just use Celestia for da we just have uh a system for oracles where our validators post fresh prices every single block we just use layer zero and IBC for messaging and and that

is the current game plan right we just want something that's well integrated that works that binds all these pieces back together and then um some of those choices that I think are relatively redundant just don't need to be made people can just focus on building their App instead of choosing between this this and that yeah I think like already in a modular ecosystem everything's super complex right like not just even using the chains itself but like the underly technology so like sometimes when there's too much Choice like choice choice overload it really like hampers the ux not only for developers but also end users so we just kind of make very decisive pointed choices if those happen to be wrong like we're always open to

like considering like using different types of Technology Etc but for now as Z kind of mentioned a lot largely a lot of these are like fungible in some sense so we don't really see the need to you know potentially switch to a different service or another provider that makes sense um you guys mentioned this a bit back but I kind of want to dive a bit more into it the enshrined liquidity and the initia de um why did you guys decide to go with this approach um and what are the I guess other designs that you considered because this is there's I guess two more that have done this but I kind of want to understand like exactly what your approach is from your end yeah so I think um there's a few reasons one is I

think we removing some of the lwh hanging fruit you know when ecosystems launch you always have like X decks X lending Market um they're not really doing anything interesting so if we just do that then hopefully people will build something else that is interesting and they have been doing so which we like the second is there's a very real use case for it um through a multi-chain world right like there is need for a deck that can support all the tokens from all the layer tws that can act as a router across them all and that can also just put productive assets to work and so that's one of the reasons that we built the in Shrine liquidity system so that you can stake these LP tokens and

we see it mostly being used for just major assets so things like eth usdc usdt um any other major coins that we think will be useful across all the layer 2s and yeah just by enshrining that system you've put productive assets to work you've built a hub of liquidity that that's accessible to every layer too and then you've basically connected all of them because now you can send from one roll up and get another you don't have to deal with the process of like okay let me first figure out which uh usdc token I need to send to this other Layer Two now I find it out now I bridge to that layer two now I can swap to the eth that I need it's all just kind of like one seamless multi-chain

World um I think that's like a huge Improvement of the current existing ux and I think we've seen this idea of taking LP tokens for a while actually so bear chain is obviously one of the most popular ones with proof of liquidity um but it actually started a long timeo with balancer uh balancer you could stake 8020 Bal we pairs uh for governance power and basically the idea was like okay that's a good way to get governance power as well as derive some use case out of it so let's Implement that on the layer one level I think a lot of it also falls down to Capital effic efficiency so if you kind of look at like P as staking systems a lot of that state capital while it's there for like Economic Security it's not usable right

you can't use it anywhere else um you can't really utilize basically the core asset of your ecosystem in other places where users may want to go in and out between different assets and so we kind of thought about it and you know this seemed to be like one of the a good solution to allow users to not only provide liquidity for supporting the chain as well as like boost strapping the economic security of the chain but also provide liquidities for other you liquidity for other us users who are trying to move between different types of L2 products and so that really improves the um underlying efficiency another thing that we kind of can do when we have this Dex that's built into the chain itself is really adjust liquidity of different assets depending on like what is needed right um maybe the ecosystem in some way forms around

Tia as like one of other major assets right so you probably want to incentivize a lot of the liquidity to go for Tia so that there's like a seamless experience when users are moving these assets across l2s um on the other hand maybe usdc is like the second most popular asset on across these different types of mantias themselves and so by having the decks actually be built into the chain itself we're able to use L1 governance to actually shift this um shift incentives right like the staking incentives to liquidity providers who are providing across these liquidity pools and so it's a little bit more flexible in the sense that we don't have to rely on some random like third party token like sushi token or like a uni token um like another separate token to be able to you know adjust the liquid

adjust the liquidity to the needs of the rest of the initial ecosystem yeah staking is already like a huge sync of a token supply for like every layer one ecosystem right now tying that into liquidity just makes a lot of sense because you're already Distributing all these staking rewards so might as well distribute them for something productive um as well as security at the same time I think it can also act as a very cool gas station actually it's one of the things that we have on Anisha is something called J in time gas um and that's basically if you're on a layer two that uses a different token for gas um in the same flow of like trying to send your transaction if you don't have those

tokens we will automatically get you those tokens using your assets from anywhere else within the ecosystem and the way we can do that is two things one skip API which is like a API system that sits over a lot of Cosmos SDK chains that um allow ows you to say I'm going from X token to Y token and it'll figure out the correct path and the second is the initia de which can have in it X token staked there or just sitting there and so if there is H say whiff in that Dex and this later to use as whiff we can route usdc from any of the other rollups to buy some of that whiff to then use it as gas while you're making

that transaction and so we can really clean up this experience that was created by my frustration using Cosmos because right now on Cosmos every token Every Chain uses a different token for gas you send some usdc to a new token or a new chain and then you can't pay to move those transactions then you have to go to osmosis to buy the gas token but then you don't have osmo on that chain so then you get stuck again um and I I've done that a few times and just given out and so I want to make sure that ux problem is solved that makes a lot of sense you briefly brought up uh skip Zone and uh I'm kind of curious with all the different uh initia rollups that are

coming out you they obviously going to be you know infrastructure that's needed like RPC nodes oracles Etc um is your team planning on using like skips like Slinky uh sort of service for you know being able to uh you know for allow for any validators any nodes to kind of you know run their own Oracle more or less and kind of curious how you're planning on solving that problem I know different ecosystems have different plac for this but because he brought up skip uh love their team so it was just curious on your thoughts there yeah so um I went to college with both Magnus and Barry like we were all in the same year together so known each other for a while and they're definitely epic Builders within the cosmos ecosystem um and so we do have skip slinking on the layer one which

means all of our validators get fresh prices every block they post to the chain and then we have a relaying service that essentially relays these prices to the layer twos so that they can be fetched atomically as well and on all the layer twos there is a uh mle prioritization system that exists there as well and so these Oracle prices happen at the top of every block even if the layer 2 is congested they will show up at the top of the block which is wonderful like now every Layer Two just has atomically fetchable prices very cool now I love that because there are a lot of ecosystems like op stack rollups polygon cdks Etc where there are these smaller roller providers

that either have to roll their own Oracle solution or pay a hefty price to chain link and uh you know sometimes that's just a really tough position to be put in between so that's really cool that you guys kind of offer that through Slinky for sure that's one of the things that we we're talking about like making modular mono ethic again there's just so many choices right oracles n VI SDC bridging da providers interoperability all of those are kind of just enshrined into the initia system across the L2 and the L1 and then it's all just there and works and so you don't have to make those choices you can just focus on your app one thing I'm kind of worried about with

the I guess making modular monolithic is the wallets um this is while I was trying out the test net I realized that you can use both Cosmos ones and evm ones and you guys have your own native wallet as well I want to understand how this works with minous specifically if it's a different VM do you have to use a different type of wallet how seamless are you guys looking to make that because I feel like that's the number one um potential difficulty Point as we kind of mentioned earlier both the ntia L1 and all the mentias themselves are Cosmos SDK based chains so actually all the signing has actually done on the cosmos side rather than the VM side um so you can use metam mask for example to sign on like a move minisha or use Leaf

to sign on on like I don't know evm minisha or whatever um the only downside you will see from like these existing wallet providers is you won't be able to carry like your token balances for example you'll just know that you're signing the message right um but that's like a third party like you're using a third party application what they decide to support is a little bit out of our hands and so that's why we've built the initia wallet itself it's like how we envision The multi-chain Experience like how you should be able to move your assets between different types of Minas that are built with different VMS um how the swap should look how the send should work how should the user names work across a interchain system where there's like multiple different types of chains themselves um and then like how you like

resolve a lot of the addresses on each of these chains themselves as well and so yeah that's kind of like why we built the the initial wallet itself we do allow for example metam Mass rabby Etc um because you know users are familiar with like Ravi on evm so maybe they prefer that even over like a a wallet that we think is better for the ecosystem but we give the users the choice to do this one of the things Dan mentioned was that if you are signing with an EPM wallet for example on a move minisha or Cosmos minisha you might not be able to see your tokens in the Wallet balance but that's one of the reasons we built the initial wallet widget which is what people use to connect their wallet with and if you just click that after you connect with Rabbi or something you

can see all of your balances across all of the layer twos on initia as well as the L1 so making sure that there are product helpers and tools in place to solve some of those problems that are out of our hands because for example I only use rabby and I plan on to continue using Rabbi and so I want to make sure there is a solution that works for me that's good that makes sense um I know it's kind of potentially a bit risky to talk about the incentivized testnet but I want to bring it up because I went through it I actually quite like it um I think you guys took a cool approach with the Jenny and I kind of want to talk about not what it is right now but what you guys would have done differently

from week one like because it's very cool I actually really really did enjoy it like compared to other incentivized test Nets I thought it was fun um but is there anything that I guess I want to get both of your takes on this as well is that something you would have done differently because we have a lot of them now a lot of incentivized death Nets and people might find it really helpful yeah I get this the I guess there's a few things that I think we could have definitely improved on um I think I generally like the mechanism like your onchain tamagachi kind of pet if you don't feed it it will die Etc I think that's kind of fun um it's kind of the reason why we decided to implement this um I think there's two things that we were kind of plagued with in the

beginning the first was obviously we didn't expect so much interest in the test net when we first launched so there's a lot of bots a lot of just general users as well um and so the chain was very clogged in the early days right and obviously people were spamming the faucet to get test note tokens um and then trying to try out the test Nets I think like we probably could have worked a little bit better on basically like um basically estimating the demand the initial demand and like how much throw put we would have needed as well as just like you know gaing the faucet a little bit more heavily instead of just allowing anybody to claim x amount of x amount of gas tokens um yeah so I think like those were like our biggest troubles in the first few I guess like

first week of test net maybe Zan has some other ones as well yeah so I'd say okay definitely demand was a problem there was 140,000 requests per second hitting our RPC nodes within the first few days like that was just existing which is insane that's like that's so many requests per second everything broke um so that was crazy and because our faucet had social logins it had a capture and it even had proof of work which means you have to use computational resources of your device to like prove that this is not like a little dinky um thing it's like a real device and all of that got destroyed by

Bots by people everything else and so we had to implement gitcoin passport which did a great job at gating people that are uh presumed human but it also cuts out a decent chunk of users that for example have only used Solana or only use Cosmos so I wish we had had the forethought of building like a much more robust system around fet so that anyone would be able to access it but I still don't know how to solve that problem um the second thing would be um staggering some of the launches so we had a bunch of mishas I think we have maybe four or five um that are live right now on

testnet um I would have preferred to do maybe a couple for day one and then roll out some of the others as test night goes along um so that there's just new interesting things to play with every time I think the program did a very good job at what we wanted though which was getting people in trying out Anisha and then pushing them to use layer twos and already explore them like our whole goal at Anisha is like help layer two teams win and so one of the first ways to do that is help these layer twos test their applications get feedback get early users and funnel all the users that came to farm our test net into trying out those layer twos is like the main goal that we had um and it worked 140,000

requests per second is insane um I I mean you guys obviously I mean I don't even think you underestimated demand I think just like you didn't expect I guess a bot swarm in the end um did you guys end up upgrading up grading it so that it can handle all of that or did you only do gitcoin passport fixes and then I guess we made a lot of RPC updates um we switched to basically this thing that we call the Giga RPC um with a team called new metric um and that is much better at handling demand and throughput right now the the basic Cosmos SDK client has like all sorts of mutex locks which means that like when

you're dealing with aquarium you can't do other things at the same time which is insane I don't think the problem is that a lot of Cosmos chains just aren't used to their full extents and once you have enough demand everything breaks and so we had to deal with a lot of those problems and it also means that in the future we know that there's so many things to fix um also one of the bigger problems was there was um I think 40,000 people that ran validators on like toaster ovens which means that in in Comet bft right it treats basically all nodes whether they're active or inactive as the same and so

traffic doesn't get directed just to the active nodes which means if you have 95 or 99% of the network on these toaster ovens that cannot handle the throughput of the chains or of the chain um when transactions get sent to them they're just going to get lost which created a big problem of like just transactions just getting dropped or lost because they weren't going to the real active validators and so we had to do um create like a private validator ring and then a guardian node system around that um and that was like a major unlock um it also means that I think we're g to have to rebuild comet bft in the near future that's been done a few times now

I feel like everybody faces that issue with the comet BFD and stuff they have to impl their own version of it people are doing a good job now though like um Dev from osmosis he has been a godsend he has been just going hard at fixing a lot of comet bft so I'm pretty eager to see the next release before we wrap it up I um obviously you're making a really big bet on modularity and rollups and we've had a few lines um making modular monolithic again is a good one I want to see I want to kind of understand how you see that develop over the next few years thousands of rollups yes but what does that look practically and I guess how do you convince people

to that and you guys are making some steps on this but at the end of the day Solana is monolithic and more fun to use I would say than something like the cosmos at this point so kind of want to get the modular shell plus the Thousand rollup feces from you guys yeah I think it's the modular mullet in some sense right like you abstract everything away on the front end and then you kind of have like the modular back end um how we add a little bit to that is making sure everything's actually interoperable within this backend um ecosystem right so making sure that your assets are freely movable fre freely movable in like a smooth manner as well um making sure that you have like the necessary tooling as a developer like the stuff that you would expect to be really basic

right like kind of the vision in some sense um if you want to make like a comparison is like to the iOS ecosystem right you don't need as an app veler you only need to focus on building your application itself um everything is there for you if you need access like inapp purchases if you need access the camera or whatever like these are not products built by you they're built by somebody else um but you're able to very easily access it and integrate to your application and we kind of Envision a similar thing for web three where if you need an oracle if you need Oracle data if you need native usdc if you need cctp if you need some sort of bridging like that's all given to you already right you just need to look into where where I where to use it um and so in similar

vein we kind of really Envision this ecosystem where all these applications you're not really flipping through chains right you're just flipping through different applications that lie on one single individual platform and so that's like our kind of our thesis with regards to like how we envision um a user using applications in a modular ecosystem yeah I think also like salana is awesome suie is also awesome you have all these fast throughput chains and like I said earlier I just don't think they're going to be able to get to the scale that we need still do you remember when the dupe airdrop happened I couldn't claim my tokens for like days that shouldn't be happening on the world's Global Financial system um and so I think just naturally we are going

to have chains because one it's better for isolation of traffic and two um people want to retain the value that they create like ultimately I want to own all the different parts of my tech stack I want to vertically integrate it and I want to make sure that um I'm getting every piece of value that we're building out here like the that's just the natural movement that these applications will take into like building their own stacks and so ensuring that every one of these Stacks can come together nicely as a nice ux and interface they have everything they need um and then we create these interesting incentive design mechanisms

with initia VIP is the best way to go about like the long-term future of crypto where there is going to be thousands of apps but they are all going to be interwoven perfect last up where do you want our listeners going to how can they find out more about adisha and is there anything specific that they should be focusing on so twitter.com sorry x.com initia fdn or go to initia doxyz those are the places to to learn more um take part of testnet if you'd like we have part two going right now it'll last for about three more weeks and then we

should have um mainnet not too long after that so come hop into the ecosystem get chatten check out some of the rollups that are being built on the interwoven stack and then we'll see you at mainnet soon TM Z Stan thank you for coming on I really appreciate it nille do you have anything no all good thanks for making modular monolithic again guys thank you for are you currently building on polygon or interested in migrating season one of the polygon Community grants program is live right now and features 35 million in madic to support the next generation of polygon projects builders on polygon these grants are for you join the aggregated

future today by applying at polygon.net [Music] w