All Cross Chain Everything : Ethereum & Friends

Transcript

all right welcome everybody to our panel about cross chain meme culture um it's glad to see the full house here we just want to do a quick wipe check and make sure that everybody is on the same wavelength who of you has seen a meme raise your hand all right who of you has made a meme nice who of you got more than 100 likes on twitter for it you don't count stanley you don't count you tweet one emoji you get over 100 lies all right yeah cross chain meme culture

as you can see everybody is like here constantly confronted with memes um memes play a vital role in the community and in an ever evolving role also we want to do a quick um uh test here to see who is uh how far with like the meme 101 do you guys know guess your pokemon who knows that raise your hands right you see the silhouette of a pokemon you guessed it we do it the other way around uh i'll show you the caption of a meme and whoever guesses it right gets 10 eve joseph why are you laughing guys no whoever guesses right gets ten eve on

girly so let's start with an easy one this goes back in history what's up what's up what's up [Music] hey 10 eve 10 10 eve oprah style next one is also deeply rooted in our history uh i'm in it for the tech bitcoin gold shark dude oh [ __ ] look at this guy tennis to begin a minute for the tech uh finally is also a fun call that dean and i run i need for the tech right italic buttering

boom tennis to you still one of my favorites next one is also easy they don't know i own these song's non-fungible token yeah the guy standing in the corner i want to go home nice thank you everybody you see we're everyday confronted with memes and memes are like i said a vital role in our community and it's ever-evolving with the culture and elon musk even tweeted who controls the memes controls the universe i know it's very kitsch to quote him but i think this is quite spot on

so let's dive in into our panel about cross chain meme culture nice why don't we start with a little introduction rod uh go ahead dean has the microphone you can start oh this works um i'm dean uh in 2017 i was called a troll now i just work at a fund no longer a troll hi i'm joe i work at sushi and uh i like to do the memes sometimes yeah i'd say i'm john palar i'm the co-founder of sport dao which is formerly eat denver or eat denver still exist but sporkdow's the new meme for our town and i'm also the

co-founder of opolis my name is eva i work at the graph foundation and eagle capital i'm anna and i write code nice the only one on this panel who does a real job including myself nice so uh john let's start with you uh eat denver as you said uh very social event community oriented how important are memes for you and what does your department of memes look like uh what do they do department of memes you

don't have one no we have well we we have a few people that contribute to getting drunk and coming up with really dumb things yes it's open it's permissionless um so it's really important to our when we first started eat denver there was a ton of events that were sort of on our heels and you know getting people to show up to things like this is actually kind of hard so we decided to like try to make it more accessible and we did it through memes so the buffalo corn which is like our most commonly known meme is the mix between the unicorn and the buffalo and it's like a colorado thing

so but like four years later you see buffalo corns everywhere so it's now become sort of a more of a meta meme not just anything i mean everybody knows it from me denver but it's something now that people can relate to because it's like everyone can be a buffalo corn it's how we marketed it so um yeah it's pretty cool i'm actually wearing a pega buffacorn cloud t-shirt version so yeah it's it's it's like frankly i would say it was pretty much in my opinion the reason why people really got the culture of what our event was about because it had that sort of cohesive meaning going on that people could

relate to yeah that makes sense on definitely ring isabel the culture how important and this is an open question to everybody at the bell how important would you say is the culture in the success of a chain or a network please go ahead give the mic to somebody else yeah who wants it go i mean honestly as a developer like it's just a lot more fun being in an ecosystem where people are having fun uh so like that's my answer i'd rather be where people are having a good time so i kind of think of memes as uh the

invisible hand like adam smith's invisible hand and so the difference between chains like if your code was the exact same a chain may win over the other that's largely based on the culture or the invisible hand so i think it's super important yeah um i think uh all of sushi is a meme and uh it was just it was this really great timing and chef nomi's a genius um whoever that may be uh for naming it sushi it's just so memeable it's like japanese everything and um that's attracted like very interesting people um but like like yeah who who becomes a part like who's in

the culture of something like that's what attracted to me ethereum into ethereum initially right like and that has a lot to say with the success reinzer talks a lot about founders likability as like a huge metric to look for in like whether he invests in a company or not and i think about that just about every day yeah i was actually just going to mention founder likeability because it's one of the main metrics we use at our fund to determine on whether we invest in something or not um because you have examples of things where you have things like dfinity um where the founder is incredibly unlikable and then you have things like vitalik and ethereum which arguably are technically inferior to

what dfinity may have shipped but the founder is so much more likable and was able to garter a way larger community to join him on his journey versus like dfinity or some of these other chains that you may see it's a very interesting point um like we said memes are integral part of the culture of the community and what is a chain without community it's cardano now what is the chain without community and i think you touched a very interesting point with sushi being a in itself and um all these d5 projects coming up with just emojis and being

more more memorable than the other why do you think other chains aren't able outside of ethereum to copy this this more memorable and more entertaining approach than in rather a serious approach or if they try it why don't they succeed oh yeah because it's like um their their attempts at that are i don't know like cringe and off-putting um yeah when you when you see like um trying to like uh man all the time i talk to like different communities that are like wanting to come to sushi and my favorite one to know that like a community is kind of [ __ ]

is they'll say like yo dawg our community's super good at memes and it'll be like it'll be like i don't know like captioned photos of everything just like really it's like really off-putting i think that prevents organic growth so i think of memes as the new version of marketing so if you look at traditional corporate marketing everybody you know it's very you know audience centered it's very creative and you know it's very manipulative stuff i think authentic memes when they're made and people get it it's like it connects with people's values and it connects with what they're about

so it when you get the cringe-worthy crap which is a ton of it you you kind of sense it's in authenticity and i have an acronym for this it's twth trying way too hard so people that get out and try to market usually fail because they're not organic enough they're not authentic for what the community actually stands for and the reason why it attracts community is because that's that's the new marketing that's what people want that's what they're looking for i mean we're getting away from hierarchical marketing structures and corporate b2b garbage it's all about communities now community is the currency in my opinion and if you don't have a way to kind of connect people

in a global community your your toast i mean it doesn't matter how good your tech is it really doesn't matter um one thing that's cool about memes just on the thread of marketing is traditional marketing tends to have a hierarchy of approvals so you have business people um people who are not anonymous who have names and reputations tied and memes are the first communication channel that you don't have to have a reputation it's really speaking for itself and so there are no rules and that makes it way more powerful yeah i think an important part that you mentioned before with like the cringy is sometimes when you see these memes you can literally tell that behind this meme it's the creator which

is an old white man usually and thinks our fund is funny now to our project our chain is to um now taking it cross chain um and getting these communities to interact with each other when projects like sushi swap deploy on a new chain is it part of the value that you bring your culture and your memes with you or with them yeah i think so i mean like anybody can deploy the uniswap v2 code but we do it and and we have a sushi logo um and i think that that's what brings the value right

and how can you like speaking of this how can you use this and this is again for everybody how can you use this actually to get people maybe from one community to bridge from one community to the other and have these communities interact or even have a community work on one and a half two chains or two projects would it be possible to use to bridge this gap i mean like when we deployed the polygon a lot of um some of the sushi like stakers moved over to polygon and i think there's cross pollination there but we've like deployed to other chains and and it's like not gone as well as polygon because there wasn't like an organic community to begin with and you can't really kind of like make

that right like that's has to kind of like exist and you have to capture it um and speaking of um like this culture of memes again we're very much like in this whole ethereum space all of us um but why does like cross chain memes don't why don't they have their own besides of just bashing each other i've always wondered if they actually do have their own culture and i just don't see them on my twitter because i only follow ethereum people um yeah because i've learned that there is like memes around the cosmos ecosystem and what not but i don't see any of it

because i don't follow anyone from cosmos other than marco who's sitting right there and he doesn't follow anyone else so it's not a very productive following um but yeah i i i think it might be a a um an issue of visibility more than anything it's a good point um eva at the graph um again a very similar question to the beginning do you have a department of memes and if what does it look like how do they work no um i would say everyone is part of the department of memes because to me memes are a narrative right so if you code you know you can do a meme in a co in your code you could meme in

your code uh we can meme on twitter whatever it is think uh people should be empowered to uh without repercussions because part of memeing is dark comedy and and so dark comedy implies perhaps sometimes offending someone or saying something contrarian and i think memes allow us that space to do that whereas traditional marketing doesn't so it's kind of also like a coping mechanism right when you use satire for like very serious topics or humor to cope with them yes and also to uh propagate controversial topics like i would say what edgar was doing last week with the mev conversation was memeing um it was in the form of text

and what resulted was actually a lot more productivity between the med community and so that's like a very dark meme that turned out quite positive perhaps because now maybe we'll you know be more efficient yeah maybe you should oh anna go ahead yeah i mean also like memes just are ideas like like you know the word comes from like mimetics like memetic desire and like memes turn into projects d5 was a meme originally um and like party bid for example was just a meme originally um until it became a project that people wanted to work on um i think like yeah i guess people just see things

actually no i didn't have a thought this mic is um taking a stand in protest of this panel yeah i love i love actually the notion of memes coming from mimetic and like this cross-pollination from head to head certain ideas pushing kind of like through the gene pool of memes uh or the gene pool of ideas as richard dawkins put it in his book um and i was going to say um to your to your comment eva um you should be a little bit like we should be a little bit aware that we've got a troll on the stage and if you call start to call

certain things supportive and like productive then dean will go through the roof and feel like yeah this is okay but speaking of euden you're actually one of my favorites you were actually one of my favorite twitter trolls he's no longer trolling for everybody rip and peace trolling um what was what was the most what was the biggest meme of a project that you've ever seen or that you trolled i mean if we were talking about a project that completely capitalized just the meme and the neck beard economy um it's chain link right like chain link is just that yeah i hope that i end up on a 4chan meme right now that's why i'm saying this

it's the link marines man those guys are [ __ ] peak when we see you know you say at the neckbeard economy um we saw a few early projects at east berlin i remember with meme lords um there's a new meme project coming will memes at some point will be a global currency that we can use and exchange value with oh god um i mean there was that pepe coin right i don't understand any of those things maybe they might be fun i think eva probably has a better take on this than i do because i feel like we've had this conversation multiple times before eva but i don't understand any of it no i presume if you want to start bartering with nfts and

memes became nfts maybe but i don't see necessarily currency um unless there's like real utility like if you're creating a meme protocol and there's a governance meme token perhaps i mean that we already are trading memes like eth is a meme i'll just go back to what i said before about it's the new form of marketing it's traditional corporate marketing is hierarchical it's top down and memes are just the bottom-up version right it's it's peer-to-peer marketing so will they become currency they already are i mean

board api club is not a meme i mean yeah it is i mean and all of this stuff is memes so and that stuff's expensive now holy cow you know like we they have whole communities around this stuff that is your access token right to own one of these these uh nfts so i think it's i i think it's inevitable that we're going to see this stuff go mainstream in in ways that we haven't even like thought about yet i think money already is a meme right like if you think those green paper rectangles in your wallet right now are valuable um that's only because we all think so yeah i think this is probably it is a

meme and probably the unfunniest meme of them all because we are the joke great i remember actually before pepe cash came out the project that that dean referenced that was a kind of like early nfts on the bitcoin blockchain with counterparty before that people were trading pepe memes on 4chan through ebay where you had the zip folder with paper memes that not even the owner saw and he sold it for a few hundred bucks um these were good times when rare paper came out pippi cash i was walking around telling everybody stop what you're doing with every ico stop using searching for the use case because we got it

trading paper cash on the blockchain this is the only thing we need nice uh we reached the top of our panel it's open for question from the audience if anybody has questions otherwise you also feel free you're invited to stand up and describe your favorite memes because describing memes always fails any questions so far marco was this a hand that you raised ah i thought it's this great in that case uh thank you very much to all the panelists thank you very

much for turning up it's continuing here with cross chain everything one talk after the other it's just gonna get crazier and crazier more cross-trainer than you can think thank you very much okay so next we're gonna have james prestwich and billy lucky wherever you are billy there he is hello hello okay so james and uh james and billy for those

of you that are like watching me looking at me right now uh james and billy are gonna talk about uh how ozon and joseph are talking to each other now hold on we're going to sanitize these because covid okay so j james and billy are going to talk about uh the history of crosstrain everything that's ever like counted or been slightly considered crosstrain the current standards of what we consider to be a cross-chain communication

and then they're going to talk about like what they see in like the actual future in the connected future so uh yeah that'll start in a second coming out hey man um oh i don't think we have one i just i

just got told about this like 10 minutes ago this is a good splash screen we can just leave that up so do you have any slides yeah apparently we're just like talking

to each other okay we just got told about this yeah i need i need you to clap for like everything that i said even no matter how stupid it is we're supposed to keep them or just ask someone else to do it no you don't you can go you can go that would be so funny so we were talking yeah so i offended him because i called him

his name was really yeah nice he is bill he's bill and i'm i feel like i'm billy he's bill and i'm never going to be bill it's just never going to happen it's not going to happen my dad's failed he's just like a man and i'm just like a child so yeah we're hanging oh wait sorry thank you okay so like in classic fashion it seems

like obviously memes attract a lot of people as we've just proven here and now you can like literally see it in real life so people are gonna talk about real tech stuff now and uh you know we use the memes to lure most people in and uh here we go uh so james here maybe many of you have seen him uh billy here maybe many of you seen him they're gonna talk about like the history the now the future of what crosstrain really looks like and how it actually exists so yeah you guys just have a conversation and we'll listen hey everyone um i'm billy and they say there's like a percentage of people in the world

who are like more scared of public speaking than death and that is me and i'm like very nervous to be here right now but um yeah i've been in the space for a while started off as like a small time gpu minor way back when um ended up like helping build the blockchain consulting practice at ernst young then i was at consensus for like four years doing a bunch of random stuff and presently i started um something called layer zero where i'm trying to i think that like we've had a relatively like robust layer zero which is the people layer organically emerge luckily which is pretty collaborative and cooperative but um i think that we can do a little bit better about adding like

a little bit of intention and strategy to the people layer process so that's me and great to see you all uh my name is james prestwich uh i've been working on crypto stuff for seven plus years now i got started working on counterparty and bitcoin things back in 2014. uh so the previous panel talked about rare pepes um i built some of the things that accidentally created rare pepes uh a very long time ago um these days i work mostly on cross-chain communication protocols uh bridges that sort of thing at c labs the company that produces the cello blockchain what should we talk about uh so i think

jarrell told us to talk about cross-chain things and like the history of this when did you get into blockchain stuff uh like late 2012 i started nice nice money do you remember uh so you were gpu mining do you remember uh namecoin yeah of course yeah uh did you know that namecoin was the first cross chain system and it was endorsed by satoshi that's incredible uh back in uh back in the day um they came up with this great idea called merge mining uh where you would use bitcoin's hashrate to secure namecoin as well uh namecoin has since you know really really died off uh it

was kind of in the handshake vein of uh replacing dns with a blockchain um so merge mining was the first cross chain system to ever be built and it was built between bitcoin and essentially the first other chain to launch namecoin uh so crosstrain tech is about as old as blockchains are and satoshi you know worked on it isn't dogecoin also like merge mined with lycone or something yeah yeah dogecoin is merged mined with litecoin um so we have like a decade of deployed cross-chain stuff incredible yeah it's wild yeah and i might i think that like everything is kind of to some extent cross chain at the moment

just because i feel like everything is extremely nascent and i don't think that um you know like even though there are like a lot of communication silos like they talked about in that last panel where you know people aren't exposed to the streams of communication that maybe exist in other l1 because they don't follow those people on twitter i do think that like everyone's still kind of like talking and i think that we're still at the stage of experimenting where like um it all feels like to some extent cross chain i don't know if that makes any sense but that's where my mind goes uh like the community is still small enough that everybody talks to each

other exactly yeah um i see a founder of cello and a founder of near in the room um this is eth cc uh i'm an old bitcoiner like it it's still kind of a pretty small i'm a dogecoin maximalist so uh good luck with that one thank you no yeah but i totally get you it's a small community there's still so much cross-pollination of ideas and people like we move between chains pretty freely yeah and i think i think that like there's there is there's the right amount of kind of cross-chain communication but i think it's also important for people to at this stage of the game

kind of operate in their own silos even though even those panels about cross-chain stuff i think that like what we're experiencing now is kind of i think it's like convergent or convergence evolution where everyone's kind of building in a little bit in their own style they all got their own ideas their own ideologies maybe ethics or whatever and i think that there's like value to be derived in you know experimenting with everything at this stage of the game and then later and then later maybe we can like all converge on maybe a single best idea or not yeah i think kind of what we're figuring out here is that there's a very limited set of good designs in cross chain stuff uh all the bridges that are deployed

use like two or three total mechanisms i'm sure they implement them in slightly different ways or with slightly different trade-offs but you know there's really only like two or three good bridge designs that exist what is your opinion on what like the future of cross chain like do you think that there will be a number of different l ones each with their own niche and their own culture and their own use cases or do you think that will converge on like a single l1 i doubt that we'll converge on a single l1 just because like people are really annoying and dumb and can't standardize anything properly uh we're gonna just keep

producing l1s because it's interesting and fun and usually profitable to do so uh so like i doubt we'll ever just standardize on a single chain um i would expect that there are a bunch of like functional chains with large ecosystems i agree i think that makes total sense um in that multi-l1 world um what does that experience look like for the end user especially when we're like mature to the point where we kind of are starting to obfuscate away all of the blockchain stuff from the end user uh well hopefully the end user won't notice um a lot of the bridge systems have new trust assumptions or latency

or high overhead which means high cost of operation um hopefully we can get all of that to the point where the user just like sends funds to another chain and someone else handles all of the messy bits but we're really really a long way from that if you go and use like the polygon bridge today there's waiting there's confusing things about checkpointing sometimes it takes a few minutes and sometimes it takes a few hours and it's just like not a good user experience the real issue here though is that there's very little standardization of wallets across chains a lot of people are moving towards metamask but you can't use that with

near or solana or a bunch of other chains and even within metamask the experience of going from eath to polygon to bsc or to arbitrary optimism is really bad you have like this network switching pop-up and then you lose your connection to the other network and uh so we're really a long way from like a good user experience from this and it's going to require a rewrite of the wallets that people have installed absolutely um another question for you so do i i'm starting to see especially with like nba top shots and these other kind of user facing applications like people kind of assuming that you know

things like nfts are the same regardless of which you know chain they are hosted on because they just don't know anything about blockchain and they're just like oh it's an nft so it's just like this one thing because and all nfts are the same um do you think there's like maybe a concern if there is this like multi-l1 world where um people don't understand that there's like differing security models and guarantees um and like do do we even expose that to the end user or do we just like i just i don't know i mean it's kind of an interesting question because nfts are they're not like just an on-chain asset they're more of a social

convention uh like top shots uh it's not the uh dapper labs flow blockchain that makes you own a top shot it's the nba making that gif and telling you that you own it um so the the top shots nft isn't about you know like flow it's about the social convention of we all agree uh that you own some basketball moment and most nfts are like that so i don't think that cross chain stuff is going to be much of a challenge for nfts because as long as we can collectively agree on who owns it we don't you know need the blockchain layer as much it's a convenient record of ownership

transfers it's not the defining uh ledger for ownership i love that i love how i'm just like asking questions here this is cool we've got a question back an there 721 of that same nba shot are you the nba [Laughter] broker for the nba or something or maybe i'm just a random dude yeah like how do you you do about that well i don't know uh if i thought from one chain to another in some way can you enforce one thing you know what i mean we can't really enforce ownership

of you know a five-second clip from a basketball game on chain uh there's uh the the thing that creates that ownership is the nba telling people that you own it uh so if they end up selling two copies of it what what do you do about it you go complain to the nba um if uh you buy a counterfeit brooklyn bridge from some guy on the street what do you do about it you go complain to the police yeah yeah but it also means that the nba could like make five times their money uh maybe you know uh i think people would get upset about it and stop using top shots

but i mean again it's a it's a social convention nft ownership is socially enforced it's not enforced by the rules of the blockchain uh as long as we all agree on who the single canonical owner of that gif is uh then it works uh if the nba or someone else in authority starts uh like messing with that social contract then it falls apart and it's social contracts all the way down to the consensus layer so yeah it's all just social games uh turns out that humans build and operate most of these things indeed um another another question for you so you said there's like two to three

standardized kind of like bridge implementations currently that are implemented and being used um are you comfortable with all of them are there some types of you know architectures that you're less comfortable with and do you think that there's still a lot of work to do in terms of bridging solutions yeah uh so it's not that there are two to three standard implementations it's like there's two to three standard like models ways of doing this and then there's a bunch of different implementations uh based on which way you choose uh so for example you could have a completely trusted bridge where some guy just holds all the tokens in a key or in a multi-sig and handles the bridging part um i'm not really comfortable with that because i

don't like the idea of just the whole bridge being some person or group of people and you know controlling everything and having all the money uh what are some examples of that uh well so like thor chain is a federation of the validators of the chain uh ren is a federation of the ren uh threshold signature um if thor chain or ren run away with your money there's no recourse and you can't do anything about it um there's also like the bsc bridge is the same way this is like most of the deployed bridges are just you're kind of trusting a group of people with your money i i think we're probably all at the east

conference because we don't like doing that and we want to have like better tech that we don't have to trust some you know like random signer set for um other than that you have like the ibc which is light client relates based you can have more complex federations uh that are coordinated by a chain that have a slightly better trust model um yeah audience question here um you both have built hey how's it going billy uh you both have built a lot of stuff obviously um i kind of just wonder this about all people and now i have a microphone in my hand so here it goes um what was have you ever and what was it if you um

had either a cringe opinion that you now regret in blockchain or built something in your past a blockchain that was like makes you cringe now uh i think i said earlier that i built some stuff that contributed to rare pepes um so we worked on like payment channel tech and other things for bitcoin and counterparty and you know like not like super happy with how it turned out yeah i think i mentioned earlier that i'm a dogecoin maximalist which huge just very cringe um i just yeah it just kind of got like got blown out of proportion and i was dogecoin maximalist until like a few months ago when it just like became mainstream

and now like yeah it's not good so that is my biggest cringe kind of attribute i think besides my public speaking skills got a question back there uh yeah well i know that james probably already talked about this previously there's a microphone next to you eric thank you thank you james i know that you probably already talked about this at a panel yesterday but i i don't know if the crowd here has heard that uh discussion before but i would really like to hear just a little bit about optics that you're working for now i don't know if that's

you already talked about it too much or if that would be okay to cover just a little bit um yeah sure um so i mentioned that there are only like two to three uh technical models for cross-chain communication and bridging um optics is the newest one which is what we work on on my team at c labs optics is uh you know a backroom for optimistic inter chain so we get the nice cute little name uh essentially it's trying to find a middle ground between the trusted federated model and the extremely expensive and complex uh light client relays and the goal is to be you know like

trust minimal so there's no like single person that can run away with all your money or a single group of people uh to be very easy to implement so we should be able to get it onto mainnet in you know like six to eight months instead of two to three years and to be reusable on many chains so where ibc or the trusted version has to be kind of a little bespoke per chain optics should be reusable just about anywhere out of the box um i'm trying not to like focus too much on my own work at this panel because i could talk about what i work on all day and i regularly do but it's uh um i'm excited about optics

we're going to be rolling it out in the next couple months on main net we're currently on uh cello test net to ethereum testnet uh i why are you looking to buy some no no no i don't have a token i do have a bridge in brooklyn i'd be willing to sell you though i sold all mine at like eight cents mistakenly eight dude i know i held for like seven years and then i sold too early so i think if we don't have any more

questions we're gonna merge this into just the next segment which is going to be uh we're gonna get a couple more people up here and it's about building cross apps and like actually holding the you the keys to the kingdom when it comes to like a layer one and uh seeing what happens when you give people money to build interesting things um i think john you are moderating this one this man here and the lovely t-shirt on this nah you don't have to say on get out of here you weren't actually ever on this i just wanted to see it okay hello ilya i like your shirt in the background

hi tough crowd well while we're talking memes i actually uh each one of your groups sponsored east denver this year and we didn't do it in person right it was all virtual virtual castle do you all do that did you go on that yeah yeah so i brought you t-shirts though they're actually 20 21 so i didn't just get the oh i have some of the old stuff too but this is the new stuff pass them down we should all just put them on right

i'll put it on put on the t-shirts shameless shilling that's what the memes are about right it's coming to you every year every year see look how good that turned out all right so i actually have some questions here um that we're so we're talking about um actually building collaboration or building and or collaboration cross chain um so we were talking about this the other day ilya

is there actually a thing called an ethereum killer anymore i don't think they're ever you have a mic i mean i don't think there ever was that was like the memes there was memes that was reaction of people kind of and maybe one blockchain that is not present here that was creating some of that but cardano eos maybe i don't know i'm not gonna not gonna go down that but i think generally first of all decentralized networks are unkillable by design let's let's start with basics the whole point of building a

decentralized network is that it exists in perpetuity until people want to use it and care about it and really after that as well and so ethereum will continue existing until people use it and you know given a lot of adoption integration and everything that's probably going to be for a long long while and so nobody is trying to kill ethereum now the current ethereum tech is not designed for a lot of use cases that people have envisioned and continue imagining right and there's a lot of things that people want to do with blockchain now and like you know new ideas pop up all the time so i think like people wanted to at least you know the creators of the space

builders of space wanted to create these new things like to allow those experiences that like especially in 17 everybody's like well why don't we you know do uber on blockchains like well like yeah but that's not you know what the current infrastructure allows you to do well they tried arcade city they tried i mean they tried there is the main part yes but like in general now we have technology now we have you know focus on experience and end users and all those things to bring this all like real you know applications of people that actually will transform how mark this markets work how you know sounds as people treated etc and and and allowed to be global so that's kind of

where i'm pretty sure all of us want to be and uh like that's not about killing right it's about creating new values it's expanding the ecosystem it's you know building bridges and bringing value around and you know kind of moving it and making sure that people can use it so on that note you know when i think about the first discussions around well we opened eat denver to cross chain stuff in 2019 and we got a lot of crap for it you know everybody oh no it's got to be eat only and i think 2021 we had nine l ones something like that i mean not all of them

you know our thriving communities but they're they're trying to that's why they come to denver right so what it what's the sh what's with the shift from sort of competition to collaboration because it seems like the that's really where we're going right is we're moving away from the killer's concept ethereum killer as like the the core meme and now we're building bridges so what do you think that's about i mean i i didn't like we were collaborating since we started like we were you know china was retaliated in 18 i'm just kidding no i mean i can still be critical about the you know funding and process of

development of specific clients in ethereum which is still true that you know there's like very little people actually developing current eth1 clients that is a problem and people you know should be like addressing that um and i can get you know crap for that but that that doesn't mean like that's actually at least from my perspective you know like peter is struggling like he he's been tweeting about it all the time the the core developer for geth they only have few people working on geth a separate point yeah i don't know like for us i mean we've done a whiteboard series we've you know talked with all the protocols from the beginning we've you know talked with the stadium we've you know tried to suggest ideas for these two

we've you know interviewed and created first i think blog post that explains what was these two back in 18 so yeah we've been trying we've been talking with consensus folks for a while like i remember at deathclaw 18 we were talking with you guys as well and so like we always were there i think maybe you know there is some kind of not always acceptance of other layer ones in some communities listening i think a lot of people in syrium want to work together because at the end you know we're all pushing toward the same direction and i'm hugging the microphone so i'm going to pass yeah you kind of are dude um we didn't actually do introductions so if you guys just wanted like on the next question let's just

introduce yourself as you're answering it so let's talk about technical challenges to this multi-chain future um this doesn't we're not talking about this social or user stuff yet this is just the technical challenges so do you want to give us your best on what you think that the the top priorities are to solve this sure yeah and then by way of introduction hi everyone i'm marik i'm the cto and one of the co-founders of c-labs which is one of the companies building out the cello platform um yeah in terms of challenges um you know i think james press which touched upon a little bit um in the in the previous session um you know i think we have various different types of bridges that people

have been building and i think the the holy grail is really the one that is verifying uh state in a smart contract from the other chain right and i think the most efficient way to do this is to to use a like client actually execute the like client protocol in a smart contract in both chains um and as james correctly pointed out to do this well across many different chains out there is going to be a multi-year effort and so it's certainly a very very big challenge and i think it requires chains to make progress on their own like clients so that they can actually get light enough to execute on

on other chains um and and then we need to continue to um uh write these algorithms in a code that actually can execute in smart contracts on all the other chains so that's one thing that we're working really hard on um we are currently in the midst of um the final final stage of our powers of tau ceremony for our zk snark setup for a protocol called plumo that uses snarks to effectively prove that a header is part of the chain effectively using snarks to prove the lycline protocol and once we once this is deployed on cello it'll be a lot easier to then run these

verifications on other chains to be able to do these kind of like client kind of verifications across chains but even even though we're really close on on our side to get this to be useful across chains is still going to be a really big effort because it's going to be a while before other chains can actually verify those proofs the cryptography that we use is different than a lot of what other chains use and then in order to create a bridge you need to actually bridge both ways and so other chains have to adopt efficient like clients as well and so to me this is a huge technological challenge um and you know things like optics i think are really exciting because they allow

us to do really really exciting ways in very trust minimized ways in the short term before we get to this admittedly very far off future robert introduce yourself and then want you to take a stab at that question yeah definitely um really good information from both of so my name is robert i've been heading up r d efforts in some of the parts of consensus for a while now prior to that i've have had a fair amount of history before i've worked in the silicon valley world in a number of the large companies earlier in the career back actually even going back to pre web and then most recent thing before

blockchain is i did a distributed virtualized software plane for 5g network so a lot of just very deep technology so blockchain i guess i i've i've come here from having seen in previous worlds a lot of um fights that yeah yeah fights it shuts off when you say something aggressive that's right so i think uh um so i think in in previous generations of technology um there always was and i think uh one of the things that's concerned me in

blockchain space is you know when when questions are asked of ilya and others eat killer and other stuff i think a lot of times that is a narrative that gets created because um from a capturing clicks capturing eyeballs attention that's a narrative people like to hear marketing it's marketing and it's it's just viral it takes off that way when in actuality i think if you talk with vitalik or you talk with other people they're all very grateful of having somebody give them honest critical feedback versus just saying wow you're brilliant you know and um having a lot of great ideas doesn't mean you don't have a lot of bad ones so um you know i i think this is a very appropriate

discussion here on the bridging side because uh you know one of the biggest problems we have is when people are really being maximalists and saying oh balkanization is bad and so forth yes it's good to have you know groups working and getting larger and larger but humans aren't wired to feel like they're making a significant dent in something that has 10 000 people in the core and so having collections of people working on different protocols where they're smaller teams with 5 30 people maybe getting to 100 distributed feeling like it's a big fish in a smaller pond i don't know if people are familiar with the mutualism model which sort of straddles between

you know the kind of evils of capitalism and the inefficiencies of socialism to distribute out power to the edge where communities can take control i feel like when you talk with a lot of teams that work in different protocols you know if they're fighting that's not the point because the entire pie for blockchain is going to grow to take over the world and so there's a massive inflationary expansion opportunity that's happening for everyone but that's not exciting to write about and that's not what sort of gets out there and gets promoted in the media so they like to harp on people clicks yeah exactly yeah know for sure so we talked about technical challenges um there are obvious social challenges the two

you can answer it we'll all wait hi mom it's not a good time i told you i'm at starbucks um so let's talk about the social challenges i there's you know community challenges there's where to buy near you know there's i mean just as an example it's not i'm not picking on you particularly but like um it's fun to learn about new exchanges to buy near that's true so what what are those and how now on through light client-based generalized bridge riding by aurora so you can drop it all right i'm out

so what what else is coming down the pipe so user adoption obviously we that's a whole nother panel topic but you know when you the nft conversation earlier about how top shots are on dapper labs private chain and what happens if i created an arc 721 like you know you guys are doing a bunch of nft stuff there's dows that are being created in different communities there's all sorts of different things how does that actually play out from a user standpoint and how do you get positive positive some economics to actually play out yeah no that's a good question um i think there's like few different levels uh so there is a definitely a social

slash like kind of tribal level that um this protocols all of them in one way or another gathering and even though there's a lot of at the end kind of common but people want to express their belonging to kind of one tribe and so i think that i'm not sure that's like it's just what's happened this is kind of how human humans behave again like from my perspective i've always you know i've said i'm part of ethereum community i've been at almost every single ethereum event since i've been in blockchain space um been supporting you know been using stuff i've been asking people since 18 who's

using stuff that that answer have increased over time which is good um but obviously there's definitely like economic sides which are it's an interesting balance how to create um economics that works for kind of just lots of teams that working separately like this is actually so i worked at google before by the way ilya co-founder of near of introduction so i worked at google before and this whole situation of being one out of 100 000 people and you have this like you know google stock that you rewarded but like you have no idea how like your contribution at the end kind of rolls up right and so what i like about blockchain

space and kind of my vision of work in general always been smaller groups you know having clear incentives clear messaging clear kind of work they can do and they can capture the value they create and so this is where like what we're doing right now is actually spinning out p parts of our team to be their own projects with their own incentives with their own token with their own equity whatever that is and pretty much creating more instead of growing a pie let's just create more pies like it's we have really like huge opportunity in front of us let's create more teams that can work kind of themselves they all contribute back to the protocol they contribute back to the space

space growing you know more use cases we have bridges now it flows like economies flowing across so like i don't have a clear answer how it all will you know end up but like with more experiments with more projects with more protocols and like this is true about ethereum right where you see more protocols which on their own capture value right they have their own token like actually like economic incentives around ethereum and tokens on top are not very clear but like the way kind of the communities work and everything is at the end it still contributes to it right and as there's more usage more growth in the apps on ethereum ethereum captures it and same you know same happens with more protocols apps on top of other

blockchains and then over the whole blockchain as well right as we have more bridges more economies flowing through it right like we have both near on ethereum and been used in a bunch of d5 we have a bunch of assets from ethereum on near that's used in near defy like we have you know different type of onboarding for users who are not familiar with crypto who are you know are able to use in first like 15 seconds start using crypto without even knowing what like public private keys are like just enter username set it up and done and then when you have a crypto person coming in they actually like confused because like whoa where is this crazy almost yeah it's too easy like they're like this is this is not crypto and so you're not signing a transaction is it actually happening yeah it's like

happened in an instant like oh what's happened where's my waiting times where's block confirmations so you have like these different kind of types of people and use cases and everything and all together kind of you know we're building this ecosystem i think like goal for i would pretty pretty sure for everyone in this space is at the end is like you know domination of web 3 and open web over the kind of legacy way right but we need like we'll need to continue innovating we need to continue trying new things and we need to continue creating more teams doing all this kind of stuff so um i don't know if i answered that question but that's kind of how i see it merrick do you want to give your thoughts on that yeah yeah and

i agree 100 with um pretty much everything you said i think maybe just to add to that i think um the um i i think the usability piece is actually what really helps here because right now there's a lot of investment in in making krypto more usable and that is just increasing the like opening the floodgates the number of people that are going to come into the and the only way we're going to fit them all in this space is if we have you know a really rich and diverse ecosystem of applications of chains of projects that are all working together and i think that will actually force our hand and i think the whole community will will both benefit and grow together with

with that massive change and so i think you're totally right i think usability is just a massive enabler of that future so um incentives for users um you know we've got meme culture that drives people to use cryptos to buy them to hold them when you talk about to fit all of these people i'm envisioning like a lot of people they're going to be coming to crypto what's the next game what's the next layer of incentives for them and how does that work on a

in a multi-chain world and how do they are they going to even know that they're using this chain or that chain or is are we literally gonna abstract all of that away yeah i think i think a lot of that will be abstracted away right i think when you know when people have heard of bitcoin and they want to come into crypto for the first time because they want to own bitco bitcoin uh they may end up owning it on on ethereum they may end up owning it on cello or near on polygon um and yeah i think many of them are not going to actually know necessarily or they're going to really care and which is interesting because right the communities care about what the

projects of the chain stand for so if we actually get to a place where it's all abstracted away what keeps them around on one particular application or another how does it shift bitcoin bitcoin on coinbase so let's start with that again most people who own bitcoin are on coinbase finance it's like they don't even are on a chain they just you know they just go to the website which allows them to enter the credit card or whatever bank and buy the bitcoin buy or or pepper or dodge or whatever right yeah that is the majority like if you look at number of accounts that this exchanges have compared to like active accounts at least

on like actual chains right like it's it's not that comparable yet there we go follow up to that and i think the reason for that is because coinbase is easy right like if you want to own bitcoin if you want to buy rap bitcoin on ethereum right now in metamask on a dex that is not an experience that a beginner is going to be able to go through right now not even close but everyone is working hard to make that an experience that the beginner can go through and if you make self-custody easy enough if you make transaction times quick enough if you uh make the applications simple enough people will be able to actually go and buy those assets using these uh indexes on these chains and i think when

that happens i think it's going to be uh really really exciting for the space because it's going to be huge for self-custody and and i think it's going to really uh again just increase the the access right coinbase by finance maybe more so than coinbase but you know coinbase isn't in every market in the world um self-custody can be and that's exciting yeah i should say that um you know of course d5 has emerged as the killer app i think actually vitalik in a little bit is going to be giving his talk about going beyond defy i mean clearly you know i don't know if a lot of people did but i got into uh blockchain you know really not for the money side you know my view was blockchain was going to be more about

self-sovereignty about having social change social change having you know pulling privacy back in the face of technology that strips it away whether it's government or companies and you know defy i think you know just like every technology has some every new technology has something that pulls it in like you know video tapes at home it was porn i guess the internet was porn okay this time it's not porn for blockchain it's defy for blockchain money porn um and so that's what's pulled people in but um you know uh that sense of feeling that you own money it is exciting but as ilyan um you know we're saying here is most people have given up the true defy

experience when you when you actually are custodian your own money you have a private key and you do something it's like you know the difference between driving around a toyota prius or getting at a high performance ducati like one just feels exhilarating and you're like oh my god the power that i possess right here i've never experienced this before you know and um so anyway so that you know i don't know if most people are gonna go in for that side but you know when it comes to what we're seeing on the gaming side um very easy for people to understand they're in a game they're starting to get more control a lot of people are getting very concerned now about things like dna profiling 23andme and so having people understand that there's ways we

can hold this data and actually participate in science and other things but retain ownership of it and we're just gonna see more and more of those cases as well um so i'm not i'm not even 100 sure that most people are financially savvy enough that it's going to just be the banking the d5 that turn them into true uh blockchain users they may you know do it through coinbase or other things but i think we're going to need that's where i'm happy we have chains that are just a lot more focused on that experience of making other use cases very accessible to new users so you're in the r d side of things and you look at like trends and patterns and emerging tech and new chains and ways of doing things

do you have any particular favorites out there that isn't a consensus project um i have a lot of favorites that are not consensus projects because you know consensus in the end did a very smaller number of projects itself and um you know uh i think anyone who's there now you know strongly i'm very strongly in a multi-protocol mindset um so i you know i think when we look at layer one protocols i think protocols that are doing things substantially different and building different kinds of communities all have validity and should succeed um you know in those uh you know love avalanche protocol uh polka dot does a lot of great things cosmos

um uh filecoin obviously in the storage space near um i i think you know yeah we i remember we were talking a lot and you did a lot of talking in the ethereum community and giving good feedback and other stuff and you know in in the end you know ethereum did this hard shift as a process of that because we all kind of realized that ethereum wasn't going into ethereum two from a clean slate design it had this incredible success with ethereum one and it was gonna have to accommodate fitting that into a new paradigm so it couldn't shift over to wasm because it had to accommodate evm and all of the currency and the assumptions about synchronous calls and the language you know with the reentrancy mechanisms and other things

in it so um you know near is you know one of those valid protocols because it in in a lot of senses actually built the you know original pure vision that vitalik was saying for e2 right with the sharding the wasm and you know and you see it when you get it you know a wallet on here and you go in um you just it just asks you do you want to start staking and it just handles all of that like the user experience is pretty flawless so i think a really important point is as users like you know you don't want to tell send the message and i always try to portray this that you know balkanization makes it sound like having a diversity of groups competing is a bad thing but human excellence in a lot of cases comes from individual groups having their

own persona and competing against each other we have the olympics and we do this because we care about how fast we can run and do these sports and other things and you get much better innovation when different groups kind of riff off each other and someone's able to sort of not have someone tell them not to do it because they have their own community in that community their god and that other community someone else would be and would sort of you know prevent them from doing something a lot of cases in technology problems if you try wandering around and try to do 20 things you're not going to make any progress so it's good almost in a distro sense that you have a group that gets some charter distributed r d is what it is it's distributed r d exactly with incentives with with sustainable

incentives yeah yeah and the other thing is entirely emergent versus corporate hierarchy well not all of it is in corporate but yeah a lot of it isn't yeah i was going to say one of the things in terms of like building up the whole new economy from little pieces at a time we've got it now to this much better idea which is that all of these different communities that are adding value in connecting chains in particular verticals or in different layer ones or different layer twos they all have the mindset of exiting to community either they started as a token or if they started centralized or exiting and that to me is leading to a much better future part of the reason we collapsed from web one to web two was the only structure that we had for

organized you know companies at the time were these uh ipos and going out to the stock market which once it takes control of the board of directors will you know generally you know corporate social good is a meme and they turn towards profit motive and you know of course see it every time that's their incentives and you know the hope is with enough of these distributed communities the dows competing there being enough alternatives and so forth we could avoid this in this humanities transition can i get a time check do we how much more time do we have now i know what what what's our

somebody want to tell like half hour per panel okay so we're gonna wrap up in just two minutes so uh can i just get a rundown from you guys on your predictions on the advancements over the next like what or why don't we just talk about your biggest thing on the roadmap that you're most excited about that you can talk about i mean so i'm excited about dao's kind of as a general sense because this is a way to empower communities to give them tools to kind of pretty much it's going away from this idea that you need to create a company to do something and then you need to have a corporate hierarchy and all the and instead saying like hey we have a

group of friends let's let's you know let's start it out let's create some value let's you know maybe work together maybe invest together maybe contribute together and then we have a bank account we have ability to you know create activity on chain we can you know do stuff with chain so that's like as a basic component which then grows into you know social in into investment into governance in general and so one of the things kind of we're doing in new ecosystem is establishing a kind of a treasury dao which will be kind of a centerpiece of the future governance because honestly like this is i think like my belief in ethereum like as a technology you know like it's all about evolution and so i think one

of the important pieces kind of for for everyone in this ecosystem is figure out how you're going to be evolving how you're going to be growing and so establishing that path and like testing it out like i also believe in you know test and iterate like that is uh i think one of the most important things and that we're working on right now mark that's cool yeah dells are definitely really cool and um sellosa has a community down um but my prediction i think is gonna be on payments so i think um blockchains now are getting easier and easier um sello as well and um you know things like even paying for gas with stable coins is becoming

uh more common it's it's um widely supported now on solo and so we're finally at a place where you can actually send stable coins really easily to people to merchants to your friends to phone numbers even in fully decentralized ways and so we're really on the cusp of being able to use crypto for payments at a really wide scale the thing that's holding us back right now is no longer really the blockchain tech uh it's really the on and off ramps the the ability for people to cash in and out really really easily uh into stable coins in every market around the world and so now there's this massive effort going on by you know literally hundreds of companies to to kind of um

compete in that race uh and it's all happening right now and as these companies launch and succeed you know we're just gonna have all of that friction removed and it's gonna be just absolutely amazing for payments robert all right i'll keep it brief um i think a meta trend that i'm most excited about now is that you know from a year year and a half ago i think now there's a playbook um that apart you know uh the wealth that's been created in in decentralized blockchains reinvesting in itself there's now a playbook that the traditional investing space which is you 10 trillion dollars or so can understand that's compatible with the ethos of

blockchain which is uh investors coming into companies that are largely centralized but have a very clear path in agreement of progressive decentralization and exiting or selling from the investor's perspective to the community and becoming a full dow that model was not really clear to people a year and a half ago and now it's become very clear and i'm very positive because i think it's you know just going to be a renaissance for all startups effectively saying this is a way to do that's great well that's all the time we have so thanks guys appreciate it thanks for the shirt are you going to

take the background oh

is sisters

yeah yeah yeah so i mean i don't know if you're like sometimes 15 hours