The Chain Abstraction Thesis | Season 7 Episode 3 | Sam & Illia

Transcript

when you interact with a dollar in the US you know it's not technically that is a debt obligation of specific Banks like JP Morgan or Bank of America but you don't see you know JPM dollar jpmd or boad right or a dollar doesn't feel different when you're in Europe versus the United States even though technically it is and it has different trust assumptions and security properties that that support that dollar all of that has been abstracted away from you and that's basically what we're talking about doing here what's up everyone we are now almost 1 month out from d l the largest institutional conference in all of crypto that's happening March 18th through the 20th obviously in London this one's going to be a blast we are almost 10 times over subscribed for tickets which is pretty nuts so again we've had to lower the

discount to Bell 10 and better yet make sure you bring your friends we sell a four pack of tickets find people in your company bring your boss bring your family bring your girlfriend or boyfriend whatever it is just go you're going to get a discount if you use that team pack run don't walk make sure you go get get those tickets today and cheers and see you in Sunny London Town all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve before we jump in quick disclaimer the views expressed by my co-host today are their personal views and they do not represent the views of any organization with which the co-hosts are associated with uh nothing in the episode is construed or relied upon as Financial technical tax legal or other advice you know the deal

now let's jump into the episode all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve today I'm joined by my trusty co-host Hart lamber and today we've brought on Sam har of skip and Ilia of near to talk about chain abstraction everyone welcome thank you for having us great to be here yeah this is going to be a really fun one guys and to to give the audience a little bit of an agenda here and some of the topics that we're going to cover we're going to start with a pretty quick definition of just what chain abstraction is I think a lot of folks listening to this podcast will be familiar at a high level but where we're going to go is we're going to start to unpack it's really great to have both uh Sam and and Ilia because both the cosmos and the near ecosystems have tackled

chain abstraction um and there's a lot of similarities in their approaches but some pretty some very interesting differences in their approaches as well that have implications for how this kind of multi-chain end game is going to ultimately end up playing out so I'm going to ask the two of them to kind of Define how like their own like how the the stack sort of works within their own ecosystems that's going to lead us to bridging there's a very interesting bridging uh different philosophical difference I think in between our two guests today uh and then we're going to end with uh maybe the the Counterpoint to all of this chain abstraction stuff which is should we just be putting this all on one layer but to to start um IL or Sam whoever's feeling bravest can you just give us a sort of a quick definition of what is chain

abstraction I mean I can start for me chain abstraction is same as you as a user don't think about which data center the website runs um you should not think about which chain and what kind of infrastructure stack is behind the scenes when you're running web three apps and so the example I like to use is you go to Netflix and the current web 3 version of Netflix would have been like select you know which data center to go to and then you know then it says like oh in this data center there's too many people so you need to pay higher fee if you want to watch this movie and then you like go to another data center some movies are not available there and so like that's the experience we kind of

currently at it's even worse right you like you kind of need to go to different you know streaming services install different like things you know fund them versus you know what we are common as Netflix right you go you watch the movie you know you enjoy your browse you don't really care which data centers they served from you don't need to like figure out which you know provider you need to pay for on the other side like all of that is taken care of and so now as you mentioned there's like a whole stack of tools behind to power this uh and enable this that only now come into fruition but I think that's that's experience we're all aiming for yeah that that's just a super helpful overview and definition and maybe to give the audience even one

other analogy I think the Netflix data center analogy is really good if you also want to take one from the world of Finance you know when you interact with a dollar in the US you know it's not technically that is a debt obligation of specific Banks like JP Morgan or Bank of America but you don't see you know JPM dollar jpmd or boad right or a dollar doesn't feel different when you're in Europe versus the United States even though technically it is and it has different trust assumptions and security properties that that support that dollar all of that has been abstracted away from you and that's basically what we're talking about doing here and Sam maybe I could I could turn it over to you um can you kind of walk us through I think Cosmos has been you know they've kind of had this idea that this is where we're

going since day one and are very far forward and actually building out the kind of common elements to that stack so can you just give us an understanding Sam of how this works in the cosmos today and for folks who aren't maybe as familiar with the underlying mechanics of it what are some of the sort of Common Core components of the stack that supports this abstracted chain Vision yeah absolutely and the term is interesting because it in on the face of it it's like kind of a Counterpoint to um like an app chain you know you if you have app chains that are specialized and you kind of Imagine them kind of calling out to one another for specific functionality like you you kind of arrive at this uh this need for chain

abstraction um similarly if you're a user and you want to you know move assets or call them from one place or another you you kind of end end up needing this but um the term I think is actually helpful because it it centers the user or or centers like the um the core operation that you're trying to to achieve um in Cosmos uh so we've been thinking about this for a long time um I would still say it's a work in progress like this stuff is very complicated um but we you know we have been grappling with it for for several years now um so just to remind everybody Cosmos kind of uh is this design pattern that has three

components effectively there's a a consensus engine comet um a uh an application framework which is typically the the cosmos SDK and then a networking protocol um authenticated message passing system um IBC and um there are point-to-point connections between different chains uh so there's no Central root of trust it's just chains kind of interacting directly with one another and um and if you're going to talk about chain abstraction in Cosmos you kind of have to um treat it at two different layers so there is um uh there is the the kind of

infrastructure or like the the chain layer um so if you want an application on one chain to call out to another chain and um you know uh bring resources back or um authenticate something and and get a token back um you will be using uh you know purely onchain mechanisms to do so so you'll probably use kind of a combination of the IBC uh protocol and uh one or more of the um uh the application standards there so either the the token standard the ic20 or the um interchain accounts standard uh near has a similar kind of interchain accounts type system as

well uh and then uh on the other side you have the um the kind of user layer and the the message construction layer so the user has an intent of some kind they want to use an application um that application you know may live in a single chain or multiple chains and you need to construct the the message correctly so that when it arrives at the application at the you know at a single chain um it will uh kind of execute across um those different environments correctly um so yeah there there's some infrastructure at the the kind of

signing level and message Construction level that that are important for um you know at the beginning of the the the life cycle of the transaction and then you hit the chain there's something that happens uh maybe it executes something remotely brings it back and then you get a result and it comes back to the user um I'll I'll pause there because I think we're going to get into each of these components more more deeply but that's kind of the idea yeah I think um maybe to to to sort of summarize um Sam and and then we can start to dive a little bit deeper is I think one for for probably the the most common framework uh that folks will have here is sort of the the cosmos way of how things work

and one of the common components there is there's like an origination sort of Point um and then there is this concept of interchain accounts which allows you to have a kind of a a puppet chain so to speak right it's the terminology but there's a host in a controller chain and you're passing a message or sometimes value from chain a to chain B and what that implies is the existence of a trusted or a very robust credible sort of bridge um in between those those things and I think Sam one of the the other important points that we're going to start driving at and where we start to tease out the difference in bridging uh in between the cosmos point of view versus maybe the near point of view which I I know I want to get you to talk about un bridging in a second is there's

many different routes that you could often take in this multi-chain world and a huge part of chain abstraction is actually running I believe Sam right like kind of an offchain optimization to uh get find a kind of find the best route depending on what the user's parameters and needs ultimately are and I think an interesting but really critical Nuance there is that you can have depending on the route that you take there can be a cost and maybe timing difference but also the security properties of the asset on the side on the other side be extremely different can you say more about that 100% um I would also add that there's uh the chain state is just is is kind of moving so you need to understand um you know the

uh the price of this asset is X and um I have this capability y uh and with those combined I can perform this action so that that's kind of part of what the the offchain component does as well or offchain system um yeah so uh because you're executing across different environments um like you you want to have some intelligence about uh about this state um and maybe just to back up a second uh one of the one of the ways that I kind of explain this like interchain accounts concept is it's very similar to like SSH um you kind of create a remote account

and then you can execute operations um as a as that remote account so it has this built-in authentication system um so uh you can establish these between a a kind of controller uh environment and and then ex um use that to you know call a resource or execute a function remotely um right so the uh how we kind of imagine it right now is um uh this is something that skipped does is we kind of like do a bunch of the simulation we kind of figure out uh you know what is liquidity in different places what are the kind of capabilities that you have and then we um when a user asks to do something um we try to figure

out how to do that so it looks very much like building um uh in the kind of Meb sense um and then we will uh kind of provide a candidate transaction for the user to sign um which will then go to like the first chain um you know so maybe it's osmosis or Neutron or something like that um and it could be that the the transaction stops there they they just execute on that chain they get the result and they're happy um but oftentimes because we have kind of these app chains you don't have all the functionality that you need on one chain so so you end up having to um uh to kind of create an execution Trace that um

moves across another chain so you may uh swap on osmosis and then move your token to to stargaze which is an nft chain and purchase a an nft a bad kid on stargaze for instance safe to assume it's a bad kid I think yeah so I mean you can only purchase bag and stars but maybe people don't know what stars are uh so you can use your osmo or or eth to to do the swap make the transfer and then make the purchase kind of Allin one atomic well awesome all right I think that's yeah heart I got like one just Nuance dumb question um for uh maybe some of

the listeners are Cosmos newbies how do you pay for all this like if the SSH analogy is helpful so home chain S shn and then maybe ssh in to another chain but I have transaction costs along the way how do I pay for that in the native currency yes um so right now uh there's a third party called a relayer IBC relayer um which typically picks up the transactions um after the initial uh user transaction is landed so using that analogy again I I have um let's say I have adom and I want to buy the bag kid um so I I will actually go through osmosis make the swap into stars and the and a relayer will pick up the

transaction and move it to Stars uh to stargus um and the relayer will pay the Stars fee on stargaze um and then um deliver the message which has like an auth authenticated payload that can then um uh that can then make the purchase and um there are a variety of ways that relays are paid and um one of the things that we're working on right now is uh well one of the main ways that they're paid is just buy the chains right now so star stargaze kind of has an intrinsic uh desire to like make sure that people can interact with their their chain that like bridging just works and the fees

are not expensive right now so um like stargaze makes their fees on the purchases not the the inclusion so um they they just kind of like want that to be handled that could change in the future it will change in the future but um yeah right now a lot of it's subsidized uh there are there are several ways that Rel layers can be paid um and uh you know eventually you could imagine that users um are uh are paying for forwarded transactions that have you know kind of directly simulated like this is what the fee is on for the entire chain right now it's kind of Overkill to do that um but

that's that's something that that we're working on we also kind of Imagine just side notes that there could be other models where like subscription fees like across multiple chains or something like that that you know there's kind of different ways that you could imagine um users might want to pay or or chains might want to pay that don't look like individual like fee payment for inclusion all right so to sum up here and this is when I want to turn it over to Ilia but I just want to underline I think a very critical thing so that just it it hits home with the audience Sam in your description so you know some of the common components to this Chan abstraction stack from the cosmos point of view is the existence of interchain accounts this IBC sort of bridge which

connects all of these different chains and a network of Rel layers which um which sort of funnels General messaging message passing value in between these different chains and the existence of a builder likee entity in the form of skip which simulates the best uh sort of path for for this these valued messages to move and I I want to bring us back to one point that we've made um on a previous podcast is going to tee you up very nicely Ilia which is that bridging is kind of a myth in that the idea in that the assets never actually leave the chain so you could imagine right if some if you're trying to route a transaction from uh I don't know from you know stri somewhere like Stride Right ultimately

into osmosis via you're you're basically the The Stride token doesn't leaves stride but you're minting a different obligation and then once you once you move from chain to chain you're minting an obligation the obligation and it gets very complicated hence very different security properties can exist at the end State and I think Sam the idea is that in Cosmos there really is no idea of canonical assets right it's just accepted that mostly what we're going to be trafficking is bridged versions of these assets and so there are very we've just kind of accepted that um almost at a societal level for Cosmos but Ilia I know you have a very different idea about how bridging should work so can you maybe describe the chain abstraction or I know you call it the account aggregation stack as it exists in near

maybe highlight some of the differences in between Cosmos and then if you could start to unpack your concept of un briding for sure yeah so I mean taking also a step back from the start of near we wanted to make something that will be simple for people to use and build on and so kind of the concept of chain abstraction was always like in near design it just was mostly applied to near and so near Network itself is is actually a collection of chains where every single account or contract on near is logically a separate chain and we just kind of abstract all that complexity uh cross chain communication uh account bottles and

make it look like it's a single blockchain uh and so that's kind of how we can actually scale the near Network itself and so actually every single like token standard uh dexs are actually a multi-chain like design so for example our tokens don't have approv you know transfer from it's actually always transfering call uh with a callbacks because you actually can I mean don't have that design pattern that uh ethereum has which solves security issues and also allows to have this multi-chain experience where you actually can deposit other chain tokens on a near smart contract and it's like doesn't actually make any

difference for near smart contract where came from just like through the design of of the system now what happened uh kind of throughout I would say 22 and 23 is and and uh maybe yeah so like WIS Cosmos obviously been you know we've been talking with Zaki on podcasts and kind of offline and we always uh argued that like my argument for Cosmos was that it's really hard to bootstrap security for a new chain and it's like very complicated and so um like why would would you do that if you can just launch on something that's like scales and gives you underlying you know somewhat similar properties maybe it was more limited uh kind of characteristics around self- sovereignty and uh

configuration and what happened is the ZK stack became way more mature and for me that's probably the biggest change that happened is that where before you needed to spin up you know hundreds of nodes have presumably you know some amount of like hundreds of millions of of dollars of security Economic Security now you can actually have just single server running transactions and proving it and post that proof and now you cannot roll back that right and and that you know and that is as secure as hundred billion dollar you know of Economic Security Network and that's a pretty fundamental change and so kind of I call that like in this chain abstraction world that's probably one of

the fundamental like security aggregation pieces that's happening and there's like few different parties you know polygon obviously kind of rolling out the agregation layer that kind of is like I think one of the foundational blocks of this multi-chain chain aggregate uh chain obstruction now the other part is indeed like okay well let's say we have you know aggregated security now all the chains have you know the same security it's super easy to launch new chain you know uh we have near da for example makes it 80,000 times cheaper to run roll up uh cool but like using all that now you know your metamask has gazillion chains you know you need to bridge you need to

remember where you have gas like it's super complicated so and as you mentioned bridging is complicated it El still require I mean like obviously it can make UI simpler there's ways to um kind of simplify things but uh it's still like every bridge opens up kind of a Escape hatch for all the for for that chain um and like there's been you know most of the hacks that we of recent times have been on Bridges right um because that's kind of the only thing that's like really easy to break into and like you can escape with money right away right like even if you break consensus of the blockchain like everybody else will validate that it's

incorrect and stop right that's a worst case what happens with Bridge the worst case or the Mia gun and so the approach we are suggesting is the reverse of this instead of trying to bridge assets to somewhere why would we not bring the user everywhere but in such a way that they don't need to think about it and so kind of similarly to what Sam described right as if you sshed everywhere right you had an account on all other chains remote account on all other chains but it's now controlled by your one specific account one specific wallet what uh or specific app and now instead of you specifying the path right like as you

mentioned okay well I have Adam I need to bridge it to asmosis swap it Bridge it to Star by nft you can just specify the intent I want to buy an nft here's some for example in our case near enough to cover it somebody should figure out how to do it for me right so you have an intent that you specify on one chain with your one account and then somebody can on your behalf pretty much say hey I'll do it you know I'll take your near and I'll pay on that chain on your behalf under your account to buy that nft right and so that's kind of the stack we're building so there is you know kind of underlying change uh like security aggregation that's happening through you know ZK aggregated layers

and like other pieces da Etc we have account aggregation that facilitates this you know single account connected to all other chains kind of remote accounts those remote accounts don't do not have a kind of explicit private key that private key is actually maintained by the validators of the near network uh kind of in multi-party computation way we're using the new cryptography on uh where multi- party computation like even as as members change the key the key the public keys that are uh they can sign for doesn't uh there's kind of a new um threshold cryptography that exists now and then on on top of it you have a data

layer that Aggregates now all of the data from all your remote accounts to show you you know portfolio across all chains and then you have this intent layer where you specify the intent and then somebody is as a relayer as well picks up that intent executes it on behalf of your account you know signing transaction uh kind of through this NPC layers and executing there and pays for transaction fees on that on that chain and then you have decentralized front end that actually package all of the sub such that it's not you know complicated and kind of transaction formation everything happens in that layer so that's kind of the stack we're building um and you know each of the pieces kind of play crucial role to make this experience really uh smooth and and kind of from a user they don't need to think

about did I Bridge something did I you know like you just you know you pay as if it was like a local uh execution but uh somebody else will execute on your behalf but it will be still in your custody as outcome so Ilia I kind of like this canonical asset maximalism view like I'm sort of biased that way myself um but I do think it kind of falls apart uh when you start thinking about some of these rollups or falls apart it gets nuanced I should say where like if I'm gonna have my U optimism arbitrum let's just take those two they don't have their own like native asset as their native gas token they're using ethereum right and so we

bridged ethereum from eth Main net to those chains um and so I am kind of curious your views here on how this fits because if you take your argument to The Logical extreme it should be like optimism doesn't have ethereum it just has its own native asset that's native to that chain and optimism same thing um but I don't think that seems to be the design parad we going through so it seems like it's a little bit messy like we still may have um bridged or canonically bridged assets to many of these chains or rollups yeah so maybe just to yeah to kind of bigger picture right this model works with not just you know near ecosystem or EVN ecosystem it

works with all ecosystems it works with Bitcoin you can have a Bitcoin address where you can deposit your ordinals your Bitcoins your whatever new crazy stuff that's going to come up it works with Cosmos it curses salana and would works with all the EVMS now indeed there's some assets that are as you said canot ically bridged kind of under some subset of security assumption one one of the assets actually a simpler one is usdc right there's usdc minted by usdc Central kind of uh party on bunch of chains and it's the same usdc from kind of security parameters of that circle is you know guarding it um and so you can you know kind of transparently exchange

them and and maintain them on multiple chains uh and so ethereum with rollups probably you know can be considered that and so it's more of a question now for the user and for probably Market to decide which one which ones they want to hold and use but the gas fees part is is abstracted like that's just Rel layers will you know they'll have some ethereum or whatever the token is on the other side Bitcoin you know Soul Adam for or osmo for the related chain and they'll pay it the question is more when you're building a decentralized multi-chain exchange now and the benefit is near now going to be the place to build them because you'll be able to have addresses on all chains and be able to execute

transactions as a smart contract on those chains without any Bridges and so uh when people depositing ethereum on optimism and arbitrum how you want to account for that right so this will be a decision for a developer who's building such an exchange to now decide how they want to resolve it and again this will also probably go toward how market makers and relays will actually uh deal with those things so I would say like Market will kind of decide you know maybe arbitrum or whatever will be the canonical kind of cheap ethereum you know there will be a expensive ethereum on you know e on ethereum like expensive to move and settle and then you know every everything else will be just

swapped under the hood uh to into two into those but yeah I I would say like I would not want to prescribe that for sure and let the market decide it's more that this model allows to have like this automatic settlement by the intent relaters based on what the asset like people actually either want or uh don't even need to think about what's in the middle I have a quick question for you IIA do you imagine the The Exchange um living on near or living on you know the the remote blockchain where you're buying the nft well um okay okay well depends what what exchange right if we're talking

about an exchange smart contract that pretty much like imagine th chain right now th chain is an exchange chain that has addresses in all other chains so you can Implement third chain on near as a smart contract pretty much on testet right now and have all of these addresses without writing extra notes without having any extra uh kind of additional infrastructure or anything and you can launch that and you know create like the best multi-chain exchange supports Bitcoin Cosmos salana and EVMS and any other chain xrp whatever right all of that is kind of possible now if you're talking about a user wanting to buy let's say bad kit right uh the idea of kind of how it works is that you

specifying the intent right and then in case of you know like solver in this case right but like we call them intend relayer they you know probably just going to go directly to to the uh to the star chain and just buy the nft like they'll they'll they'll fund the the users's remote account with the amount not just for the fee but also for the buying nft and buy there and so uh the idea here is really that like you know probably like this this intender layers will just have gas everywhere enough to cover gas and they'll rebalance like every day or every few days uh to do that instead of you know trying to solve the pass which

is like th those are really hard problem of like where all the failure cases of like something didn't work and you need to roll back like in in this multi-chain kind of uh asynchronous environment and so and under different security block time Etc so like going directly and paying there and then taking near and then they settle you know even on centralized exchanges potentially is way easier what's up everyone we are now almost 1 month out from Das London the largest institutional conference in all of crypto that's happening March 18th through the 20th obviously in London this one's going to be a blast we are almost 10 times over subscribed for tickets which is pretty nuts so again we've had to lower the discount to Bell

10 still hooking you guys up get you a 10% discount on Bell 10 and we've onboarded a whole bunch of new speakers so that's Dan tapiero of 1rt Pascal gothier of Ledger Anthony scaramucci the mooch himself Michael Sunshine of grayscale Brad garlinghouse of Ripple SRA nazarov of chainlink Matt mcdermut of Goldman Sachs their Global head of digital assets sty kulach Danny Masters the list goes on this one is going to be an absolute blast make sure you don't miss it and better yet make sure you bring your friends we sell a four pack of tickets you're going to get a discount on that so find people in your company bring your boss bring your family bring your girlfriend or boyfriend whatever it is just go you're going to get a discount if you use that

team pack run don't walk make sure you go get those tickets today and cheers and see you in Sunny London Town I've got a a question for for everyone on this call and Ilia maybe I could U poke at you a little bit about something but I want to crowdsource everyone's opinions on this so I think the the really attractive thing that you're laying out in this worldview of your yours of un bridging is I think basically everyone in this space if there's one thing we underestimated the complexity of it was bridging when I was getting into crypto five or six years ago I was like Yep this is going to be solved pretty soon and it has not been solved and it's actually an extremely thorny problem and there's a certain amount of I mean I there's an enormous amount that that makes sense about

wanting to keep Assets in the place where they're issued which is what we keep referring to as being canonical versions of that asset but it does have a pretty big drawback in the sense that you know we we're coming fresh off this conversation with Chris go where he's talking about the unbundling of protocols from their assets and the disadvantage of this particular world if it were to play out like this is there's probably a pretty big discrepancy of people that want to hold and use ethereum versus people that want to be subject to the constraints of ethereum the protocol right there's probably a large number of people that want to hold ethereum and use it as a money and buy nfts with it and trade with it and do whatever they want but they do not want

to pay high gas fees and so one of the disadvantages that you're sort of recoupling the constraints of the underlying protocol with the asset and maybe a great example of this is Bitcoin itself which is basically been unusable from the perspective of like apps and block space and now I know we've got um you know Z K rollups on bitcoin and bit VM and drive chains and all that stuff and maybe that's changing but you know TBD so what do you think about this idea of that constraint yeah so I think there's two two parts of this one is you know if you ask anyone who holds Bitcoin like I mean the the comparison between like rap Bitcoin and Bitcoin is is pretty dramatic right like the amount

of people who actually will willing to rra bitcoin um and so I think generally we have like a pretty uneven um I would say consideration when we are talking about you know Bridges and wrapping Visa centralized or decentralized uh now it's true that like you don't if you want to have already this assets you you want to trade them faster right and that's why centralized exchanges being the most successful probably applications in web 3 so far is because they actually offering like you know you bring all your assets to one place and then you trade here and you don't even think about the constraints of the networks issued on and so the benefit of what we offering is is very

much the same except you can now build decentralized exchange like this you can bring all your assets right to remote accounts and now you can trade on near pretty much the IUS of that assets without um pretty much needing to settle all the time back to those chains so like in a way that's kind of form of bridging but it's not done in the same kind of structure that uh we expect where you know Bridge holds everybody's Assets Now it's an application like you know a specific exchange hold the assets of users who wanted to deposit if you don't like it get out right but um so it kind of isolates the hotpots and then gives you the ability to build like a

value add services so you can have everything and so like the the cool examples with what you can do with near is for example you can have an account on near that has remote accounts on bitcoin ethereum you know salana you have bed kid you have you know madlad you have a you lady you have a ordinal and then you can just sell your near account on near you can you can turn it into nft and sell it with all of the assets attached to it to somebody else at you know fraction of a scent cost at 1 second you know block time uh two second finale so you can actually trade the whole kind of space of assets on near at like you know high speed and very low friction and low fees um but

like it's it's kind of isolated to a specific Trad or specific exchange you doing versus like you have this massive bridge that you know bringing all these assets and like holding them and so that's kind of the the transition right it's like user now in in a way in control of the like oh I you know I want to work with this exchange and so I'm I'm depositing here or uh you know I'm I want to hold my asset or whatever the other options there are so Elia maybe like as the guy that runs the bridging protocol umbe I could map out uh a couple uh maybe a vision for you guys let you guys poke at it a little bit here too so first of all I

think bridging is becoming a misnomer um where all all you guys and Mike it's interesting all the kind of the smartest people we have on this uh this podcast seem to think that this intent-based Vision um is is the way inter opt is going here too and bridging now maybe isn't really bridging so much as figuring out how to fulfill or settle these intents in a sense you still need some message passing like I wouldn't say like you know all bridging goes away like you need message passing that's not going you need some way of like reading state from another chain again like the data layer remote State yeah so so all of that is there it's just like the the the moving value between chains is the

most both like expensive complicated insecure and sometimes impossible way to do it right because if you try to move an N for example you can't because like all of the smart contract logic that lives on that chain or is the chain right in case of like bad kids you cannot move that to another chain right so you need to keep the asset there like we it's easier but like even even then like you remember rebas tokens right you move them via Bridge you're screwed so yeah but I think like modern Bridging the way it's going isn't actually moving value it's having this real this intent fulfiller goes and

executes the action on the remote chain and they pay for it right and then they get paid back somewhere else so like value is moved by this like third party relayer in a sense but uh it's it's not um it's not like I've sent value through a bridge protocol to make that happen yeah I'm slightly less convinced that the interchain account model is like that much more secure I mean basically if you imagine a generic authenticated message passing system which all of these are built on both token token transfers and interchain accounts a token transfer is basically a it is a right to redeem a locked token

so it's like that is the right that you're transferring over the chain an interchain account is the right to do literally anything um so which includes token transfers um it it's really just a matter of like whether you're financializing the object on the other side like do you want to turn it into a token you know that specific right to transfer um that said I like do really appreciate the the near architecture it's like very elegant and I it's very cool that you can do the the nft swaps on on near um but yeah the security argument I'm I'm like a little bit less less on board with well well I would say like I'm talking about

practical security because like I mean obviously like a light client bridge for example you know from a security perspective is like you know outside of full ZK client is the reasonable security the problem is messing up in the implementation of a bridge is is pretty much what everybody have done so far right is like you know they forgot to check on the things they forgot like when you issue in a transaction on the other side like what's originator is like there's so much complexity in Practical implementation of this bridge bridging and I mean I totally agree like we've been building you know Rainbow Bridge on near we started building it in 2019 so uh because like we do you know think this is extremely important

technology but like making it secure right you know and like maintaining that and like just it's like a 75 like item list on you know upgrades and stuff and then upgrades themselves require like because chains change right ethereum forked and and added proof of stake and so now it's like okay well we need to upgrade all of the stack in the bridge to to maintain like line verification so like the the practicality of that is you know is way too complicated that that and that's kind of what I'm arguing here is more about practicality and like the the the like moving out similarly how you guys you know implemented kind of the multichain you know Searchers Etc

like moving that out of the the bridg underlying bridging and and communication flow and letting that be done by somebody like kind of offchain like simplifies a lot of things I've got a question here which is let's bring this back to ethereum for a second and I think one so one driving force here is what users ultimately end up wanting which is probably this this intense based framework but ethereum itself is a protocol and many of these l1s have a business model as it were as well and the business model of ethereum from the way that I understand it is to grow the adoption of eth as a form of money and it feels like the way that they have to do that is to export the eth because obviously if if we want eth

to actually be a money in the in the real sense of being a money we need much much more adoption than we currently have today and the ethereum network as it's currently set up is just not I mean this is an explicit admission right by the the rollup Centric road map that the ethereum main chain is going to evolve to be this sort of bulletin board for posting ZK proofs probably at the end state but ultimately a lot of the Commerce as it were is going to happen on these rollups and so if you just think about that I feel like ethereum itself has already baked into its own Road mapap the idea that most people are going to be interacting with a bridged or wrapped version of eth and Ilia I feel like it's actually really interesting that you brought up the example of Bitcoin and rap Bitcoin

because you're right rap Bitcoin sucks so maybe from the perspective of these protocols what they should be doing their strategic imperative is to make the wrapped version of their token as usable and as secure and safe as it possibly could be and maybe that's what they should do and it's it's almost a form of you could think about this as a form of Regulation uh from the standpoint of the protocol where they give certain security insurances uh you know through like the sort of canonical Bridge like an OP or or arbitrum like rollup type Bridge as opposed to kind of a a thirdparty bridge and yeah I mean I think what what would you say to that sort of because that's that's another

Factor here is these these protocols have have business models and there are there are network effects that happen at the asset layer that might impact the ultimate Market structure here yeah well I mean it's obviously hard to predict this right I mean the ethereum business model is as big of a meme as everything else in the this uh space because like you know we've been in this space for like what five six seven years right the business model of ethereum changed already at least three times so at least in on my time I'm sure that for folks cor cor core ethereum folks it's been even more so I I would say like trying to predict how that will evolve is hard I think the important parts to understand is like yes I mean

rollups obviously have a very different security model than uh regular light cine bridge and this is because of this important part which is they fork with ethereum right so if ethereum Forks rollups actually Fork as well there's actually two different rollups exist at the same time on two different forks and then whatever one resolves becomes canonical is that what rollups needs to follow now roll up sorry an inin roll up just to no I mean any any rollup follows the fork Fork but what what's what's broken still is that upgradability right and this is why I need to try rollups is if you don't want

to also like have a multi on top of it so point is like you know practically speaking there's a lot of like practical things under the hood which um kind of prevent this to be like you know a nice picture of like yes rollups like inherit full security and it's all easy and and and so again from my perspective like for example for E specifically e is an asset right and and this is obviously a big asset but like I would still expect um you know you can have the like again like this example of of a decentralized exchange right like I mean

even think of it from a Thor chain perspective as a Thor chain you want to offer you know trading with e but you don't want to settle on ethereum because it's too expensive right so you will pick one of the other rollups the one that you probably believe is most secure and you know if users agree with that then they want to withdraw there instead of withd drawing aium that's going to be like kind of second you know most canonical uh and it's still it's still it's it's indeed wrapped but like again Market decides here not a um like not a specific you know security parameters that uh we can Define I typically think about these things kind of the other from the

other direction like rollups chains are are institutions and like uh institutions that have you know a customer base um and they have a multitude of ways to provide the security assurances that like um give their their customers peace of mind um that could be enshrining parts of the protocol that could be providing proofs that could be decentral decentralizing aspects of the uh you know their validator set or uh providing thirdparty verification you know there there's like

uh a whole array of different Technologies and techniques to to like give that additional trust Assurance um and that like you should use kind of what makes the most sense for your users and and for your product so I'm kind of like uh very happy with uh with a multitude of different um techniques they being being employed for for different use cases well Sam playing off that this idea of rups as institutions um and you go back to Mike's Point earlier kind of like US Dollars well so what's ethereum's business model they want to

be the reserve currency of crypto something like that let's say um and we go back to Mike's uh analogy early on like USD so the Federal Reserve issues USD No One banks with the Federal Reserve except for banks right those would be like your institutions your rollups then you have banks that bank with the Federal Reserve that have in they don't have exactly USD they have an entry on the fed's balance sheet that says they have some USD you have JP Morgan and um Wells Fargo and whomever else um and then you also have like Silicon Valley Bank uh and Signature Bank too right um and they're supposed to have well exactly it's the point

right um their institutions that uh failed so their USD what they had ceased to be considered canonical USD anymore uh and I think it's kind of an interesting example to map out um uh this to sort of rollup version of a landscape where transacting on ethereum we all kind of think it's going to become more and more expensive if ethereum Works um transacting it's transacting with the FED very difficult to do very people few people do it so most users will want to use their aium on a different institution to use your word Sam um and they'll pick an institution that should have lower fees and but other guarantees for them and that seems all well and good to me that

actually seems like a pretty uh compet landscape and then Elia to kind of loop this back to your point I don't think this is incompatible with elements of like your un bridging thesis here too yeah no it totally works that's what I'm saying it's going to be Market deciding which one of the rollups is then preferred for people to store their value right uh I mean in a way like in this analogy we are I mean there's actually no good like American Neo bank but like you know revolute and um like Mercury think of venmo think of venmo in America venmo venmo is not a bank but it holds USD in a form of USD that you can use to very cheaply and easily transact

with really shitty security guarantees like I don't know what the security guarantees of VMO are go ahead Mike sorry yeah and could I poke at that because I I actually feel like this is one of the most critical things that you want to get right um and you know you hear this there there's a very common argument that money and liquidity is going to reside where it's safest but I think there are I would give you two really strong data points that that's not actually how it works in practice and the first data point I would give you is most of the volumes and you know sort of transaction settlement that happens in crypto today is uh usdt on Tron so that's data point number one and I'll give you this other example of the euro dollar market versus the canonical

dollar market and it might surprise people hate it when I bring up this macro on this podcast but I'm going to bring it up anyway because it's relevant so there there is a market for canonical USD even if you accept that jpmd is the same as boad there is a much larger like a full order of magnitude larger market you can essentially consider it a secondary market for Dollars called the euro dollar market which is USD which is D sold by large International offshore money centers and it's bigger it's bigger than the market for actual USD dollars in the United States opaque unregulated um and actually there are lots of smart people out there that can trace big kind

of macro movements to to this market and so I would just you know I only bring this up to say I'm not sure that it'll play out this way but I think you know if you've been in this Camp of you know the settlement assurances are the only thing that matters like you should probably look at these two data points because totally I I think if you're on board with the idea that like we need to export more ethereum um you really should not let the perfect be the end of the good like you know how how do we provide stronger assurances for Tron like how how do we actually you know build up um security provisions uh and and kind of like draw

draw projects in um and then like slowly upgrade them um that uh I think that's going to be as important as um you building the perfect like enshrine ZK Bridge you know with three different independently built clients or whatever but I think maybe to bring all of this back to the chain abstraction because I think I mean there's a podcast somewhere there about you know the the expert of of tokens across chains but I think the point you know bringing back as a user you don't need to think about any of that like most of the time you don't think about this same as you don't think about what's happen when you pay with your

credit card Us credit card in Europe right you don't think about the whole flow of you know money exchangers and how there's a settlement on you know Euro to USD Market somewhere because people actually getting paid in Euro like you're just paying with your card and you know in the shop and getting your stuff and so like that's really what we're going after like there will be some things to figure out like on on the you know specific like settlement routes that are most liquid and the most effective I mean because like at the end it's also will be the question which which is the liquid Market which is the most effective Market because you know somewhere there the the intend Rel layers like will need to resettle all of this and make sure they like have enough

assets um which is I mean which is the reason why for example Tron is used for usdt is because there was a ton of it minted there and so it's the most liquid like all the exchanges have a lot of it and so if you want to move between them it's really easy so like at the end that a lot of that will be decided also by those uh but like as a user that's not any of the any of your concern pretty much that that's kind of where we trying to get to Sam so I was just gonna say going back to like I do agree and I think we have some agreement that like okay user who wants to buy a bad kid wants to buy it on the star Network that makes sense it's like native asset should be there then we have this like

the rollups on their ethereum maybe they want to spend their ethereum on arbitr or optimism all good all well and good your thesis which I like fully agree with is that of course the user doesn't want to care what train chain they're transacting on and so the near thesis is that uh you kind of have like one home account your near wallet uh it has signing keys for all these networks we're using intents to fulfill user intents on all these networks including on Cosmos and there's like a really lovely home that you use to transact across this uh this crypto ecosystem um just to push on that though like don't you also think metamask like there's other other people that want to

have this position too and I think this is like where a war will play out right of like who who's going to be screen who owns the user yeah yeah yeah I wanna and maybe we get Sam's view on that too right so well I I I think it's good that you brought up this distinction because this this does actually like draw a line between kind of what Ilia is doing and what what skip is doing right now um I think that there could be you know hybrid between these things but like basically uh a wallet is doing a lot of the abstraction in our model where they are signing across different networks

and um you know they're they kind of have the the key material and and some degree of uh of um intelligence with within the wallet to to know what to do and then um near is trying to like put more of that intelligence into the into the near chain and um I think there's benefits to both um you the one benefit that I I see in in the near model is you get to do a lot of kind of composable automation um in in the near chain um in the uh when you bring things into the wallet you can potentially move faster um so one of the things that we've

experienced is just like every single chain is moving all the time there's upgrades there's different you know like various State changes and writing smart contract adapters for all of these things and like trying to to create workflows where you're uh you're able to query remote State and then like understand that state and then execute on it and um you know on this this kind of intermediate domain um gets gets very complicated um so being able to just update the clients and say okay well uh we're going to tweak the transaction to you know to work this way now um that allows you to move a lot faster so um yeah that that that's kind of how I

would like one of the main distinctions I would I would draw between between the two models here yeah I mean I think maybe as a little bit Contra argument the things we're doing is a protocol and so metamask is very much welcome to use this protocol to power for their users this experience and uh and actually it will work you know as soon as launch because we have snaps and we actually are having metamask support rolled out as well like full metamask like just as a separate chain uh roll out as well the benefit here is we also moved a lot of the logic into the kind of client front end part and so because we have this decentralized front ends as a kind of framework uh this allows to have a lot

of that log Pro there living there and then any wallet can either like just use it because it's like isolated and and kind of insecure container or it can be an app that uses a wallet or you can embed wallet into your app so and what we see on near is that most of the massive user based apps all embed wallets into them right so near has you know three to four um most used apps in web 3 uh with you know million of users we just actually had hot uh in last 10 days in 10 days hit a million users from launch uh which is probably the fastest growing app in web 3 and so there there are a wallet inside telegram but that

you know you can just click on a bot and you have a wallet inside telegram with your telegram ID but you can also have you know all of this chain abstraction all of the decentralized front ends rendered there as well so you have this kind of protocol that can be embedded into any wallet any app um and pretty much turn it into a super app or super wallet on from from the get-go and you don't need those developers to maintain comp you know ton of complexity on their side they're just using this as a protocol and then for users importantly sorry you can switch between all of them right and it works because the state is not controlled by wallet right it's it's uh owned by your account by your private keys and I think that's at least like as

a user you know and you know a proponent of self- sovereignty that's what I want I don't want be binded to a specific provider of wallet software I don't want to be binded to an a specific app I want to be moving freely with my state with all of my accounts kind of across web three so there I think there's also I I think ultimately the question that we're getting at here is I think one of the most important and unanswered questions in the space which is who ultimately has the user where where does the user lock in ultimately end up residing because I think we're we'd all probably assume that there's going to be an enormous amount of Leverage for whoever attains that position and I think you guys are doing a great job of describing like two of the camps which is the sort of wallet

camp and the protocol the sort of General protocol Camp there is another Camp um which maybe did just editorialize and interject my own opinion which would be a runaway application uh ultimately ends up winning that and I think I I think I fall into that camp because I actually had a there's a great podcast a while ago Fred Wilson of USB and he was describing you know that he at one point theorized Google Maps or Apple Maps as being this place where you log in and uh you know when you log in and then you would deploy Uber from there instead of from the app itself and he was like I don't really know why that why that didn't happen and from my perspective why it didn't happen is because it's just an extra step right you already

have everything on your phone you go to the app that you want otherwise you'd have to go to an app and then do a thing as opposed to just going directly to the app and I do think there's an opportunity for frankly like telegram T like how have they not integrated like a they've got all these unibot like all these Bots launching like why don't you just launch your own decks you clearly there's product Market fit for you guys right there and so I do feel like there's an ATT there's a there's a road map for an app be it a centralized exchange like coinbase you already start to see them doing this a little bit uh a messaging application like telegram or something like that to just decide to do a wallet as a service like integration because the wallet thing is you know

people have been theorizing about this for so long like these wallets are going to be super important then they never like really are I mean they they obviously metamask is is very important they do have a lot of users but yeah I sort of probably sit on the it's going to be a killer application that ultimately ends up winning this and then sort of vertically integrating in a bunch of the stuff that we're talking about how do you guys respond to that I've thought a lot about this um one of my conclusions is that we're actually just in the early Innings here so yeah I agree what recently we're kind of seeing like an unbundling and rebundling of the wallet itself so um there's like thirdparty MPC signing services that like plug into different wallets um so that's kind of like okay

we're going to strip out the just the like authenticated like signing architecture and then like the wallet is like a little bit more of a um a user experience layer um eventually you would if you kind of like take this to its natural conclusion you would it's like apple or or Google like with their Hardware device like should have a lot of control if they get into the market like they can you know they have hsms and they can like tie it into Apple IDs and like all this stuff um so I don't really know how how that's going to play out to be to be honest um the other thing that I it seems like a big question mark is where

privacy lives in this stack so like you kind of have to bring more of the um uh the data and and State uh closer to the user um like local to the user in order for a user to have privacy like that that is how a user achieves privacy so um that could change the market structure pretty significantly if there's demand for privacy um to be honest I spend most of my time just like trying to make work like because it doesn't work right now and like like who owns the user is almost like a luxury it's like like just make it work first well maybe just to contrast it so near

has number one app in web 3 which is Cosmos and it has over a million million point2 daily active users they're fully chain abstracted they don't know for the most part they're using blockchain they're getting their loyalty points they're paying for e-commerce they uh it's directly on their phone on their log screen and it's like pretty much embedded into the operating system uh with near account so like this is already happening and it's like you know fully chain abstracted and they'll be able to use web3 apps across web three like across all chains when we have account aggregation launched sweatcoin same thing 150 million installs over I think 20 million users who who have

sweat uh about one .5 I think million monthly actives again this is a app that became a wallet right that has wallet functionality that offers you know exchanges they just launched liquid staking and so like all of this is happening now and like on near this has already happened because we have chain abstraction stack not multi-chain yet but like for near and it's powering this apps right now so same with hot it's in telegram embedded wallet uh they're going to be launching swaps and everything as well on top of it you know again you don't pay transaction fees it's all abstracted out um it's have massive you know growth so I would say like this is happening and apps are

popping up and it's either like app into wallet or wallet into app like on I just in like wallet into super app on the other side so uh I got a couple points here guys and then Mike I think we got to wrap it up too right but um first of all uh ton you should telegram does have a built-in wallet you're just geoblock in the US I should show you this stuff too and it's got really that's wild I didn't even know that yeah yeah and it has real usage I don't know the stats but they're they're not insignificant um Sam uh salop phone like this is another play like I you do see plays trying to own um own the user from the kind of wallet level and like the salop phone

thing like break the App Store but also have an embedded wallet here too I I really don't know a lot about the salon a phone but it's like part of the strategy and like Elia what you're talking about here is you're literally utilizing near as infrastructure for applications to have a wallet built in so like it's not exact it is near wallet obviously but it's user doesn't know that they just think they've got some infrastructure here which seems uh pretty interesting well that that was my point that that's what chain abstraction is chain obstruction is users don't know they just use it and like they will be using ethereum apps or you know cost like they'll buy bed kits they will you know transact on salana and they will

not even know they'll just use it use custos or use sweatcoin but there there is a question of entry point here that I think is relevant yeah saying custos and well like yes I mean we're providing protocol for coordinating that right and abstracting and that's why like it's not just near as a blockchain it's a whole layer of you know decentralized France a data aggregation layer like all of those pieces need to work together to then plug in into those applications on the top sure but the applications that users are using like again if they don't know that they're using near they don't even know their entry point to go and use like other it's like the application owns the user near doesn't necessarily right and I just don't know how that's

going to evolve because like you know a user is not going to want to have 50 different near Wallets on all the different applications and not even know it that would be like kind of unfortunate I think it would be better to have in one place so you know it'd be a great problem for you guys to have where you actually do have users that have 50 different near wallets and all these places but then you're going to want to figure out the point of aggregation and then maybe mik one of the questions we wanted to ask these the samelia was like the uh the Counterpoint of like well what if you just go monolithic like salana salop phone is trying to say hey we're just gonna have a super fast high performance blockchain and that's your entry point here too I do have some intuition that like there

there kind of has to be common signing infrastructure at in the end game somehow like you're going to have something that looks a little bit like oo or whatever and like maybe part of your credential is held on your phone part of it's like uh you know held on a a backup device or you know your mom has has a um a backup the and like that should work across all your apps How we get there I mean the technology exists it's it's more of like a a you know failure of imagination than than anything else well it's a

coordination right everybody wants their own thing 25th 25th protocol um I'm sure that I'm wrong about this but like talk me down from this sort of standpoint in that if feels like where we're sort of moving potentially is like wal Gardens is a really negative sort of connotation of this but it's kind of like you know what is the difference really in between being like hey adopt my like move everything onto one layer on salana versus like adopt my set of standards in Cosmos with my many different chains versus my kind of decentralized front end on near with like all these different common signing things like at the end of the day right like what we're what we're sort of

talking about here is I go back I actually heard this F this term first from Preston Evans it's just trust zones right where like there are these different zones of trust and there's a certain amount of heterogeneity Within These zones and it's prob everything's probably just going to work better if you're like interzone like interzone Commerce is going to work better and then ultimately there's going to be like a distinction or extra layer of friction moving from near to ethereum or Cosmos to salana or whatever is that ultimately the world that we're moving towards here or what what's the what's the Steelman against what what I just outlined there well I I think the biggest kind of um different again I mentioned in the

beginning I think the biggest change that happened is the ZK is like we're kind of equalizing the security across the board and I mean you know two three years ago I would be the first one to say like hey you know the the you need one chain and it's near uh but there but the reality is like um you know there is reasons to launch like specifically customized uh app chain for like specific use case and you know potentially remove gas and like do raate limiting in completely different way there's a reason to launch like a private you know chain that still H still follows the rules and you have ZK proof but you don't reveal the actual transaction data so like there's reasons

to have like some uh hity even if you have like let's say the most scalable chain right and you know uh like near uh but the question of like if you can unify security if you can say like actually like there is no difference in trust assumptions between this um you can then make things kind of more straightforward for the users to interact with it now there might be still you know there will be some latency like just you know sending stuff between but again from so near is designed that way like near is every single account is a separate chain internally that's why cross cross kind

of contract calls are cross chain messages which is like optimize latency such that users don't really like have that and and delivery and everything and so I think it's all possible to like package it up in such a way that users can interact with all of this without like really uh dealing with it and and you know if we draw from from web 2 web 2 works asynchronously it's all you know separate service data centers you know API Services Etc and it all like you know packaged up into you know Facebooks and uh whatever steam yards right like this probably uses like five different API Services underneath and so like you don't need to as a user don't need to

think about it like you don't you know have you paid for your uh whatever video streaming and sound streaming which is two separate Services right you just like use it so I think like that's kind of the the goal is like if we assume unified security that removes a lot of this original kind of oh okay this is different trust zones and you want to keep things like as separate as possible uh and at the same time if you kind of create enough aggregation abstraction on top uh you can actually have an experience that uh is not as like I would say cumbersome as right now uh and potentially is you know potentially more straightforward than using that chain directly yeah um well guys this was a

really phenomenal podcast and it's the mark of a good conversation when we actually had like a whole page of notes and topics that we didn't ultimately end up end up getting to so um but I think we we we got to cut it off here but this was a ton of fun for heart I hope it's okay if I speak for you here for both hearten myself so um Sam or Ilia if folks want to find out more about you guys either follow you or the projects that you're working on what's the best way to do that yeah uh I'm at HX RTS on Twitter um and I I work for two projects skip which does a lot of this cross chain um kind of building for for wallets and then I have a project called time wave that that does actually much more near like

like fully automated um transaction building uh and like cross chain flows so um going to be talking more about that relatively soon awesome yeah for me it's IL black dragon or ad near protocol for the kind of overall news and updates and I got follow-up conversations for both you guys because we do have pages of notes to go deeper on so so yeah thank you thank you guys bring your bring your gear to Denver yeah looking forward yeah I me too um yeah we can do a followup guys this was a ton of fun thank you so much again all right thank you thank you bye all right man episode two in the books and I

thought this one was a blast um I feel like maybe with Chris we got to cover some of the higher level stuff but we really felt like we Dove one level deeper here and got into the nitty-gritty which there's no one better to do that with than samon Ilia so just felt like a fun episode yeah well obviously fun I mean the downside is that we have like three hours more content at least to go through um but but you know the the one takeaway here that that does strike me is how uh you know last episode I I think I declared I was an intense maximalist and Chris goes obviously is too um these guys are as well it's it's like the it seems that the con there's sort of a form of

consensus that in chain abstraction or in this world where we have all these blockchains um you are going to have you can't be declarative about exactly how get from one chain to another you have to do this intent like thing and um in any system like where that intent originates um who controls the user or the system for creating that intent lots of open questions there but it I I am struck by the fact that like Elia is like built into his architecture as this idea that an intent gets gets relayed so you go get your asset on its native chain in a quote unquote unbridged way um and and Sam I think so too so I thought that was a kind of interesting

point of agreement yeah I did as well I think you asked this this qu POS this question in our very first kickoff which is you know are we going to have these sort of fast intent uh you know almost like Fast Bridge intent based infrastructures where which are supported by solvers or is this or is it going to be like the pipes do we want to make the pipes themselves faster and less trusted or more trusted and I don't know I think there's going to be I mean you have much more sophisticated thoughts on this than me but I think there's going to be probably similar to the across design almost like a almost imagine like a very fast it's going to feel to the user very fast right you can

just submit your transaction this network of solvers is going to end up relaying that transaction but then there might be like a slow path in the background where the assets move across the sort of canonical most trusted Bridges and you know you and and I I think we didn't necessarily set out to have an episode based primarily on bridging and canonical versus bridged representations of assets but to me that was the most interesting maybe difference in between Ilia and Sam's point of view the Ilia unbridged is canonical versus Sam's the maybe the cosos perspective which is bridging is inevitable and we should figure out what the best route is what

the best security properties and and assurances are and uh but there really is no such thing as a canonical everything the assumption is everything's going to be a bridged version of an asset that to me was the most interesting point of not contention but like very different worldviews in this conversation yeah well I mean I think Sam would agree once you start would would I think Sam's view would change and we didn't have time to get into this right but his view would change when you move outside of the cosmos ecosystem So within Cosmos you have this wonderful uh homogeneity around IBC like there is just a a pipe between every Cosmos chain that like Works um and so then once you're in that ecosystem your intent is kind of

figuring out the right path between all these pipes um and you're using solvers to figure that out but you have the pipes by default and they're pretty fast um quite fast and they're pretty secure um although you know Nuance around that but you have these pipes that you can use to get between chains and then in the cosmos world and Sam's world it's like how do I do that the best way um but then like Elia is looking at it from like okay wait uh I want to talk across all these different ecosystems and I don't have h a fast pipe uh I so I got to do something else here and this is like more like our worldview at across

right where you're going to have the intent fulfilled and then there is a pipe somewhere that does something and actually Mike that's the one thing that I I really wanted to ask Elia and didn't get into um it's kind of like where user funds are escrowed in a system and how you verify the intent was fulfilled um we we sort of glossed over this where you have this this near chain your home chain your home controller that can uh sign transactions anywhere and then you have intent relays that are going to go and fulfill them but um seemingly like there are user assets on one chain that are going to be spent on another chain and because you aren't

messaging directly you need to like escrow those user assets on their origin chain have the intent fulfiller the solver fill them with their own money on the destination chain and then verify how to release the assets back to the to the solver some point later on and we didn't get into how that works but seemingly there is still a use of pipes like you still got to somehow verify that intent um at some level so so yeah I do agree with what you're pushing on though I think I think there was a whole episode that we could have done on the blockchain operating system from near and they have like my understanding of it is is that the escrow essentially

happens at the near level their account level so near accounts you can actually trade like nfts um and the way that I would think about it is frankly IL gave this exact analogy on the podcast but in the same way that an exchange can be a bridge of sorts in between two different right in some way the centralized exchange product Market fit is that you can actually trade canonical assets one with the other and I think that's the that's the idea with near as well except you know your custody on near is it's it looks more Crypton native right it's on chain um but you have like kind of this MPC signer system with near validators that ultimately can sign on your behalf and they have a very very neat way that they do this with uh threshold

encryption but it was kind of beyond the scope of of the show um or we just frankly just like didn't get into it but yeah yeah exactly but there's still there's still this question of like if I have Bitcoin and like the cool thing about this this near multi-chain account is like I could have a near wallet that has a Bitcoin key inside of it and so I could have Bitcoin that I own and right can spend out of that account but if I want to go and buy like a bad kid on um on Cosmos uh I still need to let and I wanted to buy it with my Bitcoin right uh okay cool I could have solvers compete to do that but near can't escrow my Bitcoin or I don't know exactly know

how they would do that there is still a need to to have that Bitcoin esro with a very different kind of finality guarantee there um before I could go and like buy my bad kid um and so that's something I want to push on and and frankly like you know I think near is going to be announcing more things um at at eth Denver um too and we are as well but like on the across side we're trying to position across more as like a settlement layer for cross Jan intense um and I think that this is almost like a necessary a sort of underlooked necessary bit of infrastructure around how do you um escrow these funds and then release them but but again this this is all they're going down that path

this goes into um the the core idea here is a user just wants to do things right they just want to do things and get things done with assets wherever they may be and they don't want to think about what chain they're on um and uh again that core and goal everyone seems to really agree with that um but it ain't easy how we get there yeah all right I have so I completely agree with that and I think now heart that we need to do an episode on ZK proofs because frankly that's already come up quite a bit in the first two discussions and you know ult ultimately the thing that's really difficult I think everyone agrees on ZK proofs is kind of this endstate

technology I think where we need to have conversations with folks about the different variations that exist and what the actual latency and cost of these Z you know producing these these ZK proofs are because you know DK it's a it's an extremely New Moon maath technology but it has been around for a little while we haven't seen these proofs yeah we obviously things are moving much slower than we sort of thought optimistically and so it'd be great to talk to on the ground experts about what that is but I had a I had a question um so here's something just on that for two seconds because it does seem like where my mind's going and I agreed with you I had the same thought during during the episode um ZK is like the ultimate pipe between all these systems like I could

just prove something happened right um but a whereare I think again going back into latency and cost around the ZK stuff and also speed the ZK proofs are not going to be you know 200 MC proofs it's just not really possible and so if we want an outcome where user actions are happening in 200 milliseconds which is kind of like my goal um you're gonna need a third party to go and do the thing and then user funds get escrowed and then like the ZK proof be the way that you like release the user funds so again I'm like super interested in this idea of ZK uh ZK storage proofs or ZK

proofs in general being like your ultimate pipe to connect these blockchains but with a cost and latency that still implies you have a solver network doing something ahead of it um right but anyways that's why we got to do another episode why don't I just say something that's a little bit controversial and you can sort of push back on me and talk me from this perspective I feel like I sort of this is my last question at the end of the podcast but I feel like every ecosystem is basically on the path to solving or has solved interop within their ecosystem right so like this would be atomically at the level of like main chain eth or salana this would be within

one rollup stack so you know very good interop in between different chains on optimism for example but there's just not an enormous like push it doesn't feel like incentives exist actually to get great interop or like very fast um you know something that would look like uh I'm just wondering like how big is the market for essentially interop in between apps that exist on salana versus ethereum and there might just be a fundamental lack of incentives to actually fully pair those two ecosystems and I my mental model which is I can't decide if this even matters or not but it is kind of like a couple big trust

zones where everything just works much better within these zones and you know if you want to go from ethereum to salana there's a DEX that stands in between those but it's not like we have to do this like crazy Arbitrage that's going to require ZK proofs with extremely low latency in between those things like most of the Arbitrage will just be inra trust Zone if that makes sense and I do think that has big implications for the architecture of all of these different systems but that's that's the way I see it and and sorry just to put a bow on this point you mentioned something really interesting about Cosmos which is that they have these pipes the best thing that Cosmos did was build IBC which is essentially this public good piping

system interop uh uh tool that all these different chains have access to and they started from day one with the understanding that we needed to be interoperable with these other chains whereas I think what you're seeing in ethereum is that there is no incentive for rollups to be uh interoperable with one another actually there's a disincentive uh they're they're probably trying to keep user funds within their uh you know on their Zone instead of on the other zone so yeah well like the trust Zone thing is a useful analogy right so but it it does break down a little bit in the crypto context I think so okay we have like AWS

and we have like Google cloud and within AWS and Google Cloud great um each of them are their own trust zones they can communicate really quickly within them um if I want to send a message between the between AWS and Google Cloud I send a message using tcpip great makes sense but like what is the message I'm sending it's just some arbitrary data that an application interprets it's not money right like I'm not sending money between them and right when I want to send money between things like I need a different trust system it's literally what blockchains were built to do but a blockchain is a complicated consensus machine to allow you to move money

within the blockchain and so this idea of trying to connect these different trust zones I just it's not easy um it's not just like you send a message right um because you might want to send 100 million bucks and there's lot of people out there that are trying to steal your 100 million bucks like not simple um so IBC has allowed Cosmos to have a trust Zone that has pipes between it that like work and work really well um salana okay you don't have pipes because it's just one blockchain that works great ethereum arguably to your point it's like ethereum you want to think of as one trust Zone but these rollup ecosystems are kind of building their own trust

zones with their interupt between them and then kind of competing and having relatively shitty interop between the different rollup ecosystems so you know the um uh optimism super chain uh clearly they're going to want to make it easy to move funds and value and messages between uh optimism and base that makes total sense and like orbit chains too all that but like you said they they they perversely almost have an incentive to make it hard to move off of a super chain to an orbit chain or vice versa like business incentives mean you want that value locked in your ecosystem in your trust Zone um and so then that's

where there's an opportunity for um other interupt solutions to to go on top I'm what what you got here what we got all right I'm showing this this is uh Cod on Twitter but he's sharing this uh screen grab from this is vitalic endgame and what he describing is these three paths towards the same destination which is where where blockchains are heading is centralized block production decentralized validation and strong anti-censorship protection so again I you know I don't want to belabor this point and sort of confuse people but these these distinct systems that look very different today are all kind of heading towards this and

you know there's that he kind of lays out these three paths which is traditional big blockchains um and that that would be like the salana approach where validators get larger both in terms of Hardware requirements and bandwidth costs but ultimately you can build these sorts of like like client sort of uh anti frud anti censorship things in there to make sure that users of the chain if they're not actually participating in consensus or or validating blocks they can at least make sure that everyone is behaving by the rules right which is a pretty good end State and then on the ethereum rollups there's like two different paths that he lays out that rollups can can uh can go which is one one rollup scales and dominates um in which case you also get

centralized block production but decentralized validation or you get many rollups um but then cross domain me sort of also centralizes block production because you have a large Builder that's standing in the middle there and I I am so I just want to go ahead like these predictions will probably be wrong no one should take me too seriously I'm thinking through this all the time but I feel like we're heading towards a world of maybe like an ol a rollup oligopoly um where you kind of have two different types of rollups and it looks like it's just going to be optimism and arbitrum that sort of run away so maybe it's not one rollup but it's two two big rollups that eventually the brands of optimism

and arbitrum are almost synonymous with the level of trust that you would exper that you would uh come to expect from ethereum and so that obvious the need to even say op e or ARB eth it's just eth and it's on eth and everyone just Associates you know the level of trust that you get on optimism and arbitrum is the same as you get on ethereum and then maybe there are these other there are these other sorts of rollups that do something that's very differentiated but it feels to me like we're on the brink of a hollowing out of like this messy middle of Roll-Ups which all launch but don't really have a purpose for existing and you know one of the things I found myself thinking during this episode was I sort of feel like everyone has slept on what blast did like everyone okay I

get there's popular hate on that particular construction it's a multisig no one likes the safety or security properties of that chain but they did offer yield and this is not my observation I gotta give credit where it's due it's is John chanos and we talked about it on the episode with modular money with what Aiden is doing with stf but here's like a pretty logical series of events that you could follow so if if we are accepting the idea that most people are going to have non-canonical eth bridged eth right up and rollups where you actually do things with that eth then if we're bridging it anyway you might as well take the wrapped version of it that produces some amount of yield as uh instead of a rap version which doesn't produce yield and

everyone kind of understands that there are these security trade-offs so anyway to try to like make some falsifiable like here's where my mind wound up after this discussion is that ethereum should and is probably going to get much more opinionated about the bridges or like versions of itself that it exports and it probably should try to find out a good way to keep some of the logic like the business logic or or properties of the eth that it's exporting it should optimize that for yield and it's probably going to be many fewer rollups than we ultimately thought um and the way that this gets solved everything that we're discussing is just like not some like gigabrain Moon maath optimization routing it's just

going to be within two sort of trust zones um like the optimism from I maybe maybe it's like two roll up ecosystems or three rollup ecosystems yeah I do think there's an ability for there to be like many rollups within those ecosystems so oh yeah for sure right but so just like your diagram it's almost like I want to label that as like salana is the bottom one the the people listening without video right so so like salana is your monolithic blockchain that ends up in the same place um the many rollups with cross chain Mev is actually Cosmos that's like what's happening today um and then the the kind of like one rollup dominates

the correction here is like one rollup or a handful of rollup ecosystems Dominate and then you've got like you know the arbitrum super or sorry arbitrum orbit optimism super chain maybe polygon SDK um that makes sense and then yeah Mike like I do think that ethereum in the end State needs to be relatively opinionated about how eth is exported from the ethereum main net chain because otherwise you have like potentially shitty user experiences it it reminds me a little bit going back to like your your USD analogy where like if eth is the Federal Reserve uh you want to have like JP Oran which could be like

the optimism super chain and you want to have like Bank of America which is you know the arbitrum morbit super chain but like you don't want Silicon Valley Bank right um as one of the places where you're exporting eat that doesn't really do anyone any good um and the thought I had also on on on the the podcast was like the advantage that the US dollar system has is they do have regulators and rul makers that can kind of like set standards for what it means to be a bank and to use USD um whereas ethereum doesn't really have that someone can come come along and come out with like a

new way of exporting eth off of ethereum Main net um and that's kind of cool permission inovation that's great um but it's also kind of scary because eth could get exported in ways that are uh damaging or scary too yeah it's it's for I another analogy that we could use here is almost like luxury brands that maybe use other channels to to sell but they would have very very specific examples of like you can't discount this much right or you can't when you display it in your store you have to display it in this particular way right it's because they they might not have direct access by because they're using a different uh

sales or distribution Channel but they ultimately want control over the product and and the relationship with the end user because you know if you could buy Rolexes and gas stations at 80% off you're ruining the value of the brand right that's what Rolex has built up this trust and premium brand and so yeah I really view it like that is the that I think and uh look let me just also caveat here because I the people there are a lot of people this is an orthogonal view to how many people think about it in eth but I do feel like there is a push pull in between some people wanting people to hold eth the asset whereas I would sort of be in the camp that that battle's already lost as soon

as we adopted the rollup Centric road map and really what we should be doing is making the rap version uh as good and as solid as the the underlying I I I feel like that's the the strategy but yeah I don't know if that makes sense um and I realize that that's not the a similar view to what a lot of other people have so I could be wrong on this so big cby out there I like it I like it um but I guess let's go back to chain abstraction here too because going back to the episode the other thing that I think is like just really was mind expanding for me is thinking about really who ends up owning the user here too yeah and so you know um this you mapped out right uh kind of

three versions or or at least what I kind of heard was there's three versions of this there's like um uh you have the home a home chain a protocol that ends up being the home chain um that is where users go to to then interact with crypto generally and in a sense Elia is trying to position near as that where your near wallet can have keys to all the other chains and so it can be your home that you uh you utilize to to do everything you want to be um and then there's this other version of it being like actually driven by the wallet which Sam was sort of saying fits a little bit closer to what they're doing at like Skip and IBC

where the wallet is the uh it's it's an offchain outof protocol abstraction layer that uh controls gives a view into all the users assets everywhere and is maybe the source of intents um and then you brought up the the third uh idea where a runaway application that just onboards users like wildfire ends up being the thing that actually becomes the default home for how users interact um and we're really talking about this in the scale of like there's a billion people on board in a crypto what's their actual entry point here and this I find very fascinating and I think you mapped out your kind of your bias is

more like the uh The Runaway application is where we yeah this happens and and I kind of think I agree like intuitively uh there's going to be some runaway application with some use case we haven't yet imagined that is onboarding hundreds of millions of users and it becomes the default entry point almost like a WeChat like super app type thing it becomes the default entry point for how people touch crypto Hart let me ask you a thought hypothetical question a little thought experiment for you so all right foraster right uh demonstrates this new model about how web 3 social can look and ultimately we should have these social

platforms that are built on top of blockchains Twitter you know Elon Musk because he's the main character at this point says you know what I hear you and I'm on board with this vision and uh Twitter is moving to we're going to eventually integrate a uh a a public blockchain here who is more important salana ethereum or Twitter in that relationship who ultim has the leverage I mean Twitter does Twitter and I just it you know Sam said this it's like we're so early I I would be in the camp that the wallet it just it's we've had so long for wallets to that to play out

with wallets and I just don't think it's going to be the case I think it's an aberration of the fact that we have basically no apps with product Market fit yet but I think as soon as we get one or two apps with like real product Market fit then it's going to be obvious that they have the leverage and and they're going to basically try to build in these um yeah they're going to try to be the home base uh for Mar three and you you and I but I do think there's a case that the l1s are never fully abstracted away and and the reason why I say that is because there's a community aspect to this there's a community aspect to this that's like that is a

thing in web 3 which is like it is it is only getting stronger actually it's not getting weaker it it corresponds to these macro trends of like Millennials feeling lonely you know like wanting internet online communities like come on how many people do you and I know that's like I'm an ethereum or a Bitcoin or a salonin right there's like you want that that's actually a feature not a bug and I only see it getting stronger not weaker and if it were me if I was unilaterally in control of an L1 the which is impossible obviously but like the Playbook that I would be running is what I described to you in terms of exporting my currency I would do that but then I would try to keep a community and set of values and uh and uh touch points with my users and I would do that

through basically like events and media stuff like that like I would do these like big you know like Devcon uh you know eth Global type events um and I would like keep people feeling like there's an ethereum Community or salana Community or Cosmos Community because I think it's actually pretty powerful and so anyway there's my there's my end rant I'm I will just come out and say I've got an opinion and say I think apps are going to run away with it but I don't think it'll ever be like I don't know anything about ethereum I I just don't think that ever fully gets abstracted away well you can do both and it's probably a good thing like in the same way we talked about in our kickoff episode like I'm I'm really thankful that we have Cosmos and ethereum and

salana and they're all learning from each other right um so let's add a fourth player let's call Twitter right like if elon's listening like everybody said this and he absolutely should um build blockchain into Twitter right but if Twitter became uh the fourth ecosystem that uh onboarded 200 million people in a crypto like overnight and gave them wallet and gave them things to interact with and then became a platform to do all this other crypto likee stuff um well that doesn't like kill the other ecosystems they still work it's not like you can only have one entry point in a crypto you could have two or three or four and I don't think it's crazy to think that many users would have many many people would have at least two um

entry points into this crypto ecosystem and then the advantage here is if you did have a an app like a runaway app and by the way it doesn't have to be Twitter it could be something totally new it could be like the next Tik Tok that comes on the scene that people hasn't been created yet but if you did have that runaway app I think it would actually teach the other ecosystems where value in crypto like what are the things they should be doing to get 200 million users or whatever um and you could probably have a very different flavor for it too um and that would be uh I mean I kind of just get the sense that that's how you get a billion people uh into web 3 um you have somebody do something in a

specific context but it's specific and then we have these other l1s they don't go away they maybe become more OG they become more of a community they have a different flavor but they actually learn from The Runaway app about what they should be doing to attract tons of users yeah I I I also think like my in general I feel like we people almost like weirdly aren't bullish enough on crypto because it's like oh it's all going to be on this one thing like if we're really bullish on adoption here you know the Assumption should be this is going to be W like wildly um there's going to be tons of different ecosystems and communities and all of that so that's always been sort of my assumption from the beginning it's just like what would

it look like if a billion people came onto this ecosystem like there would be it would look really different than it does today and I I think there will be totally different I I don't even know like maybe there'll be like kind of apps and then ecosystems that sort of roughly have their own camps of apps I have no idea um it's an interesting thing to think about and I do think also to maybe point something out because people have always been like why why do people like Sam said this really interesting thing he's like look it's almost a y to even speculate about this because I just want all this to work you know it hasn't even worked yet so I think that's also why sometimes people are like why are all these talks are technicals like the builders are still focused on trying to

make it work they're not like wondering where the value is going to be extracted yet right we're in like hey let's just make sure this thing ships but sorry looked at you were gonna say something no no no no I mean like first of all it's funny Sam saying that because I think again you go to Cosmos and like the ux issues in Cosmos were like so unbelievably bad like the the skip team I was actually at this soft site with them and they did this exercise with like a bunch of crypto Builders and they sent us each um they sent teams of like four crypto Founders they're like five teams of four crypto Founders that they sent uh a 100 USD to and they're like okay you team you go try to buy nft on on stars and youo try to like stake on

stride or whatever um and literally like we couldn't figure out how to do it like it was so bad right and this is what skip is trying to solve um I'm so glad you had this experience I had to phone a friend to buy my bad kid I couldn't figure out how to do it I was like I know and they're doing God Work skip is doing God's work so they're doing God's work right so like to Sam to his credit like hopefully Sam is gonna listen to this and be like yeah I feel I feel seen right um but to his credit right it's like figuring out how to have all these um appol UPS talk to each others really hard um but I guess the point I'm going to make is like since the episode was on chain abstraction and we keep thinking about abstracting all

chains away from the user um maybe we're actually jumping ahead of Step maybe it's actually supposed to be chain abstraction within each of these ecosystems within each of these trust zones so like within ethereum things just work um I can spend my eth however I want and it all makes sense within Cosmos it just works uh salana you got yourself already figured out the monolithic thing works so great right um and and maybe we shouldn't be worried too much about connecting these ecosystems super seamlessly yet um and again to draw the analogy back to finance it's like okay US dollar systems are connected uh Euro systems are connected but like if you want to move

between USD and Euro from a normal user perspective it's a total pain in the ass it's like not an easy thing to do and maybe that's kind of what we should be thinking about for now is abstracting away Within These specific trust zones and and not going um not connecting them all from day one yeah I har I really like that yeah I think we should even dive further into that this season I think that's a really good way of thinking about it because I I would actually say like it looks like it works for salana now but they've got a lot of work to do on like their fee Market is totally broken they've got to update upgrade their schedule like there's there's work every single one of these ecosystems

needs a little bit of work and uh you know one thing thing that I would just I know we've already gone on for a little while here but like the last thing that we didn't really get to but that I so let me read this uh Ilia sent this sent this over for us to read before this episode and he talks about we'll link it in the show notes why chain abstractionist the next front year for web 3 he talks a little bit more in-depth about the parts of the stack that maybe we didn't get to cover during this episode you know but he what he describes is this idea of ZK proofs and you know so instead of having to trust it's like network of validators you can literally have one server do this very complicated thing that requires a lot of compute generate a proof and then submit

it um to this chain and you know he set ZK proofs in in the near ecosystem they um they allow for a cross-chain settlement within within near and there's this there's this line that sort of stood out to me which is the new paradigm introduces the idea of cross settlement uh as more chains become fully ZK provable if some proof is published on other chains there's no way to revert this chain without also needing intert other chains transactions from one chain can also settle on multiple others via zc proofs this provides mesh security as all proofs continuously get aggregated allowing the safe movement of assets between such chains now that sounds nice right but again this is where shared security

comes into the mix the downside of that is each of those chains are now sacrificing a critical part of their sovereignty which is kind of their Fork Choice rule you know so like the more integrated you become with another system the less CH the less uh the less in control you are of your own destiny so to speak and that's why I was kind of asking this question about like what really is it you know at one point in my crypto journey I had a very clear defin of like this is an app chain this is the this is these are the pros and cons but now it's like well app chains need shared security and then once shared security or like some sort of mesh comes into the mix you can't really just Fork whenever you want and actually you have

to coord your updates with all these other groups of chains and then I kind of just get to like well then does this really need to be its own chain or can it just be can it just be a bunch of smart contracts on the same layer and that is the I think that's why that's why I keep saying this thing like what really is the difference in between these things because you know the more I play this out the less I see the do do you see what I'm saying yeah yeah I do but like I think there's Nuance here too so just the ZK proof for whatever just as an example if I have one chain and I get ZK proof from another chain just saying here's the state of this other chain like my my existing chain still Sovereign like I don't cool great I

gotta proof that this is true that that's useful um where I think it gets complicated is if I had conditional logic so if I had something on my chain that said okay here's the state and I'm telling you uh it's dependent on the state of this other chain and then later on I get this K proof of the state of the other chain it actually says something different and then I have to like roll back my chain well now I'm locked now I'm connected but this is where it's like nuanced being able to prove the state of the other chain on your chain that's great that doesn't hurt me I just get like this is just truth right but if my chain is dependent on that truth um and if it like if I

said something in the past and be and I was wrong and now I have to like redo my own State roll it back now that's a mess right but I think you know again this is where I'm focused on this like settlement of cross chain intent set type stuff if you if you kind of like abstract that part away where chains um might be es like they're escrowing funds I'll just keep it simple you escrow funds and they don't get released until you get the proof well now you do have your independence of your chain but you're connecting them in a secure way um yeah so the architecture and the design stuff here uh really does matter and I do think the ZK tool is like a

superpower to let you know the state of other chains and approvable way um in a way that doesn't require a lot of work this was like the Chris Go episode too that was also like a light bulb moment for me where I'm like okay wait um uh my my virtual machine can now know some really complicated consensus mechanism over there but it doesn't take me it takes me like linear Time pro it proof because of this ZK proof to prove it and so just gets it's it is a superpower um but yeah man I I I think the Nuance of of this of how chains have their own sovereignty um uh and yet can

know the state of other chains into useful things that that's exactly what we're trying to figure out I agree I think all roads heart are leading towards ZK proof so we're going to have to come up with specific a specific episode for yall here so thanks for thanks for listening this was a long one I know guys so if you made it to the end we appreciate you and we'll see you uh same time next week yeah thanks [Music] everyone