The Chainlink End Game: CCIP, Link Restaking, and Competition | Roundup

Transcript

All right, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Bellcurve. 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. So, it's easy to expand the scope of services that you use all in one location with the same economic layer, the same, you know, time-tested security and proven reliability, the high-quality nodes like Framework uh helping secure the network. You basically have all the services that you need. So, like right now it's data, compute, cross-chain, but

in the future it could it could expand to any service that our blockchain doesn't or or can't provide. That's So, it's a really massive scope beyond what I think a lot of people realize Chainlink is doing. All right, everyone. We will be back to the program in just a moment, but before we do, I want to share something that Blockworks has been cooking up for these last couple of months. March of this coming year in London, Blockworks is hosting DAS London, the largest institutionally focused conference in all of crypto. Goldman, JP Morgan, Point72, all in one room so you can know what the big money is doing. So, click the link at the bottom of this episode, it'll take you right over to homepage, and use Bell20 for 20% off, and I will see you in sunny London Town in March.

All right, everyone, welcome back to another round up edition of Bellcurve. You got me and Vance. We got a very special guest on with us here who's a Chainlink God. CLG, Vance, welcome to the show, guys. Hey, thanks for having me. Good to be here. Good to be here with with CLG, the notorious. Um the notorious CLG. Um Yeah, I thought this would be a fun episode to put together cuz Chainlink has been doing super well recently, Vance. You kind of talked about how uh we we haven't covered Chainlink probably as much as it deserves. CCIP feels like a really big deal. The RWA narrative is taking off, and it feels like Chainlink plays a super important role there.

Um so, we kind of brought Chainlink God on here to ask a whole bunch of questions about Chainlink. And the first one that I have actually for for both of you, it's actually I want to you know cuz I know Vance you and Michael were involved in Chainlink way back in the early formative days. And uh I I kind of wanted to get a sense one of the before you even get into the intricacies of how Chainlink works and CCIP and real-world assets and all of that good stuff is I want to get a sense of how this community formed. Like the Link Marines are one of the strongest communities I'd say in all of crypto. And I've kind of just taken that for granted that that exists, but it's been incredible I think for Chainlink the brand. Um, so I've just been curious like how did this end

up getting formed back in the day? Like CLG, what made you you know devote your uh your your Twitter life's work to to the to the good fellows at Link? How did this all get started? Yeah, I guess on like some initial context like the the company behind Chainlink Chainlink Labs, they were they used to be known as Smart Contract and they were building a centralized service back in like 2014. It's kind of like a full-stack solution but once Ethereum came out, it's pretty obvious that's where more most of the contracts themselves would execute but there's still like this gaping hole of uh if you don't solve the oracle blockchain problem of the stacks so smart contracts can't connect to external resources then smart contracts can't realistically do all that much. Like you you can move tokens, you can mint tokens, you can swap tokens, but any real-world smart

contract use case is going to need some kind of input and output to that contract to be useful. So that that's fundamentally what Chainlink was aiming to solve and during like the very early days like the 2017 white paper and token sale, like the team was very heads down building. Like they didn't do any marketing. It kind of kind of became a meme at one point where they just they had like maybe a couple couple tweets in 2018 in total basically. So like the community at that point was just like it was completely organically grown on on Biz and a couple other forms of like just the vision itself. Like if you look at like some of the connections that Chainlink had at the time like was with Swift and some of the other institutions it did POCs with. And you look at the problem scope that they're trying to

solve and how smart contracts exist at the time and you know this was before DeFi. It was kind of obvious like if if smart contracts were going to be useful at scale, they were going to need the services provided by Chainlink the the data inputs, the data outputs, and all the services provided thereafter. So, I think a lot of the community just saw that vision, they saw Sergey's very clear and consistent vision over the years of how uh you know cryptographic guarantees are fundamentally better than paper promises and you know creating this internet of contracts will improve society and like that's kind of what grabbed me initially as well as well as just kind of thinking through like what like what is an institutional smart contract require, right? Like you need connectivity to back-end systems, you need data inputs like weather for insurance, you need to

be able to trigger things in the real world like like payments. And if you don't have all the external services then like you just have like the this contract in the middle that is a token but doesn't really do anything itself. So, like I think Chainlink was like 10 years ahead of the rest of the industry when it first came out and there was like this core group of people who kind of saw that vision and then was just like basically all in on that vision and that really that like once I once I once it clicked for me cuz everyone kind of has that moment where it clicks then it's like okay, this is like so obvious. But this is when Chainlink was like a white paper at the time. So, you know, it's kind of unimaginable to see how it's grown to now.

Yeah, it's it's uh this was also a time where Coinbase only had I think it was Bitcoin and Litecoin and like ETH wasn't even on there. And so, the idea that Link would be this big or this prolific or this developed was was definitely far-fetched. Mi- Michael and I discovered Chainlink with uh when Ari Jules wrote Town Crier and we read that white paper and that was kind of like the seminal and I think it was before the ICO uh when that happened. May 2017. Yeah, May May 2017 and then there was an ICO and and and Michael and I were like ICO whales. I I think we did research at one point to understand like who was bigger than us. I think we were one of the larger uh address recipients. The ICO was was a

a very funny, very kind of haphazard um thing that happened, but I think, you know, we we did that and and literally like, you know, when CLG says all in, it was like I think for a while, 99% of our net worth was literally Chainlink. And we still hold and and and have Chainlink a significant amount and and we still uh run nodes and we talked to Sergey and and helped the network and basically have all of our portfolio companies use the Oracles. So, we're we're definitely still there, but this was I feel like we we were much younger at this point, even though this is only like 6 years ago or whatever.

We just would hang out on on on 4chan. The other funny part was like Chainlink God said uh Chainlink not talking to the community for a year before it and like, you know, there wasn't much to talk about. Like, that product wasn't even launched. But like, them not talking to the community left the community to its own devices on 4chan. And that's hilarious. Yeah. There was a There was a day where someone said that, you know, cuz nobody was talking to us, somebody said that um Sergey gone. a bus. Like, he was over.

It was It was truly like iron sharpening iron in the the 4chan biz forum. And whoever came out of that was just left with a lot of Chainlink and probably some form of mental illness. No, it wasn't biz. It was It was all in Slack. Uh well well, I mean, there was biz, there was Slack. There was a lot of places where it was happening. But like, the community was hanging out. Literally, Rory was hanging out in Slack all the time. This is that even like pre-Discord for crypto projects. Biz is like a unique place cuz like it's just everything floats on ideas alone.

There's no identities. Like, anything that's memetic and sticky goes through like a gauntlet. Basically, everyone trying to tear it apart and like, no no team communication. People just thinking about Oracles, and then a guy named Assblaster comes in, posting these threads about institutional use cases, and like yep, nobody was supposed to know about this project. Like, it was all just the community just going through these breadcrumbs, like these really long, like, look at these screenshots from presentations Sergey did in like 2015. Look at these logos, and like it it was exciting. It was fun. It always has been. Yeah, CLG, do you remember any memes in particular from that time?

There there were a few. Like Like, there was like fud that like Chainlink's just a JSON parser. That's what other people were like, "Oh, yeah, JSON parser, he's that guy and he's not smart on the team." I completely forgot about JSON parser. I mean, my favorite was always just like, "Hey, Bib, how'd you make all this money?" Ah, guy named Assblaster 5 on /biz. Dude, it's just it's just funny. Like, you know, Yano like Yano and I joined crypto in 2017, and one of the first things that he bought cuz some guy that was sitting next to him at his desk told him was this thing called Link. And I think it was Jason's best ever investment in his entire, crypto crypto career. He just held onto that little bag. But, it it sort of

feels like Chainlink, maybe through this organic way of this like almost like duking it out on these these uh these 4chan sort of forums, and having Sergey, who's a pretty charismatic, I would say, and very unique sort of founder that kind of gets people to follow him. But, however this funny cocktail happened, Chainlink has this community that most crypto companies I feel like would die for. Like, it has these Link Marines. And I actually remember back in I don't know, 2018 or something like that, we we used to work with Pomp and his podcast and help get it off the ground, and we had a bunch of guests on, like big great guests, like Mike Novogratz. They would always do like pretty good, and we had Sergey on, and I had never heard of him, and it did like 5x every download. We were like, "What

is this?" And it was like, "The Marines, dude. The Marines. It's just incredible. It's a force to be reckoned with. You know, Sergey Nazarov might be Satoshi Nakamoto. You never know. Wait. Didn't he file a patent for a smart contract like a couple days before? Well, so all the website addresses for the token sale um and I think it was still pointing at chain chain.link for a while was smartcontract.com. Which is registered two months after the Bitcoin white paper was uh created.

Yeah. And CLG, what what do you do for Chainlink now? Like you're you're kind of like informal community band member, band leader. Like how Like what what do what do you do for Chainlink at the moment? Yeah, it's kind of like a bucket of community ambassadorship, which is really just content creation. So, I basically try There There's so much information asymmetry about Chainlink even now. There was a whole lot in 2020 when people just first heard about Chainlink, but even now, you know, people think Chainlink is just price feeds or they think it's just doing this. So, I try to create as much content as I can just trying to break down the information asymmetry. So, I do some podcasts sometimes, I write some blogs, I write tweets, but basically just trying to educate the community however best I can. It's a It's a kind

of multi-content approach, I think, but it's There's always going to be more and more people who are just beginning their their journey learning about oracles and there's always going to be plenty of the same questions that I'm I'm happy to answer. Cool. Well, um you were actually starting to get into this before we dragged you back into the the four Chainlink forum days, but can you just give folks sort of an overview of, you know, what Chainlink is and then we can get into the nitty-gritty of what oracle networks are? Yeah, so like at a high level, I kind of mentioned this, but blockchains and smart contracts are super secure at verifying and validating transactions, but that's what they're isolated to.

That's their security model, so they can't connect to external systems. So, you need another system, oracles, to connect those smart contracts to external resources, but the oracles have to be decentralized in the same manner as a blockchain is, otherwise you have a single point of failure. So, Chainlink itself is effectively this framework for building decentralized Oracle networks. There's about a thousand Chainlink Oracle networks live right now, and it spans uh not only external data like price feeds, which is what Chainlink's most well-known for, but also things like off-chain computation as well as cross-chain interoperability. So, it's these these platform of services that blockchains cannot or do not provide.

You have Chainlink Oracle networks that provide those services effectively. So, like the the initial product market fit was price feeds back in 2020, uh and once those feeds launched, that's basically kind of what allowed DeFi to grow uh into DeFi summer and become as large as it was, cuz once devs had access to a good, reliable, secure source of price data, they could actually build lending applications and stablecoins and and derivatives, and it kind of went up from there, but uh like beyond that, Chainlink's kind of expanded the scope to also doing off-chain computation, transaction automation, serverless compute to scale blockchains, as well as CCIP with cross-chain interoperability and connecting to enterprise back-end systems. Like the the scope is kind of expanded to be much more like a platform. I kind of think of it as like a a decentralized AWS uh type platform,

which uh creates a lot of a lot of network effects and a lot of composability between these different services uh versus like trying to hodgepodge different services from different service providers with different trust assumptions and different security guarantees. You have one unified platform of all these services. So, like if you're if you're a user and you're using price feeds, let's say, for a for something, then also using Chainlink for cross-chain or automation or compute, you're not really adding any new trust assumptions cuz you're already using Chainlink in the first place. So, it's easy to expand the scope of services that you use all in one location with the same economic layer, the same, you know, time-tested security and proven reliability, the high-quality nodes like framework uh helping secure the network, you basically have all the services that

you need. So, like right now it's data, compute, cross-chain, but in the future it could it could expand to any service that our blockchain doesn't or or can't provide. That's So, it's a really massive scope beyond what I think a lot of people realize Chainlink is doing. And it's a really easy thing to describe. Yeah, it's incredibly easy to Let Let me ask you this. So, with L2s proliferating and everyone wants their own L2, and you know, I guess there's not as many L1s anymore, but CCIP will certainly serve the the EVM universe um kind of in its entirety. Like do you Do you think that things are kind of bending towards like the Chainlink arc of like a network of smart contracts versus, you know, caring or knowing even what blockchain you're

deploying on or or using? Like does it feel like the arc is starting to bend towards you guys versus like, you know, deploying price feeds like blockchain by blockchain, VRF blockchain by blockchain? Yeah, I mean it seems like the ecosystem's converging towards multichain. I mean you have every bank launching their blockchains, you have the L2 ecosystem, you have like the Solana style approach, you have like the Cosmos style approach. There's all these like different clusters that have to be interconnected. And like fundamentally Chainlink is blockchain agnostic and it's going to serve all those environments, but I think ultimately in the future users they're not going to know which blockchain they're operating on or which one they're using. And they may not even know like that they're using a blockchain itself. Like that'll be abstracted away. Like if I'm a user on Solana and I want to go use an

application on Arbitrum, like today you have to like go bridge your tokens over there, make a trade, then go bridge your tokens back, which is just a horrible user experience. It's a lot of friction. But if you can stay on the chain you prefer and use something like CCIP to interact with a smart contract on another chain, and it handles all that back-end flow between different chains and sends the value back to you, like that's a way better experience. Like if if you go use Netflix, like your first question's not like, "Oh, does this run on AWS, Azure? Like I must know what cloud server this runs on." Like nobody gives a Like nobody Nobody thinks about that. And it'll be the same thing with blockchains. They won't care what the back-end infrastructure is as long as it works and it provides them what they need. And if one blockchain has

better network effects and liquidity than another, they're going to go to whatever application is the best. So, like that thesis, I feel like the industry is moving towards that, more abstraction. Uh and Chainlink's basically perfectly suited to not only ride that narrative, but also like help facilitate that in the first place through things like CCIP and these other services that are chain agnostic. What's what's the latest on CCIP? Like uh I know they're they're kind of in pilot right now, but what I mean, what can you tell us about what's coming next? Yeah, so CCIP launched earlier this year in early access, which is effectively like this initial uh white-listed uh approach to onboard users initially, you know, uh make sure CCIP is working as intended, uh changing some features so it actually works for the users. There's

been a lot of interesting traction on the TradFi side of things. So, there was a recent uh initiative with Swift and about 12 uh of the largest financial institutions on using CCIP to move tokens between different blockchains, and allowing banks to connect their back-end systems to blockchains using Swift messaging. And so, there's been other kind of initiatives that branched out from that, like ANZ, they're a institutional bank in Australia, they have about a trillion dollars assets under management, and they're creating a cross-chain uh tokenized asset marketplace. They've issued a couple of stablecoins, and they were using uh CCIP to show how you can execute trades cross-chain. So, if there's RDAs on different chains, you can still trade different assets with each other using CCIP to bridge the assets between those

networks. So, like there there's kind of like the TradFi track of how uh CCIP it is like uh basically the institutions are testing it, and then they're moving pretty quickly towards production. Then there's like the DeFi track, uh which is things like Aave using it for cross-chain governance, Synthetix using it for cross-chain sUSD transfers, various different uh users using it for cross-chain token transfers. It's like the next stage would be basically moving to GA and adding other additional features onto CCIP, different ways to bridge tokens between different blockchains. So, like that's kind of the next step. I'm the most interested in TradFi, and seeing how that goes cuz I'm super bullish on tokenized assets, but DeFi's like a very good uh almost like case study showing like this infrastructure's useful. And that's kind of how I view price fees as well. Like DeFi's a case study for what on-chain

finance will ultimately look like. What what's your level of confidence of of TradFi? Like I I was watching Bloomberg the other day, and like JPM coin, you know, that's what they've renamed kind of like Onyx. Like, you know, we're we're settling like a billion dollars of credit transactions a day on these blockchains. Like, in one side, it's like that's awesome that they're using the technology. On the other, it's kind of like you're off on an island. Like, you're not really building an ecosystem. Like, what's what's your view on TradFi's ability to build a real ecosystem? Or or does that not even matter due to the scale of the dollars involved?

So, I think that like for a while banks and institutions had this vision of like, I'm going to create a blockchain. All my counterparties will come to me, and they'll be on my blockchain. I'll have this walled garden ecosystem. And I think it's becoming clear that if every bank launches a blockchain, and they all have that thesis, then you just have a million walled gardens, and that that like obviously doesn't work. So, I think it seems like they're they're understanding that like you can have your own blockchain, but you need to be able to connect to other people's blockchains. So, I can buy and sell my uh RWAs on those chains where the counterparties are, and bridge the value back to me. And I think right now there's like the private chain ecosystem, which is very permissioned.

It's very like regulated. It's like uh very institutional focused. And then you kind of have this this public blockchain ecosystem, and there's like this legal wall between these two ecosystems where banks can't interact completely with public blockchains yet. But, I think the ultimate vision is that as there's more clarity between these uh different blockchain environments, and institutions can start stepping into public blockchains, they'll still have their own private blockchain, but they'll be able to buy and sell assets on other banks' private blockchains, but also public blockchains as well. Cuz banks just want the most liquidity for their tokenized assets. Like, they they prefer to keep their ecosystem in their ecosystem, but if they can get liquidity elsewhere for their token on other chains, they're going to do that. And if there's other assets they want to buy that are only available on another

chain, they're going to bridge that ecosystem as well and bridge it back to their ecosystem. So, like I think the walls fundamentally will be broken down between these different ecosystems. They'll still be bank chains ultimately. Um they're not going to replace public chains in any means, but they'll just be different environments for different preferences and it'll just be kind of abstracted away. Like the end user certainly won't care what blockchain. And the banks and the developers may care, but they could still interact with all these different uh environments together. So, I think everything will become much more interconnected over time. The probably public chain ecosystem is already being connected. The private chain is slowly uh ecosystem is slowly being connected, but then we need to bridge these two ecosystems together and like that's what CCIP is ultimately trying to bridge uh all these ecosystems together one one ecosystem at

a time. So, question for you CLG, where do you see, you know, if you're sort of bullish on this RWA narrative, what you know, where is there traction uh that's happening there? So, there's an announcement this week between Onyx at JP Morgan and Avalanche for instance, where they're kind of playing around with uh you know, launching their own subnet uh type deal. Uh do you see like some of this is there like a particular chain or something like that where RWAs are really taking um taking off? Um and if so, like let's just say like the because, you know, subnets are sort of their own little isolated um spots that are still interoperable with uh like other subnets on Apple. I'm just picking on Avalanche because they just had that announcement. But like let's say there are a bunch of different banks

that launch either their own like roll-ups that are sort of uh segment like a KYC'd um you know, validator roll-up or something like that or their own subnets and there are these architectures. Where does CCIP sort of step in and help uh these little almost like cordoned off validator sets and private chains interact with other private and public chains? Yeah, so I think some interesting context is like what assets institutions actually care about tokenizing. Like the first is like uh stablecoins is a pretty clear one. We've been seeing PayPal has their stable coin. A lot of banks are looking at issuing their own. Uh and then a lot of the interest I've seen is on traditionally illiquid assets that are traded OTC or literally over the phone. Kind of like carbon credits or pre-IPO stock and those things that they don't have formal market structure.

They don't have very good liquidity. But when you when you tokenize those assets, then you actually get a lot of the benefits of being able to access more counterparties. It's cheaper to settle, faster faster to settle. You're basically leapfrogging the traditional system. There's no market infrastructure, then you leapfrog to a better market infrastructure, blockchains. And so I think in terms of what blockchains they use, I think everything's kind of standard right standardizing around EVM for the most part from what I've seen. And there's different implementations of that. There's subnets, there's L2 rollups. I think it kind of remains to be seen which exact chain environments each institution cares about. It seems like they're just launching their own tech stack kind of like quorum style.

But I think, you know, CCIP is a is a fundamentally blockchain agnostic protocol. So there's no limitations to which blockchains it can actually connect to. It just it just matters like is there demand to bridge that ecosystem? Do they want to bridge their assets to and from other ecosystems? Like there's no limitation. If banks want to launch their own subnet, that's great. If they want to launch like a quorum style chain, that's great. If they want to have a private permission L2 rollup like an Arbitrum fork on Ethereum, that's also fantastic. You know, CCIP can also connect to those environments. Like there's no there's no limitations there. So I think the chain choice remains to be seen, but just Chainlink always takes like a technology neutral approach. Chainlink doesn't compete with any blockchain. It just connects all the blockchains together, which is I think good for the whole

ecosystem. It's even if you prefer a single chain, it's better for your chain to be connected with everything else cuz then you have access to the most liquidity basically. So it's really a bull case for like the whole ecosystem for CCIP to be connected to your chain. May- maybe it's a question for kind of everyone, but like the you mentioned the PayPal USD, um I do think that's like very bullish for the space, interesting, but it's kind of also struggled out of the gate in terms of like who is it for? Like is it a consumer stablecoin that competes with Tether? Is it like a back-end payment solution that like maybe you don't like see a lot of people minting PYUSD other than like large institutions who are kind of netting and clearing transactions. Like what's the path for something like that to

kind of become important, I guess. It seems like it's primarily focused towards like consumer style payments. I think that they're initially on Ethereum and that's not necessarily like Ethereum mainnet and that's not necessarily the best platform for stablecoin transfers. I know Visa has been looking at doing like settling uh transactions using USDC on Solana, for example. So, it seems like things may be shifting more towards like higher throughput chains to facilitate that, but it seems like it's primarily like cross-border payments and just like if you look at the conditions of when you hold dollars in like a PayPal account, like you're not very well protected.

Like you're at the back of the bankruptcy court. You have no visibility. They invest your assets in like fairly risky opaque things, but stablecoins are like treasury and cash. And it's very clear what the reserves are and you have ability to take your assets out of that platform, but that platform will basically offer a much better user experience if you need to pay somebody over overseas and not have to go through traditional wire transfers. So, it seems like that's the target market they're going after, but it doesn't seem like they've leaned into it 100% just yet, but you know, I can't speak for them, but that's kind of my perspective here. I mean, we share the same perspective in general. Um I'd say stablecoins is probably like the one product market fit that you can point to with uh blockchains working. But with PayPal in

particular, I think they don't really have a use case yet. You know, you look at the top stablecoins, um USDT, USDC, DAI, they all have different sort of use cases. I don't know how you integrate that, but it does feel like PayPal is is sort of missing the boat in terms of, you know, their use for pay USD. What What's the What's the other side of that coin with like the stuff you've got guys have been doing with Swift, DTCC, ANZ? Like what what does that look like? Cuz that that feels like the non-consumer use case. Yeah, those are kind of like the assets I mentioned where they're focused more on very like illiquid assets that don't have good market infrastructure. So, things like pre-IPO stock, carbon credits, and eventually, you know, most funds are going to become tokenized on

chain and they're going to be managed directly on chain with all the assets that they that they invest in. So, that's less consumer-facing and that's more banks are going to be issuing tokenized assets. They're faster to settle, cheaper to interact with, and it's programmable. You can have data and value on the same database flowing together. Like that that's already a huge efficiency gain over the fragmentation that exists in the traditional system itself. But when every bank's launching their own blockchain, uh like that's a huge amount of fragmentation that institutions are looking to solve. Plus, just the fundamental ability to connect a an institution to a blockchain. Like there's probably going to be hundreds of blockchains that some institution wants to interface with, but if you integrate with each one of those blockchains individually, it's not a very viable

approach. It's not very scalable. But if you have like one integration point, you have one CCIP layer to connect to and you can access every other chain, then you can access the tokenized assets that you want to purchase or that your clients want to purchase. And basically, like what ANZ is trying to build is just like a marketplace for tokenized assets. They'll issue their stable coins on there. You can go purchase whatever assets are listed on that on that marketplace, no matter who actually issued that asset or where that asset lives. So, it's basically every bank will eventually have different interfaces for the tokenized asset economy, and it'll just be different views on the same economy versus like different isolated ecosystems. You go on JP Morgan, you buy JP Morgan assets.

Versus, you go on the JP Morgan tokenized asset marketplace, you can access all these different assets across all these different all these different venues. So, I think that's that's more institutional focus and less consumer-facing because consumers will just let their asset managers or whatever else manage those assets and deal with those flows themselves. I think eventually it'll flow down to benefit the retail members, but right now it's like primarily focused towards institutions who want to tokenize these assets. All right, everyone. We will be back to the program in just a moment, but before we do, I want to share something that Blockworks been cooking up for these last couple months. March of this coming year in London, Blockworks is hosting DAS London, the largest institutionally focused conference in all of crypto. We are gathering 1,200 of the world's largest asset managers, so think TradFi

macro funds, crypto native funds, big allocators, and financial institutions, so banks, payment processors, etc. All in one spot. It's very rare to get the likes of Goldman, JP Morgan, Point72, whatever all in one room so you can know what the big money is doing. We're diving into the themes that they care about. So, we're talking about the intersection of macro and crypto, where we are in the cycle, real-world assets, so everything from stablecoins to on-chain treasuries to tokenized assets. It's going to be a blast, but the other reason you really want to go is London, baby, center of the world at one point. You got pub culture, you got fish and chips, great beer. It's going to be a blast, so because you're such great listeners to Bell Curve, there's a code Bell 20 that's going to get you 20% off, so click the link at the bottom of this

episode. It'll take you right over to the homepage. You'll see all of our speakers and use Bell 20 for 20% off. Ticket prices are going up soon. Make sure you go, use that code, and I will see you in sunny London town in March. CLG What do you think is the proper analogy for how many different blockchains or networks we're going to have? Is it sort of like inter or intranets of private networks for companies? Is it database technologies? Is it operating systems? I I I think we've kind of like thought about all of them as being different analogies for for how, you know, this tech matures, but what would you say is your maybe like core analogy for how we should think about each one of these different networks and like how many they're going to be.

I mean, the way I kind of see it and the way things are kind of moving towards with app chains and L2s uh is it's almost just like every website has a back end effectively. And so, every blockchain instance is a back end. There's platforms like YouTube, which is a shared database basically of videos. And so, that's more of like a a shared database of different applications. But, every website has its own back end that's optimized for whatever use case that they're doing. And I think that's likely where things will shift where, you know, somebody can come deploy their own L2 for some specific use case like uh high throughput derivatives trading, and they don't have to deal with the congestion of any other chain dealing uh different use cases on their layer. But, they can still interface with other L2 environments or other chain

environments. So, that that's kind of the way I see it where things are increasingly going towards like this app chain thesis. There may be different ways of sharing secu- security and having like a shared underlying economic layer backing some chains like L2, L3 type designs, or it could be completely independent side chain or subnet uh style designs. But, I kind of see it the same way as like there's a million different types of cloud services out there. There's a million different types of uh website databases out there. But, you still have one underlying TCP/IP protocol to connect all those internet databases together. Like, if you go on the internet, you don't go to like aws.com and then you have AWS applications and then gcp.com and GCP applications. You just go to the application and use the application itself. You don't care what the back end

database is. So, it feels like things will convert to that direction where everybody will eventually have some instance of blockchain. Yeah, you're you're not you're not bridging your PII to MongoDB. Nobody thinks about it that way before you use an app. Um I mean in 5 or, you know, may- maybe like 20, 30, what do you think crypto looks like? I think I mean, it's kind of like estimating internet use cases like back in the '90s, but I think it'll be deeply ingrained the same way the internet is today where the assets you hold will be natively on chain, but they won't be blockchain assets. They'll just be assets. Like it won't be on chain finance, it'll just be finance. It'll be like that deeply ingrained where the services that you use will have

additional layers of trust minimization backed into it. So, whether it's assets you hold has a proof reserve attached to it, or whether it's the assets you have, but you store the private key yourself. I think in the future all that complexity will eventually be just completely abstracted away into the background where everybody will be interfacing with the blockchains, whether it's decentralized social media, whether it's assets they hold, whether it's the gaming applications and NFTs that they hold. It'll just be deeply ingrained. And I think if we get to a point with AI where AI is able to hold private keys and own their own assets, you start to have DAOs that are like actually autonomous, and they can manage their own assets, they can hire their own people, and they'll use crypto as like the monetization layer of the currency layer of the organization itself. So, like that's very

future-facing, I think. But fundamentally, it's just all the world's assets will be brought on chain and operating within an on chain economy, rather than like the fragmented different pieces of the economy where it's you can't, you know, if you have like PayPal, you can't just go buy a stock uh natively. You have to go to a different application cuz it's a different database, and there's no interoperability. When you have a blockchain-based world economy, like there aren't none of those barriers effectively. So, I think it'll just be shifting the way people think about how they actually hold and own assets themselves. We've talked about RWAs tokenization. Um other than that, what would you say is the most interesting category for blockchain applications right now?

And maybe it's something that is upcoming and, you know, isn't obvious yet. Yeah, I mean, I I'm supremely bullish on tokenized assets. Like that's where like a lot of my my my focus has been focused on. But I do think decentralized social media is an interesting use case where if you have an underlying social media protocol censorship resistant, then you have interfaces on top of that that have their own filtering uh policies of how you view and what content you actually view. Like that seems like a very obvious path forward for how social media works where people are able to choose their own content moderation policies and there's this shared underlying ledger and layer for all of these social media posts. Like I think that's a very interesting path. But I think even just with like tokenized assets, we really

only scratched the surface of what we're what what we're what we can see over like the next 5 to 10 years how everything starts to begin to to be traded on chain. Like there's there's always use cases like gaming or gaming and people being able to actually own their in-game assets as NFTs and you can move your in-game assets from one game to another game and use it there. Like that that's already an incredibly powerful dynamic. Like I played Runescape when I was growing up and you know you there were like these items called party hats which were they issued them once back in like early 2000s, they never issued it again and it became very rare.

Like those party hats were worth basically the max amount of of currency you could hold in the game effectively. And so I think people already value digital goods and digital collectibles and they can't fundamentally own those assets within games that they have now. And they can't take those assets to other games when that first game shuts down. Like you basically are wiped out or the rules can be changed on you. So once you're able to actually fundamentally take ownership of those assets, that's like a paradigm shift where people can start building their own game. You can basically fork games if there's a decision made in the original game you don't like, you can fork the game and create your own instance with the same state transferred over to this other application. So like fundamentally blockchains are just used to prove ownership and show transparency so

people can verify assets. And that logic can be applied to any type of application. You know, finance I'm the most interested in, that applies to gaming, that applies to social media, and that applies fundamentally to any contractual agreement whether it's like insurance or whatever. Like every agreement is better when you can actually own ownership of the assets and you can actually verify what the contractual agreements of that contract is. Like it's infinitely applicable to any any use case vertical. So, I've got a question for you. Maybe, you know, probably there's a lot of crypto natives that are that are listening to this show. And I guess one of the things that um has I'm I first of all I think real world assets are happening and that it's it's sort of inevitable at this point,

but one of the things that always made me a little bit like pushed me back from getting like super excited about it is I'm kind of like I don't really know how to participate in that if that makes sense. Like, okay, money market funds come on chain, treasuries come on chain. Like, what do I Okay, that's like great, but what am I supposed to do with that? And one question that I have for you as like a cultural thing and maybe this was kind of maybe the to poke a little bit more at that end state that Vance asked you about like one difference that I've I've heard this from a lot of people, but I've kind of noticed it myself is like there is kind of like that Yeah, TradFi has its stuff that it likes to buy and speculate on, which is like treasuries

and the stock market and stuff like that, and then crypto has its stuff that it likes to buy and speculate on. And I guess I'm just like wondering how you see you know if if there's a future where everything that exists on TradFi, be it money market funds or repo facilities or like whatever that is, all that banking, that all comes on chain is it how does it look different than than TradFi today, I suppose, and what is sort of the existing crypto culture and set of assets and ideals look like in that that on chain you know, TradFi on chain future world. Yeah, what I've kind of seen is that like if if you're in the US, you have a fairly decent financial system supporting you and it doesn't really reveal how fragmented and unstable the

system is until something like SVB or something happens and then people realize how fragile the system is. But, you know, when you're in a nation where your currency is inflating, you know, triple digits inflation, being able to move to a stable coin in that can't be seized by the state itself like I feel like that's a very fundamentally valuable use case of crypto itself that, you know, they want to hold Tether and it usually it's Tether on Tron that I've noticed is like the most common currency I use to kind of escape inflation. But I think fundamentally like blockchains are back-end infrastructure and it's not necessarily the most sexy use case to say like, "Hey, we're going to make money markets more more efficient and we're going to make ton fun funds and all all these different markets more efficient." But I think

the more interesting thing is that like when you have all these different fragments of global economies and they're able to be interconnected with one another, you know, I'm able to go buy assets from another nation without any without any barriers or frictions from that. If I needed to be able to go pay, you know, my parents who go live in, you know, let's say South somewhere in South America, I don't need to go pay $50 for a for a transfer and go wait a week and then hopefully it lands over there. If you can send that in seconds and it settles, you know, for a couple of pennies, like that unlocks an insane amount of value and just GDP where you don't have all this friction. Like in the traditional system, there's just so much value leakage and friction from so many intermediaries. If you're able to move

those processes on chain, remove all the manual processes, I as an end user can go verify, okay, this application actually has the assets that it says it has and that I actually know the like the integrity of the application is immensely valuable. Like if you look at 2008, it was like fundamentally a problem like too much risk but also too much opacity where you couldn't tell how much risk there was in that system. But if people are able to verify the exact risk exposure of an economy of an ecosystem itself, you're able to mitigate prevent these significant cyclical like booms and bust cycles. Like they'll still exist fundamentally, but like you you're able to mitigate the huge systemic failures which, you know, results in foreclosures and people losing their

job. Like if we can solve that problem, that'll be a huge benefit even if I am not a person who goes invest in treasuries or or bonds or stock or equities. Like the benefits still flow down to you even if you're not the direct end user of that product itself. The institutions themselves become more verifiable and you can actually track the risk that's happening in that system itself. So, that's kind of the lens that I'm viewing it on. So, like you can go buy the assets yourselves and you have way more more friction, but the system itself becomes anti-fragile, basically. And that's a huge benefit to everybody, particularly if you're in a nation with an inflating currency and you can't trust the financial system or the legal system, you can trust a blockchain and you can hold your assets there. So, like there's

there's different elements here, but the benefits ultimately flow down to the end user, I think. Mhm. Can I Can I ask you actually just about CCIP how it actually works? And I've got And then I've got one more question for you on on just re-staking and how that impacts Chainlink in general. But CCIP, I think the model of a bridge that most By the way, would you call CCIP a bridge? Is that how you describe it? I would say it's a cross-chain messaging protocol. You can build bridges on. It's like bridges are a use case. Okay, cool. So, it's almost like one layer below. So, okay. So, can you kind of just walk us through like technically, when you say it's a it's kind of a low-level messaging protocol, I'm almost thinking the the reference point that I have in my head is like a

layer zero type type thing. Like how similar is it to what layer zero offers? Can you just kind of get a little bit more specific about I get the idea that CCIP connects all of these things, but how does it actually do that? Like what are the parts of the protocol that are involved? Yeah, so CCIP is not like a singular network. It's actually composed of multiple networks. So, you have the primary networks that connect the different chains together, but like each each bridge on CCIP, which is like a specific chain connection, Solana to Avalanche, say, like that's a specific collection of networks. But on addition to that, you have something that's called the risk management network, which is the second independent network that's written in a different programming language, was created by a

different internal team. It was uh runs using a completely separate independent set of node operators compared to the primary CCIP system. And it's basically a second validation layer where every transaction that flows over CCIP, whether it's just arbitrary data, it's tokens, or it's a combination of tokens and data, uh those transactions are not only verified by the primary CCIP networks, but it's also verified by the second independent network that's making sure that each transaction is actually legitimate. And if it's not, it can halt those transactions and even shut down CCIP itself. So, like CCIP is not one network, it's actually a collection of networks for every chain lane effectively. But like when you look at what CCIP can do, you can you can move arbitrary messages between

different blockchains. So, if I need to call a function on a contract on another chain, you can send that message cross-chain. You can obviously bridge tokens themselves, whether it's like uh creating a wrapped token or you do burn and mint uh style where you you burn the coin on the source chain, you mint it on the destination chain. But I think what's cool is you can you can combine those, and you could do programmable token transfers. So, you send tokens from one chain to another, and it has instructions, context, on what to do with those tokens on the destination chain. So, like let's say deposit it on Aave, then go borrow stablecoins, buy an NFT, and then go bridge it back to me on the other chain. So, you could basically create this whole pipeline of of events.

So, if I'm on Ethereum, I want some tokens, but they're most liquid on Solana, I can go to CCIP, say, "Hey, you know, take my stablecoins, go buy this token on Solana, then bring it back to me." It'll go through that do that flow, and I never had to actually even touch Solana to get that flow executed. And that whole flow is being validated by this primary CCIP network and the secondary risk management network that isn't any other cross-chain protocols. So, like Layer Zero's all about uh optionality and like having choice, but I think that's kind of dangerous for users cuz if I go use an app and they're saying they're using Layer Zero, I don't know what that means. Like what security guarantees do I get from that? The configuration could be one way Monday and then a different way on Wednesday, and I don't know anything of like what

am I getting here? But with CCIP, you're getting these strong security guarantees where every transaction flowing over CCIP is validated by multiple networks, multiple independent networks. So you have a very strong assurance that I'm actually going to move my tokens cross-chain, they won't just get lost in the void. So I think it's a fundamentally different approach to security by having this like multiple layers defense-in-depth security that's not seen anywhere else. Like CCIP's bread and butter is basically solving the cross-chain security problem. Like 2.6 billion dollars in cross-chain funds exploited, like that's it's just unacceptable. Like we have to solve that problem and that's that's what CCIP's trying to solve.

How does the Chainlink token play into this? Is it like should people think of it as like an L1 gas token as as these transactions happen? Or or how do you think of it? Yeah, so like LINK you can kind of bucket it into two different areas. Like one it's like LINK is a payment token. So LINK is the standard form of payment for Chainlink services and Chainlink's working on something called payment abstraction where users can pay in the assets they already have, whether it's ETH or stablecoins or eventually even credit cards. And on the back end it'll get converted to LINK and then paid to service providers. So that's kind of a narrative of a narrative the community created called universal gas token where it's basically no matter what chain you use with CCIP, no matter what asset you pay in, it gets converted to LINK and

paid to the operators. And paid eventually also to stakers, which is the second part, which is LINK is a staking token where node operator service providers stake a LINK as basically a commitment backing their services, which can then be slashed if they don't meet those commitments. So that staking launched late last year, there's a new version launching later this month, and that'll expand out to more services including CCIP providing like this additional layer of economic security. Plus as you get like surplus revenue that flows down to stakers, which then attracts more stakers and creating a more secure service for for that is. But uh like the those are kind of like the two broad lenses you can see the LINK token through.

So So that was actually going to be my next question, which was uh how do you define and I've heard Sergey talk about this a number of times, you know, security in general. You know, when you talk about CCIP being the secure way of message transfer or cross-chain communication, how do you define that security? Yeah, so there's like almost like different tiers you could define cross-chain security like specifically. Like at the first level you basically have a single server, like a single guy with a single private key. He moves your tokens. Obviously that sucks. Nobody wants to use that type of solution. There's things like multichain where they give the appearance of decentralization. So they say, "Hey, look at all these nodes that I have.

It's decentralized." But what they actually mean is distributed cuz one guy controls all those nodes. Multichain got wrecked basically because that situation. The CEO disappeared and the whole network went down basically. Um that's not ideal. The third is like when you have like a central- not centralized, but you have this uh hub network. You have this this single monolithic network that processes all the cross-chain transactions. And that's meaningfully better, but you still have one network processing all cross-chain transactions and that doesn't scale in the same way that blockchains have issues scaling when you just have one single monolithic network. As well as like if any chain lane connection is exploited, the whole all the connections between chains become at risk. So like this this fourth step, which is what Chainlink has historically operated at,

is where you have multiple networks. So every bridge within a cross-chain protocol has its own decentralized network. So you have this isolated security between all these different chain connections and it's much more scalable because if one chain lane between two chains gets congested, it doesn't cause the rest of the network to become congested. And if one chain lane is exploited, you have that one chain lane, but you have all the other ones that are operating fine. The The fifth level, which is what CCIP operates, is multiple networks, but also this secondary risk management system on top, which monitors every cross-chain transaction, can initiate emergency halts, as well as uh having other things like token rate limits, limiting how many tokens you can move. So if it is exploited, you don't drain the protocol, Uh uh uh basically. So, like there's there's there's different tiers, and

every bridge kind of operates at a different tier. And so, like saying CCIP operates at the highest level of security is because it has multiple networks and a risk management network system securing every transaction. Well, a lot of bridges are just this this singular blockchain-like model for uh bridging tokens, which is kind of concentrates risk and doesn't scale fundamentally as well. You're basically exposing yourself if there's one vulnerability in that bridge, like you're screwed. Compared to if you had a risk management network, it could halt those transactions. So, like those are the different tiers, and there's always additional defense in depth mechanisms that you can add on top of that. Uh like even when it comes down to upgradeability, having a time lock where node operators can veto any changes is like how CCIP is upgraded. So, like

there's little things like that, but it's just having defense in depth is something that a lot of bridges haven't done well or just had really low-quality code and got wrecked uh because they uh you know, bridges is just a fundamentally hard infrastructure to to do it securely. Do Do you see like the Layer Zeros of the world as like the competitors? The Axelar's? Like I like I feel like a lot of CCIP to me is is is so powerful cuz it has so much distribution. And it's starting from a position of strength versus like trying to bootstrap an ecosystem. Like I but I feel like at the same time like these people would be like, you know, yeah, we do that, too.

Can I Can I add uh CCTP, the Circle's uh transfer protocol? Yes, like honestly, when I look at Chainlink versus other protocols, I don't think Chainlink has any competitors. And what I mean by that is like there's other guys who do price feeds or they do automation or they do VRF or cross-chain or whatever, but they usually just do that one thing. That's their product. That's their bread and butter. But what Chainlink is doing all of these different services. So, like if you look at Google and Microsoft, those are two companies that are competitors because for every product vertical, they're competing on something, whether it's like search versus Bing or Chrome versus Edge, Docs versus Word, like whatever, like they have some competing product across those verticals. With Chainlink, like there's no other platform that offers the same scope of

services that Chainlink offers. So, like there's not really a true comparison there. But, you know, like when you look at like CCIP specifically, it's fundamentally like a cross-chain messaging protocol. And so, like Chainlink CCIP, like it wasn't the first to the cross-chain game by any means, but I think it is the most secure approach to cross-chain that we've seen thus far. I think that plus the network effects of already having ecosystem of 2,000 users is like a significant edge that other protocols just starting, they don't have that edge, they don't have those network effects. Uh to the point of like CCTP, I think it's an interesting approach of like token issuers having their own bridge, but like with CCIT CCTP, that's Circle's cross-chain uh protocol for USDC transfers between chains, that's

like specifically for USDC, which is useful for like ensuring canonical tokens between chains, but if I want to go bridge ETH or like go bridge LINK, like that doesn't really become as relevant. Uh and if you want to use it for messaging, you're basically trusting Circle as a company, which is like that first tier of security I mentioned, which is just, you know, one entity with a private key, that's not that kind of defeats the point of using blockchains in the first place. Uh but it works for USDC cuz you're already trusting Circle if you hold USDC. So, I I think that um yeah, like CCIP is fundamentally cross-chain messaging, and there will be competitors here. I just think that Chainlink is a better mode, has better network effects, and way better security than other competing solutions.

Yeah, it feels like the the cross-chain um transfer versus message is going to end up becoming a lot more message heavy uh as, you know, dApps get to be more intelligent and smarter um versus transferring assets between chains. Yeah, like when you look at the flows, most of it today is like retail bridging tokens. I think some of it's inflated by people expecting airdrop of a certain protocol, but I think over time dApps will realize like I can actually split my app up into multiple chunks on different chains. Like, I want to hold the custody on Ethereum, but I want to do high-frequency trading portion of my app on Solana cuz it's better at that. Then, if you have a messaging protocol, you can basically stay in sync between all these different deployments cuz you look at like Uniswap or like traditional

multi-chain approaches, you're copy-pasting the same app across every chain, which fragments all the liquidity across all the different chains. Like, it's not that's not really that's not cross-chain. It's multi-chain. But, if we're able to connect all those different deployments, you can have almost like storefront contracts on every chain, which then bridges to wherever the logic is actually located. And so, like those natively running cross-chain applications are way more useful cuz then if I like Ethereum, I stay on Ethereum, I can still access all the contracts in the blockchain ecosystem. I just go touch the storefront contract. I think, you know, like obviously we're not there yet. I think that's where we're where we're going to go, and I I do think that most of volume will be messaging and not necessarily token transfers. It'll be tokens as needed as a part of the messaging, but the underlying volume

will be mostly messaging at the end of the day. I got a question for you about uh re-staking, actually. And so, you were describing Chainlink the LINK token within the Chainlink ecosystem as a staking token. So, basically the idea being like, "Hey, I'm going to provide these valuable services to this network of oracles, and to prove how trustworthy I am and that you should trust me, I'm going to stake some some LINK, presumably." And maybe you get some rewards, and then you get slashed if you do bad work. And one of the thing that's happening in the Ethereum ecosystem is this advent of re-staking and eventually liquid re-staking, wherein ETH exports its security and I guess to something like an I think they're called AVSs, actively validated systems,

um so that these protocols can sort of solve that cold start problem, um and they don't need to necessarily inflate their token supply quite a bit, and they can actually just use ETH security. And they can also be like ETH aligned, you know, maybe in and cross the fingers for some ETH users and liquidity and all that stuff. So, my question to you is, do you think Chainlink, I guess Chainlink's in a little bit of a different position because it's so established at this point, it has a moat, and I would guess real revenues and all that kind of stuff, but do you ever see Chainlink using something like restaked ETH to secure itself? Is that would that ever be on the road map or, you know, how would you kind of think about that option?

Yeah, I would say two things. One, I don't actually think EigenLayer solves the cold start problem from an economics perspective in the sense that if you have a like decentralized infrastructure protocols are a marketplace of buyers and sellers, service providers and users, and the cold start problem in my mind is that service providers or nodes are not going to join a protocol unless it's profitable for them to do so, but users can't purchase services if there are already a profitable set of node operators that exist selling services. So, you fundamentally need a token in the first place to pay those node operators to ensure that they're profitable.

To to create the supply side for the demand side to actually purpose to to purchase. And you do that by token inflation, which ideally over time you replace with user fees and then you're sustainable, and then you actually have surplus revenue to the token itself. So, I think that that in my mind that's like the core economic problem of bootstrapping a network. You need some way to pay service providers, which is through a token. But I think going to the other point of just like restaking with EigenLayer in terms of oracles, I think that like the amount of collateral a node operator locks up is one element to how secure oracle service is. Like there's a lot lot of other elements like with you look at Ethereum validation, it's pretty set and forget.

You set up your node, you make sure it's working that you have backups, and then you put it in the basement somewhere and you make sure it's like running, basically. But running an oracle node is basically almost like running a business where you have to actively choose what data sources you want to support, what blockchains you want to support, what services you want to support, and it really matters more in like how high quality that node operator is. What's their track record? What's their performance? What is the economic opportunity cost being lost if they're malicious? As well as just how they run their infrastructure itself. So like if you just look at the economic staked collateral portion, that's just like one element of the story itself. But like with Chainlink, Chainlink's a blockchain agnostic protocol. So if it does restaking with ETH, that would be tying

itself to the hip to Ethereum. But it operates on like 18 plus blockchains. So it you know is it it doesn't necessarily make sense to tie yourself to one specific blockchain. As well as I think just having a token has economic flywheels themselves where you have like these implicit incentives where if you have network service providers who are financially exposed to the native token of the network, they're exposed to the overall health of that network itself. So like with Bitcoin mining, Bitcoin miners earn Bitcoin revenue, they hold ASICs. If they collude and attack the network, they devalue their Bitcoin holdings, their future revenue in Bitcoin, and their ASIC equipment. So it's just like more profitable to be honest itself versus having this external collateral which its valuation is tied to some other

external system. So I think there's like multiple dimensions. I've kind of thought about this over time. I don't think restaking works that great in terms of EigenLayer for for Chainlink. I think it makes sense for like DA or other other services like for the Ethereum ecosystem. But yeah, I think for like a Chainlink ecosystem, if anything, LINK would be restaked where you stake LINK on multiple Chainlink services to reuse that collateral in a more economically efficient manner. I think that's likely. But like in terms of using ETH as collateral, it basically breaks the economic flywheel that that's already happening in the Chainlink network. More fees leading to more services being secured is more staked being secured leading to more users.

Like this this flywheel effect is is very powerful dynamic of having a token. Chainlink restaking. You heard it here first. By the way, I'm pretty sure I Shreyas's vision, I'd have to go back and check Miles and I did an interview with him a little while ago, but I think he said that his intention was that EigenLayer is a sort of marketplace where you could restake other assets outside of just ETH also so maybe there is link link restaking. I don't know. You know, you bring up a really good point though because I've actually thought about this myself.

Like if your security is dependent on ETH, which is basically a currency that you don't print. It's kind of similar to another country holding foreign exchange reserves or something like that, which the benefit of that is that, okay, I have these treasuries that aren't going to go down in value if my, you know, I blow it with my economy and then need to print, you know, uh till the cows come home so I can't buy energy, but then you also like you could find yourself you're almost taking on like foreign exchange risk in a weird way. And the advantage of being able to issue your own token is you get total sovereignty over that over that token.

You do kind of align incentives within your own ecosystem. So, I think you bring up a really good point there. Um so It it remains to be seen if restaking really works in the way that we understand it where, you know, someone will forego having their own token to your point or like give you a chunk of like that initial emission of that first year to restake or, you know, secure your stuff on their behalf. I guess you get the attention and the and the love of, you know, whichever asset you're using to denominate your security in. If it's ETH, Chainlink, if it's whatever, but like at what cost? It and it's kind of like tokens all the way down. It's like, you know, you get like DA tokens, you'll get like, you know, bridge tokens or like if it's

another oracle, like oracle tokens, but they actually have to have some sort of inherent value for it to actually work. So, we'll see. Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. And then the other the other something to consider as well from the perspective of both, I guess like a liquid restaking protocol or the protocol who uh you know, who you're renting ETH from is what happens when you trade your token for ETH, right? I would guess from like EigenLayer's perspective, you kind of want to insta-dump that, but maybe then that's not great, you know, uh biz dev relations, you know, maybe there's some pressure for EigenLayer not to insta-dump the tokens and then Auto T-wop back into ETH.

Auto T-wop, yeah, and then it's like, so what are we really doing here? You know, I I I'm kind of there with you. I It makes a lot of sense from the perspective of if you imagine all of ETH stake being solo stakers, and they're like, "Hey, I'm like running this this uh you know, operation myself. I want to like pledge this again to opt into running my own little small business, like an oracle sort of network." I guess that sort of makes I don't know. I'm kind of slowly coming to that conclusion as well. I'm I'm just questioning how much sense it makes in a totally passive delegated stake world where it's mostly professional operator sets.

But, I will say like I've personally heard from a bunch of protocols that like they're really into this idea, and they want to do it. So, I guess we're going to have to see how it plays out. Well, we'll figure something out that works. In the interim, there's going to be so many tokens given out for free to these restaking services, it's going to be like kind of comical. We counted them up today. Uh there's 12 restaking outside of EigenLayer, there's 12 restaking protocols that are currently raising capital or have raised capital. And so, it's like it kind of seemed like the beginning of like a DeFi summer starting to emerge.

Like, I think that's one theme I'm pretty confident. 2024, people are going to be farming. There's going to be restaking, there's going to be Maker endgame, there's going to be SNX uh Infinex uh farming, there's going to be so many things that you can do on these chains. Um that's definitely going to be a a meta narrative that I do think Chainlink will also be a part of as well. Yeah. Um maybe in closing uh Wait, wait, I got I got I got one question for CLG before we close. What's next for the Link Marines? Well, I think I mean later this month the new version of staking is launching. So, if you haven't heard about that, definitely go check that out. That all eventually expand out to more services, activate user fees for stakers, as well as projects who have

joined the build program uh are contributing a portion of their token supply as being a part of that program to use Chainlink services and get technical support, which will eventually flow down to stakers. So, I think that'll be a very interesting dynamic. And fundamentally, Chainlink's making three big bets. You have CCIP, which we we've talked about. You have data streams, which is a pull-based low-latency Oracle solution, which a lot of derivatives protocol on Arbitrum are starting to integrate. GMX is using it on mainnet right now. And then you have functions, which is this like self-service Oracle uh network platform, where you define what data sources you want. You can run computations over it off-chain and then inject that on-chain onto any network. So, like I think it'll be interesting to see how those data compute cross-chain bets play out,

particularly as people will start to integrate more and more services uh into one application as like the platform thesis gets more and more realized over time. So, like I'm I'm very bullish on uh derivatives using data streams in particular. I think that'll be a significant boom. I think most derivatives trading will will happen on chain and move away from exchanges. Nice. That was actually going to be my question. What's like one thing that you're looking forward to? Um All right, folks. I think we can wrap it This was good to reunite the the old Link Link crew here.

We never We never left. All right. Cool. Later guys. Uh Chainlink God, thanks for hopping on, man. This was a lot of fun. Thanks, Wars. Thanks, all. Appreciate it. See you. Bye.