ETHCC Convos: Abstracting Away DeFi Complexities To Make a 10x Better UX with Connext

Transcript

foreign what's going on guys welcome back to ECC interview three of the day here with my boy Rahul from condexed Connex is a really solid Bridge uh and kind of cross chain infrastructure protocol because they don't assume any new instances of trust they don't they don't uh count on any validator sets uh they're truly one of the most decentralized Crossing infrastructures in uh in the D5 space and a lot of that has to do with what Rahul and the tech team has been cooking up so excited to talk about connects today what you guys are doing with your cross chain governance uh the um uh the uh account abstraction toolkit and a bit

more of your cool features so GM series welcome to Paris gmgm thank you so much for having me here this is cool yeah for sure man so let's just Dive Right into kind of the the kind of bridge dilemmas that we've seen uh in the last couple of really I guess since 2021 and recently we saw a multi-chain unfortunately go down as as well so I guess just from from a broad overview you know what what are some of the uh key trade-offs that we saw uh that some of these previous Bridge protocols made that ultimately led to a kind of a demise and um you know what yeah we'll just start there yeah so a couple things there first of all you know I think like you said like these bridges are adding extra

trust assumptions onto the thing like the crazy thing is like how big the surface area for a bridge hack really is like you can see Bridges when they get hacked they take down entire ecosystems like not long ago Nomad got hacked uh for like I don't know 200 million almost and it took down three chains with it like Moonbeam evmos uh milk comedy they were like we were working very closely with Nomad at the time but like that hack devastated those ecosystems because what what happened they were these ecosystems were relying on Nomad to be their fundamental bridge and that's the problem is like Bridges become such an integral part of new chain ecosystems because chains don't work without interoperability that's like a real

basic fact so we have to get to a point where we're not adding these extra trust assumptions we're doing more things we're caring about security more to the point where we can actually uh make these safe and I think the problem right now is that bridges are kind of competing on the wrong thing bridges are trying to run the entire stack so they're trying to run their own security they're trying to you know have their own execution layer then they're trying to like own these token implementations so they're saying okay we're gonna be the ones that own this token representation so that all your tokens are bridged through us and then that gets you in the scenario where then like all your assets are locked up in this one bridge bridge fails then everything is is bust you know so we're really trying to break it out that's why we've

come up with this term around like modular execution layer so we're breaking it the different pieces of the bridge out so we're not adding extra security assumptions we're leaving that to others so you know whether it's a canonical Bridge whether it's uh some optimistic verification model whether it's like you know what we're excited about in the future is things like ZK based storage proofs and things that can really make the whole uh messaging layer extremely secure and then what we do is we just plug our execution layer on top and add the ability for developers to do cool things with this infrastructure yeah I think that's the that's the key part with connects right is using the uh the uh canonical Bridges or or the

native Bridges to these ecosystems and we recently just had a podcast with Brian from layer zero labs and you're saying that and Max was telling me this too that uh the majority of the volume that they're seeing right now is between roll up to roll up basically through arbitrum to optimism Etc ZK sync etc etc um you know and the the key thing here with connects is that uh using those native Bridges that's about as secure as it gets to the base chain to arbitrim to ethereum right you're not assuming um like you say any trust Assumption of a different protocol or or a different team and that kind of goes into the ethos of what you guys have been building this entire time I feel like you guys are very aligned with the

decentralization kind of crypto trustless permissionless ethos talk to us about kind of how that goes into your mindset when you're coding and when you're building cool yeah totally so you know like you said just to touch on that point it's it's crazy because when you go roll up to roll up like the whole point of using a roll-up is that you're secured by ethereum and that's the whole pitch of Roll-Ups but then when these these protocols use other Bridges to bridge their tokens then all their liquidity is tied up in that bridge and they don't realize but they're exposing their users to the entire risk of that bridge so you know that really has been the ethos of connects is how do we build this in a way where we don't add this extra trust assumption at all and that factors into

everything we do we kind of like try to see where the space is going in like 10 15 years not just like this year not just like the next couple months how do we capture the most value and extract the most value we're saying okay we're gonna be in a situation where these things are going to be like fully decentralized we're going to build public good infrastructure we're not trying to like make as much money as we can right now we're trying to build something that lasts for the next 10 20 years and that really is the ethos that feeds into everything we build like most recently an example I'll give is this x token X erc20 standard that we just came up with and we announced as a as a ERC proposal a couple days ago actually so that was in Wake of this multi-chain

hack we you know we've been working on this for a while but this kind of just accelerated the process because now we have people from multi-chain coming to us and they're saying okay well multi-chain like destroyed our entire token we need to like move off of it or some people got lucky and said okay I'm gonna move off of this now um so you know the real important thing about that standard is it doesn't lock you in like there's other standards like you know Wormhole and like Axel are there zero they all have this like token cross-chain token implementation but it locks you into their Bridge fundamentally so we built this standard as an open standard that any Bridge can plug into so the token issuer will choose what Bridges actually get to plug into their token including canonical Bridges including native Bridges

including roll-up Bridges themselves we're working with a lot of the roller bridges on this but it kind of ultimately leads to an effect where the bridges are competing with each other on security which is how you want it to be so based Yeah so basically building the product that helps connects as the kind of let's say like intellectual property idea owner or starter but effectively what what does it do it pushes it pushes the Realms and the boundaries of of higher security and better uh experience for all users exactly we don't want to think about this like what's best for connects we want to think about this like what's best for the users and give them the platform and the tools and the build the infrastructure that will actually make users able to you know be

safe operate in in this decentralized world in a way that that it works best for all of them yeah for sure let's talk about some of the main use cases of connects that you know you guys are exploring and that we've seen in in uh you know in practice we we've got crushing governance so basically being able to uh use connects to put through dial proposals and to execute um on these on these proposals without having to have you know a multi-sig on a thousand Roll-Ups when when we get here and I think again that kind of thought process goes towards building products that are going to be useful 10 years down the line three years down the line not just today sure still today there's already there's already I mean by the end of the year we'll have eight or ten

prominent role of ecosystems if not you know close to there all already maybe even 20 right so that's big right then we've got the kind of chain abstraction for adapts as well and uh there's one more that I'm missing but it's on the tip of my tongue but yeah xcrc20 thing okay there it is yeah so we'd love to hear more about kind of your thoughts on these two uh Primitives and um yeah how you're putting them into action yeah definitely see you've done your research so that's cool uh the ex-governance stuff yeah it's super cool like the stuff you touch on having a multi-sig on every chain but the other important part there is having the Dow control on every chain you know because like otherwise if you're gonna manage each chain individually you have to have tokens on that chain that means there

could be like whales on some one chain but not another chain who are influencing proposals so what we're trying to do there is like centralize that governance and allow these tokens on any chain to be able to have the same kind of governance power for any other change so it basically makes a protocol kind of like governable from any chain and and that's really what we're trying to get to there is like you know the whole thing is about abstraction I'll talk about train abstraction next but like you know this is another part of that it's like how do you abstract the whole concept of even having different chains away from a user because that's really something that they shouldn't know about so you know that that gets into the next part which is chain abstraction so basically what that is is it's a toolkit

that we've launched that allows dap developers to basically make their dap operate uh not care about where their users come from so this dap can be running on polygon let's say their users users can be on optimism arbitrum they just like you know one click they're automatically interacting with that dap and we abstract all the like you know what asset they're coming from what chain the the app is actually on and that whole process just becomes like a one-click abstracted process so we'll be talking about that more during the week here and uh you know we're we're onboarding developers onto it right now the the stuff is all here live on mainnet so super exciting awesome yeah I think the governance one is is very

based because yeah like you said you can have manipulation happening across different chains as well as um just the the headache of having to have all these different multi sticks as a team and also executing different proposals it's like it's almost like if if in the in the in the uh USA government for some reason uh the every every person who participated in the state voting and the County voting and the federal voting all had to do it like like 10 times just to get just to get all the same result because um you're in different areas and then you're it's just it's just mad so um very cool and then on the abstraction part I mean that's just like the the biggest Narrative of this next you know let's say 18 months is like how so like

the text here it's happening we're we're like ready but how can we make it easy how can we abstract these kind of intricacies away and I feel like you guys are definitely kind of spearheading that initiative yeah and especially now the new narrative is like app roll up Scroll up toolkits so like you know I think we know of at least 100 Roll-Ups that are going live before the end of the year I think by next year we've we've said that we're gonna see like a thousand Roll-Ups at least so it's just like okay people are innovating on this they're finding ways they're finding reasons why they want to create new Roll-Ups but it's just going to destroy the user experience unless we have these kinds of tools so that that's really what we're trying to solve for here yeah I think that's where the chain

abstraction tool comes in for dapps right like any layer 2 dap can basically use uh chain abstraction um and their users don't really even know and it's just a seamless process and then like the best thing here is like when you're talking to teams right this comes back to like the beginning to kind of loop our convo because I think metallic is going to get ready to speak here about eight minutes but um the the idea of of the ethos right of that decentralization of that trustlessness of that censorship resistance it makes it easy to onboard some of these teams right it's like look guys we know that you're scared of like some of these Bridge incidents like we understand this but like here is exactly why we built our architecture in this way and here's the proof and you know this this this tool is going to help you

have help your users have a much better experience um you know and so I I could also see thousands of Roll-Ups and like an absolute mess and where there's a huge demand for that yeah totally and I I think you know one thing we always like to say it connects is connects is not a company connects is a public good it's infrastructure we're building like we want to we don't want to compare ourselves to Apple and Google we want to compare ourselves to ethereum so ethereum is the ultimate public good it was raised as a public good there's no like protocol treasury they're not making money and like some some treasury like that it's just launched it's there and it's it's kind of running and it runs itself and that's essentially where we want to get to super based so as we kind of wrap up

what's uh ahead here on the on the agenda let's say just first second half of uh of this year yeah so we're really focused on our token launch so we have the next token coming up so this is the first step towards getting to that decentralized point so we always want to we want to get our Dow running we want to decentralize everything we want to you know involve as many external contributing parties as possible have them all functioning through like a dow-like structure so that that's really the next thing we're focused on and of course pushing these standards forward like we want to really make standards around which the community and other Bridges other interoperability protocols chains tokens everybody gets involved in this process around like how do we make the world interoperable yeah it's super

based I'm going to Epic layer today later today and ZK day tomorrow and I'm going to be connecting Max with layer 2 dapps so I I'm I'm excited to see that coming fruition also stoked about the the token I know that you guys are gonna do it right and do it centralized fashion so keep building man and I appreciate your time today thanks so much man this was great