Finding Common Ground | Solana, Avalanche, Terra

Transcript

hey bankless nation we are back we are live streaming this special edition panel episode the theme here is finding common ground so we have some alternative layer ones some of the founders of solana avalanche and possibly tara we'll see if dokuan shows up in just a minute uh but david give us some context for this panel why are we doing it what's the uh the context going into this yeah i think the industry is still unpacking 2021 because it was such a crazy year definitely the craziest year in crypto's history like period uh and the the mental model that i have for this is that the start of 2021 was really ethereum rising out of the bear market uh and having a lot of success and then a lot of that and then in the wake of

that a lot of newer l1s to crop up on the scene with different design structures different blockchains also capture a bunch of users and there's been a ton of demand for users to do crypto stuff and a lot of these newer layer ones have innovated in new ways that have enabled a lot of new people to come into the crypto ecosystem and so we want to unpack uh just a little bit about where we all have common ground with all of these different blockchains all blockchains are blockchains which means we have common ground somewhere and we want to find where that is and and then grow that ground grow that that area of real estate of which we all share so that is the panel that we are having today we invited uh anatoly emin and dough

from tara solana and avalanche uh dough it was uh i don't know where doe is we don't know where he is right now yeah uh he's mia at the moment if he comes in the next few minutes uh that would be fantastic otherwise we have anatoly and emin who's uh imminently about to show up uh right after we get through some of these other messages ryan what else do you have to say about this fantastic panel well uh i think i just want to say that the theme for this panel is good vibes only you know in in 2022 so we're going to have a productive conversation i think um crypto is a little bit tired of a lot of the the tribalism goes on so this is a great opportunity to not be tribal and just have a great conversation so that's what we're gonna do guys some other

announcements housekeeping things as we get in the first is we've got a conference coming up this is the permissionless conference i believe avalanche and solana are going to be there uh tara maybe too not sure but this is a fantastic conference coming in may 17th to 19th just wanted to let you know to get your tickets uh soon for this event tickets go up every two weeks and uh batches are released every two weeks as well so grab your ticket to this event both david and i will be there also wanted to give a quick psa from our friends at xerion because they've incorporated some new layer 2 and multi-chain features in particular this is a xerion portfolio you see this david look at this what am i doing here

what you looks like you're swapping networks ryan you can swap networks now in zurion all of your assets in one place one user interface really cool also uh tell them about bridging david because zurion enables some bridging as well yeah bridging is a very complicated world because there's going to be so many bridges of so many different types and that's why i'm kind of bullish on the world of bridge aggregators or bridge obvious skaters where it lets you do exactly what ryan is doing right now which is not care about what bridge you're using and just simply being able to send your assets to the place that you want to go without having to worry about the details about how you got there and so that's what zirion is doing is making bridging easier so we can all become bridgeors in 2022.

we are all migrating to layer two almighty grading to different side chains getting off the ethereum l1 that's the message here get on layer two connect your wallet use xerion to hop across those bridges get started there's a link in your show notes to do that all right guys we're gonna be back with our guests in just a minute but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible slingshot is a decentralized trading platform that combines the performance and ease of a centralized exchange with the openness and transparency of defy slingshot aggregates liquidity from all of d5 in order to find the best price on thousands of crypto assets every token on slingshot comes with a price chart and trade logs to give you insights into the market's activity in real time slingshot is available on polygon arbor trump and optimism saving you from the

high gas feeds and low transaction speeds of the ethereum l1 there are no fees to trade on slingshot and any positive slippage is given to the users trading on slingshot is a social experience you can even set your chat avatar to your favorite nft or soon a slingshot 2099 nft avatar once you bridge your assets to polygon arbitrary or optimism go to app dot slingshot dot finance to trade and use the chat box to share your trades with others and find other tokens to ape into the brave browser is the user first browser for the web3 internet with built-in privacy and ad blocking to keep you in charge of your digital footprint inside the brave browser you'll find the brave wallet the first secure crypto wallet built natively inside of a web 3 crypto browser web 3 is freedom from big tech and wall street more control and

better privacy but there's a weak point in web3 your crypto wallet the brave wall is different bravewall is built natively inside the brave browser no extension required which gives the brave wallet an extra level of security versus other wallets with the brave wallet you can buy store send and swap your crypto assets and you can even manage your nfts and connect to other wallets and defy apps all from the security of the best privacy browser on the market whether you're new to crypto or a seasoned pro it's time to switch to the brave wallet download brave at brave.com banklist and click the wallet icon to get started arbitram is an ethereum scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use defy and nfts over 250 projects have already deployed on arbitram and arbitrom's defy and nft ecosystems are growing rapidly arbitrary increases

ethereum speed by orders of magnitude for a fraction of the cost of the average gas fee when interacting with arbitrary you can get the performance of a centralized exchange while tapping into ethereum's level of decentralization and security if you're a developer who wants low gas fees and instant transactions for your users visit developer.offchainlabs.com to get started building your application on arbitrom if you're a user keep an eye out for your favorite defy apps or nft projects building on arbitrom many of your favorite apps are already live with many more coming over soon you can find these apps at portal.arbitrom.one and you can bridge your assets over to arbitrom using bridge.arbitrom.io in order to experience defy and nfts the way it was always meant to be fast cheap and friction free

hey guys welcome back to the special panel edition this is the finding common ground panel with some alternative layer ones uh we've got two here that we're going to talk to first i want to introduce you to anatoly he's the co-founder of solana and also introduce you to emin who is the founder of eva labs we are missing our third panelist dokwan he might show up in the episode at some point in time and like if he does we'll just let him write in and roll along with the conversation gentlemen it's great to have you on bankless welcome nice to be here thanks for having me all right this is going to be a fun episode i think and i think it's something the crypto world is craving and i just want to throw out some ground rules as we enter this conversation so i

don't think this is really a debate i think this is about finding common ground that we all have some ground rules i think for our guests uh good vibes only this is the podcast we want good vibes only i think the crypto community wants to see good vibes from the leaders in this space including david and myself uh also plain speak we're going to try whenever possible not to talk technical the community has asked that we sort of speak at a plain speak language as much as possible not get too in-depth in the weeds and the third ground rule is letting people finish their sentences i know we're very excited have a lot to say let's let everyone have an opportunity to talk david you and i have some ground rules

as well we are not representatives of ethereum on this episode we are merely moderators not today so we're not arguing aside we're just here to be good hosts and move the conversation forward uh and uh be as hospitable as possible great to have you guys on bank list you ready to start yeah let's do it all right let's start with this first question i think this is an important um values alignment question and i i expect we'll have a lot of common ground on it and the question is why are you in crypto why are you in crypto anatoly you wanna you wanna kick us off with that yeah i had this um idea that it's possible to use these byzantine fault tolerance systems

to build an environment where there's no intermediaries for trading and this was because this was something that i did in my spare time i did it for fun i used to you know like connect to interactive brokers or a bunch of forex trading like uh platforms and trade via their apis and i was always uh feeling like my trades were getting in a little later than everyone else's the data i was getting was a little slower than everyone else's and there was this barrier to entry there that was kind of impossible to cross as a hobbyist and when i kind of had the technical idea for what for building a system like solana that

was the first use case that i thought of and that's really what drove the first i would say three years of development how we were thinking about the use case we're building and like everything we're trying to deliver is that okay hobbyists can connect to this network with just a piece of metal and they're in the same level playing field as you know alameda or jump and that that was the the goal and still is the goal uh just curious anatoly a quick follow-up on that a lot of people came to crypto for like a you know sound money thesis right uh as a result of um you know uh what they would say is misuse of monetary policy and kind of the fiat world is that you or is that not no so like despite like but i totally get it and i thought that was a

really very like important thing that crypto could enable my family growing up in the soviet union saw the failure of government like to experience it firsthand myself included like my parents you know we they left in 1992 with uh 350 dollars to seven people that was that was it that was the only thing that the soviet union would let you leave with um so that was kind of i get it like i strongly get it in a very core sense and i totally appreciate the folks working on that side but um what i was passionate personally was like bits and sitting these bits as fast as possible around the world and as

fairly as possible which was where my skills set lies and what i was inspired to do and not trying to compete in the sound money thesis at all but definitely appreciate it evan curious same question to you why are you in crypto so i like building uh big big things that work and uh it comes from it comes from a different uh different kind of background um i grew up in a at a time and in a country where things did not quite work you would go to the airport and you know the systems were down you would go to the bank they'd say come back the next day when you close the door it wouldn't close perfectly and completely now i remember going into my middle school at the time in american school and and seeing that everything actually

perfectly matched the doors were no longer drafty and and that instilled in me a sense for things that that have a life of their own that that live on the internal in some virtual universe subject to their own rules and continue functioning in a predictable perfect manner and that got me going into distributed systems and starting in 2002 with the karma system that we built um i started getting into digital money and the goal of course is to digitize all things of value to create a universe where anyone can digitize something send it around the world and trade it and then in so doing eliminate all the middlemen you should not have to get permission from anybody you should not

have to be beholden to anyone else's rules in uh transacting with your valuable goods guys i i think uh i find your uh quick background's actually really fascinating because i think both of your guys's backgrounds actually show up in the um in the blockchains that you you guys work on anatoly you talked about how uh uh you were working with you know trading and you just felt like you were getting you know front run by people with more access and better privileges than you and so that inspired you to make solana which uh i think has similar properties that make sure that everyone can do that and so and emin same with you where um you know you like big things that work where perhaps how you the in the experiences that you had influenced why you're here in crypto and

and and also the the nature of the blockchain that you guys are are building can you guys just speak a little bit to that about like um the values that that you learned when you were when you were deciding before perhaps getting into crypto and and how it came to actually shape what you consider to be important inside the crypto industry uh we'll start back with uh with anatoly um so i spent most of my career quality i'm working on communications operating systems like moving bits around through silicon and that skill set is what i brought to sowana and the use case that i thought of was like this this system that i'm building it has to be good at something useful to humans that was like that was a prerequisite and there were

plenty of people already working on the sound money thing and i and i was like i don't i don't think i bring anything new to that space like i don't think i can build a better bitcoin or a better ethereum like so it never really thought of it like as something for us to go after and trading was something that i personally enjoyed as a hobbyist and had a saw clear reason why centralized systems always kind of tend to get to a kind of a corrupted state where it's not in the sense that it's corruption where you're getting screwed it's that you gotta like you know pay 10 million bucks to chicago mercantile exchange for that preferred access and to even be able to

do that you have to know the people to even like talk to them and be part of the part of the club and that to me always felt like just not not great it felt like i couldn't do what i was really interested in doing you know and i didn't think that initially i kind of thought you know maybe maybe these systems will actually flip cme and izzy and we'll see equities being traded on these open decentralized systems but what i've realized lately over the last year is that the revolution that we're seeing is that everything is becoming d5 art is becoming d5 social networks are becoming d5 and that long tail of new use cases are going to is going to surpass all

these old financial applications by you know 100 miles it's just going to outgrow everything so where if we've switched kind of you know ideas that like what we're building is this thing for trading for price discovery but we need to start building tools for humans to actually use it in day-to-day activity that they do on the web and that could be nfts that could be using that nft to participate in a social network that's the monkey dow that's now sticking with the validate or whatever it is that they want to do right like it's kind of become much more consumer-driven like how do we apply this stuff to now consumers as opposed to jump trading or alameda or like you know even trading hobbies even though

i believe both of those joining together is really what makes the space really interesting and emin same question to you what about your experiences in your young professional life led into how you decided to construct avalanche or what you care about now that you're in the industry of crypto so um there are a couple of things that uh that struck me very early on um so one of the main things that i saw i saw in the 90s the very first attempts at digital cash and how they failed they failed because the banks intervened you can't go through the regular channels and and do a revolution that's just not how it works uh you gotta bring something to the table that is multiple orders of of magnitude better than

what's there you can't come in with like a 15 20 better thing and say hey this is this is going to change things so that made me stay in academia for actually a very long time i've been an og in the space for a long long time uh started out uh you know i remember single-digit bitcoins um so uh so you know um i didn't actually initiate avalanche until i decided that there was something in our hands that was orders of magnitude better than what was there so that's one of them a second thing that characterizes my approach is to always build systems that are flexible that to not have i think this comes from my background as a graduate student i worked on operating

systems you want to build a substrate something that lies at the bottom that enables other people to get whatever they want done you don't want to be prescriptive you want them to be able to customize whatever they're building so avalanche has this notion of subnets that allows anybody to create their own chains with their own rules with their own virtual machines so that is something that's actually fairly unique to avalanche and it's it's quite different and um and it plays at the you know place to the heart of of our values the third and final thing is that uh that all along i was always human oriented not algo oriented so there were a lot of people especially in the early days who were like oh you know bitcoin

cannot be changed because you know the algorithm says 21 million coins etc etc and so they're right you know in what they're saying but they're missing out the fact that these systems have to be serving their constituents they have to be serving their users so that uh led us in a direction where we're building a system that is within given parameters uh admits uh governance and and modification on the fly by its users so all of these had a fairly big impact on the ultimate design of the system we built i'd love to know who are your guys as like heroes in this industry who who do you who are like uh you know ancient four fathers or or four women who uh you guys think that have really like you

know the cypherpunks of old for example like personally i really like look up to somebody like amin solomani ryan here might like say vitalik who do you guys look up to that are like the early ogs of cryptography or cryptocurrency or who who comes to mind i mean let's start with you um let's see so one of the first people i would mention would be ron rivest he's the r in rsa he's a touring award winner came up with some of the the crypto that we use to sign our transactions uh he's also brilliant across the you know across the spectrum and uh you know every time i chat with them i come out go away enlightened another person that i look up to is barbara oliskov and uh she was a professor she retired from mit

a brilliant brilliant researcher set the the path for uh for for consensus protocols which are at the heart of all of these systems and uh so uh there are also some others of more modern so these are i think maybe two generations or three generations older than me a couple more people that i look up to is mike burrows um he's the person from alta vista i'm not sure if you guys remember this but it was one of the the big search engines back in the day probably the best engineered search engine of its day was just a fantastic builder all around and jeff dean someone that i went to graduate school with who's an amazing builder at google a lot of the google infrastructure that you know we all use uh came from his

vision or his his actual fingertips typing away at the code so that's sort of my you know go-to uh you know idols uh if i were to name them anatoly who are your idols or or people that you look up to um in the space i would say zaki from cosmos um he was one of the first folks that i talked to that was like a true like crypto he was like a true crypto developer and uh he's one of those people that you can call in the middle of the night and he will calm you down is this is this something that you've done before natalie you can call me too you know yeah uh he's he's just an amazing person uh

vitalik i like i haven't interacted with him that closely uh you know just a few times but i his writing i think is very crisp and succinct and he's able to describe really complex topics to uh to like an engineer like i feel like he bridges that gap between academia and engineering really well um at a personal level there's a few folks that i worked with at qualcomm that really shaped my career in terms of like operating system design um brian kelly i don't know if you would be listening to this podcast but he was just the one of the senior directors there that was designing all the a bunch of the operating systems on arm while arm was moving from architecture to architecture basically

it every year and it was such a breakneck speed of development on the hardware that um i really kind of learned what it's like to code under the gun when uh when you're when you have like hardware that's shipping at a particular date and it's shipping with bugs and every every delay is costing like a company 10 million bucks or something like that you're under a lot of pressure to deliver and solve heart problems really quickly so guys now we get to uh get into the to the meat of this uh a little bit more and ask a question that i think is on everyone's mind in the crypto community as um so you know some of us on in this panel represent maybe different tribes uh within crypto although we have just so

much so much in common but i want to ask like the meta question of why do you think crypto is so tribal and does it actually have to be does it have to be tribal why is it tribal and does it have to be what do you think anatoly so i kind of came into tech in the 90s as a teenager and i remember people arguing with passion and vitriol about linux file systems like the file system that you pick in your config and your kernel config when you're booting up linux people were tribal about that and turns out there was one evil file system but that's that's a different story the the thing that like i think what people get about these technologies like

movements is that um when you when you participate in these you're thinking about all the future things that the singer will enable you're kind of putting a lot of faith in these ideas and how it's going to change the world and that's almost a religious experience right like let's say you have an open source movement taking down microsoft that was a big deal right like you were battling a company that was like a giant monopolist run by bill gates that was just squashing everyone right and this fledging community of people are just coding for fun like you kind of get bought into this and i feel that's true about crypto we have we're trying to change the world right and we buy into these ideas and they and you think about what is this gonna

be 20 years from now how is this going to improve the world and change everything and that that is their faith that's faith right so we argue about it like we argue about religions it's part of the human do you think that yeah crypto is a bit more political than something like a linux file system by nature right it's kind of about decentralization as a as a political concept does that make it a little different i think at that time in the 90s the open source was almost a political movement and a lot of folks actually became like try to interact with politics and governance and get us governments to adopt policies that

taxpayer money should only be spent on open source software development and these were really like core important things to folks like they were they were fighting they took time for their own you know life to go do this right um and i think we're seeing similar things now with decentralization and open finance because there is kind of not a single enemy like microsoft but kind of this you know you know this vampire squid that's like slowly sucking the blood out of everything both on the web through advertisement and those kind of negative loops and in finance through fees and everything else that people deal with and uh you know so that's

these are powerful movements i mean like i i feel like i guess blessed to live through multiples of these like the web open source and now crypto um but you know it's also a curse right to have that much so much change happening in your life emman what do you think why is crypto tribal and does it really have to be uh well uh it shouldn't be my dream is that we would stop fighting over the same pool of users and focus on growing the space you know some total we're about one trillion and some total there's about 700 trillion worth of assets out there and the chains that that win will not be the ones that you know say the meanest things about each other they're going to be the ones that can absorb that growth that can make

those use cases happen on top of their platforms so that's very clear to all of us and you're right uh despite that this area does attract a level of tribalism that i actually have not seen in many other areas i've seen the the uh the open source movement of course i have seen the the uh the editor wars emacs versus vi you know we've fought on the side of one of them that i'm not gonna name because then i'll lose half my audience so um but uh well you know um but money is inherently political and it's so deeply ingrained in our consciousness everybody thinks they're an expert at it uh that's also another thing that that factors into this if you can balance a checkbook then suddenly you think you're an economist and um and

it's uh and suddenly you know you've got all these people are finding on all sorts of technical issues that really ought to belong to uh to a couple of people who've done some measurements and ought to be resolved by science and so instead of scientific discourse we find ourselves in vitriol and uh you know it's not a good look for for us you know for the industry for the space but i think we'll grow out of it um or maybe we won't i mean i actually don't think we're going to grow out of it entirely it's just always going to happen but the folks who absorb the message that hey moving on and expanding is the right strategy are going to be the ones that win that's cool uh thanks thanks for these answers guys we're gonna switch it up and throw some community questions your way from from

twitter um the first is from yankee.ust on twitter asked this question prior to the show do you see your chains as complements or substitutes to each other i think emin you were maybe advocating for a more expanded pie but at the end of the day is there some competition between these these chains is are are they are they substitutionary or uh are they are they i guess synergistic and complementary they are essentially complementary so first of all we just let's dispense away with the killer word there is no killing done in in this space there are chains that are technologically dead anatoly

knows this every techie knows this they ought to be dead and you know the horse is lying down on the ground with the four legs facing into the sky but yet they're traded they're round and they're not disappearing so even dead chains are actually quite alive and walking so uh so that's i think something that everybody needs to absorb there will be times when i will criticize anatoly for some technical choice and he will understand what i'm saying he might do the same to me but but those are technical and technical discussions among technical people so uh in general it's not one against the other so all of these chains have a different vision and they have far more in common far more in common than they have against in opposition to each other for example

avalanche and ethereum are working in the same evm space the more we have in the evm space the better it is for both of those ecosystems so solana is pushing the envelope in a variety of different areas in terms of engineering in terms of building a community in terms of appealing to a different set of programmers you know their programming language is quite different so you know i'll name the other ones for example teslos is appealing to a functional programming environment so there are all sorts of different approaches to this whole thing uh that are that are essentially going to complement each other and and it's not a you know i i win a dollar by taking it from you kind of an environment there is so much out there that isn't digitized that hasn't

come into blockchains uh that that's where the real battles ought to be and are actually that's where we are fighting because avalanche at least you know my or ava labs certainly is spending its time coming up with new assets to build on top we're coming up with new use cases new virtual machines to build on top of our platform so that's i think the thing that's going to get us out of this more ass of people who are who seem to be inward oriented and at each other's throats at times so anatoly same question to you emin says there's no such thing as a killer there's no such thing as an eighth killer or a bitcoin killer or a solana killer at some level we're all in this together but there has to be some element of competition right i mean somebody's gotta win what would you say to yankee

usd's question compliments or substitutes um i think the killer part comes from if like the developers to stop building eventually that thing will die you know in theory right like as long as there's somebody working on this open source project over the weekend you can't really kill it and we saw that with microsoft trying to kill all sorts of things that were much much smaller than any of these jains so that part i think is is kind of like just a a silly thing to think about but i think the there's definitely competition because there's overlapping use cases every chain can run nfts so now

like how are you you know we're competing in that use case you know those projects that are built on top are now competing for the nft space and if the users nft enjoyers and that competition i think is very healthy because that forces innovation at that like border between complicated technology and consumers how do you figure out key management how do you figure out what is a good ux for a wallet and all these other things you get to see a bunch of different experiments run and the best of those are the ones that succeed but they're not exclusive to that chain you start seeing people copy all the best practices like almost instantly um and that's really the driver innovation

driver of growing the space getting more users to you know have their keys full custody ultimately a good thing but it's competition that's fine i like competing let's uh let's set some context before we ask this next community question so i think the context is crypto is very much on a path towards becoming more decentralized over time at least at its best right bitcoin is trying to do this through distribution ethereum is trying to do this uh via a variety of mechanisms i assume your projects are trying to do this as well so the question from faithful stuart is what's your chain's plan to become more decentralized so some you're at some point on the

centralization versus decentralization spectrum assuming you want to become more decentralized how do you do that emin what would you say to faithful steward so the very first thing that's essential for any system to become more decentralized is to have at its very core a protocol that allows people to participate if that is exclusionary if it is for example as we saw in the case of libra it's just zuckerberg and 27 of his best buddies uh at most you know going up to they had visions to go up to about a hundred and you know they had to scuttle the whole project it didn't go anywhere because they failed to decentralize so if that's your path then you're going to be limited and we see you know for example with avalanche we

spent a lot of effort in coming up with the protocol that accommodates millions of participants in every single decision so that's number one number two of course is the ecosystem on top you want to accommodate as many use cases as possible as many programmers as possible and provide to them both a familiar environment if that's what they so choose or an environment that they can custom tailor to their needs and that's what we do we have both the contract chain which is evm compatible and we have the ability to create subnets for custom use cases so these all bring in new use cases and the ultimate in decentralization is the set of people that we attract the set of

people who are part of our ecosystem and uh and we're working uh i think overall all of us and not just avalanche but i think for all of us uh we're trying to expand that that pie and uh and i'm really excited about what has happened i think we saw in the last year or so uh that you know systems like avalanche did not exist 15 months ago and it went from from zero to where it is today and that's been a tremendous tremendous driver for us and we plan to continue on that path and emin uh you look concretely how do you think avalanche can become more decentralized like what's the next thing that you feel like you could implement the the chinks in the armor right now that need to be filled sure so currently we have only three

subnets that are on put in production and uh it's uh that we have a couple of test net subnets that are really seeing a lot of use so as we have more subnets where you're going to see a very exciting development i've been saying this for a while now nobody takes it seriously but uh staking services and validation services are going to become a real revenue driver not just for the platforms themselves and the people who hold those platform tokens but also for people who are participating as validators and stakers uh validators and stakers don't do much today but soon there will be actual use cases for differentiated validation services validators that do more than just vote on on transactions so that's coming and

as that comes in you're going to see all sorts of people participate in making blockchains more decentralized and and there will be a essentially a business model developing around them that's one of the main ways in which we're pushing the envelope and of course uh another step forward for the avalanche community is to bring the cost of uh of joining the system as a validator uh the default networks as a validator so that more people can participate in in avalanche itself anatoly how would you answer that question what's your what's solana's plan to become more decentralized so i think there's some things that we can do and that's more engineering focused and that's similar to to what eminence talking about

reduce the cost to join the network make sure it's permissionless to entry i mean those are the obvious things and reduce the number of failure points and that could be things that you see ethereum do like multiple versions of the same client because the more teams you have that understand the protocol at that intimate level that they could be able to write it the more kind of uh you're reducing kind of key man risk right the bus factor is much lower and all these things are parts of decentralization and i think the bigger picture there is do you have enough humans that actually care that this thing is decentralized to use it take advantage of these features that decentralization buys them um

that there's a reason for this thing to exist and for that to move forward without the latter right without actual demand for self-signings of custody actual humans signing transactions and doing something in these chains the work that you're doing and decentralization becomes pretty pointless right like it's you may do the work but then you know no one's actually going to run these systems and care about them and make sure that they're operating correctly so that latter part is you know a mixture of like time and use cases that have product market fit and that's that latter part is the harder part that's the hardest that's not engineering that's actually trying to understand what humans need

out of these systems and building for them anatoly the bankless thesis has very much emphasized um decentralization particularly at the the bay the base layer the the layer ones um but there are others with kind of like a different thesis on the space um basically pushing back and saying hey like the descent the most decentralized chain doesn't always win do you believe that do you think decentralization is the thing that makes a layer one uh fail or succeed or do you think there are other things that are even more important for our particular use case if it came to a point that it's possible for some sort of the network to prevent

a hobbyist to plug in and get at the same information level playing field as everyone else i would consider that a failure and i would probably start a different chain so that part of it right that physical guarantee that anybody in the world can throw a piece of metal even if it's a very expensive hunk of metal right but if we at least they can do that and permissionally start getting in the same level playing field in terms of information as everyone else that that to me is a critical piece and i feel like if we succeed there plus there's humans that want this system for something right there's some real product market fit on the human side

everything else would just be taken care of over time that's just a function of time so that core part i think both of those need to exist um and that's a different thing than sound money or or something like that or you know you know whatever nuclear war resistant finance bunker coin whatever uh two different use cases you know three different use cases potentially so guys that was all of our serious philosophy type questions i i didn't get a chance to react to that let me say a few words um yeah let me say a few words actually uh ryan i'm actually really worried about the the

issue you raised so um the issue is does the market know enough to evaluate the claims of these chains and something that you always worry about if you have a high quality product is a cheap knockoff and many of us in fact everybody on this podcast obviously is working on chains that are working really really hard to get truly decentralized or have worked really hard to be too truly decentralized now um and then along comes joe's centralized check okay joe's centralized blockchain and um and you gotta worry because they can suddenly excel in metrics that that are really hard to excel in because they've given up on one of the most important things uh in in the space

which is decentralization so they can boast all sorts of numbers uh they can they can cut corners essentially and and the thing is will that be seen uh and and and uh and evaluated properly by the market or will the market just go along because most of the time everything is good and it's a sunny day and you don't really have to worry about the leaks on the boat until the storm comes in and starts shaking it and that's when it sinks so this is something i actually worry about quite uh quite a bit at the end of the day and we have seen this happen too we have seen chains rise and we've seen chains get adopted as if they are you know fundamentally sound when you know many of us knew that they were at their core they had centralized points of failure or they weren't

decentralized enough so so this is something that actually does does worry me and and that we've worked really really hard to be able to compete even with those folks uh who are uh who are at the extreme ends of of that uh that trade-off that is our algorithmic innovations are so good that we are competitive with them but it's still something that worries me and at that level i think we do have to just rely on on user awareness we have to get the word out that there is a big difference between chains that are deep down centralized versus the chains that are actually uh bringing something new to the table versus the ones that have true technology and true decentralized uh foundations so i think at that point it's it's up to all of us to educate the

public about the differences here and the values in this space it always seems on that like i mean the thing that trips people up is like um people don't know where to draw the line right so bitcoiners will say ethereum is too centralized right and some people in ethereum will say you know solana avalanche and tara are too centralized and then maybe this panel collectively says well we've got binance chain and tron and zuckerberg coin and like that's where we draw the line so that is the hard part i think for new entrants to the market what gives me peace i'm wondering if if the panelists agree with this is in the long run the market will just figure this out won't they like well

that things will happen hacks will happen you know centralization vectors will be attacked single points of failure will will fall and the market will figure this all out but in the in the interim there's a lot of you know i guess miseducation and noise and questioning about these things would you both agree with that absolutely 100 i think uh the storm inevitably comes someday that's the the nature of these uh tail events and when it does it exposes uh problems with uh with with decentralization very very easily and i definitely agree that this is definitely the hard part about onboarding people into crypto because these are the these are the hardest lessons to learn right like decentralization is such a new word for so many people outside of the crypto

industry that when they come into this industry the newer new i knew that i remember coming into 2017 not really appreciating decentralization and just kind of thinking that peer-to-peer money was like the cool new thing and not really realizing actually how to measure or reason about decentralization it's a very hard thing to reason about especially for the newcomers uh and so guys that that was all of our like like philosophy serious type questions but in the second half of the show we have some more candy type questions and i want to tease uh the second half of the show with this candy type question here if you're if you didn't uh what what is your favorite blockchain that's not the one that you are working on so if your blockchain went down god forbid and you

had to use a different blockchain what blockchain would it be anatoly let's start with you shoot i don't know i haven't thought about anyone else's blockchain in a while um i i would try i would like to try avalanche i guess i haven't tried it yet so i'll just i'll just be nice to him we'll give you some coins if you bridge over so uh so uh that's a very easy question for me without the doubt ethereum so uh you know i'll just uh flip over my network and uh pay the extra fees and uh and go back to uh to what i used to use well that question was gonna be a little

bit more fun if we had dough here for a three-person panel but we don't we just have we just have have you guys if you say oh yeah okay uh guys so we have questions like that such as do you think your own asset is money and what do you think about l2s versus l1s and bridges and some very fun questions coming up right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible when you shop for plane tickets you probably use kayak expedia or google to compare ticket prices so why would you limit yourself to just one exchange when you trade crypto when you make your trades you want to make sure you're getting the best possible price on your trade and that's why you should be using matcha matcha has smart order routing that splits your trade across all the various

liquidity sources in ethereum and is also operational on polygon avalanche finance smart chain and other chains trading on matcha is super easy because it pulls the liquidity for me in a single easy to use platform and allows me to make limit on chain orders so you can set and forget your d5 trades and they will go through automatically while you're away so when you're making a trade head over to matcha.xyz bankless and connect your wallet to start getting the best prices and most liquidity when you trade your crypto assets the gemini exchange has been my exchange of choice ever since i got into crypto i use gemiini to both buy the dips and also manage my regular automatic monthly purchases of my preferred crypto asset on gemini you'll find over 50 different cryptos including many of the top defy

and metaverse tokens like wi-fi and axionfinity using gemini earn you can earn yield on your various cryptos including 8 on the gusd stable coin gemini is available in all 50 states and more than 50 countries worldwide so if you're looking to upgrade your crypto exchange sign up at gemini with go gemini.com list and get 15 of bitcoin after you trade 100 or more within the first 30 days that's gemini.com go bankless bank list is proud to be sponsored by unit swap unit swap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum that lets you trade

any token at the current market price no human counterparties or centralized intermediaries just autonomous code on ethereum input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy the uniswap grants program is accepting applications for grants do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the uniswap ecosystem no matter how big or small your idea is you can apply it for a unique grant at uniswopgrants.org and help steer uniswap in the direction that you think it should go thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless hey guys we are back with the finding common ground panel this is with the alternative layer ones uh anatoly from solana and we have emin from avalanche guys uh when we finished that the the

last conversation we left a few questions hanging and one i think is really important at least has been important as david and i have sort of explored crypto and that is the question about the monetary value of the tokens underlying your platform so are your assets money is the avax token money is the sole token money the reason we think this is important is because that can be what gives the token additional value and of course in these economics cryptoeconomic systems additional value means increased security so let me throw it over to you anatoly uh is seoul money are your layer 1 assets money would you say so um

if you lived on some planet where you could magically communicate with everyone simultaneously and that was guaranteed you wouldn't need nakamoto consensus you wouldn't need bft all you would need is cryptography to build money that would be the only thing that you'd need so in a world where solana is at its peak right it's the system where information state transitions pass through it at speed of light through fiber it is that thing it's that planet and you can build money on top of it but i don't think of the token or or something like that as a money in sense that users don't need to use it from day to day services to to transact in it to buy coffee in it or

to use it as a as like a i don't know yeah that i don't i think of it as like access to that magical communication bus where i send a message it's guaranteed to arrive to everybody in the world so not a store of value then anatoly you could build a store valley on top of that in that planet right on top of this tesla planet where you stick a rod into the ground and you can talk to everybody all you need is cryptography to build a store of value on it [Music] we're gonna ask these same questions to emin but just a quick follow-up um while we're talking about so what makes the soul token valuable then why number go up anatoly this is i think uh a tough question um because it's not clear

that there is a clear like i think the only clear business case that i think i see in these systems is that owning soul gives you percentage of the stake that percentage of the stake means that you get to produce x amount of blocks and producing those blocks is lucrative for some use cases such as you know map but that's four degrees of separation and this is the only thing that i've seen really as a as a real use case on ethereum that has clear kind of clear connection to the underlying token um but i personally don't think that maybe the the final use case or how the stuff plays out like i don't know right this is we're still we're so early

that we don't know yet and you can say that safely because 1994 when you're looking at those bulletin boards and the first six degrees like email chain went out there's no way you could have predicted that's gonna be facebook worth a trillion dollars right like 20 years later so we can safely say that we don't really know yet so emin same question over to you uh our avalanche uh tokens are they money are they of course the monetary premium okay of course their money uh they they can serve as money in transactions the system is so fast you know finalizing transactions in under a second that you can use it for payments faster than you can use most credit cards these days so

at least in the us so uh so that's a very good situation to be in uh the token has other uses as well it's used as a primary means of access to this underlying network of networks of the avalanche system in which there's these multiple subnets live and on those subnets you can do things like create new smart contracts interact with smart contracts stake land swap etc so it has utility it has use cases and it serves as the sort of the fluid that greases all of these financial wheels and the main thing of course is uh that uh this thing while it's money um our vision is not to compete with the world's monies we are not trying to

compete with bitcoin store of value narrative so even though we're actually a hardcapped asset like bitcoin that's not where our energy is going we're going after the use cases that are not on the blockchain we're trying to digitize all things so we have a very different vision and take than most systems out there guys i think a new player has entered the chat i wanted to welcome dokwan to the chat the youtube chat is about to blow up right now [Laughter] hey guys sorry i'm late uh it was supposed to be 5 30 a.m my time but i accidentally set the alarm for 6 30. so really sorry about that don't worry well we appreciate you jumping on and joining this has been a really uh fun

conversation so far david should we just throw dough right into the last question there yeah absolutely yeah that's the best question to start let's do it all right you know first thing in the morning for you dough so the question is uh are the underlying tokens of the terra blockchain are they money should they uh have a monetary premium associated with them and if they're not money why should number go up uh yeah i mean the if you look at our twitter handle it's terra money so definitely the intention is for it to be money um but i but i i think when i say money i mean that in a slightly different sense from let's say when people say bitcoin is money or

ethereum is money so we um you know generally think about what we're trying to do as a price neutral asset so um a stable coin that is pegged to things like the dollar or the crane one or um you know the british crown and so on and so forth and then the idea is that people can enjoy you know um programmable assets so things that they can build and defy uh and so on and so forth in a censorship resistant context similar to bitcoin or ethereum while at the same time they maintain all the price stability characteristics of your local fiat currency so dough we're gonna have to uh catch

you up and speed run through some early questions to get you up to up to speed with the panel so the first uh the first two questions that we want to run through is why do you care about crypto and also who do you look up to in the space who are your your heroes or your idols that have influenced you uh in your time here in this industry and it's okay if you name someone on this panel though well to answer the second question first all of you guys obviously okay but what about not on this panel well i mean so in general i think the people that are inspiring is um if you look at the type of people that started building you know like many many years ago uh

most of them have semi retired or fully retired at this point um and um it takes a lot right because crypto runs 24 7. uh it definitely does take a reasonable amount of toll on your health uh i actually used to be like 20 kilograms lighter uh when i started tara if that's that's useful context but um yeah so i mean like who the types of people that are finding inspire are you know the people that have been in the daily grind for you know three four five years yet at the same time still going strong so i think these are the types of people that add tons of value to the industry and you know hopefully working together for a long time all right so now that we got a little

bit of your background we're going through some of the the candy questions and and so we want to kind of unpack i think uh we want to the listeners definitely want to hear about the versions of crypto that you guys think will manifest and there's always uh while there's spectrums in crypto such as the decentralization centralization spectrum i think another spectrum that we can all talk about is the l2 versus multi l1 world and so uh what do you guys think about l2s will your chain have layer twos or will it be mostly emphasis on a multi layer one world instead uh how do you guys reason about these things and what do you think

how does your blockchain fit into the future crypto world that you think is unfolding uh anatoly let's start with you i think defining l2 to strictly this idea of something like optimism or zero knowledge proofs that verify that some computation was done correctly um those are implementation details anybody could build this on solana so the question is why would they want to right like what is it that they're trying to do with this with this thing and the only reason they'd want to do this is because the execution layer and solana is not sufficient for them that it takes too long for some really big computation but right now that's not a bottleneck

and it doesn't seem like that's going to be a bottleneck for the next couple years at least i don't know what things would change but cryptographic operations that are typically the expensive parts that you run on ethereum unless they're you know built in um those are running at nearly native speed and like by native speed i mean like cindy accelerated like speed and current processors it's to me like unlikely that we'll hit those limits simply because current hardware does a million these these things per second right so computation is just not the bottleneck um and neither state you know like i think both both of those are

are like fairly solved problems it's a it's i think might be more necessary in the this like we only want to do settlement at the layer one and nothing else and we'll build a thing for settlement and only that and run these single core e2 style validators um that may be the the necessary design choice but i don't know we'll see i i don't see it as like a necessity hey david you're muted emman what's your take about the future multi layer two multi layer one how do you reason about these things and how does the avalanche fit into that and then you're out yeah and then you're

also needed okay so every layer two solution also works on avalanche so we can accommodate anything any layer 2 that works on ethereum just as well but that's not where our scalability roadmap is taking us so i understand where ethereum wants to go with its own layer two based solution and um and i'm i'm not headed that way i'm not headed that way because i have some concerns about where one might end up if one were to go that way and that is centralization land all of these layer twos that exist today minus like some of the very esoteric ones uh that people worked really hard to build most of them that you've heard of have single points of failure they're centralized so

and then assuming at their best some future date when they get finally you know whatever they are to you know that second version of them that has you know the sequencers uh all uh made redundant etc even in that universe uh the designs the architectures lead to constructs where some central party is collecting all the rent somebody's collecting all of the extractable value from the user stream so you can end up wanting to build a new system that's really really scalable and you end up reinventing the system as we have now congratulations you have robin hood and citadel and so i don't want to end up there so that's why we have so much emphasis on layer one scalability

everything that can be done on layer one should be done on layer one um these uh l2s they essentially take an opaque blob do something to it and bring it back into the system and um and that that process that that happens away from users in many cases users of understanding at least so there are many different uh paths for malfeasance there are many different paths by which people can reorder what happens on at the layer 2 level so that's not where we're headed but you know we can accommodate any layer two uh to come so we have a very different uh path on that front oh and our subnets are the natural way to shard uh sharp things and chart by use case so

that allows us to parallelize as well and uh though i have one more candy question after this serious question so uh teaser on that one but where do how do you reason about the layer twos versus multi-layer ones and how does tara fit into that yeah so from a from a non-technical perspective it just seems that the the main distinction that people are driving between l2s and l1s is two things like number one this idea that you would have better security in l2s because you're borrowing that security from another blockchain um and but i feel like that that differential is going to get squeezed

out over time as bridges improve and things get more secure so i the mental model that i have is that the world is really just chains and bridges and the reason why i think there should be multiple chains is because at some points uh every chain is going to run into uh you know it has finite state right so in that finite state there's a limit to how much transactions that you can squeeze in so you need to offload it to different chains now the question is whether you offload that to an l2 or to other l1s and uh the way that i'm thinking about it is that once uh bridges become more secure and as as i said that security difference will get squeezed out it's all just going to be a world of chains and bridges

so in that case i think the only difference would be like where do these different blockchains declare their allegiance to so for example as we're fragmenting state uh in that world i think the only difference would be that these l2s are economically benefiting the token holders of an l1 to which there's a swearing allegiance it's kind of like a feudal system where you know there would be like a lord that declares allegiance to like a duke and this duke declares allegiance to a king so it's it's a kind of like a hierarchical file system where you don't necessarily borrow security your borrowed community um from other blockchains so i i think multiple of these things would emerge i think some um you know

blockchains would uh brand themselves as l2s i think some of them would largely association associate themselves as being entirely sovereign and um yeah i think it's going to be like the feudal systems it's going to compete in kings competing nights and you know things like that and uh though the question that i i want to ask you is uh what is your second favorite blockchain after tara if you're if tara god forbid went down or was lost for whatever reason what would be the chain that you would migrate to um we actually spent a decent amount of time thinking about that so

i i would say the straight up honest answer that i would have to give is that there's multiple different candidates uh we're big fans of avalanche um we're also big fans of solana but um you know like for example around the time that we started we um the reason why we selected the cosmos sdk was because we were super focused on payments and um there wasn't really a way for us to be able to get those payment margins down using a different chain which is why we had to uh you know uh pick a chain where we could control the rules in a sovereign type of way but now that's kind of different so um you know things are up in the air

guys this is uh been a really fun panel and i think i hope listeners saw that there's a lot of common ground between uh these three projects these three platforms maybe other projects in crypto as well and uh you know thank you guys for for being willing to do this it's been a lot of fun uh closing question for all three of you is is the same crypto loves predictions it's really fun to predict various things wondering what your highest conviction predictions for 2022 are do you have any high prediction uh high conviction predictions maybe we'll start with you anatoly and i think um i think we're gonna see the first

application with um like 10 million users and 22. like 10 million active users that are signing stuff doing stuff first decentralized applications gonna break that barrier wow big prediction emin do you want to go next what's your prediction for 2022 highest conviction that's a good question um so you know i'm a techie i'm not much of a market person but i suspect that this year is going to be far better than most people in the space think it will be i suspect that a lot of the people that we are seeing are very much the early adopters and the ones that have the ones that actually have the highest the loudest voices on twitter are the ones that have been through many many crypto

winters and those all happen in a very different environment so i suspect that this year is going to be a huge boom here because the technology has finally come of age so those things that we dreamed of for many years are now here so that's my highest conviction prediction in other in other news i think uh you know easy predictions that i could always throw out the bridge wars are going to intensify that's going to be great for the users because you'll end up having an opportunity to sample a lot of these systems and see how they are uh how they operate firsthand there will be very very big hacks as there always have been and so that's always going to be fun and and overall i'm super bullish in this space

that's my simple basic prediction anatoly predicting millions of users emin saying that uh bear bear market bear participants be gone this is going to be a bullish year uh doe kwan do you think you can out bullish these two panelists what are your predictions for 2022. well i i mean i don't know if i have a super bullish prediction but um there's a couple of opportunities i think are going to be interesting and you know these market cycles are difficult to predict but at the same time some elements are predictable so as as i think uh you know in 2021 um you know like uh layer ones were super popular and right now uh there's a lot of competition that's happening at the l2

uh and then you know the layer below that like l0 so like bridges and things like that so uh what i think is going to be interesting is if you look at like the interface of some of the stable swap protocols like sabre on solana for instance or trader joe's on avalanche there's actually multiple bridge data sets for the same thing and it leads to pretty terrible user fragmentation now the the problem here is that the bridges themselves can't create products that solve this fragmentation problem so i think the next project that can you know very low hanging fruit um you know be very highly valued is sort of like a wrapper around all the bridged assets that issues canonical assets regardless of

which bridge was used to bring assets on board and this is fairly easy to do because every single app that uses bridged assets wants to solve this problem and it sort of helps to co-locate liquidity around canonical assets instead of having seven different versions of the same thing so um yeah i think that's that's going to be powerful maybe i'll build it do it as this has been awesome emin anatoly de quan thank you for joining us today on bankless been a lot of fun thank you for having us it really was a lot of fun awesome we will do this again sometime of course uh you know uh hand clap applause these panelists they

have been uh instrumental what that's throwing that's one button that's the wrong button he killed the vibe at the end look at him uh no all of you guys all of your projects have been responsible for onboarding a lot of users in the space and distributing a lot of private keys and that increases the decentralization of our world and that's a good thing so uh we applaud you congratulations risks and disclaimers for bankless listeners of course eath is risky avalanche tara and solana they're also risky all of crypto is risky so is d5 you could lose what you put in but this is the frontier we're headed west it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over

to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence we recommend joining our daily newsletter podcast and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bank list experience you'll get access to our market analysis our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the bankless token for airdrops raffles and unlocks if you're interested in crypto the bankless community is where you want to be click the link in the description to become a bankless premium subscriber today also don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders ask me anythings and weekly roll ups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic

content thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build