How Abstract Plans to Dominate Consumer Crypto

Transcript

actually I have a personal question he might debate it cuz he's smarter than me but you look under the hood of most of these chains they all do the same thing and that was like game change how you think about the business model of abstract CH do you build stuff that people actually want welcome to igen layer unlocked an interactive educational Journey Through the IG lay ecosystem created by technical Founders and builders for the entire crypto Community a special thank you to our partners all lir polymer authentic skate and and lrange for helping to make this happen our goal is to raise the collective knowledge of the Igan Lair ABS ecosystem and unpack the technical designs of the top teams in space welcome to I layer unlocked welcome LCA let's have some fun

rolling up baby let's do it just got to Singapore been a couple hours on on the ground so nice getting just getting warmed up you're full of energy how many coffees have you had today I know I've been here for 2 days so I've been chilling hours last night so I'm ready to rock I'm as fresh as you'll ever get me fresh as ever H fresh as ever well good man well welcome in we are having a kind of a podcast uh a bit of a Marathon today nice um lots of stuff around Igan L Ian da abstract um this is not your first time on the Pod so I think we can kind of skip the intro and maybe we can just talk about actually I have a personal question y to start you are big into branding and this kind of idea of

consumer marketing I'm curious what a non- crypto brand is that you find a lot of inspiration from or that you are like really appealed is really appealing to the way that that they do their marketing I think it sounds like pretty taboo most people probably answer this but apple and I think like apple took something and I think a lot of crypto companies should be inspired by at least the apple story because it's like IBM had computers you know long before Apple ever did Apple just packaged it in a consumer friendly way and I think that's like the final I think that's the frontier in which now crypto projects to be looking at their business specifically blockchains which is like how do you package this chain which is like you look under the hood of most chains I'm an advocate for this he might debate it because he's smarter than me

but you look under the hood of most of these chains they all do the same thing right within some sort of five to 10 degree percent of of separation and now it's a game of like who can brand this better who can package this better for the consumer that ultimately is going to let them win I totally agree with that like Gary tan has a beautiful quote about this where it's like the only status game that matters is do you build stuff that people actually want and that matters and so like you know I I talk about this a lot but the reality is today in the industry we haven't really built stuff that like general consumers care about and we kind of like parade these figures in our industry as these like prominent spoke people but the reality is like you talk to anyone

outside of crypto and they don't really know who vitalic is who like you know Kyle samani is like it doesn't matter to them yet cuz we haven't really packaged this in a way where like real consumers can interact with with it have a considerable you know um positive value differentiation between something that we're already doing on web to so totally agree totally agree with that yeah yeah I mean if it's optimistic rule if it's a ZK rule if it's using this da or that I mean it's just it it becomes a game of semantics but you're focus with abstract chain which it's actually the first time on the Pod talking about abstract chain so maybe you can kind of intro that a bit and kind of how you got here as well yeah I think while exploring you know pudgy Penguins has two products that are

on l2s today and uh just ultimately like going around a different l2s and seeing like what value propositions they offer you know a company like pudgy and and products that you know are on Walmart and on target and Pudgy world that are powered by l2s I just kind of realized that like look a majority of blockchains a day are building a g with a general purpose mindset and I think that's just fundamentally flawed in the sense that one it's incredibly hard to execute and kind of pull that off and I think on the other side when you're thinking consumer like consumer and general purpose are not synonymous no and and if you need to you know you know it to to actually optimize for the consumer experience it compromises on maybe what you might be doing on the def side and so there wasn't like a real chain on evm

specifically I mean you can make the argument that salana is probably the best consumer chain today but on evm there was just nothing that really fulfilled the needs and spoke to us as a brand in which I felt like I wasn't giving them more value than they were giving me and the elephant in the room is you know apps make blockchains blockchains don't make apps and when I'm looking from a consumer angle I actually think there's a way in which a chain can provide a ton of value for for apps and that relationship can be uh mutually beneficial and so the elephant in the room was like look nobody's owning the consumer chain on evm nobody's focusing on consumer first there's this huge you know elephant in the room which we all understand that like this last year it felt like there was no new retail coming

in and there needs to be just somebody that optimizes for that experience and that experience only and just being the leaders in consumer crypto via pudgy and breaking through in ways that I think nobody has done before in the space it felt like a really great opportunity for us to actually be the ones to lead that charge and and to actually tell that story in a way that I think a lot of people you know can believe and be inspired by and ultimately we've done a lot of things at pudgey that I think are hyper unique and we're kind of looking at consumer crypto in a couple different phases I think the first phase for Us is around discretionary spending and this idea that I think when you actually think about like what brings people into crypto I think there's probably three pillars one of them is a lot smaller

than the other but the first one is know make money or to lose money but most people come in the space to make money the second one is I actually think a lot of people you know stay in the space because they having fun and then I think the second one the third one is probably like this contrarian Doomer mindset where it's like you know I I I don't want you know any you know which is a lot of power users I think fall into that that category but the fun one I think is interesting because I think people really underestimate fun and how Universal fun is and ultimately if you look at the properties of blockchain uh in in the consumer world like I'm a big cpg guy and I've been doing a lot of consumer Brands and consumer applications for a long time fun has a

ton of barriers to entry I mean usually fun have like way higher process processing fees because like the risk is exponentially higher in terms of how payment processors and Banks index that the Geo restrictions the regulations you know fund is universal but naturally it's it has a ton of borders based on which G geography you're located in and so you look at the Block the blockchain uh principles and kind of what building on blockchain Rails kind of solves ultimately it solves a lot of things that fun applications have a hard time kind of dealing with so one there's a huge like removal of barrier entry there which I think is exciting and then the second one is like fun is universal and fun is viral and crypto needs virality crypto needs something that's Universal and I think those two things speak to web 2 users and in a world where crypto

has no influx of new users as of today it seems like fun might be the actual use case to bring people in and so rather than focusing on 20 different things we are hyperfocusing on consumer but more specifically these next 12 to 24 months discretionary spending and fun I want to create crypto's digital Disneyland I want to create the world and the internet's next crypto or next to Park and I want crypto to you know be the backend and and the rails in which that lives I want the incentives to be baked into those rails and I want all of the amazing things that kind of crypto provides to kind of be the underlying infrastructure to power all of that but this platform has to be able to you know compete with Google Play Store and twitch and all these other things uh and if it doesn't then we ultimately failed

so I think from our perspective you know we're tackling the consumer chain we see a huge opportunity uh in the market in terms of being able to capture you know that value and ultimately spearhead that at charge and on the on the later end of it I ultimately think this is a thesis and and a and a mindset that I think more Builders need to be building in uh because ultimately it's the final frontier and the most important Frontier the the ETFs have opened the door for the institutions we're there in terms of institutional adoption we need to get users and we need to get them fast if not I think we'll put a ceiling on the entire industry I think the ceiling is still a lot higher to go but you know our is block is blockchain rails going to power the next generation of Internet

economies in which I think the Tam is50 hundred trillion or is blockchain going to be like on one side of it digital gold with like you know some sort of like programmable money which is really only used for Price speculation which I think the Tam is maybe 10 trillion so we still have a lot further to where we go today but I think everybody would like to see a higher ceiling than where I think our current trajectory is which I think our current trajectories to to to the 10 trillion doll mark But I think we all would probably like to see that at 50 or 100 but that needs you need real breakthrough use cases in that sense and I actually think fun is that use case or at least the first phase to that use case uh so we'll see how goes but I

think that's kind of the story of how how this all transpired yeah I mean I think the transition from pudgey Penguins to abstract to kind of launching your own chain makes a lot of sense I I tweeted about this a ton where it's like look if you're if you have this massive Community application and you're just bringing it on to a diff you know a different chain you're basically just giving away all your real estate you're a tenant not a landlord right and then there's a ton of different customizations that Saigon always tweets about with you know the account abstraction the this the gas payments the the Global wallet all these different things and so kind of putting that Tech together okay we've established Tech isn't the moat here Tech is just part of how we get there sure some of the ZK stack is going to

allow you guys to have this experience so that if I'm a non- crypto user I can come on and use abstract but it's not going to change the difference now you have a online marketing background right you you spent you know hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook ads you've done direct response marketing but the marketing for abstract chain and even for for for the pudgey pig is a little bit different where when you were selling things online it was like I put in a dollar on Facebook I get a row as a return on ad spend of three or four I see that immediate kind of like feedback loop when you're running abstract chain I'm curious how you're thinking about the business model of the chain so you've got this top of funnel you've got pudgy Penguins you've got this kind of marketing how do you kind of break down

all the way down to what the highest value is for users is it trans actions is it sequencing revenue is it how you thinking about the business model of abstract chain so we're the business model is really through the portal right and I actually think there's a franchise model around this portal in which it's powered by blockchain rails and there's something that Saar is working on which you guys might have some visibility on in terms of panoramic governance which you know that will kind of play into the sequence R you so I won't D dive into that I'll let him release the white paper when it's time he dropped the alpha yeah he cooked he cook he cooked on that Sil uh so I I don't think we're really in the business of sequencer fees we're actually in the business of this portal and franchising this portal if

and when it succeeds so like things like the swap like we're going to own that right we're going to own that with an abstract Global wallet and don't underestimate I think how big abstract Global wallet plays into the business model of kind of what we're doing uh but you know there's and real quick what is the the the global wallet could you explain that so without giving away too much because like we we haven't unveiled too much of this but but we're going to build a what we call we'll just reference this as a consumer portal and this consumer portal is going to combine two elements one is like a live streaming element and another is like a curation and Discovery element so think live stream like twitch and think Discovery and curation like Google Play store and they kind of intertwine with one another the issue is is you know a

huge part of like I think the abstract angle and where I think we're going to succeed is in the distribution to this portal and so this idea that I have one central place in which I can drive all the traffic to and really putting our marketing expertise behind it so like the the Tik Tok machine the YouTube machine the Instagram machine the things that we do best you know we wanted to give you know top applications on the chain distribution and we're going to give distribution by featuring them on this portal and and pointing people to this portal now the key caveat in all of this is the current 0o to one in crypto is still broken as long as you're dependent on extensions so extensions is where everything breaks because this idea that I'm going to go take somebody you know bring them to something be like

hey go download this wallet take them to Google download the wallet it's a broken model so to give you guys a little bit of insight like I'm a big e-commerce guy like that's my experience in e-commerce if I were to remove a button from the left to the right I could move my conversion up 1% and that would make the you be the difference between half a million and a million in right and so like it e-commerce like when you were doing C which is like basically like optimization on like the Lander and the brand your their whole thing would be like how many I need to remove as much steps as possible to get person from add a cart to check out and that would be the difference between you making 100 Grand a month and a million dollars a month so crypto's in the same phase

where you have to do where you have to remove all of these layers and so uh this whole entire portal and this this consumer Hub is going to be powered by abstract Global wallet so a user is going to go from let's say Tik Tok they're going to see some piece of viral content they're going to be pointed to this portal and to this Lander and then there they're going to be asked to create an account they're going to put an email and a password and all of a sudden they're going to have you know what we call like a smart wallet uh you know kind of built into the actual platform and so this smart wallet is going to enable you to do everything that a regular wallet does but it's actually be baked into the platform and it's not going to be something that you

necessarily you know need to kind of move to from one place to another it would also allow like seamless login so if I'm on this like Google Play Store and I'm playing pudgy world you know I want to go play pudgy TCG there isn't like an egregious process to go through that you know new information all of that information populates from one application to another so it's just like seamless consumer experience I think a lot of our engineering focus is is again not necessarily on the Chain side because I think you know I'm going to let somebody else crack 100,000 TPS and when they crack it like we will go and you know cigar we study it and we'll Fork it right like I don't I don't necessarily see the you can't Fork the top of funnel no you can't Fork the top of the funnel and you can Fork the user

experience once you see it but I think the person who's going to who who's going to crack the top of the funnel on that user experience simultaneously and who has that Head Start is going to be a really meaningful Head Start and that's where we plan on winning so this idea that uh you know user goes from Tik Tok creates account has this wallet now has this seamless cohesive experience just like they would have on steam or Pokey or you know Apple App Store it has to meet like consumers don't want to go figure it out I think that's the problem with crypto I think too many of us have just assumed and even for me I remember back in 2017 or 2018 I used Unis swap for the first time like it was complicated for the first hour it was like super it wasn't familiar and and

you can't have like the to assume that a consumer is going to spend an hour to figure it out I mean is literally like the epitome of drop off like that they they're going to drop off like flies and so I think a majority of our engineering talent and resourcing is going into that portal and that zero to one onboarding through abstract Global wallet if we can crack that and pair that with the distribution and then have an ecosystem of fun and a Creator funnel who's like you know reviewing and engaging with these fun applications you have a really interesting flywheel to to hopefully pull off something that I think crypto's never seen before well I I think you like hit the nail on the head here when it comes to user distribution being like the real moat right and you briefly touched on this where hey like these

blockchain rails need to be able to support these sort of systems and we're going to let other people build them and this is where I think like from the igen side we're so focused on like converting Cloud to crypto and we see that as our responsibility to go and build these like back in systems cuz I completely agree with you I think like at the end of the day consumers need to be abstracted away from all of the actual interaction points with crypto and not to take away from any of the engineering work that like you guys are going to put into like you know what's specific to abstract but the back end of these you know l2s the Das the you know entire like um we look we look at them as like the decentralized SAS Universe of like okay like you're going to any web 2

consumer application that you interact with is you use oot to sign in you have some sort of like payment processor that you integrate you have all these SAS modules that you're plugged into and for us we're really focused on like how do we build out this Marketplace build out this like AWS style like infrastructure stack where hey you guys focus on the distribution this is what you're killer at and let us just like handle finding you know similar to what you just said who are the best Builders and best practices of like what is actually making an impact on the efficiency the scaling Etc making sure that these things are supported but it's not our responsibility to go and make an impact on the consumers themselves because Focus theory has to apply somewhere

right like your guys's Focus theory is the consumer distribution is like the e-commerce um my dad actually like helped build Costco.com entire e-commerce system right so like that's like I had a lot of visibility into that like growing up and you know like you said like moving a single button around can have a super large impact but if that's something that we were focusing on like quite frankly we would fail we're not the type of Builders who can that s market and like make an imp but um you know like just at the end of the day like the most important thing would be how do we build some sort of infrastructure systems that like anybody can come very quickly deploy and end of the day like I hate signing Ledger transactions even today like I hate clicking through like all the fields and

doing that nobody in their right mind is going to go and like actually interact with these systems if that's how we're going to like go and you know I hate using certain wallets just because of like the setup process right and inside the eth ecosystem you have so many different teams using so many different wallets that there's like a wallet interop problem now like having this idea of a global smart wallet having this like Global interaction framework is just like something beautiful to me because okay consumers live there and like let the tech get abstracted away which is something that I think like blockchain developers haven't really um absorbed or like have been able to like come to terms with to some extent because like they're so focused on doing all of it and it's like okay we built the tech now like let's go and try and

get the consumers no no no let's go and try and get the other builders who are focused on the consumers which is like our whole take I I love that and I was actually talking to Iceberg a couple months ago who I know is working with you guys now but he was like Igan is the aw what AWS is you know to the world it Ian is that to crypto and I was like that was I wish somebody would have told me that like a couple months that was like such a breakthrough like so I think it's also it's also in the principal but also in the messaging right I was like absolutely you know that's that's a great way of framing I as like a a smooth brain you know or you know it was fascinating but I totally agree with that thesis you guys put every chain on

I da the other day which is pretty hilarious yeah like that was just nuts thank you yes we just like we saw that there was this opportunity for us to have this like fun it was honestly like a fun marketing exercise that started for us and then we realized oh like our system's actually like so performant that we can just like run with this and like let's play around a little bit so explain the thought process behind that cuz you might have been uh dabbing that up well the story is basically sham sent me a Google meet link and said nobody understands what I da is and what is capable of and so he said like 10 minutes he explained me let's just like uh fetch every block and post it on IG da make it available and that was like Game Changer because initially like we

have been working working on this for like like last two months for like iterating and then there was like um some bad sentiment so we pushed it forward but I think it was great that we pushed because like two weeks back we had 16 MB blobs and we could post like a raw blog data so like if we did like two months back it would be like we compressing the data and like it would be a very the user experience would just be a bit more fragmented cuz you would just like be compressing that it would be split across many blocks the retrievability would not be the same as like just post the raw data let people download it and let people interact with it where like it just makes things like far more simple to use and I think that's like the focus point at the end

of the day the other thing is like we have a road map to hit 100 Megs per second on a DA we have a road map to hit like 1 Gigabyte per second on a DA so then like you know I've always had this dream of like what can we do with um like this is like a multifaceted play but like what if we hosted like the League of Legends like World gaming championships onchain live streamed live betting markets you have like trusted ex execution environments that allow people to like upload their anti-che what if you put like entire player winnings on Smart contracts you catch them cheating you can slash their smart contracts and now you have like you know some sort of like economic guarantee that like Gamers aren't cheating as much right you can literally slash their prize winnings which hasn't happened before right

cheaters can just like get away with it and like they get to keep their cash okay like let's create these like positive systems where like people are forced to behave more responsibly inside these ecosystems and like the main thing and you know this is probably something that you guys would like be dealing with and you know you touched on like some sort of governments governance parameters that you're working on which is like it's the initial acquisition of users is one thing yeah but like the retention the actual like you know um narab from Camp mentioned this on the last last podcast but like month over Monon wallet interaction not just like hey I sign one thing for like the test net and then like cool like I'm expected to like get an air drop and like sick I'm going to go to the next one and like

just keep farming like that's if we keep like having liquidity rotation if we keep like you know if everybody treats this as a get-rich quick scheme then like this is never going to take off as an industry so like we need to create these like positive incentive mechanisms for people to like stay in the system and that's only going to work if we have you know like actual meaningful user experiences that people want to use and interact with which like you know as a power user maybe you don't care but then the consumers definitely will like that's the mo makes ton of sense I totally agree Luka how's testnet going it's going good I think we're like just taking a super unorthodox approach here it's like you know I think a lot of people like we we announced this thing and like 5 days later we announced

testet I think a lot of people just like to B it out was like super it it wasn't random but it was just like oh test Net's ready done cuz I think from our perspective it's just like dude let's just let's just build and like not play the charade that is being played so like for example you know I think like you know when we first did the deal with them we're like okay so like let's plan this out let's focus on like these certain metrics and it's just like the more that I because you know I haven't been in like the what I call the blockchain game right obviously we've been in the in I call them games cuz it feels like it sometimes but I've been in the nft gam so I understand that business like the back of my hand I just like kind of understanding like

how people are building blockchains how they're positioning themselves and I just like I just look at it at all I'm just like this is just broken like everyone is optimizing for the wrong thing and so I told the guys I was like we're not playing anybody else's game like I want testnet live as quickly as possible because I gives Builders as much time to build as possible Right In Like A Live environment or relatively live environment so like I'm not going to play this game of just like edging people on and trying to create hype and all this nonsense cuz like we're just we're just not and and I'm really keen on on setting the meta here like I really want people to look at what we do at abstract and just the same way they look at us at pudgy like we changed the

entire nft business at pudgy everyone was obviously like claiming they were doing things that we were doing but we put them all on notice and and everyone changed their entire road maps based on what we did that's not like opinion that's just like fact I know what's going on in the boardrooms of a lot of these guys' you know other projects conversation so like we we made a huge impact there and I want to have the same impact here like it it's very much a charade like today people are building blockchains to to play a charade to catch a bid to catch a time you know to launch a token there's really no Integrity Behind these products or at least most of them and then you have like people like with these guys are doing and it's like okay different whole different mindset you know they're

obviously more technically focused so they're doing their thing in that respect I think from what we're kind of positioning ourselves just like dude let's just do this in a way that I think nobody else has done it before and hopefully just set a meta on how people build chains moving forward well there's the really common trend of like launch an announcement shill then build totally right and like I think take that you guys have you know uh chose to go down and like something similar to what we do is like build it right like build in public have like high degree of visibility let people see what's happening and so like what ends up happening is rather than you having to shill the community actually like go and engages with each other and now like you get this aggregation effect of the community rather than just like these

oneoff announcements and then follow it up with like okay now let's go execute on the promises that we set out to deliver like okay trust me if they want to Hype train in a charade like I know how to do that right like but there no just like it's just fundamentally broken right and like the thing is when we knew this we're taking a big swing and we're not taking a swing to just be an L2 like we want to be the biggest and the best and we think we can do it so uh I think just there needs to be a shift I mean right now it's just too much of a a backdoor cabal game that I just think is just like not advantageous for any for pushing the space forward at all real quick what's next so I think for us uh

these next couple of months is uh really getting into debuting a lot of the things I'm starting to talk about so like you know debuting the portal you know debuting abstract Global wallet you know panoramic governance white paper uh a couple things you know more community building I mean we haven't done any marketing or hype building yet uh I kind of wanted to get boots on the ground in Asia and have a couple conversations before we started doing that but October I really plan on ramping things up and putting all eyes on abstract we know to do that pretty well so I'm not too worried about that and uh the goal is to main net before the end of the year and then uh you know see how that goes and uh you know go from there but uh you know really want to you know get this

thing live in the wild and and start experimenting before the year's over oh yeah you you heard it here first folks thanks for coming on Luka thank you Andy appreciate it thank you so much guys thanks