Interoperability's Product-Market Fit | Deep Dive

Transcript

normal contributors have been working with talian scopi to build what we call multi-v um which is a sort of first ofit kind multi-chain governance solution and as more projects kind of go multi-chain and expand out from a single chain that they were deployed on to to other chains that they view as as having valuable user bases and having valuable liquidity their token holders for their governance token are going to be distributed across all these chains and they're going to want to still be able to perform effective governance while having um a distributed set of token holders hey everyone this episode is brought to you by say the Blazing fast parallelized blockchain which is unlocking salonik performance for the vast ocean of eth

devs out there now you're going to be hearing all about say and their new V2 upgrade but if you take away one thing evm is here to stay there are some problems with it which we're going to get into later in the episode let's say and especially their V2 upgrade is helping solve that so thank you very much say for making this episode possible hey everyone this episode is brought to you by Kinto the safety first L2 which is accelerating the transition to the onchain financial system they've got some very cool features like use your own kyc and Native account abstraction which solves a bunch of the onboarding and bottom back problems that many l2s suffer from so you're going to be hearing all about them later in the program but if you want to learn more and better if you want to join their

launch program engine GN you can click the link at the bottom of this episode go check them out tell them I sent you if you're building anything in web 3 you likely need oracles and verifiable Randomness that's why B is partnering up with Supra which offers the fastest oracles and D vrf free for listeners of velur for 12 months and you can get that at super.com blockworks the link there is in the show notes or stick around we're going to be talking about them later in the program all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve before we jump in quick disclaimer the views expressed by my co-host today are their personal views and they do not represent the views of any organization with which the co-hosts are associated with uh nothing in the episode is construed or relied on as Financial

technical tax legal or other advice you know the deal now let's jump into the episode hey everyone uh welcome back to another episode of BC today I'm joined by nikil Sur at the Wormhole Foundation welcome man hey Michael thanks for having me on excited to be here yeah man I'm really pumped um it's great to chat with you I mean I know we've we've officially closed down uh the season here on the multi-chain endgame but you know Wormhole you guys were uh you know made that season possible and also you guys have basically one of the leading interoperability apps on the market today and I figure no better place to start than the source you know um and to hear from you who's like deep in the weeds of building this stuff so yeah I'd

love to just frankly like get your perspective maybe ask you some of the questions that we asked a bunch of our guests this season as a little bit of a retrospective but starting from a really high vantage point you know what does the future of sort of multichain look like and maybe if we could touch on the interoperability aspects as well there yeah yeah great question I guess the way I see so Wormhole is at its core interoperability platform um Wormhole contributors believe that the future is going to be multi-chain F the today the status quo is already multi-chain and we think that um the future is only going to become more multi-chain so there are only going to be more chains in the future they going to be more

requirements for interoperability between those chains and we see interoperability as like really core to providing a good ux in crypto um if you have a bunch of Silo chains the experience is really fragmented users are fragmented liquidity is fragmented applications are fragmented um that's not a good future for crypto um a good future for crypto is where users can all interact with all applications that are in the entire crypto ecosystem no matter what chain um those applications are built on there are different reasons to build applications on certain chains some chains are faster some chains are more secure so there are different trade-offs to every chain that you

already see today and that you'll start seeing more of in the future and ultimately it shouldn't matter you know to the user where an application is built that matters to to the developer and the developer can build wherever they feel most comfortable wherever they have the most expertise and then they can use an interoperability solution such as Wormhole to bring users to them to bring liquid to them and to access the rest of the broad crypto ecosystem n let's get into some of the Weeds on how that's possible because I think everyone's agreed with that right which is right now if you're a user of crypto especially like a multi-chain user it just feels crazy like if you are trying to go up to you know base and sort of speculate and and go up to one

of their l3s or something like that it's like oh my God I got to route my ethereum maybe from my coinbase down to eth main chain and like forget about if you have to go from salana to base or something like that feels very difficult we all agree that that's not the end state but the question is I think at least when it when it uh comes to some of these like interoperability protocols is all right it would be really nice if users and liquidity were just 100% portable and fungible across different Computing environments question is what new security assumptions are we taking on by doing that so can you address just like H how how are we actually solving this problem and from a user standpoint like our what's kind of behind the the metal so to speak yeah yeah for sure so

getting more into the weeds of how Wormhole works but also kind of that informs how most other interoperability protocols today work is Wormhole is a general message passing protocol that means that you have a source chain where you send a message from and then that message can be delivered to a destination chain or multiple destination chains depends on if your model is like bidirectional Point too or multicast and that message can be any payload of data that message can encode a token transfer it can encode kind of a governance message it can encode an intent it can encode an oracle price it can encode anything um how that actually

works today for most interoperability protocols is that and for Wormhole is that you know a message is emitted on the source chain with a payload of data and then in worm case there are the 19 Wormhole Guardians these are 19 very large well-known validator companies that are fully doxed well-known actors who are trusted in the ecosystem and they are all running full nodes for the source chain that the message is emitted on in Wormhole and um or using the Wormhole protocol and they each independently observe that message via their full nodes so there's no additional trust assumption there and then they each they each independently

verify it and attest to it and in the case of Wormhole when 13 out of 19 Guardians have attested to a message that's been emitted on a source chain that produces a valid attestation that can then be submitted to a destination chain um so that's like a verified action in The Wormhole protocol um and so this is the way that most interoperability protocols work today because it's roughly the best that you can do um in the there's this huge push towards you know ZK and more trustless infrastructure we can talk about that more that has a lot of sort of engineering hurls that need to be uh that need to be uh got you need to get

by a lot of engineering hurdles you need to reduce the cost you need to make it faster so there are a lot of things that need to happen to make ZK and trustless messaging possible but today um Wormhole and most other interop Protocols are you know um are backed by these trusted entities as multi sick bridges yeah I think that's one of the like one of the challenges and even like in a GMP like a general message passing type protocol like like a wormhole we also had you know we talked to Brian this season as well from ler zero like there was a there was a very interesting nuance and question that came up which is basically my understanding and like I'll probably overgeneralizing here and

correct me if I'm wrong is Wormhole provides the Foundation or the sort of framework for other entities to come in leverage that neutral infrastructure and then build their own security apparatus sort of on top of that and there was a very interesting debate this season in between with with Hart about you know should you be as the general message passing layer opinionated because realistically what people end up doing is they take this nice credible unopinionated infrastructure and they use it to have a multi you know um and this happens with like a lot of the different this is like not a there's nothing you can really do about that I guess you could adopt the philosophy that actually you know we don't even want to give our

users the ability to do this and we're going to have more opinionation uh about what that infrastructure looks like you know how do you tackle that sort of question because from an enduser standpoint it ends up being a lot of this stuff is secured by multisig but from a wormhole standpoint I'm kind of on the standpoint that you should let your customers do what they want to do you know gotcha gotcha yeah I guess that's one of the that's something that we think about a lot uh as wormall contributors and that's one of the fine lines I think you have to tr tread when working on interoperability interoperability is I think a super complex um space in crypto because there are onchain components there are off-chain components there are lots of

components involved there are lots of places where things can go wrong and there are lots of different configurations that you can put those components into interact together and you need to figure out where to tread this fine line between like ease of use versus um flexibility for the integrator or flexibility for the user and so I think at the core protocol level um I think that it's best to give developers and give integrators as much flexibility as possible one thing I feel like I see time and time again uh from integrators I talk to and just from crypto projects generally is that that Everyone likes to do things in similar but very slightly different ways and so

have giving people and projects the flexibility to kind of um to accommodate their specific use case is really important that's on the developer side when it comes to the user side and actually like building uis and actually building applications that end users are going to use I think it's important to actually be a little bit more opinionated and different uis and different applications will approach the these tradeoffs in different ways and that's why you have so many different kinds of applications that users can choose from if that makes sense it does it does do you have any opinions yourself I'd be curious from your seat on what the general architecture is going to be uh of warhole supported applications like one

you know here's a debate that's been happening a lot especially within ethereum circles right now l2s or l3s right and and there's these two sort of camps which are on the one hand there is a massive cost uh Improvement going to l3s you know you batch everything down to the L2 you don't actually need to touch ethereum for those expensive settlement fees and so there actually is an I don't know if it's a full order of magnitude there's a big cost reduction between being an L3 and an L2 then on the other side of the camp you get people that say oh my God l3s what is it g to be l4s or five next and we should be this is maybe more of the salana perspective where we should be putting putting this on one chain and I I would just be curious you guys are sitting at

like the ab absolute bottom of the stack and I would be curious if you have an opinion about what's going on way up here yeah I I'm curious to see how the L2 L3 and then if we ever expand Beyond l3s to l4s l5s or what you're talking about I'm curious to see how it turns out I personally still think that the L3 space is kind of uh nent and emerging I feel like it's it's really big and it's like it's really big in terms of narrative right now but I'm to me I'm still sort of um trying to to me it's not totally clear like that l3s are going to win or

that l3s are going to become super popular because you know for example we haven't used up l2s are not at capacity right now there are L1 chains that are coming out like monad which are um going to which are planning to hyperscale and become like very very fast um and so I'm I personally am curious to see how this game turns out from a wormhole protocol perspective again Wormhole sits at the absolute bottom of stck and Wormhole can can work with any chain and so if there are exciting L3 chains then Wormhole contributors would like love to work with those chains that come out if there are exciting applications lots of users

going to those chains then we're excited to work with them but I personally am am not totally convinced that l3s are going to like win out the day and everyone going to move to l3s yet I'm curious to see how this turns out yeah it's I don't know I well okay let me let me get your opinion on this because this is another uh theme of the Season that kept cropping up which was ZK proofs and popular like I'm want to say popularized by polygon I I think they're definitely not the only team to be working on this by any means but I think they captured a lot of people's imagination with this idea of the AG layer and it's a simple concept it's you know if even if you just look at it from

first principles what does it mean to be a rollup it really has to do with that it's like the settlement contract and that extremely secure Bridge from the L1 to the L2 and what a what a zero knowledge proof says is that actually if you you can just sub you take a a signed message and you substitute that with a proof suddenly you don't need a lot of the same apparatus from L2 to to main chain and especially once you start to batch and aggregate those proofs then the economics start to look quite a bit better as well and in in looking through the lens of zkps the rollup ecosystem and l2s versus l3s start to look pretty different uh so I'm not sure how much you've thought about sure you probably

have you know in so capacity as a interoperability Focus protocol but how do zero knowledge proofs change the game here and do they change how you think about l2s versus l3s at all yeah that's an interesting question in terms of I I guess my general thoughts on and then we can talk about how it affects you know l2s l3s and other specific parts of the crypto ecosystem but my general thoughts on ZK pu are that you know there's a lot of work that's happening on ZK there's a lot of investment being put into ZK and specifically from a scaling perspective and from an interrupt perspective like people are more focused on or the part about ZK proofs that's more interesting

or valuable is the succinctness so the abil to you know quickly verify a proof that something happened on another chain um that's really valuable from an interop uh perspective that's also really valuable from like a L2 scaling uh perspective um there are a couple of things that like need to so these ZK proofs are like possible today people have created ZK proofs um there are a couple things that need to be improved about them they need to be made faster and they need to be made cheaper right now it takes a lot of compute power to generate these ZK proofs and it can take a long time and

that's what a lot of like research and work has been going into that's what a lot of Wormhole contributors have been putting work into is making ZK proofs faster and cheaper to generate um so those are like my general thoughts on ZK I think that things in in the interop world are like trending towards ZK um things will become ZK you will see corridors is getting more trustless over time but it will take time because you need to roll out kind of ZK proofs for all these different uh kinds of source chains um and different VMS and things like that I think ZK proofs on salana is also like a pretty uh complicated thing uh that hasn't really been solved fully yet um when it comes to like impact on l2s and

l3s it'll help them scale from an interop perspective you know again um I think that when we I think Wormhole when we see like more standards around like when Wormhole starts releasing ZK uh messaging and when we start to build more standards around like ZK proofs um perhaps that can help Wormhole scale to more chains but I think that remains to be seen can you say a little bit more about why it's more complicated to generate ZK proofs for say an ecosystem like salana versus may an evm based ecosystem yeah for sure I think so my understanding here isn't super deep but at least from you know when I've talked to um contributors who work on the ZK

side of uh of warhole um it's that salana has a bit more of a complex um a bit more of a complex uh consensus mechanism than ethereum um that also changes a lot more frequently than ethereum I think the E cons ensus mechanism is pretty standardized it doesn't change too often and like clients have already been developed for eth they've been in development for a long time um there's like a very ongoing ZK effort there I think on the salana side it seems like the consensus mechanism changes a lot more frequently so it's harder to build

ZK like clients that uh that don't need to be updated okay uh I mean yeah that that does make sense come on salana standardize your stuff no I'm just kidding that's yeah it's um it's a challenge man I mean that that's one of the uh you know the things about these ecosyst the balance of like how much do you want to upgrade stuff versus um just letting sleeping dogs lie it's a it's a balance so I so I I interrupted you a little bit you know going back to maybe some of the like one of the challenges on at least from an interrupt standpoint around ZK proofs is the cost and latency because you know whenever you talk to someone who's based in ZK it's incredible right like the the benefits you know it really does it's it's a cool example of very Moon maath

Tech where the concepts are very interesting very complicated the implementation is is definitely very tough it's still Wild West although like uma's spl1 and risk zeros uh tkm is helping a lot but it's still it's still very much on the edge and the question I always ask is like why if this is so great why aren't people using it and it usually comes down to cost and latency and that that's where I think you're that's why I think you're starting to see a lot of interest in these aggregation layers for ZK uh ZK proofs do you think do you see that as a layer which ends up AC crewing value that seems like an economies of scale type game where you're trying to amortize cost across a whole bunch of different proofs um do you think that ends up being kind of like a sticky value acrel

layer what do you think about that yeah yeah you might have to remind me on why a layers like are able to to like aggregate ZK proofs from a lot of different ecosystems I'm not sure that they actually can from a bunch of different ecosystems my like for instance I know polygons they're they're starting with the in a dream sense for poly again if anyone from polygon is listening you feel free to push back if my understanding is incorrect because I'm also venturing out into challenging territory here but it would be say like hey especially for a bunch of the ZK rollups there's a lot of proofs that are going on still like approver is realistically like one gigantic computer in a server room somewhere chugging out

proofs in a very expensive way patching it down to ethereum is expensive and and wouldn't it be nice if instead of doing that you could aggregate their you know signatures or whatever and then batch that down one time so it's it should be like a cost saving sort of win-win and my my sense is that the other rollups view this is competitive and it's like I because polygon has really shifted their um the way that they talk about this layer as being extremely neutral now so so my sense is that it's it's been a social challenge to try to get other Roll-Ups to opt into it but but I'm not I'm a little less clear that you could very easily do um like salana based ZK proofs and batch it with something happening on polygon or

ZK got it yeah that makes sense I I would say you know I haven't dived too much into the weeds of like polygon's agair but generally my thoughts on sort of ZK proof gener and speeding up ZK proof is that like whoever solves this problem I I think it's a big problem to solve of first on the technical side how do you generate ZK proofs um faster and more cheaply and so how do you speed up generation do it cheaply and then how do you like create how do you incentivize or how do you create like a

Marketplace of proof um who will actually generate these proofs for you and how do you incentivize those provs to generate these proofs for you um I think that the protocol that can crack that is the protocol which will ACR a lot of value in uh ZK messaging and ZK interoperability um it's something that warhole contributors are working a lot on uh that's why we've brought on a lot of like ZK contributors to help us um but yeah I think I think a lot of value can accr to the messaging protocol that does that because it'll be the most trustless kind of messaging and it'll be you know hopefully the fastest kind of

ZK messaging and um it'll also be the most reliable kind of uh interop protocol um I think a a ZK protocol that like isn't able to properly incentivize actors to generate proofs is not going to be as reliable um because they're gonna have issues with you know if it costs a lot of money to generate these proofs you know you need to find someone who's going to do it everyone wanted to give a big shout out to today's title sponsor SE now I want to talk to you guys a little bit about why I think SE is cool from a design standpoint a big problem that it solves for eevs out there and then some cool stuff that say has coming up the reason I like say from an architecture perspective is again it's a very fast blockchain parallelization all of that

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same set of Standards the very next question everyone asks is whose standards and then someone proposes I think it should be my standards and so that it feels like is where a bunch of these conversations end up getting shut down so how would you wait that in between technical challenge versus social Challenge and if it's mostly social and how do we solve that yeah that's a really good question um that's really good question I think a lot of I I frankly think a lot of the I think ZK proofs are underway we're GNA have ZK messaging rolling out on various corridors for different kinds of VMS and chains I almost am of the opinion that a lot of the technical challenges um in

interop are being thoroughly worked on and are on their way to being solved um so ZK messaging um more flexibility for integrators um different kinds of cross chain architectures all these things have a lot of work that have been put into them and um mature existing Solutions are out there like Wormhole is a very mature interop protocol that's battle tested so are the other big interop protocols that are out there they're you know pretty and battle tested so I do think like there is a big social problem to solve in terms of like stand interrupt standards and like

adoption of which protocols to use and I go back and forth on this sometimes I think that it's it's a matter of like um uh what's the right word um uh like uh one chain adopting a single interrupt standard and then other times I think it's like actually it should always be up to applications to adopt whichever kind of interop standard they want that works best for their use case just like there are lots of chains there are different interop standards or interupt protocols and they have different trade-offs and you as the developer should adopt whichever one like works for your use case and then under the hood the end user isn't going to realize like which interop protocol is being

used and there are ways to you know build applications that incorporate different kinds of inter op protocols that don't fragment liquidity that keep liquidity unified that keep users unified if that makes sense yeah I think the application Nuance is definitely I I tend to agree with you there I if I was a maximalist in one sense it would be that I think the applications are going to be end up they're gonna end up driving the show at the end of the day and if there are onchain apps or onchain products that have tens of millions of active users the infrastructure is going to bend over backwards to support them in shape or form it needs to have that's the weird thing right now you know it maybe that's part of the challenge is that there

aren't really those apps with product Market fit and so you've got a bunch of infrastructure companies jockeying you know for my standards versus your standards and it's almost like all theoretical at this standpoint because we don't know which apps are going to be successful and what they're going to need you know there are a lot of circular arguments maybe that's part of the reason yeah yeah it's a problem I think generally crypto needs to solve um it's interesting like within crypto interop has tremendous product Market fit like a lot of Protocols are going multichain um and a lot of protocols see going multi-chain as valuable to like access more liquidity access more users um just generally grow their project um you know then there are end use end

applications like dex's all the defi applications games governance Etc that uh you know have some product Market fit from like the crypto super users um but are still trying to break into like the mom and pops of the world right so I think that's generally a problem crypto needs to solve but I agree with you I think that I I do lean towards thinking in terms of the interop world that there are different interupt solutions just like there are different chains and each has their own trade-offs and the developer ultimately is going to choose which one works for them and they can use an interrupt solution without you know fragmenting liquidity while

still being able to compose with other kinds of applications on different chains that they deploy to so the interrupt solution is you know going to sit in the background power the rails of cross chain communication and ultimately it's not really going to matter what interop solution is being used to the end user as long as the developer Architects their solution in you know a userfriendly way let's talk about a little bit where the product Market fit for interop exists today you know you you're setting a very privileged seat from this particular standpoint like you see a lot of why like people are by either applications want to build in a cross-chain way you see why users want to maybe move from chain to chain like

can I push you a little bit more on that to say like when you say that interop has product Market fit what do you mean exactly by that yeah I guess the strongest product Market fit for interop is um token transfers like there's a lot of cross chain token transfer activity um and protocols also view taking their token cross chain as like important to grow their user base so um you know you see this for example with uh Jos soul jetos soul recently went to ethereum using Wormhole native token transfers and jetos souls going to ethereum to expand their protocol and they're expanding their protocol to ethereum and as a result they want to move their governance token over as well so that

users on ethereum are able to you know trade their governance token get access to that um get exposure to that price action um and ultimately that's going to evolve into you know cross-chain governance for example maybe jto is going to launch a multi-chain dow in the future uh maybe other Protocols are going to launch multi chain Dows in the future um as they bring their governance token and as they generally move their project multi chain um so I think a lot of projects see from my perspective it seems that a lot of projects see going multi-chain as a as a great way to to just grow their user base and grow their protocol yeah the I haven't thought

about this in a while but the multi-chain governance one is interesting there are a lot you know you think oh that'd be fine and simple but you know remember that these these things have to happen with onchain votes and passing you know bridging votes it's tough man and you also run into some funny basically any any logic that exists from one chain to another is like much tougher to bridge over it's why like nfts in general it's still pretty tough um I mean this is why I guess this is a bull case for Wormhole for yall to figure this stuff out right and uh and yeah yeah I think multi-chain governance is a pretty exciting topic that's something that we've been working on a lot on a lot actually so we recently announced partnership with

Tally and scop lift Tally's well-known uh team that runs uh tally UI um host governance proposals and governance voting for a lot of uh popular protocols and uh scop lift is a really talented smart contract development team that's worked on a lot of governance protocols in the past and we've and wormal contributors have been working with talian scopt to build what we call multi-v um which is a sort of first of its kind multi-chain governance solution um there's some more technical details in you know the the article that the announcement blog post um and I'm happy to dive into it more here but uh but I think that's an exciting use case and as

more projects kind of go multi-chain and expand out from the single chain that they were deployed on to to other chains that they view as as having valuable user bases and having valuable liquidity um they're going to also extend their governance token to those chains and then you know I think that they're going to want to allow their token holders for their governance token are going to be distributed across all these chains and they're going to want to still be able to perform effective governance while having um a distributed set of token holders yeah it um is what it's I I'm pumped that you guys are doing this

because it it feels like one of those things that's super necessary and again should be kind of easy but just because of the the realities of how blockchains work today it it's just a little bit complicated so yeah for sure is complicated there are a bunch of edge cases that you need to consider um you know chains go down chains aren't always on the same timestamp there's time stamp drift between chains you know um so there are a lot of different kinds of edge cases you need to consider it's like a fun architectural problem to to go through but uh it's one we view as as really important to solve how do your time stamp what how does time stamp drift in between Chains Get result that's I realized that was the thing

yeah yeah it's an interesting um it's an interesting problem it's uh chains are never going to have the same time stamp one is always going to be ahead and one is always going to be behind slightly you hope that they uh stay roughly aligned or within a certain uh range of alignment but it is POS entirely possible that like one chain really drags um for a certain period of time and there are different different kinds of uh there are different kinds of solutions that others have put out there in the past um to try and mitigate this problem uh you know one solution is that you can and I don't think there's a way to

100% solve this problem there's a way to solve it with you know hopefully 99% certainty but there's not a way to like fully mitigate the time stamp drift issue um I don't want to get too into the weeds actually of this but there's an together by the by the pool together team um on sort of multi-chain voting and cross-chain voting uh built by the pool together team that sort of uses checkpoints and a range of checkpoints to check um like that that uh users aren't able to double vote because of time stamp drift in crushing governance designs damn that's cool have to get one of those guys on the Pod that is uh is definitely in the weeds but also super

you know what it reminds me of a little bit is um two things actually you know how they used to be when they when they first launched satellites into space they kept noticing that the clocks would be roughly not the same after a while the satellites being up there you know it would be you know a couple of seconds off from time on Earth and it's because time actually moves differently up and spit which I just if you're a space nerd at all that's like one of the cooler things I just think that's that's so awesome and then one of the other examples is the Y2K bug I watched this I'm going to date myself here I suppose but I you I was alive for Y2K but I wasn't paying attention to the business impact of it and just the decision not to include the first two numbers of the

date and the amount of time and effort and fear that caused these these database architecture questions they end up end up being it's kind of like well can we just solve this but thorney thorny problems you know yeah I mean a lot of uh crypto development can sometimes be compared to like you know database architecture um eventual consistency questions um which are problems that a lot of people have a lot of people have put a lot of time into solving in the web two side and then people come over to web 3 and uh they can bring that knowledge with them and N I've got a so here's a question that we asked are our listeners this season which is well maybe to set

the question up a little bit as we move into this world where I I think most of the people that are either oh it's all going to be Bitcoin or all ethereum I think we're gradually moving away from that view and adopting a more multi-chain ecosystem type thing how many l1s are there going to be how many different VMS are there going to be is it the evm the svm and move or is it just the evm or is it the you know questions how many are there going to be what is the Paro or the power LW going to look like we're we're less sure about that but one of the challenges that you and I have been getting into a little bit is I think one of the what has tempted people a little bit to say you know we should just put it all on one layer is

be a lot less complex right and in a sense you could actually make less tradeoffs and it doesn't seem like that's what's going to happen it seems like there's going to be multiple different ecosystems and as you have these different ecosystems maybe you make end up making some trade-offs and I feel like where this sort of where people tend to land on this spectrum is well if we you know if we make these trade-offs then we might as well just be doing Trad fight and like they kind of throw their hands up and I'm personally I of the belief that there's a lot of gray area um and there's a lot of benefit to crypto outside of maybe some of the like extremely early viewpoints on like a very limited sense of of defining things so how maybe with that qualification how do you what would a

good outcome for crypto look like for you like what you know if we're having this conversation in 10 years and you know a bunch of a bunch of new stuff has happened we got many chains some of the infrastructure has been solved but also maybe we had to make some trade-offs on it you know what would make you say you know what we did this this was a good experiment this is worthwhile to run and I would call crypto a success versus how would things play out were you're like this was like not successful ultimately um I've like gone back and forth also on what I think you know the ultimate like sort of purpose and value of of uh the crypto ecosystem is I think you know from the perspective

of improving the Global Financial infrastructure I think like you know if in 10 years we can look back and we say that and we say that you know crypto was able to improve like you know payments let's say crossb payments or remittances right make those a lot cheaper make those a lot more effective um and ultimately like help a lot of people like pay using usdc or usdt or whatever you have it I think that's like a that's like a good outcome for cryp that's one good outcome for crypto where it can help like improve the experience of

paying and improve the experience of like crossb payments and crossb remittances for like people across the world I think another like good outcome for crypto could be like you know you look back in 10 years you see that um a lot of Institutions have onboarded on to defi a lot of liquidity has come into the ecosystem like defi is a burgeoning space it's a way where people can like hedge risk it's a way where people can like uh it's one place it's like like defi exchanges become very popular I think is like another sort of success for like improving the Global Financial ecosystem system

um at the same time I think that a lot of value in crypto is also not necessarily focused towards just like improving the Global Financial ecosystem like a lot of value in crypto is you know for example people enjoy um people enjoy like the the cultural side of crypto so people enjoy like nfts people enjoy games people enjoy um meme coins people enjoy um being a part of a project and having a say in the direction of like a protocol or project um and I think that's also like if we look back in 10 years and we

see and we see that you know crypto provided a lot of like cultural value crypto provided a lot of entertainment value crypto provided a lot of like um sort of value for people to feel like they part of building something new um then I think that's also a success does that make sense sure does yeah I think that's one of the I think you know crypto is in a lot of ways a tough industry to work in for a long period of time it's really volatile I you know that it's it's kind of like that thing the thing that you love about someone is also thing you don't like about them that's how I sort of feel about crypto it's man the volatility man it the human emotions it's tough to go through like either you

know people make this joke it's either it's a SE over or were so back and there's nothing in between it's like your dopamine receptors are getting fried every couple weeks or you're in a pit of despair that's tough but on the other hand there's no industry that is more Dynamic that pushes the boundaries more that innovates harder that is open to new ideas it's really addicting it's hard it it'd be very difficult at least for me at this point in my my crypto journey to even consider working in another industry because it just feel like a massive step back yeah yeah I can't I agree with you I I love working in crypto because it's so exciting because it changes so much and maybe that's another actually that that's another thing that I think if you would

ask me in 10 years to look back on crypto that I would call success is crypto continues crypto there's so much experimentation people are like trying new things that haven't been tried before in crypto um they're trying new ways to organize governance right they're trying new ways of uh monetizing culture they're trying new way ways of um trying new kinds of exchanges like dexes are a new kind of exchange uh Crossing Bar L barend protocols just in general a lot of defi are like new New Creations and so I do think that like it's also a success if crypto just continues to experiment and continues to

push the bounds of like what's possible and that ultimately informs like the non- crypto World on what people find valuable and what people can do that's possible I agree and I've had a conversation with with someone today about this and um I think one of the the pros and cons of crypto as it exists today that I'm not actually sure there's a real solution for you my my attitude is about is that you kind of have to take the good with the bad a little bit is again going with this theme of tradeoffs and the thing that's best about something is also kind of the worst about it at the same time is how fast crypto moves and part of the reason why I think trafi is

so ripe for disruption is it's heavily regulated and there's not much Innovation that ends up happening there there's really good reason for that because the the driving factor that makes most Financial Services or Asset Management business survival for the long term is safety that is a value proposition when it comes to money you don't actually really want people pushing the boundaries a lot of the time you want them hey I've got money I'd like this to be safe that's the most important thing um on the flip side of that though that's why it's such a just like aifi uh industry that I would hate just hate to work in crypto's the opposite of that and it moves extremely fast it's really Dynamic on the other hand I mean look at how many billions of dollars get

lost because of hacks every year and and stuff like that so there is a there is a trade-off and you know even there are plenty of projects in crypto which thread that needle and they push hard and it's kind of one of those things that unfortunately is going to come down to survivorship bias it's like well if it works out everyone's going to say you're a genius and you pushed the boundaries and it worked out but if you lose a lot of people money guess what like No One's Gonna have any sympathy for you and it's a I don't know I'm kind of just rambling here but it's a unique challenge of the industry um and maybe you just got to take the good with the bad a little bit Yeah but I guess I'm curious to see just like you know how it plays out I crypto

is very uh it's a dark farc it's a very um there are a lot of hackers out there the theory of the kind of focus on open source is good it improves security it also like invites hackers black hat hackers and white hat hackers to try and like break protocols um focus on permissionless is is kind of the same and so I'm curious to see how it how it'll turn out but I think generally as an industry you know we're getting better at it um we're getting better at uh trying to make sure that we make uh we make hacks whole we're getting better at making you know incentivizing white hat hackers to uh focus on security and find bugs um so I think as an industry we're getting better at it but I'm

curious they'll turn out totally and by the way just to caveat I'm I I want to don't want my comments to be misconstrued that oh that's fine if people scam other people that is not what I'm talking about at all I I'm just saying I think the and and frankly a lot of the hacking that goes on in crypto is just straight up illegal shout out AI aie with his highly profitable trading strategy and that's just Market manipulation that's just illegal but I I was more you know talking about the the Fine Line in between like pushing the bounds of innovation and moving quickly and all the pros and cons that go along with that but but I agree with you and you you know what else I was thinking about the other day is remember it just used to be much more common to get

computer viruses and you're like ah man I don't really want a PC because you get a computer virus and if you were on Lime wire downloading songs in the day you could just crash your entire computer and you just broke the computer in some instances and then that just kind of became a solved problem and I I sort of feel like that's the way it's gonna go with crypto eventually as well yeah I agree optimistically I agree you're like but in reality no I'm it's h I think it's good to be an optimist in the long run but also be pragmatic in the short run so yeah nikil man this has been a ton of fun do you do you have any parting words for for listeners either who want to um maybe

aren't as familiar with Wormhole or can you give uh the folks a little bit of alpha in terms of uh you know don't betray any state Secrets or whatever but anything that's coming up that users might be excited about um just however you want to close things off here yeah for sure um I guess Wormhole contributors are really focused on improving cross chain ux um and building you know improving the experience of going cross chain making the experience of going cross chain cheaper more effective and like working on building an entire ecosystem of applications that use uh cross chain so um we have a lot of products coming out so multi-chain governance is one such example there are

other products coming out that will sort of improve liquidity for cross chain transfers um products coming out that will improve the relaying infrastructure there ZK messaging coming out so I think there's a lot of products that w contributors are working on that are that are super exciting um that will improve just generally cross chain ux and make the entire infrastructure more secure and uh easier to use so super excited for that awesome man well congrats uh you know appreciate all the good work that you're doing um at Wormhole and uh yeah man this was a lot of fun we should um we should do it again sometime soon yeah thanks for having me on Michael enjoy it cheers man

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