Is MegaETH the AWS of Crypto Infrastructure? | Namik and Shuyao

Transcript

even though we have a lot of block space these are not Quality Block space and Mega E is the most differentiated block space that people will ever see for us e alignment means bringing that power of E to as many people as possible and me does that because we understand the role of a layer two and we're not trying to become a layer one we're not trying to decentralize a sequencer and bring consensus back into this where in actuality what you need to take is take the power of ethereum and scale it out hey everyone we all know blockchain is changing the world world but who's actually driving it I'm excited to invite you to the sixth edition of Meridian a web 3 conference hosted by the Stellar development foundation in London from October 15th through 17th get early bird tickets at meridian.

stellar.org with code blockworks pod special thanks to Stellar for sponsoring us now let's get into today's episode hey everyone excited to share with you that Kronos ZK evm has launched its Pioneer program offering early adopters a chance to earn not only loyalty points but also potentially win part of a $30,000 ZK cro giveaway if you're interested in being an early adopter visit zk. Chronos orbridge big thanks to Kronos for sponsoring today's episode hey everyone the polygon Community grants program was launched with 1 billion tokens All For polygon Builders really excited to share

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description now let's get into today's episode all right everyone welcome back to Empire we got the mega eth folks the most hype project in crypto that nobody knows anything about so uh we wanted to have them on the Pod santi's an investor I'm not um connected me to brother Bing and namic in New York met them in person had an awesome conversation said I don't think anyone knows this about Mega eth so would love to have them on so brother Bing namk welcome to the Pod pleasure welcome guys so this is the most ridiculous thing they all have mega eth hats and I don't so you can tell who's in the Inner Circle you guys call Mega eth cabal right has cabal the had cabal

so so okay maybe let's start with the basics which is um I don't Shia can you just walk us through the story of Mega eth and like starting maybe actually way back pre Mega eth like with your days of at consensus and then talking to vitalic and like just tell us the whole backstory of Mega eth let's let's start there so like most of people I got into crypto in 2017 I used to live in Africa so the idea of crypto was really obvious I think having a alternative Financial ra is extremely important for society then I moved from uh Nigeria and Africa to Middle East and then join consensus during 2017 thinking you know what ethereum is going to take over the world

tomorrow and uh during my days at consensus I worked on a lot of very interesting ideas like for example putting the traffic light on the blockchain which obviously is not very feasible um or realistic but during the process I witnessed consens Grew From you know having 50 different ideas putting everything on the blockchain to really you know consensus 2.0 with our Marquee products such as metamask infura trle Quorum as well as uh lenia which was our our layer two answers to ZK evm so during my days at consensus I was leading business development for all of our products and

one thing I noticed is quite obvious was you know we often get um tickets for mamas you know something goes wrong right most times just people get fish but other times it's like transaction does not go through so you get a ticket and you're like let me investigate and you're like okay is there something wrong with metamask and you go a layer deeper you're like okay maybe there's something wrong with the RPC then you go to infura you're like okay you know what infura is performing pretty well and then the problem goes to the base layer and the base layer always has problem and the base has not scale even with the current Layer Two so a lot of people ask there are so many blockchains and so many layer tws why are you doing another

Mega E my answer has always been even though we have a lot of block space these are not Quality Block space and Mega E is the most differentiated block space that people will ever see so that's how we started Mega and okay I got I got to I got to ask about that one when you say like all the other block spaces are not quality but we are quality it's a nice marketing line I would say but like you I mean yeah you got to say more about that yeah I was just saying you know a lot of ways you have to look at what is possible on what kind of block space right the aerium road map so far has been very much around like let's get a bunch of these different rollups and let's let's scale

horizontally and have like 10,000 rollups really really cool but then you ask yourself what can actually exist on those rollups so yeah you can have like a lot of rollups and by having a lot of rollups you kind of have a lot of capacity right but what's the actual capability of the application can sit on any of these different chains what are the kinds of applications that can actually sit on these chains I think a great one is like autonomous worlds in fully onchain games right everyone thinks it's really cool but a fully onchain game has to be fully onchain and there is no block space that can facilitate a truly fully onchain game it isn't a horrible and janky ux what's a result there are no really fully on trained games out there

today h okay so maybe Shia you want to keep going with the story and like yeah just take us up to present day I guess yeah so you know when I met my co-founder uh we are you know three co-founders um Elon went to Stanford study low latency data center compute PhD um Lay onetime It Study High throughput Network which is practically blockchain for six years so they came up with the idea of Mega E when I met them I was like you know what is a scammy name like Mega E right like it just sounds like another 2017 Ico scam but when I really look at the TCH I was like you know this is just the most

differentiated block space and then uh yeah I was hanging out with vitalic I was like asking him around you know checking out the white paper and it turned out that the idea of Mega E was actually already written in a blog post he wrote in 2021 called endgame so what he wrote in the blog po blog post was um the endgame of a blockchain network is a relatively centralized blog production environment an extremely decentralized blog validating Network and that's exactly what Mega E is that's the end of my story can we double click on that um because I think that's if there's one takeaway of this entire conversation is

is that cuz I remember the first time that I had a conversation with you guys that was and I told you you delivered like a couple of key insights which I always look for in teams this was the first one and I was like I perked up when I heard it because just to leave the context and I'll shut up yeah most people would not lead with that if you talk to an L2 they wouldn't lead with that right there's there's and to me it's just not a full appreciation of where it matters of of what you need to have decentralized and what ultimately are the functions of blockchain block blockchains and what is the most important thing cuz mind you like we're been in an environment where a lot of the l2s are not really l2s um you know they don't

have fraud proofs um and instead of focusing on building a fraud proof they're thinking about doing things that don't matter as much like decentralizing the sequencer I'm like well focus on goddamn fraud proofs and then decentralize the sequencer so that's been from my vantage point as an investor pretty frustrating and then I hear you guys say that what you just just said and I was like okay this is this is quite differentiated at a time where there's like infra fatigue which I disagree with so I'll stop talking but I'd love for you to double click on what you just said yeah so there's an ugly truth in crypto right which is performance does not go well with decentralization and you can see this on

the L1 landscape too right most nodes are homogeneous meaning that these nodes do all of the tasks of a blockchain any other thing what really matters to you so you know for ethereum what really matters is decentralization validation needs to be as simple as possible for as many people as possible and as a result you know no one wants no one's going to pretend that ethereum is a environment that's performant but clearly there is Need for performant Block space and that's kind of where Sonic came in with more beefy nodes that allows them to do additional optimizations and before you note you have a more performant execution environment but our thesis is that like even salana is not truly

performant when we're comparing to web 2 quality Web Two performance no blockchain is truly performant and for Mega you know there is some really really interesting designs that you can do once you take the uh inherent like security guarantees of a layer two right so layer tws are able to inherit the security and decentralization of ethereum in two ways one is the escape hatch which is very powerful right your e is always safe it can always go back to L1 no one indexes on how powerful that is and the second is what you said the past few years of L2 land have been focusing on uh proofs fraud proofs so given these two things Mega 's feis is

hey you know we're Layer Two let's do what a layer two is supposed to do which is hyperscale and make an execution environment that's extremely performant so what we say is well let's look back at those nodes let's see how all of these on had to pick and choose where they want to sit on this trade-off curve of like performance versus decentralization what if we could have each of these tasks right so the tasks are like broadly block production and uh block validation what if we could have hypers specialized both in terms of Hardware as well as software configurations for these uh tasks so what we say is okay the dream state for sequencing and execution is not

decentralized it's actually very beefy and very performant so you can stream transactions on chain instantly so what does that look like and we go back to First principles and we basically build a mega sequencer it is not decentralized it's bare metal and it's very very powerful we are able to do optimizations like inmemory compute J compiling paralyzation because we've decided to create a high very beefy sequencer so that's like sequencing that's block production but the beauty is because we have chosen to specialize all of our nodes we can do that for validation as well right the nodes that do block validation can be extremely light because our approver Network each of the

approver nodes do a subset of the sequencers transactions in a model similar to stateless validation um and then we use igen for da and as a result we're able to have a architecture where Hardware is the only limit and we mean that in its truest form so 100 ktps and 1 millisecond block times is this an like an abandonment of the of the eth values and you're basically just saying screw the eth values like let's just build the most high performant blockchain because people are sick about like this whole decentralization theater like let's just maximize for for performance here yeah I would say that Tri and I are are some of

the most e aligned people you can imagine but it's actual e alignment right I grew up in countries where the value of the US do like the value of the Native currency devalued 80% in the span of three months right uh and when we look at this question of like what is e alignment it's leveraging the power and decentralization of ethereum to bring the world onchain that's not possible as an L1 right I mean I promise you the new L1 that's going to launch is not going to be more decentralized in aerium for us e alignment means bringing that power of E to as many people as possible and me do that because we understand the role of a layer two and we're not trying to become a layer one we're not trying to decentralize a sequencer and bring

consensus back into this where in actuality what you need to take is take the power of ethereum and scale it out so um I think like e alignment is much more about apps users experiences bringing stuff that no one could have done before in web 2 uh meaning peer-to-peer networks cryptoeconomics to the people I think the other thing would be um I think a lot of people confus is alignment with etherum Foundation alignment I think there's a lot of uh you know just people maneuvering uh that we have zero interest in uh our vision and square focus is on adoption you know things we're doing for example

um I had a great time at zalu uh last year and we bring a a meaz zoo format into Thailand where we bring application Builders right only application builders that let who can leverage ethereum technology to build things for real people that to me is alignment yeah I want to spend a little bit more time on on this concept of like um ma like massively centralized block production and decentralized validation um because I think it's it's quite important and so you know we've had folks from arbitrum optimism blast uh pretty much salana monad Bara all these different kind of execution environments and and l2s

so the obvious question is like why haven't people tried this before you have hundreds of l2s like what like why do you think that is yeah we I actually thought quite a lot about it because it's so obvious right the architecture is there um I I think there are two reasons the first one is you know ethereum development largely depend on you know where the e F points their fingers at the EF has been focusing quite a lot on consensus and not so much on performance so I think that's one aspect the second one is actually UNC capability the thing we're doing to optimize a sequencer is really

hard and we are the only team that can do it because Elon studied like how database works and we rot the entire state tree and L that is condenser so we actually understand the blockchain so you need a team that actually knows both in order to produce what we're doing and that's why like people say oh you know we can just do a Mega E clone and there a bunch of them out there it's like Mega is paralyzed layer too but you know what paralyzation is such a tiny part of our Tech stack there's so much going in that's on optimizing the sequencer that no one has the capability to do it so I think these are the two combined reasons make you're nodding uh anything you want to add to that point yeah I

mean just music to my ears right um yeah I think there's like two aspects of this I think fundamentally consensus is difficult right like there are a lot of really smart people in the L2 world and they've worked on these problems and this is what they've been focusing on and it allows us to you know be able to leverage the power fraud proof and build what we're doing so I think it's a lot of like the right time and the right team that allows us to build Mega now uh I hear Hardware specialization and I think about a lot of the criticism that salana has faced around higher Hardware requirements and costs and you know it was I think now people have come to understand the Nuance um could you

double click on that like on the specs on not to get too technical but just at a high level like the hardware itself the cost like the you know would love to understand that a little bit more yeah I will just it's all in our we have a re research tab of the mega website we have a basic breakdown of what those costs will be like and uh the difference between our our nodes and everyone else's so I'll walk you through that but I do want to touch on one thing before that Santi I know you're a big Soul Bowl I think there's a big difference between hard e hat yeah Mega bullish man um there are big differences between like you know that trade-off on the L1 versus that trade-off on the L2 right when

you're increasing the hardware requirements on the layer one to run a node that's like it makes sense because you get more performance but you are you know basically decreasing the the validator set right the amount of people who can participate on Mega E that's not exactly a concern because we're not even pretending to have like a like a multi like a you know a decentralized sequence architecture for us we're saying let's let's take the valuable part of having really really powerful and beefy hardware and have one sequencer run that at any point in time and let's make sure that the validation Hardware is as low as possible but sure let me walk you guys through some of the uh the numbers on our end right so the average ethereum

node is a two core CPU 48 memory uh 48 G 4 to 8 gigabytes memory 25 megabytes per second on network uh salana it's 12 cores 256 GB and 1 to 10 GBS right our sequencer alone will be 100 cores one to four memories of terabyte 10 gigabyte 10 GBS for ter for Network one to four memories of uh one to four TB in memory my bad that's going to be pretty expensive to run right around $10 an hour while our approver nodes are going to be extremely light much lighter than an ethereum or salana node right and that's going to be running the cost of running those will be

0.4 uh dollars an hour so very very cheap for validation relatively expensive for production but that's the cost that we incur got it because you're running it so it's it's subsidized or you're you're paying that in some way shape or form yes and the plan will be in the future to have a rotational sequencer architecture right where the mega team will not be the only people who run the sequencer till the end of our days but the second you have and we're pro a rotation of who is running the sequencer what is important to us that there's only one sequencer that's running at any given time that's how you make sure they maintain that level of performance we're not trying to you know sell some kind of

magic antit toe right like our performance comes from the fact that we have one sequenc you're running yeah yeah yeah when you um I know it might be farther ahead in the future but what would a world where you're rotating look like um you're presumably selecting initially the the other parties that can do the production or would it be permissionless in some way shape or form it's pretty early so I don't want to be uh talking you know that on stuff I'm not really sure about to be frank but I mean I think big picture you can think of it as a a block based thing right so like lock one to 100 is sequencer a lock 100 to 200 and a

sequencer B and there's lots of different models in which you can enable the most performing sequencer to be the one that's participating right this isn't like a it's it's a it's a fair Merit talk re scene at the end of the day if meie is not able to create the most performing sequencer and someone has coming for like a more performance sequencer that sequencer should be the one that's running the network so a mixture of rotational architectures plus a a game where like the most performance sequencer is able to run the network uh for people that might not be super well versed I don't want to lose them could you spend a very quick oneone on like sequencing itself uh and maybe contrast that with like a something like arbitrum right they're they're running

the sequencing themselves but what about their the way that they're doing it um is sub um optimal relative to how you're doing is just the hardware itself sure so um there are two aspects of this the first one is like okay so the arbitrum sequencer is there's obviously so what you're saying is correct there's only one sequence that's running on arbitrum the difference is they haven't optimized a sequencer there's a couple reasons why they do this right one is because maybe they want to decentralize a sequencer in the future the second is to make sure their approver architecture is able to match uh the sequencer right usually if you have one if you have sequencing that's extremely performant and you

don't have an architecture that's optimized on the validation side to match that sequencer the thing breaks apart so what we do is we basically say hey let's create this extremely performant block production via sequencing and then work backwards how can we make sure that we have every single other part of the sack not become the bottleneck itself if you make just a sequence of performance the bottleneck goes somewhere else that's why we use like Igan da right and a lot of people will use Igan da in the future but then their sequence will become the B neck because their sequence doesn't run at a similar enough interval at a quick enough interval to us which results in uh priority fee markets kicking in so the answer is optimizations no one's decided to

take this extreme I think the answer is Extreme node specialization no one does it more than we do and maybe on that point itself uh thinking about just the you reference like people trying to copy Mega Ethan it's fairly common you know in this open source chaotic world what went into that um specialization um you know you have other folks in the team that are highly technical as well um like how long did it take you guys to develop this when was the key insights around this was this sort of like uh brainchild of MIT coming out of MIT or

I'm just kind of curious like how this all came together yeah I was my my urge to say it's a brainchild of Stanford MIT MIT and Harvard and then you can't get more uh pedigree than the mega East team uh name another one um I mean it took it took quite a long time right the idea started about a year and a half ago when Elon graduated from his PhD program and got really fascinated um with the blockchain space and you know for for like Outsider for crypto native researchers we love the little problem that makes us feel so good so when Elon came in he's like yo this is not that hard no specialization like do things with the sequencer which is something he

studied right for six year at at Stanford um so he did AR chitecture and then leay join was like okay I can do even more with the igen da so that's why I combined them together it took us a year and a half to be where we are a lot of our engineering work is actually in and um not only in designing but coding uh the sequencer uh that takes a lot of time and most of our Engineers have experiences in you know open source software um in designing really large um Network or you know from filecoin for example and fun fact our Engineers aren't just your your nerdy crypto well nerdy research Engineers they actually really believe in crypto so something we do when we are hiring folks it's like

you know are you really here for the next five years do you believe that crypto is going to take over the world and that's something we see from our engineer as well that's why I tend to think that we have a very powerful team because our mission is extremely aligned with the wider crypto industry and then to answer your other question about you know what other people would be doing I mean other people could you know if you have a centralized sequencer right you can claim a lot what we're claiming um you can cheat on your code you can D up a few things but for you to achieve 100,000 TPS and some millisec latency you can't just simply Dow a few things right like change something on op stack and parameter would give you maybe I

don't know like one second block time but millisecond is a very heavy lift yeah go ahead y what's what's the downside of doing this doing what well if you look at all of the l1s and all of the l2s there is a tradeoff in in in every single one of them um and so I'm just curious how you guys think about the trade-off of of Mega eth there's got to be some trade-off or or downside by making one thing really good there's you're you're hurting something else so yeah I mean I think that we are our downside is we're going to the extreme of this AR chitecture right meaning it's very difficult to like if like decentralizing the sequencer meaning

having the the the the performance breakdown that you would have from one train decentralizing their sequencer to megative centralizing their sequencer are very very different right our ability to have this level of execution if we were to choose to go the other way would would go away right so I think a lot of people when they ask why do you have a central sequencer what are the downsides of it it the main one is like we cannot like our performance will be much much worse if we decide to bring consensus back into this right in a comparable Manner and I think the second one is like there's a lot of questions around how do you create more sens of resistant sequencer architectures and

that's where we're working with the rotational sequencer what do you if you guys are successful I feel like a lot of the like crypto infrastructure in the industry is not actually set up up to support something that I mean like something that actually goes this fast like like literally the rpcs um the indexers like I think a lot of them max out at like uh what 10 10,000 maybe um like like if you guys are successful there the things in the industry won't be able to support you guys like the rpcs and the indexers so how yeah I guess are you gonna have to build all that in housee or how do you think about that yeah it's unfortunate we will have to build all of this in house or find people to build for us yeah it's it's interesting right because

this level of performance is not something that like I we can go find like salana teams and convince them to you know do a couple optimizations or change X or Y and plug right in salana is not fast enough to match Mega Eve right so we need to find incubate and work with teams to build a new wave of infrastructure I I mean even the one more question something before you jump in is like even the da layer um I think you guys are are you using igen da yes like even Anan da is not spec to support I was looking at that I did a quick review of like their docs right before this call so I might be totally wrong but like even Ian DA's doesn't seem like their spec to support what you guys are

trying to build on Mega eth so I mean that's like that's not an RPC or an indexer like that's like a core thing of your Tech stack how do you think about that yeah so the current spec you're seeing probably outdated we work quite closely with IG team they actually have Engineers who are dedicated um to make sure that they have capacity for us so yeah we're going to see significant Improvement uh but on on the other side right I I think it's the middleware like the the first example I mentioned from the wallet to RPC to data index and all of that um I think simple things like blog Explorer I hate looking at explore blog Explorer it's just it's not good so we're really thinking about how to make blog Explorer super user

friendly make sure people just see how fast it is yeah um so I think all of these are part of Mega East ecosystem right we're not just building a chain we're building everything supporting TOS around the chain hey everyone Jason here just wanted to take a a quick break to talk about something exciting in the world of blockchain the Stellar development foundation is hosting their sixth annual Meridian conference this October 15th through 17th in London it's a 3-day event where the brightest mins in web 3 come together to discuss everything from tokenization to defi if you're a developer Builder policy maker or business leader looking to make an impact in transforming Global Systems

through blockchain this is your chance to join the conversation you'll get to network with the forward thinkers who are defining the future of this space head over to meridian. stellar.org and use the code blockworks pod for early bird pricing now let's get back to today's episode hey everyone Jason here I wanted to quickly talk about Kronos ZK evm a Next Generation zero knowledge layer 2 blockchain Network focused on scalability security and Innovation secured by ethereum it further expands the Kronos ecosystem using ZK sync Tech Kronos ZK evm has launched its Pioneer program offering early users loyalty

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knowledge Tech to aggregate crypto liquidity and user bases empowering developers to grow in a unified web of interoperable chains with the agir that was a big mouthful so I'm going to tell you what it means in my in my words there's all these things popping up l2s and l3s and it's chaos right if you are building something you no longer have to worry about bootstrapping liquidity you can basically just build in the a layer to tap into the liquidity of the a layer and the users of the a layer you get the users you get the liquidity it's the agir it's hot it's by polygon Labs they've got the polygon Community grants program it was launched with 1 billion tokens Just For polygon Builders season 1 it's live right now it features 35

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like there's no standards right and people confuse latency with Rood and all this stuff but the more important thing is like we're talking in an environment mind you where ethereum L1 fees are a record low so what does that tell you right it's just have we built useful applications because we probably have an excess uh supply of block space because of I mean just by virtual of the fees right and so um while it is important to like build to optimize to build for a future where you can Envision you know billions of users on chain and whatnot there's already been fair amount of traction and I've had the benefit and privilege of seeing it firsthand when I went to

Berlin and saw some of the projects that are building on Mega um so I'd like to focus like this this part of the conversation on how you envision winning that BD game what type of applications how do we get like millions and millions of users on chain um because my thesis is like it's sort of pointless to have a discussion around like performance when we don't have users or killer applications is like it doesn't matter you know uh it's like you have a Ferrari but no one can no can drive it so you know or doesn't have gas you know it's like it's pointless right so so talk to us about that like how do you win that game and how do you build a thriving ecosystem of killer

Ops so it's all about latency everyone hates latency in life like I hate latency if it takes my phone a couple seconds to load a web page I get mad right and like what what's going on here and I think that's like the excuse I keep telling myself for why we haven't one as an industry yet right we haven't been able to get users in crypto yet because infrastru infrastructure is not there but as retalic has call us in the past right endearingly Mega is an AWS server with blockchain scaffolding that's the level of performance we're talking about so now it's up to us to build Web Two performance applications with the power of peer-to-peer networks

and crypto economics and there's a couple ways to go about this we can say that the Builders will come ah yeah the tech is good the builders they'll come yeah let's create a blog post or we go and we find these Builders and we're like yo it's time let's build something insane and we we pick the latter right so we have a very very targeted go to market strategy in which we find the smartest people that we know we basically spend a lot of time with them convincing them to uh build on me for Contex Tri is literally in SF right now one team that we're very bullish on and then we do everything in our power to

make them win that goes from building an application that will not become like the 50th lending Market on some execution environment but a billion- dooll business that is enabling a new kind of user behavior that web 2 could not facilitate it's the ultimate dream right like I'm sure all four of us got into crypto because we had some wacky idea of what a blockchain would enable and make the the better place I remember mine was pretty lame I was into like bringing legal contracts on chain right I know it's kind of it's kind of out there but you know all of these ideas you quickly become disenfranchised and now you're like I guess the future of this industry or the future of France is and this six mem coin Launchpad but this

time we can short them as well or it's on a bonding curve it's like a staking mechanism right like that's not the future of crypto uh so what we do is we find these teams and we work work with them to build really interesting ideas these ranging from uh Wild game shows where you know like the individual's data is not so valuable as to traditionally be logged on in blockchain but in aggregate when there's many of them it now becomes immensely valuable for different kinds of verification mechanisms or we're talking about like decentralized VPN networks where you're able to enable like a peer-to-peer Network to compete with web two with zero latency tradeoffs we find these teams we work with them closely and we make sure that they are able to bring in

net new users we're not in the business of trying to vampire attack some user from chain a or chain B we're in the business of vampire attacking Facebook web2 meta all of these guys do you need like the basic defi things though and like can you make the can you make the basics better so like like take a take a club right like a club on or something like that like it just it's not going to be as good like high latency it's not going to be as good as a like a binance or coinbase right High latency expensive gas uh low throughput like if I'm understanding your guys's Vision like yes compete with the

Facebooks and Googles and all that kind of stuff and get the apps but like I mean can't you make a club that's better than any other club that's ever existed isn't that a win yeah yeah I mean we're not even mentioning like low hanging fruit W's across the board there right right uh but yeah we have I'm just joking I'm just joking I think that fundamentally a club is a we all of our def apps are really really interesting and we already have them we have world star teams for example our club is X IMC X jump x coinbase x Alchemy and you know what they're doing is say the fundamental feces that L1 has just has too much Jitter and not not a low enough latency to be competitive with binance right versus mega where you're literally

at par with binance realtime decks that's clubs lending markets also very exciting right what's the biggest issue of lending markets I mean primarily the it's like either the end user is going to get screwed by an unfair liquidation margin or the protocol is going to be screwed and have bad debt but if Mega where you have 1 millisecond block times uh with a co-located or Price Oracle meaning that you're pushing price feeds at the same frequency and speed as binance you no longer have these ISS ISU and you have just more efficient markets so yeah def also Game Changer across the board um can you talk a little bit about um the decision for a builder in the

current um landscape you know they could decide to build on another L2 they could go to salana you mentioned salana I want to focus there because that's where we're seeing a lot of activity you know it's it's gotten a lot of attention um and so I'm curious like what is going through the mind of a builder that is deciding hey I can't get this in salana but I can't get it in mega eth and and I and I guess as a so so let's just start there what do you mean by I can't get this on Salon I can't yeah you know right now for instance like I know salana like you said and I AG grew that no blockchain is perfect in

its current instantiation and like you know so but you're seeing a lot of Builders move to salana and build there um and so I am curious what is going through the mind of someone that says I'd rather build on Mega eth um and and I I guess this is was going to be my follow-up so I'll just bring it up now because it really goes to the heart of the fragmented L2 ecosystem you know people talk about the network effects of ethereum which I sort of would challenge because it's it's very fragmented like if you're an arbitrum going to base um is difficult right and so that presents ux and just is more

difficult for a user to understand than going to a integrated chain like salana you don't have to leave you you load up your funds there in Phantom and you're doing whatever it is that you're doing there whereas in ethereum it's it's challenging right you have to flip through the different Networks works that might get abstracted away and that's okay you know I know op's working really in their cluster and whatnot but it's it's fra it's it's more fragmented it's it's just presents issues for the user is what I care about and really is the focus on the user so how how do you think about um you guys building as an L2 and I know sometimes you would probably challenge that but like how what is that

user experience to his band correct I know that and then so uh do you understand the do you see where I'm trying to get at like it's really it's really on this focus of the user experience and how do you how do you become the the best the easiest place for people to interact and do you not care about all the other l2s do you not care about the other networks you just you know so I think there's two questions there right I think you first started by saying how will a build like why on Earth would a builder on Saul build on me instead and the second point which I think is very important is around like

the the fragmentation and the just like the noise the amount of noise on L2 and I think Yan Jason that's the that's the answer to your question before about trade-offs what's some of the trade-offs of our design that noise um but me I'm going to start the first part which is like why would someone why would a builder Own St B A negative simply because there's a lot of stuff that's not possible on salana and keep hearing only possible on Saul well I'm going to say not possible on Saul right snap like that Mega like that bpn architecture I mentioned right uh that's a case in which fundamentally speaking there's too much latency amongst all of those different like like to if there's what the latency for a block is so high right

you can no longer work with hopping between different nodes in a network as a way of encryption boom that application can no longer exist on salana you're seeing a lot of really really interesting deepen products not be fully on chain or not even stream data or uh funding on chain in a instantaneous manner because there's fundamental constraints of um of of salana I think the best example would be a game show right like let's say there is a worldwide game show and I'm not saying too much because I have a really cool team building this on Mega but this game show which has a you know Web Two level of success has hundreds of thousands of users they're playing this

game and every single let's say like a trivia HQ kind of game yeah imagine like an HQ trivia HQ just he just spoiled it to everybody but yeah so imagine an HQ trivia right this HQ trivia has let's say hundreds of thousands of users which is accurate because that's HQ trivia had up to 2.4 million uh if you want to be able to verify the winners of this HQ trivia game well you need to be like streaming their answers on chain well every four seconds right one of the a trivia question is answered if you have 100,000 people playing this game that's 25,000 transactions per second that's a level of scale that fundamentally no chain no L1 salonic just cannot handle

right meie can so I would say that's why people build stuff on Mega because the design space is no longer constrained by the blockchain I don't want people five years to be like yeah or like in six years to be like yeah you know Mega E that's this app is a Mega E app we should just abstract a way to blockchain completely because normies do not care about what a stack looks like they just want to have brilliant beautiful web uh just web web free experiences I do hate the term web free anyways uh sh my touch on fragmentation I want to add something you know Santi you you saw how Mega Mafia worked I never think I'm selling blockchain to them I I don't think I'm

selling blog space I think I'm selling a dream to every one of them I often look at them in the eyes and I ask what do you want to do for the next three years of your life I don't know you want to do a pump dot fund I don't know V2 you want to launch a shitcoin and make some money or you want to do a billion dollar protocol and the only way to do a billion dollar protocol is in an environment that does not exist and build something that's truly zero to one that is how we persuade and Inspire the mega Mafia Builders and a lot of people are scared about that Vision right and I'm sorry then you don't get you know into the Mafia the mafia is a cabal it's a premium cabal so I think that's how we do ecosystem building that is so

different from everyone else I have a very contrarian take which I'm very proud to say I think most of the application Builders are met because they like to copy others and there's like very much lack of independent thinking and contrarian thinking we love to welcome Builders who have a very strong view on certain use case and experiment the hell out of it right they could fail but at least we they're iterating so that's how I think about our ecosystem is is different from others and then in terms of the fragmentation as I mentioned everything is about quality over quantity it's fragmented because quality is low we believe in the future where if Mega E is successful we become a GL po State

machine boring salana techline where all the deps are co- living and co-building and there's no Noisy Neighbor issue we also believe that there is so much Capal Capital efficiency and coordination you can explore when you are building on one single state machine now you're the the fact you're saying oh you know layer to is are fragmented Solana is not I would dare to challenge that I've been seeing so many pitch deck on skinning Solana I do feel like salana might face the same issue as ethereum faced in the last cycle right like what is the correct scaling solution I don't think we have the perfect blockchain right now but I do think that Mega E solves

fragmentation by providing a much more powerful single state machine for every application to co-build and c-li on and oftentimes we've teased that this idea that an L2 eventually abandons ethereum L1 um what would you say to that or what is your view there like at what point does it a economically or just from Business Development or from a sovereignty however there's multiple kind of parameters by which you can think about this I'm not saying I agree or disagree I just think that like dydx may decide to Just Launch their own chain and I I'm curious if you you know

in a world where you have all these breakthrough WS you have all this traction does it at some point make sense to abandon ethereum and just live as a independent like chain so this is what I love the most about Mega this can also be seen as a tradeoff right Jason another tradeoff of the megae architecture we can't abandon ethereum because we are fundamentally leveraging ethereum to make these Extreme Design decisions and specialize our notes to the extreme right we can't just like our core value proposition right is like centralizing block production and getting this level of performance you can do something kind

of like that on the L1 but then you're very very centralized and the L1 cannot be centralized that's why we're building on ethereum people ask me why don't you Mega on S why don't you build Mega E on like you know some other L1 well the answer is because Mega needs to exist on the most decentralized layer one so it can create the most performant execution environment and yeah that's why we all never abandon inferium because then meie doesn't work anymore it's really a simple as that that's why we're aerium Allied guys Mega Allied yeah if keone from monad were here what do you think you would say to that because obviously he's of a different opinion yeah I mean I think that keone from monad and there

will be a debate between Mega E and uh you know monad on bankless in the future so two in that'll be quite exciting D don't advertise on that podcast on a existing podcast you're booted you're booted that's we were doing so well we were doing so well yeah I mean I think our team inly thinks monat's super cool right Mona has done a lot of really fascinating optimizations onto uh yeah both paralyzation but just ac across the stack right and it looks cool it looks great for n one but we're performance first and to create the most performing blockchain you need to be doing what we're doing at least that's our opinion

and yeah it's it's really as simple as that I think monat super cool as an L1 I don't know if monat's gonna be more decentralized in ethereum I don't think so maybe I'm wrong I don't think I'm wrong but maybe probably not at the start yeah yeah and then yeah aerum is the most decentralized Al one you know I found it super interesting was um there's a bunch of layer one right and then they're like oh you know we're really scalable but what you're often seeing in the ecosystem was you know another layer one another layer two for that layer one so sometimes I scratched my head I was like you know even before you're launching you're already thinking about layer to what what's the point

yeah yeah although yeah I mean to be fair I mean the L2 conversations in ethereum started fairly early on uh I mean I guess you tried different yeah for sure for sure um just sort of contextualizing what you just said um and so it's interesting this idea that like because you don't hear it often like most people when I ask this question don't don't say it to the level of conviction that you just did which is we will to reiterate and we will never abandon the ethereum L1 because we require that for settlement on the most

secure um settlement layer and in so far as ethereum L1 Remains the most decentralized I secure um sediment layer then we'll continue to use it and it's but in that answer I never heard anything about liquidity users Network effects because most people would just say that oh most of liquidity exists in ethereum that's where the attention is but you're just saying purely from a um in order for you guys to achieve that performance you need to rely on a very stable settlement Base called ethereum L1 that you're posting back to and that's how you get and that's a necessary prerequisite to

um just focus on performance of um sequencing and juice that up I so I think like the all the other reasons are the are reasons which would maybe that person who's on etherium solely for liquidity would then potentially leave etherium down the road once they get all that liquidity right yeah yeah it's sick there's the liquidity on ethereum it makes life easier in some way shape or form but from an architectural reason like we we're on ethereum because like eum is the most decentralized blockchain and that enables us to do what we do really well let's talk about um yeah road map main net like rest of the year

like what what's coming yeah so um I think the rest of the year are extremely exciting uh we are very grateful to be on this podcast obviously uh one of our first appearance uh we are uh giving up a test net around um end of September early October May net early next year we are carrying our Flagship Builders program which is called Mega Mafia to the second phase so the first phase which happened in Berlin I have my Berlin shut um where you know we rented a hotel a co-working space we got a bunch of really cool zero to one application so we're carrying that forward to Thailand where uh we're hosting a mega Zoo along

with our friends from Igan layer uh and the goal is to bring more application Builders to the ethereum world so if you have some ideas about what to build if you still have that fire in your hearts if you're listening to this podcast you're looking for an ecos system but also fellow Builders to challenge yourself please uh come to talk to us we are looking for you to join us in the Thailand trip um we are also gearing up to make sure our middlewares all work uh our data indexing is indexing pretty nicely for now our RPC providers as well we're looking at how to provide a much better wallet experiences because Mega is so fast if our wallet is not fast

what's a point so making sure that those are in the right place and then lastly um we are thinking about how to go to market with the mega Mafia so remember we're taking a very curated approach with our ecosystem rather than welcoming everyone we are doubling down on team that is truly zero to one so when we're going live with our testet we're working with the mafia Pro program uh projects on how to make sure they got liquidity how to make sure they get users how to make sure they get eyeballs so that is a big Focus because I don't want people to remember Mega E I want people to remember Mega Mafia Mega E is nothing about the mega Mafia so come join the mega

family um for someone listening um tell us maybe non- descriped like you don't have to go into too much detail I know we spend a little bit of time but like what does that Builder look like because a lot of the guys a lot of the teams that I met um had been in the space for quite a bit of time I had the feeling that they had been thinking about specific problems and and finally kind of decided to pull the trigger for instance the Vall guys you know they've been doing a lot of research on defi they've been doing a lot of research on different other observing other protocols and uh had I got the feeling they had been very

thoughtful around how to how to build what they were building and then they pulled a trigger when they perhaps heard the pitch from either one of you guys uh the same is true for other teams that I've interacted with um but I'm I'm curious uh yeah what uh Are there specific specific applications that you would like to see that haven't been that are currently not being built uh are there ideas that you have kind of like an RFQ live RFQ yeah I can go like like you obviously like like prediction markets for instance everyone in their mother

wants to build a prediction Market no I was like okay well does that is that really truly differentiated um but I am curious um how much I guess I guess how much guy how much has this is a question how much has it been you guys putting out a proposal saying here's this new thing that allows you to to build applications that perhaps hav't been possible before because of the speed the performance uh or people just hearing about Mega and saying oh I've had this idea it couldn't have worked anywhere else and I'm gonna come here and you're like yes yeah so great question with it really varies uh our Builder program is

going bigger the family is going stronger so Wala is a fully onchain perex only possible on Mega East the team is season crypto Builders we didn't know them the the guy uh dm' me on Twitter because during token 2049 the Mega E swag is a vape so Mega is brand new Vape so guy was like yo dude what are you guys are Distributing Vape I was like yo come find me I was hanging out was Jason from F Venture so he came and we we talked he's like yeah your Tech is sick should we build and then we start building together so he came from a background where he knew he wants to build something he did diligence on technology talk to my co-founder Le and boom we're here right other teams are

not so straightforward um for example our social uh application um the idea is a actually I think that idea came from one of our friend and namic and the founder took it a step forward there is a lot of complexity in designing tokenomics and the founder came from web to he single-handedly build a web to social application that is about reality shifting so I don't think about us in a crypto universe and we pretend to be Satoshi and there's a fake Instagram timeline there right and then the Builder came to my help p and wanted to build something for an anft community and I told him dude don't want to crash your dream that isn't going to work because an nft Community are not real

Community sometimes so he's like okay what should I build and then me and Namek was like yo what about this idea with you know HQ trivia so we were more heavily involved we gave him the idea we were designing the cryp crypto economics together but that guy is obsessive with product development and product iteration right he often joke with me like he's a people pleaser that translate into a customer pleasing uh so he really enjoys the process making sure the product actually works um with the end user and we come in as adding the web three value so I think these are the two extreme example of extremely Crypton native team comes you know what they

want to build and a web founder who's also very legit but doesn't know what to do and that we came in and in the middle we have different grades of Founders who's some was more crypto native but we kind of tell them like oh this idea is good that is not good um namic what do you want to add I mean I think we believe in I think we really believe in like web 2 Excellence right I think it's saying that we're lacking as an industry that person that Shia mentioned uh EX Amazon Google engineer and his his like reality shifting app had a million downloads and 100,000 monthly active users right this is a kind of caliber of Builder that when you're able to tell them that the blockchain no longer has a

performance degradation tradeoff you're able to attract so yeah I think like our guiding principle for Builders are like how cracked are you right like do you have the dog in you yes awesome let's start ideating exactly let's start ideating on ideas and some some of them we might be more involved in some we might not be involved in but we think it's actually very important to make sure that people don't feel disillusioned because that is the main issue I'm seeing of crypto Builders right now they're disillusioned they think that the only thing they can build now is some sort of like I mean for example during the Trump and uh you know Trump had this Twitter space of Elon I

saw somebody was launching meme coins of like big buzzwords and then just rugging them straight away during that Twitter space I it said he made like 150 Grand or something and I believe it like that's insane the the fundamental values in the industry are screwing way too much towards gambling because we haven't been able to prove pmf for anything else with megie we can build the ideas that people first came into space for and it's a role of myself and Tria to help people uh you know think bigger than they may be doing now so what is the profile look like yeah you can have like this insanee web 2 Founders you can have web 2 employees who are crypto curious you can have seasoned crypto Bros right

uh hopefully they're not super broy but like you know we can have crypto people uh but what I find most interesting is like you never know where these Founders can come from they may not have been founder material at first they may have been an employee in a crypto or they may have been running a highly profitable me trading firm right who knows where they come from but when that moment CL clicks and they realize that they can build that that dream of theirs right that's when me and Sh are come in to make sure that we can ideate this space together we're very founder first yeah so main it or oh go ahead now to answer your question the use case um you know every want's prediction Market

we're very consumer driven because our chain is fast um and to be honest once you get the right founder it doesn't matter the idea so please come talk to us even if you have no idea you just want to build something and then we can give you the idea we can idea it together yeah heck I'm not how do you guys think about picking winners like it seems like monad monad is purposefully not kingming and not picking winners so there could be like five dexes that launch on monad and I've noticed just watching their marketing they're purposefully not trying to King make how do you think about kingming yeah I think it's totally fine if you

find really good talent right we have a we have a talent issue in crypto like there's a massive skill issue if you find people who are really really good why should they be building the same idea there's an unlimited amount of ideas we're founder first and then we King make a Founder we make sure that that founder succeeds and we ideated with them on what they can build I don't understand who wins by having 15 clubs on a chain as long as the person who's building the club is doing a good job building it yeah uh we've been at it for an hour guys um what um and I appreciate the time maybe uh actually I'm curious about

two things maybe as a as a breather one uh brother Bing please explain and then and then and then hot and then Hot Pot oh there's no explanation I love you okay so I was um so in 2020 there were a bunch of um D5 Founders you know who were do scoping as girls on Twitter and then I was like yo why can't I just scops as a dude as a girl so that was yeah I don't get too woke in this part you know you know how I stand on that wokeness thing but do do you um do

you think that we have a a gender issue like you know Founders or just the culture-wise it's it's mostly skewed towards males maybe because you know uh you know it's more of toic point you know a very gambling type environment uh have you ever felt or what can we do about it yeah I think the the the issue is just the same in traditional web to Tech to be honest I don't know if it's it's probably uh better than AI who knows in fact sometimes I notice myself going on a call with more women than than men what I think I don't think it's a racial issue I think women should be more vocal where they are but again that's

just inspiration empowerment issue than anything else yeah amen uh hot poot that all about hot poot yeah so I really hate Krypton that work like I hate going into you mean conferences conferences yeah I hate going to an event like deciding y's like double blow here we're having them go on reference Bank bank list and then brother Bing saying she hates conferences like this is this is why I like the team they're not afraid to speak their mind for me on this podcast so yeah I you you ha networking yeah I hate networking you go in try to make small talk because oh God

frankly I just don't remember you you're you're one of the 0 Bros I've talked to so the ideal event to get to know people is always food then I started help out in 2020 during mcon which is the D conference and a bunch of us uh just want to hot poot restaurant and hang out then I just thought why don't we just do this more often and also because I love Hot Pot and then you know four years later it has grown to be the only doubt that has product Market fit in the entire crypto space because people actually pay to come to eat and every time I get like more people want to sponsor then I I believe it that's true F last question for me favorite hot uh Pot restaurant that you've been you've

been at so there is a place in Dubai it's called nice Square the beautiful part of it it has a rooftop so you can eat hot pot while watching the Dubai Skyline it's quite surreal nice we'll have to go check it out I know um for well now that we're in the conferences thing I know you guys do the circuit you know you're going out and uh where are you next where can people meet you in person yep so I'm in uh San Francisco for the next two weeks n is in New York we will have a small appearance during current blockchain week a small appearance during token 2049 and then

we'll also be there for salana breakpoint we'll be we'll be having a bigger appearance there so that's exciting very good well guys this has been a treat I mean obviously I've had the benefit of knowing you guys and uh I wanted for both of you to come on and and share the story um thank you for taking the time um as maybe any parting thoughts or just maybe where is the best way to interact with you guys on socials or Discord or what have you yeah you know I think what I really want to set on message is crypto has been here for so many years we really do have an adoption issue and now that Mega E saw the basic

layer the basic layer problem we don't have any excuse not to build anything and I want people to rekindle the original fire in their heart when they were like oh my God there's something about crypto I can do something here to change the world and if you still have that fire come talk to us we're here to support you in every single stage we don't have a lot of time I honestly think that crypto bitcoin's pmf is downside protection right for the world and uum and salana and you know the power of the smart contract is meant to show unbounded creativity to make the world much much better but we haven't found a lot of pmf yet right that initial

Mission has not been solved I don't think we have a lot of time to solve it right every single year we have more and more brain drain every single time we have like the the we didn't it's not good for any of us when the article on Bloomberg about crypto is about like Iggy glacias as mcoin and not some peer-to-peer Network that's like making the world a better place I don't think we have a lot of time if you feel the same way and you're ready to build like real time apps please do reach out because we've got to make etherium great again I'm not even that I should we should we get rid of that part I don't want to get hit by a bunch of trump supporters or even worse Democrats I mean I'm wearing the hats

sir so there's nothing there's no way around it that's the name of your company I'll embrace it let's uh I I I I I respect that and I you know it's it's uh you don't hear it often but um this sense of urgency uh I think we found have found product Market fit unfortunately on certain things like stable coins um and and but unfortunately the headlines and this is what media companies not Bist of course uh sorry not uh quirks wow y's about to go and any we'll cut that out but but I think like media I think like I think like media companies report obviously the bad right you know the meme coins all that phenomenon but I

do hear your sense of urgency and I think I I always go back to Uber as a prime example of something that was really had to it was such a such a killer product that it overcame all kinds of resistance at the local level Lobby level taxis organizations it was just because a consumer loved it and and I think we haven't we haven't really figured that out for crypto yet but we'll get there like I would hope that in the next five years there's like a particular product that you walk on the streets and people are like using it and they're like they're loving it like they're and and maybe they don't even talk about it from a this is a crypto thing but they love it and they can't

live without it and well you know brother being I mean you lived in Africa I think like stable coins are pretty killer 100% you we also have an internal thesis where the Mega E realtime applications bring more emotional value to users than financial value so every single application on us is like people you know need to love go and play HQ trivia and you know what what is on a you know fully on Minecraft what does it really mean and money token is a small part of it but you got to love being interacting with the blockchain yeah I will also I will note Santi like I I think stable coins are a massive use case right I grew up I'm

Turkish superate right like only one country in the world recognizes it it's turkey not but not great but I would say stable coins are also primarily downside protection right which is saying saying like I do not want to be holding the native currency of my own country I do not trust The Sovereign or whoever's in charge of my nation to let me have uh my my the money in my bank so I'm GNA hold it in USD on my wallet yeah so I mean I love stable coins but I I yeah that's that's also what I think yeah your Point's a really good one and this this the last comment which is most people don't think about Finance on a daily basis most people don't check their think about their bank accounts they don't Rave about Bank of America or it's like they don't like to do it it's sort

of like they'd rather it's meant to be invisible and in the background here in crypto we have that on the on the front seat and it's the first thing that you see and just just just the nature of the Beast right because you hear these crazy stories of you know it's it is a land of opportunity and you know like every major technological revolution has had this initial like very heavy speculative phase and I'm not worried about it I do think that we ought to we will and we will figure out and we will we will we will build killer consumer applications a lot of it is just been building the the the foundations to allow that to happen so I would challenge like this

whole idea that like infra is figured out by no way shape or form like it's very very hard to build decentralized systems that are performant we're finally seeing glimpses of that and anyone that like doesn't agree with that I don't think properly understands like the complexity that goes behind building that but it's worth it it's worth it and I and I think we'll probably see a faster development and rate of iteration and adoption for now that we're entering this application Phase and hopefully it happens in a place like Mega so awesome guys well thank you again for taking the time really appreciate it and hopefully our listeners found it really useful um best

way to interact with you guys Discord Twitter other than local events Discord my Twitter account Hotpot Dow very well mine is just my first and last name on Google I guess on Twitter yeah I'm very basic guy so excited we'll link that in the show notes but uh awesome guys well thank you so much for taking the time we really appreciate the conversation thank you guys for having us hey everyone big thanks for watching today's episode wanted to just quickly remind you about the Stellar development foundation's sixth annual Meridian conference this October 15th through 17th in London this is an incredible opportunity to network with the forward

thinkers who are defining the future of this space head over to meridian. stellar.org and use the code blockworks pod for early bird pricing [Music]