Open Sourcing the Superchain (with Optimism)

Transcript

I think there's been a lot of Apt Community criticism and I think the biggest thing that we've learned is no matter how much time you spend debating strategic hypotheses nothing beats putting code into production in front of users it instantly validates or invalidates a whole slew of hypotheses and so just pick the thing that's quickest to ship ship it and then see what [Music] happens hello and welcome to web 3 with a16z a show about building the next era of the Internet by the team at a16z crypto that includes me host Robert

Hackett today's episode features Jing Wang CEO and executive director of the optimism Foundation along with a16z crypto CTO Eddie lazarin we discussed the peculiarities of Open Source software including the incentives that bind contributors together trade-offs between the freedom to customize versus sticking to standards and the challenges in setting up and running a foundation we also cover the nuances of governance and accountability the importance of Vibes the indispensability of shipping products versus debating road maps and the vision behind the so-called super chain as head of the optimism Foundation Wang helped Steward the optimism Collective a band of decentralized

companies communities contributors and others who are using a suite of open-source software called the op stack to scale the ethereum blockchain network the op stack also Powers a number of popular layer 2 rollups including Bas which we covered in last week's episode with its creator and Lead coinbase's head of protocols Jesse Pollock be sure also to check out the a16z YouTube channel for video podcast episodes as well as talks from our recent startup accelerator program CSX featuring Jing co-founder Carl flourish and more as a reminder none of the following should be taken as tax business legal or investment advice see a6z crypto.com disclosures for more important

information including a link to a list of our [Music] investments Jen tell me about the early days of ethereum I'm sure you've got some stories from back in the day you've been a part of this community since it basically was a community I first joined as a bitcoiner and I didn't come into ethereum and till 2017 when basically the first early like more mainstream wave of people entered also I would say that I was attracted by the culture you really felt like you were one of many building towards something together which is something that we've really tried to replicate or follow with optimism culture and it wasn't about what you individually or independently

could accomplish so those were early ethereum Vibes I think ethereum and L1 governance has done a really great job of keeping those vibes and something that I've been talking about a lot with my team internally is you know what aspects of that culture are actually scalable and what aspects of it are difficult to scale because when you have like widespread Cooperative culture you really only need like One Bad Apple to start trying to take credit for themselves or self-promote to make it no longer rational strategy for participation to be cooperative for everybody else who's contributing together I think it's interesting that

Jing you came at this as a bitcoiner I met vitalic back in 2016 and I I remember him just talking about the Bitcoin Maxis and how you know he was just very he was so opposed to the Bitcoin Maxi worldview so how does one attract someone from a different tribe over to their tribe you know what has to be done what about the culture do you have to find compelling to actually get someone to make that switch that's a tough one that's a tough one Robert what a difficult question it is a tough one yeah about the ethereum culture well I guess I'd be interested to know what you found compelling about ethereum culture and then also whether those lessons are generalizable to other projects I mean like flexibility and Innovation I think

it's a design of Bitcoin that changes are difficult to make and as much as possible you want acific oifc is easy to plan around it makes Bitcoin super reliable for a lot of different use cases and for me personally that's just you know I wanted to spend my time feeling like I had an impact in how a piece of technology was developing and I think ethereum is a lot more flexible a lot more extensible there were grants being put forth to cultivating this kind of activity it was something that was encouraged and rewarded people um gave talks at conferences and I felt like the time that I spent working on ethereum

was more likely to equate to something that was broadly impactful for a lot of people in the community whereas I just didn't see that path for myself with my skill set in the Bitcoin community and I don't think there's anything wrong with that I think different cultures exist for a reason and you know never in a million years would I want Bitcoin to be like ethereum but never in a million years would I want ethereum to go the other direction either let's talk more about this because if optimism is to succeed and attract all these great contributors and become you know like this expansive open source project you've got to attract those people who are going to who are going to do the work and you know build on this thing how does one go about building on

something that ultimately you kind of want to recede into the background right like a lot of this blockchain Tech the chain stuff we sort of want to abstract it away so that people don't even realize that they're using it you know they're just sort of getting these benefits without thinking deeply about like the exact nature of the technology behind it so that that presents like a little bit of a marketing challenge right like getting people to be excited about a technology and yet at the same time kind of wanting that technology to recede into the background so the people who want to contribute are not the same people as those who want the technology to recede into the background it's like nerds protocol nerds versus application Developers for application Developers

they just want to focus on bringing their product to Market accessing users and distribution and liquidity and they don't want to suffer the ux of your infrastructure look at the onboarding flow however many steps it is that's what users will have to inherit and so for those people they definitely want it to reced into the background but there are a lot of folks like Sunnyside Labs Wonderland base that want to contribute to the infrastructure either because they need it to improve for their core product requirements or because they got into crypto super early as protocol nerds and they want to contribute their efforts to a credibly open-sourced standard yeah you got me thinking all these things Robert and

Jing what you're saying because we have basically from the beginning of crypto with a few Exceptions there are definitely a few exceptions so much of it is Dev stuff and like builder stuff and the target demo is kind of technical people that's just been crypto for so long I hope it changes eventually mostly because I think if we had an entire planet of people like preoccupied with the nuances of like cryptography or like decentralized consensus it would be a profound waste of talent right like like we don't we don't need all of humanity thinking about this but it's true I think a lot of the people who build on it they like its properties and they want to litigate its properties and they want to extend it and they want to talk about it with other devs and like B you know duke it out based on its merits

like they really like that so eventually I hope it does withdraw or Fade Into the background some in some sense but you know I mean maybe it's kind of like maybe one way another anal analogy is like cars you know like most PE for most people cars are just like a wayed get around whatever you just get around like I get into the thing I pay for it whatever but then there's still a community of car nuts and there will always be a community of car nuts my father is one of them yeah and like they love the details and they're just always going on about it and it's really neat and those are the people you want to cater to with certain products obviously those you know those products are not applicable for everybody and so the the

point is to say is that at the stage where are in crypto we're still at like the Carnet phase because it's early and already has to be an expert and do all those things um so I I don't see that going away for the foreseeable future like just for you know it's going to be years more of that probably at the same time that there are great mainstream applications it's too important well it's like the same flavor of nut as like Satoshi vitalic you know it's like those nuts that attracted all the early nuts and then the early nuts had a social hierarchy of nut like nuttiness and it was like protocol engineering cryptography mechanism design that like brought you to the peak of that ladder

and I think that I think that's true today also people think that you know like protocol engineering is like cool and sexy and want to make changes or modifications at the protocol layer that they don't necessarily need to be making because it feels cool to do so totally agree let's back way up maybe I could ask quite broadly why should anybody do stuff on chain like what's the benefit why should people be transacting and whatever on chain I think something that is underappreciated about building in web 3 outside of of the like decentralization meeme is just straight up the open source culture and this is achievable with or without

decentralization but I think what we have in web 3 is a lot of standards that people have organized around and having these standards made makes building tools easier it makes building applications easier anything from the erc20 standard to bridge standards the evm as a standard solidity it just brings when we talk about like composability and interoperability it's not just about collocating on the same state space a lot of it is about using the same tools and the same standards yeah I think that's so apt I've been having a lot of conversations with people who were doing nft stuff a couple years ago and it's really interesting to see the way they're sort of like

contorting themselves like they're still using nfts because the standards are so uh valuable and there's nothing sort of like it but you know in order to message it to other people they're like oh no their digital assets or their digital Collectibles or they this and that sort of like obscuring the back end but you know when you ask if there's anything else they could be using it's sort of like well not really you know it's uh this is really the only thing that we can use that to accomplish what we need yeah I think you know like one common answer is like decentralization it's power to the people like what power where to who like are we really accomplishing that you know maybe in some pockets and maybe that's a goal but I don't think it's achieved and I don't

think it's the current primary value prop yeah we have this conversation a lot here about like what does decentralization mean it's just like a big unwieldy word it kind of obscures what's going on and I've always really liked the way Chris Dixon describes it as you know community-owned and operated networks I feel like that that kind of makes the point stick yeah it's interesting because it it does mean a lot of things and it means something different in every context that you use it there's like authoritative decentralization who has the ability to upgrade the system who has the ability to push forward a proposal there's operational decentralization like who has the right to execute the work who has the right to administer a certain process and then there's also technical decentralization it's like you know the

number of nodes in a network the resilience of it the distribution either Geographic or otherwise and in each of these aspects the word decentralization is actually pointing to a slightly different value prop maybe it's like capture resistance maybe it's redundancy the power is located somewhere else in the network than the obvious center right that's like really what it means and it could be located in a lot of places it could be there could be no power located in the center because it's immutable there could be no power located in the center because it's been explicitly distributed to a certain set of stakeholders it could like you know you see like just something's not being in the center does not really explain

what it is that's why it's so easy to argue so long about what we even mean when we talk about de centralis but the reason people harp on it is because there's so many interesting things that you can achieve if you find a technical or social or social technical means of taking the power out of the center this is a really cool design space that's even linguistically underexplored right it's like it's just we don't have a lot of great words for it yeah my shot at the answer Robert like the quick like why should anybody do something on Chan do things on Chan I love Jing's answer like you know open source libraries can't monetize they've never been able to monetize they've been a never been able to capture resilient Network effects Beyond like the use of

the code putting that on chain the traditional way to monetize open source is sort of like you got the open source code and then you kind of like build the service on it that's optimized and give all these sort of like nice add-ons to businesses yeah and then and then if if it's in the wrong place then they just end up recentralizing it whereas if you put it on chain and you allow the network effects to accumulate there then the open source can live forever Maybe but another cut that I really like is a lot of complicated things require an intermediary you just you need that and the question is whether you rely on a trusted intermediary or a trustless one and if you do stuff on chain you're using a trust minimized intermediary and that's really really cool because you

can take all these things for granted stuff we talk about all the time you know like that's the that's the basic idea you can choose this you can choose that they all remain interoperable other people can build on those things and as long as you that programming environment you can trust that things behave as you'll expect them to behave yeah this sort of ambiguity around decentralization and what it means and different ways you can kind of slice and dice it it it makes me wonder Jing what aspect of decentralization is most important to optimism I think there are a lot of different layers of our stack that require decentralization and all four different things so for the governance of the protocol and its upgrades capture resistance is the most

important thing and then for the technical protocol it's not just capture resistance but it's also security and resilience of the network and so all of these value props are achieved by decentralizing in different ways maybe it's your token in the hands of a lot of people maybe it's setting up a bamal voting system maybe it's by having a multi-pro system and in terms of the operation of optimism we also think about decentralization as something to aim for but it's not for the security of the system and it's not for the capture resistance of the protocol it's just something that doubles down on our open sourc like we're fully MIT licensed and

one way to look at that is wow that sucks because everyone can look at your code and Fork it and you have no mode and another way to look at that is well it's also way easier to build a standard and attract an ecosystem of contribut is outside of what your recruiting team is capable of finding and that's an advantage that we have we've been able to execute vast swabs of the code base through a community and through external contributors so when you think about actually like you know Community ownership who's your community who's owning what and I think these are the different aspects of decentralization that we care about internally Yeah you mentioned a few pieces there from governance sort of making the governance of the system resilient to capture to

making the technology able to resist attack and then also just sort of like the ethos underlying the organization as well uh I'd love to bite off each of those in turn but maybe we can start with that last one I wonder you know being sort of the head of a foundation that is you know working on these sort of Open Source decentralized projects how do you sort of like live and breathe that that ethos of decentralization in your in your day-to-day work something I say to my team often is that we're not even aware of the centralization biases that we have and because we have those biases it's actually difficult to like propagate consistent decision- making so

let's say like you want to be fully MIT licensed in open source well how many companies out there are actually operating this way how many of us have experienced operating that way the natural tendency is to go and hire a bunch of people to your organization because we you know live and Breathe by the that it's easier to execute in a with centralized planning but is it is that true like I don't actually think it is you guys remember how like you know before the pandemic all companies required that you go to the office and show up in person because everyone believed that that was the best way to work because you know remote was just not as high context but the pandemic forced everyone to write things down very clearly write down decisions do

meetings really well be more crisp about the strategy do planning better and so I actually think that operating for a remote culture made it a lot easier for companies to scale Beyond 20 100 Etc people and so similarly for you know quote unquote decentralized Workforce I think it's similar to going remote like yeah you know conceptually we're all accustomed to hiring people into our own teams with really clear accountability and an HR team and these structures that we're familiar with but what if you were forced to write your spec or the problem that you're trying to solve so clearly that an external team doesn't

have to talk to you and they know exactly what needs to be done to solve that problem how much more could you scale execution if your team was capable of planning writing and operating in that way I want to build on that a little bit because there's this thing people may or may not have heard of called the theory of the firm right this is a Ronald Co The Economist yeah this is CO's uh essay about the theory of the firm and this is the simplest possible cut for the theory of the firm is that there are different institutions because internal transaction costs and when I say transaction costs I don't mean in the like blockchain setting I mean transaction costs like we talk we make a deal we agree on a thing we coordinate we agree on a spec we negotiate we pay

each other even right like all these things are very complicated transactions the internal transaction costs of a firm are lower than between firms right and that's because you can take certain things for granted like shared infrastructure alignment towards certain goals shared managerial structure there's all these things you can take for granted and one way I'm interpreting what you're saying Jing is that a lot of our defaults how we think about work are tuned to taking advantage of the low internal transaction costs but if you have a wide decentralized ecosystem where you can have a bunch of Partners who have slightly different goals but are aligned in some key ways you may actually have a much wider set a very very wide set of external contributors

right and even if the external transaction costs are a little bit higher which they are because like there's all these different people they're far away the scale of that is so big and so powerful because of putting things on chain sharing the code building on top of each other's stuff composability all those things the benefits of very very high quality coordination with your external contributors is high enough that it's worth enduring those High external transaction costs and actually optimizing to those in the culture of the company exactly like why does what what is external what outside of payroll why is that fundamentally a lower transaction cost why can't you just do the onboarding or the culture setting or

whatever you know process set up for contributions to reduce those transaction costs yeah and HR stuff is hard and important whatever but the opportunity we have with everybody coordinating on the ways to make uniformly valuable block space as like a optimism example the benefits are so high we're kind of leaving a lot on the table if we're preoccupied with the internal transaction cost yeah exactly yeah I remember us having this like HR conversation around going remote also like how am I gonna know if someone's having a good time if I can't see their face when they show up to work well I guess you just got to ask them you know so yeah just you change I just I find myself getting stuck in the traditional

mental models all the time and you make a decision that is at a very particular part of the trade-off Spectrum fully open sourcing all of your code and if the other sub decisions that you make don't take advantage of the benefits of sitting on that part of the trade-off spectrum and make them over here then you're straddling the worst of Both Worlds and you know every like six months or so I'll have this like big Epiphany about why something has been hard and it'll be because I'm latched on to one of these you know default modes of thinking and so this one about like internal versus external contribution is my Epiphany from six months ago that's a

really valuable one okay I have a question what is the most nut jobby thing you heard that turned out to be true in all my days or like specifically from a crypto perspective I mean I guess both whatever comes to mind oh God it's a good one I'm filtering through all of the true answers to that question that we can't share some conspiracies are too spicy for the public my favorite is whenever we get into like random conversations and Eddie's there he'll like drop into a whisper which for Eddie isn't really a whisper it's just like like a loud deep like lower register and then he goes

into a conference room and he shuts the door and he just unloads and Carl and I be like holy yeah wow amazing he's like think about the super chain like Manifest Destiny why did all these settlers come over because they had land rights there there was a new government being formed they had property rights and in exchange for that they willing to pay taxes and that's good times good times good times yeah good times yeah I don't know I don't know all this talk feels like a really good segue to talk about the super chain Jing what is the super chain what is the vision for it and uh how does optimism plan to get us there the super chain is our vision of horizontally scalable world

computering and I think there's a couple web 2 analoges one is you know like Docker or AWS as an analog but neither of these examples really perfectly fit into what we're attempting to build I think a lot of folks in the blockchain industry started out with a single blockchain and like lots of early discourse around who will win was what chain will win and you know you start having like a single slightly viral application and you quickly realize it it's not a single it's not one chain versus another chains are containers for compute and you have to horizontally

scale if you want to support what internet scale applications genuinely need and so that's what the super chain is say more about that like how do you go from this competition to cooperation I think there are still people who uh you know still these like tribal battles over which chain is the Supreme one oh for sure but at least everyone in the super chain is in a more collaborative mode than outside of the super chain because you I mean first of all let's start with the fact that it is MIT licensed code so you could take it you can Fork it and you can modify it and

you don't have to pay us a dime you don't have to open source any of your changes you know it's like blast forked it hit a single uh change in a bunch of typo fixes which is basically just Chang changing the license and have tons of tvl secured on their chain and you could go do that that is not the Super chain that is a fork of the op stack so everyone who's part of the super chain today is agreeing to pay a revenue split for MIT licensed code code that is fundamentally free you could literally go and spin up your own instance and do whatever you wanted and not pay us a dime so why would it be the financially optimal strategy to pay well you get

access to the liquidity and the users and the development of everybody else in the super chain you are opting into a fundamentally Cooperative multiplayer game because it's a better game to play better in a lot of ways it better because it lowers your operational overhead it could be better because it increases your access to a broad distribution of users whatever it is it's different for every single person who decides to opt in but it is opted so basically there are two paths you can take you can Fork the code and do your own thing you mentioned Blast has done this and not be part of the super chain or you can take the code and join the team join the super group and uh pay

your dues as it were tell me more about these two paths and like and why someone would want to indeed you know take the ladder route the level of maturity of the technology within the block blockchain industry at large is is a lot less mature than what people would expect from web 2 when they look at the kinds of valuations that exist within the blockchain industry so all this infrastructure is incredibly novel new untested feature incomplete optimism included optimism especially and so for a lot of projects that are trying to make a decision about what scaling infrastructure to use they're not just asking themselves what is the best tech today they're also asking themselves

what is likely to be the winning Tech down the line and what does winning Tech actually mean winning Tech could mean the technology or the block space that gets the most Network effects so you know you have the best distribution to liquidity and users it could mean the technology that is most likely to become the standard so whatever tooling that you rely on today is also going to evolve as your project evolves and I think there are a few explicit design choices that we've made that we believe make it more likely that we will be the winning Tech both in terms of network effects as well as in terms of standardization and being fully open sourced is one of them so for projects that want to be part of defining the

standard like base on 4844 for example the optimism community and the op stack give you a really clear path towards contributing to the standards that the entire super chain operates on and so not only do you have a cleaner path to making the modification that you want to make that also makes it more likely that the infrastructure and the code base improves for everybody else that relies on it which also makes it more likely that this is the stack that gets standardized AKA winning Tech by a lot of folks definitions and so you can go over there in your Silo and you can make the modifications to the op stack that suit you and you don't have to pay anything but it also means it's that

much harder for wallets block explorers oracles Bridges to go and integrate with you or you can pick to launch a standard config chain or if the standard config doesn't suit your needs contribute to the core engineering work required for it to suit your needs and use a stack that will be supported by all the affirm Services Chris Dixon has a great framework for thinking about this he says that composability which is sort of this key property of Open Source software composability is to software as compound growth is to finance or as like you know Moore's Law is to chip making and so you know you mentioned that the technology right now it's still in coate

it's still coming together it's still pretty nent there are things that need to be done to shore it up and scale it and make sure that it can actually operate as as everybody intends and has this Grand Vision for but that's not what we're basing the the decision off of right now it's really about this sort of quality that the fact that it is open source the fact that it is composable enables these networ effects to a crew and this value to you know be generated from it even if you can't defend it as you would a traditional business mode exactly yeah I have a way to think about the super chain like and this is kind of a loaded analogy with a lot of conceptual baggage but I think of it like the United States right or like the

Articles of Confederation right where there are separate states they are technically Sovereign right so articles of Confederate like pre contemporary Constitution right they're Sovereign but they have committed to Shared legalistic properties right without going into details like they're they are part of a single defense pact they have rules about their Commerce right and they are in other words more interoperable with each other than they are with other countries right and if someone comes in and is a citizen of one like a user of one their application is useful in one then it gets automatic privileges with those other states right that make it

more interoperable more usable easier more liquid whatever the kind of crypto and analoges are and so you of if you Fork op stack and you just go do your own thing that's like being a country that just copied the US Constitution and that's fine there's a lot of them actually like a lot of a lot of modern Constitutions are just tweaks to the Bill of Rights and tweaks to the American Constitution but it's obviously a separate thing completely and that can be a great benefit it can also be a great liability and that country would probably prefer to be an American state so I'm not trying to make a political Point here but just just just just saying like there's strong advantages to attaching yourself to like a big

interoperable system I think there's a lot of states that are huge successful states that part of that success is because they're part of this bigger thing right and of the states together are bigger collectively together than they could have been if they were all separate little countries right they were self bized so to speak nice Eddie your example though of the Articles Confederation that didn't pan out so well in practice yeah and I think it's a great point and that's because I think they needed an very potent Central Authority obviously there's all kinds of constitution Scholars that are just going to slap me around I'm sure and I'm like totally totally wrong but I think well I'm not going to get into like 18th century history but I think despite flaws there well let me kind of go back

Robert and like re answer this I'm expecting you to take us into a conference room and use your low voice I know I know the thing is I can't do that right now I'm trying to do that right now yeah insur okay well I'd say like yeah the the the Articles of the Confederation didn't work you're right and without being a constitutional scholar about it the reasons that it didn't work are complicated they have to do with land they have to do with defense they have to do with foreign policy has to do with Commerce rules all these things these are crazy complicated things the same things that the super chain will have to solve the same thing that blockchains in general will have to solve right we always talk about composability is great thing and it is it's incredibly powerful it also means that specific attacks are

possible between blockchains and between applications on blockchains it's it's powerful in every direction right it makes it easier to um easier to coordinate it makes it easier to undermine so so we'll have to evolve this right and the truth is that when we don't have the very a very very clear technical path about how we're going to resolve things and obviously everybody's working on making a clearer technical path in the absence of a technical path you need a culture that has shared values and those values will eventually emerge in Technical Solutions binding principles uh you know all those all the types of things that I'm very confident

will also be a part of how blockchains think about themselves and govern themselves in the future let's dig into some of that uh you mentioned like the security concerns about how different blockchains could attack one another presumably members of the super chain could do this I don't know there's some like vying yeah I mean without going without like going like way down a theoretical path it's just you know if you allow other people to read and write state from your blockchain like there's things that can happen right and it's just something that they'll have to design around yeah so I guess along this analogy National Security is Fault provability of your chain and right now that's hard to do because lots of folks

want customizations either the core chain product is not cheap enough or the transactions are not low enough latency internally we're still grappling with a lot of these product questions like what is the right layer of the stack to actually solve these at should it be solved with tool is it actually a protocol change what about the consensus critical changes what about like node changes anything bringing us away from evm equivalence how should we deal with that because at the end of the day if we want to automate the process of deploying a net new chain that is Fault provable With interoperable secure message passing with other chains where you can have things like a fungible token across all

interoperable chains then you need these chains to be running the same fault provable config and that's not the case for all chains in the super chain today and so we have this concept of like Frontier chains in the super chain and you can think of it like jailbroken phones people who have taken the standard config and modified it to suit their needs and then we have standard config chains like coinbase like op mainnet that run a config that is fault provable and so over time we hope to see that the core protoc the core chain product gets aifi enough such that any net new chain is deployed is

automatically fault provable and then any innovations that people want to see in terms of net new features can be done at a different layer of abstraction that doesn't impact quote unquote National Security when you say a different layer of abstraction do you mean like are we talking like l3s l4s or like what do you mean by that yeah that that could be it could be l it could be just outside of the core protocol it could be uh with certain tools that get built it could be with ux tricks like when people say they need a transaction under 200 milliseconds do they need it to securely execute and finalize within 200 milliseconds or they do they just need a popup uh that is

reliable 90% of the time to tell their user that the transaction is finalized every single app has such different needs and constraints and so we want to balance Safety and Security without blocking Innovation and net new features so that just means like segmenting the layers of the stack for explicit purposes and then pushing everything else up how far off do you think we are from that day when we have the fully-fledged super chain that you're describing I don't know anyone else who sucks more than me at time estimations so that's super tough I I couldn't guess

either it's a priority because it make it's it just makes decisions difficult and so figuring out you know when we talk about a modular stack which components of it need to be modular modular modular how and then what are the interfaces for interacting with that modularity and then how does that impact security safety but also flexibility and extensibility this is an active ongoing conversation that I had like a 4-Hour argument yesterday with my co-founders good argument what was the yeah tell tell us about that what was the no I can't come on give us like seven more hours of arguing and then we'll poop out a road map okay okay here's a question

for you there is the op main net and if you want to attract all these other players into the mix to host chains of their own is there any you know it's open source for sure but are you like how do you persuade potential super chain hosters Runners Partners whatever you call them actually we do have a term for chain people they're chain Governors I see so how do you convince them that they're on your team that they're on your side and that you're not going to be like basically competing with them and op May NIT is going to be the thing that sort of like Rolls Everything yeah in an Ideal World op mainnet is absolutely negligible and and there's

thousands and thousands of chains operating in the super chain so that's the goal that we're trying to drive towards and there's a few ways that we treat These Chains as our own block space first of all we have a token Treasury and when we do things like retroactive public goods funding or grant funding or Dev tool sponsorships we do so for every single chain and so it's not just things built on op mainnet that are eligible for retroactive public goods funding it's available across the entire super chain the treasury is for the super chain not for op mainnet op mayet is US dog fooding our protocol okay so it's sort of like a testing

ground and it's also the home of op governance so you've referenced retroactive public goods funding and we haven't walked through what that is and the mechanism for it and this is sort of a weird and interesting way to attract people to build and to get things done tell me more about that how that works and why optimism's gone with that approach you know when you're nonprofit you have like two modes of acquiring funding which is donations and grants and if you're a startup with a business model or a business model at some point then you can also get investment and venture capital and a lot of really smart people who want to do good for the world aren't trying to become

billionaires they're just trying to be adequately compensated for the impact that they actually provide and so you either go to a nonprofit that's you know scraping by funding on a regular basis relying on the Goodwill of donors or you join some maybe like more explicitly Capital motivated team that maybe doesn't align with your values and so what do you do if you're an open source developer you want to be appropriately rewarded for your impact you don't want to make trade-offs like extracting from your users or adding pay walls on something that you believe should be fundamentally open source where do you go if you're one of those people if you are like the early optimism founding team and so that is the goal of retr pgf it's to create a community of

contributors and also create the impact funding mechanism where they can be adequately rewarded for the impact that they've created impact equals profit and our hope is that by successfully doing a bunch of rounds of this and working on the impact Oracle that will open these teams up not just to donations and grant funding but also hopefully an ecosystem of venture capitalists that are making bets on their ability to provide impact and receive retrop pgf well said going back to something that Eddie you brought up at the beginning uh the theory of the firm what's really interesting about this to me is that you know there are these different ways that humans can

organize and maybe there's one that's like a really profit-seeking Corporation of some or some sort like that maybe you've got a nonprofit where you have goals and aspirations that are not strictly monetary but you suffer from the fact that you don't have a sort of native business model and you struggle to get by you know as Jing you said you're relying on grants and donations but maybe there are these different ways that you can kind of like find a sort of pathway between these two areas where you can still give people incentives you can still encourage people to work together to solve problems and to be rewarded for their effort but you're kind of in this this middle way you're

not you know fully maxed out on profit in the One Direction or you know just like poverty stricken and trying to like you know get your next meal totally agree with that like we also want we don't want to build this massive Corporation and incentivize people by through their employment contracts we want the kinds of creativity that you see in early startup teams or small people coming together because they're passionate about something and so the goal of retr pgf is to enable those people to find it worth their while to come together to work on something fully open source and we want the incentives behind how they make design choices for

whatever they're building to be about providing impact to the broader optimism Collective not to be about the way to protect their IP and protect their remote to enable them to charge some fee down the line like literally where do you go if you want to do something like that today it's a great point maybe we can shift gears a little bit I like the whole thread we had about you know how do you recruit these new super chains right that's like that's an important thing but I feel like there's so much so much more to say like also talking about like how to think about other blockchains how to think about when someone should make a new Opie chain like right some when someone should make

a chain that should join the super chain like that's an interesting one maybe saying something about specific ones like something we haven't UND we haven't EST actually that's a good one is that something we haven't established at all in the conversation is like there's multiple l2s in the super chain why are there multiple l2s in the super chain one answer is the scalability answer they're all kind of execution shards sort of but then the other is the the variation between them maybe there's some examples like I think Redstone Redstone World coin and base are World Net and base are like three really cool examples Jen I don't know if you want to talk about them at all because they're all totally different they're all part of super chain they they will be they're completely different I don't want them

to be different you want them to be the same yes I want them to all be fault provable yeah they should all be fault provable that's definitely a thing they should all share but you don't think that there may be like a different slightly different programming environment maybe different pre- compiles maybe different availability layers maybe so it's like you know kind of something I'm trying to figure out is like aberration to the standard are incredibly difficult to scale like standardization makes the you know automatic addition of net new CH orders of magnitude easier to solve as an engineering problem and so you know I'm trying to like build all the things that they want so that they don't

have to be different why do we need a super chain at all why not just have one chain sort of handle everything uh you have these instances of different projects building their own chains presumably they're getting some value in terms of differentiating a little bit and hosting their own thing but um yeah what are those sort of different flavors you can get of L2 chain that make having multiple chains worthwhile okay so one thing that we hear a lot is people asking for like a really specific uh alt da layer or a really specific protocol change or broadly l3s or ZK provability and then you know the question for me is like okay what

are you really asking for what does an L3 actually mean to you because there's no like say sever those things you just said are just costs right that's just about cost right A lot of it is about cost a lot of it is about specifically accessing the liquidity of a single chain but making security trade-offs so that you're not paying rollup level transaction fees okay I guess that's also cost and so I think something that maybe some people don't realize is when you deviate from the standard you make it a lot harder to secure your chain you make it a lot a higher overhead to build message passing Frameworks and to apply

standards in a secure way so we have a lot of experience with this we thought that being 90% compatible with the evm was going to be enough for all of the great things about the evm also apply to our infrastructure but the reality is we're missing like two op codes and that alone made deploying Unis swap on the V1 of op mainnet a one month effort rather than a one-click deploy and so every single modification you make every single deviation from the standard is is risk security risk integration risk overhead uh cost and so in an Ideal World you know base Redstone worldcoin maybe there's like one or two

or maybe at Max three different kinds of configs that we run and for those who want fault provability in an automated way people who want to be able to dip into a pool of sequencing uh compute people who want interop secure interoperable message passing you really have to be running the standard config and I also acknowledge that this standard config we have today is not feature complete it's missing a lot of things that people want just March we launched span batches alongside 444 and so what our span batch uh feature release did was it took the minimum cost of running an empty chain from $130,000

a month to $600 a month so previously having your own chain was just like Mega luxury product and that's just the onchain costs the infrastructure costs that's not even the cost to integrate a block Explorer or the cost to have a variety of these other services integrate with your chain so all that to say we have customizations today that's what I meant by Frontier chains earlier in the conversation but everyone has an iPhone today um and they don't use a jailbroken version because Apple has upstreamed all of the most desirable features and so i' love the op stack to get to that point where we have upstreamed all of the most desirable features and there's no need to launch a custom config I see yeah I definitely

see the benefits to uniformity definitely I mean that's everything you said is completely completely correct at the same time allowing experimentation at the edges is a big innovation unlock right because you you may not anticipate right some way that someone configures it that just just so much better for their use case that it's just you know it wouldn't work any other way right and I think of this as like things that are suitable for experimentation in State law versus things that are preferably federal law right not that like the US government setup is perfect or anything but it's I think you know the in the ideal case the federal laws are the

things that we benefit at a national level from having uniform and they supervene on top of the state laws such that wherever you are you can reason about okay like these are the federal laws that are applying to me these are the state laws that are applying to me and I have some wiggle room in terms of the state laws by moving States but then like there's kind of a uniformity I can always assume is true state to state and in some cases that's the liability because now like I can't get away from it right but then it can be a benefit because I can take it for granted right I just know like you know kind of like corporate law is at the level of State like I know I can make my corporate Corporation in Delaware I can make my Corporation wherever and that's valid

across the whole country right so do you think I mean given in these in these early stages it makes sense that as we're developing security and thinking through how it'll all even work more uniformity is much better because it simplifies our reasoning about the interoperability of the system but do you think it'll be the case at some point if we mature the technology that we'll be able to specifically codify more parameters that can vary more configurations that can vary while adhering to like some minimum properties that need to remain uniform in the super chain yeah for sure this is exactly the debate around modularity that we're

having internally it's like what what do we actually need to codify today when we're like just forming as a nation and uh we don't have enough proof points behind the c like various things that we want to keep uniform what are like fundamental components of the system that must be kept uniform for things like National Security fault provability to be standardized across the super chain and then for all the modifications that people typically want to make at that layer why do it why do they want to make those modifications is it about latency is it about making security trade-offs like what is it and can we can we enable those modifications or

that extensibility to exist at a different layer and then which of those things are important to prioritize this quarter yeah that makes total sense yep custom gas tokens for example is a big one that people have been asking for that we have just really been slow on the uptake for because of this debate precisely yeah for each of these chains not only offering them a way to make the Box space more uniform and you all these all these other like we talked about all these benefits they also they need business models right and right now there is one business model that's like interesting is and that's being running the sequencer and you know collecting

fees as the sequencer but that could change very significantly right like not only could the super chain as a whole change the way sequencing is done but there could be decentralized sequencers there could be shared sequencers that this is a very early stage of the evolution of of the tech allowing each chain in the super chain to reason about its business model could be really really important for them and they could all end up choosing something completely different you could imagine some chain into the Super chain that doesn't even charge gas fees right like it just does something completely different or that applications pay the gas fees on behalf of users strictly and there's no user gas fees I'm just making that up you can just imagine all types of stuff but

point is that there's just a lot of there's a lot of Dimensions I think that they ought to be able to experiment so that's an interesting point because when we made the super chain pivot we thought that it would be primarily about reducing transaction fees and reducing transaction fee variability so that applications could offer more consistent end user experience for fee payments and a cheaper one or even subsidize the transaction fees if they wanted to and we thought that that was like the primary use of having your own chain but really we've seen people who want to build their own developer ecosystems with their chain and so you know we thought that sequencing fees was

something that they would want to reduce or minimize as much as possible and they would want to you know charge more fees at the marketplace level like layer or whatever they're building and so actually we've seen people who are resellers of you know optimism block space super chain block space and that block space resale is really valuable as you've seen with the explosion of Building on Base because when you purchase Bas branded block space you get lots of other things you get a retweet from Jesse you get support you get marketing you get uh BD opportunities you get access to liquidity and all these other builders so all those things are super valuable for developers and

that's not something that we anticipated and so it's something we're trying to adapt to with our product can you guys explain the sequencer what it is how it works what's going on there yeah did you attend University yes okay so you know how you took classes with Tas and it was like Tas that graded your homework and your exams for sure and if your ta Fu it's only when your ta up as you reviewed your as you checked your ta's grading work that you would go to your professor and dispute the grade that the TA had given right and so for the university the professor is a really really expensive computer to utilize and so you want to utilize the professor's

computation as little as possible and you want to offload the computation to cheaper more centralized and maybe sometimes less reliable Tas and the way that you ensure um Quality from the outputs or correctness from the outputs of the Tas is that you enable a challenge mechanism for those who are checking the ta's work with the ultimate Arbiter of Truth the professor so that's when you dip into the professor's salary and so taas are rollup sequencers does that makes sense yeah I like that a lot actually are are you sure I think so but this ability to be the one who controls the sequencer gives

you some ability to generate Revenue that that's some power that the sequencer gives you the sequencer can set the transaction fees so there's a base cost of submitting a block to ethereum and so it can never be zero the the cost is of operating a chain is never zero so therefore the revenue split to the collective is also never zero there's always a base cost and you can decide as a sequencer to charge some margin on top of that and that can be incredibly profitable although presumably that cost will Trend downward right people will choose the cheapest possible chain for their purposes yes well yeah it will but the sequencers

could still be very profitable they may become less profitable right like the the thing that's going to Trend down is going to be the cost of block space that that that is going to Trend down but whether or not the profitability of sequencers deine or not has to do with how easily they're commodified and how easily they are to commodify is very very nuanced nuanced internal debate on the product road map as well I would say you know last year uh before we implemented span batches and EIP 44 and all these things transaction costs on average were like 10 cents per rc20 cent and now it's less than one cent and so if you're previously paying 10 cents per transaction as a user and now the like core cost is subsense but the sequencer

is charging let's say a bigger Revenue you know a 200% Revenue so the transaction cost is three cents that's still 3x cheaper than what you were paying and so part of our hypothesis around continually reducing the cost of transactions is that you can increase the margin in a way that's negligible to the end user in may even preferable they don't even notice it all and it's so much cheaper than it was previously and that generates more activity volume traffic and so net net you're still making more as a platform or as a chain operator even though your margins are higher right I see so the cost of block space is going down transactions are getting cheaper and so to the end User it's still a compell it's still a great

proposition because you're you're paying less but that also enables the uh wielder of the sequencer to have some margin and and even that is sort of like tucked into the the savings the end user is experiencing exactly like after 444 launched and we're like oh my God substant fees we're like okay how long is we did some calculations on how long it was going to be before congestion pricing kicked back in and you know activity like went crazy on base and at some point I think a single transaction fee on base was more expensive than on ethereums like $38 50 something like that and so I guess it's kind of a self-own like we need to do more work on the scaling the scaling solution road map but also it's a good indicator of just how much demand there is for base

block space and what people are willing to pay yeah wor worth pointing out like a little mini point that we often talk about about gas pricing is that the in in some in a in a very indirect way the price of gas is not strictly dependent on the price of a transaction is not strictly dependent on the put and that's because once you enter into a scenario where people are auctioning the scarce block space the price will quickly reach the willingness to pay like the top price paid will reach whatever people are willing to pay like it doesn't matter how much throughput there is they need to be in this block right now they

want to do the transaction immediately and the price will be whatever they are willing to pay at that price to get in if they have to pay to get ahead of others right now of course if you have massive throughput then there might you might never end up in the auction scenario right where there's just tons of space no one needs to bid to get ahead because others don't need to be excluded right but what happened with base was just a funny thing if I recall it was at the like two and a half million gas limits uh time Jing was that when that was basically oh okay there was like there was like a was a brief time where they after

4844 the base team hadn't yet adjusted for good reasons they hadn't yet adjusted the total amount of gas per block base was still growing and there were some applications people were going crazy over and uh they just basically blew through the new blob space instantly and got straight back into congestion pricing so the price converged on the willingness to pay but that that's but that's been fixed by the way right Bas rais the gas limit right so now the congestion pricing has gone down yep since we've been talking about 4844 I should ask how has life changed pre and post that upgrade okay so I don't do I don't say a lot of stuff publicly which is something I'm trying

to correct through engagements like this and I think there's been a lot of Apt Community criticism about things like why it's taken so long for us to ship fault proofs why it's taken so long for certain governance rights to come online why it's taken so long for us to adapt to things that others seem to be integrating quite quickly like alt da or custom gas tokens and things like that and so Twitter commentators will be like it's because the optimism team doesn't care about decentralization or because they don't care about their users or whatever there's like so many reasons and I think you all and all the other builders and Founders listening to this will understand it's just like figuring

out how a team is supposed to work and how work is supposed to be done and making the wrong calls on uh strategic decisions or roadmap prioritization or allowing uh disagreements over implementation details to go on for too long to a staggering extent and it has taken a long time to debug why these execution problems were happening why is optimism always at the Forefront of the vision for how the space will evolve from optimistic rollups to sequencing to the super chain we've always been on the money with the narrative and we've been able to inspire a lot of people with

shared Visions to come together yet time and time again execution has fallen short of our marketing candidly and I think that it's been a long tough road but through the first quarter of this this year we've shipped a lot from span batches to 4844 to finally fault proofs to testnet to a number of other things from and and Bedrock as well and I think the biggest thing that we've learned from 44 four is no matter how much time you spend debating strategic hypotheses nothing beats putting code into production in front of users it instantly validates or invalidates a

whole slew of hypotheses that you've spend hours or days debating with your co-founders execs team leads and so you know one of these hypotheses was should we continue focus on quote unquote Gucci gas like you know pay a little bit higher transaction fee better security Properties or do we believe that lowering the transaction fee will actually create an explosion of activity and instead of spending all of that time debating it and reorienting the road map and figuring out what we should next what we should have done was pick the shortest line from point A to point B which is just pick the thing that's quickest to ship ship it and then see

what happens and so that's like the meta thing that we learned from 444 totally I think that's a I think that's a really valuable anecdote I'll add this is one of those things that like I feel like parents say right is like it's a truism but and you it's a stereotypical but you cannot overemphasize how true it is every portfolio company I talk with every company I talk with in the space they say the same thing this is just like a this is like a hundredy old idea like you have to Just sh the thing you have to put it in front of users you don't really know you know premature optimization is the root of all evil right don't try to guess just put it out there I constantly see people thinking that they know better than this they don't and then they learn the hard way

it's like a law of nature yeah I think that's great I think that's great I liked your term Gucci gas so what was the idea there that like this is primo it's Primo gas and it's a lot easier to pronounced than jivon sheas so that's true yeah good call there I like I used to say it's Gucci to to mean like oh it's good with me it's fine and my co-founder Carl thought it meant like it's pricey it's expensive it's luxury and so um he came up with the term Gucci gas to be like it's a luxury offering with luxury pricing so The Branding the security the like Mystique around it is what you're selling that's not like Gucci gas is not scaling ethereum yeah

for what it's worth I I agree that just more scaling is the Thing versus uh tiered pricing yeah if there was like one thing I wanted to get out to the community that's been like confused by the progress the like inconsistent waves of progress coming out of the optimism Collective like that's why it's just been part of our maturation journey of learning how to communicate with other humans to achieve goals together and like setting a goal and making a plan so the goal is achievable yeah I love that and also I wanted to ask a little bit about foundations because there have been foundations for a while in crypto but I don't know that there's like a clean mental model for how people think about them yet they're evolving really

really quickly right I've been asked by a lot of Founders in our portfolio and outside our portfolio just how do I think about a foundation because i' love you know somebody to be an advocate for the protocol or whatever the thing is directly right to be as like close as they can and to represent it as best they can independent of the company but there's risks in setting this up right like how do you pick the right person to run it how do you make sure that the foundation is accountable to the protocol and to the you know to the whole ecosystem have you like how how's your thinking developed like you've been there tons going on I think optimism Foundation is probably one of the busiest there's tons of projects

happening at all times what what have you learned so I think it's important that the incentives that govern the foundation the body bootstrapping incentive design for the collective to have no other incentive other than to do a good job for the collective there's not some like sidebar profit interest on running a um sequencer or creating a profitable services company that is influencing the design of those mechanisms that the collective is bootstrapping with yeah well like for for example how do you think about accountability for the foundation if the foundation's not doing well like let's

say you know let's say I'm thinking about making a foundation for my protocol how do I choose who's going to run it maybe I don't have co-founder that I trust you know who's aligned with the goals of the protocol how do how would I pick pick someone and then second how could the ecosystem hold them accountable and by the way we've seen how it can go wrong like my friend Kathleen Brightman of tezos you know they set up a foundation and they were just embroiled for years in a legal battle so you know it can be a challenge so that's actually why I vacated my position as CEO of optimism PBC to go and stand up the foundation for me it was like okay is it easier to find someone I trust to promote internally to run what is already a well functioning

company with tons of aligned people or find a net new person to figure out what to do with a 3 billion token Treasury and so we were operating on a tight timeline I decided it was easier to promote internally at the lab's entity and then go over to the foundation myself at the foundation my accountability is to a board of directors but the ultimate accountability is in the hands of the token holders and so it is in our Charter that the token holders can that there's a a director who along a vote of token holders can remove any director of the optimism board and so ultimately power resides in the hands of the community now this Charter has no

concept of the citizens house which is a super important part of our governance design and so yeah please yeah say a little bit about the citizens house and just the sort of theory of of governance so far just how okay I will say I'm about to say a bunch of wrong like Eddie said someone out there is going to want to smack me around about you know wrong things um and so if you find yourself cringing at any of this jobs. optimism. you're actually a great candidate that's a good point again I'm not a governance design expert my co-founders in I we're just trying to build a world that we ourselves want to live in and I think that when we think about power in the hands of the community what is the community well the

community is not just the token holders it's the contributors it's the users it's the fans and so shouldn't those people also get a say in how the protocol develops and so we tried to segment it out in two houses the token house and the citizens house the token house invests Capital expects economic growth you can buy tokens it's like really kind of standard token holder models and those people are important they care about whether or not optimism is able to generate economic activity and grow and build a product that gets adopted at the same time we don't want the optim is platform to be purely about extraction and extracting from the end users we want this to be a platform built for the end users and so that's

the role of the citizens house and so the first governance right that has recently come online for the citizens house is a veto for protocol upgrades in the first kind of two years of optimism governance we've mostly built out uh you know processes and structures for tokenhouse and retr pgf and this year is the first year that we're really um starting to hire up for the citizens house team and building out the rules and rights for the citizens house and so ideally these two houses keep each other in check where we can have economic growth and prosperity but also a platform with applications that are genuinely fun to use so basically optimism has two different houses that get to vote on certain things they have

certain rights you've got the token house and you have the citizen house the token house consists of token holders these are people who own uh pcoin and they get to have certain rights and then the citizens house is a different sort of thing and and how does one get into there like what is the membership criteria for the citizen house and what is the exact sort of balance of power checks and balances that we're talking about here yeah I would say it's super nent this is a new body of work we hired a first person onto the citizens house team the only right that's come online for Citizens house so far is the ability to veto protocol upgrades and the first set of citizens is selected from retrop pgf badge holders so this is like you

know Community participants that have been entrusted with the right to allocate tokens towards funding public goods in the last three rounds of retrop pgf they're really interesting design questions here we don't want to create a self-perpetuating group of Elites how do you define who gets to be a citizen what kind of Hoops do you have to jump through what's the immigration process uh to getting your green card and then your citizenship these are all open questions and so that's like one aspect of it another aspect that I think we're currently ill equipped to answer is what are the rights of the token house which economic parameters are important for the token house to govern and what information do they need to make good decisions around those parameters not only is there you know Capital

allocation there's also like token monetary policy inflation inflation funding where that inflation goes how much inflation on an annual basis what fact of the economy are you looking out but if someone doesn't have a co-founder Jing if you didn't have a co-founder you started op Labs PBC solo and you wanted someone to run the foundation I would have quit before we were even gonna I would have been like this sucks yeah that's so putting that aside how would you pick a pick someone to run the foundation knowing what you know now on the other side of the fence I don't know if this is a copout answer but you shouldn't be in that situation if you're in that situation you're not ready to launch a token IMO either whether you are not actually launching a governance

token for Community ownership because if you don't have a single other person that you can rely on to do something like this then like if you can't even build your own tiny contribution Community how are you going to build a broader Community you know start with finding someone that you can onboard onto the vision you'll learn a lot about gaps in your vision start by trying to make yourself somebody that other people can work with you'll learn a lot about what it takes to build a community of people if you cannot keep one other person motivated aligned and happy you're going to have a hell of a time doing that for hundreds or thousands of people as you likely intend to if you're launching a governance token so that's like uh first aspect of it and that's by

no by no means easy to do and once you do have that trusted person if they're in a position of authority at the foundation and you're in a position of authority somewhere else and your Visions Clash how are you going to negotiate the outcomes together are you incentivized correctly each of you have you interviewed for that have you tried on some trials and tribulations do you know how can you model how this person is going to act in situations like that because the foundation role especially at the beginning of a project has a ton of influence over your token

Treasury and if you are successful that token treasury is going to be worth a lot and so when someone is suddenly in charge of a lot how does that change who they are as a person this is ah this this is something you can't really interview for that's really hard to test for and it can throw wrench in things and so I guess try to have someone that you can rely on to take on such a big bucket of responsibility figure out what your backup plan is on a legal structural accountability level if that person doesn't behave the way that you expect them to and go find some people who have done it before and more

difficult than instantiating the foundation is having the labs entity Foundation entity continue executing work productively and effectively and cooperatively that let me tell you no joke I was going to make a funny little Point like on my Motif this podcast of like weird government analogies is like it's kind of funny when I was a kid I I used to wonder when they select Supreme Court Justices like how do since the Supreme Court Justices like are not accountable to anybody they're Sovereign right like they can it's a lifetime appointment they can't be kicked off I always wondered how the president that selects them ensures that they remain

ideologically consistent with the president but the answer it's not there's no enforcement mechanism it's that they have a long judicial track record and they pick someone who already has the properties they want right and and that they just kind of assume that people are slow to change and they pick the correct person so I'd say if I was picking someone I'd apply the same framework as I'd say I want to pick someone who has a long track record who behaves in a way that is totally aligned with our project and put them there and obviously have all the usual gubernatorial controls but trust on the fact that I know who this person is as as an analog but can you ever really know somebody you can't you can't but that's cast performance is not

indicative of future uh it's true you performance it's true and and supreme court justices have changed and drifted along the ideological spectrum and then now give them a token treasury now how are they gonna act It's Hard Mode no no no doubt about that I think there are two traits that we do select for one is obsession with Improvement people who are high ego about the quality of their work because they care deeply about their work but low ego about what it takes to improve and so people who actively seek feedback I think this is going to be really important like if you're a founder and you're about to UST this huge responsibility to somebody else find someone who is already in the habit of coming to you for feedback on

how they're operating and is interested in growing with you that's like really the only kind of regular habit that you can rely on totally it's a really interesting challenge my other question to you Jing how much of your time do you spend thinking about vibes okay oh my God what is Vibes I have an answer what what Eddie I I don't want to spin the ball go go ahead I have't I have I have an answer but yeah what's your answer to me the vibe is the the subtextual things that are not right before us that are implied by what we are seeing that for tells the future behaviors that a person or scene

will exhibit reputation that can be a part of it but it's like like let me put it this let me put Let me give it couch an example you meet someone they don't say anything wrong but they're acting a little weird right the vibe is wrong right you can't look you can't point at a specific thing and say yes I know they're going to do a bad thing because they said it or they did a bad thing they didn't but they're doing behaviors that are indicative that there's something complicated behind the scenes that you can't see and so is going to go wrong things are going to go wrong right it's in other words it's what is implied by small clues that are not explicitly the thing that we're

discussing but forell weird stuff in the future or things that are not right in the future that's that's that's what vibe is and so like you know in the early days of optimism optimism had a great Vibe and it's you know still is a great Vibe but it was like a very notable thing about it in its early days what does that mean what that meant was all the signs were right the UN the little subtle things were right it's like the right type of nerds saying the right type of thing focusing on the right types of problems near the right type of people all the little clues that are just beyond view that at forell that good things are going to happen because that's just how these things okay I like that you know the Twitter thread that's

like boink Mary kill and then like you know yeah and so some of the comments are like oh like you know marry optimism or boink optimism because optimism will rub your belly or optimism has a hot friend base and I think really what they're saying is like The Vibes are optimism takes care of its community optimism is considered legitimate by other legitimate players such as coinbase so like what like what is Vibes I don't really know what Vibes is but I guess I spend a lot of time thinking about the humans because at the end of the day we're all sacks of water and we're just like trying to Vibe like

trying to find some place to go jiggle to because we don't like you know like I don't know if this is demotivational but we don't actually need technology right like we don't like we could just live in a cave and we could still survive and people are like oh yes but like what without AI we couldn't find a cure for cancer well maybe if we didn't have capitalism we wouldn't have cancer or you it could go in a number of different ways and so for smart people who want to feel meaning on a day-to-day basis like your work is one of the one one really good way to go and feel that and so how you feel about the way you spend a majority of your waking hours is like is what you're building that beneficial for

the world are you productive like are you actually able to create an impact do you like the core people that you have to interact with on a day-to-day basis is that culture is that Vibes is that a community I don't know but I spend a lot of time thinking about that and we put our money where our mouth is and so I think when people sometimes when people say Vibes they can't put their finger on it but one of the bo Mar kill people was like well you just know that optimism is going to treat you right and so that's built up over years of small decisions whether it's actually paying out a critical vulnerability even though the specific bug discovered was not listed

among our critical vulnerabilities or if that's sharing the fix for that vulnerability with the antagonistic Forks because we prefer to protect their users over compete like there's like tons of small things like this over many many years that I think we end up with Vibes also because The Branding is cute yeah I agree but I I I think that that is so consistent with like what I'm what I think about Vibes because if you're always kind of doing the right thing and that's part of how you create a good vibe you are literally giving people evidence data that in the future you're going to keep behaving that way if you go to a cool room like think of it this way you go to a cool place and the vibe is killer right like the music's great

the lighting is amazing the decor is great just the funu of the space is great it's not just an aesthetic consideration the fact that there's all these other people there and it's busy means that the potential that you find someone else there that you overlap with in terms of your values and your aesthetic preferences is very high right that's because all those things are indicators that these people if you find those things beautiful and Charming that everyone else will find those same things beautiful and Charming too right it's like it's like it's I'm I'm being like really like a nerd about it but it's like these all these things are all data you know and if like you know optimism is going to treat me right like guess it's got that nice you know like friendly vibe that like literally means

that if I deploy an optimism I can take for granted that technical decisions being made in the future won't be net extractive and will be like serve the serve the like common good of the you see what I'm saying it's like it's Vibe translates into like literal expectation about concrete very important economic technical social whatever decisions exactly yes and so you know all of that is like part of this explicit culture building we're putting out there about how we expect people to behave culture is how you behave and how you communicate and that's part of the optimism culture and so um that's not to say people haven't had a terrible time interacting with optimism whether it's

the protocol with the team with me it but the core intention is to put our money where our mouth is and ascribe to a set of values and be consistent with how we propagate those values and if that hasn't been true for you then feedback is the only way we know how to iterate on the next version of ourselves so my DMs on Twitter are open I love that as one sack of water I feel very jiggled after this conversation y so I hope that all of our listeners are vibing too I hope that the the positivity is emanated out and if it's cringey kill the part of you that

cringes that's right get down with it this is great thank you so much for having me guys yeah thank you so much for coming on this was excellent bye see you [Music] [Music] [Music] w [Music]