Optimism Co-Founders: What Happened to the L2s?

Transcript

Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is forformational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Block Works. Our hosts, guests, and the Block Works team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. All right, gents. I'm excited about this. We have Carl, Ben, two co two of the three co-founders of Optimism. Op Labs, Optimism. What am I supposed to say?

>> A little bit of both. >> A little bit of both. >> Yeah. >> How we doing? >> Great. We're doing great. >> The office. Your vibes are surprisingly high considering >> you named our company for good reason. You know what I'm saying? You know, >> always the optimist. I actually someone messaged me the other day on Telegram. They said, um, you know, do you really not understand what's going on in the market? Why are your tweets so optimistic? It's very annoying. >> That's how we feel. >> Sorry. Unapologetic. >> Calm it down, guys. We gota We're at a 10. We got to bring it way down.

>> Um I actually thought we could start on a on a maybe a more depressing note and then we can bring it up, which is um uh there's been this like I don't know if this is I mean I mean this in the most respectful way. There's been a a reckoning of the L2s, I guess I would call it. Um, I'd love to hear you guys maybe just walk through like what happened here, right? Like I feel like if you go back to maybe 22, uh, maybe 21, 22, like L2s were like the hottest thing in all of crypto, you know, 5 billion, 10 billion valuations, and now things have been, you know, then, you know, Salana got hot, now it's hyperlquid, now it's maybe like back to ETH1. Um, so I'd love to just maybe hear like and then we'll we'll take the

audience out of it. We'll do the the rebirth obviously, but walk me through the last couple years and like how you guys think about what happened to the L2s. >> Yeah, I mean I think in short it's hype meets reality or crypto goes from being speculative blue sky, we're going to conquer it all to actually trying to deliver on its value to end users. And it turns out that delivering on value to end users requires real product development. actually knowing what value you're going to give and generate for your users and actually providing a good and cohesive product. And let me tell you, if you've been in the crypto space, you know that that is a serious shortcoming of many of those, you know,

chains or hype projects that really have not weathered the storm because they don't have those fundamentals. And when you don't have fundamentals, the floor can fall out from under you. >> Yeah. What do you think, man? >> Yeah. I think like what Yeah, I super agree. I think like one way to frame this in many ways is like um crypto has lost the ability to uh not hold itself accountable to the crazy [ __ ] that it does. You know what I mean? And like there's one framing of this that's very like what the heck were you doing? And the other hand it's like we finally reached a point where people outside of our little bubble were taking us seriously. And it's like not surprised that you would have a little bit of deflating as you enter the real world of like not just like memecoin farm you

know circular dependency virality and like actually have real businesses that are considering using real products. So, like, you know, at the end of the day, like we came a long way with our industry with some of those vibes and it got us to where we were, but to take it to the next level, you need a little bit of a reset and like >> professionalize. >> Yeah. Button up that last button. >> Yeah. Look at this guy. >> Yeah. Zip it up. Zip it up, Carl. Um, what do you think? And I'll, you know, we'll talk generally about like L2s and then we'll take it into optimism. Like, what do you think that L2s got right and what do you think that L2s got wrong?

Yeah, great question. I think fundamentally L2s got the delivery vehicle to providing a good product. Correct. Right. When you are building an L2, you are extending the capabilities of the L1 and then being able to differentiate your block space to actually deliver a good product to your users. You are focusing on the correct thing because the correct thing is differentiated products that your users want and not reinventing the wheel of yet another validator set hype cycle you know buy my token because that is ultimately unsustainable even if it is wildly successful in the short term.

What I think L2's got wrong is it turns out that you need to differentiate your block space. You can't just launch a chain, launch a token, and then throw up your hands when nothing happens because it turns out to deliver a good chain. You need to deliver a good product. And ultimately, a lot of the hype cycle wasn't doing that. >> It was almost like the L2s started being viewed as like a shortcut to the new validator set hot chain thing instead of doing what we were typing, which is don't worry about that and just make it easy to build onchain products, you know, like that. Yeah. Do you guys think of your customer as the like you mentioned user and product who's the user who's the like like your customer is not the end user right it's a B to you're you're in the B2B to C game.

Yeah, I mean, you know, of course we have OP mainet that's growing super well and of course there are B2B relationships there. Ultimately, like you have to take a more holistic view, I think, of these products to really more deeply try to ingest that because the answer is like not one sizefits-all in in any way. There are many relationships and the power of crypto is like, you know, think about like the DeFi Lego world, right? Like you're stacking up all these Legos. Is that like should you call that a B2B to B to B2B to B2B TOC product, right? like that framing is a little bit reductive for like effectively what you're building is a network of participants and so it's you need to apply the product framing and like understand the relationships and the

value being provided from one user to another and ultimately we are sitting at the infrastructure layer that is serving a lot of levels up that's true um but it's also not one size fits all where you just say like B2B B TOC these are the two options in crypto right it's a little bit more complex >> and is your product blockace or do you think about it differently? Now, >> I think that that is probably the closest thing to our product. It is the infrastructure to host block space at minimum and the ease of creating net new block space that is differentiated and enables your product to do whatever your product needs to do because ultimately blockspace is as good as what the users are using it for.

>> If you have to fit it in a word like space is a reasonable word. It also begs the question like what the f is block space right and so like you know in some cases that is like an asset issuance uh substrate on which you're providing assets in other case it's a substrate for building financial products so yeah it is block space but it's also like you have to dig a little bit deeper if you want to more deeply understand how people are using the block space which is where you need to make the product decisions in the first place. >> Yeah. Do you have a uh how is your thinking evolved on like what chains like how chains will look and what chains will be used for? You can go anywhere you want with that question. I mean okay there you can think of I think

it's a natural evolution of most technology stacks from bespoke to standardized to specialized. So this is a very counterintuitive thing but it's in some ways a reverse cycle from uh what you would imagine which is standardized to specialized or even specialized to standardized where we started out building really bespoke technology stacks that were hyperfixated on a single use case and only enabled this one thing. For example, payments that was the first use case for L2s. It was how are we going to scale up a payments network to global scale? We knew we needed a layer 2 for that. That required a huge amount of technical development to build a single use case

solution. Then what happened was we went into the specialized camp and that is a technology stack that can technically be used for anything. And this is where the trap happened because you ended up with a hundred different clones of the exact same product. we are going to be the standardized block space for all things to all people. That is not differentiated nor does anyone want that. And so what we're seeing is a transition from standardized into specialized again. But it's different than bespoke because standardized to specialized means that I can take a general purpose platform and then tune it easily to my particular use case and I don't need to spend a 5 to 10 year R&D

cycle to do it. I can extend it and make it different in a product cycle that is you know a few months as opposed to multiple years. So that is kind of the transition that we have seen and that we are really trying to accelerate at this point enabling everyone to build their differentiated block space across the board. >> Yeah. when you guys were trying to figure out like I'm assuming you know Blockworks has had these times like really hot and then like times where we're like oh my god like it's all over and then it's really hot and then it's all over like I'm assuming at some point in the last couple years you went through the oh my god it's all over phase and you know you guys seem good right now but um how did how do you guys figure out what to do like even the like

bespoke specialized standardized like I know you have great investors like entre for example like are you sitting down with like the entre folks and they're like no no no no like Carl this actually a very normal thing. Like was it internal team? Are you talking to the whole company? Is it just the three founders? Are you talking to customers? Like can you just walk me through like how that this is maybe a really nerdy founder only question that no one will care about this answer, but personally I'm very curious how you guys went through that journey. >> I mean it's a mix, right? One of the things that we realized I think relatively early on was that we needed to actually build out a like a a pipeline for talking to customers at this kind of scale of like the institutional like I know, right? Like

it's like what do you mean we don't just like get in random Telegram group chats and like try to find other anons with you know like >> we really need a CRM like oh >> I know. Yeah. It's like whoa it's we're growing up right that's back to like the the bubble goes down and you inflate it back up. So you know it's obviously a mix and like >> the other tricky thing about it is because you this more complex network of participants that I was talking about where it's like >> not just one layer of B2B to C like there are many routes through the network that a block blockchain is building. You definitely have to talk to a lot of people like you want to understand what traders are doing at the same time as you want to understand what asset is asset issuers are doing at the

same time as exchanges. So one of it was just building the reps of being able to like talk to the serious players that are getting into crypto now and be able to understand what they need. >> Um but then you also have to go at different layers of the stack that it's not just like the chain uh you know the next chain purchaser but who they're going to talk to. >> Yeah. And it might sound like, you know, very silly advice. Oh yes, we talk to customers. We need to talk to customers. But we and we've known this from day one. But something that I learned recently, which I thought was a great little insight, the difference between a professional worldclass athlete and, you know, your average Joe is how incredibly perfected their basics are. And so we

ultimately need to get in those reps. And that's how you can actually build something that people want because this is really hard. And talking to customers regularly, I struggle with that more than most is really hard. >> Yeah, >> it's tough. Yeah. It's also like unlearning the like cryptobubble language for things like starting to understand like Carl knows this where like so we've spent days like trying to understand the traditional financial system only to realize like it's actually quite obvious other than the fact that it does things exactly the opposite of how crypto does it in the first place and like we were just like assuming that the way that crypto does it is the way that everyone does it. You know what I mean? This is like it's crazy. Just being able to translate between those two worlds super

challenge. Not just finance, like traditional SAS, go to market motions. >> Yeah. Customer success, BDRs and SDRs. Yeah. There's which I actually want to get into that because I met your guys' chief revenue officer, Kyle, who's, you know, fantastic. Um, and so I want to get into the transition to this enterprise scaled business now in in a second. If someone's listening to this thinking, you know, this all sounds great, but like the L2 meta is over, like L2s are dead. How would you respond to that? >> It's like the server meta is dead, you know? Okay, what are you building? I think it is true that you know selling a server in the abstract to a you know hype machine is dead but you need to sell a product and to build a product

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find out more. Okay, let's talk about this evolution of optimism now. Um, how do you think about the how did how's the business model of optimism evolved and and did you guys even think about the business model at the beginning or were you just like mass proliferation of this block space and eventually the money will come? I mean ultimately we are um still in the early innings of crypto adoption, right? Like when we're talking about being taken seriously as an industry in the trady world or just like in anywhere outside of our own little bubble, we are still in the world even with the proliferation of stable coins and

everything else. We're still in a fraction of a percent of the the building the markets for the world. So in some sense like you have to keep an open mind for things evolving over time. One of the simplest um understandings that I think that we came to more recently was that we we went first of all from having one OP mainet chain um and just like building that out and that's still around that's doing really well. >> Um but eventually we hit a point in time in which it became time to scale that up and like now we have built one server that server runs well now we need multiple people to have to be able to use this server technology and we're ready for that. So now we're in the world of OP enterprise where we have a managed offering where you basically can

say hey I want a chain and we say don't worry we got you all the technical details we'll handle this for you just focus on what actually matters which is >> your product your differentiation >> specialization baby >> so it's definitely evolved in that way where we've like added these income streams like there's still an income stream of ok mainet now there's an income stream of people paying for this block space for what they're building I think that will continue to evolve you know I wouldn't I don't think we should delude ourselves into thinking like oh crypto is being taken a little seriously by a few institutions like the story is done it's written let's pack our bags >> um >> ultimately like it is true that the thing to scale out is to build the servers and so >> in some sense we always knew that there

would be a lot of these chains like that was the point of L2s was that you take one chain and you extend its security to a bunch of L2s so that was always in the cards but I would say that the shape of that uh as like a business model has definitely evolved. >> Yeah. Was Coinbase the breakout deal where you guys realize like oh this is a business model providing specialized blockspace customized deal to an enterprise that needs block space which we can deliver to them. It was absolutely and it was absolutely a uh clarification of how these technology stacks are going to be used in the future. And so I will say we definitely had a bit of a unfair head start in that

kind of process of actually professionalizing because it turns out that to sell to enterprises you need things like SLAs's, SLOs's, you need all of the actually useful things that the traditional stack provides to its customers and we really didn't have a way to replicate that and so it's been building that muscle professionalization. Exactly. It is forced professionalization. Now of course it means you have to talk to customers to get there but it's really being guided in this direction I think by the demand by market signals.

>> Yeah. How has the way that you guys spend your time changed? >> Wow. I mean it changes the the role I think of a founder changes literally you know every six months you have a new job title. It's like okay this is the most pressing thing for the business. Go do that. go learn how to do uh product, etc. And I well I wasn't the one who learned how to do product. I'm living in that research mode a little bit too much. But the kind of useful thing about having a bunch of us is that you just >> you find the right hat at the right time and we evolve and the the business evolves because the business demands fully different skill sets at every stage of the cycle.

>> Yeah. Yeah. We I've seen that with with Mike and I. We've completely shifted our roles every, you know, every like nine months or so. So, what are the roles for the three of you right now? >> I've been recently I've been deep in the engineering weeds. It is a real change in the way that we've been building, you know, when we have the advent of these incredible tools. That means that the way that we develop software, the way that we think about securing our software, all of these processes and pipelines, we have massive opportunities to optimize. and we're shipping some really ambitious features that require some deep in the weeds attention. Um that's been my focus in the past, you know, six months, but before that totally different.

>> So I mean I'm also in a little bit of a research journey right now. I think the um >> So where are the customers coming? >> And a very good team. >> Yes, very good team. Also, we have uh a recent habit which has been the happiest thing ever where we have a competition of who can bring in customers every single day to the office and we have like a conversation, a different topic, you know, this person works in finance, this other person works in this other sector and we're just gaining all of these insights and you know, >> piecing it together. And to be clear, like the important research that I think that crypto has to solve right now is understanding or coming to terms with the different market structures that Tradfi has where they're actually

massively beneficial. So I don't mean just like how can we get more TPS out of the L2. It's like what can we learn from the market structure of broker dealers being separate from exchanges like and settlement like we in crypto have kind of tightly coupled all of these things together and this gives us this very cool permissionless decentralized substrate >> but there are also like economic inefficiencies that come out of that and it's very important to learn how the like the rest of the real world has solved those inefficiencies in practice and like try to figure out how to incorporate those.

>> Yeah. And then how to build a product that can serve them. Right. Exactly. Exactly. >> Exactly. And they're like some things we do better, some things that they do better. We need to do those things better. >> And those are opportunities. Ultimately, crypto has a pace of innovation that is possible that the, you know, other sectors are not going to be able to match. And so, yes, we have these inefficiencies. Yes, we have these crazy inefficiencies in a lot of cases, but we also are patching those holes every day. And the people who patch the holes first get rewarded. and we're trying to enable those people.

>> Yeah, 100%. Um, can we talk about the business model of optimism today? So, the the way I understand it is it's almost an enterprise SAS model where you you have this great block space that you spent years building and but there's all this all this other stuff that comes around building on a chain and so you guys have built this like uh you know stack you know full stack solution where if someone wants to go build a blockchain they can come to you and you offer everything. I don't know how much you offer but you can offer maybe someone needs a wallet like you can probably offer that like you know you offer all this stuff >> block explorer sequencing >> everything um so it's a it's a block in a box so you charge a lot of money for that which is I don't know how much but

I'd guess you know five to six figures a month or seven figures a year and I would guess your target customer list is actually not 10,000 people there's probably like a 100red to 200 names on a spreadsheet um is that roughly the business today it's like an enterprise SAS with seven figure annual deals. >> Yeah, that's that's exactly right. And that is something that we have a foundation for because we have experience building out our own chain, building out other chains. It turns out then when that chains are a great opportunity. They allow you to launch products that otherwise would take an enormous amount of time and effort to launch. However, they can be if you are doing it from scratch, a massive hurdle.

You don't realize how many integration partners you need to work with, how many things you need to stand up, how to balance the various like liquidity incentives, how to how to make the lending pool work just right with your spot exchange. The token availability is an incredibly important, you know, situation. Fragmentation is massively inefficient. All of those things are learnings that we've kind of accumulated and therefore can leverage in all of these enterprise deals as we are bringing these enterprises on chain because guess what? They have enormous potential to reach a large number of users with incredibly useful financial products and other products that otherwise they would not be able to

offer and offer new tokens and new experiences that are just not super feasible unless you're on chain. And so this is just been a we're trying to accelerate that transition. We're not kidding ourselves. We're not the biggest exchange. We are instead the people who know how to take that distribution and leverage it for a new product line. >> Oh >> yeah. Yeah. And I think for the um you know for the customers listening in on this only thing only thing we might add is there is still a little bit of solutions engineering in there as well where like yeah where like especially now with um the regulatory landscape sort of like >> coming into focus across different different jurisdictions. There are

different like you know specialized works that we can do to extend the chain technology to meet where people where they are. >> Yeah. For example, if you have a token and you need to apply some kind of compliance controls on your token, the best place to do it is in the sequencer itself so that you don't have any risk of that token kind of spreading and getting into the wrong hands or you know you can impose trading locks where you lock down trading for all of the different pairs for your particular block space. There's so much more customization that you get when you actually have, you know, control over your block space where you can customize your block space and access the onchain distribution at the same time.

>> What what else goes into this thing that you're selling like you know Morgan Stanley like JP someone comes to you shouldn't have said some some financial institution comes to you and said um and says we we want a chain and we want the full stack. We want everything. What like what's in there? like a blog explorer like get like like maybe bullet points like a wallet like what what do they actually get? What are the deliverables? >> Block explorer running the actual sequencer. There are a few tiers by the way depending on the throughput scales and things like this that you want. Um block explorer um compliance modules um the sequencer itself. Um the other biggest one quite frankly is just RPC providers. like you have to keep in mind that whatever app that you're building on top needs a connection to the chain

state to like read it all down and that's like a huge um industry protocols there's a laundry list >> like you would give them a lend borrow on like they might say I want a native lend borrow I want a native DEX >> oh yes this is another thing that we are actively exploring that is a level of customization that is like absolutely the frontier of blockspace which is like okay how do we build in native, you know, native lending into the chain. How do we build in your particular use case? >> It seems like things are going see what Hyperliquid has done and Yeah.

>> Exactly. And so really that is part of this like bespoke uh engineering solutioning where really the part of this is okay, you want a chain, but why do you want a chain? Right? If we had the one-sizefits-all solution for you, then we're recreating that standardized non-differiated block space that has plagued L2s and L1's candidly for you know cryptos genesis. So now it's really about okay what is the particular use case that you are targeting and what are those experiences and then we just happen to know the kind of laundry list of things that you need to actually land that particular beach head product.

>> Yeah. Yeah. And are you guys white labeling other people's products or are you built like um for the you know an RPC like are you going to like Alchemy or Infura or QuickNote or something and be like hey like white label this thing or the wallet provider like are you I don't know who provides wallets right now but yeah uh >> we're the like one throat to choke when you are trying to uh work with a bunch of providers and so we have these agreements with a bunch of providers and then you can come to us and we have you know we know how that process goes down and can You've got the wallet as a service provider here and then it goes Okay.

>> Exactly. And so it's really about collapsing the kind of chain onboarding process from 9 months down to a couple weeks. You know >> why did you guys go with So there's two business if you guys if I was in your guys' seat there'd be two business models that you could uh you know maybe go down. One would be fees. So we will give you a chain not even going to charge you guys and as you guys scale we charge we're going to take a percent. The other model is um which I think may well anyways so that's one model. The other model is like enterprise SAS. You can scale you can make hundreds of millions. We're not going to take any fees. We're going to just enterprise SAS model. It sounds like you went enterprise SAS.

>> Yeah, right. And why? >> I think one of the things that's really important and that crypto has really undervalued is actually legibility to existing businesses. If we're going to say, "Hey, we're going to take a percentage cut of all of your me," people are going to be looking at us like we are crazy. If we instead say, "Hey, we have this very predictable pricing model. This is what you are signing up for. You can get control over your infrastructure it at any point, but in the meantime, we'll charge you this much per month based on usage, etc., etc." And that is something that someone can read and understand versus a kind of sneaky jargonfilled contract that doesn't make a whole lot.

>> You add up the priority fees and the data fees and you subtract it by the amount of L1 data that we spent and then you divide by and there's like what are you talking about? >> Exactly. And and and to be clear when you are working with an institution they want to pay you. They want to understand why you are not going to go out of business in a couple months. And so part of having a legible fee model is actually so that you can have a trusting relationship with your customer. So you know where the lanes are. >> What's been the toughest thing from a culture perspective? Like you know like Blockworks has seen multiple iterations of the company or like you know media and events and then we got into data and then you know we cut the news business and there's like big cultural shifts

that have to happen there. Um so I've you know we felt these we felt these big cultural shifts and they're they're um externally maybe not as scene but internally they're felt right. What what has that felt like internally? I think it is a new experience, a new challenge all of the time. I would say that this recent cultural shift away from the kind of hype cycle version of crypto into the kind of enterprise uh rubber hits the road version of crypto has been a particularly challenging uh transition. And ultimately it is it's challenging for everyone but it is also a really fun thing to do where you are you come into

the game saying I want to deliver impact to tons of users. I want to have a real change in the world. I want to make something positive happen. And it starts out as a dream and then when it becomes real and you start seeing people using your tech stack to do incredible things across the globe on and mass that is a very satisfying experience. It's a different kind of satisfying experience between dreaming about the car and then having the car. But it is an incredibly valuable journey when I don't know I'm I I feel like the folks who have been along that ride are very grateful for that experience. You know, at least I

am. I I shouldn't speak for others. >> The transition is a little challenging, but then you start to see the payoffs and everyone can really get aligned behind that and like see, oh, we are having impact here like this deal is closing because we are providing a valuable service to these people. That's very positive. >> Yeah. Now, and now you have I saw two announcements go live. One was like Bit Panda >> up. Exactly. Up bit. >> Uh did you guys do OKX's chain? Yeah. Okay. So, >> well, and I want to get to the customer stuff in a sec. Um yeah, I was talking to the founder of an OG DeFi, you know, app. Um and he's like, "It's interesting. We have almost like two sets of employees now. One was the the dreamer set like the initial and they're here for the, you know, dreams and the

vision." And then he's like, we but we have this new class of employees and they're actually almost more productive today. Like they're almost better for what stage we're at now. And there's not a clash of, you know, we're rolling off the first set and onboarding the second. So >> yeah, and and I think the dreamers can become practical implementers, you know, and that's in some ways that's like the point of being a dreamer is to see the dream manifest. And it's, you know, can't get stuck in the dream cycle. Yeah true. >> I think we're lucky to be on the infrastructure side as well, right? where these aren't these shifts aren't so dramatic as like a complete 180 pivot of the fact that block space exists like yes block space is a reductive word to use and what we're talking about is actually getting to the deeper value

that we're providing but you still have chain infrastructure you know yeah so there's a nice bridge there >> um all right we'll get to customers in a sec because I want to hear actually like what they need what what they want what they need in an exchange need something different than a fintech and uh what does the revenue mix look like today >> I mean >> like how do you guys break it out is it like you have the fees from L1 then you have like enterprise contracts you have like ARR and transactional revenue like how do you when you show the P&L on a quarterly basis like how do you look at it >> it's it's a majority from the enterprise sales motion um and a lot of those deals are you know we are growing that business actively right now um historically it has been a lot of

onchain fees but ultimately that has served as being just a kind of bridge to our uh you know what I think is our more sustainable business model long term. Yeah. >> Yeah. The only other thing I would add is like we have actually have not talked about this yet, but one of the other key product awakening realizations that you need to have is that not everybody needs a chain at least right now. >> Ask for me. >> I know I know and and I you know uh ask me on the that's a time frame caveat of right now, right? But we do also have OP mainet as a really successful chain growing and so so folks like Ether for example just moved their card business over and like migrated 200 million.

Not without some drama. >> Oh my god. >> Yeah. So anyway, >> moment of silence. >> Moving on. The the um Yeah. Anyway, I was just going to say like the reality is that we also do have this OP mainet product that is blockace >> that we kind of view as a like a launching pad for people. Like today, Ether Pi doesn't need their own chain. In the future, it could be the case that they need one. So, you have that transitionary motion. Um >> interesting factor in as well. Why should someone come to optimism and work with optimism instead of I would think that you probably in these enterprise motions compete with like three or four other chains. Sorry to the folks I'm going to forget here but it's probably arbitum

Canton Salana ZK Sync. I'm sure someone's going to send me an angry message because I'm forgetting people. But like those are those are the folks that that come to mind. Like why why would someone come to you like or why do you why do you win these deals? >> Oh yeah. Yeah, 100%. It is the production experience. Being able to talk about the ways that we've transitioned people over to their own chains, you know, greater than 50% of all the L2 transactions. It really comes down to, you know, experience and time and reps working with all of these enterprises, making sure that we're able to differentiate their block space for what they need and do that in efficient process with a long track record of

folks that are, you know, that we've worked with. >> Yeah. I would also say like it actually does become the case a little bit that human trust comes back into the picture, right? And so like that's an important thing to provide and actually action on. Like one of my favorite meetings that we have that is in a really good place now over the past I don't know six 12 months is our monthly engineering prioritization meeting where basically there's all the work that we could do and we are just ruthlessly going through that list and saying what is the set set of this work who is the customer that it's providing value to how urgent is it and like let's prioritize exactly according to that list. So like being able to action and build trust like with what we build is I think super important.

>> Did you have an investor who told you to do that meeting? We have been blessed with some incredible executive talent, some of which you have met that have uh taught us as very uh inexperienced uh folks how to actually run businesses. >> Yeah. Yeah. What a concept. >> Yeah. >> Harder than it looks to be clear. And I'm not saying I'm doing it. >> Yeah. And and how big is the team right now? >> It's like 90 >> 90 folks. Okay. um what's the revenue roughly? Because it's funny, it used to be all on chain, right? And now so now you have this off-chain revenue which is a weird thing like you know the industry is going like

there's more and more revenue that's happening offchain which we're trying to figure out as a data business like how do you you know figure that out but um I know you can't tell me exactly what the revenue is but like what's the range or roughly >> I think I mean your estimate is probably about as good as as as mine your your description of you know uh roughly what we're charging etc you can probably work out but yeah >> um what are the customers Like who are your who are your favorite not can't pick favorite children here. >> It seems like you're having the most success with the centralized exchanges.

Exactly. >> Is that right? >> Yeah. >> And why is that? >> We have a huge amount of experience working with centralized exchanges, building their own chains, bringing their distribution on chain, enabling the products that they are trying to build. I mean you have the list. >> Yeah. I mean >> well co so Coinb here are the ones I know. Coinbase with base Kraken in >> Kraken with Ink >> OKX >> OKX the Panda version up with Gwa. >> Yep. >> These are the biggest chains. Um, and we've been doing this for a long time.

And in fact, there's a we just have a target list of all of these different customers and we are going and building relationships with each one and understanding their product needs and enabling them to deploy their products on chain. Uh outside of exchanges, who do you guys think you'll Let's fast forward optimism in a year, two years. Who's the group that you will start having the most success with outside of exchanges? >> Because you you have like fintex. >> Yep. >> Payment providers. >> Yep.

>> Financial institutions. >> Yep. >> Um >> uh crypto companies, let's not forget. Oh sure. >> Like like an EtherFi. >> Definitely. >> Um who do you think is like the second biggest customer? Like who will be Yeah. fastest growing customer segment in a year? I think it's natural to go to folks like FinTech just based on their desire to onboard onchain. However, I will also say that we are seeing a huge amount of interest from traditional financial institutions that are coming on chain with a whole, you know, whether it be NY, NASDAQ, ICE, all of these folks are absolutely making crypto investments and so it's really a matter of when and you know at that time depending on how it pans out that could be a massive massive

uh opportunity for all of web 3. >> Yeah. And there's like a little bit of uh agility factoring that into that equation as well. Like some of the bigger players and like uh more tra the more trady you are, a bit of a slower uh sales cycle ends up coming about. You know, >> I know the game. We do. >> I know the game. >> It's fun. Um, how do you think about uh incentivizing people to work with you? Which which for what it's worth, like okay, so for I think people know this, but like most of the big deals that people see in public, you know, this chain won this huge deal, those are p there's some payment that's happening.

Um, which by the way, they that gets a really bad rap. It's not actually the worst thing. Like a lot of that actually is how a lot like AWS landed a bunch of their early customers by paying. Like it's not actually the worst thing to do that. gets a bad rap in crypto. Um, what what's your philosophy on that? >> There is absolutely a time and a place. However, that time and place is on the way out. I would say one of the things that candidly loses us deals, deals that we, you know, in an ideal world would make. Some of those deals are won and lost just by how much you want to pay. And at this end of the day,

if you lose a deal like that, then you should feel good because that means that you are not incurring this massive debt on your balance sheet. We are transitioning really importantly to look for, believe it or not, paying customers. That has been a >> crazy concept. >> Crazy concept. But candidly, even if it is an extremely exciting opportunity, sometimes you really want to ask, do you want to pay for this? Because that is a signal for whether or not you want the thing in the first place because a lot of folks will be tempted to launch a product just to get the payout.

>> Yeah. Then the other thing to look out for is like the blank check deal. You know what I mean? There's a big difference between putting some payments between milestones and like incentive aligned success where like like both parties are doing really well. That that's a much more uh synergistic than just like the number on the line to get the >> I I got a call from someone the other day. They're um they're being offered uh I'm sure you're talking to these guys, but they're they're being offered $125 million by a chain. Um uh which is uh and they're like, "Should we do it?" And I was like, if they're offering you 125 million, you probably got to take that even though it's a uh you know, maybe.

Yeah. Anyways, um what is uh what do you think? Why like why does someone need a chain? >> At the end of the day, they need a chain to build a product that is going to be used by end users. And so having a chain is incredibly important relative to just deploying on someone else's block space if you want the distribution to the onchain user base that is and the ability to deploy new applications. So there are like three way let me make sure I understand that because if you deploy on >> ETH L1 >> sure >> you get the distribution of ETH L1 it's

actually almost hurting your distribution if you take everyone into your own chain. No, >> definitely that is the case in the status quo today. That is certainly a bug, not a feature of the tech stack. The vision and the reason why layer 2s were even successful in the first place is actually because you were able to leverage the Ethereum distribution when you deployed your layer 2 in the first place. Now, is that the same level of interoperability as deploying a net new smart contract on Ethereum L1 today? No, it's not. However, is that going to eventually absolutely be the case? Yes, it absolutely is.

>> So, someone should be able to opt into the interop or or keep it private in their own >> Exactly. And regardless, still be able to connect to the liquidity and tap in with all of these other chains. And ultimately that is a technical problem which eventually will be solved both on the financial and also the infrastructure side. But once we've solved that asking why do you want your own chain is almost like asking why do you want your own website? It's because I am a business and I care about owning my own space where my users go and I can control it. I can customize it and I can distribute it just as well.

>> Yeah, I agree. And I also think implicit in this question like this is like the golden question of like what does blockspace mean? Like what are we caveing away or like silently ignoring when we describe that is something that's really relevant to this conversation as well. like a chain for an asset issuer versus a chain for a lending protocol is going to end up in this endame that Carl is talking about looking like very different things, right? Like they'll both be blocked like >> because a block space blockace is just like a server, but look at all the different types of servers and ways that servers are used. there's a big difference between a a big data backend server and a Twitch uh you know stream out the video you know signal to all the

people watching some viral stream or something like these kinds of differences matter here and so it's it's >> you can't be one size fits all. >> I think it was I'm trying to remember that um I was talking to one of your was it maybe it was Bit Panda and they were telling me that they I think it was did they end up doing this? They wanted to have a European stable coin. >> Yeah. So they're gonna be the first L2 with the Euro stable coin as the gas paying token. Okay. Small customization probably matters a lot to them. >> Yes. Massive impact. >> Yeah. Okay. So, so what's the actual So, they want to So, the Europe they have a European stable is it circles Euro stable coin or something else?

>> I don't remember off the top. The whole thing for them is about compliance as well. Like >> European stable coin is the gas. >> Yes. >> Mechanism for them. Interesting. Yeah. >> Um >> Yeah. And they're doing like the full MA compliance suite. So like they're going all out. Yeah. For the EU regulations >> and we are seeing with the advent of Mika uh clarity all of these different regulations. We are seeing a huge amount of folks who would otherwise maybe be a little bit unsure about coming on chain. They're coming on chain but they need their own chain. They need to be able to customize it so that they can comply with the various regulations that are coming out today. If you had to uh rewrite the I know I know the Coinbase deal was the first big enterprise deal

you guys did. If you had to rewrite that contract if you were going back I'm trying to I I want to pull out like what you learned from that deal other than the generic answer if we learned how to work with an exchange and we learned how to you know what like tell me what you guys would have done differently with that deal. I mean empirically it is create a deal structure that is legible to traditional financial institutions and other you know centralized exchanges and generally just well-run businesses. Um that would be ideal and not a deal coded in the language of crypto that we Exactly. which we were we grew up in and obviously we know like the back of our hands but ultimately is not a scalable way to talk about these enterprise

deals. Exactly. Exactly. And we were like, "Okay, now we're learning, oh, this is how we actually speak to enterprises. This is actually what enterprises want ultimately to use our tech stack for." >> Yeah. And you are I sorry, I should have caught up on this before, but they are rolling they're rolling off or they're still you're still working together or >> Yeah, we still work together the uh general way that they have taken their chain to the maximum degree of customization. They're making, you know, the base stack and they're making changes to the protocol and rolled out this really cool Azul hard fork recently. And so they're kind of at the end of the customer life cycle that we have, you know, started to see where there's a lot of customers who want to

come in, they want a chain as quickly as possible. They don't want to host it. They don't want to make a huge investment, but they want that product payoff. And so then we enable that and we bring them in, give them their chain, get them set up, grow their chain. Then like Coinbase, they have a big team of engineers that want to make massive customizations, differentiate their block space even more. And so we're an open- source stack. That is why we are open- source. It's so that you can make these customizations. And so they're kind of at that tail end of, wow, their chain is so customized that they just want to do whatever they want with it.

And so that is ultimately like part of this whole cycle that we're starting to see as we're transitioning to enterprise sales. >> Step one, an etherfi comes, deploys on open mainet. Step two, they use the full stack. Step three, if they get to this stage, which probably most won't, >> but they could if they want to. Yeah. >> And it's amazing that they can. And that is a real case study in what it looks like to be a successful chain. What do you think of some of these um anything else on this on the optimism business model or customers that you think we should talk about?

>> Wow, we did go through a lot. My gosh. >> I mean, the open source standards is one thing that I would just say is like that that that is like something that I would say of all the things that we've changed, that is one of the threads that has paid off the most dividends. Even when you look at base making these customizations, like being at the tail end of that customer life cycle, we're still able to collaborate with them on like new protocol features that are going to be useful to others and things like this. And so, um, I don't know, shout out open source just because we didn't do it yet. >> Yeah, true, true. Um, speaking of open source and some of and decentralization and some of these um, you know, other topics, what do you think of some of the new chains that

have gone maybe in different different directions? >> Different strategies make total sense. I think it is great to see again differentiated block. Sorry for being on a broken record here, but we need some closed source chains to have a chain ecosystem that's actually highly differentiated. Is the closed source chain going to be the standard open standard for all for for printing your own chain or creating your own chain? You know, probably not. But is it an awesome thing to see? Absolutely. And I'm really excited candidly to see all the experimentation and people trying to find different use cases for crypto that will hopefully expand the market and the market opportunity because once you do make that expansion, once you show that

opportunity, that is an invitation for another person, another company to come in and try to run a competitive product and we want to make sure that we're there and talking with all of them. Yeah, that experimenting is like super key. And like you know in our when we were all in a little crypto bubble together many years ago, I feel like the idea of a permissioned chain was this like a new thing. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's because enterprise blockchains had one wave of complete failures in 2017. Blockchain, not Bitcoin. And Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

>> Yeah. And the reality is like these these are like two points that are very far on extreme ends of the spectrum. And you know, like going back to what I was saying earlier where there are things that Tradfi gets right that are just like strictly more economically efficient than what we do in crypto. These are the middle grounds that these experiments are trying to tease out, which is super relevant. Like it's super super useful to think about, okay, you have a chain that is more public, that is settlement, than a matching engine that is a little bit more private. Like that kind of nuance take is not where we were in the failed 2016, 2017, 2018, you know enterprise.

write your validator set into a database here. So, it's super important to like find those middle grounds. They will become useful products. >> Yeah. Um, is there anything that you've learned from who should we pick here? From Salana, Hyperlid, or Canton that you said, I actually really like the way that they do this. We should think about doing, you know, maybe our version of that. >> Absolutely. So, first off, I think, you know, Hyperlquid, for example, one of the darling childs of crypto today is really showing that you can build a competitive kind of exchange that is decentral well is uh you know, web 3 onchain and really can provide a good

user experience. And so that is kind of opening up a new design space for I mean it's related to the thing that we talked about earlier with all of the enshrined DeFi with all of the enshrinement and customization talks. It's really created a new surface area and diff you know derisked that surface area to then provide even more sophisticated onchain products that maybe people wouldn't have thought were uh possible previously. Um Canton is obviously uh definitely similar in a sense. we're gonna have many chains. They're all going to connect and uh you know that's I think it's just something in the water. Um I think it's very obvious that that is the future. There will be many chains. They

will be interoperable. They will be a massive network of these differentiated block space. And so really it's just about you know enabling that that that future across the board. >> Yeah. >> I mean I went my brain went to Salana for the same reason of enshrin but it's the same reason right as enshrinement. Yeah. So it was like a very interesting decision for Salana to take some of the core primitives like the idea of a token and embed that into the you know native definition of a chain as opposed to just saying it's all smart contracts your tokens your everything is smart contracts and this is probably an interesting trend that like it's very interesting to imagine the world in which Ethereum did that and like probably Ethereum wasn't ready for that but when we're talking about specializing like now that we've gone from bespoke to general and now we're

back to specializing that is a very very interesting um use case. Yeah. >> Um let's talk ETH for a little bit maybe. Um so Carl, I I first heard of you when you were I think like pre- optimism days like research >> Ethereum Foundation. >> Ethereum Foundation. And um >> I'd love to just hear how you think about or how both of you guys think about like Ethereum the network, ETH the ETH the asset like Vitalic like the whole un you know the ETH found like Ethereum foundation like just unpack your thoughts on Ethereum right now.

I'll give I'll give some some hot takes. Generally, I think Ethereum is wildly uh misunderstood by the ecosystem in a lot of ways and the ETH asset is also very misunderstood by the ecosystem in a lot of ways and I think it's very natural but it's really worth stating. So, Ethereum in my mind, hot take is competitive with Bitcoin. That is its primary competitor. It is a decentralized store of value, maximally distributed, maximally credibly neutral, maximally crops, for example. And the competitor to that is Bitcoin. This, you know,

mysterious Satoshi that is actually a very compelling narrative, a very compelling product in a lot of ways. And that is where the networks go toeto toe in my view. Now there has been a rise with the advent of all of this differentiated block space where it's like no Ethereum needs to compete not just with Bitcoin it needs to compete with Salana it needs to compete with Hyperlid it needs to compete with you know the list goes on and at the end of the day that kind of competition is actually really one not Ethereum specialty and two a losing game and this is also why

Ethereum is going in the direction that it is and it's going towards decentralization and credible neutrality and robustness and security and the layer 2 are going towards differentiated block space fitting in chains across the spectrum competing with the Salas competing with the hyperlquids all of that stuff and so it's really you can't have it all in one product you really can't compete with everyone because then you lose to everyone and so ultimately that is the kind of misunderstanding of I think the Ethereum uh many folks in the Ethereum ecosystem and look it's normal even companies get really

confused about their product positioning and internal you know there's internal questions do we compete with them do we do this and think about how that dynamic how hard that dynamic is and then multiply that towards a global decentralized ecosystem of a whole bunch of opinions. It is a little bit chaotic. And so that's why when you go on Twitter, you're not going to get that just, you know, clear-cut story. But that's at least what I think is the consistent through line for, you know, the Ethereum and L2 space.

>> So if you were the if you were Ethereum or Vitalic or Yeah. for whoever you want to be. Would you stop trying to sell bring people onto the chain and build on the chain and you would more try to be like store of value? >> The idea of bringing people onto the chain is absolutely not in conflict with being a store of value. But it's just who are you bringing onto chain and why are they using that chain? Ultimately, layer 1 is useful for a certain class of things.

that class of things is absolutely really important, widespread, and going to have a massively positive impact on the world. Is that class of things literally everything to everyone? Absolutely not. It doesn't make sense. And so >> these are not really in conflict. They're only in conflict when you think about it in a kind of, you know, zero sum reductionist viewpoint. And then you look at it more holistically and with a kind of little bit more of a growth mindset and you're like, "Oh, wait. The pie is way bigger than a single single type of block space. It's literally kind of the the mantra that I've been repeating." Honestly, I apologize on this entire podcast.

>> Yeah. Do you um are you in direct competition? Is optimism in direct competition? >> Oh, with Ethereum? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. That's the most insane thing. And I Okay, I'm not going to lie. I think it's a Salana SCOP. I actually think I think originally it was some crazy like some crazy community members that were like, "Yo, we know how to take out ETH. We're going to convince them that they're competing with the layer twos. Divide and conquer. It's the classic strategy goes back all, you know, way back." So anyway, that's what I think happened. I, you know, it's from Twitter, you get some crazy stuff. The relationships, that's what you, that's what matters. Exactly. You know, >> what do you think the role What do you think the role of Vitalik should be?

>> That's a good question. I mean he his role is a leader. His role is to set the direction and his role is to make unpopular decisions and that is ultimately a very challenging role but an incredibly important role and so saying no is the most important thing right being able to say this is what we are doing >> that's where we are that's our differentiation that's what we're investing in and sticking to it >> I think that that is what Vitalik has been doing and has you know and continues to do.

>> Yeah. >> What do you think? >> I mean, we've had a lot of late nights together on this one. We're pretty uh we're pretty >> align the salana sigh off and what we need to do to prevent it, you know what I mean? >> Um >> yeah, I think like the only I mean the only thing I might add is like the only like to your question of like bringing people like should does that mean it it shouldn't be growing its ecosystem if it's focused on being a store of value? And of course the answer is no. And these two things are not in conflict. Like they could be in conflict. uh if Ethereum tried to do that so hard that it sacrificed some of the valuable like decentralization good money store properties right and um I don't see Ethereum doing that but if

it did start doing that was that would be where I start raising red flags like whoa we gota we gota we got to shift but for now we're getting what we need it's good >> five years from now who is uh who's more successful Hyperlid or Salana >> wow Oh, >> spicy one. Should I say shout out to Hyperliquid? Is that I feel like that's kind of the consensus. I mean, maybe it's like consensus semi- consensus opinion, but Oh, yeah. I mean, Hyperlid I'm I'm I'm bullish. I'm bullish. Um, I'm also bullish competitive to Salana than Hyperlid because you kind of grew up at the same times, more competition, more like animosity whereas Hyperliquid's like, you know, it's five

years. It's almost feels like a different era of crypto. >> Yeah, definitely a different era of crypto. I would say that that's probably true um to an extent, but I don't feel really competitive with any chain. You know, I think it's really about like enabling people to deploy their chains. And so I the kind of competition that I feel with a hyperlquid is kind of more an admiration where I'm like, "Ah, yeah, that's a good use case. Let's like enable that one, right?" And it's like go that goes for really all of the chains. I I want to make sure that you know the the the delta between uh becoming having a massive distribution and then launching your own hyperlid killer is minimal. Right.

>> Yeah. I mean we've gone through so many cycles now of like asking that question about two of the hot contenders of the month like the upcoming. >> Yeah. Exactly. So like after you watch this story enough like like >> maybe you want to ask the deeper question of like where does the equilibrium rise or will it just always be you know >> we don't ask deep questions on this show just superficial this verse that Ben >> well it's like will there be one winner is like you know markets always are changing one >> okay I can only pick one yeah but I have to pick optimism I guess there we do it for the short clip on X >> exactly yeah actually optimism competes with Bitcoin you heard it here first baby is the store Exactly.

>> Um, all right. That's why I transition into talking about the token, which is um, which, yeah, I'm guessing you guys don't want to talk about, but I I have to ask almost from more from the less from an investor's point of view, more from a founders's point of view. Um, like in one case, you have this amazing benefit, which is you launched a token at this peak like hot time, which is awesome because you get a lot of money, you get a big treasury and a big balance sheet, which lets you do things. downside is um you're you're essentially a public comp it's tough to raise. It's tough to capitalize the company now. Um maybe I might be wrong about that and it can be demoralizing when something goes down a lot for internal employees and for you guys. How do you think about

like I don't know just having a token like was it a good idea to have a token? Do you wish you didn't have a token? How do you I'd love to just honest thoughts here. Definitely I think it's been a great thing overall capitalization we're doing great in terms of you know the morale and watching a price chart and kind of being you know having that in front of you it is absolutely brutal for sure. I know that I know that uh Jen our our uh she went years without checking the price and in general that's been like our kind of sanctuary is just like let's focus on fundamentals and watch and or sorry and not watch candidly um

the craziness of the market because ultimately so much of it is just macro. It's just where's the new hotness right now? It's in investing in AI. That is totally fine, but it doesn't change what we came out here to do. So, we are moving forward. We have a very clear path ahead in terms of how we actually achieve the goals that we set out 10 years ago to achieve. Bring the world on chain, build the world computer, all this stuff. And I think it's a uh ultimately it's it's a it's a positive thing overall. It can be a distraction.

It can be emotionally charged, but you just got to keep walking through and focusing. >> I think if we were if there was a a crunch spot where it felt like there's a big runway problem that we have, that would be a lot more painful, but it's like we're not in that world, it's nice to have the recurring revenue and be figuring out the business model. I also think I'm very thankful and like my answer might change like I agree with Carl, but my answer might have changed if we had just become laser focused on number go up, number go up, number go up and that's um like sticking to the fundamentals of we're building some decentralized governance and there's some value behind this is a dramatically different story than like the >> the course that you see some other projects take where they're just like

now the token is out and it is the bottom line and it is everything that we are doing and everything is about a discussion about what's going to happen and that's not a way to build a sustainable business. Like it's good in the short term, it's bad in the long term. >> One more on the token would be uh do you guys think at all I know you're not focused on the token price, but if you were a publicly traded company, it's really important I think for the CEO and the employees not to focus on the price, but you do have a set of people who owns your token and might actually want to buy your token. And traditionally, it's called investor relations and there are IR teams. You do quarterly calls. Do you guys do that? Do you think about it? Not the right time.

Not the right time. Gotta stay focused. Gotta make the actual business that is the underlying promise of all of crypto actually real because we are not there. >> Okay. Maybe maybe getting out of token land and uh you know getting getting away from that. Um one more question on the customer base. It seems like the the product market fit for a blockchain is capital markets, right? Right. So even as I ask you who's your customer, I'm still saying is it a fintech? Is it a brokerage? Is it an exchange? These are all really, you know, a capital market player. So do you guys think that like, you know, blockchains are just good for capital markets and finance. Do you

think that it's like, you know, we we should at some point talk about AI and decentralized AI? There was a whole gaming thing that completely died. Do you think that comes back? Like I'd love to hear your the use case for blockchains where you see this go. >> Okay. I think crypto has a very particular use case that everyone uses it for. Why? It's because it's the only thing on the market that can provide that particular use case. Decentralization. Now, we have paid a price. Every whenever you're building software, there's a uh complexity and capability trade-off. The more complexity, the less capability. The less complexity, the more capabilities you can build. And so

I genuinely think that we in crypto have not actually achieved the kind of final form or the realization of the vision and that is missing. It's because we have to reduce that complexity ceiling so that we can increase the capability ceiling. And so I genuinely believe that we have a future and a path to a no compromises crypto. That means if I'm looking at deploying my application, if I'm looking at putting my IP somewhere that I would not use a centralized web 2 hosting platform, standard

run-of-the-mill database solution, whatever. I would actually lean towards bringing my new IP onchain, >> deploying there and composing with the broader ecosystem and it might be something that uh the uh it's hard to convince the uh I don't know existing builders but I do think there is a new class of builders folks that are leveraging AI that will gravitate towards that if there are no compromis compromises. Now there are compromises today. We are not there today to ask why don't you just deploy your you know every crypto social media platform again

I'm not proposing we do a crypto social media platform but all of them have died and that is I believe because it is just not a better platform to build your social media platform on ultimately and so that I I genuinely do still believe it is a counter opinion these days that composable block space will be a better web platform for all sorts of usage in if we can break that complexity and make the capabilities match and there and exceed web 2. So you think decentralized social will if you guys are successful

we should have decentralized social we should have onchain gaming >> we should have name all of your readr write own bestcase scenarios everything we should have it and will it look like your decentralized social from the ground up maybe not maybe it composes in some fancy way with Twitter that your AI bot generates a magical front end customized to you. But ultimately, we need to be a backend. Crypto needs to be a backend for the best web platforms.

And I think we have the foundation to be the best platform because we have something that no one else can provide, but we don't have the tech. >> Soon, soon. >> Soon. Maybe as we uh wrap up, I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts about um just AI in general. Like you guys are both, you know, engineers, I think, and researchers at heart. Like I I would love to hear your guys' thoughts on AI. I >> feel like I gave in some ways I gave Yeah, you should talk. >> I mean, I don't know. Beware, if you want practical advice, we're got we're shooting for beware the slop and beware of the hallucination. Yes. I mean, you know, the power of a a gentic engineering vibe coding, right, is like

there and that you can create massive amounts of code and oftentimes now the bottleneck is about your understanding and confidence in it. And I think this is the failure mode that everybody gets into is just like, oh my god, the the the zero to one is so dang fast. It's so damn easy. And like >> I'm gonna just do that a hundred more times and now I'm at 100. Right? And ultimately what you need to do is not that you need to be very thoughtful. You need to be very methodical. How many times have you like it's really easy to go from zero to one but you should probably like in traditional engineering go from zero to one many times before you actually consider yourself at one.

Like this idea that like rewrite like it's it's very standard practice that in just traditional software engineering you end up rewriting code multiple times before you have something that you're really excited about. And yet we go into the world of crypto where you can produce a thousand or the world of AI where you can produce a thousandx the amount of code and people are like, "Oh my gosh, there's so much technical debt here." Well, okay, you you got to move slow to move fast. And that is still true of AI. It's just that the moving slow is about your own comprehension and confidence in what is being built in the first place.

>> Yeah. Ben, Carl, thanks, J. >> Thank you. Pleasure. Cheers. Thanks, guys.