The Real Strategy of Optimism's Superchain | Ben Jones & Ryan Wyatt

Transcript

the sort of opening premise of your question of well there are these chains that just can Fork the code and go do their own thing and there's no like value acral that may be true at a financial level but it is not true at an innovation level and that is the power of Open Source giving out 800 million in retr funding tokens that we have over the next whatever let's just say 10 years of making it up you there needs to be value that's created from that for that flywheel to come in and so none of it sustainable unless you do that you want to get this ecosystem up and running once it's up and running you have you have to fully and fundamentally believe that the value that you're offering is something you want to participate in today's episode is sponsored by geod net they're a leading

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follow on X hey everyone Jason here I'm excited to announce that today's sponsor Petra a top non-custodial wallet developed by by app TOS Labs just launched NN a new feature to access defi with just one click NN lets non us users deposit usdt directly into AR's markets lending pools and manage it all directly from the Petra wallet this is not Financial advice participating in defi does carry risks to learn more visit petra. apppp earn all right everybody welcome back to Empire we have uh Ryan and Ben join from optimism Ryan leads all things growth at optimism uh and Ben Ben is many things

uh co-founder of the optimism Collective chief of a whole bunch of things over there has been very integral to a lot of things uh just in the whole L2 ecosystem and is also uh musician Ben which we will talk about in a second but Ben and's favorite Ben by the way the best Ben the best Ben actually I told you guys I have a picture of Ben either a really fun picture or really embarrassing picture but I'm going to share it anyways this is uh Ben you remember this of course of course nothing like a good meloda session to get a to get a panel I love it so Ryan I think this was before you joined uh optimism but Ben Ben graced us with his presence at

permissionless in 2022 with I don't truly know what this instrument is but it's called the meloda it's great great yeah if we have if my rule is if I'm the first like if there's an early morning talk you got to Hype the crowd up so I do a little wake them up Nation Army like you know and everyone gets hyped and then they're like on it they're paying attention they're responding to the speakers it's great especially in 22 because the nft parties were like quite the hit in 2022 uh then so you got a lot of people that were staying out late the night before exactly so Ben maybe actually this picture is a good place to start because I remember this conversation and

you weren't really talking about the super chain you were just talking about like optimism the L2 right and I remember there was a panel that that that conference it was like you guys Avalanche arbitrum and everyone's talking about like how to scale ethereum and like l2s um and now optimism is something much bigger and very different than just like an L2 obviously I think most people listening know that at this point I'd love to just hear your like view of what is optimism today it's a super chain baby I think you know um yeah there's a few levels to that uh question the most fundamental one that I think just is the one clear one to start with is to talk about the technology obviously optimism is building a scaling protocol and we call

that scaling protocol the super chain so effectively what that means is a it is a collection of l2s that share a standard and basically try to work together in unison to accomplish shared goals to build on shared standards and to um result in positive some outcomes so um what does that look like in practice basically what it means is that you don't just have one L2 chain you have many L2 chains you have a super chain of L2 chains um and I'm sure we can get into lots of the awesome uh you know members of the super chain and the collective these days but fundamentally what that's about doing is about horizontally scaling block CH block space that's about taking ethereum which is sort of like this fixed pipe like only so much can go through it no matter

how many transactions people are trying to put through it the pipe is only so big and so if more people are trying to fit more transactions in it gets congested and prices go up so when you talk about scaling ethereum horizontally you want to create multiple pipes each chain in the super chain so that we have more total throughput and we don't get congested and we keep fees low what was the um I I I know you've told this story before but just I I just refresh my memory like why didn't you what happened with this pivot because I think the original thought was okay ethereum and you've got this pipe and it's not big enough and we got to make a bigger pipe and the solution was the L2 but then but then eventually you decided hey actually we need there maybe G to be millions of l2s we want to be

like the stack to go create those l2s a very different type of company and business model like what was that pivot actually like and why'd you do it yeah you know in many ways I might actually push back a little and like I think the perception shift is as significant of a pivot as like the fundamental plans that we had so um you know to stick with the pipe analogy it's always been the case that the ethereum an ethereum style pipe like a quote unquote evm has a certain like amount of stuff that it can fit through and so even when we were building L2 like starting the L2 Journey um it was kind of understood and appreciated that you would need to have multiple of these chains to truly increase like the

throughput in a meaningful way yes there were things that we could do in terms of um making those pipes a little bit bigger and making certain resource requirement trade-offs like that things like that but fundamentally the reason the reason that an L2 scales is because it uses a small portion of the l1's throughput while inheriting all of the security properties from that L1 and so in some sense from the start the reason that you do scaling is to have a bunch of these L2 chains that are each taking up a portion so with one bucket of kind of ethereum security you get a bunch board chains pipes you know a bunch more pipes worth of put at the same level level of security however that is a very different thing said in practice uh said

said then actually deployed in practice and in production so the reality is we kind of always had that in the back of our brains of like this is the true way that like L2 scale it was also the case that just building one of those pipes just building one L2 was you know a a handful to say the least and so um in many ways the transition of the super chain which occurred basically at the same time as those photos you sent was as much a indication of Readiness From optimism's perspective to be able to handle multiple chains running to be able to handle other people other than the experts that built it running those chains and being able to like support and maintain those products without uh sort of that expertise so the big kind

of pre precursor moment for us really was something a release that we called Bedrock um which was basically us taking like you know the two or three years of running op main net the1 chain and saying okay we have learned a lot of lessons in how to productionize l2s how to make it easy to run these l2s how to document the l2s just how to build them at a fundamental architectural level and once we did that rewrite we felt like it was time that the op stack was like capable and it was a responsible thing to do for a bunch of other people to start running these chains and sort of start building towards the super CH so that's kind of what it boiled down to honestly was Readiness it's like you know you want to crawl then you want to rock then you want on if we had started

out with 10 OP main Nets that would surely have not gone well you know probably more than 10x worse quite frankly um but once we felt ready to go multichain it was time to take that Vision to the next level and I think you're right to call out there were like lots of clarity in business model and things like this that we found along the way but fundamentally it's about the stack being ready for other people to use okay Ryan maybe I would ask you the way that I see optimism today is the okay you like the da which you guys I think called the collective and then you've got the op stack which is like MIT license open source no limitations for Builders um and but MIT license open source like the the gold standard right

um no no limitations for Builders people can kind of just Fork it um I think blast did this but the downside for you guys is there's no value capture um and then you have the super chain right which is Core Business um uh but there are some Li limitations right and expectations for Builders and there is value capture can you talk to me about just like the relationship of those first off is that is that a correct uh way to define like lay out optimism today and like how how do you see the relationship between all all of these yeah it's been a it's been a little bit of a journey for us like the past year um yes you can absolutely if you look at kind of um there's really what we wanted to be two paths that's probably oversimplifying it but one is MIT open

license your point anybody can go do it yes blast is a great example of that there's no value capture there but it's you know truly ethereum ethos and the principles and values that you know optimism wants to have to your point the gold standard the other is like the super chain really coming to life where you know uh the upgrade keys are with uh the optimism Security Council you're on the right version in standard you are adhering to that framework and by doing that this allows us to do something very unique with interoperability but there's also this kind of other path that I would say like op stack chains waiting in the wing right and cell is a good example of this where they have made customizations or have deviated off of this kind of Standard Version standard

config of of op stack but long term their aspirations and goals are to get in line so that they can be part of this you know super chain set and so this is a group where I would say they've made configurations or changes but their aspirations and they are sharing Revenue but their aspirations are to be a part of this super chain set and so in a couple weeks on January 16th you know depending on when this goes out we're going to be rolling out something called the super chain index uh with another team that's you know in the optimism Collective called super chain ecosystem and inside of this it will leverage the super chain registry so people can get a better lay of the land of okay what's the percentage of Revenue that they're sharing back with the collective how much revenue have they generated in eth

for the collective you know what version and standard are they on where are they at and and season 7 which is kind of our next bucket of rewards uh starting you know i l now through the first half of the year um we'll focus on interoperability and so the visibility of where chains are are is really important what you know we obviously want to make sure it what we're offering is like really valuable that where you could have this path where you don't have to share any Revenue with the broader Collective people see such value in being part of the super chain being a part of something that's bigger um and as we Upstream a lot of the changes into op stack this whole thing of hey it lacks the ability to to customize or deviate from the you know core stack

these become lesser of issues because you start to integrate them right and so uni is even a great example of like the work and the Innovative work they're doing with like block times right that will all be stuff inevitably Upstream to the op stack and everyone will benefit you know in the super chain and so I think that we need to keep hammering away at these things interop will be something that's massively valuable you know being able to spin up a chain think about where today the super chain is today and it's like early days 50 if you look at l2b 50% of all tvl is on the super chain right uh 55% of all L2 transactions that are happening on ethereum are on the super chain and this is you know driven largely by Bas and to some extent you know op mainnet which

has you know a significant amount of tvl when you start to have these this tvl interop with each other and you start to see teams like Inc and uni and swell these other teams were going to be powerhouses at driving liquidity and tvl into their chains all of a sudden becomes accessible by everyone I do think you're going to see this like knock on effect of a lot of other people saying look I could just up and run I can have shared security I can have shared upgrades I can plug into 75% at that time of the tvl that exists in the ecosystem uh you know three fours of the transactions are happening and we start getting this weird thing of like what customizations are you making that are so wild so outbound that that are not going to be Upstream here or part of

this cohort that you would not want to tap into this that you wouldn't want to contribute some of the fees that you're generating back to this this Mission that's greater so I I'm excited I think like we're we're we've got a lot of work to get there like no doubts but this will be you know moving from last year which was you know op main net being kind of optimism's identity to this thing that's greater and bigger in the super chain and how we work with all these different chain operators to to realize this Vision to I think we're we're really you know going to see a lot of excitement in q1 just because you'll have ink you'll have uni chain you'll have swell and all these chains up and running uh and you know causing a big impact so I can't help but think of our

uh actually yeah Ben go ahead go ahead I was just gonna build on that I think I just I cannot emphasize enough the importance of Open Source both like for our industry broadly but as it relates to this conversation one thing that stands out to me is um you know the the sort of opening premise of your question of well there are these chains that just can Fork the code and go do their own thing and there's no like value acral that may be true at a financial level but it is not true at an innovation level and that is the power of Open Source like the beauty of it is even those folks that just take the op stack don't talk to us once and build awesome products are building that in such a way that those product features can come right back into the mainline op

stack and be benefited so like the power of Open Source cannot because so blast takes Opie stack they if they don't want to they never talk to you once they Fork it and then you can go see that code and then you're like oh I actually blasted something really cool there we're going to go build that into the Super chain stack and then Inc and swell and Zora Etc get to benefit that's the fly exctly okay um what is keeping these folks on the super chain and the context here is we have uh we've had two models of our podcast business um we our original podcast business is we went out to all these like big names in the industry we're

like hey celus PP Charlie Shem melum Jill like come on and like we'll launch a podcast for you and it was great and like we were making all this money and then like a few years later uh they had built these audiences and the podcast has grow had grown and they said hey guys actually um been really fun working with you guys uh you know we're going to pull the Rev like we want to pull the Rev share down and we're like no no no no you can't do that they're like yeah we can we have the leverage and we're like ah crap actually they're right um and in the worst cases they could just leave right and so that's actually what forced us to do a new podcast model where we now just build our shows in house so this kind of reminds me of our

podcast business early on um and I'd just be curious like why I'm wrong or like what what's actually keeping these folks yeah a couple a couple layers there yeah I think one of them is um first of all I I think well the first layer to it is the philosophy that I think you need to approach these kinds of things to build a long-term sustainable Network that is going to survive the test of time and you the basic premise of that philosophy is you should not cut Corners to extract more value in a way that makes you uncompetitive in the long term so I think you're right like the the first thing to acknowledge is that you are right that there are sort of like

different problem statements different Associated challenges that come with saying we are going to give all of our code away for free you don't have to talk to us you don't have to pay us you don't have to like us can just take the good code and use it as you please so there's no question that that comes with a layer of uh complexity and challenge when you talk about the kinds of you know scenarios that you alluded to at the same time if you zoom out it seems incredibly clear that there is no winning stack that does not have that property like the minute that you have it like the the abil some if you imagine some counterfactual where you say okay we're going to restrict this we're going to add a license like I don't know maybe in your analogy that's like we signed

the podcasters up to a 10 year uh deal so that they had the Rev share locked in that's not the basis for a long-term sustainable business and it's a market opportunity for somebody else to come along and build the MIT licensed totally free make money off it in other ways uh kind of starting point so I think that's the important starting point is like we're here to build a long-term sustainable Collective and so it's we want to be mindful of not taking too many shortcuts and being too concerned about these things um with that being said there are more like more non philosophical layers that are super relevant so the fundamental nature of l2s or like one of the fundamental trade-offs that L2 Landscapes are making today is effectively the trade-off of

fragmentation so if you are a solidity Dev and you want you want to come and deploy some ethereum app the uh the magic wand marketing would tell you oh just go to any L2 hit the deploy button and you're Off to the Races and if you were use running on L1 you just redeploy on L2 your prices are cut 10 100x your trans transactions are getting confirmed really really really quickly and everyone's super happy from many perspectives that is just not the actual reality that we see in the ethereum L2 ecosystem today and the reason is fragmentation issues span like oh my gosh how the heck do BR do wallets uh and bridging work when you have dozens of these chains like you open up your metamask and you see a

bunch of different coins listed or they're aggregating them but they you don't actually know which coins are on which chains and what does that mean you want to go use an app on some other chain and oh snap all of the your eth to pay for gases on some other chain and now you have to bridge it over there's that whole experience and from the perspective of a developer you actually can't just hit deploy and say oh I think the contracts will work you really need to dive in and say okay for all of these uh CH potential change that I could Avid to what are the nuances where does this differ in Security in like block times in the behaviors of certain like uh you know developer libraries and things all of these things in practice cause fragmentation not just for the user users that are like caught in you know

sort of bridging wall at hell but also the developers that are caught in like what chains can and can't I deploy on safely so what does L2 need L2 needs unification and it needs standardization the end state of crypto should be that you can deploy to the cheapest block space possible and you can do it without thinking about it like it's built on a standard where everything just works and so at the end of the day this is where the um long-term sustainability the super chain comes from it's the fact that when you put chains on a shared standard there are many many many Network effects that fall out of that naturally that you can't have without a shared standard and a shared governing body that mediates that standard got it

okay two questions here one is um uh maybe this one's for Ryan uh if I am coinbase I'm like hey all this activity is happening on Bas Kraken in the traditional world is my one of my main competitors I don't want stuff flowing over to Inc like I'm Jesse we've done an amazing job we've got all this liquidity hundreds of apps I don't want things flowing over to Inc take me into the conversations where people are actually comfortable with that and like what yeah just it it doesn't really track with M maybe I need to get more on the Ben's I need to put a shirt on like Ben and get more Collective well a lot of people will you're not alone right I think it is like a it is a foreign concept and there is a little bit of like scariness

and hesitancy we saw it first with ourselves like the idea with OP main net you know before bases launched far bigger you know you know one of the biggest L2 second biggest right and you're still making a sacrifice there when you're like we're going to believe in something that's bigger we're going to start to invest in these other chains like a base and so forth and that means when we do interop we will be sharing out of that L2 like that op mainnet tvl and liquidity and users and across the board so um I don't think it's like an unusual thing for like a a base to just naturally feel that we felt it and we can kind of like be empathetic around that I think at the end of the day is what are you building and and trying to build something like much bigger and

much larger and and I do think Bas is very aligned when they think about the super chain and ethereum are they going to be the first movers into to the inter opet no and I wouldn't be either and nor should they be right like I think there is something about like you have time to observe this how's this thing growing how will I participate how will I play a role in this ecosystem and that's not just from like I'm joining the inter op and sh in liquidity it's a role that Bas has to play from a governance perspective where they did get a large Grant you know and that is focused around gov influence and participation and so forth and so they'll have a voice so when you think about oh the Rev share is splitting the Rev share splitting like are changing right chain operators

will have a voice in the governance process of like what that rev rev share should be it's not like oh I don't want to share any Revenue so I'm just going to hit the rip cord you know I think people will be able to have very thoughtful conversations of what value does the collective bring does the op stack bring how do we as a chain that's participating in a group of many other chains feel that split is or the fees that we play pay in the future of interoperability what value do we believe is being captured and I think ultimately what's going to happen will be seeing applications be able to simultaneously operate across the super chain and being able to deploy across not just one but many chains you know and have a seamless experience that's going to be something application developers are going to just say that's

like a prerequisite like moving forward they're going to be like I want experience when I deploy I'm like deploying across the super chain that is my new expectation of what life is as an application developer people that are not in the interop set or are choosing not to be in the inter op set are now going to have to be like I am not joining that or like not joining that inter op set and therefore you have a fractured application experience I think what will happen is long term applications will start to become very successful they will be the influential leaders in the room versus chain operators this is my opinion and that you will want to be a part of the shared standard and want to deploy want to participate in it because it's really good for application developers it creates the best experience you can

possibly have for app developers in the ethereum ecosystem users want to be a part of very seamless experiences and chain operators will go where the builders are where the users are it's just like if you look about like YouTube technically creators could go like [ __ ] off and start a video site and take and and have no Revenue they lose distribution so like you're gonna have massive distribution yes based in the early days because they have massive distribution they can kind of you know sit and say when is it best for me and that's why the super chain needs to be more than just Obi mayet more than just bass why I think you'll see players like world and Inc and uni all be massive participants and you'll start to be like Oh I'm gonna hoard my small amount of tvl and small amount of users small

transactions relative like is that where we're at today like that's what you're gonna want to do it's not a that's not a very exciting game plan so we're talking timing and sequencing here where I think that makes sense but long term I I I don't I actually like I like that I mean I know you came from YouTube um I like the YouTube analogy a lot actually which I've never thought of which is like Mr Beast um is maybe the base is BAS here and um uh you know op the maybe the super chain is YouTube or something and you know Mr Beast could easily say like look I I don't want to give any uh distribution to all these other influencers who are kind of leeching off of me but obviously he knows that the platform is bigger than himself yeah and it's somebody am I right very much knows

it right and it's like this is better you know so I would yeah I would throw out a couple other things I'll Dawn my like philosophy how give you that bad answer you're looking for one thing I would just note is that regardless of the subchain conversation that question is already answered in the affirmative that people are willing to collaborate and use shared systems by the fact that they're building ethereum l2s on the first place like all these competitors regardless of whether they're even participating in optimism or other Stacks are all participating in in ethereum sure B could have just built an L1 is what you're saying but they didn't EXA yeah yeah exactly because fundamentally there is value and what uh building on chain is about to some extent is about being able to credibly give power to the application developers

and credibly give power ultimately to the users like that's the same thing the abds do right like Unos swap is powerful because ethereum runs it exactly as it wants uh that's powerful to unisoft because they can make an app that is really trustable the users that are using it understand that it's following the rules of ethereum which is what they want so they understand that Unis swap can't mess with their ability to use Unis swap because it's on chain and so you have a I I I I think the the stories are similar where like counterintuitively to the Web Two World in some ways like relinquishing control is the thing that like summons success in this industry yeah Ben what do you think I mean my understanding of the Bas deal is like they I'm sure I'm going to botch some of this but like they

contributed two and a half% of chain revenue or like 15% of the profit to the collective or like roughly two or two and a half years into the deal um it's like I think a 5-year deal what is your best guess of what happens at the end of the five years what actually sorry let me rephrase that what is the wor worst case scenario and maybe the best case scenario yeah good question I I I think Ryan is right that it boils down to like a re-evaluation of the value that is being provided by optimism and like economics are very relevant part of that um that situation in general I I think it's very important to understand that the like ethereum uh crypto scaling journey is

like not a oneandone like it's just one cycle away kind of a thing like this is going to be like Decades of work I think literally and within that context one of the things that we need to understand um as a collective and as an industry is that these kinds of values and value propositions will change over time so I I think you know what does it look like in five years probably looks like a reevaluation of where are we at how important is the stack what are the new features like what are the new ways that the stack is being used that are different from the original deal that was set out of just having one roll up like at a big enough scale there's lots of like more app specific chains or sort of like a broader Network um and so ultimately it will look like a

re-evaluation of where is optimism providing value where are these Network effects um coming from and also how much uh funding is needed to continue sustaining that you know one thing that we haven't talked about very much about optimism yet is the public goods funding portion of it but the goal of all of the revenue coming into the optimism Collective is to be Rec into the op stack and contributors to the super chain and builders on the super chain to make it better and improve it so the other side of that equation from like what is optimism um you know providing right now is what do we need to do to continue that scaling Journey for the next five 10 15 years into the future yeah yeah it's just yeah just like add adding to that I think like you know if you look at basis

contributed 12 13 million Us doar in eth equivalent um you know to to the collective to date and that kind of pales in comparison to the broader deal but like the the impact that they've had on the actual stack moving things forward their contributions um have been massive and their halo effect of others who they've like inspired to go out and think about chains and launching like a people working with us like they have they have driven tremendous impact and so I think like long term it's so hard to tell like what like a year ago the things that we were talking about in general in this space of like what the future is will'll be so different a year from now I actually think it is very simple thing of how do we continue to

collaborate where there is reciprocated value being offered back and forth and that's the [ __ ] theme with everybody right it's just like bases further ahead and yes they're bigger but that's like that is going to be the gist of all of it and so I think worst case scenario is like two years from now we didn't offer any value and base offered so much and they're like we're out but that's like that's not that's a that's a broader much bigger optimism L2 ecosystem issue than anything else and I think the likely scenario is two years from now we continue to have these like conversations and things change and collaboration is where we all can like have the biggest progress and move forward so yeah kind of where I'm at with it yeah it's I was talking I was talking to someone at uh another L2 yeah

another L2 um leave it at that I not in the super chain there's not many of them so I can narrow it down uh who said it's becoming um I guess I'll just say another chain it's becoming it's becoming tough to compete with optimism because there are now it's not optimism that's contributing to optimism it's now the best engineers at coinbase base Kraken Etc are are contributing um that's like that value I'm saying it's like even if you know we have five years they go somewhere the the the impact and value that they've driven will will be amazing will be forever grateful for it yeah okay so you kind of have this like interop as a service we could call it I don't know if you guys like that or not or um but what happens if what is the impact of this on

ethereum interoperability because I could see I could see it's like if everyone if all the best teams are working on op interoperability well then who's working on ethereum interoperability and then maybe vice versa like if people solve ethereum interoperability does that actually hurt your guys' value prop 100% so um um maybe we could put in the show notes by the way I was on a panel at Devcon um with a bunch of awesome folks talking about kind of exactly this um with like a bunch of other um L2 leaders um as well as hard from Uma we had a mullet analogy that I threw out there that I

might reuse but I I think the um the fundamental answer to the question is that interoperability really fundamentally needs to come in two parts it needs to come in a part that is ethereum wise wide sort of evm standardization that makes everybody's lives across all of the L2 ecosystems not just optimism not any other one but all of them really really really powerful and as good as they can be and you can't do everything with that but you can do a lot with that so um EIP 7683 is the big like intense standard that is a super important way that basically gives you a way to say hey I want to do this thing with this token on this chain somebody please fill that

kind of like order for me and I will give you the tokens that I have on this chain which is the wrong chain or a different chain than I want it to be on and like you have a way for market makers to come and like play this this role and fulfill these intents and we will continue to see more and more standards like that like there needs to we need to go kind of from that world which is um you know right now focused on just like raw bridging to being super well integrated into the apps where like the first time you come to an app on any ethereum L2 you can like hit your first transact button and there's a way for the interoperability standard to basically generate the exact transaction that will Bridge your funds from wherever they are to wherever you want

them to be and execute the transaction that you wanted to so you don't feel like oh snap I'm not in this chain I have to bridge so that is something that we can do ethereum wide and that we need to do ethereum wide and there are more efforts that we need to continue doing at the same time on the back end the L2 the ecosystem specific interoperability Innovations will come around secur security and efficiency and like application kind of application level unlocks around doing that so what I mean by that is at the same time as we're working on those standards you have optimism cord devs that are working on making the op stack the best possible way to fill those cross-chain intents within the super chain so now that we

have this infrastructure that says I want to be able to move assets anywhere with the click of a button and like do my first transaction on a new chain I've never touched before we want to make the interoperability of the op St that goes on behind the scenes to like fulfill that intent to be as efficient and secure as possible and so you know we can talk about how op op stack interop is doing it but I think to answer your question directly it's kind of like we call it intense in the front settlements in the back there's like there's a notion of you want ethereum wide interoperability standards to express user actions and then you want eosp specific uh interoperability uh architectures that are only possible right now within a single ecosystem to fulfill those more efficiently more

quickly more securely I also feel like interop has gotten it just like it's it's so conflated it I mean like you know I have people be like oh you know there's like egg we'll solve interop for all things it's like okay it's like a you know we I think Bridges will get better things are going to improve ethereum will have some level of interop but like the interop that we're talking about the super chain and what does it look like when you can do things at like sub one second and what kind of user and application developer experiences can you offer is a very different thing than like oh let's all ethereum interop or even just connecting more highways into the Super chain right where all of these things become interesting from an egg layer to a layer zero and everything in between you know and like what do we do

with zkps long term and all of this um so I think the it's going to be a funny comical year of just people throwing the word interop around and just like talking past each other on what what on What timeline how fast what is it how you doing it so it'll be fun I you know good luck to you on all the podcasts you do this year talking about it yeah yeah yeah um okay maybe we'll move from one um big word to another from interoperability to customizability um my understanding is you get more customizability with the op stack less with the super chain but with the super chain obviously you get to opt into like what I think will be interoperability in 2025 like we're talking about so um how do you guys just think about like

customizability of folks building on the super chain because I think um like like uni right uni wanted uni wanted fat blocks I'm pretty sure because they're trying to make this yeah fast blocks because they want excuse me because they want to um have a very like defi High performing chain right so like like maybe just tell me how you guys think about customizability on the super chain I mean at a high level then Ben like Ben should jump into it you know one I think it's technically the oback is MIT open license you could do whatever you want however you want it is is like peak level of creativity I think the one thing that we've seen is when we go talk to these you know particularly those who are likely to be larger chain operators and we talk about like what is it that

you want want to do that you feel like you can't do um we haven't gotten a lot of different answers in the times that we have like Fast block times we're like hell yeah that's a great thing other people should want it we should want to support it we should do the work to Upstream it and make it happen youi is a great example and kind of that that's like a perfect example of like how you work with somebody to up stream it other than that I think it's like we continue to look and see but like we are not having like when you look at the swells and the inks and the Unis and all these folks that continue to pick op stack and do it on the standard inversion they need to there's not a lot that we seem to be like missing that's not upstreamed

and feel that we're able to kind of prioritize it to some extent um so that's that's what I'm seeing at least interacting with the partners I you know Ben you can chime in too yeah I would just say um yeah I mean I think you hit the nail on the head Brian it's like when you look at the personas that really want to aggressively customize um those are usually a different person that even really will find the largest value from the super chain in the first place um and if you compare that to the folks that are better suited for the super chain that expect to have like much higher security uh considerations like much larger amounts of user assets uh you know in in the protocol etc etc all of those things are associated with a general conservativeness that you want to bring to the table anyway to not YOLO

code into prod when you have you know the next billion onchain users in your system so that's a piece of it and to Ryan point it doesn't mean that you're stuck on some version if you're on the super chain and that's never going to change more than half of the um upgrade proposals passed through optimism um last year were authored by external contributors or like members of the collective but not OP Labs or the optimism foundation so you are it's not like those big players are even completely disempowered from making those changes we see lots of great active contributions from those members to your point like all those Engineers are building on it but depending on the nature of the change uh you know we want to move a little bit more methodically like we have a core development process

for the op stack that lets us hold us to high you know security bar high performance and up time standards stability etc etc etc and yeah and then the last thing I would just say I mean if you want the technical Deep dive there's a bit more Nuance of like what customizations can you support while not sacrificing security and what customizations are just like completely wonky and scary so like uh an example of this is actually the Unis swap example so like um the way that unisoft together with flash Bots is building their fast block times is actually completely additive to the protocol it's basically a custom sequencer that they've written that runs in a te and basically like promises slices of the block at a time so we call

these like micro blocks so you say that they're faster blocks they're really like these little mini blocks that then get combined into a block every two seconds which is the same way that the rest of the op stack works so that's an example customization that does not requ a protocol change it does not requ an upgrade they are able to do it fully within standard and without doing any sort of upgrade because of the nature of that if you do some crazy like a new way to send erc20 is with a new type of cryptography that could be hacked like that's when you get into territory of okay guys let's slow down like that's great to do on a custom chain off to the side maybe let's not billions of tvl behind it quite yet yeah uh Ben side note for my small brain can

you explain te quickly for me trusted execution environment basically um basically it is a uh think of it as a special kind of processor where the hardware manufacturer said I I constructed this processor such that if you it's kind of like a hardware wallet combined with a just general machine it basically is like you can give some code to this trusted execution environment and it is guaranteed to run that code um correctly so basically what that means in the context of um Unis Swap and Flash blocks is it means as they're proposing the little itty bitty chunks of the block of this sort of pending block because it's running in this trusted execution

context there they could shut it down but they couldn't like reorg out those blocks or do anything other than like progress uh and yeah so like it improves the trust model basically geod net is a firstof its- kind dpin protocol that's revolutionizing satellite navigation services they're actively generating onchain Revenue that's growing 500% year-over-year by providing Precision location services that are 100 times more accurate than standard GPS on Empire we always talk about finding how crypto can power completely new business models and they're a perfect example of this they're already trusted by over 30

Enterprise customers across Industries including Automotive agriculture construction and even robotics the network is powered by its native token GE EOD and easily mined with their satellite Miner by setting up a base station you can get involved with this uh groundbreaking web 3 ecosystem learn more by heading over to geod net.com or just by hitting the link in the description of today's episode today's episode is brought to you by uni chain an upcoming layer 2 Solution that's changing defi forever it's built with a vision to be the home for cross-chain liquidity and defi Innovation as part of the optimism super chain uni chain brings you up to 95% cheaper

transactions than ethereum's base layer as well as near instant finality with 250 millisecond block times coming shortly after main net launch to make things even better seamless cross-chain transactions if you're a developer this means you can build defi applications that truly push the envelope of what's possible on chain visit unich chain. org or follow unichain onx to stay updated on the launch upcoming features and getting started on building your dream applications hey everyone earlier in today's episode I mentioned Petra a top non-custodial wallet developed by apos labs they just launched NN a new feature to access dii with just one click NN

lets non- us users deposit usdt directly into Aries markets lending pools to gain interest and rewards and manage it all directly from the Petra wallet Petra earn was designed to make dii more accessible for everyone you can manage your balance claim rewards and deposit directly from the app this is of course not Financial advice participating in defi carries risks to learn more visit petra. apppp earn or by hitting the link in the description of today's episode what happens if someone does want to leave the super chain like do how do they do that because you've never you've never had it happen I guess guess right we haven't um ultimately this

is a very interesting problem statement um I think you know the place that I would start is to say the right to exit and like Fork ability is baked into the like constitution of the optimism Collective so we haven't seen it happen yet but quite frankly it is like a critical right to maintain just like a critical protection um for the users of the super chain because I mean it's the same story we said before where you don't want to do some short-term lock in for the long-term failure like if there's something that you can get in and then you can never get out that's going to fail in the long term to a system where you can get out because it lowers the barrier entry and improves people's willingness to opt in in the first place so um that's what I would say there in practice I we because we

haven't seen this explored I'll just kind of more talk about the hypotheticals and it really is going to come down to what the application developers and kind of the users and chain Governors end up choosing so there are schemes where you can imagine basically writing a chain such that the chain Governor can click a button and it can pull all of the bridge funds just unilaterally into some new uh bridge that respects a new chain and they say this is the new chain and it's all been upgraded um that obviously comes with a big centralization trade-off and so it's not clear whether or not the right way to provide an exit is just allow any of these chain operators to click a button and migrate the user funds to whatever other new smart contract they want that would allow them basically to steal all the funds in the system but it's

obviously the cleanest because if they do well they just click the button and it's all very seamless um then you kind of have a spectrum like the other end of the spectrum is just like you know Unis swap style like Unis swap has no upgrades when they migrate to new versions they just give a front end where all the users opt in they click a button and it migrates all their you know V2 positions to V3 it migrates all their V3 positions to V4 and so you can imagine a space like that on the other end of the extreme where every single um user that is that was parti ipating in the sub chain is going to basically opt in and click a bridge transaction to migrate to some new version of the chain so those are kind of like the two ends of the spectrum of

like exits and there are some middle grounds involving like app devs that are maybe reasonable as well Ryan in the there's a there's another element I'm sure that you didn't mention Ben which is I'm sure there are contracts with these people you guys are a business that does need to make money at some point um how long are the contracts usually for it depends it varies right it varies greatly I mean you don't you know I think in the the end they they really like Bas is the longest one that we have like I give you that as far as like the the from a transparency because of all kind of like what Ben's point is to begin with is kind of the same thing like if you have an agreement you need it longer than like 12 to 18 months in this space because you're trying to

build something you're investing a lot of resources in both sides into standing something up you know Ink's going to be a stage one chain you know uni if not at launch very fast after will be a stage one chain as well there's resourcing that goes and all that yada y so we want long-term commitment but at the same time if this thing isn't in a place where people are participating people actively want to be here in a couple years you know it's like we need to we need to you know think about our strategy pivot our position do a lot of these different things so there's no point in having these long-term contractual obligations and so we don't have them I think Bas was so different was the first of its kind you know it was really somebody we want to like lock arms with and build together and that's

what we've done with Bas so that that like level of length is quite unique um that's not what we're looking for right what what was the biggest mistake because Bas was the first of these deals right so I mean I'm sure you made some I'm there's some learning there like what was the biggest mistake that you guys made with that with with the actual contract in the agreement or like the biggest lesson or the biggest learn I think one thing in general I would say is we've gotten really we've gotten a lot better at at the at kind of the outcomes and aligning the incentives right so it's like what you know we we understand you know like uh fees generated the Collective is something that's really important to us how do you model a deal where you have an understanding of the fees that are going

to be generated the collective how do you put you know Milestones behind that if you're going to put tokens into a a deal like how do you hit Milestones behind that tokens also aren't just like it's not just like it's governance right it's participation as they get bigger they deserve to unlock more because they will they will participate more as well um and so yeah I would say you know the you not speaking to any specifically moving towards a direction where you feel much better about like you're happy to to reward these teams these tranches of op tokens because they are doing things that are so impactful to the collective that it is a thing that you want to give up versus not

understanding that and whether you do them time bound whether you just give them you know in tranches whatever the case may be this is a better way to to make sure everybody is is is you know aligned in their interests is there any concern about just the sustainability of that model I was I was doing like rough napkin math and it looked like I mean you guys have spent a lot of money it was like 500 or 600 million uh in tokens I think or no maybe that number's wrong okay that's why it's napkin M yeah but uh yeah two things on that one super chain index which we launched on the 16th you'll be able to see all of the tokens that are remaining so it's like you know there's hundreds of millions in the G fund there's like 00 million left

in air drops there's 800 million in retr funding there's like 300 400 million op tokens so there's like billions of tokens in op tokens as far as like rewarding developers this is none of it sustainable if you don't have the flywheel going right like right obviously right like giving out 800 million in retr funding tokens that we have over the next whatever let's just say 10 years and making it up you there needs to be value that's created from that for that flywheel to come in and so none of it's sustainable un unless you do that so on the deal front though because I think that's like obviously you know more where you're at it's not sustainable right like you want to get this ecosystem up and running once it's up and running you have you have to fully and fundamentally believe that the

value that you're offering is something you want to participate in right now we're not there yet we're very close we kind of talked about it the front of the podcast of right now 50% of the tvl 50% of the transactions on the super chain when that's 75 80 85% you should just want to participate there should there's not going to need to be a grants why would I need to give like anybody or anybody a grant because you're like oh my god tvls there great stack great security I'm intering boom I'm in so there shouldn't there shouldn't be any grants Grant should be something that is like you know winning and done at some point and you but you do need to make bets and invest in people that are going to participate like uni is dedicating and Kraken and coinbase dedicating a lot of engineering resources and investment

believing in this participating in this they deserve something from optimism they deserve governance you know influence they deserve some kind of you know reciprocated energy and effort and so I think it is all very fair but it's not sustainable and at some point the flywheel will have to kick off which I think between sequencer fees between kind of the interop long term there's a pretty beefy model there that will work in the event you can a 100,000x this ecosystem and I think you can only a 100 or a thousand X the ecosystem in a design space like the super chain uh I was reading about weirdly enough this morning uh Amazon the history of kind of like Amazon Alexa like the Alexa product and at the beginning nobody no they couldn't

convince any companies to join Alexa and build apps on Alexa so they just they gave out grants and then once there were enough companies on it drove more users to sign up for Alexa and then now they don't have to give out any grants so there's a yeah tried and true model here um Ben what happens with OP mainnet because it sounds like just from hearing you guys talk in this podcast like your your mind share like the where where your priorities seem to be focused on is the super chain um what what happens with just op main net yeah so um this is one of those things that I think will like continue to change in flavor and answer over time just like the rest and it will evolve with the architecture um of ethereum as a whole

like I talked in the beginning about when we were just op mainnet that was clearly the right thing to do because the stack just wasn't ready for dozens you know forget hundreds and or thousands of people to be running their own chains and like staying sane and not up in the we hours of the night you know fixing things or figuring out what the heck's going on so yeah um you know I think that the caveat here is that always the story changes as the architectures um continue to change op mainnet is a great neutral home for Builders one of the things that uh we try to communicate with OP mainnet is that um the decisions that we tried to make there we tried to make the like kind of most reflective or of the standards that are shared within the rest of the super chain so like it

should continue to be a good place where if you want to test something out working on op main debt means that it should work in other places should be one of the should be one of the goals and of course the other big thing is that it's the home of optimism governance and so you know just as we talk about more of these chain scaling tryan's point there are more participants that have you know need a voice in governance and will be participating in that so the more activity I think we would expect to come um to op mainnet around the governance front as there becomes more to govern and more people um participating in the governance yeah yeah Ryan I don't know if you had anything add I mean you can even see it here we have a for by the way I should have said this at the

beginning we have a free dashboard on the super chain it's optimism. blockworks research.com you can actually see the TVs of I mean you can see of everything like bass and zor and mode and op but if you just filter down by just op midet like number is still going up and to the right um yeah we were a million transactions on op Manet last month you know it's like a seven billion some tvl yeah yeah yeah so yeah we're excited and I think like I mean even look at some of these folks that will grow quickly like a swell and and uni and Sony as well we have been spoken about a lot and so yeah I'm excited I'm excited for all of them like um it was funny you know like a year ago was kind of like oh what is optimism gonna do if

Bas doesn't succeed now it's like what is op goingon to do without that Bas is so successful so I'm excited to like have more of those questions you know as Kraken and Unis Swap and sonum and world and all these other folks continue to have kind of the same success would you ever think about just cutting it and just focusing on super chain cutting what op mayet op you don't have to I don't think it's a decision that needs to be made because if you think about interoperability and the way that we're thinking about it and application developers deploying just across the super chain it's also kind of like our home of governance it's neutral block space so like a good example is world right like world started as an application you know they wanted a place where it's like I don't know if any of

these chains have my aligned interest I do want to be a chain I want to start as an app op Manet was a great place like if if you think maybe Kraken or Sony or whatever Bas are not interest the line for you you can kind of say I'll deploy across the super chain you know like op mayet is kind of how I'm looking at as home um so there's just no no point I think it it's a it serves as as a valuable anchor in the super chain world is a world is a really good example there where like it it speaks to what I was trying to get at with the like it changes with the architectures where when world you know deployed on op main net they kind of had ideas that yeah a chain would be cool but at the same time

the trade-offs for them at the time didn't make sense the overhead that it would incur the state of you know providers that make it really easy and kind of like a service to have a roll up and so on and so forth and um it was very so it it just made sense architecturally to not have to deal with the entire overhead of man managing a chain at first for world then they continued to grow the RAS ecosystem got more mature the ability to run these chains got easier and easier the demand for World kept going up now it's like okay now it's time to look at uh look at the the story of having our own chain and I think that and we think that story makes sense now so that's more about like the architecture and about like the state you know the state of a world that

changes what the right decisions for application developers is to make um and that will like continue to shift and it's hard to predict but I know oh and the last thing I would say is opet will never go away from a perspective of being secure block space even if the op Manet sequence are shut down even if a bunch of infrastructure providers shut down down it is a layer two chain it is secured by ethereum it is permissionless for anybody to run a node follow the chain secure the bridge with fault proofs and keep going so like it or not chains are a mutable baby um all right pivoting to a totally different place can we talk about Andries and Horwitz um Ryan I heard that

um so I mean you are a uh if if people are are assets you were a you were a hot asset when you were on the free market um and you know for people who don't know you at a different I I you polygon right I think at polygon and then YouTube before polygon yep yeah um and I'm sure you basically had your pick of you probably could have gone anywhere um and I heard the thing that got you over the the Finish Line was a call from Ben Horowitz uh who said hey optimism is great and Ben and Carl great people um Chris Dixon but yes it was it was Andre what has the um role of andrees just like how helpful have they been um in I can kind of give you though my perspective which was like an outsider

and now we're because I love to pose the same question to you as well but yeah huge huge huge fan of them um okay so I I I'll make this like a quick story when I was at YouTube I was asked to uh think through our web 3 strategy this is like you know end of 2020 going into 2021 and I I didn't really know much about crypto and blockchain in the space you know just like very surface level so I went down a rabbit hole and crypto school was kind of the first thing of how I learned about it which was you know Chris Dixon and all that and so um knew some other people at a16z had spent time with them previously their games team was awesome John Li you know Andrew Chen some of those folks serum all of them right and

so got connected with Chris and y y anyway around that time you know he he did call me and and I didn't know ben jing or Carl like I knew a lot of the other folks in this industry it was weird actually I didn't know any of them um and kind of knew everybody else and so he was just like look this is a great team like we love them we're super excited about them um you know you should definitely talk to them and so I watched actually Jing then video on crypto school like she did one of them and then that later year and was like ah like just absolutely loved her attitude her thought process the way she talked about optimism optimism's Mission like everything so I was like please and that's you know the rest is history I will say being on the inside now I

they're just like incredibly helpful like just being tapped into their team who has a lot of different perspectives across the board they're just a great resource whether it's hiring whether it's thinking through strategy whether it's having honest reflection with yourself on how you improve as a manager or a leader or as a cross functional worker um and they just have a just an abundant amount of resources to help you with that and the more that you want the help like you have to want it no matter what like the more you will receive from them because there is a lot of it and so yeah it's been super valuable for me and I'm like I I can't say enough positive stuff about them I think they are Head and Shoulders Above the Rest Ben what do you I mean how how helpful has it been to just lean on them

because actually I'm sensing a trend of like the super chain there are I mean you guys have what 30 folks I think on the super chain but there are World Horwitz likes good projects and we do too yeah World Unis swap coinbase like these are all there's a underlying theme of the main investor Behind these folks so I'm just curious Ben like how helpful has it been for like like just from the founders view yeah incredibly helpful um it's hard to choose which one hiring is definitely one of the ones up there like even very very very early on in our journey when we were like less than 10 people um andreon brought uh introduced us to like a very powerful Mentor that stayed with us for um a few years and was just like taught us so much about

how to company was it and yeah of course yeah Josh Stein he was um when optimism PBC he was the the COO and general counsel um and he just brought like a level of experience that was just like an overnight wakeup call of like oh wow don't wa Josh Stein the uh Harbor Josh Stein yes sir yes sir yeah I remember Josh yeah Josh also took a risk on blockworks actually very early on he like sponsored I think our second ever dinner and gave us 10K when we thought that was more money than than God so yeah well there you go there you go yeah so it's hard I mean people are you know ultimately like the most valuable resource of like any organization and so I think I would have to go with that but like Ryan said like things like strategy

you know Making Connections being able to just like talk through decisions as we're making them it's yeah unmatched incredibly valuable yeah yeah yeah I also heard from um I was talking to the founder of an L1 who's like launching their token soon and I was like how like what's the most helpful thing and he's like Andre has 80 people who are basically at our service right now so uh that's cool um that's if you want the help they have the team you know yeah yeah um uh two other topics I want to cover is um actually the Sony deal is interesting to me um and because Ryan I know you're at YouTube and there's kind of this like it's it's almost like a meme of like Enterprises falling on their face trying to do things in crypto at this point um I just curious like do you think that

will obviously the financial institutions are launching ETFs and maybe launching l2s and probably issuing stable coins this year but do you think these Enterprises will ever obviously they will at some point what is like the one to twoe time Horizon for like Enterprise crypto yeah it's a good thing like totally I'm like forever associated with the Starbucks meme uh yeah I look I think in general um a couple things I think it's one you wna like you want to take swings at those opportunities if it makes sense you know if you look at like Starbucks was like A4 or five million deal that we were going to recoup on and was like is this going to be something where like you can get get nft adoption I'd do that thing 10 out of 10 times I would do that deal

even kind of knowing the outcome I think the things I would look for a little bit different is you know if there are R&D just kind of like fun pet projects where you're not getting kind of the Buy in you have to obviously be very weary as you go back into a bull market and there's that interest to come in you you know I also think if we can keep as an industry out of and having like fraud you know and some of the issues that we've had with FTX and 3ac which were huge catalysts for scaring away traditional companies both trafi and more broadly U that also is like a real variable to consider I think with Sony what I've seen is like they have been very sincere about bringing in a a heavily defi native team with you know star tail and some of the work that

they've been doing there so I I I feel very excited and good about them the sky's a limit for them I mean with what Sony owns across music and gaming and all these different things they if there was ever a company that wanted to do it that is like a very traditional web 2 company that has a lot of different avenues that they could go to succeed in just like a blockchain crypto space Sony's well equipped um I think they recognize this as well of the like there is going to be a little natural skepticism are you going to be Crypton native are you going to do something different this is a big bet for you and so I think they've taken it in Shrine have gone all in and they've demonstrated that level of commitment and seriousness um that's very different than looking at like a kraken team you

know obviously yeah yeah I mean I mean moving IP on chain has always made a lot of sense to me and maybe just I see it a little more obviously because of just my seat is like in in the media world but yeah that's made a lot of sense there is a there's a funny thing in crypto where if you go to Enterprise though people in the crypto natives see you as like trying to go Enterprise yeah so got I think it's a balancing act we obviously what we want to do is be the home of Defi and we really want to Champion Defi and we want to do things that like allow for that and so that's why you could where the bets have like we haven't done crazy stuff in gaming Sony is really our only bet that's outside of that model that

you've seen right like look at you know even world is a little bit outside of that right like if you're seeing the teams that you know are coming on it's very defi Focus um and I think we have a lot of progress that we need to make there like liquidity users transactions these things need to be driven they're not going to be driven by Enterprise right now um or like web 2 Enterprise if you will it's good to make a couple bets so you have visibility in line sight into how these things are happening but like my background's in gaming but there's a reason why we're not doing big gaming bets right now I don't think gaming is ready for this space I don't think it's part of the mission that we're trying to build today does that mean you make no gaming bets no I think

there's like a couple small ones you make to have a a foot in that industry and be hedged in it but if you spread your bets too much across the board it's you lose your focus and so I think we really want to be focused on driving tvl driving transactions the best suited are for folks that have that same shared goal in mind yeah what is the what are the like three metrics you guys look at there's a handful of them but I would say right now you know tvl and L2 transactions have been really helpful in US understanding like where we need to get because what do application developers want they want liquidity and they want to know users and people are transacting and so I think look there are those perfect no and are there like flaws in both of those metrics like

absolutely like all things from a data side with crypto but I I would say generally that has helped steer us in a direction of where our strategy needs to go um but yeah we have a you know it's important to like be very thoughtful about the data you're looking at because we know people skew it like crazy in this space yeah yeah yeah that's why we yeah we're pushing on the data side too I mean maybe actually let's talk about data Ben you guys um you guys have one of the best data cultures um actually in most of crypto I would say uh we we know this because we've worked with a lot of teams on on these data dashboards that we have and we we care a lot about like very good data because I think a lot of the misinformation actually in crypto

doesn't come from like clickbait news it comes from like just factually inaccurate data so we're spending a lot of time building these dashboards and you guys took a bet on us and we built this dashboard together at optimism. blockworks research.com and um what what what was behind like caring so much about just open data for optimism like was there was there a decision like like this is why it matters for the strategy or is like you found a good hire and like it became part of the culture yeah it's a little a little bit well actually I think I first have to shout out Josh Stein once again who we were just talking about because he was the one who said we he was the one who was really pushing us for the First Data hire and we were like what do you mean we can pull data together whenever we

need it we don't time and it's like no you need to you need to invest in that I think there's um one the answer is just the standard product like web 2 stories oldest time answer which is like you want to be tracking metrics and like doing your best that every time you make a decision you see whether that decision like meets the prediction that you made in terms of some measurable outcome so there's one kind of I think traditional lens which is just saying it like that and I think that holds especially true in our industry where we are constantly doing like kind of new science so it's not it's not like we're building some other website that is just like some you know

a clone of some other website that that has a better UI and we can all sit down and like reason about what is gonna have the best UI and then like do a little AB test and watch the data we're doing like new science here like web 3 is super new l2s are even newer on top of that crazy new projects are the apps that are being launched on l2s regularly and um fundamentally that means you're making decisions that have never been made before like you're do when you're doing things that haven't been done you want to be following the data otherwise you're just like blindly shooting into the dark and because no one's ever done it you don't even like have priors to really compare to so yeah I mean that that's honestly largely like you can borrow that from the web to SAS Playbook as well I think

the other thing ju I mean just to reinforce um or like Echo your sentiment that data is is bad though um I do think that there is still a long way to go not just for optimism but I actually think for the broader ethereum um ecosystem itself one of the one of the narratives that we see come up a little bit in ethereum and you know whether this comes from external adversaries versus well-intentioned internal people is always Tri tricky to develop but one of the things that I think has come up over the past like six months is a little bit of like our l2s adversarial to the L1 which feels like very backwards to us but then like people throw out intuitions this is to

me a space where the numbers really matter and need to be tracked and a lot of those claims are just like shots in the dark don't how would you track it like if you could have a dashboard or you could have like a chart like what what would you want to see to to talk about that it's so okay well I'll give you the Grand Vision and we're starting to work on some of this with um what we call op Atlas in governance which is the sort of like data repository for public goods funding which I haven't talked about but doing good public goods funding is it's really important to have the data and that's both onchain and some offchain um data fundamentally what like what is my dream vision for ethereum basically I want to go on a website and you have a map and this map

is like a collection of like nodes that are all basically it's just every project in ethereum there's like ethereum the chain itself there's all of the infrastructure providers your inferi your alchemies there's all of the l2s there's all the RAS providers that use all the l2s and there's like just a massive graph like just a huge map like you know how like people do these like e system Maps where they'll be like look at the status of X alt L1 or XL2 and it'll just be like a bunch of little icons of all of the like apps on that chain that is a completely broken model in my opinion what you need is not just a bunch of boxes within other boxes of categories but you want every one of those boxes to have well defined

measured relationships that say how does this uh app use this infrastructure what does this app pay that infrastructure provider to use and you get a comprehensive view of like all value flow through the system and you can like run SW swell leverage gelato which they click they use optimism and they're on the super chain which flows back to ethereum exactly and then maybe like Nosa safe is being used by all of those and like nobody really pays NOA safe so that's an underfunded thing likea I like this idea a lot that's a are you guys building this we're starting we're starting to build it yeah we're start we're starting first with some of the like optimism kind of public goods project so um the new retro retr funding flow the way you

will sign up for project will be all on chain and it will be like kind of addressable information and you can kind of build these layers on top of it with different schemas from there so it's coming it's gonna take a lot I'm sure understand how how tough data measurement is tough um okay let's tie this conversation together and start to wrap it up so maybe if I could summarize what it seems like from an outsider looking in optimism 2021 building an L2 2022 Maybe get this big idea for the super chain and start kind of actually building it out 23 Milestone deal with bass I don't know if that was 22 or 23 but bass really starts getting going 24 you start signing some actually big deals with other folks the Sony's and the Krakens of the world what does um how would you if we're looking back at

this in a year from now like what do you guys think you guys will how do you categorize 2025 I have actually excited to hear Ben Ben's answer I really like for me it would be great to see a couple demonstrating interoperability at least you know having having one up in you know sometime around the summer right so that we can demonstrate what this actually looks like so that others can be inspired and see the vision and actually like feel something that's very tangible and that and by that I mean like users feeling that experience across multiple chains application developers so forth so I think it's like so many people the super chain means a lot of things to a lot of different people but the most literal sense they think they they think of interoperability and so like that coming to life will be will be epic I obviously

I've already shared kind of the stats but I do think if we can see the 70 to 75% kind of threshold this idea of having some adopted standard for scaling ethereum starts to become more of a reality and you know really seeing op stat come into its own would be also on my list so I I hope in like January 2026 we're talking about it and it's like Ryan there's chains that are in our operating and you know a vast majority of the activity that's happening on ethereum is happen on the super chain is uh is what we're talking about yeah nail on the head I mean I'll throw out a couple of other a couple of other things um but interrupt 100% is the focus Ryan's right one of the things that I want to continue to see the trend line go up on

is external contributions and the open source Community really coming up to speed um we are there's a few elements of this like one thing that's happening is like we're starting to move to contributors that are Beyond just the core chain teams like the bases of the world so we have folks like um you know ZK proof teams that are contributing actively to the op stack like um to improve it we also have folks like flash blots that are blocks flash Bots which are working with uni chain to build flash blocks these are all really substantive protocol contributions that um are planned in the new year that I think are uh going to test the power of our open source development processes so I hope what I see at the end of 2025 is

a bunch of mistakes that we made and a bunch of improvements that we made to make it so that every contributor coming to the op stack has a best-in-class experience and every team building something substant substantive gets their stuff included and and like secured and sanely uh basically pushed through the proposal upgrade process um yeah I don't know that's kind of that's kind of it's less sexy than like oh exciting interrupt 75% of of measures but for me when you asked what metrics I track I one the one I was going to throw out to build on Ryan was um was uh the number of GitHub stars of the optimism mono repo these are important perspectives of yeah yeah um uh let maybe one

question which was from the Empire telegram group was um FK a lot of folks wanted to know what you guys are doing with AI agents and just like AI crypto in general um curious to get your take then I mean the first thing I'd say is there's lots of awesome stuff going on on a bunch of other chains super chain so I don't want to take all the credit amazing stuff going on in the world of Bas um and others um this might be this might be a spoiler alert uh so I'll allude to it another thing that I would love to see is um and where I think quite frankly it's um going to be big trend of expanding is AI agents for Dows and for governance so one of the things that I think is um

honestly been like a long time kind of in the back of our heads or like wouldn't it be cool if in the artificial general intelligence future kinds of things that are coming to fruition now is being able to have AIS that interface with governance communities to help participants make informed decisions resolve conflicts and get information like right now if you go to gov. optim optimism. there is a lot of amazing discussion in there it is also arguably completely overwhelming wouldn't it be cool if I had some sort of extension or agent or bot that can interact with where I could tell it some of my preferences tell it what discussions I care to take get take a closer look to in the conversations that I don't care what my voting preferences would be and

kind of like how I would want decisions to be made and have governance decisions be automatically like recommended to me have a report at the end of every week that tells me what are the latest updates um on the Forum and in the Discord and what are people talking about and here's where you might want to spend a little more attention Etc so um yeah that's a a lot is going on in a lot of chains in the ecosystem so you know go check out all the super exciting stuff but for me I'm really excited for governance I think we're going to fix Dows with AI and you're now the third smart person who has talked about this the other two on the podcast who have talked about this are run and Ilia from near um both of whom uh know a little something about something so yeah I

think you guys might there you go there you go cool well Ben Ryan this is great um Ruden for you guys you guys have built something awesome and uh yeah congrats on everything and big 2025 ahead thanks for having us on so much hey everyone just wanted to give a quick thanks to today's title sponsor geod net by setting up a base station you can get involved with this groundbreaking web 3 ecosystem learn more by heading over to geod net.com or just by hitting the link in the description of today's episode [Music]