Rollup TV Live from Devconnect Day 1

Transcript

[music] [music] How about [music] [music] the mother? >> [music] >> I'm about the [music] ST [music]

[music] [music] down two days live stream. We got an event planned Q4. [music] Stay tuned. We're going into the events business. Robbie Andy the boys straight days [music] live stream TV number one spot [music] [music] I'm [music]

>> [music] [music] >> How about [music] [music] the [ __ ] [music] The mother [music] [music] [music] above the

>> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> We'll see you around the timeline. >> Feels good to be back. >> Yes, sir. [laughter] Yeah. >> See, see, we are not [ __ ] rubbed. They rubbed

us yesterday. >> They can't rub us. >> They can't rub us today, baby. We are live from the Lambda office in Buenosis. We've got an insane slot of guests. Let's have some fun. >> Half of them are going to be hung over. The other half are probably going to be on stimulants. Welcome to cryptocurrency, baby. Welcome to the [ __ ] cryptocurrency. >> We're uh we're here. We're not we're not on stimulants. Can you tell [laughter] >> numero cafe? Just some good old cafe. >> Guys, we have our first guest, Jamal of Polygon, the head of payments. Polygon's came out with some absolutely banging news with Revolute uh as well as a couple larger uh institutional establishments. We're going to roll into our first guest. We've got I think 10 or

15 guests today. We'll be rolling for at least 5 hours if not six. Um and it's going to be a absolutely epic stream. So, we're going to roll into Money Moves Fast episode 11 and be right back and see you guys in a sec. Let's have some fun guys. >> Let's go. >> [music]

[music] [bell] >> Money moves fast. >> All right, guys. We are Money Moves Fast episode 11. We're here with Jamal, the head of US payments at Polygon Mods. Jamal, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> No, we don't get to bury the lead with Revolute [laughter] in the world.

>> Yes. >> I mean, there's only one question. How did you pull this off? >> Uh, hard work and dedication. A couple of beat us makes the partnerships happen. But we're excited. They're obviously supporting a number of chains, but we we really like working with them. We think they're vision aligned with our payments thesis. And uh yeah, super bullish. I've been a longtime Revolute user, so I'm just happy to see our name in that app, which is great. >> I love it. Yeah, that's awesome. Tell us a little bit about the story. How did you guys first get acquainted with the Revolute team? Um I I we had Sam on in New York just a couple weeks ago, and he he told us how a lot of times these institutions will bring you in to almost in a consulting format because they're just curious. They're just trying to

learn about the space. And was that how this started and then it gradually morphed into what the partnership is now today? Um, tell us a little bit just to read off a couple of these facts here. Revolute integrates Polygon for payments, trading, and staking processing $690 million to date. How did So, so take us from from 0 to 690 and then we'll we'll take it from there. >> Uh, you are right. I think most of these enterprises, they they know that they want to do something in the space, but they just they don't know what, right? they have some mandate from their CEO or some, you know, some some sort of like high board member and they're like, we just need to get into the space like what do we do? And they uh they come to us and we're obviously in a in a

favorable position for them considering we don't sell financial services or anything like that. So they come to us first and they ask like what do we do? How do we architect it? Who do we talk to? Who are the right players? And we actually spend hours and hours and hours with them giving them like a lay of the land, not even pitching them, just a lay of the land of like this is this, this is what a stable coin is, this is what like is predominant use cases, whatever. Uh, general stuff happened with Revolute. I mean, it's a long time relationships like over a year and they're super fintech forward. They're super super bullish on on crypto. They're really excited about like the crossber payments applications and whatnot. But yeah, it's just it's huge that like someone who's moving the fintech space so forward is now jumping

into crypto because they see the the value of some of these rails, the value of some of these these stable coins, which is great. Um I mean they they integrated trading in their exchange mostly in Europe a while back. So that's been live for a while. So a couple chains, a couple different uh assets and a lot of volume on the trading side. But the cool part about this partnership is that they're actually validating the thesis behind stable coins. They're actually validating that stable coins are are not just a trading mechanism. They're actually very very useful for crossber payments for remittances especially people who don't have access to Revolute right and the the integration is that Revolute now gets to tap into like the whole African market the whole Latin American market which is really tough to tap into right like you got to go get regulated licensed

whatever one integration you turn on the whole world which is pretty powerful >> and so what they have probably almost a billion users or customers or couple million >> 65 million sounds right sounds right yeah casual 8 billion people in the Yeah, revenue is so big that it's, you know, a boom is I mean Yeah. So 65 million users across 38 countries and 14 million crypto users. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty much had such a large crypto representation already. >> Yeah. >> I mean Revolute's always had this like fintech forward crowd, you know, people who are are open to challenger banks and people who are open to like, you know, better experiences on the financial system. need to know or don't need to use one of those like old school names

or whatever. So just it makes sense to me that all of those guys are like naturally dipping their toe in crypto. >> Yeah. So maybe we can talk a bit about what the actual like road map is to get this you know now that now that the headlines hit hit the newswire what does the implementation look like for uh polygon and foroot and what kind of traction do you expect to get these? I think the big focus here is that we want to do remittances, right? So, I think the really exciting part is that like this will start being used for like overseas payments, crossber payments and whatnot. I think that they've had a ton of traction on the exchange stuff. So, it's just kind of now like uh now us getting getting our feet wet with other stuff. I think um you know long-term I

think they're looking at a whole bunch of stuff. Uh in the beginning it started with just like regular stable coin remittances and step stable coin payments. There's like interesting conversations happening about like onchain FX like how do we do like crossber payments with some of our other stable coins like we have a ton of stable coins in in Latin America specifically. Uh they have a ton of users that are asking for uh crossber payments and reminces internally in the app as well. The implementation is actually already done. >> Uh so this announcement was kind of just like telling everyone that this is like going live soon. Um I actually don't know what the official launch date is. I don't even know if we have one yet. Uh but I know it's soon. Um, and I know that they're pretty excited about it and we've spent a lot of time working with

them uh to try to get them up to speed, you know, tighten up the product for that. But really, almost all the plumbing was already built. But the beauty of blockchain is you integrate it once and like you don't have to like reshape it or do anything crazy for it. >> And that's where the 690 million uh dollars of volume already comes from is the stable coins that are already being processed on Revolute have gone through Polygon to the tune of $690 million. Oh, they have a they have a lot of like so they have a trading exchange on the Revolute app in like uh Europe and other countries. So like not available for me in the US unfortunately yet. Uh but they do have an exchange where you can trade like pole and a bunch of other tokens as well. So that exchange has already done

around 690 million. Now they're taking that plumbing which is the same plumbing that you need for remittances or like B2B payments or whatever. They're taking that plumbing and building the product to be more payments focused and that requires much more stable coin integrations and much more like of that crossber payment stuff. >> And so I'm I'm starting to see Polygon become ubiquitous in payments. Uh to your credit, US the head of US payments. Um and so Mastercard, Stripe, Flutterwave Dcard now Revolute joins all of these other teams, right? I'm curious about the network effects as you start to build this coalition. Right. it it starts you have to go out you have to do the outbound to go get these projects but [snorts] once you have that critical

mass of teams now I'd imagine you're going to start to see inbound oh Revolute partnered with these guys now Cash App BVNK all these other ones are going to start coming to you to start to join that same network. What has that been like now that this has been live? It's been, you know, happening. Uh have you seen some inbound? What are you expecting to come next into Polygon? >> Yeah, tons of inbound. Uh big names for sure. like names that we all know and love. So, we're excited to see some some more announcements come out, especially in Q1. Um, I think the interesting thing here is that like there is a massive distribution plate to be had with some of these guys as this like network effect expands. You kind of look at Polygon as like the payments place, right? If you want to come to do

blockchain payments, you want to tap into this market, then you have to come to Polygon and use that ecosystem. So, it is an ecosystem play for sure. As we expand with more partnerships and partnerships and partnerships, there's a flywheel effect of like users lead to more partnerships which leads to more partnerships and which leads to more users. >> So, so that is what's happening in kind of like the institutional like sales side you could say like in the business development pipeline, right? So, it's just going to keep happening, right? Because now you've got the Lindy, right? Like, oh, you know, we're working with X Y and Z. We call it like like the Clooney effect. So, Oceans 11, they were trying to get uh Brad Pitt and George Clooney, right? But neither of them were interested. So they told Clooney that Pit was in and they told Pit that

Clooney was in and then then they got them both, right? You guys have Stripe, you guys have Revolute and also you have uh this recent announcement with uh Mastercard and Mercury. So that's on the BD side. Now on the onchain side, Mastercard is has chosen Polygon to launch usernamebased transfers for self-custody wallets. It's a lot of words. Like what the hell does that mean? What is a username based transfer for self-custody wallets? Um, how does that affect my daily life? How does that going to uh affect Mastercard's uh kind of customer base?

>> So, I mean, it's it's it's no like secret that sometimes transacting the blockchain can be rough, right? Like, so 100% I think that like, you know, 0x 559 blah blah blah like can be kind of complicated, especially as I'm trying to get like my mom into crypto for sure. So I think this is like it's a huge step to just make the user experience better, but there's also like another layer in where this like makes transactions safer, right? You actually have heard there's probably a good number of stories of like, oh, someone like Crypto.com accidentally send like, you know, a couple million dollars to the wrong address or something like that. So there's a lot of examples of these and that is just a poor experience if we want to get this to like the next level.

So, um I think the partnership is is bigger than just the naming service. But I am actually the most excited about the naming service. Just the fact that everyone's going to have this like super super human readable address or address and we'll all just be able to share that. And Mastercard, which is like the connective tissue for so much of our financial world already, is going to have this like infrastructure available for everyone, which is really exciting. But the cool part about credential that's like really not like teased enough in the presser is that there's a whole credential stack underneath that, right? [clears throat] And it's just starting with identity, right? Identity is one of the most difficult problems on the blockchain, especially in financial services, hands down. But there's a lot of stuff beyond that, right? Like credit scores or like your mortgages or other,

you know, data that could be put on chain and ti tied to that credential that can just make your entire onchain experience tremendously better. >> So, it's that whole architecture that I think is really exciting. >> Is there an ecosystem project that you guys are using for identity? We we know that there's a couple decentralized identity worldcoin humanity. >> Yeah, we actually humanity just announced Masterard integration. >> Mastercard's human ID is going to be powered by them. This is like another step here. It seems like they're entering the space pretty heavily. >> 100%. Yeah. Yeah. I think uh Visa came in aggressive earlier in the space. Oh yeah. So like it's well known that Visa came out with USDC settlement really really early which was very forward thinking. They hired a bunch of people in the crypto space which are really

sharp and you know built some cool stuff for sure. Um but like Mastercard's a sleeper. People people don't talk about it enough. I mean they uh you know much love to the master Mastercard folks but admittedly they moved a little bit slower but when they moved they moved way more methodical they came out with something called MTN which is like a robust uh tokenization framework which like really really good for banks. It's like becoming a gold standard. This crypto credential is another good example. So I think they're being more creative. They're going to do the same stuff right. They're going to do USDC settlement. They're going to do all the other USDC stuff because that's obvious. But this like credentiing stuff, this more onchain frameworks, I think it's like a really really interesting way that they're entering the space and I think it's going to be really really

important as we go on because they are like I said earlier the connective tissue for so much of our world. So for them to hold this infrastructure really makes it powerful. >> How do you look at the competitive landscape of not not the blockchain competitive landscape? We talked about that at at Nausea, but the Mastercard, Visa, the these payment networks that are entrenched and and the incumbents. How do you think about this competitive landscape? You've done a partnership with Mastercard. Can you also go and do a partnership with Visa? >> Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. >> They don't really care, do they? >> Well, I mean, uh I think there are some feelings here and there, competitive spirit, but honestly like uh what I love about crypto is that there there's this like decentralized ethos like we're all winning together and like you know like I'm very close with all the different

payments leads at all different blockchains. We're all joking around. We're all really good friends, right? And I don't think there's this mentality of like one person is going to win. There's so much business to be had. there's so much like uh like traction to be made because like the opportunity is massive. Our traditional financial system is a dinosaur, right? And to chip away slowly at these pieces is like it's going to take some time. So I think that yeah well number one we love Visa. I think there's a very important relationship there and I think we're going to see you're going to see a lot more coming out hopefully at the top of next year. We're already in in motion with a couple things. U but yeah, I don't think that there's any sort of like negative spirit between the two of them. Um, I tried to get Visa and

Mastercard on the same panel yesterday, but I don't know why that didn't happen. That would have been funny. Um, but yeah, I don't think that there's any like competitive spirit. There's a lot of love between them for them for each other. There's a lot of love between us and and all of them. I think there's there's interoperability that needs to happen. I like kind of the competitive spirit of keeping each other in line and delivering fast. >> Um, on that note, kind of flipping that more into the crypto uh verse, how how you guys, you know, have established Polygon as this payment chain. Uh there's obviously like this whole sleuth of of stable coin chains that have came out, but I think you know one thing that has been pressing on my mind here in Dev Connect has been this and really following from SmartCon last week man is

is just or two weeks ago is like the the the seats at the table are being are being set like the table is being set. There's like a really a one or two year kind of phase here that's already started probably six to 12 months ago. probably only have one year left of like this really true institutional kind of like adoption phase meaning like you know uh if the if JP Morgan decides on a blockchain provider to like launch their own chain or to build all on like chances that they stick are like pretty like they're probably a pretty sticky like you know client or customer right um the the vendor lock in maybe isn't as intense as it can be with traditional uh you know software but it's still pretty like intense and So that being said, I

have this thought and and Robbie does too where if you don't have an institutional arm to your company as a blockchain uh company today, you're pretty much cooked. Um like you're like you're screwed because Polygon's going out and getting onboarded to Revolute and like you don't even have an institutional sales guy. Like you're screwed. talk to us about kind of this like how this shift in the crypto landscape is is happening and do you agree that like you know you have to earn your seat at the table now and you know that this time period is going to be fleeting is it g is it more positive sum is it more longer term you know how do you feel generally about this kind of uh phase that we're in >> um you totally have to like live and breathe it to be able to like properly

penetrate to to you guys's earlier point like there is a consultative game to it right a lot of these guys the phase that we're in right now, a lot of these guys are like, we we need to do something. We just don't know what that is. And I think we're on a very very long journey of a lot of interesting stuff, but we're just entering fa phase one where they need these type of like enterprise handholding, whatever you want to call it, right? So yes, you're right. If you're not doing that and you have it started already, there's a race and you like you should get on it 100%. >> There's just so so many teams are asking us like what do we do? Like like you know our product is X and our our token is Y and like here's where we're at. no

one cares and it's just like well have you thought about like going and getting institutional adoption and it's like yeah of course but it's a slow process >> but it's like how do we do it right? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Like people are like teams are really like confused right now because they see the likes of Polygon and others going and doing it and they don't really know what to do about it. >> I mean enterprise sales is a tough game. It is enterprise just BD in general. Um I think you there's an art to like just being everywhere and talking to the right people. I mean the language you use, the types of calls you schedule, who you introduce them to, all of that stuff matters and there very much is an art to it. So you do need someone who I think knows that art and can can kind of

penetrate into it. Network is like a huge thing here. I've been in the the crypto space for almost about nine years now, right? And like having met all these people and building a really good network, everyone works together like we're really close with the team at like Fireblocks. We're really close with a team at I don't know like Rain and like with those they're going out and getting enterprises. We're co-pitching right a lot of the time. So, uh, I think working with people like you guys, getting the good word out there, getting a lot of people like interested in the space and teasing them to to kind of learn more, then they approach people or we find a way to get connected with them. Then there's a long consultative cycle of like, you know, educating them. A lot of the time we're not even pitching them.

We're just like simply educating them. We've done like so many workshops, multi-hour workshops where the word like polygon is like barely written in the presentation, which is good, like which is good. We want them to just like feel comfortable to explore the space, not feel like they're getting pitched or whatever. And then you slowly become that consultant for them. And then when they do something, they call you or they think of you immediately and they get your advice on it. And that's how you like shape them to go the direction you want. Like I love when people like when like Tradfi executives will go to an airport and they'll see a Bitcoin ATM. They'll text me like, "Ah, look, I see a crypto thing." And like >> then they think of me, which is like what I want them to think about, right?

>> You a text message. >> My crypto guy. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's who I want to be. I want to be the crypto guy for >> for JP Morgan. I want to be the crypto guy for >> Bank. The older people less experience. They come to you for advice. They they may even ask you for like stock picks, you know. [laughter] Not financial >> advice, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. 100% 100%. Yeah. >> We have a similar approach. It's an abundance mindset to share information without the uh the forward thinking that you're going to get something back from it. >> Agreed. We do believe in this principle of economic karma where you you put good uh ideas, good thoughts, good knowledge into the world.

>> I love that. Economic karma is amazing. Yes, that's a good one. >> Um I wanted to ask you before before we let you go about uh this blockchain payments consortium which has some incredible founding members of which Polygon is one of them. And the stat that sticks out here is $10 trillion of stable coins uh transferred. I believe that's this year. Um, wow. Annually, right? So, uh, 10 trillion dollars of annual stable coin volume by the founding members of the blockchain payments consortium. >> Generally, this feels like the table.

This feels like the founding members, Monad uh Stellar Salana Polygon Fireblocks. These are the companies that currently have a seat at the table. Is it closed? Like, is this what what is the blockchain payments consortium and how do you anticipate that this will help bolster the stable coin industry? So that was born out of just like an amazing group of people who we all like love each other and we hang out at all these conferences. we go we go have mucho babidas together like we're we're having a good time and and while we were there we were like look we're all going through the same struggles when we're talking to large financial institutions they don't feel comfortable with XYZ and on top of that like a lot of enterprises pick multiple chains most of the time they pick multiple chains right so like

we're all working together in some way shape or form and each chain has their own niche and advantage so like you know it's all love at the end of the day but there needs to be kind of a unified front to work with these large enterprises right as you said enterprise sales is like tough and a lot people haven't figured it out, right? So, there is an art to it and we need to have like this like robust experience for those enterprises that are coming into the space. So, number one, it's to create set of standards for the blockchains across all different chains to make payments a really good experience. >> Similar things happen in the credit card space. There's a foundation called the EMV foundation which created chip cards, right? So, like they created standards for how those chip cards and those data those data transfers happen and it led

to a better card experience for all of us. And it's actually a joint consortium with Visa, Mastercard and a bunch of other card networks. So similarly in that same spirit, we thought like why don't we get together and create a set of standards of what does a payment look like on a blockchain? What needs to be included? What data needs to be there? Do we need to optimize the blockchain for that? Do we need to add like more fields or do we need a technical upgrade? Like whatever. But we need to create a set of standards and we will come out with a set of standards soon hopefully by like Q1. Um but we're gonna create a set of standards that makes people more comfortable to rely on blockchain transactions as payments. So imagine like [clears throat] Bank of America getting into the space and

they're like, "Oh, I don't know if this transaction's like actually from someone legit or whatever." And because of that, I'm just not going to do anything in the crypto space. >> But now they can look at this like new transaction standard and say, "Oh, I at least know that like this is a KYC transaction or I at least know that this is this and I don't need to know the KYC or whatever." Or maybe I do, but at least I know that this transaction is legit. >> Y >> and when [clears throat] you have that, you have just a lot more comfortability for enterprises, large financial institutions, even regulators. Even regulators will like that and feel more comfortable with it. On top of that, it's going to lead to a better experience for the users, right? So users using different wallets, [clears throat] crosschain swapping and

all this stuff that's happening, they're going to need to see the same kind of standards and the same data fields and the same experience across all those different chains. And this type of like layer, whatever we're going to call it or wherever we're going to come out with, but this type of infrastructure is key to providing that crosschain experience as well. >> Plus, we just love hanging out with each other. It's super fun. >> Exactly. [laughter] Yeah. >> You know, you become the uh kind of like dictator of the uh of the standard or of the idea like you become the uh creator of it. So >> yeah, >> it's been great to have you on, man. Before we get you out of here, >> payments is the most fundamental use case of the blockchain.

>> Oh, I like it. [laughter] >> Return to fundamentals, buddy. >> Yeah, I love it. This is sick. Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. >> Fundamentals are leading the way. >> We're here for it 100%. Let's go. >> Almost. All right, guys. We'll be right back. See you in just a second and we will our next pop up, guys. Thank you. >> That was sick. >> Awesome. >> That was awesome. >> Pleasure. [music] Hey,

hey hey. Hey hey hey. >> [music] [music]

>> Hey, hey, hey. It's official sales. Enterprise sales is [music] not easy. We just heard it from Jamal, the head of women at Bollywood. But it is it is absolutely crucial to any team on the market [music] right now. Guys, we've built so much infrastructure. We cannot just allow the traditional uh stratified giants to come in and build the applications on top of this open infrastructure that we've invested billions of dollars in. We must go [music] implement with them and build

alongside them to have a successful 2026 and 27. Trust me, we do not want Stripe [music] Chain, Visa Chain, Mastercard Chain. We want them to build in our public networks as they [music] exist today. Guys, you do not have an institutional sales strategy in 2026. You are [music] cooked. What do you What do you have to say about that? >> If Stripe and Mascard and Visa have public composable change for the rest of the open Washington landscape, I'm all for it. >> I don't know if Mr. Zack can ask that he's going to agree. We're going to have him up, guys. We'll be right back. Uh we are live from [music] Yeet is built for big moments. The most

fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. [music] Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. [music] Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. [music] Get a treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge

your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his Rio upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. [music] Khi is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to call sheet.com to trade today.

Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience. Havachi is fast and private [music] per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. >> Looking for yield that stands out?

Infinify gives you >> All righty, Zach. Welcome to the uh roll up uh I don't know dungeon here. Yeah, I love it. >> The privacy dungeon. >> Trust me, there's no there's no other cameras or mics. >> There's no surveillance. It's just you, right? [laughter] >> What you see is what you get here. >> How you enjoying? >> Oh, I am loving it. You know, it's been um it's been intense. Uh um not only just like the the crowd, the vibes. Um, but you know, you might have might have heard we're we're doing a few things uh ourselves at Aztec. You know, a few things are happening um with our launch with our token sale.

>> So, yeah, honestly, it's been it's been an incredible mix of a mix of bugs. >> I think it's important to point out that you're wearing an Aztec original white paper suit. I am. That is a I'd imagine it's one of a kind. >> It is one of a kind. It was made by our designer, Tiffany. Absolute stroke of genius. So, this was from 2018. It was the first cryptography paper I published >> um back when I was like much younger and like desperate for some kind of legitimacy. I wanted people to pay attention to me. So I used my PhD title. I'm like doctor [laughter] I'm Dr. Zachary. I'm here with the acid protocol.

>> So you've been thinking about privacy for a long long time. >> Oh yes. >> Okay. Privacy has now come back in favor. >> Yes it has. >> Um the nature of these narratives is that they tend to they tend to oscillate and swing come in and out of popularity. um what struck you about privacy when you first found the concept and and started yeah becoming attracted to it and and why do you think it's making such a big comeback now? >> Oh, those are good questions. Okay, so what struck me about privacy? Okay, I have a little bit of backtory, but you can probably tell from my accent that I'm British, right? And so um in my in my rather um strange country, you know, when you graduate from university, um if you want a good career with some status and some money, right, like you have

three options. You can be a lawyer, you can be a consultant, or you can work in finance and that's it. Anything else go get lost. Um, and I was no I was I was stuck in this in this this this treadmill, right? I'm like, okay, do finance. Um, and I was building a trady fintech product on Ethereum. Uh, where I was doing like corporate bonds, like really boring, valuable, but boring. Um, and we had this this minor privacy problem because we wanted to put multi-billion dollar portfolios on chain. [snorts] Uh and and we're like, "Oh, privacy. Surely that's going to get solved by somebody, right?" And then we're like, "Oh, no, God, it's not."

>> So anyway, that's the that's the start of it. But but why I got privacy pulled through that? Because I never learned about zero truths. >> Yeah. >> And and it blew my goddamn mind what you can do with these things. You can you can encrypt information and then but then like you run computer and like prove stuff about the encrypted data. You don't have to reveal anything. I can prove to you any password without telling you what password it is. I'm like, dude, you this epiphany where you okay, you take this tech, you plug it into a distributed ledger and you can rebuild the goddamn world We're a pro fully programmable privacy

layer, you know. Um, uh, we like to call it the private world computer. We take a like everything that Ethereum did, all that incredible innovation and dynamism and you take a network like Ethereum and you take the smart contract platform, you just you add private information into it. >> Um, where you can, you know, our smart contract language, it's like a regular programming language. It's based on Rust. It's called Noir. Um, and you just write your code in it and you can you can have contracts with storage and data and that data can be private and you can do logic on it and you can call other contracts written by other people that do other private data processing and it just all works. You don't need to be a cryptographer. Yeah.

>> And so you can you can do anything on it. um you know so a lot of these other likeing because of general purpose >> but um I guess part of the reason why I'm really interesting is we do a lot of original research >> at Aztec um and you know uh we've pushed the boundaries in extremely meaningful ways to the point where we can make a purpose programmable and we can do it in a way that is fully decentralized is fully permissionless and absolutely unckillable.

>> Okay. So if I bridge from uh you know let's say arbitum or L1 or Hyperlid or whatever to Aztec uh am I entering a fully private environment in the current form? >> So in the current form >> um like what is the level of like what's the spectrum here? Okay. So, so yes, but I have to give some context because um ASIC is a hybrid layer as in as an application developer, you can choose to write a fully private application, but that might not actually be what you need. You can you may need some public information. You may need some public settlement stuff. So, you can basically the app developer chooses what's public, what's private. So, assuming you only interact with private contracts, then if you deposit into Aztec, obviously people can see that deposit transaction, but they don't know

the address of whatever's holding it on Aztec. every single transaction on Aztec, they don't know who you you are, the transaction center. They don't know the smart contracts you're calling and they don't know the data that you're modifying. It's [clears throat] complete privacy. >> Okay, I like that. Okay, cool. So, so, so, so that's the nuance in the current form. >> Yeah. >> Is every smart contract on Aztec a private smart contract? >> Uh, well, as it's a hybrid is a hybrid system, so you can choose to make them or public or mix of the two. and the private components of it um like that code is not published on chain. It doesn't need to be um so uh it does open up these interesting niches where you can basically you can create smart contracts that you can not only perish a group of people to interact with but not

everybody can even see it. Um it's not the model that I'm I'm it's not my favorite model. It's not something I'm going to personally push for but it can be done on Aztec and I I think it's interesting. So um what do you think about uh Zuko and Zcash? >> What do I think about them? I mean they are the absolute OGs. Um you know like everyone everyone in the space that that even mentions the word privacy owes a debt to Zcash. >> Um like they uh none of us would be here without them. And it's not just Zcash, but Zik has been in this space in like these um even like before blockchain, right? Like dealing with the whole fact that the 1990s encryption was basically banned. Um you know, and uh if you if you if you distributed cryptography

software outside of America to another country, you were technically an international arms trafficker. >> Oh god. >> Yeah. It was part of the movement before to like the stupid laws. So, um, I remember in 2017 I I realized, oh, I need privacy. Like, what's what's out there? Oh, Z what's a Zcash? What's Zcash? And like, and like, you know, um, okay, I owe a debt to Zuko student because because I learned a lot from him, but so like I feel like you like, you know, you fix some kind of uh, psychological torment on me having to understand all this, all this stuff, understand the original papers.

Basically, we're building on the shoulders of giants and and Zcash started it all. >> And so, there's a significant portion of Aztec, like you said, anyone who mentions uh privacy owes a debt to Zcash. >> Uh and then there is also secret sauce that you guys have by doing your own research and pushing the boundaries. Give us a sense of the secret sauce. What have been the scientific conclusions and findings as a result of your research? >> Yeah. Well um so uh our research is very uh I look at this web three native and has three native names. Uh so we we so one of the main things we did in 2019 was we published something called flunk.

>> Yeah. >> Um flunk is okay so back in the day right um so you have zcash you have snarks but snarks are like hard to work with like zero knowledge proof things. Um and you need to do this thing called a trusted setup. every single program you want to turn into ZK into into like a private space, you need to run this trusted setup ceremony where you got to generate some secret some secret data and learns what that data is, you'll the whole thing gets broken. >> Zach Zash did that when it first came out, right? It was Zuko and a couple of guys in a room and they said this is >> ceremony. They did it and it it works at that scale. If you're building one app then sure you can run one Tor setup but if you're trying to do what we were

trying to do back then even back in 2018 you want a customizable logic >> of apps and and it doesn't work to do if you like imagine an asset launch and I'm like you can write a smart contract but oh by the way you got to run a trusted setup ceremony >> developer like you don't know cryptography you're no it doesn't scale so so I was obsessed with like how the hell we get rid of the trusted setup and create a snark that's still fast you can do it on the laptop and it's not going like smoke's not going to come out of your machine. Um, and clock was the breakthrough one that first pulled that off. Um, it is something called a universal setup. Um, like you do, we did it in 2019. Um, we still use it, but but that's it. You just need one. Uh and it

also like we we we we made some other substantial like cryptographic advancements basically like there's we created these frameworks for reasoning about um zero cks where basically uh the old protocols you had they were like these very monolithic things that were very challenging to reason about and think about and design and we split them into kind of discrete components like uh to get into the weeds like you interactive oracle proof and a polomial commitment [clears throat] scheme and circ arithmetization. You can basically treat these layers as somewhat independent um and compose them together and and the font paper was the first one that really broke that down.

>> Um and I think I'm very biased, but I think led to like an explosion of a lot of ZK research and ZK papers because it made it made research a lot more manageable and and systematic. Um yeah, and then like we've done stuff after that like we did uh um lookup tables. Um okay, so lookup tables sound like a basic thing, right? you know, I want to look up in in in Starcraft in GK land. Um, all your arithmetic, all your logic is over these like prime fields like prime numbers. Um, which is kind of a pain in the ass because you don't like that's not how normal computer code works. You don't work over prime numbers. Um, uh, and um, and also like it's very hard to like the amount of computation you can do is quite limited

because these things are slow. Um, and so I took a lot of inspiration from the 1980s. Okay, so 1980s home computers, your computers suck. Like they are so stupid. They like like literally it's like a box of rocks. They literally silicon. It's like it's and so you trying to do really cool stuff with these machines, but these machines are stupid. And so what you do is if you want to do math, you frequent stuff, but it's really hard. And we we were I think I would be the first group that cracked that problem in an efficient way. Um and uh led to all of these table that all these all these e kitchens use today. Uh and you know we

continued to iterate and develop from plon ultra plunk uh megaplon um [laughter] >> just optimize this for different uh use cases. >> It's well it's more I mean not really like the stuff we're using today is a fair few times faster than the stuff in 2019. Okay. It's there's been an enormous number of like multiple independent advancements and obviously we've taken a lot of stuff from outside this like you know the whole industry's been innovating um and so you're getting this kind of compounded double MS law effect from ZK not from hardware improvements but also the fundamental like algorithmic like technology is also improving at a rapid rapid rate.

>> Yeah. Yeah. But it still feels too early though like it still feels slow and expensive. Well, it's because we it's because you you say good idea. >> Well, actually, well, that's something to talk about there. Um, you're technically correct. Um, uh, but you know, this is why we've been doing this for seven years. >> Yeah. >> Over that time, we've not we've been shipping plenty of products. You know, we had asset one, which was a shielding tok protocol for Ethereum. Aztec 2, which was the first private roll up. A connect where you did private DeFi. And what we're doing each point at these checkpoints saying, okay, with the absolute state of the art we have right now, what's the best product we can make? Can we make it? And then we're like, well, we we really want this

program ability. So, we go back to the drawing board, we go back to the research cave, we try to figure out some more stuff. Um, and then once we make a breakthrough, we we turn that into a product. [laughter] And it was only three years ago where we we were like, "Okay, it's actually ready now for for like the full protoable version where it's not too slow, not too terrible." >> Um >> uh and and so yeah, I think it's very interesting times. You are right that it's like Sorry. >> No, no, I just feel like the that the way that the landscape has shifted is just working ever so in your favor.

you were building this before um you know in a really rough regulatory environment in in the [clears throat] states where this would be uh you know had you launched you you may have gotten into into some [ __ ] >> you know it was probably you know you guys built built built and now the launch is clear as day >> there's not going to be any problems like you know >> absolutely >> I don't foresee it in in the next three years in the US you have you guys having any issues whereas in the the last four it would be hard to say >> oh yeah I know you can tell me that it's been it's been some tough times.

>> You guys have like you had the foresight to see the evolution and like built through it when a lot of others wouldn't have been able to do that anymore. >> Well, I mean honestly I feel like I'm a dog chasing a car as in like I can't let go how to build this thing. >> Um and and like because it's listen this is privacy is the most important thing right now in crypto. Um, obviously I'm crazy biased, but I'll explain why this is. Um, I think you before you wereing about um about like about enterprise institutions coming in and traffic coming in.

>> Let's say like take stripes temper network, right? Um, you know, if I strike, I'd be doing that. It's a no-brainer, right? Like, you know, you have all these points of terminals and payment devices. Just plug them into a settlement network that's cheaper than blaster it. But imagine a world where all blockchain activity migrates to these to these like um somewhat like permission controlled layers like tempo. What has blockchain become? It's purely become a slightly more efficient settlements layer. >> Yeah. >> Visa, >> right? >> And like what's the bloody point? Is that why we're here?

>> Yeah. >> Like [laughter] we before blockchain like no we weren't. Um blockchain is more than that. These are gone. >> Yeah, that you make a great point. We're not here to just squeeze a couple more basis points online. >> Continue. >> Yeah. So, why why is that like why why are we so excited about this? It's because like you could like it's blockchain is not just a financial technology. It's a social technology. It's a social layer. >> And that honestly has been struggling to fulfill that promise. Um you know things like think the Dow hack. Um uh but you know the what you really want to create is public ledgers where you have multiple participants coming in building

financial products and services um and and assets and and um new banks and where everything is composable with everything else. Right. And you have this this this innovation furnace. >> Yes. Where everyone's building off each other, feeding off each other, competing against each other. And what's happening is the barriers to entry participation just going falling falling and falling and falling falling. Um and value for retail is rising and rising like this is all about delivering meaningful economic value. Yes. For retail. Yes. And right now >> let's be honest that is not happening. >> As in I love blockchain. I love the casino you know. I mean don't take market away from me. I love it. But uh but but it is an extractive institution right now. Like if you are retail you're

not kind of like really plugged in. You're you're going to come out of the space with less money than you came in. Well, Zach, I've got something for you. >> Yeah. >> We're running low on time. >> Okay. >> We've got this saying which is exactly what you're talking about. Return to fundamentals. >> Yeah. >> And so, we brought you a shirt that that we think you would truly enjoy. Return to fundamentals. >> Absolutely. Thank you to to have a look in the camera and say what that means to you in the context of Aztec, in the context of privacy. >> Okay. Return to fundamentals. What that means to me in the privacy is making blockchain great again. fulfilling the original visions of Satoshi of Italic of enabling like a vibrant ecosystem of real financial products and services

like real neo banks real ebanks where we are allowing you know we're enabling users rather than retail to to engage in a kind of rich financial activity that is is is the preserve of a tiny belief right now um it's about open participation it's about open governance um it's about it's about control it's about taking control away from these elite institutions that are relying on closed information networks, be they a a traffic bank or web two giants with the data modes and breaking them apart and giving that data back to users in the form of privacy tech enjoy the products and services that they become accustomed to. Wow.

[ __ ] joining us, man. Congrats on that. I'm sure it's busy. We'll let you get back to it. Thank you, man. >> Thanks a lot. It's a real pleasure. Thank you. >> All right, guys. Take a quick break and we'll be right back with our next guest. See you guys in just a second. [music] Is built for big moments. the most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game.

Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get [music] a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now.

[music] Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his Rio upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KCHI is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade [music] today. >> [music] >> Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a

fully private chat experience. [music] Havachi is [music] fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz XYZ to start trading today. [music] Looking for yield that stands out? Infinifi gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the [music] current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz.

>> [music] >> Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. FRA is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released [music] its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. [music] Get a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion dollar transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now.

Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and [music] payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. Khi is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai AI to have a fully private chat experience.

Havachi is fast and private per [music] trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. [music] Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the [music] current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to

holiday.xyz XYZ to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of stable coin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pion >> up, >> we have to give a shout out to L2B. Um, we are literally in the Ethereum ecosystem. Without L2B, we would be nothing. Guys, very I have once tweeted that we need more L2 beats and I got the biggest flak from Hubert and the team ever. I deeply regret this. I am sorry to all the L2B team. I did not mean that. We only need one L2B and they are just fine. Guys, if you are a rollup and

you're at stage zero, I'm sorry, but in 2026, I don't think you're coming on the show. You better be on stage one or you're not coming on our show. If you're on stage two, we'll bring you on as much as you like. Now, look, I get it. You have to do a responsible transition to each stage. I get that and I'm all for that. But guys, don't give us this progressive decentralization [ __ ] Do it. Like, let's go. Let's make it happen. Shout out to L2B for keeping the Ethereum technical community accountable. We do not need more than one L2B. One is just fine. Much love, guys. We'll be right back.

You really You really want to cut the commercial after that? [laughter] Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get [music] a treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to

bridge your assets now. [music] Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest prediction [music] market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to callsheet.com to trade today.

Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience. Havachi is fast and private per [snorts] >> All right, guys. Luka, welcome to the uh uh the dungeon the whole >> Thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me and sorry for me late. Uh like my Uber driver cancelceled on me and I feel like this is like very nice analogy with like sequencer. If you're allowed to uh and the sequencer baits on you, you know, you won't force transactions. Uber doesn't have force transactions. [laughter]

>> That's unfortunate. >> Exactly. Exactly. And I'm going to start with something super hot, hyperlquid. Notably, we have lighter coming out of uh the Ethereum, you know, landscape. Uh >> better better technical architecture from a risk perspective than Hyperlquid, you could argue. >> Um >> how dangerous is it to have your funds on Hyperlid? uh from a a scape hatch perspective, what should users who have a lot of capital on hyperlquid under like need to understand about uh that architecture and then how does that compare to lead?

>> Yeah, so uh hyperl specifically I see a lot of people saying on Twitter for example that they have you know 15 20 validators. I don't know where those validators are because the only uh thing that I see on chain is the bridge and the uh what it uh what actors allow uh those bridge to move out uh those funds to move out from the bridge and it's a three out of four right so it's a three out of four like multisig more or less uh all controlled by hyperlid and there are like several billion dollars uh in those bridge uh in a smart contract on arbitrum >> and um if they want tomorrow today they can just uh rag everything Right. Uh so it doesn't matter that they have whatever number of validators in the network. We don't see them. Uh what

matters is the security of the bridge. >> And then lighter is kind of coming at this from a different approach. Uh I believe on L2B I've got I've got a pull up. I think that they're stage one or >> No, not yet. Not yet. Yeah, we can we can talk a little bit about the still the problems. >> So stage zero app chain full training wheels. >> Exactly. But like if you if you look at the risk pizza, uh it's mostly green, right? >> It's mostly green. Just the exit window is right. >> Yeah, the exit window. >> That's the requirement of stage one. Yeah, that's a requirement for this one. You need to have at least a seven days exit window, right? Uh right now they don't have that. They have instant upgrades. But the thing is um all the others license are green which means um

they already have for transaction. They already have this escape hatch. They use blobs. Uh everything is pretty good. They have state validation. They prove proofs all the transactions, all the order book, all the matches. Uh which is something that Hyperlid doesn't do. Like you have no idea whether Hyperlid is actually matching things correctly or censoring anyone. Uh on Lighter you cannot. If you're being censored, you can uh have a force transaction on chain, right? For example, and if they don't process this transaction, you can shut down the chain. Uh which is crazy. Uh so there is a very strong incentive for them to process everything. Uh but again, like they just uh deploy their chain. So they want to have a little bit of uh time before they they add uh delayed upgrade because of course if something uh is wrong, they want to fix

it immediately. But, you know, we're talking with them and they're uh very open to to adult these things to get to stage one. >> We've heard that uh there's been push back that, you know, stage one is very or excuse me, stage two is very um let's say [snorts] it's very uh kind of pie in the sky. It's not very practical for teams to go through that right now. Uh for instance, Fuel V1 was a stage two rollup. It really didn't pick up a lot of traction. Y >> and so what would be your response to the teams? I think we had Stephen Goldfeder of Arvin Trump yesterday come on and say you know uh stage two is certainly on the road map. We will get there but it's just not practical right now to incorporate some of these features. Uh how do you think about

that? Why did you choose the requirements that you did for stage two? Um and generally uh what do you think is is a practical road map to get these rolls to stage two? >> Yeah. So it's very difficult to get to stage two because uh if you're stage two it means if there is a bug you cannot do anything. Uh right? uh and rollups today are very complicated especially the proof system um and you know arbitum has a very complicated fireproof uh protocol uh also ziki proofs uh there are bugs every week uh there is something new in in some library and all these projects uh need to upgrade to fix those bugs so a lot of teams tell me that you know um we're not at a point in which we get we have enough confidence that there will

not be bugs right and there are solutions uh that we're trying to to figure out on this uh for example there was this blog post by Vitalik on having multiproofs this two out of three proof system with like an optimistic proof system a z proof system and maybe a te the thing is you know the more things you add uh the more complexity you have as well uh that you need to manage uh that you need to you know spend resources on um so now the other thing I'm also working on is native rollups >> and ideally this is something that would massively simplify uh the the rollups uh the idea is >> [snorts] >> uh you can get a rollup an EVM equivalent rollup uh without having to deploy the proof system. Uh the Ethereum Ethereum itself will expose the state transition function. So as long as the

only thing that you want to do is uh the same you know having the EVM standard EVM the same as Ethereum has um it's like super easy for you. I created a very small proof of concept for native roll-ups and with like 60 lines of solidity code including comments and spaces you can have like a functioning rollup right while if you look for example optimism proof system it's like 10,000 lines of code and there are different uh difficult to maintain >> and likely have you know some bugs. >> So this would simplify rollup design significantly. No, >> but the push back on native roles at the moment is that it would in effectively enshrine a ZK VM of sorts, whether that's risk zero or succinct or another

uh by bringing that op that that execute pre-ompile deeper into the L1 and that is something that we would have to overcome so that we still maintain a decentralized uh mainet. >> Yeah. So the idea here is uh L1 itself is moving to ZK right we have all these efforts you know Justin Drake Lin Ethereum um so eventually Ethereum itself will use ZK uh so it's you know there are different proposals how to do it you don't need necessarily to enshrine uh any of the proof systems even though if you do that I would simplify a lot of things but in any case is already moving towards that uh so rollups will need to you know already have a dependency on one uh so what native rollup will do is just expose the

same infrastructure to develop themselves so that they don't need to deploy their own stuff. They don't need to um have dedicated governance system to just upgrade to get the new features. You know when uh for example 7702 came out uh for account abstraction all the rollups wanted to have that as well but it took a lot of time for them to upgrade and you know go through the governance process especially the more decentralized ones like arbit process and takes a lot of time. If you're a native rollup, you can upgrade like you will upgrade immediately at the same time as Ethereum. >> Yeah.

>> Uh which simplifies a lot of things. >> Yeah. And would this help if a lot of these roll-ups were native roll-ups, would that help them achieve stage two? >> Absolutely. Like the main reason I feel like uh projects are not moving to stage two is because they fear bugs and bugs are mainly in the proof system. So if we allow these projects to remove the proof system entirely and thus rely on uh Ethereum um that would massively simplify the things also because if there is a bug >> uh in one of the ro one of the native rollup since it reuses same infrastructure it means that there is a bug on Ethereum itself right >> so Ethereum will take care of fixing it >> Ethereum would upgrade and >> upgrade hard fork and fix the bug right >> doesn't wouldn't that mean that doesn't

that mean that Ethereum itself is not stage two if it can upgrade to fix the bug >> uh I mean the thing is you know uh Ethereum governance process is like much more oified and much more you know complicated and we will do whatever it takes not to go through that process. So that's why we're working on multiproofs you know multi clients formal verification and this is like a huge effort that maybe the single rollup cannot do. Uh we would like them to have you know formal verification for example of the proof system. uh and I feel like this is something uh that all the NL1 like Ethereum can do uh can you know uh try to get the resources and have many different teams converge to to to secure this right uh for a single rollup this is complicated uh we would like to have

multiproofs but it's very difficult to for the rollup to coordinate between them for example to you know let's say zikasync uh to use the same proof system that polygon uses or the same proof system that another like scroll uses right it's very difficult for them to come together and agree on this but if we come together like on Ethereum for Ethereum blocks we do this for Ethereum uh it's much easier to coordinate and then we just expose this infrastructure to the world >> uh I'm curious on the on on pain points that you're seeing in L2 if you could fix one uh big pain point of the L2 landscape snap your fingers and it would be done from you know like clients finality settlement etc what would that pain point be and and uh you know how would you go about actually solving that

problem >> uh I feel like one of the main ones that you know the foundation should very much look into is uh finality like this is a super uh painful thing uh for a lot of projects like for example if you want to you know we always discuss the challenge period and how 7 days is very long time to to go back from L2 to one uh but a lot of people don't know that for example if you want to bridge to arbitum so from Ethereum to arbitum it takes 20 minutes right and it takes 20 minutes because it arbitum wants to wait for finality >> um if you want to bridge for Ethereum to base it takes three minutes that's much much less but this means that you're potentially vulnerable to reorgs and then having to handle reorgs uh on a rollup or like an application level it's

like way more complicated um uh compared to if you have like finality right or like very short finality like many other chains so I think this is one uh thing that um like Ethereum should look into >> okay cool >> also from our perspective we do a lot of metrics on autobe chains and every time we need to like handle reorgs is like such such pain. >> Um, >> so yeah, that's that's one of the things >> you guys just announced this token origin uh product on your site, this new tab. I need to pull it up. Is it is it on my site now?

>> Uh, token origin. >> No. >> Or did I miss it? >> No. So, no, no, no, it's not live. So, >> it's it's coming. >> It's coming. So, >> yeah, talk to us about this. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, we're doing uh we're expanding a little bit. So I think you know over the years we did a very good job uh trying to make people aware of the risk of L2s. I think uh you know back then after a few years ago if you're allowed to uh what it meant was like you're assem uh but now there are a lot of other things where people are not aware of the risks right so now we're expanding to bridges we want to do risk assessment of like across layer zero hyperl all these bridges uh people have no idea how bad some of these solutions are

>> um and then what we want to expand is also token risks >> so uh because you know you can say that for example on L2 is very good but if all the things that you can do on the L2 are not good. Yes. >> Uh you are still exposed to some of risk, right? So we want to go a little bit deeper into the stack and do risk assessment for other bridges uh for tokens as well. Uh so that uh you know exactly when you want to bridge a token uh if this token itself introduces some some additional risk, right? And there are some of them like even very big ones that are like >> incredibly terrible. >> Uh so it will be fun to to to expose those things. Yeah.

>> We got we just got a couple minutes here. I've got a gift for you. Um Robbie's got a gift for you. Uh so we have this we have this kind of uh saying return to fundamentals here up. Absolutely. >> And so we have this shirt for you here. And I'd like you to explain to to the camera what that means to you from L2B's perspective from Ethereum's perspective. What does uh return to fundamentals mean to you? >> So like the whole purpose of blockchain is to remove intermediaries, right? And if we dies all too we introduce new ones like you depend on the sequencer you depend on this you depend on you know this three out of four in hyperlquid oh that's not good that's not the purpose of blockchains right the fundamental is let's remove this areas let's get to uh to stage two and you know and let users

you know uh force transaction escape if they need to without relying on this pleasure to have you man thank you very much for inviting me >> absolute pleasure >> love to have you again beat man doing great work incredible neutral layer of Ethereum technical development. Guys, we are here live from Buenosades. It is a beautiful day, Wednesday, November 12th. We're going to clean up one or two things and we'll be back. Yeah, it's the 19th, not the 12th. Yeet is built for big moments, the most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire [music] point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now.

Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his Rio upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KCHI is the world's largest prediction [music] market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable defy platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. XYZ. Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to

holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. FRA is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. >> [music] >> Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire [music] point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now.

Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains [music] for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. Colshi is the world's [music] largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. yours private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

Havachi is fast [music] and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start [music] trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that [music] is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz.

Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit fra.com to learn more today. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire [music] point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to

[music] bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. [music] Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to call sheet.com to trade today. [music] Talk to AI like your lawyer or your

doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience. Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia [music] underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out?

Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinifi is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that [music] is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of

stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit fra.com to learn more today. [music] Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get

a [music] Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his Rio upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more.

Colshi is the world's [music] largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade [music] today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience. [music] Havachi is fast [music] and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz XYZ to start trading today.

Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. XYZ Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. FRA is building the next generation of

stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit fra.com to learn more [music] today. Ye is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get

[music] a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion dollars transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more.

Colshi is the world's largest prediction [music] market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private, and here today. Visit near.ai AI to have a fully private chat experience. Havachi is fast and private per [music] trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today.

Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz XYZ to never write a smart contract again.

Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit fra.com to learn more [music] today. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot

wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get [music] a treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. [music] Money shouldn't wait for Mondays.

Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest prediction [music] market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to callsheet.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

Havachi is [music] fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to [music] start trading today. >> Looking for yield that stands out? Infinifi gives you just that. Deposit stable coin. >> All right, guys. We're live. You're my son. Good to see you, man. My favorite return to fundamentals player. We got him a gift. She does not know what's coming yet. How you doing?

>> Good. Pretty good. I love the weather and also food here. >> Yeah, >> pretty good. >> But no Wi-Fi. >> Yeah, you're right. >> No Wi-Fi. Just meeting friends, you know, having chats and all. Yeah, it's everything is pretty good. I'm talking to a bunch of these uh EF people talking about their next year's plan and also on this new air stuff right X4 to >> um AO4 and also show like sort of the new stuff I've been building for some time is um you know on the payment side and also on this AO4 scan apparent a lot of people like it >> um yeah so yeah it's pretty interesting I I appreciate you bearing with us I saw

your tweet before the event started as a photo of you in Vitalic, but that was actually it was a quote of a larger post that you had written out. Yeah. >> Maybe you could talk to us about the inspiration for where that came from. You know, it felt like it came deep from the heart like you you're know you're a veteran builder here in Ethereum. What message were you trying to get across to the Ethereum community? >> Yeah. The thing is like you know right before because like from Singapore it was a 36 hour flight. Yeah. So um before the flight I was uh still writing some articles and building some products on the um this X4 AO4 stuff and then on the flight the same issue no Wi-Fi no the Wi-Fi not good and then and then I I

started to like sort of uh recall and also start to think about like u what are the missing parts and what are the as as you mentioned right what are the things I want I want to discuss with Vitali and also the friends and then um then I started to ramble a little bit. Um and when I start to tap and then this it becomes longer and longer. Um the so basically the story behind the scenes like literally as I mentioned in the tweet right since uh around the second half of last year a lot of my friends a lot of them they are OGs. Um they the the they already made a lot of money for the past few cycles either from the ICO craze or the diva summer. And uh what

really keep them like sort of staying in this space is really about they they share the same vision and also dream with this world computer and also this web three uh vision is basically to share or eat the market share of internet uh industry with like sort of all the technologies from blockchains but uh we all know right since around the end of last year the meme season and a lot of these um you know right the culture in crypto and blog blockchain completely changed. Um like previously we still have a lot of these um uh builders or dreamers still want to do something. I mean not that kind of uh casino related

>> and but later on people is just into all these kind of mansa like let's just uh do this memecoin and perpetual decks and also predition market. Actually we had a discussion like last year is like people feel like okay is it is it like a crypto or blockchain just about like casino >> it's kind of leverage trading stuff and that that's why a lot of these dreamers and builder they started to leave and then for the past few months um it became like even worse because like the liquidity um got like sort of um um removed a lot especially last month uh you saw the articles I wrote This is due to the biggest liquidation

event uh in the crypto space and a lot of uh liquidity and also money like basically also extracted from the space and then right now if you look at like sort of the market condition it's pretty dumb. >> I mean it's not like sort of from the price wise is dumb but also mentally I just feel like um >> I hear you. >> Yeah. builders and also VCs and even like s of retails everyone feel pretty dumb. Um that that that's why I just ramble a little bit like I just feel like if uh if possible we should still try to get more users, more builders into this space because like not everyone wants to build like sort of a casino related stuff, right?

>> Okay. So let's talk about what you guys are building with rumor app. It's still kind of in the beta phase but it's it's you know it's in line with some of the prediction market trend as well as the per trend. um talk to us about the inspiration for rumor app and just this general trend as well of kind of like uh building applications for consumers and why you're seeing that uh that this rumor app was what you guys wanted to build from the player side. >> Yeah. So um as as Andy mentioned like for the almost past one year uh because like on our side we have both the B2B business basically launching rollups and ABS on the other side we also have this uh AI team previously they are focusing on this decentraliz AI hosting stuff uh

and then later they pivot multiple times and right now working on this kind of as Andy mentioned this rumor trading stuff because we feel like uh for uh for crypto right for crypto people or even for non-crypto people they want to know what's happening in like sort of in the space if you look at the Twitter timelines right now it's fully packed with like sort of infoy AI boss and >> the sorry interrupt the infoy trend has kind of came and it feels like it came and gone a bit >> like uh like it's not as pressed for maybe those type of content just been taken away from my feed >> you know what I mean >> I know I know but the thing is like now they're new trend of the AI bots right

>> oh my god [laughter] generate content >> even better but it's so bad. >> Yes. Yes. So, so that's why like even for myself I I want to see okay what's that like sort of the what's the real stuff happening in crypto if I look at twist right all the timeline like basically 90% of the content useless so that's why we build this rumor app even from the name is rubar app but the thing is like we want to really have all these kind of transparency of the news and rumors so we leverage the AI sort of data platform we have to filter all the like sort of u source and information from Twitter, telegram and then present you like sort of what's the most

important like sort of informations um uh including this news and also rumors because in crypto right everyone wants to know okay what's happening as an insider >> so uh so that's a part like we try to have the AI system and to curate these rumors and and the news and beyond that we also allow or community member to submit this kind of information. Of course, beyond that, once you have some like sort of the information, right, you can buy the rumor, sell sell the news. >> Yes, >> you can do this kind of either via this DAX or even this kind of hyperl integration. You can you can just do that. But the sort of the rationale behind the scenes really like we need

much better transparency about like sort of rumors and also the information in the space. Um like right now like we have the tweeter but it it just like um too much like this kind of useless information. We need a place to really like sort of model kind of concentr concentrated and the future information for the retails and users. Yeah. >> What uh what are some rumors that you've heard after seeing the EF and some of the people uh around Buenosaris? >> Oh yeah. Um the the the thing is like I um so first is like I roughly know um more details about the road map for the next probably one or two years

especially on the L1 scaling like um I think that's something probably they haven't shared in the u public speech speech um but I I think this information anyway they will share so so one is like this six second finality I think probably next year we we can half >> um of course it's it's from me not from EF [laughter] >> and I think the other one is like uh they will double the gas limit >> so immediately I think next year we can see the throughput will be at least double um and beyond that also about their strategy on this uh AI stuff right I'm closely working with their D AI team mainly on this AO4 um I I can share that

um the they they know what they're doing either At the same time, um there's a lot of uh improvements um like we will place on this current AO4 specs >> and uh I I think it will be something like for the upcoming launch in December. >> Uh it will be focused on the registration >> and of course there's the other components like reputation validation. So that part um we have some drafts but at the same time I don't think it will be released immediately. But you guys just uh released this 8004 scan v2 is live now.

>> Maybe you could talk us through the product side of things. What does this enable for uh developers, for users and really just why are you so why do you have so much conviction in this uh effort you know? >> Yeah. So uh actually it's a continuation of the the the first question like this >> voting staff, right? >> Yeah. Uh I I just feel like right now like the space is moving so fast sentiment changing almost every day and I just feel like what we can do or at least what I can do is really try to find the best way to present what I know. So that's why I started to write a lot of these in-depth articles and beyond that I also build start to build products myself. So try to like make

sure like all everyone everyone has a chance to really understand what's going on. is from perspective and this AO4 scan. So because like some of the A4 team members are my close friends for years. So I just want to help them and um the plan for this >> the sky is basically a public good too. Um and um since since the AO4 is mainly for registration and also this um um this uh exploration for all different agents uh especially in the future probably for the interop of all the different agents for the A4 scan of course first thing we need to present all the detail information for every

agent as as detail as possible. The second thing like we will start to support I mean you can launch a fully uh AO4 compatible agents via the page it's a self custoing so you don't need to worry like no one storing your secrets the the next thing is like we'll start to uh uh like sort of onboard new features um to support this feedback and also this validation system. So you can directly uh sort of submit me the feedback for different agents and also there will be some validator to validate um some of the uh commitments from these uh agents but in general it's still early um I for myself I just try my best to make sure like everyone can really

understand in layman words okay what's a for at the same time I also want to make sure like everyone can have a try >> yes >> you don't just like okay there's a cool thing I want you to just click a bunch of buttons and then you can have a try. Uh regarding like sort of what's the end goal? The end goal is just I want to bring as many users to crypto as possible right now. Um it's it's no matter like either on the technical side but in general like just a normal user they want to have a try the we should represent a better way to attract this new user to the space otherwise right now I just feel like everyone is competing against the existing market shares.

>> Um that's not something we want to see for the next few years. Yeah >> man I uh I have a gift for you. >> Oh really? >> Yes. Um and I think you're going to love it. Um, I think you you're going to want to collaborate on it actually. >> Oh. >> Um, I saw your team. So, so we have a uh a return to fundamentals short for you like you. >> Oh, great. I love it. >> Look into the camera and explain what this means to you. I know that we [laughter] talked about it early on in the show. What does return to fundamentals mean to you? Why you as a builder, a longtime Ethereum OG, and a prophet of the crypto?

Uh yeah, it's a great gift because like we've been organizing events called ref fundamental, right? I mean um so for me I just feel like I've been this space for over a decade. I still hope we can have some like cryptonative applications with tons of millions and even billions of users. So that's why I always claim like we should return to fundamental and basically build some applications or protocols can onboard all the ordinary users to this space. Not just crypto, not just a traders but ordinary users to this space. So that's why like together with you guys, we always claim let's

return to fundamentals. Let's build some cool stuff and just on board sort of next billion users into space. Yeah. Thank you, man. [laughter] >> We're really doing it. Thank you, Y. >> Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. >> Joining us today, man. >> Thank you, man. >> Week and thank you for being a part of the show, for being a great partner. I hope you wear that shirt and keep embodying that in all of your work. >> Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Return to fundamentals, guys. It's Dev Connect. Bitcoins under 90K. We don't really care because we are going to return to fundamentals one day at a time. We're going to inspire the builders and continue to do so. Guys, we'll take a quick pause and be right up with our next guest. We're firing. We got the audio dialed. We're in a good

spot. This has been a wild Dev Connect so far, but we're getting it dialed. Thanks. Got is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, [music] if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your

coins. [music] Get a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more.

Colshi is the world's largest [music] prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. yours private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience. Havachi is fast and [music] private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today.

Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again.

Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit fra.com to learn more today. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your [music] coins.

From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. [music] Get a treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays.

Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers [music] and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest [music] prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to call sheet.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinifi is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready. >> Sam, Sam the man, >> let's go.

>> How's uh how's BA treating you? >> It's good. It's good. It's fine. Love the city. >> First time? >> It's my first time. Yeah. In South America. >> What's your like first impressions? Spanish culture, food, the language barrier. How you been doing? >> The language barrier is real. I've noticed zero Spanish. [laughter] It's not very common in Australia. So, it's it's fine though. The um the food's been great. People been super friendly. Yeah, safe, right? Too. I got a bunch of flack. I put out a tweet. I was like, "Yo, it's very safe here." And people were like, "Oh, it's very safe." I was like, "Yeah, it's very safe >> so far." Yeah. Yeah. I guess group conferences, we've had some rough ones. So, >> definitely knock on wood.

>> Yeah. Keep it tight. >> Yeah. >> Uh Sam, I'm curious uh why you guys decided to enshrine a purpose. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, the big news as of last week was uh um we acquired a team called PSX. They were >> huge move. >> Yeah. It was a big move. It was it was pretty um it was it's like a amb ambitious play and really just doubling down on on order books and perexes. >> Um but really it comes down to what we were setting out to build and that's we want to bring markets on chain. >> Um and we we were working with a bunch of teams that were looking to build perex on Rise and Rise is essentially the the best chain to run a fully onchain perex.

>> Um but the problem we had was just um kind of balancing the the needs of the chain and the needs of the decks. Um, so like for a high performance chain, you want to offer block space to users. Users want cheap abundant block space, but the actual the chain itself wants to charge congestion. >> And that just that that trade-off doesn't really work with perexes because you need to be running at like 10k TPS for instance, right? >> Um, so it just like when it came down to it, um, it just made total sense for us to enshrine this order book as like a native primitive. um and build that out as like moving our ourselves up the stack a little bit and and offering books as order books as our infrastructure product alongside the chain alongside the chain. So this move really um what the guys are building out

on on rise is this enshrined orderbook infrastructure layer and then the flagship sort of the initial instantiation of this orderbook infrastructure is rise x which will be our flagship decks. I've been thinking about this incentive divergence, this misalignment that seems to come up because as and and we can just take Ethereum for example, but it's really all rollups and L1s. As the network scales, you get more and more activity. That's how you charge fees. That's how the chain makes money. You're not incentivized to scale the throughput of the chain because then you're going to make less money. So the these things are fundamentally at odds. And so you've chosen to move the business model of Rise off of congestion and you've chosen to monetize the order book.

>> Totally. I think for this industry to scale, there's there's something that has to happen and that's for the gas to be completely abstracted. Like I I tweeted about this yesterday. If you're if you're not imagine if you're expected to pay microtransactions to AWS just so that you can use your bank account's mobile app. Like it's just it's just not not going to work. And we've known this for a long time, but I think uh this is really one of the first chains. I think we are the first chain to really tackle this head-on and kind of flip the business model. So that we don't see our business as block space as our offering. I see that as a >> like a facility to to facilitate what our real offering and that is economic activity on the chain and >> and order flow as well. So, so the whole

like block space commoditization thesis or thought like uh loop is you guys are perfectly kind of like showing the market here that that's what you believe in effectively. >> Totally. Yeah. So, rise we we can we can our test net we've hit 50k TPS. Um we're we've brought the transaction cost down to about as far as you can thanks to um alt DA and and just how cheap you can run this infrastructure now. >> Yeah. Um, and so we we we're at the point where it it's gradually getting towards the cost of running this infrastructure on AWS. And that's really how we need to look at it. It's just we want to be running this at cost or below cost subsidized by the activity elsewhere. Um, there's a reason why the fastest chains or the the uh applications with most activity actually

uh cover the cost of of block space for their users like Hyperlquid on with per stex. they're not charging and they're not they're not um getting super excited about their TPS. They're just building a product and that product needs 10k TPS. >> So that's really how we're looking at it. >> So when you guys are building this super high throughput rise x exchange um the the chain is meant to be able to manage that as well as a whole sleuth of other uh applications on on the chain. You know, I would in my in my previous days, I would write that uh general purpose or universal chains uh they've got this noisy neighbor problem, right? There's always this competition for block space.

But you're saying basically, okay, look, we're just going to you focus on making block space as as cheap as possible, if not gasless. I think you have like three millisecond block times or or you know, in that in that ballpark. And basically you're saying look we can have a hyperlquides 12 to 15k TPS application existing on this universal layer but still offer similar or even higher levels of TPS or adequate levels for other applications. Yes. >> How like talk to us about how that like that breakthrough came about. I know you guys are doing some interesting stuff with shreds too. What's kind of been that process?

>> Yeah. So to build a centralized exchange quality order book uh you need to have really really low latency and our target was essentially working on Binance which is the one 1 to 5 millcond range. So right now we're at about 3 milliseconds and then there's the you need to be able to spike transactions to 100k. So that's just table stakes to actually build a product that's that's viable. Less than that it's just not really viable. Um but how we're looking at the broader ecosystem is that the the order books we we see as like if you look at an ecosystem like a city we see the order books as like the vertical lea. It's like this economic hub that really thrives the rest of DeFi. So we've got some killer D5 primitives coming on board um teams building great tech and we see this is like a kind of like a

DeFi middleware and there's like the mullet thesis. It's been around for a while, >> but really where we're focusing, so we've got we've got the order books, we've got the um the um DeFi uh middleware, and then on top we've got the app layer. And I really see this as the applications that your grandma could use. That's that's who we're targeting. There's like no gas, easy on boarding. Um and these are the kind of teams that are innovating on modality. So the UX, the kind of experience, but then also uh the distribution. So if they've got a particular distribution channel they're tackling just like very focused rather than being like broad and tech focused but they're very focused on say distribution.

>> So yeah it's we're we're very much not a perexec we're I see ourselves as an orderbook um defy chain EVM based. Yeah. >> Could you tell us a bit more about the purps that you acquired? What what was the existing activity on there? How much traction did they have? Why did you choose to acquire them? >> Yeah so the BSX was the was the DEX. Um and so they were offchain uh order book so offchain matching onchain settlement on base. Cool. >> Um the the team uh the three of the founders all based in the US two of which are in in New York City Arvy and Henry.

>> Um these guys are hungry. They absolutely love order books. Um they they love Perfs and they've been through the trenches. So they've been building this for for two years. Um and why we we excited to work with them was because they saw what what we also saw and that that is an opportunity to bring those books that matching engine from offchain to fully onchain where it's actually coexisting with with the rest of DeFi. Um, and this gets particularly interesting that if if you look at the landscape of spot in crypto today, we've had mature AMMs for or books, oh, sorry, not auto books, sorry, um, automated market makers for for five years now.

>> And yet and and they they're very like it's really great tech, but it's purpose-built for the constraint environment. >> Um, and what we see in the market is that these AMMs still haven't been able to eclipse the crypto market. like they're about 20% of spot volume in crypto, let alone trying to tackle the broader trady market. And I I really I'm very much of the opinion, our thesis that we're we're betting on is that order books are going to be that that different that factor that changes where um where we can actually eclipse and take a like onchain trading can take a market share, a majority market share of crypto in to in total and then move on to the rest of bringing finance on chain. I I just got a sense that this is this is really really huge which sounds

kind of amorphous and but I I'll explain why because you know on your shirt there you say big and based right [laughter] which is pretty I that's big based and bullish I love it I love it and so big and based refers to the blocks of rise uh giggas gas high throughput all these things that's essentially table stakes at this moment um what we're also seeing happen in parallel on the Ethereum ecosystem is based and native. >> So as we start to bring more and more rollups into the based ecosystem and the native ecosystem, we start to reach a network effect and a shelling point where all of these assets coales around one another. And this is not necessarily just an order book that is comprised of

Rise native assets. This is an order book that's comprised of all of Ethereum's native assets. I think that's a huge unlock that maybe if we really comprehend the billions and billions and billions of dollars and eventually trillions of dollars that are on Ethereum, we're no we're not gatekeeping those assets. We're we're opening up the entire breadth of Ethereum assets and potentially Rise and BSX is the order book that is home to all of those assets.

>> Yeah, totally. And I'll just clarify so BSX it's uh we're not just like moving BSX to Rise. It's they've rebuilt it fully on chain in smart contracts and it's called riseex. >> Ryz so so so the offchain uh uh matching is now happening on chain. You can only do that if you're the onchain club >> fully on chain. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah there's been a fair bit of R&D that's going into this. It's not live yet but but hopefully soon. But to to speak to your point about where this what this looks like for Ethereum having base sequencing really I I won't touch on the details base sequencing but it allows for like a a lot more composability with the assets on Ethereum. I really see L L2s as a massive opportunity to uh to focus on a very particular vertical and

obsess over something and and for rise that's that's order books but like other chain other L2s will focus on RWAS and stables like CEX for instance >> um that's where Ethereum is really going to shine that you you won't have you won't have these sparse L1's focus on different verticals Ethereum just like has it all. It feels like we're bringing DeFi back to Ethereum L1, but it's happening in the form of these native rollers. >> It feels like this this it feels like the the trend of this week is like, okay guys, we really pushed out on the L2 road map, but like we really got to come back home, right? Like it feels like that is like a larger trend here.

>> And now there's this new competitive landscape, this new race to win in some of these primitives that are reuniting, re reigniting on L1. >> Yeah, totally. I and I think a a thriving DeFi ecosystem on like DeFi ecosystem on the L1 is so beneficial for any L2. So I I think going based is just the obvious choice at this rate. >> Yeah. All right. So let's zoom out of rise here. Let's let's have a kind of a bigger look at Ethereum at the kind of broader DeFi landscape here. Uh we spent uh a week in New York City two weeks ago at SmartCon. And so we're finding our brand is kind of coming into this middle space here where we're really getting

more institutional and our our network has grown there a ton and really understanding what's happening there with some some of the larger players. And then obviously we're here at Dev Connect and it's just very tech. It it was like finance over there. I don't think we talked about a single technology topic >> finance and regulatory. >> It was finance finance finance and this is just like tech tech. So Sam from from your perspective um how do we bring these worlds together and what is Rise's strategy and just a bit of context we feel like uh based on on that week that the table of the crypto adoption for the institutions is being set like you know there's this year-long period here or maybe two years where you know you've got to have a strategy for that uh

market or you're going to be left behind by those who do you know not to put the pressure on you here but like rise does seem seem very DeFi oriented, very you know kind of like uh in that world. How do you guys go and expand institutionally? Maybe Rise X is that what is the what is your strategy and what is your broad uh holistic view of how these worlds are going to keep kind of intersecting? >> Totally. So how how I I look at this is if if you're looking at uh some of the reports coming out of that that side of the world like City Bank reported um that they're expecting 4 trillion in in stable coin assets and also four more than four trillion in tokenization by 2030. Um so once you have stable coins

and you have tokenization on chain, what are you going to do? You're you're going to uh you're going to look for trading instruments around that. So that's really what we're looking at. So, we're watching those two markets very closely, particularly tokenization. Um, and that's the market we want to be involved in. Um, we want to be using uh stable coins as collateral and tokenizations to to to trade. And I think uh from a trad um standpoint, they're looking at where they want to build liquidity on chain in in this like completely open and accessible ledger. It's going to be on what's familiar and that famili familiarity is an order book. And the other thing that I I I see is particularly interesting is this like layered approach. So if you look at um trading in trad today you've got like broker um clearing house exchange each

of them manage their risk independently and there's just uh a lot of inefficiency and you you can't it also means you can't do high leverage as a result but what we can offer is essentially flattening that stack so it's all in in one transparent ledger with with the the risk logic just completely um open source and and accessible and then the brokers can really just like plug into this and they can build out the liquidity. it's they can um charge uh fees on top of their distribution. So they're charging for that flow as well. And I really think that's going to be advantageous for some of these parties to actually get involved. So how we're looking at this is like we can't just go there. That's we went and knocked on Wall Street like hey come check out Rise, come deploy some assets. It's not going to happen.

Um so our strategy is to really build this out onchain and and and and crypto is our test bed to do that. Build up the liquidity and the volume. Um, and then like step up and really look at this this broker uh strategy where we bring on the brokers to trade on on Riseze and use Rise. It's like people won't know they're using Rise. It's just infrastructure. >> Is tokenized equities a big part of the strategy? >> Totally. Y we've it's a long way to get there. Um, and it's it's there's a lot of challenges like it took equity has been an obvious use case for a long time, but we just haven't seen the volumes. So, there's clearly like a fundamental problem that's going on that hasn't been solved. Um, and there's so many people working on this where I'm

not going to be uh naive and think that we can solve this when we've got so much else on our plate. So, it's really like a we're in kind of a wait and see and and make sure we get involved at the right time. >> Ladies and gentlemen, Sam Batinelli from Rise. The the question, the myth, I think we have a gift for him. Um, [snorts] >> return to fundamentals, Sam. >> That's right. >> We're getting back to it. It's always been the fundamentals. >> That's right. >> That's [laughter] for you, >> Sam. I'd like you to uh explain to us briefly what return to fundamentals means to you from the rise perspective as as well as just personally.

>> I think uh return to fundamentals is for rise in particular, it's looking at revenue. Like what we we have principles that we follow when we're making decisions and one of them is follow the revenue. >> Do we have a revenue meta shirt, anyone? It's coming. It's coming. [laughter] >> I need that. Honestly, that's what it's about. It's about building sustainable business models and finding PMF. That's that's what we should be doing. Um, no longer is the time where you can live on hype alone. You really need to be generating particularly with them. If we do have a a longer bare market ahead of us, it's going to be the the projects that have revenue to sustain it. And like we saw this in the past seven days, I think Hyperlquid is the only token that's that's hasn't dropped more than 5% in the past few. It is holding up in

the top >> incredibly well. Yes. So >> Sam, thanks for your time, man. >> Brilliant. Good to see you, fellas. Thank you so much. Yeah. >> Cheers, man. See, >> guys, return to fundamentals is so is so on. I mean, come on. Like, h like you can't even argue about it. I mean, come on. Is it is it not? >> It It certainly is. We're really doing it. We're really getting back to fundamentals. >> We're at the tokenization tower of uh Buenosadis. We're here. We are live. Rob, >> we are >> We got our setup. >> Yeah. Let's We'll let We'll let him go. Thank you so much, man. We'll see you next time. Thanks, man.

>> Cheers. >> Rob, how you feeling, man? >> I feel great. I uh I had an empanada on one of our commercial breaks. >> There you go. >> We got this. >> The empanadas here are incredible. >> I I genuinely think this this is the country with the best empanadas. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. That might be a bold bold South American take, but that is my >> You boys are going to be pissed. [laughter] >> Guys, I mean, while we're waiting for Luca Prosperia, our next guest >> from M0, the stable coin protocol powering the stable coin super cycle. I'd like to just have a rant briefly about uh this idea of of privacy as it relates to the return to fundamentals.

So guys, you heard from Zach, the CEO of Aztec, and we spoke deeply about why he is so so bullish on privacy and just to make this quick, privacy is a human right in the internet. It it has been taken from us by the mega corpse and we truly believe that data and this bringing data ownership back to the user and being able to monetize that data is a very important concept. It feels like the previous administration did not allow for these types of businesses to succeed on chain. That is a problem. We are now in a new era. We we literally just had Hester Pierce, the commissioner of the SEC on our show. We're going to do drop that very soon guys. She is

pushing forward for positive innovation, positive regulation within the space and we are going to firmly firmly see that come. So guys, I don't know if you if you if you own Zcash or Monero or other kind of private crypto assets, but that is is that is where a lot of the attention here is at Devconnect. Um, and I just had to had to just explain that that is something that we should be pushing for and that there are these non-negotiable parts of our industry that frankly we've kind of lost and I and I do worry about the institutional adoption, how we kind of lose some of that where they come on and they want to do things their way. But guys, we must stay strong and hold our ethos. We've got Luca Prosper from MZ coming up next.

We're going to take a quick commercial break and be right back for you guys. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. [music] Not your keys, not your coins. from the team that pioneered cold storage. Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire [music] point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure at treasure.io.

Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay.Link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. Call sheet is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to call sheet.com to trade today.

Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience. Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading [music] today. Looking for yield that stands out?

Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinifi is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. [music] Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. >> [music] [music]

>> All righty, guys. We have stabled up episode number 11. We've got Luca Prosperity here live from Buenosirus. Guys, we're just going to we're going to have him get set up, sit down, and be right back in just a sec. Uh, quick standby and we'll get Luca in the show. Alrighty, Luca, welcome to the show.

Thanks for joining us. Uh, we had a hell of a week so far. Welcome to Buenosadis. >> Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me. >> Is it your first time? >> No, I have been here before, but last time we met was like on the other side of the world. >> It was It was all the way on the other side of the ocean. Yeah. And it was a fun chat, too. Uh, we met in Singapore. Uh, we had a great podcast. If you guys haven't seen it, go check it out. Uh it's live on all the platforms and you really helped to helped us understand how MZ is underpinning the entire stable coin super cycle. Uh this show is called Stabled Up. Uh and so I think uh anyone who's been stabled up in the last few weeks has done quite well in the market

because it's been >> they've saved their ass. >> They've saved their ass. They've been stabled up. Um and so you're helping companies stable up uh at MZ. The most recent partnership is uh Moonpay and you guys have done a partnership with Moonay uh to help enable enterprise stable coins. Tell us a little bit about enterprise stable coins as a category. We we talk a lot about uh stable coins that are used for payments and and real fungeible money. Uh this these are typically genius compliance stable coins. Then you have yield bearing stable coins. Enterprise stable coins feels like it's a brand new category of stable coins. Generally sup stable coins super cycle. Uh why are enterprise stable coins particularly important?

>> Yeah, I I I think stable coins we we discussed this last time. In my opinion, stables are just piece of infrastructure >> like is the next way we will interact with money in digital form. So some stable coins are used to move money around. Other other forms of stable are just simply powering the dollar virtual accounts in an application. So they exist within an application. I think this is going to be the most uh the fastest growth uh category in it. So we will move around money will exist in places we don't know what is powering it. So like money when it exists within enterprise uh platforms is that's probably the category that you're referring to. Um but like ultimately this is a platform that will help

building so many different financial use cases like everything we're building now within a bank we we can decompose and build with and and the stable coin the stable coins are like the the the platform that connects them all on the ME I mean we've known the Pompei guys uh for a while I think everybody knows Mi is like one of the most active and successful companies in the history of crypto uh and the team has been expanding their their reach uh they they obviously are one of the most famous I don't know offramp provider that the way people started to interact with crypto most recently they they have expanded to actually uh play more in the issuance stable condition space you might have known like they have done a set of acquisitions in that space they got the

licenses required so they are definitely one of the best and most like cryptonative players that wants to expand their reach and help people to interact with crypto and simplify their lives And we decided we decided a while back to partner where we could have we could have been we would have been M0 would have been the onchain infrastructure rail on top that we built. >> Yeah. >> So the this partnership was announced as most of the times when you announce the stuff there is still a lot of things to sort out behind the scenes. So now we're working like 247 to make sure that our our products and what we're offering to the market is live in the next like couple of weeks and we have a a bunch of partners potentially lined up that will will will issue on the MP M0 stack in

the same way MetaMask has issued on the bridge M0 stack for example. Is it a strategic decision to go to the wallets the the MetaMask that's your flagship partner you helped launch the MetaMask stable coin now you're at Moonay Moonay again payment provider you know is is this kind of like more going into this direction you're looking at distribution partners wallets uh fiat on-ramps offramps these sorts of things and you're going more and more in this direction is that is that intentionally the strategy and if so why >> yeah it's I think it's intentional up to a certain point I think Mi plays two things here. I think they obviously have connection with the distribution but they also now are trying to do other things but in my opinion like when you have we you you build a piece of

infrastructure like M0 we want we need three things to make it work uh to make it work for everyone uh because we don't believe in like vertically segmented stacks. I think we should create really open architecture networks. We want to we want to work with the builders which is the most important thing. people that build cool stuff on top of our rails like the teams that build new financial use cases for crypto and non-crypto. So that's our main client. Let's say our main market. On the other side, we want to connect with financial institutions that can can custoy stuff because the stable the stable coins need to be really stable. uh and then also the connectivity with the distribution in the case I think MP was started as a as I don't know off like distribution machine and platform but

now they want to become much more and I think so they can play both but in the case it's not they're not the only ones like we made the example of the friends of bridge that we also partner with I mean bridge can can help platforms and corporates bootstrap their own stable coin but the bridge is part of the stripe family and stripe obviously has huge distribution with vendors and merchants and users So we need a bit of all the elements. We're trying to build the most transparent rails for people to do cool stuff without being captured by one one vendor. >> So is Stripe exploring uh their own stable coin?

>> No, they're not. But Bridge is helping Bridge is helping others launch their own stable coins right on their and with some level of integration with with with Stripe. I don't know if Stripe is thinking about their own stable. >> I wasn't sure if you knew anything that we didn't. >> I don't know. I don't know. I [laughter] don't know. Luka, we have a uh a consistent mental model on this specific segment of the show of Rollup TV where we discuss there's really two types of stable coins and I'm curious to hear if you agree with this. There's there's these genius compliant backed very clearly publicly onetoone uh stable coins uh that are almost like hard hard pegged to a dollar, right? It's basically it's almost impossible to have a DPEG uh situation because they're very clearly backed and then you've got these

kind of yield bearing uh more esoteric exotic forms uh you know think about like the USD of the world uh and these types which are uh natively yield bearing and provide a lot more kind of like functionality in DeFi but also come with certain risks and we're kind of seeing these two worlds really permeate as the two kind of like major classes of stable coins. Do you agree that that is the is the current right way of thinking about it or if you know if so why? If not you know what are we what are we kind of uh leaving out here? >> Yeah know I I actually don't agree. Uh what I mean is slightly disagree let's say that I don't think these are two alternative models. I think these are two alternative layers.

>> What I mean is like nobody not even the no not even the the builders would actually call USD a stable coin >> and they wouldn't call USDA as as stable coin. I think everybody knows clearly that these are other things other products. So in my opinion I I look at things in in layers. I think in my opinion stable coins are platform a platform the main platform like super risk-f free. Uh the only yield they can provide is the risk-free yield. They're super liquid is like this kind of um fabric of finance that currently is played by bank deposits like you have bank deposits going around. I think this is the main layer. This is what M0 is risk- free as risk-f free as liquid as programmable comes and then people can

build products on top. So some people build payment products where there is no additional risk. It's just like another functionality. Some people build investment products and so I I think in st in like in different layers of the stack. So we are trying to build the best possible base layer for others to build product on top. Some of those products will not add additional risk because they will be they will do other things and others will add additional risk and additional returns. But I think it's very important to have this distinction because you know uh return is proportional to risk course. So nobody should ever market any asset that is yielding any any basis point above the risk-free rate by definition is not risk- free.

>> And so you should think people should think about how they use and how they embed certain assets. also thinking about this right there. There there is the right product to do the right thing. So I kind of agree with you that these are two different categories. I just I wouldn't put them one uh next to the other but just one on top of the other. >> Yeah. Um and one of the things that you can layer on top of the stable coin base layer is FX foreign exchange. Um and so one of the missions of MZ as I understand it is to bring together a fragmented stablecoin landscape. We have several US dollar denominated stable coins, but we also are starting to see >> like dozens.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Dozens if not, you know, soon soon to be hundreds, right? >> And so eventually we'll also start to see the emergence of more geographically based stable coins that are not US dollar denominated but denominated in other fiat currencies. How how much are you looking at FX as one of the layers on top? Is M0 thinking at all about some of this functionality or generally how are you looking at the clearing of different denominations of stable coins? >> Yeah, I mean a lot of stuff that you're uh that you're that you're mentioning that's super relevant. I think in general like starting from the beginning I think stable coins are maturing like at the beginning stable coins were considered like a settlement asset for crypto trading that they became a payment asset for international payments

and then now it's some it is like an a proxy of a deposit business but it is ultimately a platform you can build stuff on top so uh this platform the most important thing is interoperability and shared liquidity like I always say like you know how many dollars I think we discussed this last time like how many dollars exist Today people say $1. There are like hundreds. Yeah. >> Because every bank the factor has a different form factor of a dollar but they are all interoperable and liquid behind the scenes. >> So what we're trying to do here is at M0 is first of all solve interop with technology not only liquidity because solving with liquidity is very inefficient. So you don't need necessarily clearing houses within the dollar denomination. Then we move to other currencies. Now we didn't need

other local currency stable coins when stable coins were like international payment products of course. But when stables become a platform to build financial services then we have financial services in any low currency denomination. So we will have many more of this then obviously the FX problem will come but I'm very I'm actually uh I'm bearish short term uh onchain FX uh because I think that I used to be I used to work in Wall Street for quite a while >> uh in investment banking and you know the FX market are the most liquid markets in the world >> are like it's super they're super super efficient in specific corridors. It's going to take a while, right? I think we're gonna get there, but be first we need to bring the stuff on on chain that we need to bring build new primitives

and then we will start seeing these interactions on chain. But I think we're a few we a few years away. I think it seems the most obvious problem to solve >> but in my opinion from a capital perspective is actually the most difficult problem to solve. >> Uh FX [clears throat] because there is so much capital deployed in traditional >> rails. You know, we are obviously in Argentina, uh, where this country has been plagued by an inflationary regime that's gotten out of hand. I was here in 2023. It was one US dollar to 400 pesos was the rate and it's currently 1 to,400 and that was >> 3xed since >> Yeah, quite literally. And and I came in January of 2023, I believe. And then I also came back in April and it went from 300 to 400. So there was this insane

rise uh of the dollar comparatively or this insane devaluation. Uh when it comes to uh bringing these new kind of emergent markets on chain, you know, stable coins seem to be the the most obvious easy thing to explain to people to get this kind of store of value with the US dollar. Um what what are we missing to onboard Turkey, Syria, Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela and and the likes into a fully US dollar denominated uh economy using a neo bank app or iPhone or or or a mobile phone app? What what needs to happen to actually see that go through? Because it seems like the logical next step for this entire kind of web 3 ecosystem.

>> It's that we have conflicting interests, right? Right. I mean like uh the users, retail users, they want to preserve their market power, >> right? >> But the the governments and economies, they don't like to see this such a uh um like a an escape of capital from their environment. Yes. >> Because also also in good faith, right? Because this is just worsening the problem is making the local currency very very weak and uh it's like it's is worsening the economic problem. So some of the concerns about uh about um the capital escapes and it's uh are I mean are legitimate because this is like I

mean it's it is very very concerning. Uh the reason why the the governments put capital controls is that they want to stop they want to stop the bleeding. Uh but I but on the other side on the other side um it is a credible threat because now for for governments that are not very good with their fiscal policy they know they need they know they need to step up their games but it's so easy for people to move money up >> and u so we will see we will see a lot of pressure on uh on smaller economies to sort out their finances because now there is an option that is ready to go that you can you can access dollars or bitcoins or digital assets in a way that you couldn't do uh uh like 10 years ago or five years ago. Then I I guess like a

logical follow-up here is what what is the what is the path that you actually see like uh playing out here let's say over the next fiveish years if we have these conflicting forces which obviously makes sense um you know is this going to be a peaceful kind of uh transition or or or or how does this because I feel like it's happening regardless right because if you're a citizen of one of these markets you're going to want US dollars I mean whether your government wants you to do it or not you're going to be taking care of your family your what's important to you? How do you kind of see this transition happening? Um whether it be with policy makers, with governments, with uh entrepreneurs, what do you kind of see unfolding over the next couple years?

>> Yeah, I think it's not I mean couple of years is a short time, but I think it's uh it's happening as you're saying like you know when when something is possible is it is going to happen. I don't think it's going to be gentle because because there are a lot like a lot of forces and ultimately but ultimately money wins. What I mean is like even for example even in the US or Europe right when stable coins emerged I mean we don't we we almost already forgot but you know to to build in crypto like a year ago in the US was very complicated. I don't know how to go. It was very complicated.

And we were in this situation and I I don't care about politics at all, but we were in this situation where we had the big banks that are lobbying for the Democrats and tech was lobbying for the Republicans, which is kind of weird >> because like stable coins also in the US, they are threatening the banking system because if you're a bank, you have very cheap deposits and you can lend this deposits out. Like nobody wants to give you money now because why do I need to give money to to a bank if I can put money in a stable coin that's giving me my other things. So even even within an economy there is going to be a lot of a lot of lobbying a lot of pressure because people are defending their business and the same is going to happen in like other markets but at the

end unfortunately or fortunately uh capitalism always prevails like even in even like there are now like this uh we are not small startup businesses anymore. We can we can have our voice heard in the US in Europe. Uh Europe started saying we want to be very very conservative in stable coin. So you cannot build a stable coin de facto you can build a stable coin on top of banks >> which are very antiquated and now they're complaining because the capital is flying out and it's going into dollar stable coins. Sorry but not sorry like so so I think that now they will probably change their mind. So I think it's going to be it's going to be a combination. Uh it's going to it's not going to be gentle. Uh but let's see. I don't know. I don't know exactly how

it's going to happen, but most probably we will have in certain in certain jurisdictions more crypto friendly uh governments like has happened here at least on the surface. It's happened obviously in the US and and certain certain local equilibria status quo will will change >> and ultimately but I think in I'm very bullish long long term. I'm I'm cautious short term because these dislocations they create problems right some people that don't have the the mindset the technology to move out and just take care of their families they will suffer right because they are left behind >> right >> and that could happen on a government scale >> and governments could uh feel behind behind the curve like Europe is right now as to your point now they're seeing the capital flight out out of their

currencies and they're seeing it into stable coins US dollar denominated stable coins I think the point that you made uh ve at the very end is is one of the most important ones which is that this could accelerate the crypto adoption in these countries once they realize that they're losing capital uh to the US dollar through stable coins. You know they can choose to resist they can continue to resist but it is inevitable to your point and I think this will only once they realize this they will accept stable coins but they'll do it in their own fiat currency. They'll denominate their stable coins so that you don't have this is the same reason America is accelerating stable coin adoption. It's because it's not fiat that is going into some other currency. They're saying fiat go into their same US dollar denominated currency. You don't want capital flight

out of your denomination. Doesn't matter the form factor to your point. You just want it to stay in your denomination. And so once other countries realize that they're losing capital flight to the US dollar, they'll end up just creating the more advanced form factor of their own denomination. >> Yeah. And then a couple of things to add is like yes for sure we live in a more global environment so some weak weaker currencies will struggle because now we're super interconnected compared to like 50 years ago. >> Uh but the other thing is and then you know we are very open builders and we always like we try not to engage with with regulators too much because typically it's a waste of time. M uh but we are really I mean I and I I I mention I'll mention this also in the podcast

regulators should reach out and have constructive conversations because this is going to happen. So unless they need to be reactive because in five years they need to defend themselves and somebody's going to vote them out. It's actually better to be constructive with technology builders because this stuff cannot be stopped. It's so funny like Revolute for example. Revolute is one of the most successful fintexs in in the world ever. I think Revolute is based in the UK. I think they move they just moved out of the UK. Probably the headquarters is now in Dubai or but it's been they started in the UK. They are the probably the largest one of the largest banks in terms of UK users.

Revolute doesn't have a UK banking license yet. >> Wow. >> They're not giving it to them. They don't have a banking license. They're using partner banks in the UK. They have banking license in Europe because they because the UK is worried that Revolute as a as as a as a NEO bank. I believe they didn't have a banking license until recently. I think they still don't because they're they are afraid of that. But I mean better products win. >> Yeah. >> So their customers are going there. So what are these guys doing? >> Um I hope I really we really hope the regulator is going to be not crazy uh but constructive and just engaging with smart founders and builders that are building cool stuff that can help their economy >> and our our world is so interconnected now. This is this happens in UK and like

you said they moved out of the UK. they weren't getting what the the UK wasn't providing them the sort of regulatory clarity that they were looking for and so now they're in Dubai that you know uh uh based on what you said uh how many companies are we seeing in the states move out of Delaware go to Texas or move out of California and go to Texas um this is happening because we have a more connected world where we can pick up we can move our companies if we're not seeing the type of structure that we're looking for on a regulatory or a government landscape. Um >> just one thing to add there guys. I it's uh it's the point of some folks will will take the uh entrepreneurial uh jump to do something that is borderline uh you know uh debatably legal in their

jurisdiction on the behalf of everyone else. Those folks are few and far between. And also the folks who will uh you know if their government is telling them that they cannot hold stable coins or that that they cannot you know take money from their bank account put it onto an exchange and and and kind of operate in this like stealthy you know quasi illegal fashion those folks are also few and far between. And so when you have this kind of oversight from this like restrictive oversight from governments or from uh you know you know leaders it it it really creates that further divide. And I just wanted to kind of like double click on that point because I feel like that is the that is the concern of the stable coin adoption cycles that there's going to be this

this kind of bifurcation of people that are able to kind of escape in in ways and who are willing to take that risk and those who don't. Um and that split is going to be uh a unique development to watch. >> Yeah. And also uh you can you cannot going back to what we said before you cannot ignore reality because currently technology gives us the ability to have a global connected system. >> So it's going to work like even even in even in uh if people cannot use stable coin they will use bitcoin >> or they will use eth and there there are so many so many ways that are not necessarily good for for the users. I think we should always have we should always be constructive and um but I I

feel it's happening. I mean like comp like compared to a couple years ago there's no no comparison. >> Yeah, certainly is. Uh and the reason why is uh what's on this shirt, we're returning to fundamentals and that's what's happening. Stable coins are one of the fundamental things uh not ethically but well like to >> yeah gift to you. Uh guys, >> absolutely. Return of fundamentals, payments, stable coins are one of the most fundamental things that are happening on chain. Remittances and uh MZ is helping to power this new economy. >> Luka, what does return to fundamentals mean to you in a short uh in a short uh exert >> for me is uh spending time doing the difficult stuff.

>> Yeah, >> that makes a difference. >> Yeah. >> So, just get away from the fluff and just spending time solving the difficult problems. >> Yeah. Luca Prospero, thanks for your time man. >> Thanks so much for coming, guys. >> Good to see you again. >> Pleasure to have you. >> Cheers, >> guys. Amazing Staple Up episode number 11. We'll be right back with our next guest from Uniswap. We are live from Buenosides. It's a beautiful day. We We haven't seen the sun all day, but that's okay. We got, you know, some fake light in here. >> Bright lights anyway. >> Feeling good. All right, guys. >> We'll see you in a minute. Yet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new [music] wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire [music] point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. [music] Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now.

Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. [music] Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KCHI is the world's largest [music] prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, [music] private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

[music] Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. [music] Go to habachi.xy XYZ to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinifi gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. XYZ.

Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. FRA is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, [music] if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion dollar transferred. Go to

relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest [music] prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today.

>> Boom. We are back live at the rollup dungeon. [laughter] >> We found the only place with Wi-Fi in Buenosare. 7, welcome. >> I'm so excited to be here with you guys. >> We're so excited that you're here. We got rugged by the main venue, but that's okay. [laughter] >> We found refuge. >> Kevin, the executive director of the Uniswap Foundation, uh the flagship DEX in the crypto economy, the OG. Robbie and I were are uh >> uh recipients of the Uniswap airdrop in 2020. >> Thank you very much. >> You guys are OG. >> Very OG. Glad glad to have you on. How you how you liking BA? How how's the vibes?

>> Great. Um the vibe is awesome. I think uh anyone tuning in, you should stop by the Uniswap house. It's pretty close to the venue. I think it's kind of around here. It's great vibes, great food. Um, I'm having a great time talking to builders, talking to delegates, everyone. >> Amazing. I mean, you guys had the Uniswap Cup, which I think >> was so fun. >> Takes the cake for the best event of the week, I must say. Unfortunately, we were just jetlagged and just But >> the day after. >> Yeah. How was it? >> It was It was a blast. I actually I um our amazing marketing and events teams did a lot of the work. So walking in I was also blown away by the production quality and everyone who was there. It was a blast though. We had a it was on

like the front page of Poly Market too. There was a like $3 million in volume which for a you know corporate soccer tournament [laughter] kind of mind-blowing. Um but it was it was a lot of fun. It was and it was fun fun. Not even like not like work like actual. >> And who who won? >> Uh ZK ZK ZK Sing. >> And who they play? >> Uh Across. >> I think some some uh local actual soccer players might have like slipped onto each of those. >> I saw I was like I saw a video and I was like there's no way that this is a [laughter] crypto person. Like the guy hit that like like that rainbow ball where it like flipped over on it and then he scored.

>> Did you see there was the no strip guy? the no strip guy on a cross or you guys maybe weren't watching that closely, but but there were like a few people who you could be like they're not like us like like that is like >> one of the 10day contracts. >> They do not sit in a dungeon coding all [laughter] day like but but it was it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. >> Well, we are glad to see these kind of like sporting initiatives come out like more kind of unique events. Uh they provide a different level of like of kind of like uh team building, >> just a different kind a different kind of energy. Like the energy of the event was just incredible. Like there was great food, great drinks, but it was it was nice to like like literally touch

grass. Forced to touch grass in a group and just focus on something, you know, outside of industry talk for a while. I think we could all use some of that every once in a while. >> Definitely. >> Yeah. >> Should we get into the industry? [laughter] >> That being said, >> all right, guys. We've like touched. >> It's great to have you Deon. [laughter] Fantastic conversation and uh uh decentralized governance. Okay, let's do it. >> Let's start. So decentralized governance um is certainly it is a long long road that we've been on here.

>> Yes. >> Yeah, that's one way to say it. >> It's been a journey. Um if you guys have you know participated in any onchain governance on snapshot or been on any discourse forums it it is actually where the like where you can actually interact with like the top you know creators and builders they spend more time there than on Twitter I think you know the actual dialogue >> well well I think I mean what's what's crazy about a lot of dupins is a lot of the uh a lot of conversation happens in the forum but it also does happen on Twitter like like a lot like they they're kind of interspersed a lot of the discussion and debate that I mean we're we're I'm here to talk about unification the unification proposal that just came out um and there is a ton of discussion and commentary on that

happening in the forum but also on Twitter and I think like you get a lot of real time if if there you can say a lot about decentralized governance but you get a lot of real time feedback that and from everyone >> it also happens here we we've had people come on here and and please I mean tell us about you know your um uh if you were to aggregate sort of what you're seeing on the research forum what you're seeing on Twitter Twitter give us the download on >> unification just like the story too because like and I'll lay the context. It's unis swap shareholders get all the value. Unis swap token holders get nothing. It's a three-year conversation on Twitter. You guys have been kind of like the scapegoat of the issue of equity and token holders and we're not here to, you know, put you guys down,

but that is kind of like the rhetoric. And so I think the market was ready for this and you know there's been a lot of takes. So maybe give us a bit of of the lore and why this was the right time. >> Yeah, that's a really good prompt. I I'll give uh my best attempt at a very short TLDDR of of the history here, which a lot of folks here and and you guys certainly know. So going back, I mean Hayden uh deployed the first version of Uniswap back in 2017 2018. So it's Uniswap has been around for a long time, eight years, right? going back um uh a few years now, you know, you had um and maybe let's go back like fourish years or so, you had like the launch of the community, you know, the token launch around like 2020 or so that

happened to coincide approximately with um a a new kind of like SEC regime which was not the friendliest to to crypto to put it to put it lightly. And the long story short there is a lot of um a lot of things which we outside council the industry you know the best lawyers in the space largely see and believe you know back then and today to be compliant and not only compliant but you know uh uh better in many ways than like tradi oh yeah better in in many ways uh to you know like how trady offers services to to um you know traders swappers etc like financial services users um were um not looked very kindly upon by by the regime and and it kind of pushed many um many

in in the industry including you know Hayden's talked about this openly particularly recently folks like um Uniswap Labs to really you know step away from doing anything with the protocol to grow the protocol and you know in that um with that kind of context me and my co-founder Ken Ken um Ing who had been at the Ethereum foundation started a grants program I was at labs met Ken saw an opportunity to put more resources behind um behind uh the grants program, turn it into a bigger foundation. You know, flash forward a few years, we've seen um a lot of things shift, the regulatory environment shift. Recently, the foundation introduced a proposal to create a legal entity wrapper, the DUNA,

around the DAO, which is kind of a a new we can talk about that if you guys are interested. We don't have to. It's it was kind of key a key piece here. And um we were able to do two things in the unification proposal or my summary is two things. One is turn protocol fees on which has you know as you guys have said is has been long awaited. Um we're so excited. I think the foundation you know we've felt the pain as much as others and in this long journey of um going through all the obstacles that that we've we've um come up against based on the environment whatever it may be. very excited to do that as one and two um aligning major contributors to the protocol. So the majority of the foundation team um is going to join UNIS swap labs with uh you know majority of

grant making activities moving and community growth ecosystem development governance efforts moving to labs as well. So that um the folks working on that will be under one roof working on one road roadmap. Um it will simplify things be more efficient effective >> this foundation labs uh bifurcation because of the environment a result of that environment. >> Yeah. It was just like a it was just >> it was it yeah >> unnecessarily complicated >> and and it's not just again we're not going to single out everyone >> yeah everyone who launched the token >> had to separate out this >> I mean it got to be the point where I remember I was doing a podcast with the monad kind of CTO but he's for category labs and I was telling him about the token he's like I don't know anything

about the token >> like how are how are you the guy who's worked four years on this project and like you you have essentially don't have control over this because of this kind of divide Yeah, it's there are like a lot of things to say about it. Like one way I've talked to kind of my team and others about it is we're we're moving from a world in which you know we're we're optimizing for like how do we stay alive? Like how do we avoid like paying insane fines? How do we avoid you know like enforcement actions to a world in which we can say hey like you know we have always believed all these things to to be compliant. like how do we actually um you know do what makes the most sense for for the protocol for our users like which is so exciting like like it feels

like a burden has been lifted up and I think it's to to your point I think it will look differently for every protocol and every ecosystem they all have different needs but I saw uh Jen who had previously led the optimism foundation I think tweeted last night or this morning she's moving to run labs and and optimism is kind it sounds like they they tweeted last night. They're they're kind of undergoing a similar similar spirit of the of the shift that we're undergoing, which which is so exciting. I mean, I think everyone's in the space because we are so passionate about the technology and what it can unleash. And I think the fact that we can now now all organize ourselves in a way that will be most effective in unleashing a lot of that the power of these protocols is

huge. >> Yeah. >> And so you're no longer uh forced to think about surviving day-to-day. Now you can think about thriving. >> Yeah. surviving in different ways maybe now. Well, [laughter] we can think about, you know, like the competition and just like how do we how do we um provide the best value to where you like the the ways it makes sense to think about surviving, you know? Yeah. >> Hayden has been a little feisty about the competition. I'm loving this new mark. This like all right, like you're going to come for us, we're going to come for you type of thing. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so let's get back to the proposal. So, let's get into some of the specifics. You know, that was a bit of the lore. Maybe take us from where we just left off into the proposal. Yeah, sure. So, um the proposal, so proposal

is two things, you know, turning on protocol fees, aligning major contributors. There are, you know, eight major, you know, 10 polls in the proposal. I won't talk through all all of them. I don't think I can like name all eight of them off the top of my head anyway, but um yeah, really we you know um over the past few months given the the landscape of you know a a um friendlier you know more optimistic environment in the US plus the fact that um we there's more I guess like clarity and structure around governance. we were actually able to think about okay like what if we could go back to day one like what is the um model for longevity, sustainability, growth and success that we would create for unis swap like like

what model could we put in place to create a true kind of like self-reinforcing flywheel that um again like aligns all of the people who care most about the protocol succeeding and incentivizes them to help the protocol succeed. So, so really I think the the TLDDR and the proposal is, you know, if UniS swap's contributors are winning, Uniswap is winning. If Unis swap is winning, UniS swap's contributors are winning. Like like that is like the long story short of the the model that um we hope to have created. And you know, it may iterate over time. We're really excited to learn those things along with the rest of the community, but that is the true spirit of what we've tried to put in place.

>> One uh there there's a lot here in this proposal. Um, a couple things on this that I I'd like to ask you about. Um, one thing to clarify here is that this is not a buyback mechanism. This is a burn mechanism. >> Burn. Yes. >> Maybe a spicy take for me is that isn't burning money just lighting money on fire like what what is the value back to the to the token holders for the burn mechanism? >> Yeah, it's a good question. So, so taking a a step back, you know, what is like actually happening here? If you look at, you know, swapping on unis swap, if and when the proposal passes, a portion of the fee paid by every swapper will go to this contract uh token jar and essentially like when certain conditions are met, any searcher, any

kind of like third-party, you know, person searching for arbitrage opportunities on chain can um collect those fees if they burn UNI. It's basically like like a me it's so it's a programmatic automated mechanism for burning uni. And you can kind of think about that as a um >> a continuous like demand function for uni like like that's kind of like like like the the underlying you know like if you would be silly if you saw hey if I um burn $100 worth of uni I can claim like $100 and one penny um worth of of these fees. Like that's just kind of like a free arbitrage opportunity on chain. would be silly to not buy the $100 worth of uni and and burn it. And so so you can kind of think of it as

like a continuous demand for >> and those fees are a basket of several denominations of different currencies. >> Exactly. So so the one of the beauty like behind this mechanism is it it simplifies a lot of things that would potentially become very very complex and complicated with with um how uh the protocol actually actually works. So um you take you know unis swap has I don't like hundreds or like definitely tens of thousands maybe even hundreds of thousands of tokens and so um the mechanism which has been uh put in place and would be deployed and turned on with passage of the proposal um kind of simplifies simplifies things a bit um and you know will allow any searcher like a pretty like sophisticated actor

typically to claim those fees in exchange for burning right >> yeah burn yeah >> it it's effect the solver is the one burning. But it's effectively the same the same end result as if um unis swap was uh using all the fees the basket of fees that I collect from all these tens of thousands of different currencies using that to uh buy and burn. It's just you skip the buy part. You just directly burn. >> Yeah, that's so that Yeah, that's not happening. It's all just like happening programmatically on onchain like search searchers, solvers, whatever you want to call it are the ones doing it. >> Yeah. So I saw this thing on Twitter.

Well, actually yeah. Okay, we'll start here. I've got a more like philosophical thing to bring up, but uh there was some concern about uh the nature of V4 hooks >> allowing people to effectively uh create pools which would not be subject to these uh you know these fees, thus this burn, thus this kind of uh mechanism. But I then then I kind of further read that well effectively that you know why you know basically someone's not going to be able to execute this consistently because of of liquidity and just general kind of structure. Maybe you could explain why V4 and this hoax does not kind of like cause issues with this

mechanism. >> Yeah. Okay. Very good question and very like deeply researched question. That's kind of like a you know like a niche topic. I do like my like deep CT lore like thread reading like >> Yeah. >> So, so for folks who aren't as deep into the, you know, Twitter lore on like V4 design. So, V4 is like the newest version of Uniswap. And the the long story short there is it allows for like arbitrary logic to be inserted into pools. It turns developers from like integrators who have to build on top into first class citizens who um when you're creating a pool now you say hey I want asset A asset B fee and code that does something really special and um one of the things that um uh I think you

know we're calling it custom accounting pools no pools I think custom accounting is the the term we've decided upon they allow developers to kind of throw out you know even um even like the the basic uh curve the the basic like pricing curve which is used by all other pools on on unis swap and that creates maximal flexibility around like the kind of logic you can introduce. Um, a byproduct of that is it also like throws out the, you know, automatic um, uh, uh, buy in or automatic um, uh, having to to adopt the the protocol fee. And I think we've, um, you know, if you talk to like Dan Robinson, Hayden, they they thought a lot about that design trade-off. And at the end of the day, like the benefit

that you get from the added network effect of allowing maximal flexibility into the singleton contract um or or the thinking went like the benefit of that added network effect would outweigh any potential kind of you know that would be taken from protocol fees. But um I'll I'll say a few other things. How my team, the foundation has approached that as we've worked with teams like um Oiler Swap or um or other folks who are building hooks is you know if if we if we uh the the way we've approached it so far is if we work with your team if there's you know like a grant um we require as part of the grant that you know like a protocol fee is kind of inserted into some of those custom accounting hooks. And so we're we're exploring, you know, the right the right

um trade-offs from more of like a strategic perspective on um on how to think about that fee over time while still allowing um you know the maximization of uh of you know value creation and growth and experimentation on the protocol. >> I appreciate that answer. I think another kind of similar uh threaded question is so right now there's the LP fee for swaps on swap the.3% for the LPS in the 50/50 pools at least in the V2 and the V3. Yeah. >> Um what kind of LP behavioral changes do you expect you know post this uh proposal should it pass? Um right this fee structure kind of changes the the kind of game theory of the system

almost. How do you expect LPS kind of being like the the lifeblood of your business? How do you expect them to uh change their behavior or how do you plan to accommodate them to to make sure that you know they stay around? >> Yeah, really good question. I think um one of the things that we're very excited about as it relates to unification is it will also allow foundation but also labs to prioritize LPS as like one of the core users of of the protocol in a way that wasn't really po that that wasn't really possible for a number of reasons over over the last few years. So, I know one of the things that Labs has already done is create a team focused on LP experience and they've begun to spend a lot more time thinking about their LP page, things

like that. And I think um while you know to your point turning on protocol fees, um the way it works is it it looks at the LP fee and it actually takes a percentage of the LP fee and that will go that would go to token burn rather than the LP. One of the things which we were really excited to include in this proposal like the proposal is not just you know turning on fees or making these structural changes. It also entailed a lot of like core development design like research and and R&D go going into it. One of the key idea uh uh you know uh concepts and and designs introduced is um protocol fee discount auctions um PFDAS um uh which the white paper is included there and one of the things

that um it contemplates is um you know it's it's a design of a you know an upgrade essentially to the fee system in the future that would um reduce the the negative impact on LPS while also potentially increasing um the token burn by internalizing me in a way that wasn't possible and >> they're able to like bid for these protocol level fee reductions. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Way to think about it. So LPS get this additional power in this new system almost. So, so not quite that like like basically so one of the the key really like cool insights that the team had when they were thinking about the ability to turn on protocol fees is like you can actually um there are all these searchers out there right who are

looking for arbitrage opportunities at the differences between centralized exchanges and dexes and if you if you like allow searchers to bid on the right to turn off the protocol fee for some set period of time whether it's a minute whether it's like some period of blocks like whatever it may um you actually like create a distinct advantage for that searcher um that they're like willing to pay for because then they they are able to capture hypothetically they're able to capture more arbitrage opportunities than any other searcher and unis swap you know has you know historically if you look at the data like so much of its order flow is made up of these mev opportunities um and um so so yeah does that answer the

the question kind of it So, so then by this time period uh you know being created for the arbitrageers to effectively have uh reduced fees how does that then translate to the LPS? >> Um so the LPS Oh yeah. So um so the benefit there is you they're seeing um due to the fact that there there are like more price differential like the price differences between centralized exchanges and indexes. That's where a lot of like impermanent loss and like LP losses kind of like come from. And if you make it cheaper for searchers to basically like update those prices and keep them up to date, that that translates to basic like that helps.

That's one of the ways. Yeah. The LPS. Yeah. Exactly. >> Yeah. >> You really do. >> LB will Yeah, exactly. LBs they'll also see, you know, potentially like more flow like Yeah, I think we're excited to see like when when it goes live, we'll actually be able to begin to like look at the data to see how that looks. But >> very cool. Um, anything to say about unit chain? Um, switching gears a little bit, but uh, it's, you know, almost hundred billion dollars in annualized volume, uh, which I think is I mean, it's certainly significant, but people don't really give it the credit that it's due, I think.

>> Yeah. Um, Uni Chain is great. One one of the things in unification which we're excited about is upon the passage of the proposal um the we're sending you know the majority of sequence through revenue would be sent to the burn mechanism which that was like when uni chain went live that was you know I think a a fair question that that the community had is you know like where where is that you know value for for us here and that is something we're really excited to introduce on a a macro perspective perspective though I think like the the alignment between labs and foundation.

We're already you know having a lot of discussions with teams thinking about how to really like continue to double down on all of the like chain level improvements you can make on um on an L2 to benefit swapping to benefit and and swapping is such a you know not only a function but like a core primitive for so many other DeFi apps that are built on top of it. I think we've only begun to see the the kinds of um changes that that can be made to to not only benefit unis swap but like every other hook that leverages unis swap every other like defi primitive which leverages unis swap which I think um I'm excited to see uni chain.

>> Yeah, >> Devon, we have a uh we have a gift for you. I think we have a uh a a nice shirt. We'll find a medium one. Um and and we have something that is near and dear to the Roll-Up's core brand, which is uh return to fundamentals. Uh we we firmly believe in the core ideals of this space. I'll take it. >> Um and so we we got you this shirt, return to fundamentals. >> Um and we we would like to hear about what that means to you from your personal perspective with your journey through through the space.

>> Okay. What does return to fundamentals mean to me? I um like to remember why I got into crypto in the first place. The kind of wonder and whimsy I I felt when someone first explained to me like, hey, you know, Facebook, Instagram, these company, these apps you use every day, they own your data. Imagine if you could, you know, use an internet in which you owned everything that you created on the internet. and the the shift in my mental model really blew my mind and led me down this road where now I'm I'm working on unis swap which is such a core primitive that powers the rest of the space and whenever I feel like I I get distracted by you know some of the like

>> bummer stuff you can see on Twitter like [laughter] I yeah all of the the noise I like to remind myself of of that and that's why we're we're all here at the end of the day >> thanks for your time >> thank you so much this was so fun >> it go unification Guys, go go go vote. Go vote. Vote your uni. >> Vote vote your uni. >> All right, guys. We'll be right back with our next guest. We are live here from Buenosirus. It is day one of of the journey. See you guys soon. Ye is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not [music] your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you [music] are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now.

Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. Colshi is the world's largest prediction [music] market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to callshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor [music] or your therapist. yours private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

[music] Havachi is fast and private per [music] trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. >> [music] >> Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz.

Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit fra.com to learn more today. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever [music] have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game.

Not your keys, not [music] your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get [music] a treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now.

Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. Khi is the world's [music] largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to call sheet.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

Havachi is [music] fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz [music] to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinifi is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz.

Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today. Yeet is built for big moments, the most fun [music] you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game.

All right, guys. Welcome back. Rollup TV live from Buenosades Dev Connect. It is day one of the Rollup TV marathon. We've got Hanoen Lee of Codeex, one of the upcoming stable coin chains, the the native >> the man himself >> for all stable coins. I assume you flew in from uh Korea preps. >> Uh despite the haircut, [laughter] >> yo, so that's how you know Frank. >> I People look at my hair, they go, Korea. >> No, not Korea. Not >> yo, that's that's crazy. >> New York, >> man. Well, shout out to Frank for helping to make this happen.

>> Shout out to Frank. >> He's a good guy. >> And to the Dragonfly team. >> Yes. >> Oh, yeah. Congrats. >> Thank you, Anukica. >> How are you enjoying Benosis? >> I've had three steaks already. >> Okay. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. >> I, you know, love steak. I don't know if I want a fourth steak. >> Yeah, that might be a bit much. >> I kind of want food dispersion. You know, I have like some diversity. >> Did you get an empanada? >> Have you tried any empanadas yet? >> That is a great idea. That's what I should do next. >> That'll mix it up. >> I mean, that'll get you fired. >> Our diet has consisted of pretty much purely Malbeck wine, uh, Argentinian steaks, and empanadas >> and zins and [laughter] espressos.

Espressos for sure, >> man. So, Codeex, man, stable coins, DeFi, this expansion. Um, where where do we start? I mean, we're in Argentina, right? Why don't we start here with just the understanding of where we are in the world, in the global economy? Um, you know, stable coins being more of a lifeboat for emerging markets than, you know, people in New York, people in the states. Um, what has driven you to create Codeex? What is your what was your kind of lore and story into building this? Uh, and why do you feel like this is what you wanted to choose to do with your life's work?

>> Yeah, I remember being handed a envelope full of cash as a child because I was going to US for school. I thought to myself like how can this possibly be the best way to do this? I'm going to get robbed at Boston Logan. And so that's an early memory of mine. I also grew up around um, you know, parents that grew up in communist China where you know, property was maybe expropriated temporarily, right? And and so I've always had this deep uh resonance with this mission of helping people create the best possible way to transmit the fruits of their labor across space across space and time.

>> Um was my earlier spiel not perfecting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hanging out. So we're just hanging out. Um and so so that's why this mission is particularly interesting to me. >> Okay. Cool. Yeah. And so, you know, you've you've chosen to go and build Codex as this platform for, you know, Rob, what do you say to power all of the stable coin >> coin in a Codex.xyz. It's the native chain >> for all stable coins. >> For all stable coins. >> Okay. So, we have some Tether chains and we've got like some circle chains, some USDC chains. Codeex is for all stable coins. That's right.

>> So, you're like the DEI chain of stable chains. [laughter] >> Um, I'm not sure under the current political climate we like that framing. I I think um we are equal opportunity. >> Understood. >> Um you know maybe we would call the tether chains affirmative action chain. >> Okay. >> You know affirmative action for tether over there. Okay. >> Um we're very much uh you know we want the market to sort it out itself. I think >> if you want to bet on what the stable coin landscape looks like 10 years from now. I think it's perhaps not very wise to assume that it's looks like the sort of incumbent position today. In particular, we think non-dollar stable coins will become more and more prominent and more and more useful.

>> And so our thesis is very much about making the best possible neutral infrastructure. >> We don't run a PSP. We're not a fintech. Yeah. >> We're not an issuer. We're not going to be competing against you. >> So if you want a neutral place to build, we're the best place. >> So, you know, I don't know if you guys played Call of Duty back in the day, but there was a special ops uh uh uh game format, >> right? Um you you guys are describing or you know you've been described as Ethereum stablecoin spec ops team. >> Yeah. >> What does this mean in the context of of Ethereum's kind of stable coin landscape?

>> Yeah. I mean so I grew up in the Ethereum community, right? I was very lucky to be pretty early at optimism and at the time you know six or seven of us living in a hacker house in LA with Vitalic. I'd come downstairs and Vitalic is on the phone with Elon. Ashen Kutcher's in the kitchen. You know it's sort of that type of surreal environment. Um, and so I've always felt a deep affinity of Ethereum. I think, um, it's incredibly important for us to extend the dominance of Ethereum and stable coins beyond where it is today and into the future. I think you see a lot of these other players come in in an effort to supplant Ethereum and we're very much Ethereum's answer to that.

>> But aren't you building your own L1? >> L2. L2. >> Okay. L2. Sorry. And [laughter] >> and so after >> that would be that would be a problem. I was going to be like, dude, you can't just come up here and sit down and say this stuff if you're building your own L1. >> Okay, good. >> After all this time, I I mean, people are building all L1's. They're they're building stable chains, but you guys chose to build an L2. What even you know, Ethereum has certainly gone through it trials and tribulations. What is it that continues to draw you in? Why did you build an L2 instead of building something like an L1? >> I think they're rational reasons, their ideological reasons, and their emotional ones. Let's start rational um versus the brute fact that most stable coins are on Ethereum today. I think that's something

that's not talked about very much. Second is that neutrality actually does matter. I know it sounds like this crazy religious word that Ethereum people chant in a corner while holding hands, but it does actually mean something, right? What it means is that you know you won't be competed against. You know this layer is not going to be adversarial to you. If you're addant, right, and uh you know you're thinking about what chain to deploy on, >> what does that calculus look like? Do you want to go to your board and say, "Hey, like listen, the Stripe guys is way smarter than us, way better than us. We're just gonna go do that." Some of these things are not quite tenable on a BD basis, right? And so I think um Ethereum has a ton of advantages that are perhaps underappreciated.

>> Okay. And so what what uh technical architecture did you guys decide on for the L2? I mean, we've had big and based rollups come in here. We've been talking a lot about native rollups. We've had stage one, we've had stage zero, stage two, you know, all of these things. >> Uh, and there's such an expressive design space for you to choose from. Uh, where exactly did you guys uh fit in that in that map? >> Incredibly expressive. And um I I um I want to make sure that we don't catch a very terrible disease. >> That disease is research fetish. >> Yeah, we've had >> Wow. We should coin that.

>> Yeah. >> Research fetish. >> Fetish. >> Fetish. >> Fetish. You know, the technical DDH, PhD founders that are only doing things for the research and never shipping us. >> Super cool. Super cool. Great for recruiting engineers. Fantastic for recruiting engineers. I get nerdy reading some of this stuff. It's fantastic. But then I think the question you have to ask yourself is, does the customer [ __ ] care? >> And if the customer does not [ __ ] care, you probably shouldn't be focused on it. >> Yeah. And so there's this legacy of like chains distinguishing themselves or making themselves legitimate by doing this kind of R&D fetish.

>> R&D for R&D's sake, right? Does it even matter? If you squeeze out more TPS, who gives a [ __ ] It makes me legitimate. >> Yeah. >> If it can turn a new net use case, then it does. But very, very few founders are able to turn a research fetish into something pragmatic. >> That's right. Because you're trying to back into it, right? you've got this research agenda and then you're trying to back use cases into it >> which is ass backwards. >> And so you know what we're focused on is what we actually see as the key bottleneck today. And it's almost so obvious as uh it's incredibly obvious what that bottleneck is today. What that bottleneck is today is if you want to move $10 million of local fiat into stable coins is still too expensive.

>> Simple as that. that barrier between fiat and staples is too difficult >> and it makes too many of these use cases not make sense. >> And so there's all this story and hype about stable coins today, but the reality is it only makes sense for the most extreme edge cases, the most crazy situations. And our mission is to extend that well beyond the edge cases into the mainstream. >> Yeah. >> And we're not going to get there by catching research fetish. >> Okay. So let's put this a bit in some of your terms for context. uh quote, "We intend to leaprog Tron. Our priority today is to make the boundary between fiat and crypto disappear. To do this, we are willing to work through all the painful banking, licensing, and engineering issues no other chain team is focused on." So, I think the question

here is what does the work that you are doing with banks look like? How does Codeex plan to make its mark on this institutional realm of DeFi? >> Yeah. So, if you think about your classic chain team, what is it? It's um a bunch of very brilliant people. um seated in a circle and thinking about well you know what would be great is if we squeezed out XYZ technical property out of this substrate and what does nobody want to do nobody wants to touch the fiat because one three years ago it'd be ideological right like fiat why the hell would you touch the fiat like we're crypto people >> second like it's incredibly inelegant right I could send a ERC20 from here to

you know China incredibly easily if I have to deal with all this fiat [ __ ] It takes forever. It's super painful. But that's actually what needs to happen, right? But nobody wants to do it and nobody's staffed to do it. >> And so we are staffing up to do it. And so what does that look like on a practical basis? Uh it looks like institutional relationships. It looks like BD connections. It looks like uh relationships with decision makers at financial institutions. Um I take it you have those.

>> We do. We do. We're very lucky to have some of those. Um, and you know, it means doing it the right way. It means doing the licensing. It means grinding out a lot of the gunk, honestly. >> Yeah. >> Which, you know, is why I have I many folks on my team have eye bags and and are working very hard on this. >> I I think um crucially it's the focus on eliminating the friction of moving between fiat and stables is crucial. Why is that crucial? Because um if you want a mainstream use case to emerge, meaning like your average company wants to do this stuff, that's the real friction. Like is it is it gas cost? If I'm moving $10 million, do I care if it's 10 cents or 5 cents? Maybe.

Is it that I need a dedicated payments lane? Is that really the problem? Is there so many stable coin transactions we can't handle the gas? So, you know, I think again we want to focus on where the real problems are. And so this fiat, the stable coin swap product you guys are calling Avenue if I'm not mistaken. >> That That's right. Uh we are renaming it Codex FX. >> Codex FX. >> Kudos to your research team. That's great, >> dude. I find it hard to take him seriously. Um so with this Codex FX product, um we actually just had Luca from M0 on and Rob, you actually asked a question about that the FX uh market and kind of what what he thinks and how M0 is going to play in that. So he was a

little bearish. We're going to see but coins path of resistance it will come flooding

in the question then becomes like can you actually create the least path of resistance and there you know we have some ideas um >> I think classically the problem with non- US dollar stable coins because you're right dollar stable coins stable coins so far have been a dollar phenomenon, >> right? >> The problem is who the hell wants to use this stuff, right? Let's say I have a um I who do I not offend? Uh let's say I have a ringit Malaysian ringit stable coin. Why the hell would anybody want to use this thing, >> right? >> Doesn't hold value particularly well. >> Even Malaysians wouldn't necessarily want to use that stable.

>> I've got fiat, right? So why why what what the hell does this get me, right? And I have to take all this what's this weird wallet thing, right? even if I want to buy crypto, I got to swap into a dollar stable coin because all the markets are not made in dollars. >> And so it just doesn't make sense. Now, uh where we think it does make sense is if we can shift the FX transactions on chain >> and that's beginning to happen. And uh you know, we've got some exciting things cooking there. >> Any helpful on that? >> Maybe not specifically there, but like I I'll give sort of other color here. Um, we're starting to see transa like classically what is the problem in FX?

Classically, the problem in FX is all the local countries want to disintermediate the dollar because you're giving so much power to the United States government if all your transactions go through the dollar. >> You're a Malaysian sitting in Malaysia, you want sing dollar, you typically actually go from ringit to US dollar to then sing dollar, >> which is insane, right? You got these two countries right next to each other. The United States is oceans away and yet you're going through the dollar. And that's because of the death of liquidity, >> right? >> Um and so the dream of these governments has always been what if I could just do local swaps directly and it has never happened.

>> What [clears throat] we are beginning to see in the wild >> is that people are doing these transactions directly on chain >> without the dollar. >> Yeah. >> Which is a radical reshaping of how commerce works globally. Now, the flows are quite small still, >> but it it it's it's in in like in the current sense, in the traditional sense, it's always gone through the dollar is what you're saying. And so, you're breaking that you're basically taking that intermediary out, if you will. >> Uh, right. >> In a sense. Yeah. >> Right. That that's that's happening. It's unclear to what degree it will continue to grow, right? But I think it's quite interesting to see sort of commerce get reshaped.

>> So, we're a bit tight on time here. Um, just one last thing. I just want to put in put into perspective the the idea to respond to the previous uh regional denominations of stable coins which is that we're you know attacking this massive industry of FX but we're not unbundling it all at once. We're taking the particular pairs the particular denominations that currently are not very liquid on the traditional FX markets. We're choosing to bring those pairs over first and we're gonna incrementally unbundle the FX mark and bring it onchain very incrementally one at a time.

>> Yeah. Um yeah, >> I think that's right. I think that's right. And I think um look, the US has been having all the fun recently about so think about it from Besson's point of view. You're taking what is classically been an offshore dollar system out of London >> and you're moving it onshore through stable coins. So now you have much more purview through it. You have transparency through it. You no longer are backstopping this sort of foreign system. It's beautiful. >> Yeah. >> But I think there uh there are other games to play as well. >> Last thing for you. What's the what's the Q4 Q1 Q2 uh trajectory look like for Codeex? What are you guys cooking?

>> Yeah. So we're we're cooking this onchain FX product that we're really excited about. Um and uh you know we're ramping up uh various other community initiatives. So be an opportunity for the community to kind of partake in some of the profits generated from the system which we're very excited about. >> Very cool. Thank you for your time man. >> Thanks for having me. >> Keep cooking man. >> Thanks for diet coke. >> Cheers man. >> Cheers >> guys. We are running day one marathon here. Uh >> that was a extreme that was the most uh vibrant conversation so far. Shout out to Henoin. Thank you man. Much love. Um and guys we have Reika next from Boundless. Um let's check the markets.

I'm scared. [laughter] >> Don't do that. >> I'm so scared. >> Uh >> I'm scared. >> Hen is the man. Uh >> yeah, those guys are bullish. Oh my gosh. What's going on out there, guys? Who's selling? All right, guys. Take a guess. Which coin is green on the day? Everything else is red, Zcash. And what's Hyperlid doing? It is of course down 3% while the rest of the market is down more. Uh it looks rough out there guys, but zoom out. Um listen to my inst in institutional adoption rant if you want. That is kind of like the uh that is the main frame of thought that I think that we should take uh now.

So guys, we've got Reika here from Balmas uh the director of marketing and uh yeah, we're going to vibe out and talk ZK and uh and more. Welcome Reika. >> What's going on? >> Hello. >> Hello everybody. >> You're on TV. >> We got T. We got Reika >> Giant Women or Tiny Teacup. [laughter] >> I can tell that you're enjoying Bonosis. >> I am. >> I feel like this this city's, you know, it's got it's going to have a little place in your heart. I know you travel a lot, but this place has I I don't know.

I like this place. >> Can we see that berry? >> Oh, yeah. I brought a berry. >> Yeah, we see that >> to represent. >> Wow. >> Can you zoom in? >> Yeah. Let >> It's the cutest. It's the cutest thing. >> This is your camera right here. >> Okay. >> Wow. Look at that berry. [laughter] Absolutely amazing. Truly, >> truly the mind behind the berries, ladies and gentlemen. Break [laughter] up. >> I've made up berries. They didn't exist before. >> Let's make sure we [laughter] >> So, how you settling in here? How's the week been? >> It's been nice. >> Good.

>> I wish they actually sold mate in coffee shops. >> It would be so much easier to try. >> Yeah, they local goodies. Not really. >> So, did I see there was like a a serenation ceremony last night? Oh, there was a a ceremony you were at of all these candles. It was a hype partners event with Octint or something. What happened there? >> It was a candle concert. If you've I don't believe you've never got the ads on Instagram for candle concert. >> I have seen them. Yeah. >> Right. They do very interesting targeting because everyone's seen them. So, there was a Kendall Lake concert sponsored by Hype and often often often often often often often and we were invited and David Phelps was serenating my friend Cheryl.

>> Ah, right. making it more interesting because the songs were also very pop songs. >> We all knew all the world all the words. Um so it was a perfect serenade opportunity. I was just listening on the second floor like this. >> Every single candle is I think battery driven or powered. So I was the whole time I was thinking someone is walking around for like an hour before this and turns on every single one of them. >> That's a crazy job. >> So they weren't actually fired. >> No. >> Okay. Okay. >> Hazard. It's a really old like wooden building and they're hard to see.

>> I know. But they look real. The vibe was real. >> So you like the candle light marketing? >> Um >> Yeah, that was good. >> What other like what do you think is sticking out these days in terms >> or like this week? >> This week like Uniswap events. Yeah, Uniswap Cup was good. >> I think that's been good. What other good marketing have you seen around here? >> That was great. Yeah. Well, did you guys see how much Holy Market >> 3 million? Goodness. Yeah, definitely on it. Yeah. $3 million volume. Yeah. Yeah. >> Three $3.5 million in volume to bet on which crypto project. And by the way, guys, it's been rigged.

>> It rigged. This is lowkey, but I'm going to spread the tea. >> Behind the scenes, the teams have been recruiting local people who are actually playing in leagues here. Wow. >> Into their teams. >> No way. >> And I can't call names because it's literally every single team. >> No, but I saw the video of these players and they were like, they were insane. And I was like, there's no way anybody in crypto is doing that. as like >> yes team members played >> of course >> rep represent but I know majority of some of the teams have been kind of semi-professional players >> I think it's so crazy that poly market like prediction markets are getting >> function >> yeah that much that much volume >> makes sense >> and we're >> did you guys not bet >> no I I arrived the day after of unis

swap cup >> yeah I didn't so I didn't go but it looked awesome >> I just like a few weeks ago uh Brian Armstrong from Coinbase >> read off all the words on the earnings call and was like, "All right, congrats everyone who bought these things. We're I just >> said all the words in the mention market." >> He just did it on purpose. >> Just did it on purpose. He just said all [laughter] the words. And so these things are to >> That's hilarious. >> rigged or uh influ What is I don't know what the right word is to describe these things, but they're >> I mean crypto does a lot of market manipulation. So this is nothing new.

>> It is totally market manipulation. [laughter] Yeah, that is >> just a different kind. >> Yeah. All right, guys. >> Just okay. Now, >> let's talk ZK here. Come on. >> Let's talk ZK. >> We [laughter] It's been It's been position. Give you guys a break. Little giggles. >> Thank you. [laughter] It's been some time since we've had Mash I think on the show in >> and Jacob tooist and Jacob. Catch us up post post TGE. You guys are crushing it. Tons of cycles being ran. Uh new new provers coming online. What's been the last couple months at Boundless? It's been a wild ride. We basically started any public presence in January for Boundless. Obviously, it's much easier because we did start with being risk zero as the entity and growing out of that. But we did a mainet beta earlier

in July with 20 plus partners proving for the first time ever in history full Ethereum consensus that we still do every six seconds. All history of Ethereum as an open source code is right there for everyone to use. And then we did do an 18 times overs subscribed community sale in August. >> There you go. >> Thank you. And then we did do a main [laughter] mainet launch which means our market is fully live um balance is not a chain. It's mostly a marketplace at its core and it's uh universal infrastructure connecting multiple ecosystems uh and blockchains with applications and on the other side physical infrastructure of GPUs and provers. Um and so with obviously with mainet we had a TG as well which has

been really exciting. It is different than most chains because for a marketplace like Uber think of all the other marketplaces you know in the world. That's when the real work and the adoption actually starts and the growth and the everything. So it's it's a much different launch than for a layer one or a layer two that we're mostly used to and see every day and the token actually has a job. It's actually utility tokens which is very interesting. Um the our token ZKC actually serves a function in our incentive mechanism of proof of verifiable work which is an innovation we made up. It's an evolution from proof of work of Bitcoin. Basically we can measure the complexity in the exact amount of work that the provers are doing to create these proofs for the

apps and chains that are requesting them and get paid accordingly automatically. and ZKC serves a large function of that as well as being staked by the provers to be able to get these jobs. So, it's a much different setup. It's been really interesting to get the feedback of um we haven't done a good enough job, I think, in the building up to a T RTG of communicating this function to the very large public that's used to the normal governance token >> uh setup. So we'll do much more of that in the future because we have a couple years to do that before it actually becomes an issue. Uh but it's been really interesting. And then in the last month and a half since then we've been on boarding our partners to mainet. A

lot of them are also launching their own mainet. So it's a little bit of a slower transition from both parties of >> making sure that everything's live because a lot of our partners are also in test net phase or mainet beta phase. Um but yeah, some of them are live and and are requesting, but the biggest source of our proofs and where we've been doing most of the of the proof generation has been the the full consensus proofs of Ethereum and also base. >> Yeah. >> Which is a big innovation, but >> it's been a big year. >> Yeah.

>> Yeah. >> I am tired. Thank you. Thank [laughter] you very much. >> So there's kind of uh two things going on in Dev Connect. One, obviously privacy. the whole entire crypto landscape is like reinvigorating this idea which I think is awesome. >> Um, and people are excited about. And then there's like there's also this kind of like return to the L1. Like we like pushed out a lot of these L2s the last couple years. Now like it seems like like the focus is coming back to the L1. There's a there's an upgrade coming in the end of the month. Uh, Fusaka there's uh privacy implementation proposal or kind of like spec released this week.

Um, so, so like there's kind of like these two forces going on and both are pretty relevant to Boundless and to ZKVMs in general. >> Uh, feel free to kind of take this wherever, but what is the Balance's pers uh team's point of view on privacy as well as kind of powering uh a future of Ethereum that is like ZKified? Um, what is the balance perspective there? What are you guys doing to to try to basically push these forward? >> Very good question. Thank you, Andy. >> That's a [laughter] perfect question. looked like you were looked like you were holding up the berry like Barry congratulates you on a [laughter] great question.

>> Good job. You get >> you get a red berry gold star. >> Oh my goodness. >> A raise even maybe. Um sorry I'm done. I'm done. I'm done. I'm done but bursting you. Okay. Um well I did have the pleasure also this week. I rarely do because we usually do other stuff but I did listen to Vitalic speech as well or mighty leader of Ethereum and it is basically all ZK like 80% of the future of L1's Ethereum the Ethereum ecosystem is ZK basically and it's because blockchains are not really good at low latency scalability and privacy at all.

They're good for many other things and in combination with zero knowledge and verifiable compute though they're going to achieve all those things and become internet scale. And so every blockchain is becoming the ZK blockchain. >> Yeah. >> Starting with Ethereum as well, leading the charge >> and well not starting but they are loudest about it maybe and have the biggest leader to to voice these opinions. >> That's right. >> And Balance is the best CK provider like we we're already live. The tech is ready. We have active customers. it is going on and it is the next evolution for blockchains undeniably that is needed to achieve the scalability the interoperability uh as well as privacy and for listeners that don't necessarily have close

familiarity with ZK or verifiable compute these three things scalability u interoperability solutions and privacy are all properties of how zero knowledge proofs work and how they can be used and blockchain is the first place where ZK has its prime. It's a very old technology. Very old is an overstatement, but it's at least 30 40 years old, but it's mostly been in research context. And blockchain is the first place where it really does a difference. It makes a difference. And so, Ris Zero has built the first general purpose ZKVM and then a few teams have started innovating. Right now there's over 50 ZKVMs at this stage and Balance is really focused on um working with all of them basically to take the best ZK

and make it accessible for the chains that are taking this next step of improving their scalability, latency and privacy features >> and and talk to us about the prover uh kind of uh acquisition process. Right. So you guys are trying to onboard more and more uh essentially people that have hardware that are you know want to uh prove in this verifiable competition network. How's that process been? You know who's been leading that charge? What does it actually look like? And then maybe looking ahead to 2026, what are some of your expectations internally as far as the kind of breadth of the proven network? So already we are and that's I'll give a reminder of how boundless

has a marketplace at its core and we connect the GPUs physical infrastructure and the onchain world and it's a very important part for the marketplace to function well especially as its launch in the last two months and everything to have an over supply of GPUs and provers that are ready to do the work when demand comes in. That's how every marketplace works when it's healthy. My CEO has built multiple marketplaces have worked at Coinbase lift well and APAC expansion. So it's literally a perfect we're the perfect team to build this. I believe I truly believe that um and for prover expansion. So that has been a large focus for us and that's another difference with other projects that are launched not only on the token utility side but on this side as well is that we

don't necessarily have to focus on attracting app builders right now. Our focus is more on having the most physical infrastructure be plugged into Boundless and have the easiest time to do that. Even if you have one machine at home from like your Bitcoin days, um, which is what we've been doing all year and proud to say that Boundless is the only and largest permissionless prover and we have thousands of machines connected that are ready to pick up the job. So all our partners that are coming over to their mainet and also constantly proving Ethereum the whole time. So my it's just record after record gets cheaper and cheaper and also because we have so many provers competing for right now a smaller amount of jobs.

>> They are optimizing their betting systems to get the jobs and and everything else that they need to be able to do this. So that price is going down tremendously fast. >> And it's at this stage where I don't know if my team would like that I say this but we as a boundless team can't compete for the jobs anymore because we also have a small program. >> Yeah. we can't compete because we can't bullish every two days. We have epochs in the protocol. It's two days. Every two days, that's how rewards get distributed and everything. They are iterating their their bets so fast that you literally have a new puzzle to solve every two days. One of our largest trooers is a teenager from Germany who has borrowed GPUs from his friends.

>> He's been with us the whole through mainet beta. He has well he's gotten the largest airdrop as well for like banking but he's so good and we've talked with him. He's so lovely and he did say this that every two days he literally has a new puzzle. He wakes up 1:00 a.m. and figures out how to beat everyone else. It's like a game every two days and it's getting so optimized that it's really improving the system. And this was core to how we designed boundless as well. This is a very important function of how the system improves so much to the point where we can't compete right now which is the next thing that we're going to do that we need to put even more effort and like keep them pressured that balance of course.

>> Yeah. But um that's has been really interesting and >> a big focus for us and obviously we are talking to app developers as well. Um but for from an ecosystem strategy perspective for us provers and prover acquisition is larger and um from a maybe it's interesting to the listeners as well is how do you find these people and how do you attract them? >> There's a lot of GPUs in the world. There's a few applications that people use GPUs for left over from Bitcoin and Ethereum days. Uh those are usually older machines but they still work for most of these purposes and AI.

>> Yeah. And so there's also some services that let you rent cloud instances or let basically distributed as you don't have your own machines but you rent from someone else and they distribute the work. Some of them are a little iffy but it does work as well and so most people do this. >> Uh plus we also focused a lot on China and we did build a lot of presence there earlier this year. We went there multiple times as well as some of our partners. our biggest GPU partners are from mostly APAC region. Um, and yeah, it's been really interesting. That's a unique strategy that I don't have anyone else to talk about with in crypto because no one's doing this, >> but I do have some friends in AI and we

bond over this sometimes. But, um, >> it's been a very good challenge and yeah, we're the leader in crypto with this right now. Well, I'll have you know this entire setup is is absolutely churning GPUs right now in a data center somewhere. So, just pumping for the recording. >> Yes. For the stream, the real time it is just editing everything. >> I'll say one more thing. >> If um anyone who's listening does have a 4090 GPU, which is not it's kind of expensive, but not the biggest GPU. um you can already do ZK mining and it's the most if you start ZK mining on Boundless you're mining every chain that Boundless is serving and we are working across Bitcoin, Salana, Ethereum, Stellar and every other ecosystem so you

are exposed to those immediately and we have a lot of guides on our docs page so feel free to check. >> Very cool. >> Last thing for you Reika, what has been your favorite food this week in Argentina? I'm a vegetarian, so I'm not gonna say asado, but I did I did have a really good mango from one of those corner shops. >> It was perfect. >> Did you wash it first? >> No, [laughter] >> you just you you cut it in half. I've learned this from the internet. You cut it not on the long side. You cut it across on the skinny side >> and then slurp it up. Yeah.

>> Well, we have a we've got a gift for you. It's not a It's not a mango, but um >> not a mango. We do uh believe that we are returning to fundamentals and ZK like you said has been a technology and development for 30 40 years >> lecture [laughter] >> just what I needed. >> What does uh return to fundamentals mean to you? >> I I like that you guys are meaning this. This is a good choice I think. Good job. Um it means that we are going back to our core as the industry and really focusing on why we're here and why we got into here in the first place. decentralization permissionless per permission permissionless decentralized open source infrastructure and we really are building the better future at boundless we're making blockchains internet scale you guys are making it more popular and and moreformational and

spreading the news and information and knowledge about it and educating that's what return to fundamentals means to me >> that's the mission let's go boundless marketing director guys we take a quick break and be right back thank you guys so much >> thank you very Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage,

Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a [music] treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays.

Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains [music] for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to call sheet.com to trade today. [music] Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor [music] or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

Havachi is fast and private per trading [music] secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinifi is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to

holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. All right, guys. Dino, welcome to uh the uh Rollup uh studio. Um I'm loving the hat, Scout. [laughter] >> I went all Brooklyn on you, man. I moved there for like less than a year. Went all Brooklyn, >> dude. Holy [ __ ] you did [laughter] from Bali to Brooklyn, baby. >> Yeah, I'm actually I I broke one of these and I'm missing a couple rigs, but yeah, I I I completely uh did that on you. Um what's up, boys? Good. Thanks for having me.

>> I I heard you had a good party last night. there was a good party or a good event. >> Yeah, it was pretty good. Nice nice venue like right across the the main venue that whoever those guys must be must be crushing. >> Wow. >> Here we go. >> Well, you know, it's been maybe over a year or maybe just around that time since we've had you on. Um, man, catch up catch us up what's been what's been happening with Fluent uh with the with the blended execution concept as as well as the application ecosystem, you know, t take us from like late 2024 to to where we are now.

>> Well, it's I mean it's all about it's all about the apps. So, uh we've triple down on just ecosystem building. I think we have a pretty novel um way of supporting our ecosystem. So, there's this notion of the blended builders club. And so for those who don't know, that's like the highest caliber apps on Fluent. Um you can think of it like the CryptoNavy Seals like I mean people know when they're coming in like we're going to work really closely together. They'll come in often at a very early stage and they go through like seals boot camp baby like literally just like put through the ringer um pressure testing everything from like product to positioning to uh like community building to growth everything. And then we'll help like fund raise. A lot of that's kind of like work in progress right now. A lot to announce that we we

haven't yet. It'll be it'll be a fun Q4. But yeah, I've been working on building out the ecosystem. Um, a few few noteworthy uh you know, a lot of them are are ramping pretty well, right? So like just a couple to call out. You know, we got like buzzing realized that these guys came in ex Tesla guys realized that hey like Khi Poly Market doing well but like the prediction markets creation and resolution are still like curated and um done manually and like that just doesn't scale internet speed. So they came in, they said, "Hey, AI can actually solve this pretty damn well. Creation and resolution." So they're they're crushing it. Their product's actually like already um pretty pretty damn good. Uh you could use it on Fluent Testnet. Um there's also uh I know you you met the founder last night and you know of you

know of the Pump Pals guys. Guys are crazy. They're just like they're they're winning over like it's for those who don't know them, you might know Fantasy Top. I don't know where the camera is. You might know Fantasy Top. That one. Um cool mechanic. Like I think it's actually a way to solve creator uh capital markets, right? like I think of creator capital and art markets have been getting like a lot of [ __ ] recently because like there's a lot of just like memecoins and hoping for the best. Um, but these guys like saw what Fancy Top is doing. Said like, "Hey, this like passive monetization thing can work pretty well. Where can that be useful in the real world and so only fans only fans in the adult industry, it just hit and these guys like are you know like S tier trust builders and they're they're

winning over the supply side." So all you know and you know some of the other guys too, right? I mean you saw like Blend, Manny from Blendout last night, Sprout, Yumi. So that's our f that's our first cohort, right? And so like we are, the reason I'm getting so into this is because we are like fully [snorts] fully focused on um empowering like that first cohort and now actually we're about to announce kind of our next cohort of builders. So um that's really ecosystem building. >> So it's like an opinionated uh stance on the development of the ecosystem, right? Because I feel you know some chains effectively take two routes and I think there's there's pros and cons for both.

The one route is like you know welcome you know everybody just come build try to be the like as as equally in terms of your support as possible try to be extremely like neutral or take a very opinionated stance on like here's who the best uh teams are or the best ideas or them or the concepts which have been like you know you know built in the best way and we're going to fully support them. So you've kind of gone in that latter direction. You know why? >> Think think of it as like there's like periods of like bundling and unbundling, right? Like you can bundle in a couple different ways and like you can bundle like technically like literally building an app chain or you can bundle I'll say like socially like it can still be like a general purpose platform for anybody to build whatever. But like you can work

very you can be very opinionated and work very very very closely with with a team or an ecosystem of that knows that they're going that that are that are socially bought into that, right? And like then you get some really like amazing benefits that emerge, right? you actually get to not only like be an extension of the team, you get to um actually foster an environment where they all start kind of working together. Like you guys know Manny and Blend. Well, guess what? They provide this like one-click really high yield. Well, guess what? Where is that useful to some of these consumer apps? They can plug into pumpouts. They can plug into Buzzing. So, like basically all the apps on Fluent or at least like a strong like majority of them um basically have this like passive yield that's just kind of like sitting there because like

everyone's just willing to collaborate. I mean, so that's like at a functional level, but uh we're seeing that a lot of them are just kind of homies, too. So, it just it works, man. I I think like it's a period of you need to be you need to bundle and be like really concentrated and opinionated um for anything to work in this like very still very native stage of of crypto, frankly. Um and so we chose to do it in in uh in that way. >> What would you say is the ethos of the community that you've built? You know, there's a handful of projects. They all share these common values. And if you're looking for something in the next cohort, you know, for these people to come in ecosystems that that do anything and everything, right, there's really no like through line, but you've built a a

handpicked group of projects. What is the through line that you're trying to get across? >> Um, honestly, I think like where where we've threaded the needle so far and and it's early, right? We haven't we haven't like done the jobs are starting to started obviously like we're we're testing it right now. Um, but I think one area that we what we've noticed uh as far as like a need in the market and and and also just like that there were a subset of builders who actually like fit this mold is people just like product obsession and product taste. I feel like historically crypto has like really swung on two different sides. the pendulum is like constantly swinging from like over like overindex on like speculation, attention, all this kind of stuff to research and then like back and forth and like um I think what we found

is there's there are a small a subset of builders who actually have really good like product taste and like we can kind of help them with more like rigorous like startup thinking and like kind of you know take these like really ambitious kind of like product visions and be like all right how the hell do you get to market like in the next three months? How do we combine that with fluent go to market and and just so it all kind of works together almost as if it was um like an an app like almost like like app chain vibes but more socially. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So the original kind of promise of this blended uh execution was to be able to have the best uh expressive >> most expressive execution environment >> from WOUM SVM EVM kind of for developers. I'm curious on the progress

for that. Obviously EVM has been established. what is kind of the road map for SVM and for the others kind of programming languages. What does that actually look like from implementation? >> Yep. So there there's there there's like the technical and product roadmap and then there's kind of like where where like we're focused, right? And so like um WM and EVM are enabled. You can you can build stuff in Rust. WASM rust you build stuff in um you know solidity and um you know more more like SDKs are being built for some of the other like wom light based languages. Um SVM is technically ready. It's like I mean it's it's live. It's on uh on testn net, but we haven't turned it on yet. It's kind of like like just disabled for now. I feel like in terms of like expectation management, right, when people think of

SVM, they think of like high performance. And so we're like like it there there's a there's a path to getting there. Um but we want to spend a couple of months really making sure when people like first experience this like SVM um you know, if they deploy like an SVM app, they port something over Salana um that that it that it uh that that it rips the way they think they would. Um so it's it's it's pretty cool. Like it's all done. And like shout out to like our engineering and and team and my co-founder Dmitri for just being like absolute gigas. Um but yeah so probably within the next like few months we'll we'll enable um SVM as well. Uh whether that's on testn net or that's like live on mainet um TVD. Uh but yeah the wom and EVM side are are are there and live.

Um then so that's technically in productwise. Then there's like where we're like placing our energy. Like another thing I mean kind of on the thread of like what we look for in in in founders as well is just like pragmatism. Like we're we're pretty pragmatic. Like we're never going to we're it's early. It's still [ __ ] like early days of crypto. Like I don't care. I I know there's like a lot happening certainly on the institutional side all this. But for like a developer and app ecosystem like it's still kind of it's still pretty early in the grand scheme of like the internet. So like we would never try to get people to overengineer things. Frankly, there's just like a ton of lowhanging fruit in like the EVM land and like the bottleneck is just like product taste and and like kind of structured like

startup thinking. It's just like actually stuff that you can kind of bring over from more of like a web 2 like startup vibe. And so we've honestly been focused all the apps so far have been like let's just say mostly 90 to 100% kind of EVM but starting to dabble in some of these like novel like blended features, right? That's the cool thing about being like being really really hightouch. You you know somebody could start off saying like hey I have this cool like EVM primitive. It's like okay don't reinvent the wheel like we'll help you productize it and like figure out the business model and everything like that and then along along the way we're starting to see is people do say oh well I want to put this extra thing on chain and oh wait that's easier in Rust and and so you I think it's the long game

honestly. So, and right now the main problem that we're solving is more on like how do we enable the [ __ ] out of like these I don't know if I can enable enable these ecosystem uh applications to like be real revenue drivers like right at mainnet um be like extremely pragmatic get product market fit and then you know what they'll start dabbling with some of like the novel blended stuff over time we'll enable SVM and we'll we'll we'll go from there >> I'm excited I think there's a lot of a lot of uh very exciting ecosystem apps that are currently on testn Let's talk road to mainet. You know, there were some rumblings. I was at the same event you were at. We got to talking.

>> Oh, you were there, [laughter] >> dude. There was a lot, huh? >> There was a lot of people there. It was had a lot of fun. >> Shut up like 90 minutes late to his own event. This guy >> Yeah. [laughter] had to set up the studio today. Um, man, tell us about the road to mainet. What is still on the docket before you guys take this thing live? >> Well, I'll spoil it. We're doing mainet in Q1. >> Whoa. [screaming] >> Whoa. I told >> clip that. [laughter] I [gasps] may or may not have told some guy in that last. >> That's what I heard. >> Mainet Q1, does that come with a token? >> Uh now, you know, I can't speak to that kind of stuff, man. But um you took love you love these guys love [laughter] to um I'll talk a little bit about uh some

of the the steps on the way though, right? So like there we there is a lot coming in in Q4. There's kind of there's three big things happening. I can I can tease one of them. Um the one is actually a product that we're building internally on Fluent. >> Um and is not a perplex. Um a lot of perplexes these days [laughter] there are. Um >> but basically like what we're seeing and and it's and it's all it's all kind of part of the same motion of like are just like like being just frankly obsessed with like helping these builders. What we're finding is like it's really damn hard for builders to to find real reputable users. It's just hard. Um, and so we're building, we're actually I can't say too much yet, although you will know in like a few weeks. Um, and

then you know, maybe if I run into you at some random party, I'll I'll I'll I'll tease you a little bit more. Um, but it comes down to like who it's really hard in crypto, but also kind of just the the internet today, right? Um, to know who to trust for what. >> Um, I think over the past like year, people have swung way too far towards like attention being the end- all beall. But now what I think people are realizing is um what really what's really important is you know identity, reputation and uh and connection. And so like what we're doing is we're we're building we're building a product that's like going to start off helping um just ecosystem apps um connect with like the right builders find their their thousand true fans. Um and then there's there's there's a there's a there's a lot more

to that that product vision. Um but that's that's where we're starting. Um, what would also be cool is just in the name of kind of like PMF and revenue. Also, what's nice is that's a revenue driver for for Fluent, which um, which we're excited about. >> Yeah, revenue meta. >> It just keeps coming. >> Real users, real me revenue. >> It just keeps striking us. Um, what what >> I heard we're referring to, it's hard to cut you, but I heard you were returning to fundamentals around around here. >> Have you seen that around? >> I don't know. I heard these guys were talking about it last night. They wouldn't stop yapping. >> Yeah. Yeah. Alignment, baby. Um, dude, so you've been able to watch like a lot of these teams ship their like mainets and tokens and like the the whole token launch process has evolved to like sonar

sales, Legion, Echo in addition to like the process for like pre-eposit vaults like Plasma did and some of these other chains did. And >> you know, you've kind of also watched the L2 token uh designs kind of be rethought, right? This unification proposal from Uniswap. Obviously, Hyperlid has put a lot of pressure on people with their kind of dynamic. What are some of the biggest takeaways you've been a been fortunate to be able to watch kind of from the sidelines, if you will, as other teams have shipped to mainet over the last year? What are some of the takeaways that you've seen of things that either, you know, you liked and that, you know, you want to build on or, you know, certain mistakes, you know, without maybe calling them out, things that you would, you know, want to

improve on. I mean, look, like anyone tells you that they're not kind of like learning from the predecessors is is is lying. I mean, you take like the most revolutionary products, they're kind of like, you know, pieced together from a bunch of like um pseudo successful or or to to failed like versions of that in the past, right? And so like market timing is like a huge part of it. Obviously, execution is part a big part of it as well, but like market timing is huge. indust like whether that's like whether like a certain tech stack is ready, whether you've like learned from how previous like people have done things, whether it's the market's ready, like all that stuff. And so like I frankly I'm honored to have like be in this space like when when we are because I feel like there's been so much like

amazing experimentation in crypto um in terms of like different types of way to do economics different kind of protocol design different way like like uh periods of time that it takes to decentralize a protocol like go to market strategies like there's been I mean like we're not the first to try this like was thing like like for Christ's sake like it's been it's been in the industry for a while like everyone's known that was kind of like a good idea at the base layer. It's like very expressive. Um but the but you have to learn from you have to like study as hell like all you know the people came before you and I and I and I yeah I mean we've learned a ton man like I I think especially as it comes to um uh go to market and and how to distribute

distribute this thing like I think we have like a lot of really really good learnings. Um and you know of course like regulatory environment is a big part of it. Um and so I think it's honestly I'm I'm very excited about like the period of time we're in as I know you guys are. >> Yeah man. I mean, I just think that there there has been these structural shifts that have changed for the better in terms of the regulatory, but also just learnings from seeing different teams play out and like like the market structure as as well >> when you're looking at Fluent right now uh and looking at kind of like the landscape, what are you seeing as like some of your biggest strengths and then what are you seeing from the founder perspective as the things that you that you trying to lock in on and kind of uh

you know harden up a Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a good it's a good good couple questions. Um, I would say biggest strength so I won't uh some of the ones I talked to before in terms of just like how we're approaching an ecosystem like like the way we've identified like you know the some of the bottlenecks in terms of like product taste and and matching that with our expertise. So that's kind of one I think it's actually enabled us to win over um on a on a shoestring budget, right? Like like we've only raised like 10 mil. We haven't raised like a ton of money at like a huge valuation which I'll get to in a second. Um, but we we've actually been able to win over a lot of like really talented builders um, just because like we've been forced to like execute so so sharply that we're able to

kind of transfer some of that knowledge and skill set to to the apps. So that that's turned into an advantage of itself. So that's one talked to that before. Um, obviously the technical and product advantage I think will every year that goes by and as this industry matures um, I think that'll become like more and more and more of a weapon, right? And like so we're playing the long game. Like I'm I'm very very excited for when we're someone's able to just like build that DEX and that uses like EVM and SDM assets like it's just like they don't think about it just deploy it and like use them like it's all in one place right and so so there there's the product and technical side then there's also I talked about like how much we've raised so far and I won't go I won't go too into it um but it's

there there's this really challenging thing in in crypto where people are um often you know hype hype steers a lot of of of the space and like People often fall into this what I'll call trap of like raising way too much at way too high a valuation and it feels good, right? You're like you're like famous for validated, right? >> Yeah. You feel good, right? It's like, whoa, I have a unicorn, but like you're not ready for a unicorn yet, man. Um and so so I think actually one of our one of our biggest edges and it goes towards more of what you said about Hyperlid is that we we we didn't we didn't start like sprinting. We didn't get above uh like ahead of our skis, which I'm like really really proud of us doing. Um and that was like a team thing because

there's a ton of pressures in the space, right? And what's what's what's cool is >> what's cool is um you know the fact that now like when it comes to like like decentralizing the network, you can do that in like a much much much easier way on on a few fronts, right? So you're not caught in this like in this bind. And frankly like I think we've built up a really strong community and you know to the extent that we do any kind of like public sale looking things like I'll feel pretty good about it. >> Good man. Very cool. you mentioned uh you know that you would get to the raise part in a second and is there anything more to say about that in terms of what what you do have coming down the pipeline?

>> Um no I I I think that the only thing I would want to say is I want to make sure that um what we do going forward is as as public as possible. >> Very cool. >> Awesome. >> Dino, thanks for coming on, man. It's been a pleasure, man. Love you guys. Absolutely, brother. Cheers to you, man. We'll see you soon. >> All right, guys. Um quick commercial break. >> Let's have a quick break and we'll be right back. All right. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. from the team that pioneered cold storage. Treasure has just released [music] its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly [music] with Relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link link to bridge your assets now.

Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. [music] Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. Call she's the world's largest prediction market. [music] You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. [music] Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz.

Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. Frack [music] is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit fra.com to learn more today. Yeet is built for big moments, the most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your [music] coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. [music] Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire [music] point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to

bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his Rio upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for [music] stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest [music] prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today.

Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience. Havachi is fast and private per [music] trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out?

Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable defy platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. XYZ Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. >> Open stable.

>> We're back. >> All right, guys. We're back. We're uh back in the institutional zone. We've been deep in the tech zone all day, all week. >> We're going to switch gears, have a little bit more of a financial conversation today. >> We were at SmartCon two weeks ago, and all we all we talked about was finance. >> Very much of a financial conversation now. >> All we talked about this week is tech. >> All tech, >> dude. >> Someone Someone's got to do it. >> I know. I mean, we got to get back to the capital allocation. Where are the capital flows? Where where's money going? >> This is the position of these two worlds. >> Yeah, totally. >> And so, you guys are at the cross-section of of these two worlds. You're seeing the convergence in real time in Maker and the Maker ecosystem

has been around for years. One of the first obviously did a lot on the tech but also on the finance and now starting to develop more and more uh uh presence in the financial world and you guys are a big big part of that. >> Kind of came out of nowhere from you know that's what it looks like from give us the lore on inside scoop. How did how did grow come to be >> upwards of like the story there >> upwards of two billion in TVL? But yeah, please tell talk to us about how how we've arrived here today. >> Yeah, totally. I mean, we publicly announced at ETHCC um I guess back in July. So the growth and everything that's happened since then. We've gone up to nearly two billion in TVL. Um pretty rapid extension. How did that all

happen? So uh the Grove team I myself we kind of started on the journey with working with maker DAO back when I was at block tower and the whole thesis is hey man there is quite a big gap between DeFi and trapi um and block tower our thesis is you know we can probably create a fund structure and enable the bridging of these two worlds starting with treasuries and then we move to CLLO's which is what we're doing today but now at a completely different scale. And today we hold about a billion dollars in Janice Henderson's AAALLOS which is like the first real time of DeFi capital making a really significant impact in the US economy to US consumers

to US businesses. like we're lending a billion dollars and hopefully more um to to these real world entities that that's injecting capital into you know the uh traditional economies uh traditional capital markets which is I think a pretty cool thing. So a lot of the audience here uh because we have been talking more about the tech you know they're familiar with ZK they'll tell you everything that you need to know about L2 architecture and all these things they may not even know what CLLO is right and so that you know our our financial friends uh back in New York City they know but give us the high level right yeah clo is is it it feels like one of the most prominent RWA products out there right now what is a CLLO why is this the choice for tokenization

>> totally yeah so to answer the first question of like what's a LLO so collateralized loan obligation um it is one of the most popular and you know I think innovative tools that traditional finance has to bring the cost of borrowing down for again uh US companies US consumers and uh the kind of credit and capital markets that runs um not only the US US economy but global economy and what we're doing with CLOS's is effectively you're you're providing structural enhancement to credit assets.

So that we for example are holding the AAA trunch of um these structured credit CLLOs's which means we are at the most senior position and um it's a highly uh principal protected um and safe fixed income asset to be in. Um the reason why we we're holding a billion dollars of it is again because these assets are um they generally yield a comfortable spread above uh treasuries which has made its way into DeFi and uh now we're starting to see you know public credit and CLLOs's make that similar u penetration and um it just follows suits with what um a properly constructed capital stack is. Um, CLOS's

are generally held by pension funds, insuranceances, um, traditional businesses that have a very similar risk profile to what we believe, um, you know, Maker or the Sky ecosystem should have with, uh, with the backing of USDS and previously called DI. So, it just makes a lot of sense. >> Yeah. So, we have the framework guys on the show every so often. Um, they're obviously big sky bulls, big growth bulls. Uh, and we were speaking to them last week actually about kind of what happened in DeFi over the last couple of weeks where we had different exploits. Really, we just had this this kind of opaque off-chain lending happening and this kind of like uh recursive lending that happened that that led to some blowups effectively.

>> Yeah. >> Um, >> how does Grove avoid that situation? What what do you guys do to avoid that? And then I guess you know even better asked what what is the what is your edge compared to other kind of uh RWA providers when it comes to bringing institutional assets on chain? >> Yeah. So conflicts of interest or the like the avoidance of that is is extremely important. And one of the things that happens a lot is when you have uh entities or parties that have interest in both the lending side and the borrowing side and that immediately is a significant red flag in the traditional capital markets and that's why there are structures and and um entities and uh agents that are put in

place to prevent that. At Grove, we follow a fairly robust underwriting process um and risk and due diligence process that um has a lot of those elements baked into the reviews. Um we also follow um well adopted u an adapted version of well- adopted frameworks like Basil 3 that again provide a long-standing standard that we can then kind of adopt and apply to our risk and review processes. um that in first and foremost is like where we start with onboarding any new type of collateral asset. So, uh I think most recently we just onboarded Apollo's um private credit diversified fund um hdx on

>> plume >> and um that's another great example where we worked really closely with the Apollo team to understand hey like who are the borrowers what is this um private credit vehicle doing um and that was a lengthy process but it's something that we repeat with every asset that we on board um I forgot the second question but >> you know what is your edge when it comes to onboarding institutional assets on chain? >> Yeah, I think really our edge is we get our hands really dirty. Like we roll up our sleeves and we really go down to work with asset issuers and protocols as well. Like I like to say that we're onboarded with like the largest traditional asset managers like the Black Rockcks, the Janice Hendersons,

but we're also deployed into A and soon to be in Morpho. Like in both instances, we'll work with the counterparty to really make the asset work within the framework of Sky and Grove. Um and that takes a lot of I think uh diligence but also technical risk legal structuring that um we try to kind of bundle together as as a as an offering to not only the Sky ecosystem but the entirety of DeFi because a lot of what we do is published publicly on forums and and you know very popular channels and one thing that we've observed is when we deploy at

scale into an asset that other protocols follow suit and um we kind of sit in a privileged position when we do that and so we take our jobs very seriously for us. >> Um USDS has just uh surpassed uh USDE uh in terms of total outstanding supply. Is Sky just going to keep taking people's numbers and taking names? Will Athena ever overtake Sky again? Yeah, I mean we're really close with the Athena team and they're incredibly incredibly res resilient and um you know guy and and the whole team there. I'm sure they'll figure out ways to you know have this battle for third place in terms of the stable coin market share um continue

for quite some time. Um we take we generally take I think somewhat differentiated approaches. So, uh, USDS focus on transparency, focus on integrating with the largest and most scalable yield sources out there in any market environment. And and that's something that I would stress like uh we had exposure to the basis trade when I think funding rates were up but we also like did the work of getting CLLOs's onboarded private credit and other um fixed income uh instruments on boarded in the event that the basis trade you know disappears which happens on happens a lot. So, um, we're really positioned

for like an all kind of weather or all yield environment kind of scenarios. >> Has that happened though? Is is Athena's basis trade in a rough spot? >> Yeah, I think with like the current market regime that we're in, the basis trade has definitely compressed a little bit. The other thing is with the basis trade, you're having a lot more competition with players like Superstate and USCC and other types of um um protocols that are going after going after the same markets uh which is compressing the yield uh on that front. So we don't kind of we don't concentrate our bets in like one particular yield opportunity like the the whole point of endgame and grove and spark and all the

initial like uh like launching stars is we want to be as diversified as possible and as reactive to market conditions as possible. >> Yeah. Um you know getting these assets on chain is first and foremost right tokenizing them. Uh what happens next? Like where does the yield come from? Right. We bring them on chain for a particular reason. It's to juice the yield. >> Yeah. >> What what happens after they become on chain? >> Totally. I mean that's when things get exciting for me, right? Like um I work with like Apollo for example and we had a big celebratory moment when we allocated the 50 million and I was like wait wait wait like there's still so much exciting things to do here. The first and first thing that we always look at is um getting it then added as collateral in a variety of onchain

lending and repo markets. Um that Cool. We are back. So back. Um and so

Kevin, you know, we were talking about like after uh you know, these things are tokenized, this ends up uh extending the potential for yield. Uh you guys have done quite a quite a lot in this regard. Um another question we have here is uh you know the competition of stars is heating up. Yeah. uh the maker ecosystem is uh it's on fire and uh and so how are you guys thinking about the competitive landscape of stars as more and more uh attention coaleses in this ecosystem? >> Absolutely. Yeah. Um no doubt like we uh announced I think three at least three more pending stars coming up. So, Grove is the second. Spark is the first that was launched. And um it's certainly really exciting to see all of this

activation and energy in the space. But I will say um you know, we're definitely positioned to win. We're definitely positioned in in a spot to I think capture the best deals and the best opportunities when it comes to institutionals uh institutional focus. And um you know, I welcome I I invite as many stars to launch as possible. uh reach out if you have questions, but in terms of the sky ecosystem, um the star landscape is only just going to get hotter and hotter and we're ready to compete.

>> You're going for the top. >> We're doing it. >> We're really doing it. >> Kevin, man, thank you so much. >> Yeah, >> it's a pleasure to meet you. >> Cheers, man. >> Pleasure. >> Appreciate it. >> Guys, we're live from Dev Connect day one rollup TV. Uh I don't want to look at the markets. I'm a little bit scared. We've got the Espresso team coming up next. We've got a couple more more guests left. Kevin, thank you for joining us, man. Pleasure. Uh, go sky. Go maker. Go. Go USDS. Yeah. Go freak guys. Thank you so much. >> Cheers. >> Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, [music] 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion dollars transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now.

Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. Call sheet is the world's largest prediction [music] market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to callshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai AI to have a fully private chat experience.

Havachi is fast [music] and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to

holiday.xyz XYZ to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. FRA is building the next generation of stable coin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit frack.com to learn more today. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a [music] treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain.

>> Bang. Jill Britt, we got the ladies in the house. >> Welcome to the show. >> The ladies [laughter] of espresso. Happy to be here. >> We're here. Espresso. me espresso. [laughter] >> Cheers. >> I love it. >> Guys, how are you guys enjoying uh Bonosetis? >> Oh, it's awesome. >> It's lovely. >> Yeah, first time. >> First time. >> I I came here 10 years ago and I was doing at the time academic like ma like my master's degree research on cryptocurrency and capital controls. Oh wow.

>> And Argentina was obviously one of the first to adopt Bitcoin in a meaningful way. Um, so yeah, I managed to convince the university I was at to like pay for me to fly the BA for a month. >> It's beautiful. >> And what's so cool is like so many of those entrepreneurs who were working in Bitcoin at the time who I met then. There's this place called the Espasio Bitcoin right around the corner from here. Um, and like they're still here. Like they're building an Ethereum now. They're at Dev Connects and like >> that's awesome. >> Yeah. So full circle. You have a background. >> Yeah. I I I love it here. I love South America. It it also just feels right to have these uh conferences in places where it actually matters, >> right? Like we can go to we can go to

NYC or you know wherever Denver, LA and like okay great London like institutional but like this actually matters a lot here. Stable coins matter a lot here, right? >> 100%. Yeah. >> It feels better. It feels more impactful. >> Yeah. And the weather is great. The food is awesome. People are great. It's Yeah. on. [laughter] >> You guys have uh been building uh and shipping quite a bit and so it feels like there's something that's coming. >> There's something brewing. >> Oh, brewing. That's another good one. [laughter] >> Before we get there, >> ladies, we have we kept hearing this entire week that we need to improve finality within Ethereum. So we've asked arbitum uh optimism teams uh we talked to L2B today just generally the ask from

the L2 kind of scaling uh minded folks is like guys the one ask that I have is to fix finality such that we can have a basically a more robust ecosystem for Ethereum. Um I think you guys might have something to say about this. >> That would be so cool if we could do that today right [laughter] now. >> Wouldn't it? Yeah it's here. It's live. So, you know, we often get asked like, okay, what exactly does Espresso do? Like, we understand it's like an interop layer for Ethereum. And, you know, for a long time, we actually avoided using the words fast finality because it's kind of loaded. And to a lot of people for a long time, it like didn't carry real meaning. Like it was a little bit nebulous what that meant like why finality matters, why fast transaction

confirmations would matter for interop. And I will say it is so refreshing to me today to hear the EF talking about it, to hear all the folks at OP talking about it. Obviously the arbitrum ecosystem we're close with, they've been talking about it for a long time. But like it feels like we are at this moment where everyone's kind of collectively woken up to the importance of fast finality and we're happy to share that it's live. It's real today. Brought to you by Espresso. Been in production for over a year now. running on over a 100 geo distributed nodes. Uh the latest internal benchmarks we're down to 2 seconds >> finality and the big goal is subsecond next year and that's how we're going to make Ethereum composable again. That's

what it all comes down to. And um yeah, we're getting adoption and traction from some of the most major rollups. You know, the brands you know and love. Rarity Chain was one of the first to adopt us. Ape Chain is now live. Cello is going live with us in the next couple of weeks. So yeah, the the Ethereum interop layer is here ready for the taking. >> Great. Anything to add? >> I mean, she kind of nailed it. Like there's not really much to add to that. But I am quite happy that people are at the very least understanding the difference between settlement and finality. I think those are once you figure out that difference, it all kind of like clicks and makes sense. But yeah, seamless interop is possible in a secure way today.

>> Yeah. What why is that so important? The difference between settlement and finality. because settlement is kind of just an instance of bridging and it only really matters with for the chain that you are settling to. But if you're an R if you're an LT like arbitrum, you kind of want to be able to stand on your own and showcase to the rest of the world, hey, this block is finalized. You should we should be able to pass messages between each other and not have that be dependent on whether or not NL1 believes you. >> Yeah. >> Um [clears throat] >> yeah. So yeah, >> what is this what does the world of of Ethereum look like um post you know like in a post espresso world or in a world where this finality problem of having to wait for Ethereum blocks to be finalized

to do crosschain transactions to do high throughput uh you know purpose trading these types of of use cases like what is that future world look like what are we building towards here >> it's all one chain again that's the beautiful thing I think that >> if I look back at the last 10 years I that we've seen two big evolutions of blockchain architectures that have happened already and I think we're on the brink of the third. I think the first evolution or the first iteration was just monolithic blockchains and you know that was when Ethereum was all one thing. You had the consensus layer and then you had the obviously the execution layer where all of the apps lived and they lived harmoniously together and we

had you know seamless composability amongst them but that did not scale and then we've had the rollup era brought to you by the rollup [laughter] uh and that's been the last five years you know kind of looking at like uh 2020 through today um and we've scaled which is great but we've broken that composability and I think we're about to enter the crosschain era um where you know you can have the scaling that all of these different rollups have but they will all behave like one chain, one pool of liquidity, one set of users >> but importantly like they'll each have their own quirks and their own customization so that they can remain like autonomous. They have their own autonomy but they can at least communicate and interoperate more

seamlessly real time. >> Yeah, real time. >> That is another big trend of this week. It was like we pushed out the L2s and it was like this massive effort to scale Ethereum and now it feels like we're all just kind of like all right we got to come back to the L1 lean L1 we want a private L1 we want fast finality it's like >> push out okay everybody come home now and and I put out a tweet I was like it feels like there's way less infighting this week than ever at any Ethereum conference like arbitr optimism aren't bickering over XYZ like ZK singing and Starknet aren't going out there you know it feels like it's kind of like all right guys like the stakes have gotten so like large and real. It's really like we are all kind of Ethereum here and

it's been that way kind of in a kumbaya sense, but there's always been this, you know, >> and I think like it's fine. It's good. You know, this debate is good, but it does feel like it's like, okay, it's it's really us versus like all L1's or this kind of institutional all L1's like keeping that kind of energy. What I'll say on that is I think that you know last year and like I was very vocal about this. There was so much consternation about like Ethereum alignment games and all of this BS candidly that doesn't actually matter for adoption or adoption of your technology. But I think the beautiful thing about the Ethereum ecosystem is that it's always welcomed and promoted competition >> and like people like there was this whole thing about like is a communist

last year. I did not understand that at all because it doesn't get more capitalist than saying, you know what, we're going to let sort of the free market take care of duking it out over like what's the best rollup stack or what's the best fast finality layer? Is it Espresso? You know, is it whatever the EF is working towards? Is it um you know, things like Celestia and Avail now are kind of like moving into the space? And I think that that to me is why Ethereum is the best place to build whether you're an infra builder or an app builder.

>> Yeah. [clears throat] Yeah. And I I think the institutional onslaught of all this capital is is sort of what's at stake here. And it has pushed everyone in this industry to sort of realize the infighting is silly. we can work together to achieve a bigger goal and that is in the incoming capital so that it goes onto this public permissionless composable layer and it doesn't go to some L1 uh that doesn't share the same values. >> Yeah. And and you know, we were in New York a couple weeks ago and we were in there with Fidelity and Black Rockck and these guys and um they're really here like they're we're really >> the institutions have arrived here [laughter] saying this.

>> I mean like in 2017 we were saying like we were going to dump on them and like I must say that like I successfully dumped on them a little bit in the last six months, but like gosh I should have dumped on them way more in like you know August and September and October. My goodness. >> Totally. Yeah. Totally. >> Um guys, you have some news for us this week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, we soft launched this week. It'll be coming out uh live to a wallet near you in the next two weeks, but we soft launched a product called Presto, >> which I think will just help make it concrete of what this future looks like of an Ethereum where all of the rollups can be one chain. So, I don't know. Do you want to describe a little bit of >> I do want to critique the way you said

that. It's called >> Presto. [laughter] Espresso presto. Come on. >> Exactly. You nailed it. You nailed it. But it's it's just a um it's just it's a crosschain NFT minting mechanism that allows you to do this via messaging um which is more capital efficient than having capital on all these different chains. You can pay on one chain. A message is passed in real time uh because it uses espresso confirmations and it mints you an NFT on on another chain. Uh and so I think of uh to start it'll be available on Rari and 8 chain.

>> Yeah. >> Yeah. Um, and maybe more to come soon on that, but it gives you, you know, a real-time NFT minting experience regardless of which of those chains you want to pay on. The beautiful thing to me is we've been we have a booth at the main event and people have been coming by the booth and trying out this minting experience where again their funds never leave Rary Chain and they're minting an NFT on Apain and they click through it and okay, maybe this is like a fault of like my product marketing because they click through it and they're like, "Okay, wait, but like what? That's always what happens.

>> That was so simple. And I'm like, "Oh, was that it? That was so simple. You didn't have to bridge funds. You didn't have to get the gas on the right chain. You didn't have to like deal with the dust left over on the chain that you minted on." Like like it was so simple. So, uh this is again I think our first um kind of like internally built sort of like flagship showcase. Uh, I don't think that this is going to become like our business model, but I think it's really important to start to expand people's imagination of what UX can look like when everything can be seamless across chains. And we're working on a bunch of cool stuff on like the DeFi like deck side of the world that it's much more complex than a simple NFT payments product. But, uh, I'm excited

to start rolling these things out soon and again just expanding people's imaginations, getting more developers building crosschain. I mean, it's it's pretty cool when you see these things in real time and you don't realize what's actually happening under the hood. Like there's like so many steps that have been compressed into one. >> We got to figure this out. We need like the block explorer. >> Yeah. Yeah. All these different or like here's what you would have had to to do to actually do this and then here's now like what you know. So, but people always ask like what's next, you know, like how do we >> Yeah. >> Well, just on that point, the AI chat bots do a really good job of this now. They're like, "Oh, I actually searched 35 different websites and I was thinking about these different questions and thought." Yeah. The chain of thought.

And you can see it as it's thinking. Holy >> [ __ ] That's a lot of work. [laughter] >> Yeah. >> I'm not using my brain. >> Thank goodness I'm not doing all those steps. >> Yeah. No, that's that's real. That's a great great shout out. But yeah, I'm just so excited to see simplicity coming into these user experiences because I don't know about you, but I've experienced a wave of sort of like, you know, cousins and normies and family members getting curious about crypto again because they hear about all this institutional interest >> and even still try to on >> it's better you guys. Rabby pulled me.

>> Oh, hardcore. [laughter] Hardcore. After that podcast episode I did with you guys, I downloaded Rabbi and I was like, >> "Yeah, Infinex is now like about to take that leap." I think it's still like I I still don't use it all the time, but it's like it's it's getting to the point where I think that if you get on it, it's going to be hard to get off of it. >> So, I think I think you guys should try that as of the next >> um guys, mainet. >> Yeah. >> Uh the proof ofstake chain >> mainet 1.0 >> 1.0. >> We're on mainet zero right now. >> Okay. talk to us about the >> Yeah. What's the level up between mainet zero right now and mainet one?

>> Uh we're going full proof of stake between mainet zero and mainet one. Um so right now we have a validator set of uh 100 different nodes. I think we're still going to have roughly that many when we go live, but it'll instead of a closed set of validators, it'll be um fully open [clears throat] permissionless for sake. >> So yeah, for the last year we've had 22 partners. you know, some of those that you know and love like the block Damians and the FinoAs, etc. of the world. Some much smaller uh outlets that um you know, do staking as a service and we've worked with them in a dedicated capacity to make sure that you know the system is solid and uh we're not going to be dealing with downtime, but you know,

it's been secured by that permissioned set of validators. But yeah, as Britt said, we're going to open up the system. Um, of course that means in any proof ofstake network there will be a token that goes along with it. That will be uh the economic security behind the system. Um, and yeah, that's a huge milestone because it's >> it is the same process as launching like a fully permissionless proof ofstake L1. Yeah, >> I know everyone's like everyone is launching tokens these days like dime a dozen. It's still really rare to launch a new proofofstake system. It's like there have been like five in the last few years. It's like After Sweet, >> um obviously Monad coming up, right?

>> And so I'm sure I'm missing one or two in there, but um huge milestone. >> That's why it's taken one so long to get to main. >> Yeah. To be fair, that's also why it's taken us so long to get to [laughter] permissionless proof of stake, but we've been in production at least. >> And the dynamics around proof of stake have changed, too. Like Near just cut their inflation by 50% I think last week. Salana is trying to do the same. And I know a ton >> everyone's basically looking at their token and being like, "Guys, our price is not looking good. We're spending way too much money on inflation to keep this thing secure. Do we really need this?"

>> Everyone's realizing it's a cost. >> What is your take? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that we've had the benefit of being able to learn from the 8% inflation rates that have been rampant in industry standard for the last five years and have just punished these tokens. Um, so yeah, we've we've learned from that. You know, all of the details on this are going to get published in the next two weeks. Like final feedback is being taken from the community and the ecosystem, especially on the validator side. Um, because you know, security should come with a cost for the project. But yeah, I it turns out that 8% is too high and it also turns out that the market mechanisms for determining these things >> have really painful feedback mechanisms.

They do. So >> yeah. >> Yeah. >> Guys, we we have a gift for you. >> Oh, yeah. >> Before we do that, if you haven't picked a ticker yet, we should probably [laughter] cafe >> cafe. >> Oh, that's a good one. >> Everything. That's what it is. >> Coffee's too long. But >> I'll disclose we kicked around Bean for a while. >> That's a good one. >> But uh there have been a lot of projects called Bean over here. Some of them not so great. So we >> So uh our our current uh slogan is return to fundamentals. Yes. >> And uh I feel like this is really really for you guys. Um what does this mean to you guys? What does return to fundamentals mean if you have a look here and uh let us know what it means to

you guys. >> Gosh, no. You go first. I have to think. >> Come on. You're OG, Jill. >> Oh man. Okay. I If you follow me on the internet, uh you may be aware that I was very anti-mecoin. And this was a very unpopular take. I almost can't believe that it was an unpopular take, but like I a lot of friends in the industry actually like really take issue with how vocal I was about being anti-mecoin. But to me, memecoins were fundamentally different from even like the NFT hype or even like the ICO bubble where behind those other things, there wasn't this financial nihilism going on. It was like we all really were working towards changing the world in some way. And to me, return to

fundamentals, I think that this is so spot on for the time that we're in where that nihilism is going away again. And like we might get we might be wrong in our thesis about what fundamental value looks like, but at least there's intent there. And at least like the dream is back and the dream is big. >> Great. Got [snorts] to follow that one out. Tough to follow. >> I do. Uh I don't know. I think like return to fundamentals is powerful in the way that people are just talking in the space right now. like like you mentioned, people are asking for fast finality. So, it's we're kind of getting back to what does it actually take to run a business in this space and not just like what can we yolo about. Um, so yeah, I think it it'll just be interesting to see

hopefully uh a lot of projects in the space make smarter decisions that are actually generating revenue in crypto. >> Yeah. Oh, yeah. >> I think that's what I'm >> That's our next shirt. The revenue meta. >> We already have it coming. I I [laughter] want a hat that says the rest. >> Yes, the hat. Asking for that, too. [snorts] And and AJ. Guys, thank you for joining, guys. We'll be right back. Thank you so much. >> Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire [music] point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion dollar transferred. Go to

relay.link to bridge your assets now. [music] Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable [music] coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. [music] Talk to AI like your lawyer or your

doctor or your therapist. Yours, private, and here today. Visit near.ai AI to have a fully private chat experience. Havachi is fast and private per trading [music] secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out?

Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. [music] >> Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users. >> We are so back. >> So back. >> Alex, welcome to the studio. Thanks so much for having me.

>> How is Buenosirus treating you? H >> much nicer than New York. Loving the sunshine. Had a few margaritas. Yes. >> Some steak. >> Some steak. Have you tried any uh red wine yet? >> I had a few last night if I'm being honest. Yeah. [laughter] >> Very cool. >> Well, Alex Cutler, founder of Aerodrome, congrats on the acquisition. >> Thank you, man. Yeah, >> let's talk about it. So, Aerodrome Veladrome coming together, expanding different chains. You guys did this presentation. It was really well done. >> Yeah. >> Let's just take a step back in the story here of Aeradrome and kind of like how this all came to be and then, you know, let's let's get into the Veladrome uh conversation. Um we had you on recently talking about this uh new meta damm or

>> metadex. >> Metadex. Yeah. >> So we started there and catch us up. What happened in the last couple months and how did we get here? >> Yeah. You know um it's a pretty crazy journey. Uh we started as like a handful of guys in a discord totally a non uh we didn't raise any money uh we didn't sell any tokens we didn't even sell any like or give ourselves liquid vesting tokens to go sell right and so the journey started with drrome um and uh in 2023 we released metadex0o2 right and this is the dex operating system that underlies both drrome and aer drrome today and just to illustrate how crazy this is, right? Uh the metaex is now the top

revenue producing uh decks anywhere in DeFi. Uh the metaex is also uh the fifth highest revenue generating protocol in defi period. And anywhere competes against legacy exchanges like unis swap. It takes three4s of the market share relative to a multi-billion dollar category leader. >> I told you the spice is gonna flow on this one. The spice is gonna flow. Well, calling unis swap a legacy. We call the mainstream media the legacy media and you're calling unis swap a legacy deex. >> Yeah. I mean if you look at the L2 landscape anywhere they are competing against the metaex right. uh they are a small DEX and what we are so excited about is in New York what we uh unveiled

is the third version of our DEX operating system and that Veladrome and Aerodrome are combining into one single exchange and it is expanding to the home of DeFi mainet Ethereum. >> Very cool. And so before we talk uh about Arrow which will be you know the brand going forward what what historically has been the difference between Aerodrome and Veladrome and then we'll talk about why it makes sense to unify these two. Yeah, you know, I think if you think about the history of Vex's um how they initially came to be, right, it was envisioned by Vitalic. This idea of an AM Bankor was the first to make it real. Unis swap iterated, made it popular, right? Brought it to scale, but these were still simple two-sided

marketplaces. It was the Sushi Swap vampire attack, right? That showed that they were actually three-sided economies. Because if you remember that moment, all sushi did was provide a slight premium to the most important stakeholder in the DEX ecosystem, liquidity providers. And what was the impact of that? 50% of the category leaders market share was gone in a week. >> And um what metadexes fundamentally do, right, is they think about liquidity, which is the second most important component to an onchain economy as a network, right? And so what does like Ethereum do, right? It maximally captures all the value that the network creates in the form of the token. It uses that token to manage all that block

space, align the incentives of different stakeholders. And I think the big difference between the metadex and these traditional two-sided marketplaces is that it is truly like an operating system that aligns all these stakeholders and treats the liquidity layer as the network. It is just like a a chain layer. And so fundamentally, you know, let's make this even more simple. We're able to internalize all of the swap fees. We're able to internalize things traditional exchanges will leak, right? Like uh incentive payments to LPS for bootstrapping. And then they're also able to internalize launch payments. And this is what has traditionally gone to centralized exchanges like Binance.

We've marketized this. This is a billiondoll industry, right? They have made a killing on this sort of stuff. We internalize all that in the form of the token. We distribute the token to liquidity providers only when they're providing active liquidity. And so going back to that sushi swap example, simply we can pay liquidity providers more. >> Yeah. So the day before you guys announced this uh the unis swap team put out this unification proposal. You had a crazy >> a coincidence, right? You had you had a crazy tweet um that basically was like, "Wow, how could they have made this grave mistake right before we're about to announce what we're doing next?"

>> Why do you feel like this new burn mechanism that leads to fees for uh those who burn in this proposal should it pass? Why would that give a drum or Arrow a competitive advantage in the market? >> Yeah, I mean, look, I'll be sympathetic here. they've been in a tough spot. You know, they have been rewarding uh liquidity buyers with 100% of the fees generated by the decks. Um they have had a stakeholder and token holders who have for years had to eat like hundreds of millions of sell pressure on the token in exchange for nothing back. So they had to do something eventually, right?

Um but you cannot steal from Peter to give to Paul. And fundamentally [snorts] right what the protocol fee represents is uh as we were just describing the first and only thing an exchange has to do is maximally reward liquidity providers. They are now effectively taking from liquidity providers right and it's an on an average I believe about 25% cut in theory to LP payments and that means if they are already struggling to compete against the metadex model on L2s while giving 100%. And what we said, what we set out in New York is we're going to internalize all these additional revenue streams to Arrow. We're going to add even more on top of what we described. So, we're going this way. We're going to say we're

going to reward LPS with even more. And right before we go out and announce that, they say, you know, that they finally are making this move, which again, I think is a good one for crypto. We need more coins that have utility, but I think it's going to be a really challenging one for them to defend their share, you know, when they are up against metadexes. And again, uh, you know, perhaps coincidence, perhaps not that this happened right before we took the stage to New York to describe our big expansion to Ethereum. Have you done any estimates on the capital flight that could come from out of unis swap's LPS and two arrows LP uh as a result of them decreasing the incentives for their LPS?

>> Yeah, I mean we we definitely have but uh you know it's probably more credible coming from a third party. So um a few years ago uh Gauntlet did a research report and this report was actually paid for by the UNIS swap Foundation and what Gauntlet described was that if you implement a protocol fee if you take a reward away from liquidity riders what happens you have fewer liquidity riders. So what does that mean? worse ex execution for trades, right? What happens if you worse execution? Less flow, less fees, and it basically hits a negative flywheel, right? It's a vicious cycle. And so what we would expect to happen even before the metadatex arrives is what the report from gauntlet commissioned by unis swap said you will

have a negative flywheel effect. >> Um and what we expect to happen um when we go there is very much similar to what we've seen on L2's. I mean I believe right now unis swap is incentivizing using tokens on uh networks like base but it's not really putting a dent in the market share right um that metadexes have and I think it's just going to become more and more difficult because our only priority is maximally reward these three essential stakeholders and create depositive flight more rewards more liquidity more fees more rewards >> awesome and so you guys have started to build out that onbase And now it feels like there's this expansion that's happening. You're rewarding LPS. You're

also expanding outwards. I believe circles arc is on the is on the road map. What what's the multi-chain thesis, right? As you start to expand beyond base. >> Yeah. I mean, I think it's very simple. Uh as I said, like the the foundation of any economy, traditional economies, you have macro structures, right? And that's like the government, establish property rights, all that sort of stuff. The next most essential layer is liquidity because without exchange an economy doesn't function. So every business, every product, every service is built on top of those two essential rails. The onchain economy is no different. The macro structure is the chain, right? The chain networks and the next layer up is liquidity networks. Now >> what we've seen so far in crypto is that

the liquidity network, the exchange layer is the single highest value creation layer of the entire onchain economy. And our bet is following what Brian Armstrong said, which is 10% of global GDP is about to come on chain. So what we need is an exchange, right, that operates like a network that can capture and manage all of this value that's going to be orders of magnitude bigger, but also make it a single unified experience. So I'll just give you one example here. already we believe you know we'll be able to take uh the liquidity centralize it on arrow right across all of these networks now say you have tokens right now on mainet Ethereum and you know we see Jesse's launching a

token today you you don't have any tokens on base now with the metadex what you will be able to do with arrow is you just open it up and you already see the Jesse token directly in the UI um even though you are on Ethereum you didn't have to select a chain you just go to swap you don't need to worry about having tokens on base. You don't need to worry about having gas. We bridge it, we swap it, we execute it. And this is the first liquidity aggregator crosschain plus bridge plus swapper allin one a fully chain abstracted experience. And you're going to also hit the best liquidity in something like Substream D3.

>> Yeah. Yeah. And so when you decided to to you know expand Ethereum and and obviously base and then now think about arc are you also you know keen to expand to other stable coin chains or stable chains like you know tempo has gotten a lot of this kind of appeal even like Dankrad has left the Ethereum foundation for for Tempo. Why arc why not plasma or tempo stable codeex these other kind of stable or is that on the docket for you guys? Yeah, I think our focus is very much on Ethereum, right? And we we do believe that there are going to be cases where we can think about the broadest definition of Ethereum is in EVM. Um, as of right now, you know, if you just look

at the total addressable market, most of what can be captured right now is on Ethereum mainet. So, that's going to be our main focus as well as servicing the 12 chains that we service right now. We saw ARC as a amazing opportunity because we do think that they have a unique value proposition. They are going to be bringing instit institutional partners on chain who would not otherwise deploy on Ethereum, right? And we want to be the connective tissue, right? If there are new interesting stable assets, there are new interesting RWAs and as I just described, you have uh something on Ethereum and you want to go access them, we think that is a unique place. because we want to be the connective tissue between them base and maintenance. Um but uh the cool thing about you know our

model um and about the technology we build I mean you guys probably felt the cloud fair outage. >> Oh yeah. Oh we felt it hard. >> Yeah. >> Yesterday's stream was not possible. >> Yeah. I mean it's it's crazy. And isn't the whole point of like building on Ethereum and building these things that they're always on that they're reliable? >> Yes. >> So our front end was not effective. >> Why is that? because we've spent years building the first fully onchain front end that operates at this scale. The uptime of our front end is literally the uptime of the underlying application or the the the chain itself, right?

Ethereum's very reliable. So why does that matter in context of of your question? >> Well, if you are scaling a traditional web two front end and most dexes still use web two front ends, there's intermediaries, centralized services, uh they have to pay AWS and cloud cost and all of that. We can scale our product um infinitely across any chain at zero marginal cost. And this is something not well understood about our technology mode. I think for a long time people assumed ah these guys aren't real builders, right? You know, they're not building anything interesting. We were up yesterday when everybody was down.

And if tomorrow suddenly, you know, the entire world came on chain, started using our front end, zero marginal cost. Yeah. you know there's no infra there's no devx cost and that means that hey let's say there is some new awesome L1 that starts to scale unbelievably fast we need to get over there deploy the contracts and the front end and we are there and then you're connected of course to the single cohesive network uh the liquidity network of all of broader theory >> I just got to push back real quick on this because I a has had IPFS instances for a long time uh liquidity has had hundreds of front ends. So there's no way that you guys are the first front end uh that is fully

on chain in the sense because we've had these IPFS front ends for a while. >> Yeah. Well, there's uh some difference. It's one at this scale and two it is about the data you see. So why are we able to surface um in real time data from 12 chains right now in a single front end without any of this? That is because we built a technology. called Sugar and it surfaces live onchain data to the front end in real time. Okay, so there is nothing there's a difference between IPFS which just means we're hosting it there and every single piece of data you see is live offchain which means when you look at our front end it is basically the same as looking at the the chain itself >> and um you know it is unreal given the

scale we are operating at that we've been able to achieve this. >> Very cool. I I have one more question and it kind of comes back to our original topic that we were discussing which was uh the fees that are paid to LPs. It sounds like when it comes to uh LP incentives, you're a maximalist. Pay all of the fees to the LPs. Um and so, you know, that's on one hand. On the other hand, we've also got this revenue meta that we're talking a lot about. And so if we're not and and I think I know the answer here, but I want to give you a chance to to uh you know tell our audience if we're not using uh the flow that's coming through arrow uh to generate fees for the protocol and pass those fees back to token holders, what gives the arrow token value? Yeah.

>> Um ve tokconomics I think is the answer. But please it's useful because um the important distinction here is that um the token the the arrow token is a wrapper for all the fees but not just all the fees right all the fees today and tomorrow and liquidity payments right and launch payments and it's also now internalizing things like net right so we are wrapping more and more revenue streams in the token because you can take that token lock it and take that reward each And we are distributing that wrapper in the token to the active tick of liquidity.

So that's why our system it's a network right it's about connecting all of these and distributing value through them can reward more right it's all only about addition more value captured more value internalized straight to the most important stakeholder then you don't have to get into these games of well if we're going to decrease fees then maybe we could add some protection and maybe we're back up to par. We just wrap it all into the token. We make that token a claim on all of that if you participate and then we give that claim right out just like a network token would >> uh to the people adding value to the network.

>> Alex, man, you have this very competitive spirit. Did you play sports growing up? >> Yeah, baseball. >> A lot of baseball. >> Baseball position. >> Uh shortstop and then I think I moved to the outfield. >> He's got a good arm. Short stop. Got to have a good arm. Play shortstop >> and good good at building. Yeah. >> Yeah. Um, your your Twitter banner is Steve Jobs like flicking off IB IBM. >> Yeah. >> Um, I I gotta say that's like your spirit in a in a photo. Uh, where does that come from? Where does this inspiration come from? What is this chip on your shoulder?

>> Yeah. Oh, I wouldn't call it a chip. Do you think Steve had a chip? I mean, >> I think he had a lot of them. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but >> he had something internally driving him, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. I think uh so I like grew up watching, right? and the entire reinvention that we saw and then I just became like a student of technology right I read about all the early days the battles between you know first it was Apple and IBM and then it was Apple and Microsoft and you have all of these examples in technology where you have deeply passionate people and what is this other than an emergent technology and you you need these people who are unbelievably passionate and that means when they see something that they think could be better hell Yeah, they're

[ __ ] like like fired up, right? Yeah. And so I think for us it is this idea of >> our entire thesis revolves around one core idea. Um that if we're going to go out and beat traditional firms, right? And these are some of the most capitalized most entrenched interests in the entire world, right? In entire history. And we're saying, you know, we're all here at this conference saying we're going to build the technology that does this. Um the only way to do that is to build better systems than they can and I think so much of what you've seen on chain so far would look like the worst version of a firm would be illegal in a firm right and uh why we think firms will fail is because we don't need

to extract value when you can turn the firm into code and you maximally reward all the participants. It's this hyperefficient thing they'll never be able to compete against. And so whether it's the the ethos of you know let's look at all the the waste the extraction the insiders in the traditional world or let's look at all the ways in which a bunch of people came here wrapped themselves in the values of the space and made things even worse. Um I think our ethos is and we bet our lives on this right because I say we didn't raise like it's a great thing but let me tell you it was dark you know at many times and we thought from first principles we were right um and that is what we want to do we want to make better systems

things that create shared value for all participants and we don't just think it's a moral necessity you know I've got a bit of that in me but it's a strategic one if we don't do this as industry will not be what we all hope it will I love the game theory. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Ladies and gentlemen, Alex Cutler live from Buena Stev Connect day one. Alex, thank you for joining us, >> dude. Thank you so much for having me. >> Awesome. Always. >> Cheers. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, guys. Little quick break and then we'll be back with our last guest. >> Our last guest. Yeah. Coming up. >> Cool. >> Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. [music] Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to

bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his Rio upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KCHI is the world's largest [music] prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today.

>> Look at this guy, man. This guy comes in here. [laughter] This guy comes in here absolutely looking like the Chick-fil-A cow. Moo moo moo. Right. Ready to be >> cow swap. [laughter] Ready to be >> sponsored by cow swap. >> Oh my god. >> Wait. So, can I tell you a story? So, yesterday I'm at this event and this woman >> sit down. Sit down. Come here. Come on. >> This woman comes up to me and she's like, "Yo, can I do an interview with you just like about your look?" And I was like, "Yeah, yeah, absolutely." She's like, "Great, great, great. Here, like, take take a mic. We're going to put you on camera." She like mics me up. I'm like, "Cool. What do you want to ask?" She's like, "Why the [ __ ] are you wearing that shit?" [laughter] >> And I was like, "What?" She's like,

"You're at a formal [ __ ] event and you consider that to be formal [ __ ] clothing?" And I was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, like, calm down. Calm down." And she's like, "You think that's chic? This is supposed to be [ __ ] chic. Get the [ __ ] out of here." And then she walked away. So, >> on camera, >> this interview could only go better. >> Wow. >> Yeah. >> That's insane. >> Isn't that great? >> We're going to quote tweet this clip on that video. >> We got to find it. Uh, basically this exactly the same. Yeah, this is all I wear. Just this couch shirt. [laughter] >> I like the hat, too. Don't forget about the hat.

>> Don't forget the Gremlins hat. Yeah, the >> Gremlin. The greatest one of all time. Gremlins, too. Sexy Gremlin. Yeah, >> there you go. Sexy Gremlin from Gremlins too. >> We brought you here to talk about Ethereum culture. >> This is this is a great fashion. Yeah. >> Um, man, I mean, David, um, Eddie, >> so yeah, where do we start? Um, [laughter] >> well, let's let's start fashion. We'll get into culture. What gives you this look? Like, where did this come from? >> Yeah. Um, having cooler friends than me is the real secret. Yeah. Uh, who are not in crypto?

>> We like to talk to people smarter than us. >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You find people actually have fashion taste and you're like, "Oh, what should what should I what should I wear?" Yeah. And then they help you out. Uh, no, it's I don't know. eBay is the real secret. >> Yeah. Yeah. Nice. >> Yeah. [laughter] >> I mean, dude, um, that's awesome. Sick. I mean, [ __ ] yeah. >> Thank you, dude. >> Um, >> and so I mean, look at look at us. Like, we're just like all black. >> No, you look like you're really successful. To be honest, I look like I'm trying to be successful. Like, I [laughter] look like, you know, like I'm Nevo Ree. Like, I'm like really try to show off success like in a way that's so hard. You're like, "That guy hasn't made it. That guy's done [laughter] like the

worst trades of all time." Whereas you show up in like that black pole and they're like, "Oh, that's a billionaire." >> Ethereum culture in 2016. >> Ethereum culture in 2025. That's completely right. [laughter] Shout out Shout out to my man Vitalik for showing up in like what was it like the mudang button? >> Yes. >> Where the [ __ ] did he get that? [laughter] >> I was like, you know, okay, perfect place in the eBay trenches. >> Vitalic is the top down, right? Like that is like so do you think it's it's it's it's it's good that you know he dresses that way?

>> Uh, absolutely. >> Okay. For what sake? Like diversity for like not taking yourself so seriously or like >> whimsical? Why is that a good thing? having fun. >> If he can do it, then editing yourself. >> I think I I think it's it's the same thing as like being on Twitter, which is like who are the voices that you want to listen to on Twitter? It's like the most colorful voices, right? Like like same thing is true when you show up in person. It's like the most colorful person in the room. Like you might not agree with anything they say. You might think their fashion is absolute [ __ ] trash, but you got respect for the authenticity that they're willing to [ __ ] show up as them, right? % and that I think that sets a tone to be like you can be your [ __ ] self, right?

>> I think that's what it is about that like ability to just it's inclusive and just it's that uh kind of um Yeah, exactly. Just like >> be yourself unapologetically yourself. >> Metallic is unapologetically like silly and it's amazing. >> And let's be honest like the corporations have had to follow retail in crypto for the past 10 years. Like you know whatever issues we can talk about the suits have had to follow the badger dance. You know, it's like the badger dance came first and the suits came after. So, it's like there's no reason for the badger dance, you know, the badger dancers to have to put on the suits.

>> When you say suits following Badger Dance, you mean like the [laughter] suits that have had done their >> Anyone knows where their research like these are the guys that that found an edge because they kind of realized that >> there was something more to learn here. There was something to dig deeper into. And the ones who kind of abandoned their own like suit philosophy and dug a little bit deeper into this world were the ones that learned about it first, got in early, and are now profiting as a result. >> Like uh ultimate uh meritocracy, right? It's like I don't need to wear a suit to uh you know, signal my value, right?

>> I think we still have a lot of suits like in Blackstone or whatever who probably are making all the money off of us. Like we're probably all down bad this last cycle. Blackstone's way up, you know, because the suits came in and probably took all the money from the Badger Dancers. But you know what? The Badger Dancers got here first and we got the money to lose to the suits. So, you know, it still [laughter] says something like that they had to extract from us. >> Yes. >> Yeah. That's right. >> That means that we did something right. Right. There was some value that was created here that >> we had the money that you had to take from us to make us broke again. >> Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. Exactly.

>> So, we're in this transition, right, to like this more like culture, >> whatever it is, right? Like keep Ethereum weird, I think, is is great. But like how does one adapt to this like you know how does how how does one you know because it's an important part of of strategies now you have to have some sort of institutional I mean for a chain or for a big app whatever right >> um so like how does one keep the cipher like like the cipher punk in them while also adapting to this new world I I think I think there's also like a kind of broader business question here which is like you know is the opportunity for something you build the TAM that is out there or is it creating a whole new TAM that didn't exist before, right? Like classic example is like Uber. It's like

if you went when Uber started and looked at like the TAM of cabs, like it's not that great to like displace the cab industry, but once you realize that Uber is actually going to completely change how people travel and way more people are going to order cars that never would have taken cabs before, then suddenly you're growing the TAM, right? And so I do think crypto always is kind of back and forth because we're like, we can see the payment rails out there. We can see how much better crypto would be for them. We can see all the institutional adoption makes so much [ __ ] sense, right? And it's easier in some ways, like in some ways it's just like if we just take our world and put it on chain, like that's already, you know, a trillion dollar opportunity. But it is really easy to miss that there all are

all sorts of new things that could not have existed without crypto that are going to become possible. And like the real possibility actually requires a lot of imagination, too. And so it's like those two things are always at odd. Like do you go after the institutions or do you go after the new ones? And this is not new. It's like Polygon in 2021 being like, are we the NFT chain? Are we the Starbucks chain, right? like and then trying to be both. [laughter] >> Yeah, >> we're the Starbucks NFT chain. >> Yeah. >> Um th this conversation is is a perfect just juxtiposition of uh the conversations we had two weeks ago. We were in SmartCon in New York. Uh >> I was wearing like a white button-down like >> Yeah. full trench coat vibes. I had a collar on my shirt.

>> Damn, look at you guys. >> These [ __ ] were calling Sherlock Holmes out. >> No, I will not put a blazer on. I will not put a laser on. >> And and so um we it felt like we had a lot of the same not the same conversations we're having here, but we did a similar marathon stream and it was just the same conversation over and over again. It's like how do we squeeze another two basis points of profit out for Blackstone? Totally. >> And so we can only have those conversations so many times. We already see those payment rails. To your point it, you know, the room was sponsored by Fidelity. Black Rockck were there. the the conversations we've had today have already been so much more vibrant and so there's been so much more variety in the conversations we've had today.

>> Yeah, it definitely has been. >> Yeah. And and so I'm just having a lot more fun. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. And I think this is always a question too which is like is is boring the TAM or is exciting the TAM? And like they both are but they're different games and you kind of have to land. >> Boring makes boring makes money and boring capitalizes on the TAM but boring isn't imagination. And to your earlier point, imagination is how we grow the TA. >> It's also a question of who makes money, right? Because it's like stable coins are the best business probably in the history of business, right? Like like you know what is it? Tether is like 30 people who average like $100 million of profit or something.

>> There's never been but but like the correlary to there being 30 people who have $100 million, you know, of profit each is like there's only 30 people. Like if you're excited by crypto as like decentralizing finance to give anyone opportunity and access to capital markets, it's like >> stable coins actually are kind of the opposite of that, right? So it's like it's both really exciting in terms of like what it can mean as a business. It's also really [ __ ] boring to everyone else. Not just because stable coins are boring, but because we literally can't make any money off of it. >> Yeah. Well, that's the thing is like all right, tokenization stable coins. All right, how do we get exposure? And it's like, >> yeah, >> well, you could have bought XPL a month ago and not looking too great. Or you

could have bought circle and you know been up a little bit from the launch and >> there's really not that many options right now. That's the biggest that's like that's the biggest bifurcation in the space right now is like CT native people are like >> down bad depressed not having a good time and institutions are like literally elated just like through the roof bull run in New York because they are going to get exposure to the upside of of this work that they're doing through like whatever IPOs spaxs etc and we can't and so it's like we're in this deep bare market of like vibes and altcoins and like they're in this extremely early bull and it's just like what the [ __ ] going Yeah. No, that's what that's you said it.

>> And so like then taking that to like the culture. I put out this tweet that was like it feels like there's a lot less infighting this this week than previously. Now you ruffled some feathers and we're going to talk about that. [laughter] Um but uh do you agree? Like it feels like it's more of like Ethereum and like realizing like okay you know what I've heard I heard from multiple people in the last two years Ethereum hasn't won yet. >> But like I swear the last three years Ethereum people were pretty like not arrogant but like pretty like on top. It was like Ethereum then everyone else. I still think it's like that. Yeah. >> But like where are we at? >> Yeah. Yeah. In terms of Ethereum adoption or in terms of >> in terms of like this infighting the uh the community like where Ethereum's at.

Yeah. >> Well, I mean one reason I think there's less infighting is because like the way to generally the way to make a lot of money over the past few years is either stable coins or crime, [laughter] >> right? It's like how many chains do we know where it's like the founders sold OTC, they allocated all the airdrops to themselves, you know, they were their own market maker like behind the scenes, you know. Um, and it's like or then they pull all sorts of shenanigans to pump the token price, right? And it's like uh those guys >> did exactly what they intended to do, which is to farm their own protocol, right? Uh, and extract and dump. And like I've been an angel in some of those and it's like kind of interesting being an angel and being the exit liquidity

where you're like wait this wait the seed stage round is the exit liquidity like what this is coming earlier than usual. Yeah. [laughter] >> Uh feel you on that. >> Those guys are those guys have kind of run that playbook and I do feel like now we're getting consolidation where it's like the rugs are you know like like the days of being angry at Blast or whatever no one cares right or front or whatever. It's like they they they did their thing. they they got their bag and it's like we're now in this very consolidated era where it's like okay it's very clearly base it's polygon it's arbitum >> same as it always has been right like bass is kind of the standard for optimism but like it's really hasn't changed and maybe we had to get mega eth in there too >> yes that is exactly what it feels like

it feels like we started there and then we went through this whole loop of likeund long tail chain >> and then it's like oh okay we're just back to the big three again >> we're literally back to where we started yeah [laughter] >> oh man >> like we wasted how many hours on crypto Twitter fighting about chains that we're just going to extract and dump and leave anyway. >> Oh my goodness. All right, David. So, you put out this tweet, man. >> I want to pull some of your tweets and and go through >> specifically this base one. Um >> Oh, no. I just had to talk about this on another podcast, too. >> I've been debating writing this. Maybe as a founder, it's really dumb me, but the number one regret I've heard at Dev Connect from nearly every builder is choosing to build on base. Yep.

>> Uh then you go on this, you know, absolute rant uh that ends with basically reasonable. It's the exact same story as so many chains from the past two years. Is both a lesson and an opportunity because it shows what a chance there is for new chains. >> Um, Bass is going to remain one of the best places to deploy. It has network effects, top American crypto companion, but Bass has spent their days talking up all these applications on Twitter and that it basically built an app that lets you discover and use other apps. But the positivity has been toxic. The content coin thesis has been mind-boggling and the whole approach has been a classic case of overpromising and underd delivering. This conference has made me feel a lot less alone. 322,000

views. >> I'm making you read all my tweets. Look how much better it is when he does. >> Jesse DM'd you. >> No one would be arguing with me if they heard him read it. >> You had the audacity to post a screenshot of Jesse's uh >> He gave me permission. >> He gave you permission. Okay. Okay. We're going to clip all this. Um take that. And um so what the [ __ ] going on here? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So uh the post I did is kind of in two parts. I actually really appreciate that you called attention to the second part. The first part is like okay here's all my issues with base like I've had as a builder. Others a lot of other people have had as builders as well. And like I will say the reaction is like one of those

interesting things where you just realize how crypto Twitter is like the least reliable barometer of sentiment because it's like I have just been getting like I don't know sledgehammered by base community people over the past day being like no bases are gods like uh you will not you will not attack. Yeah, good point. Right. It is pret. privately I'm getting like so many messages from people being like yeah this has been our experience too and like big projects you know um and so you're like oh there are just a lot of things people are scared to say you know publicly and so >> I mean I'm even scared to bring it up >> public sentiment is very we're staying very neutral here we like the bass team they're fantastic they've been good to us >> there's a lot there's a lot that's

really good about bass and I and I tried to say that in the post too in the second half which is like yeah I have a lot of issues with bass I have a lot of issues with how they've approached things and what their marketing strategy has been but like ultimately When it comes down to it, it's not just base. It's like we were told a year ago that if you win and build on Salana, you would get distribution there. All the users and liquidity were there. Everyone gets distribution. Time move time which great product moved from base over to Salana and they gave up um because they didn't get it right and it's like we were told this about blast two years ago. It's like build on blast you're going to get users, right? And it's like these chains actually all of them have

been incapable of providing users and and it's not just bass, right? So, like, yeah, Bass is my target in this one because they've promised this kind of level of distribution, but the fact is no one's been able to offer it. And it's not just Bass, and they don't deserve like, I think, you know, single single-handed blame here um either for that. And like, yeah, as I said, Bass still is a great place. Like, we ran contests there a couple weeks ago, and they were generating like close to $100,000 for for voters. It's a good place to launch stuff like um and you know >> what I try to get at is like if anything the irony here is like Bass actually understands how important distribution is in a way that other chains don't like they understand that like being able to support app builders is a reason for app

builders to come and build with you. It's like two years ago you went you built with the chain with the best performance the one with the most interop with most liquidity. It was like UX was so [ __ ] to be able to like move tokens around between different chains but it's like today you go to Joke Race it's like we have a widget from Jumper if we need you to be able to play in a contest. It's just like one extra tap, right, to move it over. That stuff doesn't matter. Like what matters of like why you go and build on chain is that they can really support you. Like distribution is the differentiator. And Bass gets that. Like that's what's interesting is like Bass understands that. Like Jesse is doing more probably than any other founder of any other chain to like emphasize distribution and

go and push apps, right? Um but like I do think there's a danger when you promise that level and then it's really hard to actually deliver on that. And you get to the point where like I was saying this before, it's like kind of where Ethereum was like 2 to 3 years ago where they're like Ethereum's for everyone and therefore we will never pick sides or support any individual app because it might be competitive with another app. Right. And you kind of started to get that with bass where it's like Bass is for everyone but then actually almost no one's getting support. >> If it's for everyone then it's for no one.

>> If it's everyone it's for no one. Right. Right. >> And and so you know you you you say positive and negative things about bass. I think you know you're you're very honest. You're very real. Um, one of the things, you know, you're uh when you when you say base isn't, you know, a great place to launch right now. Um, I >> I actually say it is a good place to launch it, >> but but maybe founders are finding what I'm trying to get at is like disappointment, >> right? The best analogy that I have here is like uh like you make a proposal for like where to go to dinner and then you know if you say no, >> you got to provide an alternative. Well, that I'm curious like what is the alternative if Bass isn't follow you know following through on what what you

know you want to see from a founder and a builder what is a network where you know they are coming through and they are providing that >> totally and and I do think there's probably more I could have done in the post to be like here's what I'd really like to see from base like proactively like these would have been nice things and also I could have said like you know here here's other chains so like personally like we're live on like 20 different chains right now I've worked with about a 100 different chains over time that's been really wild to see >> we did a great partnership by the way with Ian unlockred We ran contests that went really well. >> That was awesome. Um, and like yeah, I can say like Avalanche ran a showdown with us 2 months ago that generated a

million and a half dollars to voters. And so it's like we benefited. That was great for us, but like also they used us as a community marketing tool to like market their apps and the apps got a lot of traction because people were learning about them and going on to understand who they were so that they can make money by voting for them. Um, and so like you know it was kind of a win-win. And it was one for the apps, its one for avalanche and one for aium just did that this week. That's also been going well. Um I would say like you know Polygon has run demo days with us. Uh Arbitrum has run demo days with us. Ethereum Foundation just has run like two or three contests in the past month with us. Um and so it's like like literally Ethereum itself, Polygon, Arbitum,

Avalanche, Sonium like like those chains have all been really Abstract also has been coming in and supporting us a bunch and and then there's a few others that we have some plans with um for stuff coming up soon too. They've all been great. They've all been really great. So like when I'm when when I'm coming after base, I'm like it really is kind of for me as a builder the only chain that I've had a really different experience on because these other chains have been really really awesome. >> And and look, it's not the case for every builder. Like if you go through, you read the responses like Base has been really great to some apps. Um and I'm happy to hear that. But I will also say like my DMs have just been filled with unbelievable projects being like, "Yeah, like we were the moon. We got a

call and then we were put in touch with the team. They ghosted us." And it's just like, you know, there's a problem when you're so good at doing frontman work that like >> it's really hard to back that up. Expectations are so high it's really hard to back that up. And I and I I will say Jesse's credit like I think he understands that and he's like we need to build a backend engine so that like you know there are a thousand Jesss here that can like actually support this and I think he gets that. Yeah. >> Just to close the loop here um when you're thinking about like Ethereum in 5 years. >> Yeah. Yeah. What do you think the brand looks like in five years? Like 2030 Ethereum. Like what do what what do we want the brand to be? Yeah.

>> Because it's kind of evolved, right? Like 2016 it was very like it was the you know it was the preminded Bitcoin kind of thing where all the Bitcoin was like oh it's a premine but it was all about like programmability, right? And then we had like the ICO. It was kind of like the ICO brand. Then we had like the DeFi NFT brand. Maybe we're like in like this more institutional or something. I don't even know where we are honestly. What is like the what is the 2030 Ethereum brand? >> Yeah, I I I I I think there there's probably one of two directions we go in and and I'm still kind of trying to figure out which one. So, I'd be curious your take. One is that one interesting thing that Ethereum has done to chain full interop, right? Like native

interop. It's like Ethereum's done a really good job of like almost going piece for peace and being like lazy bridging, you know, like ZK like attestations for interop like all this stuff that Celestia was like kind of pioneering. Ethereum has taken it and like good for Ethereum for doing that because I think Celestia had the right idea and I think like Ethereum's done really well to to run with it. And so I do think like this narrative of like we are the best place to launch a chain is pretty powerful. It's like Robin Hood comes along, right? And I think like right now Tempo is obviously not Ethereum, but it's like Ethereum is very well aware they got to work in finality. If they can work in finality, like then you really could be getting every single major corporation, government even like launching a chain there, right? On the

other hand, I think the other thing we're seeing is like there actually aren't that many chains like we're consolidating and so then it really does become about like the major chains are all here and they have EVM interop with each other, right? Um in a way that this is the base layer. I I I think that the risk for Ethereum is not the L1. It's not the liquidity from DeFi because that has never gone away and that's super powerful. Salana has never even really come close to to catching up to it. Um it's not the ability to like launch a chain, right? It's not the culture. I think the risk is actually just the token. It's like why is ETH valuable?

And I think like back when everything back when it was creating a global economy where you paid for everything in ETH in like the OpenC days um then there was so much value around the token. It literally was like a nation state currency where it's like you have the laws of the nation that are subtending like the transactions to ensure that this goes through with the native currency which is ETH right and now everything's kind of being priced in USD and it's like well why is ETH valuable? It's definitely not revenue. We agreed like revenue sucks right for no one [laughter] but it's like is it GDP like like how do we actually navigate what this thing is worth and so I think the risk for Ethereum >> is is is really figuring out tokconomics to be honest is the token piece but in terms of where it goes I could see it

one direction going like we're the best place to launch an app or second direction there's only three apps and all of them are on or only three chains and all of them are on uh Ethereum >> ladies and gentlemen David Phelps um what a what a session to end us off. We're going to have a quick break and then we're going to close out. >> Yeah. >> Thank you for having me. >> My [ __ ] pleasure. Pleasure. >> Appreciate it. >> Thank you guys. >> Thank you. >> Be right back, guys. >> Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. [music] Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on $10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now.

Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest prediction [music] market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private, and here today. Visit near.ai AI to have a fully private chat

experience. Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. [music] Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested, reliable DeFi platform that is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz.

Holiday is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz XYZ to never write a smart contract again. Open, stable, borderless. Frack is building the next generation of stablecoin infrastructure for the digital finance era. Visit fra.com to learn more today. Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto.

Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are missing the entire point. [music] Secure your coins. Get a treasure at treasure.io. Go anywhere onchain instantly with Relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now.

Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest chains for [music] stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. KHI is the world's largest [music] prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to call sheet.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience.

Havachi is fast and private per [music] trading secured by ZK with Celestia underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today. Looking for yield that stands out? Infinify gives you just [music] that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinify is a battle tested reliable defias in Argentina.

No no no no no no. >> Guys, we're going to be all right. Do not look at the market. I promise you, as long as you have rollup TV, you're going to be fine. We're not going anywhere. I don't even give a [ __ ] what the price of Bitcoin or ETH is. I know that there is a future in this market. You will be just fine. We will take care of you. We will guide you. We will be here no matter what the price is, up, down, or sideways. Guys, we're not going anywhere. We We had six hours today with the best builders in all of Ethereum.

And guys, we are extremely extremely excited to be in the position that we are, which is kind of this little jello layer between the institutional adoption that we had at SmartCon two weeks ago. We we saw the likes of JP Morgan, DTCC, Black Rockck, the White House, the Fed. They came in, they sat down with us, and they basically said, "Guys, we are coming for you, your bags." They they literally quite literally said the technology that you've built is superior to ours in many ways and we need to get on to this and catch up or we are going it's it's going to our business is going to suffer. Stable coins are going at private banking and many other examples.

So now today it's much more techoriented which obviously we're excited about. We love the tech. If you've been following the role for a while we got our roots in the technology. I mean we Robbie and I have no engineering background but you know we could tell you the difference between you know the execution environment data availability zk L1's L2 bridges multi-igs what makes you know escape hatches important exit windows and we've only been able to do this because we we've learned from the best people in the industry and so you know our brand role going forward is going to be to combine these two worlds as effectively as possible. We want to be a bridge between the tech, the developer community, the builder community, and

the traditional capital allocators of the world. We have a lot of plans for 2026 that we're not going to get into. I'm going to pass it to Rob. He's going to introduce day two of Dev Connect lineup. It's going to be absolutely epic. So, Rob, what do we got on the agenda for day two? How you feeling, man? >> I love your rants. I love them so much. >> Got to break the fourth wall is what they say. I don't know. That's what the creative strategist says. I just [ __ ] sit here and show up. I don't know, man. Our creative strategist is outside wearing a mask. Um, [laughter] we uh we've got a great >> [ __ ] mask off.

>> We've got a great great second day for you guys. Uh, if you are looking at the market, Starknet is up 20% on the day. We're going to have >> Zcash Hyperlid looks good. >> Orin, the COO of Starknet coming on uh tomorrow. He's going to kick us off. Uh then we're gonna have Defi Dave from CAP also in the stable coin super cycle. We're gonna follow that up with Dankrad. The last time you guys heard from Dankrad, it was him leaving the EF going to Tempo. We're going to have Dankrad live from Dev Connect. Then we're going to rip, we're going to go Francesco from Consensus, head of developer relations.

Then the one, the only, the legend, the king of DeFi, Stani from A. uh the same I mean we're going to we're going to have Stani and then we're going to have Rave that evening. So that's going to be pretty fun. He's going to be fired up. Sean from Magic Newton, we love those guys over there at Magic. Great co-hosts for a lot of our events. Uh Barnaby and Josh from the Ethereum Foundation. Very ETH aligned episode. Uh very very exciting. Those guys are going to come on at the same time. We're going to have a lot of fun with the EF. Monae from Makerd guys. super ethine, super D5 focused. Uh, another Ethereum Foundation researcher, Anscar. Uh, you guys have seen him. Uh, Alex is going to call in

from ZK Sync. We're going to have Mike Silig from Etherfi. That's uh, rollup port. We're going to have Cammy from the Defiant. Shout out to our media uh, brothers and sisters. We're going to have Nick White uh, the Hawaiian hero of Celestia. We're gonna have Paul from Morpho and we're gonna close off with a just [snorts] absolute technical genius from Flashbots, Quintis Kilborn. And that will be our show for tomorrow. I'm excited. I'm stoked. Don't pay attention to the markets. Pay attention to Rollup TV. We've got everything that you need to know and more. We're live. We're going to be live tomorrow and we're

going to keep bringing bridging this intersect, bridging this gap between traditional finance, DeFi. I am tired. I'm going to have a beer and I'm going to just keep working and set up for tomorrow. So, shout out to the team. Shout out to N Leo, Brad, Alex, Estamos, and Buenosares. Return to fundamentals, baby. Return to fundamentals. It's coming back. The fundamentals are coming back. You need a business model to succeed in crypto anymore. This isn't 2016. You can't run off with ICO money in 2018. Blockchains are better than Bitcoin. It's not 2018. 2019, not much happened. 2020, we had DeFi summer fundamental season. 2021.

>> 2025 is the line in the sand. We are returning to fun, we're we're returning to fundamentals [laughter] in 2026. And I promise you, you will see more of this slogan everywhere you look. Return to fundamentals is a deep, deep message that all people in our industry can relate to. Rob, what does return to fundamentals mean to you, man? >> Um, it means that uh I'm fundamentally exhausted after a great great day of streams. And so, >> guys, we'll see you tomorrow. Let's go.

[music] >> [music]