The Rollup TV: The Signal

Transcript

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Hey, hey, hey. [Music] Welcome back to the rollup TV. Today is the signal powered by boundless mainet beta. We have a slew of projects, great founders and people coming on today to

talk about what it means to prove the entire Ethereum consensus. Also just get some updates from what they're doing on their side. Stoked on that. We have an amazing lineup today. Uh tons of tons of great guests. We got Tommer from Stellar. That token's been ripping. Those guys are doing great work. One of the OGs from the 2017 era. Shiv from Boundless, the new CEO. obviously got to talk to him about what's going on with the mainet beta with that announcement that they they absolutely crushed. We got Shirro from IEN Cloud, also known as IGEN layer. We got Robinson from Wormhole, a good friend of the show.

Declan from Lineia, who I love who I love to mess around with and have some fun with. Um, and Michael from Netherm. So, great crew today. It's another beautiful day in Sweden. It's 7:40 p.m. I'm ripping the Coke Zero. I got some water. No. No AC here in Europe. I don't know how they do no AC in Europe. I don't know what to say. I think the Genius Act is getting voted on as we speak. We should get some live updates from that from the timeline. Let's have a damn good stream. Markets are ripping and uh yeah, we we we going to get our first guest in here. We got six guests today and I think there might be a a surprise guest as well. So, looking forward to that and uh we're we're going to get Tomer in here quickly. So,

looking forward to getting that rocking and rolling. Here we go. We got Tomer coming up, guys. It's going to be a banger stream. We have six guests plus a potential surprise one, as I said. Looking forward to it. Um yeah, let's let's jump in. We're live from Sweden. From from Sweden. Just in case you didn't hear the first time, we're live from Sweden. Market's ripping. I missed the Calera airdrop today thing. Uh that token launched at 1.4 4 bill it's pumping a 1.8 eight. Um, glad to see that our fund invested in like the series A, so that looks good. But I saw ICO beast post about the airdrop today.

Bit bomb. Uh, but that's the that's uh that that's what happens when you're not paying attention. Uh, is what it is. So that amongst with crypto week in the USA are the main the main kind of macro topics. Uh, Trump was going to fire Powell, but you know, pulled off that. So that's good. And yeah, I mean, let's have a damn stream, guys. This is going to be a marathon. Uh we got, like I said, six guests and maybe a potential surprise one. It's hot as hell in Sweden. I don't know what's going on, but we're going to push through. We're going to have some fun. Can somebody please tell me where Robbie is? Where's Robbie?

Oh, I know where where Robbie is. He's not on the stream, but he'll be back next week. Following week, he's going to be back. He'll be in action, and we'll be ready to have him on. So looking forward to getting him back, getting the gang back together. While it is fun doing these things solo, it is more fun with Rob, more dynamic. Frankly, this is a very very technical kind of uh ZK conversations today amongst other broader blockchain infrastructure talk. So excited about that. Uh kind of brings us full circle back to the original the rollup content strategy back in the in the in the depths of the bear and 23 into 24 all the way up until about Q1 this year.

Seemingly we've we've grown into this new live format which you've seen get adopted quite a bit across uh crypto Twitter media and I think it's just going to keep accelerating. Uh I've seen more and more pop up. So you'll you'll keep seeing them. But just remember the rollup TV was the first in the crypto industry to be ripping live streams, interviews on air, multiple guests. We have gified segments coming up. We've got unique things coming up. I can't spill too much, but it's going to happen and uh we're ready for it. So, yeah, guys, we're we're going to get Tommer up here shortly and uh he's in the back end. He's getting ready all set up and we're going to have a damn stream.

Pour one out. Going to be a bit of a marathon. Looking forward to it. And here he comes. So, Tommer is the chief product officer at Stellar. Stellar is one of the uh larger projects that's that's getting reception from the institutions and has has always done so. Um so yeah, we're going to get him in here and guys just uh just to have some some throughine between a lot of these conversations. Uh today is all about balances mainet beta and the signal where they are bringing out technology to power consensus proofs to prove Ethereum finality broadly. We got Tommer

in the back end. He's ready. We're going to get him up on stage. Bring him up for his live show. I don't I don't know if if he's been on a live show like this before. Tomer, what's going on, man? Good to have you. >> I'm doing great. Can you hear me? >> Yes, sir. Welcome to the Signal, brother. Awesome. Good to be here. >> Yeah, man. Uh well, well, cool, man. Thanks for coming on. Uh stoked to chat. I think it's actually my first time speaking to your company in the five years that I've done uh content on podcasting, etc. Uh you guys have been crushing it on a lot of the institutional brand stuff and uh just broadly getting distribution amongst, you know, just the crypto audience that I think a a lot of us are trying to to to get. So, um you're the chief product

officer at Stellar. I would love to just understand what you guys are working on, most focused on today. I got a bunch of other questions, but let's lay the foundation for what your core focus is right now as a chief product officer. Welcome to the rollup. Welcome to the signal brother. >> Awesome. Thank you for having me and I'm glad after five years that we're finally intersecting. So, um, Stellar is an L1, uh, really focused on world real world utility. Been around since, uh, 2015, so it's been a while. um and uh really about stable coins, payments, RWAs, all the things that are like really in trend and in the meta right now. We've really been laser focused on them for uh for a while now. Uh so we have things institutional players like Franklin

Templeton who have issued more than or around half a billion dollars worth of their Benji uh assets on Stellar. We have players like uh Moneygram who are actually an interoperable on an off-ramp on the network and you can um uh cash in and out of USDC uh stellar to local cash like 400,000 agents around the world. We have um you know institutions like the UNHCR dispersing funds to refugees in Ukraine uh like GISZ dispersing payroll to uh health worker employees in uh northern Syria. So, a lot of like really strong product market fit, real world utility. Um, and uh, last year we actually introduced the biggest protocol

upgrade to date, which is introducing smart contracts. Like I said, Stellar has been around since uh, 2015 originally without smart contracts. Uh, and so now we also have a DeFi ecosystem that is actually coming into play, still kind of nent. I think we have around $150 million in TVL right now, but growing. And we're seeing this really cool intersection where wallets can offer a what do we call like a cash to defy experience. So in the same wallet they can actually do a cash in through moneygram and then go into like a yield bearing instrument like the blend protocol for example which is a yield bearing protocol uh lending borrowing protocol on stellar. And so we're seeing this kind of like uh awesome intersection between traditional finance and defi finally starting to come into

play providing like real world utility for people. >> Yeah man. I mean, I've been covering a lot of RWA's e or RWAXYZ's uh stats in my previous, you know, week or two's tweets, and you guys have have been consistently up there across different verticals. Um and and and I mean you know I think that having a really fast cheap L1 with a lot of Lindy uh is what a lot of these you know institutions are looking for as well as just like your your I think the distribution strategy of trying to go out there and kind of bridge that gap.

Um what is some advice you have for some of the you know players chains etc who are trying to kind of make that institutional push as it seemingly is the most important part of you know the crypto stack strategy uh you could argue today what are some of the things that have worked for you guys when it comes to actually interfacing with these people what value are they looking for how does stellar provide that >> yeah I think that's a great question so you know one thing is that you know we've been around for 10 years now really um you know keeping our eyes on the ball and really focused on this core use case of uh what we call everyday financial instruments and I think the main problem in this like larger ecosystem of crypto is that there's

always um you know like the current trend whether it's like you know memecoins NFTs whatever um and so it's really easy to get like distracted get distracted in like token drama uh but at the end of the day uh you know the same playbook for succeeding in web 3 should be the playbook that uh you know we've been using in web 2 for the past 34 years, which is product market fit, delivering real value for people and kind of like fundamentals, right? I think we're really stuck in the larger crypto ecosystem with like vanity metrics, uh, with really kind of like looking under the street lamp rather than actually figuring out how to provide value for people. And so I think for for Stellar it's really been about building this uh accessibility

infrastructure which is really important because you know um I assume you're here in the states I'm here in New York uh getting access to >> Sweden brother. >> Oh you're in Sweden. Okay cool. >> This is a live show from Sweden. Welcome to the signal man. >> Sorry about that. Okay. Um >> I'm just around. >> So um it's really uh you know accessibility in crypto is really uh is is kind of like not a solved issue. I think that a lot of times if you're in Northern Europe or if you're in the US it's really easy to get in and out of crypto and a lot of places in the world it's harder in a lot of places the you know the fees are less cumbersome and so I think that uh building out this network of interoperable on and off ramps and I gave you moneygram as an

example we have like more uh coverage around the world you can even go and uh you know at places like Brazil you can actually connect your like pix account to uh stellar and get like super cheap fast on and off ramps and So I think that infrastructure is like really important and I also think that going back to the fundamentals like the stellar consensus protocol um is actually a protocol that we've seen been really successful with uh communicating to uh institutional partners because it's a consensus protocol that puts reputation front and center and I think that a lot of times uh for uh tradi folks when they come into like the um you know the proof of stake or proof of work network they're really trying to

understand like what is going on here like who is actually making uh who's calling the shots like what does governance actually look like and I think uh we've seen a lot uh and I think maybe you've also covered this in your show like in the past few weeks u or a couple months we've seen a lot of uh this realization in the proof ofstake universe that proof of stake actually has uh kind of like different emerging properties than what we had originally uh imagined and so suddenly people are like okay if if successful proof of stake network is basically just a very convoluted complex way to point uh to point up reputable um uh validators to actually make decisions. Like you look the Ethereum ecosystem at the end of the day um you know the the top stakers are

you know Coinbase, Binance, Lido, all these like big reputable players in the ecosystem and these are kind of like the people. So that's great right but why not just make that more explicit and this is for like the big proof ofstake networks. What happens with like the small ones, right? What happens with the need to actually call governance in like a small emerging ecosystem? Who's who's calling the shots? We saw this happen in the sweet ecosystem a couple of of months ago with CentOS where there was this uh hack and the validators decided to like claw back funds. Great. I I support that governance decision. But I I would argue that probably no one knows who these validators actually are. And so, you know, governance is is becoming like a really important thing.

traditional finance institutions are like really uh they're care they care about this a lot. >> I see we have a fellow the rollup uh spicy takes fan in the arena today. Good to have you Tommer and I agree broadly around the point with proof of stake proof of work as well as broadly around the uh the core concept of you know trying to actually build uh for real world use cases real value and I think that is going to continue to be rewarded um and will continue to be. Now, one thing that I think that there's been a lot of struggle with in Ethereum, which I think that part of this boundless the signal idea is aiming to achieve, is around interoperability with all these other chains. And so, the whole idea of the signal is to essentially prove

Ethereum's full consensus using ZK proofs uh and and prove Ethereum's finality as a result of that. So, I'm curious from your perspective at Stellar, how does Balance's efforts here, um, you know, how does it help your work at Stellar in terms of interoperability with Ethereum? Um, you know, what makes you excited about proving Ethereum's full consensus uh, and proving Ethereum's finality? >> Yeah. So, I think if we take a step back, this specific project sits at the intersection of uh, crosschain interoperability and then zero knowledge. Uh, two areas which we care a lot about. And so from a crosschain interop perspective, what we're seeing is that this infrastructure that I was uh talking about that we built at the

Stellar ecosystem, a lot of folks from other ecosystems are also interested in getting access to that. And so we're seeing people use uh Stellar as like an onofframp chain and then move funds to another chain. And that's like completely okay. We're totally down with these like use cases and we think that's kind of like great. Um and so the question is how do you offer more crosschain interoperability solution? How do you make them more kind of like trust minimized, more robust? And this other um effort that we have in place is zero knowledge. Our gateway drug into zero knowledge is actually uh mostly through privacy because we really care about kind of like the privacy use case.

We're seeing traditional financial institutions are asking for privacy. And so we've been building out this uh zero knowledge infrastructure uh with some of the fine folks that are also working on um on risk zero and boundless. And uh and the signal kind of almost came out as like a byproduct of these conversations where we were literally at the table talking about um you know how important interop is talking about how advanced ZK is getting and kind of like moving from like a very basic uh building block to more uh you know being able to prove entire applications to being able to prove entire blocks and being able to prove entire chains and and and it just clicked to us that we

for having it sounded like two separate conversations, but actually it's the same conversation. Um, and so I think there's a lot of potential in ZK being like the missing building block because historically, if you look at bridges, things like IBC for example, um, the getting to a really good trust minimization part required this tech. Um, and so obviously proving Ethereum is like a first step. Um, and

you know, we're we're working on a bunch of projects to get uh both risk zero uh verifier and also get stellar contracts uh themselves being able to be proven um on these EKVMs. And so what we're seeing is that eventually we see a universe with not only Ethereum but pretty much every chain out there part of their you know go to market will be here is kind of like uh uh uh our chain compiled into like you know ZKVM and this ability to prove it everywhere and I'm really excited about this future. Yeah, man. I mean, I think that uh those two specific use cases that you laid out make a ton of sense just given the first of all the the state of this kind of multi-chain

world. People want to onboard in into Stellar, offboard into Stellar, but they may want to do other things. You want a very safe way for them to interact in this multi-chain world and go from chain to chain. You also want private, you know, interfaces. you want this ability to uh cater to institutions to funds to to more sophisticated people who want privacy baked in into certain interactions. um you know then you know more broadly speaking right with this with this broader infrastructure push it's very clear that the accelerations in ZK have allowed things like like clients to pan out have allowed interoperability to now be something that is uh you know that the trade-off spectrum shifts from speed to speed and security being kind of a barbell to now

you know almost evading that entirely and getting the best of both worlds now perhaps we you know we still need another 100x in ZK but at rate it's taking about maybe that'll take another year. So yeah, >> definitely. Yeah. >> So you mentioned that Stellar has brought in on smart contracts which is super exciting. Um you guys are working on kind of growing this ecosystem there. I'm curious what from your side is the most exciting ecosystem projects uh in Stellar. What are some of the things that the community can do and get their hands on today? Um you know whether it's DeFi, NFTs, community stuff. just generally curious what's uh what's happening over there.

>> Yeah. So if I'd have to choose one project, there's one um project called blend in our ecosystem which is a D5 protocol that's basically like a building block for various type of uh liquidity uh protocols mostly lending and borrowing and so anyone can actually deploy their own pool on top of lend. Um, and not only that, but if you are uh a wallet operator, for example, you could offer this as a service to your customers by creating like a blend vault in which you actually take a cut of the profits. And so what we're seeing is that a lot of the stellar native applications which present to a lot of the users as just kind of like a a neo banking application rather than a cryptonative um experience. What we're

seeing is that these applications uh are using stable coins as kind of like this building block of a like a checking account equivalent in these applications. On top of that, they could offer things like real world assets. So, you know, we have a bunch of assets right now. Fragment Templeton, for example, and is onboarding uh we have Etherfuse, for example, which is a really cool project that does uh tokenized uh bonds from uh across the world. And so we have this layer of like RWAS that you can think of as like like a high yield savings account. And then on top of that, you can offer additional yield opportunities that come from DeFi.

And so wallets are offering these to the users. Users are immediately jumping in. And you see the retention numbers, they're pretty insane. So, if you're already using these applications, whether it's for remittances or if you're using them as um uh just a US dollar savings account in order to hedge against inflation wherever you're from. Um and so we're seeing these users are really keen to jump into more uh assets to more protocols and um while you know the numbers are still small, the retention is really nice. So, we're seeing users that use these wallets and they come back every month when they get their paycheck or when they get a remittance and they top it off. Um, and so we're seeing a lot of stickiness at this like intersection of like uh DeFi and Trafi.

>> This blend this blend project looks super interesting. I'm just having a quick look. Quite a nice uh DeFi summer branding on it as well, you could say. Uh with the with the with the bottle and whatnot. Um >> yeah and they they just did they just did a hackathon uh in our ecosystem uh where basically uh they gave rewards for building using uh for people using blend as like a a building block to build other DeFi instruments or other frontends and we saw a lot of really cool projects coming out of it and hopefully these will manifest into real products in the near future.

>> Yeah man. Um last thing for you that that I got to ask you what's up with the uh with the beef and rivalry between XLM and XRP? What's what's going on there? >> O, no beef at all. No beef at all. So, I think um as uh I actually have good friends at Ripple. Uh not going to mention them by name right now, but um yeah, look Jed MB, founder of Stellar, was also the founder of uh of Ripple. And so, uh in the early days that created a lot of uh uh mostly like Twitter tension to be honest. Uh so, it's like on social because people get wacky on social. Uh but I think that uh I think that uh Ripple has actually done like really uh cool job. I I uh

especially I see them also introducing smart contracts as well but in a very different way than Stellar. They're like exploring like a different direction. Uh and I think that's cool. We're following along. I was on a um I was on a panel with uh uh with these folks uh a couple months ago and you know all hugs everything good. >> Beautiful. Tom, I appreciate your time. Thanks for being a rollup listener. Appreciate your insights as well. Um, thanks for joining on the signal today and glad that you are leveraging the power of ZK along with Boundless and their team to uh bring more possibilities to your ecosystem. Stoked to have you on again in a couple months see as you guys rise the uh RWA.XYZ charts and uh keep keep climbing. So,

appreciate you, man. >> Awesome. Thanks for having me. >> Salute. Cheers man. All righty, guys. Uh, up next we've got our guy Shiv, who is the CEO of Boundless. Shiv's going to be talking about obviously the release amongst other things. I I feel like their strategy was pretty ballsy going straight into uh mainet beta without even launching a test net or public test net. I saw Mash's post about it today. She was pretty fired up about it. So, got to got to see what what the man himself was thinking about that decision, how that came to light. Talk about some of the partners, get a vibe check here. So, we're going to get Shiv up here in just a sec. I think he's ready in the back

end. And, uh, we'll be rocking and rolling, guys. Welcome, welcome back to the signal. Again, a celebration today among some of the best partners of Boundless's ecosystem, repping, proving the full consensus of Ethereum, proving Ethereum finality, increasing scale, increasing interoperability. We got Shiv in the back. Let's get him up. Let's bring him up and uh let's chat. Shiv, welcome to the signal, man. This is your house. >> Thank you so much. It's uh it's a real pleasure to be back and uh fantastic day for us and the team. U we're all super tired, super pumped as it should be. Um and and and thank you for hosting us and you know, participating in the signal in your own unique and fun way.

>> Yeah, man. I am like I said I was super curious about some of the uh tactical stuff here. So I I can't help but ask first. You guys chose to skip a public test net go straight to mainet beta something that I think a lot of teams in the space wouldn't do. Why did you guys do this? What was the thought process? Did it has it worked out the way you thought it had or it would? >> Yeah. So uh I think you're right. It's not an easy decision because the second we sort of pitched it to like the friends of uh bombless they were like wait what are you doing um huh uh right like because I think there is a comfort in saying like oh it's a test net everything can break like and then going around breaking things um and that's

true but once you start accepting money once you start having live funds providing real utility um it is hard to justify calling it a test net um the team of course Like my challenge to the team was like, okay, it's a little little bit of a sell. We can do that. It's a little bit more work, but that also means the bar for quality, the bar for accepting the bar for everything really goes up a notch. Um, is the team ready for that? And the the biggest surprise for me is the team in unison said yes. They were like, don't worry, we got this like and and and to me that is a um vote of confidence that the team has in us uh in themselves. And um it was important for me to uh provide that

vote of confidence as well. >> Yeah. Um when when it comes to actually using the uh when it comes to using this you know kind of concept of actual real money per se what we're actually getting is a you know real capital real uh proof real proofs. Um but rather than doing it as we said in this kind of test version uh you know you brought it to light in the in what they call or what you guys are calling the mainet beta. So um let's get into some of the nitty-gritty exactly as to what the signal is. So the signal proves Ethereum finality. Um let's talk about some of the of of of the why and then we'll get into some of

the how. Why is this such an important thing for um boundless for the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole for the multi-chain landscape? Um you know what does this mean for the space? >> Yeah, 100%. So one key key sort of like value propositions of ZK is in solving interrop. Um it's always been the case people have been waiting for ZK bridges and all of that. Um and if you actually sort of look at our landscape and the fragmentation of liquidity, who exactly is going to build the bridge, right? So one way to sort of think about this is when uh England and France decided to build the tunnel, it was like years of

negotiation, each of them built half the tunnel and met somewhere in the middle. Um we can't expect that from chains. So it is a public utility that all the chains need to come together to build. Why? Because once you actually solve liquidity fragmentation, it solves so many other problems. We can now go up the stack very confidently give a fantastic UX to customers where it doesn't matter where your asset lives. You can play on any app on any chain. You just have web 3 apps that just have access to liquidity everywhere. That is the dream, right? So if you for example, I know you travel quite a lot as well.

You go to France and all of a sudden your money in your credit union or whatever Wells Fargo account is deemed well not usable in France and you have to do a bunch of transactions to move money around before you can spend any money in France. You'd be basically not traveling anywhere to be honest. Um that is the kind of land we live in right now where it's like oh it's an ETH app running on ETH or an EVM chain and so on. This actually solves that problem. um a full sort of uh consensus proof allows you to trust the information on uh Ethereum on any chain and vice versa. The real goal for us is to prove all the chains and that's where we're headed and that's what got all these partners excited. I know you spoke to Rob uh you know from Stellar you talk to folks from

Wormhole Lineia I never mind our list of partners goes on and on. Um, I'm sure I missed out like another dozen and that's because they all got excited by the opportunities for their business, for their users, for their customers and also for where we are headed. Um, so we're super excited. We wanted to launch mainet beta with something real. Um, I think it's um, often the case that people, you know, launch with something attractive, a game or, you know, something else to just get people to click and do things. >> Um, we've always been a company that has been a little bit more hardcore. I personally, you know, have a background in building businesses. My whole point is like if you're launching something, it has to have utility. I don't want to launch something where people just click

around, have fun for like 20 minutes, and then they're gone. But rather find a way to engage, find a way to understand ZK, find an way to see the promise of ZK and really internalize it. Um, that's what the signal is. Um, the name itself is sort of like, you know, plays on multiple levels. Uh we want to signal out to the world that the promise of ZK is being delivered. Um you know we want to invite people to come join, participate, learn. Um and the fantastic thing is people have responded in in in so many ways. We've already collected $200,000 in like unique small donations for people to like vote on what the next change should be to prove. This is going to be a unstoppable sort of journey. Um we really really hope that um this never

stops and we have this public good running forever. Um and frankly it's going to change the landscape in one big way. Uh and then you know the next big thing is just follow up one after the other. >> Yeah. Yeah man. Um I mean I I appreciate your lens on how this impacts the space. you know, it's it it it's got the kind of founder product first mentality towards uh the actual impact and the outcomes that are a result of of this. Now, I I'd like to just get into a bit of the of the how actually. So, so we kind of covered the why and and maybe maybe we can just explain how exactly, you know, you know, as as deep kind of technically as you'd like to to get how

exactly does um the full proving of the Ethereum consensus work just from a foundational understanding for our audience and then I'd love to to talk about some of the use cases that you're seeing with the partners that are enabling better applications, better ideas, etc. for them. >> Sounds good. So I mean it's it's good to maybe first understand what a light client is. So I think um in a lot of ways a light client is essentially what it is. It's light. It instead of like looking at the all of like consensus, it kind of samples and um based on a sampling um um sort of gives a quasi guarantee of like uh trust. Um it has a lot of issues. For example, there's no

economic security. So if there is collusion amongst the nodes that got sampled, there's no way to really slash them and whatnot. So there are there are a lot of like downsides to this. Um we have a blog post that that we put out that has like this entire thing, you know, mapped out in like a neat table. The only way to really build full uh consensus clients is to be able to like take all of Ethereum's consensus the way Ethereum clients actually work and verify that consensus which means like looking a couple of block or waiting a couple of blocks making sure you collect all this information create a gigantic proof of all of these signatures and that's what uh it actually took us um to build this um client. It is extremely

convoluted, requires deep understanding of how Ethereum works. Shout out to the team. Um, it started as in my opinion a half joke on Slack where we were like, oh, why don't we just prove all of consensus then and and it was more like a mock than anything else. And they're like, well, it's not impossible. Here's all the issues and so on. And people started working on it. Um, I actually was I was happily kept out of the loop because to be honest, from my perspective, I would have said, "Oh, yeah, that's probably not going to happen in time, there'll be too many bugs. You guys can't do it. Why don't we just focus on something else?" But my team is uh confident enough to know that like if they bring me something that kind of sort of works, I will go, "Yeah, let's go." Um, and and that's

exactly what they did. And they came back and said like, "Yo, we don't want to just call test neta. We want to launch this thing." And I was like, "Yeah, but you who's going to do all that work?" And like, "Oh, yeah. We also have a proof of concept. It kind of works. We have like an audit to do and maybe like fix a few bugs, but we're pretty sure it works." Okay, then. Um uh and and I was I was so surprised and happy that um the team is empowered. Um, that's that's really what um I mean I'm a CEO, so part of me is, you know, spending 15 minutes in 20 chunks or sorry, spending my day in 15-minute chunks doing like 200 things. Um, the fact that I have an empowered team that knows how my brain works and goes like, "Yeah, if you get to this point, she

will approve and it's it's an okay." Like, people are playing that game with me and I know and I love that they're doing this. Um, that's really what, you know, brought about this full consensus. We're the first ones to do it. It's an completely open problem which is why the Ethereum Foundation is so gung-ho about it and you know shared their support on Twitter which is why Stellar is so supportive. Everybody is so supportive because it's an open problem. Somebody else is doing it a neutral party. They can all throw in their support get this sort of like paved path available um and unlock things. In my opinion, this might actually be the way in which a lot of these um ZK infrastructure pieces might get built out where instead of one party saying like, "Oh, I'll just do it and

you have to buy it from me and whatnot." These public goods might just be like a bunch of coalitions coming together and saying like, "Let's just fund it. It's cheaper if somebody else builds it. We'll just give it to them." And and become ZKified in from that perspective. This is a very exciting future in my opinion. um if we always relied on one team and like one sort of person to do it because of the nature of humans we might say like oh how about I make myself the center of the universe and I'll create the standardized API and now everybody else has to play ball we found a way around that uh organizationally as well um so again talks to the majority of the BD team the way the tech team handled this uh handled this problem and moved ahead um I really want to also at

some point get uh the two or three engineers who are behind this in front of an audience are a little bit more on the shy side, but I'm going to maybe like sit with them and like get them to talk through all specific details. There are so many interesting things about how the ETH client works. Uh shout out to every single dev who's working on this stuff. Like it is so complicated. Um these state machines are have have become wildly convoluted, have so much historical context. So yeah, shout out to everybody involved. >> Yeah man. Yeah man, that's awesome. Um well congrats. I mean, we're we're on the signal. We we got to talk about who the signal is benefiting some of these partners that you said in this kind of uh positive sum ethos, at least the approach, you know, technically,

commercially, as well as just broadly in a collaborative fashion. You're bringing this technology to the market to help Ethereum. And I think that, you know, that is that that is probably why a lot of us got into Ethereum in the first place was that sort of uh thought process and energy, per se. So let's talk about some of the partners. Some of them are coming on today. We've got Lineia, Wormhole, uh I layer or IEN cloud, um Nethermind. So maybe we we can talk about a couple of those. Uh what are some of the use cases that some of these teams or others are are uh you know most excited about when it comes to this? I think perhaps the better question is what does the signal unlock for these teams that are being a part of

it? How does it advance their uh protocol? and uh you know help them achieve their goals >> 100%. So I think um in a lot of ways uh the use case that everyone understands is bridging but the protocol that powers bridging and mostly a lot of other use cases just message passing. What exactly is bridging? Bridging is basically saying like oh I have some asset here here please trust trust trust that and give me some assets from the other place right and you're just trusting messages that go from one chain to another. This is a very very powerful primitive um that a lot of teams are trying to work on and have made improvements in their own way to an extent. People people had reached a sort of steady state on it and said like I don't think there's anything more to do here. Everything is too risky

and I don't know how we'll make get the other team to agree and so on. This actually solves that problem. Um so if you are a company that has a lot of uh your business based on bridging or message passing or moving assets from one chain to another or building D5 projects or powering D5 projects u that are crosschains allow wormhole like a lot of other projects that are similar to that. Um this solves a bunch of those issues. uh it makes it much much cheaper like like going from like hundreds of thousands of dollars to like negligible amounts of money to like you know get information from one chain to another.

This is also useful for like teams like Ien who are trying to like restake and do all of these things to take these restaking uh um uh you stake on say ETH and now you can validate all of that on another chain. It's another interesting business model that like opens up for them as well. Um, interestingly like if you want to move large amounts of money between chains, you want to like prove you have a lot of money on Stellar or something else or Salana and you want to use that on Ethereum to do you found some other protocol that gives you a fantastic yield. It brings you that opportunity as well. So that is really the power that we're unlocking. Um the the fact that you can just take information from one chain to another.

Let's say you're a rollup and you now have to pay a bunch of money for Oracle services and all of this. Maybe you just inherit all of it from Ethereum free. You're done. So a cost of rollup just went down. If if you are really if you really believe in the rollup ccentric universe, that's how it should be. Um if you should just be able to launch the rollup, pay for whatever little infrastructure you need, not for any other information that is freely available on the L1. This solves that problem as well. Um movement of data is how information is acquired. The power of information is translated into applications, applications translate into revenue, revenue translates into growth. It is a fantastic journey that that we are on because of this. So yeah,

so I'm really excited about like what happens when like information from all the chains are available to everyone freely. Uh people are free to move around to pick and choose the apps irrespective of ecosystems. there is a um I think uh uh overindulgence that we have in like alignment of like chains and whatnot. It's infrastructure. I'm not aligned to infrastructure. I'm aligned to my own needs, >> right? And this is a much more customer ccentric view of the world that that our technology sort of really really like allows builders to access. So you don't need to be aligned to one chain and be like, "Oh, I guess if I just build for Ethereum L1, I'm done because that's like 70% of the revenue or whatever."

Now you have access to everybody. People can move around. Maybe you want to do something on Salana. They have fantastic apps too, but all your assets are tied up in ETH. What do you do? Bridge or just do this. This is going to be this is really going to unlock these user use cases. Um unlock the increase the size of the pie. Uh and that's really what I'm interested in seeing. Uh as the size of the pie grows, everything becomes easier. Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean it feels like uh if you could imagine that there has been uh figurative shackles on uh the technical side of different projects as a result of just the intricacies of really I mean if we're just talking about interrupt connecting blockchains is hard doing that safely and securely is difficult extrapolate that to across you know

different types of use cases from applications to transfers to payments to uh interop etc etc etc and you get to the point where you there are these literal shackles. But if we're thinking about it kind of like in in this more information all the way to growth kind of uh uh um story that you lay out the signal kind of removes these shackles per se and brings a a more uh unobstructed way to to go from idea to revenue to growth etc. You can think about it as like accelerating the onchain economy broadly by you know making making things that are have been previously difficult uh you know easier and in in a safer and secure manner which I think it is is the most

important part because there's always trade-offs but again it does feel like with the acceleration of ZK I said this to Tom earlier you know we're going to get another 100x in the next 12 to 18 months and I think we're going to be able to evade that that speed to uh security trade-off and interrupts specifically uh in some capacity at least at least let alone the the other spaces of the of the cryptoverse. So, um I'm excited. I'm stoked. Um and it seems like you you are as well. >> Yeah, 100%. I mean, like if I wanted to change uh if I wanted to say change mindsets, I would say like we've had like a mindset of like limited availability. I want everybody to think about abundance, right? One web two is successful is like they just know they

can just throw whatever at AWS or whatever and it'll all work. I want people to like change their mindset to like a mindset of abundance. The last thing I'll say is like um I I tweeted about this like a while back as well. Like I was I interviewed at Stripe like a few years ago to be a senior manager and every interviewer told me the same thing. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet. Fantastic mission statement and that's something I want to like I something I reinforce with my team as well. Our job is to increase the GDP of web 3. the the more that happens the more you know token go up revenue comes in like all of that you want to increase the GDP the gross domestic product of web 3 not get caught into like weird sort of like conversations

which are subsumed into their own sort of like oh it's like a technology specific thing or like it's a oh it's a Solana versus ETH versus like whatever like none of that matters and I actually saw BAS's approach here as well like my former employer um um launching their super app this is something actually been on their mind for a really long time. I'm I'm really glad they're now in a position to do that. What they're do trying to do is exactly the same thing. Increase reach, increase the GDP of web 3, increase access. Um the signal is like very very aligned with projects that are trying to do the right thing by the ecosystem. Um so are we u we see our fortunes linked to the growth of web 3.

Um I don't think there is a world in which boundless will succeed and web 3 fails but rather when web 3 succeed boundless will succeed. We want to align with the growth of the entire industry. Um that I think is the ultimate alignment. >> Well said Shave. Last thing for you real quick real quick. What is the next couple weeks to months look like for Boundless? Busy time still. I know that you guys are on team no sleep but uh you know couple days of rest and I know that you guys will be right back at it. What's what's coming up? >> Yeah, I mean it's the road to mainet. We have it set out. Um there is a calendar of events. Um follow us on socials because uh like you said there is no sleep. Um um I'm really proud of the team for like holding the fort, but like

we're we're going to keep at it for the next five to six weeks. It's going to get bonkers. Um our ambitions might be too big for us, but like we're going to give it a fair shot anyway. >> Beautiful. Shiv, thank you for joining. Thank you for uh bringing this product to market. You're welcome back anytime. It's the Signal. It's the Rollup TV. Shiv, shout out to you, man. See you soon. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All righty. All right, guys. We're going to go on a quick break. Uh I need to fix something real quick, but uh bring it back. We have amazing guests left. We're going to bring the standby on and uh we'll be right back up w with you guys.

That was awesome. Shiv's awesome. That guy's vision is just absolutely just cracked. I mean, one of the better founders in in the space comes from the web 2 kind of background. So, we're going to throw it on standby. I'll be back. Thank you. [Music] [Music] Hey, [Music]

hey hey. [Music] We're back. Up next, we got Shirram, co-founder of formerly known layering cloud. We're going to be talking about verifiable apps. We're going to be talking what their collaboration is with the risk zero team with the boundless

team uh and why the signal is important for what they are building. Shuram is a mind of I don't know how many but a small fraction of the world he thinks he articulates ideas. So excited to have you on talk about some of the recent happenings at iing cloud and verifiable apps as well as the importance and impact of the signal. A reminder today is boundless ma mainet beta celebration the signal. We are excited to have the full consensus proofs prove Ethereum finality and we're going to figure out why Shiron is excited. We're figure out what he's doing at Cloud and we're going to bring him up here shortly. So guys,

thank you for being here on on the real TV today. The signal, that was a great segment with I mean, the guy just gets it. Talk about a founder that has a lot of previous experience from a different industry bringing that experience to our space doing it for the better. And and I think he he's I think he's right with regards to the uh you know ability for uh our space to start to think more and more about um doing things together in this not necessarily in an altruistic fashion but just in the fashion that you know we we could build a lot of this open source tech together utilize it together help scale the ecosystem as a whole. So look I think I think that's how he's thinking about it

you know I think that's how the balance team's thinking about it. think how that's how a lot of the Ethereum teams have been thinking about it, which may have gotten them into some trouble in the past. Uh kind of this, you know, credible neutrality, let anybody build, don't try to make any money type of vibe. It's definitely the the tides have turned a bit in the Ethereum space, which is fine. um if probably for for the better in terms of figuring out ways to bring value back to ETH figuring out ways for L2s to you know acrue value creating supply uh syncs for ETH the asset but I think generally from a technologist perspective from an open source perspective what Shiv shared previously was the right way to think about it. So um I know we got Shroom in

the back we're going to get him up and live. We're going to have some fun. We're back up. We are live. It's I'm in Sweden. It's 8:30 p.m. I got some water. I had a Coke Zero. We got another hour or so left on on the stream. Maybe a little bit more. I think we got a special guest coming confirmed at the end. Will be a bit of a different vibe from the signal, but we're going to finish the signal strong. We got three or four more guests coming up. So, here we go. Let's get our guy up here, Shirum, when he's ready. Friendly reminder guys, the signal we are celebrating balances mainet beta.

We're celebrating full consensus proofs to prove Ethereum finality. You know, I was with some of their team uh in New York a couple weeks uh maybe at this point a couple months ago and man, we were talking about proving an entire base block um and doing it very very cheap. So proving a single base block is you know there could be what base doing 22 transactions a second. Um so you know there's there's a certain amount of transactions per block they can prove that but if you can prove the entire Ethereum chain and then prove the entire consensus of every future block of Ethereum. What Shiv was saying is that there was so much historical data uh going back all the way to Genesis of Ethereum that the engineers were able to

actually go back and create this entire uh proof that goes all the way back to Genesis to then be able to basically recursively prove that uh going forward. So that takes a lot of work and and a lot of effort. Um all right, we got Sham in the back. We're going to talk about verifiability. Um and I'm looking forward to it. It's good to have him back on the show. Let's get him up here and uh welcome him on. Shirram, what's up, man? How are you? >> Hey, hey, hey. How are you? Really excited to be here on the roll up. >> It's good to see you again, man. It was it was good to see you at Permissionless. Um had a good chat about some of the work that you guys are doing in the AI and the verifiability space.

Congrats on Cloud. Looks sweet. >> Thank you. >> And uh >> thank you. Yeah, excited to talk about that and uh the other work that's going on in the space. >> Yeah, man. So today's a signal. We're celebrating some of the work that Balmas is doing in ZK. We'll touch into that. Um but I'd like to get just a quick update as to as to uh some of the stuff that you are currently working on that we were you know we're talking a bit about some of the kind of AI work app permission list and some of this verifiability. Uh what's the latest in the IE layer ecosystem in the IGEN cloud ecosystem. Um yeah what are you what are you mo mostly uh prioritizing?

Yeah, thanks Andy. Um, we did this recent like you know uh brand announcement of IGEN cloud and the idea is that uh our it it states our goal more clearly. The goal is to get cloudscale programmability. You should be able to write programs just like you write and deploy on you know existing cloud platforms with cryptograde verifiability right. So you don't want to just like you know send it to AWS then why are we here we're here because we need verifiability and so that was the kind of like core core driving principle that we've always been driving towards but I layer got bundled as a restaking platform which it is so we

wanted to create this umbrella brand of cloud so if you think of like layer is like an engine and like you know IDA is like the these fast wheels so you put all these things together and build a car and that's a cloud. So it's kind of like this thing that brings everything together. So the idea is if you're building an app and you are constrained by what you can write inside a smart contract, you can actually write only a portion of your application logic inside the smart contract. The portion that moves the tokens around. We call this the token logic, right? You know, if it's a lending market, it's basically putting a token in escrow, liquidating tokens, all these kinds of things.

That's the token logic. But the conditions, the application logic can be returned inside a general container like a software package that you can deploy on the cloud. You can write it inside a container and deploy to IGEN cloud and it'll run and bring the results verifiably back to the chain that you're operating in. So that's the vision for cloud. And so what that does is now it makes any container running on any hardware device verifiable. And um so now you can write programs that were simply not possible before.

And the biggest example of a category of programs that's not possible to write onchain is AI, right? So I want to write an augmented logic in you know use AI to do various kinds of actions do token trades do like you know uh decide when to liquidate change my prices you know all these things I want to use complex AI logic and I can't do it today. But with Igen cloud you can actually do it. So that's that opens up a whole category of applications. So very excited about that.

>> Beautiful. Um when you guys are thinking about taking this like you know like verifiable apps concept um to you know to kind of like consumer scale. The one of the ideas that comes or one of the products that comes to mind um is ernify that is using a a a uh opacity underneath bringing a lot of these users data using zkls onchain effectively without them knowing it. Um is this like is this the path that you see uh cloud playing in the broader goal to bring a lot of new users on chain? Okay. So we have this verifiability stack. We can power

these verifiable apps. Users can download them on the app store, you know, as an example. And little like little do they know they are they're going to be interacting with the verifiability guarantees and greatness that I can cloud would bring um and basically be onboarding these users uh in a more secure safe environment uh compared to like a centralized AWS server or some sort of u you know other alternative like when you're thinking about uh bringing cloud to mass consumer scale via these verifiable apps you know this is one example but how how do you think more broadly about um you know that kind of happening like that you know Ernify is a great example right?

>> Yeah. >> Yep. Absolutely. So Ernifi is doing these payday loans, right? So you you work at Cheesecake Factory and you want to like you already spent like 20 days working. So you know you're going to get paid for those 20 days but it has not yet happened. And so you can actually prove that to a blockchain and say hey actually I have done this and therefore you know when people are lending to you they have minimized that credit risk and so therefore they're able to offer a very low APR for lending. So that's what uh Ernify does. But broadly what is happening is verifiability is an antidote to counterparty risk. Right? So when I'm lending to you I if I knew more about you then I don't

need to worry that you know you're going to take the loan and run away. So is this and the broader the category of verifiability that we can bring to crypto the more applications get unlocked. So that's the broad thesis. But in terms of adoption, how we are thinking about it is there is a inside out component to it. Inside out as in start inside crypto take any existing crypto smart contract builder and then tell them hey you can augment what you're doing with this IGEN cloud. You can do way more right. So it's make crypto more programmable. So that's one angle and we will be leaning into that quite a bit because anybody building a smart contract today should actually use and can express and go to market much

faster by using something like iken cloud. So that's number one. Then we look at what is the outside in use cases what you know what is being built on the cloud that suddenly when you have like unlocked verifiability becomes easier cheaper faster better and so we're going to go both these directions but I think initially you will see definitely a little bit more of the inside out because we already a known quantity inside crypto want to convince every crypto developer that actually whether you're launching a memecoin platform or you're working with the biggest institutions you can benefit from additional verifiability.

>> Beautiful. So, one of the kind of core components I think of work that you guys have done with risk zero is around um working with them on some of the slashing uh conditions for ien cloud. Um that is one key thing but I'd like to kind of understand from your perspective in this broad lens of the signal today right so it's it's a bit of a celebration of you know achieving full consensus proofs to prove Ethereum uh finality using ZK proofs I'm curious why this is a big deal to you or you know what makes you excited about this from a builder's perspective from from ien cloud's perspective and how would this impact what you guys are building at ien cloud whether it's on the DA side on the app side on the verifiability side. How

are you thinking about that? >> Yeah. So, let me start with the problem statement of what signal actually solved. So, if you look at Ethereum, Ethereum has 1 million plus notional validators. So, you are getting 1 million plus signatures, you know, to certify a block's finality. This is just a lot, right? And all of them are aggregated and put on Ethereum in the beacon chain. And so if I have to verify that a block is finalized, I have to verify all these 1 million signatures every block. So this is and and what risk zero has done with boundless and and this particular implementation of signal is to actually enable that using a zk proof. I don't have to now verify 1

million signatures. I verify one proof and then because it's bundled through the ZK proof, I've actually indirectly verified and I'm assured that these 1 million people have signed off on this block. So this is, you know, to to explain how deep and fundamental this problem is. Ethereum already kind of like anticipated this problem and what they did is they said, "Oh, we'll just sample a random 256 or 512 member committee called the sync committee and let them sign off on blocks." But you know you have 1 million validators because you need that much amount of security >> and then by just like sampling you know 250 or 500 nodes is not that powerful.

>> Yeah. >> So this was kind of like unsettling to all of us you know especially people like me who think about economic security and because you know it's 500 nodes with 32 ETH each how much is that economic security as opposed to 1 million nodes putting putting up 32 ETH. So it's just like orders of magnitude off and you and so where is this needed? This is needed in bridging as as the most important aspect. So I want to verify Ethereum state on Salana on like you know Monad or whatever other L1's I'm transporting the state there and when I'm transporting the state that blockchain's smart contract has to verify that Ethereum has run correctly. These

million validators have signed off correctly. So imagine running inside another like Monad or Salana a check that 1 million validators have signed off for every block. This is impossible. So what signal and risk zero does is to remove that as a constraint because now you can just like verify one ZK proof inside an EVM contract or inside Salana and then you're done. This is a really amazing kind of like uh technological unlock. What it does for us at IGEN layer is for example as we talked about IGEN cloud what we say is build powerful apps on any chain not just on Ethereum and L2s but on any chain right because I want to run some complex token logic on

monad and but I want to offload the kind of like a co-processor computation to cloud but cloud still like built on layer it's living on Ethereum so you have to transport like the actions happening on Ethereum to another chain and so do it to do it safely you need something like the signal which unlocks a lot of possibilities for us super excited about it uh so in general I think that's the big unlock is whenever you want to transport information happening on Ethereum to other chains this is going to let you do it faster cheaper easier more secure and secure being a very important word because at the end I layer cloud is a security

platform form and if we said oh you know we are now dependent on like a three node bridge to secure something which has like $20 billion of security you would wonder why do you have $20 billion of security why not just have those three nodes sign off on everything but by removing that trust friction now you're actually getting a zk proof that everything happened correctly >> so actually having that 20 billion dollars of security matters >> yeah um Sheream you bring up a point that I can't help but uh try to give you a good two minutes to uh to uh push back on. So clearly you saw the uh uh the clip from Hib at Permissionless talking about economic security being a meme.

You were you were pushing back hard on that. uh you gave out six really good points and I just want to get get like that kind of um that discourse has continued with regards to just kind of like different ways of orienting around uh staking designs and actually is is quite relevant to what you you're saying with regards to kind of like okay you have this 1 million notional size validator set or node set you you know what's the point of just kind of sampling like like you know one 1,000th of that you know it kind of takes away from the entire purpose of getting having all these uh distributed uh sets of validators. So uh in in a in a 60-second to to two-minute answer, you

know, why is economic security not a meme? And um and uh why do you feel so strongly about this? >> Yeah, I I think there is um is economic security a meme at an L1 level? There's one kind of a question and you know I that was what I had posted about. But irrespective of that, economic security is absolutely not a meme at like a co-processor level and it's specifically in the way that we've built it. So let me explain that. So I want to run a container and I want this to be secured by let's say $100 million. Why? Because you know I'm going to take an action worth $100 million. Now if I tell you not just that if this was run incorrectly I'm going to slash these

guys. I tell the application that if this container was run incorrectly, I'm going to slash the guy and take that 100 million and distribute it to your app users. So now it's actually a much simpler concept to understand. It's insured computation. You're doing a computation with an insurance that the computation is done correctly. Is insured computation useful? It's absolutely useful. Right? Because I'm asking somebody else to do a task for me. If they mess up, I take their money and make my own like customers whole. It's a very simple concept to understand. So I think I want to just start from there.

Whether for an L1 you understand why economic security is a meme or not a meme insured computation using cloud is absolutely not a meme because you can actually understand what it is very easily. >> Yeah. >> So that's something that I just want to lay out. But going deeper down the stack, actually the way economic security is used today is just slashing and burning the funds, >> which makes it look like a meme because I I just got burnt. It it did nothing to me if I'm the harm. But what I was suggesting in that thread is some of our work called stakehure which basically even at an L1 level what you could do is to offer this kind of an insurance where

if you're a transactor on an L1 you can hold insurance against the staked funds so that if somebody gets slashed you get whole. So if you're Coinbase and you're relying on Ethereum L1 to do settle hundreds of millions maybe billions of dollars of transaction every day you might want to hold an insurance against Ethereum stake and you want to say if you're Black Rockck and you're holding like you know tens of billions of dollars hopefully of Ethereum ETFs now you might want an insurance against Ethereum going wrong. So these are places where obviously as we see this stratfi influx into crypto this whole YOLO security model is going to be questioned and people want rigid correct security model in fact I think the

reason that I'm very annoyed with removal of economic security >> is what remains what is the way in which your your blockchain is secure is secured by random internet anons running your nodes and And what is this security thesis that we are going to be able to go and sell a black rock to say hey you know don't use your like 10 node network use our 10 node internet anon network like what is this mark so anyway that's what makes me very >> sure I'd love to get you on a uh some sort of like panel or debate or something with somebody who will who will challenge you it would be a really >> I would love that conversation

>> I got to let you go today but thank you foring ing the signal. I appreciate your time and keep up the great work. Have a great rest of your day, man. >> Thank you so much, Andy. Thanks for the roll up. Congrats to our friends at Boundless for uh bringing signal to market and enabling more builders in Ethereum and crypto to take advantage of this. >> Yes, sir. Cheers, man. See you soon. Bye. I love that guy. What a great guy. Just full of ideas. Um, and just yeah, we we got to get a uh uh uh economic security debate going. That would just be that would be that would be a lot of laughs.

So, all right guys, we are uh we are jumping up next into uh our guy Robinson. If you if you have watched the rollup TV before, you've seen Robinson on. Um guys been cooking with the institution. So, got a lot of updates to come. He'll be happy to hear that the rollup is going much deeper into the institutional realm. It's probably why I'm wearing a collared shirt today. We're going to polish Rob up and we're we're we've been posting RWAXYZ stats. We're going to get that audience one day at a time. Uh let's get him up here. Let's get Robinson up here uh on the signal. We're live from Sweden. Great vibes. Robinson, what's up, man? How are you?

>> What's up? What's up? Love the caller. I'm I'm feeling self-conscious. I should be wearing one. I mean, every time I see you, you're in slacks, a tucked in shirt, and a belt, buddy. So, you're a changed man. >> Fair. Fair. Today's Today's an in the office grind day, so a little less stressed up. >> Well, congrats on that scope announcement. I saw that photo that you posted with the uh head of digital assets there or head of, you know, kind of uh that kind of arm and it looked very candid. It looked like you were in there just, you know, shilling God's word for all of us to to onboard more and more people.

>> Yeah. Thanks, man. That was a that was I mean these things take take a bit of time as I mentioned and um you know this is one we're really excited about. I think I'm particularly excited about private credit. Um and you know that's one of the the bigger I guess holdings that Hamilton Lane or the bigger products that they focus on. Um but it was it's been a pleasure working with that team. They're very excited about crypto. Uh Victor you know is a very passionate I would say uh person when it comes to democratizing finance. So just a good person to kind of have in our corner um in terms of the crypto industry as a whole.

>> And so they're excited about bringing private their private credit markets onchain and tokenizing them for access for folks uh who want to like basically KYC and participate in that or kind of what's the Yeah. >> Yeah. No, exactly. I mean if most I don't I don't know today what their like if you go through the typical broker to try and buy priv private credit with Hamilton Lane what the exact like threshold is. Typically, you'll see anywhere from like minimum of 100K, sometimes you see minimums to 500K just to participate in that asset class. I think today you can purchase a scope investment for as little as 10. Um, so there's still a little bit of a it may even be less now, um, depending, but there's still a little bit of a hurdle,

still a little bit of like a barrier to entry, but if we think about how far we've come down from, let's say, 100 or even 500K, like that's a significant improvement on this like idea of democratizing finance. So, I know they're really excited about it. Of course, we are. Um, but I think it's a good step in the right direction. >> Good, good, good. Well, I had Michael Sonishine of Securitize on on Tuesday, I think, and he gave me a a school of thought that was like a bifurcated school of thought with regards to one of the situations that's happening in tokenization today. I'm curious to get your take on it. Um, he basically laid out there's two kind of ways that tokenization's happening right now and and I'm sure you're familiar. It's effectively some some form of a of

wrapped assets onchain. um more or less, let's call it that for uh summarization purposes and then effectively like native assets on chain um being being tokenized. He he talked about uh securitizes this big push into kind of wanting to try to stay clear, if you will, of these wrapped assets and and try their best to to uh you know, focus on bringing like true native kind of non-custodial assets and tokenizing them and and doing it all within the crypto ethos. Now, I've I've probably butchered the exact ways that it's happening, but he kind of explained that there's like two ways and that he he he was almost like weary and cautious of this like wrapped kind of way. it. You guys are

obviously working closely with secure ties. Maybe you could just like illuminate quickly as to like uh more more exactly what's what's happening there and and kind of if you if you agree there if that's the stance that you're that you guys with wormhole are taking as well or if or if it's different. >> No, absolutely. I I think that we we recycle a lot of the same problems in crypto but apply them to maybe like different categories, different asset classes, right? So I think maybe I don't want to speak exactly for Michael but I think some of the things he's talking about it is number one like having the assets on chain having like a almost onetoone reserve. So maybe the same mental model as you would with the stable coin the assets are on chain you know it's native right uh you can you

could see the contracts that they're in and then you have an an asset that you can maybe mint against that can be used in DeFi versus maybe uh you know some sort of off-chain vehicle. this asset represents ownership and said off-chain vehicle and there may be like when you think about the unwinding of that there could be issues and then you also think about all of the different versions that could be created based on this off-chain vehicle. So like mental model here is I think someone tweeted about this. You have a Tesla, B Tesla, C Tesla, D Tesla. And so when you think about these these onchain stocks proliferating, how do you build deep liquidity? Uh which one do you choose? Which one wins? So you almost have like the repeat of kind of

the stable coins tokens like >> Yes. And the bridge tokens. Exactly. So, so I think I think the push here is like let's kind of learn uh from stable coins, from bridge tokens, what the best practices are and make sure we're just not yeeting into onchain stocks getting excited and doing it in a more like you know systemically healthy way. And so I generally agree. I do think that there will be rappers of sorts like even today securitize wraps their native onchain. They have onch the liquidity onchain wraps it to be used in DeFi. Um, but that's more so to put it into like an ERC20 compatible version that can be used in like Morpho or some other money markets. But I do think it's something to pay attention to and I do think it's

something that we should make sure the people that are talking about this are kind of educated on >> and and one other thing on the RWA's front and I appreciate that and I think private credit could be an answer here is you know I think a lot of us were perhaps like a lot of the crypto natives thought that the RWA space was a bit slow. It was just tea bills 5% great. It's obviously evolved way more since then. Very very uh exciting. I mean obviously I think a lot of us are talking about the treasury companies and how ESB is up 300% and not so much the tokenization but you know still very interesting what's happening. I'm curious is there a is there an overlooked uh area of this sector right now? like is there something that you

that you're starting to see interest peak up uh you know not tea bills um you know not uh tokenized you know real estate per se but like maybe it's private credit maybe it's tokenized equities maybe it's onchain IPOs I don't know is is is there something that you're starting to to kind of get a sliver of that that interest or that kind of buzz wasn't there three six months ago >> well I will say to the one point you made the digital asset treasury they're even getting an acronym now the dats like the sbats etc I do think that's I do think that space is is really interesting. Uh what what typically happens is you'll see some some larger like you know the SB bets and and some of these other ones go and then other people want to you know do that as well right because you want buy

side for whatever the token is and so like this is obviously opening you up to a lot of different to investors and so I think you'll see a lot of lagging like DATs come online soon so I think it's like an interesting narrative. it seems a little bit hacky. Um, but uh, you know, at the same time, I'm uh, it's definitely something to keep an eye out for. Look, I don't want to be boring. Um, but I think sometimes being consistent and sometimes the boring stuff is, uh, what ultimately works. I'm going to go ahead and still say private credit, but also um, these RWA using being used in DeFi is what I'm interested in. So, why private credit?

I've talked a little bit about it is it's a it's an asset that's yields like p right now Apollo's Ared gives you 9%. Of course, there's things like uh you have quarterly redemptions and there's like it's not as liquid. Uh but that's how most of these assets work kind of in the quoteunquote real world. But I do think it's just the general concept of giving more people access to an asset that they haven't been able to have is fantastic and a lot of the reason like some of us got into this space. Secondly though is these watching these assets being used in DeFi. Um, so I actually, you know, not to plug a post I made on Twitter, but I did an end toend like tracking of what it looks like today to go through this. And I'm just going to call out a few um, protocols that I

think are doing really well and kind of on the cutting edge here. Morpho, talk with the team there. They're really focused on RWAS. What does it look like to have faster liquidations? What does it look like to offer private credit money markets? Like these assets are really good collateral. Um, so like being able to draw out stable coins and use in DeFi, I think we'll see more. obviously Athena I'll call them out with their USB USB some acronym like that where it's biddbacked uh drift also with acred. So I'm keeping a close eye on seeing how these RWAS are being used where they're being used in different ways. Um and so that's something to get excited about and keep an eye out for that I don't think a lot of people would talk about RWAS in DeFi. There is the percentage of people who actually use it is less than

1% of the people who talk about it. So, I'm really really trying to watch and keep track of what's happening there. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Very cool. Very cool. Well, with all of this focus, I you know, I would assume and I mean, frankly, I I I know that these these these people use wormhole because they value the security that uh you guys place as a priority for uh transferring these assets and bringing these uh different products multi-chain. Today's the signal we are celebrating. balance is kind of uh bringing to market of uh the these full consensus proofs to prove Ethereum finality. Robinson, what what impact does uh this have on wormhole?

What makes you excited about this? Um how does this help your interrupt solution or just broadly how does this improve in interrupt at large? >> Absolutely. So maybe and I won't be I have a tendency to be too longwinded as you know Andy so I'll try and like quickly go through this history. So we've actually been tracking the space, I would say like the broader ZK space very closely for the past two years. We have ZK cryptographers on the Wormple team. Um so like we we we know the space well. We've been tracking it and actually at the beginning our thought process was we've actually thought that and and maybe I'll take even a further step back. We we've always known or one of the core I guess the core things when it comes to interoperability is being able to verify anything between chains, right? For us, right? And so we want to

make sure that we can share the state in a very trustless decentralized way. What you can do on top of that once you're able to do that kind of core primitive is build things like asset transfers is build things like oracles crosschain all this different stuff. But you need a way to share share state at the bottom. We've we've always known that like ZK is kind of the endgame there. Um so much so that we started investing in it, right? We started to build our own uh ETLC. We started to work with the ATOS team. We started to work with other ones. We we actually like half acquired a couple ZK teams. Um you know we work closely with Lurk uh Zpoken and so we made a ton of investment there and I think that that was the right decision. I think what we've seen kind of how the market played

out is that there's going to be teams entirely specializing on this. And so we want we then kind of made the decision if I'm being kind of completely transparent maybe a year ago to say you know what we know we are going to be users and consumers of ZK proofs but we maybe it's not best for us to be the ones actually building out all these light clients. maybe there's an opportunity to work together. And so what how the space kind of played out is that you know rollups of course are kind of like the one of the biggest injusters of of let's say like a ZKP or something but so is interop right like we're we're demand for these proofs every asset transfer and you know we do anywhere from 30 to 120 million every 24 hours in value and that's a lot of transactions

involves some sort of proof right and so what what we kind of made the decision a year ago back to what I was saying is like do we want to build this ourselves or partner with someone that's doing it really well and build the entire stack around that and so that's kind of why we're here today is saying the guardian network is an incredibly strong verification mechanism. It's why to your point Andy like Black Rockck why uh Apollo why some of these institutions are choosing us because they're like this is a really really good way to share state and verify state crosschain. Um you know the next iteration of that though is instead of trusting humans you're more or less trusting math. And so we're really excited obviously to be part of this. um we will be uh kind of like users or a customer for these EKPS

within the wormhole network and they'll be used to verify state for something as simple as an asset transfer. Um so that's how kind of like a little bit of our history and uh when it comes to ZK in particular and like why we're here today. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean I think that the the way that I've thought about ZK for so long is that especially with interrupt is you've got this this kind of safety and speed trade-off always and you know with any sort of proof aggregation that we could evade that per se at some point, right? It's been it's been quite expensive and slow still. I think we we probably I've been saying today we probably still need another 100x. Uh but at the pace that that it's going it's maybe 12 18 months away. Um, and I think

like intents have been a really great way to like have, you know, crosschain asset transfers for like DeFi users in a in a completely different way, but in a similar idea of like, okay, this is the speed that we're used to. Now, if we can, you know, rather than having to to rely on third parties, if we can just rely on code for this, then that's, you know, that as you call it, that's that's the endgame. >> Yeah. and and and and if you think about the business we're in, we're call called an interoperability protocol of course, but one of our core business is just asset flows between chains, right? And so when you think about how we need to be competitive there to your point Andy, like speed and cost is everything. Um and so we I remember two years ago when we were thinking about CK and trying to

like map out how long things were going to take, we made a deliberate choice to say we're going to still continue to invest heavily into the Guardian network or the verification method we have today, which is a Guardian network. and we're realistic about like I'll call it the commercialization of ZK, right? Like when we're going to get to the point where we have the speed needed to to stay competitive with our core business and why why is speed needed? Obviously, users demand it, but more importantly, aggregators are becoming, you know, a kind of like they're becoming very important, right? Like a LiFi or a Squid or all this stuff is aggregating all of this kind of like these highways of asset transfers into the wallets. We do have a lot of direct integrations. We have direct integrations with Phantom,

backpack, uh you know, MetaMask, etc. But like there there's also the aggregators play a large role in demand genen for wormhole um or any wormhole asset transfer. So if we have a latency that go like if we if we can't serve a user in under 12 seconds, we're not going to get serviced, right? So like there is this interesting trade-off where we want to adopt the most trustless tech, but we can't do it at the expense of our business. And so we've always been kind of watching closely when we're going to get to that point. and just making sure we're ready at least our tech is composable enough to say this is a highv value transfer so maybe we want to use some sort of ZKP and the speed doesn't matter or this is a you know being uh this is a you know an intent transfer needs to be fast as

you know fast as it can be two 3 seconds you know maybe we use the guardian network because it could be that fast so that's kind of how we're thinking about things you know we're ready to dive in but we're cautiously optimistic on like it needs to be able to serve our core business >> yeah yeah Robinson one last question for you around kind of how you're thinking about the strategic vision here. you're already obviously so close to asset issuers on their in their product lines as they have you you know you you named a couple and you're obviously already you know this completely inter like interoperability behemoth like is is there a world where wormhole ends up being an asset issuer itself like you're almost already one but like isn't that

like the logical next step of like building these relationships owning all these different interrupt venues having all all that volume, don't you just kind of logically think to then go and be an asset issuer of of of your own? >> You can't give away our company direction secrets. No, I'm kidding. No, this look I I've actually explained this some like we'll we'll we'll we'll give kind of some context just I try to like do a lot of mental models if possible or just try to um relate to certain things. But it's you're exactly right like in some ways bridges even historically even like the the kind of bridged own liquidity fragmented model were asset issuers back then right like for a good example is WBTC is native on Salana but we are the most the the wormhole issued

WBTC is by far the most liquid. I think there's $360 million worth of WBTC in the lock and mint bridge, right? And so like that that that is technically an issued asset. And so especially as we get more into NT and we have some of these RWAs adopt them, we have some big stable coins coming, etc. Like being able to you kind of have these these systems today where you issue on one chain. It's pretty cool if you could just say I can issue securely natively across five out the box, right? And so you know your hunch is good on the direction.

>> Yeah. And then you can own the yield too and take fees and stuff like that. >> Exactly. Into the whole revenue meta. >> It's it's it's a delicate balance too, right? Like you know we do work closely with asset issuers. You know, you know, at what point are we kind of like competing with our customer? So these are all things we have to keep in mind, but um definitely kind of at the core of it and and looking to get more involved. >> Robinson, thanks for joining the signal. Stoked to see you guys uh collaborate with Balos. Work work on uh improving the product for your consumers. Whether they're end users, institutions, KYC, non KYC, they got a million dollars, 10 million, or a dollar. You're there to support them. And I'm excited

for the future. And I'm going to be thinking more and more about this asset issuer interoperability thing because it's so it is literally one and the same. But uh thanks man. >> Yeah, always a pleasure Andy. Thanks for having me. See you. >> Cheers, man. See you. All righty, guys. Um, up next we have our guy Declan from Lineia. Uh, I I always love chatting with Robinson, though. It's uh guy's got his head in the right place with regards to the institutions, with regards to bringing more people into the space and really like going where they are. I think they've also recently moved to New York.

So, uh, they're, uh, they're working harder than my digital digital nomad self could do. Dad did three months in New York, but now we're live from Sweden. It's the signal. We're having a good time. We're going to jump in next to Declan and Lineia. Last I saw Declan, I was uh I think we were at a Polygon event and I was telling him to scram, so that should be pretty funny to hear about. Uh it's 900 PM in Sweden. We're live. It's the Rollup TV. It's the Signal. We're having a damn good day. We got a ton of people on the show today.

We're we're crushing 7,000 viewers. Welcome into the rollup. It's your first time, smash that that like button. Follow the roll up. Welcome to the signal. Market's pumping. Bitcoin 119. ETH's ripping. Coinbase ripping. Everything looks good. We got our boy Declan coming up here next. Looking forward to having him. Um, and uh, yeah, like I said, last I saw Declan, I was giving him a load a mouthful for uh, being at a Polygon event. So, we'll see how he responds to that. Let's get him up here. Let's get Declan on. It's good to have him in. We are live from Sweden.

It's the signal. We're celebrating balance mainet beta zking everything. Declan wants to make every roll up a zk roll up. I think he's going to do it. What's going on, man? >> What's going on? Yeah, good to see you. How's it going? >> Yeah, man. It's uh it's Scandinavian summer over here. It's 900 PM and it's light as day. How are you? >> Yeah, doing good. Nice summer here in London as well. So, you still got the sun out. Long days. >> Yeah, man. Somehow you guys are uh getting the uh Joe Luben Consensus ESB hype right now. Like just absolutely on a freaking roller coaster ride, brother.

>> Oh, I haven't noticed that. I don't know what you're talking about. >> Your your Twitter account engagement has just gone boom. Yeah, it's been crazy. I think uh >> you know, everyone's really excited. Espec Sharpling, biggest holder of ETH now. >> Yeah, man. >> You know, so uh that's yeah, super exciting and obviously great for the great for Ethereum as well. And you know, I'm a big Ethereum fan, a big Ethereum Maxi. So, yeah, very happy. >> So, all right, tell us tell us the story here. You get a call from Joe. He's like, "Man, I'm starting ESBET. We're going to buy a billion dollars of Ethereum. We're going to own more than the foundation. Are you in?" like like what happened? How did this like what was your first understanding of this if if you don't mind sharing? What's the

story? Um and what is your relationship like with Joe? >> Yeah, so I mean the story started pretty recently actually. You know, we obviously saw what Michael Sailor did with Micro Strategy, right? That's a very famous story now with Bitcoin and kind of drove a lot of the sort of bull market for Bitcoin and you know obviously ETH being a more productive asset than Bitcoin just made obvious sense that you know Ethereum and ETH is clearly the next Bitcoin and BTC and I think sort of like who better than Joe Luben the co-founder of Ethereum to be the one behind that like driving force you know so um the play was pretty obvious I think it all comes down to execution it's obviously just getting started and you know sharplink is its own sort of company so I can't say too much But um but yeah,

really exciting. I think yeah, now the biggest holder of ETH. And I think also, you know, what's amazing is they're actually, you know, buying ETH from other entities as well. You saw the Ethereum Foundation, you know, sold some ETH to sharp link. So now we have these like diamond hands of ETH in the in the space just kind of continuing to accumulate and put that ETH to use as well. That's the key difference is Bitcoin's a non-productive whereas ETH is a productive asset. So really excited where that's going. My relationship with Joe's really good. Uh we talk all the time, every day. He's there in my Slack DMs being like, "Hey, Dan, I've got this great idea. You know, we should do it." Sometimes I'm like, "Joe, you know, buy more e we buy more buy more." Yeah, I've got I've got no money left, Joe. I'm all bought in. Um,

no, so he's obviously very involved with uh with Linear and what we're doing there. Uh, obviously, it's part of Consensus. So, he's been instrumental since the very beginning. And I think, you know, uh, he he really is he sort of bleeds Ethereum in my eyes, like he really is a true visionary thinking five 10 years ahead. Sometimes he'll say something to me and I'm like, "Okay, that kind of makes sense." And then, you know, few months later I'm like, "Wow, you're like totally right." So, yeah, big fan of Joe. >> Good, man. Good, good, good. Yeah, man. I mean, um, today I saw Winter Mute put out a post saying that their OTC market is out of ETH. Uh, somehow they still have some fartcoin to sell. That's what I heard in the Denu uh trenches. But, uh, apparently they're out of ETH, so that's got to be good for us. So, let's

talk Lineia. Um, you guys have been teasing Lineia Token. Community is going crazy about it. Uh, I think uh I think they were pretty angry for a while. Now they're happy again. Now they're angry. They're happy. Um, are you guys going to do anything different compared to other L2 tokens? You've seen L2 tokens over the last 18 months get smashed. They were in a different era, a different time period. They weren't able to do different things. Are you guys following the same path as the rest of the L2s? Talk to us about the token? How are you thinking about it? Um, and what's the latest there?

>> Yeah, so I guess one of the benefits about being one of the last to kind of TG out of the big L2s is like you get to see what everyone has done and kind of learn those lessons, right? And obviously the space moves so fast. We can kind of see, you know, what what might actually it mean to be a really good Ethereum L2. And again, like we are we've always been since day dot completely Ethereum aligned in our approach. We really do believe that Ethereum should be the global sort of layer of trust and ETH is the most important digital asset. And so even when we built Lineia, it was always about like how can we help achieve that mission. So when it comes to linear token, which obviously we've spoken about, you know, for a while now and it's maybe taken longer to TG than some

might have liked. Uh but yes, the linear TG will be very different from all other TGES and the token itself will be very different. And so I don't want to sort of reveal too much but you know obviously we come from a very unique position being part of consensus having this sort of connection to the L1. I will say that you know many of the L2s they don't well I would say acrew value to the L1 right they aren't actually ETH first and foremost and what I will say is that linear will absolutely be ETH first and foremost. Linear is going to be the L2 that Ethereum deserves. scaling Ethereum without compromise and from the tokconomics to the economics to the way the governance is positioned everything is going to be you know really really different to what we've seen before with any other L2 and I

think also with this new wave of you know institutions and institutional capital obviously ESP but like there's way more all of Wall Street is coming on chain and it wants to come on Ethereum it wants to come into the L2 line is going to be the gateway for Ethereum for these institutions and so making the tokconomics and the economics sort of you know attractive to those types of uh institutions and capital is like a key part of our design. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I got to put it on you. How does one make a token a a a a chain a very very beneficial to Ethereum economically but also s sustain their own? Aren't those two things kind of butdding heads and that's been a lot of

the the crux of of the problem? Well, I think the way to think about it is like what's wrong with the other L2s or like other L2 tokconomics. Okay. So like firstly you can think you know a lot of L2s have come from like VC funded startups right you know they get a bunch of capital raise a lot of capital and you know when you actually have to launch a token they might have like a huge you know allocation for VCs and for the team right and that just creates systemic down pressure right you now have like on average 50% of the token that's just designed to basically you know be exit liquidity so like that is a fundamental issue of most L2 tokens because of the way they're constructed as businesses right? They look like corporations of CEOs, they don't they don't look like open protocols.

>> That's one problem. And then the other problem is that, you know, since especially like 4844, >> like all of the value started going to these sequences, these L2 sequences, right? Extracting it from ETH holders and stakers. And we saw that with the the change in the sort of supply of Ethereum. It went from, you know, being deflationary to just flipped back to inflationary. I think it's already now over the supply since the merge. Um, so again, that was a huge issue as well. So, I think if you look at those two problems and think, how can I solve that? That's what we're focused on and that's what we're going to deliver soon when we announce more details about the token. Give us some alpha. All right, cool, man. Um, what are you most focused on right now outside of the token side ecosystem apps? What's what's uh what

are the good apps? What are the what are the cool teams? What what is the ecosystem that you're proud like what are the ecosystem projects that you're you know that that are getting a lot of traction? um shout them out for us. >> Yeah, so we had a big announcement uh yesterday. So there's going to be a new decentralized exchange launching on Linear uh that we've been working on closely with consensus and obviously Linear. So it will be like a third party protocol, but we'll be supporting it very closely. Um so definitely keep an eye on that. That's going to be sort of the liquidity hub for consensus, right?

The main place that Wall Street and everyone comes to trade on Ethereum. Again, Line is the gateway for Ethereum and it's great for trading and payments. So it's all going to be based around this decentralized exchange. Um we've also on boarded a lot of the blue chips now. So again like you need to have that core influx of like the RBS of the world and we're definitely doing a lot of that too. Uh I think sort of things I'm excited about that are kind of coming is uh equities. So again like we're really appealing to institutions. Tokenized equities are a big thing. Um there's lots of different solutions and trying to do it in a way that's still compliant. We're still like a US-based you know company and we want to like work closely with regulators and so doing tokenized equities on chain that's all coming very soon and coming to

linear maybe even you get to trade you know espineia very soon uh maybe even goes into some per you can you know den trade some sbet um so these kind of things are definitely areas we're focusing on the ecosystem side uh I'd say like on the you know and also like we're still in our sort of DNA like a technology team like we definitely doing a lot more on the ecosystem side, but you know, we took this bet 6 years ago to build the ZKVM. I mean, I'm sure you remember Andy in like 2023 or whatever, there was like, you know, the first ZKVM. Well, now there's none. It's just us. We're the only one left, the last one standing.

>> And I think that was like a very like a very good bet, a difficult one, right? You have to play the long game. And that's not always what people want to do in the space, but we played the long game. U we're seeing that now where like there's lots of risk fms obviously with riskier being one and they're really great and they provide that sort of you know general flexibility but what we've done is say right we're going to do one thing really really well right so we just prove the EVM that's all we cared about is the only thing we do everything else like not in our interest we just want to be the best at proving EVM and it also gives a very different like you know piece of diversity to the ecosystem because we have all these other provers but linear is like completely different

like the tool chain is completely different. And so that's great because as an L2, you know, because we're completely, we're going to be able to be enshrined into the L1. You have this thing called a native rollup, which I know you're aware of. And like Line is the only one that can be a native rollup today because it's is fully EV EVM equivalent. And then the other cool thing is because we're obviously focused on proving the EVM, we're now seeing that we're able to prove the L1 as well. So actually, yeah, there's a path where you can use it on L2 and L1. To be honest, the future I don't even see the difference. So it's kind of like becoming a an old term, but yeah, you'll be able to sort of generate a proof and then obviously a block will a tester will be able to

verify ZK proof on the L1 from a linear stack. And we're actually working on an EIP right now with the Bezu team where you can optionally you know a part of the L1 consensus attest to a block using a zero knowledge proof from the linear ZKVM. So so the technology stuff is really interesting but obviously linear mainet is is kind of the focus on the ecosystem. What I will say as an alpha on the ecosystem side, linear will be the best chain for your ETH. Right? That's, you know, there's a lot of this is a shest. >> What's the specialization? This is a one thing really well. It's going to be the best chain for your ETH.

We've got some really exciting announcements coming out soon on how that's going to work and it's going to be something that is going to take a lot of people by surprise. So, if you know anyone with a lot of ETH and they want to put it somewhere, then you know, Lenny is going to be the best chain for you. >> Yeah, I'll call up Justin and Joe. We'll see what they got to say about this chillfest here today. Native rollup guy ZKVM. I'm glad you guys stuck through that one. I'll tell you that was a that was a hot topic and no longer is. Um, we're on the signal. We have but we we have Boundless today coming out announcing that they are able to have consensus proof to prove the entirety of Ethereum finality using ZK proofs. What does this mean for Lineia? What does

this mean for Declan? Why is it exciting you know for interoperability for scaling Ethereum? you know, what does this bring to your life? How does this make your life better, Deon? >> Yeah. Um, so it's funny, you know, I was chatting with with Jacob from the risk zero team, and this is back in Berlin, and he like told me about the plans to signal, and I was like, this is amazing. Um, because, you know, my team had been spending a lot of time, probably the last six, maybe even longer months on like interoperability, right? There's like so many different, you know, obviously interoperability is something we need to solve as an ecosystem. We were involved in lots of working groups and like ideas on how to do this. There was many different approaches, some of which wanted to like change the EVM and you know, I'm like, as I said,

I'm a stickler for the EVM, right? Like, uh, you're not going to you're not going to get that past me. Who really like didn't want to go down that path. Um, but I've been always working groups. There was like, you know, new solutions. None of them really was that compelling. And I was like, well, we'll just park that problem for a while. And then, you know, risk zero came along and Jacob was like, okay, we're doing a signal thing. I'm going to have a zk proof, you know, for the consensus layer. I was like, fantastic. And it's fantastic because that finally allows us to anchor the L1 state into L2. And this is just going to unlock loads of great interroperity use cases like crosschain. Um, for example, you can also have keys store accounts. So, I don't know if you remember the idea of

like a key store account where you can actually, you know, in the multi-chain future and obviously this is when I'm talking to my, you know, friends at MetaMask virtually next door. It's like, you know, you can have one account on the L1 which controls your your private keys, your like smart wallets across all the other sort of like L2s and L3s that live on Ethereum. And so this also starts to enable these kind of use cases and I think to have it as like a well my question was like okay like is this going to be some sort of product that you sell you know is it going to be all this kind of stuff but no it's like a public good. Yeah. >> And I was like that's just that's just >> super amazing. I think what they've done is great and I'm really kind of yeah

excited and happy to kind of support the signal and um see this actually be used on linear and other linear stack L2s. >> Yeah, I mean I think that that like public good part is particularly interesting. It feels like a return to the original Ethereum ethos. I mean, I don't know about you, but I I I would assume so. When you when you got into Ethereum, it really had this this optimistic feel to it that this culture of building open-source technology for everybody um and just stacking those on top of each other and just building building. What's kind of funny now is like a lot of the Tradfi people are going to are kind of coming in and just they're they're going to reap the value of of a lot of the stuff that has been built. I think Ethereum the community itself has also flipped the switch a bit

in terms of like okay we got to bring value to ETH maybe there's ways that we need to kind of like restructure our thinking uh around necessarily uh this kind of super credibly neutral open for all you know free for everything open source everything you know that has that remains but it seems like there's been a bit more of a capitalistic turn with theruct restructuring with the foundation etc um but I think what balance has done is is in that that line of the core ethos and I think it's a lot of the you know it's you know when we started building the rollup we were like we're going to build a public good of education for the Ethereum community right and like obviously these things turn into businesses over time because well VC money only lasts so long and you know the world's real but at the end of

the day like that core ethos I think sticks with a lot of the Ethereum community and excuse me I think that that would you know that that sticks with you um and that you you know I I'm not surprised to hear that Do you value that aspect of this entire thing? >> Yeah, I think open source is kind of like the Trojan horse for crypto because, you know, it's like we talk to institutions, you know, they get to kind of rip on the back of a decade long billion dollars of R&D, right? That's what they Yeah. They're like cool, like you guys did this for 10 years. It's like >> Yeah. But then that's okay, thanks. You know, we invite them in. But the thing is they're building on a decentralized protocol. This is where it's different than web two and decentralized protocol

is the greatest Trojan horse because now we are disintermediating all of these centralized entities and so yeah it's uh you know open source is the way I'm really glad signals open source everything for linear and consensus will always be open source so yeah Declan may this ride to all-time highs be be with you be joyful enjoy the rest of joyful July we've got uh amazing August coming up next and who who knows what but uh thanks thanks Thanks for joining. Thanks for being a part of the signal today. Uh it's it's been it's been great hanging out the last couple years and uh we're going to see this thing through.

>> Yep. Great to see you, Andy. And cheers everyone. And yeah, take care. Big big summer. >> Cheers, Declan. Speak soon. All righty, guys. Uh we are live on the Signal. Up next, we've got Michael, the head of research at Nethermind. Uh a lot going on here. Uh I love Declan, man. guys just got a lot of stuff to say positively about uh Lineia, about Ethereum, um and everything in between. Um these guys have been holding off their token for a while. Uh I think that's going to be a good hit with all the hype around Joe Luben, around uh Sharplink Gaming, etc. Up next, we've got Michael from Nethermind. We're going to get him up. He's he's in the back.

He's ready to go. Uh this is going to be a fun one. We are live from Sweden. 9:23 p.m. It's the signal. We're celebrating balance mainet beta. Wish we had some music, some sound effects. Producers working on it. He's working overtime. We got Michael up here. Michael, what's going on? If I if I had a drum roll, I would I'd play it for you, man. >> It's great to be here. How are you? >> Good, man. Good, good, good. Um, Scandinavian summer. It's the signal day. Having a great day. Markets look great. A lot of stuff is happening.

Ethereum narrative revival is in full effect. How are you doing? >> I'm good. I'm good. Thanks a lot. It's like an amazing day for for the community. >> Yeah, man. For sure. Uh broadly for for open source, for ZK, for the research community, for interoperability community. So, we'll get into that. But I'm just curious, man. What are you spending your time on at Nethermind as of the last couple months? What are you researching? What is some of the technology that that you're seeing? um you know what's what's interesting. >> Yeah. So so my role at Nethermind is uh head of research. So basically Nethermind is a blockchain new research and engineering company. Uh it started in 2017. So like for the space is like

relatively old company. Um we have like over 250 people. So I think like for for the space is also like one of the the big companies. Maybe not the biggest. Uh I don't think so but you know it's one of the big Yeah. It's like a solid team. Uh so as you can imagine like we are doing like multiple things. We have like multiple arms like uh yeah focusing on various um types of of blockchain in various blockchain research are yes uh but primarily we are developers of uh nethermind execution layer client. um you know you cannot fully trust statistics here because the these are very imperfect but it's like first or

second most widely adopted uh client in Ethereum. So for for those who who don't know like execution layer client is basically the software that you run in Ethereum nodes that execute the the transactions right. So, so basically like every node in the the network needs like to to go through through the code of transactions and like validate like reach like the the state that is um that is like that that creates the the blockchain, right? Um arguably uh our client is also like the the most performant one but you know like your like opinions may may vary. Um yeah so so besides like the doing the execution layer client we also like collaborate on the blockchain research and engineering

with such a great teams like starknet tao world arbitrum nosis and and more. Um we are deep into into research uh on one hand on like protocol research on the other on on on zero knowledge. uh our expertise in ZK engineering also like allows us to like fully appreciate the uh the signal and like the fact that you know that uh that we can uh do proof of consensus um of of Ethereum like because like previously what we had like we we relied on either bridges or um on or proofs that that rely on on a sync committee and you know that's that's not

the level of security that that we want to have for for the future. So so it's like having having like the full proof of the full consensus is is like really important here. Uh we are very big infrastructure provider. Uh we run the validators for um for for Ethereum. We are operating in Lido. We have we run over like uh 20,000 validators. So it's like 2% of the network. We also participate in in in various networks as as as provers. Um we deeply care about security. So we have audit and formal verification team. The formal verification team is also um very much in into formal verification of of zero knowledge proofs. In in the past we were

also um formally verifying some some parts of of risk zero VM. >> So I think that's it. It's like you know I I told you it's like a big company. So >> no many topics. >> All right. So what exactly what is the number one use case that you are most excited about as a result of the signal? >> No. Um so you know like we see the future of Ethereum to be to have like a billion human users brought to to the ecosystem by projects like world or by financial institutions who are also looking into um into Ethereum. uh plus we will also have like billions of of

agents uh for example like deployed like like by by protocols like like virtuals. So we see Ethereum as like this uh this place where we really need to count actors in billions and in that case you need to have um you you have like very high demand for for onchain compute and for for onchain um onchain data, right? And you you you just cannot like process all of that. And like with ZK what you can have is you you offload the part of of the compute offchain and only verify onchain, right? So so this is what truly allows uh Ethereum to to scale and to

accommodate for for these billions of users. And then like with billions of users, there's also very strong need of having like a verified information about the state of Ethereum. Right? So here is where where the proof of consensus uh comes in because you cannot uh require from every agent, every user to you know to locally have a copy of a note right maybe like when when we have like financial institutions they they will mostly rely on the nodes uh you know that they have under their premises but like for for no more users and like for for agents I think it it will all rely on on the proof of consensus to understand like what's going on on the chain

>> you know I was talking to Shiv the the the CEO of Boundless and he was telling me about how their their development team spent so much time going back to you know gather all the historical context of the state of Ethereum to be able to pull this off. You know you've got years and years of state there that that you can go back and access to basically uh you know create these like uh proofs that can you know recursively prove all the correctness going back. Um and it just speaks volumes about not only the balance team but but the progress that the ZK space has been making. I mean it has been 100x's over and over year over year. What other parts >> what other parts of Ethereum or of the

broad broader blockchain space have you seen with similar levels of rapid uh improvements in you know like specs in product design and performance? Is there anything else that that rivals the uh speed of of improvement like ZK? >> So let me go to for ZK first because uh my my own background is in cryptography. I I did a PhD in cryptography around like 2016. Uh and I joined um TTO University for for post dog on on ZK and like back then like when when I started it was like still like there was like proofs like Japetto or Pinocchio that were somehow you know usable but like

still like nowhere near like the you know the being usable for for for real life use cases. Uh but then like drop 16 came out in 2018 we we got uh plunk marlin uh we got um if starks so so in in one year we we just like got like a massive uh massive speed up in like and like new new opportunities opened because like these new proof systems were like much more friendly for for developers to to work with for example because like they didn't require like a trusted setup per per secret. Um and then like from 2019 like the the progress is is like really like crazy, right? It's like uh 10x year after year

if if not better. And it's like and it's what what's amazing here is that you have like this hand inhand progress like the the there's like research collaborating with engineering. So on the research side you you have like uh super strong teams like pushing uh towards like new schemes like name like polygon zero name startware. Uh these are like the the greatest of all times in in in zero knowledge research but you also like have this like super focused engineering teams like like like risky zero for example, right? like that also like focus on like making like this this theoretical con constructs of like zero

knowledge tools like really usable and friendly for for for for developers. So like I think like it will be like super hard to find like a space that >> that that grew so quickly. Um like um like like Zik maybe you know like client execution. This is like we we also like see like Ethereum now pushing like the the the execution uh client teams to you know to to to deliver more more functionality or more more more performance. we uh with with layer 2 like we also see like this this push to to have like more uh possibility of processing gas per per second right so so currently we are talking like not about like 15

like 30 uh gigas uh per per block um so so it's like not fully like 12 seconds of a block but it's like two seconds for for execution uh but we are talking about like gigas per second right and this also like opens new new possibilities because it also um allows us to to um to accommodate for for much bigger traffic that I'm I'm sure is coming to Ethereum. >> Yeah. Yeah. So um Michael, I saw a recent post in the technical Ethereum community going around. It was like this graph screenshot where you could fill in which part of the ordering of priorities is most important. uh and you could go

on the website and fill it in on your own. And I saw a big consensus answer was the reduction in slot times to uh six seconds. Um is that what you chose? Do you believe that that is the number one priority for scaling Ethereum right now? >> I think I I would put I think I would put it like really highly. >> Okay. >> I think >> what would you put above it? >> Oh, good question. Um maybe something like fossil. Um so so um sensor Brazilian >> possibly yes fo c i l I don't recall like how how this abbrevation is like the full form but it's like one one of the um the things that that that will keep

ethereum truly like sensory resilience resilient um but yes like faster block types are extremely important uh so >> not slot times it's block times not slot times >> block times Uh yes. >> Yes. >> Um so yeah at at mind we are also collaborating with taiko on something called preconfirmations. So basically like preconfirmation is also like very neat concept that allows you to to have your your transaction like softly confirmed by uh by by the proposer before it's even like the the block is created. Right? So it's like a two-sided deal where um where where the proposal

like promises to to to include your transactions and in the future I think like will be also uh it will be also possible to to state like uh how you would like your transaction to be executed and in which context. So I think this is also like very fascinating area because it like it gives you that even even faster even faster block time and like of course it's like virtually the faster block time but but still >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, last thing for you. It's the signal. It's celebration of boundless mainet beta. What is Nethermind going to be using the signal for in its development, in its research?

What practical use cases will you guys build or be working on as as a result of this unlock? >> Yeah. So, so, so like we we are building infrastructure and that we are also uh want to contribute to to the agentic future of of Ethereum to to have agents that are for example contributing to to to the core development of the protocols because we we as mind are are also like part of this core def community, right? So, so we'll be definitely working on on this agentic future that that will bring this this millions of or billions of of agents to to the ecosystem.

>> Beautiful. So, very focused on the agentic side of things then and trying to facilitate that next part of Ethereum. Okay. Okay. Michael, thank you for your time. Thank you for for being a part of of the signal and amazing work that you guys have done at Nethermind. Obviously, uh, Thomas has gone on to lead the Ethereum Foundation from his work that he did there. Um, and I mean, it's been a pleasure to ev every time I've interacted with, uh, your team, it's it's been great. And, um, thank you for your time. Keep doing the hard stuff. We need you guys. And, um, see you on the other side.

>> Amazing. Thanks a lot, Andy. >> Okay. Take enjoy. Thank you. Speak soon, buddy. All righty, guys. That wraps up the signal. Uh we have a we had an amazing slate of guests today. We had we had Tommer, we had Shiv, Shirram, Robinson, Declan, and Michael. Uh all excited about pushing the boundaries of Ethereum with ZK. Uh truly an amazing six guest lineup. Um I wish Rob was here. He would have enjoyed this one. Uh we'll get him get him next time. Thanks for watching the Signal. We have a last minute guest from a new hire in the crypto ecosystem coming from the web 2 AI space into

crypto. We have Sand Deep who's now the chief of AI at Story Protocol. Uh I wanted to get him on to to welcome him into our space and get him a part of the role, get him acclimated to the show. Um, this guy has a really strong track record of accolades uh from from different PhDs, professor work, um, and a background in AI. So excited to have him on. Again, shout out to Boundless Maynet Beta Celebration. Thank you for tuning in to the Signal. We've got an huge audience today. 9K viewers right now. We're going to get Sandheep on here. We're going to talk AI. We're going to talk story protocol markets ripping. ETH ETFs with staking are probably coming to a brokerage near you

coming soon. BTC looks great. ETH looks great. All the memes look good. Charts are amazing. Everyone's vibe is just up. I mean, I tell you, we used to do these these pods and we did we we've done them twice now. Through a bull, through a bear, through a bull, through a bear, and the vibes in the bull is just, man, everyone's having a good time. Everyone's hanging out. And that's been the vibes today. It's 9:40 p.m. We're in Stockholm. I need a beer after this. I don't smoke cigarettes, but if I did, I would I would have one. Maybe I'll put another piece of nicotine gum in, but I'm chilling. We got Sandeep in the back. We're going to get him up. Last one of the day. Big announcement from the Story Protocol ecosystem. Let's get Sandeep up on the stage. Sandeep's in the back. He's coming in from hot from

the web 2 world. We're welcoming him to the dark side. He's probably way smarter than I'll ever be, but that's okay because we are all one and the same in this world together, living together, breathing the same air. Sand deep, welcome to the rollup. Congratulations on on the new role. How you feeling, man? >> Great. It's great to be here. Thanks for the invite. >> Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Well, um, look, man, there is a lot happening in the AI space. Um, you have quite the background in studying these different systems work like this. Uh tell us a story. How'd you get connected to SY to story? Why is this a a compelling enough opportunity to shift careers to to shift your focus?

Time is money. Your energy is all that matters in in this world. Why did you choose this endeavor? >> Oh yeah. Uh great question. So I actually met the story team while I was a prof at UT Austin and giving a talk and I talked about my PhD thesis at Stanford on what was called cloud robotics or fleet learning. So the the question of interest was well how can you augment um inference learning and control between say swarms of autonomous vehicles and drones using cloud computing. So I talked to them about how one key problem is distributed data collection and when I became a professor at UT I started thinking about how you incentivize people to collect interesting training data and data is

intellectual property. So we kind of hit it off and um that's how I kind of joined as an AI adviser and then soon um the team liked me so I'm joining as chief AI officer. >> Beautiful. Awesome. All right. So, one big question that story gets a lot that I'm going to throw at you is in the world of AI, it does seem like we that we have trained these models on what is effectively hundreds of thousands of hours of unpaid labor. They go out, they scan the internet, they get whatever data they want. In fact, I've actually heard of some of these models going out and figuring out ways and teams are raising to go behind pay walls or even open pay walls and use that data as well to train

specific models based on payw wall data. So in this world of endless internet swiping, let's call it for to be politically correct, why does IP matter? What is the new version of IP that matters in the age of AI? And how do you how do you combat those who say IP does not matter in this new era? It is a it is something that is around for the previous print era but does not apply to the internet and the agentic era.

>> Well, that's that's a great question. So, this actually starts from even before I met the story team. My lab was working with a Fortune 500 semiconductor company and they were testing out their AI algorithms for video search, right? And they came to me saying, 'Look, we need an evaluation data set and we really care about IP because of our lawyers and so forth, right? And what they cared about is saying that essentially all public data sets have a non-commercial license. Therefore, they wanted us to collect data. So I asked them, well, in this world of generative AI, can't you just use synthetic data?

and they said look sometimes generative AI models that create imagery could have been trained on IP unsafe data and they cannot even use synthetic data especially in the European market right so that's an anecdote from a real Fortune 500 company but more broadly getting to your question what you were talking about is the first wave of foundation models that often illegally scrape the internet and they operate on text right and actually now you're starting to see things changing for example cloud flare. They recently had this pay-per- crawl thing where they're blocking a bunch of blogs and websites and making sure you need to pay before illegally scraping that, right? But what story is really focusing on is the next

generation of foundation models, which we call multimodal and they're for physical AI. So, what I mean by that is they understand video, they understand audio, and they're taking decisions in the physical world. And you can't just scrape that data on the internet. It's going to come from your sensors like your iPhone, your dash cam, and so forth. And those are all different forms of intellectual property. >> Okay. I appreciate that answer, and I didn't mean to be too pointed, but I had to ask. Um, okay. So, let's talk about some some of your work in edge AI, and autonomous systems. How how will your background in these two fields help story further entrench itself as as being the rails for AI native data licensing? maybe you could walk us

through kind of like how you see that playing out and and what some of your you know previous research and learnings will will allow you to uh help push this forward for story. >> Yeah, I'll give you a concrete example from my PhD thesis that kind of seated this idea in me. Right. So the problem was on fleet learning. So every autonomous vehicle measures about four terabytes of rich data per day video LAR and radar just in in an hour and a half actually. So if every robot in the world could only send 1% of its data to the cloud, how can you maximize accuracy but minimize systems costs? So I took a really practical approach. Every day at Stanford as a grad student, I would turn on my dash cam and measure my commute

data and that was gigabytes of data and that's intellectual property. So what I would see is kind of rare events um self-driving cars being tested on the road. So we built this like kind of where's Whimo detector and really small computer vision models running in your iPhone and I would actually pay as a grad student for my limited budget pay scale AI and Google to actually label this right so as I kind of finished this it was just one grad student it couldn't scale and then I started thinking about okay incentive mechanisms how can I scale this are there cryptoeconomic incentive mechanisms but moreover if I train a model on your data my data and a bunch of other people's data and the marginal contribution of to accuracy of

your data is much higher, you should get a higher payout, right? So there's natural questions about how to license this data, how to remix it, create new versions using synthetic data to boost model accuracy and that's all IP that can be naturally kind of like stored efficiently and encoded well on the story blockchain and we can talk more about that too. >> Yeah. So, so like there's this concept of like basically what you're kind of getting to is like data as IP and it it can effectively, you know, I'm considering it can re reimagine how agents learn, pay, operate, interact, etc. You know, I'm just curious like out of the blue, what's your most radical or or hot take as to like where that is

headed? Like like what is data as IP? How does that change the way AI agents can like interact interact with each other, interact with humans, learn, pay for things, operate like what's the what's your what's your spicy take here? >> Yeah, I have two of them actually. So the first one is just when I was reading about story before I gave my first talk, I saw this interesting case study that's actually real. So let's say Justin Bieber has a new song, right? That's IP and then you create a generative AI remix of that and then I stream it, right? So the dividends or the royalties should flow to you as well as original creator who was Justin Bieber, right?

That's a graph kind of relationship. So I saw that on their website and I immediately was like, well that's the same thing we see in AI because I have a raw image from my dash cam. I might send it to you to label it. That's your intellectual property. You've remixed that. But then I could send it to an AI agent. Okay, this is not even a human. They could be running stable diffusion and creating that same image from my dash cam but in fog, sleep or snow to stress test an auto autonomous vehicle. So the combination of real data, data from agents is valuable. So that's one take. The other is totally contrarian.

It's actually some research from my lab and my students have actually incubated it as a startup called synthify. So everybody today is talking about foundation models for video, audio and text because you and I naturally as humans understand that. Yeah, >> but the bulk of data in enterprises whether it's medical ECG records time series or it could be energy demand patterns or in crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum, stock market prices are all time series. So you can think of trading bots that kind of ondemand license Bloomberg or different financial analytics data and then make decisions on chain. That's also where IP kind of comes in as a data input to these models.

H um I'm curious more about like the physical world of these things. I feel like a lot of the AI conversations that happen on podcasts and on and may maybe I need to expand my my podcast listening, but um a lot of it is is around in in the digital context, but I >> I just can't help but think that the physical that the implications of the physical world are so much so much more, you know, important and present in our in our physical lives. And perhaps I mean the trend is already accelerating towards uh you know heavier digital usage but um you know you you spent quite a bit of time training robots uh at at Stanford. Do you have any stories that were uh particularly um like you you came up with a a

hypothesis you had your independent and dependent thesises or uh variables and you you did these experiments and things and trainings. Was there anything in like situations in particular that completely changed your perception or worldview of how these robots may act or what you know different uh situations garner different results like is there anything that that like particularly rings a bell from your uh robot training days that you think is interesting to share? >> Yeah, definitely. So there there many of them but fundamentally we're definitely moving into the world of physical AI.

you know that's echoed by even Jensen Huang at Nvidia and it's all multimodal so you need to understand audio you need to understand radar data for autonomous driving video and so forth right so you need to coales these different uh streams but the key lesson I got from that and by the way my grad students train real robots all the time at UT Austin >> is it's much harder to um generate physical decisions in the world and just spit out the next token in text right and that you need a bunch of randomization you need. Let's say I'm trying to train a robot to cook. I need to see different homes, different recipes, different manipulation, egocentric video from AC across the globe. That's where crypto comes in

because you can crowdsource this data at scale like never before. >> Very very interesting. Um Sandy, last one for you. I'll let you go. I'm sure it's been a busy day. It's been a long stream for us here. Um, why does programmable IP matter more for physical AI than for LLMs and image models or or or does it? >> I believe programmable IP applies to all sorts of training data >> for foundation models. But like we were discussing earlier, text is largely a commodity. Everybody's scrape Reddit, you know, common crawl and so forth. The big differentiator is longtail data from the physical world, right? And if I'm

going to build a robot, I need to do what's called domain randomization. New scenarios for autonomous driving uh fog, sleep, and snow, right? So there it's a remix of data where you have the raw data and you have to boost it with synthetic data. That's what Nvidia is doing in its omniverse simulator and so forth. So tracking the raw data and derivatives is kind of natural as programmable IP and naturally encoded in a hierarchy or a graph on stories blockchain. When you say raw data, that's just like any sort of data that a human would provide an LLM.

>> That's like an image from your dash cam, right? Or an image from from a robot doing a task, right? >> Yeah. >> That image is not enough. You need more scenarios that are slightly different to give enough variation for the machine learning model to be robust in the physical world. >> Yeah. All right. All quick last one. What is your gonna what's going to be your main focus next quarter or two quarters at story? what's your uh what's your key prerogatives? What are you looking to achieve? >> Yeah, so we have a new incubation. It's going to uh you know be public next week or at latest two weeks. It's fundamentally on what we're talking about how data is IP and how can we crowdsource licensable IP safe data for physical AI. That's going to be my main

initiative. But I'm also going to help out with a bunch of new incubations at story u at the intersection of crypto and AI. Beautiful. Sandy, thank you. Thank you for your time. Thanks for joining us. Just wanted to have a quick chat. I know it's been a big day for you. Um, appreciate you you coming on. Good luck. Welcome to the dark side. It's going to be fun. Um, and uh, >> always in the dark side. Yeah. Thanks. >> There you go. There you go. Um, have a great rest of your evening and um, looking forward to seeing what you guys can put together. >> Perfect. Thanks so much. Pleasure.

>> All right, cheers, man. >> Speak soon. All righty, guys. That's the signal. That's the new story. AI hire, Sand Deep. That's going to be awesome. I know that they have some big stuff coming out next couple weeks. Um, can't leak it today, but uh it's been super super cool. I'm headed to KBW as well uh in a in a couple months. Going to be a great event out there as well. That's also alpha. Um, but tons of cool stuff happening in the Ethereum space in in in the ZK space. Again, the signal was a celebration today of Balance of Balance mainet beta and everything that they've been working on. Um, really a great stream today. Tons of guests. The market looks great. We had uh I think we're

pushing over almost 10K over 10K here today, guys. Um, been a great time. Amazing stream. Thank you all for coming on. Um, really great conversations across the board I thought were all fantastic. Um, and you know, the last one with Sandeep, every time you hear different AI things, it just really reminds you that, you know, uh, got a lot to learn in that new era. Um, thank you guys for tuning in. The Rollup TV, the show for live, entertaining, insightful content in crypto. Rob's back soon. We've got more stuff coming. We've got new segments. We've got shows. We've got some new animations, some different

sound effects. We're working the producers's ass off. He's already tired today, so we're we're going to close this out. I saw him laughing a bit at some of the jokes that I was cracking, so that's good. Thank you guys. Peace.