Saga: 'Ethereum and Solana CAN NOT Scale. Our Chainlets Fix This!' - Rebecca Liao. Ep. 543

Transcript

a singular chain like an ethereum or even a salana etc that by itself will not scale so our belief is that as applications start to grow and we get more user traffic scale becomes a very significant issue for these applications and the only way in which they're able to accommodate that traffic is to be able to scale horizontally we would need to automate chain deployment for you which we have done the way that we stand up our chain LS is every time a developer requests a chain L then our valid are obligated to automatically spin up a chain for them that has the same security model and the same validator set as our mainnet so first of all we wanted to completely abstract away the chain creation and chain

deployment process now it's so easy to spin up one why not spin up multiple welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Felix luch and today I'm speaking with Rebecca Lea who is the co-founder of saga Saga is a lay one network that allows developers to spin up dedicated chain Leets app chains dedicated to their specific use case before we talk with Rebecca we'd like to tell you about our sponsors this week this episode is brought to you by gsis gsis builds decentralized infrastructure for the ethereum ecosystem with a rich history dating back to 2015 and products like safe cow swap or nosis chain nosis combines needs

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high yield staking to your own customers is using their API your assets always remain in your custody so you can have complete Peace of Mind start sing today at corus one hi Rebecca and welcome back on epicenter great to have you again great to be here Felix thanks so much for having me on um you guys lucked out this is the very last podcast that we'll do before mainnet launch um and we're obviously not releasing until after main at launch so um yeah quite a bit of Rich information and I can tell you today yeah thank you so much for taking the time in this probably super busy day so one of the busiest days in Saga

history I'm I'm sure we can dive into like you know what what you learned over the last year since you last came on so for listeners Rebecca was on I think I guess April last year may almost a year ago exactly wow yeah yeah that's right and so we talked a lot about kind of saga's architecture and like sort of the core value proposition there um it was much earlier days than today I'm sure so um but yeah anyway so maybe you can we can kind of start by talking a bit a little bit about you know the high level of of saga what it is for the people that didn't listen to the first episode

and and who you are maybe we could start there yeah absolutely and well feel it's great to see you again um it's always great to spend time time with you guys epicenter is definitely one of our favorite podcasts um so I did want to miss this for sure yeah so Saga is a layer one um but we are a layer one to launch other layer ones uh so everything that is built on Saga is by definition on their own chain or set of chains which we call chain LS and why do we architect it this way it was for infinite horizontal scalability so our belief is that as applications start to grow and we get more user traffic scale becomes a very significant issue for these applications and the only way in which they're able to accommodate that traffic is to be able to scale

horizontally uh and so at a high level that is what Saga is we are Costless on the front end so we're very careful to um to specify that we're Costless as opposed to gasless so it's blockchain um anytime that you're dealing with a chain there's no such thing as no gas I mean you can set gas to zero but um we don't advise it and I think uh any any sort of like blockchain engineer archit out there will advise you against that even though it's very tempting so instead we have a system um by which your transactions on the front end remain Costless it's true that Saga does not show up on the front end we do not charge a gas fee to the end user Saga token is used by developers to pay the validators to keep our chains alive so

um given all of that it is a system that is optimized for Consumer adoption in terms of uh what I've been working on I mean running this project has been quite insane I would say it's probably one of the most insane things that I've ever worked on I mean before this I didn't know the crypto start up with Zaki um that was more in the Dei space and then before that I did an AI startup and uh things have definitely changed in that field I mean back then natural language processing was impossible and I mean now it's table Stak right people don't really think about it anymore as so it's it's been incredible to to see the journey over time of just what technology sees as the next Frontier but this is the exciting thing to be working

on um at the moment for sure and uh yeah I I'm thrilled going into main at launch yeah that's awesome there's there's a lot to dive in there maybe even a little bit the AI case we can we can see if if Saga returns to its Origins uh but maybe we can start like you mentioned yeah infinite horizontal scalability I guess we have had a lot of infrastructure projects on here I think that's kind of like one of epicenter focuses in in some ways and maybe also like blockchain overall Focus since we didn't have that many consumer apps yet how do you yeah I guess compare to like other infrastructure projects that like

like like I don't know new stuff like shared security reaking modularity how how do you feel Saga fits in there what differentiates from like maybe other infrastructure products yeah so I I would put it this way you know it's always interesting how these Tech narratives pop up in crypto um because the fact of the matter is you can discuss endlessly until you actually have to deliver a product and so at Saga you know we look at all these different things whether it's reaking um shared security I mean they're kind of the same thing um so every protocol has different ways of doing it but they're all getting at the same idea which is that a singular chain like an ethereum or even

a salana etc that by itself will not scale and so the way that you are able to to scale out something that's existing or how you're able to build a system for scalability from the beginning is you're able to accommodate for additional block space so you need to be able to provision with new block space and the way that some protocols do it is by you know reaking from another chain that's completely foreign to them um to their own set of chains um at Saga everything is native so there is a saga main net um it has a set of validators it is a fully decentralized proof State Cosmos chain the way that we St up our chain lets is every time a developer

requests a chainlet then our validators are obligated to automatically spin up a chain for them that has the same security model and the same validator set as our main net so it is definitely shared security can you call it reaking sure you can call it reaking um because we're taking the validator stake from the main net and then applying it to a chainlet you can call it modular as well because we're definitely not doing a singular L1 um we are in L1 specifically to proliferate l1s but at Saga I think that um our experience is app developers can get quite confused by all of these options especially because a they have to understand what the technology does and then B they have to understand what the significance is for them and uh we

tend to want to cut to the chase here um and so we tell the app developers you want scale at the end of the day if you are a game for instance which is our main focus you are looking for scale because the fact of the matter is you know game designers are creatives fix I don't know if you're a gamer but I'm sure you've played lots of games throughout the years uh they are creatives and so they have a Creative Vision in their head and most of the time the technology is nowhere near capable of meeting that Creative Vision um and so what we're trying to do at Saga is to get you as close to that Creative Vision as possible so if you wanted to create an MMO RPG for instance with lore thousands of characters all of whom are nfts interoperable assets you

should be able to do that we don't want the base infrastructure to constrain your game design in other words so um that's how we think of it is yes there are these Tech narratives and honestly some of the the best researchers and brightest Minds in the space are working on those narratives and so of course we pay attention but at the end of the day our focus is the end user it is the app developer the game developer in particular and when we build our product it is really with them in mind right yeah super interesting and yes I am like so many like even vitalic old school World of Warcraft gamer that oh really there you go you understand you understand I like where the hell did my

skins go yeah you understand yeah exactly exactly I think one of the first articles I wrote about like why blockchain and gaming Works back in the day was actually about like sort of these portability of the assets or the the power of the the game over your assets and stuff so interesting to see we're we're probably hopefully soon actually getting there that the scale is possible to to Really build a blockchain game so yeah super curious to hear more about that like you're you're saying you're focusing specifically on the gaming use case can you or like I guess also app developer perspective can you describe a bit how how you do that in practice and how you like abstract stuff from them that that the blockchain does

or or things like that yeah so first and foremost I I think um and and this is not a small thing I mean it's um it's one of those things where I think the role of discussion it's become um sort of a more muted part of the conversation but I think it's important to remember which is that building a chain is not easy um so what are the components of a fully decentralized proof of stake chain first of all you need a validate our set and um that means that you need to be a project that can be profitable for validators and that already cuts out most of the applications out there especially when they're first starting out and so having your own chain um prior to Saga was an enormous lift so

that's the first thing that we wanted to solve for developers is if you want your own dedicated block space which is your ticket to actually scalable infrastructure then um we would need to automate chain deployment for you which we have done um so right now in our web app honestly you fill out five parameters for your chain um and then our validators will take about a minute to sync um and then all the services around the chain will have to be spun up so the indexers the RBC end points for sure the block explorers once that is done um the whole process is maybe about a minute and a half you have your own chain and you can have as many of these as you like so first of all we wanted to completely abstract away the chain creation and chain deployment process

now it's so easy to spin up one uh why not spin up multiple um because at the end of the day one change should be enough for most applications to start off with but if you are a large game for instance that is built on another system and you are looking for a scalable solution now then you have a lot of users and a lot of assets that are already built in you're already starting to think about multiple chains um so fix if you're a wow player then you know all about game instances game shards different Realms and this is how game developers like to organize their game um so it starts to expand on to multiple chains but it'll still feel like the same application um so it's actually quite similar to to cloud in that sense um because you probably start up with one

AWS instance um or a couple and as the compute resources you require increase then you would expand to as many instances or servers as you as you can so it's same idea on Saga just expand to multiple chains if you need that additional performance um because we're all familiar with Cosmos I can start a little differently on this point uh which is that IBC allows all these chain lists to speak to one another um so there is complete interoperability within the Saga ecosystem now bridging out to other ecosystems is also where it gets interesting I would say that with most solutions out there whether it's um rollups for sure even other app chain or side Chain Solutions bridging is an issue um because the way that bridging

usually works is you have a bridge provider and um even for the ones that are completely decentralized there is still some way in which they will whitelist a chain um and it's usually a bey effort so you have to talk to the core team and um get them to agree to open up the bridge for the assets that are coming from your particular chain now um for most layer ones so for um any layer one prior to Saga that was I mean it was a manageable effort because the number of layer ones was pretty finite um but here we're going for infinite horizontal scalability and honestly any application developer should be able to just spin up chains whenever they want and therefore talking to the team every

single time you're going to spin up a chain l is not scalable so we needed a way in which you can permissionless add um our chain leads to the bridges and then open up bridging for the assets that are contained on those chains so the fact that we are a fully decentralized proof of stake system with fast finality that gets us to that fast bridging and that's something that a lot of application developers are looking for as well they just want to go where the liquidity is we at Saga think that there is far more value um that we can create in terms of being the hub for these application developers that in making sure that all the liquidity is locked on here um as we know in technology often times if you are the easiest platform to use and liquidity just happens to find you um

because that's where the user traffic and the developer traffic will go yeah so um those are some ways in which we're helping out developers and then the Costless transactions that I mentioned earlier that is absolutely key I think especially for game developers um many of them have aspirations to have their own token or uh they are looking to maybe use a token of another ecosystem even if they're coming to us from uh an ethereum Community or polygon Community Etc and we allow for that kind of flexibility on the front end so we don't interfere with the monetization in other words um of these application developers with their end users so yeah the entire system has been really AR conducted to maximize the experience for the appdev and um I think given the the traction

that we've seen so far it's resonating yeah thanks there was a lot super interesting and am I understanding correctly that it's not like the aset bridge have to go kind of through the Saga Hub L1 but they can actually go straight from the chain L to to somewhere else that's exactly right so every chainlet is a chain it is a fully decentralized proof of stake chain in its own right um and so it's able to do everything that a layer one can do the only difference really is that we don't require you to have your own token for staking um because again everything is I I guess you can say it's restak from The Saga main chain and so there's no need for you to have a staking token um a lot of people will ask about staking

regardless and I think that's because maybe some validators have become important community members um for these applications for you know for various reasons and they want to be able to reward the validators or people who have been long-standing community members through the mechanism of staking and it's true staking is an incredibly powerful incentive mechanism is why many people attempt to stand up layer ones but what we always tell people is okay I think it's it's time to change the mental model a little bit in that you don't have to have actual staking you know you don't need to secure the network per se but you can have staking um you can have people stake their Assets in liquidity pools or with certain assets based on certain activity in your application it's just you no

longer have to worry about a staking token for purposes of security yeah that makes perfect sense I think I guess that's it's getting back a bit to because in the end obviously the app chain develop ER needs to kind of pay for zaga so maybe that's also uh yeah something we can talk about a bit how does this pricing work I know we probably talked about it last time but we we can probably go back into that yeah so pricing is um no thank you f it's a very important Point um pricing is a very uh important Vector for us and the reason for that is I think from the perspective of an application developer gas is annoying not just because it's

been potentially High um it's unpredictable and so when you are trying to actually you know stand up a project get some traction for it you want to be able to know what the costs are um pretty basic and I think for us when we um designed our tokenomics uh that's one thing that we really aimed for um was some sort of understanding of what the cost is going to be for running One of These Chains um and we did not want it to be reliant on gas so so here's a mechanism we call it musical chairs every epic which is about a day we run a reverse auction among our validators and um the number of validator slots that

we're starting off with is around 20 so 2021 and um in order to get one of those slots uh the validators will bid their price for providing um security for a chain L for that particular day and the lowest set of prices wins so if you were in that lowest set of prices that's great you're part of the validating set um the highest price in that winning set of prices is the price for that particular day so if you're the validator who bid that then congrats you got exactly what you asked for but if you are a validator that bit actually a little cheaper than that so your pricing was even lower then you actually get a nice margin over and above what you had originally anticipated which is great if you price

too high so you are out of the validating set for that particular day um then not only are you not validating you're actually not getting the rewards for being a validator for that particular day that you're out of the set and so this is an incredibly powerful mechanism to encourage validators to bid their true cost or as close to their true cost as possible for providing security for chains um so what's the definition of that it's it's commodity pricing so we aim to get to commodity pricing for our application developers now um what we're currently clocking in at is about $500 um per chainlet per month and given that there are no other fees in the system um that is probably the most

affordable way in which an application can develop um whether it's on a monolithic layer one or whether it's on other side chain um dedicated block space Solutions we aim to be the most cost effective awesome yeah that's that's really cool and how did you actually like arrive at this cost because I guess that's you running it on testet and validators already price in in like dollars their sort of cost or how does it actually work in practice yeah yeah no that's exactly right so for uh the tests that we've run so far they are free of charge um they are free of charge and therefore um we are so we haven't actually put this mechanism into

practice yet um that'll come in the phases of mainnet but what we did do with every test set was um we had the full set of validators so we had ourselves so we were a validator but um we also invited in what anywhere from like 20 to 22 other validators to be a part of the test St and so um this entire time we are monitoring the collective cost basically of each uh chainlet that is stood up and um for our Pegasus incentivized test net which is um our next to last test net before main net we actually we have a test net V2 that is running right now but that's really for final verification purposes no one's really meant to build or do anything on there um the one that we had immediately before was Pegasus and um

for that one we I think maxed out at around 210 chain lits or so so we had a lot of data to work with in other words so it's based on cost at the moment it's based on cost and the Assumption here is that because of how we have architected this reverse auction it should be the case that um when validators do actually come online and participate that the final pricing will be very very close to the actual cost that they're paying yeah super interesting yeah like curious to see how it like will look on mainnet and if it will turn out like that I guess that will be the the big question so like I saw actually I I mean yeah you you mentioned 210 uh chain Leets there on the Pegasus testnet like when you go to main net how many do you

expect to go live in the first few weeks do you have a idea of of how much it might be yeah so our um day one main net launch Partners there are over a 100 of them so um I mean we have innovator program that's our ecosystem program we've been building that for the last year and a half 2 years and that has 350 projects in it um and so not everyone is going to come online day one uh but we definitely wanted to encourage as many people to get started as soon as possible as so it should be over a 100 all right yeah that's that's super exciting yeah congrats that sounds like a lot I think I'm assuming a lot of them given the core focus is games still as as I understand are games um can you

talk a bit about yeah is that like the main one and then maybe how do you yeah what did you learn from these games or how how what sort of games are there like what excite you that which games excite you yeah how are you approaching these game developers everything in in that sense yes the vast majority are games um some of them are going to be more pure nft collections so I would say 80% of our ecosystem is gaming um and then about 10% % is more pure nftd and entertainment and then the remaining 10% is defi so we are in L1 um at the end of the day and so there there are always interesting things that you can do with respect to defi on an L1 especially here uh where pretty much every single chain

lent is going to have at least one token so uh that's that ecosystem is actually it's it's starting to uh gear up which is very exciting to see but in terms of the games I would say that the kind of game that is really suited to web 3 is the kind of game that really relies on ugc um so ugc is user generated content and um the reason for that is a decentralized system very frankly is never going to beat what kind of computing power AWS and Nvidia combined can give you um so if you're looking for a game that is meant to be you know a fast moving high performance completely optimized visual experience blockchain

is not really meant for that blockchain I hope can support that kind of game but it's not the base infrastructure for it there are many other game infras and tooling for that particular kind of purpose so what is it that web3 and blockchain uniquely bring um to a game it really is that decentralized generation and control of intellectual property um so what that means is if you are mod for a game not not a a social mod isn't a moderator but if you modify games for instance then you are much more easily able to monetize that without ever having to consult the the big Studio or the original creator of the game if you are a gamer and you're looking to customize your avatars or your skins then this is a great way um in which you can go ahead and do that

and actually retain control and monetization of those assets uh and so it's really those core things around ownership creative freedom that is really suited to web 3 gaming so the kinds of games that we seek out they do tend to be um pretty vast in Vision um so open worlds MMO RPG things that have lore but we also are starting to see some like pretty pretty fascinating genres come on board um so survival horror games as well um some of the games that will come online immediately are things like Rogue Nation um by moonl games there is um a game called Another World which is classic RPG game um

there's a game called star Heroes it's like it's first person shooter but it's set in space super fun game um eity which is kind of fortnite but on jetpacks um there's significant AI component to it um so those are some of the ones I can come up with off the top of my head right now uh but we also recently announced a game publishing arm at GDC called Saga Origins and anyone can build on Saga anyone can build on Saga but in terms of the games that we financially back and that really get the benefit of full publisher Services uh including go to market user acquisition creating game awareness Community Building Etc all the things that that a publisher generally does for games um it is a very specific kind of game so we have a pretty clear creative point of

view at Saga when it comes to Origins so we're looking for games that are provocative expansive and uncompromising so these are the hardcore games we're looking for that intensity of content and um why is that because again we're looking for what is it that web three can uniquely bring right and um I think e for everyone games are terrific I mean you know who wouldn't want a game that anyone and everyone from your like two-year-old cousin to your like you know 50-year-old dad can play that's awesome but we think that web 3 is meant to push the envelope we should be a home for that content that will not get accepted by big studios and there's quite a lot of that right now games that are really great quality um but the

content is just not acceptable for mainstream consumption but as we know uh if you build something that is of great quality it's a great product and it resonates with people it will find the mainstream and so the games that we're starting off with for the publishing arm they do tend to be a little bit more intense they are they're not e for everyone they're definitely m games and we just we think that we're going to carve out that pretty unique Niche um within web 3 and I mean we're we're already seeing an early play testing that people are really responding to maybe a little too much um but it's it's fun it's it's a fun process of discovery right yeah that sounds that sounds interesting so I mean maybe a weird question here like

I guess if these games are so intense like do you do you have any concern that like validators might not want to run the infrastructure for it or something or is that or could you are you addressing that somehow or is that even let me let me put it this way um so first and foremost validators the beauty of the Saga system is that so much is automated so validators don't even have to know which chains are um being run by them if you are within the validator set of saga then your SLA is that you will um automatically stand up and run whatever chain Le Comes Your Way um for as long as you are a validator so we've taken the you know the qu Choice aspect out of it um which just simplifies the whole thing for validators now if you

are are as a validator are so offended by the content of certain games on Saga such that you don't want to be a validator anymore well then you are welcome to go on to salana and validate some of these mean coins and you know what I'm talking about so yeah if censorship is your thing then you know go with God right right yeah makes sense sounds sounds sounds fair super interesting and so I think one thing I also wanted to talk about I mean first of all like supering with the publishing how did you actually like so it's funded by Saga in a sense and it's like its own like sort of business uh and people like working on that yeah okay that that's super super exciting yeah yeah yeah so

it's it's not a separate entity right now so it's still a part of the Saga 14 um but we are starting to think about how do we like make it its own thing because I mean we are focused on gaming entertainment as a chain to to begin with um most of the people on the business side at Saga um have been sort of oriented towards gains this entire time anyway um so we're starting off the publishing house with just the core team working on it but yes as we grow as we get more titles um as the demands for those titles become greater and greater then I I do think that we're going to hire out a specific team for that yeah very interesting um maybe also going to like this sort of test net learnings and kind of how it is for the

validator side I mean I guess I have like a bit of a background there so maybe that's why I'm interested in it but yeah how has that bin for the Valu have they how much infrastructure are we actually talking if you're like 210 chain L chain lets like how many like how beefy are the machines or is it like all one machine or are they like provis in separate infrastructure for this and yeah I guess or what other alerting were there in the test that maybe aside from the price Discovery there yeah so I would say um in terms of validator load um so so far it's been it's been manageable um in terms of how many machines a validator has to run or to support one of these nodes I think it

has been quite manageable um and we've seen that for our own validator as well but the thing that we did learn this was interesting is often times when people talk about scalability they they focus on things like TPS for instance you know what your block time what's your time to finality settlement um these are things that people focus on but what we learned um is sort Midway through Pegasus incentivized Testa that's when we ran a developer Challenge and we told um developers who are part of the SOI innovators as well as outside developers actually we invited in the community please pound the system just pound the system with transactions and just because we want to see how it responds under great duress and what we found is that the chain holds up so the chain

holds up nothing wrong with validator operations the chain holds up very well it's actually the services around it that have a problem so for example the block explorers um even some of the RPC end points indexers or you know there sort of whatever for now um but definitely the block Explorer it was just not able to catch up and uh what I mean by that was when you spin up uh a new chain light and you're sted pad width transactions I mean the block Explorer sort of has to come online at the same time and then keep up with the block production and the Explorer that we had been using at the time just was T able to do that and any sort of failure of transactions as a result of the stress test it was actually more due to the services um surrounding the chain

and so that's when our Engineers were like this is this quite interesting to learn um because in the journey to main net they had been thinking okay we're just going to focus on making sure that the chain is entirely stable and secure and that turned out to not be the issue um so ever since that particular stress test and then leading into mainnet now the engineers have really been focused more on the services um so making sure that the services can be optimized and catch up with the production of blocks that was the main learning that was the main learning and we're doing the best that we can right now um given the services that are available and we don't produce any of these things ourselves so we don't like have our own native block Explorer for instance we have not built

our own indexing Serv us but uh we are doing our own service provider stack for RBC end points um just we note orchestration because it's more complicated in our system than others where every single chain has their own rbcn point so if you are integrating with Saga there's really no such thing you're really integrating with individual chains so yeah I think it's optimizing for all of that um that's that's a learning that came out of it was it's pretty fascinating um and it also gives us a good idea of what kinds of projects we want to back going forward not necessarily in terms of games but for growing The Saga protocol so if you are a developer in the community and you want to contribute to this protocol you're not a part of the core team you know what are some of the services that that will finance in other

words that we'll give grants to um in order for you to just make this a lot stronger but yeah it was it was fascinating yeah that that's super interesting it's kind of like once you have real usage you start to realize this like base layer is actually maybe maybe like comet bft is performing well but but some other things are not guess even like in theor maybe in Def you had it a bit with like me and and and stuff there where that was probably also a similar realization and so like these services are run not by like the validator or like the I guess the RPC noes who kind of provides them in the end or how are they part of the Saga system at large is

there like also like some sort of Economics around them or how do they how can I imagine that yeah at the moment at the moment it's a package at the moment it's a package I mean oftentimes the services are you know they're open source tools um they don't really have sort of an economic model to them as of yet um but having said that I I do think in the future what can happen we've sort of started to to plan for this already in the road map is that there's kind of a Marketplace of tooling um so here is a saga chain Le out of the box um it has our validator set security model it has the set of services and um I um I do think that there there is actually a a packaging for the services which we call

the Saga OS um so this is what every chain needs in order to run um now if any component of that Saga OS is something that you want to switch out then that's entirely possible um but it's not possible right now but we would like for it to be possible in the future so if you wanted to bring your own block Explorer for instance if you had your own preferred in indexing service then you can switch it out if you wanted to switch out any particular component of the chain itself so if you don't like the execution layer you don't want to use evbm you'd rather use SPM or some other kind of virtual machine if you wanted to switch out our da or somebody else's da that's also totally fine so it really starts to be this like Marketplace of developer tooling you can

see by the way that I've been describing the system that we've taken quite a bit of inspiration from the cloud because right now if you are developing on AWS or Azure or whatever Cloud surface then there is a very robust Marketplace in which you can switch out particular tooling um for your application your website whatever it is that you're hosting um so we wanted to be the same idea here now what it does mean is that life gets more complicated for you um as you start to switch out from the the main chain lid package um then uh if any of these Individual Services that you prefer are charging then you have to bake that into the cost and I mean it may be the case that Saga does some sort of Revenue share some sort of package deal um with these service providers those are individual deals that need to

be negotiated out but as of right now it's I think for a mental model the app developers just have to keep in mind that if you start to customize to that extent then it's likely that your costs May they'll start to vary they'll just more they'll get more complicated right yeah makes perfect sense I think yeah interesting how to see that develop maybe in the long run how much of that yeah Marketplace can be like done through Saga or how it maybe integrates the protocol in the long run I guess there's like like a lot of things to think about there Saga itself the like you said the has a main or is L1 uh has a chain and I I I read a bit of an article where you kind of describe the roll out of the Saga Manet so I mean

I'm probably a lot of people here are familiar with like how Cosmos chains generally are launched um maybe can you explain a bit how how you're approaching this I guess you have like all these different chains and there there's much more complexity of how how this roll out needs to happen so I found that pretty interesting how you're how you're doing that yeah so I think um in in the opinion of um Jake mcdorman who is our brilant co-founder CTO um and um Bogden Alex andru who as our co-founder VP of engineering I mean it's a massive system that we're building something that is infinitely scalable on a horizontal Vector I mean this is a system that can break down in so many ways uh and so

when we wanted to design the roll out for main net we could just have it all exploded out there without a ton of user testing along the way or we can do a phase roll out because what's going to come out or maybe by the time that this airs um what has come out as our s the main net it is a gated launch uh and so it is a chain to launch chains that's in layer one to launch other layer ones but we are still um keeping the um the security chain decentralized and then the platform chain itself uh it has a very simple task of just standing up these chain lits now what happens through phases 2 through six of main at launch is that we start to add in some

critical services like IBC that is probably the most important one so that the chain LDS can speak to one another we'll also further decentralize the validator set as well um and then by the time we get to full feature main net version one um which will be in a few months from now now um that's when we know that the system can scale in a really sustainable way um that all of chain lists can speak to one another uh and we will have established some of those early bridges uh that go directly from each of the individual chains as they are stood up out to other ecosystems and then out to their say nft marketplaces or their dexes as well I think the reason why we wanted to roll it out like this is we know the kind of user traffic that we're going to deal

with and rather than risk everyone coming on at the same time and this whole thing just kind of exploding the chain dying let's go ahead and phase it out in a way such that it's very useful at every point but it's still relatively safe that was the thinking behind it um yeah so that that's the technical launch plan um I I think what's going to end up happening actually is even though we divided everything after phase one into five additional phases we might start merging some of these I think along the way the engineers have learned okay there there are some things that we can optimize for here so yeah um it it should be good over the next few months yeah I think it's it's very very thoughtful already to have thought like

this far and build like this plan I think in many ways we have seen many launches that kind of did it while the while it happened you know while the plane was flying so I think um this seems to be like a very thought through approach and I mean if you can optimize it more yeah that that's great right so um yeah pretty Keen to see how how it will go down I guess yeah like you said hopefully once this airs or it might already be live so yeah best of luck at this moment yeah I think I guess to another point which is Al like a big part of the launch and especially nowadays in this market the thing that people care about a lot I guess is the Saga token itself and the token launch you did have some

interesting campaigns and like air drops I mean I guess you uh building or focused on games so gamification is Al core to your business in some sense but yeah maybe can you explain a bit Yeah the thinking behind like sort of the the allocations or how how you conducted the airdrop yeah and and how it all worked first of all the airdrop criteria that you saw for the community is a result of several months of work um on the part of our token team which is led by jinquan our our co-founder Chief strategy officer and uh the goal was to really encourage loyal long-term community members and uh within a cosmos system that's evidenced by staking so we

wanted to Target the most loyal stakers and um in terms of sort of narrowing in the on the subset of stakers and how the budget will be allocated between them so we wanted to Target um roughly 200,000 wallets that was our goal that was a ceiling for this particular campaign overall for airdrops we have allocated 20% of our total token Supply but that is going to be air dropped out over the entire life of the project not necessarily just for Genesis for our Genesis drop we wanted 6% and um among that 6% we wanted to reserve about 4% for those stakers um so knowing that and knowing that we wanted to Target roughly

200,000 wallets overall that's when we started to look at the ecosystems that are of interest to us so obviously Cosmos is a big one that is the ecosystem that we came from um it underlies our core technology so we wanted to reward Cosmo stakers for sure um we wanted to reward Celestia Staker Celestia is our first major partner our partnership was formed God like maybe 14 months ago or so uh long time ago and um ever since then I mean we've been working together incredibly well and the team has pulled off amazing technical Feats so we definitely wanted to reward their stakers um polygon and Avalanche were the two other major Tech partners for us so for polygon we automate cdk chains for them and for um Avalanche we

automate Avalanche subnets um so cdk chains subnets these are both also ideas of dedicated block space um but the reason why they um are just they're harder to stand up is that it's still a very manual process and one thing that Saga really excels at is that automation so those two ecosystems have also been very supportive of us the leadership teams for sure have been incredible to Saga so we wanted to reward them and we wanted roughly the same number number of wallets per ecosystem so given that we started to look at snapshots and um the thing about um polyon Avalanche is neither of these ecosystems hugely emphasize staking certainly not to the extent that Cosmos does and so when we

came up with the air drop criteria we worked very closely with our foundations to figure out okay what does loyalty mean to you guys it could be that people are staking but it could also be in the case of polygon that people are using their ZK evm Bridge quite frequently that is a sign of loyalty for them um so we worked very closely to come up with criteria for that and then for Celestia it was this was uh definitely one where we we had to you know think a little bit about how to form this criteria because it's a very young chain and so how do you define loyalty for a chain that is that young so the snapshot that we generated it was a balance of okay like this airdrop is happening now and so we have to cut off the snapshot at some

point but at the same time we want to make sure that people had some amount of time to stake um before they get included in the snapshot shot uh and so we worked with the core team there as well to Define okay like who who gets into this eligibility group and then for Cosmos there are a lot of stakers there are a lot um too many to have been included in this air drop and so the criteria that we came up with is pretty creative um it was also something that we came up in conjunction with Chris berneski at placeholder which is our lead investor um it is to have stake increase over time so if you've built up your stake in Cosmos through the bare Market you are probably one of the most loyal members here and so we wanted to

definitely reward for that so that's how we came up with the eligibility criteria for all the stakers now for the remaining 2% that is more Community drop so that was for our innovators first and foremost so the people who have been building on Saga this entire time they've been doing it without any grants so other chains are throwing money at them throwing tokens at them but they chose to build on Saga and so we wanted to reward them certainly for all the work that they've done here so far we also wanted to uh help out the games and honestly this was when we started to really believe that we could do a publishing house because a publishing house at the end of the day is a user acquisition engine and we wanted to make sure that we could actually incentivize users to come play our games so we

invented play to airdrop uh which is a very popular mechanism now within gaming it's a simple idea you play the games the leaderboards are eligible for airdrops and in this case airdrops of Sala tokens um so we ran like 50 plus tournaments probably um throughout the months of December January February a little bit into early March as well and the user acquisition numbers were absolutely fantastic so this was a successful campaign for all the games that participated but also for the entire community so that's how we were slicing um all the individual airdrops and then we thought okay we have to do something for the culture because I mean we are coming into this having taken a lot of the work that early nft projects have already done so uh we pay tribute

to crypto punks um so we Dro to punks to board Apes as well um as one of the most OG nft Collections and then we also air dropped to bad kids um just to pay tribute to cosos so um yeah that's how we came up with the overall airdrop criteria there will be additional aird drops through phases 2 through six of mainnet launch um so people were not included in the original Genesis air drop there's still a chance for meain at launch to to get an air drop and then there's an additional 10% of air drop after that so definitely huge emphasis on using this mechanism our air drop planes page is going to live on basically forever I think um given just how central air drops are to a lot of our community building efforts and it's

not just going to be air drops of saga tokens that are going to go through that page I think for many of our chain lits our game Partners as well they'll also be using it so yeah um those a lot Felix but uh I I think they're yeah I've been curious about it I just want to lay it out there no yeah yeah again I think it's like a good example of how much you've thought about this and uh kind of targeted so I think yeah actually interesting to hear right like I guess makes sense games want to maybe use it so it's kind of like part of the zaga stack to also get like sort of these features almost uh delivered to you uh so if you're a game developer you know where to go I think we covered

everything I wanted to talk about so yeah thanks so much for coming on in this short time before launch Rebecca and uh maybe if you want to like some final thing you want to share or where people can learn more or or anything like that please feel free to do so yeah absolutely no Felix thanks so much for having me um it's definitely a lot of fun always great to catch up with you and um yeah I mean we covered a lot of territory there um I I think that this will be a very exciting period I mean heading into the post launch period I think people will start to understand how it is is that we made our choices for our underlying architecture and then how it is that we approach distribution so uh the challenge of web

3 is that so much of of what we do already has a basis in like web 2 and like you know traditional programming traditional gaming but what is unique to this particular space I think that that is the question that has Obsessed Saga for for a very very long time so I I think that with um the the system that we've built for infinite horizontal scalability that a lot of app developers are going to figure out okay you can do a decentralized system but it is still eminently scalable and so it can take on this consumer volume and then in terms of the distribution channels um yes I mean all the usual ways in which you get user acquisition for a game for any sort of application they they still apply

here so marketing is marketing is marketing but at the end of the day web 3 because of the community building aspects and because of the aspects of ownership uh and control of your own assets and your place within these communities and ecosystems there are many more powerful tools that you can unlock if you're built on this technology and I think that um people are going to very broadly recognize that um through the campaigns that we run both here in crypto um so people who have been in this space for a long time but also for for people who've never touched it before that's that's part of our goal is how do we bring in people this cycle who are I'm sure they've heard of crypto they're crypto curious but they've never actually used any of

the products before that's a huge goal of ours so yeah I mean our our journey really Starts Now for a lot of people you know meain it launch is such a huge lift that there's a giant exhale afterwards and people just kind of like you need a little bit of time to recover I'm sure our team will take a little bit of that as well but this is really just the beginning I mean we're we're recording this before M NE goes live but already there's an extensive post-launch plan so yeah we're we're not slowing down I mean this is just too much exciting work to be done awesome yeah thanks so much again and yeah best of luck with the launch and hope we're going to see some Saga apps uh be like among the top most used crypto apps in in the next few weeks and

months so uh yeah exciting thanks so much and see you soon maybe next year one year after launch awesome thanks so much Felix take care but