Solving Fragmentation in the Rollup-Centric Paradigm w/ Austin King (Omni Network)

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome back to the strange waterer podcast thank you for tuning in for another episode there are a few very important reasons that ethereum is so valuable but but let's focus on one which I'll refer to as the shared space you're probably much more familiar with the two major implications of the shared space composability and shared liquidity but I find it helpful to frame their property by referencing that all applications liquidity and users exist within the same shared space the

evm I find this Frame helpful when you begin to consider rollup which by definition create isolated spaces away from the shared evm where execution is quick and cheap but segregated from the rest of the ecosystem each time you deploy a new rollup you're fragmenting and therefore reducing the value of ethereum right and this is particularly important in this moment where you just need to spend 5 minutes on crypto Twitter or listening to crypto podcasts before you hear someone announce that by the end of 2024 or

2025 there will be at least 10,000 rollups what does this mean for the shared space have we lost one of the core properties that made ethereum so valuable well dear listeners fortunately the answer is a resounding no and it's thanks to the efforts of people like today's guest Austin King co-founder and CEO of omn network omn network is building a solution to tie together the rapidly expanding L2 ecosystem and to ensure that assets can be quickly and safely moved through the ether as Austin put it one of the more

interesting things about ethereum from a developer perspective was that it felt like you were deploying code onto one computer but in reality it was really being deployed to thousands of computers the rollup Paradigm broke that experience but by the end of this episode you will understand just how the Omni network will fix it one more thing before we begin please do not take Financial advice from this or any podcast ethereum will change the world one day but you can easily lose all of your money between now and then okay time for Austin

King Austin thank you so much for joining us on the strange water podcast hey yeah thanks for having me of course so I'm so excited to talk about Omni and like really this transformational moment of uh ethereum that we're going through but before we get there I'm a huge believer that the most important part of every conversation are the people in it so with that is like kind of a start can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you found crypto and I guess what led you to uh the to Omni yeah yeah 100% so I've been in crypto for about seven years at this point I was uh in University I was studying computer science at Harvard and really just fell down the rabbit hole um I had an internship at Microsoft my junior summer and I just frankly didn't really have to

do anything for that job so I just spent the whole summer getting into crypto you know learning uh like mining ethereum buying ethereum and then learning a program in solidity and so I had always wanted to build a company after I graduated and so senior year I really just committed to building a crypto company so spent most of my senior year running around trying to find the most interesting research in the space ended up founding my first company right around the time that I graduated built that for about two years which is you know interesting in hindsight because in many ways Omni is very much the successor to that Network that we built it was actually an L2 interoperability network but back then uh l2s meant like lightning Network and other payment Channel Solutions and so it's really a like high throughput uh interop network

but specifically for payments so we built that for about two years uh sold it um then I sold it to Ripple and then worked there for a year until I vested and then quit to build this company um so yeah I mean that's the highle background as to like how I got on crypto at large really though like it was very intellectually interesting from a computer science perspective but it's definitely the ideology and the like uh potential of what this uh te is going to be able to do for the world that really got me hooked and committed for you know this past decade and you know certainly decades to come as well for sure and I think you know throughout the next hour we'll unpack so much uh about the ideology and like what's exciting about this space so I don't want to like uh

harp on it too much uh right now in the beginning but I guess like a good uh way to continue moving this conversation forward was I would love uh to fast forward to this moment where you've left Ripple you are an entrepreneur you know you're to build something can you talk through like what were the the things that you were seeing in that moment I guess give us the year the things you were seeing in this moment and like maybe just talk us through the story of how you ultimately landed on like interoperability is going to be like the key piece to transform ethereum into the world computer and you need to build that so I guess like how did you how did you come to that realization yeah so when we started this company actually we built a defi protocol first and it went

really really well we you know hit the protocol cap of 50 mil TBL in like two days after launching um and so we started to at this point rollups were not nearly as uh production grade or validated at this point in time but my co-founder and I we've always just been deeper in the research community in crypto and so we saw where the space was going it was pretty clear to us that uh the future of ethereum was rollups and so uh we built this D5 protocol and wanted to scale it across different rollups and so we started looking into different ways that we could do this um really that had three key things we were optimizing for uh one had to provide a good user experience two it could not compromise on security and three it could not fragment the liquidity of the

protocol um so with those three things in mind we started thinking about yeah different designs of how we could achieve that around this time at Stanford blockchain conference we met the igen layer team and so we started going deeper down this path and we realized at a certain point that it' be way more valuable if we just built this as a generalized infrastructure layer instead of just for our depi protocol specifically and so that's really where Omni came from like we saw earlier in the like days of the research Community like okay even though rollups don't have majority of the activity right now this is where it's going and we're seeing this validated a couple years later now you know uh more activity happens on rollups consistently than on ethereum L1 today um so that's really where Omni came from we build a protocol and we

face this problem ourselves and as we talked uh with other teams throughout the ecosystem we realized that if we built it as a general infrastructure layer um it would just be a far more valuable contribution to the ethereum ecosystem at large yeah one of the things that is so unique about ethereum and that draws me to it is like there's nothing else on this planet where you can actually see the future of like where the like technology and the business and the community is going and like I I just couldn't even imagine if if Mark Zuckerberg like weekly was on like just open to the community calls that go out onto YouTube that like talk about the product developments and the long-term road map um and and that's what's like incredibly special about

this space so I'm really happy to hear the story of a Founder who like not only recognized that but like moved on it and um for everyone else listening like there is so much coming down the ethereum pipeline and like we have this unique opportunity to know that it's coming and there are billions of dollars in in equity to be created just off like that Insight so listen to Austin yeah yeah totally agree I one of my old roommates uh has worked at Facebook since he graduated and he never tells I still don't know what he works on CU he's so closed lip about it yeah um yeah the open source energy in the ethereum ecosystem is great like even now you know like anybody can hop in go to eth research and just start like looking at

what the kind of like Frontier researchers are focused on right now and there's a lot of interest like honestly I think this is the best way to do product development in crypto it's just like you need to understand what the space and what the infrastructure stack is going to look look like a solid like 2 to four years out and you do that by going to the research forums and just seeing like what Core Concepts people are exploring right now um that that's honestly probably the number one advice I would have to anybody starting a crypto company it's just like because it moves so fast but you can get a view into what it will look like two to four years from now by being involved in the research Community yeah and and what I like to say is that ethereum or fine crypto is like the final form of Open

Source where it's the same things that we learned over the last 30 years of how much more powerful and secure and extendable and just better open sources and then we created an incentive layer on top of it to say that whatever you build if people use it like ultimately value will come back to you and whether that's like directly and how you structure your protocol or just through like the EIP 1599 and the burn and like just value AC cruel to eth like there's something just so cool and um Next Level about like when you think of Open Source and what crypto has done for that like this is more than about like Finance or whatever we're we're reshaping how computer science is actually done in the real

world yeah uh completely this is something that my friends and I talked about a lot in college we were all just very involved in open source and uh there's just not a clear a clear business model for it for many of these companies they often become like Consulting companies for the open source software that they have created but crypto totally flipped that on its head uh and opened up fundamentally new types of business models yeah super exciting so let's uh let's Zoom back to Omni Network So In This Moment you've built a dii protocol you've got a lot of tvl you're realizing huh we want to be Omni chain we want to be cross chain but like it's not really doable unless we build the technology and so can you talk through like before you guys have built

what you've built today like why wasn't it doable what were the what were the solutions that existed and why did they not achieve your um you know three property rubric yeah so what were the solutions out there that we considered um honestly not many of them even really came close to uh none of them were really thinking about the problem the way that we were for a while we have had interoperability protocols um in the space but none of them have been extremely developer focused and none of them have been specifically ethereum focused if there's two things uh to like understand what Omni really is it's like those two key things we're extremely developer focused and it's for the ethereum ecosystem it's purpose built

for you know uh to be the best product for the biggest market and that's ethereum so it doesn't actually you know uh you can't connect to salana using omne it's purpose built for ethereum um so none of these solutions they were all mostly about moving uh mostly bridging they were mostly uh bridges for the most part you know if you want to move some ether usdc from ethereum to salana you could do that but nothing really gave you a native developer experience um that ethereum was shooting for so ethereum at large uh two programmers was built to look like a single computer despite the fact that it's powered by hundreds of thousands of computers across the world this is really nice in the fact that it makes it much easier to program and reduces the probability that you make a mistake and you like program

in a bug um at large this is broken with rollups so the ethereum ecosystem at large it's no longer just L1 it's rollups that you have to think about as well and this specifically this developer experience was broken and no other project was trying solve that problem and that's what we're focused on omy is really just like return ethereum to the original Vision where to programmers it looks like a single computer they can build an application and it's available to all the users and all the liquidity in the network that's broken with role up today but that's what we plan to fix with Omni but no other project really is thinking about that way so that's why none of them really fit what we're looking for yeah I love that and I I am a huge believer in the world computer metaphor um like I I

think that that's the best way to understand let me just like put on chips on the table like I'm an ethereum maxi not because like I believe it's the best chain or it's going to achieve the most value like I think the point of crypto is to create one credibly neutral space one not like 60 not like a bun but like one and I think that's ethereum and I think you're totally like the Insight that you just gave I've never heard it described like that but you're totally right the cool thing about ethereum is that from a developer's perspective it lets you program like it's one computer even though it's a decentralized network and say what you will about the rollup Centric road map but like we have lost that and it's that is such a perfect way to encapsulate like the problem you're trying to solve but I want to slow this

down a little bit uh before we I just really want to unpack this one piece because when you were describing why uh all the solutions that existed at the time like didn't fit what you needed that you said something very specific which you said they weren't interoperability networks they were Bridges and so I would love for you to unpack that a little bit and help me understand the difference between what is an interop interoperability Network what's a bridge why did one come first like is one just a souped up version or the other can you help us who don't live and breathe in Cross chain world like help us figure out what the landscape is yep gladly so uh at large an interoperability Network picks up some

State update some transaction from one platform and moves that information to a new platform that's what they do a bridge really is a product that you can build on top of a technology that allows you to like see something in one place and let another place know that that update has happened so this in like 2019 to 2022 I think uh there are other networks that build interoperability networks um and didn't really know what to do with them other than build Bridges uh at large I think we're mostly going to deprecate bridging uh at large uh throughout the industry I think this we we implemented very many very poor design choices here and it led to a lot

of hacks uh you know we've lost like over a billion dollars in hacks like this not just defi but like specifically Bridges um and a lot of that I think maybe over half of that has gone to North Korea and so this sector within the industry has pulled in a ton of bad visibility uh and really I think it comes Downstream of poor design choices so uh what is Omni it is an interoperability Network are we building a bridge on it no uh very intentionally not we don't think that that is like something that is going to be useful for the space what we're actually far more focused on is technologies that in r view largely deprecate bridging so uh X erc20 it's this uh new EIP I think the formal like ERC is 7281 but the idea here really um is wrap tokens that are

controlled by asset issuers themselves so when you have something like this uh it removes a huge amount of the risk that comes with moving assets across different domains historically what we have had is Interra networks selling WAP tokens as a service effectively and so what you'll see is uh some team wants to have their token available on new platforms uh they onboard this asset into it and then they issue the asset on these other platforms but it comes in a way where it's really a derivative of the like Bridge or interop network um this is just really bad design from our perspective because these are really difficult to secure so anytime you bring uh the stability and security of an interoperability Network and meld that

into really three different we think about this in three different forms like assets if you make an asset a derivative of an interop Network that's uh dangerous if you make an entire platform dependent on an interop Network also very dangerous but this also applies to developers as well um so instead what we're pushing are Open Standards like xcr C20 where really what you have is just a standardized interface where if somebody wants to expand their asset to uh another platform what they can do is they can use a standard and then they just whitelist interop networks to like facilitate that movement uh they could also Blacklist uh that interop network over a certain period of time if they wanted to or rate limit so really it keeps the power in the like hands of the people who are actually building uh or

like issuing these assets are building these uh applications so that's how we think about it at large like we are not trying to build a bridge uh in many ways we are promoting Technologies and Open Standards that like remove the need for bridging at large and so this is something that we care about a lot because we think it's the like most stable uh path uh forward for the ethereum ecosystem and then you know taking a step back from the ideological perspective on it uh it's simply a better product honestly we've had really good traction uh selling this to people because whenever we are like hey you should use this open standard and sure you can like use Omni to facilitate these movements behind the scenes so like they often try to ask like so what's like how does omni lock Us in and we're like it doesn't that is the point

here and so when we get people to understand you know what the Alternatives actually are compared to these proprietary standards uh honestly it's pretty easy to sell this thing because it's objectively a better product I it is so interesting for me to hear this framing of like if you build a good interoperability Network that leads to the deprecation of bridging and I think we might even just this might even be a point about language because there's like Bridging the verb which is moving assets from one chain to another and then there's Bridges the noun which are maybe like a very niche specific uh implementation of an interop Network or maybe their their own thing or whatever but like Bridging the the verb will never go away if anything that's only going to get crazier it's Bridging the

noun um that you're saying and so first of all quick pause right there is that a fair distinction does that sound right to you yeah yeah I mean an interop Network moves data from one platform to another bridging specifically are some bespoke implementations we have made for moving tokens from one to another on top of these inov networks yeah yeah and think okay so I think it' be really useful to unpack like what Omni network is from a like systems design uh and just like H how what your building looks and then maybe we can walk through why that's different from a traditional bridge and then we'll talk about like the benefits from that so maybe just starting from basic like what is Omni network from what exists on chain to the

network participants and everything in between cool all right so let's do uh High Lev overview here the oneliner really is like it is an interoperability solution specifically built for the ethereum ecosystem and when you build something specifically for the ethereum ecosystem you get to make different design trade-offs on the engineering front than you would be able to if you were had to connect like salana for example so one really nice property here is the fact that uh when you're working with rollups specifically they are all posting their data down to ethereum L1 so there is an ultimate like Global worldview of what's going on here uh it just delayed uh until you see it on eth L1 when you are going cross chain you do not have that luxury you have to you

know build a system that looks at two other systems and like they will never converge and so ultimately you're just depending on like your system to understand what the world looks like with Omni everything is provable at the end of the day so you know even though it's not provable immediately it doesn't need to be so um let's walk through an example of how you can use the omin network and talk about the participants along the way so the way the network Works um it's really nice because it's like agile and dynamic with integrating new rollups all you need to do is uh have a smart contract called a portal contract deployed on a rollup um the nodes in the Omni Network and these are the participants who are reaking capital um are monitoring transactions that

affect that specific smart contract um so let's just say for Simplicity that we have one on arbitrum and one over on optimism um some user Alice could be on arbitrum and talk to this contract and say hey uh I want to make this function call uh over on this other rup what would happen is the nodes in the network would all observe that state update and it's actually a blockchain Omni is it just happens to be the best design for this type of solution um so all the nodes and the network run a consensus process like in any other blockchain and they all come to agreement like hey Alice just stated this over on arbitrum um and at that point once they've come to consensus on that there it's like verified with their signatures and a relayer can go post that to uh the Des

rups so from a zoomed out level pretty simple it's just like a network of nodes watching State updates on rups and then there's also these actors called relays who just take once they have come to Consensus These updates and put them on destination rups um so it's ethereum native in the sense that the statements that the nodes make about what rollups look like ultimately are always going to be directly comparable to what is on L1 so they can have their Capital slashed this allows us to have really nice secur properties out the gate because no other interoperability solution uh can have that um one other thing that is extremely nice about this is it uses reaking so that means that we get to pull the massive security budget that is

available from ethereum uh into the network itself so uh we can have a cryptoeconomic security budget that is far beyond any Network that has been able to exist before because we're not just securing it with Omni anytime you anytime you secure it with a new network token uh the token's going to have a lower market cap it's going to be more volatile it's going to be less liquid and that has direct implications on the security and so if you use eth instead you just get a far more scalable security budget and so that's in like specifically why we used eth as the asset to secure it because uh the ethereum ecosystem is going to outpace any new token that is issued so you have to go with something that is massively scalable and so that's specifically why

we use reaking yeah and and I can't wait to like get to the reaking part of this conversation I think there's so much interesting stuff happening there but while we're still walking through uh Omni like 101 so um I guess like some some brief clarifications this relayer entity is this a independent entity or is a relayer like a proposer which it's all valid like everyone's a validator and sometimes you're a proposer um it can be anybody it's like there's not a rotation process going on it's really just like a race uh for who can submit it first got it I was really trying to pick apart is the real era centralized entity that acts based on the consensus of omn network or just happens to be one of the nodes it sounds like it just happens to be one of the nodes it's not

even one of the nodes it can just be anybody out there uh the way that it's secure is that it can only relay State updates that have been signed off by the network at large once the network at large has signed off and come to consensus on these State updates anybody it could be you it could be me it could be a company uh can run a relay which will go and move these updates uh so it's not it's not even restricted to like having to stay Capital because you need the signatures from the people who have staked Capital uh in order for it to work got it so the idea here is as you said each uh rollup has its own uh like I'm sorry you called it something like a watcher smart contract portal contract yeah portal contract that the uh Omni network is like at all times

watching to see like a new command come in when a new command comes in the omn network independently on all the decentralized nodes each runs that command make sure it's valid and and there's nothing interesting going on there they all sign it we aggregate these signatures and assuming we reach some threshold then like we we count it um as like a valid message correct yeah good recap and so I guess like that makes so much sense to me when we're talking about the interoperability like base layer of what you guys are building uh like messages move back and forth but now let's talk about Bridging the verb because like what you're talking about for this relayer step without asset

bridging all it is is just sending a new like transaction on chain and then putting the data that's in the transaction on chain sound super easy for bridging you actually need to move value that exists let's see where it technically exists is in a smart contract on ethereum Main net to a different smart contract on ethereum main main net and those different smart contracts might have like withdrawal timelines or or differ security measures or or whatever my question to you is how do you use the generic interoperability network of omni to like then actually do this action of bridging like what's the what's the next step that happens after the message passes yeah so it's it's

funny because bridging at large everything's just moving data around at the end of the day uh but moving value is really more like moving special data that is accepted or like issued by some specific smart contract um and so specifically the thing that we are focused on right now is XC or C20 with this um like we are not planning to build our own Bridge around it like what we care about far more is just moving to a place where um basically every asset issuer is using XC or C20 so uh you know when you're talking about the like these smart contract constraints that is handled at the xcc2 level um and so the path that we see happening uh in the ethereum ecosystem is that there's going to be many many rollups going on and uh

many of these bridging Solutions often use kind of like a liquidity pool type model or various other mechanisms to get more into kind of like what one is considered the canonical asset um you know like the one accepted by the smart contract that deems it like that token in that place um what we think is going to happen here is that we're going to scale the number of rollups that are out there to at a rate that basically it becomes impossible to uh manage something like that what's really nice about XC or C20 is that you don't need liquidity pools you just just need uh those smart contracts of the asset issuers to whitelist these different interop networks and it moves these assets around at a zero slippage um and possibly at a really low latency and so at large basically that's kind of the

stance that we're taking on this is that let's instead onboard and effectively upgrade all these different assets that are out there so that they can be complying with these new more like futuristic standards that will fit more nicely into a world of where there's like you know a thousand rollups out there because any solution that uses liquidity pooling or something like that will be unmaintainable at that type of scale so obviously like we're not on here to pick on anyone so I'm just going to use usdc as an example because um no one cares so in in this x ERC uh like Paradigm I I guess my question is like where does the actual value itself live right so if I have like X XC usdc on arbitrum and then I want to use omn

Network to uh to to have XC usdc on optimism like from the state of arbit sorry arbitrum optimism and ethereum Main net like can you help us understand like where does the usdc the canonical usdc exists and how does it like flow through these three chains in order to like successfully do a interrupt transa interrupt functionality yeah it's funny you say like not to pick on on anybody and then choosing usdc because actually you know there are definitely ways that this can be improved but usdc is actually they've been pretty uh Forward Thinking with how they uh get usdc

across these different platforms to the point that they have effectively implemented a bespoke version of XC or C20 and so it's always like he what determines like is the real true canonical token in this case it's a server run by Circle uh so like specifically what they have is cctp uh cross chain transfer protocol what this is is um effectively yeah it's basically xcc2 where the whitelisted interop network is a server run by them that just monitors these chains and says okay somebody made a transaction over here and they want to move it over here it's a little Limited in the sense that there's no relayer within this so developers actually themselves have to

go listen to that server update that just gets signed off by like the key that's there and then make a secondary transaction on the destination domain and so um in this case to answer your question specifically like how does the value actually move the value actually moves by Circle publicly stating all right this how we're going to do it uh anytime people want to move tokens around you have to listen to our server once our server says like uh basically listens to an update on one platform of somebody wanting to move tokens we'll give them permission to move those tokens from that server and then you go make a second transaction on the destination so really it's from like circle's own like just they're just making statements about where it's going

um and this makes sense to me uh it makes sense for uh you know assets at large to not necessarily run the server infrastructure they should just Outsource that to interop networks in my uh in from my perspective um but you know usdc has actually been forward looking to this you know we've talked with their research team about um one thing that they put out I I forget the name that they use for it but it was effectively like a way to permissionless expand uh usdc deployments because what they're seeing is that new rollups are deploying uh you know usdc contracts where people try to move usdc into it but it's not canonically accepted uh they even put out a standard for uh how these teams can structure in a way where

it can become canonical and like accepted by Circle the corporation down the line um so it's all new want and in the weeds like how like what is True Value movement um Circle has taken their own somewhat bespoke implementation but to their credit they have been forward looking on this we've chatted with the research team about like how we can like apply the same type of permissionless expansion uh to other assets as well yeah so sorry that's a roundabout answer but it it's just nuanced uh because like Circle does it totally different than uh any other asset in the space really yeah and and not to like pick on Circle here like this isn't an episode about usdc but the way you just described that was super interesting so let me just

rephrase it a little bit is that what cc wait sorry I always get confused between chain link and circle too C it's transfer circle is transfer yeah yeah okay CCTV the the idea there is essentially there is a centralized server that is watching arbitrum and watching optimism and it says oh I see the transfer command so I'm going to send a command to the usdc smart contract on r that just says burn this amount and then I'm going to send a a message to the uscc smart contract on optimism that says mint this amount and like that works it works right it's great but like my question for you is like whether we're talking about usdc specifically or

any other future asset that might like want to use a similar Paradigm like what's the point of using blockchain yeah yeah so what the question more specifically is like all right if you're just listening to a single server As you move these things around like why is it on chain anyway yeah yeah and I guess like what's the like at the end of the day we're saying Circle server tells us where the usdc is like why not just like create D apps on Circle server yeah yeah it's a funny question um so with circle specifically uh you know I think the whole point of usdc is the fact that they can take advantage of the global

distribution and composability of ethereum for an asset that people can have reasonable confidence in that is stable so uh you know there are many ethereum developers out there and like people building applications that integrate usdc into their application uh they do this because uh people are comfortable holding usdc there's a decent amount of it out there I think like 30 bill at this point um would people would those same people be interested in building applications on circles proprietary API platform it I think you might get 1% conversion there I don't know do you see how much money is on blast yeah yeah maybe if you give enough incentives uh you can make it work but uh yeah I mean fundamentally I think it really comes down to like so

even though uh Circle has a centralized uh bridging solution that they have implemented the real value of usdc comes from the fact that uh it's a stable asset that can take advantage of the global distribution and composability of the ethereum ecosystem at large um that that's my take on why it makes sense for Circle to still be providing this service I think they could definitely improve their solution um because it is just like a little fragile if you think about the fact that it is just one server that they're running internally saying yes or no uh to this but um at large I think they're moving in the right direction of okay let's just empower the world anybody on ethereum

with the ability to hold uh you know a stable coin I think that that's something that's super important yeah yeah and and I definitely take the the implicit point that like man Circle a special case like it it's special right the the point of it is essentially to be a cbdc without the uh bells and whistles right so like I I take your point that like let's put that in a corner and maybe I I think like a a cooler example so uh the protocol previously called uh dopex or dopex I think they rebranded to strike or something but they were a defi options protocol that launched right around the same time that arbitrum did and something that I noticed is that

they uh minted their like 100 million supply of DPX tokens on mainnet and then minute one bridged 100 million of those tokens to arbitrum and then they built their protocol on arbitrum and so um I I haven't seen like a lot of of things like that since but that to me is like super super interesting and I'm wondering if that kind of Paradigm where like maybe you keep your home base on ethereum but you put a bunch of liquidity on different chains and then you allow an interop company to do like the mint and burn across the chains while like touching main net as little as possible like I could kind of see that as um more what you're skating towards as opposed to the the circle

example so I guess do you have any Reflections or or reactions to that yeah you know that's actually pretty forward looking for you know when they created the token I think that makes complete sense I think having your core token contract on ethereum L1 that is entirely rational to me it's extremely important that you have extremely high security properties uh wherever that that core contract lives but uh having said that gas is expensive the other day I paid like $200 to make a swap just ridiculous like you know it's pretty clear that uh people are not going to be using the average people are not going to be using ethereum out1 so you can get the best of both worlds where you deploy your core token contract on ethereum L1 where it's

super uh highgrade security but then you know you give access to that token across all these different rollups um that is a future which strategically just makes sense uh to me for from the perspective of any token issuer um and on top of that just it's really nice uh from an accessibility perspective it doesn't matter if like uh you know using something like XC C20 it wouldn't matter if it's on arbitrum optimism you could have liquidity and access to that token across all different rollups mhm yeah so while we're still like kind of in the main net uh realm so something you said super interesting when we were first talking about what Omni network is is that you mentioned that like by definition if it's a rollup that means the entire State and the history of how

it got there exists on ethereum Main net and like that's always been the role of vision it's always been like true in the sense that the data is there but like while we're still in this like super permission phase and like haven't really like achieved the rollup Vision while we're still in like uh Dev it there's very few applications that are actually like picking through the call data that exists on mainnet and in rollup contracts and then making decisions based on that and I guess um I would love to hear like a little bit about as you're developing Omni like what does that mean to you the ability to treat um m n as like the canonical

state of all rollups and does that mean you know that that people are running like transactions in proof on Main net and and uh aggregating all this data together to to create uh validity is this about offchain actors just looking at all the different states on Main net is this about like um reconciling what's on Main Net versus what's on the actual chain like talk to me through about how you see the coordinating power of mainnet in the solution that you're building I think it's actually all that is deeply in the weeds especially for any developer who wants to build like a D5 protocol like parsing through call data like that's not going to be a good developer experience so uh where it really matters is effectively from my

perspective just that it's there that it is there and people know it's there so specifically From omni's perspective why uh this is valuable is because we can take uh signatures from nodes uh in the network like let's say a node signs off off on something that didn't happen uh what we can do is we can take that signature and compare it to what is posted down uh at L1 to prove that they are lying um so that's where it matters From omni's perspective no developer other than you know the core developers of omni should have to like think about that level because it's so in the weeds anybody who's building an application uh should not have to think about that and they don't need to think about that specifically for us it matters because

we can take uh the signatures from nodes and the netw work and just compare it to reality that is posted down to L1 got it so for you guys you look at that as like your job is to abstract all of this conversation away from developers and the way you use it under the hood is just as a dispute resolution mechanism uh for when you when a note in the network thinks something weird happened exactly that's that's a great way of putting it and I I would take it even further that we see the great product opportunity here to be uh the opportunity to abstract away the reality of multiple different platforms from and developers so that we can get back to that vision of ethereum like we talked about like it just looks like one computer but your application is

accessible everywhere to all the users and all the capital yeah no man just so you know I am for sure stealing that framing that like the cool thing about ethereum is it looks like one computer even though it's 100,000 like that that is awesome and I really love uh what you're building to achieve that so just want to highlight that again to the audience that that's a great way to think about the the purpose of blockchain computers um so anyway I think we we've spoken a lot about like how this system is architected I think it like makes sense to start talking about uh uses and like applications and so I don't know if there's that much more to say about bridging um if you have anything like insightful or something we should think about like i'

would love to hear it but I think like the the interesting part of this conversation is like a if we believe that a bridge is just a specific implementation of it interop Network and you're building a general purpose interop Network what type of applications are you looking at that aren't bridging Yeah so basically all of them all of them all of the applications that are on ethereum should be globally accessible by default that's our perspective so uh what we're seeing today is this kind of you know objectively very difficult reality for developers of any application you're putting a really difficult spot where it's like okay do I launch my protocol on L1 and make people pay $200 every time they make a transaction against it

or do I launch on a rollup uh and be able to give users affordable transactions but just accept like one corner of the marketplace here and so uh this is really difficult especially when many of these teams are new you know they're launching a protocol for the first time they're still iterating towards product Market fit so it's very important to them to get as much customer and like user feedback is possible but they can't because they're cornered into one tiny part of the market and so really where we're heading at large is the uh a world where where people will be able to build their applications and what they'll expand to other rups is effectively the end user facing interface uh like the final step really in talking with those users um

but still be able to program as if it's a single computer so to walk through this in a more like concrete example let's think through uh you know GMX uh for example GMX is on arbitrum it's been on arbitrum for quite some time and it's been very successful it's quite unlikely that they want to move uh from arbitrum what they do care about though is having access to more users in capital and so what Omni enables for an application like GMX is for them to you know let's let's say like stake glp let's let's imagine that that's just the name of the function using Omni what you can do is you can go put the function stake glp and let's say it accepts like amount and like token uh uh for this function what you can do is you can go put that on

optimism but remove all the actual functionality from it and point it to the portal contract that just relays the information to the actual function on arbitrum so what this enables for end users uh is I can be on optimism I can talk to the optimism RPC and submit a transaction on optimism but at the end of the day that gets routed back to the actual application deployment on arbitrum and so really uh you know you you mentioned the word abstraction that's mostly what like we're focused on in Omni is like people are building their applications in a way that the ebm empowers them to today Omni is not going to fundamentally restructure what you can do with an evm it's more about reach and accessibility of these applications and so in many ways you can think about

Omni is really expanding the surface area of these applications just across all the different smart contract platforms that have been built on ethereum yeah I love that I love the the concept of like a Omni net or sorry an omni an interop Network allowing you to like project forward the action without having to project forward the code with it and the liquidity with it and so I think that's really cool um I do I guess like sorry just to to hop us back to our last conversation a little bit um because like my question about that is like okay let's say that I am GMX and I want to like push forward the functionality of like you can buy a per on optimism through our platform and

using omn network we will like do all the routing for you and whatever and all you need to do is deposit and we take care of the rest and like eth is a special token right because it's it's not it's not controlled by anyone it it actually isn't even an erc20 token let alone a x ERC token and so like in the cases where your uh customers or like participants or whatever you call them um are building from scratch like I understand how you can architect your system to like really take advantage of it inter opt net network but like how do you deal with assets that you and your partners don't have control over like how can I get my

one eth from optimism to arbitrum using an interop Network yep yeah and so again eth is a very interesting asset because uh xc20 is going to work very well for uh you know Dow projects just anybody that launches a token like it's going to be very easy for them you know we've like worked with injective uh mantle flow it's just like there are there are core tributing teams that you can go talk to uh in order to like upgrade or you don't even need to upgrade the core contract uh but like you can uh still just expand it without that so let's talk about eth right uh we can't go talk to ballic and effectively make eth in xc20 because like you said it's not even

nc20 out the gate so how do we do that with eth um at large TVD it's it's kind of like how nicely are these rollups going to uh play with one another there's a proposal from uh ZK sync about how you can create uh effectively joint accounts on L1 like let's let's imagine there's multiple rollups in the ZK sync stack uh what they're interested in doing is effectively like a shared balance across them so that the rollups could talk to each other without having to make uh an interaction on L1 uh and it would still all be like provable at the end of the day like which rooll of owns a certain amount of e and so this is something that's super interesting that we're seeing across these different

ecosystems in the sense that ZK sync wants to make Technologies within their ecosystem that allow their rools to play nicely with each other we're also seeing this from optimism and polygon and arbitrum all these different rollup platforms are interested in creating technology that makes it more composable within their own ecosystem at large we're very interested in like how do we do that in a global way for the entire ethereum ecosystem um but yeah like there's a number of different ways like if you have a shared sequencer like uh maybe there is a way that you can layer this on top as well there are multiple different mechanisms through which uh we're going to have to get there at large we will have to get there though as an ecosystem um and if you think about the ZK sync Pro proposal it

actually kind of mirrors uh what we did with State channels back in like 2017 2018 like it's kind of like two rollups acting as a state channel uh implementation so it's interesting to think about that um but at large what we will need to figure out though is uh how we do this in a way that you don't have to talk to L1 and effectively allow them to relay something like eth um because there's going to be so many rollups that it's going to be impractical uh to use it uh if it doesn't if we don't solve this yeah and I'm not super familiar with the ZK sync proposal but we did have Brendan farmer from polygon a couple weeks ago on this podcast to talk about Ager and like yeah it does seem like they're uh everyone is like racing

to solve this problem because it's really not easy and I think like the the message that I'm hearing hearing from you is that you'll leave like the ZK syns and the polygons and like the starkes and arbit like all these players that are focused on worrying about liquidity can go figure out how to do this like the liquidity portion and what you guys are focused on are like the layer below that which is the messaging portion does that sound right yeah I would say it's accurate okay cool well ha kind of tricked you into this next question which is like talk to talk me through like we we've talked through that interop the difference between interop platforms and bridges and like what that conversation is but can you help me understand why an interop

platform shouldn't just be called an oracle I mean uh from a formal perspective it's all oracles uh the question really is how secure is your Oracle is this one server that you're running in Google Cloud that is saying okay it moved from this network to another or is it a distributed Network that has over a billion dollars of cryptoeconomic security all coming to consensus in giving this Oracle output so from a formal academic perspective uh they are all oracles uh but there is a very very wide spectrum about like how secure any Oracle solution can be yeah fair enough so it's the same answer as before which is like I'm having a language problem and like that is always going to happen in a space that moves

faster than like the language evolves and so um like your response which is well taken is like yeah I guess it's an oracle but what is oral even mean yeah it's just an external system that is like giving you its view of Truth elsewhere um yeah and so that that's what an oracle is uh and any time Ina ultimately always all boils down to that but uh I think the term Oracle is like a little pejorative in the space like it sounds very centralized um and there are ways to do it where like literally the entire omn network the output of it uh is an oracle answer but it is you know or just mag more secure than you know just a Google Cloud Server for example

yeah makes a lot of sense so I think this is a great opportunity to kind of pivot into reaking because what you just said is that like if maybe we can get away with terning everything oracles like all that really shows us is that like we really need to think past like functionality and look at implementation and things like security and that kind of thing and so I guess like the way that I want to frame this is that everything that we've talked about so far like it is so irrelevant to reaking and igen layer and like really cryptoeconomic security because what we've talked about so far is technology and functionality and so what I would love to hear from you is like can you help us understand the difference in the

product that you're able to make today because of this reaking moment and like because the whole Community is ring behind it and because there's 11 billion in that smart contract versus if like we if if if uh seram had never gone on that a16z crypto podcast and explained to us what all Ian lay was like got like almost a year and a half ago now or two years ago now so can you can you talk through like what does igen layer mean for Omni Omni Network yeah happy to so the way that I think about this is large let's go back to framing it as oracles right so uh the question is how can we build the most secure censorship resistant uh oracles step one we could build a multisig uh and we've done this a lot in

the space a lot of uh these networks and like especially the historical ones some still around today are effectively just multisig there's no cryptoeconomic security here you're just trusting some some set of nodes to uh be honest and so that's like step one like okay at least it's better than one server I guess uh but still just servers where like if these people uh collude maliciously there's no direct economic repercussions on what they do so that's like not great uh but it's where we started as an industry and yeah we've lost a lot of money doing that um just that's the objective reality step two uh we can put cryptoeconomic Security on top of it so

instead of just uh various participants in the network just answering out of Goodwill uh we can now create a proof of stake system where if they do not answer honestly uh they could lose the capital that they have stayed this is better uh it's still fragile though uh like I said before what we have seen is networks secure this exclusively with their own like governance token uh and anytime you launch a new token again like the market Cap's not going to be that high so your max security budget uh is not going to be high especially not high enough to like meet the security standards of ethereum uh and two it's going to be more volatile so your security uh could fluctuate rapidly especially in like times when let's imagine the Market's

tanking like you don't want your security to all so like tank heavily during that time um and it's lower liquidity so in the event of some uh activity like it could the security properties could fall faster so like this is better than you know just a trusted multisig effectively uh still fragile though it's effectively the way that we viewed this is that it is uh not acceptable for the ethereum ecosystem reaking uh offers a kind of evolution of this where instead of just using a new token to secure these networks you can use ethereum like eth the asset itself so this gives you a massive security budget that you can scale you don't need to you know the 11 bill that is in igen layer today you don't need that day one

um but uh you can scale to that so like as you grow the adoption of the network you probably want to grow the security properties in the network as well if you were only securing it with a third party token that like was just made for the project effectively the price would have to go up in order for the crypto economic security to go up and that's just kind of a risky Gamble and you don't want you don't want to gamble on your security with an inter off Network um so reaking at large unlocks this new opportunity for an interoperability Network to effectively derive security from the ethereum network itself uh and this is really as we were looking at the different solutions out there uh it was quite fortunate that we met the igen

layer team you know about a year and a half ago and started talking about this because it makes complete sense if you're trying to build an ethereum native inter operability solution uh it needs to have it needs to have taken design principles that like are or design choices that you can only make when you're building strictly for ethereum and it also should probably be secured by a massively scalable asset that is eth itself yeah for sure and so I I hear you agree with you on everything and for me the most exciting like the the aha moment for igen Lay is almost not even about cryptoeconomic security it's about decentral ization and like in all of our endgame state of ethereum we've got like at least 100,000

nodes and then we've got like at least two but let's say five Oracle networks and each of them have 10,000 nodes and then we have Bridges and then we have uh like whatever right like and I just think we're going to run out of people willing to put like computers in their closet to like to to be decentralized and so for me igen layer is this like realization that hey like we have one network of computers let's build more on top of that as opposed to like spinning up a new network every time someone has an idea and like for that reason I will always love it and it will transform ethereum and it it's a good thing the thing where I'm like a little bit like hold on uh what are we doing here is the

second the igen layer deposit contract opened up for lsds because like to me that betrays cryptoeconomic security what essentially what you're saying is in this two-sided Marketplace of ABS operators and services that need things secured like if the AVS uh operator the person that is holding all the stake in order to secure this service if they do something malicious they lose nothing they like when we're in using lsds and then delegating those to somebody else we're creating delegated proof of stake which is essentially saying we're going to solve the crypto trust problem that sorry we're going to create crypto trustless by forcing you to trust node

operators and so like on the one hand I'm so excited about the the path that we're going down but on the other side I'm I'm worried that with the way things have gone we've almost like Hoodwinked ourselves into thinking that we have something like valid which is really just like we just created trust again and and I would love to just hear your thoughts your Reflections on what I say and like am I am I completely out of line here like how do you understand this like 11 billion number yeah so it seems like your main concern here is not even with enan layer it's with delegated proof of stake right yeah yeah yeah yeah um and it's totally valid uh it's totally valid

this is one thing I love about the ethereum ecosystem at large is that when there's a problem we tend to call it out uh you know like almost like proactively you know people are like hunting for things to like like you know uh there's basically four companies right now building all the blocks for all of ethereum like like that's a huge problem uh but like ethereum is uh an ecosystem that invites scrutiny and so uh yeah like I think this is totally valid to call out because it affects igen layer itself and like anybody who's freaking I can tell you from our perspective building a network that uses freaking one thing that we care about is that uh getting Capital that is not strictly delegated so like we've signed NDA so I can't say specifically who but

there are like participants out there that are planning to like you know stake with sizable capital and be running the nodes uh themselves so you get that more direct like this is proof of stake like there is huge a huge amount of cryptoeconomic security here directly at risk from the people running the software themselves but um zooming out at large it's like yeah you know with Lio like this is something that is we have a huge amount of e staked at this point but uh I don't know maybe you know off the top of your head but I know uh a lot of that comes from Lio as well so it's like these node operators that are being delegated Capital but it's like we cannot treat proof of stake uh equivalent to delegated proof of stake

these are very different things there's like a principal agent problem here that like I don't think is solved um and so yeah I think that is a totally fair uh concern to have about any delegated proof of stake architecture and this goes beyond ethereum as well this goes into the cosmos ecosystem um yeah this is just like something that happens throughout crypto that is totally fair to scrutinize yeah and and we're just like we're entering this super interesting moment where like we we had the igen layer deposit contract and like the vast majority of that came from uh lsds and some people changing their withdrawal addresses to the Igan layer contract and then the next like let's say at least half if not more came from these like literally so brand new that they didn't exist a year ago LSD

providers that like said hey whatever you put in here we're just going to restake it and like now they're um enormous right and I I don't really have anything smart to say about that other than like Rex whatever you think about Igan lay and this delegated proof of stake problem or whatever like the most important thing that Igan Lair has done for us is like giving us a real shot at CH challenging Lio dominance and like giving us more lsds and T's and so I think what you love about ethereum I love it too that we're all like think we're the smartest guy in the room and out here to call everyone out us on their but the other thing too is that like what's so cool about permissionless open source technology is that like you put it out there and it

the entire like meta can change around it in ways that you didn't necessarily anticipate and so um I guess I I've brought us this kvasac that doesn't really have like a a strong like ending here so I guess with like I I'll let you uh walk out here but um I would just love to hear like as you look forward to to the future of ethereum and now that we have igen layer like what are the things that you're most excited about um as we walk down the next like five-year road map yeah so I think that reaking fundamentally unlocked uh what the ethereum ecosystem needed you know I've been working on ethereum Technologies for like seven years it's slow it's objectively extremely slow you know I

I've been in crypto long enough to think that the merge was going to make this thing soup souped up and transaction through it was going to 10x and stuff and then the merge incrementally you know huge credit where it's due great engineering achievement but eventually that you know the merge was not just proof of work to proof of stake originally the merge the vision of it was that this thing was going to look like salana um and that didn't end up happening um I think that's actually totally fine and I think it might even be good that the core ethereum L1 Network itself optimizes for what it's really good at distribution like decentralization and security I don't care if it's super slow and expensive and it seems like the ecosystem at large is coming to uh agree with that that

like okay maybe we just really optimize for these like few core uh features that we're offering um reaking though uh enables us to build new networks that derive security from ethereum itself uh and get us to that uh comparable state where it looks like salana so uh for example like this is very much how think about it on me is like uh the the real problem in the ethereum ecosystem is not fragmentation uh it's actually latency like that's like our kind of like take on it is that ethereum will never be uh fully United you know that like fundamentally in order to scale you need these different machines on top of ethereum that are all settling to it but we're not going to get back to a place where they're all working together in

the same consensus protocol or something uh so what we actually need to do is let them talk to each other really really quickly uh out of speed that users don't even notice uh we will get to a point uh where you know like Omni is working with pre-c confirmations and you can move across rollups in seconds uh we're not there today uh but I think you know you asked on a fiveyear timeline I think we're definitely going to be there in the next year or two uh ethereum will look like salana I don't think people understand that at large today um but I I can see that quite clearly and again this goes back to kind of how we started the conversation like if you stay involved in the research Community you can see where things are going and to me it's quite clear at this this point that

all of these rollup Stacks are going to have some form of pre-confirmation that can be issued uh on the order of like hundreds of milliseconds what a network like Omni is going to be able to do is listen to those pre-confirmation and relay these State updates to new rollups uh in less than a second and so uh we will get to a point that ethereum looks like salana but it's built upon a more like sturdy Foundation uh fundamentally though I think this is uh the proper uh engineering design where the core Network optimizes for decentralization and security but you still need to unlock this layer of innovation on top of it and so yeah super excited for you know where Omni will go but as well as like other networks that you can build on top of this technology because they're all going to complement one uh

one another very nicely yeah man awesome Austin I need to cut us off right here because I need to go buy more eth like I I'm just so bullish like on the specific things that you guys and everyone's building but like really just on like people are going to succeed people are going to fail people are going to Pivot like whatever but the only thing that I really believe believe is that ethereum and that the world computer is inevitable and um it's just like always awesome finding someone else who believes the same thing and like knows more about it than I do so Austin thank you so much I really appreciate the time and just thank you I yeah thanks for having me on of course Before I Let You Go um can you just share with the audience uh where they can find you

where they can find Omni and if they're like inspired by like what it means to be building in a cross chain interop world like what are the best things to be thinking about and the best places to get started yeah so our website is Omni network uh I'm on Twitter ZX ask uh Omni is on Twitter Omni fdn uh yeah uh the Twitter we update very consistently uh with all the news that we're going on uh that's going on in the ecosystem um for people that are most interested in kind of like how to build applications best I would I would actually rephrase it people who are most interested in how to build apps the best way in the ethereum ecosystem are Dev docs we just hired uh a a lead of devell uh he's done great

work in you know walk giving our docs like a full revamp on how you can actually do this in a simple way um so that's uh and then on top of that go check out the research forums um it's one of the most interesting spaces uh in the industry in my opinion for sure and everyone go check out the uh X ERC or ERC X and help us push this through but man I just uh I I'm so honored and and I I guess I want to leave on this point which is when I entered this conversation I thought Omni network was about Omni chain and like obviously it is but um I'm now walking away from this conversation realizing that Omni network isn't about this like cross change and and the thing that you're doing on the

technical side it's about exactly where we started and what you said was so awesome about ethereum was this experience of developing like you're on one computer even though you're on 10,000 and um that's what Omni does is like giv the Omni experience to the developer and so um thank you good luck and uh just yeah I guess thank you again yeah said it better than I could man thank you