From Suitemates to Web3 Innovators: The Journey Behind Uniswap and Optimism

Transcript

[Music] welcome to the afternoon session we are lucky to have with us uh two crypto ogs uh Carl florish co-founder of optimism Hayden Adams founder of Unis swap uh is as has been uh reported on the internet but never fully revealed until today uh these guys have known each other for over a decade they first met as uh as sweet mates in college and that has a lot to do with the Genesis of both Unis Swap and uh and optimism and so we wanted to have them here today to talk about that journey and that experience

and uh what they've learned along the way and we'll we'll uh talk for about 30 minutes and then open it up to you guys for questions uh and one of the exciting things for me about this interview is like I barely have to say anything I can just turn it over to them and they will uh talk endlessly and tell great stories but uh let's go uh let's start off so both you guys were both at F Bingington Stony Brook University the one the brother only the only real uh only real finny what the heck happened Hayden I feel like you tell the story best um yeah I think I initially met Carl through uh my roommate they were friends from uh Cs and we ultimately ended up living in the same Suite together um and

uh Carl was just obsessed with this crypto thing I wasn't that into it yet um but Carl and what what year was this this would be uh 2016 about 201 201 2015 um and then leading into 2016 Carl was just obsessed with uh crypto I didn't really know that much about it he would talk about it kind of endlessly it would be like feel like okay Carl um uh sure you know um but then uh he ultimately ends up getting a job at consensus out of uh out of college and I go and I'm I was a mechanical engineering uh major and I went and I worked at Seaman doing uh heat flow simulations and uh I was I don't think I like really liked my job very much and I don't think I was so I ended up not being very good at it I

think you have to like what you do to to be good at it so I got laid off after one year working as an engineer and I called Carl I think he was maybe the first person I called and uh just we were good friends at the time and uh he was so happy and so excited um he was like congratulations you can now work on ethereum it's the best thing ever it's going to change the world it's the future decentralized smart contracts blah blah and um was just so passionate and so excited about it and basically convinced me to um you know I was kind of like oh well I don't really know how to code um I don't know if I'm like how do I get into that and uh the thing that he told me is he said it's so early on

and and ethereum is going to become this bigger thing and there's this new way that you can build applications that people don't can trust with their money um and they don't have to trust each other other they don't have to trust a company but they can like coordinate using this this blockchain thing um and uh he was like if you spend like the next year working on it you'll probably be a world expert in one year because there's so few people who know know about it right now yeah I I really think it is underappreciated just how you put a relatively feeling small amount of effort into something and especially at the time it was literally you know it was a green field and I actually do think that we're we're up there a number of green fields that are that are that are coming up but yeah no it was a it

was a crazy time and let's just go back a second so I mean how did you initially get red pilled on the whole because this happened like in college right oh yeah um I was building out peer-to-peer Tech um just for fun because I was you know anti-authoritarian or something like you know weird and then uh I found Devcon zero videos of you know vitalic and Vlad talking about consensus protocols and I was like wait a second you can actually build like State machines in a distributed context this is insane um and I ended up just kind of going down the rabbit hole and I think that you know I I was in you know Long Island lived in New York city grew up in New

York City and so you know consensus was close by and so it was actually like I was able to kind of go to the meetups and see all of these crazy people that I had seen on the internet talking about crazy stuff and from then on I was just you you know pilled working out of the consensus office and uh trying to convince this guy to get into the space well one thing that's honestly really cool about Carl is that he did crypto pill himself on the inter like he like most people like Carl has evangelized it to so many people like me um like I got into crypto because of Carl but like Carl himself just like discovered it and like I don't think you had a friend you didn't like have a friend in the space that like convinced you to get in uh but

you sort of just like learned about it and really liked the ideas and adopted them and so I think that's really cool that's that's why you got to listen to all the podcasts that's what I do I listen to zero podcasts and then uh and then pretty early on right you guys had a either either one or several like formative discussions with vitalic about what needed to be built uh talk about you know how how both uniswap and optimism emerge from that oh definitely yeah so I I of course I started out at consensus but I ended up working at the theum foundation kind of like just studying under vitalic and there were definitely you know two things that vitalic was focused on um you know proof of stake and scalability and so of course I was

you know building out these protocols and we were chatting about Layer Two and all that kind of stuff and that's like optimism but the other thing was he was like why is this not a thing why do we not have an x x y equals K very catchy term a market maker on ethereum this is like a no-brainer and so you know I was I was told that I was like okay you know Hayden he just got laid off let's get him in um yeah yeah they basically like tapped me they were kind of so for me I was like I spent the first like few months uh in crypto basically just learning how to code solidity uh on like YouTube even like Carl had written tutorials I was reading and trying to like write my own smart contracts um but

I didn't have this like full TS background so I felt like I was kind of wasn't learning very quickly um or like I felt like I was like stalling in my progress and I wanted to learn more so I talked to Carl about it and remember effect and and and you know he was like well you need a side project um he like you know that's the way you learn in in uh coding and so I was like okay I'll take a side project and they like brainstorming different ideas um I created a pink unicorn logo that's the first thing I did we didn't even know what the side project would be yet um and then uh there was this epic photo of italic from the time wearing this purple shirt with a cat bag and this like amazing backdrop and it was like inspired a lot of the vibe um of

branding that existed even before this project was but anyway then Carl was like well Al has been talking about this idea of what's called an x * y equals K Market maker no one has built it yet you should just try building that and I wasn't very interested in trading yet or like I don't know it was like I was kind of new to trading new to but I just like figured vitalic was pretty smart uh and Carl had guided me pretty well so far and so I was like okay I'll try to build it and then Carl basically was like offered like an almost like an incentive he was like you know I think he knew me I need knew I needed a bit of like a like and he he basically said if you can build an implementation of this with a working front end uh in one month uh

I'll shout you out at my talk at Devcon 2 on stage and you I'll shout out your project and so I basically spent the next month I basically learned uh it was my first website as well I did like the create react app I basically like created my first interface and my first real smart contract um which was just like very simple x time P Market making contract and uh had a demo ready within a month um was a huge grind and then Carl did in fact shout you know he was at the time you were talking about these ideas of like cryptoeconomics the idea of like we can use blockchains to incentivize outcomes um and coordination really uh without um you know without like you can sort of just like create economic incentives that lead to like self-perpetuating systems that was the idea at the time and um very early

thinking the the these ideas didn't really exist yet that much at the time at least not formally was something now we take for granted is like part of what we call defi um so yeah like did the term defi even exist no the term defi didn't exist for another like year and a half probably um it didn't even exist at unisoft launch it was about you know some time after that I think and then uh yeah and so I I built this demo and and Carl shouted out on stage and that actually led to like people reaching out and kind of a perpetuation of the project that ultimately uh led to where unop is today we talked earlier today about uh navigating the path to product Market fit like how long or or what what happened to uh give you signal that you'd built something that that mattered

and was working so I think for me and then I think there's an interesting angle to talk about for optimism as well and how it relates to Unis swop um which I'll let Carl tell that part um but for me I think that like was pretty obsessive both on the front end and the smart contract side from the very beginning um right that that first time that first demo that I did it was you know the first it was the website and the smart contracts and uh you know even though you know it put a lot of effort into trying to like make it feel simpler and simpler and one of the core ideas and benefits of of doing you know uh using an automative Market maker at the time felt like that it was like very simple relative to these like ether Deltas of the world and so um and the

first person that ever started like really helping fulltime on Unis swop was uh C who's our head of design and so the two of us he's sort of like a designer who can code and I was sort of you know and so we basically like collaborated on making it both like I think partially because the the there are so many comp complex Concepts here at play like the the protocol seems complex blockchains even people are still wrapping their heads around what they mean and how they work and so having them that packaged up in something that felt simple and easy to use uh felt really important and so we just put a huge amount of time you know like endless iteration and before the before most people knew about it before we like launched it on mainnet there was like a year to a year and a

half of just like constant simplification and and Improvement um on the front end side I think I was telling you this before like that's one of my earliest memories of Unis swap right everything else I'd used in crypto up to that point was like you know an 18-step process to do a simple thing and you just you you uh show up to the Unis swap website and you can like magically uh trade these tokens yeah and and at launch I don't think we knew I don't think I even even at like the main at launch I don't think I knew if it was going to become a full-time thing for me I thought it was like it was like just like a side project that I like at that point felt like I should release yeah and and Hayden was obsessive of course on the front front end and the smart

contracts but there was a third thing he was just obsessive as a person just talking with everyone including myself incessantly about Unis Swap and you know I got a little taste of my own medicine after being very obsessed with ethereum I was very annoyed with Unis swap at at least at some point there was also a parallel you know product kind of development track that happened um for for optimism here where we started out as plasma groups so this was like you know Layer Two research group uh you know Jing kind of got us together and Kelvin Ben Jones myself we all worked on how to to scale ethereum and there was one issue that we kept coming back to

every single time which is can it run Unis swap so we actually lived very close to to Hayden and the kind of Unis swap folks and so we were always you know we would hang out and we' kind of spitball various research directions and of course you know Hayden would be like okay so you know how do I put Unis swap on this and we're like oh you know it's like a kind of works you have to like rewrite everything and it's like a horrible experience and he was like okay okay he was very nice about it but it was a terrible a terrible design terrible product we just kept going over and over and over again back to see if it can run un Swap and we eventually arrived at this kind of optimistic rollup design which finally could support the kind of same security

guarantees and decentralization guarantees or at least close to the same as you know Unis swap on L1 and so that's when we were like okay let's ship it this is finally the design you know started optimism proper of course within the name and uh uh also released unipig which was the first uh you know optimistic roll up PC alongside Unis swap so that was a whole like very entangled development process with the protocol and the app layer kind of jammed together so it fair to say that sort of like support for UNIS swap was the north star that like up ultimately drove you to your name your architecture your your company yeah pretty much yeah I think that like there were properties

of Unis swap that made it like hard like when when people were brainstorming like there's all these different iterations of plasma there was plasma plasma cache plasma Prime plasma there's all these different like plasma variants which are like the precursors to rollups and they all had like these like trade-offs that were really challenging but they they they they worked for very simple applications and then the more complex the application got you swap is simple in a sense but it's complex in the sense that there's like many different users being coordinated in a smart contract so like for payments like you could use State channels or or plasmas and it worked totally fine but when you started to try to coordinate like pooled liquidity provision across multiple providers that needed to backtrack like things like plasma had all these like Mass exit games that were scary and all

those problems that were like holding back the plasma designs were like like they all just like conflicted with Unis swap uh which is sort of like a trying to embody like ethereum sort of like they like the idea of like Defi and and people coordinating within smart contracts was just like most um affected by some of these plasma trade-offs but It ultimately did like iterate towards this design that that finally worked um that was at that scaling ethereum conference was I think when we first really talked about that oh yeah oh yeah good conference in Canada I think it's amazing and humbling to think about like where you guys came from and and where you are now talk about uh you both have like pretty big grandio Visions for what the future looks like maybe you know I mean I've heard you talk about this

before uh what do you think the F you obviously have there's Unis SW fe4 which you can yeah talk about liquidity pools but like talk about how you see this all coming together yeah I think for me um one thing I think a lot about in in terms of like what we're trying to achieve in the world you know the internet really democratized access to information so most information is like digitized put on the internet and is accessible globally instantly um you know it's in one click basically and that's a really powerful concept then when you compare that and contrast that against you know the world of like ownership and assets um right the internet just works right you have all these like seamless flow of information right I can like take a photo of you I could post it on Twitter someone else could download it post it to Reddit

email right it all just flows CL together and it's all accessible and when you uh compare that against the world of like ownership and assets and finance right whether whether it's stocks or whether it's you know uh like Starbucks rewards points or you know airline miles or video game items or whatever it is like all value like lives in these like very siloed uh different systems and for me a lot of what blockchains are trying to do is really just like uh standardize how value is represented in a way that basically the same way that the internet made information more you know democratized uh is trying to make like ownership and value and wealth creation more democratized and so that's what like defi is about and the role that we play

Within that world uh is you know as Unis swap is allowing people to convert between different forms of value so the same way that like there's like way more information on the internet than ever existed in any like library or whatever there's G to be so much value and like assets represented within blockchains and we you know our mission is to like make it so that you know you could uh you know it's to have like a universal uh way of exchanging and converting between these different forms of value whatever they are um and and uh I think one of the reasons that sometimes people like think about trading and they think like Casino or gambling or something like that but I actually think that like people underrate how important trading is to society right trading is how you like convert between things that you

value um and if you know if any any and any cost uh you know put on top of that like is like a ex like you know some value is almost like in this like exists in this potential state that can never even be realized because converting it it's kind of like energy when you convert between forms of energy energy is lost and that's the same thing with trading between forms of value there's like waste and loss and by like making lowcost efficient conversion of value we think that we can like ultimately create a more you know prosperous and abundant world you guys have obviously made a ton of progress making that statement true like in the in the world of erc20 tokens like what do you think what's the next concrete step that you want to take to make yeah maybe yeah okay I can try to

bring my this back to like a closer to like um concrete uh place which is basically that like right now when you use uh products within the blockchain world it they feel like this like entire separate thing that you're not used to and kind of uncomfortable but when you think about like what things like optimism really are like paralleled to in like outside of uh crypto it's kind of like almost like it's like when you send an email you have to like View and track your AWS credits it's like that's what gas is right it's kind of like crazy and um you know when people like are managing people don't want to have like entirely new of managing their security and access and so I think it's partially is about like taking the real underlying benefits right that like the 24/7 transparency the sort of improved

trust and and redundancy and all that that you get with blockchains so these fundamental properties it's about keeping those but then creating uh products real products that users use that have really you know don't feel like a completely different more hard thing to use and like and so it's just about like abstracting away the complexities of crypto and building applications on top of it and and continuing I think that like the scaling that is continuing to scale it up so it continues to get cheaper and faster um y cool and yeah good good say way to what your what you spend your days and night's thinking about great segue yeah just as Hayden wants to abstract away the complexity of crypto at the app layer my focus 247 is the super chain which a lot of that is about abstracting

away the complexities of different chains at the developer layer like we currently exist in this world of massive massive mation between all of these different chains different developer Stacks different versions it is an absolute Nightmare and so you know what I what we're working on is okay what are the fundamental Prim developers need in order to deploy their applications and also scale their applications beyond what any single chain can provide and so that means you know getting everyone to a shared interoperability standard and making sure that the developer tools are for this because I do think that we are we're kind of you know at a paradigm

shift moment where we've been working in this like single chain context for a really long time and now we're like Plastering over a bunch of you know different chains but we are moving into a new kind of world where chains are no longer just these like clunky things but instead they are Primitives that you then manipulate and work with and have access to as a developer as a chain Governor within the the super chain and so like this is this is that kind of Paradigm Shift means that we have a huge amount of kind of rewriting re-architecting and retooling that we can do that will massively speed up developer productivity and and I do think it is legitimately similar to you

know like Mainframe era to the you know commodity Hardware era like we're we're moving from that in the kind of virtual sense from Main frames to you know horizontal scalability I I think one of the best mental models for me a lot of what I've done over the years is just talk with Carl and try to figure out how to put his ideas into words that make sense for me um I don't mean that as an Intel I think it's just like an interesting part of the the process here for me the easiest mental model right now for blockchains is basically just like servers with superpowers where it's like okay like you know just like a server you know provides compute and you can run applications on it the what is what is different from normal servers it's like various things like let's say you have a an application where you

don't want you know an operator to steal the money right you know you know SPF or like you know if you want a version of of FTX with the where SPF can't steal the money right then you might want to use one of these fancy blockchain servers because you can use you know uh things like you know open source verified smart contracts on top of them to guarantee that like funds are where they say they are uh or if you like have an application where it you think it's going to become so critical to the global economy that uh it can never go down and you can never have access restricted to it then you might want to use one of these fancy blockchain servers um but like that's like a really simplified mental model that that I think for me has helped a lot um it also

helps a lot when you think about like scaling trajectories and like like it make it's that's kind of why the sort of like when you think about like if you think about like it's like how do you scale servers well you have like beier servers and then you have many of them and like how do you scale blockchains you have like you can have either b or blockchains or you can have many of them and like you know part of when you when people talk about like things like interupt it's just like how can we there's something like today or like so far we've been running everything on like like on ethereum everything's been running on this one ethereum server and because everything's running on the same server it's very easy to have application logic shared and then part of what interlap is trying to figure out

is is like how can we recreate that in a world where we have more servers and it's like that that to me is the easiest mental model that gets you pretty far in in blockchain scaling and so if you think out you know I don't call it uh two to five years like what what do you think are the main things that look different uh both about Unis Swap and optimism and just like how people are using blockchains and and how the role that crypto plays in people's lives either could be that you that you wish will happen or that you think or or both okay I mean I'll talk about it on the infrastructure layer I think we will have thousands of chains I think that individual ecosystems thousands of application specific rollups or uh or I would say like ecosystem I mean a

combination of course application specific but also I think each ecosystem might even have many chains that are all working together and then you can still bridge between all of them and they're all interoperable um we've scaled up ethereum da very significantly we have you know stage two decentralization with multi proofs yeah um for me I hope that we've really abstracted away G so you know we especially the user layer I hope but sometimes doing fixing that user layer also requires like protocol level uh Innovation but generally I hope that we have solved like five or six problems one is like gas should be fully abstracted two latency should be like sub half a second for every transaction um onboarding I should be able to tell you know if if like today

if if you know someone's uh grandparent or something wanted to on board to crypto I would tell them to use coinbase and I would want to be able to tell them to use a a a you know more like Crypton or like a like a more self- custody type of thing like I would want them toble to tell them to use Like You Know download the unop app or whatever and have like the the kind of like some of the account abstraction stuff that everyone's been working on play out to a point where we can onboard people directly into some of this like self- custody or sem me self- custody but like um uh directly my hope is that every transaction would be sub one cent and cost um so yeah just like a few like key like user properties speed cost um user experience I just want I my

hope you how many years did you say two years two uh two yeah fingers crossed but um and then you know and then also there's just like these product level like abstractions right like um you know in the unop products you should be able to convert any asset to any other asset you know you shouldn't have to think about uh like the chains and you shouldn't have to think about it like we should have fully abstracted those and my hope is within two years we get there Subs subc and oh my gosh we need to fix the sorry the infrastructure so that we can have a creative space to build real applications that people love to use and like otherwise can't use like I feel like every time it's so sad looking at the crypto space I'm not going to lie I

the the application space has not really changed since basically 2016 like since Unis swab was created it's so sad like looking at it like even applications that I used to like kind of have been deprecated and it's it's really it's a it's a sad place but but there's hope at the end there's opportunity with every problem comes opportunity because I really do think that we have been Limited in the creativity and the composability based on you know what we can actually do and so we're getting we're really getting there yeah I do agree I think a lot of like end user applications have been really held up by like waiting waiting for progress on infrastructure layer things but I think that one thing that that's why one reason I'm kind of we've started to build more and more full stack at Unis

swap uh which I really like I think that like people underrate I think a lot of the time in PE in crypto people like pick a very narrow like horizontal sliver of thech stack and say like this is where we build right when you think when you use the like it and that's where things like the the server mental model helps like when you think about like blockchains as servers you think like you know oh well we're building a server and then it's like well what's on top of the server and then like and so like I think that like it's I'm excited for more people to kind of build further across cross a stack where they're like building their own front ends and their own back ends they're building their back ends to serve their front ends which is like an end user application

that needs these fancy properties of these blockchain servers um and I so I think we'll get there and I think that there's like going to be momentum there but um I do and so I agree like it's hard to know if it's just been held back by infrastructure or if it's been like I think a lot of it is also that a lot of funding has gone to infrastructure maybe that's a you know fund apps please no um I'm joking I know you guys do I know we're we're always looking for right out I think that like app level I think that's really like what is going to progress that the space forward is people building compelling user facing products that rely on on crypto for certain of some of its properties um but still are like compelling in their own right right not just because they're

like not like it's a crypto game so it's a good it's like you know it should be a game that uses crypto for because it needs it or something you know things like that if you guys could uh rewind your metal clocks and think about uh when you were at the uh place that uh it un Swap and optimism where the CSX cohort is you know what what is like one piece of advice that you would give your prior self that you've learned the hard way yeah I mean I'll say it is some very basic stuff but I spent a long time too long being entirely nomadic and not having a home and not having basic needs covered and I will say like not just from a like quality of life perspective but just straight up a productivity

perspective there was so it was an an insane thing and I had to like you know lean on Hayden Hayden was like get an apartment fix your fix your stuff because otherwise you burn out and it's crazy and and like we can do some insane stuff if we have the right foundation so that that I definitely underappreciated it's worth the investment I remember begging Carl to just rent an apartment for like two years um as he like traveled the world constantly um uh yeah for me honestly also some of it is very basic stuff like I think that like um you know I've had to go through a lot of different forms of personal growth through the unisoft Journey it really like each stage brings in like a lot of new pressures and learnings and um I

think something that I underappreciated is like learning about myself like I think I like learned how to like do new things that I had never done before and I was always like very focused on that I did I did put a lot into learning and and growth there but I think where I like underappreciate it is like better internalization and understanding of how I think and what my own preferences are my my own needs and wants are um and that for me has been what I've been like pretty focused on for the past uh like half a year maybe in in in growing I it's paid off a lot and I'm like maybe I should have done some of this earlier so your your own preferences in terms of uh company product or or just like what lifestyle like like I I hate mornings and I like I tried fighting that for so

long and like forc myself to wake up and do early morning meetings I just hate mornings I still hate them and like I'm happier and more productive if I get to sleep in sometimes and I just do my meetings a little bit later in the day and I still work really hard and got a lot done but like forcing like things like that where it's just like why am I fighting my own natural like desires so hard here um just like very basic stuff like that um there's like more like maybe like other things around like um you know my own preferences for like for like autonomy versus like how that relates to running a company and there's all these like there's so many things you have to go every stage of you know we're 120 people now and so I felt like my job has completely changed every six

months probably for the past seven years oh yeah and yeah and and like um every time I have to Le completely new things but I think that what I hoping to bring this time is like a better understanding of what I value in my own life so that I can like as I new grow and change my role and whatever like I can factor that in so I'm not suddenly like putting pressures on my own like personal kind of happiness because that's what motivates me and like what actually makes me do my best work yeah let you enables you to play the long game which is like super important when and it is a long game like you know to to do anything right I've been working on unof for seven years been working on optimism to some degree for probably even longer if you count the precursors totally

totally yeah and I I will say on the six month Your Role changes that is 100% right and I will say the thing that I have learned recently more than anything else is that I need to be actively seeking out knowledge advice Etc shout shout out to Jason who has given me a lot of this seriously I went through I feel like I went through a period of time grow like learning about it ethereum where I was just hungry for hungry for knowledge and like studying up on my next move in the space and then there was a kind of L where there wasn't it felt like there wasn't that much to learn but I realized that I just wasn't actively seeking out that advice and that knowledge and you know I kind I my

my role changed I went from CTO to CEO recently and that was an experience where I was like humbled by the amount of information and advice that I needed to get and so you know it is out there if you're like actually looking to grow and like you know stay humble and try to improve yourself because we all need it I mean I I need it I don't know all right well incredible thank you guys wanted to open it up to you guys and uh you know these guys are amazing about being open book so feel free to make your questions uh provocative specific uh whatever you'd like to ask hey guys my name is visha I'm a co-founder and CEO of anera labs um we're actually intimately involved with

an ERC standard that you guys I think have both supported I think across and Unis swap proposed ERC 7683 we actually the only cross chain solver that you can find an email ID in a website for today so uh yeah just just what to say make myself known and that's the domain that we're interested in um you know there's two aspects of that which I think overlap for different reasons on on both sides um one is obviously on the liquidity side and I think that's where it's intimately more important to Hayden um unisoft V before is coming out there's a bunch of interesting that hooks that are making their way in and I wanted to ask you at what point does uh someone who's making a trade on Robin Hood have their trade routed through a

Unis swap V4 hook and like what are the things that need to happen for that reality to to realize um and then on the uh on the on the optimism side of that is uh within ERC 7683 there's this like massive foot race of who gets to fill the order and uh we play some of those games so that we can try to fill user orders and we can make money doing that um arbitrum recently announced time boost and so they're creating this sort of like uh secondary market for you know contested state within uh within arbitrum how do you how does that make you think about like me markets for optimism main net but also more broadly for the super chain thank you it was very long rant great great questions um yeah EIP 7603 right yeah it's a good one

love that EIP um uh was it actually kind of came out of uh our work on unisoft X in the cross chain unisoft x white paper and then we um we realized that uh if it was unisoft branded it might not like we really wanted it to be like an industrywide standard we felt like that was the best version of it so we decided to abstract into an EIP to like kind of encourage other people to adopt it as well versus if you were like everyone should use cross train Unis swop X people might be like okay that's a Unis swop thing only um in terms of how to get it integrated into Robin Hood I think that like you know I think we'll get there I think that like we're you know excited to be building out a lot of infra on top of the standard um and and

really integrated within our own products so that to get to when I was talking about like chain abstraction right we want to get to that experience where you can swap any token on any chain to any other token on any other chain and this standard is essentially how we're proposing that we do it um probably before Robin Hood we should get it in our the unisoft web app that's probably like the next step for it is to like launch it get start bootstrapping liquidity and and fillers um you know like like what you're talking about um but I think that if it is successful um I think that uh it will become like the obvious way to do cross chain trading and then I think that like pretty much every interface to crypto trading um uh or particularly like for example like Robin wal or something you know should

uh adopt it for cross chain trading I I think there's an interesting question sometimes about like if they want if if teams like Robin Hood want to integrate through like the protocol directly or if they'd rather integrate through like an an an API abstraction layer I think it's possible that some of them would rather do that or even they could do it through like Market making abstraction layers where market makers that tap into it are like the abstraction for them so I don't know the right um I don't know the exact answer there but I think that like it's kind of like a you know crawl walk run of it which is like let's just get it up and running um have people start to use it within like the current context of how people are trading crypto um uh and then from there uh we you know start

getting it integrated everywhere pass it the Carl pass it off well okay on the you know me in the super chain topic I mean I think that the ultimate thing is Subs subsecond transactions and you'll notice that neither one of those things have anything to do really with me and the reality is that we just need to push down prices push down latency and make a good user experience and in order for that to happen we need a good developer experience and for that to happen we need good Primitives and great infrastructure please use the super chain no but anyway really though I think it's it's it's important that we don't like over engineer these things I think you know huge shout out to Dan

Robinson with like priority is all you need if you've seen that um I also think priority is all you need specifically because that's exactly how we currently do our uh transaction ordering it's based on priority fee it's like the you know keep it simple and I think that there's a lesson there because if you choose a simple design and then you just improve on it then the longer it's around people come up with crazy uses of that design that allows you to create all this expressivity but if you you know so if you just keep it simple and stick to it and then try to make the product better every you know month every day I think we'll end in a good spot and we don't need to like create research papers to you know get Mass

adoption uh we I mean we do need to create research papers it's just different face different part of the design process yeah and yeah by the way I keep it simple as like a really like the most underrated thing in almost any part of any that anyone does like and but it actually is also how we created that standard it was like What if we like we it was like we need cross chain trading what if we what if we just handwaved everything and that's how we evolved at that EIP like what if we just handwave all bridging and we assume that we have it figured out and abstracted Away in this concept of what we call like a settlement Oracle like whatever we'll figure that out later and then that was like what literally created the standard is like what if we just abstract away and keep it insanely

simple and uh ultimately I think it's like you know uh I I think it's really promising standard so hi this is a uh bill um from p and uh yeah good see you again uh so at P we're basically building a open and web alternative to Apple intelligence basically like your series you can talk to it and ask it hey can you give me some nice restaurant recommendation or can you like help me buy some nice yoga pants and uh essentially that's a intent similar to a defi intent that you can like go go into and do MV here it's like a more like a advertising M uh like intent that you can go and uh throw it to all qualified service provider that we imagine in the

future all be AI agent with wallets to come and beid for that intent and uh to to do this the settlement can be slow but uh the beaing and the the deciding of who will be the service provider needs to be subsec just like how Google like ads auction systems work I was wondering like how do you guys see the future of the current kind of infrastructure going to support is like even much larger more scalable micr payment uh stuff that's one question second question is about super chain we're also like doing some research on like potentially be part of uh the super chain ecosystem and develop one of the

uh eum uh like Layer Two since uh one of our uh co-founder David is also from usum Foundation doing research uh on all the m stuff and to and we have very strong developers that worked on base and all those other protocols so wondering for what our use case want to build do you see uh the like Optimum super chain is the right F out we need to build something that is even more like a s Channel style Solution on top of uh like super chain thanks yeah I mean I I don't this maybe a hand answer but like generally speaking like we the way you like the needs actually predicate the like like the tech like maybe the question is like fast will we get there because like absolutely we

need like fast like people aren't going to use worst products and so if you want the products and things built on crypto to be adopted and used you have to make them as fast as people want them to be and as fast as products that don't use crypto um so the answer is like maybe you're saying like how ready is infrastructure how it's like it's getting close it's it's sometimes like the speculation in crypto evolves faster than the infrastructure in Tech like you have this like steady drum beat of like Tech progress and then you have this like hype cycles of narrative and like and and it it the cool thing is that it's still like it's still a converging height like you know and so like I I don't know where we are like I don't it's hard to predict like exact like adoption timelines because it's really

funny because if you took if you talked to me seven years ago and you told me where Unis spot would be today I would never believe you it would be like there's no chance that you know def is that big and unof is that big but then when you if you went to me like three years ago they'd be like I I would have like underp what I expected you know so like it's kind of like very hard to know how fast these things will progress and be adopted but the the the the steady drum beat of tech progress from teams like optimism um uh you know and and scale you know the steady drum be of scaling and and even like focus and understanding that like things like latency are incredibly important maybe one of the most important properties um uh is is like continuing uh but then

we'll pass it off to Carl for super chain uh to tell you how you should use a different Tech stack you should use the super no subs subc seems to fit your uh needs no but uh in terms of what we have right exactly now it it depends on the timelines Etc however will we get there eventually absolutely do we have line of sight to get there eventually absolutely like that's that's going to be that's going to be a thing um the only thing that I will say given the fact that we you know realistically if you're talking about Mega scale just like literally it's not there yet um if you build using the right abstractions then the the application logic can be

portable for you know a kind of suboptimal Solution that's maybe more centralized maybe less ideal and then ports over to the more decentralized future once the infrastructure is ready I think a huge amount of the like crypto Evolution has been establishing what those abstraction layers are and figuring out okay how how can we all work on things in parallel and ideally not block uh application layer logic from with infrastructure issues and you know we're seeing this pay off we I mean the okay I'll just randomly shill a fact we finally have a uh uh ZK proof uh validity proof for um op sapoia our test net and that was because you

know we built via with this abstraction where we were like okay we know that ZK proofs can plug in eventually and we'll make the bet that they will and now they are and so like the infrastructure as long as we're you know kind of working in on our little things and we negotiate those apis I I'm I'm pretty bullish that you'll be able to make fast progress and be supported in the future when we have decentralization Nirvana I want to ask what are the most significant obstacles in your opinion to for get to getting to this future where there's thousands of chains is it for example the kind of liquidity requirements that are difficult maybe the deal making process yes okay so I I'll say two two things one the first one is definitely the

proof system we currently have proed proofs which prove a single chain we need proofs that essentially prove all of these different chains and allow them to interoperate at low latency and then that brings me to the second thing which is the low latency bit which is we need to make sure that all of the messages pass through the network in a realistic way that doesn't compromise on decentralization and security Etc so these are like the major infrastructure challenges I will also just say there is a huge number of developer challenges as well that come around once you have those Primitives and apis which is okay we are now existing within a more asynchronous environment so things like

building your application in a way that you know does account for asynchrony or building out developer tools that abstract away the asynchrony and allow other people to not have to worry about it those things are going to be a Kind of Green Field that we're just starting to explore like chains are not types yet they're not like developer Primitives yet and we are getting to a point where they will become developer Primitives once the you know interoperability standards have stabilized and that'll be a challenging and of itself sometimes I just feel like people just have to do it I don't know it's like like a lot of the tools are there and you can build thing it some I I think that there's like a lot of reason I think that like when it comes to like mainstream adoption it honestly feels like the biggest thing

that holds back like big companies from adopting crypto is literally just regulatory stuff and like weird I hate to bring it to regulatory because I'm like so it doesn't like like I'm I'm just like am such a believer that like in the long term like crypto is here and is here to stay and it's like sort of like an inevitable uh like continuation of like progress Humanity's progress um at the same time there's like these like local thing when you talk about like local like you know issues and like short-term things that like hold it back I think that like we would have an explosion of use cases if there wasn't a bit of like a regulatory chilling that happened in the US to be honest and and and outside the US as well um where I think that like it's such a powerful technology and it's so impactful that

it's like scary to people that are you know afraid of change and rightfully so and I get but at the same time there's like so much you can do with it and there's so many people that could use it but then I think there's also a bit of a branding problem sometimes which is like oh yeah um so that's that's sort of one side the other I think from within the industry I think that there's like a lot of sort of short-term thinking and a lot of like kind of like um uh you know our space has often been had had not as good actors in it as well and I think that's like really hurt so there's two things that's holding back some some people are afraid to build because of regulatory stuff some people are afraid or don't want to build because of like a

reputational branding damage that has been done in part by like uh issues from within crypto which is very normal like if you think about like email like most emails are probably scam emails but email isn't a scam uh technology um and so I think that we just need like better understanding of what this stuff is um to and and a kind of a little bit of almost like a repositioning of our industry within the world to be honest which is a weird CH I know these are like AR Tech that maybe part of what I'm trying to say is like I don't think our biggest challenges are technical I think they're like uh you know honestly like a combination of like uh people just needing to build things that work and it's kind of like sometimes you need someone to like carve the way and like

prove something out that other people have like um like as an example like I think that in the long run uh crypto vampire attacks will become like such a part of the real world like like someone will take down a web to like giant with a crypto token so that's like an inevitability like there's going to be some project where like crypto company will come in with a token and like create a direct relationship to users uh that like un dethrones like a multi-billion dollar uh Corporation and whenever that happens that like unleashes like a Floodgate Of like other people being like Oh we can create direct because and I don't mean that like it's not about like it's not about like short-term incentives it's about like you know like building like uh like you know a direct relationship between product and platform and users in a way

that hasn't really been done before and but doing it in like a non-s scammy real way um it's just like so powerful I so anyway it's like but like once one person does it like other people will learn how to do it yeah I think I think that that's a perfect example of something that seems contrarian today but when as to your point as soon as the first person does it everybody's gonna in my mind it's like a complete inevitability hi my name is Matthew I'm the co-founder of open gradient we're building decentralized infrastructure um for uh seamless anml model hosting as well as secure inference so the goal is to be able to you know train a model on your computer drag and drop upload it to our decentralized file store and be able to immediately inference it within a smart contract on any chain within

seconds um firstly thank you so much for being here uh actually open gradient stemmed from uh you know we started building it at uh super hacks which is optimism hackthon last year uh and one of the best op stack fork and then shortly after that we uh actually got a grant from Unis swap to uh do research on um for looking volatility for casting and using that to scale fees dynamically uh for UNIS swap V4 so yeah super excited to see you guys here um my question is uh what do you think you know in each of your respective products has been kind of the biggest major factors that helped you know your product weather multiple cycles and you know maintain its dominance on the market given the fact that like Hayden mentioned you know vampire attacks are

very common you know you know sometimes liquidity could be mercenary a lot of like people just want to farm the newest token for the newest protocol that's up and coming um and yeah would love to learn more about your experiences with that I think that it is easy to vampire attack at a surface level however consistent effort in a genuine direction is very hard to fake and therefore people would rather just work together to try to realize the vision versus you know go off on a separate Direction and if they do go off on a separate Direction sometimes they'll come back and join and you know hopefully we can get to a point where we're like we are moving in that productive Direction I

think that Hayden's kind of vamp Empire attack story was really about disintermediating uh existing intermediaries but the whole point of what we're building is the platform for disintermediation and so if you want to help contribute to building that platform you know join us because there's only one platform of dis intermediation there's only one world computer there's only one world world computer is actually another scaling company no um um but uh you see you wanted you know not never mind okay so uh I think for me it's actually not about like a specific feature it's more about like a mindset and a continuation of progress like for me like it's about like the thing the

death of a product is actually stagnation not um uh not uh like anything else and so like for us like the reason I think that we've been able to continue our to keep our position and continue to grow is that we've constantly maintained and tried to improve on what we built uh right we didn't stop at UNT V1 we built unisoft V2 which kind of you know it's interesting because these are like non- upgradable smart contracts each version is almost competing with the previous um and then like after V2 we built V3 and it kind of like killed V2 and now we're building V4 because you know we're never like we're never quite satisfied with the current state we always want to think about how do we how do we be better right that's even like unisoft X and these other things are also in some

ways like competing with their own products if you think about them purely as protocol or if you think about them as like protocols but when you think about like what we're trying to achieve we're trying to achieve like and the mission we're trying to achieve we're trying to make things like you know better cheaper fter faster simpler so it's just like a constant focus on being better at what we do and then not um losing sight of that um right it's very easy to get distracted in crypto and try to go do other things or like we did this thing let's do this other synergistic thing um versus like in some ways we're doing a lot of things at once right we have our wallet we have our web app but when you actually look at it all it's all serving this like ultimate need

of like how do we make swapping like really simple and easy and cheap so I think it's just about Focus yeah oh and and you and it is very easy to afraid and like being open source being like you know doing this thing it's very easy to be afraid and like close yourself off and close down your repo and like do these kinds of stuff and you have to see the long game and even if people say hey you're going to pass up on this this opportunity like this is going to destroy your company blah blah blah blah you really have to like stay true to the principles and not get distracted for for a focus reasons but B that is what makes the thing successful in the long term at least I think yeah there's a

good saying actually that uh like inspiration is temporary but discipline and consistency lead to long-term results and you guys have both been like incredibly disciplined and consistent in in moving forward what you're building over a very long period of time well consistent and disciplined in some respects J know not STS my name is wri I am the founder of Firma we are uh universal proof generation layer um and we generate proofs for any proof system in a cheap performant and reliable manner yay uh and uh I back in the day I was working on the Mina protocol I was part of ov1 labs and worked very hard on the proof system so very thankful that

you accepted our proposal I remember the day when we learned about the news um so now um so I have a question to you Carl what do you think are the pain points of uh a project uh that is as big as yours uh even um in embracing ZK uh let's say you've already chosen your proof system what are what are the pain points of of still embracing z i yeah there is only one pain point you could say there are two but there is only one and that is it is very expensive if it was cheap okay I'll give more than that but if it was cheap that would be immed

enormous value ad we'd just be ZK proving everything no questions asked I feel very confident about that um there are some other things that are going to be longer term but we you know first let's solve the the cost and that is security we probably are going to need time for these things to harden multi prooof Etc so yes we will need that and then there's also latency we can ALS we can get around some of the Lany issues in the near term so I'm not super concerned but man if we get to cheap proofs that would be insane that would it would change the game but you know we'll we'll be ready it was the things IED Carl I don't know if I have too much that I think for Me Maybe the only thing I'll throw out on DK is I get a little

sused out sometimes because it's such new novel cryptography like you know I'm I'm not an expert level of cryptographer and I do think it's probably like less like most things in crypto tend to be less complex than people think they are especially the things that sound complex but at the same time just because it's like a much more novel new area of cryptog cryptography relative to like things like hashing and like whatever which are so well understood to me I get like a little spooked out like if an implementation is broken will people even discover or figure that out in the first place um so for me it just feels like it's like a hardening overtime thing like I it literally just needs to cook I think a bit from my perspective but I also am very excited about the the ZK world and I'm also a believer in ZK

proving pretty much everything awesome well thank you guys really appreciate the conversation [Music]