Will Ethereum layer 2s beat Solana? Optimism's Ryan Wyatt

Transcript

GM good morning welcome to the milk Road show The Daily crypto show that's as fulfilling as finally getting your partner to say okay you were right I'm your host Jay Hamilton today we are joined by Ryan Wyatt now Ryan is the former head of gaming at YouTube he was responsible for leading YouTube's gaming vertical leading it to be one of the largest gaming Platforms in the world got it to over 300 million daily active users generating billions of dollars in revenue for YouTube then he came to the good side he joined web 3 he started off his web 3 Journey over at polygon and then came over to optimism as their Chief growth officer today we are talking with Ryan about why are companies like Sony launching their own

blockchains what is the benefit to them why are they choosing to do so as an L2 instead of launching their own L1 and who is going to win longterm the salana monolithic road map or the ethereum modular road map you're going have to stick around till the end to hear Ryan's answer to that question it's Black Friday and you know what that means it's our biggest sale of the year and the timing couldn't be more perfect because now is when you can make lifechanging money in crypto in the next year so we are giving an incredible deer our biggest sale of the Year 40% off milro Pro this week only plus if you buy our annual membership we will throw in our

crypto investing master class for free that's 6 hours of content breaking down exactly what you need to do to build a winning portfolio what do you get as a milro pro member you get weekly token reports breaking down your investment so you can invest with confidence you get access to the milro pro portfolio which has 12 tokens and gives you the exact allocation percentage of each in our portfolio you get weekly where are we in the cycle indicators that's multiple charts showing you where we are in the cycle so you can track when is time to sell when are we getting close to the top and of course you get access to the milro pro Community where there is thousands of investors just like

yourself talking every day and the milroad team is there giving you guys feedback answering your questions and make sure that you invest with confidence and that you know when to buy and you know when to sell and you guys come out as winners in this cycle that's what we're all about so make sure you hit the link in the show notes or the QR code on the screen and hook up this black Friday deal incredible can't believe we're doing it milkman's nuts but things are hot and we're feeling good before we jump in we just need to take a moment to hear from our sponsors do you own your data nope every post click and search you make is controlled and monetized by unseen Giants I've had enough it's time for navigate where their mission is to give back data

ownership to you and share profits with you that's right money in your pocket how you ask first the navigate browser extension makes it easy to turn your everyday browsing into passive income second the data quest game where you can boost your earnings and help train their AI visit navigate. today to earn and own your data meet uphold a trading platform that's changing the way you think about money imagine this earning up to 4.9% apy on your us no catches no lockup periods and no fees and yes it's FDI insured up to $22.5 million they offer access to over 300 digital assets which

you can trade store and exchange with confidence knowing uphold operates with a 100% reserve and a transparent model create your account fund it with a few Taps and you're ready to go click the link in the description and join uphold today Ryan welcome to the milk Road show that was a great intro that you made me I I was chuckling uh in the background thanks man I appreciate that nothing better than when your guest gives you an ego boost right off the bat like this I'm just saying it's been a tough two years of a lot of people being like Oh you you're still work you're still working in crypto like you're still doing that thing so I uh I'll take a little Victory lap as well I think it's

the right thing to do you deserve it man you deserve it okay I want to just set some quick context before we jump in so optimism one of the first l2s and then over the past few years optimism is a move to really focus on building the super chain and the super chain since has allowed base to deploy their chain using the op stack worldcoin Unis swap more recently building using with their uni chain and almost 40 other projects have built on top of the super chain and as part of this Arrangement these l2s pay fees back to the super chain in order to use the op Tech any other context you want to set quickly before I jump into my first question here no I

mean I'm happy to like elaborate on that if that's helpful you know I think with with optimism if you look like if you go back two years ago and you looked at the ecosystem it's just very hard to create a blockchain from scratch the actual ability to create the software the tooling the infrastructure support that you need to have in place is very daunting and very hard so it took away this and and two years ago was really expensive as well so it took away anyone's ability in you know to launch a chain and it was really this thing that only a few select groups were able to do and so that is why we pivoted we're like this is great software stack in fact it's so great we should we should also MIT open license it to empower anybody anywhere that wants to use it and so

even teams that are not part of the super chain like blast use optimism's op stack to power their Network right and so we just saw there was a really big opportunity instead of focusing on just being one chain trying to maximize that and competing with literally everyone how do we have this positive some game where it's like use our software build your own blockchain and let's build something much bigger together that strategy was kind of deployed about 18 months ago and it has worked out really well so far for us and we've been excited so yeah that has been a big pivot that we've gone through incredible okay so I want to start with in August Sony one of the largest companies in the world does over 12 trillion in annual revenue announced that they were going

to launch their L own L2 on the super chain since this happened in August nobody really seemed to notice or make as big of a deal of it as it should be but this is super bullish when we have some of the largest companies in the world building their own chain first question is is it their sea Suite I'm curious what level of Sony is in these meetings that's thinking about blockchain and then why why are they so excited about getting into crypto why do they want to build their own chain yeah it's a good question you know when I was at polygon I learned like a tough lesson we a really Infamous meme was Starbucks right you know and Starbucks nft program was like the peak of kind of the nft cras and you know at that time it was really exciting because I was like this

is a different way to think about nfts this is a way for a company to really enter the space and I think my one of my big learnings there is you can't really work you don't really want to be the person that's investing on the R&D side so when it's an R&D for a project and you have to fund you know a couple million dollars for this like R&D exploration it's actually is it totally stupid to do no but that risk is very high of does do they act does it gain traction does it have the patience to you know last a long time to actually want to stay in the space the space as we know all too well is full of ups and downs it's full of people that come in and are tourist and depart and so that was like obviously a lesson that I

definitely took with me um you know from my polygon days where I spent you almost two years there and so when looking at Sony your initial skepticism is like oh man is this that again you know is this like some team that wants to do the R&D exploration and wants you to fund it and let me tell you like the Sony team polar opposite one it is at the highest levels of of Sony's leadership team that they are really gung-ho about it and seeing their plan fully fleshed out where it wasn't hey here like help us think about web 3 help us think about crypto we have a fully thought out plan we have some of the best IP that the world has ever seen across many different genres and

verticals and obviously I don't want to speak too much of so for Sony and on behalf of Sony it's their story to tell and you can see it playing out with sonum and the stuff that they're starting to share and the stuff that they'll be sharing in the coming months but I needed that level of like conviction and you know executive presence and you know long-term thinking to have you know feel good about it because look all of our tier one opportunities um we do give grants to right like we gave Bas a grant and and Kraken and some of these other players in the space we're like we want to be very transparent about that because when we do these grants they are sharing sequence of Revenue and when you commit to a chain it's a big decision like you don't just go spin up a new chain in a

couple years you get users on that chain there's a lot of activity on it it's very sticky and so these are not decisions that you make every couple years like if you're in an application oh we're on this chain now we could easily go migrate to another chain if it's not working out for us because we've seen a lot of that when you deploy your own chain this is a massive long-term decision that you're making and so they obviously don't take it lightly either and the other thing is there's not a lot of solutions out there right there's a lot that you know are aspiring to be Solutions but when you think about day one ready Stacks that people are using you're really only looking at arbitrum orbit L3 or you're looking at op stack as an L2 like there's a very clear delineation between

these Solutions and then you know emerging is ZK sync and some of the work they're doing we haven't seen those chains come up yet but like that's kind of you know the Third Kind of chain option and so you don't have a lot of options and they're big decisions to be made and so I really enjoyed the time we get to spend with Sony you know the team going out to Japan how committed they have been to the space and look like everything that they've done thus far has been pretty awesome to see like you can you can look at them and immediately be like they get it I don't want you to speak on behalf of Sony either actually in chats with them to bring them on the show so I will let them tell their story so s soda the legend yeah okay so let's

go broader how many son are you talking to we as you can imagine talk to everybody I think the thing that's going to be interesting is with this like you know bull market starting to reemerge with like the regulatory changes that are obviously on the horizon you're going to have a lot of teams that are going to now have a lot of confidence about entering the space the infrastructure now compared to two and a half years ago is like night and day as far as your ability to use it it has a long way to go all of all of the chains have a long way to go but it is in such a substantial better place than it was three years ago when we saw kind of the like web 2 Enterprises Peak their head into the space so I think we've learned a lot as a as an industry we still need

to have a little bit of caution about how we jump into those relationships because all of the web 21es across all of the ecosystem pretty much fizzled out whether they were games whether they were nft projects whatever they were you know outside of trafi entering the space like all the other verticals kind of fizzled out and even like you look at you know genres that have kind of come up like social they've been web three native and I think a lot of the success will be web like web three native projects moving forward so the question then is those teams that come back those big Enterprises are you actually going to be a web three native team or are you a web to R&D team and that is really the like personas you have to identify and so yeah we have to be really disciplined

and like why do you want a chain why do you need a chain especially as we're moving towards a a world of interoperability you know you're going to have you know the super chain interoperating with each other and so now instead of having to be like an application developer is like which chain do I deploy across the answer is like deploy across all of them you will have this kind of fluidity for your users for your application to interoperate across this ecosystem and so what I do think you'll start to see is people start to contemplate what ecosystem or what cluster they want to deploy to as an application developer versus I'm going to spin up my own chain there will still be more chains there will be l3s you know to some extent but the idea is that you know you'll start

to see blockchains be more horizontal right so you'll be able to see like you know if you see like a bass ecosystem or a uni or whatever they could have multiple l2s that are inter operating with each other and the the user and the developer that's deploying on to top of it they don't really need to actually know which specific chain much as you would think about servers and you know uh traditional kind of like web 2 Cloud infrastructure like you just know you're on AWS you're not like particularly concerned with you know what cluster of servers you're deployed to and so forth so you'll start to see some of these behaviors emerge I think it's over a 12 18 month time frame but that's why you know to answer your kind of question and bring it back to the top we're going to talk to all of them I don't think the

answer is get all of them in a roll an OP stack chain like at all like I actually think you know our team will gravitate away from that a little bit and say there are a lot of ecosystems you as an application developer why pick why worry about the devops that you take on running your own chain even with Ras providers you're still taking on some kind of devops because you have your own blockchain and focus at what you want to be which is actually an application in the space and take all of the chains and deploy across all of them and and I just want to be clear here because the the semantics get so confusing the way you're speaking about this when you say why would you launch your own chain you mean your own L1 correct no own L2 even you mean your own L2 on the super chain

yeah so like my take on it is this it's really easy to deploy like an OP stack chain today because you know there's something called rollup as a service providers there's like 10 of these companies and they all support op stack and the cost has gone down and when you roll your own chain you need to get rpcs oracles wallet providers like you actually have to make like you know to to not get super technical in order to stand up a chain you got to go do deals and Partnerships with every single like a block Explorer you know data and analytics it's a lot of work it's a lot of work for the big companies that are really good at doing this like a a kraken a Unis swap a coinbase all these teams that are committed to optimism in the super chain so it's not just for

anybody and although Ras providers have been like godsend as far as making it easier it is not a like Silver Bullet in solving some of the complexity that comes with rolling your own chain and so the begs a question of why do you do you roll one well it's like you believe that like interop isn't there today anywhere right so this kind of goes I'll save it but it goes into a modular mon iic conversation interop isn't there today so what you're what you face with if you're ready to go is do I deploy as an app you know on a base or an OP main net or uni chain or do I Ru my own chain and think about interoperating with those networks if you're going to roll your own chain you better believe that you're going to have a large thriving ecosystem that you're going to continue to be able

to invest in and fund and resource and grow because let me tell you Kraken and Unis Swap and coinbase and Sony do right and so before you thought about like L2 is the only way to really go you know it's like I'm going to do my own thing so what I actually think is going to start to play out is people when given the option of interoperability are going to say it is much better for us in what we are building to be an application like we're a game why the hell would we have our own chain we can be across you know we could be like platform agnostic on the super chain you know so I think decisions will go there not to say you won't ever see anything but the people that should be coming in making it like I'm going to roll my own Shain for an L2

should be like we're a we're a big player in this space and we can actually bring the type of users and liquidity and network activity to a chain yeah I think this decision gets easier now when you start talking different time frames like three four five years can we talk time frames yeah I'm talking about kind of like how does the next 18 out yeah yeah if I think about five six years with what zero knowledge can do and like ZK proofs without getting like two into it you're going to see these networks be able to span like horizontally at scale this is like the L2 meme of like oh there's just G be like thousands of l2s and the answer would be like very well yes because there could be and it there can be and if they're interoperable and you want your own network and it's

really cheap and they're all kind of connected and you're not really thinking about fragmentation then sure why not you know it's the the idea of like you know launching your own website right so we'll see and I do think what will happen is the dust will settle on some of these verticles you know where does it make sense to have your own Chain versus being an app you know how do you actually want to operate you know should Staples and you know liquid staking or reaking have their own chain should they just be deploying on like a standard universally across the super chain these answers will start to get fleshed out but I I do think what we will we what we will solve for is this idea that you can have as many l2s they can all interoperate that doesn't mean you need to have all of

them over a three four five year time frame right and when you say interop to what extent do you mean interop within the super chain do you mean interop Beyond like between the super chain and between arbitr orbit and between these other polygon's egg laay ZK sinks elastic chain like is that the interupt you mean what is good question and when and when does each happen yeah well I can't speak for the other ones right like there's a lot there's always a lot of chatter what I think like when I think of inop over the next let's say 24 months I think it's really important to talk about time frame I think in the first half of next year we have you know two or three chains that are interoperating in the Super chain right and when I say interoperating it means

like you're a user that your wallet has these things these balances all merged together you're able to deploy an application seamlessly across both or both or all three of those chains you're thinking of those chains as just one ecosystem so like kind of how you feel like salana being this like you know uh like a monolithic chain that's what those three chains will feel like your wallet balances any bridging happens burn you know burning and minting and bridging it happens all in the background it's abstracts away from the user it's abstracted away through the user because of the wallet you know have something called Super Sim which allows these applications to deploy smart contract seamlessly across them like it will be cool and it will open up a new behavior of application developers who

before had to make these tough decisions of because of liquidity fragmentation and because of these user Journeys being fragmented I have to make a choice about what chain I'm on that will go away and they will be like I'm deploying my app to the super chain that's how they will talk now if they're like a defi app they might be like you know uni is going to be my my like we're lot of my folks are going to be as an application but op Main and bass and Kraken and Sony are really interesting to me as well and so there I'm there seamlessly and so your user experience when you come in now is not this chain switching like oh I've got one eth here on sonum and I got one eth here on base and I got one eth here on op it's like oh you have three eth

and you want to buy an nft and a game on you know op midet or bass or whatever right it's just like boom that happens in the background bye right and so we have a a token configuration for erc20 that people are adopting across the super chain this will be a reality in the you know the later part of the first half of the year and what you'll see is because of the unique setup of op stack and super chain it's these chains are on the same software they're on the same standard they're on the same version they do their path to stage one is with the permissionless fault proofs that optimism is built their keys are handed over to the security Council so these upgrades are at the same time and so a bug in one bug and all of them so you

have these like shared upgrades and shared security and these are like value props of why would I go pay optimism Collective a fee if I can just Fork it that's why right you're getting this like robust service of interoperability you're getting shared security you're getting kind of these you know shared upgrade Services okay so we're going to see in the next 12 months some interrupt within the super CH oh oh absolutely absolutely you and it'll be sick and there it's then and then we'll get to full interop across the whole super chain IE yeah look that that's so it's a broad it's broad right you know like the super chain there's a lot of people that are on op stack chains contributing Revenue the group getting chains they have to

make sure that they're on this like standard configuration and the most updated version of software and they have done the key hand over to Security Council and they've got you know permissionless fault proofs because fault proofs is a prerequisite of interrup that's why you're seeing one because we should just be pushing stage one it's good for the space like not to get too technical but you want these networks to be gen genely decentralized right like no matter how much you care or not about it like that's the Gen that's the direction it's going to go and needs to go but that's also a pre requisite for these chains to be interoperable and so I only say that as like you're just going to see them kind of lining up one at a time and so your your your signal on who's going to be ready to be part of the interop set is

are they a stage one chain on op stack have they done key Handover with Security Council they are ready to be on deck to join the inter op set and so that's kind of how we'll think about the the list who are there right now well I mean this is early days right like you know if you just look at permission fault proofs Bas just launched them they're still stage zero right so no one's there yet no op main net is there right obviously first and foremost you're gonna see like uni chain and crack in and a lot of these folks run like launch not day one of stage one but like maybe day one but or if not very fast followup right and that's because it's ready to roll like you you can we've already shipped the permissionless swers there already is a security

Council it's on the Chain operator like are you ready to roll because optimism ecosystem is now established in the infrastructure set up so the only thing prohibiting them is themselves so that is the clear path for stage one the interupt work is still being developed so once you're there you're kind of like on Deck waiting for the interop work to get done so that you can join that interop set so yeah like you know when we see who joins like it's going to be those folks and the folks again goes back to what we were talking about earlier that are ready to do that are those that have these like large L Dev hops teams that can like do like handle all of this like it's a lot of work still to to do this you know for sure so I really like the analogy of when will

it look like salana because everybody just gets what that feels like as a user we're going to see some of these l2s built in the super chain start to feel like salana across base across uni chain whatnot what about broader broader with an ethereum will that ever happen is there a timeline when that happens or do you think it's always going to separate clusters within ethereum that don't have the interop I think one day it happens there's so much that has to happen between then now right like one it's great to see a lot of everybody in the ethereum community as like feisty as everybody gets competitively you know I think we're we see that play out on social it's been

cool everyone's at Devcon they're having a lot of these conversations of what does it look like to interoperate these are the right starting conversations these things take a long time to material realiz right are some of the chains that are around today going to be around in five or six years to be a part of like solving for that fragmentation or like how how do things shake out so I think one it's good you start having these conversations I think it's also okay that you have these clusters and if you really want to use like a layer zero or AC cross you can really easily Bridge right like if you really wanted to move assets over you can bridge in seconds today right and yes it's not a great experience to be like hey do this what's a bridge mean friction friction friction friction yeah right but that's why I

think we we care about reducing all that friction it's like optimism op stack shared standard it's 50% of L2 transactions are on op stack chains you know I think there's a a world where like 75% of L2 transactions are already on op stack chain and therefore that could be a massive interoperable cluster on ethereum today so yeah like are we not interoperating with arbitrum or polygon no but like that super chain ecosystem is you know a three4 of all of ethereum transaction I totally see what you're saying I totally see what you're saying yeah yeah let's switch from the um the adoption from the tech side to the adoption from the user side one of the things that I'd love to get from

your mind because I'm sure you've thought a lot about this from your conversations with Starbucks and Sony is how does the the next big wave of crypto users come in and let me let me tell you what our thesis is and then I'd love to hear yours so when I look at the way the internet was adoped did is and I think about eCommerce what I see is that there was a lot of people who did not adopt e-commerce because e-commerce was available they adopted e-commerce because the store that they shopped at all of a sudden told them that they could buy online best example this is Walmart Walmart was late to e-commerce a lot of people were thinking oh Walmart's

way behind they're never going to catch up and then one day they said hey everybody that buys in our store you can never you can now buy online and most of their customers were not already buying online they were older customers people who were not techsavvy and then they said oh wow great now I'll start you tell me I can go do this I'll start to go do this so my theory is that the same thing happens with crypto and blockchain is that rather than as it is right now where we all go and download wallets and set up extensions and have to onramp in like through an exchange all these things I feel like get extracted away instead I'm part of Sony's Community I use Sony PlayStation Sony rolls out

something within PlayStation that gets me a wallet that gets me easy access that I can onboard with out setting up with just my email or something very simple that's the way I see adoption happening how do you see it happening I actually pretty much totally agree I think if you think about a user what they come into um just think about it like let's just even say metamask as like a experience like oh wait I want to do something onchange it's like okay you yeah I I need eth you know try going through the flow of buying eth it's like are you're getting your ID out your credit card is declining it because it's crypto you're using another credit card you know you're like who knows you're like on some website trying to get $500 like all right I have it then you you bought it on like actually eth main net

and then you're like wait wait wait wait I'm like trying to do this game on op main net and you're like I it says zero eth but I just got it and you're like oh what the [ __ ] I got to bridge this now right and so it's terrible and that's today like if you go set up a wall wallet and do that that is today now coinbase is smart wallet you know I I'm like really bullish on like the things that coinbase and Kraken and uni are going to be able to do with on ramping folks into there I also think with the regulatory Clarity people like Apple and Google and some of these other folks are going to get way more ambitious and bullish about supporting digital wallets and I think at the end of the day talk let's talk about like more simplistic

turns I'm shacking away you have a wallet right now in your phone you know it's like having your assets stored there having understand like understanding where those assets are stored showing them as like a a you know a collective Viewpoint of what you have if you want to go usdc and use it somewhere you can just boom tap it'll pull these different assets if you have usdc across six different chains doesn't matter to you you know that your wallets are all aggregated and they're all accessed this is the stuff that's going to happen and it will get abstracted away that has to happen on the entry point of the user Journey when that happens you like broaden the aperture of of users available to enter the ecosystem and now application developers can actually start to get some momentum

they're beholden to really tough challenges right now they're beholding to fragmentation of networks they are beholding to this really terrible user journey and you know in the short term that's something like salana has been able to benefit from super super easy it's like here use this Phantom wallet and whatever's on salana you can go use and it's great and maybe transaction fails or whatever it's much easier right like your your zero to one positioning is like much much easier than the ethereum journey right now which is convoluted it feels like very research oriented and you know very academic at times and you know a lot of like you know people fighting about what these Solutions look like there is some beauty in that because you basically are simulating thousands of different paths

to what the end game looks like and I do think what you'll start to settle on is more of a an aligned thinking of how this thing should look because you're able to run all these different viewpoints and simulations and capital is pushing it so yeah this is where I think so I it's 01 for the user their step their first step in the journey has a long way to go but it's it's made great progress I think you really are going to need as much as this might sound dirty to folks in web 3 you're going to need big Tech to support it and you're going to need to see a lot of traditional companies we have to support it as just this is just the modern day is supporting kind of like digital assets and this is demo you know PayPal and you're starting to see it right like

you're seeing it Robin all these folks are making some of these moves kind of leading us towards the this monolithic versus Mo modular debate is okay so when I think about this this world this Walmart example the way I project it out of my head is that we're g to have a whole bunch of large Enterprises Walmarts Sony's all these types of large companies that do various different things that are going to want to launch their own chain and because they already have a massive Community they have a massive ecosystem like they they have a legitimate reason to launch their own chain they have the money to put up all the cost to do it all to figure it all out and so that makes me think that there isn't room for salana long term because if these businesses want their own chain the only way to do that is to

do it as an L2 on ethereum currently because doesn't really have l2s so that kind of says to me that yes salana has all the hype right now but they just have caught on to it's just a moment in time you said time frame so many times throughout this episode that I think that that is why ethereum wins in the long term who do you think is going to win in the long term and how do you how do you think about Sal versus a yeah look I'm aan I think I think salana is I'm a fan of salana and I do think salana will be around long term I think they have this Advantage right now because of the way that they've thought about infrastructure setup and they're making a different bet too right their

bet is like we can scale this thing we can have one just large Network right and time will tell right time will tell just like theum like that's a hypothesis that needs to play out over time and there's like a lot of points you can say where that doesn't look likely or it doesn't look likely in a way that really Embraces decentralization there's a lot of points where they can I think you know toy and Raj are brilliant and and that ecosystem will figure it out at the end of the day ethereum is playing a much longer game of how they're going to scale and how this is going to play out and I'm my guess would be if you looked 10 years in the future ethereum will have a vast majority of the market share but salana will be it it will be kind of a a early Apple

Windows you know you're taking one of these two paths kind of concept um and I think there's room for both of them you know hard to predict outside of that on how those things turn but that's how I think of it playing out so when I see a lot of this commentary it's so many people are just living in the moment of what today looks like and I do think if you're not on the inside of this working every day it's very hard to start to think about what do three four five years look like and so you start to make decisions in the now of I am an app this is a place that works today and is a great user journey and so therefore I'm going to deploy on salana that could have long-term consequences depending on how things play out with some of those

decisions but it's I I'm really empathetic to app developers where they're battling really tough issues here you're kind of damned if you do damned if you don't you're like stuck in a smaller ecosystem with better user Journeys versus an ethereum that's very fragmented but significantly bigger and has way more Capital being deployed into but that changes though that's that changes and it's going to start changing over the next 12 18 months in a meaningful way right one thing that a lot of people say and there seems to be a consensus around this which kind of confuses me is that will Unis swap unic chain or base leave the op stack eventually because a lot of people are thinking okay well if base gets big enough then why stay why not spend their

own capital and build their own L1 I don't know why I can't explain why I don't think this that's the case what what's your take will will they super needs to bring value for these folks they're contributing Revenue to it they are adhering to all these different upgrades that are governance LED like they they are they are definitely committing something to optimism and so like it's a very simple thing it's like they need to see out of the optimism ecosystem long term that that's like a valuable thing to keep contributing to when you join interop inside of the super chain that is another level of like you you really the way that it's like technically designed you can't depart at that point right it's very interop is is there like that chain will exist inside the super chain now in

theory you could always launch a new chain you know you could always go launch like here's my new L1 and you could migrate folks from that L2 over into that L1 and that's like how you would have to do it so there are big decisions to be made and look I we you know we as optimism Collective everybody that's playing a role in optimism Collective need to make sure that there's real value being you know a part of the super chain interop I think is going to be a big part of that having all of this protocol software that you can use is a big part of that and I I do think um it's still very positive some and if they're all sharing users and liquidity like that is a very attractive thing long term what is the the alternative you go out and L1 I mean

like good good luck you know I think the alternative is actually you're another L2 using like like a blast you're using op stack chain you've decided to stop basically basically what you've decided is I'm not going to be governed by optimism I am not going to share any of my sequence of Revenue with optimism but I'm going to be an OP stack chain like a blast and be outside of it and that's tough because now you're like you're competing with the Clusters you know like you're a single chain in an island you're competing with arbitrum you're competing with eg and whatever they cluster which they'll cluster some l1s and l2s together like EG you know will be cool long term it's gonna it's a like I think more to play out there there's a lot to unpack you're competing with the super chain cluster

and so now you've put yourself where like yeah I'm ethereum Al line because I'm an L2 I'm an OP stack chain not in super chain but you're fighting with everybody at that point and you have now created you you look more like a salana inside of ethereum where you're like you're you feel more monolithic in your approach and so yes if they go that routes you know anybody goes that routes I think um one we haven't created enough you know value for them to be a participant in the super chain and they have the confidence to kind of go alone and go into an ecosystem you know I I think that's kind of how it plays out I don't worry too much about it because these are things that you control by creating value and so like if optimism in the collective and the ecosystem and

all the different core devs that are contributing just focus at delivering value to the users value to the developers value to the chain operators these things solve for themselves yeah okay so what about eth the other narrative that is non-stop is you know our l2's parasitic to eth what's the use case for eth in this L2 world is eth safe long term is is it does it have a strong use case do we still need it or are l2s parasitic these no I think like look this is I know this is like such a topic right now right you know this huge Network state where you can fully and wholeheartedly trusts the security of it and that that is the underlying soil

that pulls all this together will always remain true and will stay true right and there are no l2s without that and I do think that people forget how valuable that is and and evm and where all this started from I get it there's a lot of tokens there's a lot of talk there's a lot of activity you know there's tough things when you look you look at the Bitcoin versus eth trading patterns that feeds into this stuff you know obviously blobs and cost going down I get it I think we're generally an industry that's like wildly reactive to everything good and bad you don't have all this stuff without ethereum and we are through and through ethereum aligned right like we you know why do we think about like

getting to stage one and getting to stage two these are ethereum values of how you actually scale this network but it's the nucleus and so like taking that out just being a bunch of l1s you know is effectively what you would be saying in this thing where it's like ethereum is no has no value everyone drops down to just being an L1 with their own trust properties and mechanics such a terrible outcome for the industry is not where it's going to go and don't believe in it at all and I think a lot of these things that people talk about in the short term get resolved in the long term yeah you make a good a good really good point about how overreactive everybody is in this industry and you see one chart and you think it's going to be that way forever but you forget that you know

what was true six months ago is not true anymore because we're evolving so fast dude it's ridiculous that's why honestly I stay out of it because it's like you really have to think a little bit long term and if you if you get on Twitter too much and you it's like oh my God what's like what are we talking about today oh like ethereum is dying like that's [ __ ] hilarious you know you just have to have this longer term frame of mind it is a it's it's also part of the beauty of our our like dgen space where it's like we're so back it's so over we're so back it's so over right like we just we like these big swings it's why we work in this industry and look I can't tell you that I'm like always this mild measur like even Keel

like don't react to it it's hard you know like FTX claps I have feelings that day you know Bitcoin going to 93k I have feelings that day like I can't lie to you but like let's be for real on on how this stuff plays out you know okay last question is any predictions for 2025 yeah I think you're going to see three or four major chains interoperating and showcasing to application developers A Whole New World in the way that they think about developing apps and deploying apps it will be a whole new reality it will will spawn new ways people think about apps that they've never thought about before that will be really awesome I also think

optimism super chain will have you know 50 to 60% of all L2 transactions that are happening in the space what does it have right now it's 45.2% okay today and so yeah I think another 10 15 20% you know increase on that is not is not in crazy and that's where I see we're at and it'll you'll start to see these clusters form you know I think AG come out and you start to see a couple of the chains that are on egg you know like they've got a couple l1s and maybe kx's chain that's a cluster you've got ZK syns got they've got lens and I think they got ens domains and they've got a couple different clusters going crypto crypto.com chain crypto Kronos Kronos is there abstract which is

pudgy Penguins you've got kind of arbitrum who's just taking a different you know look at it right they're they're like instead of we're going to scale instead of a cluster like that going to have this you know vertical scaling with l3s honestly I could even see arbitr connecting to egg to be to be frank right like it's like why why why not join that like you're just a single L having quick assets being you know deposited into arbitrum would be good so I could see arbitrum and polygon doing a partnership or like the 's there so so do you think long term then that we all talk about ethereum versus salana is it better to say salana super chain agir I think more there's five kind of five ecosystems

like is that more the reality I think if you were having an honest conversation with arbitrum optimism polygon and ZK sync and there was none of the like theatrics yeah that's how they that's how everyone thinks of it right now at the same time everyone's ethereum aligned right so it's like you want ethereum to win and so but you also want to win right and so the reality is that is you have like you've got three or four clusters on ethereum and you've got salana and then you've got some of these other l1s as well so like we got a lot of game left right you got you know Aptos and soie and Avalanche is doing some great stuff with gaming and salana is like you know back from the dead and you've got the super chain had a big year and then you've got egg layer looks

exciting from a ZK Tech so y'all like we the the game is long that's why I'm like it's a small small small pond still and there are not a lot of users in this Pond any of them yet and you have one one of these ecosystems one of these clusters get the first breakout 100 million real user app it's it it's like that will be the big thing you know when I was at YouTube what really changed for us was like you know people that were uploading gaming videos just these like really shitty Snippets of like gameplay clips and then Minecraft came people just really enjoyed watching people do Minecraft because it was like exploration and building and it just like boom huge inflection point for YouTube on users and Minecraft for 10 years after it came out for 10 years was the number one game on YouTube watched

and so that is like a huge moment and you don't like break that out like twitch could never be bigger than YouTube gaming maybe on live streaming but overall because that breakout happened there so one of these ecosystems is going to have a big bet and let me tell you none of them can support that right now none of them really no no one can support a 100 million users no nobody right now so we have to get ready for that we have to get ready for our 100 million you know application moment that's what 2025 is looking like for most of these teams right and by the end of 2025 they'd be these ecosystems will be ready for 100 million yeah hopefully I think so I think you'll get closer to it there still a little ways little ways to go you know what I'm

saying that's why like there's a chicken and egg here like you need infrastructure you need infrastructure that's reliable and you need an easy user Journey let's be honest these things are like not done yet they need worked on then you can allow for a like the soil for an application to flourish of that kind of size and doesn't happen overnight and all of that so for me all these people are like we're the home of this and we're winning this and like I saw these super chain articles I'm like this is like super chain you know one you know 2025 is like the fact though I I I was like T team is like definitely don't buy into that [ __ ] like definitely don't buy into that you know nobody's even close to winning anybody tells you that winning I actually amarish on the

fact that they think they're going to win because there are way too many variables to play out so we've got to like play our hand be very smart know it's a long game and like definitely don't get caught in that trap of you know think about it what think about who was winning two years ago we were talking about Doan good you know and algorithmic stables and FTX where the are any of those guys now so one thing we've learned in crypto is the you know the the high and mighty fall real real fast here so stay humble keep building keep your head down is definitely the optimism Mantra I love it with that I'm going to let you drop the mic on this episode Ryan thank you so much for joining us today everybody thank you for listening in if you don't follow Ryan on

Twitter we're going to throw a link to his Twitter in the show notes so you can check him out we'll throw a link to Super chain as well so you can check it out and see all the chains they have there thanks Ryan appreciate you joining us today thanks for having me have a wicked awesome day everybody as always if you liked today's episode please hit subscribe and make sure you follow us so you don't miss out on the next one there's also a link in the description to our free five minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you well making you laugh and if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game we're going to also leave a link for milk Road Pro you get access to our portfolio where you can see exactly what we are buying this is your number one

resource to help you invest successfully in crypto one final note this show is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice investing in crypto or any asset is risky and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose thanks so much for listening in my friend friends have a wicked awesome day