Wormhole Token Launch: Everything You Need to Know

Transcript

[Music] [Applause] [Music] he what is going on guys welcome to the rollup it is W launch day Wormhole just launched their token we are super hyped we're talking to Robinson all about it

um we're gonna be going through what the uh what the token means to the ecosystem give you guys an complete rundown on what to expect going forward uh the functionality the mechanism um and wormhole in general so uh Robinson it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today and and uh pleasure to dig into everything Wormhole thanks for having me guys really uh really excited to be here big day um lots of lots of good things happening and it's the culmination of honest of honestly like three years of of really hard work from a lot of people so really exciting and I don't want to be cliche but I'll say it it's definitely just the beginning we are still so early for sure all the Mad Lads all the Mad Lads are

very happy um and I've been using the uh the nft token distribution as a uh as a means to kind of explain to other projects like hey guys wormo did a pretty good job of this um and I think like with the specifically with like the vesting stuff as well I I don't want to get too deep into it before kind of uh just unpacking it so why don't you talk about uh the decisions that you've made uh with regards to launching the W coin and um how you guys thought about this as well as the kind of distribution process yeah absolutely um so this process believe it or not you know you see a tweet right and and and it uh you

get a big announcement it's great uh but you don't actually understand like the months of hard work that went into to making it happen so we started a lot of this work uh probably like four or five months before the actual um when when everything went live the drop and a lot of the work was focused on on chain uh specifically how do we make sure the users that have used Wormhole for the past you know three years are the ones that ultimately are going to get rewarded and not the ones um you know I may there may be people that get upset about this but like not the ones that are ultimately like farming the protocol right so our our ultimate goal with this was how do we reward historic users what

you know they're using it because there's product Market fit there's a reason why um and they' had no expectation for a token and so that that's like goal number one and then I would say goal number two is how do you use this opportunity to help build a broader and larger community and I think for like interoperability protocols in particular we're at this like interesting intersection quite literally an intersection where we connect all these chains and chains have uh do a really good job of having like these Echo Chambers right like where the community can like uh compounds on each other uh you know anything on salana like it compounds and people love salana same thing with Ethel to and so on but like interop Protocols are like the

connection between all these two and so what you know as we were going through this we have we have our like classic Wormhole Community but like how can we build that bigger with all these chains that we actually are involved with in a meaningful capacity and so the best way to do that that we kind of identified was these uh you know strong nft communities they're like the beach heads of these chains right like you can we can probably have a discussion now argue go back and forth on what what we think is uh you know the best nft projects on each chain but like let's just say a mad Lads on Salon since since we were chatting about this or you could say a puggies or a Zuki or Punks on ethereum uh you could say uh bad kids on Cosmos Etc right but the idea behind this is

like they're really good strong rep representations of like the loyal users of those ecosystems so for us number one like I said the goal was how do we reward most importantly the onchain users they got over 80% right of the actual drop and then how do we also use this as an opportunity to um you know build a bigger and stronger community so that's like the high level thesis behind it with a lot of uh uh civil algorithm work to try and make sure we weren't rewarding the farmers too much yeah there is a strong uh tie to Identity that these nft communities have um and a lot of times that's that's the signaling uh that happens is you signal that you're part of the cosmos Hub by having

a bad kid or you signal that you're you're part of the salana community by having a mad lad um so it makes it makes a lot of sense to involve those communities as a as a core part of uh this interop protocol that ties not only These Chains together but but these communities together um and now the you know this token is gonna is g to play an integral role in tying both these chains and these communities together once again so could you could you explain like what the what the mech like how does the token integrate into the Wormhole ecosystem what is its role uh what is the W tokens role in this in this Wormhole world yeah I'll take like a brief step back and then get into that

so I think for we're really proud of like how long we've been been around um and like what we've kind of accomplished from a a technical perspective as well as I would say like a commercial or growth perspective right when you take a step back warmal connects over 30 plus chains across five run times that's very hard to do a lot of interoperability protocols may be across one maybe two um and so for us we kind of view uh in a way if I were use an analogy it's like these like railroad tracks across all of all these different chains and it's almost like a requirement for all of them to you know work together be composable if I can use you know a good buzzword here um and so when you think

about it like that our our goal is actually to continue to fall to the back like like you'll have bridging apps you'll have cross chain swaps you'll have everything aggregated in the wallet you actually shouldn't know that you're using warle that that that that means we're doing a good job and so when we think when you think about it through that lens it becomes like this almost like a public good of sorts where it's this thing that's connecting All These Chains It's in the background you don't know you're using it as a user but you have to trust it um and so for us we feel like that amplifies even more the need for it to be like in the hands of users and the decision- making in the hands of users um so the the I think the thing here there's no like Silver Bullet answer

right like this is for a lot of uh token launches how it kind of progresses but for us uh you know governance can't be understated specifically for like a protocol of this this magnitude and that connects so much so you know eventually very much so at the start um we we'll be rolling out governance uh to make key decisions around contract upgradability the networks we connect to um various products that we have built around Wormhole decisions around those um but I think what's what's really interesting and one thing we're maybe like a little bit of a alpha here is like we feel like it's important to also have multi-chain governance um so wor most most protocols you vote from one chain um and we think

it's really important for you to be able to vote from any chain especially for an interoperability protocol something that like you know it could be on salana it could be on ethereum on l2s like wherever the user is we want to meet them where they are so wherever they hold you know their their W their stake in the network they can vote from there so something that we're we're working on and we'll kind of have a phase roll out of this is what does multi-chain governance look like and we think it's like I said critical for like an interop protocol to have something like that yeah are you thinking about incentives for users who participate in governance and continue to use worm as well in the future yeah I mean it's a good question I think there's a lot of uh a lot of

good research out there around like governance incentives and how uh essentially you need it um so I I definitely think it's something we're considering um we've got a entire research team here at the foundation that's um leading a lot of the the governance charge in particular and uh you know I'll say yes for the most part when that rolls out it won't be live launch right now our focus and priority is making sure that a user can vote from essentially or hopefully eventually excuse me any CH yeah very cool um how how else do you see other than governance the Wormhole token um kind of being a part of the

Wormhole ecosystem yeah it's actually it's actually really uh it's fun I think a lot of that's like a weird way to explain it but and I'll explain why like when we think about like tokenomics there's a lot of tokenomics models around chains right like how the token plays in securing the network fees things like that same things with apps right like how the token plays in governance uh you know fees etc for interoperability protocols it's like really this new design space um I think a lot of people could be like oh you know charge a fee uh when you Bridge right like okay sure maybe we can do that but there's there's like a lot of other interesting things we could do and I don't want to spill too much much uh you know information for for others but

um you know you could essentially let's say you wanted to connect to the network right you're a blockchain you're not connected to the Wormhole Network and for Wormhole one connection like if you connect to Wormhole you connect to all the other networks we're connected to so that's that's super valuable right like it's like all of a sudden you have connection to all this liquidity all these users and so um there could be an opportunity to say hey I want to be part of the network you know and you could stake to have a slot on the network right we also have um like core Primitives like messaging right that's that's effectively what we are but there's pull-based messaging we've recently launched easiest mental model for this is it's like an onchain API call like you want to pull something that's happened from this chain and like

verify that state on another chain and you could if I were to put it even further you have a game on salana on that game you want to make sure someone has a pudy penguin uh but their py Penguins on eth so you could you could essentially do a query you could say like does this person have this pudy Penguin on eth okay yes brings it back and then you you know that individual can like enter that room in the game if you will now when we think about the token you you know there's an opportunity to have an API model maybe right like how do you figure out how to you know charge for something like that and so I'm I'm kind of just like giving I know I'm painting broad strokes and not getting super like detailed and that's by Design um because these are

things we want to we're going to be rolling out with and um I think like I said I think the team's really excited because there hasn't been like really in-depth and interesting in our opinion interop uh tokenomics and so we're we're hoping to kind of be the the bleeding edge on some of that very very cool um and I think this leads to like a more abstracted future which in a user experience World means so much like when it when it comes from liquidity uh having Bridge transactions behind the scenes or even to gaming right where you get this cool crossover between mad Lads but if you're you also have a pudgy penguin you get into like this more exclusive room I think there's like a lot of fun and creative things to do

there I want to I want to go kind of double down on one thing that you said about like staking to enter the network um because I think that's a really really interesting aspect of these interoperability protocols um and I'm curious like if we think if you think about that is that is that now like almost like its own L1 is that like now like you have slashing when someone Stakes and you become like a proof of stake network is that kind of where where you're thinking or is there is there some tradeoffs that would maybe take away from from Wormhole the interoperability protocol and your bread and butter yeah it's I mean it's a good it's a good thought exercise um I I would actually so um you know there's a

ecosystem that doesn't get a lot of love but I think they have a lot of really good Tech and it's it's the polka do ecosystem um and they have an interesting model and I actually think it's going away not because of the model itself but there's other technical reasons they call their app chains pair chains right and so we'll just say app chains like the app chain to have like a lease on the the network you have a slot on the network for them it's like security the value is like I can I can essentially have like this uh giant proof of State Network secure over one billion x y and z of Economic Security and um you can you can I think it's like you you it's called a crowd crowd loan or something like that but you essentially can like lease a slot on the

network and so I think it' be a similar concept to that so we wouldn't necessarily say like oh you did something bad uh you know and we slashed the tokens that are obviously locked in that contract but um I think it's it's an opportunity to set the value for them is different right it's not it's not um it's not actual Economic Security it's how do I tap into all these users how do I tap into all this liquidity um and that would be with a connection with Wormhole but I don't know necessarily if there would be an opportunity to say like hey Network you know you you didn't do the right thing here um slash you but I think the one thing that you bring up a good point is that eventually and we can get into the modular conversation later but uh eventually like

verification of interoperability right so like how each interoperability protocol comes to some sort of consensus on any message eventually that will be modularized um you know you could have some sort of staking mechanism like a or a proof of stake mechanism for consensus like an axar um you could have the guardian Network you could have ZK and so on and I think there will be more of an opportunity for w to play a role like you're talking about now um than you know a network having a leisan on the war networ and I I think these are the really fun like thought experiments where like Yes W starts out as a governance token but then there's all these cool interesting whether it's used for consensus or it's used for whatever

like it that that's where I think there's like a lot of a lot of design space and a lot of fun to have here um and and you know I want to tie in like something that happened recently which is blast and they like H are having some issues there and so I'm curious as far as like what if you know blast was to stake some W they were to like enter the ecosystem but then something happens on their chain you don't want to let that contagion if you will leak into all these other chains so you know it see it seems like W's going in this more decentralized more permissionless Direction but he's it's still very important to make sure that it maintains all the economic security properties

that um are inherent to a lot of these layer ones so could you just kind of like talk about how like in this mechanism you know maybe we get to permissionless eventually but how do you maintain Economic Security in that in that realm yeah yeah and there's a few things I can I can touch on especially in regards to the blast situation but um I think it's helpful to just like take a step back understand like Wormhole Wormhole security right so wormal has a model that we call the guardian model but um it's essentially 19 validators the Guardians the Branded term and it's a prove of authority consensus right these validators are the most reputable staking companies uh in the business right you have like your course one your

figment your P2P Rockaway X is is joining um and 13 out of 19 of them have to come come to consensus on every single message that goes through warle um that is our ver that is like our most popular verification method today and we can get into what we're what we're doing kind of tomorrow if you will but that is live and scaled across um 30 30 plus chains so that that's how we're all kind of maintain Security today however um when we think about like interoperability one thing I think is important that a lot of people mix together is actually and I hate to like add more layer conversation but really the way you should think about it is um the messaging or some people call it the

trans support layer and the asset layer right so like Wormhole at its core is just sending sharing State between chains it's saying like it waiting for finality on eth then pushing that state you know via the Guardians and and sending that to salana right that that core primitive is like what interoperability really is you have these two systems that can interoperate however the the the model people immediately think about because it has such product Market fit is the asset layer right so most people we'll just kind of combine the two and it makes sense but really I think it like if we're really going to get kind of like technical about it it makes the most sense to separate them and so I think from like a from a blast perspective or

from an asset layer perspective I think it's really important to have uh security features in place that can prevent like let's call it contagion right like this this individual now has x amount of packed funds and they can take those across all long chain networks how does that work so there's 's a lot of applications built on Wormhole the most popular one is um is uh well not the most popular but one of the more famous ones is Portal right portal two Bild plus tvl lots of people use it and it's been around for for a very long time that we have security features out of the box two of them in particular that can help solve a situation like that so one of them is called the governor so the governor is literally the way I would think about it

is like a rate limiter between chains like let's say you wanted to send $20 million from uh soie to salana like let's say the the guardian set this and vote on it you can only send five mil every 24 hours right so the idea would be um and I'm sorry I'm getting a call guys I'm muting it um will edit it up so so anyway like back to what I was saying like we separate out the messaging we separate out the asset layer but what features do we have at the asset layer to make sure something happens on blast like how does that not blast everywhere else um and I I think it's these some of these out-of the-box security features so it's the governor it's the we we limit flow between chains um so let like I don't

know how much 60 odd million right like that can't be transferred off because they would hit the LI um or we have something called the global accountant so not a lot of people know this and I won't you know go too deep into it but we we launched a chain in the cosmos ecosystem that chain effectively gives us a ledger like a blockchain does and so what we're able to do is we're able to verify transactions twice so essentially like any transaction that happens on the smart contract on blast we can double check with on this Ledger and if there's something off in the accounting system there is it one to one we can cut a connection right so that would be the case of like an infinite mint error or something like that but this this in particular the governor I think would be

a very interesting um I would say solution to potentially solving some contagion issue soft L yeah yeah I think uh I think the separation of the layers is very important for people to understand but I'm just going to pick at you a bit because I think that like there's a there's exponential use cases for asset transfers in blockchain and much less use cases for messaging transfers and blockchain what's kind of the response yeah to that great question so I'm not even going to like lie and say that that's you know try try and tell you that that's not the truth it absolutely is right that asset layer is like 80% of use cases today however uh we're starting to see more and more

messaging use cases the one I I I will instantly refer to because I think it's like one of the best uh I would say use cases for kind of product Market fit when it comes to like interoperability protocols to expand your business is pith pith is probably the second I would say most popular and widely used Oracle like very upand cominging um pith for those of you who aren't familiar started on salana it secured like 90% of the tvl at the time um Wormhole and pith was very much so in natural fit because it was like Hey we've got this really good this really powerful powerful Oracle it uses um you know this High Fidelity low latency data from all these Financial firms brings it

on chain and then um you know provides that in defi what we ended up doing was saying like how do we get pith to go to all these other chains and essentially like long story short pith utilizes Wormhole and Wormhole essentially broadcasts all P Price feeds to I think P's connected to like 40 plus chains now and I actually wish I could show you guys the graph we might have to put it in the show notes but there's this really cool like here's pith and then pith with Wormhole and then it just goes like this in terms of uh I think it's I forgot the actual metric it was maybe like amount of apps integrated or monthly active us or something like that and so that that's the use case I immediately point to and and um it's like a really good example of like interoperability to

scale a business like that's literally what's happening there um some of the other ones that aren't as I would say asset uh related uh governance um so we we actually do think that governance is going like cross-chain governance is going to be really important for those of you who don't know worm will actually secures five Unis swap deployments so the governance that happens between them and essentially so Unis swap home if you will is on e um but they've got deployments across a number of food chains and most people know this but if a vote Happ happens on the home chain how do you make sure that that vote is then um you know implemented on B&B on a Avalanche Etc so Wormhole secures essentially that that message those

messages that ultimately enact those votes which is not a lot of like message volume but if you think about being able to like uh rug those votes like it's the it's the security and governance the entire protocol right like you could you could uh turn fees up to X Y and Z like you could do you know whatever you wanted for the most part so like there's a lot of trust that comes with something like that where messaging is absolutely required um and yeah I think I think the last like yeah I think those are two good examples but I think you bring up a good point like asset transfer is definitely the main not even asset transfer but just like this uh unifying of liquidity is is like really what the goal is and um it's you know 80 85% of

the use cases today yeah get it yeah there's a there's the Oracle example which I I I like because this conversation I think grounded in the token and chain link the biggest Oracle like charges in their natural token for every like API caller Oracle update right or to even add chain link onto your chain so is is there like anything in the road map or anything like on on the deck to to potentially charge for those messages in the W token yeah it's a great question um I'll start by just answering directly there's no no

current uh plan to monetize Push Messaging in particular no current plan um but I I think like and and this could be like a good opportunity for me to like dig on a chain link right like a competitor of pit a competitor in some sense of Wormhole but I think from a business perspective at some point you know if we we can't like uh dog on protocols for not m like making revenue and at the same time then be like oh they're charging for an integration right like it makes sense to me that you know chain link does that what whether the costs themselves Mak Sense on an individual basis I can't comment on I'm not as familiar but like at some point these protocols need a way to monetize the protocol and and you know make it more um sustainable if you will but I I

don't think we can have our cake and eat it too to like say you know oh I can't believe this this protocol is charging um and uh yeah you know they they have to protocols have to to be around for for a long period of time well so um there's no no current plan on our end to to monetize messaging or Push Messaging but um you know I think that it's not unreasonable in the future to do something around potentially PLL messaging or more I think uh involved products that you can build on top of the in stack cool yeah I mean it's tough to compete with project that aren't charging if you're charging um especially at they're at early stage it

doesn't really make a ton of sense for a lot of crypto and also there's like this ethos of like public goods and um early stage Tech that doesn't necessarily need Revenue um but you know some people have other opinions and people capitalize on opportunities uh speaking about opportunity uh this is the funniest transition ever we just put out a modular ecosystem map um woro was in there under interoperability um so why why does Wormhole deser deserve to be in the modular ecosystem map why is Wormhole modular yeah it's a good question um I think there's like two ways I can answer this one is like how is Wormhole the actual protocol itself modular and then how does it help

with um help with like modularity so there's this funny like saying in crypto that I come back to a lot is like it's all chains and bridges um depending on how you define Bridge of course but like all everything we're doing is like connecting chains and Bridges at the end of the day um you know often times like l2s and things like that I think like they get maybe like this ethline glossiness but like they're they're there's effectively it's a bridge right connecting the settlement layer and the execution layer um the native bridge is effectively a lock in Min Bridge right um going from Main net to to these l2s so you know interoperability is just inherently because it is connecting it's

at its core what it's doing is sharing State Between Two Chains It's going to be at the core of anything modular any anytime it's not a monolithic stack where you're not just vert vertically integrating things you're going to need to share some sort of State uh or or something with like with the chain right or or um you're going to take out um data availability right uh out of the kind of the consensus the data data availabil availability in the execution there's like some always some sort of like a message that needs to be sent that's you can trust a secure and decentralized so you know I I I kind of view things in a more simplistic fashion and think we've in crypto really like marketed things up quite a bit uh to make them a little bit more complex in some some

instances but um wormo itself is you know actually going to be very modular I I tweeted something about this the other day like 2024 is going to be what I think call like the modularization of the messaging layer and optimization of the asset layer and I'll explain what I mean by that so uh the the messaging layer today is like very much so and it's it's hard to explain without getting too technical but like you essentially have a way to verify messages cross chains of again I talked about Wormhole being the Guardians you have a way to like relay that message so it's essentially another Network that picks up that that message that's been verified and drops it off almost like a

mailman right to the other to the other house to the other chain um and then you have your contracts on on either side that are like the inbox outbox almost if you will now what's going to happen is you're going to start to see like the swapping in and out of these components along the way and so for today for Wormhole just focus on Wormhole we have the Guardians it's like the best it's you could consider it like a consensus mechanism if we're thinking about from like a chain perspective we could swap out the way in which we come to consensus essentially and that's going to be with for us it's going to be with CK and we can go into that a little bit in our recent AMD partnership um but that that's like that's a modular uh component right it's like you're swapping in and out how you come to

consensus on a message cross chain and so that for wormal right now like I said it's it's the Guardians and it'll be it'll be ZK um and you can also do that with the relayer network right you can make the relayer so like anyone can come and stand up a relayer um and relay that message but the asset layer the optimization I know that's not as you know involved with modularization if you will I think when I call when I when I talk about optimization I talk about the asset later for like way too long but there's almost like this like a brief history it's like uh lock and mint Bridges which still have their purposes you know to some extent today people will demonize them and I get why but like they're still eth on eth is immutable it can't exist anywhere else if you want to bring it to salana it has

to be locked and minted um but like now we're starting to see burn and mint we're starting to see cross chain swaps really what we're starting to see now is intense right so the way I think about is we're continuing continuously optimizing how to get chain asset a on chain a to asset B on chain B and so the the 2024 is going to be like modularizing this messaging layer to make it so you can like connect more chains in a more secure way using parts from here parts from here and then the assets G it's just going to be easier it's going to be like a centralized exchange when it comes to assets on salana on suie on bass on mainnet you're not going to have to like go through the pain as much of wai for a while the bridge etc etc so hopefully that kind of

was a little bit more than why does Wormhole belong on the modular map but hopefully it was kind of helpful yeah yeah that is very helpful and I think you know we we've had conversations about the separation of these two layers um I think it's important to note that even when you are sending an asset on the asset layer it still requires a message it's just you can do some funky things on the asset layer to like aggregate or batch messages and make it maybe maybe more affordable for the for the entire batch of those transactions um and then and then it's very cool the things that are happening on the intent Spectrum uh to like even achieve transactions quicker than finality um abut with some of these market makers

that are taking that finality risk and and kind of like bottling it up um and then just put fronting that capital on the destination chain so that the user ends up with the quickest cheapest transaction possible um so let I mean let's get into the partnership with AMD because like the hardware is something that people don't talk about very often um and we've spoken about ZK technology and how it is almost like just it is that Evolution that everyone sees off in in the distance but it's like it's still just a ways a ways away so how do you envision getting to ZK and then when you're ultimately there what does ZK in Wormhole mean yeah yeah yeah great questions um so we're investing a lot of this uh we're taking a bet on um on ZK

and uh I think a lot of people when they think of ZK the main like commercial use case they think of is privacy which makes sense um and it's definitely a use case um for us though it's this concept of trustless and I'll get into that um but woral itself just to like take actually take a quick step back so Wormhole has three kind of like core contributors we have the foundation Wormhole labs and xlbs very like similar model uh very like common model for protocols we just have additional Labs but we actually have even more contributors than that so we have succinct Labs contributing to ZK stack lurk Labs spoken we're announcing another one soon the idea is like we're we're working we're trying to work with

some of the what we think are the best like ZK researchers in the space to bring it to like application and it's actually been pretty interesting like on this journey um you know privacy I mentioned is a good commercial use case what a lot of I think ZK teams realize is like is I'll just say bridging is a good ZK use case um and and a lot of what is happening is like you know we've been hearing zero knowledge zero knowledge for so long and we're actually moving from I think like research to application um and a lot of that going to show itself in my in my opinion well actually I know it will I'm seeing it a lot of it will show itself in in in in the bridging component of things now how does that fit in with Wormhole why is that important um so I talked about the

guardian Network um it's all it all comes down to trust so whenever you use a protocol like who what entities are you trusting this is a common question we're asked in crypto something that's very top of mind for us for for Wormhole you are trusting these large staking companies to not collude right if 13 of them technically came together they could you know fudge a message uh and cause probably you know some pretty serious damage on the network right so you are trusting these 13 entities to to u to a certain extent now the goal with bridging because so much and I talked a little bit about like it being this public utility so much is going to like be built on it rely on it in the background the goal of bridging is to be as trustless as possible meaning like

how do we actually take the humans out of the situation right like human error or like human greed is is a thing um you know we've seen seen this in multiple multiple types of exploits in the space um how do you take that out so at it's like highest level zero knowledge is a way to prove something is true with math instead of relying on you know 13 out of 19 Guardians to come to consensus and so for Wormhole we view that as one of the more secure ways to attest to the state of the chain which is again remember verification is just part of interoperability and so for us um part of like our our roll out plan and we'll we will I'll say this now live like we will see this in 2024 for for Wormhole

um our our plan is to give give optionality to the developer right like you choose your security configuration like let's say you want to go across chain and you're fine with the Guardians right Guardians are live across 30 plus chains you want more chains and you're fine with those security assumptions you can choose to use the guardians or you say I want to use these ZK light clients but maybe at the first at least it's only across five chains but you know security is super important for you because you're building you know X Y and Z protocol where that's you know security is the most important thing so that that again is where that modular component kind of like Peaks its head out again is like you choose the security and for us you know I talked also talked a little bit about like these Twitter announcements having like

their like one day which is great but like you don't actually realize a lot of the work sometimes that goes into some of this and AMD you know is year plus kind of partnership that we worked on and the idea here is quite simple like a you know there's no need to over complicate it like ZK proofs take a lot of computation uh and they need really really good Hardware to get to and we have to think about the user the stack like all the way up to me using you know an app on my computer it takes a lot of computation and a lot lot of um um I'll just use the word like acceleration uh to get to a point where you can quickly prove something's true um and still provide the same user experience that you would maybe today our goal is to

make it better like you know today with a lot of bridging you have to wait for finality like you said Robbie um some intense confront finality using you know market makers essentially um but for ZK it's like we want to get go from let's say it takes 30 minutes to to prove something uh we want to go as quickly as possible and that's where AMD is partnering with us to give us provide us with the hardware to make that make that yeah that's that's bullish because um sometimes in crypto when you see Partnerships with big web two companies people just feel like oh my God here we go don't get me started don't get me started I I bet you heard some of that actually oh yeah for sure for sure

although I don't think I don't know if the I don't know if the AMD part parip as good as the uh the Jensen arm touch we just saw that's pretty it's a pretty pretty big pretty big crypto partnership that was pretty good These Arm touches are getting nuts the uh the um the partnership with AMD when I first heard about it I was like wow this is like a full circle moment for crypto because we started proof this is a little meme but we started proof of work then we went into like this big like proof of stake meme crypto econ anti environment anti-environment crypto like save the world it's only it's only there because we believe in it now we're getting back to like wow like these

machines are actually committing hardware and like resources to securing these ZK proofs and it's like ZK brought us back to proof of work it feels very full circle it does a lot of things in this space are weirdly full circle though like it just it is it but yeah in particular this yes it does lots of lots of Hardware to make onchain happen and ZK happen yeah yeah so then what is the what is a ZK powered Wormhole future look like I mean I like to talk in user terms just because sometimes I feel like we can get really technical in the weeds and not like see how it affects the user so let's just continue to use asset use

cases we've established that those are definitely like a very important use case um and the predominant use case today for like interoperability so to me a user I I actually think it'll happen at the developer level but if the developer wants to to to to give that to the user as like an option to choose in the front end they can but the developer will ultimately choose the config so let's think let's use portal as the example right like easy cross chain most people know it as a bridge but like now the swaps Etc but it's like how do you get any asset from any to other any asset across all different chains so portal could essentially say like you know what we're going to swap everything all verification to ZK ideally like the proving time is the same as what it

would be today most bridging done today is based on finality so like ideally it's still it's it's feature parody there but they swap it in the background and the user doesn't know um or uh they could expose it to the user right like you could have a front end that says hey this CK transaction is like super super secure trustless and they charge an additional fee I actually don't know if that's happening I'm like projecting and you know what could be in the world right but like hey you need like a real you are you transferring a million dollars oh here's this like what we would consider this like uh highly secure verification cross chain pay a little extra to make that happen and wait a little longer maybe um but eventually not so I think like in its

simplest form that's kind of what we'll see but I most of it will be abstracted for the from the user it'll just be like a secure way to go cross aw Rob and I are quite bullish on ZK I think we think that it's going to push the future forward and um I think that you could you could from a from a brand perspective as well you could fight a lot of arguments about like different kind of like centralization points and Things by introducing a lot more verifiability y yep we're we're obvious you know proof is in the pudding we're obviously very bullsh too yeah cool well as we kind of wrap up here um we we covered a lot um obviously people are are kind of jumping from the

jumping from the hills excited about Wormhole token um kind of circling back to the start here um you know we touched on governance and we touched on uh kind of airdrops and and how you guys plan to distribute the token some of the ZK stuff so what is the next three to six months look like for wormhole in specific um how are you going to kind of I mean really how are you thinking about this like like what changes from a builder's perspective as well as at post token and then specifically like kind of what are you guys focus on yeah it's a good question I I'll like put it in two two buckets um I think the core contributors will still be be shipping

products and there's a lot that we're launching really soon and I'll I'll um touch on that in the second um but also the goal is actually to shift a lot of the decision making you know as quickly as possible to to token holders and and also the Guardians the will play a role in governance too um so there there will be kind of like work streams along that path and then work streams along along this path and they'll start to converge more and more over time and so um for us there's like two two really big things we're we're focused on um optimiz we talked a little bit about intense we talked about like optimizing the asset layer we're doing a lot around that um so we're we're contributing to you know what we consider like liquidity layers and things like that there's a lot out

there already we think we have some pretty novel designs so we'll be launching some that a lot sooner than than later I know some people talk about what we're launching and in crypto and it could be six months from now uh that's definitely not the case with with this and then I would say the other thing is is native token transfers and you know we probably could do a whole whole episode on this but there there's this idea of how do you take a a token cross chain right and there's really I think like I don't want to say two ways there's a number of ways you can do it but most most of tokens I think I think portal might be like one of the biggest conduits to tokens going cross chain or Catalyst to tokens going cross chain that there is like there's been

thousands that have gone cross chain via portal which is crazy um and the idea is that it's like Bridge owned contracts uh you know it come it's battle tested it's been around for a while it comes with additional security features but you you're kind of giving up rights to the essentially like who's controlling that bridge and instance of of Wormhole would be the guardian Network right so you don't own the contracts but super out of the box battle tested here are your like additional security features you can you can put in place and then there's the other side of things if you want to choose the goal for us is optionality there's developer own contracts and then everything that comes with that so you'll hear a lot of different things now you hear of I know axar has their own version I know there's xc20 for us

that's native token transfers um it's developer owned contracts it's burn and mint and there's no vendor lock in so the the actual um developer will get to choose if they they want to use Wormhole if they want to use another competitor it doesn't matter um and I think we think that's really important for us and that was actually a big stance and a departure from a lot of the the other um um I guess what people will call standards out there so those two big things I think from a product perspective were really focused on outside of a lot of other things like ZK Etc but those two in particular I think are important and then yeah on the on the like I said on the governance side the most immediate thing we're focused on is multi-chain governance um and we think it's extremely important we've

learned more and more going through this process how it's a very difficult problem to actually solve uh being able to like coordinate all these votes across all these different chains meet users where they are and execute on you know a given proposal and so we think it's again we're taking like putting our flag in the ground saying that's important for an interoperability protocol that's an immediate focus and then everything else that comes beyond that right so we talked a little about Network expansion uh queries and other monetization um methods and mechanisms so um I think both of those will be happening in parallel we got a big enough team and uh yeah we're excited about 2024 awesome Yep and uh just the beginning just the beginning the

beginning we're still early guys we're still it's like you start all over again you build for three years and then you start all over again seriously in a different way kind feels like it kind of feels like it I bet well thank you Robinson for coming on