Wormhole's vision for connecting all chains

Transcript

is interoperability just a buzzword in the blockchain world or the key to unlocking its true potential despite tremendous growth blockchains remain fragmented with many operating in isolation interoperability is crucial for bridging these divides ensuring a unified crypto economy but is this really achievable and if yes how in this episode we are joined by Robinson berky co-founder of Wormhole Foundation to discuss wormholes andish to connect all chains Robinson takes us back 3 years ago to the founding story of Wormhole we also discuss Wormhole upcoming token launch and the role W will play in the

Wormhole ecosystem and finally we discuss how wormal thinks in decades not years and their endgame to become a fully decentralized public good gmgm welcome to web 3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet we make sense of an onch World in constant transformation I'm jird and I believe that interoperability is going to change the world that's why I'm carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web3 GM Robinson welcome to web3 Academy GM GM thank you for uh having me on I'm excited to be here at chat today awesome we are super excited to have you we've been talking Lots about Wormhole over the past I would say

over over the past year but really more recently won't deny that we've been talking about your points program and the airdrop that's upcoming and there's a lot of excitement our community around that we're not going to start there though I want to go back to the purpose you've embarked on a very large Mission here you know to empower blockchain onchain Builders to create interoperability Technologies which is not easy to do so kudos to you can you sort of take us back to the beginning walk us through maybe a your backstory and what led you to found Wormhole foundation and then maybe we'll lead into the purpose and the mission of worm

Hall Foundation absolutely yeah me as a person as an individual I've been building I guess within the startup space for the better part of a decade was more obviously in the web two space when I first started my career was in AI before it was cool I think I like to say was it a healthcare Tech startup that was acquired then was it door dasf for those of you are I think most our now third party delivery service was there on the New Vertical team for about four years I had always had this interesting crypto back in 2017 personally I got interested someone I knew started mining ethereum back when that was a thing and I was like what are you doing what this very hot and loud or system it looked like to me at the time before I more

understood it more so that was kind of like my dipping my toe in the water if you will so got interested there and then at the time I was at doorf I was doing well but once the IPO happened and we went public I was like all right what's the next challenge and I wanted to get more serious when it came to web 3 and crypto I actually started my web 3 career in the polka dot ecosystem for those of you who aren't familiar polka dot was started by Gavin wood Gavin wood worked closely with talet you know the founder of theum if you will Gavin wood helped code the EDM itself a story as it goes as you might hear is that Gavin was like know ethereum won't scale and spun out and created polka dot and polka dot

essentially is what I would call like an app chain Network right it's what kind of ethereum is now if all the l2s right but it's been live for you know many many years now so I was always interested in this concept of interoperability so I was originally drawn to polka dot helped launch a chain there called a Kala it was actually the first her chain which is just their branded term for app chain if you will and then I ended up once we lost the chain I looked around I was like who is kind of doing really big things in the industry who's building that you know the next most important infrastructure Beyond blockchains right we have the apps things like that but who's building that that critical infrastructure if you will in Jump crypto and time is doing a lot of that so for those of you AR

familiar jum Miss A A really you know traditional trading firm in the space that they also have a crypto arm and they I ended up joining the team really kind of like incubating warhole there and eventually we spun it out of jum so now it's across like five six different entities and growing almost by the month in terms of contributors and the wwol foundation that helped co-found is kind of in charge of coordinating across all these bodies and making sure wormable and interoperability in general continues to grow amazing so let's jump into jump can't help but use that word there uh let's jump into Wormhole for a second here for those who maybe not be so familiar with warm or even for those

who are I think there's just so many projects in the space it's so difficult to keep on top of all of them give us a sort of a a background on when you were at jump and you first were incubating Wormhole why did you come up with the idea what was the problem that you saw in the blockchain space that you wanted to solve yeah so definitely I can't I can't say credit for coming up waren wol we had a core Core group of of Engineers who originally actually kind of came up with the idea of connecting salana and ethereum at at the asset level I'll get into kind of how we think about levels but I think the thesis at the time was interoperability is extremely important

if crypto ever wants to work or become mream and I'll explain why you'll probably hear on this segment like we talk about this term interoperability it's like a long word uh but really it just means two systems operating with one another right like working together it's nothing new so when we think about the banking systems right banking systems are these like closed systems and they need a way to communicate with one another like if I wire money to someone who has a different bank you know how how does that happen it happens via VIA communication Network that network is called Swift swift helps these Banks interoperate Cloud compute needs a way for their servers to interoperate we're taking this like high level concept and applying it to blockchains blockchains a lot of people

will simplify them almost as like databases and ledur you know with these virtual machines you put on top of and build applications right but they don't talk to each other salana and ethereum are kind of these closed environments they don't know what goes on on the other one they have no knowledge of this and so Wormhole it's or like the original idea was hey salana is gaining a lot of traction ethereum you know has good amount of traction how do we connect these two like you at the time you could not send you could not send assets between the two right and so that was kind of the original impetus of well the problem we're solving here is like if I want to send my money or my tokens on theum to salana how do I do that that

was kind of the original like problem to be solved fast forward today where it across 30 plus blockchains you know tons of different applications are now built on top of worm but I think it's important to kind of like at least go back frame the idea FR of interoperability from not just a crypto perspective and yeah that's kind of the how things are before we dive in further just to give some context here because as you said there was a group of people that initially came up for the idea for Wormhole and now we have Wormhole Foundation which you are one of the co-founders of can you sort of give us a a map or explanation of how Wormhole and Wormhole foundation work together so we

everybody has Clarity on that throughout the episode absolutely So within within I think the Crypt space Dre brace in general you'll see this very like a common model so word hole I would think about it similarly to ethereum ethereum is a protocol there's no one that actually works for ethereum and that's by Design so for Wormhole there's no one that works for Wormhole there are teams that contribute to the open source code that were bullets not a lot of projects are open sourced by the way well not a lot of interoperability protocols but the whol foundation is just one of you know technically anyone could come along and to wall first of all but the war Foundation is probably the main kind of contributing entity to waral we then

have waral labs xlab and then there's other kind of developer shops zero knowledge developer shops that contribute to the kind of broader Word Stack and the way I would think about this is is the wormal foundation does everything from marketing Community BD research security and the list goes on but we are like a a minimal contributor when it comes to actually the building the the code or the core protocol code if you will a lot of that will come from moreal Labs a lot of that will come to X from xlabs and that's by Design you kind of separate these things out different parts of the world Etc that's that's how I think about it today and a lot of people would would kind of view a lot of Foundations right think about the Y

Foundation is very similar to Wormhole Foundation we're stewards of the protocol so our job is to make sure wor continues to grow in a secure and a decentralized way when did you start the foundation then like when did that sort of come into play can you take us a little maybe a little bit through the timelines of when you went from working on Wormhole the open source protocol to shifting over to founding the foundation yeah so Wormhole as a protocol it's which which I think is really cool is about I think 3 years old at this point which is old pretty old you guys are pretty old in crypto yeah yeah that's pretty OG at this point we actually were the first the first salon hackathon ever was sponsored by salana foundation and

warle pretty cool no way but uh yeah so I you know three years ago the Inception of the idea happened it was this group of like three awesome Engineers who still involved in somewhat somewhat in the project today and the foundation itself was started about about I would say I don't know like a year and a half ago is and we slowly slowly started to spin everything out of jump so now everything is completely decentralized jump jump is obviously still an investor it contributes in that capacity today but yeah about three years old foundation's probably about a year and a half old and we're onboarding new contributors all the time we just onboarded a few CK teams which is really exciting and I can get into why later in

the episode but yeah hopefully that's helpful yeah we just had uh Brandon farmer one of the uh co-founders of polygon he came from one of the ZK teams that they purchased we just had him on the show so we Dove deep into ZK and what they're doing over at polygon to advance ZK Tech across the whole ethereum ecosystem so yeah we can touch on that later for sure okay I want to come back to this big mission of interoperability so as you said you know we started out in this blockchain uh Evolution we only had a few chains in the beginning and now I think we all I I hope for the most part I don't have to convince anybody that we're going to be in a multi-chain world that's for good I

think you know there might be still Maxis out there that don't believe that but give your head a shake we're in a multi-chain world you guys have already integrated over 30 blockchains I believe correct me if I'm wrong on that into Wormhole why do you think interoperability is so important and you could whether we talk like in this current market and maybe this bull run of what we expect to happen in the next sort of 12 to 18 months or you could look even further out if you want into a longer term vision of where the role that Wormhole will play and why in Char prody is so important if we're going to achieve this vision of billions of people on chain yeah absolutely it's funny you say that because I remember

starting out in the like interoperability space or like focusing on that Niche and it was definitely not the overall consensus that you know things were going to be multi-chain it's been great obviously for us but it's also been kind of funny to watch things as they progress but yeah I think I agree with you right like the one chart that's really been up into the right the past 10 years almost is more chained right that's the one thing we can we can kind of count on so yeah I think there's a number of ways we can kind of like approach approach this question in particular but woral I think it's helpful to just take a step back and like really understand what woral is because sometimes I think people associate it with things that it might not be so at its core wormal is actually

just like a message you'll hear this term message passing layer the actual term is it's an interoperability protocol or platform for multi-chain applications and bridges so the underlying thing that worm's doing is it's a protocol in between chains that allows them to share what happened on either chain or as other people would say share state right so if you can have securely in a decentralized way share what happen on ethereum salana that like core functionality is actually really difficult to build I'm oversimplifying if you can do something like that and then expand it to 30 chains you can then the the next layer above it is you could build apps now what do I mean by apps a lot of people will associate woral

specifically with what the app layer is which is bridging you could say that's only that's actually only one category of app but bridging is what a lot of people latched on to because you know bridging as product Market fit and this kind of gets into to your question of like why is interoperability important now or the future you know the proof is in the pudding right you look at the most popular app on on warle it's probably portal Bridge one of the oldest as well it has like a $2.2 billion TDL just on portbridge alone that's like more than most a lot of blockchains right so so you could you could say hey let's look at the metrix but you can also just think through the actual way in which a user does things on chain right if you want to do if you have a

lot of your assets on ethereum and want to do anything on salana you need you need to bridge right and that that's the case for any of the chains formals connected to you know you have assets on sui Aptos Etc and when these chains actually launch for the first time having a interoperability protocol and these these apps built on top of it are super critical think about sui for instance or abdos most of the liquidity and users are on ethereum right still today so if you want to like tap into this like onchain this group of like onchain users essentially and onchain liquidity you have to figure out a way to connect to I almost view them as like these economies so it's really really critical not only for like app Builders

to make sure they build their apps cross chain but also for these new especially these new like alt l1s if you will and actually all or I'm sorry l2s it's even important right like e is only native to main net if you want you want eth on arbitrum you want eth on optimism you want eth on your Fel 2 has to be Bridge so that's how I think about product Market fit a little bit and why interoperability and what I will say is that I just talked a lot about asset use cases asset Ed I say that because that's still like 70 to 80% of when we think about things on chain why interoperability in Port right we can shuttle assets anywhere we want essentially and we can do it permissionless but there's a whole kind

of like other I guess you could say like cross chain application you can now build for instance piit is a really popular warle I think it has like the second most secured price feeds behind Chade like you know they are completely powered by Work World warhol's messaging infrastructure allows them to to essentially send data across all these different chains all these defi apps I think like 200 plus so I'm being a little bit longwinded here but I think the way I think about it is like today why interoperability is like well freedom of asset flow on chain anywhere right in a permissionless and secure way tomorrow I think it's we're going to start to see these like multi-treat applications that will solve a lot of these ux problems that users are you know we keep talking about like solving

ux and all these next billion users I do think actually interoperability play a big role yeah for I I completely agree especially when you consider the original ethos of crypto was to be able to peer-to-peer remove the middleman allow permissionless movement of money or data or identity whatever you know whatever bucket you want to pick that was where this all came from and when you think about and it's sort of funny because I think we all tend to do this when you have like uh new technologies you get a bit rosecolor glasses and you know and everything's picture perfect and then

you get into it and you're like oh wow actually this is really hard for an average user to use and you actually end up creating a ton of friction and and so we're in that phase that's natural that's part of any development I mean you can use the simple example remember how hard it was to get on the internet when the internet first came out right like it was not easy like you had to you dial up and all of a sudden you pick up your phone and your sister's on the internet you're like get off the phone like you're breaking you know all that stuff so we're still moving towards that I I think that you bring up a great example of and we we use the same example to of blockchains are basically nation states or economies where if you you might want to buy land in that

economy by creating a store or acting in some sort of Commerce within that economy well you need to use the currency of that economy the same if you wanted to do something in the US you got to use the US dollar right well you need the currency of that blockchain and if you don't have that you need to bridge over to that and bridging is naturally like I think everybody thinks about Wormhole as Bridging the interesting thing that means can you explain why the why is the word messaging the word I just have a little bit of a bone depin a good point because to me sounds like what's that and like sending you know a message right which is there's others that are solving that for onchain like xmt and push protocol but that's not

work you know so why why do you use the word messaging it's a great call it honestly in crypto we're so funny with words like I think it's one of the funniest things like everyone's competing on acronyms and like new terms that like you know shift your brain and like certain mental model but no I look at the end of the day what world Wall's doing is it it is a form of instruction right it's saying that this happened on this chain and in almost like sending what happened so in in some sense in some ways the mental model is a me you're sending almost a me message that's kind of the mental model so it's like you know the classic Alice and bomb like Alice locked x amount into this Vault on this defi application and then

you're sending you know sending that to salana essentially saying that this did happen on ethereum so I think a lot of people I think what kind of the original thought process around that was just like the mental model does do kind of well as a message right it is it is a set of instructions but uh you could call it honestly sending data sending bites I think you know but if we're GNA we're g to maybe simplify a little bit more it's the canonical phrase or word if you will right yeah okay let's talk a little bit about you have a unique perspective on the onchain world because you sort of play this middleman role right I would

assume you're not a maxi for any one chain you want all chains to succeed you want more people to just be operating on chain so from your perspective where do you see the gross growth for cross chain usage coming in the future what are the and maybe this is ties into some projects that are in research right now that you're in touch with and you're supporting through Wormhole Foundation you might want to speak to that or maybe this is just a general you know thesis you have on where you see you know Wormhole playing that role long term absolutely I think it's a great question and I'll try to actually stray away a

little bit from asset use cases but I'll get into that a little bit as well hate to kind of lean into more of like a web two comparison but really what we are doing and you said something earlier is like people are patient with the ux here when I think about it what a lot of crypto is doing is like replacing the rails that you know everything runs on while also competing with the ux of web 2 while also having these principles of decentralization know middleman Etc it's so it's going to be a process to get there but when we think about ux and web to right like you go to a c a certain page let's say we're on Amazon and you you're checking out for an item there's so many things that are happening in the background Asing right there's you're being served certain payment information

Etc and so for wor and when we think about things on chain I think applications are going to get a lot easier to use because Wormhole can send instructions in the background right so the way I think about this is and I'll try to simplify it in layers because we like to think in layers or Stacks in in what three space you have these message passing like we talked about are data kind of passing protocols right and think about them as just like in between all these Chang so we's kind of this web in between these chains then on top of that you have let's say your asset Bridge things like that then on top of that you have your aggregators there's like your lii of the world your socket

they're just aggregating everything below them and then you have the wallet right the wallet is where more and more stuff I think will happen for the user or the app Etc but why I say that is because we VI ourselves is kind of laying the railroad track being able to like call send a message call things over on this chain and and the idea is that as you move up this as you replay more of the railroad track as more it gets aggregated that like user experience becomes a lot a lot nicer right so I think you'll be able from a wallet to say I'm on ethereum but you wanted deposit something on salana that is technically actually very difficult to do in a decentralized way you'll be able to do that with a series of you know uh cross chain contracts right

that's just one way to think about the stack the other kind of cross-chain use cases I think are really interesting or governance I think like as as apps feel the need to kind of be involved with more chains they're going to have to Port their governance over so we've actually been working with Unis swap for almost a year now for every one of the Unis swap governance deployments they they essentially need a way for from ethereum where their main Hub is to send instructions to make sure they get executed on these other chains right like change the bit fee to this and then it sends a message to these other Employments to do the same thing right I think pith is another good example like orbl think about if you think about it from a business perspective pith had 90%

of the tvl on salana like from or from your Oracle business 90% but they were on no other chains so what they could do is they could write smart contracts across all these languages they could audit across all these different chains or they could partner with someone who already does that and they're now on like 50 plus chains right in a matter of I don't know like probably a year and a half or something so as so as long as this Things become its St multi-chain if you want to like get the most access to users most access to liquidity the builders know that they have to do that and you could build all these contracts you could audit all these contracts you could the opportunity cost of all that time versus doing other things or you could you could plug in with a provider

like we all and we just we'll get you there right so to summarize I think like asset use cases will continue to be the bulk of it and grow like we're going to get better at that right like intense I think are intereste you know there's cross-chain swaps there's cross chank borrow lens but I think like oracles governance I could even get into games for instance like I think it's people are more and more going to want to have access to all liquidity and users on chain but not having the confusion that comes with switching and in trying to work across all these chains yeah yeah well and it's a really good point because you know and this is the power of Open Source and composability and I hate to like I can't help it I feel like I always throw these classic crypto

buzzwords around you know decentralization interoperability composability and and look I I get it like they're overused but if you take a step back and you really think about if we didn't have tools like Wormhole that were open source and enabled somebody like pith to come in and quickly within it's hard to grasp how long it would have taken them to access the 50 chains that they can now access without Wormhole like you're talking about we might not make it like literally we might die because we could never or it would just take you know decades for us to actually build the systems necessary to achieve a lot of the objectives that

we have right so it points out the power of developing and building along with partners using open- Source Tech and what that allows just because I I brought up the word composability I had this in my notes to make a joke about on today and I gotta make a joke about this because you recently on your Twitter pulled what I would consider a composable pfp move you put a hat on yourself on your Twitter pfp and I was just filmed earlier people are going to be listening to this next week so a few days ago I filmed a podcast about mcoins and we were talking about dog with hat being one of the most powerful examples of composability in the space because you have a meme that's composable you

can take the Hat you can take the whiff or you could take the dog tell us just for a sec about why did you put a hat on your PF to be honest I love the like I love the woral community because they're just so fun and creative that was just made by the community and I was like I have to put this on yeah they so someone on Twitter was like hey new like digital woral merch just dropped like some account in our again in the wormal community and I was just like all right this is too good because look if meme coins right now you know people may you know quote unquote dog on them that's be funny but like they do get people interested like I think there are I

think it's fun right like yes they can be dangerous like anything else but dog with hat has kind of like taken on the life of its own it's made people excited made people interested again and I think it's been a Kind of a Funny like theme of this cycle so like yeah to your point it's a very composable Meme and the one thing that I'm starting to see is like that is like continuing from that Meme which is funny because that's actually an extension of like Doge and dog means before it but the thing now that's continuing is HS like I I'm not only seeing in the warhole community there's other chains like you said we're we're in between a lot of chains so I get kind of like a a little taste of all what's happening on each of these Echo Chambers and there's multiple chains where like

different Hat type memes are taking off I know manad is an up andc coming chain and they have like this whole blue hat theme and so yeah I just had to put that on I mean it's the theme of the cycle I love it I love it yeah so everything's better as long as you have a hat on is really the message of this podcast today okay let's go to I want to touch on a few things that Wormhole is solving that I think people really care about is let's talk about the wrapped asset model for a second because wrapped assets and and you know it's funny because you said yourself and I even in prepping for this was like let's not talk too much about assets but it you can't help but come back to that use case because that is

the most like money Evolution that crypto is enabling is currently the best use case that is going that is taking off around the world and so you can't help but talk more about that like let's just be real like yeah nfts are amazing and they're going to do a lot to change D ownership we're not there yet identity going to happen on chain and etc etc etc many other use cases but assets here we are so talk to us a little about the wrapped asset model and how Wormhole plays its role in that space absolutely and I hate to like step back with a lot of these questions but again the way best way to think about interoperability like the best mental model think about it like the layer one layer two in a way

layer one though is is like the base protocol that helps you send the data helps you send instructions from one chain to another that's kind of like the base you could call it the messaging layer the transport layer the communication you know you you pick your flavor of word on top of that is is the asset layer and so when we think about the asset layer there's a a few ways you can go from chain a to chain B whatever you want to send assets one of those ways is to lock and mint the asset another way is to burn and mint and then you could take those two things and you get even more creative with it we can we can get into that the lock andman is kind of the most like historic method if you will the idea behind lock in is this

some token contracts are what we call immutable meaning like you know they can't be changed a good example of that is E on a theory right if you want to burn and mince e like you you would need to upgrade it it's for better for not possible what you need to do instead if you want e to exist on salana is you need to lock it in a contract on ethereum and then you can remint another version of it derivative of it a wrapped version of it or asset on salana and so this served a really big purpose in the past and it still solves a purpose today the you know portal is now much more than a rap asset uh bridge that te has

been doing a lot but it is still a component of it right because wrapped assets for from like a user perspective are just a means to an end in the sense like they'll either get you eth on salana or they'll help compose some sort of other transaction now what we're seeing though which I think is interesting is like a lot of people moving to burned R where you can right if I launch a a protocol like there I don't know a I don't know if they Tok contracts mutable or not but like you could technically burn a and then remint it on on another chain and I think a lot of people are moving towards burning it when they can because this idea of aot what a lot of people know is like honey pots and things like that it's a contract where you lock funds in and

it's a lot of funds right so haers are like oh how do I get these funds and so a lot of people mve to burn of mint I think the common misconception though is like burn and mint also has its you know security risks right you could do what's called an infinite mint essentially you could have the ability to Mint as much as you want and that that is something that's happened in the past as well but these are kind of like the core ways and which an asset will go cross chain and then you can build really cool stuff on top of that so intents are essentially a way in which you could like lock something on one chain without sending it and get something else like I could lock ethereum and then I could be someone could come along and still that transaction usually that sunone being a

market maker and it could be salana on on salon right and it and it's fast it's really cheap uh and that's kind of like this optimization that we're going towards but there's been this like asset transfer history it's been kind of interesting to watch but I think they're all to some extent still necessary but we'll likely move to this world where it's very intense based and burnit based very interesting okay I want to move to uh your token so you're launching your token I don't know exactly what the date is I know it hasn't happened yet but I know that you have said I got the numbers here that I believe the airdrop is going to about 400,000 wallets and there's about 600 million W is the uh

the name of the token or the ticker you can correct me if I got those wrong let's just talk about I don't want to speculate on token price or anything like that I'm not getting into the investment side of it today although I hope people who listen to this show are excited about Wormhole and they can make their own decisions and their own research on that side what's the purpose though of launching the token how does it play a role in the decentralization process it's a good question the contributors to war for condex there's probably I don't know close to 100 now we View and and I think a lot of like our Builders and in blockchains as well view Wormhole as like a public utility it's always like a public good and the more in my opinion the more something is a public good the more it should be in

the hands of the public I say that most most protocols or all protocols excuse me will eventually kind of decentralize and put the hands in token holders but I do put emphasis on it because I think it's even more important or maybe not more but it's just extremely extremely critical so the the first thing is we're going to put the network obviously in the hands of token holders so governance is kind of our main main focus here and the reason kind of why now and waral itself we've been building for three years and we feel like we you know we've gotten to a point where it's kind of this really big ambitious project has a lot of traction and it's a good time to kind of put it in the hands of token holders but beyond that I mean it's a

really interesting design space because we've seen tokenomics from apps right you know Unis swap might be a good example around fees Shar or things like that we've seen toonomic models from from chains right gas paying validator secure the network grp stake all that what we haven't seen is like really strong tokenomics in my opinion on kind of like interoperability protocols so there's a lot that can be done and I think what we're excited about is like actually being on The Cutting Edge there we have a few ideas that I won't get too too into uh just yet or else the the team the team wouldn't be too happy but we've got a really a bunch of really interesting ideas where you know that

how the token can kind of play a role in this you know protocol economy if you will to ultimately make we more sustainable right like we do this sounds a little like maybe over the top ambitious or or not genuine but I'm as genuine as I could be when I say this like we think in decades you know it'll be decentralized we can't shut it down if we want to so how does this like big big protocol with arms in every ecosystem kind of function on into the future with o let's just talk a little bit about this Foundation model and the importance of public good I I like that term the public good Tech that you're building because you could have decided

to go a different direction the original contributors especially coming from jump you know having its roots in more of the traditional world you could have gone in the direction of this is a private company and you know we're not going to make this more of a open- source public good you said yourself at the beginning like a lot of interoperability Protocols are not open source currently so what made you go in that direction and you being the contributors the broader team it's a good question I think there's two things I think number one is like our team ethos when building this like this is this is some this is like almost how

it had to be designed and how we how we thought it had to be eventually candidly like eventually we shouldn't kind of have the goal of almost putting ourselves out of work right like this this system becomes autonomous enough that you know the foundation will will be around and for some capacity but what that capacity is it will likely change and the goal is to really have the down manage it but you know I think something as big as this can't exist in this space without having like the core principles of the space right without being decentralized meaning specifically not to use the term I can't shut it down jump couldn't shut it down back in the day no no one or two contributors can shut it down like that that's something

that like something this big could has has to it needs to be permissionless meaning anyone can use it sure you could go on an exchange go through KY create an accounts etc etc and like buy tokens on salana or buy tokens on eat but like that's not what people want we see that in the numbers like Builders want to build cross chain users want to send assets cross chain whenever they want visionless way no kyc ETA so like those are very important principles especially for the apps building on top of us and yeah I mean look it's kind of just getting back to the core principles of why we got in the space and wormal being at the center of all of that that had to embody those principles as closely

adhere to them as closely as as possible it's a noble uh mission that you are undertaking and it's uh it's so interesting to hear a Founder like yourself say that you want to basically make yourself redundant like that is fascinating that is not the typical Founders mindsets that is a ethos that you know as you said you felt like you needed to connect to the ethos of crypto and blockchain and that is an ethos really exists within the space is that we're not trying to put pad the pockets of a few people who create this stuff the way web to really did where we created these walled Gardens and only a few people got really wealthy and started to own all the data we're

actually trying do the opposite of that which is uh yeah very impressive I want to touch on um Wormhole base accelerator which let me be honest I'm not sure if it's launched yet or if it is launching soon but I think it's important part of your ecosystem and what can allow other builders to participate and to get some funding possibly from Wormhole and I guess that might actually also connect to your grants program so maybe I'll tea up on you can talk about both those things take it how you want yeah absolutely I actually it's really cool because a lot of us are used to thinking about like apps or daps it's funny how we don't call them daps as much I don't like daps do you like daps I don't like that it's I think it's kind of G I don't

really hear I think it's dead I think it's on chain now on chain yeah is what it is now yeah I think that's right I think that's right well I'm no longer saying daps there we go um the way I think about the space is that like apps originally would Deploy on one chain they do well on one chain right ideally they do well and then they say oh I want to go to this this other chain like how can I do that and there's a number of ways but like it's an afterthought and then it becomes this bulky process of having to do all these other deployments and but takes a while for instance like where we see Unis swap go through that's taking a long time through a lot of governance all these additional audits Etc the interoperability layer like this in

between and layer has now gotten to a point of maturity especially from a security and a devx perspective when I say like developer experience that we're seeing this like new wave of multi what I call like multi-chain application and so what what that means is like day one they launch they're alive across let's say like five or six chains so I think good examples and I encourage the audience to go St as like Pike finance curv an cinn in finance and this is obviously more so in the the D5 space for the examples I just gave but like they're able to use woral as a way to like build across all chains simultaneously and the old models like I mentioned like Pi that Oracle on salana they're like okay how am I now going to

go to all these J which could still work but it's cool to see these CH these apps go live and they're moldy Ching date day one and so with the accelerator with the BRS program why we're putting these in place is we want to see more multi-chain native applications if you can build across all chains you can get this unified experience to the user where you know there's not as much clunkiness like I want to go here I connect to this wall and I switch to this network how to meet this asset I also need this gas of this network right like oh I've never been there I need to get soie where do I get sui I go to the centralized exchange so on and so forth I think it's just I'm really excited to see these team come out of the accelerator of the gr program

that are building kind of these these I would say more ux forward applications and so the accelerator has already kicked off um we've got six teams in the accelerator they should be coming out I believe in end of April um but the the grant program is ongoing um so it's specifically there to fund new multi-chain research and what we say new multi-chain privative and features but essentially like a lot of the things we've built today and the more model iic are on one chain building those kind of poor Primitives order ones but in a multi-chain Capac like think about ens but you're ens for all chains you could do that on hor who's building that's really what we're looking for coming

through the the grant program that's Evergreen let me know if you're interested awesome yeah we we we'll put links in the show notes to the grants program and we'll keep an eye on the project coming the accelerator and be sure to share those uh okay before we wrap I want to take a step back and give you an opportunity to just talk about the the longer term road map and it was very interesting to hear you say you might be one of the I think most people in the space thinking decades but you you probably one of the only people that's ever come on the show that actually said that out loud which is very very admirable because in a space where a month can feel like a year it's not easy to think what would happen 10 years from now what does the road map

look like for Wormhole and what's on the road map and you pick the time frame tell us whether it's one year 5 years 10 years whatever you want absolutely I want to touch from what you just said when we're like we're hiring bringing new people on the team I think one of the things that we've I guess one of our values now is we really appreciate the ability for people in the crypto space to be able to identify a long-term goal and be able to execute on a longer term Horizon yes the space moves fast and you want to Pivot I like don't get me wrong that is 100% the case but I think that there is so much shiny objects in grow SP it's really really easy more than any industry I've ever been in it's really easy to get distracted and it's really

difficult to prioritize and so one of the things that we really really value like I said is you know can you kind of make some sort of thesis on where things are going maybe you probably make it broad like I said the space changes a lot and then you know execute on that on the longterm time priz it I think it's just like very under something that's not present in the industry and I think protocols that can do this well ultimately perform well or hear the here to say and I think that plays into kind of our our longer term thinking as well but I would be a fool if I said that we know everything that's going to happen and we're extremely confident in our in our strong term like plans so look I think for for wormal there's three things we're going to

focus on simple as that we're going to make things more secure decentralized because if we're doing a good job which is crazy you should know you're using woral like I want most of the listeners to go on applications that they don't know they're using Wormhole and that's by Design it's just like you don't know you're using you know SMTP or TTP IP when you're using the internet right like you just get the uis you interact with those but that's like even more of a responsibility to us so security is extremely important so I've mentioned zero knowledge and we probably do another episode about this but we don't use zero knowledge for privacy we use it for security and we replace kind of humans or entities coming to consensus with M and I I just say that briefly to talk about that's going to be a much

long term investment something that's coming out this year and will continue to come out with more in the following but it's just this concept of making it more secure the token obviously is that decentralization concept so those are like multi-year projects in and of themselves then we want to make the developer experience great right we've talked a lot about Builders I hope there's some Builders listening that want to build cross chain that's what we need we need more apps just like you think of ethereum you think of all these apps on ethereum that's how it needs to be and how it will be and how it is on workable and then yeah the last thing I would say is we're going to continue to be everywhere so the chain expansion journey is never done there's always new chains as we talked about at the beginning and so our goal is to continue

to expand to these to new high value chains chains that will be here for the long run and making sure that if you're going to use warable you know you can have access to to I love it just as start at the beginning of the episode it is an ambitious ambitious Target but if anyone can do it it feels like Wormhole is on track you guys have already achieved so much in relatively a short period of time three years probably feels like an eternity for you having been so deep in this but yeah it's pretty short period of time and amazing to see the results before we go to a speedr we're asking some fun questions just want to give you a chance to tell people where they can follow you on Twitter or where whatever platform

you're most active on or if you want them to follow Wormhole or Wormhole Foundation feel free to uh to let us know yeah I think both of those are great I would say you should follow the protocol main account Wormhole crypto warhole crypto and yeah you can follow myself on Twitter as well that's probably where I'm most active it's just my full name Robin bery easy easy enough awesome we'll put both those links in the show notes okay we always like to do a little bit of personal fun questions at the end here these do not have your answers do not have to be crypto related but they might be one thing you bought recently for under $100 that brings you Joy this is a really question this G sounds so I recently bought just a

really good backpack I think that can't be un understated like I bought a really good backpack I think it was like 75 bucks and yeah this sounds so lame but I really like it I it just when you have a backpack that's that doesn't have too many of the tassels fits my laptop well and I now like take it everywhere so yeah sorry that's not more of a fun answer but it's an honest no no it's a it's an honest answer to be honest you reminded me that my wife's birthday is in next week and she asked for we have a eight-month-old son and she asked for a backpack for her birthday and I totally forgot until this moment so thank you for reminding me to put that on the list to get that backpack for well you list

my podcast so she's not gonna hear this last question if you had a billboard that 1 billion people were going to see what would you write on it if it were easy everyone would do it where does that come from is that a a life I think anything in life that you people want is typically you know usually it's typically kind of Out Of Reach or or take some work and if it were easy to achieve no one would want it because it's easy to achieve and if it were easy to achieve everyone would do it I kind of think about it like a trade right like if you're going to there's a a secret trade that you're making good money off of by the time

everyone feels out figures it out they're going to trade that trade right but I think just in life the simple cliches are oftentimes true and good things take hard work and it just kind of a reminder that when things get hard if it were easy you know everyone would do it and you likely want things that not everyone can achieve right you want to be successful for sure for sure it's uh simple words but very deep meaning Robinson thanks so much for joining us today appreciate you and the entire Wormhole team everybody at Wormhole foundation and all your partners for everything you guys are building for the space it really makes a big difference I hope all of our listeners if you're not

already using Wormhole or maybe you are and as Robin said you just don't know that you're using it which is them achieving their objectives so thanks for joining joining us today yeah thanks for having me looking forward to next time for sure thanks for listening everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web through Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web through Insight so you can confidently build and invest in web 3 make sure to subscribe today one final note this this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3

are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one