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Mic check, are we coming through?
I can hear you, It's just slightly quiet.
Can hear you all right, Luca?
Am I coming through clear?
Thanks for jumping in, Luca.
I think we will give everybody a little bit more time.
To fill in and kick off here in a second, maybe give it another minute or 2. Thank you. All right, it's been a healthy minute.
Can jump into things and let folks start to fill in.
The conversation is being recorded recorded which is always great but um how's it going over on your side luca you uh you get over there
yep i'll get on my end um my uh my headphones just died actually so apologize if there's some uh
some mild background but should be good to go. Coming through clear so far, but yeah, that sounds good.
We got Luca calling in from New York,
a different part of Manhattan and us here at Allura,
but nonetheless, glad we could make it work in today's episode of the Allura forecast.
But nonetheless, for everybody here,
thank you for joining another episode of the Allura forecast.
I'm your host, Jack from the Allura Labs team.
we've got a great conversation lined up with our good friend, Luca, head of AI and D-Pen over at
Base. And today we're going to be catching up on some of the latest with Base and their ecosystem
and also catching up on what's taking place at the intersection of DeFi and AI. Now, with that, for anyone new here,
I'll maybe just give a quick reminder
on what we're building over at Allura Labs.
Now, with Allura and our AI network,
it actually functions as an AI model coordination network,
right, that's largely focused on providing on-chain builders
with predictive intelligence from a global pool
of AI engineers that we've been onboarding to the network for multiple years now, right? focused on providing on-chain builders with predictive intelligence from a global pool of
AI engineers that we've been onboarding to the network for multiple years now, right? And so
with Allura and our network, it makes it so that instead of trusting a single model's forecast on
an asset's price, for example, the Allura network will coordinate lots of independent ML models
predictive objectives. Like what's the price of Bitcoin going to be one hour from now, right?
That's the objective. And then the network will score these different independent models
in real time and aggregate their outputs depending on performance into a collective higher
confidence forecast that apps on base, agents base or whoever it may be can use on
chain for things like smarter trading hedging liquidity management and more now we'll get into
that just wanted to set the stage a little bit for for new folks and that might not be super familiar
with the laura but uh let's let's turn things now towards luca our guest and what's going on with
base now i would love to love to have the audience get to
know you a little bit better, Luca. So to kick things off, maybe tell everyone a little bit
about yourself, how you got into crypto, and why you chose to make Web3 your career, my friend.
Yeah, of course. And thank you for having me. So maybe starting with how I got into crypto
was actually, I mean, I guess like relatively late, I feel like compared to some people.
I feel like really during the, you know, I had gotten interested in it in late 2019, 2020, and then had started like trading more often during the global pandemic.
like trading more often during the global pandemic.
At that time, I was in undergrad
and was very fortunate to have some peers of mine
and friends who were working in crypto full time already.
We're dropping out of school.
And at that point, like I didn't really know
that you can work at these protocols
or that there were careers in crypto. I thought it was really just
like permissionlessly trading tokens and then really went down the rabbit hole from there.
And yeah, decided to make it my career. I had like very fundamentally aligned beliefs
with Web3 on chain and decentralization, self-ownership and sovereignty and more
generally, and then joined the base team over two years ago now.
Brilliant. Yeah, it's always cool to hear, right, I think, how people kind of got their start,
and, you know, especially, you know, working with a team, that's the caliber of base, right,
because there's not necessarily a one- track path to end up, you know,
where we're at. So it's always cool to see. And, and, and I know my,
my story and getting into web three is relatively similar, you know,
working for chain link out of school of roughly four years ago. And,
and also, you know, Luca and I go back a little bit where, you know,
prior to my time at Allura, we had some overlap when I was at chain,
like, you know, working with the base team and their DeFi builders.
So the relationship between him and I has been the same for a little bit now.
And it's definitely kind of cool to come into 2026 with a lot of new efforts together.
But also maybe to kind of further intro, what you're working on, I'm sure everybody here in most of the world is familiar with BASE at a high level. But yeah, we'd love to hear it from a core team member's perspective as far as tell us about what BASE is at a high level, what you guys are doing, maybe the latest for BASE coming into the new year.
And also maybe feel free to touch on your focus area within the BASE ecosystem, Luca.
I think the very unique thing about base
is that our focus has been the same since day one,
and that's building a global on-chain economy.
And we're really pursuing a few key things
relentlessly to enable that.
I think, like, fundamentally,
we have to have, like like really usable block space.
So making sure the chain is cheap, that it's fast, that it's permissionless, trustless, etc.
to ultimately make it the best block space to then build a global on-chain economy on top of.
Last year we launched our Solana bridge. We're going to continue to be a global on-chain economy
and a hub, enable bridging to other ecosystems as well. We're going to continue to expand
the capacity of the chain, which will make it cheap, increase the amount of megagas per second.
We've been pursuing that very well unless we anticipate a lot more scaling to
come. We also in 2026 want to make base the best chain to trade on as well. So again, a lot of this
comes down to block space, but we want to have like really efficient execution. And I think what
you guys are doing at Allura is enabling part of that as well
with the combination of AI and DeFi.
More specifically on what I've been concentrating on,
again, like BaseSolo very much operates like a startup,
so everyone touches everything.
I've been focusing on the AI and D-Pin space
just because of my interest on how much they overlap
and intersect with the world outside of crypto.
And that, you know, I think we see that intersection converging more and more nowadays, including
within DeFi as we now see like on-chain equities now become like a focus and more real world
assets become more of a focus for within the
DeFi ecosystem. But yeah, really just focus on, you know, supporting our founders that are,
you know, dedicating their lives at this time to building protocols within the base ecosystem
and doing what we can do to help them grow and be as successful as possible.
I love to hear it. And it's, it's important work, right?
You're, you're, you're fighting the good fight and it's, it's something that,
you know, us at Allura, it can relate to it. It's why we, you know,
we brought Luca on today. We have a good bit of overlap with him in that,
you know, with the Allura network,
our work within the base ecosystem is to also service builders, right?
Where us at Allura Labs directly,
the user-facing dApps that DeFi users will come into and interact with, but we are providing
infrastructure to those dApp builders, to the different protocols, right? To make sure that
they can build out the most efficient products possible, the most cutting-edge products possible.
So yeah, it's been a lot of cool work being done. And I think that's a decent
segue, Luca, into maybe diving into a bit further about what all of this work has looked like
for you and I and your team independently more recently, where maybe we'll provide
somewhat of a kind of market outlook and deeper dive into the base defined AI ecosystem.
kind of market outlook and deeper dive into the base defined AI ecosystem. Now, what I'm getting
at, right, and where my mind goes to, excuse me, when it comes to AI is that we see AI everywhere,
right? I mean, innovation AI has taken place, you know, in every facet of the world. And I think
it's important to distinguish, right, and have conversations about the different verticals
of AI that are quickly evolving. Because if we just want to talk about AI as a whole, we're going to be in this
space for the next three days. But nonetheless, at Allura, we interact with many different protocols,
but especially as of recent, a lot of different DeFi agents, right, that are executing a number
of different things on chain. And for Luca and I, working in crypto, it gives us a
unique vantage point to both participate in and witness the growth of on-chain finance in AI.
So with that, on the subject of these DeFi agents that are executing on blockchains,
we've seen the birth of agents essentially take place that can interact on chain in the last year.
We've seen some innovative
platforms quickly follow that, like the virtuals ecosystem of agents that is native to base.
And also with that, we've seen these types of agents evolve into things, into agents that can
execute stablecoin strategies, like our friends over at ZotFi. We're seeing agents evolve into being able
to use Allura's predictive signals to trade, manage liquidity, and more. Now, Luca, it would
be cool to hear is from your vantage point, what does a DeFi native AI agent look like
one to two years from now? Is it more of the same? You think these things continue to expedite at a rapid rate? How does that all kind of look from your perspective? I think for DeFi Native
specifically, one to two years from now, I mean, again, there's so much innovation in the space
and things change so quickly. I think something I'm particularly excited about is just the expansion and the types
and amount of assets in the DeFi ecosystem. I think one of the huge things that's enabling this
is on-chain and crypto enables programmable money, which is very complementary to, you know, allowing AI to interact with finance, right?
So like DeFi will be the native layer for AIX finance more generally, right?
So I think like once to two years, we'll see, you know, a much wider range of strategies, right?
Hopefully we'll see on-chain equities, maybe doing some things more around like managing risk
with perps and other assets.
I think another idea that has been floating around too
that's like in its very early days
is some of these other types of markets
replacing existing industries.
An idea of this was like prediction markets
replacing insurance to be
able to hedge either like weather events or those type of things. So it could be like really
interesting to see how your, you know, maybe like personal agent is now also managing, you know,
knows where you live and is managing risk in more ways outside of just financial
risk and volatility, and is also introducing like new types of insurance and new asset
classes altogether, or replacing existing asset classes with, you know, different kind
of markets and assets in the back end.
I think it's something where it's hard to say exactly how it'll unfold over the next one to two years, but nonetheless, something that's exciting to see unfold with the rapid innovation. into three phases of AI agents on chain, right?
Starting off with Terminal of Truth
and what we saw kick off roughly around this time last year,
where essentially these agents were LLM wrappers
That could interact on Twitter,
Fascinating stuff, right?
We saw phase two as being what's taking place today with folks,
like I mentioned, XyFi, where these agents can automate a number of different DeFi tasks,
scan for the best yield opportunities across lending markets on base or whatever it may be.
And we kind of see phase three is generally this phase where agents can think much more dynamically
life, whether it's, you know, like what you're mentioning, and when it comes to, you know,
just having a good sense of its individual kind of user for insurance use cases, or,
right, executing very specific predictive trading strategies that can dynamically,
you know, adjust funds dependent on forecasts, you know, from a Laura. So a lot of cool ways,
you know, that this all can go. And I'm sure that
we'll be seeing it happen relatively quickly, relatively quickly. But somewhat on that note,
when it comes to maybe somewhat pivoting notes, something I'm curious about that our team has
been talking about is when it comes to base and growing your guys' ecosystem,
what kind of infrastructure do you believe an LSU like yourself needs to provide
so that agents can safely and efficiently operate on chain?
Yeah, I actually, I mean, would be curious
to hear your opinion on this
because we definitely rely on folks like Allura
to provide some of this infrastructure.
Back to what I was saying earlier, I think fundamentally we need to provide
best-in-class block space. So we need to be fast. I think it's really important to be cheap as well,
especially as we see agent-to-agent interactions and micropayments and things like that.
especially as we see like agent to agent interactions and micropayments and things like that.
Obviously, it's important that, you know, to enable micropayments, the cost of the transaction has to be ideally, you know, less than the value being transferred itself.
So that's a big part of it.
Neutrality and, you know, and being trustless and permissionless is also really important.
It's important that we you
know we continue to strive and accelerate towards reaching stage two um as a as a roll-up and um
yeah and i think i do think neutrality is is very important uh and making sure um you know people
can be confident in their um their execution when happening on top of base. Other things, honestly, like we've been like also like really fortunate to be part of the
Coinbase family in some sense with, you know, the team incubating things like X402 and Agent
Kit originally and experimenting with some of these early on ideas of, you know, giving
But we also, again, in that aspect of neutrality,
we see folks like CrossMint, like Privy,
and other folks as well, providing that infrastructure
and really leaning into that narrative.
And then we also rely on folks like Laura
and what you guys are doing uh and enabling agentic
um coordination as well um but yeah kind of curious as to like you know as you guys operate
across you know base and other chains um what fundamentally the the builders on the laura are
asking for and what you guys are building towards yeah it, it's, it's more of the same for what you're kind
of mentioning when it comes to your guys's core focus, you know, over at base, right? I think a
lot of what anyone wants is, is ease of use, right? And kind of that user friendly, you know,
approach to setting up your different products and platforms, speed, and affordability, right?
I think those are going to be three pillars that is not new to anybody, but something
that increasingly become the top of the conversation that we have with any new DeFi agent when
it comes to, you know, how can they really see their agentic protocol or whatever it
They want to be in an ecosystem that has that.
And so I think that's been a primary reason for why a lot of the work that we've done
over the last few years has been overlapping with base builders.
Because inherently, you have a lot of that there where they can focus on building.
And then know that they're an ecosystem that's set up well to kind of lift them up as they're focused on the meat and potatoes of their specific protocol.
focused on the meat and potatoes of their specific protocol.
And then, yeah, going off of that, I think, you know, once you have that in place, you know, with an L2-like basis,
it's working with the right middlewares, you know, like we're saying.
It's, you know, working with the Allura team to get a sense for how you can tap into our collective intelligence network,
you know, for predictive signals that can benefit your agent.
It's working with folks like Privy.
I know they've come up in multiple conversations with us,
make sure that there's seamless onboarding of users
to a given platform so they're not worried about X, Y, and Z
about even being able to start using.
They can just get right to it.
And I could go on and on about some
of the impactful infrastructure to middleware.
You mentioned the CrossMint guys, big fans of them as well.
But I think all of that is somewhat all-encompassing into what it takes to properly
set up these agent builders. And you mentioned the nod to Coinbase side of the house,
and also a quick nod to the X402. I think it's maybe a good segue into something
that's picked up a ton of steam since its launch.
But we'd like to talk about X402 maybe a little bit more
because I know it's something that we're interacting with as well
with a couple of different partners.
But I guess at a high level, Luca, right from your perspective,
what exactly is X402 and how do you view it as a game changer
for users interacting with agents or even for agents interacting with other agents?
Yeah, I mean, X402 is amazing and the work they've done and to see the traction so far has been amazing.
is basically a revival of a long dormant HTTP standard called HTTP 402,
which is basically a payment required status code.
And what X402 does is, you know, originally developed by Coinbase,
now, you know, sits in like an independent foundation with some partners of ours as well.
I think, I believe Cloudflare is part of that.
And then there's some other like institutional partners that are looking to use X402 in their
own products. But now, you know, we now have, as we talked about earlier, DeFi kind of being the,
you know, the standard for what's going to be the future of internet native finance.
know, the standard for what's going to be the future of internet native finance. X402 is now
going to be the standard for internet native payments, specifically between agents. So, you
know, this is a game changer just because now agents can transact directly with each other.
Wallet infrastructure, even in particular, like a smart wallet infrastructure,
ability to allocate their agent funds for them to act autonomously or have permission
settings and also have instant low cost payments for services or agent to agent commerce.
I think some of the early signs of traction that we're seeing in terms of, I guess, maybe not like off-chain use cases, but more traditional businesses is API monetization.
So on a pay-per-use basis, paywalled content.
And you also don't need API keys anymore, no account setup, right?
This is all held from your wallet.
And why this is important to Agentic Commerce specifically is, let's say like theoretically
we put our agent out for a task and our agent has $1,000 to spend or $1,000 in its wallet and we want to go buy an
airline ticket. Now what you could eventually do is say, hey, go buy me an airline ticket from,
you know, let's say like New York to LA. It'll go pay for its compute on a per use basis.
Maybe it spends a couple of hours doing that. Maybe leveraging other agents in the Allura network, for example.
Finding a flight that's ideal.
And then paying for that flight directly as well.
And basically returning you with a full ticket.
Compared to today where I think there are some solutions like,
actually BrowserBase is now using X402.
But where Browser browser base basically enabled you
know agents were essentially like clicking around on your screen on your behalf uh using existing
credit card information and infrastructure um so uh yeah um that's kind of the the overall rundown
on on x402 uh basically streamlines the entire internet native payments protocol.
A game changer and enables a much cleaner path to a real agentic economy.
And on that note of an agentic economy, it's something that, like I mentioned, we work
But maybe to be a bit more forward looking, Once again, I'm curious of some of the more front of mind, top of mind thoughts you have, Luca, of how things look when
every user has an on-chain agent that they can access for trading, managing positions,
or whatever it may be on a 24-7 basis. How do you think that impacts the market structure on base
when it comes to liquidity, volatility,
MEV patterns, protocol design incentives, any one of those numbers, or maybe more generally,
How do you kind of see this looking or how did this impact on base?
You know, like, I'm not sure.
like i'm not sure i mean i think it does change i mean basically like everyone has uh could be like
I mean, I think it does change.
a financial advisor in their in their pocket right so i think opportunity for yield and and things
that were i guess only available to more advanced t5 users are now available to everyone which is
fantastic um i think that just basically increases the baseline
for what everyone has access to,
which is what AI is doing across the board, right?
Whether it be coding, knowledge, et cetera.
I'm not sure like in terms of other, you know,
in terms of like incentive design, MEV patterns, et cetera,
not entirely sure yet. I do think there's been very sophisticated
bots and MEV bots specifically and market makers in general all over crypto and blockchain,
and there has been for years now. So I'm curious as how that affects
things like liquidity and MEV patterns, etc. I do think design incentives become really interesting
because then you're basically saying, okay, like, is your user now an AI agent or is it an individual and how quickly the agents are able to make decisions
in comparison to when an individual would or how do they evaluate potential like future incentives
as well which is always like a big consideration when people are using DeFi protocols or using
crypto protocols more generally.
So I do think that's something that's probably going to be the most interesting design space
And basically, you know, again, like everyone wants to retain users.
It's difficult to retain users in crypto with people chasing incentives.
And then how do you get, you know, how do you retain agents on your protocol?
It's going to be like a really interesting design space.
That's an interesting perspective.
And I know from our side of things, I think this having an agentec economy in full swing, it's especially interesting when financial machine learning, right, that specific type of AI, well set up for financial applications of AI becomes industry standard infrastructure, right? That specific type of AI well set up for financial applications
of AI becomes industry standard infrastructure, right? I mean, that's what we're working on,
of course, but with something like a LoRa in an agent economy that's in full swing,
these agents, they're not just reacting to static signals, right? They're not just reacting to the
latest spot price of an asset, or they're not just reacting to the current APYs of a given market, right? They can consume these higher
confidence forecasts that come from a global pool of collective intelligence. And, you know,
with that and the predictive capabilities that opens up, in our opinion, it really enables a
more institutional types of behavior on chain, right? Sizing positions by confidence, proactively rebalancing, hedging earlier,
or even running liquidity management that stays in range more often in concentrated liquidity.
Now, net, you know, it's not just more activity, in my opinion,
it's a shift in market structure towards execution quality and adaptive incentives, right?
Because protocols will potentially want to reward a consistent liquidity and risk managed flow.
And then it's hard to say,
but maybe MEV becomes more structured
around better routing, auctions and intense dial rails.
But another one of those things, right?
Where it's just interesting to see how this might unfold.
So we've talked a little bit
about some of the different infrastructure
that can be involved in building out agents or what you might interact with.
But from a builder's perspective, right, if I'm a builder talking to you, Luca, and I'm looking to launch a DeFi protocol on base today and I want to be agent ready,
design decisions that you think kind of make the most sense to set yourself up well for agents to
be able to plug into the protocol native later or natively later excuse me um would also be curious
to hear your point of view on this um i think part of this is in the future there's going to be
you know making sure that you are involved, like as a DeFi protocol
accessible from a kind of like an orchestration network like Allura. But I think like generally,
this is like one of the huge advantages of building on chain is, you know, it is internet
native. So it should be as simple as the, you know, agents being able to call your smart contracts. I think another big thing is making sure like data is really accessible.
readable. Again, so if you're managing risk or managing LP positions, et cetera, that can all be
done very efficiently and very quickly as well. But curious to your point of view on that as well
from the Aura perspective. Yeah, it's maybe a little bit redundant right from some of the
points we were making earlier, but I think a lot of it comes down to the infrastructure that you are using i think we mentioned you know our uh our friends over at privy
um and you know and having um you know essentially uh user flows in place that make it seamless so
just going to kind of connect via your x account your email like through their infrastructure so
you can you know um you know just set up those users to uh to plug their agents in right away
But yeah, just continue to stay ahead of the curve with a lot of these types of infrastructures being distributed on top of base that improve the user experience.
I think it is going to be, you know, where a lot of the winning protocols have success with, you know, fostering an AI agent, you know, environment that executes through their protocol.
And, of course, you know, with Laura, we're looking
to be embedded with all of these protocols. Nonetheless, now we're coming up on time here.
I got two more points that I wanted to touch on real quick. And one of which is if we're
zooming out, maybe to kind of like get a nuanced perspective from you, Luca. Is there a certain opinion that you hold when it comes to AI and DeFi
that maybe people in crypto or traditional AI circles underestimate or disagree with?
Pretty open-ended there, but yeah, curious your thoughts.
Yeah, I mean, we'll keep this one quick.
I don't even know if it's, I don't think this is like a very much a contrarian view.
But kind of what you were mentioning earlier is I think around DeFi specifically,
like systems will reach consensus very quickly, right?
Especially with like everyone, like you have networks like Laura,
there'll be incentives to align consensus as well.
So I think there'll be even more value around holding in general contrarian views in terms of
things like trading and stuff on chain and what you're doing. Yeah, honestly, I do think the path in the intersection between AI and DeFi should be pretty straightforward.
It's really, really hard for an agent to do things with money today.
And DeFi makes that very easy.
It's really just a matter of time when these things become mainstream.
I think that's almost like more reliant on DeFi
becoming larger and more accessible
and having access to more assets.
But yeah, don't really hold any very strong
Contrarian views in this space.
Yeah, no, it makes sense, right? Curious if you
just kind of had specific angles or nuanced opinions there and I appreciate the insight.
I know from our end, like something, I don't know if it's a contrarian view, but something that
you know, we feel so much strongly about is that a lot of people, I think when it comes to
on-chain AI, almost especially when they're thinking of AI, they're thinking of the generative
applications of AI. Their mind goes to ChatGBT or the competitor LLM chatbot types of platforms to
ChatGBT. They'll think about content generation AI, music generation AI. And I do think it's
important to note that while these generative applications are great, financial applications
of AI are somewhat of a grandfather use case for AI. And as for
financial machine learning, that specific type of AI, instead of large language models like
ChatHPT, this is the type of AI that has been used in banking and trading for 30 plus years now.
So kind of like what I was getting at earlier, I think it's maybe overlooked to see,
to incorporate financial ML into what you're doing on chain.
But something that I don't expect to be overlooked for too much longer,
as we continue to innovate and work with our friends over at the base side of the house.
Now, I know we're about five minutes over.
I really appreciate you jumping on, Luca, you know, maybe to wrap things up.
You know, if a developer wants to begin, you know, building on base, you know, what's the best way for them to get started?
What's the best way for them to get in touch?
Anything you wanted to kind of like plug or mention on that note before we wrap up?
I mean, I think biggest thing heading into 2026, if you've been thinking about building on chain is just do something, get started.
I think it's like an amazing, one of the amazing things about building on chain and one of the best experiences for me is how welcoming the community has been as a whole.
Not even base or any ecosystem specifically, I think just like crypto as a whole.
not even base or any ecosystem specifically,
I think just like crypto as a whole.
So just get started, get something with start,
get started with something small even,
especially with leveraging AI,
it's getting easier and easier and easier.
I'll point people, please reach out to anyone
from the base team, the team will be super receptive.
We have country leads located all over the globe now.
So if you're not a native English speaker or based in a different time zone,
we have everything available in the docs and who to respectively to reach out to in your local geography.
Please feel free to reach out to me, whether it's about AI, D-PIN or anything else and I'll help you get connected with the right person.
And then if anyone's looking for ideas
for things to get started with,
recommend downloading the base app,
trying out some mini apps and go to the base docs
and check out how to build a mini app.
It's a really cool way to start small
and get access to users from day one
and then just start building. And then we're here to support you on your builder journey from
Yeah. Awesome. A lot, a lot of great ways to get involved in it.
Truly, you know, with the base guys,
as professional and helpful of a team as it gets and yeah,
they're distributed all over the globe.
So it's definitely a no brainer to be working closely with them,
but nonetheless, you know, we're over here, Luca,
really appreciate you jumping on.
Great catching up with you as always.
And for everyone else that tuned in,
really appreciate your time as well.
And keep your eye out for the next episode
And also keep your eye out for some of the innovation
that's taking place between the Allura network
and the broader base ecosystem of builders.
But we'll wrap it up there.
And yeah, thanks everybody. Have a good rest of your day and or broader base ecosystem of builders. But we'll wrap it up there. And yeah, thanks, everybody.
Have a good rest of your day and or evening.
Thank you, everyone, for your time.