Hey, Don, I'm doing great. How are you doing? Yes, I can hear you. I hear you. Hear me. Yeah, yeah. Good times. Okay. So I think we'll just wait a bit. Let small people join because obviously we just opened up the spaces and great, great, have you? Thanks for joining us. That's my pleasure. Thanks so much for
me on. Where are we in the world are you then? At the moment. I'm in San Francisco. What about you? Nice. I'm actually in Bangkok in Thailand so it's 7.30 a.m. Very, uh, actually early, early start for me, but I'm also. Well, thank you for getting up
really to speak me I really appreciate it. Pleasure Pleasure. Okay so if you guys are just joining us this is the second of our MAs with L1s. Last week we spoke to the Quareros team and this week we have Sui and which is a really new L1 chain by Mr.
labs, US stars that we have Sam here who is the CTO of the company. So we're going to get into a bit more detail on what's going on. Probably one of the most exciting companies in the crypto space at the moment, obviously. So we'll get into that very soon, but we'll just let a few more people join first.
Just a quick reminder of why we're doing these AMAs faces. So I think we have we have five or six lined up Sam and mr. Lamton series the second of the series it's really based around the comms recent where
research arms, so the company has produced a very in-depth document on Layer 1 tech out there. So if you're interested in the crypto space and you find Layer 1s to be confusing or an ever-changing space which it certainly are,
put it up calm slash slash research as you covered. There's a recent report that went out two weeks ago on the state of layer ones and there's also updates every week so if you're into crypto space or you're keen to learn about what's
what's happening out there which I think everyone is. Do check out the link and the reports that are being produced on a weekly basis. Okay Sam, I think it's a good time for us to start. I'm sure more folks will join as we
As we go. But yes, let's talk about Sui network. So I guess the first question I always have is Sui, S-E-Y. How do I pronounce this properly? Is it Sui? Is it Sui? Is it something else? Yeah, it's Sui. We like to say Sui is and Sui is but without the T.
Nice, okay, sweet, okay, good, good, okay. You guys launched in March 2020. So earlier this year, there's a lot going on in terms of the sort of type of L1 that you've got in the type that's behind it. I think most folks might know you best
or the recent funding round that you guys raised, which I think is 300 million USD, we'll get onto that and also the tech side too, but perhaps you'd like to introduce yourself first and give an audience a bit of background on yourself and on the company too.
Yeah, absolutely. So let me start with myself from a title's perspective. I'm Sam. I'm the co-founder and CTO of missing labs and the creator of the move programming languages. Let me tell a little bit about my background and how I got to missing. So I start off my career as a programming language researcher and the particular subfield of programming language research that I worked in is called
static program analysis and in a nutshell, like what folks who work in this research field do is they look at a lot of programs, especially programs that have bugs in them and then they try to study them and understand things like how did this bug come to be what led the program to make this mistake, what things the language did, made it easy to make this mistake or prevented it from happening by construction.
And then sort of generalizes from looking at a lot of these examples to build advanced tools to prevent bugs from making their way into programs. And so I did this for many years in academia doing a PhD in program analysis, a looking at open source code, studying a lot of code, trying to understand what developers were doing, building tools to fix their bugs. And I really enjoyed this work and then got a chance
So, I think that's to join Facebook and do this work at more of an industrial scale in 2014 as an intern and then full time after I finished my PhD in 2015. And so they're like, this was really cool. Facebook has a lot of code. They care a lot about software quality. And so I worked on lots of different automated bug finding problems, classic issues.
like no other references and buffer overflows and data races and just over that time, like just spent so much time reading code, looking at bugs and just understanding the common patterns of how programming languages set developers up for failure and how they help them and what you can expect from programmers and what you can't. I just had a lot of opinions about
language design and software safety and compositionality and sort of how to do things differently. The one rule of thumb in this field of static program analysis is that you can do whatever you want and adding a tool on top. You can't change the programming language, but I had all these thoughts like, you know, there are certain ways where if you set up a language with these features, then it would be much easier to write these analyses.
There's a much easier for programmers to write bugs. And if you maybe did this a little bit differently, things would be much, much simpler. So I had a lot of these ideas and I got a chance to put them to work in 2018 when I joined the the Libra project at Facebook. And so back then this was this secret project working on building a blockchain powered global
and they were basically pulling in folks from all across the company who had expertise in areas that were relevant to this project. So of course, cryptography, distributed systems, databases, payments, and then languages as well. So they brought me in and said, okay, there's this thing called smart contracts. We want this to be a programmable network.
gave me a very broad mandate. We can pick something like the EVN and solidity off the shelf, we can take something like we can take non-blockchain technology like Waza or like the the Java virtual machine and use that instead or we can maybe design our own language. And so I just basically did for smart contracts the same thing that I've been doing for the last eight years for other programs.
I studied them a lot, like looked at what kind of code or programmers trying to rate, what kind of mistakes do they make, what how does the language help them and how does it hurt them. And then as part of that effort, decided to decided that the right path for Facebook to go is to create their own smart contract language. And so this led to the effort to create the move language, which is this smart contract language that has
Assets and scarcity and access control and safety all those really first class principles. It's really tailored to what smart contract programmers want to do and is informed by a lot of the vulnerabilities and bugs that you've seen in systems like the EVM. And so the the main thing I did at Libra was working on move and then beginning to integrate into Libra blockchain and
And then as part of that, I felt a bit deeper down the crypto rabbit hole. I met folks like my co founder George who's a world expert in distributed systems and learned about his expertise and how it shines lead on different aspects of protocol design. I met my co founder, Kostas, who is a cryptographer who has really creative ideas about how to integrate cryptography into programming
I just used it differently in blockchains. I met Evan who ran the research team as part of DM and was my manager and manager of many folks who we worked with for a number of years. And then Adani who just had a lot of great product ideas for how to use this stuff. And so we did a lot of great work that wanted to DM and to move. But at the same time, like the
The ambitions of DM at the beginning were very broad, but as time went on, both to do the regulatory pushback and sort of pragmatic focusing, it focused a lot more on the niche of being a compliant payments network than being a scalable L1 that can sort of do everything. And so on the research team, we did a lot of work on, that was inspired by limitations of DM.
or like extensions to DM that we'd like to make in the future. Like George worked on the Nollil Tuss consensus algorithm on fast pay, which is some of the research that underlies what we do in SWE. We looked at different ways to use move to write smart contracts that did things beyond compliance and lots and lots of stuff in the cryptography space. So this is basically the origin story of Mr. Lambs and of SWE in the
We all worked on DM and then we worked on research going beyond. We felt a lot of commitment to the DM mission and one to see it through to the end, but at some point it became very clear that that project was going to launch. All of us are friends in a talk for a long time, but doing a startup. And we said, "You know what? Let's take some of these ideas and sit on the shelf. Let's take them out into#
And then the fast forward number of months later, like we've done all this design and implementation work on SWE, we've launched a DevNet, we've got a testnet coming out, we've got a lot of folks excited about the vision and we've raised the funding that is really going to let us build this thing the right way and the way that we want to. So it's a very exciting time for us. >> That's so cool.
Was there any particular moment that you guys sort of realized that it was it was time to take what you've been doing inside, inside Facebook and like bring it outside? You know, was there a particular moment or was it just more like you say like on an ongoing basis you sort of realized that the goals you had and what you're working on when you're at Facebook weren't quite aligned?
I think there are a lot of almost moments and you know it's just uh DM was a great team Facebook is a great company it was just really hard to pull the trigger I think it was just an accumulation of those almost moments to the point where just oh one person said you know what I think it's time and then I'm gonna also follow along with it so I can't put my finger on a single moment but it was sort of like a you know you talk about#
something enough and it eventually become reality. Makes sense. It's really fascinating to win that sort of moment of clarity sort of drops right and that anybody sort of sort of a band together and decides to do something that's always always always fascinating. But I mean obviously, obviously, like Sweden, lots of others, there's many loved ones out there.
right and I'm putting them in fact adoption and you know I've been going for sort of like you know three fourth five years plus I'm just kind of curious like like why is it that you guys thought that you know doing a new L1 in 2022 when obviously there's a huge number out there like like what do you think sort
the reason for entering, I guess what is a fairly crowded space, what is a fairly well-funded space, what is a space that has a decent number of users and you know, to try to mount that already? Yeah, it's a great question. I think one that's very important for any new entering in the space to answer. So the answer
And so, let me explain what I mean by both of those terms. So what we want is, you know, there's a lot of talk about sharding and blockchains and any system that that scales you can have to shard somewhere. But the most common thing is that we can
And then there's sort of the experience you get on on on if even one today where there's only one charge.
a program perspective, you can write code that can touch any account, that can touch any state, there's one source of truth for the assets, everything lives there. And so we think from a developer experience standpoint, this is really the right kind of experience where you have full composability, there's no notion, there's no notion of stars exposed to the programmer or to validators, everything just appears to be one global ledger.
everything important in the world lives and that's how it should work. So we feel a lot of conviction in that being the program experience we want to provide. And then so what we want to do is we put that we want to put the sharding inside the validator. We call this intra validator sharding so that when the network, when you want to add more throughput to the network, if you use one machine, you can get some amount of throughput#
But if later there's more demand, new customers come in or they find new ideas what to do with the blockchain, you just ask the valibator to add one or two more machines. You ask them to add more cores and then the throughput of the network and scale horizontally with that. So those are the two properties that we really, really care about. You need this horizontal scalability because we don't know what crypto can be at and a lot of what it can#
And we think is limited by infrastructure limitations that let you have tens or hundreds or even thousands of TPS, whereas what we really need is to be able to scale with whatever demand the our customers and the broader ecosystem is going to throw at us. But in scaling, it's very important that we don't break that atomic composability property. Black chain smart contract programming is hard.
enough and insecure enough as it is, you really want to continue to have this abstraction of having one global ledger to program against. So this is the problem that we are trying to solve, but we think no other folks are really trying to and the reason to build a new L1 and as you say a very crowded space.
I'm just so fascinated, you guys recently raised $300 million funding round, which is obviously huge, right? We regularly see big funding rounds going through, but 300 million is obviously enormous.
And as I understand it, it value the business at about 2 billion USD. That's obviously pretty big for a, you know, a product of a network that hasn't yet launched. Can you give us some sort of insight into, you know, why you were raising so much sort of where the capital is going to be going?
And I guess the valuation that you've got is, you know, as I know you're putting L1 and obviously that's potentially the backbone of like thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of apps, right? Just kind of curious like how do you sort of get your head around the fact that, you know, the company's already valid at two billion and yet the product isn't yet out there.
Yeah, so trying to think about it. I mean, so let me answer that in a couple of different ways. So one thing like I think we're not we're really focused on building the building the right platform and building the right team to do it and less focused on the valuation amount that's raised. I mean when you're building new I want it's definitely true that this is a capital intensive.
activity, you have to hire the best people, including world experts and fields where there's not very many experts. So they're very expensive, like cryptography, like systems, like databases, and cryptospecific subfields, like say, MEV. And so we really don't want to be constrained and building on our team. And so you need a well-capitalized company in order to do
that. Another thing too is you have to do lots of thorough testing hardware to spin up the test networks and to be trying out different configurations to build the ecosystem. You have to travel around to conferences and events and build out the developer community.
But this is a crowded space where other competitors are very well capitalized and so you have to do things on par with them. And so the really it's like it's less about the specific amount really just not being limited and having the resources we need to build out our team and to build out this platform. I mean, if it's if it's going to reach the
If it's going to reach the level of throughput that we want, if it's going to reach the level quality one and security we want, we really need to be competitive. And so we're really grateful for the folks that have funded us and the amount of faith that they've placed in us at such an early stage and that they're really glad with our vision and want to help us realize it.
You know, I mean, it's pretty impressive doing a fair market rate to raise that much money. There's obviously a huge amount of conviction in what you're doing. So yeah. Okay. Going back to the P2 suite, it's kind of curious, like, as you've said, you know, multiple times, right? It's a very competitive market.
So there's a number. Let me start with the one that you've probably heard the most about. If you've heard anything about Swayu, which is gaming, where we feel like this is a very natural fit for crypto and for blockchain. I mean, you have lots of gaming
They're revenue model and bread and butter is by selling digital assets. If you put these on a blockchain, you get access to a broader market. You get all sorts of compatibility advantages. There's transparency and social features that can be built in. So that's a very, very natural fit. In addition, there are new ways of doing creator monetization.
and both for games and for social media platforms and just for anything like many services on the internet where you really rely on a backbone of creators or users to deliver your content and you can come up with new ways to incentivize them to create good stuff to reward them for the things they do create and all things along these lines. Then of course like there's the area of commerce and payments
This is something that this is something where it's been talked about in black chains since the beginning, but I think really hasn't reached the phase where both transaction fees are low enough the capacity of the platforms are sufficient and I guess also fees are stable enough to really make this a reality. And then also that integration is easy enough so you can put this into ordinary products without requiring folks to
manage private keys or to hold their own crypto or to do all these things that can be quite difficult. So that's sort of the broad view, but to jump back to gaming for a second because I think when you talk to other platforms, like a lot of folks are talking about gaming and crypto. And so I want to go a little bit into what we think makes we uniquely suitable here. So for game developers, you know,
They focus on creating an engaging game. They don't want to become smart contract developers. They don't want to become experts in airline blockchain. And they really don't want to have to deal with exploits or the security issues that you have to worry about as a normal smart contract developer. So one thing we're very focused on is taking move and then shaping move, move itself or like the dialogue
We use called swing move and the tooling around it to really make it palatable to game developers to make it look like the program experience they're familiar with in their front end and back end code so that they don't have to go through the pain of becoming a smart contract developer. And so there are things like as a game developer, everything is the scene hierarchy where it's like a hierarchy.
of objects like here's the map and then their children of the map that are the characters on the map and then the inventory of those characters or maybe children of each of the characters. And then so in Sweet Move we have everything object-centric. It's a familiar programming paradigm to developers and you can lay things out in this way and express ownership and connection hierarchy.
And then on top of that, we have APIs and SDK layers and then third party services that are going to integrate into game engines that folks build on and then just make it really, really easy to put as much or as little of the game.
I think of gaming as one where this is going to be the path where you see lots and lots of new users coming into crypto. Gaming is a huge, global industry. There's a lot of product market fit and we really think infrastructure issues have been holding gaming, back from entering. I think there's a lot of validation of that from our early partners who are super excited about building on Sweden for about some of the limitations.
we're going to remove for them. Makes sense, makes sense. And I agree, right, there's a really, there's a really huge opportunity, but nobody's really like nailed it. And I think it'll be interesting to see the next six, 18 to 24 months, probably onwards. But just just just going back to Sway for a bit, right? So we talked about the move
language and the language vera that you guys have and the fact that you know you were actually one of the core folks who arptated the language. Can you explain sort of, I guess, in relatively high-limit terms, right? What is so a revolutionary about move and how do you think it could
really sort of changed the game in terms of getting more talent to build. We went through apps and services, I know right now it's a bit tricky. The developers who are already out there building, I guess, non-cryptoproducts, right? There's a bit of a learning curve for them to go
to adjust to build blockchain based products. What does that move off is? I guess you'll be aware of the move off is that isn't sort of out there right now. Yeah, absolutely. Let me start with a broader problem and then I'll back into how move is addressing that and then also putting some of the other issues you mentioned, which is I really think that some are contrary
security is an existential threat to broader crypto adoption. I mean, you sort of look at the frequency of smart contract hacks today. Like if you go to my favorite website, rik.news, it's there in the top 10, there's many, many of these hacks that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. These things are a fairly routine occurrence. They happen more or less every week. And when we talk to partners, we talk to builders, especially folks#
Not crypto native or looking at getting into space. This is one of their biggest reasons for sitting on the sidelines. If you have these folks who in many cases have worked on blockchains for years, or security experts, or smart contract experts, and they're still writing this code that can get hacked for hundreds of millions of dollars, what hope is there for the average mainstream developer to be able to do this and to do it safely?
So, if there's already a problem with this, future developers who are less concerned with the crypto-specific things, like, are going to have an even harder time. And so, I think, like, if we stick with the languages we have today and the tooling we have today, it's going to be really hard to grow the developer ecosystem safely in a sustainable way. And so, with Move, we've
the language as I was explaining earlier, we took a very careful look about where these vulnerabilities tend to come from and how we can take as many of them as possible off the table at the language level. So to give a specific example, like the re-entrancesy, which is one of the big issues, and the EVM that led to the famous hacks like the Dow hack, basically the problem here is that
You allow an attacker, the language gives you a primitive that allows an attacker to inject arbitrary code in a limited way, but still arbitrary code into code that's managing money. And that's just really, really hard. It's just really, really hard to write safe code when that primitive exists in a language. And so in move, we've taken out all the forms of dynamism that allow you to do this sort of thing.
Every time you call a function, you can tell without even running, you can tell upfront exactly what code that's going to call. And so you never get surprised about something happening after the fact via some code injected by an attacker they didn't expect. And then beyond that, another one of the big problems we saw is that these smart contracts are very specialized. Basically, all they do is they
have some assets that come in as inputs, then they're going to do access control checks on the assets. They're going to write the assets, they're going to transfer them, they're going to read them, and they really don't do anything else. You're not going to be writing a compiler using these languages. You're not doing network IO, you're not talking to databases. It's a very specialized set of tasks that you're doing. And so you#
the radio vocabulary for programmers to be able to express this sort of thing. In a move we've done that by providing a type system that lets you talk about specifically assets. Assets are kind of funky because they have these inherent scarcity properties, you know, things like they can't be created from out of nowhere. You should not accidentally drop them on the floor. You shouldn't be able to copy them.
Whereas in a normal language, like there are copies everywhere when I say something like what x equals seven, let x equals y, like I'm copying y. And so we provide a nice abstraction of a kind of value that has these built in asset protections and that you get it at the type system levels so that you find out right away when you're writing your code that you're trying to do an asset relevant mistake, like trying to copy it.
And then because you have this nice abstraction for assets, you can say what you're trying to say is a smart contract programmer much more directly. If what your code is supposed to be doing is taking an asset as input and then transferring it, then your code will look like that. Whereas if you're writing on the EVM or another platform where the data model is more indirect,
to like that will look like reading an account, changing an entry and a hash table and then changing another entry and a hash table. And it's we move really take this to the limit by taking the the object centric features of move and then pushing it out into the data model of suite itself so you can see transactions specify what objects are going to operate on and then the code you
right is a developer just you you have an entry function that takes typed arguments as input and then you just do these tasks that I mentioned mutate mutating transferring reading etc. And then we put the the ownership metadata into the objects themselves so that the runtime takes care of it for you and you it's much harder to forget things like missing authentication checks.
And then putting this in the data model also means that things like wallets or explorers can understand transactions much better. Your wallet can say, hey, this transaction wants permission to use these objects. And so it's hard to get scammed by a transaction that does something unexpected because you have to explicitly ask for permissions of I want to touch this NFT or spend these coins and what I want to do is transfer them versus read them versus write them.
So basically, I would say that to summarize at a high level, I would say that the thing that move is doing differently is it's really security focused and folks know how important that is, especially for broader adoption. And then we've given folks the vocabulary to say the things they're always trying to say in a much more convenient way. And I think that's why they're we're seeing a lot of interest around move in Sweden and the broader ecosystem developers just fielded#
This is a language that was designed for me and for the specific task that I haven't had, which is indeed the case. Got it, got it, thanks for that. So one thing that we know from the outside at least, right, is Sweet Adopt's dual consensus, right, which I think as I understand it, you guys have adopted that.
to help speed up transaction speed, to get to speed to be much higher than other chains would be. Is there any concern that that approach brings additional complexity? Because it means that the developers have to maintain two different
for consensus mechanisms at the same time. Yeah, this is a good question. Let me explain the dual mechanism a bit more than I'll answer the specific question about complexity. So the way this works is I talked a little bit about this fast pay work that George and other folks worked on at Facebook. So the observation of that work is that not
So, I think that's not all computations are created equal. Some computations fundamentally require ordering. If you and I are bidding in an auction or trying to do trades on a deck, then you need full consensus to establish an ordering between those transactions. And so we can decide who goes first and who goes second. But there are other class of computations that don't that are fundamentally commutative. Things like payments, they actually commute.
payment to someone you're sending a payment to someone else. There's no reason that the system has to order these things. They can happen independently in a parallel. And so what FastPaid did was figure out for certain class, well, for that specifically, for payments specifically there, how do we make things as fast as possible by actually avoiding full consensus? And this is where the speed up you were describing.
And when we built suite what we did is we took that class of computations and include payments and we basically generalize it to arbitrary move programs that don't require ordering those can go through this faster path the week this busy need system broadcast fast path. It has a little latency and it doesn't require full consensus. Then for transactions that do require ordering.
goes to this other path where it goes through consensus, it gets assigned a version with respect to other transactions touching the same object and then you just sort of do the normal thing. And so that does sound more complex, but the way we've set up the system is that every every transaction goes through this Byzantine consistent broadcast path, just the way it works is that you start out basically
From a user perspective, you never have to worry about this. You send your transaction at the same place. You do the, there's a full node that takes care of doing the broadcast bit so that the validators get it. And then when the validator gets the transaction, they can look at it and figure out, is this something that I can commit immediately using the fast path and get that lower latency, or is this something that needs sequence thing that I'm going#
to consensus. So because we've designed a system in such a way that when the fast path to consensus is always a precursor to the ordinary path, it's not really more complex to maintain and that there are two different parts of the pipeline and one part of the pipeline always gets hit and sometimes you can skip the second one and sometimes you can't.
Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for just taking a quick pause here and just to say that if you just joined us, this is our second in a series of AMAs with L1s. We're talking to Simon who's a CEO of Mr. Labs. Mr. Labs is running the SWE L1, which
is about to launch soon. The company just raised $300 million and it's pretty weather most exciting in the space at the moment. This is part of a series that we've done with Pritzah.com based around the research papers that we are launching at the moment. So, Kritzah.com/research, there's weekly updates
there's an update on a weekly basis, sorry, and at the end of August, being there a set time of a week was so launched, a very in-depth paper on L1s. So if you're a little bit behind on L1s or you want to know what's going on, it's an ever-changing space. I'm going to put it to the com/research and check out the paper at
other stuff that we do. Okay, just a quick change in that direction here Sam. Obviously you guys aren't the only project that came out of Facebook right? AppTos is another L1 that's out there that's also been raising capital and I guess it's own version of
to move language that came out of Facebook. I know that as you've explained, there is some difference in the sort of flavor of new that you guys have built. And I'm sure you get this question a whole lot, right? So I'm kind of just kind of curious, like can you explain the difference between what you guys are doing with Sweetie and also Atos?
Yeah, so let me answer the broader question first and then I'll talk a little bit about the specific move flavored difference. So this goes back a little bit to the origin story of Mr. and Sweet where you know my co-founder is and I we and many of folks at Mr. and actually we all worked on DM. We like we can trade a lot of parts of the system. We really understand what it's
designed to do and what it does well and what it doesn't. And same with Optus folks, many folks that worked on Dm, they're building a Dm-based system, they understand things very well. And so when we launched, a missing came out a little bit before Optus, this was sort of like fall 2021. I think Optus is more like early in 2022. You know, we knew we wanted to build an L1
And of course, like we know DM very well. And we thought about building based on it. And the reason we decided not to do that is sort of this thing I described before where a lot of my co-founders on this research team where we had these ideas about how to do things very differently, like normal tasks or these fast pay ideas that are very, very different from DM that
You could imagine this data model where you have transactions as objects where you can imagine trying to take DM and shift it around and add these things. But of course we thought about that while doing the research and we had an idea of how difficult that would be. And particularly with DM, as I was saying, the start off of this very grand vision,
And then later on, like it's specialized pragmatically. This is not a criticism of them because they were just trying to launch a product and a payment product. And that's what they were doing is specialized towards this niche of what's built a compliant black chain based payments network and you know made decisions or based on that things like well, you know, the most payments will happen off chain for privacy.
we don't have to worry about scaling through put at the base layer as much because that will happen inside the wallets or the only state we're going to allow on chain or user accounts and balances and some compliance info. So we don't have to worry about storing lots and lots of data. We can have a valid data that has a big disk and we don't have to worry about filling it up or we'll worry about that later when Dan becomes
very successful and we'll be able to make it scale. And so we looked at both the combination of those sort of engineering decisions, that are pragmatic engineering decisions that have been made, and the new theory that we had done, and we decided, you know, if you really want this black chain that has horizontal scale ability built in as a core principle, you need to start from scratch on the new data model and you need to think about how to incorporate these technology is like#
and the fast pay, a disney system broadcast, and really just start from refresh rate. And so that's why we decided to take this particular path. And I think like APTOs, they're taking a mature system that's been built over many years and trying to take that to market. And that's also a very valid path.
They're optimizing for different things, but I think like these are both great projects and both move powered projects as well. Now to focus in on move specifically. So move was designed as a platform agnostic language. So the app does uses it. Sweet is that it's also in two other black chance called starcoin and oh well, and I expect you'll see many other move power chains in the future.
And so when you integrate and move into a blockchain, you have a lot of leeway and customizing it for the particular features of your blockchain, your transaction format, the way you set up your storage, the way you set up your account model and coins and all of these sorts of things. And so we had had experience of doing that one way in DM and we sort of learned
And what worked well and what didn't and did it and took the good parts and tried some different things when we integrated into sweet. So specifically the thing we've done different there is I talked about being object centric. And DM the data model was set up in a way that made it makes it hard for objects to flow across accounts. If you want to, if you're an account and you want to receive an object
of our particular type, you have to opt in to receiving that first. This was done for capital controls and sort of compliance reasons, whereas we think in a premise L1, you should be able to send objects to any address and just let things flow around freely without having to opt in first. And another one is a lot of the DM integration was designed for NFTs became very popular and so we thought
It's okay for an account to have at most one value of a given type like you have one USD balance you have one You have one GBP balance like why would you want to have more than one of those things both NFTs and with other kinds of tokens that have come out later You want to be able to have as many kinds of tokens of the same type as you want at a given address and so
So in Sway we use a different data model that allows you to do that. We key objects by their ID instead of by these type address pairs and that makes it much easier to express lots of things that we think people want to do with NFTs and with games. And then finally, this is maybe getting a bit into the weeds, but we think it's important for something like a game that
has some permissionless mods or extensibility, you don't want to specify exactly the structure of what a game object or a player will look like or what the inventory will be. Maybe when you start off with you have a hero and they're going to have a sword and shield, but later someone's going to want to add a shirt and pants and the initial designer didn't anticipate that. And so we put a lot of features
and to swing move and make it easy to have heterogeneous collections, collections of objects of different types that look like they're all kind of the same thing and that can be added to later instead of fixed up front. And we think that's going to be especially important for a lot of the opportunities with blockchain gaming where the cool thing you can do is collaborate with other games or cross-promotion
with brands or other things where you sort of want to allow this mixing and matching without too much upfront planning. So that's the high low answer both at the tech perspective what's different, what's different and then specifically what we're doing differently with move. Makes sense. Thanks so much, Sam. It's always great. This is one thing I love about the crypto spaces. I think in
two people don't talk about other products or competition. Everybody keeps in their lane and does their thing. I just love the openness of the industry here. There's lots of friends across different places and lots of tech. I think the bar is always being raised, which is obviously
awesome. And then you've got into a lot of detail on the tech. Thanks so much for that. I think that's super insightful. Just kind of curious on this sort of the go to market plan that you've got because obviously having great tech is all when I'm good, but people have got to actually be using that tech and taking the
languages that you built and put them into work. So, just kind of curious at the moment, I know you guys have been sort of very much heads down working on the layer work on the technical side. Do you have any information for us in terms of the grounds
or other sort of community and develop the programs that you guys are working on. When do you think that we can start to see Dev's actually taking the take that you guys have built and putting it into action? Yeah, great question. So we are seeing this. We've had a DevNet Live since April and even from the first day we've
put it out there. We saw folks start to build on it. I think we've seen a steady acceleration in that activity over time. So with developers, we pursue a two-prong strategy. We look for a big part, we look for official partners who we have a very tight relationship with them and they have ideas for a big app or use case of the way we launch on Sway and then also we care lots about third party
developers, of course, like supporting them via grants programs, helping them on our Discord or IntelliGram groups to learn what you can do with Sweeney and with Move and how to implement various things and what the differences are with existing programming platforms. We're working on the point where we're going to be able to do grants. I think you'll see details
I was about that coming out later this month or shortly after. But this is clearly an incredibly important part of building an ecosystem beyond the partnerships part, which is something that we focused on a lot early on. Something else I want to highlight here is a lot of this is move is a new language and it's
And so they're like we have outreach both toward teaching existing smart contract developers about move and what I can do for them and getting them excited about it. And then for folks who are just excited about building private services,
and don't care as much about using a better language or better tech, you know, just make it as a sort of describing before with how we're catered to game developers just make this convenient make it easy look like what they're used to so they can focus on building. And so these are all these are all what we're doing in terms of developer acquisition. Like this is the primary thing that we care about. Like this is a suite as a developer platform.#
our customers are developers, I think we do well to the extent that we make it the best platform to build on the most fun and most productive platform to build on and the other things are our details that are going to matter less to product builders and so we're very very focused on that and we'll be even more focused going forward. I use single interest in US,
given that the sort of connections that you guys have having with Facebook or is Asia a big sort of era of focus for you. And also are you seeing like sort of smaller developers like the indie folks or are there sort of corporate? It's just kind of curious on sort of who's adopting the tech at this point. And also
way you see that one going. Yeah, absolutely. There's a mix. So definitely Asia is a big focus for us. We've done a lot of events and I'm very excited to develop our community in Korea. Of course, like, as you said, like we're from Facebook and we're US based. Like we have a lot of interested folks here. We have a big community and
and various parts of Europe, like specifically Turkey, I think there's like tons of folks coming out of the woodwork, which is interesting. And so, yeah, I think it's just a big mix. And a lot of times too, like, you don't, sometimes there are local events, and sometimes it's just folks hopping into your discord or onto your GitHub, and you don't know where they're from, and it kind of doesn't matter. You#
So I think I wouldn't say there are any particular trends here other than that we're very Asia focused and have like this especially large interest in Korea, but we really think like this global platform and we want to bring in folks from all across the spectrum and we'll need all of them because the some of these products will be localized and you know there's talent everywhere in the world.
Okay, make sense. Got it. So the previous chat that we did was with Kronos, which is it is EVM and Cosmos Compatible Chain. I'm just curious, like obviously you guys have built something that's very different to what's out there.
But if anything at this moment is your plan in terms of making sweet, like, interoperable with other, other at one change out there? Yeah, absolutely. We feel that this is virtually important. Like, so one big part of this is, of course, bridge strategy, like, you need bridges to bring over liquidity from other chance to bring over
to allow interesting use cases on suite to flow elsewhere. So there we're taking a partnership's focus strategy where we're working with wormhole, we're working with Axelar, these are two top bridges that connect to basically any chain you can think of where their substantial activity. And we've selected them because the bridge security is obviously an
And we really pick partners based on who has a bridge with a lot of connections and who really has a strong strategy for securing the bridge because if it's not like this is the biggest one of the biggest threats for the security of the ecosystem, particularly because it's not just about swibeying security, but if you're connected to another if you're connected to another chain where there's a half of the network.
there's something else that's going on. There can be contagion, the results. So we really care about both our side of the integration and the bridge having a good story for being able to to contain that sort of thing if it happens elsewhere. And so that's the most obvious part of it. I think like bridges to let to basically get hooked up to the rest of the great stuff that's out there and let assets flow freely back and forth. But then also#
like having, having NFT standards and token standards that leverage some of the new features of sweet and of move, but also like that you can implement old standards as some sets of those so that when you do port over your assets and say and your C721 compatible NFT like that, that will still work. But then you can maybe enhance it with some sweet specific features or leverage
our standard. So we think about this both from the bridging perspective and from the standards perspective. And then also of course just in getting to know other one founders and technical folks that are ones learning from their experiences and taking some of their expertise on how to do ecosystem design and various tech things. As you were mentioning before, like those
The thing is great about the space is people talk about their competitors because their competitors are their friends that ethos is collaborative and I think we're the feeling in the air is that we the the right the thing that benefits everyone is to grow the pie. It's not it's not a cutthroat or zero in some games. So I really love that about it and that interoperability like interoperability is something that people ask
and even demand rather than like how do you wall yourself off from other chans and build a wall garden. I love that we do the opposite of that here. Yeah, absolutely. Very cool space. And actually speaking of other ones, obviously the big Ethereum merge is coming up very soon. I mean it's mad.
It's been on the front page of the FT. Google's got a countdown down. Obviously it's an event that's been probably four or five years in a making. I remember talking to the Ethereum Foundation back in 2016-2017 when they were planning on this kind of stuff. It's taken a long time.
time to get here, it's being touted as potentially making the Ethereum chain more scalable, certainly more environmentally friendly, very much changing the way that Ethereum is working. Obviously it's a massive topic at the moment. Just curious, does
the merge have any impact on Sweden in any kind of way in terms of how you're building the chain to be interoperable and also as a second due to that, what sort of takeaways do you take from it in terms of how the industry is changing in terms of how L1s are also changing to
Yeah, great sort of questions. I mean, let me first bike preliminarily congratulating e-throkes on the merge, which my countdown says it'll be about five hours from now. Exactly. I mean, the vision that it takes like, he has been trying to talk him out transitioning to proof of stakes, since I think maybe 2014 or so. And like the vision, both that this is the right line.
long-term path instead of proof work, which is not like everyone agrees, I think, overwhelmingly now, but it was not all clear at the time. And then the care that it takes to move over a platform that has billions of dollars in assets and like tons of users and is security critical and to set out a plan for a stage rollout and to test things very carefully and to do it.
is just an enormous undertaking from both an engineering and a community perspective. So hats off to them. So I think this doesn't impact the sweet community very directly like the our bridge operators of course will have to deal with this but for sweet directly it's not as much. In terms of takeaways I think there are a lot of things I
So one thing is that it's really hard to make these big changes once you've already launched and particularly once you get popular like you know this 2014 to 2022 gap and to me that says to me that you know we were looking at that back when we decided to to go with Sweden where if you're going to make big changes
If you're going to try, if you're going to do something disruptive, you really want to have that baked in from the beginning. Like if you have a plan like course all scalability, you don't want to bolt that onto an existing platform. You have to design from these sorts of things from the ground up. And so the really like Wigandis has been a big influence in our decision to start from scratch and our artists
to take our time and really like try to plan for these eventualities from a tech perspective just because you see how much time it takes, how much time it takes to do this after you launch, you know, if it maybe takes two months or three months to design something and to implement it and to roll it out now. It's more on the order of years if you do it later. So we think a lot about taking the
absolute best things we know about and trying to get things right the first time and just anticipate what a future blockchain that is world scale and consumer prize and enterprise grade will need from a tech perspective and just making sure we do the best we can to support that from the beginning or have the hooks that we need to add this feature without being too disruptive later.
Yeah, I think that makes absolutely sense. It's like, I guess the influence will go far and wide even if technically, as you say, the folks that are bridging or the technical side is going to be carbon. And hopefully it goes off without a hitch. It's super interesting. It's just happening in this period.
right where I guess the market in terms of you know prices and everything else is it has kind of is a little bit lower than it's been previously to say the least right interesting that such a huge event is sort of upon us now so so hopefully all this well okay well I think we've got a little bit over time Sam but you know
Thanks so much for the insight that you've given. Is there any final word that you want to leave the audience with? I know you've got into the technical side of how Sweetworks, how you guys went from being this project inside Facebook to being your own style
company, how you raised the money that you raised and how you plan to go out there and get developers to actually build, but is there anything else that you wanted to add before we get back to it? I just want to add a call to action for listeners who are curious about Swee, but haven't checked it out yet, especially for developers and builders. We'd love to talk to you and to help you take a look.
and to get your feedback on what we're doing. Just want to share a couple of different avenues for doing that. So you can jump into our discord. If you go to sweet.io or docs.sweet.io, you'll find all the documents about sweet and links to these various things. There's our GitHub, there's Telegram groups so we can add you to that.
to you can follow us on Twitter, really like developers are gonna make this platform succeed or fail and we're just really eager for folks to try things out to see the cool stuff we build and to help us make it even better. I really appreciate you hosting me and giving me the chance to talk to your fantastic audience about what we're doing. It's William Eston.
No worries, real pleasure. And just final plug for me. As I mentioned, this is the second in five auditors that we're doing on Twitter spaces with L1TAC. This is in conjunction with putter.com's research arm which delivered
a very comprehensive and deep research report on layer ones at the end of August and if you get a put to calm/research you can check that out and there's updates every week so if you're in a good space and you want to know what's going on and you're overwhelmed by the
information that's out there and trust me, we all fill that way and do check out the site and there's plenty more stuff that's going to be coming. Sam, again, thank you so much for the insights, like real alpha stuff that you've dropped here. Congrats on the round and good luck bringing the product to market looking forward to seeing what you guys are going to get up to.
Thank you so much, John. I really appreciate the thoughtful questions and enjoy the conversation. Have a great morning. Awesome. Take care and see you soon. And for the audience, come back next week. We'll have another layer one interview which we're looking forward to. All right. Thanks again, Sam. See you soon. Take care.