Hello, hello, everybody. Hey, guys. How's it going? Good. How's it going, everybody?
I think just us two right now. Oh, I see there's some listeners already, actually. I have no
idea how Twitter Spaces works, so this will be interesting.
A couple listeners, a couple loyal listeners. Hey, everybody. I see you, Nathan. I see you,
Yeah, we're just a minute before the hour, so the other guests will be joining in just
a minute, and it'll just be you guys up on stage and everybody else listening.
Sounds great. Excited for it. I like everyone here is very timely. I like that.
I see you've got a mirror now. Okay, we've got union. That's good. Beautiful.
All right. I think we have everybody that we need here, so I think we're ready to go,
which is great. Thank you, everyone, for coming. We're excited to have the official Twitter
Spaces for the Kanto and Union partnership, which I'm sure you all saw announced. We're
very excited about this. The format for the Spaces will essentially just be a couple
of questions. I'll be playing the role of MC, and then we'll obviously go over some benefits
of the partnership, all that kind of stuff, and then at the end, we'll kind of do an open
Q&A if we have time and hopefully take a few questions. Yeah, and we'll do some introductions
as well, so I'm contributing to the BD and partnerships team here at Kanto, so great
to meet you all, and we're super excited about this partnership. At a really high
level, Union is an interoperability layer, uses a consensus verification to create decentralized
connections, and enables anyone to transfer assets and data, and so this provides kind
of further interoperability optionality for Kanto users and ideally enhance liquidity
and users activity, all that kind of stuff, and really just more assets across the ecosystem.
A lot of synergies we'll get into, but I'll let TK and then Amir and Kilo do a quick intro.
Yeah, thanks, Evan. I'm TK, I'm the co-founder of Plex Labs. We are one of the core dev teams
that kind of works on Kanto. We work on a variety of different things across the Kanto ecosystem,
so mainly focused on like the core client itself, and also we build a bunch of the apps
that you guys can enjoy on Kanto as well, so that's pretty much it for me.
Hey, this is Amir from Union, head of strategy and partnerships. Union, as you all know,
is a fully trustless interoperability protocol for general message passing and asset transfers.
Our flagship is Ethereum to IPC connection, so working with Kanto, being an EVM-enabled app chain
is definitely a check on our list, so very excited for it. I'm also joined with Carol,
who's our CEO today, so we're happy to take any questions from the community.
Yeah, hey guys, happy to be here. I'm Carol, Union's founder and background development as well,
mainly systems engineering dash should both start at the moments.
I love that. That's a great combo. Thank you everybody for the quick introduction.
With that being said, we can get into questions, so we'll start with this one. How does Kanto
plan to differentiate itself from other EVM-compatible L1s by using a free-to-use model
or free public infrastructure, and maybe just a little more context and history around the
long-term vision of Kanto would be a good starting point. Yeah, absolutely, that's a good question.
One of the core ideals of Kanto is this idea of free public infrastructure,
and that's basically like the idea is that DeFi primitives, that
every ecosystem kind of needs to thrive on, should be free and accessible to everyone, and they should
be kind of like owned by the actual ecosystem itself, rather than being owned externally or
having other people who may have different incentives running those. I think the analogy
that makes the most sense is if you think about blockchain ecosystems as cities,
world-class cities have things like free public transportation. Sorry, not free, but public
transportation, and that makes a lot of sense for the city to own those, because
it's very important that those things are run in a way that is not profit maximizing, but rather
kind of maximizing for the efficiency of the city itself. Kanto kind of takes the same approach
to these core DeFi primitives, like DEXs, for example. We have the Kanto DEX, which is
fully protocol owned. There's no fees. All of the liquidity is incentivized by Kanto itself,
and we also have things like Note, which is our unit of account that's packed to one dollar.
To borrow Note, and basically you can take any of the accepted collaterals. Right now,
those are like RWAs and also stablecoins like USDC and USDT, and you can mint Note against that.
There's no delta between the minting rate or the rate that the lenders get and the rate that
people who are borrowing it get. That means that we're not taking any kind of fees.
It's completely fearless, and these kind of things, we believe, are very important
for the health and the growth of an overall ecosystem, not only for just the users using it,
but also for protocols that may build on top of Kanto. Them having access to these kinds of
primitives we think is very beneficial, and we've kind of proven that model out over the
past couple of years. There's many protocols that are built on top of Kanto right now,
which directly integrate all of the free public infrastructure that exists. A great example would
be something like Cadence, who is a pretty new protocol that launched on Kanto maybe about
a month ago. It's a perps protocol, and they're kind of using the same ethos as we are. They're
not taking any fees, rather they're using things like Note, which has an interest rate
that you can kind of get for holding it, paying that back to the users,
and kind of supercharging their liquidity in ways like that. That's kind of the idea of
FPI, and I think long term, we really want to focus on sort of making our free public infrastructure
even better. We have a lot of things in the pipeline planned to kind of add to that
lineup that we already have. The way that we kind of view it is that
basically it ensures that none of these primitives can ever
become rent seeking in a way. If you look at other ecosystems, for example, they'll usually have
one really big DEX that kind of acts as almost a monopoly in some ways. There's always the
possibility that they may start extracting fees or that they may do something which is not
necessarily super aligned with the overall ecosystem. We just want to ensure that that
never happens on Kanto. That's sort of the grand vision of FPI and Kanto in general.
Perfect. Thank you for the description, TK. It's a little dated at this point,
but there's a very good explanation of everything that TK just said on the Mission DeFi podcast
with Scott Lewis around a year and some change ago. If you want to dig more on that, there's
plenty of content, and that still holds up pretty well. Perfect. Okay. Then maybe it would be good
to hear kind of more around the vision of Union as a whole, Carol, from you as well as
maybe why you decided to partner with Kanto as well.
Yeah, of course. See, we founded Union about a year ago with kind of a contrarian position,
to be honest, which is that as it stands right now, the whole modular slash horizontally
scalable future for crypto isn't really going to work out. That is because right now creating a
cohesive product out of third-party protocols, let's say DEX or landing protocol in Ethereum
is very easy in the modular stack or horizontal stack extremely hard. If you look at, for example,
Quasar, right, doing a DEX aggregates or has a massive tech lift to do so. And really,
as it stands right now, we probably won't be able to outcompete Solana or Ethereum even and have
as big an ecosystem. We see L2s and app chains build out their whole entire ecosystem, right, and
kind of be isolationist, but we don't really see people doing what DYDX did. I'm sure DYDX has
the resources to take their smart contacts and build their own state machine, but the next 10,000
builders don't. We believe that the reason for this is the interrupt stack itself, where if
you work with current bridge protocols, you basically need to ask them for permission to interrupt,
right? You need to be supported by them. You need to have enough traction and enough funding,
and you can't really integrate yourself with this stack, as well as interrupt, to be honest,
just being too slow to make all of this work right now. If you look at Ethereum,
basically, users are used to a 12-second feedback cycle, maybe 24, right? You wait
one or two blocks, and then you're pretty sure that your transaction is landed.
And so as long as bridging an interrupt takes 20 minutes, 30 minutes, you won't be able to do your
own app chain that has just a single product on top of it. And so we found a union really with
the idea of solving this problem. On top of that, and this is more personal thing for me,
I kind of think that within crypto, we have lost track a little bit on why we are building
on chains itself. In the end, it's like we're looking to build financial infrastructure
that is nation-state resilient, right? Where we're looking to have a world where code is law,
and really, anyone is able to transact, no matter what country you're from,
no matter where you're incorporated, etc. Now we've done this for blockchains themselves,
right? We spent all of 2017, 2018 in search in the old L1 boom, proving that a new consensus
type is secure, that it is censorship resistant, that it has life in this search. And then what
did we proceed to do afterwards? We decided to connect all of these L1s with centralized bridges.
And basically, we created a way for hackers to start attacking these systems we built,
but also for basically regulators to stop what we already set out to build with crypto.
Now, for us to truly overtake finance, and make sure that we do create this world where
everyone is banked, everyone has access to all of these assets, we do need an intro player
that supports this. And so that's kind of the second pillar of what we built with union.
Now, what we like about Kenzo, and what we like about builders in general, is alignment with
this vision, right? Do you support a world where anyone can build whatever they want,
interact with the protocol they want, where they have access to any type of finance? And so
that's what we love seeing and love supporting.
All said, I appreciate that. We've definitely always been very crypto native aligned. So I think
I think we've shared that vision from the beginning, even when separate. So awesome. I think a good
question maybe for TK is more on going off of the interoperability kind of ethos, like more on
the role of interoperability in Kenzo's mission, and in more accessibility for users.
Yeah, I mean, I think like, interoperability is such a huge thing going forward. Like,
I feel like every single month, we see like new chains launching, like,
whether it's like an app chain, or like a generalized L1. In order for like these things
to like not feel fragmented, you need to have really good interoperability. And I think that's
like the role that union fits. And I think that's one reason why we're so excited to partner with
them. It's always good to have like extra options, because it's just giving your developers
more sort of optionality to build the things that they want to build. And kind of like going back to
what I was talking about originally, we have all of like this free public infrastructure. There's
like no reason that only people building on the Kanto ecosystem should have access to those,
like with interoperability, like people who are building apps on other ecosystems can also
have access to like these products that exist on Kanto. And so that's why like we're always looking
for basically different types of solutions that can like increase the interoperability from like
external ecosystems into Kanto and vice versa. Because as a whole, it'll just make I think the
entire crypto ecosystem in general just more robust and more unified, less fragmented.
Completely. And I think in that vein, TK, maybe it makes sense to discuss a little more like
which ecosystems Kanto plans to attract liquidity from, and maybe what synergies or overlaps we
have with other projects in this partnership. I mean, it's really like really anyone who
wants to really, I would say there's not like a specific ecosystem that we're like targeting,
but it's just that like having that accessibility kind of opens it up, right? And so with Union
specifically, like being, I would say, like IBC enabled and stuff like that, it'll increase
the interoperability with Kanto from maybe other Cosmos ecosystem chains, which is like a really
big value add in my opinion, in addition to, you know, other major ecosystems, L2s that exist,
L1s that exist. Yeah, to answer your question, I don't think there's like one that we're like
one that we're like specifically targeting per se, I would say like the more the merrier, right?
Always, always. No, that's great. I appreciate it. And then conversely, this would be better for you,
Carol, but what, you know, what are some of the maybe possibilities of the partnership in the near
to medium term given maybe what the next three, six, nine months look like on Union's roadmap?
You know, what does that look like for you all? And I'm curious from your perspective,
how that could impact the partnership here.
Yeah, so what I'm excited to seeing is a more assets flowing into Kanto, right? I still think
especially the states that we're at right now with web three, that to be honest, for interoperability
as a transverse are the biggest use case right now. What I would love seeing more, to be honest,
is basically change, no longer just relying on the DeFi applications on their chain specifically,
but calling out to applications on other chains. So for example, making use of the public good
lending markets, for example, to take out cost chain loans, to basically interact with protocols,
which are better than what you locally have, and especially for the different L2s. I think
that's going to be one of the best use cases, because in the end, we should be building more
app specific L2s and app chains instead of reinventing the wheel every single time and
fighting over fragmented liquidity.
Yeah, just to add to that, we're always integrating with a lot of chains, right? We have a BD pipeline
and such, and the inflow of those native assets into Kanto will definitely generate more use cases
for users to play with DeFi primitives that is free, and to be clear, more democratized,
right? What you guys are doing is a public good, enabling people to play with text on a free level.
That's a huge value add. So along the lines of those decentralization and giving your users
multiple options for interoperability, it feels really important for us too.
Yeah, I completely agree, a very, very cosmos ethos, but there's absolutely a snowball effect
that occurs here, the more chains you all add, and the more assets on Kanto, I mean,
everybody wins, right? So TK, can you talk us through some of the exciting plans we have for
RWAs are hot right now for Note, and then RWAs as a whole. I know that Cadence obviously had some
pretty exciting news recently, so we'd love to hear from you there.
Yeah, absolutely. So RWAs, I would say, power a pretty major part of the Kanto ecosystem,
especially through Note. And we have right now four native issuers who can issue tokenized
assets on Kanto. And then if we're able to make the interoperability experience really good,
there's no reason why those assets would only have to exist on Kanto. So other ecosystems
can tap into our RWA stack and use those in ways that they see fit. Actually, right now,
we're finishing up audits for a protocol called application-specific dollars.
It's actually a cross-chain app that allows users to basically deposit stablecoins into
a vault that is backed by C note and gain yield. And the idea is that protocols can integrate this
and maybe any stablecoins that they have lying around in their liquidity pools, they could put
into ASD and generate yield and revenue from that. And so that's just an example of what becomes
possible with interoperability. And I think going off of Amir's point, asset transfer is
really sort of interesting when it comes to RWAs, but also union has general message passing as well.
And I think that is like a really interesting design space because it allows you to do things
that are like slightly more complex. Maybe you want to call on some function on a contract that
exists on Kanto. You could do that with general message passing. And that's really, I think,
cool, the synergy that exists with that. And our current RWA stack is very cool because
this is something that currently just exists in my head. But you could very easily build
a protocol or an app chain, very easily build an integration into Kanto's RWA stack to get yield
from some of our RWAs or from note or C note using something like union not build. And so
I think that design space has been not explored very much. We're just beginning to kind of
understand what is possible. And having, I think, partners like union really kind of
expands that side space even further and opens up the possibilities to developers
in terms of what they can do, what they can provide to their users. And yeah, that's, I think,
something that I'm super excited for. And one of the reasons that I'm excited about this
partnership in particular. Yeah, well said. I completely agree on the general messaging format.
And I think the more that we can dive into that, the better. So I'd love to ask the union team,
if there's anything in particular that they are really excited about that's coming up on their
roadmap or kind of what the near to medium term looks like for them, would love to kind of give
them the floor for a second to discuss that.
Yeah, so some of the exciting stuff that's in our pipeline. We slowly are enshrining ourselves
within the modular stack, right, to be that intro provider. So talking to seeing all these DA layers
at specific DA layers pop up, it's really exciting to see. Because at the end of the day,
without interoperability, modularity will fail. So we want to kind of make asynchronous
composability the norm within the interoperability space. And while doing so, obviously, we want to
do it in the most trustless fashion possible. We've seen many bridge hacks and many, many
issues with bridges in the past couple of years. We really want to kind of bring the spotlight to
decentralize interoperability and tell them that, you know, look, if you use union,
your funds won't depend on multi-sigs or third parties to be transferred and such. So
we think that there's going to be this new wave of spotlight coming back to union or trustless
bridge providers. And we slowly kind of see traction with new L1s, L2s reaching out to us,
as opposed to us reaching out to them. So once we kind of, you know, after I think a year or two,
we're going to be in a very good position to actually make union this permissionless hub,
where any roll-up or L2 can actually like join union and transfer funds between themselves.
We also believe in a future where thousands of roll-ups exist. So with that comes modularity
and modular interoperability. So, yeah. Great answer. It makes sense. And while I have you,
one last quick question. You know, what do you all see as like the main differentiator? Because
there's a few, ZK and a few others, but what do you see as the main differentiator between you all
and IBC? We kind of extend IBC using zero knowledge, right? IBC is kind of the standard
protocol that we want to onboard everyone onto. What differentiates us from the other protocols
that are connected to IBC is that we're using consensus verification. That's basically kind of
the key difference there. But our bet is on IBC. Our bet is on IBC's growth. Obviously,
like we've seen more chains, you know, switching over to IBC. I think compared to last year,
there's like, you know, 50 IBC enabled chains. Now it's 120 IBC enabled chains. So we want to
do is we want to take IBC and basically connect it to different ecosystems, whether it be like
Ethereum or Cardano, like we want the boundaries of interoperability to be basically non-existent.
Well said. And then we'll do one last question, and then we will have a little time to open
stuff up here. So last question for you, TK, is what user feedback have we received on
existing Interop partners that we think could maybe be improved with Union or maybe expanded?
Yeah, that's a good question. I would say like the number one thing is just like developer
experience. If you want a lot of people building like these like protocols that use interoperability,
having like good developer experience, creating like good standards for like different sort of
functions, like, you know, apart from just regular asset transfer, would be like a huge value add
for the people building on top of this kind of stuff. And so, you know, apart from like the
things that are, I think, a little bit more obvious, like just like liveness and stability
and things like that, which, you know, if you're based on IBC, I think it's quite,
quite good, quite stable, just like making it so that it's very easy for existing protocols and
also new protocols to like integrate into like these types of things is probably the biggest
sort of thing that I would say, one of the most important things in my mind. And that's something
that also is true for Kanto as well. Like we have all of these products and like these
pieces of infrastructure that can be used. We want to make sure that there's really good
documentation. There's good examples that the protocols themselves are very easy to integrate
into and that they're built in a way that's very composable. That's like the way to maximize,
I think, the power of interoperability. So yeah, I would say that's, yeah, basically the biggest
thing that I can think of. Awesome. Thank you. Perfect. Well, I think we can open things up a
little bit and maybe take a couple questions. So yeah, I would love to,
if anyone has one, we'd love to welcome them to the stage.
Not all at once, please. No questions. Yeah, no problem.
I think also if you guys want, you can just like throw the question into the chat as well.
That's fine. Or you can raise your hand at any of those things work. But if we have no questions,
that's fine too. It just means that our speakers did an incredible job is what it means.
Okay. Well, if we have no questions, is there anything,
anything else from our speakers that you want to mention while we have everyone here?
I would just say, yeah, I'm very excited for this partnership and excited to see like
the kind of stuff that people can build around it. Yeah.
We're equally excited to say the very least, right? No, adding a new chain to integrate with
union is really important. We basically want union to be connected to pretty much all lab chains and
L1s and L2s going down the line. And counter was a big piece of the puzzle, given the amazing
you guys have been doing with democratized finance. So very excited to have you guys on board.
Likewise. Awesome. Well, thank you everyone for coming and listening and
recording will be out soon and appreciate the time. Thanks everyone. Thank you.