hello hello everyone welcome to another Iliot series Twitter spaces
today we're joined by two amazing guests
as usual. We also have Zaki here. I'll let them introduce themselves. Today's Twitter
spaces will be about chain abstraction. So let's go ahead and get into it. And at the
end, I'll again, as usual, open the floor for Q&A if we have time. But Zaki, why
don't we go ahead and let yourself, let you introduce yourself. Hey, Zaki
Monnion. Been working in the blockchain space for nearly a decade. Worked on a lot
of different projects. I'm most famous for helping launch the Cosmos ecosystem. I
co-founded with my co-founder on both inclusion, which is like the infrastructure
business, and sommelier with Kristi Polston. And we did all we've done all of
this work. Sommelier, you can think of is relevant to this question, because it's
kind of the 2021 version of what chain abstraction was. Sort of a prototype of
this world that Ilya and I have been talking about. Worked on IBC, worked on a lot
of different bridging protocols. And yeah, I'm excited to be talking to the near
community about where I think like a whole, what I think is going to be like
the next big sort of industry wide sort of meta narrative coming after sort of the
fast monolithic blockchains and the like sort of modular exploration. Awesome. Thanks
for coming. I'm Ilya. I think you need to. Okay, hold on probably. Yeah. So yeah, I'm
Ilya, I'm co-founder of NIR. And yeah, we've kind of from the beginning been really
focused on how do we really make it easy for people to use blockchain. Kind of the
strong belief is that as a user, I want to get value. I want to have an, you know,
all the economic opportunity that blockchain provides, sovereignty, security.
But same time, I, you know, don't really care about the specific
infrastructure decisions that different chains are taking, you know, different wallets, as well
as kind of the complexity that, you know, a lot of blockchains have introduced. And so for us,
we've really kind of from the start, try to upstart blockchain as much as possible,
kind of hide complexity, as well as, as we've been thinking about how does kind of this
multi-chain world looks like it pretty naturally meant that, you know, we can continue expanding
our kind of offering to multi-chain world while still preserving the simplicity that we've been
trying to introduce. And so actually, we had a podcast with Zaki in 2020, that I just
released today, where we were, it was a debate format of if they're gonna be only few chains or
lots of chains. And I mean, there was a lot of interesting aspects there, but obviously we see
world was a lot of chains. But to me, the kind of enabler enabling factor has been the ZK that
kind of enables really unified security for chains. And so you don't need to spin up like a new
that is that new blockchain to get your own kind of environment. I think maybe we can start there
because I mean, there's a lot of pieces of kind of the chain abstraction that coming together. But
I'm actually curious, yeah, how you think about it, given kind of Cosmos started in a very
different place, right of like, okay, everybody should start their own chain with their own
value set. And then, you know, you kind of also started exploring some of the security
unification. Yeah, so I'm curious, how do you think about it, Zaki?
You're muted on spaces, too many devices.
Okay, so it's been clear to me from the beginning that the or, okay, so I remember, like very,
very early on in my sort of blockchain journey. Aaron and Ellie came and presented at my tiny
little meetup in Mountain View, the zero cash paper, which eventually became the basis for Zcash.
And it was like the first public presentation, outside of like MIT and Israel about outside of
MIT and Technion, like Snarks. And it was like, okay, this is like complete magic and witchcraft.
Like, how is this possible that like you can get these like succinct proofs of arbitrary
execution. So then it was like, okay, how long will it take before you can have these succinct
proofs? So, you know, at that point, you know, this is like 2013. So, you know, zero knowledge
was like almost was, you know, it started in the 80s. And it, it took 30 years to get from,
from like the from like the original like PCP theorem papers to like zero to like the zero
cash paper. And we're like, okay, another 30 years to get to like, you know, fully programmable
succinctly verifiable proof carrying data systems like what we like. Okay, and that was the
expectation. And then Zcash launched. And then Zcash launched in, you know, 2015, and it unleashed
this giant torrent of innovation. And here we are, like, it seemed like we have like expressive
proof systems, expressive languages, provers are getting more efficient all the time.
And like zk just completely reframes the world of and so I do think of like the cosmos design
as, you know, doing the best you could with satisfying people's desires for sovereignty and
interoperability with a technology of like consensus protocols and consensus protocols with
effective like clients. And you still there, you know, there are, there are still use cases for
consensus protocols and committees aren't going away. But the security properties of the system
and like what your committee is guaranteeing you go down dramatically when you add proofs on top of
it. So like the future of interop is like a system that like direct like deeply relies on
zero knowledge. And in general, that's like the end state of blockchains in general, it's the most
secure censorship resistant system is a system where like, you know, like if you want to have
a system of financial markets, and there's a financial market that can be spun up basically
on any computer anywhere in the world, but provide really, like strong guarantees against
corrupt ability, and can interoperate with any other market anywhere in the world,
you're basically created like this like kind of extremely censorship resistant, extremely
like, you know, cockroach like unkillable financial system. So I think that's like,
you know, that system essentially like the prototype of that system now exists today.
A lot of people have done a lot of work to make that system possible.
And I think once you have imagined the base layer of that system, which is like,
there's some interoperability protocol, there's some proving proof system,
like there are some languages for building application for building like economic primitives,
like we've kind of we're like, we've, we've been speed running to the end state
of that. And now it's a question of what comes later.
Yeah, exactly. I think this was very interesting to see kind of last year, right, as we had
modularity, pretty taking shape, kind of seeing a lot of folks kind of experimenting. So there's a
really, you know, somewhat a snarky tweet from Merck about, you know, like if you if you list all
the possible options of all the, you know, execution, the a kind of sequencer VMs, etc.
You get like, you know, a thousand different roll ups. And probably like, there's probably
some combination of things that will be more preferred. But even on top of it, right, there's
with roll ups in the service, you can spin up another 10,000 of these. And so we have this
kind of highly modular, highly fragmented world. And we obviously still have a ton of blockchains,
you know, layer ones, app chains, and cosmos. And so, so now the question is, okay, now what,
right? Now there's like this vast amount of block space, you know, these blocks have
been produced everywhere at all the time. And as a user, now, you know, I have, like,
I have one metamask that has so many networks and everything to scroll. I have a lot of different
windows with different wallets and different browsers. And so, so we have this highly fragmented
environment. And then on the other side, as a user, sorry, as a developer, when you're building
your app, you're only targeting whatever's audience is on that chain, right? You have a
very limited kind of addressable market. And so now you are pretty much looking for additional
help from the chain itself to grow it, addressable market, kind of its own user base to even be able
to interact with them. And so, so this kind of what, you know, something that like from our side
near, near is designed internally as a lot of chains, right? But we abstract this out,
we don't, like you as a user don't need to think that like every account is actually a separate
chain. Like you just, you know, transact and all the cross chain interactions kind of hidden
to use just an account of the system. And so the question is, like, can we get to a level
of similar experience across a vast multi chain environment? And like,
what are the pieces that I needed to really pull it all together?
So one thing that I think is the case with near and other blockchains that I think are going to
be doing this chain abstraction thing, like Agorik and Enova, etc. Is that like these things were like
designed correctly from like, like with like a correct set of abstractions, like from the get
it's that, you know, like the current, like the current theory of how everything goes to market
right now is like, you, like, you launch your new thing, whether it's a monolithic L1, L2,
Cosmos chain, whatever. You set off a speculative frenzy of like new asset issuance and meme coins
and NFTs. You have some set of economic primitives for like trading and exchanging those things
that onboard users, and then like you achieve some critical mass under which, you know,
there's like a sufficient total addressable market in terms of both TVL and users that like your
system. But like, if there are thousands of possibilities of, thousands of possibilities of
like chain DA execution environment, etc. Like this pattern cannot repeat itself forever.
And this is like not this, this is not how I think. So like these like systems that I think
may not have been like are not like systems that like have been built with this like vision of,
okay, like every account is its own little like the synchronous locality of state that can like
reach out across a multi chain environment from your account that's hosted somewhere, like
create effects across multiple blockchains. Like these things are like properly designed.
And they're properly designed for that world that comes after like this sort of repeated pattern of
like speculation, TVL accumulation, like trying to break through. One of the other problems, right,
is that like, that I've always that was like a real challenge for for crypto is that like
people who respond like very positively to like, number go up yield, like, like this thing will go
to zero 1000x, like playing PvP games in like liquidity pools. Like this is a relatively
small population in the world's consumer base. Right, like this isn't this is not the user
base of Facebook or Instagram or Gmail. Like, yes, there is demand for like payments is a wide
we demanded thing, identity is a long way by loyalty programs are widely demand things. Like
there are lots of things that we do in crypto that are like have very large TVLs. But if our
bootstrapping is like, attract roughly the same population of like volatility attracted people,
like there's this continuous gap that we're trying to like bridge across.
And where you're in the one where you're trying to leap from, okay, I've attracted all like,
let's say you've succeeded, you've attracted all of these, like people who are attracted to volatility
to your chain. Cool. Now how do I get them to do things other than just speculate on me?
Yeah, I think that that's a valid point that I mean, there's kind of different sub audiences
that we have. And the sub audience of kind of speculators, right, is very important for
crypto, but at the same time, it doesn't provide a very clear path from kind of how to how to
bridge the gap, right, to kind of more early majority that actually going to be using this
kind of not for speculation, but for their day to day use cases. So what we've seen on
near, right, and we have actually just recorded, I think, all time high of you of daily active
accounts was over 1.8 million, is that if you remove the need for the users to know about the
blockchain, right, if the application is designed in such a way that it's extremely straightforward,
you can get to kind of almost educate the users on what a different benefits are, as you're kind of
introducing more and more features to them in a way that is interesting and engaging for them,
right. So we have sweat coin and customers, which are have completely hidden blockchain from the
users. But I think like, there is a way to find that you have an address, and you can like even
find how to bridge tokens to other chains and stuff. But it's not like in your face, right,
you just have an app, you interacting with it. And kind of all the interactions are within that
app. And that's kind of the inspiration in many ways, right, it's like, how do we get that
experience, but really working across all the blockchains, and in a way, transparently
kind of remove, you know, need to know about transaction fees about, you know, specific
gas tokens, bridging, kind of all the species of experience that are really just an implementation
detail of kind of our specific, you know, approach to, to, you know, securing and transacting
on blockchains. So I know, I mean, customers been working a lot of the species for a while.
We've started also kind of over a year now, building out some of the pieces of the stack.
So I think the biggest kind of enabler for this is what we call account aggregation,
and you guys have as interchange accounts, is this ability for a single account to really
transact across many chains. So I'm curious, yeah, maybe if you can expand like,
on the history of interchange accounts, as well as how you see this evolving
kind of from different directions. Yeah, okay. So
initially, IBC will, so the history of IBC was initially like what was proposed in the white
paper was we would watch a token transfer protocol and then build a generalized system.
What ended up actually happening is we built a generalized system and then layered a token
transfer protocol on top of it. The token transfer protocol was successful as a system of,
the token transfer protocol was extremely successful as like for building like basically
DEXs on top of it, like token swaps, all the stuff, osmosis, the token transfer protocol on IBC
does billions of dollars of volume a month. It's like one of the biggest bridging and interoperability
protocols. But then we came up, but like shortly after there was this idea of what if we made it
so that, so standard user accounts or something that looks a lot like a standard user account
on a Cosmos chain could be controlled. So basically any transaction that could be sent
by that user could be sent over IBC. And I want to say like, interchange accounts,
like the initial version of it shipped probably in 2022, it's like been live for a long,
long time. And the primary adoption of interchange accounts initially was, it turned out that like
basically liquid staking protocols in Cosmos decided to build on top of interchange accounts.
So the basic idea is you launch a blockchain and that blockchain would have, that blockchain has,
you launch a blockchain, a blockchain takes like atoms, it opens an interchange account,
it stakes those atoms earning staking rewards and then like compounding those staking rewards.
And then it gives you a fungible token that is like redeemable for that. And a lot of other parts,
and it wasn't like entirely obvious that this would become dominant, but like the dominant liquid
staking protocols now in Cosmos all use this interchange account system. But interchange
accounts can be used for a lot more. You could have like on-chain governance for DAOs can control
accounts on other chains and that kind of stuff, but like user, like UI, UX. So like,
I think we're like, we're probably about two years into like the interchange accounts protocol
and there's finally a UI for like a DAO on one chain in Cosmos to control an account on another
chain in Cosmos, which is to a certain extent a result of the chaotic nature of Cosmos.
It's also an extent to which all of these things take a long time and are early.
But, and then like another sort of related system that like is sort of in the like wider
Cosmos ecosystem is ThorChain. And the way ThorChain works is really is also very interesting
in the sense of there are like ThorChain does not use is built on as a Cosmos chain,
but it's in a multi-chain text, but it doesn't have IBC. Instead, what it has is escrow accounts
on all of the different chains it supports, most notably Bitcoin. And then so like if you
want to do a swap, you send your funds to the escrow accounts controlled by the validator set
of both chains. Those validator sets then like see that this all the funds have been received
and then like execute the other side of the swap. So like you could send Bitcoin to an escrow
account, that escrow account then and you say I want to buy Tether, then you know Tether on let's
say Ethereum or Tron that's sent to an escrow account. And then the chain sees that those things
are it has custody of both funds, and then sends the Bitcoin to whoever's supposed to receive it
and the Tether to whoever's supposed to receive it. So like we have these like early chain
abstracted apps, and we could talk more about how Sommelier is also in this pattern,
but I think those are really good examples of like things that are practically doing,
like ThorChain is doing like 1% of Bitcoin spot volume roughly right now, which is just huge.
And you know Interchain accounts for liquid staking on cost-wise do are custodying hundreds
of millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars. So these are all big successes for
these systems. Nice yeah I mean I think this is really kind of paved the way to show how this
works. I think for me one of the important things have always been that bridges on themselves are
sadly the least robust part of the blockchains, right, because they kind of they try to unite
security of two sides, and you know as we talked in the beginning the security part is getting
in some way more unified, but still kind of they require a lot of maintenance,
they require a kind of synchronization. And so I think one of the things that we are pushing
is what we call unbridging, and so in a similar way that ThorChain for example,
the chain itself has accounts on different other chains is this ability to have kind of for any
account on near to have kind of remote accounts everywhere else and being able to transact with
them without needing to bridge. And so kind of as part of this I wanted to invite Kendall just
kind of who works a lot more closely with all this to kind of speak about some of the use
cases that he sees as well as like people already building out.
Yeah, hey everyone. And yeah, Zach, you appreciate the examples and the kind of
history of interesting accounts there. I think that's actually pretty enlightening.
Yeah, I mean, so I think there's like you kind of been discussing a few different groups here.
I think like with the way I sort of see is there's like, oh, okay. Yeah, so anyways,
I see it. There's like two kind of different audiences here that are like kind of appeal,
can eventually be appealed to by whether it's interesting accounts or like kind of a near
multi chain accounts. There's the crypto native audience who is very different in that a lot of
times they actually really care or want to know about what chain they're on. And then you have
like normal people or institutions or whatever it might be more like the normies who actually are
just trying to solve some kind of problem or like actually want, you know, as much of what
chain they're on or where their assets are, whatever it is, to be abstracted away as possible.
I think the yeah, the for the crypto native audience, the areas are really excited about
are basically just, there's like a couple of important things to basically abstract away,
you know, one is or at least simplify one is just getting your assets between chains.
And in the Cosmos world, IBC does a really great job of that. But in the non-cosmos world,
which is a lot of, you know, a lot of chains that people want to interact with,
the solutions are pretty messy. Like at the very least, you have to kind of navigate the
world of bridge trade offs. And while there's plenty of great teams there, like that is
complicated. And then even if you find a bridge to get your assets across, you have to kind of
figure out how you're going to pay for gas. And I think there's a lot of teams trying to solve
that problem, but it's still quite messy. And then the other problem you'll have is that like
almost zero bridges go everywhere, right? Because it's obviously quite complex to even
add, you know, any sort of new chain to this sort of mix outside of the IBC world.
And so I think that there's some yeah, the for chain, I think actually has done a really
good job of at least showing the potential for, you know, using threshold signing for these,
for these kind of deposit accounts. But what we're excited about doing is expanding that even further
to like the user account level. And I think that opens up a lot of opportunities both on the normally
side, where like you actually now can have an account that can sign for any chain, like any
chain that's elliptic curve is supported, which you know, can is actually fairly straightforward,
at least to add over time, you can sign for it. And then what gets really interesting is you can
also like, make these accounts smart contracts that are immutable, and then you can build
protocols on top of it. So you can then have protocols that can actually control assets
on various different chains. Now, where things get complicated is, you know,
for chain, obviously, to add support for these new chains, they basically need their
values to run full nodes, which does create some kind of scaling challenges there, or at least
like some, you know, there's a lot of implementation work to add new support for new chains.
So we're actually pretty excited about the potential to build protocols, accepting the
design constraint of the fact that you that the near chain, in this case, would have no idea
of like, essentially, which account like with the value of the accounts that it's signing for.
But there's some interesting ways to still kind of design some cross chain swaps with this,
or even lending protocols with this. Or, you know, even I think, you know,
other great design spaces kind of bringing smart contract functionality to chains that don't
happen, whether that's Bitcoin, or, you know, even Adam, I think it's been really cool to see
the inscriptions protocol that's taken off on Adam, obviously, a lot of great ways to use IBC
there. But I think there's some fun stuff that we'll be exploring building there too,
to just like bring programmability to these kind of chains that don't have a smart contract layer
built in. Yeah, I think one of the really interesting examples is kind of using the
nears kind of account obstruction, native account obstruction that we have is because if you have
this kind of addresses linked to your account, and let's say you have, you know, some bitcoins
and mordinals, some atoms, and you know, MATLAB, NFT, you kind of all linked to one near account,
you can actually sell like that near account, turn it into NFT and list it to the marketplace,
and do all that at kind of a speed of near in, you know, atomic or semi atomic approach without
needing to kind of transact across all the blockchains involved in this transition. So I think
this is one of the kind of those interesting cases where by abstracting this out, right, you're
actually kind of creating this new level at which people can transact without needing to think
about individual kind of assets and chains and transacting there. And in turn, this allows
to have kind of this new level of programmability as well for developers. So maybe kind of switching
gears, there is like a, you know, use case, whereas, you know, some of these apps like
customers, you know, getting hundreds of millions of users, they transact across all of this.
I think the question is, like, how do we bring the kind of most developers to this concept? Like,
how do we educate them that this is really important versus kind of the current approach
where people pick one chain and kind of focus on it? I know, Zach, you've been kind of talking
about this before. So curious kind of to waste your opinion.
So I guess the question in my mind is really whether or not any of these,
like, I think, like, one of the bigger points is that, like, very few applications that represent,
like, a full end-to-end user workflow exists today. And in the modern world,
no application that, like, does a full end-to-end user workflow is going to be, like, truly single
chain. There are, like, I think, like, but, like, I think the idea is, but, like, the
other side of that is, is that these tribes are never going to go away. There's going to be,
like, there's going to be an Adam tribe, there's going to be a Sol tribe, there's going to be a
Neer tribe, there's going to be an E tribe, there's going to be a Bitcoin tribe.
There's, it's unlike, I don't think the, like, social layer of these things just dissolves.
And so I think, like, what you are going to see is, like, more, like, apps that are located
firmly within their tribes and, like, appeal to people within their tribes, but, like,
are, at the same time, willing to, are going to be, are going to need tools and abstractions
to, like, appeal to, like, all users who are willing to be onboarded.
So maybe to, to kind of frame this a little bit more controversially,
the current dApps are not actual dApps. They're just front ends for smart contracts on some chains.
Yeah. And smart contracts are not apps. Smart contracts. Smart contracts are not apps.
Yeah. They're just pieces of logic and functionality and state.
Yeah. Like, I think our question is, like, like, to, or, like, to be more concretely, is,
uh, like, Uniswap or, uh, or Oasis on Solana, uh, uh, or even, like, Osmosis, are they apps?
Or are they just front ends to, uh, uh, like a swap functionality, which is a useful piece of tech,
but, like, you know, not financial. Yeah. It's a finance feature, right? Nobody thinks,
you know, like, the market is somewhat like, uh, if you look at, like, TradFi and, like,
what you're, like, on what, like, a brokerage account, uh, provides you, um, uh, and, like,
which is, like, multiple ways, like, you don't think of the stock exchange as the app. No. It's,
like, well, I went to, like, I want exposure to this asset. I want to, like, manage a portfolio.
Like, portfolio management is the app. Uh, uh, not, uh, not, like, I happen to swap it,
like, this particular game. Yeah. And I think, I mean, this, this being the flip side of
composability is that, like, you can build, and composability and, like, this access,
you can build a feature, a very powerful feature, and make it really big, right?
Because everything else around you composes, uh, and so, you know, Uniswap obviously built on
top of the fact that there is MetaMask and there is kind of other, uh, you know, forces that
onboard users and assets have been launched, uh, without needing to do all that. Uh,
but at the same time, yeah, I think as, as we need, as we need to transition to
this, uh, kind of next stage of growth, we really need to kind of acknowledge that
the best products will, you know, encompass the whole user journey. They will provide a really
easy way to, you know, start using, start earning, start transacting, and kind of, uh, but, like,
it will be all packaged in one, and then from there, like, they probably want, like, that app
will want to have access to the whole multi-chain world of, of kind of logic and liquidity and,
uh, kind of bits and pieces that exist in Web3 to really provide the best experiences for users.
And I think that's really what the core of chain abstraction that, uh, we're kind of talking about
here is that, um, like, this new generation of apps that will be kind of built in, in this
mindset will, will be the ones targeting kind of broader set beyond just, you know, any single tribe
but in turn, they will be able to, you know, provide value and, and, uh, to all of the chains as well,
and kind of in the way, arbitrage, whatever the best smart contract and whatever the best
kind of liquidity attractor is. I know, Kendall, if you want to add something?
Yeah, I mean, I think, uh, you know, if we look at a lot of what exists in crypto today,
you know, especially at least on the DeFi side, like, it's, it's infrastructure, right?
It's like the primitives are basically finance infrastructure. And so like what matters is that
that infrastructure is used to like proliferate new new assets or, or make, you know, existing
assets, like just, you know, the experience around existing assets and the financialization
of them, you know, more efficient in some way. So I definitely agree that like, you know,
the apps, the fully featured apps are kind of yet to come. I think what gets really interesting
and where chain attraction becomes kind of more paramount is like, you know, there's a lot
of different design choices and trade-offs that are being made in, you know, creating each
of these different chains, whether it's app chain or, you know, kind of like a, you know,
a general chain. And so you would expect that like, we're going to see different applications
that are going to like make more sense on different chains. And in that world,
you're going to need, like, that's where, that's the world in which you expect that
these kind of full feature applications may actually be taking advantage of different components
that are proliferating on different chains because those technical trade-offs are more
likely to favor them. And so I think that like, yeah, it seems like that's the way that we're
going. I mean, it's, it's early in the sense that I think there's right now, like Zaki pointed out
earlier, there's basically like the same set of primitives that each new chain or even L2 now,
or eventually L3 is just redeploying under maybe different brand names or even the same brand names
and just kind of like, you know, splintering off, basically, like more like copy paste,
and then maybe you get to the point of innovation. So I think we'll see that hopefully start to kind
of erode as it'll be like, Oh, actually, you know, this chain or layer two, whatever it is,
makes more sense for this type of use case, this makes more sense for this one. And then we
can have enough of this kind of like infrastructure built on top of it that hopefully, you know,
whether it's IBC or Nier, or a combination of that can be used to actually build these,
these full experiences that people actually desire to use rather than just like infrastructure for
them that, you know, appeal to a specific tribal norm. And obviously, tribalism is not going to
go away. That probably is one of the core products of crypto, digital tribalism, at least.
So certainly that needs to be catered, like those users need to be catered to as well.
But yeah, I think we're gonna see a lot more of like the building on top and the abstraction
as we onboard more and more people to this to this kind of world.
Awesome. Should we have open it up for questions? Or I don't know,
Zach, if you have anything else to add?
I think that this question, right, is it's like, so I will just say, like, one of the experiences
with building sommelier, which is like this, like, has, it has components on Ethereum,
and has components on Evel too, as opposed to products on a Cosmos chain. It presents to its
users exactly as if it was an Ethereum app, which is, was like, Kristy, Kristy's like,
Kristy, my vision of like, do not ship this as a Cosmos chain, there's. And so, you know,
the tribe that you build for, and the tan that you go after, are not inherently related to the
technology you use. And I think that's going to be like that. So, you know, you're going to start
seeing things that get positioned. Like, you can imagine a world in which you see something that
is like fully positioned as, like, the best Bonk trading experience, but it uses a bunch of
near accounts under the hood, and a bunch of places to, like, enable people to, like, onboard
and offboard off of Solana for their telegram bots to, like, for the telecom trading bots to have,
like, smart, like, intelligent account permissioning, etc., which is without having to say, oh, okay,
like, what, what can we cram, can we cram the optimal solution to every design problem
into, like, the SVM design patterns, which, like, there's just, there are inherent trade-offs.
Yeah, I mean, to show we have a telegram trading bot coming out leveraging account
abstraction. So, sounds like that's a next use case to offer Bonk. But, yeah, I think
the, maybe one thing that, like, for me that I always find challenging that people perceive,
like, you know, there's kind of a perception among, and especially it's VCs, but it kind
of goes beyond that a chain-specific metrics like TVL or other things affect, like, the success
of the app building there. Because the perception is that you're limited by the users and kind of,
you know, liquidity that is available there. And I think what, what we're talking here
importantly kind of breaks through that and in a way invalidates a lot of the things that
people are looking at right now and instead really kind of brings it back to, like, what is
the best use case? What's the best, kind of, you know, programmatically, like, you know,
if you think of databases, you don't think of, like, oh, this database is, like, I'm going to
cram everything into it, right? It's like, oh, I'm going to use MongoDB for this and, you know,
Postgres for this and, like, Cassandra for that. And so, I would say, like, we'll see some of that
transition as well in the space, which I'm just generally excited about. So I think, like, one of
the things just to, like, reinforce this idea is I think, I don't think a lot of investors in the
space have a detailed understanding of why things like TBL sort of restrict your ability.
And it has a lot more to do with, like, custody, onboarding, like, custody, risk, management,
that kind of stuff and, like, how a lot of actors in the space, like, think about those things.
And so there's, like, a lot of different counterparties that are, like, onboarded onto
Ethereum. And it was relatively, it's like, it's been an easier story to say, oh, you as a
counterpartier are onboarding Ethereum, how do we onboard you onto an L2 than it is to, like,
go to that same set of counterparties and onboard them onto Celestia or onboard them onto Solana
or onboard them onto... But I do think what we are sketching out as a world is a world
that if you think of counterparties onboarding onto these, like, sort of,
account, like, or chain abstracted, like, interfaces and chain abstracted systems and layers,
then they're, like, okay, cool. And we have both, we've seen some of this in Cosmos,
and we're seeing, and I would say we've tried at various points in the past to push it harder
and maybe that those moments are coming closer. So what we've seen is that, like, if you onboard
onto, like, one Cosmos chain, even if the Cosmos chains are very, very different from each other,
it is easier to see for, like, counterparties who have figured out custody, compliance,
everything for one Cosmos chain, to then do another Cosmos chain.
One of the things that we've pitched in the past to things like custodians is, like,
hey, like, what if there was one Cosmos chain where you would control, where, like, where you
would hold all of your assets? Could you simplify your onboarding? So, like, rather than every
individual Cosmos chain having to go to the same list of custodians and the same list of exchanges
and get onboarded, can we just have a solution? And I, you know, there's some things I can't talk
about yet, but there are some, like, big players in the ecosystem that are ready to, like, kind
of dip their toes into this a little bit where they're like, okay, like, we haven't onboarded
this chain, but we have onboarded a chain that, like, IBC is embedded in. And, like, we are
comfortable starting to use some IBC features so that users on our platform can, like, for instance,
like, you know, send assets to Osmosis if we have an onboarded Osmosis or, you know,
or, like, liquid stake atom or something like that using our interfaces without having to, like,
directly, and I think a lot more of this, and, like, some of this can be done permissionlessly
in Cosmos, like, you could, like, you could create an account on, let's say, Noble and say,
like, another smart contract platform or an MPC platform or something could, like, say,
if you, like, we'll create an account and a user just needs to put that account into their
Coinbase, send USDC to that account, and then it will do some complicated thing, like swap into
atom, liquid stake that atom, and then, like, you know, like, leverage stake it. That complicated
thing could be embedded and encoded as a user interface element as just, like, here's this
one Noble address, stick it into Coinbase. Yeah, and I think this is kind of the direction we,
as near trying to build toward where ideally anyone just needs to integrate one time and then
has access to kind of all the chains, you know, from Bitcoin to all the EVMs to Solana to Cosmos
chains, and I think on the, on our side we're also trying to make it easier to integrate by
actually adding Ethereum transaction format and kind of standards to really make it kind of
straightforward for a lot of the counterparty to users. So I think there's definitely, like,
this kind of removing the barrier to onboard and then also removing the barrier to interact kind
of across the vast majority of the chains. It also has this, like, interesting equalizer effect
where right now, you know, if you have, like, a roll-up or a chain and you, you know, you
figured out how to do partnership with, you know, this custodian or that partner who, like, added
whatever some other support, like, this approach of, you know, account aggregation will actually
kind of equalize it because, you know, you can just deposit assets, you can kind of swap,
etc., with any chain directly. You don't need to have them onboarded. You can even, for example,
take the Oracle information, repost it on every other chain in the same way, right? And so you
have kind of the same level of security that Nia provides. So you can have, like, all those
interesting, like, replication waves going kind of through the whole other blockchains as well.
All right. Well, so we have, I think, 10 minutes. Let's maybe open up to some questions,
especially to people who don't agree with us and think that blockchains will not be abstracted
and they are building the most important apps.
Awesome. Sounds good. Yeah. If anybody does have any questions, any feedback
about the session today, any thoughts, feel free to come up and request speaker. We have about
five to 10 minutes so we can take a few questions.
And look out for t-shirts. Your daps are not daps.
All right. We have Dean Tribble that is requesting to speak.
You are connected. Go ahead. Hello. You had a challenge of having to disagree. So I had to step
up and at least bounce something that I was thinking about this morning because chain
abstraction, I think, is huge. It's coming. It's really important. And I was thinking of the
analogies to Web 2 for it where, you know, you've got a browser and you just get to go to
all these applications and use things across the board. But, you know, we've got a lot of
interoperability, hard challenges, of course, you know, orchestrating the activity across all these
services in the background. But in Web 2, I use like Google Docs and I can't trivially drag a
Google Doc over to my box. I mean, sometimes the front end does the work to kind of make that
mostly seamless to the user. But in fact, we're doing okay where there's this hybrid
of some things are very abstract, but some things really aren't. And you really can't
tell the boundaries of when you've got your thing at Fidelity versus Schwab, you know, in a remote,
from a road asset point of view, or if you've got your document in one storage facility versus
another. And I'm curious, sort of, you know, that limits of how much we actually got
chain abstraction in Web 2, what that looks like in Web 3, from your perspective, you know,
and that'll give us the limits of what we need to orchestrate across, what we need to be able to
program to have, you know, smart contracts interact across all these different applications
and do stuff on behalf of the user. I'll start just quickly. I think the interesting analogy
of the current Web 3 is, if you imagine that email, you know, everybody back in the day had
their own email server and were able to send emails to each other. But we are in this world where,
you know, you could only send email to the people on the same email server. And so we're kind of
adding that into case. But I think maybe just to kind of what you mentioned, the examples,
I think the core differentiator here is that they don't use a common protocol underneath,
if they were using common protocol, which, by the way, for banking, the common protocol is money,
like actually sending dollars is the protocol of exchanging information, right? So, like, if there
was a common protocol for documents, right, there probably would be a way to, you know, transport
the documents, like, pretty easily between, because somebody would just build an extension
on top of this. And so I think the benefit we have here is really we have this open protocol
that anybody can build on. And it's also like, kind of by design, not supposed to have this like
lock in. And like, I'm assuming some protocols will try to like, avoid chain abstraction and
kind of allow people to do this, but that will be like, antithetic to the whole space.
Yeah, actually, it's worth noting. And I think there's, you know, that this also speaks to
sort of my question, your answer, is money is not, in fact, the common protocol, it's sort of a least
common denominator. But you've got Swift, and you've got wire, and you've got check, I mean,
they refer to these rails, where there are a whole bunch of money rails that various different
subsets of the world talk, that from the point of view of users, you know, at one level of
abstraction, they're uniform and abstract across that at another level down, when you choose to
move money from one bank to another, you decide is it, you know, are you going to use ACH or wire,
but it's all controlled through the same mechanism, or, you know, through different mechanisms.
And actually transferring the money involves some software, somewhere orchestrating lots of machines
of multiple different players. But there are multiple protocols that different people
implemented that overlap. And I could easily see us ending up there where again, you know,
the programming side of that is we've got to be able to easily produce new protocols that
orchestrate, you know, from smart contracts, orchestrate multiple machines talking different
things. And then from the UI point of view, we need to present a more uniform interaction
from the user's point of view. So those all kind of work the same from the user experience.
You know, but that would correspond to having different interrupt protocols,
or, or slightly different worlds that you can still operate between, but
you still perceive some boundaries as you cross them.
Yeah, I mean, I think a big, a lot of it's going to come down to, you know, what level of like
collaboration or alignment can we expect between chains? Like, in the Cosmos world, I think what's
worked really well is like everyone agreed on like, well, we're at least going to agree on IBC,
like this kind of, you know, protocol to like communicate between chains and send assets or
whatever it might be. But a lot of other chains are not necessarily agreeing on that right now,
at least. So there might be a world in which, you know, IBC, there's something like it does
become this kind of like, very, very commonly agreed upon standard, like, you know, in the
world of email, where like people are at least are going to agree on that protocol.
And that, and that can influence a lot of what gets built there. And then, you know,
we may not see that happen. I think that's a world where something like, you know,
like we're really keen on this idea of threshold signatures. And like, as long as the chain
supports the elliptic curve, they hear your support with your threshold signing scheme,
then you can build some level of integration there. Now, obviously, there's limitations,
right? It's like the lower level, I think the lower down, the closer to like the, you know,
the core of like each chain, you can agree on some kind of protocol for whatever it is you're
trying to solve for the the more powerful these integrations, you're at least the easier it can
be at the app layer to build this. Whereas if you have to go higher and higher up the stack,
then probably it's going to limit some of the applications you can build or the very
least make them more complicated. That's kind of how I see it.
Yeah. And in general, I should say, I very much agree with chain abstraction,
I was just exploring the limits, you know, and, and, and so I'll stop now. But the,
you know, a protocol for exchanging tokens versus a protocol for exchanging NFTs, you know,
things will get more richer and richer as we get more and more of these standards across,
across the different low level transports, if you will.
I mean, one thing we actually, we actually started building this early on. And it was
more for a broader composable decentralized front ends. But we actually think that that
that it will be one of the components that will allow to have kind of a more abstracted out
across multi chain world interfaces. Like even the example you describe,
versus wire transfer versus, you know, SEPA versus whatever, like the reality is you can't
build an interface that just like automatically chooses based on whatever address you entered,
like which protocol should be used underneath. It just banks don't do that. And so the idea here
is like, even if there's like multiple, you know, different protocols, depending on some set
of conditions, like it can choose all of them for the user under the hood. Like, it's just,
you know, somebody needs to define that, ideally, like everybody adopts that kind of
logic and then reuses it in their own front ends. And so that's kind of how we see a lot of the
decentralized kind of composable front end that we've been working on as part of NeoJS,
really fitting in this chain abstraction stack, where it's not just about accounts,
it's also when you start building kind of applications, you want to reuse a lot of the
kind of UX pieces as well, kind of off the shelf, not needing to reinvent, you know, a new UX every
time you build an application that like handles all of the different protocols across different
systems. Yep, makes sense. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Awesome, really great, really
great feedback, actually, you know, it's kind of what we need to continue to build out the
future and, and kind of make sure we're heading in the right direction. But with that doesn't look
like there's one, there's actually one more request from equipment, we have time for one more,
just be mindful of time. Let me go ahead and get you up here.
All right, and you are connected.
Yep, great. Thank you for hosting this call. Lovely to hear Zaki and Dean as well. So we were
actually the last two people I mentioned, we were actually on a call three years ago, also with
Sunny, talking about the preserving this constraint that we want proof of stake tokens to stay in
their respective staking pools, while also kind of not sacrificing the bridging. And this is just
context leading up to the question, by the way. And so the solution that we discussed was
essentially having an implementation of option pools on every chain. And rather than transferring
assets, you transfer beneficiary rights to execution of options. So that kind of solves the
need to actually do transfers of assets. But the one thing I think this is the open question,
who really addresses if we don't sort of narrow ourselves on chain link dons or what have you,
is the problem of validators actually reading across chains and having equal sort of
permissions to those respective contracts on behalf of users to kind of do these
proxy transfers, if you will, of beneficiary rights. So at some layer, you kind of still have
to do, you know, there still has to be a middleman at the end of the day, kind of like cross chain
oracles or however you want to call them. Is this sort of still the consensus? Or what are the
thoughts there? I do have a particularly strong opinion here. So I think it's a great question.
And I actually, I think there is a design space that allows at least two parties who maybe have
assets on different chains to trade the rights to the basically the right to sign to move those
assets on those different chains without actually the sort of chain that's facilitating this
interaction to be aware of the value of the assets on those chains. So I mean, just to give
a tangible example, like we're actually building something exactly like this. So if you imagine
a near is like this layer, they can basically trigger signatures for two different chains
that are not near. And you have a user on one side, maybe it's Bitcoin, and they're basically
going to like, generate an address from the signing scheme that's like controlled by near,
send their Bitcoin to that near, which fills them like depositing asset into, you know,
into this exchange. And then another user on Ethereum, who's basically doing the same thing,
but on Ethereum, if the as long as the smart contract done, whatever chain it is,
in this case near is able to basically adjudicate who can then sign to transfer those assets out to
their whatever, you know, hardware wallet exchange, wherever they want it to be, then you can
essentially perform this, this swap in a completely atomic and, you know, trust minimized way.
So I think I basically, I think there is a design space that doesn't require the chain where
the sort of like the smart contract and that's managing basically the swap of these two accounts
or these two, like asset rights to assets, to be aware of the state on those respective chains.
Now, I mean, it introduces some, some like potential complexity and like some limitations,
but I think it actually is, you know, it's underexplored, like versus the thought chain
approach of kind of like, essentially having, you know, the validators with our chain also run
full nodes of the respective chains. Yeah. So I will say to this question of like this, like
trade beneficial options. So one of the things that you can sort of recreate in this like beneficial
options abstraction layer is some of the benefits of atomicity that like exist in like a single chain
unique environment where you can take out a global mutex. I think the design is underexplored.
I think the practical reality is that you have that like a lot of infra has to be built before
it becomes really practical to explore this. So I made a like a design sketch called Cinderella tokens
that like floats around on Twitter periodically about this idea of like trading beneficial options.
I think there are a lot of, I think there's like potentially like a lot of stuff going on here,
but it's just, and like this, these ideas reemerge and like people are talking about this, like,
you know, in like the shared sequencer context, people are talking about this in the,
like Anoma has this chimera chain concept. Like all of these things actually kind of are very,
very similar related things that probably that like are part of this sort of chain abstraction
story that eventually emerges where you have, where you can abstract over like a bunch of
this economic complexity. But we're, it's going to be a longer road than I think a lot of people
expected. I mean, I think it's been a longer road than the Thor chain people have expected
to get to where Thor chain is. And there's, there, there tends to be like, you know,
like the reality of crypto is like the, is a lot of things happened on the road to the end state
and a lot of, a lot of, a lot of different, there's like a lot of side quests and adventures.
And just linearly building towards the end state has actually almost always been like
the wrong move in crypto. It's like you want to build like the next incremental thing.
And like generally the timelines in which you have to build have also gotten shorter. So like
IBC was like five years end to end, like to design and like there's nothing that you could
be building in crypto that you have five years to like, just like go into a cave and build right now.
Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, we'll see if Soundvault is playing out. I'm inviting everyone to come in
in Denver. We're going to be organizing kind of a more deeper dive on chain abstraction.
If you're visiting, I'm also going to be posting kind of a longer blog posts. Also kind of
diving, diving in into this and we'll, we'll have more content coming out. And yeah, I mean,
I want to thank Zaki and Kendall for coming in. I think it was amazing spaces, you know, we
need to continue educating this while we continue building this. It's been a very long road already
for all of us, but you know, we do have like made a ton of progress altogether. And I remember,
you know, talking about all of this, like in 19 Zaki and like, we had like, you know, zero apps
working or zero functionality working. Now we have some functionality working and we have like
couple apps, you know, millions of users. And so, you know, hopefully next time we talk a little bit
shorter than public, publicly, a little bit shorter than this. But yeah. So yeah, anyway,
I mean, I think it's exciting to see all those pieces kind of converging as well as
really working kind of this, this multi-chain vision, really starting to work in a way where
how it's supposed to be honestly, like that it's a functionality and infrastructure providers
that really fit all of this together. Yeah. All right. Awesome. Thank you very much. Both of you
or all three of you, Kendall, thank you for joining us for coming out to the spaces. Thank
everybody. I want to thank everybody here for joining us today as well. And we'll catch you on
the next one. Have a good day, everybody.