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Future of Web3 Interop | LitVM showcase | 🔄 The Aggregated Ep. 146
Recorded: Jan. 23, 2026 Duration: 2:18:33Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, key players in the crypto space explored the launch of LitVM, a project aimed at enhancing interoperability between Litecoin and Ethereum. The conversation highlighted significant partnerships, the upcoming ESP token launch, and the potential for yield opportunities, reflecting broader trends towards unifying liquidity and simplifying user experiences in Web3.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. hello everybody
awesome looks like people are still trickling in We have a couple more guests that are joining us.
Welcome to the aggregated episode 146. So good to have some of our partners here today to discuss LitVM.
And also we have some alpha that we're going to drop today with a wit from
espresso. So thank you all for joining us. Yago wit.
I think Matt from Caldera will be joining us a little bit later for the first
half of the show.
And I just thank everyone that's here today on a Friday to hang out with us and talk some LitVM and Litecoin and Ethereum, interoperability.
Welcome, Rock.
Good morning.
How are you doing today?
Doing very well.
How about yourself?
Good, good.
I'm excited for this episode here, and I'll go ahead and get everyone introduced.
So we'll just take a quick 30 seconds to introduce everyone on the panel here.
Iago, please take some time just to explain all the awesome things you're doing
in this space and uh and what we're cooking hey guys nice to be here thanks for inviting me
um yeah so uh just a quick intro on myself i've been working in the Bitcoin and crypto space now for 15 years, building various things.
My main sort of personal mission is to try and make sure that we can build systems that
allow myself, I'm building for myself first and foremost, and all of us to be able to have access to a fully fledged
financial system that we could actually live off of without having to go through central
intermediaries. And for that, my belief is that we need to solve two primary problems
that are related. The first is that the most important asset,
and certainly the most important asset
that we use for saving in the space, which is Bitcoin,
you can't really do anything with it
unless you go through some kind of intermediary.
That intermediary could be an ETF,
it could be a lending provider,
it could be a exchange,, it could be a exchange, or it could be a bridge. But
one way or another, you're giving up on the one thing that actually makes Bitcoin different and
special from all other assets, which is that you can own it and control it yourself. If you want
to do anything with it, besides just give it to someone else or sell it.
And the second problem is that the world of crypto that we've built over the last 10 years since Ethereum launched hasn't turned into an internet of value because it's turned into
a fragmented mess of many, many, many different systems which aren't interoperable, can't speak to each other.
And the only way that you transfer funds from one to the other is through very, very risky, effectively centralized intermediary bridges.
And these two problems are related because networks are built around network effects.
networks are built around network effects the network effects have always accrued mostly to
Bitcoin and then everything else has been secondary to that and so because Bitcoin itself
wasn't programmable and couldn't integrate with other systems we ended up with this fragmented mess and with Bitcoin and other assets that you can't actually put to work.
So for the last 10 years and more, my primary focus has been trying to deliver greater programmability to Bitcoin
and allow Bitcoin to become interoperable with other systems.
Last year, for the first time ever, we were able to demonstrate how we could not only bring
zero-knowledge proofs to Bitcoin, in Flactin Block 853626, for the first time ever, we verified
a ZK proof in Bitcoin. But since then, through the BOSS system, the Bitcoin OS system,
we've
been building a system which solves these two problems one allows Bitcoin to
become programmable and two through that programmability allows new kinds of
assets to exist on Bitcoin so smart programmable assets like stable coins
Dow assets DeFi assets but also allows Bitcoin to become interoperable with other systems
like perhaps the most important example right now, because it will be the first clear example
of this, will allow us to merge Bitcoin and Litecoin into a single programmable mega chain.
programmable mega chain. Love it. Love it. Yes. And Iago is a genius, as you guys can see,
and pioneer. The whole team is pioneer on the Bitcoin ZK side of things and
helping us on Litecoin. So very excited to talk about that a little bit more
in just a second. thank you for introducing yourself
iago and you've definitely been you know cooking over the last 10 years here so i also want to
introduce wit from espresso pass the mic over to you brother hello thanks for having me um yeah i work at espresso systems we're um a uh the first uh base layer that's been
purpose-built to support roll-ups um and you know the the end mission is really to um
really solve the fragmentation issue that um i mean, within the Ethereum ecosystem, but I mean, that's where we
kind of grew out of, but really, you know, beyond the Ethereum ecosystem, and it's really about
solving fragmentation throughout, you know, the entire blockchain space. I mean, our technology
is really, you know, at the foundation level uh and is about uh providing a
fast secure way for blockchains to communicate um and that's kind of really the end goal and um
so you know excited to talk more about that and about what that looks like and
and about how we're doing that um We're working with LitVM right now
and BitcoinOS.
I'm very excited about what's possible.
Definitely.
Very exciting time.
And I'm glad to be working
with so many innovative partners,
people that are definitely
changing how we look at blockchain
and bringing this all back to Litecoin.
So, Whit, thanks for the introduction.
And also, some may have seen that there is an ESP airdrop.
I'm very excited to see this here.
to see this here.
And what, I guess one of the first things
we can start off with,
drop some alpha right at the top of this show.
What can we, what can you tell us about the ESP airdrop today?
I know that, you know, this information
is still rolling out day by day.
Sure. The Espresso Airdrop has been... So the Espresso Foundation is managing that
Sure.
The, yeah, the espresso,
airdrop. And it's been rolling out information about eligibility criteria and the different
eligibility criteria and, you know, the different, you know, kind of paths to earning the airdrop
over the past several months.
You know, us at Espresso Systems, we're, you know, the original developers of the network
and, you know, are making recommendations to the foundation.
But I don't have, I can't really speak for the foundation, but what I know is that
There's no been no official date as of yet, but it's pretty safe to to assume that it's within the next month
Yeah, I mean the the you know litvm is
As a as a partner, both, you know, as kind of a research partner as well as, you know, a role that will be integrating.
I know that your community, certainly, certain members of your community will be eligible.
certain members of your community will be eligible.
And there is the registration portal is live and which you could find at
claim.espresso.foundation.
We'll get it in the jumbotron up above lit so that everyone can see it.
Yeah. Apologies for interrupting. Please go, go ahead.
Right. And so the ESP token, obviously there's a lot of projects and a lot of tokens out there, a lot of projects that it'll launch tokens just because that was the meta.
Right.
In the case of Espresso, we are actually a blockchain, and this is actually a token with utility.
This will be how the Espresso network is powered.
The airdrop will coincide with updates to the network to run on permissionless proof-of-stake,
so further permissionless nature.
I mean, we launched Mainnet in November of 2024,
and it has been decentralized since the beginning,
but it has been a permission set of node operators.
So this is a milestone.
You know, the ESP token will immediately be able to be used to stake um and
uh run a node uh power in the network it is uh also i mean you know most people will delegate
so there will be a delegation um option as well if you choose to stake your esp tokens
stake your esp tokens um so so yeah this is um it's exciting time big milestone and
yeah that's about about all i can say there definitely yeah we're really excited about it
and i know the light coin community has uh been excited about it as well. Had a lot of people reach out to me over the, I think it's been
roughly weeks since some information came out and you know, we're, we're excited to hear
more information as it, as it yells out. So yeah, thank you for that. Whit, I want to ask you a couple of questions before we move on here.
Hey, Witt, could you mute in between speaking and echoing?
Awesome, awesome.
There we go.
Yeah, I was hearing the feedback.
He was kind of throwing me off.
But how does Espresso technology enable fast finality for LitVM?
And what benefits does this bring to users?
And so everyone knows that's just joining us here.
I see a lot of friends in the audience.
We have the whole Litecoin community here, the Boss community,
a bunch of Ethereum bros that we've known for years here.
So welcome to the show, everyone.
What we're discussing is lit-BM today. And we've brought a bunch of our partners and friends to discuss
the modular stack. So right now we're talking to Whit from Espresso. And I know a lot of people
have kind of asked, like, how do all these parts work? So you're going to be able to hear from the teams directly, you know, about, you know, what they're helping us with or contributing to the LitVM modular stack.
But yes, how does Espresso technology enable fast finality for LitVM and what benefits does this bring to all the users?
Sure. Let's start with just the definition, finality. I mean, there's so many terms
thrown around the space. A lot of people either kind of just assume they know or just get it
wrong or confuse them. Finality is one term,
which often gets confused with settlement.
And so the, but differentiating those two is important
to understand kind of what we're doing
and why it's important.
You know, finality is really this idea
of the point at which a transaction
is final and won't revert.
It's the point at which a user or any other roll-up or chain or exchange or bridge can be confident that, okay, that's final.
This will not revert.
It's okay for me to now go ahead and trigger another action, you know, in response to that transaction, right? And so this is, you know, the importance of this will be apparent as I, you know, talk about what that enables for LitVM. And settlement, though, is, you know, actually a different
term. Now, most people just kind of have always grouped them together because when you're talking about um uh you know monolithic l1 like ethereum they kind of were just coupled and they were kind
of the same thing like you know ethereum reaches consensus on transactions and you know that kind
of finality also you know is tied with with kind of the settle settling but when it comes to roll-up architecture um actually they are
quite different because um it's uh it's not as simple anymore so the you know roll-ups really
have been like the roll-up architecture um you know as we all know roll rollups grew out of this need for Ethereum to scale.
Ethereum obviously wanted to host all the world's apps, but obviously bottlenecks became apparent,
and so rollups were the way to scale more users, lower the fees, lower the latency, all that that stuff and then roll-ups i think you know have evolved uh quite a bit and
have really emerged as uh you know kind of the preferred architecture um for you know building
blockchain you know enabled apps and um just you know the customizability you know of them is is attractive and fast and all that stuff um but you know ethereum was built
as a monolithic l1 it was built to support thousands of interoperable smart contracts
right um and when you have uh you know all these interactions on the l1 slow finality doesn't matter
um because of the atomic execution, right?
So like all transactions, if they're, you know, related, will all their either like succeed or all fail, right?
So Ethereum's finality is like 12 to 15 minutes right now, right?
And when we were all interacting on just the Ethereum L1 and doing, you know, flash loans and da, da, da, da, like it didn't matter.
That was slow finality.
Rollups, though, are their own execution environments.
And so finality suddenly becomes an issue
because now a rollup,
if I'm transacting on an app that's on a rollup,
the rollup sequences that transaction into a block.
It then batches a bunch of blocks
and at a certain point transaction into a block, you know, it then, it then, uh, batches a bunch of blocks and, and,
you know, at a certain point sends that to, you know, Ethereum to quote unquote settle. Um, and
you know, the finality is like 12 to 15 minutes, as I said. So that means that any, you know,
That means that any kind of transaction is,
that prevents kind of any sort of interactions
with apps on other rollups, for instance,
right, if you want to wait for that finality.
And so, you know, finality,
and then, sorry, settlement then,
is actually really just about a rollup wants
to, you know, have its users be able to custody ETH, native ETH, then they maintain an asset
bridge to Ethereum, right? And then they're going to need to settle to Ethereum, basically
proving its state and enabling withdrawals of the kind of native asset back to the VL1.
That's very different than finality, right?
And so roll-ups have really decoupled these two concepts.
And Ethereum was, as I said, built to support thousands of interoperable smart contracts.
It was not built to support thousands of interoperable roll-ups.
And that's become very apparent with the slow finality. It's really created a bottleneck. And it's just the fact, I mean,
it's just the reality that roll-ups really are, you know, built right now on infrastructure that
was not designed with them in mind. And so Espresso, we designed from the ground up to support
thousands of interoperable rollups by providing fast
finality. And we do that just making different design choices in Ethereum. We are a BFT consensus
protocol, just like Ethereum, but we're designed for that speed. So Espresso does not, like we're
not executing, you know, our nodes are not executing these transactions or anything like that.
You can't launch a smart contract on Espresso.
You can't launch a token on Espresso.
The Espresso network, once a roll up, immediately streams its blocks to Espresso.
The Espresso nodes are, within seconds, reaching consensus on the order of transactions and the data availability of that block.
And then, so within seconds, the rollup state is basically locked and can be considered final.
Protocol level restrictions mean that in the future of that rollup,
when it does want to publish its block to an L1 where it wants to settle. There's a protocol
level restriction that prevents the rollup from publishing any block that's not identical to the
Espresso confirmed block. So once Espresso confirms a rollup block within a few seconds,
the rollup state is locked. Those transactions are considered final. And any other rollup app,
bridge, centralized exchange can treat those transactions as final and react to them.
So that provides very fast, asynchronous composability with other roll-ups.
And we've demonstrated this recently.
Had a cross-chain, two integrated roll-ups,
Ape Chain and Rari Chain from the Rarible Foundation,
did a cross-chain mint where, you know, one click,
users could mint an NFT using funds on Rari chain to mint an NFT on Ape chain without any manual
bridging or anything. And it was only because Fast Finale for those chains allowed those chains to
communicate directly in a fast, secure manner. So, I mean, I could keep going, but I don't know
if you want to stop me there
and ask me for the questions
because I didn't actually get into LitVM
or dual settlement or anything like that,
but that's a good base.
Sure, maybe, and I really appreciate you breaking it down
because that's exactly what people have been asking for.
And even if they're not here today,
they're going to be able to listen to this later.
So I can't wait to share this with a large group of people that have been asking for the technical explanation.
You've really broken it down in an easily digestible way.
I appreciate that.
I'll actually just ask you the next question, which is a good segue.
is a good segue.
So, well, actually, yeah, maybe you could add a little bit more
to how this specifically will benefit LitVM.
You have explained what Expresso does,
and you did add information about RARI and ApeChain,
but maybe just a quick explanation on Litvium.
Right. So, I mean, once you, you know, realize that finality and settlement are not the same thing and you've decoupled them, right, and you've, you know, just basically led people to realize that, you know, they need to reframe how they think about this right like
you know people still just assume that you know a roll-up must gain finality from the same place
it settles and it's just just that's just not the case it's just a misconception and it's just I mean
because that's the way it was on monolithic L1s so in the the case of LitVM, LitVM will be integrating with Espresso,
gaining the fast finality that I just talked about.
And that will enable LitVM to be more composable
with other roll-ups because of that.
But it'll also enable it to settle to, chains. So again, I had mentioned
settlement, you know, really is just the act of kind of, um, you know, reconciling with, with, uh,
another chain, um, that it bridges assets, assets from. So a roll up wants its users to be able to, you know, custody and, you know,
interact with native ETH, then there's, you know, an asset bridge to Ethereum. And if it wants its
users to be able to use and interact with Litecoin, then, you know, Litv lithium maintains an asset bridge to litecoin so um and the fact that it
gains fast finality from espresso you know is is enables you know it's just you decouple it you
don't need to get finality and settlement from a single chain i mean that's that's the that's just
the the basic uh you know truth to it so liv Livium, gaining fast finality from espresso, then can settle to however many chains it wants.
Right?
I mean, maintain an asset bridge to Solana?
Okay.
Sure, do it.
improving the role of state, you know, to that other chain and, you know, enabling, you know,
withdrawals of that native asset back.
And just so it's, you know, I that's that's the the dual settlement architecture that we'll be exploring and helping develop and make it possible.
And, you know, as far as the benefits to LitVM users, I mean, obviously that's, you know,
you're probably better prepared to talk about that.
But I mean, it's just the idea of providing more opportunities for Litecoin, Litecoin
native assets, you know, interacting with the Ethereum ecosystem and the DeFi ecosystem
that exists within the Ethereum ecosystem and the DeFi ecosystem that exists within the Ethereum ecosystem.
And, you know, the VM will be the place for that to happen.
And because of fast finality and everything, it'll be composable with other rollups.
So, you know, it just it kind of unifies liquidity as well.
I mean, the whole goal, again, as I said at the very beginning, is solving for fragmentation.
And roll-ups of, you know, traditionally fragmented users, fragmented liquidity.
When you enable different chains, different roll-ups to communicate fast and securely, suddenly, as demonstrated in that cross-chain Mint I mentioned, one-click cross-chain payments, suddenly liquidity is not as fragmented anymore.
And liquidity can flow to wherever it's needed, when it's needed.
Right. So VM users will benefit from that as well.
And and it's only going to get more powerful as more chains wake up to the fact that, oh, we can wait.
We don't need to wait 12 or 15 minutes for our users transactions to finalize.
And, you know, so we also in the process of integrating is Celo.
Right. So other big chains like that.
Katana will be integrating at some point in the future.
So, yeah.
Yeah, it's definitely an exciting time in Web3
because for years, I feel like, you know, roll-ups, layer twos,
it's just been a bit of a clunky mess.
But what we're starting to see is that all the technologies are starting to converge and brilliant people like the people that are on this stage today are essentially solving the problems that were there and making it a lot more seamless so that all of the chains
kind of feel like one big chain and unifying the liquidity is basically the goal.
So I'm very happy to be working with Expressor here.
I know that there's a one other thing. I'm not sure how much you can add to this today, but, you know,
what are the future plans for integrating Espresso's decentralized sequencer network?
Like, how will that work in the future? And because I know a lot of light corners you know they're
we really care about decentralization and this is one of those things that
a lot of people are looking forward to so what kind of information can you share about that today
oh yeah so great question i didn't even mention that.
Decentralization is very important to us as well. And just a quick little backstory. I mean, Espresso, many people, if you are familiar with Espresso, you know, may remember that we launched several years ago kind of as a shared sequencer.
Right. And that idea, again, I I mean the mission was the same back then right
was solving for fragmentation um and you know trying to uh you know fulfill the ultimate vision
right of web3 you know decentralization is very important rollups again you know launched to help
Ethereum scale and they launched you know very quickly and left some things kind of undone.
And so roll-ups are centralized in the sense that most roll-up teams or their RAS providers
operate their own sequencer. So that's the part of the roll-up that is the the part um you know of the roll up that is uh ordering the transactions um into um
into blocks uh and you know on ethereum or or you know uh litecoin or whatnot right this is a
decentralized process um and so you don't have that single point of failure or or or censorship
resistance that sort of thing so um roll-ups right are centralized in the
sense that you know right now it's base that is ordering all the transactions and deciding what
transactions to put in this block you know the order of them all that stuff so um you know we
espresso originally launched as a shared sequencer that would allow rollups to decentralize the sequencing process.
And the shared aspect of it was the additional benefit that would enable rollups to be
synchronously composable with each other. So again, I mean, still the same mission that we're working at today, but we've had to pivot a little bit because, um, the shared sequencer, uh, you know, uh,
architecture and kind of that model in terms of like a product market fit wasn't great because
it turns out rollups, um, most rollups didn't actually want to decentralize their sequencer or give up the sovereignty or the control that it provides.
And that's just a reality that we've had to deal with.
And the revenue it provides, right?
That is the primary revenue of the base chain.
Yes, the sequencing fees definitely provide revenue.
And so that was, you know, we ran into that problem as a startup, trying to find that
product market fit. It was like, you know, where the rollups we talked to don't want to, you know,
don't, don't seem too eager to that. It's like, so we had to pivot, right? So the current,
we had to pivot while still trying to maintain our mission, right? vision so our current solution um is you know one that we
architected that enables roll-ups to actually keep their centralized sequencer if they'd like to
um now we the underlying espresso network and everything is is still the same right where we're
custom you know designed consensus protocol and everything and so, and we can still provide decentralized sequencing.
So, which we are excited to do for LitVM.
But the shared sequencing is slightly different.
And I don't need to get into the nuances, but I mean, decentralized sequencing is about,
you know, who's doing the sequencing, right?
Is it a single server or is it a decentralized network like Espresso?
Shared sequencing is what's being sequenced together.
So that could be a decentralized sequencer like Espresso,
sequencing transactions for lit VM and, you know,
another chain that wants to use Espresso for decentralized sequencer.
That decentralized network could sequence transactions together in the same block,
therefore creating this kind of synchronous composability between these two chains.
But shared sequencing doesn't have to be decentralized.
You could have a single server sequencing for multiple transactions.
So decentralized sequencing and shared sequencing, you'll hear these terms.
They're related, not exactly the same.
And so while we're still able to kind of provide decentralized sequencing to rollups,
And so while we're still able to kind of provide decentralized sequencing to rollups, shared sequencing is a more complex matter and not something we're currently prepared to provide.
But, you know, in the future, if there is demand, and I certainly think there will be maybe clusters of shared rollups with shared sequencers.
But, yeah, we've had to update
our vision a little bit on on what that looks like so um as far as decentralized sequencing
and offering that to litvm yes it's espresso network um you know is is able to to offer that
and and you know further decentralize uh litvm and make it more secure and um yeah
centralize LitVM and make it more secure.
And yeah.
Definitely.
We're really excited about it.
So thank you,
Whit,
for talking about these key components that are so crucial for the LitVM
build.
Really appreciate you guys coming out.
And over the course of the first half of this show,
guys,
we're talking to partners of litvm
and uh discussing the technical uh aspects of you know what how they contribute to litvm
uh i'm going to be passing mike over to iago here in just a second but i also want to welcome
james from caldera uh So, but yeah, thank you.
There's plenty of alpha.
If you guys joined us in the last five minutes,
you probably missed the beginning of the introduction with Iago
and also the information about the ESP airdrop.
This is Espresso's airdrop.
So please go back and listen to that in the future also we have the
espresso foundation the official link to get access to information about the esp registration
portal so please follow everyone on stage we have james from caldera, Whit here from Espresso, Iago,
building with BitcoinOS and also us at LitVM.
So much love everyone.
Iago, I have a couple of questions I wanna ask you
and then of course we'll have some questions
for Caldera here as well.
But in what ways is bitcoin os adapting their bitcoin related
work for litecoin compatibility on litvm so bitcoin and litecoin are very similar
from a technical perspective um in many ways litecoin is a fork of Bitcoin.
And they have, as a result, many of the same possibilities and many of the same limitations. The key limitation for both Bitcoin and Litecoin has been a lack of programmability and an inability to manage the types of cryptography that would allow for layer twos like rollups to be built on them
or for them to become interoperable with other chains and in particular with each other.
So what we built with Boss is the ability to build programmability for Bitcoin. We have since
then launched the first programmable tokens on Bitcoin.
We've seen quite a lot of activity.
Sometimes as much as 40% of Bitcoin block space has been programmable tokens running on the BOSS platform.
We've seen millions of dollars of BTC become programmable BTC.
And now we're going to start seeing the first Bitcoin rollups launching.
So what we've been doing over the last few months as it relates to Litecoin is we've been adapting
what we've done for Bitcoin to bring the same functionality to Litecoin as well. so that will mean we can now have litvm be a roll-up to litecoin we'll be able to
have zk ltc so programmable ltc move seamlessly onto litecoin roll-ups and in particular of course
onto litvm which will be the first system to demonstrate this as well as having zkbtc so
the ability to trustlessly move btc and ltc back and forth onto a single roll up where they can be
traded with other assets from ethereum as well as stable coins and um and from there we're going to be working on additional
developments like the ability to integrate uh confidential transactions or privacy shielded
transactions for bitcoin for ltc and um by integrating with what you guys are doing with
And by integrating with what you guys are doing with LitVM,
integrating in Espresso and Caldera,
we're helping build out the system
where you can now have DeFi trustlessly able
to provide
Litecoin holders with the ability to start earning yield, start utilizing their Litecoin
as a collateral asset, use it to trade with stablecoins and have private transactions
coins and have private transactions in a way that was never before possible.
in a way that was never before possible.
Yes, it's awesome. So what people are going to start seeing over the course of this space here,
you know, we started off with kind of diving into Espresso's tech and now Iago's explaining
all the brilliant work that they're doing as well.
You're going to start seeing that these are the most cutting edge pieces of technology. We're bringing them together for Litecoin.
And, you know, Bitcoin is also a big part of this as well.
But, you know, this is a Libium.
It's the Litecoin layer two.
the Litecoin layer two.
And so we're fully unleashing Litecoin,
enabling it to access Web3.
And like Yago was just saying,
it'll be able to now earn yield in a trustless way.
You know, there will be Litecoin-backed real-world assets.
Also, the agentic world is exploding so without all these
pieces it it makes it a lot harder for litecoin to uh participate in you know the agentic side
of things where all the builders are and we can talk about that on another space. But the point is, is that these all these pieces are crucial.
And this is the foundation of enabling Litecoin to fully trustlessly enter Web3.
Iago, thank you for that explanation.
I also want to dive just a bit deeper.
And I appreciate you kind of building on
top of what wit was just saying earlier but uh can we dive a bit deeper into like charms and grail uh
so um yeah how about yeah go ahead and take away on on those two pieces of technology and how they
on those two pieces of technology
and how they work with LitVM.
Yeah, so I'll start with CHARBs.
One of the challenges that you have is
when building programmability,
it's not enough just to have programmability just for,
let's say Litecoin or BTC.
For these ecosystems to become fully functional,
we need to be able to have other kinds of assets
that are issued and for those assets to be programmable.
So what do I mean by a programmable asset?
Well, if we go back to sort of BTC and LTC,
without programmability,
you're very limited in what you can do
the reason defy on the bitcoin network hasn't developed is because you can create a transaction
to send bitcoin to someone else you can create a transaction to put bitcoin into a multi-sig but you can't create transactions that are automatically triggered by a trade by
interest rates on lending platforms by the need for collateral for a stablecoin no no transactions
are automatically triggered and you also can't pull assets together so you can't have
automatically triggered and you also can't pull assets together so you can't
have something like an AMM you can't have something like a lending pool because
there is no program that you can deploy which would say okay I will automatically
swap or lend to you on the basis of transactions that you perform on chain.
Now, we started out with the goal of providing this kind of functionality so that you could
have rollups, you could have DeFi, but it became quickly apparent to us that as rollups
were going to be launched and as projects were going to be looking to launch these kinds of things, they would want to be able to introduce new kinds of assets as well.
Real world assets, stable coins, but also assets tied to specific kinds of DeFi platforms.
Either the token for the DeFi platform or the native token for the the roll-up like LitVM might have and also tokens
representing holdings that people have so for example if you deposit funds into a AMM you want
to be able to have an LP token all of these need to be programmable tokens they can't just be tokens
that require someone to manually move them around.
And so we built a protocol called CHARMS, which allows for the creation and the issuance of these kinds of programmable tokens.
The CHARMS protocol already exists in Bitcoin and in particular now is starting to gain significant developer traction and what we're doing is we
are bringing that to litecoin as well so people have heard you know we've had tokens we've had
like things like ordinals and we've had things like brc20 on litecoin as well as on bitcoin but
like bitcoin itself these have not been programmable.
And they've been, as a result, very awkward to use.
Their UI hasn't been good.
And all of these problems ultimately come down to the inability to build adequate programmability
around them.
And so what makes Charms different, unique, and I think think important is that for the first time ever all of what we've
seen in terms of programmable tokens and programmability on other chains and more
is now becoming available in bitcoin and litecoin as well um and then that brings me to grail so grail is the system that we've built which allows these programmable
tokens to interact across not just with not just on one chain but across multiple different chains
utilizing zk proofs and and this is actually something which goes beyond what we've seen
in any other ecosystem including including Ethereum or Solana.
Because for the first time, it's possible to build an application which can interact with tokens in multiple different chains. of a ERC20 token and you want to use Aave, for example,
you have to choose, am I going to use Aave on Ethereum
or am I going to use Aave on a rollup?
But you can't do both.
And so as a developer, you're deploying Aave
multiple different times and the liquidity is getting split.
And as a user, your UI and liquidity is fragmented.
So what's unique about charms plus grail
is the ability for a token to move between chains
and continue to interact with smart contracts
on multiple different chains.
So you can be trading your token on a different chain.
You could be lending your token on a different chain. You could be lending your token
and using it as collateral on a different chain.
And all of this occurs trustlessly
and is now becoming available in Bitcoin, Litecoin,
and soon other chains as well.
Isn't it crazy that we, I don't know, expect,
you know, or most people just accepted the fact that we need to
deploy something like, you know, Uniswap on 100 different chains. Like, you can't just be
in one place. It's just, yeah. I think it is crazy and it has been a fundamental I think it's been one of the primary reasons that we've seen
that have limited the degree to which crypto has developed um and and it and it arose because
of the ethereum paradigm which was like let's build the world computer and so there was this
type coupling of the the virtual machine with the
chain. Bitcoin doesn't have that problem. And so it sort of freed us from that paradigm of thinking
because Bitcoin doesn't have a virtual machine at all. And so we had to figure out how to build a
system where the virtual machine could be anywhere and could actually be embedded into the
token itself. But this has been a huge problem because fundamentally what we're trying to do is
build a network. A system which should be built on network affects the internet of value, right?
In the internet, if I build an an application i just deploy it and everyone in
the world can use it but in crypto if i build an application only a subset of people can use it
on a specific chain right and and so as a developer and as a user i'm screwed i got i don't
have access to the whole world it's a it's as if the internet had developed
in a completely different way where the United States
had an internet and France had an internet
and England had an internet.
So crypto today actually kind of looks like the Chinese web,
right, where they have a whole bunch of different systems
that Westerners don't use, can't use,
and they can't use the systems that we use
and that broke the internet and is severely limited to the degree to which
there even we could even talk about there being the same internet for china and for
the rest of the world so imagine if we had done that for every single country we basically
wouldn't have an internet and that's exactly what we do with crypto so we actually don't have true crypto we don't have a true
internet of value we've just recreated you know the same you know silos that we have in web2 right
like uh it's just yeah i mean crypto promises so much but we somehow have found ourselves in
the same situation where we've fragmented liquidity, right?
Like, you know, I can't, I have Venmo, you know, you have Alipay, like, oh, can't send
you that money.
That is a pretty funny and ironic situation to be in.
Now, the good thing is they don't really have a way to solve that.
The good thing is they don't really have a way to solve that.
We do.
By the nature of our industry, we actually can solve these things.
But it is funny that at this current state,
we do have similar siloing and fragmented liquidity
and fragmented applications as Web2.
But I mean, zooming out, that's what our industry really,
a cool way to look at what our industry is,
is providing a standardized process for all applications
and value and time and labor time and, you know, whether it's airline points or AI tokens or, you know,
DeFi stuff or sound money or video game money or whatever, all being able to trade on the
same exchanges, all being able to build composably
with these DeFi Legos.
It's just, that's the end state.
And that's the goal and that's the dream.
But at the moment, we're just not quite there.
But we're fixing this now.
Right here on this space.
Yeah, exactly.
These are the guys right here.
Yeah, you guys are all legends and i i really
appreciate you know you know everyone here today with iago caldera um caldera i do have some
questions for is it is that mikey uh behind the the uh caldera account hey Hey, it's Matt. I'm co-founder and CEO, speaking from the official account.
How's it going?
Oh, hey, hi.
Going well, and thank you so much for being here.
And I wanna tell everyone in the audience,
thank you for joining us on a Friday
and chopping it up with us.
Yeah, let me go ahead and pass the mic over here.
how will Caldera's infrastructure support Libium's
overall architecture,
particularly in terms of reliability and performance?
Yeah, so we're supporting LitVM with our Rollup Engine product. That's basically our
flagship product. It's what we're known for. A lot of people call it Rollup as a Service.
So we're basically managing infrastructure as a service for launching and running L2
Rollups. What this means practically is we're helping run the roll up sequencer of the chain.
That's the, you know, the, the service that actually processes transactions, things like RPC nodes for developers, of course.
It's important that those exist and they're live and they're running for people to interface with the chain, whether, you know, you're building your own app or you're just throwing that in your MetaMask wallet.
That's, you know, what allows users to connect to the chain.
We also provide a bunch of tools
that are just broadly useful.
So things like the Explorer, some indexing solutions,
that sort of thing.
So we basically have all of that,
providing it as a package and helping LitVM
get spun up as quickly and as easily as possible.
You mentioned reliability and performance. That
is basically the number one focus of ours. Of course, from a reliability perspective,
blockchains can absolutely never go down. You really need as close to 100% uptime as possible.
We typically are able to hit that. Our SLAs are four nines of reliability. So that means 99.99%
uptime and all core components of block production. Typically, we found we actually exceed that.
We've like literally invested years of effort. Now, you know, making the most battle tested
infrastructure for rollups. So we have like best in class monitoring that includes both on-chain and off-chain monitoring.
Uh, so, you know, off-chain for the actual software we're running, the RPC nodes, the
sequencer, et cetera.
Uh, and on-chain monitoring is really important to make sure that settlement is happening,
happening correctly.
Um, you know, rollups, they need to settle on a certain interval in order to maintain operation correctly.
And so we have monitoring for both of that.
And, you know, mostly on the off-chain infrastructure side, we have a lot of scaling infrastructure that we've built in order to make sure that the chain is always able to handle the demand that users and
developers are throwing at it. So these are things like scaling RPC nodes automatically. So if there's
like a burst in activity, the capacity of the chain in terms of how many like read requests
and RPC requests we can handle, like that will automatically increase, you know, that sort of thing.
One example, actually, whenever people ask me about reliability or performance that I like to bring up is I'm sure some folks in the audience recall when ordinals were really caught on EVM chains. This is like a couple of years ago now, but it was still probably like one of the biggest broad stress tests of our infrastructure that we saw.
At that point, at the peak of like Ordinals mania, some of our chains were processing
like literally thousands of transactions per block.
That means like hundreds of millions of gas per second.
So like many multiples, the capacity of Ethereum or even the usual activity of chains like Arbitrum,
Optimism, et cetera. And we were able to handle that without breaking a sweat. So we're bringing
all of that infrastructure and the expertise and the technology we've built to build big chains,
and we're basically providing that as a service to Litvium.
basically providing that as a service to Libium.
Beautiful. Thank you, Matt, for explaining that.
And you actually answered both of the questions I had all in one so eloquently.
But I'll ask the panel here today.
It looks like WIT may be having to drop soon or or now uh looks like yago
or actually are you are you have to leave now yeah i do have to drop for another call i really
really appreciate you having me um was there a quick was there another question for me though
it was i was going to start opening up more for the panel and just kind of asking
general questions from here,
but I really appreciate you being here with and explaining everything on the
espresso side.
If you have questions,
yeah,
feel free to just DM me or reach out on,
on Twitter.
Awesome.
Sounds good.
Please follow everyone that has joined today. So Whit,
Iago was here just a second ago. We also have Caldera. Thank you, Whit, for joining us.
Yeah. Well, yeah. Shout out to Matt and James. Caldera is a very important partner for Espresso.
We've really been enjoying working with them.
You know,
they're the RAS for,
for several integrated rollups that are already integrated with espresso.
So they are a top notch team,
but again,
thanks for having me.
And yeah,
see everyone around.
Thanks for coming with really excited about what we're all building together
here.
It's,
it's pretty cool to bring all these technologies together and it's all culminating in litecoin virtual machine or litvm and uh thanks to
great development teams like all of you uh that we can all put this together ditto yeah very excited
awesome so uh the second half of the show is going to be more broadly about interoperability.
So that's coming up in a second. And Matt, I'll ask you this because I think we have some more guests that will be joining us in a second you know how how do you see
all these technologies essentially working together so we were briefly talking about this um before i introduced you and and you started uh talking about caldera but you know what does
the future look like with with all these new technologies joining us
and all these innovative teams building,
trying to unify the liquidity.
We have Espresso, BitcoinOS, Caldera
and many others around Web3, Ethereum world building.
What does the future for web3 really look like?
That's a really great question.
We've always been pretty opinionated
that the future of web3 looks a lot like the web itself.
I guess you'd call it web2.
We've always seen it. It's pretty clear for new chains and multiple chains to exist. I think if you were to go back three or four years ago, everyone was
trying to build the chain to end all chains. That's obviously that's obviously, you know, to some extent like the Solana positioning.
A lot of the companies that came out of like that vintage,
let's call it like the sort of 2022 vintage,
sorry, 2020 vintage of companies,
like a lot of companies sort of like Monad
and a lot of these like high performance chains,
even like Say, I think had this positioning some time ago.
Like everyone, you know,
was kind of building with assumption like,
hey, maybe we can just make a single chain really fast. And that will mean that we can obviate the
necessity of every other chain existing. What we've seen obviously in this space is that, first of all,
in the space is that, first of all, that just for practical purposes, not even related to technology,
is very hard to do. I think one of the great things about crypto is that it's inherently
multipolar and competitive. People will always use many different ecosystems. People are always
hunting for alpha. That means that there's actually some benefits you get as a non-incumbent to be competitive. And that traditionally leads to
there being many more chains or basically many more products in any given category.
And as well, what we found in running our company is that performance is just one thing, right?
So like people have this thesis that if we make like a really fast chain, maybe everyone will just come to it and that'll be the end of it.
What we've seen is that like there are practical purposes outside of performance where you would maybe want to launch your own chain.
you would maybe want to launch your own chain.
And I think LitVM is a really good example of this, right?
And I think LitVM is a really good example of this, right?
Like LitVM, Litecoin is gonna be the first class token,
the main native token of the chain.
That allows you to leverage the Litecoin community,
get users from there, kind of act as like a bridge,
so to speak, between the Ethereum, EVM land,
the folks in Litecoin community. That's a very unique and really strong position
for this chain to be in.
And in order to get that, you need to have your own chain,
right?
Like Solana, they have their own tokens,
Say has their own token, Monad has its own token.
You need your own chain in order to,
you know, provide that for users. And so I I think like you know what what we've seen is
that you know some chains come some chains go but the secular trend in the space is towards more and
more blockchains um and what that means related to your question with you know interoperability and connectivity and what the blockchain space is going to look like,
it's going to look like the web, right? Like the web is multipolar. There are many different
cloud providers. They're all running different services, different applications, and communication
across those applications can happen, mostly asynchronously.
And I think that's kind of like what we're seeing in the chain landscape as well.
You'll have many different chains.
Some are general purpose.
Some are focused on specific apps.
We have things like Hyperliquid, Lighter, et cetera.
And we have interop solutions that basically act as the networking layer
between all these different
chains. So rather than having like a single world computer, the space has kind of graduated to
there being multiple computers that all have like similar properties when it comes to the core
blockchain stuff and really robust communication layers between them. And that's actually a lot more similar to the internet than how I think
crypto used to be with very fragmented ecosystems.
I agree, Matt. And this is something that I've been talking about for a long time.
You know, just all the technology is starting to converge.
All the technology is starting to converge.
You know, many people, I think, was it 2020?
I think it was around 2020 when, you know,
Cosmos and the app chain thesis started coming out.
And there was all these chains.
And what we noticed is that there was a lot of issues,
but a lot of these issues are actually being solved over time.
You know, Espresso was just here talking about how they're fixing the future
so that all these chains can work together with Fast Finality.
And, you know, Caldera is helping, you know, many chains come online.
And the future, in my opinion, does look exactly like you're saying, you know, just like the Internet open, free and everything working together with, you know, think there will be a a greater uh greater um involvement with privacy
in the future and and so it's it's definitely exciting to to see all this starting to unfold
i also want to introduce uh crypto solutions i have to click on your name here just to make sure I get your name right.
Damian, thank you for joining us as well.
Matt, on the second half of the show here, we're just kind of jumping into interoperability more broadly.
So I just want to thank you for being here
and also explaining a bit about Caldera
and your thoughts on the future here.
With my next question, this is for anyone.
So anyone can jump in.
Oh, also Roots Lab, thank you for being here.
Why has it proven so hard to make lots of chains feel like one connected system rather than dozens of isolated networks? I think we kind of touched on this a bit briefly earlier, but if we could just dive into, you know, what the problem was and then, you know, maybe, you know, what's being solved today.
Anyone can jump in.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Let me allow you.
Take that.
No, go ahead.
It's fine.
It's fine.
I can go second.
All right.
Okay.
Thanks.
I think thanks a lot for actually bringing us all together.
And it's actually been amazing listening to the great minds we have, you know, creating a lot of solutions for us.
Just like we have heard from Katz, who happens to be, you know, doing a lot when it comes to you know caldera and you know
they have been shipping a lot you know in terms of ai stable coins as well as you know talking
about privacy talking about a lot of things so they have been doing well and i think the question
you ask in as much as we know one of the major issue actually ought to do with you know uh
cross chain bridges and um as well as some more or less like, you know, crossing communications.
These are some of the issues that is actually hindering that.
But I can actually say with my, you know, experience and I've been, you know, researching and looking into what Caldera is doing.
researching and looking into what you know caldera is doing they have been doing massively well where
they have actually solved such kind of a problem if you look at it uh with the solution one of their
solutions the metal layer as well as the metal tokens you know they've been doing well in that
annal and um many people are actually using it now and many people are leveraging on the tools they
have actually built because look these are huge issues that uh today everybody tried to do his own thing everybody tried to like build his own chain
but imagine you can actually do that within just a few clicks and um you can actually get them
unified uh they can actually communicate with each other without any issues you can even use
the meta token they have which can can enable you to use the same contract
across different chains.
And that, I believe, is something remarkable
that we all need to look into.
And yeah, actually, these are just some few issues
I know we have, and I think Caldera has actually
sort of been a lot about that currently.
And I'm actually waiting to see how other platforms will also
integrate the solutions
that they have provided so far.
Yeah, I don't know, but we'll also want to learn from
other people as well.
GM, GM everyone.
Hey, Rock.
Just one second here.
Rock, can you hear me?
Yes, sir.
I'm rugging, so my entire screen is starting to freeze.
So apologies, guys.
Rock, if you could take...
And he's gone.
And he's gone.
Damien, I think you were going to follow up with that.
Yeah, I can jump in.
I was going to say, I think the issue used to be composability, honestly.
So as you just mentioned, there's just been a lot of chains that have been built in the past.
Everyone's trying to kind of own the base layer, the settlement layer.
And the block space premium is a thing of the past, I would say.
Like gas costs on Ethereum mainnet have gone down exponentially over the last few years um you know and as a
result of those initial high gas costs a lot of l2s came about a lot of alt l1s to compete um
either on the speed or cost to developers and um yeah i think uh the issue was can put like
composability like these changes couldn't talk to each other.
And now you just have interop from Rails.
You have a lot of different bridges,
a lot of different tools that can get from point A to point B.
So I think we're seeing actually the problem become a lot more
about how we orchestrate amongst chains, essentially.
Like how do you actually ensure that you as a user are able to find the most relevant
thing that you want to get into on-chain essentially.
So it's kind of like instead of having to, I don't know, use Google, I would say like
30 years ago and trying to basically find, you know, like you have like the top page maybe,
like, you know, websites you want to find,
but you never get to see like any of the content below a few pages.
I think search engines have been optimized in a sense,
in a much better way over the last 20 years, where even more relevant results get kind of presented to you.
And I think the agentic economy
is going to really exacerbate
the way users kind of go about
choosing things, essentially,
because a lot of these Rails do exist.
It's just a matter of how those choices
are then kind of consolidated, I would say.
Yeah, I think that's really why
the well-entrained world feels fragmented
at the moment.
It's not so much as in the Rails for this don't exist,
because they do.
The tools are there.
The volumes speak for it as well.
And even token standards are there.
Like OFTs are a thing as well.
And, you know, if you want to be doing like one-to-one stable swaps
across different chains, you can vince and burn USDT zero.
So I think the solution's there.
It's just a better of what can I actually do that I care about on chain
and how easily can I go about doing the one thing that I'm looking to go and do.
I mean, like, Espresso kind of touched on it by accident earlier, but could a lot of
it just be the monetary side for the actual chains? When you look at it, if you're a chain,
you're an L1, you just sell your own blog space you make all the
money elaborate you become part of the big elaborate well if you become part of a bigger
picture where maybe like as as an aggregator you get only 15 of a trade instead of the full trade
um there you you obviously still get some benefits where you can maybe capture some volume
that you wouldn't have otherwise got.
But you maybe miss out on a lot of block space
that otherwise gets routed elsewhere
because maybe that chain has more liquidity
so the trade gets routed to that chain.
So I mean, even like thinking instead of a DEX level,
a chain level, like a lot of the transactions
might get routed away from you
if you become part of like a bigger sort of aggregated player.
So what's the question?
Well, no, I was just thinking, I was like,
maybe would that be part of it?
Like you mentioned the tools are available.
Like a lot of chains can probably be much more interoperable
than they are currently,
but maybe they're not doing so because of the revenue side of things.
Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, I mean, I think that's correct. And I think honestly,
this is kind of also signal of the chain premium really breaking down. I think like it's not
gonna be a question of whether it's kind of chains that people can make their decisions
around. It's going to be around markets, it's going to be around applications. So I think like it's not going to be a question of whether it's kind of chains that people can make their decisions around. It's going to be around markets. It's going to be around applications.
So I think a lot of launches over the last sort of year might speak to like that sort of premium trend going downhill.
I'm not going to point to any specific examples, but it's just really about like what killer app do you have as an ecosystem or what service are you providing that I want?
And it just, you know, it being built on on-chain Rails at all, I think is the main distinguishing factor between the space and TradFi.
It's no longer about whose chain is better. It's about how good is the service that I'm actually getting.
All right.
Can you guys hear me again?
Yep.
Yes.
Okay.
Awesome.
I'm back.
We're still back.
All right.
Yeah.
X sometimes chooses to just rug me.
I can never tell if it's Panda behind the quick swap space
just rugged me i i can never tell if it's panda behind the quick swap space just kicking me or
or uh or uh just x being rugged but it's a little bit of both yeah good time i blame the panda
yeah yeah he's sneaky but uh i was catching the tail end of of of what you guys were saying missed a bit there
so please you guys could continue and I'll jump in
Ruth's lab you are muted okay can you hear me now basically on the question
that was wrong I feel that most blockchain protocols build in isolation.
And due to this fragmentation, of course, cross-chain communication becomes an issue.
I feel if most blockchain protocols can begin to build monolithic layers, you don't need to build from scratch or you don't
need to rely solely on bridges you could just plug into their network and be able to access liquidity
access network state and other information that is solely solely available on the protocol you
the issue of interability will be a little bit reduced
i think that is what caldera metallia is solving already as well i think the solution is there i
guess maybe you can also look into that perhaps learn more about what they are doing yeah so
Yeah.
So just to clarify, Caldera is probably a different project than you're thinking, crypto solutions.
But yeah, I appreciate everyone's thoughts on that.
Maybe I'll do this here. So what real user problems are caused by poor interoperability right now? What do you guys think is, what are the real user problems? having issues with now and how will these solutions that are coming online
solve and make for a more seamless Web3?
I think a lot of the interoperability is running through a lot of these bridges
or these third layers that aren't necessarily as trustless as we'd like them to think. I think most of them kind of have a lot of like,
well, a lot of weak points. So there's a lot of opportunity for scammers or anybody to kind of
come in and for an issue to occur versus, you know, having, you know, like a trustless bridge
that kind of like offers more of like a decentralized versus centralized option
for a lot of these interoperabilities.
And I think that's the biggest thing is the centralization of most of this interoperability currently.
I mean, we're obviously seeing a lot of the progression and some of the bleeding-get technologies,
somewhat like, you know, just like Bitcoin OS,
who's able to effectively, you know,
become interoperable between, you know, Bitcoin,
Litecoin, Cardano as well,
but on more of like a trustless and decentralized manner
versus some of these centralized
options that we currently have. I think that's the biggest fail or not fail, but that's the
biggest thing that we have, I think.
Are you guys thinking about privacy as well in terms of the data leak?
I think it's part of what you said, right?
No, I mean, well, it's mainly because of, you know, most of the time that, you know,
you're having to transact in between two different chains or, you know, if you're wanting to
swap, you're having to utilize like a centralized bridge, right?
And that centralized bridge offers an opportunity for another team to actually hold that asset
versus like a trustless version
that allows it to be seamless,
allows it to be a lot safer
versus like a weak point of centralization.
I mean, we've seen a lot of like these hacks
or these hacks that have happened to,
I think Ronin was like one of the biggest one
where they were to kind of take away
like millions and millions of dollars
because of these weak points in them.
So I think that that's kind of like
one of the biggest issues
when it comes to some of the interoperability and having, yeah.
I don't know. What do you guys, what do you think on that?
I mean, I think the biggest issue overall is just explaining this to someone that isn't crypto native.
Like we're all like used to bridges and stuff.
I mean, I still know people that like use crypto that like just don't like bridges.
I mean, I still know people that, like, use crypto
that, like, just don't like bridges.
They'll send money to, like, Coinbase
and then from Coinbase to a different chain
instead of actually just using a bridge.
Like, if I had to tell my sister,
like, she's usually the normie that I use as an example,
like, okay, like, go bridge some ETH over to Monad
and then play with that.
She would not have a clue what to do.
Like, yeah.
The depth of her knowledge is
that Monad is coming to be.
I've been in the industry for 11 years
and if you wanted me to bridge to Monad,
I wouldn't know what to do. I'd have to look into it.
I'd have to ask you or I'd have to go ask AI
or I'd have to go dig around on fucking Reddit
or something.
It's not that easy.
Or at least ask Damien.
Well, I mean, I would say it's not even easy anymore and it's just not cost effective.
I mean, it's extremely expensive.
I mean, the amount that you actually have to pay in order to do a bridge these days is just absolutely ridiculous. Even on a small scale,
you're still paying a large tax to have to bridge over money. And that's a shitty situation. I mean,
if I'm sending money, and I'm just going to put this on the TradFi side of things, if I'm just
sending money from bank to bank, I mean, they don't charge me anything I can I can do that pretty
quick pretty seamless so I don't know why you would want to do that via crypto besides having
the um you know the the the security advantages of of you know the blockchain as well but at the
same time and also but but you still have to you know utilize the centralized system of the bank when you're doing that.
And I think that once that right there gets solved, where it's not so expensive, I think it will definitely be a big advantage.
I have to disagree.
I guess in some cases, bridging can be expensive.
you know, bridging can be expensive,
but the cost of bridging cross-chain
is definitely a lot cheaper than it used to be.
In my opinion, it's become a lot easier as well,
especially with some of these cross-chain
kind of like aggregators that are out there.
that are out there and I'm totally drawing a blank
And I'm totally drawing a blank on the type of technology.
on the type of technology.
What's the really quick, fast solver?
Not Axelar?
No, well, no, it's the technology
that's in the background that's a bit
not as decentralized.
I'm forgetting that. Yes, there we go.
Intense.
You can actually
swap
cross-chain pretty quickly
and affordably nowadays.
I would have to agree with Rock
though that
a big issue is probably education and the steep learning curve.
Even if you just look at things at the wallet level, you have a long key that you send funds to.
And this is how most people are introduced. Luckily,
there are now, you know, send a name services and, and it's making it easier to
send funds cross chain, you know, to your friends, etc. But But I think overall, this is what we've been talking about on this
basis, like the convergence of all these technologies where you have AI coming online,
you have these send-a-name type services where you can actually just easily send funds to
someone's name. Hopefully in the future, people start adopting private send-a-name type services.
Bridging is becoming faster and cheaper.
Chains with product market fit like LitVM
that are enabling Litecoin to enter Web3.
All this is going to convert and come together.
Hopefully that solves a lot of the pain points
that we see but yeah i'm just wondering if there's any other pain points that you guys are seeing
that you know is going to keep mass adoption from coming in or or uh you know is there any
like innovative technology that that you think that will also be part of this technology that's converging to make it easier for, you know, everyone else to participate and
not have such a massive learning curve, you know, to join Web3 Crypto? For fun here, guys,
as co-founder of Quickswap and having built a lot of stuff in this industry over the last 11 years,
I've been trying to sign a multi-sig transaction since last night. So it's really frustrating. I
had to go to bed and wait on bridges. I have to switch RPCs 10 times, switch wallets multiple times, switch to like direct writing
to the contract because the multi-sig, uh, platform, it's, it's a very early, uh, version
of Gnosis, um, that is obsolete now.
And so had to go directly to write contract, you know, uh, and just problem after problem after problem.
Gas is not estimating properly. Can't speed up transaction. Can't cancel transactions,
switching between wallets, switching between bridges. It is like, this is this, our industry
has to solve this. And thank God that the people on this space are doing that. Uh, but we still
have a ways to go.
I mean, if I had to go through,
imagine if you had to go through this
every time you liked a photo on Instagram
or every time you wanted to post a photo on Facebook
or send a message to your family on WhatsApp or something.
This is just ludicrous still.
But I'm being negative because I'm frustrated right now,
literally been on this space for the last hour and a half while I'm on the space
trying to sign this damn transaction.
And yeah, so a little frustrated, but I will say Aztec got a good point.
It, it has improved as crazy as it sounds.
It has improved like 50 times from the beginning.
So that's good.
But we still, I think have another 50 times from the beginning so that's good but we still i think have another 50
times to improve definitely what i the issue i had with hardware recently i was doing a multi-sig as
well uh it wouldn't sign the transaction but the issue was actually super simple and more of a user error and i i just needed to update the firmware on the on the
cold storage and then as soon as i updated it backed out and then you know restarted everything
and tried again it worked so it it's kind of funny that like sometimes the problems that are there
are just they're they're very simple uh i know in your situation it sounds a
lot more complex but who knows maybe it is simple man and i'm just not getting it right like and
sometimes it's it seems obvious i don't know i've tried you know 20 30 different things so
it doesn't feel simple well and it's also because i'm using like an old it's a very old multi-sig
that we're upgrading to a new multi-sig that's what this transaction actually is but um so it's a very old multi-sig that we're upgrading to a new multi-sig that's what this transaction actually is but um so it's a little bit different but it's still simple but not obvious yeah exactly
because like it was a simple fix but i i didn't realize you know and there's nothing popping up
saying you know update it just i randomly figured it out with trial and error.
So, yeah, I get what you're saying with the space.
You know, it needs to continue evolving.
But good thing, you know, we are seeing that.
Anyone else want to jump in?
Wolfswap, welcome to the show.
Juju, welcome to the...
JujuKey, welcome to the show.
Woof, as well.
Welcome.
We also got Wolf up here, too.
Yeah, that's too, Woof.
GM, GM.
It's like the dogs just all came out all at once.
Woof, woof.
Love it. Yeah.
I wanted to say who let the dogs out.
But Darren won't, the panda won't play the song.
Yeah, we might get a strike.
I do have a mute everyone button here
don't you guys miss when our spaces
were very music centric
and then we had to worry about stupid copyright stuff
so we couldn't anymore
we used to play music at the beginning
we'd play a couple songs
we would have musicians come on the show
and play music
I miss the music let's
bring the music back we can bring back some of it the issue is that x rug like so i had a process
where i had to like have a virtual cable that input into google chrome and i'd play the music
through that but um x decided they didn't like that anymore so they tried they do noise canceling
even if they think it's just an audio input like from a person uh so all the music sounds crap
yeah what about um i know there was the option where we used um like we had to give a login to
some account does that one we didn't want to do it because of security anyways
But does that one not work either anymore? I
Would have to ask
narco
But I got a great bring back the music
Yeah, well music was was really big especially with when ordinals andfts were a big deal and there was uh well not a not
that they're not a big deal but they were more popular you know there was kind of going through
their rage and i remember um there was some awesome musicians that were a little bit more
uh on the timeline at that time a little more active. And that was awesome, just having live music on the spaces.
But hopefully...
I could get a large diaphragm,
and I can just start singing the afternoon again.
That would be great, bro.
I actually...
Ooh, let the dogs out.
Oh, here we go.
You can rock off.
Ooh, ooh, ooh.
Quick swap karaoke.
There we go.
Hey, maybe that could be a segment we do sometime.
I got to, you know, Matt, you seem to be a bit of a futurist.
And I can tell that you'll probably have like a good guess on this question.
So this question is for everyone on this space.
Guys, if you're new to this space, you can jump in at any time. But I do want to start off with
Matt from Caldera here. What do you think, you know, because we're talking about interoperability,
we're also talking about these solutions that are helping to solve pain points in blockchain and mass adoption and all this so what do you think
will be kind of that the interface for interoperability in the future when everyone
what will like make it a lot easier so for, a lot of people think it's going to be at the wallet level
where you have this super wallet that's really easy to use
and you can access all of your chains, all of your funds,
all the liquidity is unified.
Others think it's AI.
You'll just directly talk to, let's say, an agent. Maybe it's ai you know you'll just directly talk to let's say an agent
maybe it's a mix i'm throwing this question out there you know what what does the future look
like because i think we've been talking about mainly like the rails the infrastructure but
for the for the average user that's going to join in the next five to 10 years, a lot of these pain points get solved.
What is the front end of Web3 going to look like?
And I guess if I could draw a parallel, you know, if we think of the Internet, a lot of people think, yes, it's all these websites, everything works together.
There's all these standards. But a lot of people think of Google.
You know, that's the front end end you just type in what you want you could also uh you know access
like google's ai or whatever i i personally don't use google but but uh you know that's how a lot
of people think of the internet so i guess for us here today uh you know we have a lot of people
building in this space a lot of great minds on the panel today. I'd really like to just pick your guys' brain and hear what you guys think the future of, you know, the front end of blockchain, what kind of unifies everything is going to look like.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, Matt.
Yeah, I think you're totally right that traditionally the focus has been almost entirely on the
rails and like the core technology and the infrastructure.
But the biggest unlock is going to come from the UI and what users are actually interacting
with.
I think all the solutions you mentioned are all components to solving this.
Wallets are a big one.
I mean, this has been kind of one of the more persistent, annoying things that we've needed to deal with just in the nature of our work.
There aren't really many wallets today that actually handle like multi-chain in a way that like feels good
to the user. I think like MetaMask, you know, is kind of the canonical wallet for EVM and,
you know, to their credit, they've always supported like adding new chains very easily,
which is a huge benefit to the competitiveness in
the space of making it easy for people to launch chains.
We very easily could have been in a worse scenario where it is hard to add new chains
to a wallet, and that effectively enforces a monopoly or I guess an oligopoly from the
chains that do get included versus the chains that don't uh so i'm glad we're not there um but like for us like like for me like i i try
to use as many caldera chains as possible and now that we're at like over 50 chains like my metamask
like drop down is like insane and unworkable like i need to scroll through a massive list just to find what chain I want to be on.
I think that, you know, the ideal, at least for a wallet that general, you know, users can use,
maybe people who are less familiar with the underlying blockchain tech, is something that
abstracts all that away. I actually think a huge underrated unlock for this is the fact that we now
have fairly standard rollup stacks,
right?
So like LitVM, you guys are going to use the Arbitrum Orbit stack.
That means from a wallet's perspective, from a user perspective, you have, you know, similar
kind of security profiles across all of these different chains.
And that I think kind of can shift the Overton window a little bit around providing better
aggregation and allowing which chain you're actually interfacing with at any given time
to fade into the background a little bit.
Because users don't need to be as aware, like, oh, I'm using this specific chain because
I need to know that because that you know, that actually provides a ton
of valuable information that a user should know about like the security of their assets, you know,
how settlement works, et cetera. So I think some of the consolidation around Stacks is actually
somewhat helpful in this regard. That's kind of like a purely theoretical thing. I don't think
we've seen it happen yet, but I think, you know, in the long term, that'll be helpful. And then I'll try to be quick, but you mentioned
AI and agents. I think this will be a huge unlock too. Again, because agents are actually a very,
very good interface for abstracting away all chains. Like if a user can just say like, hey, I've, you know, I want to buy like this asset with
the stable coins I have in my wallet and an agent can figure out the best way to route
that, you know, leveraging the rails that you talked about, that the space has already
built, that, you know, I think that might be like the UX that like the vast majority of retail users end up
using, you know, in the long run. So I'm very bullish on it, but it's very, very early days.
And I think there's been not enough investment in the actual like multi-chain UX versus the Rails.
Fully agree. And I hope this is something that I'm also working towards with LitVM to work with wallet providers in the agentic world.
And it's crazy to say that it feels crazy to me, at least. I guess it's not crazy because, you know, blockchain has only been around for, you know, over a decade.
you know blockchain's only been around for you know uh over a decade but but it feels kind of
weird because i've been in the space for so long to say that we're still early and we really are
because what you see is all of that core infrastructure still being built out um ui is still you know many teams are trying to solve it
and you know i i look at some of the work that like x402 is doing for the agentic world and
you know kind of building the underlying network for these agents to be able to access whatever they need in order to work properly, you know, cross-chain or gather data,
whatever it is that they need.
And so what we're seeing is it is early.
A lot of teams are kind of building the infrastructure.
Even LitVM, you know, with what we're starting with in phase one,
you know, it is fully unlocking Litecoin.
It's enabling Litecoin,
Sound Money Web 3 moving forward. And so it's really going to be about working with the best
teams like we are currently, you know, and to continue making sure that we're on the cutting
edge. But it really is early.
I agree.
I see a couple hands up here.
Please, guys, on the aggregated, just jump in.
It's like a bunch of friends around a table.
I want to welcome Dimitri to the show.
Juju, I think you had your hand up first, please please take it away
jam guys it's me tree from one more dog here uh i'm curious uh about your thoughts about
acquisitions of polygon recently made with coin me and sequence i'm interested in hearing thoughts from quick swap and interesting your thoughts on some kind of interop because it seems it will
track new users to polygon and instead of focusing example you know like we have defy
protocols and some specific defy protocols are booming on polygon it seems on different chains
it seems like polygon will be focusing on different states to become a prior, I don't know, on-ramp or from a mechanism and it will change the matter.
So just curious, what are your thoughts on this acquisition and will it eventually be beneficial for Polygon or it just spending a lot of money to try to figure out the strategy, but that won't work?
It's a good question dimitri i mean right
now we're talking about like interoperability more broadly i i can just give you my thoughts
as aztec you know i'm not speaking for polygon or you know anyone there but it definitely seems to
be you know a good acquisition of these uh two large companies recently polygon is uh you know they have this narrative of being the
open money stack darren am i i'm correct on this right saying open money stack correctly yeah yeah
yeah so you know acquiring these businesses and the infrastructure that's there will help them with uh you know in my opinion
as as you know help them become that open money stack uh you know i don't know you know darren
from quick swap or rock if you you guys want to jump on this but but i would like to return back
to kind of like the the main topic um but yeah i
don't know if anyone else has thoughts on that i mean yeah obviously thoughts is that from quick
swap instead of quick swap but uh yeah i mean obviously it means they can go full end to end
like they're they're going literally from like someone at an atm to um i mean i think sequence
will allow them to like send send money across multiple chains.
Polygon's vision is
interop and sending money everywhere.
It looks like they're trying to be complete
end-to-end. I mean, typically in DeFi
and crypto in general, you see
a lot of modular stuff where
there's hundreds or thousands
of projects or different pieces
of tech built on top of QuickSwap
that do various different things.
And we've always sort of embodied the,
Brock calls them DeFi Lego blocks before he says it.
And it looks like Polygon are actually trying to manage
to do like full end to end and just,
I mean, obviously if they get the revenue through that as well,
then it could be really good for them but um just handle everything from onboarding on ramping
to the actual just payments and sending money around so yeah i mean it could could be really
good for them so um yeah sorry um going back to the topic right I feel everybody's been literally talking about the UI, but in
a sense, I feel it's more like into the UX, right?
Because now I'm going to go into a personal story, right?
For the longest time, if I was trying, I don't use bridges, right?
Because I feel like it's kind of stressful.
There's a whole bunch of friction trying to like bridge funds.
And, you know, especially when you have to like wait for hours, right?
What it was back then.
And, you know, we kind of like created a bitter taste in my mouth for bridges.
So rather than bridging, what I do is I send funds out from my wallet
to a centralized exchange.
Ah, Juju's my sister, Gigi's my sister.
Gigi's my sister.
I swap it over to the token I want to use.
Then I send it back into the wallet, right?
So it saves time.
It saves, like, you know, the stress of having to, like, you know,
go through just waiting on bridges.
The fees.
It saves the fees as well, right?
Because that's also something
that's super important and you know a whole bunch of battle so i feel there's a whole lot of friction
currently in web 3 coming straight off starting from like setting up a wallet like actually using
the tools and if we're looking to go intoop, it just needs the whole process to be more seamless, right?
Like maybe having a DEX walk like a sex, right?
And I'm going to say great job to the Relate team because that's the only bridge that I kind of like use right now.
That's the first bridge I actually used and something I stayed using, right?
Because it's super easy to actually bridge funds.
It's just like you're swapping and, you know,
talking more about interoperability, right?
I feel like that's where the future leans into where we're
kind of like operating seamlessly across chains without
really knowing that we're doing that.
Right.
I don't know what tools is going to be needed for that.
That's for the tech guys to actually know
but i just feel like for the future of interrupt is gonna be more on the experience side rather
than the ui ui is always important though it's always important from the past till now like
simple ui is always great but the experience is the key part of everything else so i think the experience
just has to like be better and everybody's gonna use it but i also have one point right i feel like
an everyday user doesn't necessarily need to like you know be on a whole bunch of chains like 20
chains 10 chains at the same time all we just need is just and that's what we're doing currently we just look for where the
volume is that's where we trade that's where we do stuff so yeah i just feel if we really look at it
though and we're really looking at interoperability i feel it's not something that we kind of like
super need at the core of it all but it's just like a necessary addition to whatever
i have currently so yeah that's just what i wanted to say dude you you use uh the centralized
exchange that's like that was the og bridge this is like what everyone did back in the day
like i i don't do that because i feel like, I mean, I actually hate centralized exchanges.
You know, not your keys, not your crypto.
And I really believe, like you mentioned Relay,
and there's some other really great cross-chain interfaces that are really similar to that
and, you know, kind of aggregate everything and make it just feel like a swap. Um, so I, I use that, but, but yeah, it does work. You know, you can, you can, if for
instance, like a big exchange, like finance, you can just send your funds there and, um, you know,
off boarding is generally depending on like, if you have KYc and how much money you're moving um you know it
it could get sticky you know just because like if you're moving a large amount of money you know
and you're not kyc on a centralized exchange you know they might only allow you to move like what
is it is it because i don't even use centralized exchanges but it used to be like 10 bitcoin
or something along that lines a day um the cool
thing about these decentralized cross-chain aggregators now you can move you know millions
of dollars uh in a single in a single cross-chain swap um and it's all decentralized and and there
are like you can you can choose as a user you know do you want to use
something like intense uh type solution you can look at the time the fees and and it pretty much
just makes it easy but yeah that's the og way for uh i didn't know that people were still doing that
um but that's cool yeah i'm like damien damien definitely threw up in his mouth
when you said that
I mean
oh I'm sorry
I still do it
because I don't know fees
I just wanted to say that
does it
yeah because you're basically
just paying like one
well no you still pay both times, but it's cheaper.
Yeah, you have to pay for swap now.
Yeah, you're right.
You're right.
So there are fees.
There's fees either way.
You're not avoiding that.
And even with time, you're not really saving that much time, honestly,
depending on what permissions you have.
So yeah, and honestly, the actual underlying risk you're taking is pretty much one-to-one,
especially if you're using an intent based protocol.
Right. Right. Yeah. Cause like the, with intense, I mean, you can literally move ETH,
you know, from Ethereum chain. So the fee, there might be a bit of fee because you're on Ethereum
chain, but even, even like right now, the fee super cheap like if you're moving a decent amount
of money it's like you know dollar maybe uh the most and then and you know you can move hundreds
of thousands of dollars for like uh a dollar and then only take what you know 50 seconds maybe you
know maybe even less in some cases with intense so it's it's definitely the wrong way
so um now let me give an example why i say why i said this chipper right um i think there is a time
let's say an example i'm trying to bridge over funds i want to swap into like one eth that's like 3k i could potentially get charged on v-day for like i might
not be accurate right but something near 100 bucks right or like 70 or something
and instead of that right i'd rather just send it to an to a set i'd get like charged
or gas from sending out out of that wallet maybe lesser than $1 right
then I send it out so centralized exchange I do the trade over
it's who I still get like charged lesser than $1 so the total of doing
everything minor just car might just cost me like $3 or something instead of
bridging directly through the wallet. That's actually smart.
But so the thing there is that
that's kind of a Litecoin issue specifically in that case
because Litecoin hasn't really like fully integrated
into web three yet.
You know, we're gonna solve that.
So right now, like if you wanna do a swap for Litecoin,
you'll go through,
oh, what's, I'm like totally drawing a blank.
What do you.
What's the solution, Darren?
It's like a cross chain.
Swap.
Oh, shape shift like shape shift. OK, so basically you'll use something like shape shift and shape shift. oh, Shapeshift, like Shapeshift.
Okay, so basically you'll use something like Shapeshift.
And Shapeshift has this mechanism where they broadcast.
And so you're basically paying a pretty hefty fee
to, let's say, swap Ethereum for some Litecoin
in a decentralized way without, you know,
like basically going to a centralized
exchange and swapping and then bridging out to, you know, wherever you want, like your
wallet or whatever.
So in the future, you bring up kind of a, a good point for, for live in, because in the
future, what will happen is there will actually be, um, more TVL for Litecoin in the web3 world and the swaps will be more seamless because
Libium will enable you know Litecoin to have its own pools and there will probably be many types
of Litecoin pools and then these aggregators will actually be able to swap something like
ETH for Litecoin a lot cheaper so instead of paying like let's say if you're you're buying like ten
thousand dollars of litecoin you're selling some eth for litecoin you use shapeshift today it's
you're probably going to pay like 80 you know you might pay like 80 in in fees uh you know in the
future that should be a lot less with LitVM.
Yeah, and I mean, I think with LitVM versus like things like ShapeShift is you don't get the programmability as well.
And it's not native Litecoin, which nobody's ever done, is brought in like the native programmable Litecoin.
I mean, that's why this Grail technology with LitVM and that actual ZK roll-up is so bleeding edge. And to be honest, nobody's ever done it before. We're just at the right time and really at the pinnacle of interoperability with bringing LitVM, BitcoinOS, and Caldera all together at once. I just wanted to throw that in there.
Because, like I said, I mean, Shapeshift, you know,
if you're bridging Litecoin over, it's not programmable.
Guys, don't it feel that we build all the stack only to each other,
to developers?
Because I cannot imagine, like, will be used some some breach or swap
just because it's more efficient I suppose like we can have a look on Robinhood and Coinbase
the charge crazy fee not sure which one but I'm sure on chain it's much cheaper but anyway
that exchanges more more used so I suppose decentralization should be just a feature but
not the main point and i suppose the
main focus should be on distribution and somebody mentioned ai i suppose people won't let ai manage
their assets for several years but i suppose ai will open the opportunity to create more distribution
apps like mobile apps and i recommend if somebody interested to check out a16z post
because they are bullish on AI and on crypto and they have very interesting article on this
interconnection and the problem also that I'm currently facing maybe you have some solutions
that when you have like using like one exchange you have all the stats, all the transactions. And for example, if you would like to have like crypto, like tax report is easy to collect.
But if you use like decentralized applications, there is no good service that will cover everything.
And the cool features that we have right now is like a cross chain swaps.
Right.
But from as a feeling standpoint, it's very hard
because you breach, but you swap.
So you can have some PNL and you need probably calculators.
So it's crazy stuff.
And also, as I mentioned,
I suppose people don't care about tech.
So it can relate, for example, to lending markets, right?
We have our, we have Morphe, who gives a better rate
and who has distribution that wins and for example like it can be referred to legend xyz if somebody
heard it is somebody not they recently like no promotion just to for you to play around they
created mobile app that abstract chains that abstract gas fees, they raise 10 million from Coinbase. It's like X compound team.
So I recommend to play with it because it literally encapsulates swap logic,
breach logic because end user probably doesn't need it.
And ideally, I wish they would have on-ramp and off-ramp methods.
For example, like Etherify has because from interoperability,
I suppose Etherify did a great job with all this card stuff because they have a very good volume and it's easy to use.
So you just deposit some liquid assets and you just spend.
And I suppose user, what they need, they need to unramp on crypto.
They need to save their money.
They can trade and they need to spend. And they need to pay their money, they can trade, and they need to spend.
And they need to pay taxes with tax reports.
So I suppose it feels that we're building cool stuff, really.
But I suppose end user doesn't care if you charge them 0.1 bips or 0.2 bips.
Yeah, I mean, you made some good points there. I know that like in different AI conversations,
I've heard some people that are a little bit more apprehensive, you know, to just allow AI to
handle their funds. But I think it will depend on the type of system,
the underlying infrastructure that the AI is using.
You know, what is it that they're using
some type of ZK technology
and they're just facilitating whatever you want
on top of, you know, something that's trusted or is it, you know,
an AI solution that is less decentralized or,
you know, maybe like a trust minimized solution that, you know,
and so it will really depend on the user,
maybe how much funds you're also sending,
what type of transactions are happening with AI.
But yeah, it's a good point.
I do think that there will probably be some people
that are apprehensive when using some of these AI technologies.
I think it will just take a lot of education
to understand what these AI agents are running on top of
and how they're actually moving your funds.
And once that education is out there,
everyone has a good understanding.
You see audits, you see battle tested ai networks you know then yeah i think
that uh fear or concern will go away but yeah it'll take time it'll take time a lot of good
points there we've been going for about two hours guys if you just joined us maybe in the last 30
minutes i do want to shout out that uh the first half of the space was a LitVM kind of like tech conversation.
We had Espresso talk about the Espresso airdrop and then how they are contributing to LitVM, BitcoinOS, their contributions.
caldera matt from caldera was also here explaining you know what caldera does and how
libym's working with caldera and we'll have more spaces like this in the future
just kind of itemizing and explaining how all this technology works so that we'll have kind
of like a repository of information out there and i'd like to really
like chop up a lot of these conversations and um you know put them out on the timeline so everyone
has their questions answered about how it all works but we'll do more of these also i want to
have a litecoin space in the future maybe like a litecoin meta space with all the different innovative
projects that are building for litecoin so much love to all the litecoiners that have joined us
here today um and thank you like everyone that that has joined us uh like from our eth friends
our sound money like our bitcoin friends just everyone here on this friday we want to start
ramping up in the new year, creating some really exciting shows.
Like if you look at the aggregated over the last, it's over a year now. We're at episode 146.
We always have different topics. So I'd really love to bring, you know, that, that big mega space energy back to the aggregated and maybe create some other shows, uh, during this time slot and work with a lot of people that I see in the audience the general space, but guys, like you've heard on this episode today, we are early.
There's a lot of opportunity.
Really, things are just getting started. have been in this space for probably a lot of the people I'm seeing, at least on my screen here,
I have a lot of friends here that have probably been in the space for roughly anywhere from three
to five years. And I understand like, it feels like we've been here for so long, but it's really
still early and there's, there's going to be, you know, major upswings in adoption still.
Don't lose faith.
There's no way that this is like the end of crypto.
I see all these like space titles, which is probably clickbait.
But, you know, like, is crypto over, et cetera?
I mean, we're just getting started. The technology, the foundations of blockchain and Web3, AI, and how it's intermingled, it's all barely getting started.
So we can't forget that.
Brock, I'm not sure how much longer you want to go.
I actually have to go.
We've been going for two hours.
And I also want to thank everyone on the second half of this space that has contributed to the conversation.
It's fun talking interoperability more broadly uh oh hey real quick
i want to shout out red hey bro i just seen that you joined us on the uh on the panel
i'm like ending the space bro and you say hi real quick what's up man hello good morning everyone hey bro hey good to see you man we much love we we uh um yeah thanks for everything you do for the light coin community
and uh i know you're you're really active you've supported litvm i just want to shout you out real quick man do you have any thoughts before we're
closing up no i just got uh that i got home from from work didn't manage to get on the space i'm sorry i really i i listened to the recordings i love you all hey bro when we do like a litecoin
meta space i'm going to invite you personally so you'll uh hopefully you'll have like a heads up and everything. But yeah, Rock, are we basically
closing up here? Probably a good time. Yeah, I think so. I want to say though, on what your
point about we're just getting started, I mean, when you hear the news about our industry and
when you hear the great things happening and the progress being made in our industry, it just seems
like so laughable that we are not just bursting out
of the seams in terms of investment in the industry, retail excitement, investor and VC
and fund excitement. They're there. They're certainly there. We were just at that family
office event in Vegas for CES, and they're certainly interested in the space and one
exposure, but we're just not seeing
that big euphoria that we've had in the past that's making people a bit sad or whatever. But
when you hear things like the New York Stock Exchange, this one just kind of slipped under
the radar, oddly. But when you hear that the New York Stock Exchange is now coming to blockchain
and they're going to be making all of their stocks that are tradable on the New York Stock Exchange is now coming to blockchain and they're going to be making all of their stocks
that are tradable on the New York Stock Exchange now tradable on blockchain. And it's going to be
multi-chain. I think they're building their own chain, but they're also going to be moving these
to other chains and allowing users to choose what chains they want to use the New York Stock
Exchange assets on. I mean, what are we talking?
How is the industry not, how are we not blowing up? How is ETH not at 30K, Bitcoin not at a million,
and all of these great projects being built, you know, not 50X from now? I think everything is just
so undervalued now. You know, by the way, you can go back on this show and look at the receipts.
I've said it in the past that in previous cycles, I think a lot of things were massively overvalued, actually.
And I think the industry wasn't so good at valuing what was good and bad.
Things that were really hyped were up thousands of X.
And things that were really valuable sometimes weren't as much.
Or at some points it was
all just going up thousand X, which isn't healthy.
But now there's just, yeah, I think it's way undervalued.
I think, and that's what the family office people were saying, that they think that crypto
has taken a massive hit and is now, and it's like, you know, kind of like the dot-com bubble,
you know, when everything pulled back, you know, Amazon was down 96%. And that was when, you know,
the richest people of our day today were born, you know, or born as in they made great investments
and, you know, bought these sort of distressed assets or undervalued assets. So, yeah, I think
this is a great opportunity as investor as an investor
in the space as lda our incubator at bid angels where we bring these projects to to pitch with
lit vm all this stuff um to me it's a huge opportunity to pick up assets at really discounted
prices well i think another thing to note is that we all got to remember the internet came out in 1983.
I mean, it's been around for how long? I mean, and there was tons of FUD in and out and in between before we are where we are now with the internet, right?
I mean, it's just completely taken off and we're now re-innovating internet.
I actually just did a post where there's an article in the year 2000.
And remember, like the Internet came out in 1983.
And in the year 2000, they made an article that said the Internet may be just a passing fat as millions give up on it.
I mean, I think this kind of just gives us sentiment of where we currently are today with the, you know, the crypto market that, you know, where we're at.
So, yeah.
What we need is a good old pandemic.
Walk everyone in their houses.
Send them money.
No, Darren.
No, no, no.
I don't know if we need that again.
I mean, I'm pretty sure the last one.
Yeah, I'm still scarred from that, man.
I'm already both buying toilet paper.
I'm good to go.
You're crazy, bro.
Yeah, but everything did pump during that time.
You know, that was a pretty crazy time.
But you know what was even crazier was just 2017.
I really believe they were going to have another 2017 type bull market where it's like you actually have euphoria like Rock's talking about.
We have not had euphoria in this bull market.
I still believe we're in the bull market.
If anyone's ever looked at some of my technical analysis, I don't do as much as I used to.
I just don't have time.
But I believe we're still in the super cycle.
We've only had roughly around a 40% pullback.
This happens in every bull market.
You get 30% to 40% pullbacks, and then Bitcoin just continues.
But yeah, I totally lost train of thought where I'm going with this.
But I have to agree.
Oh, yeah, the euphoria.
I remember back in 2017, like just Telegram chats, just full-on spam,
people just posting Dragon Ball Z GIFs like crazy.
And it was just like these massive parties.
And like, crypto was going up like crazy
because someone had a white paper or a website,
you know, whatever it is.
And I think what really brought that
is that there was a lot of innovation.
There was something new.
And I think we're actually on the cusp of
that again because you know we we've had all these technologies but what's going to bring
so much more people in uh as as um these technologies maturing basically like what
we're doing at libyum with uh sound money you say the tech is maturing but
juju is still sending stellar lemons between exchanges that's juju bro i think you know like
some like it just it does depend actually like he brought up a good point though
he was doing it for his eat the litecoin that if you do that you actually can save some money versus using
like uh uh I'm drawing a blank on the I I did this just last time what um it's the Fox
it's the Fox guys yeah the the solution that decentralized uh shapes Shapeshift. Shapeshift. Shapeshift.
Yeah.
You know, like, you can actually, because, like, Shapeshift, when you broadcast, like, I love the service.
It's great.
But, you know, pretty hefty fees there. So, like, Juju saves money by going, you know, to a centralized exchange and just doing the swap there.
By the way, on the note of what I just said about how the internet came out in 1983 and they wrote the article in the year 2000, that was exactly 17 years apart.
I mean, and if we count Bitcoin coming out in 2009 and it's the year 2006, exactly 17 years apart.
2006 exactly 17 years apart
yeah yeah and and you made such a great point because like i remember
uh i don't know when i was first getting into crypto and people were making this exact point
um about like they were posting videos where there was like guys saying like nobody's ever going to
where there was like guys saying like, nobody's ever going to use the internet for information.
Like we have newspaper, you know, we get the newspaper every morning and, and like, why would
you use the internet? Uh, you know, there, there was also like videos about, you know, like,
what are people going to even use the internet for? Like have your your web pages like no one had thought of
like you know streaming services and gaming and you know all the the fun stuff we all use internet
for nowadays um so yeah it's it's a good point that's and that's i think where we're at again
it's just you know with blockchain with and web3 so yeah much love everybody i think um let's let's do this
again soon we have to get all of you guys back juju thank you wolf swap great to have you here
damian uh red great for joining us uh also dimitri was here earlier and then again last last time i'll
say this you know we had uh espressoso, Caldera, BitcoinOS.
They explained some of the technical parts of the LitVM modular stack earlier.
So if you want to listen to all that, just listen to the recording.
And I guess last thing too, Espresso had shared some alpha at the beginning.
We have the ESP Espres espresso airdrop link in the
jumbotron up above this is the official link be careful guys there are fake links out there
so don't click on those to take all your money you know be very careful but there is a
the official link is up in the jumbotron above. Much love, everybody. We do this every Friday.
Rock, you want to close this out, bro?
I love your last, last, when you get the last word.
Yeah, sure.
I'm just pumped to be in this industry.
And I know that sometimes it feels down during the down times.
And there's a lot of highs and lows in this
industry, but coming from, this is my fourth cycle now. Um, I've been in the industry for 11 years.
So I caught the second half of the first cycle, but, um, or something like that, whatever it was,
but anyways, um, yeah, it's ups and downs, but the ups are always, uh, a lot better than the
downs and are worth the fight.
And I think right now we're going through a cleansing of the industry and the people who stick around will be greatly rewarded.
This happens every cycle, every time there's hard times.
You know, the fakers, the people who didn't actually believe in the mission, the people that were only here for the quick gains, they all, you know, leave.
mission, the people that were only here for the quick gains, they all leave. And then the people
who actually are here for the mission, ironically, make all the money later when all those people
leave. So the people, the mercenaries make less money than the missionaries. So stick around.
This industry is not going anywhere. Everything in the future will be built on this industry,
just like everything now uses the internet, right? When the internet was coming around, nobody believed that was
possible. Now, every single company in the world uses the internet somehow. Every technology uses
the internet somehow. And the same thing's going to happen with crypto and the same thing's going
to happen with AI. They'll touch all aspects of life. Are you telling us to stick to missionary?
Come on, bro.
It's the family.
You know, some, some, I'm not going to go.
Legal is going to come after us.
A little dog.
Huh?
What?
Okay.
You guys, you guys are back. All right. I'm jumping. I'm going to explain the us. A little dog, huh? What? Okay. You guys are back.
I'm jumping off.
I'm going to explain the mercenary position.
Oh my God, I'm out. Later, guys.
Have a good weekend.
That's some BDSM.
End it, Darren, before we get in trouble.
I'm not going to Darren's house.
The mercenary
position. That's great.
I got to figure that one out.
I made the mistake of Googling it.
All right, guys.
Catch you soon.
Bye-bye. Thank you.
