Good afternoon, we'll point to our community. My name is Noah. I'm here today with Lewis of the Gelato Network. Lewis, welcome to the stage. If you want to give us a quick background of yourself, your origin story, how you got into Web 3 before we get started, that'd be awesome.
Hello, hello, hi Noah, thanks for inviting me on. Super happy to be here and talk a bit about Jolato, crypto, everything. So I got into crypto, I think in 2016, 2017.
I'm pretty usual if you're your meraud just like just buying some eaves trading a little bit and then very quickly getting very interested in the tech things more than the sort of trading things and then very quickly start
working in 2017-18 on blockchain projects. Back then it was enterprise blockchain stuff and so on. It was a bit boring so I was always wanted to go to the public blockchain space and eventually just broke free and started
building and building gelato with my co-founder Hilmar in 2019 and now we're here and we have a bunch of very cool talented people working on the project and we have many cool web3 projects using our tech for over
to years and yeah, I'm super happy about that. Awesome and so let's get started. What is the lot of network, right? What problems are you guys solving and give us some use cases for other protocols using your tech?
Yeah, so gelato is a project now that's four years old and of course it has evolved and what our original invention and mandate was smart contract automation so we were really like the first project
really doing that starting in 2019, before DeFi Summer, obviously the first sort of focus was DeFi projects and actually the first sort of big project that you was gelatinous technology to automate things was instead of you probably know the
They are a super cool project to young guys from India who started it back then and Yeah, they have now this super cool smart contract wallet and they have a huge TVL and a lot of people that are using make-out are all these protocols are all using in setup and they back then
We worked with them together and what we build was this automated, depth refinancing. I think it was between some makeup vaults and other based on interest rates and so on. I guess it was a bit like a mini year.
You're hadn't been built back then and sort of was built in parallel to that. So I guess it had some some parallels. Yeah, and then from then on out in general the problem with smart contracts in general is that they cannot really be automated like on the blockchain.
per se, like EVMs, smart contracts and so on, don't support automation because everything has to fit inside one block so things cannot run persistently. So you needed the second layer network to be built and that's what we build with Jelato and what we build is a very general
realistic protocol for automation. So really, really you can build anything with it. But the sort of early use cases we saw, DeFi were these sort of more complex interest rate optimization strategies or for example, limit orders are very simple thing like limit orders on an aim, like
Uniswap for example, and that's not possible. The Uniswap smart contracts don't support these auto types, so you need an app like to allow to support automations like this. And there we saw great success and adoption from all the sort of Uniswap forks.
For example, on Polygon QuickSwap, use our limit orders and on Phantom SpookySwap and on BND Chain, PancakeSwap. If any of you out here have used limit orders on any of these AMAmers, then yeah, those were powered by Jolato and still are to this data.
And then more recently we also branched out into other things like we also didn't just do smart contract automation. So we pretty early on realized that in general, like what we were building was like a transaction execution engine that made it very
made sending transactions on chain very scalable. So eventually our software clients were able to handle hundreds of transactions per second dispatching them to multiple blockchains, or Polygon, Avalanche, all these blockchains, and making sure that they get mined in time.
but it was specialized in it turns out that it is also really useful for transaction relaying, which basically is nowadays commonly used by big sort of games and NFT, minns and so on. Some of you might have had like a gaseous user experience before. So big projects like Z-Run, for example, Pyunid is gaseous.
transaction sending or open see even and so on and lands nowadays like everything you do on lands if you notice you just have to sign a message or not even that like all of your transactions they are basically sent without you sending it it's a relay doing it for you and there it also has also very specialized software and is for example has
been used by cross-chain messaging protocols like CONNX. So this was like a bridging protocol and they just released the V2 as well, super cool stuff and they are every transaction and their system is basically a gelato-related transaction. And yeah, and as of recently we also look a bit more into account abstractions on that that's basically the same like
transaction relaying but it's combining that with smart contract wallets so it's combining that with a user on chain identity that basically makes it so that as a user in general from your wallet you don't need to have I don't know if you are a polygon you don't need to have met in your wallet anymore or if you're on if you don't need to have ease in your wallet
to pay for transactions anymore. You can simply use other tokens like use to see to pay for your transactions or even better application developers can choose to completely sponsor all of the gas for all of the applications users so that the users don't even have to bother with transaction fees and ethos can and whatnot at all anymore.
more and you have a user experience that's much closer to the great user experiences that we know from Web2. So yeah, it's also cooking. There's a bunch of other stuff like we are a very technical project. So like most of the sort of direct users of us are like top developers from the top projects and so on. So it's quite developed
oriented and there are a lot of features I could talk about but it can get very technical for sure. Wow, so lots to impact here and you guys started out you said with the smart contract automation and kind of broke that down for us. I'm more interested in an
And also, I didn't know that if we're using limit orders on AMMs, we're actually utilizing the gelato technology. I find that very fascinating. I feel like a lot of other people wouldn't know that that is something you guys proprietary that you are, I guess, loaning out or allowing other protocols to use. How does it work?
Yeah, exactly so it's not like it depends on the a-m-m of course there of course the a-m-m has to integrate our limit order system but quite famously pancake swap did so quick swap did so spooky swap did so so that was where the big a-m-m's of the last bull market right and at
And yeah, if you did a limit order on this MM, it basically went with the gelato system and you probably noticed because there's usually a little like sort of branding powered by gelato sign or something on the UI. Yeah, so how does it work?
Basically, the technological barrier in Web 3 is that on the 100th Supercool, right? Like you, for the first time, have your own wallet. All of you might obviously know this because you probably at some point created a wallet with MetaMask or what
ever else, right? Coinbase wallet, one inch wallet, maybe you even used a smart contract wallet, like those are safe or argent, any of these things. So what's super cool about this is that you are self-custoding, right? Like this is the big difference to banks, to
centralized exchanges like FTX and so on, Coinbase, where basically the operator of the bank of the exchange and so on is completely in control of your identity, of your data, of your assets, which if it goes bad, then it can go really bad, right? Like we've seen this a lot.
a lot of times with exchanges, especially most famously recently with FTX, like literally they can rug you, they can take all of your assets, whether criminally so or whether just by a bad luck, maybe they can hack themselves, they don't have money to repay or whatever, right? Like in any case, you are not in control there
and control, basically you're loaning all of your assets and whatever you have on these exchanges to them. And of course, a lot of times it also goes well and you never notice this, but technically you're not in control. And the cool thing about crypto is that for the first time we've managed to build a technology
with blockchains where users are in control, which is that's like the true power of it here. It's also I believe part of the reason why the mass adoption is so slow because you know you are in control it is super powerful but it comes with a lot of responsibility and at least for now with a lot of
very frictional user experience. Right? I mean, just the fact that you have to write down these 12 words when you create your mate mask and then there's a bunch of warnings that you, you know, you have to store them safely, you cannot lose them, don't show them to anyone, don't keep a digital copy somewhere otherwise you might get compromised, not horrible, horrible, you actually
So with great power comes a lot of responsibility right hopefully by the way we can build technology that preserves These these principles of self-custody of keeping control of your stuff without forcing you to have such painful use experience like there's a bunch of stuff I think we can do here that makes it more simple
seamless to the users while still not giving everything away to an intermediary. Like that's the goal here. And similarly with smart contract automation, the problem is that automation basically says doing something on your behalf, right? And if
If you are with limit orders on AMMs, if you are not online to click buttons on the website to submit the order, which is normally what you have to do when you trade on Uniswap or something, you have to log in with your MetaMask, you have to sign and send these transactions. So how can we automate this if we don't have
access to your wallet. That's the whole point of crypto is that you don't have to share your private keys with anyone. You don't coinbase a crack and so on. Obviously they can execute limit orders for you because they control your money. They promise you basically tell them, "Hey, please sell as an X, right?"
They will do it for you and they promise to do it for you and of course the good projects will do it for you in the correct manner and so on otherwise you could also sue them but it's a trust relationship. And crypto the whole point is that you don't give custody over your assets to someone else. So the problem with that is how can you
you replicate user experiences that we know from Web 2, like fully automated things, simple things like a limit order for example. Well, it doesn't, why also not forcing you to give up custody over your funds. And that's basically what we invented at Gelato. We're basically using an often
chain network of bots and these network of bots is there to monitor these conditions so that when pancakes were limited, orders get submitted that the bots store them, they pick them up and every block they check if the orders can be executed and then when the orders can be executed they execute them for you. They send the
to execute them for you and now the crux is in the middle there are some smart contracts and these smart contracts make it so that the bots can access your funds but the only thing they can do with them is execute the order and exactly the manner that you prescribe so basically the smart contract makes sure
that you get exactly the tokens that you want to buy. So we're combining smart contracts here with an off-chain decentralized system of operators. And that's how we can have great automation in Web 3 without you having to give us your keys or your wallet or your
essence. So it's all non-costodial basically. And that's thanks to the magic of smart contracts and Jelato Network bots basically at the end of the day. And these are important barriers of entry that need to be brought down in order for us to see a mass adoption. I wanted to also note
that the gas list, let's see, the gas list user experiences that you guys are working on building out and spreading across the DFI ecosystem is also a huge barrier to entry. A lot of people don't bother with crypto just because they don't want to go through the steps of getting the right gas for the right network.
You talked about how you guys are allowing or helping to allow users that might not have ETH or might not have Polygon, for example, to use USDC for gas instead. Tell us a bit more about how that works and also tell us a bit more about how your gasless user experiences work.
actually able to sign up for a lens account thanks to you guys. The whole thing was gassed on Polygon. Is it just something on the back end which makes it so that lens is bearing the cost of the transaction fee and because transaction fees are so low on Polygon, it doesn't really matter, it's all negligible.
Yeah, basically. So the whole gasless transaction thing essentially also just uses some smart contracts that make it so that relays can send transactions
And they can access your on-chain account or whatever you do, your LANs profile, your NFTs and so on. And what happens here is that instead of you sending the transaction, you give a signature saying, "This is what I want to do on-chain." And then the smart contract
And what the really are simply does is the really are collects your signature of chain and then sends a transaction on chain to this mark contracts and there's like this middleware smart contract that verifies that what the really are says you want to do you actually want to do it because you sign it.
that. So that's basically the magic. And but indeed, under the hood, there is at least for on chain applications, right, like Lens and so on, that want to store a lot of information on chain. The whole point of it is to be on chain, I guess. There's always someone that has to pay for the gas, someone that has
do these transactions. And with Lens it's basically the Lens project and indeed so I really hope that the future of these chains will become so cheap that every project can sponsor all of the
for the users because it's really a really bad UX to for someone who just wants to play with NFTs or social media or something to immediately force them into all these weird quirks of blockchains with you have to buy currency to pay for everything you do and so on. So that's obviously for me just a symptom of the early phase
that we're in, but it shouldn't stay this way. And I think part of the reason why we haven't onboarded so many people to the space yet is simply because we haven't quite figured this part out. We still ask people to write down 12 words, buy some crypto, and then pay for everything they do. That's horrible. Where else is
the internet do you have to do that only here so yeah that's basically how it works at the end of the day you still have a wallet or something to to represent your identity on shame but you don't
actually transact anymore with the chain, you just sign and then someone else sends a transaction for you. And the coolest thing is when these applications that you use, use a network like Jelato to dispatch transactions in a decentralized secure manner and they pay for them, they sponsor them. I think that's the best UX.
By the way, is it Lewis or Luis? I've heard both but I would personally say Lewis, I guess, in English yes. Okay, Lewis. So Lewis, what are some plans you guys have for
private key storage, right? You just mentioned how that is a process that's not seamless. It's a bit clunky for lack of a better term. You have to write your private keys down on a piece of paper and store it in your backyard. I don't know. What's your solution for that?
So currently we don't have any solutions ourselves in the private key management space. It's a very interesting space and there's a lot of cool new innovations happening. I think the most popular ones in recent years were multi-party computation wallets. So for example, the coinbase wallets
It's one such example where very recently some very cool projects like Web 3 auth for example have found ways to make it so that you can use your Google account or something to generate a key and Have it also be stored by a guide, you know something
in a share of it. And this allows, while like long term, I think it's not like the fully decentralized trustless vision of crypto, at least for the first interactions with blockchains, it makes the onboarding much easier. And because now people can come and can log in with their Google identity or their discourse.
identity world, whatever and create like a wallet there without having to write down 12 words and so on. So these sort of social login solutions are currently getting quite hot and they're super interesting. We are leveraging them as well. So we have built a new software development kit.
that uses Web 3.0 and knows the saves to give you what we call a gaseous wallet. You should check that out. I think we give some things there to hackers at each Denver to be to build with it. So if any of you are attending Denver or
Any other hackathon online hackathon make sure to check out our gelato tutorials and demos on the gas this wallet SDK And that really gets you you know like to a point where you can onboard your users Within 10 minutes and the all they need is like a Google account or something like some social log and they
a wallet and they can immediately enter equity application without having crypto and the wallet and so on. It's all using gaseous transactions and so on. That's super cool, but we don't really have an interest in becoming like a de facto wallet provider, private key management solution or so ourselves.
When I open the app for gelato with pretty straightforward you have a create task column and then you have a leaderboard column. How easy it is for someone to come on and
and create tasks and start leveraging your technology. Do you guys have special tutorials, built-in, other than this documentation? Are there like YouTube videos people can watch, would love to know more about the learning curve?
Yeah, so what you see there is just one part of the Jeladu universe, it's the front end to the automation service. And there if you're a developer and you have one like or two functions in your smart contracts that you find yourself calling manually quite a lot or
writing scripts for something, then you should definitely go and check this out. And I think we have the best product here in the space for a smart contract automation. And it's really super easy. You just have to go to this UI app.jl.network and you can
literally just put in your smart contract address the function that you want to be automated and then you can immediately from the UI get started, depending on your first task with something simple like call this function I don't know once a day or every hour and then if you want to go more complex than that there's all sorts of stuff you can do you can write
these resolve as we call them where you can define arbitrary logic that defines under what conditions you want your smart contract function to be triggered. And very recently we also launched our serverless product gelato web 3 functions and if you're familiar with serverless development from the web 2 world it's very
similar to that where you can now write like TypeScript or JavaScript of chain scripts that pull data from APIs, events, whatnot, and then put them on chain for you. So I don't know, maybe you have some game or something, and on your server you store who the winners are every day.
and you want to publish that to your smart contract, you can write a very simple way, a three function for that with Jelato. And you don't have to worry about running your server or something yourself. It will automatically execute the script for you and do as you please in terms of smart contract execution.
We spoke briefly about lens protocol and if I'm not mistaken, lens was your first Dow experiment. Is there anything that you wanted to dive into with respect to how that's going so far?
Yeah, sure. So to be precise, it was Coru Dow was the project that we launched on Lens, which is a super cool project. Basically, it is a sort of community shared
own account on lens, the social media platform and how it works is basically you need to own one of these NFTs and I can see some people here with the NFT actually in the Twitter
So some coral fans are here. Nice. And yeah, basically as long as you own this NFT, you can access the shared lens account and post from it. So it's basically a Dow controlled
social media account and yeah the way to access is currently it start by holding this NFT and I think that's a super cool social experiment and I guess the idea is to sort of have a
a bunch of random people in the internet come together, curate this account and eventually make it an account that posts interesting topics frequently. Now of course there's in the beginning phases there's also a lot of shit posting and also some spam and so on so there's a couple
of problems that have to be solved in such a sort of crazy, open, anonymous, shared social experiment. But I'm quite hopeful that the spam and tone will be filled out eventually and then this account will become a very valuable account.
and many people will follow it to get updates, memes and whatnot. So yeah, that's the idea there. And it's also using Jelato Relay for a gas list transaction so that people can post there without having to have cryptones on.
We're just about at the halfway mark. Lewis, I was wondering if there's anything so far about gelato that we haven't covered that you find important to dive into or shed light upon. I know you guys have a lot of exciting stuff coming up. So let me know.
Yeah, sure. So maybe one thing is, first of all, if Denver, if any of you guys listening will be at East Denver, you should definitely come to our booth. I think we have a lot of things planned there for the Hackerthon, for the conference.
a lot of side events as well. We were hosting some response and I personally won't be there. I'm actually based in Europe here in Switzerland and I'm not traveling to the S this time but probably I will come next year. A bunch of other people from the Jelato team will be there and they will be all very happy to meet. So don't
be, don't be shy if you're going, the folks that you allow to are super nice and if you have any questions about your Lato, whether you are a developer or not, just approach us and especially if you are a developer of course we have many cool tools and things that we would love you to try out.
So yeah, that's that's coming up and also if you are a developer and You have like for example, you currently, you know, I don't know pull data from some server or something write your own scripts around that you should definitely check out our web free functions private
So for that just go into our discord and you will find someone in there. I think there's a discord channel just about Web3 function so make sure to check that out. And yeah, also the gas is wallet SDK. So if you are building a website and you want to have a
really great you ask maybe you're doing NFT min or something and you want users to be able to just mint the NFT maybe with a credit card or something without holding an eCrypto and you just want it to be sort of very quick and so on without them being burned with all the crypto onboarding then you should check this out as well for sure.
Yeah, apart from that, I mean gelato itself is a DAO as well as we have an active community. So that's also mostly on Discord, some on Telegram. We have votes every now and then if you are token holder, gel token
and hold that you can also participate in those and become part of the community. Yeah. So with respect to the setting up Gasless Infrastructure for a website or for a project, what goes into that? How long does it take? Is there a cost? What's the process?
So that sort of depends on what you want to build. But I would say normally the process is, it really depends on what you want to build. But one of the decisions you have to make
is where do you launch? And if you launch on a very cheap chain like on noses or I mean polygon used to be cheap is not really cheap nowadays anymore but on for example noses chain right there are like transactions are a subset then you should really consider completely removing
transaction fees for your users and just sponsoring the guys. It really unlocks a whole new user experience and it's totally worth it. And that does mean that you as a business cannot make any money and you just are a charity for transactions, right? You can still make your money elsewhere. It's just that you don't, you know,
put the burden of this horrible gas market that blockchains have on your users. So that's one decision you have to make, but you don't have to do that. You can also use gas transactions and happy users pay for the gas still. So for example, if you're building an app where the user is somehow sending assets around,
maybe it's a bridge or maybe they're purchasing and if T is something then you couldn't also use our systems to have the user assigned the transaction then I have to send it but this might contract take a small fee from the money the user
around and pay that fee to the relay. This also works. Then you don't have to sponsor the gas and it's still a gasless user experience for the user. They don't have to worry about any funds in their wallet to pay, I don't know, the avalanche transaction fees or the noses transaction fees or whatever. But yeah, it completely depends on what you're trying to build or something.
Lewis, I didn't ask about security. How does gelato ensure the security and reliability of its automated transactions and what measures do you guys have in place to prevent errors or even malicious activity? Yeah, so the whole point is
to use smart contracts as much and wherever possible. So a lot of the things, for example, the whole limit all our system are completely secured by the blockchain. There's like nothing anyone in the gelato network can do to hurt the user.
It's all regulated by small contracts and they're immutable right and the code is law there and yeah, I guess the only thing that could happen is that like the order doesn't get executed when it should get executed but that also doesn't make any economic
make a sense for the gelato and not operators because they get rewarded for executing it. So they're very incentivized for executed, you know, unless they want to leave money on the table, you know, which obviously they don't. So yeah, that's the one side of the thing. There are other things
So it's a bit of a spectrum. There are things where not everything can be secure best mark contracts or it doesn't make sense because it would be too expensive. And they are basically, I mean, first of all, of course, we are building the software clients and
Of course, we have many processes in place to make sure that the code is as good as can be by frequently auditing it. We're working with both external auditors as well as having our full-time in-house auditing team.
software as practices testing and so on reviews all of that of course I mean those are given I would hope and and then what we're really excited about and what our mission was from the start is to be a decentralized project and in reality you cannot start decentralized
right like you have to get there it's like a road but we're certainly holding true to our mission there we just unballed the first sort of node operators a couple of months ago and we're really this year going to double down on this mission to become a decentralized network
so that it's not just us running these nodes, not just us securing the network, running this logic, but also more and more other node operators. So we're building that out, we're onboarding new node operators. They all have to stay vigilant or token to be able to access the network.
and provide their services and the more they stake the more skin in the game they have the more sort of tasks they're also allowed to do on the network to earn revenue so it's this sort of positive flywheel effect and yeah so that's basically our
our long-term mission is to become more and more decentralized, to have less single points of failure, and to have our software be verified by more parties, eventually attested to by more parties. So, you know, that we can get pretty close to the same security
to stand out to the blockchain side of themselves. Yeah, basically that's what we've met at the moment. Yeah, have you guys ironed out what would be requirements to run a node as far as minimum amount of token software hardware requirements and how would yeah, we'd love to learn more about that.
Yeah, so at the moment the requirements are extremely low. That's because our first client that we sort of, you know, distribute and give to all operators is written in such a manner that it performs a very simple job on a network which is executing transactions.
It's still a very cool piece of software because it executes transactions on like 80 different networks and sometimes we see I don't know hundreds of soul per minute right so doing that is pretty impressive indeed but it's still a very so compared to the other pieces of software that are very simple and very cheap
want to run like you don't need any big computers for that, you don't need any expensive things. The only thing is that currently it's still a permission system so you have to be added to the network by us that the gelato dao and you also
So very soon we will launch our gel staking that's some alpha by the way, and it's not out yet, but it hopefully will be out before May of this year. And then basically you also have to stake gel to be able to join the network and run one of these nodes. And eventually in the long term, we want to open it up completely.
So that everybody can join and run a node if they want to, we all be open source. They just have to put up some stake. But for now, we're working closely together with expert node operators and so on. Because the software is still in beta, I would say.
You know, before you like if you really want to go full public decentralized it's not just a breeze right like it is it makes everything much harder the software has to be super stable and so on. You have to maintain different versions of the software you have to when you roll out new versions you have to coordinate
among many different parties, some of which you may have never talked to and so on. So yeah, it makes everything a lot harder and I think you should only do it once you're really ready. So I think we're getting there but yeah, that will probably still take another year or so until it's fully open and accessible by anybody that wants to run and all
permissionlessly. And then also we will add new types of nodes to the network that are actually that will be a bit more expensive to run and so on there. They're doing the heavy lifting of the sort of data processing and so on like the checking all of the limit orders, every block and so on there. And that can actually get quite expensive.
But there we also expect node operators, but probably more on this sort of professional side of things, like probably some teams and so on that have very good blockchain connections, RPC connections and so on. But yeah, there will be, I think, different types of node operators in the network.
So I want to know what you think about this Lewis as far as some of the biggest challenges facing DeFi what do you think some of those are and where do you see or how do you see Gilato contributing solutions to those challenges?
Yeah, I think some of the biggest I want to say adoption is always a big one although to be honest sometimes people say, oh yeah, my grandma should use this or something and then wondering who's grandma's
currently trading and trade fire, like I think in general, DeFi, like financial services products are like not for mainstream users, right? Like it's not like the mainstream users unwrap tool are all just degenerating on Goldman Sachs or something, right?
So I think DeFi was super cool already. I guess still some adoption there couldn't hurt. I think if I remember correctly from the last boom market, sometimes you would literally pay thousands of dollars on a helium-4 transactions and so on.
And the next bull run, this should be gone right, like the D5 should be on rollups and so on, where it's super cheap. And then I suppose one other battle that's currently obviously being fought is this whole regulation and overreach.
I think to be honest, one of the challenges we have in crypto is also all the scams, right, all the bad actors. And that's really hurting us a lot, that's hurting many, many good people a lot. So we have to deal with that ourselves, we have to educate the people
a lot more we have to raise up the good projects, the good people a lot more. But yeah, that's hard. But at the same time, I also think we are fighting regulators where they are trying to do too much.
regulate too much on something that's also an important battle. Other than that, I think there's some interesting products and so on that probably haven't been built yet simply because blockchains as a technology were still too slow or too
expensive. There are actually things the Solana ecosystem is really interesting right they have a whole different philosophy there and so on they just care about latency and transaction throughput so I'm not like that familiar with Solana yet but I really like hearing that they're like focusing on other things than just decentralization.
So yeah, I think that could also be something to bring in new users from traditional finance hedge funds and so on high frequency traders and so on. Yeah, so that's pretty much it on the DeFi side. I think DeFi wise, we
already got quite far to be honest. We already have products today that are, I believe, strictly better than what the alternatives are in the traditional finance area. Yeah, then I think what's really missing more of it from the blockchain space is things like
social media and so on. And that's finally coming now. And I'm really excited to see what else these developers that are building stuff right now will invent. Definitely last time before the bull market there were a lot of new inventions. And I would I would hope that there will be some new inventions this time around again. And I'm sure there will be
Yeah, on that note, Lewis, what sectors, apart from social media and defy obviously you said has come a long way, what sector or sectors of the industry excite you the most?
So yeah, I mean to be honest, DeFi does excite me quite a lot. I think the whole idea of, you know,
the internet first freeing up information and data and making it sort of globally accessible and at the speed of light that you can talk to people on the other side of the world and so on that there was amazing. And now the same
happening for money and assets. That's simply mind-blowing. So I think currently DeFi is in a bit of a, doesn't have quite the attention as it used to, but I think it will bounce back from that. And I'm still using it a lot for sure.
But apart from that, I'm a developer. I'm super interested in the tech. Sometimes that can be a bit of a slippery slope because you get super interesting. And I think that's happening a lot in the crypto space and so on. Like people, you know, there's a bunch of techies and they love
the tech and so on but there are any users so it's like no one really knows whether this will be that useful for anyone or something sometimes but there's a bunch of things that I'm super interested in obviously like and some zero knowledge proofs and so on some of some of the ideas there but but usually this is like another very technical level and I just
want to figure out how does the cryptography work here and how does the engineering work, like it's a great engineering feat and how can we scale like a blockchain, how can we know how to roll up the work, how secure and so on, all of the stuff is super interesting. It's just
that you can get like you can fall down the rabbit hole get super interested in the weeds of the tech and then it's it's sometimes easy to lose sight of okay wait a second apart from the couple of techies here and so on is it actually useful for a broader audience and so on and and there are sometimes unfortunately turns out that not all of these things get adopted
But yeah, I'm quite, currently I would say one of the things that really interests me is the sole app chain thesis or you know, I guess what cosmos pioneered. I originally didn't think it was, didn't make much sense to have that many blockchains and so on.
but now like seeing what OP stack did, the Coinbase, I had too launched it, by the way, Jelato also participated in as a launch partner there. That made me really excited. And I'm seeing a world now where blockchains are the new small contracts and where actually it does make sense for developers to
without having much skill and so on just spin up a blockchain for an application to get rid of you know essentially a lot of the sort of costs and so on of course you also get rid of the decentralization so on but but I think at least experimenting with this will be will maybe serve as some cool
cool killer apps that we hadn't thought of before that were impossible before. Like probably to be honest maybe social media and I don't think that you know social media will live on a chain like pulling on as it is now forever because it's just too expensive and so on so it will probably have to live on its own app chain somewhere eventually so yeah currently I'm quite
interested in this whole you know building blockchains I think I saw a funny tweet today someone tweeted something like okay there's like 69 L1s now in 420 L2s and 6.9 users or something right so that is all
also a bit true, like there seem to be more blockchains than users now after Cosmos and or piece stack and everything, but I believe to be honest that this might also get the next 100 million users or so eventually. If one of these appchains finds something that's
super usable, super cheap and so on. Then you know what, it will have been worth to build, I don't know, 2000 blockchains and one or two of them explode and get the one build users and then I'm fine with it and I think we're on the right path here. Yeah, I saw your post about gelato making account abstraction for base.
It's super exciting to see Coinbase launching their own L2. I'm very excited when I see L2s that are helping scale Ethereum. I'm seeing more and more of these pop up every day or every week. What are your thoughts on Ethereum? What does this mean for the future of that ecosystem?
Yeah, it's a very interesting question and I mean I came into the space because of Ethereum I was super in love with Vitalik he was my personal Jesus in 2017 or so and I like I guess people still treat him like a prophet and he really is but yeah
I don't like on the one hand, you know, these rollups, they all say they're a few of them aligned and so on and right now they also pay a few of them gas for their settlements but some of it is also I think just strategy to align with a few
to take some of the community over there. I mean, certainly not for optimism. These are Ethereum guys, I know that, but other roll-ups maybe. But more so. And yeah, so I'm not sure if it seems to me like, eventually they could just
swap out the, like, Ethereum for something else, right? So, I mean, when I got into the space, the idea was still like, oh, Ethereum has to scale and charting and whatnot. And basically Ethereum will be scaling. And now we have sort of
I would say that somewhat capitulated I would say into this roll up centric roadmap which is also super cool and makes sense from a software perspective and everything but I haven't fully come to terms with it to be fair though I haven't fully researched yet as well right there might be a lot of black spots I have that would give me a
the fuller picture here but yeah I'm you know what's clear to me is that Ethereum the chain itself didn't scale you and it seems like it's not that scalable and people are going to altruise now in altruise and altruise and altruise or
settle on Ethereum then good for Ethereum and good for their tools. But yeah, it's a very different model of scaling than what was there when I came into the space and it's certainly moving, I would say it's moving some power away from Ethereum for the sake of scaling.
And before I'm going to ask a quick follow up question to that, but I know that one of your team members, A&B hooked us up with a gelato Twitter AMA is like a giveaway. It's an oat giveaway. I'm not very familiar with oat, but
I pinned it to the space and if people that are listening want to go and mint one of these, I don't know if they're Poops or NFTs, but you have to follow four different steps. You have to watch a YouTube video, you have to follow the Twitter account.
And then joined gelato's discord and I think followed a lot of network as well. So if you want to tap off on that link and you're eligible for an out, you know what an out is sorry Luis I didn't quite catch it from Zaynab.
I'm quite embarrassed to be honest. I don't know what it is, but I see that it's using Galaxy. So I think it's probably some type of quest. But yeah, I'm not sure if today I'll be here, but no, I don't know actually. Onshane achievement.
I think it's basically like this questing thing that has gotten quite huge recently. I haven't done it myself to be honest, but yeah, definitely try it out. I think you basically have to complete the quest and then you get
get this type of token that sort of verifies that you did it. And who knows, maybe just come in handy in the future. Hey, right on. I'm sorry. I'm from the Zolada account and from the Zolada marketing team. I can just, yeah, briefly explain what an OTA is.
Yeah, it's basically a po-op where if you join the space, then you're eligible to claim it. So there's like a special NFT for everyone who tuned into the space. So if you just click on the link, you should be able to follow the instructions and mint it pretty easily. Awesome. Well, thank you guys.
So much for setting that up. Follow up question for you, Lewis, but isn't the whole idea of these layer 2s that they're basically benefiting from Ethereum security, Ethereum serves as a security layer, a chain of proofs, and then the transactions are happening on these layer 2s and these highly scalable rollups eventually.
Yeah, that's true. In theory, in reality, I think all of them currently are still completely centralized. So it's not like they are, like as a user, you have the security of guarantees of Ethereum when you use them.
certainly like they can use Ethereum to store to settle and store states and that state will then live on Ethereum and will represent the state of the roll-up and Ethereum is a very secure network and so on. That's great. But yeah, they're also paying a lot to Ethereum for that, right? But obviously this is already a known
issue and there's this EIP 4844, I believe it is a proto dank shouting which will make it like much cheaper for rollups to do what they do. I think I've heard 10 to 100 X cheaper so definitely the Ethereum Core developers are also working hard to make Ethereum cheaper for the rollups and so on. So I think this is like some synergy
they are that could really make this work out in the long term but yeah. I could also see roll ups eventually once they become big enough and they like think more like businesses saying hey we want to reduce our cost basis if here is super expensive and so on and then suddenly they swap I
I'm not sure, technically, I'm pretty sure it's possible. I'm not 100% sure, but yeah, they could just swap Ethereum out and say, look, we're settling on something else now on our own, or whatever. But of course, Ethereum is great because it gives them these sort of very strong security and decentralization guarantees all over.
box but yeah I think rollover modules are and it does sort of mean that they aren't I don't believe they are technically forever bound to Ethereum they could move somewhere else if they wanted to and that's the thing that gets me thinking sometimes a bit like I'm
just in terms of like, will we see something like this? Will there be a whole outfit starts on Ethereum, but then eventually just makes a business decision to migrate somewhere else or something then. Yeah, I haven't thought it through yet fully, but what would be an interesting sort of thought experiment, I would say. Certainly interesting to see what happens in the future and
With respect to Delado's future, how do you see the network evolving over the next few years? What are some key areas of focus for the company and for you as a developer? Yeah, so I think our key focus will be on decentralizing.
building a bunch of cool tech. So we're building new features for developers. It's really the underlying substrate that you allow to network. We wanted to make it so that whenever you use something on your lots of whether you deploy a script or something and you rely on the script to take data from your API.
your eyes and pulse it to your chain, to your smart contracts. We want you to sort of get these decentralization properties out of the box so that you don't have to worry, you know, what if Jelato shuts down business or something? Is my application just gonna stop running? You know, and we want you to sleep well at night
there and don't have to worry about that kind of thing. So there, this year, I think, at least most of my time will be spent on, okay, how can we take what we have and make the technology to transform it in such a way that it lands itself more easily to decentralization and
How will it look like? We've already done it before in some areas, but we're shipping so fast so many features that it's simply impossible to immediately write them all in such a way that they can be easily distributed in a decentralized network. So when we're releasing something new, usually it starts out in like a bit of a centralized manner and we want to very
quickly get it to a stage where it can be decentralized because that's at least the commercial here still. So yeah, but also in general we're looking into account abstraction, we're looking into how we can deliver great user experiences and so on. So I'm also really excited about this.
year the whole the whole okay how can we make sure that the next time web2 users come in the bull market that they don't have to deal with all of these shitty user experiences anymore and that they have something really great that's super fast and doesn't involve transaction fees and so on so so they are working together with the NOSA safe team with
with their smart contract wallets and with our relay product that is also a big theme for us this year and yeah you will hear more from us there soon we will do a couple of collaborations with them with the safety. Beautiful, well Lewis look it's been a pleasure having
you on. I tried to cover all the high-level topics and questions that I had in my head and you did an excellent job answering everything. Some of the stuff went over my head. I'm not a developer, but it's been an educational broadcast for me. I hope the audience members got something out of it as well. At least half as much as I did. If there's any final words or last thoughts that you want to leave,
of our audience with. Go ahead and do so now, but also remember you're always welcome back on our podium to share updates or share news about other projects you're working on. I've had a relationship with members of your team in the past through the Gilato Manicoun and you guys are very nice and super interested in collaborating. So yeah, you guys are always welcome on our podium.
Thank you very much and again thank you very much for inviting us on stage here. I really enjoyed that as well and yeah I mean for everybody who was listening thanks for listening and make sure to if you're a developer to check out our developer docs docs.
out to the network, you will find a bunch of useful stuff there that will make your life easier. And otherwise just join our discord and join our community. There's many interesting things we also have. Now we produce content to help people that are new, that are non-technical and just want to learn a bit about this stuff.
We produced content there to get you started with some of these concepts. Meet our team at E10var. I'm also going to be speaking at East Dubai in March. I'm going to be there on the ground of any of our few guys on Dubai. Feel free to chat with me at the conference.
And yeah, if you want to try coding, you know, I also only started four years ago or something, don't be afraid. It's especially starting with solidity is super easy. So don't be afraid. And yeah, hope to see you guys soon.
Beautifully put, Lewis, hope to see you soon as well. And Whalecoin talk community, thank you for joining. You're listening to another episode of The Aquarium. That was our third AMA of the day.
in the last one until tomorrow. Remember that everything you hear on these broadcasts meant for educational purposes only nothing is financial advice so be safe out there everyone have a great weekend my name is Noah signing out take care