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Looking Back, Building Ahead on WAX w/ @LukasRepublic
Recorded: Dec. 10, 2025 Duration: 1:09:33Space Recording
Short Summary
WAX blockchain is gearing up for significant advancements with the launch of a decentralized RNG, updates to its cloud wallet, and strategic changes in block producer compensation, all aimed at fostering growth and community engagement in a challenging market.
Full Transcription
All right, everybody, we'll get started here in just a second.
Whoops.
And then we will kick it off.
Happy Wax Wednesday.
Alrighty, alrighty.
Sounds like my mic is working.
Go ahead and... Yeah yeah that's working let me uh approve my speakers who are coming up a few wants to tell me there it goes hey happy wax
Wednesday Lucas how are you doing all right how How are you? Doing all right. How are you?
I'm doing all right, too.
I just grabbed some fresh coffee.
I ran outside real quick, put some sun on.
Oh, nice.
I'm ready to get this going.
I've been looking forward to this for about a month now.
Oh, cool.
Yeah, it's going to be fun.
Yeah, absolutely.
So shout out Sully, Breakman.
I see Craig's in the audience
thing hey what's up craig puzzled dad asker rob hobb cleanup center what's going on some familiar
faces i see in there hey he played your events proton of finance let's go ahead and kick this off
um all right everybody good morning wax blockchain welcome back to wax wednesday
i'm tommy from wax today we are diving into some of the more important
technical updates we've seen on Wax in a long time.
So over the last few weeks,
you've seen us roll out some major changes.
The end of October, we have the fully decentralized RNG.
We just last week had been making some updates
to the cloud wallet,
including opening the beta experience, everybody.
We've also some meaningful shifts just announced yesterday, as well for the guilds
and how block producers are being compensated.
So all of this has a huge impact on builders, gamers, creators, and the long-term health
of WAX.
So now is the perfect time to sit down, talk this through about what these changes mean.
So joining me today is Lucas Lica,
Chief Technology Officer at WAX.
Lucas helps lead the technical direction of the chain.
And today he's here to walk us through what's shipped,
why these changes are made,
and what we're focusing on next as far as 2025 goes.
As always, quick reminder,
nothing shared here as financial advice.
Some of the catches you're interested in,
make sure you follow up,
read the docs and dig into the details before we take any action. So Lucas, it's great to have you back.
I hope the day is going well. How are you? I'm doing all right. It's good to be here,
my friend. It's definitely great to have you. And I'm happy to hear that you're doing so
well. So I usually like to pepper you with a bunch of questions, but if you wouldn't mind,
would you want to give us a quick rundown of,
or an overview of what we've accomplished this year in 2025?
Yeah, it's kind of crazy that 2025 is wrapping up.
It seems like just yesterday we had a discussion about kicking off 2025 and what our roadmap is going to be.
kicking off 2025
and what our roadmap is going to be.
And that was around the time
where Bitcoin hit all-time high.
We were finishing 2024
and getting into 2025.
Everyone was really jazzed up
about the state of the market
and what it's going to be
because 2025 was supposed to be this another
bull cycle. So I think that from a perspective of delivery on our roadmap, we have done really well.
There's been a lot of updates to Cloud Wallet.
So we launched a mobile version on iOS and Android in April.
We also removed the account creation paywall, removing friction.
And then we've also removed a whole bunch of tools for developers like Unity and React Native SDKs.
And then we've also integrated more tightly with the WarfKit so that builders and developers can adopt the cloud wallet easier into their ecosystem. And then we've also expanded
cross chain interability by,
you know, adding Solana NFT
tokens to our bridge solution.
And we've also introduced
a ton network into the bridge.
So so there's been a lot of
again interoperability
type of improvements.
And then we started going on to the path of open sourcing
and decentralization because we believe that having some
of these tried and true solutions that have been vetted
by us and that gone through regular security audits.
You know, it would be really good to have those open source and given back to the community
so that, again, builders and people who are developing new things can actually use them.
So we will continue to do so.
And maybe, you know, there's a section when we talk about
what 2026 is going to be like for us, but we're going to kind of focus on the same theme.
One of the first things that we've released as part of that is we essentially decentralized
is we essentially decentralized random number generator
that is on chain, this wax RNG.
And we are going to be also open sourcing it formally.
And then we're going to follow up with the token bridge as well.
And then there's going to be changes to my cloud wallet,
which some people already have seen
in the beta.
As we're doing that, there's been a lot of development on the gaming side of the house.
So Spin Tycoon has launched officially.
So the team is working on optimizing that game and they will continue to do so and on the blockchain side there's been a lot of
tokenomics improvements that we've done we've experimented with you know introducing a better
inflation tracker and and we've moved some parameters on chain around to see if we can actually improve tokenomics by, you know, changing the ratios between
how the power up is consuming resources versus just regular staking.
And, and ultimately, you know, we are also now working with OIGs and the block producers to kind of store up the
public API ecosystems and making sure that with the current market condition, we can actually support
the community developers and there is enough funds to go around to actually have
high quality providers along with block producers. So that's very important. I think I mentioned
at the very beginning of this that as we're going into 2025 everyone had really high hopes for that this year to be a repeat of 2021 or maybe
even previous bull markets with a strong altcoin season and all that stuff. However, I think it's beginning to look like this market cycle is going to be closer to
what 2019 was.
And as far as the crypto space in general, it's just been a very, very difficult and
grueling bull cycle with I, altcoin season not transpiring.
And, you know, it is my personal opinion that we will not see altcoin season the way we thought we would see it in previous iterations.
iterations. So we as a team are working from an assumption that we need to essentially
work with the market we have, not the market that we want. And it's adaptation of kind of this
maxim from a lot of traders where you need to be trading the market that you have,
not the market that you want, because
that will be a mistake.
So a lot of moves that we're making right now are essentially in preparation for another
bear market cycle.
We may see in Q1 a leg up in terms of maybe another rally.
up in terms of maybe another rally. Maybe we will see Bitcoin hitting 50 week moving average.
But it is my opinion that the bull cycle is pretty much over and we need to be very defensive and we need to plan for the bear market cycle and prepare the team and community for that so we can bridge ourselves to the next full run in the future.
All right. That is, yeah, that's pretty thorough outlook of where we were and where we've been,
how we're moving to what's coming next. Good. Thank you for the update. I've got a lot of
questions to follow up on almost everything that you kind of mentioned too. And also hearkening
back a little bit to the conversation we had in June. So I'll start kind of with you towards the beginning of the year.
We were thinking about some of the changes that happened back in the start of 2025.
And in June, we talked about changing the way that inflation was tracked and some experiments
explored to reduce inflation without breaking incentives for the guilds.
We've had several months of real data since those changes.
From your spot, what do you think has worked as intended,
and what had maybe an unexpected side effect regarding how we've been making experiments? Yeah, I think that that's an important conversation.
So I think ultimately the way our tokenomics system is set up with having those two options,
having a power-up versus the staking, we essentially have these two different levers
to how the chain is powered when it comes to the transaction fees and costs. So obviously staking we're all familiar with,
where, you know, Wax is very unique.
That as opposed to paying gas fees like on EVMs,
you know, you can stake Wax for resources
and then reuse that
because that buys you certain bandwidth, essentially.
With PowerUp, we introduced a more gas-like system
where you essentially can pay gas fees
and then that gives you a little bit larger chunk of resources.
So we've essentially started to experiment with both of these models
hoping that the variable inflation system that we introduced in previous years would start
taking the fees into account and start offsetting the inflation in a meaningful way so that the inflation would go down.
And we did observe that, but it was not happening in a meaningful way, primarily because that,
you know, the majority of the traffic was still using the staking system.
And, you know, due to the market cycle, there was not as much activity. If you compare
it to let's say 2021, when there were days we had, you know, close to 800,000 active wallets
and we were hitting 3000, three and a half thousand transactions per second type of traffic. So that was back in 2021.
These numbers are no longer here.
And, you know, we're playing with the parameters
in terms of how to prioritize power up versus staking.
And we've settled at a good ratio
where we feel we have a good balance
of staking versus power up.
And then that system and those levers
are going to be in place.
I'm glad we have them
because as we move into the next cycle,
we may actually need that depending on the
activity and what's going on on chain for sure.
But as it is right now, you know, we had plans to, we even had plans to reduce the inflation from 5% to 4% at the beginning of the year as we were
dispensing with the parachute that was introduced in 2022.
But ultimately, because where we are in terms of the market, we're not going to be making that adjustment because we will need to use that percentage to reallocate to block producers, standbys, and potentially to the API providers, free public API providers, so that they can actually pay their bills
in terms of the hardware cost and infrastructure,
in addition to also operations,
because I think we need to remember
that a lot of these systems require 24-7 monitoring
and people responding to any sort of issues
and keeping these APIs up. and people responding to any sort of issues
and keeping these APIs up. And again, this is kind of in response
to what the market is and not what we want the market to be.
I mean, if you look at the crypto space right now you know it is a very risky space that was supposed to have a
explosive run-up in terms of various different projects and altcoins
especially but the reality is like if you look at the last 12 months bitcoin is actually down about 10 percent
uh while the gold is up 50 and the overall stock market is up 15 so so what we are seeing
essentially there's absence of retail investors in crypto and a lot of the speculative investment I think moved away from altcoins and is has
been consumed by the meme coin market and you know now I see the emergence of like the ICOs
again in in the various different iterations So maybe that's gonna be another speculative thing
that's going to emerge back into the space
because let's remember ICOs was huge in 2017.
And then you also have the space
of predictive marketplaces like Polymarket.
So there's a lot of speculation going on there.
However, we don't see that in the traditional altcoin space.
So like you look at Bitcoin being down 10%,
Polygon is down 80 to 90%,
Solana is down 30, 40%,
with WAX being down about 50% year over year.
So the altcoin space is definitely hurting
and we need to accept that
and create plans and operational plans accordingly
without really living on hopium of some sort of a crazy altcoin
season which I don't see I don't think we're gonna get simply because the retail FOMO is not here
there's a lot of institutional investors participating crypto in via the ETFs, but that also brings additional
facet to the overall market because now we're trading more
like Wall Street and less like what it used to be.
Okay.
Just to clarify, we were adjusting the CPU to power ratio. I think that ended at a 70% power up, 30% CPU.
That's right. Yeah, I'm sorry. That's correct. So the actual ratio, I think that we left it as 70 to 30 with 70% favoring power up.
70% favoring power up.
And, you know, those fees are being collected and they are flowing through the variable inflation rate. or there is a page there that talks about how much the inflation is actually offset
by the inflation. So let me see here. Yeah, by the power up. So, so, you know, it's, it's about
0.5% offset today.
offset today.
But yeah, like I said, the system is in place
and we will continue using it
and we will see what the next
cycle brings for us.
Perfect. And then while you were answering that question, let me move into our next
subject. I'm going to ask a little bit about the guilds. We talked about we were going to get rid of that 4%
or we're going to get rid of that 1% inflation and drop it down to 4%. But now, like you mentioned,
we want to make sure that as we're adjusting what's going on with guilds, they're still able
to make pay. So you already talked about inflation remaining at 5% for now. You've already kind of covered this question
about like why we did that.
But let's talk about the changes we're making
that we announced yesterday.
Our plan right now,
we're moving from the paid positions for block producers
from 27 down to 16.
And we'll have a temporary transition period
while that's happening.
What can our users expect, the common user expect during the transition period while that's happening. What can our users expect,
the common user expect during the transition period?
And maybe what would,
how is that going to kind of shake out?
How do you see it shaking out?
So I think the good news is that the normal WAX user and people who are running applications
shouldn't see any difference.
And in fact, all these changes that we are making
behind the scenes are being made so that we continue operating the chain with high availability and integrity. The reality is that with the removal of the parachute over the six months during the summer and then arriving in September, October at the place in the market where we did not see altcoin season,
needed to take a look and say, you know, how do we make sure that we have public APIs that are
robust and we needed to restructure the overall compensation system. So we essentially
introduced this notion of API providers and enhanced API providers. And we have essentially split of three guilds
who are providing the enhanced APIs that are public.
And then we've got four guilds
that are just providing regular APIs.
So in the past, that was essentially
everyone was required to do that.
But like I said, that requires a lot of costs when it comes to hardware,
especially if you're running full history solutions like Hyperion.
And so we needed to reduce and concentrate the rewards to essentially a smaller number of guilds
who could do it still with high integrity
and high availability and still have money
to be able to cover the hardware and operations costs.
And the same theme is essentially working now
towards the VPs.
So the reality is that at the current
market condition, the BP rewards are not enough to cover the cost of running all the producers.
So what we need to do is reduce the number of BPs and standbys, and then concentrate rewards through the fewer number of VPs so that they can continue running high quality operations.
we're going to be making starting January 1st is again in preparation for the next market
cycle.
So we can actually weather the bear market and then emerge onto the next side.
and the changes are going to be a reduction.
And the changes are going to be a reduction.
We're going to be going down from 21 block producers to 10
and then we're going to have initially 11 standbys
to essentially accommodate the people who are dropping off
from the BP roster as they transition
and then we're going to come back down to six standbys,
which should be more than enough.
And, you know, that gets enough rewards for these guilds to operate well.
All right.
So my next question was going to be kind of like, what are the guilds going to be doing
now?
But you've answered that with the remaining will be providing public APIs as well as some
of the stuff that they've already been provided.
Is there anything else that we're adding?
Yeah, let me talk a little bit about that because I think what was important, what's important also is to highlight some of the changes when it comes to the
scoring of that ecosystem. And, and, you know,
OIG had a critical role that they played in that
task. And, you know, they were,
they've been excellent in driving that, that system from a perspective of making sure that everyone who participated in the parachute and also being a BP or standby, to the ecosystem in a meaningful way by building tools and potentially doing additional product development,
business development, that type of stuff.
So at the end of the day, we did not see a meaningful action
in terms of valuation of the chain.
So at this point, we are recognizing the fact that we have more than enough tools.
WAC's ecosystem is rich with SDKs and APIs and tools to essentially build a lot of robust solutions.
The chain can scale. We have everything that we need to essentially be
experimenting and and doing various different business um ventures um and support business
ventures but uh you know we we don't need uh guilds to to do all these activities. And I think one thing that we recognize also is that
the fact that you are a excellent BP and excellent infrastructure provider
doesn't make you a really good product development shop
or business development shop.
So, you know, we want to make sure that we concentrate
and focus rewards on the things that BPs do well.
And then, you know, everything else is going to be done through Wax Labs.
And we can talk about that as well.
Yeah, I'll have some labs questions a little bit later on.
But I actually, I want to get a little bit more close to the community, right?
So I'm going to talk about the wallet, our MatCloud wallet.
Sure.
Back in March, we removed the five WaxP for creating a wallet.
That was a big step towards making it easier for people to get started
because they didn't already need to have Wax coming to their account.
So later this year, we saw a change with how with resources and
how the weight's changing favoring the power up personal cpu we've already kind of talked about
that so right um has user behavior shifted the way we expected or do you think most people are still
i'm trying to ask is do you think most the most of the common users are they more kind of using
power up you see or you know they still they still like the staking? What do you see? I think the majority of people are using staking.
PowerUp does get usage, especially when you're operating.
And let's say you're doing a whole bunch of things during a day
and you've run out of stake and maybe you've got a couple of transactions
that you need to complete.
And so what we're seeing that users do then, as a one-off, start using PowerUp, right?
But again, I would say majority of the usage is still user staking.
user staking.
Okay.
And, you know, we did remove the fee because we wanted to make sure that, you know, account
creation is as frictionless as possible.
I believe we will continue supporting that with all the changes that we're making.
And, you know, it's important to note that the new
version of the cloud wallet that is being tested right now.
You know, it changes. It changes the architecture, how the
transaction signing works and you know, Cloud Wallet has been under botnet attacks since its launch.
And we all know that controlling botnets is difficult and we need to recognize that, you know, botnets are just, I guess, a fact of life for the online applications and blockchain in general.
So the new version of Cloud Wallet is essentially shifting transaction signing to the client's machine,
which is going to be more in line with how most of the other
wallets work. The cloud wallet that the version that we have right now is actually doing majority
of the signing using the backend systems in the WAX infrastructure and that it can be very costly and we're going to be making a shift
where you know the actual transaction signing is going to be taking place on the client's machine
and then the clients will be managing the signing credentials so in a way we're going to be actually giving more power to the users, but the effect is
going to be that we will be offloading the pressure from our systems.
Solid.
That makes sense.
What else can we kind of expect to see?
It almost seems like we're...
When I look at this, it seems almost like we take some of the pieces that look that we like from current wallets and are kind of adding it to the
my cloud version um like uh the mnemonic for for instance um instead of necessarily the key through
the private keys and stuff yeah so so we definitely are gonna be adopting some of the new technologies that have been emerging. And, you know, I think that the passkey is going to be something that we're going to be using definitely more and more in our systems.
And that's the direction that the wallet is actually taking right now.
I believe this is going to be more of a standard as we move forward.
Okay.
And especially as far as the security aspect of using this is going to be adopted more widely.
I mean, the main reasons for the shift is that, you know,
we can provide any sort of password database leaks or hacks.
There's no password reuse for users.
There's a built-in multi-factor authentication.
And these typically are phishing resistant.
So those are all good items for the wallet in general.
So I think that there is a growing industry-wide support for this through Apple, Google, Microsoft.
Maybe some older devices or older operating systems are not adopting that yet, but as far as the new cloud wall is concerned, we're going to be moving in that direction because we, like I said, we're going to be shifting transaction signing to the client.
And for that, you need stronger cryptography and security and pass keys are the way to
Yep.
All right.
And then I also wanted to ask, beyond what we're seeing right now, do you see any future plans for the wallet or future updates coming to the wallet maybe or in the next year?
And I also wanted, like, what about the app?
Are we looking for feature parity between the two for, like, the MyCloud or mobile app?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, so moving into 2026, I think it's important that we are going to continue expanding on the toolkit that we have.
So we will definitely be working on the wallet.
The changes that you guys are seeing is a kind of like this foreshadowing of what you should expect in 2026.
shadowing of what you should expect in 2026.
So more operations are going to be happening in the client.
Users will have more control over their keys in general.
And we will be making sure that the new wallet is
backward compatible as much as possible with what we have today.
We will continue working with WorfKit developers to make sure that everything works.
And then we will also be working on making sure that mobile applications like the Android and iOS wallets definitely work and that we continue
supporting all the SDKs and that includes Unity SDK. We are internally talking about
potentially expanding the SDKs to accommodate gaming. But we'll see what happens in 2026.
A lot of these features our team is definitely using and dogfooding.
So it's not like we're building these things in the vacuum.
The roadmap is definitely accommodating some of the features
that we need on the gaming side of the house.
So there is a synergy between what one team is doing
versus what the other team is doing.
I see.
And then that's all I got for the wallet right now.
Let me talk a bit about the decentralization
and some of the updates from last year.
Right now we're talking about Unity.
I think we also released React Native.
We updated WarfKit.
You know, I just mentioned that to integrate MyClubWallet as well.
Why is it so important that these already be existing for developers?
And how much do these types of kits speed up development of games or dApps when you're releasing a WAX?
Oh, for sure, man. This is very important.
I think that anyone who is building applications on top of blockchain stack will rely on SDKs.
And WAX is not an exception. I think we want to make sure that people are able to build and focus on growing their business
and not get lost in minutiae of cryptography and signing transactions and all these types
of things.
So it's important for us to provide the tools,
allowing people to use the blockchain as a tool
in as easy way as possible
so that then they can focus on, you know,
using their mental cycles on growing the business
and developing a business idea
and not get, you know, completely tired out by focusing on the blockchain components.
So that's why all these tools and SDKs are in place.
And like I said, we'll continue supporting them and adding to them so that, you know, we have a full feature set of tools on WAX.
And I think that if you look at our ecosystem,
all the tools that have been developed not only by the WAX team,
but also by the community,
it is a very, very rich set of tools
that allows people to do a lot of things
that are not even possible
in other ecosystems so especially when it when it comes to real world assets using of nfts that
you know digitizing and tokenizing assets um we are definitely um stacked when it comes to features
are definitely stacked when it comes to features.
It seems kind of similar to,
well, with the changes we made for the guilds, right?
We made a few changes to concentrate what they're good at.
And by doing these changes, making these tools,
these kits available, it allows game developers
to concentrate what they're good at.
Is that kind of similar?
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of the same thing for sure.
And you talked about decentralization and open sourcing.
So again, I think we've done a significant investment
in developing a lot of these tools,
especially when it comes to then third party security audits
and all that stuff.
So we want to make sure that a lot of this tooling is open source as well,
so that if there are developers that want to expand on them
or borrow some of the architectural patterns and leverage some of them,
especially when it comes to bridging, you know, that
can be adopted.
And RNG is a first pilot project that we wanted to implement.
So RNG follows some of these first patterns when it comes to, you know, taking a critical blockchain system that was a fairly black box and open sourcing
it and decentralizing it so that it can be run by infrastructure providers and block
producers and not only the wax team and also potentially a version of it can be adopted by other developers.
Like if someone wants to build their own RNG system
and extend the one that we have,
they should be able to do that, right?
And that's the goal.
I mean, if someone wants to build, let's say,
an online casino on top of WAX,
and they want to have a probably fair RNG on-chain,
and they don't want to rely on the common one that is used by everyone,
just so that maybe they can control it better,
then they can simply clone the RNG system and then launch their own if they want.
All right.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was going to bring up the RNG, kind of like, that would be my next thing.
When we released this, the major things that I saw changing was now that projects will stake a little bit of wax
or put forth a little bit of wax to cover some of these RNG calls.
What else has kind of changed? And how does having, because we're talking about decentralization,
I have more questions about that next, but how does that kind of benefit having a fully
decentralized RNG, I think benefits a wax user because it's decentralized, no one person is
messing with it. But does it also help the average WAC developer in the same way?
Or is it more for allowing them to be able to make their own?
It's both.
Yeah, so I think it gives a blueprint and a pattern
for someone who wants to build their own, for sure.
So that opens up a lot of possibilities, I think,
for people who want to build applications and they
want to run their own on-chain random number generator that's probably fair and transparent.
Like I said, these systems are not easy to build and there's a lot of R&D costs and third-party
security audit costs that goes into these systems.
And, you know, a system that is open source and decentralized have 100 times more attack
vectors than a system that is closed source and you don't necessarily know what's going
So it's much easier to attack something that is, you know, you see the code, you know how it's
working. It's easier to find exploits. At the same time, the whole nature of decentralization
is that, you know, you could have malicious operators that are running RNG node and maybe they want to skew results. So the system needs to be designed so that a rogue operator
should not be able to circumvent a system like that, right?
So there is a massive complexity in redesigning RNG
that we had to the one that is being released.
And like I said, we want to do the same thing with the bridge.
And we're going to be working on open sourcing and decentralizing the bridge also so that the infrastructure providers and block producers can run bridge nodes, but also so that people,
if you want to launch your own bridge, you have a pattern to follow and at least you have a
bootstrap code and bootstrap blueprint of how to build one.
So again, this is going to be kind of giving back to the community and developers if they want to build their own, then, you know, mi casa su casa, you can go and do that.
and do that awesome and then you already answered this i think um but i was gonna ask what does it
Awesome.
kind of take to make a change like this um from something that's managed like you know by us um
versus it's decentralized and i know you mentioned there's lots of r d um that goes into it third
party audits that go into it as well is there anything else um like that you see that maybe
didn't mention um that's what we're doing specifically to help kind of set this up before we open it?
Yeah, I mean, like I mentioned, it's just not a from the surface, you know, you just
people will see just like a tip of the iceberg.
But there's been this was fairly complex and large lift for our blockchain team to kind of go through just And, you know, we were using it as a testbed
to also come up with a good decentralization blueprint
that then we can use for our bridge as well.
Solid. One second.
Sorry, excuse me. All right, then um in the june space we talked about
because we were just talking about of descending rng decentralization of rng um we also kind of i
think if i recall from that space we also mentioned like you just said the bridges and potentially uh
the wallet so is this something that we're still interested and obviously we're still interested in doing the bridges you just mentioned it um is the wallet so something that we're still interested in? Obviously, we're still interested in doing the bridge, as you just mentioned.
Is the wallet still something that we're looking at to open up in a similar fashion?
Yeah, I think that's definitely something that we want to look into in 2026.
As we move through decentralization projects, like I mentioned, the version of the wallet that we're going to be releasing is going
to be very important update from a security perspective because we will be adopting this
emerging standard that is just from a cryptographic security and how you generate your seeds is just much better.
And we definitely want to adopt that.
Also, as part of that, we are going to be shifting the way the wallet works
so that a lot of work is going to be happening on the client side.
And then as a follow through that, we will be looking into open sourcing and possibly opening some of the code so that, you know, if you want to take some pieces of the wallet, if you want to actually implement some of the things on your own,
then you should be able to do that.
How much of that is going to happen?
We're still working through that roadmap for 2026,
but the theme is very similar.
We want to make sure that we open things up, we decentralize, and also shift computational responsibility onto the clients away from our data centers.
And then calling back how the guilds and the VPs are making a little bit different role as things become decentralized,
what does it take or what's the guild's part in helping manage something like a decentralized product, like a decentralized bridge, for example?
Yeah, so we're going to be using our enhanced and regular infrastructure provider agreements
to essentially work with those selected few guilds that are
actually running infrastructure to also start running, you know,
the RNG nodes or bridge nodes and creating more of a decentralized
system for these key components.
And then, like I said, if developers and projects want to then adopt some of these pieces
and launch their own versions, they will be able to do that.
And then they can run the nodes themselves,
or they can also come up with some sort of their own way
of of uh spreading the load uh across various different uh partners that they may work with
okay so and then before i go off the subject to the bridges um we did have a couple updates to
the bridge this year and i mentioned um uh sublux solana ton yeah yeah we added a salon on ft support and I believe Solana and Tan. Yeah. What does it take?
Yeah, we added Solana NFT support and we also added Tan Network
to being able to bridge tokens.
And then what does it take
to add a whole new chain to the bridge?
What types of research or work
are you doing ahead of that
before you turn it over?
Yeah, so it all it all
depends on the technology right i i think that when it comes to let's say evms um you know once
you do one evm then pretty much the the the same pattern could be used for for adding um you know
additional evm like chains but if you're adding a completely new blockchain with a new new for adding additional EVM-like chains.
But if you're adding a completely new blockchain with a new technology,
then you kind of have to go back to the drawing board every single time
and do a lot of work to make sure that your architectural patterns,
security, and operations still hold.
So there is a significant investment that needs to take place
when you're adding a new blockchain
that may be different from the ones that you already have.
So, for example, if we were to decide to add a support to other
envelope chains that's fairly easy if we want to add a support for other evm chains that's easy
but let's say if we wanted to add support to some other network that is not covered yet by the suite that we have. You know, that's a fairly heavy lift.
Okay.
And, you know, the one thing that, you know,
I want to mention is like maybe the development
because we now know the patterns.
We have a very skilled team that has done this many times,
you know, from the development perspective,
something like that may not be as daunting,
but the security audits
and the cost of these audits remain the same.
And those can be very high.
All right.
Yeah, that makes sense the way you laid it out like that.
All right, so I got a couple questions about AI I wanted to ask, because it's no secret.
What we're calling AI right now has been a huge headline through the past year, right?
So when we last chatted about it, you talked about using AI, helping with testing, writing boilerplate code, and speeding QA.
So since June, have our engineering teams, have they changed how they're using AI in their day-to-day work,
or is that still the main thing that they're using?
We've continuously expanded how we use AI.
And in fact, we have now, we've set up specific,
we are a Slack company, so we use Slack a lot,
but we've set up specific Slack channels
with dedicated AI agents that help us to do,
to manage our infrastructure and operations,
also project management and costs, for example.
So today I'm able to go to, for example, our operations channel and ask AI
what is the operations cost for the last 24 hours and is able to gather all the information and tell me system by system,
component by component, where the cost is going, are there any anomalies?
And it's able to actually troubleshoot and give me alerts about these complex matters.
And I know that our developers are constantly experimenting with different tools to get that, you know, efficiency multiplier in terms of using AI to do more with less.
So that is an ongoing process.
We'll see how the AI space develops, but, you know, every day there are more tools being launched.
And I know that the engineering aspects that I talked about last time, that is definitely
still the case. We're expanding on that. And then what about with the different
engineering teams or pods? Do they use AI differently among each other?
I know we've got separate, like we've got like a blockchain team,
we've got like a wallet team, gaming team.
Is it all kind of the same, like for summary and for speeding the admin and making things, adding, applying grease, so to say?
Yeah, they have common patterns when it comes to how different teams are using it.
Some teams are adopting AI more than others.
I think it's interesting to see that there is just, you know,
new technology or new pattern adoption curve is always the same.
It doesn't matter if it's AI or some some new new tools or whether that's like a project
management methodology. Like back in the day, there were wars between like a waterfall or
agile. You know, the adoption of these new things typically follows the same type of a pattern where, you know, out of a team, you typically have people on both sides where people, there are people who don't want to touch it, don't want to, don't want to look at it.
And there are early adopters that are all about it.
And then everyone else, then there's very few on both sides, right?
So there's very few people who never want to do AI.
And there's very few people who never want to do ai and there's very few people who are all about ai and then everyone else kind of falls in the middle where they're like well
let's see what you know how this can actually help me and then over time uh the the weight shifts as
the patterns are proved out and uh uh you know if there's actual benefits to day to day then then the adoption
accelerates on the team and we have teams that are more proficient at these tools than others
so it's it's also very typical you know my my whole thing my whole thing is has always been that
My whole thing has always been that everyone who works for me, I want to make sure that they live better than when they started.
So I want to make sure that we develop people and we give them tools so they can be successful as they move on through their career journey.
on through their career journey.
And I want to encourage learning,
and I want to make sure that people who work here
walk away with tangible solutions and tools
that I can use somewhere else in the future for sure.
Perfect.
And then so I mentioned earlier I was going to bring it back
to Labs.
So let's talk about WaxX Labs for a second here.
When we last chatted, since we last chatted,
labs has helped support different issues such as like WAX Pay,
I think atomic asset upgrades as well.
We even have some support for community events and spaces.
In the future, now that we have so much, like you said, excuse me, all like the, we have RNG, wallets, bridges, we have a lot of core infrastructure with SDKs and everything.
How do you see WaxLab maybe evolving as a funding engine now that we've got all that already?
Yeah, so I think that, you know, we have slowly transitioned away from funding tools.
There's been a lot of proposals about building tools
and more tools and tools on tools and all that stuff.
I think we're at the point where a lot of times
when I'm interacting with projects that are trying to get funding, you know, my message to them is what is you an entrepreneur that you're trying to solve some sort of problem?
Or are you trying to get like $10,000 or $30,000 for another SDK, right?
And if it's the latter, then this is going to be a very short conversation
because I believe we have plenty of tools and SDKs.
We don't need another one.
Having said that, if you come to us with a business idea,
business proposal, then we would be more than willing to,
to help you get it off the ground if it has legs. Right. So another,
another thing is, you know, do it a diligence, right?
You know, treat wax labs as if this was a DC, right?
So you can't just show up with a slide where
and you've got a deck of slides.
And, you know, I think it's important that if you seek lab,
if you seek funding from angel investors or wax labs or VCs, typically we want to see that you've tested the idea.
You put your own skin in the game.
You built something.
You have a prototype.
You can show user adoption.
You can talk about maybe potentially initial revenue and where the revenue is coming from.
You know, have a story, right?
Have a compelling story.
But if your story is like, I want to build an SDK and want $30,000, you're not going to get that money.
I was going to ask, is there anything you wish...
Oh, I missed it.
Okay, I was gonna ask if there's anything you wanna...
you wish you saw on all the proposals that come through
and it sounds like clearly stating a business use case.
Yeah.
Doing due diligence on what's going on.
Treat the labs like a VC.
And this means you can't just be like a doc like a single doc
yeah here's what I want to do I mean I I think I would just go through a mental exercise of like
you know if I were to go to Y Combinator or or some other VC or or or tech lab you know you know
do do a level of research and and find out what it is that they want to see, right?
If somebody were to write you a check for your idea, you know, it's pretty well documented by now of what is required to get funding.
So it's similar with Wax Labs.
Okay.
All right, solid.
Yeah, and I think it's also important to mention that, you know,
in the past couple of years ago,
we were not really keen on funding any sort of like for-profit business ideas.
And, you know, that has changed.
So I think we're more than willing to have a conversation
with a team or a founder who has a business idea
that has been at least in the prototype phase
and they've proven somewhat what it is.
And if it's for-profit, let's have a conversation.
We may be able to find some of it,
come up with some sort of a revenue sharing split or not.
I mean, there are different options to slice this.
Cool.
And then kind of like looking back, looking forward,
what are some highlights you'd like to see us hit in 2026, And then kind of like looking back, looking forward,
what are some highlights you'd like to see us hit in 2026?
Like with regard to, I know we already said that we've got everything we need,
but is there anything else we'd like to see as far as bolstering our technical snack here on WAX?
Yeah, I think we will continue definitely expanding
on decentralization and open sourcing.
We will definitely continue leaning into making sure that we as a team,
working with BPs and OIG, we expand and augment any tools that we already have.
And then WAX team is and have been leaning into gaming
team is and have been leaning into gaming because we do believe that is a path for adoption.
So we will continue to do so in 2026.
And then we will at the same time be very, very careful and paying attention to what the overall market is doing
and what the space is, where the space is moving
in terms of new opportunities or maybe old opportunities
that are being rebranded as new.
And we will definitely be paying attention to that and adapting as we go forward.
Cool.
All right.
I've got one question left.
In a minute, I'm going to open up the floor to those in the audience who have a question
that I haven't asked yet.
So if you have a question, please press the mic, and I'll bring you up in a minute.
So while we're waiting on that, let me ask you this last one. We last talked in June. If you compare where we were back in June, kind of where
we are now at the end of the year, like what's the biggest shift in how you personally think about
like the direction of where we're going? Well, from my personal, well, I personally, I am disappointed in that we will follow the pattern when it comes to
the market cycle and that we will see something similar what we've seen in the previous cycles it comes to having a robust outcome season and you know that Bitcoin continues to drive
the market but then the dominance will be relinquished to alts and then all the different
projects will see a nice run up as well. Since that has not happened, then we know that the pattern has changed.
The fact that a very risky asset like Bitcoin has not produced the returns and in fact is
negative for the year in December as we speak.
in December as we speak, while the less risky assets like gold or stock market in general are up
is very concerning because that means that the retail needed to see a meaningful old season along with liquidity is just simply not here.
The only asset in crypto that is driving this bus is Bitcoin.
And everybody else has been pretty much bleeding out over the last 12 months.
And we see that across the board.
So you know, I mean, you look at a lot of different projects like the Polygon Solana's
even Ethereum, you know, this is the, you know, the story is pretty much the same across the board.
There are some projects that saw run-ups, but I think the patterns change. So like if I compare
my sentiment from June to where it is right now, I am fully in defensive mode. So I am preparing my team for a bear market cycle
and I am essentially
trading the market we have,
not the market I want.
And that's the theme.
I need to make sure that
from the operations
and just, you and just rewards perspective,
BPs and infrastructure providers are set up for
success to what we have and what's coming.
And that also goes for my team.
Stiller.
Let's see. Stellar.
All right, let's see.
All right, I don't see any hands up, so I think I'm giving your time back, Lucas, and we can end it here.
So that's going to be the end of today's update.
Thank you, Lucas, for taking the time to walk us through kind of like where your mind's at and like what we've been building and then working towards for all this in the technical side of wax like we talked about decentralized rng
workflows from ai updates to the wallet bridges and then everything else with the guilds too so
um before we wrap up and we throw it um throw the ball over to a breakman for the pitch break space
i want to give you just a moment for any other final thoughts or anything
else you want to want to share on with our community.
Well, thanks a lot for hosting the space. I think it's been awesome.
I love giving it updates. I wish I was more cheerful,
but you know, the reality is that I am a hundred% in defensive mode and essentially preparing for the bear cycle.
We will continue to build and we are here to stay.
I think on the WAX team side, we'll definitely be continuing to lean into the technologies,
expanding the technologies that we have, but also making sure that we decentralize as much as possible
and open source the tools.
And, you know, through WAX Labs
and also other business development activities,
we will continue to expand on the WAX blockchain sweep for sure.
Well, thank you again,as um for all of this um and
i really appreciate you being able to take the time and chat with me um for our space
oh yeah for sure my friend thank you very much take care absolutely and then for everyone else
of course thank you all um for joining us today live um if you're listening this space a bit later
um i appreciate you spending part of your Wednesday with us. A couple quick reminders from me before
we go. Tomorrow night will be the final Brawlers Community Tournament of the year. That'll be
happening tomorrow night at 9 p.m. Pacific, right in the Toronto server. So if you want to think
about jumping in or checking it out, you want to come kick my ass at Brawlers, now's the time.
If you want to do that before 2025 events, I think those will be picking up again, starting up again on Thursday nights in the new year.
WaxHub is winding down. If you haven't logged into WaxHub lately, you should log in,
convert your WaxHub points into WaxBee before December 28th. So you do not miss out on that.
And finally, it's Wednesday, stick around for the pitch break space, which should be starting up
right now or in just a moment. You can check that out on Twitch or right here on X.
Follow the Consumer Break profile.
And that's it. That's all I've got.
Thank you all for being here with me today.
I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and have a happy Wax Wednesday.
I'll see you next time. Thank you.
