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Noble AppLayer Chat with our Founder & CEO
Recorded: April 29, 2025 Duration: 0:27:18Space Recording
Short Summary
Noble is gearing up for the launch of its innovative App Layer this September, aimed at enhancing stablecoin utility and user engagement. CEO Yelena outlines the project's evolution from stablecoin issuance to a comprehensive platform for crypto-native applications, while strategic partnerships with teams like Morpho and Pendle are set to expand USDN's reach in the DeFi space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hi everyone, we're going to get started in a moment, just waiting on some folks.
Can everyone hear me?
Yeah, I can hear you.
Hi, hi.
We can give a few minutes to have some people join. Let me tweet it out, get everyone excited.
Awesome.
I see some familiar faces in the room.
Hi, everybody.
Okay, amazing. Maybe we could just start with intros because people will be coming and going.
I'll kick it off. So I'm Kenzie. I lead marketing here at Noble.
Been here for a handful of months. Very excited. Obviously, as hopefully everyone knows,
we just recently announced our plans for the Noble App Layer coming later this summer.
So very excited to be joined by our CEO and founder, Yelena, who's calling in from the Noble account to kind of talk about what the App Layer is, why we're building it, why it's important, yada yada.
So, yeah, Yelena, I'll pass it to you to give a quick intro of yourself, of Noble, you know, the classic spiel.
All right.
Hi, everyone.
So good to be here.
Happy Tuesday.
It's almost May here in New York.
It's becoming beautiful.
So, yeah, happy to be here.
So I'm Yelena.
I'm the co-founder and CEO of Noble.
For those that are not familiar with myself,
I started the project about a couple of years ago, actually about two and a half years ago at this point. I was working very deeply within the Cosmos ecosystem when I had this realization
that as blockchains became more fragmented, as more developers and businesses look to build their
own application-specific blockchain, whether that's a roll-up or your classic Cosmos app
chain, they'd all need access to native stablecoin issuance. So we started by servicing the Cosmos
ecosystem with, of course, native USDC closely partnered with Circle and really expanded from there.
So we, of course, are now, you know, doubling down on the issuance piece, which is actually a big part of the app player story.
But also really thinking about, you know, what kind of applications can we build with stable coins sort of at the center?
applications can we build with stable coins sort of at the center, right? We're always talking
about, you know, kind of real kind of useful crypto native applications for kind of everyday
kind of users that go beyond pure speculation, right? Pure kind of high risk games. And we
believe that stable coins will serve these types of applications very, very, very well.
And so from there, we, of course, most recently decided to, of course, build this app layer, which we're going to talk about in more detail.
But yeah, overall, been in the crypto space for a very, you know, kind of long time at this point, about 70 years and have seen a lot of what works, what doesn't work.
And honestly, have found kind of a home and a passion with the stablecoin space. So yeah,
thanks everybody for joining. It's always really nice to kind of touch base with the community,
and we should definitely keep a few minutes at the end for some Q&A.
Amazing. Thank you so much for that intro. Fabulous as always. So yeah, that's a great point, Yelena. If you guys have questions about the project, about Noble or the app layer, just drop them in the comments of this video and I'll take a look and make sure to ask them at the end.
But let's just jump straight into it. Yelena, can you tell us about the app layer and tell us why Noble decided to build an app layer instead of kind of doubling down on the chain that we already have.
Yeah, so I'll take it back just a couple steps.
So obviously, when we decided to address this stablecoin kind of issuance challenge across the Cosmos app chain ecosystem, we really thought very deeply about like what kind of design for a
Cosmos layer one like made sense, right? If you look at sort of the history of kind of app chain
designs, and you look at the history of the app chain thesis as a whole, going back to honestly,
the 2015, 2014, early Ethereum, early Tenderman days, you'll kind of see there's like two ways of looking at it.
You can either build a general purpose layer one, or you can think about something more kind of application specific or purpose built.
So we very much, very like clearly along that spectrum, decided that a purpose built chain was like the design that we wanted to go with. But at the same time, we also wanted to make sure that with that purpose
built kind of framework, we would have very secure, very kind of reliable stack that was
upholding this singular purpose, which is literally stablecoin issuance. How do you
proliferate native stablecoins across a highly fragmented network of many, many blockchains. And so we decided obviously to do a few things.
One, we wanted to leverage the Cosmos SDK. So we actually made a very, very strong kind of decision
not to go down the smart contracting route. So not to support an EVM, not to support Cosmosm,
not to support smart contracts, and to very singularly focus on modules and the CosmSysDK.
Why do we do this? Well, a few things.
One, we never wanted this chain to be for smart contracts, for DeFi, for speculative activity, right?
What we wanted was for asset issuers to feel comfortable with app chains, right?
With this network of many, many distinct sovereign chains.
And to do that, you don't want to kind of compromise
on security, you don't want to compromise on reliability,
you don't want to have to upgrade all the time
because there's maybe smart contract kind of defaults,
things like this.
And so we decided let's build this kind of Cosmos layer one,
the Noble Core chain as of Cosmos layer one, the Noble Core chain, as a
Cosmos SDK chain, obviously leveraging Tendermint for consensus, and taking advantage of IBC and
kind of other interop solutions that would come our way. Eventually, of course, we supported
Circles cross-chain transfer protocol. We also technically have support for wormhole fermenting Noble Dollar, can get into that. But really the Cosmos chain, the kind of
core Cosmos chain was all about providing kind of as much flexibility and being leveraged to as many
interoperability solutions as possible, while keeping in mind that we needed a very secure,
while keeping in mind that we needed a very secure, stable, minimalistic design that leveraged
kind of this Cosmos SDK module framework, which has worked very well.
So yeah, for kind of other kind of builders on the call, the Cosmos SDK is like really
good for like permissioning, right?
For logic, like kind of authorizing certain actions, certain kind of
intent workflows. But it's not the greatest for, let's say, building DeFi or smart contracts or
anything like this that you get in the Ethereum space. And of course, it's not EVM compatible.
So kind of fast forward a couple of years into our journey, we have really done, you know, again, like a really good job of proliferating stable native stable coins throughout Cosmos, throughout the app chain world.
Again, we have maintained this focus on issuance.
But what we decided was we need to think bigger, right?
Like we need to really think a lot bigger than pure distribution and pure issuance.
And we really need to think about a kind of a larger, you know, approach towards actually
building like apps, like crypto native apps that use stable coins at the center.
And what we decided is let's launch this app player, which is basically a rollup on Celestia
that has all of these performance guarantees, right?
We're using Celestia for DA,
it'll be EVM compatible,
kind of out of the box,
there's 100 millisecond block times,
we can do different things around the sequencer
to kind of think about revenue, things like this.
And let's make sure this app layer is the place where we can
actually, again, utilize the stable coins that Noble already, like natively supports already
issues to actually build performant applications with. And that's what we're going to be launching
actually in September. So we did, of course, announce this recently. We are making a big push to kind of get the community
involved kind of now because this will be this point where Noble kind of transitions from this
like highly purpose-built, stablecoin issuance kind of product service, let's say, to something,
again, that's a lot more user-facing, a lot more kind of, you know, community-driven as well,
right? Like we're constantly getting inbound from all sorts of folks that, you know, have all sorts of great ideas for,
you know, different stable coin centric applications. And we believe that this app
layer will be just a great way to kind of see those come to fruition. And of course,
Noble Dollar and USDN is actually a big part of that, and I'm happy to kind of get
into more details on that, but, yeah, it's definitely an interesting kind of point in the
Noble journey. Amazing, yeah, I mean, that was such a great in-depth explanation of kind of the why.
I know you touched on this a little bit, but can you maybe talk about like why
we decided to partner with Celestia specifically, maybe instead of any other project?
So why we decided to focus on Celestia? Sorry?
Yeah. Why we decided to focus on working with Celestia versus, yeah, somebody else who maybe
does the same kind of.
Yeah. So, I mean, listen, our DNA very much is within the Cosmos ecosystem. Right.
Like we have been, again, building, you know, the noble kind of core layer one in a way that makes us highly flexible and interoperable with, again, like the wider Cosmos ecosystem.
kind of flexible and interoperable with, again, like the wider cosmos ecosystem.
But when we thought about, you know, programmability, right, when we thought about smart contracts,
when we thought about DeFi, when we thought about what kind of infrastructure can we leverage
to really build these like ambitious, again, like consumer facing stablecoin centric applications,
we realized Celestia would be the best place to do that.
To be clear, my vision for crypto in the future for Web3 is users should never know actually
which stack, which infrastructure that their app is running on. It should just work. And if it
doesn't work, and if fees are too high, gas is too expensive, and it's slow, and it's clunky,
and then it's just not going to work. It doesn't matter where you're building it.
And so kind of taking into consideration these like user facing concerns, right? Speed, performance,
you know, even, you know, our reliability when it comes to like uptime, making sure like there's like kind of like network upgrades
are like not like no longer a thing as you have,
of course, with like your own layer one.
We realized that Celestia was just like the perfect place,
honestly, to kind of build this app layer.
Obviously, when you think about kind of Celestia roadmap
and Celestia vision for blockchains,
they kind of started with data availability first, right? They said, okay,
it's expensive to post data to Ethereum mainnet. You know, there's a lot of kind of contention and competition around block space. And, you know, it's become very, not clunky, maybe isn't the
right word, but maybe bloated is the right word, where that results in high fees,
that results in strange things around MEV. So how do we make sure that we can kind of create this
new stack, this new infrastructure, where we can have app builders feel safe and comfortable with
building high performance applications where they don't have to be, you know, scared that like some new crazy meme coin or NFT launch is going to like eat up a bunch of their, you know, into a bunch of their kind of network and result, infrastructure that leverages a lot of actually like Cosmos
philosophy and Cosmos principles around like sovereignty, right, around, you know, kind
of owning your kind of block space around all of these kinds of things.
But at the same time, it is a lot more Ethereum aligned in the sense that you have like tooling and an ability to build,
you know, again, these like applications with smart contracts and things like this. And so,
yeah, Celestia really, you know, is kind of the perfect fit for us. But again, at the end of the
day, if Noble works at a very high level where it can compete with the neobanks and fintechs of the world,
you will not even know it's using Celestia or Cosmos or IBC or any of these kind of protocol level considerations.
In the same way, when we interact with Instagram,
you're not thinking about which cloud service providers
like Facebook or Meta is using.
So that's the vision there.
Totally. That makes a ton of sense. It actually kind of makes me curious about,
you know, I think my original question was going to kind of be like, what's Noble's
thesis on the EVM, but it kind of seems like the point doesn't, like the machine doesn't matter. So then I'm curious why an EVM compatible L2
versus building another app chain.
Is there a reason why like that was a better choice for us
versus doing like Noble smart contract app chain
and then Noble, you know, issuance app chain?
Yeah, I mean, obviously when you think about,
okay, you know, you're a team, right? Like,
let's just like take a step back from Noble, right? Your team, you want to do this, like,
let's say something a little bit more general purpose, but like, not to a general purpose that you want to like reinvent the wheel and like, you know, build like an Aptos or a Sui or even a
Barra chain, right? You just want something very, very tailored for your use case. In our case,
our use case are stable coins. Although again, the design space is like, very large, right? You just want something very, very tailored for your use case. In our case, our use case are stable coins. Although again, the design space is like very large, right? So we are
on that sense, a lot more general purpose. And so when you think about like those requirements,
right? Okay. You want super high throughput, right? You want, you know, a high amount of,
I mean, you anticipate a high amount of transaction activity because your use case is
stable coins, everybody uses stable coins. And again, you want a layer where people, builders,
your team can actually build these applications. You know, we're not, again, looking to reinvent
the wheel and launch an entirely new layer one with an entirely new consensus mechanism, an entirely new VM, like that's not
the business that we're in. But at the same time, again, as I like for all the reasons I mentioned,
the current kind of Cosmos L1 wasn't sufficient. And so yeah, like if you're a team and like,
this is the kind of path you're trying to go down, yes, you could launch another layer one,
like on Cosmos, like, right, that like, it was totally interoperable
with the existing L1 that we already have. That didn't work for us for like a number of reasons.
One, we already have a very, very strong validator set that we kind of rely on on the Cosmos side
of things. We do have a 20 validator set that runs a proof of authority consensus mechanism.
that runs a proof of authority consensus mechanism, we wouldn't want to necessarily
convert that to another kind of security model as a Cosmos L1. So obviously building a Celestia
roll-up, you don't need a validator set. That kind of makes things easy already. Of course,
the Celestia roll-up will on some level depend on the validator set for the L1 because obviously there will be very
close interop and communications between the two, right? And who knows, maybe in the future
we do convert the roll-up to a validator set for like decentralization purposes or something like
this. But again, for now, we just wanted the fastest kind of path to market. So don't need a validator set, right? Don't need to kind of bootstrap a bunch of like the infra that's needed when you typically think of a launching a Cosmos chain, Cosmos L1. And we just figured that this kind of roll up, again, was just like the fastest path to market. Again, keeping us EVM compatible.
again, which is like the fastest path to market. Again, keeping us EVM compatible. That's like
another thing like EVM and Cosmos is like hard to do, right. And there's just a lot of like
unknowns there from like a UX perspective, it's actually like hard to use EVM Cosmos chain
sometimes in terms of like signing and authorizations and things like this. So yeah,
we just figured that, again,
this kind of approach where we like keep it simple, right?
Like we keep the Cosmos L1 like as it is,
don't change a thing unless we're changing
a protocol kind of level software
to improve like routing or of course like security.
But other than like the basic kind of like minimal requirements needed to keep the l1 like performant and reliable for all
of the chains and partners that we service we said let's let's not mess with it like let's not change
anything that doesn't like don't if it's not broken don't fix it right and it's not broken
right like it works very well same time we have these ambitions. We have all of these desires to, again, build these
user facing consumer applications with stable coins. Right. At the center. And of course,
Noble Dollar, again, is like a big part of that story. And so we figured this roll up
kind of framework is just a very a very good way of doing it.
Yeah, that totally makes sense.
Yeah, definitely aligned with that.
So I wanted, I guess now I'm curious to, like, what's going to happen to the current Noble chain once the app layer is announced?
Will Noble continue to build improvements upon it and continue maintaining it? Or is that going
to kind of be a legacy project for us now? No, no, we're definitely going to continue
build, like maintaining it, improving on it. I mean, you know, some of the things that we're
maintaining it, improving on it. I mean, you know, some of the things that we're kind of thinking
about, again, you know, going like understanding that like our DNA, like as a project very much
is within the Cosmos ecosystem, you know, we're going to, you know, eventually support IBC Eureka.
That's going to be very exciting. We're actually doing like an upgrade in about a month with the Noble chain, which is support for something called auto CCTP.
This is a feature that we've gotten a ton of demand from from our partners.
It effectively allows users to sign one transaction to go between a Cosmos chain and any CCTP chains like Ethereum, Solana, etc.
Right now, you can do the reverse in one transaction
because we have something called the forwarding module on Noble,
which has been live for quite a few months.
And that allows users to sign one transaction
to kind of go natively across all of these chains with their stable coins,
I mean, mainly with USDC.
And that is, again, a one transaction type system
called a forwarding module.
So again, we're continuing to make these improvements
to core layer one, just to make sure that, again,
all of these complexities that we've seen historically
around bridging, around routing, around, you know, signing are kind of, you know, done away with.
Fun fact, like this forwarding module that we've had live for a few months has forwarded over $1.8 billion of USDC in its lifetime, which is pretty amazing, right?
million dollars of USDC in its lifetime, which is pretty amazing, right? Like this is like a tool
that like we've built or a feature that we've built under the hood that people like probably
don't know about if they're like, let's say, you know, sending their USDC from Ethereum to
Osmosis. Like they don't know that Noble is like forwarding that on the back end, but that's like
the kind of stuff that we really like doing. So yeah, we're definitely going to continue maintaining it, making it better, you know,
making things just, again, from a UX perspective run smoother.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, never want to like abandon our roots.
So that's really awesome to hear.
So yeah, we're coming up on time, which is crazy.
I feel like this flew by, but I wanted to talk to you maybe for our last question.
I've opened it up to the floor.
I'm looking for some community responses.
And while we wait for those, anyways, so USDN is obviously coming to the EVM.
Is there any project that you think off the top of your head would really benefit from
USDN or maybe like a dream project that's kind of a legacy DeFi project that you think off the top of your head would really benefit from USDN or maybe like a dream project that's kind of a legacy DeFi project that you think would be really awesome to have USDN on?
Yeah, we're already in chats with a few really strong teams that are looking to support USDN, chatting with the Morpho team on setting up a Morpho vault for USDN,
chatting with Pendle, potentially putting a Pendle market for a noble dollar as this
yield-bearing stablecoin that's highly composable, highly permissionless. I mean,
there's just really fun things you could do with that. I would love to see, you know, USDN obviously used across DeFi, like across various perp
sexes. We're, you know, still exploring like the hyper liquid ecosystem and the hyper EVM.
That's when we really started to take off just now. I mean, really, when you think of hyper
liquid, you think of the perp sex, which, of course, is a huge success. But there is kind of more cooking there.
Yeah, there's really a lot to come.
And it's great to kind of see that product market fit
immediately.
But I see that we have one person in the room
who wants to ask a question.
So I'll just approve you now as well,
since I have admin rights.
Thanks again everyone for joining. Mohamed I think you can speak now if you'd like to ask a question.
Otherwise if anyone else wants to ask a question we we're just, yeah, feel free to raise your hand.
But yeah, unfortunately, I do have to run in like four minutes.
Yeah, well, while we wait maybe for Mohamed's speaker to work,
Yelena, when can everybody expect the app layer to go live?
Yeah, so we're working really hard to launch this by September.
We are in the process of kind of narrowing down our scope around kind of which applications we expect to be kind of like the flagship kind of apps that launch kind of on day one.
I don't want to give away too much because there's kind of a lot happening there.
But, yeah, that's
the current timeline. Sorry, Mohamed, you want to, you can go ahead.
Can you please explain the deposit to token ratio?
Sorry, what was that?
How much token can we get from the airdrop and what will be the ratio for the deposit?
Okay, so I think you're referring to the points campaign. So yeah, so that's a really
something that we're in the process of evaluating. Sorry, I'm just going to mute you because you
um sorry i'm just gonna mute you because you um have some yeah um you just have some feedback
uh coming from your audio yeah so we're uh obviously we've been kind of running this
points campaign for the past couple of months um and uh there'll be a lot more information around, obviously, the Noble Dollar and different launches there.
Is there any fixed ratio?
Okay, awesome. Anybody else?
I don't see any more questions in the chat.
Actually, let's see.
Yep.
Yeah, it looks like we don't have any more questions in the chat.
So thank you, Yelena, so much for joining.
Thank you, everybody, for listening in.
AppLayer, very exciting.
We're going to keep posting updates about it and details as it comes, of course.
So please follow along here.
Follow us on Discord.
We are having community calls all the time there,
and community is very active.
So please join your Discord.
And, yeah, Yelena, thanks for joining.
Thanks, guys.
All right, thanks.
