Enjoying the smooth sounds of the X Spaces House Orchestra, especially orchestrated for
our orchestration spaces, no doubt.
We're just giving it one more minute for all of our speakers to settle in, but we're about
Thank you to everyone who has come out to join us today.
We've got a great lineup and we're all really excited to talk about what we've been working
on on our side for a long time.
Well, let me, since you turned off the music, you have to sing along, right?
I think, well, while we're getting our last speaker up on stage, I think, Dean, we can
start with an introduction to, well, I'll introduce our space and we can start with
an introduction to orchestration.
This is the first orchestration call that we're going to be hosting.
This is something that on the Agorik side, we'll be doing periodically in place of our
So be sure to check in here so you can get the latest on what's going on in the orchestration
If you want some more information about it, you can read the new post we have on our website
at agorik.com slash blog about the orchestration post.
And I'm really happy to introduce the all-star cast that we've got joining us for our, for
our piece today, Dean, Dean Tribble joining us on piano.
He's an accomplished piano player in case you didn't know, Cryptoceto on violin, Zucchimanian
on saxophone, Roland Grouse on drums.
And on the Calypso side, we have John D. Bernardi, who is playing guitar.
That's just my fun little musical references.
But sorry, to be clear, Roland, cowbell.
Without further ado, then I think let's kick this off.
And Dean, if you could give us an introduction.
We've been talking about it a lot.
So orchestration is, you know, grows out of the work that we've been doing in, in, in,
in building a platform and in JavaScript and so forth.
And so, you know, the first one is really the programming power to, you know, to coordinate
asynchronous activities across multiple systems to, in order to provide a unified experience
And so this is something that JavaScript has done for trillions of dollars over, over web
It's, it's, and it grows out of how we built the system that we have for programming in
JavaScript and, and it rolls up into enabling simple, straightforward programming using
the assets on other chains, the services on other chains, the, you know, the applications
on other chains to pull together into, into unified experience.
That's kind of the, the, you know, the, the quick summary of what it is and, and, and
how it, you know, relates to all of the JavaScript power we've been putting together over the
So, and, you know, some of this was, was, was, you know, some of the, the, the guests
here today helped us understand how important that was.
So Zucky, if you can speak on more of the problem it solves in the crypto space, that'd
And then we'll go into others here.
So I guess the, you know, the way I sort of think about, you know, Agoric and its role
in this chain abstraction situation is, you know, this a lot of work over the last, I
don't know, five, maybe 10 years of, of, of cryptocurrency research and engineering and
development is coming together today with this like explosion of execution environments
where it's become cheap and fast and easy to spin up on your own blockchain, to customize
that blockchain, to have, to build a community around that blockchain, you know, we have
this, we have, you know, a reasonably large number of apps starting to, with like tens
or hundreds of thousands of users starting to materialize.
And so this has been, this is like a huge accomplishment, but the, but the challenge
that is, is sort of, or like, what has been coming for a long time and is now the sort
of next stage of this evolution is, well, I'm a user.
How do I interact with many blockchains?
How do I like, you know, the experience is very common of, okay, well, I, I have some
assets or tokens or things I want to do on one chain, you know, and it's, I mean, it's
like, I mean, you have this like never ending nightmare that is the current situation.
You know, I was trying to buy like warps on base.
I was trying to, you know, you like all these simple things like buy warps on base, claim
your dimension, airdrop, a liquid stake, your Tia.
All of these things are these actually really complicated flows that like are really challenging
for end users and are sort of, sort of foreseeable net result of this explosion of execution
And I think like one of the questions that we sort of ask is, okay, is, is it worth trying
to build up Agoric or was it the right thing to do is to position Agoric as yet another
one of these execution environments, or is it something that really plays to the unique
strengths of the Agoric platform to say, this is the place where you build apps that
are the sort of tran, transcend any one execution environment and really captures what the user's
So that's what you're doing, right, Roland?
Well, I want to, I want to, yeah, go, go, go ahead.
Okay, let's jump that in a moment.
We have Kripta Sito here who, you know, more people know him than, well, everyone here
But I wanted to get, you know, did that problem statement, did that challenge, did that need
Do you have questions from that as sort of, you know, your brain coming from the giant
world of the community out there?
That's a good question, yeah.
And I think also like my brain not being technical at all, it always takes me a lot of time to
I remember like the first time I interviewed the Celestia guys, John Adler back in like
November 2021, I was talking about modularity and all these terms and it's like, what the
Like why is this a game changer, right?
And I think your explanation, like, it's good for like technical people, but also considering,
you know, we're in Twitter, there might be less technical people like myself.
I'm not technical at all.
What is kind of the pitch to the kind of retail general crypto community that is like, okay,
we want to understand why this is a game changer for the crypto space without going into the
depths of like technical jargon.
So let me just put something on you here and you can clarify and let me add one and then
I'll let Roland in here because this came up recently a couple of times and getting
it to that point is absolutely critical.
In web two, you know, I opened DoorDash, I order food and it arrives, right?
I got this very simple uniform user interaction and I have no idea which parts of that whole
thing involve how many different companies where some things are running on AWS and some
things are running on Google, right?
The that, you know, Zucky used the term chain abstraction, that ability to hide the details
the user doesn't care about in order to provide a simple experience, turns out providing a
simple experience across a variety of services and applications is really hard.
And so what this lets you do is do the programming so that developers out there can provide those
simple experiences that like, you know, Zucky was talking about.
Right now it's really hard to take your atom in one place and stake as Osmo in another.
And that and the user experience of that ought to be easy, but that doesn't, but making that
happen is exactly orchestrating the activities of your account on Osmosis and on atom and,
you know, through bridges and all these other steps that the user doesn't care about in
order to accomplish their straightforward goal.
And so what this does, it unlocks, it makes those straightforward and unlocks sort of
the next, the next level of having applications that span all my multiple assets, the multiple
services available in the crypto space, the multiple application chains where I don't
care about going to an application chain.
I care about getting that application in combination with something else.
I care about taking my money and putting it into an UMI position or putting it into a
liquidity position or what have you.
Is that higher lever for you?
Yeah, that, yeah, I think also, you know, then, you know, just thinking about, because this
sounds to me like, you know, my, my early kind of Celestia days trying to understand this
modularity. And I think what really clicked for me then was like, hearing over and over,
you know, separating the execution layer from the settlement layer and being able to like
just combine these different tech stacks.
So I think, you know, I think that the end goal sounds like, okay, that's a, that's a big
mission, obviously, like chain abstraction, just, I guess, also making the whole experience
in crypto and Web3, like much more intuitive and just get rid of all that complexity.
And like, to be honest, still to this date, as I mentioned, the dime a drop that just came
out, right? Like, I mean, non crypto people that are not glued to the screens 12 hours a
day, like we all are, they don't know, like, what they're even doing, right? Like, sometimes
I don't even know what I'm doing when I'm clicking around. So I think the end goal is
clear. And I think that's also kind of aligned. I think the question is like, just how is
a goric right to really stand out from the competition, right? I also feel like we're in
a phase of the crypto revolution now, where there's a lot of mindshare flowing in, right?
A lot of money and capital flooding into the market into this technology. So yeah, maybe
how is, how is the goric position today to be able to like tackle those, those issues
with this new narrative, moving forward with this orchestration thesis?
Sure. So I'll jump in there. Thanks, Ido. And this is Roland at Agoric. And I'll also, maybe
I'll try to answer that as well with some specific examples of what's happening in the
space and what this gives developers that they can do that is difficult otherwise, or
potentially impossible otherwise. So there are a lot of folks, especially within the
Cosmo space, where this this challenge around lots of chains interoperating has been part
of the design philosophy since the beginning. You know, I like to say, I mean, this group
is probably the most forward thinking around how to deal with that, that we have in the
crypto space in general. And so you've seen applications spring up that do cross chain
things and try to improve UX, right? So squid does a great job of doing cross chain swaps,
the skip router and skip API's, they've done a whole lot of work on IBC unwinding it and that
sort of thing, which has really been targeted at trying to improve these same sorts of
things. But where they fall down is because it is actually quite difficult to string
multiple separate actions together with one user signature. And that's not a limitation by by
squid or skip, it's a limitation within sort of the rails they're using in cosmos that allow them
to, you know, specify these multi hop IBC routes and things like that. You can do one thing and
get an acknowledgement, it is really hard to get that acknowledgement and then follow up on it.
And so where where goric contracts come in and where orchestration comes in is being able to
just sort of continue those operations. And so not just make a swap on osmosis, but make a swap on
osmosis, react to that, and then bring that over to a lending position or something along those
lines. And so you start to get the composability in the multi chain space that you would expect,
you know, in a blockchain ecosystem, and developers can then build those easy experiences. And so in
particular, the the how here for how goric actually accomplishes this is really that our
platform is natively async, right? So contracts on a goric speak to each other asynchronously,
even within the on the same blockchain. But that means that to a developer that wants to do
something outside of the goric blockchain, it actually is semantically similar or even the same
to to send a message that may need to wait multiple blocks to complete versus one that happens within
the same block. And so from the goric perspective, contracts and actions are long lived. And so we
have this async await and multi block execution where I can just say await the response here,
and then the contract will continue when the response comes in. And so it allows just a
completely unique capability around managing more complex multi block transactions than we've we've
seen in the space so far. And so we have we have a bunch of other specific differentiators to that
help make this easy. But I want to give Dean a chance to jump in here to it in case he wants
to add context, because really, you know, the async await and multi block execution really drive
a lot of this. Yeah, and, you know, and that came out of JavaScript that came out of, of, of, you
know, what we think of as smart contracts are long lived durable processes, being able to say,
you know, unbound, and then a week later, go to the next line of code after the unbounding is
completed, and transfer over to some other chain, you know, that's a straightforward thing to program
in web two, in order to do this, impossibly interesting, you know, pull together these
different services. And, and, and that's what we now enable. Some of that was inspired. You know,
we were already doing this, but it was a team from mystic labs that that that helped us realize just
how unique it was just how impossible it was from the perspective of other of other developers.
And so, so first, let me stop to see if, if crypto you had, if you had any, any questions
about what Roland said there, or sort of these, the unique benefits, and then otherwise, we can
dive into kind of how they're using it and that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, one question, one
follow up to that, you mentioned also this kind of multi block execution, like, does that mean,
or maybe there's another question, like, how, how, what kind of category within crypto is
agoric optimized for, right? Obviously, we have we have enter IST over, over collateralized stable
token. But like moving forward, do you kind of plan to, like, optimize for a specific category,
whether gaming or DeFi, or what's the game plan there? So we'll talk a little bit more about the
game plan there at the end, really, there's themes of this, of what this infrastructure does. So the
first theme is very much DeFi and liquidity, where it's not how much, you know, how much can we lock
onto agoric, but rather, for an application, what's the total value accessible across all the
conveniently reachable chains, right? And if I can easily write an interaction that includes assets
on osmosis and assets on on on Umi and assets that are across, you know, axel or some other bridge
on Aave, that's a much richer, more powerful thing. And so we'll focus on that. So, so the, the,
the focus here is the first theme is on enabling cross chain seamless, cross chain smart
context and JavaScript for DeFi and liquidity. Second focus, you know, that later in the year
will be the same kind of thing for NFTs. And we'll spend a lot of time on that, you know, in,
when we're back, you know, when we're back here in, in three or four months. But, so that's, that's
the focus is let's get, you know, let's, let's get this cross chain seamless contract support out
there for people building applications, not just in Cosmos, but that reach across to, to, to other
chains from Cosmos and, and, and get that ball rolling. Yeah, I would say one way to think about
it is, is really focusing on being the composability layer across other multi-chain, you know,
across the multi-chain ecosystem. So as we see really interesting capabilities spring up on
specialized blockchains somewhere else, you know, having contracts, being able to orchestrate that
capability and combine it with something else on some different chain really is where we will
shine. And we, we kind of expect there's going to be an explosion of those possibilities.
So, so the, the Mystic Labs team, I'll jump in here and introduce them because they can also
talk concretely about this. So, so there, this is the team that built the Cosmos Metamask Snap
to be able to use Metamask generally across a lot of Cosmos chains. And they've been, you know,
and they've been working on the Agorak stack and built several of these A-string orchestration
kinds of pieces that they're all pulling together into their application. So if one of John or Joe
want to speak to that, first please introduce, you know, just give a quick summary of, of what the
problem that, that, that Calypso is solving. And then let's talk about how it uses Agorak to do
that. And that may answer some of Sita's questions here. Definitely. Thanks, Dean, for the intro.
Appreciate it. Yeah. John, everyone. Yeah. Nice to meet everybody. John from Mystic Labs and
Calypso here. So the real question that Calypso is answering is how do we get people that don't
know how to use crypto the way it is to actually use crypto, right? And I, you know, we're at
Cosmos space. You guys obviously know that there's a huge, huge learning curve to actually get into
the space, you know, downloading multiple different wallets and IBC transfers and staking
and yada, yada, yada. That if you tell a person that might know what Bitcoin is, how to get this,
that it's just going to go in more at the other. So what Calypso is really accomplishing is just
fully optimizing the entire crypto experience from start to finish, right? Onboarding through
offboarding, right? Optimize through just using the email address and trading through Bitcoin,
Solana, Ethereum, and Cosmos. And this is all made possible through the Agorik, not just the
tech stack, you know, the ease of building using the hard JavaScript, but the orchestration aspect
is key here. And this whole orchestration aspect really means how can we control things like an
orchestra on other chains? How can we make things happen without actually having another wallet,
having another yada, yada, yada. And this is through use of interchain accounts and,
you know, Axol or GMP and a couple other implementations that are built, that were
built in other places, but now are on the Agorik side that make this possible. And
when you put all of these different things together that, you know, send messages and
essentially actions to different chains to complete desired results, you're actually start to
make crypto feel like crypto, you know, the way that it's kind of sold, you know, the way that
everyone tells what crypto is supposed to be, the super efficient, game changing thing that is going
to do all these amazing things for the financial industry and yada, yada, yada. Well, now that's
actually starting to come together because of things like orchestration. So that's really what
we're concentrating on. And that's what we're building with Calypso. And we're pioneering this,
we're starting this with something that we're going to call a staking widget.
And the staking widget is using the orchestration from Agorik and essentially it allows you to
stake with any token to any chain. But we're starting with all EVM chains and all Cosmos
chains. So pretty much you only own Ethereum and you want to stake Osmosis. You just press
stake Osmosis and it will automatically handle everything in the background for you. And vice
versa. So that's kind of how we're previewing what this Calypso contracts and what the orchestration
on Agorik is really capable of. So just a little intro there. So in presentations we've done,
I've had little snippets of code that are of the flavor, you know, as they unbond on Osmosis,
move it, you know, when that's done, the very next line of code, when that's done, move it over to
Aave and when that's done then stake it there or trade it for something and stake it there.
You know, those snippets came from snippets of code out of Calypso. But that's that, you know,
that sort of in some sense key magic of orchestration is what Roland said. Start one thing
and then in the next line of code say, and when that's done here, do this next thing, right? And
do it in a way that millions of programmers are already familiar with building. That turns
out to be really hard. That's the magic that, you know, the unique benefit that the Agorik
execution platform has built over the years and now has working, you know, in production and
available to everyone to build. And so that simple thing, I describe it so easily, but it's,
you can't do that on other platforms. Okay. And just to say, it took us a long time to realize
that that was hard elsewhere. I think it came as a surprise to a lot of our team. That's right. And
so that means we can fold in timers. That's another one of the examples where
you could add timers to other chains potentially, but here it's already done. It's deterministic
and it's just wait for three o'clock and then do this other thing or wait for a ton bond,
then wait another 30 minutes for something else to happen and then do some other things. So being
able to coordinate these activities around time and around and around waiting for changes in the
system is that powerful magic that enables this next class of applications.
We've talked a lot about the different features of orchestration and sort of that make it all
possible. But in the last couple of minutes, I would love to sort of get some input on how this
could impact the state of the market. What are the trends that people are seeing, you know,
in the multi-chain space right now and, you know, where does orchestration fit in? Who's getting
excited about it? Cryptoceto, do you want to lead us off and talk on that for a minute?
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I'm always kind of at the pulse of, you know, what the community
is excited about. And I also think one huge kind of launch this year that everyone is looking
forward to now, amongst others, is obviously the launch of Eigenlayer and this whole kind
of restaking thesis, which also maybe fits into that whole multi-chain philosophy and roadmap
that crypto is going in inevitably. So yeah, I don't know if there's any kind of use case or
direction that you guys are going with the orchestration thesis with restaking, like,
is there any kind of overlaps or? So there's quite a bit of overlap, you know, in some sense,
those are do a lot of work to build a particular single use case. And so, you know, and so you've
got in the space, you've got people building particular use cases or a few use cases that
work across multiple chains. Eigenlayer bringing an example, we've seen, you know, the end-end use
case for Squid Router of, you know, of starter transaction with assets here, move them over
there and stake them. And that's, you know, and so those are the use cases that people want.
There are a couple of ways of implementing them. One is, you know, really challenging. Another,
maybe Zaki could speak to you about occasional app chains that are, you know, that like like
Psalm that are building a cross-chain use case as a full-on app chain. And then there's the
execution environment, the orchestration environment of Agoric where you can write those things in
JavaScript to do those particular use cases broadly across multiple chains. And so the going after
restaking, you know, going after like the staking widget that John was talking about as the first
thing of Calypso, but all the other things in Calypso and, you know, like DEX aggregator
project that's building on Agoric are, you know, take advantage of the applications on other chains,
take advantage of the services on these app chains to build an application that uses those services,
right? You know, we've got multiple lending services, but if I want a portfolio manager
that can handle multiple of these on different chains in a uniform fashion,
how do you program that? As the smart contracts, you get all the integrity of execution of a smart
contract, but still you're using these services uniformly across these different chains. And so
that, you know, that kind of portfolio management using services on multiple chains is an example.
All that, you know, Zaki can, you know, if you want to touch on other examples of chain abstraction
that people are pursuing that we'd like to see getting built on Agoric, that'd be useful.
So I guess one way in which I would sort of link this sort of explosion of interest that is
happening around restaking. And so, like, one aspect of restaking is basically, you know,
restaking is essentially leverage staking. It's, okay, I earn the base yield of some protocol for
some amount of slashing rules, and I opt into new slashing rules for more yield. And right now,
we're sort of in this, like, very speculative phase of restaking where the yields are all
hypothetical. Everyone is free to imagine that their airdrop or their points are going to be
worth any arbitrary amount of money. But we're going to transition, you know, this probably
within the next couple of months into, you know, these airdrops happening and then concrete yields.
And we're going to, you know, now have people, like, staking is going to become a much more
complex and multi-layered activity. And the question is, what are the products that people
are going to build to give sort of people access to those and, like, sort of make sense of those
opportunities? Like, you know, I do think that, like, I think it's going to be very cool when you
suddenly see, you know, right now there's, like, been there's been, like, like, basically for every
asset, there's been one staking yield. There's, like, an eat staking yield, there's an am staking
yield, there's a tia staking yield. Post-restaking, we're going to start seeing more, you know, there's
going to be 10, 20 different eat staking yields that you can choose from. When you see, when, you
know, restaking comes to other assets in the sort of proof of stake ecosystem or comes to Bitcoin,
it's going to be the same thing. There's going to be a lot of different yields to choose from.
I think chain abstraction and apps are then going to become, you know, sort of necessary for people
to, like, manage these portfolios of all of these different assets and exposures in any sort of
reasonable way. You know, I think, I think the last thing that we want to do is recreate C DeFi.
So, the most toxic aspect of the last, like, all the Celsius of the world were created by,
hey, I want DeFi yields, but we're going to set up the centralized platform,
and the centralized platform is going to go and do all my leverage for me.
That was what Sommelier was designed. You know, this is Christie's vision for Sommelier is, like,
you know, build a Celsius that cannot rug its users. I think we need an entire family of
cross-chain abstraction apps for the next cycle and for, you know, the next few years
that allow people to have, you know, to manage their portfolios, optimize their yields,
participate in these systems, but we need systems that can't rug their users.
And I think, you know, you talked about the making it easy, making it also
easy from the user perspective. Another simple example that I'd expect to happen relatively soon,
we've got folks have been working on atomic swap for a long time. Being able to do atomic swap
across chains turns out to be hard. You can't do that very well right now, but that'll be the next
step. You know, and you've got things like skip routers, Roland mentioned, that off-chain can
do some amount of trade through X, then to Y, then to Z in order to get that final, you know,
X to Z transition, but it can't do split swaps or part of it goes through one, you know,
through after part and part of it goes through osmosis or whatever, right? And it can't do stream
swaps where you break it up into chunks and it can't do, you know, calculated finance is cool
where it can do incremental buy and sell into a market in order to build up a position, but it
can't do a thing where it's going to, you know, withdraw from one LP fund in order, you know,
in order to do that, that, that incremental buying over time. So every day it withdraws a
little bit and buys a little bit more because that requires talking on multiple chains at once
and doing something, you know, and, and doing orchestrating that activity across multiple
chains. Those are examples where from the user's perspective, it was still just, yeah, make this
swap, but underneath the covers, you know, you've got much more power, much better prices and much
better user efficiency. If it's able to do the splitting and the routing and the chunking and
all these kinds of things, and you want it to do that on chain, not off chain, right? You don't
want to have the need for those simple user experiences, drive these use cases into black
box off chain things that are now in a position to rug you or, or do other things. You want it to be
transparent, executing on chain in a way that you've got all the assurances that we build these
systems to provide us. And so enable, that's what I mean by that next generation of apps. The use
cases are kind of similar to what we have today. They're just better. They're just more, you know,
easier for the user to absorb and they enable, you know, providing, you know, combining these
services across chain. I mean, that's all I want, right? Is that so much to ask for? I don't think
so. You want the vehicle across the cryptovers all in one place? Right. It's easy. Sure.
Well, I mean, you, you all did such a great job of explaining some of these concepts that it makes
it seem really easy. And I mean, it, it also gives me a new appreciation for all of the challenges
that the people building in the space face every day to make the end user experience, I mean,
palpable, among other things. But thank you all so much. I know we ran over a little bit,
but all of that information seemed like it was totally, totally worthwhile. Check out a few
posts underneath this space post. If you want to see some of the resources we mentioned,
like the blog post on orchestration or the Agoric events page. Speaking of events,
anyone who's coming to East Denver, we are tearing it up in Denver. Agoric will be at
Adam Denver app chain day. We have our own orchestration splash event chain abstraction
day and frictionless among other events. We'll be around that week as part of the
wider group of people who are representing Cosmos at East Denver. And yeah, follow our
events page if you want to stay up to date because we're doing a ton of different
in-person events around the world this year and virtual events as well around orchestration.
If you have any other questions or always want to follow up with us, you can reach us here on
Twitter or excuse me, X formerly known as Twitter or join our discord where most of the team is
pretty active. And we also have a community forum as well. Thank you all for joining us and stay
tuned. We'll post the recording later. Have a great day, everybody. Thanks, Zaki. Thanks,
thanks, Joe and John. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, everybody.