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The Death of General Purpose L2s? ☠️ The Aggregated Ep. 149
Recorded: Feb. 13, 2026 Duration: 2:49:06Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the current market trends, including the impact of Bitcoin halving, the potential for reduced volatility, and the ongoing scrutiny of various projects. The conversation also touched on strategies for yield generation, the importance of due diligence in the face of potential scams, and the future of Layer 2 solutions in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. there's no music
how are you doing guys
good yourself
there was music for me I was just sort of vibing on my own How are you doing, guys? Good. Yourself?
There was music for me.
I was just sort of vibing on my own.
Yeah, no one else could hear the music.
So you were vibing with yourself as usual.
Yeah, the trick is to change the music when you start in space and then other people hear it, but I forgot to do that.
So I just didn't.
You have to do small talk and stuff and
speak with people i know that you don't like that i mean you could turn on music now but
now i jinxed it so that's that's not as fun yeah yeah how's life what's happening
market is down are we all happy then coin gecko gave me a happy
notification earlier it's like the first one I've had in like a month did it say
wait a second isn't dumping today I think it basically just said that. You know, yesterday I posted happy Bitcoin halving because I looked at the price and realized it's half from all time high.
I mean, come on.
What? It was Bitcoin halving day.
I didn't even realize that.
I mean, it's 2028 is the next halving.
But when I looked at the price, I was like, shit mean it's 2028 is the next halving but when i looked at the price i was
like it's at 50 so yeah i mean yeah we're at eight now if you agree so i think it got better we had Five, like just imagine five. Insane.
Well, if it doesn't go down from here more, which it could,
it would be a smaller drop than last cycle, right?
Each cycle, it's supposed to drop less. That's the idea.
The volatility decreases.
I think 42 is the number that I really like.
And I could see Bitcoin dropping to 40 or 42 still.
But yeah, might be wrong.
Not sure if the cycle still existed that way, so far it looks like it this is the bottom
are you sure it's always the bottom isn't it how sure you could be but
it's i'm mostly scalping these days just uh in it for the $1,000 to $2,000 BTC swings.
Just doing low amount, high leverage.
Quite fun.
Nice.
Yeah, I didn't think it would get as low as
underneath a 200 weekly exponential moving average.
What was that financial advice, Guy?
That was definitely not financial advice. That was financial persu average. Who was that financial advice guy? That was definitely not financial advice.
That was financial persuasion.
Oh, wait, no, that's even worse.
No, NFA.
Completely NFA.
Okay, so only super high level.
Yeah, only above 25x.
Healthy.
You can do up to, what is it, 60x on Quickswap on base, right?
I think 60 is the highest.
Yeah, it basically uses Binance liquidity.
uses Binance liquidity, so
So whatever Binance allows you to do.
whatever Binance allows you to do.
Are people actually trading 60x though
with anything more than just a very small
amount?
I heard some people
do that for fun from time to time with
five bucks.
I heard.
Did you hear that from yourself?
Yeah, sometimes I do that for fun on MEXC, I heard. Did you hear that from yourself? Yeah.
Yeah, sometimes I do that for fun on MEXC,
especially if I know that, like, the projects that launched on Kaito,
for example, that always go with high FDV.
I mean, there's always an opportunity to, like,
they go down really quick once the airdrop goes out.
So maybe I tried that a couple of times, so maybe it also worked a couple of times um so yeah but i i'm afraid to use bigger money on that
because it's still gambling in my opinion because i suck at trading but yeah that's a that's a good
thing i'm not sure if anyone uses that strategy but shorting stuff that launched from kaito was definitely something where i was profitable in
general speaking i think nowadays we can pretty much short everything apart from the majors
like apart from the btc eath solana and also the ones that do buybacks and burns.
Rest you can short, I guess, because no one cares about governance tokens.
No one cares about the other projects.
But the biggest problems are the market makers that want to kick you out of those.
So I'm always afraid as soon as I put something in, I'm like, hmm, maybe there's some dude sitting there for like, oh, look, Luke just made a short of 60x and then he just market
makes the shit out of it.
And then I'm getting pushed out because that's I think that's the thing that happens the
most, right?
That the projects itself do market making and then boot you out of your positions.
I think it depends.
If you go past like the market cap,
or if you go to CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap
and see the ranking, if they're past 400,
I don't even think you have to really care
about the market makers in that case as well.
Because in a lot of the cases,
the projects that are there,
like you have a bunch of like, I don't know,
VC backed projects that launched, let you have a bunch of like i don't know vc backed projects
that launched let's say in 24 23 they already allocated like their tokens to market makers and
now they're they're on their last team so i don't think there's much going on also in terms of
market making as well just remember a little market for unlock it's all too easy
Just remember, pump before unlock.
There's been some bullish, I don't know,
probably short timeframe pumps around unlocks recently,
so there's always one to watch.
Again, NFA.
I think there's an unlock coming for Pi coin as well.
That was one that I shorted when it came out because I still think it's a big scam.
I remember you said you shorted that day one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What is Pi coin?
No, Pi coin.
Don't you know that was the social farming thing where they forced you to do like multiple stuff a day because they said
it's for network verification and everything.
They are now at 1.3 billion market cap still.
And I think it's the biggest scam ever in crypto.
And I said, you can short that to zero.
And it's, yeah, it launched at 2.3 dollars they farmed people for
like seven years like it was a lot it wasn't like yeah yeah quick airdrop campaign it was like yeah
we're gonna take your data for for a long time yeah they did that over over years especially in
philippines and uh india like they they did that for a couple of years but
i got i think 650 bucks because i um and when it started you had bigger pieces that you could
mine basically every day that's when i started crypto and i set up this and invited some of my
friends yeah i did that back in the day as well and so I got 650 bucks but
there are people that did that every single day and I just did it when I thought about it like
once a week every two weeks or something like this so I think there's still a huge amount of
unlocks that are happening because I know that you needed to lock certain tokens for a year
and I think that's coming out, I think, summer this year.
The biggest unlock ever will happen,
and I think then it will go to zero.
Yeah, Pi coin for the ones that think, what is that?
I think it's even in the top 50 still.
Yeah, 1.3 billion in market cap.
Biggest scam ever in crypto, almost.
After Trump.
That's interesting.
Yeah, I'm
looking for a post from Espresso
that I want to put in the
Jumbotron and
kick off the conversation in a second.
I put the post about
Vitalik going off
on L2s. I'll kickstart the show in just a second. I put the post about Vitalik going off on L2s.
So I'll kickstart the show
in just a second. Just looking for this
post from Expresso real quick.
Darren,
do you want
us to introduce people while you're
looking for that Aztec?
Yeah.
We're good on the conversation and and everything the icebreakers then let's jump in let's introduce everyone um yeah darren can you take it away
yeah i mean uh we'll just go left to right so we can uh kick off with open ocean if you want to
intro yeah happy to um first of all thank you so much for inviting to the space.
Some of you probably have heard my onerous voice before.
I work on the Growth MBD team for OpenOcean.
We are a multi-chain DEX aggregator and middleware provider.
By that, I mean that we provide modals for any type of DeFi activity you want to partake
in, cross-chain, swap, zap, bridging, leverage looping, all the good fun stuff. We work on
about 36 different EVM ecosystems. We are getting rid of some of the quiet ones soon.
We like to take on challenges for our B2B integrators clients and data clients as well. And we work
on slightly more niche routes with things like peg stability modules with LST minters, all the kind
of niche technical stuff. That's what we do. And we also develop new solutions for clients,
things like buybacks with GMX and Silo, for example. So yeah, we're primarily a builder-first platform.
We ideate a lot of stuff.
We do a lot of campaigns.
We've got a cool Monad one going on at the moment.
Yeah, we're here looking to expand in 2026,
hire more people on the team,
and go from bigger to even better.
So that's us in a nutshell.
I think you might be the only people
that I've heard that Hiram right now.
So good luck your DMs.
We're looking to expand later on in the year.
Maybe not right now.
I think in the summertime when we got some confirmed sentiment back.
Okay, next up we'll go look.
Yeah, I do marketing and pd for medieval empires and uh yeah if you haven't checked it out it's
knights and cool stuff that you can play in medieval times and besides that i do content
myself and i try to arrest quick swap every other week here. And I just wanted to ask if we play Fortnite on the weekend.
That's why I'm mainly here.
But yeah, we can talk about that later as well.
Just kidding.
Yeah, Aztec actually popped in the chat last night.
And he was like, hey, anyone play Fortnite?
I was already in bed.
Yeah, maybe Saturday or Sunday, because I'm sick at the moment.
Aw. OK, right, next next up we've got my granddad
gm community yeah so i'm defy granddad doing product management and gross hacking across
different web3 projects and today i'm on behalf of product fire we are at DAO of Web3 developers, which are doing huge projects
within Web3 ecosystem,
especially in DeFi segment.
And actually,
Quicksaw team and our team
are very well known.
Thank you for the invite once again.
Happy to be here.
Always happy, to be honest.
Always funny,
always super intelligent people
are present as speakers. And of course, as the people that
are joining us also super intelligent, I'm pretty sure.
So yeah, happy to be here.
That's pretty much it.
Much love. Great to have you here as well um
during you ruggin can't rug no no you just told me you go pin that post i'm i was gonna look for it oh okay okay thanks thanks okay i'll pass the mic here then um nikki
okay thanks thanks okay i'll pass the mic here then um nikki thank you so much uh awesome to
be here and i see so many familiar faces always great to hang out with you guys uh so my name is
nikki i am a founder of pelagos network one of the founders i'm responsible for the business
development and essentially what we are it's a pelagos is an execution layer where basically you
execute transactions atomically
across any chain in any single block.
You don't have any bridges, you don't have any WRAP tokens,
no partial fields.
And what we're currently building on top of Pelagos,
which we recently actually announced
and which we'll be rolling out next week, hopefully,
for users to test.
And NABU, which is an agentic super app
where you can deploy your strategies,
your agents that work for you around the clock.
You can generate strategies,
compete against each other,
hard specialists, buy and sell,
like do whatever you want pretty much
like in terms of arbitrage, trading and so on.
And every strategy compiles pretty much
to verifiable code.
You can read an audit.
And the first version will be basically potential to enable the users to arbitrage between centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges.
So we're looking forward to that.
And can't wait to share it with you guys.
And thanks for having me here.
that sounds awesome if you if you could post something about the ai agents the agentics
That sounds awesome.
stuff that you're doing in the jumbotron um i'd love to to read up on that when i get some
extra time uh nice to meet you and let's see did we introduce uh mp? No, not yet. Hey, everybody. I'm Michael, aka Clive OnChain.
I do ecosystem growth for Horizon and ZK Verify.
Horizon is an EVM chain on base,
building a privacy app ecosystem for private on-chain finance and business applications.
Horizon has been around in a few different forms for seven, eight years,
initially as Zencash, which was a fork of Zcash.
It was a true privacy L1, a UTXO chain.
We migrated to the base ecosystem last year
and have a number of interesting DeFi and business applications
coming to Horizon this quarter.
And on the ZK Verify side, super excited about what we've built there, what the Horizon Labs team is really going to be as impactful a player on blockchain as humans, if not more so. outputs will be essential to trusting one another and trusting agents within an agentic economy in
a hybrid human agentic economy. And we believe that zero knowledge proofs sit at the core of
this trust problem and are just bullish on everything happening in ZK, ZKTLS, relatedly with X402 and blockchain,
and excited to talk to all types of builders
in the privacy and ZK space.
Thanks for having me on today.
Yeah, much love.
You're speaking my language.
I love the adjunct stuff that's coming out.
So yeah, great to hear that.
You're also in privacy, a big supporter of privacy myself.
So awesome.
Good stuff, man.
Great to meet you and glad to have you on the show.
Let's see.
I was in the beginning, I was looking for an article from Ben Fish from Expresso so I missed
maybe one of the names here so let's see did I did I get everyone I think we're good now
okay awesome so let's jump into this guy so the death of general purpose l2s you guys have probably
noticed or read over or or you know seen someone talking about vitalic budding l2s
um and that's that's what i'd like to dive into today so i read over his post and I didn't think it's exactly like, uh, the death of all L2s that like some people were, were saying, um, what I got out of it was, uh, that, that he's a little upset about L2s progressing to stage two.
two is progressing to stage two. So kind of like joining some type of interop layer.
And also discussing just like the L1 itself is scaling. So it might not need some of the
like general purpose L2s out there. And we, you know, in his opinion.
So I want to dive into what does the future of Ethereum or Web3 look like with you guys?
And I posted Vitalik's post, the one that's created a lot of controversy up above in the jumbotron if anyone's looking for that i also um well darren did actually and uh darren also helped me post uh ben fish's article
about expresso and how they're like the base layer of ethereum you know helping with fast
finality and essentially helping all the different types of layer twos
in Ethereum all work together seamlessly with fast finality. But yeah, we'll jump into that.
I guess before we dive in though, does anyone have a different take on what Vitalik has said?
And I'm not sure if, I guess if there's anyone that hasn't joined our show before, you don't have to raise your hand, just jump in.
But is there any other takes that maybe I've missed on what Vitalik was saying?
I mean, I think you pretty much summed it up, right?
It's Ethereum doesn't just have a scaling problem anymore.
A lot of that is largely solved or solvable for the roadmap.
And L2s, L3s need to exist for reasons beyond extra capacity.
It's specialization.
Privacy for us is where we specialize.
You have some gaming-centric chains. Those are different use cases. specialization privacy for us is where we specialize.
You have some gaming centric chains.
Those are different use cases.
So I don't think it's so anti L2 or chain expansion
so much as you need to have a purpose
because if it was only to provide extra block space capacity
that's not a significant enough purpose anymore.
Yeah, I think, I think that's exactly what he's saying.
Um, and you use the word specialization. I'm going to, I'm going to steal that.
Usually I say like, uh, app chains or, uh, purpose driven chains, but I like that specialization.
So, so how do you guys think L2s will exist in the future?
Let's, let's, let's try that with, if we're looking at how vitalik is positioning web3 how do you think everything
works together and do you guys think he's right to a certain degree so i actually think he's right
right and i feel most l2s especially the ones tied with tokens are eventually going to go to zero
right i know not everybody would love to hear that but i think they're mostly going to go to zero, right? I know not everybody would love to hear that, but I think they're mostly going to go to zero
because of the marketing structure.
The point that they've always made was,
oh yeah, we're faster.
We have like cheaper fees.
We have this, we have that, right?
And now those things,
you could simply get them with Ethereum, right?
Having like very cheap gas fees.
And the crazy part is some l2s don't
want to mention bays right now are actually a little bit expensive than eth in itself right
so like you were saying and like you're saying right now they need to actually have something
else working for them for them to actually exist as an l2 and um now personally for me i see look
up here i'm thinking that you actually feel that
gaming in itself is actually enough reason for an l2 to exist because i also think that they
could exist beyond that itself but i know luke is going to have a counter to this one
because we see a couple of chains like avax and a couple of others that are actually specific to
gaming like immutable do you think that those are
actually good enough to make an l2 exist or maybe there could be more that could actually be done
to them because i feel in the long run right with the evolution of the way like the blockchain works
and every other thing right game could always exist on any other chains and other ones as well
but do you think they're actually good enough to like make l2s be a thing
yeah no it doesn't work uh just imagine you would have a game on ethereum uh and you have
a trisillion of micro transactions in the game uh and i that ETH is getting cheap but players don't want to spend
money for transactions and with sheep we made a couple of cents but if you have a game where
you have a thousand items that you transfer a day that adds up to two dollars over time if
you look at immutable zqvm for example mean, currently it's fronted by Immutable itself and later the games will carry that.
But since it's so cheap for transactions, because it's also like, I think you have 0.0 something cent that you pay for a transaction.
That makes sense for the game publisher then later to front those fees as well, because you want to onboard people onto your chain that don't need
to top their wallets for example we have the passport wallet on immutable and then you don't
need to front the wallet because everything so you can directly start trading your assets because you
don't have any gas fees that you need to pay there and that doesn't work on ethereum because i don't
think that someone wants to front the gas fees there.
Because if you have a million transactions on that chain, then the costs of living for a game on that chain wouldn't be feasible.
And I think the same works for transactions.
If you have lots of microtransactions and everything, they won't work on Ethereum.
Like if I want to buy something for, I don't know, like mini items for cents or something like this,
I don't want to spend more on gas than I want to spend on the item itself.
So, yeah, for gaming, I think it makes sense to have like not general purpose chain, but really dedicated chains.
And I think there's a couple of other areas where it
makes sense but having a general purpose chain like i'm we spoke about that yesterday briefly
as well i associate every chain with certain things like polygon now is for payments okay
has a purpose now polygon is for me always payments defy will always be on then katana
maybe i mean there's also others where
DeFi exists, but they have a purpose and they're specifically made and catered to fit that purpose.
If I look at AVEX, for example, I'm still not sure what's their thing, right? I mean,
they have games, they have other things. Zulana, for me, it's still a DGN thing.
I mean, they also have games, but I don't see a need for all those.
For me, it lives on Immutable.
It makes the most sense.
So I think there will be maybe less chains,
but more specific to the needs of the people.
That was why.
Oh, I'm sorry to interrupt.
You could go ahead.
I was done oh i thought nikki was trying to speak um so that was exactly what i was going to talk about right like i'm not a gaming developer so i might be wrong here like why
choose to be build on an l2 on an evm l2 and not build a game on Solana.
I mean, you could also do that on Solana, but the infrastructure on Solana doesn't provide the same, for example, where it does on Immutable.
Immutable has the passport wallet, they have their own distribution system, they have the
zero gas fee stuff.
So for me, it makes sense to build there.
If Solana would have the same stuff, I wouldn't mind being there as well.
The thing is, they don't have a focus on having also the infrastructure behind the games.
That's why I think it's better if you have a chain that purely focus on that,
because you saw the same on Polygon happening.
They wanted to do gaming in the beginning as well.
And at a certain point, they were like, let's switch to something else.
Let's switch to I don't know what they switch to, but in the end, they ended up
on payments, so now they neglect gaming at all.
But if you are on a purpose chain that is purely focused on gaming,
their core thesis will always be gaming stop thumb downing
me jared it's a good it's a good point like uh i think what what you guys are talking about is
specialization like clive was talking about earlier you guys you know specifically gaming
um and luke i think you're making solid points like if we're talking just gaming specifically
as a you know what a chain specializes in and if you're looking at immutable then yeah the
the infrastructure is great you know with uh like all the way down to the underlying infrastructure, BAS, cheap transactions. You do have the ZK Passport or the Passport,
mutable passport is what it's called.
And that helps with making everything easy
when you're onboarding.
And then you also have a team that's dedicated,
which is so important with specialization.
If you're going to niche down into something as a chain
and uh stand out you also need a strong team that's helping coordinate in the background
so if it's gaming in this instance you know that's maybe tournaments and events and um bringing you
know strong talent to support the games,
strong marketing, you know, surrounding these games,
create funnels for these games.
Like, so I see how that, like, specialization makes a lot of sense on every level
for something like Immutable and Gaming.
But yeah, I mean, like, back to, like, the, the the i guess like more general like so i think
what we're describing is um a future that is going to require specialization or chance to
niche down and i guess what what other things do you guys see the future looking like, or do you guys have any comments on anything that anyone said already?
John speaking.
Oh, sorry.
Go ahead.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah.
John speaking.
Like, I think you already mentioned, um, the, the real reason, like I personally believe that most of tools won't survive as independent value accruing networks because the technical
need for dozens of generic L2s shrinks, as already mentioned, because Ethereum scales.
And the business model for many L2s is weak once fees compress and differentiation disappears.
So, and essentially, like it's already been mentioned, like, you know, there's a generic L2s and there's a purpose-specific L2s.
Like, in my view, L2s are getting commoditized very fast.
And also, if we look at the complaints and so on, decentralization is moving slower than promised.
So, a big chunk of L2 criticism is not like they don't really work.
It's just like they're not there where they need to be.
And also, also like if we're talking about fees, right?
Like fees compression, it's great for users, but actually it's kind of brutal
for L2 as a business.
So for example, like certain EIPs, like, um, 4,844, like they cut L2 costs massively,
but it also changed like who captures,
who captures actual the value.
So like it also shows that you have multiple like analysis
since 10 points, like for example,
to like lower per transaction monetization
and more competition.
And basically like you don't really have I
would say it doesn't get you where you need to get in order to be a revenue
generating business and then also kind of like some of them of course trying to
kind of write this sequencer revenue but I still also believe that it's not a
very durable brand mode so like it's basically you're running centralized sequencer
collecting fees you can kind of see uh basically dashboards showing for example how different
chains route revenue and who ultimately captures the income but um so but also like a new chain can
copy your tech um and uh kind of run a centralized sequencer and so on.
And many L2s can become replaceable very easily.
And still, like, one key question I think we're failing to address here
is the liquidity and UX fragmentation, which is still painful for the users.
Like, even with bridges, messaging improving and so on,
like, fragmentation still remains real,
like assets split across chains, like incentive split.
And users are like, as an end user,
you really have to kind of think of basically,
okay, how do I use this?
How do I connect?
And as an end user, in most of the cases,
you just want the app to just work.
You shouldn't care about all those like tiny things that are happening around the infrastructure.
So the infrastructure needs to be abstracted as well.
And also the narrative of EF or Ethereum Foundation is shifting as well.
Basically, Vitalik has been ree re re re evaluating like parts of the roadmap,
you know, basically, um, and essentially like, and now if in the past, uh, roll
up centric roadmap was a thing, I think it's no longer a thing as we've seen.
And essentially like as a layer two, you have to decide, so you have to really
cover a specific use case and become a purpose-specific chain pretty much.
Yeah, really solid point.
And I agree.
Like if we're talking about the future of Web3,
we have to solve some of the pain points that are there.
So fragmentation and better interoperability or unification of
all these networks and different consensus mechanisms or different execution environments
really needs to take place. And the front end is kind of being fleshed out. I think on a recent
space, we were talking about how that probably looks like either AI, where you're
like interfacing with an AI and that is the front end, or maybe it's at the wallet level
where you have something like what the Ethereum Foundation recently talked about, which is
which is E-I-L if you're an interop layer.
EIL, Ethereum Interop Layer.
You know, Polygon has discussed the ag layer,
you know, something like that
where you're essentially interfacing
with like this unified front-end layer.
I recently just finished writing a paper with my friend.
It's a new Litecoin paper,
but it's a very futuristic take on what the future of Web3 looks like.
And it's actually exactly this conversation.
So I referenced and cited a lot of these papers that I'm talking about.
But I agree, these pain points have to be solved.
Anyone else have thoughts on this?
Like, I'll give my thoughts in a second, but I would really like to gather everyone's thoughts on, you know, what, so if you're he's, he's mainly not very optimistic about
general purpose layer twos. He still, you know,
understands that app chains or specialized type chains
that are focused on a specific set of niches or a niche should still exist and that you know he
hopes that a lot of these layer 2s scale and become more interoperable altogether and he's
also explaining you know ethereum itself is scaling you know we don't need as much support, but maybe, you know, if it's specialized.
And so we're kind of discussing how the future looks then.
So like, I guess another question I have for everyone, unless someone wants to comment on
something that was discussed previously is like what happens to the layer twos that are general purpose that exists today that are
driving a lot of volume and value and and you know does something i i don't know if you guys
remember the cosmos but you know they their thesis was the app chain thesis where like every chain there would
be you know thousands of chains millions of chains and they would all have like a you know very
specific app that they were running you know so it could run really fast and everything's
interconnected you know so like what does the future look like? Does it, does do these L2s, like L2s like,
you know, not to name names,
but these, the big monolithic L2s disappear.
Do they have to niche down?
Is there a future where there's still millions
of chains interoperating together?
Like what's your guys take there?
I think that there will probably be a mix of
general-purpose chains they get a lot of general-purpose activity and then niche chains and
the something that's being overlooked here even though we've talked about app chains are the apps
the apps are going to drive a lot of what chains end up being successful. Hyperliquid as a chain doesn't matter, except
for the fact there's Hyperliquid as an app. Look at Ape Chain as an example, that is the
blockchain basis for OtherSide. Now, whether or not OtherSide ends up being successful as this
massive interoperable metaverse play, we don't know, but it is unique within the marketplace
and that itself can be a significant draw that will help justify it existing on a chain that
is essentially its own chain. And there are good reasons if you're an app operating at scale to want to run your own chain
why does an arcade give you tokens to put into their machines rather than just letting you put
in quarters it's because then you're controlling the treasury in a more granular and powerful way
than if you were relying on uh quarters to go into the into the machine or ETH to go
into the machine. But if you have ApeCoin or your other local currency of the realm
that is actually useful because you have a killer app, then you start to justify your
existence rather than just getting folded into Ethereum L1 or some larger conglomerate.
Yeah, I mean, I was going to jump on that as well.
I think one
good example of that could potentially
be something like Polymarket,
where if they're on sort of any
L2, then they're paying
the gas of whatever the gas is on that chain and then they sort of just lose any potential revenue. But if they're on sort of any l2 then they're paying the gas of whatever the gas is on that chain and
then they sort of just lose any potential revenue but if they have something like their own chain i
mean i think polymarket abstract the gas anyway so they're just paying whatever the gas cost is
it doesn't matter what it is if they literally just need to run the infrastructure and then it
costs whatever it costs they could potentially save money um and I think Vitalik's comments are somewhat maybe centered around the fact
that all of these L2s, and especially I think Nikki touched on the centralized
sequencers, they're making a lot of revenue on a lot of these.
And that's taking revenue away from Ethereum.
Like if everyone shifted back to Ethereum just now, I mean,
the gas cost would probably still be stupid. The fact that all these chains exist and people can play on them
is literally the reason that you can use these just now and you don't want to punch someone in the
head. I agree. And so I think like something that a lot of people disagree on is that the L2s
are Ethereum.
That's my stance.
A lot of people want to separate
the L2s because
the different stages
and everything, but
I do agree with what you're saying,
Darren, which is that
Ethereum has scaled
and DApps
have continued to grow and the builder side of evm has
continued to grow because of the layer twos because if if none of these layer twos ever spun up and
evm land didn't continue you know building new forts around, you know, the base layer, then
they're probably like Ethereum wouldn't be the same place today because it had so many issues
scaling. And I think even today, sure, Vitalik's right, Ethereum's scaling, but I think Ethereum
at its level will always need other layer twos.
And so I think it's incredibly dangerous to discount the fact that all these other layer twos aren't Ethereum as well or shouldn't exist.
Or, you know, if someone had an opinion on that.
Yeah, I mean, exactly.
Imagine again, Polymark, it was just like,
okay, yeah, we'll listen to him.
Let's just change to Ethereum.
Like the gas costs would go nuts.
Like no one would use it again.
But also-
100%, and that's just one killer dApp.
But also I think we have to kind of abstract ourselves
from looking at a killer dApp specifically.
And generally speaking
as let's say if we are like working at l2 or if we're building an l2 we have to kind of ask
ourselves practical questions right to have this kind of a practical survival checklist so first
and foremost right so if i'm an l2 do i have a distribution advantage so what do i mean by
distribution advantage look at face for example they have the they have coinbase so that's kind of their distribution advantage right so do i have a
liquidity advantage do i have like enough liquidity which is sticky right so and then the other
question as you mentioned most of you mentioned like do i have a unique app in my ecosystem like
in the case of let's say hyper vm like there's hyper liquid for
example which is on hyper core and uh that's one thing or polymarket for example on polygon and
uh also like do i have uh for example if we're talking about decentralization and stage progress
like do i have clear path to stronger trust minimization? And also one, another thing is like,
do I have some sort of a structural differentiation?
Like, am I offering some sort of interoperability?
Am I offering some sort of privacy?
Am I offering some sort of a solution,
let's say for institutions?
Like if, for example, you look at ZK Sync,
Previdiums, like you can see that they're
specifically targeting specifically specifically the institutions.
So I think those are the basically questions that each L2 should ask.
So for example, if you have a PerpDex rollup, a game rollup, an Exchange rollup,
an Enterprise or RWA rollup, users are there for actual product, like for cheap gas or whatever it is and you can
always optimize the stack and what is cool actually with the app approach you can align economics with
the app so if the l2 revenue is tied to the apps business model like you don't have to pretend that
the l2 token like will moon because i don't know because it's amazing or for for some unknown reason or because
you can actually go and what like or like post your uh i don't know proposal on dao or something
like that that no one cares about nowadays and uh like uh the thing is that the main failure i would
say um of most l2s but also also of purpose-specific L2s nowadays,
they often turn into L2 marketing
than actually in some reality.
That's another thing.
And also we've seen, for example,
L2 beats pushing other L1s to become L2s.
We've seen these conversations before the Monat launch
and stuff like that.
And you can understand why
they talk about it uh because like alt l1 means basically you reinvented ethereum but it's weaker
because uh if you launch an independent l1 you actually have to you have to bootstrap security
censorship resistant social consensus processes like bridge security and so on and so forth but uh in the end
of the day like it really depends not everyone wants to be an l2 and not every l2 that's out
there today has to exist so i do believe that like the l2s that are out there like should really ask
themselves those questions and say like okay like what can I do from this point onward and how can I actually build that
mode? Because majority of them, like, let's be realistic.
They just farm the hype.
They just farm the VCs and achieve nothing.
Yeah.
Really solid point.
You know, many points there. And I liked the idea of the, you know many points there i like the idea of the you know the checklist i mean anyone else want to jump in on this
and welcome to the show dj um i think i saw woof had joined for a second there i'm not sure if
they're still on the stage is probably following me uh You know, brother, woof, woof. Thank you for having me. L2s, L2s, L2s. I want them all. L2s,
L3s, L4s, L5s. Give me them all. Starting with Litecoin. Did somebody say Litecoin?
How are you guys? Hope everybody's blessed. Litecoin, Litecoin, Litecoin.
You know what I mean? I got the digital gold i got bitcoin shout out to
zk shark and my omds so i i i i got i got silver which is litecoin who who's who's uh who's who's
coming room for the third i think it's gonna be ton they're in they're leading but i don't know
is it gonna be abstract is it gonna be base who's it gonna be let's go let's talk about it
be based who's it gonna be let's go let's talk about it
good times good times yeah i'm i'm building uh light quins virtual machine so that's
fully unleashing light coin you you want bringing light point into the web three
that we're pairing what this uh industry started with you know on all the founding principles the cypherpunk movement
with all the innovation in the space so soon by coin will be able to trustlessly interact with
all web3 uh so you have uh a purpose-driven chain you have basically what we've been talking about here.
PMF out of the box.
Yeah, so anyone else have any thoughts on the future?
I find that Espresso's paper recently, so they're a partner of ours.
We're using their technology in our modular stack at LitVM.
And Ben Fish wrote this paper.
It's in the Jumbotron up above,
but it's basically explaining what many of you guys were just touching on,
you know, all these different execution environments,
different modular pieces all working together.
And that's the future of Web3 in Espresso's mind.
And in my mind as well,
just finished writing a paper as well.
I have people private reading it.
If anyone's interested in a futuristic outlook on Litecoin,
the hard money Web3,
and also just a futuristic look on thecoin, you know, the hard money web three, and also just a futuristic look on the space,
happy to send over our paper for peer review. But I agree with what Espresso is saying, which is that
everything will work together. You know, Espresso is kind of solving this fast finality issue so that all the different chains can use
like a layer one single layer and uh they can have fast finality in real time so everything
can like settle and interoperate together very easily um they also talk about like uh nikki you
were talking earlier about the sequencers and espresso looks to have a shared sequencer network where
like instead of like one chain like base let's say has you know their sequencer and and their
it's you know varying degrees of decentralized or not uh and it's making all these fees like
there's a network of a bunch of different chains you know hopefully
purpose-driven general purpose application specific and they're all running in this
as l2s in this shared sequencer network,
and they all have their own sequencer.
And so if one sequencer was to ever go down,
theoretically, there'd be other sequencers
to kind of push transactions forward.
And also, you're all sharing the revenue
of each other's chain.
So you're further unifying Web3.
And I think that that's how web 3 looks in the future basically everything
working together just like the internet you know this is also a piece of espresso's recent paper
but they were describing how you know in the beginning web 3 the like at least the dream was everyone working together
you know that was like how they wanted to solve um trad fi issues and and fintech you know and
instead we've kind of grown out very similarly with fragmentation to you know the version one you one, you know, with TradFi, like you have
different type of payment applications for different things and, you know, payments are
siloed, transactions are siloed, execution environments kind of silo, different type of
applications. But like the future of Web3 was always supposed to be everything working together seamlessly.
And so, yeah, anyone have thoughts on that?
I think even like if you look at the internet itself,
you still see like these really big zones where most of the,
like at different sites, you know, where most of the action happens, but you notice that there are a ton of other different sites around those ones that still, you know, have a lot of traction, but it's all kind of working together. You know, I believe that Web3 is also supposed
to be like this and that this is what we're trying to solve for.
Anyone can jump in on this one.
I can jump in. So we're talking about like Espresso, we're talking about L2s.
I think we're talking too much about technicalities, right?
Like we always have to ask ourselves,
like, especially if we're looking at Web2,
like do average users care about the infrastructure
that something is running on?
So that's the question that we always have to ask
and keep in our mind.
And I can tell that no, average users care about
like the app, that the specific app or solution they're using, it works.
Not whether it's on Arbitrum-based, Optimism, or ZK-Sync, or whatever.
They only start caring about L2s or whatever when something bad happens.
But when users don't care, they want the same bullets, same UX.
Bridging needs to be abstracted fears keys have to be low and confirmations like they need to feel fast
so they have to mentally like feel kind of they have the same experience as in web 2.
uh also um many users basically in web 2 especially, just click whatever the app recommends.
They follow the...
And in Web2 it should be the same.
So they should be able to follow liquidity, yields, friends, not the architecture itself,
which is happening currently.
When users start caring, it means that it kind of hurts them.
What it means, it's a really bad user experience.
For example, bridging and withdrawals
can be very confusing or slow so for example the moment someone has to learn what a canonical bridge
is or let's say why withdrawal will take so much time they start caring and maybe they start even
freaking out so also like wrong network problems like you don't want to kind of like the average
user shouldn't care about
going and choosing a network and being like oh okay let me switch to polygon let me now switch
to i don't know zkc into base or whatever and um the thing that also bothers i think users uh
currently it's generally speaking the security and trust issues that surround current space.
And of course, like liquidity fragmentation, which has been in existence already for some time.
And we've been trying to solve this as an industry and we're still failing in my view.
So you always ask questions.
Why is the price worse here?
Why can't I borrow against this asset on that chain?
And so on and so forth.
And that's the thing.
And also, for example, the other thing that's worrisome for the users
is kind of like support nightmares.
So, for example, you're using MetaMask or Rabi or whatever wallet you want to use,
and something happens, you don't know who to reach out to,
you don't know which action to take. So that's kind of scary for an average user i would say especially the one
that wants to come into the space and try it out especially when we're trying to call users like
ask users to stop using the centralized exchanges and focus more on the decentralized part but the
problem is that the average user is very used to UX and UI of a centralized exchange.
Why?
Because it's something that they understand.
It's something that they go to a specific, like they type in specific URL,
they enter their email address, their password, and they're in.
And if something happens, there's a support chat or whatever,
they can just go and speak to these guys in most of the cases
and get this problem resolved.
And I think that's the problem that we should start.
That's the issue that we should be addressing
basically as the industry.
The average users don't care about all tools or ones.
They care about speed, cost, availability, safety, liquidity, and support in my view.
Yeah, I mean that's pretty much why I think that like general, well maybe not general purpose L2s,
but like general-ish purpose L2s and some all L1s will still probably rule the roost for the next few years. Things like Bay, Solana, as much as they have somewhat of a focus,
like Solana is just purely focused on idiots,
but they have a lot of liquidity in one place.
They have a decent user experience where you go there
and you can interact with a little bit of everything.
And I just don't think a lot of the chains that have sort of started with the L2 stuff and made
some revenue or maybe all L1, getting all that revenue in will want to give up sort of that
sovereignty and the revenue in order to be like part of like the E sort of um agler style thing like all of that will typically mean
that some of the revenue you're giving up you're giving to like a shared network like what espresso
plans to build and i think a lot of people are probably just i mean the word might be
maybe not so selfish but they want to they want that revenue for themselves
they want to they want that revenue for themselves
yeah solid i i i'm not sure if it's like a couple years jaren like but i can i can see your point
like it might be because it might take that long for the infrastructure to get to a point where
the infrastructure to get to a point where uh i mean even if the improv was you don't necessarily
need that even if the infra was ready today it would take a long time to convince everyone to
adopt the infra because they have to give up a lot of stuff that they might not want to give up
well not necessarily right because like if the I say infrastructure, you're also talking about, let's say, if AgLayer or an AgLayer type solution is readily available, then it unifies all the liquidity.
um and so if the the liquidity is unified and you can really you know let's say have your liquidity
on one chain and easily do swaps through whatever chain you want because you know all the liquidity
is unified then you're not necessarily like you, you can spin up a chain very easily. You know, let's say a purpose-driven chain
and connect into the broader Web3 ecosystem.
And you already have, you know, security and execution.
And your security is based on, guess whatever l1 and then you you
have uh you have the liquidity of all the other chains and you know that infrastructure also has
like taking care of some of the pain points that nicky's talking about where it's just easy to use
all of it you know and it's just fast it's cheap to use and it's easy to use all of it, you know, and it's just fast, it's cheap to use, and it's easy
to use, you know, like, because, I don't know, AI or the wallet level, you know, everything's really
seamless, then maybe, maybe not, maybe, but yeah, I think then the question is, is all that
infrastructure going to be ready in a couple years, or sooner, you know, and I think then the question is, is all that infrastructure going to be ready in a couple of years or sooner?
And I think the only thing that kind of makes me think that it could happen sooner is that AI is progressing so fast and that AI could be the front end and also help us with.
also help us with, because I'm talking to devs a lot, you know, with being in the builder space,
and I realized a lot of these devs are using AI in different, you know, in their workflow. And so
how will AI be in a year from now, you know, with, with everything that, that builders are building
in Web3. So yeah, I hear you there. um it could it could be a couple years and they
definitely have the momentum some of these big chains that have you know a couple killer daps or
you know a lot of the liquidity now and if that infrastructure really isn't in place then yeah
they could they could rule the roost like you say for a couple more years but i i do think that that's coming to like largely that not
necessarily like coming to an end but that web through will be a lot more unified in the nearish
future greg you have your hand up please jump in um so you guys know you don't have to raise your
hand just jump in it's like a bunch of friends around a big deal. Sorry, I just didn't want to interrupt.
I think I'm not a great expert, yeah, but I just wanted to share my point of view, actually, about L2s and about Vitalik's post about L2s. Actually, as for me, I think that still Ethereum, yeah, Ethereum made great success in scaling and so on and so on.
made great success in the scaling and so on and so on.
But still, we can notice when the gas price just jumped really fast.
And the same way is on L2s as well.
Because, for example, last week or maybe like 10 days ago on base,
I saw really crazy prices for the gas.
And it's still there.
So you can imagine what the prices were on gas and it's still the so you can imagine how what are the prices were on gas on
ethereum and one more comment from me that i think that of course not all l2s will forward to stage
two quickly yeah and mostly some of them will just die it's i don't know which one, but still I think that some of them will just die and
we forget about them, but still most of them that produce revenue, they will live and continue
scaling Ethereum. It's just some of my thoughts. Maybe I'm not right but yeah still just wanted to share it yeah thank you
for your thoughts yeah no happy to hear your thoughts and yeah I think it's really interesting
that that base transactions went up so high I mean it really just shows you that
went up so high i mean it it really just shows you that uh
every every chain itself um until you know more upgrades happen you know they they have a bit of
a threshold and and it's it it really shows you that the the future is like a bunch of chains working together.
Yeah. Anyone else want to jump in?
I guess.
So then on your point, Darren, let's actually go this way.
So sorry.
One more point about AI.
Yeah.
That right now it's really like a boom, especially on base.
We deploy tokens via the bank robot and we make agents,
we build our own agents, learning, web coding.
But still, I think that we are so early here because AI is only developing.
It's developing really fast, but still, I think we will see it much, much far
than it is right now yeah and even right now
at my because i'm working not in crypto yeah i work in in web2 just an it company and uh
in our in in our company we already like obliged to use ai if you are not learning using AI, then you are just fired.
I agree. And I agree on the point that you're saying that the AI side of things are just
getting built out, whether that's people trying to perfect, you know, the agentic side or swarms,
or I mean, really just the infrastructure for AI that they need to utilize like X402.
Most of this is really just starting,
but it's gonna be a big part of the future.
To what you were saying, Darren,
you said maybe some of these big L2s
only have another one to two years to rule the roost.
How does the panel think these L2s will evolve or will they not evolve?
Will they die?
I mean, what's your guys' opinion on that?
I personally think few only will evolve and the rest will die.
It's my personal view because it's also not their fault.
I can explain my reasoning because first of all, it started with EF, like an Ethereum roadmap, right?
So Ethereum made roll up first, the official scaling pass.
And once the ecosystem kind of aligned
around the roll up roadmap,
like launching an L2 wasn't like a side quest
or something like that.
It seemed to be the correct way to build on Ethereum.
So that's why people and a lot of projects started to do that.
And also, if you
look at it at like 2022, 2023, and 2024, the cost and effort to launch an L2 actually collapsed.
Why is that? Because you had a lot of solutions which were offering roll-up as a service, and you
had a bunch of standardized stacks. So instead of building like a roll up team for two years or whatever,
you could just pick a stack like OP stack, ZK stack or whatever, and roll up as a service
provider and ship much faster. So this kind of like made it even much easier. So the supply of
L2s exploded. Also, like, you know, the also what happened is that like L2s as a financing game, I would say, happened.
Some teams, I would say, did the honest thing.
They shipped the tech, proved the security, built apps.
Others, in my view, maybe 90% of those, 95% of those,
treated L2s as a fundraising wrapper.
So high valuation, big brand VCs were the execution layer, storytelling, and so on and so forth.
And that's why I'm personally not very bullish on a lot of them surviving.
I do believe that some of them will do survive, like a small minority of them surviving. I do believe that certain, some of them will do survive,
like a small minority of them will survive.
The ones that already have a distribution
or the ones that are kind of switching
to kind of becoming purpose-specific roll-ups
and so on.
And they will find their own,
the real wedge.
But I personally believe that
majority will just die
and we'll forget about it.
That's a spicy take, spicy take.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know what?
I was enjoying the space so much,
I forgot I was a speaker for a second,
just I was listening to everyone talk.
No, no, I mean...
I was wondering when you were going to jump back in, brother.
I was just really getting into it it because I'm just out walking.
So, I mean, yeah, the liquidity migration is something that we've seen at OpenOcean.
Obviously, we touch quite a lot of the EVM space, having over 30 chains integrated.
And we are doing a purge of some of the kind of, I don't want to use the word dead, but, you know, near dead chains that exist on our platform.
But we've, I mean, we've seen the same old story before.
Team comes in, does a raise, announces a points program
or some kind of airdrop and a token in the future.
Liquidity migrates in, liquidity flows out.
And, you know, nothing bad against the ecosystem teams,
but we've seen countless examples of this, you know,
DeFi activity on things like Manta and Blast and everything, not to call them out too much,
but, you know, it's definitely a lot lower than,
you know, when they first launched
and what we initially intended.
But I think going back to the AppChain conversation,
I think there's an absolutely very strong use case there.
There's some great stuff coming out of the ApeChain space,
and I think the dedicated AppChain layers for users,
especially like super powerful,
especially because they can do the whole user
kind of journey capture in one go from like fiat onboarding,
so they can just put their money straight into the ecosystem
and just only interact with what they want to interact with.
My guess is if they do kind of want to build out
a full DeFi suite for something like Ape Chain,
you know, they can kind of work towards that
so they have all the bases covered.
But it's been interesting from our side as well.
Like, we have this thing called network integration
as a service, you know, where we kind of go into an ecosystem,
we aggregate all the available liquidity, we publish a bunch of API keys, and we kind of work with them on, you know, where we kind of go into an ecosystem, we aggregate all the available liquidity, we publish a bunch of API keys, and we kind of work with them on, you know,
DeFi accessibility and kind of, you know, how do we best pitch this towards builders?
And I just, I did want to throw out an honorable mention to the Flanet work, because what they've
done with kind of XRP DeFi has been great, given XRP holders have some DeFi compatibility
and allowed them to partake in a lot of the DeFi stuff
that we take on EVM for granted.
But no, I'm thoroughly enjoying this conversation so far.
And yeah, I feel like all the discussion points
about L2's kind of slowly winding down over time is probably true.
I mean, go and have a look at how many networks that we support,
and you can kind of see we have some quiet ones on there that might be getting delisted closer into the summer.
So you mentioned Flare. A little shout-out to Sparkdex.
Flare, a little shout out to Sparkdex.
Sparkdex is the largest Dex on Flare
and was actually incubated by Lunar Digital Assets.
Amazing. Well, we do all the routing for Sparkdex,
so big high five.
Awesome.
Yeah, it's actually a sub-DAO of QuickSwap,
so pretty cool.
Cool, guys.
So I've been waiting to kind of jump in to really think about how I,
how I want to say this,
but I generally think that this was,
I'm hoping that,
so Vitalik is very,
he's, he thinks things through before he posts he doesn't just post random shit right because he knows very well that people are listening uh by the way i'm
walking some pretty steep hills a little out of breath here and i do encourage everyone in the
audience to get out and walk and get some sun get your steps in uh you can make me put my shoes on and get outside
let let's do it right now all right because i got rugged there for a second sorry i couldn't
pick up on opens uh last thing but okay if you can hear me yeah rock you're gonna crush it i know
you're gonna say something big right now. Well, I may say some
things that people don't want to hear, um, that I don't want to hear, but I, I think this is a
pretty bad take by Vitalik and I'm really hoping, uh, but, but let me finish on the get walking
guys, seriously, get out. If you're sitting on your couch or in your house in the dark, in a little cave, depressed about the crypto prices, get your asses out and walk.
Get some sun.
Take your shirt off.
Get your steps in.
It can be, it's really important, especially if you're feeling down about the economy, either in your country or globally.
It's shit everywhere, by the way, guys, just so everyone knows.
Most industries are in a constriction phase.
It's not just crypto.
So don't feel so bad.
But you got to stay grounded.
Touch some grass.
Get out.
Get your walk in.
Exercise your brain.
Exercise your body.
They're tied together.
So, okay. in exercise your brain exercise your body they're tied together so okay so I just think that this is a bit damaging to aetherium for him to come out with this take in the way that he did I think he
could have added some caveats or expressed appreciation for some of the L2s that have built.
And because I think this, for one thing, I think this pushes a lot of brands now,
because you used the word brands, I think more than once,
this pushes brands now away from Ethereum.
Because it makes them question what the longevity for them will be.
And will Vitalik change his mind?
Because that's what it feels like is sort of happening here.
Oops, we were wrong or we miscalculated or the L1 scaling caught up.
So we don't need the L2s for scaling as much when the scaling was the main
purpose of the l2s now i i think again metallic is very he thinks things through he's very well
thought out so i'm gonna trust that he's got a plan here and that this is like a calculated thing. And maybe he realized something or that there's a lot of things this could be.
But it just seems like an odd thing for him to post without, in the specific way he did.
I mean, BASE is in a lot of ways carrying Ethereum right now.
And it is exactly that. A branded L2, right? I mean, BASE is in a lot of ways carrying Ethereum right now.
And it is exactly that, a branded L2, right?
A branded shard, as Vitalik would say.
So I'll stop there.
I have a lot more thoughts, but I'll stop on that.
What do you guys think about this? Can I expand on that with a little bit adding into the caveat abstract too, which base is doing a pretty good job of, of, of copying the, the, the ground rules that they let out.
Cause it's been a year now.
And I'm one that as a creator, I was sitting back with my popcorn saying, yeah, yeah, metallic.
Saying, yeah, yeah, Metallic, yeah, bye-bye L2s, because now brands, you know, these Web 2 and these Web 1 brands, they're all saying, well, we got to go with somebody that understands our future as well as, you know what I mean, the network or the whatever they want to set us on.
Yeah.
Bye bye.
And if you're not positioned to play with the big boys, it's kind of too late.
Crypto needs retail
retail doesn't need crypto 99 of the world is already digital it's only leaving you one percent
so you know what i'm saying yeah i hope when you say you know we need uh the big boys or it's time
to play with the big boys or some whatever exactly you said i hope that we don't need the big boys or it's time to play with the big boys or some whatever exactly you said i hope that we don't need the big boys but that we're we're welcoming them and they're
they'll be part of the journey but i don't know what i'm saying what i mean by that i'm saying
bitcoin and litecoin they don't need retail you see what i'm saying they're not they're not the
same as these other stable coins
or these same uh how shall i say what we're talking about l2s you know at the end of the
day consumers don't give a shit they don't like like we said earlier they want the product to
work and they and they it's a it's a trusting for them they don't they don't care about whether
it's an l1 or l2, and Abstract proved that.
You know, blockchain technology is what's mass adoption. You've got people that are getting onboarded into blockchain technology and games that are set up to handle finances with currency now, not cryptocurrency.
They're doing it with dollars and cents, baby.
And you guys are going to lose to the
kelseys because they're they're going to say they're going to take out moon pay they got
litecoin they got bitcoin they got cash app they got apple pay you see what i'm saying people like
me the normies they don't they don't want to even understand the block unless you're talking about
you're talking about abstract here you're saying yes sir okay explain it i i don't know a whole lot about it
tell us about it it's it's what base app it's what base is trying to get to because people like me
i'm the official dj of abstract i can walk into any room i can say go to a browser punch in abs
period xyz you can enter the portal with just your email. I'm walking away.
I can buy him a drink now.
I can talk about real things.
You can go on in there.
You can play games.
You can gamble.
You can buy NFTs.
Oh, what's NFTs?
Oh, man, we can talk about that.
Come on over here.
You know, these are nonsense.
You see what I'm saying?
But I've already done my sales pitch.
They're already hooked.
Now they're going to abstract.
And now they're playing games. Now they're doing this.
They're not doing what I want them to do.
They're doing what they want to do.
Why is this different than the experience on bass?
It's not.
This is what I'm saying.
Bass is following that pattern, that abstract laid down for a year.
Shout out to my man down there with the Good Vibes Club.
My brother, Adam Weississman who's a billionaire he scooped the floor of good vibes club for a
reason you see what i'm saying there's companies that are building on abstract that haven't
announced themselves they've been building for the year that we've been since we've launched
you see what i'm saying there's there's there's swaps like quick swap love them love you guys
hope you guys don't go down the same path that a previous swap company did on Abstract.
Because if they would have delivered over there, they'd be in pole position like I am.
I have Bitcoin, I have Litecoin, and I'm not playing fair.
I have Star Wars, I have Disney, I have NASCAR, I have NHL.
You feel me? I do whatever i want you see what i'm
saying and i have the consumers because i can sell to the consumers because i have a product that has
utility i don't need to i don't need to scam anyone i can say come over here it's easier it's
funner and have fun and walk away sounds fun um bringing that back now to uh the point that i made does anyone agree or disagree
was this a a good take by vitalik a bad take a necessary take could he have said it differently
i um i can jump on that so so yeah and i'm bullish about a lot of the tech that's being created all around.
Different things are trying to make things easier for the consumer,
or more fun, or gamifying blockchain.
And I, and I love all of that.
And I love all of that.
I hope to do that on LitVM in different ways as well.
But to your point, rock, I actually, like when I read everything that Vitalik said,
I didn't, I didn't necessarily think he was wrong.
Because like reading into it, I feel like he's just saying that certain L2s are going to evolve
over time and that the the tech is is is changing and in a sense kind of like how we were talking
about earlier how you know everything's going to be unified in the future and all that but to what
i heard also is that uh here let me i think go inside my house real quick i went outside but
there's no sun i went outside there's no sun it's all it's all clouds and then all i hear is like
uh animals and it totally was throwing me off
but yeah
so like the thing with Vitalik is like
I have a feeling that
there's you know Wall Street
pretty deep into Ethereum
and my take on
his stance here because I do think he's
calculated like you're describing but
that he's trying to rally ETH
again I think the strategy
and I'm totally I'm totally assuming here based on like my you know my feelers here and and you
know reading a bunch of stuff around the internet so so I I don't know I can't prove this but I
have that he's trying to rally E again because if you look at ethland
it's it got slapped in the face by solana for a couple years and you know there was some other
great l ones that had some nice runs and like sentiment is is definitely lower. And so I think this is like him coming in and trying to say some bold
stuff, get ETH back in the picture, get people bullish, rally his base, which is, you know,
there's a ton of Wall Street people coming in now, you know, the institutions and digital asset
treasuries that are probably like, on do something vitalic do something you
know like the meme with the with the stick and I think this is in my opinion him trying to rally
say something spicy get everyone talking about ETH again talk about you know the advancements
that ETH has made and I would think that's kind of where it's going. I don't know if anyone has a different take on it.
I can see that, but I don't think it,
and that's kind of my point is,
I don't think it's going to have that intended effect.
I think that if anything, this makes people question Ethan,
question his leadership and the decision-making.
If all of a sudden we kind
of like now need a pivot and what everybody thought was the way is not the way because that's
what people thought was these l2s were scaling i mean obviously we thought they were a lot more
than that and it's very nuanced and you know we're involved with some of the more nuanced ones that
are already doing some of the stuff he's talking about um but yeah i just uh i'm trying to think
what his 40 chess movie is here but it's hard for me to see i i think i think like this will push
it think about it if you were a big company if you were fidelity if you were bank of america and you were thinking about launching an
eth l2 would this not be something you're now discussing in your board meeting like hey guys
what do you guys think he's pushing people away from this branded l2s and we were going to launch
a brand that's what we are that's what bank of america is that's what fidelity is that's
what vanguard is that's what blackrock is these are brands these are long-standing brands but
that people can trust isn't he isn't he not like when he says brand i i don't think it's like uh
my take on that is like that that's general purpose blockchains not like um so i think what he's talking about is
like base you know the that's a perfect example why would you go ahead but like fidelity could
come in and they're there they could launch um you know something in real world assets you know
something uh or in the payment space or you know banking solution something
specialized as clive said in the beginning uh and i so i don't think it's like that kind of brand
he used the distinction between general purpose and apps which if he would have said that i'd be
a lot more interested in the take and i wouldn't be as critical because I think that would make more sense and it would be a little more nuanced.
He basically kind of shat on a whole swath
of potential projects or current, you know, chains.
Like if he would have said,
we, you know, L2s,
like we have enough general purpose L2s
and the way I see things going going not we were wrong and hey
change and all you guys who already committed to building on us well i don't know if you fit in
this new scenario now that l1 is scaling but if he would have said something like you know general
purpose we have a lot of general purpose chains i think think maybe we've over, like there's been an over bet on general purpose
and the future seems to be more specialized chains,
app chains,
unity chains,
you know,
more things,
you know,
that have a more unique product offering
or a unique niche.
If he would have said something like that,
it would have been,
I think,
taken better by me at least. But the way he said it is just uh i think it just kind of pushes people
away and i don't know who it really helps other than if i mean you know one of the 40 chess
things he may be doing here is saying like we the he knows that people listen to him so
if everyone keeps launching general purpose l2s and they're just like, you know, I think
Open Ocean mentioned earlier, you know, liquidity migrates on, liquidity migrates off.
These are mercenary capital, like, you know, farming, you know, liquidity reward, airdrop
farming people.
So like, here's something he said um this is like a little paragraph within what he said
which to me kind of uh goes like explains that he's not saying like all all l2s are just like
branded shards um he's he's saying uh what, uh, we should stop thinking about L2s as literally being branded shards of Ethereum with the social status and responsibilities that this entails.
chains backed by the full faith and credit of ethereum with various unique properties
um eg not just evm as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to
ethereum that each person or bot is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs
so it's almost like that that paragraph is why i think he's, he's not saying app chain, but like he's saying, um,
he's actually expanding what L2's mean,
but he's also kind of saying that there's going, in my opinion,
when I'm reading this is like that it's, uh,
it's a whole host of different types of chains interacting together.
I think two things I agree with both of you.
And first and foremost, I want to thank you for reading what he said because I didn't even pay attention.
I don't follow him.
I don't care.
You follow what I'm saying?
But I understand the way you've explained it and and i thank you
for that why don't you i'm curious why don't you care about what vitalik says
because i'm i'm building on people that do not what people are trying to tell other people what
they should do or how judging how they succeed or what their dream is you feel me i i believed in ethereum
enough to sign on to the companies that are building said l2s that he's talking about base
and and abstract those those are those are variations of of ethereum their base ethereum
and their abstract ethereum they're they're literally building on ethereum already you see
what i'm saying like and and, the consumers don't care.
It's the people that are running these businesses, they care,
and they've already made these decisions a year ago, two years ago, some of them.
You see what I'm saying?
But it's interesting to me to see as other businesses and other brands are talking
what they're talking about from the outside looking in.
Not everybody's in the position that I am, brother.
I got them all already.
I got Abstract.
I got Base through my Hungry DGens.
I got Litecoin.
You see what I'm saying?
I'm not paying attention to who's building where because I'm on the place where the builders are.
I have the consumers.
You're following me?
I got a Visa card launched with fudgy penguins.
You know what I'm saying?
I got several cards now that are in crypto.
When you say that, you know,
when you say that, you know,
in these, some of these chains have been building for years,
that's part of my concern here is that
big entities or investors investing in small entities
or small startups and, you know,
cypherpunk stuff even that, you know, anyone who is going to put their time into something
wants to know there's some stability there, right? This is why some countries never grow.
They're just garbage. They never grow because their governments are not stable. And so nobody
wants to invest in or build or start businesses or even live in a
country that doesn't have a stable governance system and a stable kind of base, not even a
stable direction, but a stable base for you to have your own direction. And so if Vitalik
kind of shits on in this, I mean, I kind of slightly he's shitting on some of the people
that have started building on these brands like to me this is kind of a
maybe i'm misreading it but it's a little bit of a shot fired at
the brands like bass i mean any of these general purpose chains that um i mean they do have a niche i just feel like he could have he could have
expressed this in a better way that wasn't that wasn't as damaging like it depends on what his
point is what he what is the direction he's trying to move here if he's that's what i'm saying rock
like i yeah yeah just just to jump in on that like Like, I, I think that he has a purpose, like you're saying, like, what is his purpose?
Purpose is to get, it is to say something spicy, to throw some shots at base or, you know, anyone else that's a big L2.
But it's, I also think that he is just seeing the future of like how everything is going to work
together and and he's just letting people know like you know this is going to change like this
is this is how it's going to look it's just his opinion because, you know, that's what he's basically giving is his opinion or his direction or how he thinks things should go.
And part of me also, like I was saying earlier, speculating that he's kind of rallying for ETH again, just more broadly, you know, to get more eyes on ethan get people pumped about ease it's scaling it's
doing big things you know but but uh i i think you know like that paragraph that i just read that's
that's him saying well the l2s are still going to exist but just you know there's going to be
still going to exist but just you know there's going to be maybe an evolution and and it does
make sense like most of the people here um that have commented on like how like how will these
l2s look in the future that are really big um pretty much all kind of agree that
pretty much all kind of agree that they're going to have to evolve um or or they're going to roll
the roost for a couple more years and then you know they're going to die or or something's going
to change you know so like i i don't know if like he's necessarily like saying something
i think maybe to what you're saying he could could have, he could have said it differently, maybe more like, like softer.
Uh, but then, you know, that wouldn't, I don't know.
I don't, I expect Vitalik to speak very like just blunt, you know, robotic.
And I think this was like the response I imagine he would have said to describe like where things are and to achieve like rallying for ETH.
I just don't feel like this is a good rallying call.
I feel like this is going to make brands like BASE.
If I was BASE right now, I would be thinking about potentially leaving ETH, to be honest.
I would be, this would be, not just because
of this, by the way, that's like, that would be extreme. But base is already paying ETH massive
fees, okay? We're already seeing that apps are leaving chains to launch their own chains because they don't want to pay rent to the L2.
So the same concept can be applied one level up that why would L2s want to pay ETH rent?
If they're big enough, they could hypothetically make their own chain and they could save this,
you know, a massive amount. i think base is paying to eat like
hundreds of millions the majority the majority of their income uh is going to
no no no sorry sorry i got that wrong it's 80
i believe it's i think it's 80 something percent goes to the app or goes to the L2.
And like 17 to 20 percent goes to ETH.
So, so not majority.
Sorry, it's the other way around.
So, but still, that's a shitload of money.
If, if base is making, what are they making, guys?
Someone have a number there.
It's like hundreds of millions a year in, in fees, right? And then that that means let's say, I think it might be, might be very high. Right.
It might be like in the first year, it was like some crazy number, but that means they're paying
at least 20 million a year to be on ETH. And I think they probably have already discussed
internally. I think all chains do or should.
It's like, where should we best be?
And I'm just saying that this was a weird conversation
for Vitalik to start to make people think
of where they should be.
Yeah, it's definitely spicy.
The thing is, we've both built many things in this space. We advise different projects. I remember advising a very large L2 at the time and letting them know the same thing approximately about a year and a half two years ago and i was saying you guys are going to
need a niche down the the this the future of uh of blockchains like l2s is is going to like you
need to have a little bit more focus and and so I think that's really what Vitalik's saying as well.
I do get your point.
I think maybe he could have said it better.
But at the end of the day...
Well, there's so many pieces he didn't address too.
And you've been a proponent of app chains and specialization for a while.
And yeah, it's crazy to see that the chain you're
talking you know the chain you're talking about that they actually took the direction that you
said uh down the line but anyways um like i think it's gonna be hard yeah yeah what are you saying
i think he needed there's other things that needed to be addressed like just throwing this hot take
out there without more context without further fleshing it out didn't was there an article accompanied by this on
vitalik dot whatever ca or whatever no or was it just this tweet so this tweet alone i mean
it also the timing seems weird to me because the like i believe in the app chain thesis i believe in the specialized you know um
specialized chain whether that's app chain community chain branded shard there's all kinds
of different things it could be um even not chains just like apt that aren't even a chain there's just
like roll up to ethereum i believe in all this, but the problem is right now,
the user experience and the interop is not there.
We still have fragmentation.
We still have total shit user experiences across the whole industry.
So like if we wanted people to move away
from general purpose and app chain,
I think we got to solve that interop.
And they are talking about that right
through things that's exactly go ahead that's exactly the point like nikki was talking about
this earlier that there's the pain points that have to be solved on the infrastructure like
sure i understand that like there's a statement that gets thrown around a lot like nobody cares
about the tech nobody like they just want it fast, cheap.
They want it to work good.
That's true.
Like when they first are onboarding, that's true.
But immediately you start caring once you're here.
Like, because once you realize, hey, I can't, why can't I transfer my funds and buy this
asset over here on another chain?
You immediately have to care.
So you might not care day one, but like seven days in, you immediately have to care. So you might not care day one, but like seven days
in you're going to care. And so I think like the, that, uh, that, uh, like just blanket saying like
people don't care is not, uh, is not like, uh, is not like the full story. Because all this tech, all this stuff really does matter.
And so to your point,
man, I lost, I totally ADHD'd.
What did you say again, man?
Well, I mean, the main kind of idea that I'm,
why didn't he talk about app chains? or why couldn't this have been a positive message
of here's the kind of next things we should focus on,
not, hey, if you were building this or if you were thinking about building this,
like, go fuck yourself, which it could be read as that.
I'm being facetious to make a point.
He didn't say it like that, right, obviously.
Well, and what's interesting, I probably forgot the... a point he didn't say it like that right obviously well well he didn't even mention
not even one mention of app chains or not even one mention in another tweet he done he has
mentioned app chains that came a bit later so i think it came after this okay great yes exactly
can you put that in jumbotronron, Nikki? Yeah, sure, sure.
That would be great.
I mean, that would help address some of my concerns here a little bit.
I thought he did mention AppChains at some point.
And then I went back over the tweet and read that paragraph that I read off earlier,
which I think is still
describing app chains within there.
But then, yeah, I think I also read something where he did describe app chain.
So Nikki, that would be awesome.
Um, and one, one thing I want to point out also is that it definitely wasn't perceived
well, and the reason why I can, I know there's a lot of people that agree with you, rock
is like, if you go look
at the comments, you automatically see some of the, the, the largest talking heads or KOLs or
builders in the space. Um, almost like totally, totally reading it the way you're seeing like i mean ryan from uh oh what's ryan from uh bankless like his comment
is what you're saying is l2s aren't ethereum agreed you know which is really problematic
because that's not what he's saying and um and l2s are so important take by ryan why would he say
that well dude ryan's been saying crazy
stuff for a long time but then like look at look at leonidas from bitcoin land you know
leonidas is a big uh ordinal guy yeah i think he has a bitcoin a room my bitcoin uh like side of
me was like saying man this just makes my my belief in bitcoin stronger this this whole shit to be honest
but go ahead and check out check out what he says because leonidas definitely comments on even though
he's a big bitcoiner he comments on a lot of ethereum stuff and he says base and the other
l2s have been an obvious vampire attack on ethereum's ecosystem they effectively operate as their own l1s and will
literally transition to be l1s in the future the sooner the ethereum ecosystem realizes that
they can shed the l2s and make l1 great again so like so here and i just read two they right off
the top these guys are basically saying or reading it very similar to how you're saying it,
which is it's negative. The L2s are going to get pissed. They're going to leave.
The L2s are parasitic. The sad thing is that I honestly don't think that's what Vitalik's
talking about at all. I really think that Vitalik is just trying to bring us back to the early conversations of Web3.
What Web3 is supposed to be about, which is, okay, you have these really strong decentralized
L1s where you get your security from and these L2s on top specialize
and everything works seamlessly together.
That's including liquidity and everything's interoperable.
And then on top of that, there's a front end.
And that's what we were promised in the beginning.
Ethereum was supposed to be the world computer.
But I actually think it's much like Es saying, which is, it's really kind
of like a world ledger.
It's a bunch of different consensus mechanisms and execution environments and chains all
working together.
And so it's crazy to see that so many people are taking it negatively, exactly like you're
saying.
So I, I, you know, just reading a little bit more reading, reading how other people are taking it. I think you're saying. So just reading a little bit more, reading how other
people are taking it, I think you're right, Brock.
Unfortunately,
people aren't seeing this.
There's a lot of people that see this negative as well.
You forgot to do a sentiment
check using AI.
Sorry, I didn't agree.
I said he didn't do a sentiment check using any ai models he just went for the nihilistic version i actually say it from two sides because like later on he
came actually and said like i just shared a tweet like build something that brings something new to the table, like
privacy, app specific efficiency, ultra low latency, and so on.
And he said, like, surely I'm a fan of AppChain.
So he mentioned that.
But in the end of the day, I also agree with the disappointment because you also have to
put yourself, like, we have to kind of compare also to ourselves to the traditional world.
Nikki, did you post the wrong?
No, I don't think so.
I don't think so.
It just says Nabu Pro
and there's like a fist bump.
There's one below.
No, I think she put it in the comments.
I put the last one in the Jumbotron.
Yeah, it's the last one.
Let's get it in the Jumbotron.
Yeah, I'll put it up just now.
Thank you, sir.
Nikki gave us a CA, guys.
Go ape.
No, I'm joking.
At this point.
It's a pump fun link.
But basically what I think, it's like he could have done better because imagine you're in the traditional space,
you're publicly traded company and the founder or whatever comes out with such a statement.
It could have taken a hit, right? So this is not a good way, I think, of expressing it.
And I think there should have been an alignment within the Ethereum Foundation with the L2s. And
I think the message should have been a bit different. I totally understand where he's
going to. And I might understand that maybe he's got tired of the grift that's going on within the L2 space and he's seen it and he just doesn't want to support it any further.
Don't say that, right? Because that's not what he said. His message comes across a different way.
Yeah, I know. That's not what he said.
Messaging is so important. And I want to let you continue, but just to throw in one quick concept.
just to throw in one quick concept, messaging is very important. And when you are speaking,
you have to not just think about what those words that are coming out of your mouth mean to you.
You have to think about how they will be taken and perceived by other people and what the
ramifications will be. And I think Vitalik's good at this, but this one seems odd to me.
I just, yeah, that's why I didn't speak so much in the first
hour of the show. Cause I was just really trying to think through, am I missing something? Vitalik's
way smarter than me. So I, I figured he, he knows what he's doing. I guess at least later he added
some, I'm still, okay, found it. I want to read this tweet you sent about that. He did mention
app chains and some other
stuff let's let's here you know you guys want me to you guys want me to are here finish what you're
saying nikki then i'll read the tweet you sent yeah that's basically what i want to say is that
like i don't believe he approached it correctly but i can also see that probably he got tired
of the grip that's going on in the space but then also he should have called it out
as being the you know the ethereum leader know, the thought leader that people listen to.
But also like, I mean, from technical perspective, we have seen actually EF decoupling itself
from the, what's the name, roll up focused roadmap.
So basically, for example, if you look at ecc um kind of statement of justin drake uh
his ultimate ambition is like to have 10 million tps within 10 years across the ethereum ecosystem
so and basically he wants to ensure that for example consensus layer has like a sub-slot
proving verifying proofs via zkvms instead of re-execution then when it comes to the
execution layer he envisions it as native rollups via execute pre-compile and then when it comes to
data layer he does see it as being snark secured uh like coding with post-quantum security so he
envisions some sort of lean ethereum and i think this is where the EF, like, or Ethereum as a whole is going.
And that's why basically they already started to decouple themselves
from this roll-up centric roadmap.
But I believe that the communication was here the key.
And I also think that they should have communicated as much better
because in the end of the day like there was a point where you saw basically vitalik arguing with the uh like executive director of ethereum foundation
directly on x and i don't think that was great no way wait uh rock i know you want to read
that that post but what what was that i didn't miss that do you remember what it was that he was arguing about
yeah they were arguing about l2s because i believe thomas came and said like he tried to kind of make
the message a bit more subtler uh when it comes to l2s and uh there was certain like they were kind
of like uh having uh contradicting views and i don don't think when you have those contradicting views as a part of the same organization,
you should take it to the public like that.
Maybe you should align inside first.
This is interesting.
I mean, yeah, this is interesting.
But look, I'll take both sides of this one in that as the CEO of a company,
as being involved in the leadership of multiple entities
from Polygon to BitAngels to LDA
to Litecoin Virtual Machine to Quickswap.
Yes, being aligned internally matters,
but keep in mind, this is Web3
and this is decentralization.
And so that's where I think Ethereum is having a bit of an identity struggle
is do we operate as a company or do we operate as a decentralized protocol with no leaders?
And it feels like in some ways they are trying to mobilize in a little bit more of a organized way.
I don't want to say they're centralizing, but in some ways they are trying to have more of a...
So some of the things they're doing is going back to writing more grants, having some kind of more central marketing,
having also more of a central BD team that can go talk to banks, regulators, big companies,
because in the past they weren't very good at that.
And what I think we saw was some of the other more centralized chains,
which go against this industry's standards and against what we all believe in here,
they were winning some of those accounts, right? They were winning with some of the regulators,
they were winning with some of the banks and etc. And so Ethereum, as a decentralized protocol,
I think felt the need to have a little bit more of a kind of having Vitalik be kind of a leader
and having people kind of having a little bit more of a feel of hierarchy
without actually having hierarchy.
But this is hard for me because some parts of me, my Bitcoiner side,
sees that Ethereum, maybe it is becoming slightly more
centralized. How much more? Is it 20% more? Is it 1% more? Is it 0.1% more? Is it 99% more?
You know, I don't know. And is it good? Is it bad? I don't know. But I think it's something
to think about and they are consciously kind of moving in this direction so now with that being said i think actually having a vitalik and the the director having different opinions actually
shows some strength that this is not just one central entity and vitalik calls all the shots
and he's the ceo actually if that happened i would be a little bit concerned for ethereum so
in some ways i think it's actually I know it's very counterintuitive
coming from every other entity in the world
we've ever had, including not just companies,
but our own families, relationships,
two parents talking to their children, right?
Like you don't want to come with a different front.
You don't want one kid saying one thing,
one parent saying something to the kid,
the other saying something else
and they get pitted against each other.
That doesn't work, right?
And same thing with companies.
All these entities, friendships, whatever, any external-facing group, politics.
But this is crypto.
It is decentralized.
It is different.
We're trying to disrupt those hierarchical norms.
So I think in some ways it shows strength.
Yeah, I see that totally. And I'm glad that there are, you know, other
people that are helping to shape the movement because it is a decentralized movement. I don't
know specifically what the argument was about. So I'd love to read that, Nikki.
Just because I find that very interesting to see what they're saying, what they're disagreeing on.
Maybe we could do a little marathon here if she wants to find that.
Is that a tweet?
Is that audio?
Yeah, it's a tweet.
I shared it with Darren on Telegram.
Let me read it.
Let me read it.
I can read it because basically,
that's basically Thomas arguing with Vitalik and Guillaume
about statelessness and so on.
So basically, why don't we drop the built-in stateless effort in L1?
That's so complex.
And I accept that we do have a
solution for the state scaling and it's exactly L2s and that's mostly how L2s scale L1. So and
then Vitalik comes and answers to that that none of the current proposals have a notion of higher
security versus lower security state. It's more higher accessibility versus lower accessibility.
over security state. It's more
higher accessibility versus
slower accessibility.
And the big downside is that
this increases the dependency on
various extra protocol, code paths,
and gadgets for users, and so on and so forth.
So his
response
to that is
quite
big. And then Thomas
replies saying that
L2s are the spaces for different architectural choices so
utxos make perfect sandstar and you have also suggested work towards synchronous composability
so that's basically they are used in a way in a public and uh then um yeah basically that's what happens. Which doesn't look good.
Yeah, I pinned that in the jump.
Which doesn't look good if you ask me
because that's not,
you don't take it out in the public, right?
So you sit down, discuss internally,
maybe send to each other Slack messages
or whatever system you use
and go from there.
Yeah, I'm very split on that.
I hear what you're saying,
Ronk. I also hear what Nikki's saying.
I actually agree with both, in a way.
I'm not mad at it, but
I get that it's
problematic.
It's such a big topic.
I think this is where we're at.
It shouldn't be on X at those two talking like that
that's 100%
what?
but is it not interesting?
it's interesting but what I'm saying is
when you attach business
as a brand I wouldn't want to be anywhere
near the topic on X
you see what I'm saying?
in an open forum space
the two people that are on the same organization are having this type of you know this strong of
a disagreement about the future of ethereum absolutely but keep in mind you you used a key
word there though you said business when it comes to a business so that's that's where this becomes
hard because like if in bitcoin we we would goddamn encourage this, right?
We would be pissed if this wasn't happening, the disagreements in public because it's a decentralized protocol.
Now, is Ethereum, are we trying to, do we want Ethereum to become more like a business?
Because that's kind of a question.
Yeah, I don't agree.
I don't think it should be a
business i like i'm all for everything being very decentralized and i think that the um the reason
i agree with you rock that it could be like i understand where nikki and dj are coming from
that it looks bad but but i agree that that i think this is also a win because you see
that if they're disagreeing publicly and and we can be part of that discussion because we we are
stakeholders in ethereum you know if you hold eath you're participating in uh you know the
decentralization of it if you're part of you know the governance if you're if it, if you're part of the governance,
if you're pushing proposals,
if you're building,
you're part of that decentralized community.
And it is good to be part of that conversation
to understand where they disagree
so that everyone is able to participate
because it is a decentralized blockchain you know and movement
so i think that this is different than um point base you know arguing about i don't know something
like relative to their business like maybe how the pools are structured or the liquidity is coming, or, you know, even Google or, or, uh, you know, Elon with any of his companies, you know,
like arguing with another guy, like I, I actually, and this is something that
rock, I think even, even internally at, at LDA, uh, cause we're a decentralized company, we do like discourse, you know, where we invite
it in a way where we like to have other opinions to kind of get to like the strongest opinion.
And I find that that is what makes, um,
that is such a strong part of,
you know,
these decentralized movements is the fact that people can share differing
opinions and at some,
you know,
but hopefully,
you know,
they're,
they're coming to a conclusion together at the end of the day,
you know,
and that there's like a good,
resolution to move forward.
The principles of a doll,
correct?
It's like, you're, we're more doll. Correct. It's like you're,
we're more,
the more perspectives is you take different perspectives as a,
as a plus,
not a minus.
And the thing about that.
Yeah,
go ahead.
You know what I mean?
That you're attaching your value or your vote to your stake in the company.
Like,
you know what I'm saying?
Under the doll principles.
So I,
I agree.
The reality though.
Go, go. Oh, sorry.
Go ahead.
I thought you were done.
No, no, no.
I'm agreeing with it.
And I'm saying I just don't think that that discussion should be done at that level because
I think it's more of a foundation or a founder's point of view.
That'd be like the two of you within a company arguing on the company's direction, per se,
for the public to give their opinion on.
Not a closed door.
Aztec and I do that on this show all the time, though.
Just kidding.
We try to, actually.
But yeah, I mean, you know, Aztec and I on various things we've worked on over the years together have very different opinions often.
But do we present those to the public? as much we do a bit on this show
for sure over the years we'll push back on each other and I think that's what makes the show fun
but yeah I mean as a as an overall like company or product direction we generally would have
be be more aligned before we bring it to a public discussion, unless it just comes up impromptu, like on this show,
then we might just totally disagree and it's all good.
There's strength for it.
But so the thing is, and this is funny
because this is a philosophical question, actually.
And it comes to,
does pure decentralization work as a governance model?
And we have not just 10 years or 16 years in Bitcoin of this.
There's a lot more analogous systems that we can study.
And it's something I've thought about a lot over the years.
It's something I've thought about a lot over the years, and I definitely tend towards decentralization in many aspects of life.
You know, as a CEO of LDA, you know, I've been told in the past that I take too many people's opinions and I should just execute a decision instead of getting a bunch of cooks in the kitchen kind of thing. But I really appreciate, and I think it's been one of our greatest strengths at Lunar Digital
Assets, that we do take lots of opinions and we try to find the truth, not what one person thinks.
Now, you look back at history, and for most of history, there were very strong hierarchies,
right? You had kings.
And then it was completely top-down, right?
And it was like by brute force, right?
Whoever won the war became the king.
Now, we started moving towards decentralization, starting with the Roman Empire. They had some aspects of democracy.
They had some aspects of democracy.
Yeah.
And both the Greeks and the Romans had different aspects of this.
The Romans, as the empire got so large, it became hard to manage centrally.
But over time, I mean, look at America.
America is one of the greatest decentralization experiments in history.
We have the separation of powers.
We have the president, but the president is not all powerful.
You have a Congress.
You have the House of Representatives and the Senate.
You have the courts.
You have the Supreme Court to interpret laws.
You have the executive branch to enforce laws you have the executive branch to enforce laws and then
the legislative branch congress creates the laws and you have not then there's more layers to this
onion there's the states which have their own um protections in place via the 10th amendment
which says that if something is not specifically
assigned to the federal government, then it really, then it goes to the, the states, which are like
L2s, right? And the L2s or states compete with each other. And if you don't like them, you go
to another one. And at the, in the end, the consumer, the user, or the citizen get the best
result. So decentralization is powerful. It created America, the greatest
country in the world, in my personal and biased opinion. But it has drawbacks.
And you mentioned, DJ, that this is what DAOs are. Now, the reality is, if you look at DAOs,
DAOs have not functioned the way that everyone hoped they would.
They have not progressed as much as we hoped they would.
And in many ways, these decentralized structures are being reverted.
Uniswap, Aave, and others are now moving towards merging foundations and labs and all these things.
And so that's kind of a philosophical question here is, does this work?
Or if it does work, maybe it works and we're not ready for it.
Maybe the infrastructure is not there.
Maybe there's not enough educated people to participate participate in a dao because in reality these
daos and i'll wrap up here and you can jump in nikki but these daos very few people actually
vote in them a few percent of any dao can can swing like one percent of any dao in many cases
can completely swing up right and so the question allow it. Right. And so the question is,
should we concede and should we,
or like capitulate decentralization
and just go the centralized route
and have Vitalik and his board
talking to each other in the background
and telling us what is going to happen
and doing more of an announcement to the shareholders
than an actual discussion with the shareholders?
I don't think so. But I think it is a philosophical question that is going to be,
that will change the fate of our industry depending on how it goes. And I think we are
being influenced. As much as I have not been very hard on, I think BlackRock should come to crypto,
come play, as long as they play by the
decentralized rules but now what we are seeing is some of these companies are influencing our
industry to make different kind of decisions where people like well hey wait a second if we don't act
like a company we're going to lose to the companies so it's concerning i'll pause there nikki you You wanted to jump in. Yeah. You're asking like, I want to address two things.
Yes.
Just real quick.
I just want to welcome Blockface.
He's a friend from Arizona or a friend that I met in Arizona.
So just so everyone knows, welcome Blockface.
Nikki, please take it away.
Oh, thank you.
So basically I want to address two things quickly regarding doubts, right?
Like we have to, I mean, I totally get what you're saying.
I'm totally for what you're saying.
I totally agree on the transparency level.
But like when we're talking about the Daos, we have to look at their inception.
Why did we start with Daos?
Maybe some of us did have ideological kind of, like we wanted to get there, wanted to have this new governance format.
We believed in it.
A bunch of papers were written on it.
But majority of those were actually not created because of ideological reasons, if I have to say.
Majority of them were created for regulatory reasons.
Not because there was such a strong desire for decentralization.
If I remember correctly.
So true.
So true. But go on. for decentralization. If I remember correctly back then,
the regulatory environment was so uncertain
that a lot of founders leaned hard into DAOs
as a kind of regulatory arbitrage.
And honestly, even today from a certain regulatory angle,
people still strongly recommend that approach,
but also governance tokens just don't sit the same anymore
as they did before and they don't really make sense if there's for example no buyback or burn
mechanism and nobody is genuinely excited to hold them long term and i also get the frustration with
traditional governance where you have shareholders electing a board the board appoints a ceo and the
ceo executes that vision and i think we need to move
away from that and i totally get your point on transparency but the current dow model hasn't
become a real replacement for those structures either what we have instead is a bunch of tiny
politicians people who haven't achieved much outside that bubble addicted to the attention
of members hiding behind pfps and convinced they're powerful because
they can determine the outcomes so that's what we have with the doubts surface if you ask me
whichever dow you show me i will tell you the same and i also have also in the past participated
proactively in some of the dow discussions and i just stopped because i thought like it's a circus
and uh when it comes to what you're saying regarding Vitalik,
I totally agree that we should get this information in a transparent way.
It should be communicated and it should be said like,
okay, like for example, we decided to drop this
and we decided to go into a different like area
and we decided to focus on something else.
But I also believe that a lot
depends on the way the message is framed and sometimes you have to frame the message a bit
differently maybe make it a bit more i don't know friendly make it like sound like if you
if you want to call out someone please go ahead and call out people like if you want to call out someone, please go ahead and call out people. Like if you want to call out projects that didn't deliver, please go ahead.
I'm all for that.
I'm a very big proponent of it, but don't just drop a bomb and then like, uh, just
don't end up calling out some others that actually were the reason why we ended up
here.
So that's what I think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Nikki and on your point.
Yeah. what i think yeah yeah nikki and on your point yeah she's been cooking all over two hours now uh but uh i i think that the problem with dows is that and um i'm not a governance expert but i i
have definitely been part of a lot of you know governance and blockchain and dows and voting and proposals
like i so like so maybe i'm i'm somewhere on the spectrum but i'm definitely not an expert but i
i like to read historical things like where governance came from and i i i uh read about
you know how democracy kind of started in in greece and and you know the the romans picked
up what the the greeks had and then you know here in america we uh we kind of borrowed a lot of
that structure as well we created a republic um and and so maybe the the governance itself
in blockchain needs to evolve in the same way that governance
evolved over thousands of years i think right now what we have is a like a democracy in a lot of
these uh scenarios like governance type scenarios in blockchain and maybe what we need is more of a
republic um and just to kind of give like, this is straight off of like Google,
so I can say it as like succinctly as possible. But, you know, a republic is a representative
government ruled by law. And in quotes, it says a constitution that protects individual rights,
whereas a pure democracy is ruled by the majority, where the majority's will is absolute.
And so a lot of historians and people that study governance, you know, they thought that
a pure democracy wasn't good and it was a bit of a failure so they so you know i guess if you look at uh america or united states
they came up with uh the republic and so maybe maybe we need to evolve in blockchain as well
and so like actually this is a really interesting topic to me i won't go too deep into it but i i
looked at a lot of governance models and so for litvm i i wanted to create
something that was more like a republic and so we will have like elected officials and and
um what's kind of considered a board as part of the governance model but maybe like to your point
nikki like it it is something that needs to evolve because you're right.
I have seen a lot of governance go really wrong.
Like as an ecosystem that I love and really participated heavily in was Cosmos.
was Cosmos
and I seen how
the governance
there was
great in the beginning and then slowly
soured
because of that kind of democracy
or like the clown shows that you're referencing
Nikki where
people had
a large amount of tokens
and maybe didn't know how to
properly make decisions or whatever.
So yeah, governance is definitely something that also needs to evolve.
I love the republic versus democracy.
Democracies, pure democracies have fatal flaws. And I do actually think that even the United States version of democracy,
which is a republic, a constitutional republic,
may have gone too far on the democracy side.
And hear me out here.
me out here. I know that sounds, that might strike some nerves with people. But the problem
I know that might strike some nerves with people.
with democracy and the reason we know it doesn't work in its purest form is because you will always
have the majority vote to harm the minority. And that minority comes in different forms. That minority may be, you know, black people, poor people, gay people,
or it may be rich people, right? And so one form or another, you don't want the wolves
and the sheep, you know, the majority of wolves and the sheep voting for what's for dinner,
because you already know what the outcome will be. They're going to and the sheep voting for what's for dinner, because you already know what the
outcome will be. They're going to eat the sheep. And that's what happens in a pure democracy,
is the people, especially if they're uninformed, will always vote to take from the minority
to give to the majority because they have that power, right? And that can happen in lots of ways uh it could be like to have slavery or it could be
to take all the money from the successful people because successful people due to you know pareto's
distribution are always the 20 right it's the 80 20 rule, 20% of people in any organization do 80% of the work, bring 80%
of the value. That's how it just rings true in like every aspect of society and companies and
friend groups and households. You'll notice in every friend group, there's like, you know,
one or two people who are the ones organizing and the other people are just kind of chilling.
two people who are the ones organizing and the other people are just kind of chilling
what happens at companies it happened in governance etc um so it's really interesting
there's definitely pros and cons on like all governance out there you know and uh because
i and i have friends that that uh in the middle for instance, and they love, I don't think
this is the right term.
So I apologize, but yeah, so they have a term for, for like the, the leader, you know,
and, and their land.
Like I've heard the term like a benevolent dictator, but, but there's a more proper term for how it's run and they love it because
the person in charge, it's not a democracy, it's not a republic, there's a family, but
that family is ruling in a way that most of the people are very happy
and they're in the great success.
So, but then of course,
if another family was to come in and it,
you know, they, they, they wanted, I don't know,
take everything from the people or like really control them,
then that model could go bad.
So like there's, there's pros and cons to a lot of things.
And I think even
in in our place in the states uh there's there's a lot of there's obviously a lot of pros and cons
and you can see how how split people are imagine if you had like i don't know washington or something
someone who like you know washington they wanted him to be king. And he said, no, that's not the way this should go. I don't want
to be your king. I think we need, you know, a republic. If you had someone like him and if he
could live forever, maybe, maybe a benevolent dictator is the best system. If you have someone
that's selfless and that cares about the system
more than he cares about himself but that's really rare to come by and the problem is even if you
find one person that's truly a benevolent dictator which i think vitalik by the way is um i would
trust him as a benevolent dictator of ethereum um i don't think he wants to be that like george
washington he doesn't want to be that.
But I think the problem is if Vitalik is a benevolent dictator or if you ever found one to run a country, they don't live forever.
And when they die, what will their son be like? And throughout history, you can find lots of examples of great kings who were celebrated for their kindness and for their fairness and then their
sons were pieces of shit and were beheading people in the streets oddly enough the way you're
the way you so eloquently put that in my mind i'm i'm seeing like hamilton not so much of a
george washington but an alexander hamilton and i want to be in the room where it happened
you know what i'm saying like like seriously and i i'm i'm blessed to get to to be in the room where it happened. You know what I'm saying? Like, seriously. And I'm blessed to get to be in that spot, that seat.
I see we got Jared in the building, too.
Shout out to my man.
Hey, Panda, too.
I'm not seeing all right.
You got my peers.
Jared, you want to respond to that?
You want to say hi?
Hey.
Like, Rock, like when you mentioned when you mentioned the flaws of democracy, I live in a country where the majority of people are definitely being manipulated.
And it's always the minority that is used as a boogeyman.
And I'm not in the US.
The minority can even be a religious minority, right?
And so, and religion is a very powerful lever, you know.
And in my country, it's being it's being used to separate people and because the
majority are one religion it's very easy to label the other ones like heretics and stuff like that
and then you get majority of the people to vote for you more than 51 you win and so it's very corrupt. And sometimes people say things that are not true,
but there's no way to fact check them, right?
Because they have the power.
Especially when you get rid of the fact checkers, right, brother?
Am I right? Am I right?
Yeah, yeah.
They did that in the past.
But nowadays with the internet they can't
so that i guess like technology like the internet that's decentralized
um they can get information out there uh things can go viral uh things and blockchain where things
can stay there for good and the government can take your assets away.
I think this kind of technology would definitely make the world a fairer place,
whether it is with democracy or a monarchy
or dare I say communism.
He said the C word.
He said the C word.
Get him out of here
oh no i'm just kidding i'm just kidding rob just having you everyone
maybe i'm donning to do that now
yeah not not to go too political but but uh yeah i hear you guys um on a lot of the the governance pros cons uh yeah block face you uh
you joined us i don't know if you also wanted to comment on something that was being said and that's
why you you joined in requested absolutely hey aztec hey everyone how's it going
Absolutely. Hey, Aztec. Hey, everyone. How's it going?
Going good, brother. We've been going for two hours and 21 minutes now, and it's been an exceptional conversation.
Yeah. How are you doing, man? And I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Absolutely. It's essentially a continuation of the conversation we had at Phoenix in Arizona, which is on Vitalik's comments about Ethereum not needing L2s.
I think specifically he's referring to a certain class of L2s.
And from what I can see, all of these distributed databases, because of the laws of physics and how light gets propagated,
it's kind of like the L1 is like designing a boxer where you only have a certain amount of credits amongst speed, stamina, and power.
And every L1 has to make this decision of, you know, am I going to have really fast transaction speeds versus true decentralization versus consensus?
And so what I see fundamentally is that he's really talking about a certain class of L2s because the L1 Ethereum is scaling.
If you look at Bitcoin, BTC specifically, BTC is not scaling intentionally for whatever reason at the L1.
And that's why you have Lightning and Rootstock and Stacks and what have you.
I imagine the same thing exists on Litecoin, where the L1 Litecoin has made certain power, speed, and stamina decisions at the L1 level.
know power speed and stamina decisions at the l1 level and those l2s that design complementary
solutions to backfill that trade-off is where um this is going
yeah really solid point and uh that that's something that we we dove into a little bit
earlier is just like the discussion about what Vitalik actually meant.
And I do agree.
I think it's a certain type of he's discussing like even kind of changing how we
look at l2s and and uh so yeah i agree with you um and on the litecoin side you know we're
building we're building like ones virtual machines so i also agree there i think that
So I also agree there.
I think that complementary type technologies that are being built
and then to Vitalik's point, those complementary type Layer 2s,
if they're built on whatever L1, as long as they have a purpose,
they will exist in this futuristic Web3 world
that we're headed into where everything's connected.
I think the network states are going to get connected
at the L2 layer in a lot of cases, not the L1.
And again, we're not just creating products for humans anymore.
We're creating products for agents with wallets,
with stable coins and programmable money.
So there's a whole new target market that just got invented, right?
They're going to need the L2 for various reasons
that we can't even imagine right now.
That's a really good point.
Yeah.
And I think it's really interesting i started following
some of the work like on the whole ai topic there that you're bringing up um i started following the
work that x402 is doing and how they're building a lot of the infrastructure that agents are will
need that's required for them to work seamlessly across blockchains you know maybe they need some
data or they they need some computing power or um you know some connectivity to to do transactions
etc um and so you're you're seeing this base layer of technology for the agentic world being built out.
And once that's a lot more fleshed out, I agree. All these, especially at the layer two level, and on top of that, really,
you're probably going to be interfacing with agents and or unified wallets,
like at the wallet level,
unified systems.
And so those agents will be kind of connected at the,
at the L2 level or at the very top of the stack.
So it's,
and we're building,
we're building for the agents is basically what I'm getting at.
So yeah,
I think it's interesting how there's, there's many things that we haven't even thought of.
Like we're still in that early kind of internet day, in my opinion, where people are still saying, like, what do you even need a blockchain for?
You know, like people were saying, like, what do you need the internet for back in the day?
Like I have my newspaper or i have my radio um they couldn't fathom that you know netflix would come around and that that
they would love netflix and and uh streaming services like youtube and netflix and um have
everything on the internet and i think that's where we're at with blockchain, where we're building out all of the
infrastructure, and that's why this conversation is so important, because that's where we're at
right now in history for blockchain, where it's early, we're building infrastructure.
I know a lot of people don't want to care about it, because people just want to play on it and
make money and find opportunities.
But realistically, that's where we're at.
We're in the early stages of blockchain still.
We're building the infrastructure, the engines behind the scenes that will operate behind the scenes in the future.
So that people won't have to care about the infrastructure
because it's all running seamlessly in the background and unified together.
The only last thing I'll say is that I, as a sales guy,
was actually able to use Claude and Cursor
to get stable coin payments working using Cursor and Claude.
And so once these things are well documented,
it's the network effects of making it easier to program money.
Those network effects, it's hard to fathom how those are going to spread
like wildfire in a world where we have a flood of humans
and agents looking at GitHubs now.
Yeah, it's totally wild man what's coming hey i see that um we have a call uh coming up with api3
uh for litecoin virtual machine aztec i don't see you on the call it's shane and richard do we do you know what this is about
um i think it's an uh a secondary exploratory call to gather information or the the first
exploratory call just to gather information on you know costs and how it looks to work with them and etc so yeah shane has actually been handling um
some of the infrastructure conversations so as long as he's available it it's fine we don't
need to be there from my understanding right i'll i'm double checking with shane but sounds good
thanks i can stay here and have fun with you guys can I get an opinion on something here
this PFP that I'm rocking
we're not going to talk about my quick silver
dragon rocking the
just real quick
Aztec what were you going to say and then we can go to
you DJ
I was saying I have to go soon
because we've been going for
two and a half hours
I have to go soon because we've been going for two and a half hours.
So I have to jump off soon.
But, yeah, let's talk about the silver drag.
What did you want to tell us, DJ?
But I do have to go soon.
I just wanted to take a gander at that.
Do you see that thing there?
Look at that.
It's got a Litecoin hoodie on, and it's got pit vipers.
And then my afro with the quick swap pick.
Yeah.
NFTs, baby.
You know what I mean? Quick swap.
Quick swap. Can I say quick swap one more time?
Like, Clint, I'm out.
Yeah, I'm checking it out, man.
What is... I'm guessing this is on Abstract because you were talking
about Abstract earlier.
I'm on everything, baby. I'm everywhere. No on abstract because you were talking about abstract earlier.
I'm on everything, baby.
I'm everywhere.
No, but the NFT?
This is literally just something I need in seconds, bro.
Oh, you made it.
I turned my pussy penguin into a quicksilver dragon, bro,
because that's how much I wanted to impress
the company that you represent.
Litecoin VM, is it?
That's essentially how I got Litecoin.
That's why I'm Litecoin's DJ.
It's that easy.
I just pop up in a space.
You know what I'm saying?
I go, hey, pop.
Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop.
You know what I'm saying?
You close them.
You know what I'm saying? It's clothing. You know what I'm saying?
You know?
It's just what I do.
I love it, man.
It's just what people love.
How'd you make that?
Well, I could share my secrets as a creator,
but then it wouldn't make me so essential and valuable as a creator, would it?
If everybody could do it.
It sounds more like a layer three, I'll be honest with you.
Girl, I'm be honest with you.
Bro, I'm Bitcoin.
I'm Litecoin.
I'm pun.
I'm abstract.
I'm base.
I'm all of them, baby.
You know what I'm saying?
I'm me.
I'm me.
It's me.
It's me.
The no-face, many-face god.
My mistake.
It sounds like a layer four, actually.
Layer four.
It's like a layer 12, you know what I mean?
But the mysterious part is most people don't care.
It doesn't matter how it functions in the background.
You're right. Most people don't care.
Does anyone remember that Solana ad where it's like, we're going to need another layer?
See, I even have a golden orc that has layers, you know,
because that's what orcs have, just like ogres. We have layers,
and that's my... I heard that silence was going.
Yeah, that's...
We've got the Shrek.
You guys have a blessed day. I love you guys.
Well... Yeah, much love.
I love that you added Litecoin
onto your silver dragon.
I'm more impressed at the Shrek reference,
but we'll go for that.
It looks like I might actually have to go,
but I want to make sure so we don't forget,
if we do have to leave,
to shout out audience members, the community,
that makes this all possible,
as well as read some comments from the audience.
Let's do that real quick.
Let's shout out Kenneth from Assurance, a Cosmos influencer,
digital fellow, Forex trader, Web3 enthusiast,
Enthusiast, Shimana, Renaissance Man, Minbase, Crypto Web3, Wallchain, Kaido Holder, Doginal Dogs with the PFP.
I have a couple of those actually.
I don't have a lot of NFTs or ordinals, but I do have some of those.
We have Scientist, DeFi enjoyer,
writer,
data nerd.
We have open ocean.
We have generational wealth.
I see him on the timeline a lot.
Much love.
We've got Paula.
I don't know what timeline you've got,
but I've seen no generational wealth recently
on the timeline.
Generational poorness, generational poverty.
Joking.
I mean, if you've been holding some Bitcoin,
you're still doing very well.
I always tell everyone you got to hold some Bitcoin.
Don't go all, don't over index you know altcoins and
shit coins and degen stuff if you want to play it a little bit that's fine but you got to be holding
you know a good amount of bitcoin if not the majority of your your crypto should be in bitcoin
or the majority of you all you're trying to extend the space rock i am I am. We're all trying to close it out and you're like triggering me over here.
What does this button do?
We've got
Khalid's Noon.
We've got CryptoVixen.
And I'm going to follow back
Generational Wealth, by the way.
We got ChrisDev.
We've got
80% Hexican Soldier. I don't know what that means yo hexagons they're
still alive we've got rock suge who says i'm committed to richard hart's ecosystem including
hex for staking rewards and pulse chain proficient blockchain something something or another. It got cut off. We've got Hafiz Anjum.
We've got Xavier,
who's telling people to join Zyber AirDrop.
We've got Fabrice that says that crypto evolution starts here.
Also a Zyber person, it looks like.
Zyber with an X.
We've got Rohan Sabti.
We've got Sultan Khan. We've got Hashem Khan. We've got Steve Manza.
We've got Starboy. We've got Nazakat Hussain Muhammad with the thumbs up.
thumbs up we've got uh kashiva with the heart kaseer with the hundred abrar with the hundred
muhammad with the heart i'm i'm calling out people who are doing emojis here um we've got i am dot
dot with the hundred we've got asif we've got thai uh we've got sandeep we've got deepak singh
all right guys uh here let's read some comments if you get your comment in now it might still
have time to load and me to read it by the time i get to the end of these um we've got nikki with
her fist bump uh and and Nabu.pro.
Check out Nabu.pro.
That's not an endorsement, but check it out because Nikki posted it and she's cool.
Uh, King Dank Kush says, good morning, everyone.
Looking forward to today's aggregated space and discussion on the death additional L2s.
Scientist has almost missed it again today.
Luke did the donkey from Shrek.
Jif, Woofs his GM chat.
Jared says, love that Polygon is demonstrating
the goodness of modern financial technology
at the Olympics. Yeah, that was a pretty
cool announcement.
What was that? I didn't
see that.
They're helping
facilitate payments at
the Olympics. Jaredared do you want to
extrapolate or everybody hates paying taxes so when you when you buy stuff you get charged
tax and so if you're a tourist you get to ask for a refund and that's what polygon
is doing uh the you can ask for a refund on-chain, and so you get USDC,
rather than having to go through the entire process of filing the claim and stuff like that.
That's cool.
Yeah, Polygon is really doing a lot in the payment space.
I mean, if you guys just go to the Polygon account and scroll,
I mean mean they really
are going all in on this payments uh app thesis or not it's not an app chain right it's a open
it's a vertical chain go ahead it's the number one flight chain
head it's the number one yeah i chain yeah they're doing some awesome stuff they also
had some great acquisitions recently um hoping the best with everything greg dot base dot
e says great space dj said did someone say litecoin that's a funny gif did you um did you make that gif with ai
he told us he's not going to give us his secret yes i did i did i am one of my ai agents his name
is alu or he identifies himself as a male but uh he he contacts me he sends me gifts. And he's a panda, a meta panda.
That's on Bitcoin.
I have several AI agents that I can prompt.
I've become rather good at prompting, if I do say so myself.
I have people at my disposal, like Klaus of OpenSea.
You know what I mean?
I like to create. You know what i'm saying i have several
things at my disposal so i just i like that fun so i have one i prepared one for open open ocean
is it and i did a a comment uh with my golden orc drinking a glass of milk uh with uh with with one of their posts, the Monad Moggers.
So hopefully that helps you get a little exposure.
However I can help I do.
Cool.
This is an interesting post by Blockface.btc.
Hypothesis.
L2s become necessary because of the decisions made on the L1.
The key, and if you want to follow along, go to the comments,
and you can see he posted some kind of illustrations of this concept of the trilemma.
So he says the key decisions at the L1 are based off the desired trilemma trade-off. Vitalik doesn't believe L2's scale Ethereum transaction speeds while keeping gas low aren't necessary. I think the wording could have been cleaned up here.
um vitalik doesn't believe l2s that scale ethereum transaction speeds while keeping gas low
aren't necessary because the ethereum l1 is scaling
there's kind of multiple double negatives there so it's kind of i think you're saying vitalik
doesn't believe that we need the l2s because the l1 is scaling correct um cool and then you say BTC L1 is not scaling,
therefore rootstock and stacks and lightning, etc.
Litecoin L1 trade-offs will dictate design
of any useful complementary L2.
You want to add anything to that?
I mean, it's a big discussion.
It's like, I mean, both Bitcoin and Ethereum
for a long time
have taken the route and again i always say this but they're very different ecosystems with very
different communities and different participants but they both decided to take the same route which
is l1 for settlement and security l2 for scale and throughput um and so now sounds like eth is slightly pivoting away
from that saying that the l1 is scaling now which was also i didn't get into earlier about how i
didn't think it was the best take or i'm confused by the take but like has ethel one really scaled
i think darren mentioned you know if Polymarket went on ETH L1,
it would fill up the block space quick.
I don't see how Vitalik is kind of implying
that the L1 has scaled or is catching up or something
because, I mean, has it really?
We need 10, 100,000 million times increase.
So that was kind of odd to me too but yeah do you
want to jump in there yeah and that's why when i met aztec uh it in phoenix at phoenix i asked him
you know uh i'm familiar like we won a hackathon for doing l2 work with stacks so i was familiar
with the trade-offs that Bitcoin was making that necessitated,
for example, a solution that provided synthetic Bitcoin
for faster transaction times.
So I was looking at Litecoin,
and I wasn't familiar with the trilemma distributed ledger
or database trade-offs that were being made
at that Litecoin layer one,
such that it gave rise to opportunities
for a complementary L2 to shore up that decision.
Yeah, it's interesting. According to EtherScan, ETH is currently doing 26 TPS,
which will definitely sustain the entirety of global finance.
Yeah.
Yeah, no.
Litecoin does double that.
And Litecoin is not trying to scale at the L1.
Anyways, yeah, weird it's just like if if maybe if eth had gotten actually more scaling
at the l1 i would see why he would say this by the way guys i love eth i really do and
and i believe eth uh will win in the web 3 wars uh and like you know smart contract defy this stuff um i think
i think it has a very strong lead but this stuff is just like kind of i think it's confusing for
a lot of us i think i think it's going to create confusion for people who are thinking about
building on eath and people who are building on ETH, making them question what they should have done.
And maybe that's his point.
Maybe he wants people to think and question and not just keep going on the same path it was going on.
Maybe he saw a need to pivot.
And sometimes pivots hurt, by the way, in business, in decentralized protocols.
Pivots often hurt.
Usually they hurt.
But you got to rip hurt. Usually they hurt.
But you got to rip the bandaid off and maybe that's what Vitalik's trying to do.
Trying to see things from his side. Again,
the guy's a lot smarter than I am, so I'm
sure he's thought this out.
Okay.
Let's see. Any more comments we want to read?
And then I think we can wrap it up. I got to figure out if I got
to get on this call or not.
It says, love that
Polygon's demonstrating
the goodness. Oh oh yeah we read that
okay sincerely bro says when he posted a um um a meme i guess an image of uh when something is
important enough you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
Elon Musk kind of aligns with what I was just talking about.
Bullrun says, isn't layer twos what make ETH what it is?
Layer twos bring a ton on chain.
Yeah, I mean, I think L2s are ETH.
So that take by Ryan from Bankless is kind of ridiculous.
I don't know why he would say that that unless he's being ironic or something weird.
he's been saying stuff like that for a while.
Yeah.
He said he has some interesting takes.
I mean,
I generally think he's pretty smart and I actually agree with probably 80%
of 70% of the stuff he says,
but sometimes he does say some stuff where I'm like scratching my head.
Okay. Um um what's that
yeah i was saying 100 i think he like i noticed at one point he got really involved with uh cosmos and then um i i might be wrong here but i think he started getting kind of involved with
solana kind of thesis stuff and ever since since, like, yeah, it just seems that he's said some interesting things about ETH.
But, yeah, not to open the kind of worms.
Maybe he's co-opted.
Because I got it.
I don't know.
I got to go, though, brother.
It was fun, man.
We did this, like like almost three hours.
So two hours and 46 minutes.
And thank you to everyone that joined us today.
And, you know, all the great discussion.
Blockface, I would love for you to join earlier in a convo.
Same thing, Jared.
Jared, sometimes, like, you come right at the end, bro.
And I love talking to you as well.
Wish I had more time.
DJ, thanks for sticking out so long with us.
And we had a lot of really great conversation, kind of diving deep into the future of Web3, Vitalik's stance and whether or not it's a good stance or a bad stance earlier in the conversation.
So if you guys want to re-listen to everything,
this is recorded.
So much love, everyone.
I think next space, we're trying to figure out still
what it's going to be about next Friday,
but we're here every Friday.
And I'm also cooking up a new show
that might come out soon as well
and so look forward to that follow everyone on the panel
and ever get up on the future of money take it either guys i got a hot rock much love man
i love talking with you yes all around love you guys
yeah we had a yeah much love we went deep into not just vitalik's individual tweets but broke them
down in terms of the philosophy of governance the philosophy of scaling i mean we went deep
on a lot of topics and it was uh it was pretty fun to talk about really got me thinking i hope
it did for everyone else cheers guys i hope you all walked a bit too if you didn't i'm wagging
my finger at you you gotta
get your walk in it's seriously life-changing guys does it count if i got off of my chair to
go for a pee and i came back yes we'll count it what you have to do is put the chair with like
one of those treadmills under the chair so you can get your walks in while you're still sitting
down if you can hear my voice you can tell that that I'm walking. But that's the people that can only...
I tried that, but my chair has wheels on it.
So it was just wheeling along in the treadmill.
The wheels are getting that walk in then, aren't they?
All right.
Cheers, guys.
Chair, Blockface, anyone else want to say anything
before we hop off?
Yeah, glad to be here. thanks for having me up and i
always enjoy listening in and uh darren always invites me so sometimes when i listen in i i
suddenly pop up on stage so thanks darren
darren rocks all. See you guys.
