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The Lookout W/ John Wang
Recorded: April 11, 2024 Duration: 0:35:10Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hello, testing, can you hear me?
Okay, I've got a thumbs up, which I'm assuming means you can hear me.
We're just going to wait a couple of minutes for our guests today.
I'm just going to DM them quickly.
So hold tight and we'll get started shortly.
how's it going
hello hello can you can you hear me can you hear me okay yes i can i can hear you okay so it's all
going well gm yes so welcome everyone this is the lookout uh space on x slash twitter
as we used to know it um so today we've got a very special guest um we have limited time so i'll try
and do all the introductions and everything um sooner uh get them out the way and then we can
get straight into the discussion um so yeah welcome to the lookout it's um a space where
we try and take a kind of top-down look at the blockchain industry in dragon ball z there's a
giant geo stationary platform in orbit above the planet uh where the story takes place and
sometimes characters kind of squat on it and look down on everything that's happening on the planet
so that's kind of what we're doing here we're looking down um from a very high level on uh big
industry trends um with people who have something to say um builders and leaders in the space uh and
also we're not going to talk about any uh trading or tokens or prices or anything like that that's
what everyone else does so so you probably heard it all already and it's not what we find interesting
we're talking about uh the technology here and and you know interesting stuff going on in the
industry so i am your host i'm angus i do dev rel at say so if you're interested in building
anything um you've got any ideas we've got some exciting programs coming up and also we've got some
good support groups you can join um on telegram and discord where you can speak to other devs
uh get your questions answered um and discuss you know building stuff in the ecosystem uh also
should mention as well there's been the say creator fund was announced uh last week this week um at
nft new york um so that's an exciting 10 million dollars uh fund available for creators in the say
ecosystem um to to build uh cool stuff so that is also available uh i'll tweet out a link that people
can use to apply uh for the creator fund as well so that's very exciting um so yes uh without further
delay i'd like to introduce our guest today john wang so uh why don't you hop on and say hello give a
quick introduction to yourself and then i will also say a couple bits after
awesome thanks angus um so my name is john i'm originally born in sydney
um i just dropped out of penn where i was studying cs and finance but i've been actually
in crypto for a very long time um so i started trading in 2017 then joined immutable where i helped
launch imx um and then i was very involved in d5 governance via like the um partnering with like
and recent horowitz um and some other vcs in dela token delegation so i helped propose the second
uniswap proposal with gfx labs um and then i started my own company in crypto where i um we essentially
built like define infra um products one of them um scaled up to around 1.6 billion in tvl and then we got
acquired um so now i'm kind of just exploring and having fun on twitter um also doing my own building
on the side awesome so i'd like to uh point out to everyone you should go and follow john wright
immediately um on x there's actually a really good like pinned introductory kind of thread about uh your
history john and i'd like to say thank you for putting that in there as someone who has to find
guests for twitter spaces it's extremely useful to have a little kind of blurb of uh you know
interesting things about people uh what people's stories are pinned to the top of the page so you
don't have to look through a bunch of tweets and figure out like oh is this the kind of person that we
want to talk to um there are some really interesting uh nuggets in there though i would say
so you you mentioned that you've dropped out of uh uh college um well i prefer to think about it
maybe temporarily pause you can always go back uh if you want to right but that's actually the second
time you've you've uh you've you've stopped your education right yeah i feel like this time might be
lost otherwise i'm just gonna piss off my parents like way too much but right yeah so obviously there's the uh
yeah the the the the family considerations um you know if if you're a college dropout that has some
some kind of uh connotations right but also if you do want to go back to university uh or college would
they let you back in if you say on your kind of cv or your transcript uh i've dropped out twice already
or do they take your money yeah i don't think they care they're pretty flexible at pen
i imagine yeah certainly uh uh you know uh the university systems that i'm familiar with
i think they would take money from anyone um so that's interesting also interesting i mean i i don't
even want to think what you're kind of uh the immigration headache you have if you're going
somewhere and become a student and then you know then you drop out i don't know i don't know what uh what
goes on there but um i also have to ask as well so you mentioned there that you kind of you went to
visit the trial of sbf uh live was that it was in new york right yeah that was super interesting i wrote
a thread about it like a week ago it was in new york it was in financial district um near wall street
did you have to kind of could could anyone just go along or did you have to apply for some special access
yeah surprisingly i think these trials um anyone can come along it's it's like a civilian right
um i'm not an american citizen myself so you don't even need to be one yeah wow amazing um
that's cool so uh i think we we identified uh quite a few topics that we're going to get into
and seeing in the interest of time i'll move on um so so basically we kind of identified three
big things that we're going to talk about um i think they all kind of overlap with each other
a little bit so why don't we start off uh and this kind of tracks your career uh trajectory as well
which is you've built some stuff in defy right and i wanted to ask you like what were some of the things
that you learned along the way building in defy you know what are some i mean yeah can you tell us a bit
about your journey building defy what did you find interesting what did you learn uh and you know
what do you see is exciting for the future of defy yeah i think defy is super interesting because um
it essentially allows you to automate so many things um and make like finance real really real time
that's what's exciting to me and i think this cycle around um blackrock joining in gives me the
ability to take a pause and just imagine like what if we had all of the world's financial or even not
even just like the biggest financial assets um or long tail assets on the blockchain and what we could
do with that would be insane like liquidating assets using oracles real time um allows you to just
re-hypothecate and like leverage up at an insane rate and then also be like much more capital
efficient in ensuring like liquidations and stuff are priced um correctly whereas the kind of boom and
bust you had with the 2008 bubble um occurred because a lot of the um a lot of the leverage was done with
these mortgage-backed securities which were not very were not priced very correctly or very opaquely
packaged um so yeah i i like defy legos um i think it's interesting i think the trend towards modularity
and defy as well is also um the way we should be going so protocols like morpho which are making more
trustless immutable systems underneath um and then adding like different things that you can swap in
and out on top is probably the better way i think monolithic protocols like ave
um and or like uniswap amm a v2 amms are kind of a relic of the past um and then you know with newer
faster protocols like say coming on the chain um that are really really fast you can kind of get
like a lot of the performance enhancements and bring on things like order books um that really
are the end state of what defy should be and i think athena is kind of an example of a protocol which
has kind of had to make a lot of centralization trade-offs because a lot of the def uh the infra for
defy isn't there yet like although we have fast tps blockchains most of the activity is still on
centralized exchanges and a big part of this cycle will actually just be like we can unlock
a whole new community um and and crew and like have a whole like on chain um bull run if we just
capture more centralized exchange users and bring them on chain um and that's part of my thesis we
don't this cycle we don't even need to onboard new people um in order to like have a decent
growth trajectory um so i think yeah say has a really important role in enabling like the next
generation of defy applications um like set like athena and evo kind of come to mind in in terms of
defy apps that are in the next generation that have a lot of centralization trade-offs like they run a lot of
um in-house infra and centralized like autobook matching models um or just like custody models
that allow you to interface with centralized exchanges or allow you to run a more performant exchange
um but bringing that all on chain with with super performant infra is is kind of the must-have um in
order to enable the next generation i hope that answers your question yeah i i think it does some
interesting topics that you mentioned there i think certainly say we believe that um high performance is
you know enables more trading activity right um i think the the the protocols that you've mentioned as
as as being um relics of the past which uh i think is a yeah an interesting way to describe them
there's certainly a lot of aspects of the kind of blockchain trading experience that
have been inherited from from blockchains that have lower um you know tps lower throughput transaction
and higher transaction latency um and i think with newer more high performance blockchains we're going to
see you know steps away from those models right um and i think you know we talk about when it comes to
users we talk about providing a a web to like experience so that that being in terms of of how quick things
are um for the ux um and and you know not being prohibitively expensive like oh fifty dollars to
to do kind of a basic functionality but i think when it comes to yeah um financial infrastructure
there's a kind of a point where technology new technology mimics current ways of doing things
and then kind of establishes itself as as a way of doing things faster or cheaper but then
you know after that point people start to really get to grips with the capability of the new technology
and design new ways to do things and i think that's a very exciting prospect um for you saying
you know these these kind of traditional firms getting involved i think you know for the past few
years in blockchain we've looked at you know the world and said oh we're going to change the world
in all these ways and and the realists have always kind of said oh that's a bit of a pipe dream but i i
i believe that it could kind of happen you know all at once essentially kind of like once it starts
it just kind of happens so quickly um and i think we can change the way that money works in the world
with this technology right and i think sometimes you it can it can be seen as a kind of niche esoteric
thing it's like oh this is just something that affects financial markets but money is really important
right like finance is how everything in the world works in market-based economies so i think it's it's
got you know it's going to have a real big impact um and you know we need to have high performance blockchain networks to scale to that kind of global
scope of the system right like to have permissionless um you know as you said immutable uh defy infrastructure
that everyone can use in the world and businesses and governments and all these kind of massive
organizations we're going to require like you know a massive scale of of technology infrastructure
and that's something that you have kind of done research in as well right and like threads about
is this idea of like you know scalability and high performance what do you think in the same way
what what your kind of learnings there what do you think is particularly interesting what do you see
as being the kind of future direction for for high performance scaling you know infrastructures
um yeah let me think about this so
i think for layer ones um
obviously we have you know the parallel evm frontier which is led by say and uh monad is launching soon
um and other protocols as well um
there are also like i remember say started out as as kind of integrating
forward books natively but they've got you guys have kind of pivoted away into general purpose right
um i think that the that's probably like the right way to approach like a layer one um whereas
protocols which kind of want to be more like app specific can either be layer twos on layer ones or layer
twos on ethereum um i think the layer two design space is is also quite interesting in terms of like
enabling high performance um infra so the the problem though is what kind of is a is a like a constraint
on all of these layer ones and layer twos is bridging infrastructure to me and i think that's kind of
a little bit underexplored um in terms of what the infra will look like because people will want
to like that i think the the amount of layer ones and layer twos um has kind of grown exponentially
over the past few years and it continue will be doing that as well ups as a service um and even like
layer one deployments become more commoditized
so the answer for that to me actually ties a lot into like how can we build um an ecosystem of
interoperable um chains and that kind of that kind of needs building like a sort of zone of sovereignty
which is what celestial calls it um where op roll-ups in like the super chain they can interact with each
other um cosmos ecosystem projects can interact interact with each other and for say like ecosystems
and chains that are building on top or besides say with like um safe infrastructure can interact with
it i think that's very important and i think optimism has kind of been leaning into this for the longest
time so far with like world coin and base um and the other roll-ups built on top of the op stack
so yeah that's that's part of my thesis um you you either scale i think for layer twos you kind of
scale horizontally with onboarding partners like base and world coin and forking your op stack and then with
layer ones you sort of scale vertically where you really focus your energy on one um single chain
like say does and create a general purpose ecosystem of apps around it
yeah i think it's a very it's a point that i agree with that you've mentioned that bridging
is a kind of underexplored area possibly and i think it might have something to do with the incentives
on offer um you mentioned uh the cosmos ecosystem we've had a someone on the space before to talk
about kind of yeah the cosmoverse as it was um and we had a really interesting discussion about ibc
ibc is an amazing idea and it's implemented in a way that does work um but one of the problems
in it in the kind of design of it is that the the relayers so so the way that ibc works you have two
chains that have this module running um in the the core software and then there's someone in the
middle like a relayer who runs a service that kind of passes messages between the blockchains and and
the the question of how to compensate the relayer isn't something that we've really nailed down a good
set of practices for um sometimes they get overpaid um and sometimes they get uh they don't get um
compensated enough for all the transactions they're doing um on each different blockchain and so
that's something that i think could this this idea of the kind of the economics of of figuring out a
way to do bridging um could be quite difficult um if you compare like you know instead of connecting
two blockchains together well we'll just kind of run our run our own blockchain and collect transaction
fees rather than trying to um you know build some sort of bridge uh and take fees on that because
i i i imagine i mean like either you do it permissionlessly which look there's a lot of
very smart people um looking at permissionless um interoperability and permissionless bridging right
and and they've not really they've not cracked it yet um and the other kind of option is you do some
sort of custodial um or kind of centralized piece of the puzzle somewhere and that involves taking quite
a lot of risk and we've seen massive hacks of of these bridging um products right because it's kind
of a huge pot of of gold for for any hackers to go after um so i think that makes sense and i think
conversations that i've had with people in the industry about interoperability seems to be that
a lot of people say zk is going to be the kind of the silver bullet um once you can create a zk proof
that something's happened uh you can verify that on another blockchain and then you can kind of take
action so all we need to do is is uh create zk proofs on our blockchain passage your blockchain
you verify them and then therefore you know you you bridge in that way right is is that
you can verify the proof that something's happened on another blockchain and that that's that gives you
um you know you can then take an action on the sort the the destination blockchain but
it's something that i've noticed is that
that only works if everyone uses the same zk machinery um the same zk kind of um building
blocks and everyone's basically gone in their own direction right and so that the the compatibility
of different bits of zk um is doesn't really have a lot of crossover with a lot of these big protocols
so that's another thing i think you know either we all go different directions forever um or someone finds a
really good way to do it or or there's kind of yeah so someone nails it and then that's what everyone
starts using or they're kind of one protocol or way of doing things takes over and everyone starts
using it that's the only way that i can really see that working the zk interoperability um but something
so so we've talked a bit about defy um high performance uh you know and the layering or
leveling of different uh you know blockchain infrastructure very very interesting uh but
something that i really want to ask you about as well is uh this idea of of crypto social um which is
the kind of in the blockchain industry um it's kind of a it's come along at the time when it's a a
collision of financial type things like you know wallets and balances and tokens and trading but
also this idea of kind of influencer you know personality based products that we use on the
internet like social media um sites like twitter uh and you know there's content creators there's people
who have interesting opinions that you want to talk to like yourself and and so we've kind of collided
that together uh uh it's well known that creators don't always get a fair uh you know portion of
of the value that their work creates and we've got a an opportunity to really kind of address that
imbalance right so i wanted to ask you about crypto social you've written things about friend tech
in particular but but there's other kind of ideas out there um what do you think why is that interesting
first of all um and then what do you think is is going to be worth looking at in future in terms
of these kind of new ways of doing things with with this idea of social networks but also combining
it with blockchain economics
yeah i'm um personally so okay i think combining social networks with blockchain economics is two ways
you can have blockchains augmenting social networks so like blockchains making social networks better
fundamentally and you can also have social networks making blockchains more accessible and better
fundamentally so let's tackle that in two ways um one being how um blockchains help social networks and i think
the approach so far that lens and farcaster has taken um has been to essentially create this underlying data
layer for any client to tap into so warpcast which is the main farcaster client um that's just one of many
that can be built and that have been built for farcaster which means that you you know you can have
build opinionated clients that have a certain design on top um maybe you're like catering towards
intellectuals or builders um but then you can also like use this very abstract data layer that's
underneath which just contains like whose name whose ad is it tied to which address you has interacted in
what ways you can use that data and reshape it and reorganize it into a new client that has an entirely
new front-end interface um whereas like the back-end data is sort of interoperable and you've seen that
done with dracula which is like the tiktok app um backed by paradigm that has been using dgen as the
token um so that's one way which which is like using the open data layer another one is um i'd say
yeah another way blockchains have helped surface social networks is kind of introducing tokens and
collectibles nfts into it um the way i would define it the social networks that can be enabled via this
technology is i think of it as socioeconomic networks as opposed to just social networks
networks and that's the real unlock we have here where we can introduce this ownership graph into
the mix and that's really powerful um i'm sure everyone here has experienced what it feels like
to be part of a community um and especially an early one for example you're early to a meme coin or you're
early to a new app that you really believe in and you feel like this sense of belonging or identity
amongst the other people who are early um and you you almost feel like you're you're an eight you're
a collective agent who wants to spread this message of of this like really underappreciated idea or
community to the rest of the world um because you either resonate with it personally or you think
there's um some level of like profit that you could generate from sort of spreading this positive
some game around and um you know we've seen that with frentech as well where people be a word of
mouth i think discovery on frentech right now is like terrible um but people kind of just buy into
each other's rooms based off what about like saying oh this guy's chat room is actually giving a lot of
valuable information and is very active uh you guys should get into this chat room and
that's kind of what enables is enabled as well and so the second aspect of all of
this question is how can social networks improve blockchains and i think that this is actually the
more interesting question um for me so this is the the thesis behind this is i think that social networks
or crypto social platforms will be the front end um for crypto in the future so i think most people
interacting with on chain will everything will be extracted away via crypto social and i think this
is actually the end game of like dexes wallets um everything um this is where most of the mind
chair is going to be this is where most of the eyeballs and attention is going to be so you kind
of saw like a land grab the wallets um last cycle with like phantom um rabbi sorry rabbi all these guys
starting wallets specific to different chains now i think that's cool um that's what's you that's what
you kind of need to interact with dexes but if you think about it what retail like wants to use and
how people will interact with blockchain today is people will just go to crypto twitter they'll see
what or discord they'll see what's popular they'll go on deck screener then they'll go to like uniswap
um then they'll go to their wallet and then they'll have to interact with all these different apps
but at the end of the day the top of the funnel is like crypto twitter and discord and if you can
pull all of the things underlying that like user journey up to the surface of the social layer um
and give it context i think that's really magical um and i think that's what's going to happen so we're
only at the tip of the iceberg with crypto social right now um right now like
like frames on farcaster is is very very primitive still um but they've discovered something really
special which is how can we embed on chain interactions within a social context and make
it super easy um such that you don't even need to sign it um or like if you want to sign something you
might just use your face id on mobile and that sort of seamless interaction is also what's been
happening with like coinbase wallet their smart wallet they released just uses apple
pass keys um no need to use like seed phrases and stuff and i i think that really is crypto social
really is the end game for how people are going to interact with the blockchain in the future
um at least consumers in retail very very cool um i think yeah frames made a big stir when when they
kind of got released right and people are excited and i think we're going to see a lot of really cool
stuff built with frames um and we already are seeing cool stuff like that on farcaster uh also i'd like to
say when when you missed a two crucial steps in the user journey um which is one they remember that you
know nothing on twitter or discord is financial advice and two is to do their own research so remember
that everyone um don't but just buy things because other people tell you to um it's never financial advice
and you should also do your own research so that's been uh it's been really really great talking to
you john i know you have to go soon i just want to ask you what can we expect from you in future uh
are you going to keep writing your threads and also you know have you got any other projects in the
pipeline exciting stuff yeah i'm gonna keep writing my threads um i have a couple lined up that i've been
procrastinating on um i'm also building planning on like shipping some stuff in public whether it be
around like social crypto social stuff which i think is kind of interesting um or just like general
info work that i've defy work that i've been doing in the past um yeah i'm kind of like getting together
a small team to just hack on things um and then see what sticks that sounds brilliant well thank you so
much for coming on um you heard it here everyone crypto social is the future if you want to follow
john uh see these threads that he's going to put out that he's been procrastinating on and also see
his progress building stuff in crypto social you should obviously follow him on on twitter follow me as
well uh follow all of our hosts follow say network and tune in next week we've got another really good
guest but thanks so much john for coming on um we're really glad to have you uh we'll have you back
anytime um and yeah uh good luck for the future awesome thanks everyone for coming today see ya
nice one thank you everyone goodbye
