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THORChain Spaces #119
Recorded: April 17, 2025 Duration: 0:59:18Space Recording
Short Summary
ThorChain is gearing up for the launch of version 3.5 on StageNet, introducing the new TCY token and integrating XRP, which signifies a strategic partnership aimed at enhancing the network's capabilities. With ongoing hiring efforts at Nine Realms and the addition of new chains like Tron and Cardano, the ThorChain ecosystem is poised for significant growth and innovation.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Hello, hello.
What's up, mic check?
Hey, Simon.
Yep.
Familiar cow here, Tyler from the Nine Realms team.
If anyone else wants to come up and join, Orion, Chad, or anyone else,
we're going to do some updates for a couple minutes.
So we'll give some updates on different network things that are going on.
And then we'll do an intro for Simon, because this is his first time on Spaces.
So we'll take some time to do a Q&A at the end after we go through some ThorChain updates.
How you doing, Chad?
What's up, Kyle? How are you, buddy?
I'm good, I'm good.
Orion?
Orion, join us. That's fantastic.
I think he's up here, too.
All good.
How's it going, Mike?
Good to see you.
Yeah, I like that.
Cool.
All right, so we wrapped up planning,
and we're just about ready to put version 3.5 onto StageNet.
So let's go through some of the things that's coming out in 3.5.
Most notably, it's TCEY.
So Chad, when is this stuff being released to StageNet? 3.5. Most notably, it's TCY.
Chad,
when is this stuff being released to Stagenet? I think it's being cut today
or tomorrow to get to Stagenet and then
some period of testing.
I think it's going to be cut either today or tomorrow.
We'll probably have a bacon
Stagenet for a few days
up to a week, I would think.
I guess for just
testing on St just testing and validation
cool yeah so there's a baking period that's gonna go into go into place and
obviously we need we want to test things like Tcy claims and the flow there we
have the region team is putting up a front end that's gonna go live and
that'll that'll be hosted right on ThorChain.org so it'll be right now
right in a trusted place that's really easy to get to be able to access it from all your different wallets and that's where you'll be hosted right on ThorChain.org. So it'll be right in a trusted place that's really easy to get to,
be able to access it from all your different wallets.
And that's where you'll be able to clean your TCY, stake your TCY,
so that we're aiming for everything to be available before the end of the month.
So the initial testing will still happen this week.
After that, things will get rolled out to mainnet with a 3.5 update
happening in about a week.
And then after it's live, then the front ends go live, and people can start cleaning their TCUI and getting
their yields. So that's the path towards, you know, the unwind of ThorPhi and, you know, finally
moving on to the next chapter here. Awesome. Go ahead. Yeah, just wanted to give a quick update on on the uh very short term here so i'm
writing up a tcy stage net testing plan right now and um i'll work with the the maya guys to get that
uh solidified so as soon as it's live on uh stage net we'll be able to uh put it through the through
its paces make sure that um ui devs also have the capacity to to test
against station if they need to and then um yeah make sure that we're we're covering all of the
edge cases and then uh and then we'll be you know really confident in a mainnet launch uh the tcy
launch for me just like personally is is a really important kind of milestone
because, yeah, to just kind of put a bow
on the recent events with the whole Thorify Unwind.
So excited to get this tested
and make sure that it goes smoothly.
Yeah, I was just gonna say special thanks to my team
for all the work on this.
Much appreciated by me and I'm sure the entire community.
Yep, 100%. So besides Tcy, there's a couple other things that are upcoming. So we have XRP, which is on StageNet. It's being tested. That's Ripple.
Ripple. And that is the next chain that is likely to go live. It's basically ready to go,
as far as I'm aware. So there's only one more little thing that we need to do to
just tweak the economic security a little bit to just add some space for RUJI and the new chains.
But I actually think we're above the security budget right now. But it's still something we
need to do. But next chain should be Ripple, which is basically ready to go.
And obviously work on other chains is still ongoing.
Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of chains being worked on.
EDDSA, which would include Solana support, is still in the pipe.
That's coming just a little bit later than XRP and TCUI,
which have been prioritized.
And yeah,
there's other chains that are being worked on too.
Which other chains are in the pipeline?
I think we have Tron, Cardano.
Yeah, I think there's Tron,
Cardano, Solana are the quick ones, hopefully.
And then we've got more on the horizon from there.
Yep.
So we're going to get XRP out first.
And all this will be after Tcy launch.
So everything's getting queued up right now for a big burst of features. But we didn't want to push anything and have anything take priority over Tcy launch. So everything's getting queued up right now for like a big burst of features,
but we didn't want to push anything and have anything take priority over Tcy since that's
one of the most important things that's going on right now. So it's all just on the back burner,
but we have XRP ready to go essentially. It's on standby. And then I guess the last thing of note is just, you know, the Ruji merge is ongoing.
So their tokens are getting imported to ThorChain right now.
So if you're a holder of any of those tokens, you can merge into native assets on ThorChain
right now.
And then I believe they're also getting all their contracts spun up to get ready for their
actual contract launch,
which should be happening probably, is that 3.5 or 3.6?
So is it this next version or the next one?
I'm not 100% sure.
For what? Which thing?
Sorry, for the RUJI contracts should be going live pretty soon.
Yeah, I think it's actually ready in 3.5, if I'm not mistaken.
Okay, awesome.
Awesome. So yeah, that's going into StageNet
ASAP, and then
we get it live on Mainnet, and then
their contracts are live for the first apps.
So, that's awesome.
Yeah, that's
Paul. I'm going to try to see
how that goes.
Yeah, yeah, me too.
I think it'll be fun and definitely
a breath of fresh air into some new products and new apps,
which is something that we always like to see.
Yeah, I think one of the things for me I'm excited about
is it's hopefully going to produce more revenue and more
income for the prototype.
So that's eventually a piece of nodes,
and all of these images, and .
Yeah, anything else of note that you guys want to talk about protocol updates?
And then after we get through any protocol stuff,
I'd love to introduce Simon and go on to that.
Yeah, one more thing I would bring up,
I think it was really nice in 3.5,
worth talking about briefly at least,
is something called the Enchrined Bifrost,
which is something that the Strange Web
teams have been working on for a while.
And without going into much technical complexity detail, but it's basically cutting down by orders of magnitude.
Maybe 100x, 200x, less transactions for node operators
to make observations of external blockchains.
So it's really going to reduce the load on the chain
and create more space in some sense for other transactions,
whether that be UG or something else.
Right. So that also goes into cutting down the block times, right?
So right now, I think there's a PR up to get block times down to two seconds.
And Strange Love is taking the lead on that.
And once these things are landed, then we can start getting the block times down.
So yeah, this is just dramatically cut down on chain bloat, which makes it so we can start
dropping the block times, get them down to two seconds and below, which will just make execution
faster. It'll make ARBs faster. It'll make swaps faster. Overall, faster block times is good for
the chain. Good for all the users. Good for swappers. They're just good all around.
Just need nodes to actually be able to keep up.
So when they're observing like, you know,
200 transactions per swap that comes through on Thorechain,
you know, it scales up pretty quick,
but they should really cut down on bloat,
which will help with that problem.
Yeah, for sure.
One thing I would be progressive about is that,
by having a faster block time,
streaming swaps happen faster,
because block times right now are about six seconds-ish.
So going down to two seconds,
gives you three times faster block time,
which means streaming swaps will execute three times faster,
which is good in one sense,
but also bad in another sense of that you need to make sure
that there's liquidity on the other side,
ARBs are there to maintain those trading spots.
So it's something that we can keep the pockets of in the near future.
Right.
I mean, it's a good problem to have.
And also, I saw that you raised a vote for reducing some of the confirmation times for Bitcoin.
And I think we should look at some other chains, too, it's hard to get like really solid research on like what exactly are
like safe values for some of these things. But yeah, just overall,
it's that it's the first,
it's the right first step to just increasing swap UX,
making swap UX better. And yeah,
like any problems that come out of that are good problems to solve.
It just means that we're executing swaps too fast and need to figure out how to just make them execute better
if there's starting to be problems with that.
But I don't think we foresee any problems with that right now.
But yeah, I mean, yeah, it would only, yeah,
maybe only for extremely large swaps
where you need like a really big arb in order to do something.
But I don't think it will be too dramatic of a change change. Right right well you're right about the reducing the comp counts
for BDC from three comps to two which is following standards with uh what finance and
for that does from my understanding uh and since they're much larger than us and then volumes and
then they have more you know security risk to be considered of You can make it argue that we're oversecure now by following their footsteps because they're much larger in a sense.
But we can look at things later on.
I know that like ShapeShift only had one comp for Bitcoin for almost their entire life and never had an issue, even at one comp.
And that was when Bitcoin was significantly less secure than it is today.
So the argument we could make, we could go smaller.
But for right now, I started that vote for two comps on the Bitcoin
just to help ARBs get their capital faster into the protocol for the union too.
Yeah, 100%. Cool, yeah.
So I think those are the major things
that are all being worked on.
So we'll have version 3.5 out next week.
It's going on to StageNet this week.
And then TCY and this week. And then
TCY and XRP. And then we can
finally move on to the next
stages of the roadmap. So if you need to
take a look at the roadmap, all of it's always published
in the quarterly reports. So there's a
roadmap at the end of the Q1
report in the
Doorchain Medium. So you can go there
and just see what
is on the roadmap and things
that the devs are going to be working on for the next couple months.
Yeah, one thing I just kind of like draw a little attention to is that we've had our
share of dramas in the past, but people are still here, people are still skipping, they
still have a roadmap, they still have big things planned. We can't take the hits and
keep moaning. It's something that this community does particularly well.
Yeah, so I guess that's a perfect transition into into this next thing.
Wanted to introduce Simon.
This is Simon Morris.
He's the new CEO of Nine Realms.
He's been at Nine Realms for a couple months now.
And I think now's the right time to just give him an introduction to the community.
So I'll let him up here.
I have a couple questions for him, but of course, if there's people that want to say hi or ask a question to Simon,
feel free to request and we'll get you up at some point.
But take it away.
Hey, Tyler.
What up?
It's great to be here.
So, yeah.
So how are we going to do this?
Maybe just a couple of
introductory remarks. Hi, I'm Simon. I am like hugely excited to be taking over at Nine Realms
and I am, you know, honestly humbled to be like in front of the ThorChain ecosystem for the first time and kind of offer what support I can and obviously
NineRealm's support. And this is an important project. This is why I'm here. Excited to be here.
Just happy to share parts about my background or whatnot, any questions. This is obviously kind of, you know, a new thing for me.
So this will take a minute before I have the depth of knowledge
that Orion or Tyler have or others in the Nine Realms team.
But, you know, really, really excited to be here.
Yeah, I mean, I think everyone's like,
I think people just want to know a little bit more
just about like some of your background and, you know, things that you're like, what brought you to Thor chain?
Like, there's a ton of things that I think we could go into.
So, like, maybe we'll just start with, like, you know, where you came from and what you did before.
Yeah, yeah, right on.
Okay, so look, I'm a Brit, so I have a, but I've lived half my life in the US, so I have a slightly confused accent,
so I apologize for that in advance.
My kids are Americans and my wife is an American,
but I, in my heart, I'm a Brit,
and I will have confusing pronunciations,
but I've lived in the US for a long time.
I have been in technology for basically that entire time. By background, I,
like, it's sort of worth going back, I think, to almost the beginning, because you can sort of
understand and pigeonhole me a little bit better. I basically went, I was an undergrad, went to kind
of school in the UK to originally do physics and math, but kind of got distracted from that very
early on by more
idealistic pursuits and got involved in doing political philosophy. And then I did a master's
degree in international development economics. And then after that, I sort of didn't know what
I wanted to do. So I went to become a management consultant for my sons. But as part of that
journey, I learned quite a lot about transactions in banks in particular.
I spent a long time at Swift, which is an organization some of you may have heard of.
It's like how the world's banks move money around the world.
This was almost three decades ago now, and incredibly that technology hasn't actually
moved on that far in the last three
decades.
It's one of the, I think, sort of motivating reasons why Satoshi was interested in figuring
out a better way of doing things.
So I sort of had a very, very early insight into how that world works.
After that, I came to actually to business school in the US.
I'm not an engineer by background,
but I spent a great deal of time with engineers in my career.
After that, I got involved in the startup scene
in Silicon Valley and there was
a sort of unfortunate dot-com crash in the early 2000s.
I came and did some work for
a company called Verasign that did managed PKI.
And so really understood something about cryptography at a pretty, you know, in the early 2000s.
Worked for a company after that that did basically how the internet is going to get transformed onto smartphones.
So really at the dawn of the smartphone revolution before the first iPhone even came out.
But I got pulled from that into a little company called BitTorrent that was setting up and running
a decentralized CDN. And I thought that decentralized CDN was a pretty cool idea.
It seemed to me that this is going to work and really be a disruptive influence.
And this really kind of got me excited about the disruptive effect of technology.
And so I ended up spending all in almost a decade at BitTorrent.
And for various reasons, I ended up kind of doing a whole bunch of things there.
I ultimately ran most of that company.
And we sold it into the crypto space in round about 2007, 2008.
And so and then I guess in the aftermath of that, I kind of sort of went from there to I spent a brief time with Facebook's Libra initiative that turned to DM.
But for the last five years, I've been at a company called Consensus, which many of you may have heard of, or if not, you'd certainly heard of Metamask. Metamask is the biggest product of
ConsenSys and really getting into the heart of the Ethereum space. And I was the chief strategy
officer of ConsenSys for the last five years. Anyway, that's a long diatribe about my history.
I got sucked deeper and deeper into the decentralization space.
I wrote some articles at the end of my BitTorrent time about why BitTorrent matters. I think it was titled BitTorrent Lessons for Crypto.
And by all means, if you're interested in deep history from about six or seven years ago. That was my opinion at the time.
It still largely shapes my opinion now,
but got really interested in
what is this decentralization thing doing
and why does it matter
and how do we actually use it
as a power for good in the world
to disrupt things that have gotten us stuck.
So anyway, I'll pause there.
Yeah, that's awesome.
If people have questions about any of these specific things,
again, feel free to come up.
This is an open Q&A, just kind of an introduction to Simon,
to the community, because you're new to ThorChain, right?
I mean, maybe we can go into some of the background there,
but yeah,
yeah. Is your first time like, yeah.
Yeah, so I've heard of Thor chain, like Thor chain came across my radar. Probably in its
fairly early days when it came out. I but I that was really in the early days of trying
to understand this kind of proliferation of different chains out there
and how are they gonna connect together.
And Thor chain was, I think,
one of the very early proof points that, yeah,
you can connect these different chains together.
I kind of parked that under kind of, you know,
in some place in my memory,
but didn't really think too hard about it
or look too hard into it.
I was kind of heavily pulled into the Ethereum ecosystem
and then deeply
involved in the emergence of different L2s in Ethereum. Inside ConsenSys, ConsenSys was
actually launching its own ZKEVM L2, if that means much to folks here, and it's called
Linear. And so the Linear team reported into me on the exec team at ConsenSys.
And so I got a pretty close understanding of what it looks like to launch a network like Linear.
I was really inspired by Nine Realms, honestly, for a couple of reasons. The first one is that it seemed to me that ConsenSys has got its very
broad company. It's almost a thousand people and doing all sorts of really interesting things from
deep R&D into future scalability and directions of the Ethereum protocol, and all the way out to
running the infrastructure, building, launching an L2 implementation itself,
and then all the way up to managing the user interface to millions and millions of users through MetaMask.
And how do you do that in a safe way and enable tons of apps to be successful at the same time?
apps to be successful at the same time.
So with that in mind, I didn't really
want to do something that could be sort of alienating
to many friends at Consensus by going out
and doing something that seemed like it was competing
with Consensus.
So that kind of rolled out quite a lot of things.
And I really appreciated what Nine Rounds,
or in particular, ThoughtChain was doing,
in this vision of allowing liquidity in a,
like native liquidity to flow
between these different ecosystems.
And if you step back a really long way,
you can easily think of, look,
where's all of the liquidity? the liquidity is all in Bitcoin. And it's not all in Bitcoin,
but it, you know, an awful lot of the liquidity is in Bitcoin, a lot of the values in Bitcoin.
Where are all of the devs and the users? Well, a lot of them are not in Bitcoin. A lot of them
are in either Ethereum or Solana. And then there's other networks that are coming up, that are up and coming that are also kind of exciting.
So how do you enable the value to find the developers
and the users?
And so I really liked the positioning
of what ThorChain is doing.
And that seemed like a really good sort of fit for me
and also a way to keep a lot of really kind of good
sort of friendships or consensus intact. And then to keep a lot of really kind of good sort of friendships
or consensus intact. And then I guess the second thing that really convinced me about
MindRealms and ThorChain in particular is like there's actually a real ecosystem here.
And I've been around enough, like so BitTorrent had a real gigantic, incredible ecosystem that was absolutely unruly,
absolutely, you know, much to its own beat. And it was different, very different from
the company. But just the existence of that ecosystem was incredibly important in creating
kind of continuity and the future. And there's something very special that's going on in ThorChain.
And I watched the kind of really unfortunate events in the last couple of months, kind
of, in the ThorChain community and the ecosystem.
And I was, you know, one thing stuck with me as I was watching this, and that's the
fact that people kept turning up.
People kept showing up and through really difficult times and just like figuring out, like really trying to figure out how are we going to make this work? What is the right way? Like there's a level of principled kind of engagement with the problems that typical, you know, typically a lot of the ecosystems that you see emerging elsewhere don't have the maturity, don't have the depth of commitment to be able to sustain.
So I'd contrast that with, like I said,
I've seen a lot of L2s taking off on Ethereum.
A lot of the communities and ecosystems that are there are pretty synthetic.
All people do is they wave a couple of tokens
at people and people will run around
and take their promises of tokens or points or whatnot.
And then the minute the tokens are dropped,
they vanish and they go to the next thing.
And ThorChain is far beyond this moment
and there's still a community here.
And for me, that's like, that's a really positive sign
that yeah, things are going
to be hard for a bit, but actually, I think it's going to be okay. Yeah, it's a really good point,
actually. Especially, like, yeah, there being some kind of real value here is, like, I think why a lot
of developers really stick around and want to build in this space. It's what made me want to build in this space.
And I think a lot of the other Nine Realms team and just the community devs,
and that's why people keep showing up,
because they know there is actual value that's being created here.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that just really speaks to what you're saying,
where, yeah, a lot of other ecosystems and things like that.
There's some shiny products, but it all kind of boils down to a couple of things.
And, you know, swaps being one of the main,
one of the main just app use cases in crypto.
And obviously like, you know,
really being evidenced by like Uniswap
and some of the really big things on Ethereum.
But yeah, it's, we love DoorChain
because it's just a little bit bigger
than just Ethereum.
You know, it just kind of expands, especially into Bitcoin, is really where you see a lot of interest come in
and why we have such a strong community and a developer community and a chain with actual revenues,
like things you don't really see in other ecosystems.
And there isn't a lot of opportunity to be part of this type of thing in many other
places. It just doesn't really exist. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like swaps is such an important
part of all of this. I remember, so I was part of the fundraising team in ConsenSys for a couple
of years and we raised a lot of money. We raised, I think, three quarters of a billion dollars all
in. And one of the sort of central threads through the case that we were making back then was around the importance of swaps and, in particular, MetaMask's ability there to perform swaps for end users in a safe and kind of effective way.
effective way. And the line that ran through it is this line that in many ways in crypto,
the very act of acting is an act of swapping, right? The very act of acting is an act of
swapping. And it's a really, you know, that's what, you know, you express yourself through
the exchange of value. That is, you know, and there's a few other things but not that much
like i think the the very core of what we're doing the way that crypto becomes meaningful to us as
human beings is our ability to do something with it which in many cases is is swapping right and
so this is it's very very profound and so i think that there's something
incredibly important about a community like or a technology like thor chain that takes that
kind of insight and then establishes a system that can be decentralized can be permissionless
that enables that type of swapping to happen from chain to chain, not just within a chain.
Yeah, I think even expanding on that, just delivering a real product to that, you know,
other people and like people find it useful, businesses can monetize it. You know, there's
a lot of different ways to tap into it. Developers can build cool things on top that it's pretty composable in a lot of ways where,
you know, it has something for everybody and like the actual value comes from the product
and like what's being offered, not just, you know, like a token or something.
Yeah, yeah, no, exactly.
And, you know, I think sometimes in, you know, one of the things that is difficult in crypto is I think often there is a rush to add tons of different features or tons of different things.
There's almost this impatience about like, well, we're not part of some central kind of team.
We can do anything we like and go anywhere we like.
And this leads to almost a sort of almost overly verbose sort of attempts to want to do everything all at once.
And I think sometimes the right thing to do is just slow down
and just look at the thing you do do and do it really, really, really well.
And so I think there's huge depth in, you know, honestly, profoundness in kind of the use cases that ThorChain does enable.
I think that's really exciting.
And there's obvious evidence of product market fit that kind of, yeah, people want this.
And, you know, I'm open, very open to a discussion about kind of like where ThorChain kind of goes next, but I don't want to lose sight of the importance of what we've got.
And so really trying to tune into that and kind of hold that as the most important thing, I think, is one of the things that I'm hoping to convince collaborators of the importance of going forward.
of the importance of going forward.
Awesome.
How do you see...
So what's your vision as for how Nine Realms
interacts with Thor Chain and how it has in the past
and how it's going to continue to evolve?
Do you see that changing in any way?
Or maybe you could just give an explanation
of how Nine Realms today interacts with DoorChain
and if that changes in the future.
So look, I mean, Nine Realms is here to help, right?
At the end of the day,
it's the technical end of the community
that is gonna continue to make DoorChain successful.
And Nine Realms in many ways is a sort of magnifying glass
that helps to focus those efforts on a path forward.
I think it's very, very important
that the ecosystem continues to feel empowered,
that especially at the technical end,
that there is a through path from kind of initial crazy idea
all the way through to you know how
does this coalesce into an intent for the future of Thor Chain and then how does the roadmap kind of
get pulled together and Nine Realms simply sits there as trying to be that magnifying glass
Nine Realms is not there to tell Thor Chain what to do Nine Realms isn't there to tell ThorChain what to do. Nine Realms isn't there to manage ThorChain, but Nine Realms is a, hopefully a shelling
point where kind of people can come together and we can make sure that things happen in
a sort of, you know, in an orderly way and make sure, you know, because like the safety
of funds is very, very important.
The predictability of kind of functionality and like consistency of operations is very, very important. The predictability of functionality and consistency of operations is very, very important.
I have a couple of things that I would love
to work more with the community on around governance
and how do we introduce more maybe structure
and transparency into how certain decisions get structured and then implemented,
I think the community would benefit a great deal from that.
But again, this is like, we exist to, we're here to serve, we're here to help any way
we can.
I think we'll continue to make suggestions about how things could happen in our view
better, but then it's open season for the rest of the community
to do that as well.
And we will absolutely show up and participate
in those discussions.
Awesome.
Yeah, it's great to hear.
And yeah, definitely share your vision
with just how 9Realms interacts with the protocol.
I think it's important to have, you know, this kind of group of people who, you know,
are really knowledgeable about, like, how things work, but, you know, also willing to
organize with others.
And, you know, it is a decentralized protocol, but we still need some kind of structures
around things to, you know, still maintain our own vision
and, you know, move the protocol in a way that aligns with the consensus of the network
itself.
But yeah, I just think it's important to, you know, have some of these structures in
place because otherwise there's a little bit too much chaos, which, you know, is not what
a mature network like, you know, Thor chain is uh trying to be really needs so
it is very important to uh you know have that kind of structure underlying especially in in
the governance which i think you know definitely shows some some room for improvement and um but
especially with the coordination of all these different teams because you know kind of moving
into the new phase here there's been a lot of different players to show up from different angles, right? You have like
the aggregators and the integrators. You have all the dev teams that are spun up around,
you know, shipping new things on the blockchain, you have independent contributors. There's
a lot of different stakeholders in the ecosystem. So, you know, having some kind of group to
just coordinate folks across all these different avenues is very useful to the
ecosystem as a whole. Right, right. Yeah, no, I mean, so there is huge value in the sort of,
you know, the barely managed chaos. I think there is a sort of opposite end of it where,
like, obviously, there's a slippery slope that you want to try and avoid about, like, you know, let's just get everything into anymore? And so I want to be very cognizant
that that is not a hacky outcome.
It was very, very interesting.
So like I think I said,
I was briefly involved in the Libra initiative at Facebook,
and I've honestly never seen a collection of engineers and other
professionals that was, you know, in the technology space more unbelievably awesome and kick-ass.
Like, it was like, it was really incredible to behold the, not just the caliber of people who
were involved in the number of them, but also the way it was organized
like this incredible sort of execution machine.
And I think in hindsight, and hindsight is wonderful, right?
But in hindsight, it's hardly surprising
that that thing failed because ultimately
it would have failed any sort of test out there
of kind of answering a there of kind of, you know,
answering a question of, well, who controls this, this DM thing?
And the answer is Zuck controls it.
And even though they had all of these kind of big ideas about, oh,
it's going to be decentralized and we'll have Visa and MasterCard and Uber
and all these like tons and tons of people involved in this kind of
association like in spite of their best intentions to construct that the obvious answer to who's in
charge of it was Zuck and that was absolutely flat out not okay for kind of regulators and
encourage them to just kill it with fire. There was literally nothing,
nothing that Facebook could do to convince the world that Zuck wasn't going to be in charge of
this thing that wanted to be the reserve currency for the world. And so, you know, there was this
incredible kind of, you know, sort of immune reaction that just absolutely took it down, which was, you know, interesting.
Like, you know, I think it's an object lesson in like, don't, like if you assemble the dream team to go and do exactly the thing and, you know, pretend or even sincerely want it to be decentralized, it's really hard to get there.
hard to get there um if you have that kind of incredible force of of kind of organization as
the starting point to get to a decentralized ecosystem because you're never going to escape it
right yeah i mean the gravity just kind of sucks you in at that point and um the ecosystem is
stronger because you know we don't have that kind of central force of like,
the central directive, you know, like, we don't know who node operators are, they vote in their
own way, devs propose things to the node operators, just the way that the network is structured,
and structured in a way that optimizes for decentralization, obviously, like this door
chain being the largest instance of threshold signatures and the largest rotating threshold signatures vault in production for many years now, just really speaks to that ethos. a participant and as a guiding force, but not as a function enforcer or an organization
that says the chain needs to do this and the validators need to do that.
We're stewards of the protocol and we'll suggest governance and things, but we won't force
things to occur.
We still play by the rules of the network.
Yeah, quite right.
And I guess it's probably also,
so I'll offer a personal opinion, and this is like,
I mean, it is what it is.
Like, I think, I personally think that we are wise
to be pragmatic about where we're
at on this journey and we don't have a ton to gain from kind of you know believing things
about how incredibly decentralized we would like to be about believing that those are
already the case and decentralization is both a spectrum and a journey.
And I think we've made incredible progress,
and I think there's more progress to make.
But the reality is,
ThorChain is not as decentralized as Bitcoin yet.
It just isn't.
And so we have a journey to go on there,
and there's huge value in continuing on that journey.
It's also very clear that it's not totally centralized,
although I think some people out there
would like to make the case that it is.
I haven't seen the inside of it now.
I'm absolutely satisfied that it's not.
But there is a journey to go on here.
And I think we just need to be very kind of pragmatic about where we're at today.
And let's not pretend that we're something
that we're actually not yet.
Because I think that could invite a type of hostility
that would be probably not super helpful for us to have to
deal with. But still, you know, I think there's a level of decentralization that is
pretty admirable and there's a direction of travel that is pretty clear. And, you know,
it's an exciting time to be in this sort of project. Like I said, it's an authentic kind of community.
It's got a direction, and I think it's actually performing an incredibly valuable service for the world.
Yeah, so just as for the network, I know you talked a little bit about the evolution
of the decentralization of the network.
Are there other areas that you're thinking about with Doorchain besides just decentralization?
I'm just curious where your head's at in terms of what this network looks like a couple months
from now, a couple years from now if there's like
you know certain things that you're you're thinking of just like you know strategy wise
or things that you that you wanted to do or just more of a you know take a step back and let the
nodes let the nodes govern or are there like certain things that uh that you're looking to
do or think about look i i yeah i mean i i think it's pretty straightforward. And certainly probably the next year, I dare say,
like there's been a lot of drama in the ecosystem that we have dealt with.
And it's simply allowing ourselves to get through that,
deliver Tcy, sort that out.
You know, it's regrettable.
You know, whatever, the past is the past.
I was never involved in it.
It is what it is at this point.
So let's look forward.
And I think, honestly, we had a really good chance of fixing it.
It's definitely not, this would not be the, like, the first time that some type of fix
like this has happened in the crypto space.
And so I think we've got every reason to believe it's going to be very successful.
But I do think it's going to be important to just be kind of very steady and, you know,
remove drama, do what we say we're going to do.
And I know it sounds boring, but, you know, it's the reality of just obsessively focusing
again on what we do really well.
I think beyond that, obviously expanding out to other networks,
like becoming a product that is fit for purpose for anybody out there
who wants to be able to swap assets in a non-custodial way,
I would observe that there is plenty of evidence out there
that all of the players in the space, whether they are centralized exchanges or institutions or even just retails, are very, very interested in this idea of non-custodial swapping of digital assets.
Coinbase is doing with base and Coinbase wallet and their declaration that they're going to put
their entire exchange on the chain. Every other exchange around the world is watching that very
carefully, and they probably don't have the capacity that Coinbase has to really make that work at scale. And I think ThorChain is literally the obvious path
to enable them to pursue their strategy
while ThorChain can actually truly succeed.
In order to do that,
I think we've got to prove that ThorChain's okay.
It's gonna be just fine.
Like there's nothing to see here.
There's really good, solid new chains being added on.
The app layer is absolutely fantastic.
That's exactly how we should be extending the technology, in my opinion.
So that can add a huge amount of extra volume on top of ThorChain.
on top of ThorChain.
And so really just kind of proceeding down that line
and just reducing the kind of the volatility level
inside the community.
Yeah, 100%, right with you there.
Do we want to go into just Nine Realms?
Because maybe some people aren't even familiar
with what Nine Realms is or what do like what like what services we provide so like maybe
you want to go into that sure yeah yeah no that's great that's that's a that's a great problem so so
look nine realms um as a company we've actually just uh republished our website so please do take
a look at uh the nine realms.com website um we also put on there, like we had a really interesting session with the team
trying to kind of figure out, you know,
when we're representing opinions in public spaces
with the thought chain ecosystem,
what are our principles?
What are our values as a team?
Because I think one of the things that we have, you know,
we could have done a better job in the past of
is putting engineers directly to stand for themselves
and have to represent their own personal values.
And so instead, I would like Nine Realms to stand for some things.
And so what we did is we worked through some defining principles for Nine Realms,
you'll find on our website now.
And I think that is what we're going to try and stand for as
a team.
9RAMS does three things.
9RAMS supports the 4Chain protocol.
And in return for that, we get paid a stipend
from the 4Chain treasury.
And that really is involved in both contributing
towards the release process, managing a bunch of ThorChain
infrastructure, but it's really kind of protocol support,
if you like.
The second thing we do is we run nodes.
And we run nodes on ThorChain.
And we run nodes, like if have rune that you would like to
stake please come and stake with us there are many other kind of good node providers out there as
well but ThorChain but Nine Realms also has a essentially a bonding business or staking business
for ThorChain nodes and so we kind of that. And part of that is with proprietary Rune.
But the majority of it is with other customers' Rune.
And we've been doing that for a number of years now.
So we have a great deal of experience
in how do we maximize returns for our customers there.
And then the third thing we do is we have an integrations
business where we try and find front ends around the world,
be they wallets or DApps who want to integrate
into ThorChain, and we try and act as an integration partner
to drive more demand into ThorChain.
So people like Ledger or Trust Wallet,
and we often work very closely with the SwapKit team on this.
Really, how do you increase the amount of volume
going into ThorChain from wherever it's going to come from?
And so we scour the world looking for demand
and then making the case for why ThorChain
is an excellent choice for enabling these non-custodial
native asset swaps. Awesome. Yeah, it's a great description of everything that we do.
So yeah, there's a brand new nine realms.com website.
And yeah, there's any,
all the information you might need to know contact like in case, you know,
you ever wanted to get in touch with nine realms to bond or, you know,
look at any of the opportunities we have available.
Because we're actually...
So I guess Simon should probably say this,
but Nine Realms is hiring for a couple of roles.
We are hiring.
Yep.
Yeah, so if you're really interested in ThorChain
and this ecosystem and building in the cross-chain space,
if you're a dev, if you have your own talents,
definitely contact Nine Realms because this
is what we do. We've been doing it for a long time and just continue to provide excellence
to the ThorChain ecosystem. And yeah, we're just looking to expand the team for a couple
different roles that are open and they're all on the website.
All right. So, Ty, did you want to do questions here or?
Yeah, I mean, I didn't see anyone that requested. I'm sure people might have questions for Simon,
just to, just to, you know, just learn more about, about Simon, about Nine Realms. Like,
maybe there's just some general things that people want to know, like your, your stances on any
number of things or, you know, just learning more about just learning more about some of the things you used
to work on. So if you want to request, request to come up. I don't see anything right now. So
you can talk about whatever you want until people request to come up.
Until all the questions are from. Easy. That's great.
So are people excited about the app layer? What are people's favorite apps that are coming?
People are very excited about the app layer. What are people's favorite apps that are coming? People are very excited about the app layer.
I'm very excited for lending,
like having some kind of lending product on ThorChain,
especially like getting this on Ruji.
The Ruji devs are just so talented.
I know Hans was here before and he's still here.
These guys are absolute rock stars.
So I think getting a lending product out there is just going to be, that's going to be amazing because there really isn't
that many good lending products out there. They all use wrapped assets and I think we can do it
better on DoorChain. I think there's just so much surface area for building cool things on this
chain just because it's so composable, just in terms of like what you can work with, especially with Bitcoin.
You know, it's an app chain for Bitcoin is what the chain is.
And it's a system for custody and an app chain.
It's great.
I mean, I absolutely love the positioning of like, yeah, you just send a transaction
from wherever you're at.
And that transaction can result in like interacting with
this entire kind of um app player in any way you want to and it's and and you're still native you
know from your perspective you're still native on whichever whichever um uh asset that you came from
in the first place so if you you don't even have to, like, it's almost like you're not
moving assets onto Ruggiero. It's almost like, no, your assets are still Bitcoin assets controlled
from your Bitcoin wallet. And you start and stop them from Bitcoin. And I think that's a position
that we're going to have to work on. How do we communicate that to people? Because that's an
incredibly powerful primitive.
Right. Yeah, I mean, you could think of ThorChain here as just as a decentralized custodian.
And I think that's really where there's a lot of power that comes into it.
Because you're talking about centralized exchanges
and how every single centralized exchange has said publicly
that they want to go 100% on-chain.
Well, doing the actual trading is the easy part.
Doing the decentralized custody,
that's the part that door chain has already solved.
So I think that's just,
it's such a hugely important angle that, you know,
none of them really have an answer for.
And, you know, we've been doing that in production
for many years now and have like real apps
put on top of it.
And now there'll be a much larger ecosystem of apps
to pick from.
Yeah, no, 100%, 100%.
I have someone that's coming up, Professor McCarthy,
but it looks like you're connecting still.
Let's do it.
I don't know if it's working or not.
It's just spinning around in a circle.
Incensored. That's no good.
That's that's Twitter for you.
Yeah.
Twitter overlords are not cooperating today.
No, it didn't work.
Okay.
So let's see.
What else?
NextChain is coming up.
Yeah, so NextChain is XRP.
And then obviously Sol is still being worked on.
But for a second here, here's ThorSwap.
Cool.
Hey, everyone.
This is Paper hopping on the ThorSwap account.
It's really early for me, so I've got to hop up soon.
But yeah, I just wanted to extend, obviously,
a really warm welcome to Simon.
Great to have you join the ecosystem.
We have a really passionate community, as you are probably aware.
Most definitely.
Yeah, lots of different teams, but I think we all have a shared vision. So, yeah, really glad to have you with the community.
Hey, Tate, appreciate that. Thank you very much.
Yeah, and Nine Realms works very closely with thor swap and the swap kit team work together in integrations and just any any kind of
technical support that uh that they need so yeah i love supporting thor swap great great front end
so really appreciate your guys team and we also brought up uh alux too hey yeah no questions no comments just simon
welcome uh it's been great talking to you and i'm very excited for for what's coming uh me and my
team are at your disposal and i know we've been at a couple engineering calls already but uh i'm
just excited by the steady answer so uh let's go's go. Hey, Alex, I really appreciate it.
And I should echo what Chad said earlier.
Like, honestly, this community owes you and the Maya team
a huge debt of gratitude for the work that you've done
on helping us with ThorFi Unwind.
So thank you.
It's our pleasure, and we owe it back.
We owe it back to ThorChain.
So nothing to thank us for.
Thank you, guys.
Thanks, Alex.
I finally got a Professor McCarthy here.
Hey, you have a question?
Hey, GM.
Hey, GM.
How are you guys doing?
Good, good.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
I'm doing well.
I'm the tokenomics workstream leader over at ShapeShift.
And so just wanted to come and shout out and thank all of the work you guys are doing and that you have done in terms of, you know, building in the back end for us front ends.
And yeah, we're just excited to see what comes next in that player and, app layer and the different chains that are rolling out and connecting that across chain with all the rest of the platform at ShapeShift and figuring out the next steps for the Fox token and the whole ecosystem.
I just wanted to come up and just say hi and just, you know, show some love and appreciate you guys.
And, you know, thanks.
Very cool. Appreciate it. Thanks so much.
And obviously it's been like our privilege to have the Shapefifth team on the journey with us all these years.
So thank you.
Our pleasure.
100%. Thanks for coming up.
So, yeah, Simon, any closing thoughts? We can wrap it up real
soon here.
Yeah, no, that's cool. Hey, so look, thanks again for being here. I really appreciate
the welcome I'm getting. I am really excited about this thing. It's a weird time to be
kind of joining with kind of getting through some drama,
but there's something really special here.
There's something really, really important here.
And, you know, I'm excited to be here.
I'm excited to be along for the ride.
And, you know, any way I can help, like, you know where I am,
please kind of reach out to me if you need to check in on anything.
I've spoken to a number of you already, one-on-one, but, you know, always happy to engage.
Yeah, and honestly, I think this is the perfect time to be, like, coming in because coming at it with a new you know set of eyes and a different perspective i think is is uh really wholly welcomed by by everybody so i i think
that it is definitely a weird time to be coming on but also probably not a better time to be joining
as well so yeah totally and you know what like the the cool thing is the technology doesn't care
about the drama the technology technology is just technology.
And it's like, it's going to be fine.
And it's the community here that's going to,
it's the ecosystem here that's going to carry this through.
So certainly that's my experience from prior decentralized ecosystems
I've been involved with.
I see all of the same pieces are in place here.
And I and Ninerams are absolutely committed to be there on the journey.
Awesome.
All right, let's wrap it up then.
So these always get uploaded to our RSS feed.
You can download, if you can't catch these live, they're always on Spotify.
They're on wherever you get your podcasts, Apple Podcasts.
Any app that you get your podcasts on,
just search for ThorChain Weekly Live and it's on there
or just get it from the RSS feed directly.
And yeah, thanks for coming everybody.
We'll hopefully get Simon on a couple more of these
and whenever it feels necessary.
So looking forward to getting Tcy out
and getting B3.5 out, RUJI first tokens, XRP.
Looking good. getting a b 3.5 out ruji first tokens xrp looking good looking great thanks everyone cool thanks thank you all let's go see ya bye bye bye
