Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
WAX Wednesday | Blockchain update with CTO @LukasRepublic
Recorded: June 25, 2025 Duration: 1:16:54Space Recording
Short Summary
WAX is gearing up for significant developments, including the launch of its mobile Cloud Wallet and the highly anticipated Spin Tycoon project, as it navigates a changing market landscape. With a focus on optimizing tokenomics and enhancing user engagement, WAX aims to solidify its position in the crypto space amidst evolving trends and community growth.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. We'll get started in just a few minutes,
send out some invites, and then we'll get the show on the road.
Good morning, everybody. Happy West Wednesday. you happy wednesday tommy hey lucas happy wednesday welcome
sounds good mike sounds good how do i sound to you
you sound great as usual my friend all right we'll get started here in just one second. GM, Woofie, Far From Home, Tara, Mike, JR, Skunky Chonk, Sadak, Dimitri, Rampage Marv, Richie Rappah, Ram Man, Bashir. Thank you everybody for joining us today.
I am really been looking forward to this space. I'm always excited to be able to have chats with Lucas and then be able to share them with everybody here today. So I think without further ado, I think we can kick off right now. Please go ahead and retweet the space
if you haven't already. So good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining me today on this Wax Wednesday.
I'm Tommy from Wax. And like I mentioned, I am excited to bring you an update directly from the
source. Joining us today is Lucas Zulika, the CTO of WAX. He's here to walk us through kind
of where things stand right now, some of the work happening behind the scenes, as well as what's
coming up on the WAX as we continue to evolve this WAX blockchain of ours. So if you're joining us
live, please, like I said, please retweet the space, let folks know that we're getting started.
And as always, nothing discussed here is financial advice advice i'm not your advisor lucas isn't your advisor no speakers here would be your advisors
today we're here just to learn to connect and get a look kind of behind the curtain and seeing what's
being done puts the ecosystem forward so lucas it's been a minute since you've been here um it's
great to have you back thank you for joining me this wednesday morning how are you? I am doing all right. Thank you for such a warm welcome.
And it's always exciting to speak with you, my friend. And also, I'm glad we can take this
opportunity and give everyone a quick overview of where we are. And, you know, as everyone knows,
we're in the middle of a very turbulent times.
There's a lot of uncertainty and especially, you know, I think we spoke last time three, four months ago. So the last three, four months were very, very inventful on the world stage.
And everything that's going on definitely impacts not only general financial markets, but also crypto specifically.
Because it seems like crypto is very sensitive to the global events.
So this cycle, this bull cycle that we're in is very, very different, I think,
than other ones, and that also affects wax.
So very excited to talk about all that stuff today
and also give everyone an update regarding where we are in our development.
So I know that this is going to be another banger.
Yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited, too. I'm looking forward to sharing these updates
and kind of showing off what we've been working on. So before we launch into this, let me give
a quick background on you for anyone who may not have joined the space before or know who you are
yet. So Lucas Lica is the chief technology officer here at wax um he's been leading the
charge on the tech side um with over 25 years of experience in engineering and product development
um under his watch wax has grown into one of the most active and energy efficient blockchains in
web3 and he's been a big part of building both the team and the technology that have been powering
our ecosystem so um at the core of it all it's been the goal of giving users real ownership over
their digital assets. So now before we dive into the questions, Lucas, I know you wanted to mention,
like you did mention, it's been a few months, like three or four months since we last had the time
to have one of these quick interviews. So why don't you, I'm going to hand it, Mike, over to
you. Why don't you start with a quick rundown of what we've been working on for the last couple months. Take it away.
Sounds good. So let's start, I think, at the top. On the protocol level, we have been working on
optimizing tokenomics. So there's been, I know, a lot of discussions in the community regarding some of the changes that we are doing in terms of configuration regarding WAX staking for resources versus power up.
What these things are, quick recap, on WAX blockchain, you can stake your WAX for resources in order to execute transactions.
Or you can use something called PowerUp to essentially pay per transaction fees to pay for transactions.
to pay for transactions.
And, you know, there are various different levers
on the blockchain that govern this resource pool.
The one that we are right now tweaking
is essentially allocation,
percentage of allocation of resources
that is available to both Power up and what staking.
And the changes that we're making, we're slowly shifting the weight of how much
resources are actually available to power up versus staking.
So when we started this process, 90% majority of the resources were available to staking versus a very small percentage was available to power up.
And then, you know, we're trying to reverse that ratio where we want to prioritize power up in terms of having the access to resources.
And I'm not going to be getting too much into it at this point.
Tell me maybe at some point we should
have a specific conversation about this.
But let me just go through my quick updates
and then we can come back to this topic.
So that's number one.
Number two, also on our tokenomics and blockchain side,
we have been making sure that our tooling is correct and up to date.
So there's been some changes on the wax block hosting and features.
So the team is working on that.
And then also we're working with our block producer
and OIG community to make sure that we realign
the compensation that block producers receive.
That ties also with inflation changes
that are going to be coming down the pike.
But right now we're kind of in the middle of this period
where we are phasing out the parachute that block producers
were receiving for a very long time during the bear market.
And I can also dig in a little bit more into that.
But there's just been a lot of back and forth between us
and OIG
and the community to kind of figure out the next phase of this setup, including inflation changes,
but also this also includes changes to wax labs and how we fund projects.
wax labs and how we fund projects.
So those are kind of the big hitters on the protocol level.
And maybe final note here is that the team has done
quite an extensive research on quantum proofing
and the changes that we would need to make in order to get ready for
just the computational power going through the roof with quantum chips coming online the next
couple of years commercially and the threats and opportunities that presents for us. So that
research has been done, and that project
is kind of queued up for implementations
at the later time this year.
So that's on the protocol side.
On the Cloud Wallet side, as you guys know,
we've launched the mobile version of the Cloud Wallet.
So I'm very excited about that.
And right now, the team is just wrapping up
some of the tooling for integration.
So number one, Unity SDK is being finalized and polished.
And we are now in the final testing stages.
So I'm hoping that we can actually deliver that
into community's hands beginning of July.
And I apologize for any delays here.
I know that this has been promised a while back.
It's just the complexity of the implementation,
and we wanted to make sure that there's a high quality
behind everything that we do.
So we're just double checking things.
And that also includes a work kit plugin implementation.
So that also is going to be released.
So that's going to have a whole bunch of quality of life
and improvements as well as additional features that I think everyone's
going to find happy to be happy with.
And as part of that release of WarfKit plugin,
we're going to deprecate our wax.js JavaScript library,
because that's going to essentially
be replaced by the WarfKit.
By now, most of the projects on chain are using WarfKit,
so I don't think it's going to be a big change for everybody.
But I just wanted to mention that at some point
over the next month or so, we're going
to issue a deprecation notice for Wax.js.
And that version that's out there today
is going to be last supported version.
We're not going to be releasing any new ones.
And on the Cloud Wallet side, we've
got a pretty rich roadmap for the rest of the year.
We can also talk about that once we start zooming in on specific projects.
Additionally, the team has been working on decentralization initiatives.
So that is specifically for starting with tooling like RNG.
So our on-chain random number generator,
we are using that as a test pilot for a new framework
that would allow us to run these decentralized tools
together with our block producers.
And there will be like this shared responsibility
for these tools to be managed.
And then we're going to extend that framework into our bridge
and try to get that open sourced and decentralized.
And there's a whole bunch of things
that we want to follow suit with that
um and then finally the team has been uh working on um spin tycoon so that is a
massive initiative we're in that final last mile before the launch hopefully uh you know
throughout towards the end of the summer uh So it's kind of all hands on deck
for the gaming team to make sure that, you know, all the game mechanics and in-game economy and
then all the animation and user experience and all that stuff is up to snuff. So we're having a lot of fun with that.
And I am personally very excited to release that title.
I think it's going to be an extremely well-put-together game.
And that game is going to release as Web 2 first.
And then it's going to have Web 3 Dynamics
as a fast follower at some point.
Because I think if we've learned anything from the space of the last cycle or two,
is that when it comes to gaming, we want to make sure that we focus on tried and true principles.
And you cannot really lead with Web3
if you want to have a successful project.
Obviously, that's debatable, but that's
the experiment that we're running.
And that's it.
I mean, we just had a summer solstice,
so I think we're all ready for summer.
It's going to be exciting.
I know that a lot of people are going to be typically taking vacations
during this time, but our team is loaded up,
and we've got plenty of work,
so I'm sure that we're going to blink,
and we're going to be in September.
So that's kind of where things are, Tommy.
Solid, Lucas.
Thank you for that update.
So there's a lot happening behind the scenes.
The thing that was biggest for me, like right before, right when Spring started, was removing the paywall too from the wallet.
I don't know if you mentioned that, but that was big for me too.
Yeah, we've been tweaking around with some dynamics with the cloud wallet.
that when we removed the paywall,
we very quickly saw that there was an uptick and spike
in botnets going after account creation again.
So we made some changes to kind of introduce a paywall at a very different spot in the flow.
And then that seemed to kind of manage the botnets a little bit better.
So for now, we removed the paywall on the beginning of the flow.
The paywall is now further down when you're essentially claiming your keys.
And that seems to be a dynamic that, you know, still allows people to create the wallets fairly easily.
And, you know, we manage bots, it seems so far, because I'm seeing that, you know, bots have essentially figured out that it's better for them to create accounts on-chain directly versus, you know, spamming Cloud Wallet for now.
And then as far as other improvements, I think we are slowly relaxing our rules when it comes to data center blocks. centers, which, you know, unfortunate byproduct of that was that the VPNs, some of the VPNs
that do not report publicly their infrastructure, they're kind of in the stealth mode. And then
those VPNs were also being blocked. So, so that they should be working now. so that's a good thing. And we're going to continue to relax the rules as we kind of tweak the platform.
There are going to be big changes coming to Cloud Wallet.
I think this mobile version, along with our Unity SDK, as well as the work kit plugin uh this is just the beginning of
of this larger theme that we're going after um i think that you know cloud wallet as a platform
was initially launched to support a lot of the initiatives in 2020 and 2021,
when we were really pushing hard into trying to get mainstream adoption from users
that were not necessarily used to Web3 in terms of how the wallets worked
and the keys and the signing transactions and the resources
and all that stuff. So the cloud wallet was developed as a supportive platform to reduce
that friction. And because of that, there was a lot of bells and whistles built into the Cloud Wallet platform that allowed us to manage that user
experience without assigning transactions and creating this boost framework that was boosting
resources so people didn't have to worry about that. And there was a certain amount of transactions that you were permitted to execute
with with very little friction so this was all very very um strategically developed and placed
in the ecosystem to support the this this massive explosion of marketplaces and nft drops and and uh
so so this was not only to support our own initiatives,
but also support the community.
And I think a lot of things have changed since then.
Number one, I think a lot of users are much more Web3 savvy,
and they're more educated in terms of what it means to interact with Web3 systems, number one.
Number two, I think the focus has shifted to other narratives in the blockchain space.
So some of these features are not as important, but they do put a lot of pressure
and unnecessary strain on our infrastructure.
So the cloud wallet is going to be evolving more
to be client-based.
So I think what you're going to likely see
is more control over your keys.
You'll be able, I mean, you can claim everything now,
but we're going to have a much richer client. Signing transactions is going to move to the client.
There's going to be Key Vault, and you'll be able to manage your credentials.
And, you know, I think we'll still have a lot of user-focused features, but a lot of these very advanced features that we built initially are going to remain for super users.
And the majority of the clients will be fairly straightforward, very similar to other wallets that you see in the Web3 ecosystem.
Awesome. Awesome. I was talking for so long that I forgot what the question was, Tommy.
No, I was sorry. You got to keep me managed, man. If I ramble, you got to jump in, my friend.
All right. I'll make sure to keep you on the rails.
One of the big, the start of spring for me was removing that paywall
and allowing more people to come in and make it easier
and removing some of those roadblocks and headaches
that new users might see was such a big deal for me.
I think it was a lot of projects as well.
Let's dive in right into the uh um some of the
stuff we were talking about earlier um i'm going to start with the tokenomics um you mentioned a
little bit earlier i'm just talking about um optimizing tokenomics um so the recent updates
can you walk us through kind of like where we started where things are headed and like maybe
just read maybe a little bit more information why these changes are being made right you mentioned power up you
mentioned staking versus power of balancing I want to hit those two
points we could please right okay so let me zoom out a little bit before we dive
into wax specific changes I think every every layer one ecosystem is trying to figure out the right business model for their chain.
The question of, you know, how we are going to fund chain operations from the perspective of block producers or validators, but also be able to, you know, pay for other things that are native to the protocol.
And I think that that is something that a lot of chains struggle and typically, you know, the business model, if you want to call it that way, for most of the ecosystems is like, you know, we're going market make and we're gonna drive the price of that token as as high as
we can so that our market cap is as high as we can and we're gonna keep selling those tokens to pay
for things um which is very much disconnected from i think uh chain activity and operations and and
and and true business of the chain right like? Like ideally, at least that's my opinion,
ideally the chain activity and chain,
what's happening on the chain should cover,
if not all, at least large portion of the operating cost.
So that's kind of from the high level.
Now zooming in into WAC's ecosystem,
you know, we adopted this staking model because back in the day, we thought that gas fees were a massive friction and having a having a wax staking model where you stake wax
for resources and then and then you just kind of establish that renewable replenishable pool
that you can keep reusing would be a better business model and and you know there are
various different opinions still on that what's better what's what's worse and whatever but i think um
knowing knowing what we know now um there are some basic human behaviors that are are just true
across various different ecosystems and uh bottom line is that free things are not being valued
so i'm going to repeat that we believe that free things generally are not being valued. So I'm going to repeat that. We believe that free things generally are not being valued.
So having an ecosystem like wax where you get these so-called,
quote, quote, free resources by staking wax,
or they are very, very cheap that it's not necessarily good for our
ecosystem and the the changes introduction of the power-up and changes
in in this dynamic is essentially moving us slowly away from the staking model
and and to a model where you pay for transactions.
I think that out of all the innovation
that's happening in the blockchain space for a decade now,
at the end of the day,
I don't see anything else that is emerging
that is at the end of the day as fundamental
as if you use as, you know,
if you use something, you pay for its use, right?
I think we're still debating internally
whether staking is going to go away completely.
I don't think that's going to be the case in the immediate future.
I think staking still has a big play on WAX,
especially for developers,
people who are deploying and building the apps.
But I think in an ideal world,
we would slowly start to shift majority of the transactions
to the power- up fee model, which is very,
very different from some of the other Antelope chains, because our power up fee model actually
feeds variable inflation mechanism that we have, which means that, you know, all fees collected
start offsetting our inflation. And if there are enough fees collected to offset inflation 100%,
then we go deflationary and we start burning wax. So I think the tweaks that you're seeing in terms of
assigning priority to resources from staking versus power up
follows that larger narrative where we want to start seeing,
you know, more and more users start using power-up fee
just because it's becoming more cost-effective
to pay per transactions versus taking wax.
And then that feeds inflation,
which hopefully at some point goes deflationary.
And then you have ecosystem imbalance.
At least we want to go to zero.
So with the changes that we've made,
we've reduced our inflation from 5% to about 4.8%.
I was excited for a while there
because I was watching our wax block report on inflation,
and unfortunately, there is a reporting bug
in aggregation of these numbers.
So that number being reported on the wax block
is actually incorrect.
We're going to be correcting that API.
But the current number is about 4.8.
So we are collecting enough power-up fees to reduce the inflation by 0.2%.
With the sunset of the block producer parachute towards the end of September,
we're going to be reducing inflation from 5% to 4%.
So, you know, we're going to be,
if nothing changes between now and then,
we're going to be at 3.8.
Hopefully, as we're shifting the narrative to use power-up and more and more people
decide to actually use power-up,
you know, we're going to be driving that number down.
And that's the state of things as far as power-up inflation and staking.
Oh, I wanted to mention that the changes that we're making,
that has nothing to do with staking for voting rewards.
So, you know, voting rewards and that system does not, is not affected in any way by the changes that we're making.
You can continue. If you're staking WARX to receive the rewards and participate in that pool, which I believe is still about 8% or 9% APY.
Yeah, so you still earn pretty high rewards
for staking and voting.
You can continue to do that,
and any sort of tokenomics changes that we are making today
is not really affecting that system.
Awesome, that was going to be my next question.
So I'm glad you, I'm glad you pointed that out. I'll come back, I'll come back to the inflation for a second, but I know for a lot of users, myself included, like we've been staking CPU
for so long. The idea of how we're, this balancing is happening. we sometimes we'll see numbers like uh uh six to four five to
five what is what does that really mean and and like try to like break it down like i'm five years
old because some of these questions like i'm asking they are for me as much as they're for
everyone else listening but like when we are adjusting or rebalancing the um uh the staking
versus power up what does that look like to like a normal user?
I have a hundred wax stake.
What does that look like to me?
Right.
So the TLDR is that as we are making these changes,
then if you're a user that have staked,
let's say a hundred wax a year ago,
and you've been using that 100 WAX to essentially fund the standard number
of transactions per day that you execute, all that means that 100 WAX is not going to
go as long as it used to, right?
So as we are tweaking these parameters, all it means is that if you want to continue staking,
you are going to have to stake much more wax
to get the same effect.
Or you can simply switch to using PowerUp and paper
transactions, and then PowerUp is going to give you
much more resources for less.
So in effect, it's like,
let me see if I can repeat it back,
see if I've learned anything.
It's like paying for PowerUp will be
almost more affordable or cheaper if I'm transaction heavy
versus staking for transactions.
Right, yes.
So there will be a point where, and it's all relative depending where we are.
I mean, with the current price of wax, I think wax is so cheap
that at the end of the day, it may not matter,
but I hope it does because, you know,
staking versus pay per transaction
is a different model on our chain when it comes to tokenomics.
So the gas fees that we're collecting, they're ultimately
offsetting inflation. And that's a good thing that benefits the whole ecosystem. And if we're
able to actually shift the mindset and use that power-up mechanism as a primary way to power transaction fees,
I mean, paying for transaction resources, then we do have a chance to actually bring that
inflation as close to zero as possible or even maybe go deflationary which which would be fantastic for for the wax tokenomics and and ultimately i think
um wax market cap in general so so those are you know those are those are good changes i wonder
too if um if you've got people um like we're it's we're always trying to onboard right so i wonder
if it makes it easier for people to onboard um who are already in web3 if they don't have to take the time maybe they're using
ethereum or something right that's what i'm imagining they're used to paying every time
they do a little transaction i wonder if it's easier for them to not have to learn about
thinking just it should it should be i mean every time someone entersX ecosystem and they have to stake, it's a very foreign concept for people who come from EVMs, for sure.
The pay-per-transaction model is de facto standard
when it comes to Web3 systems.
This concept of RAM and net and CPU,
This concept of RAM and net and CPU,
as straightforward as they may be for technically savvy people,
it is a fairly high barrier of entry for most users.
Because then they have to decide,
how much do I stake for CPU versus net,
and I still have to pay for RAM, why?
And if you have just one fee that takes care of everything,
it makes it a little bit easier.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
All right, then my last question here
for the kind of tokenotic stake in inflation.
Being that we've got, we now have new data
and we've corrected the previous reporting error.
Are there any new experiments or any new approaches
being considered to reduce inflation
while also keeping everything in balance
as we have been going so far?
Yeah, we'll continue, you know,
we'll continue working with our block producers
and all the other members of the community to kind of see how it goes.
I mean, every time we make a change, we wait and we see how the ecosystem rebalances.
We talk to our OIG team and they always keep their ear to the ground in terms of what's happening
and how these changes are affecting everybody.
So, you know, it's not like we're just going to keep doing what we're doing without checking
in with everybody.
It is a collaborative effort.
And then we'll see where we are towards the mid to end of summer.
And like I said, this rebalancing that we're doing with block producers and BP pay and standby pay and the parachute is also going to result in our ability to kind of reduce the inflation by one percent. So we're just going to go from five to four. Um, and, um, you know, hopefully everyone
will still be happy. Yeah. All right. Let's, uh, let's talk, um, about AI a little bit,
because that's been a hot topic. Um, It's something I've been fooling around with a little bit.
So I want to get your take.
As a CTO, where do you see the biggest benefits of AI for blockchain projects?
Okay, that's a good question. So let me break it apart into a couple different larger topics.
So topic number one, I think AI today is already disrupting software engineering in general. And, you know, if you are a developer or if you are leading development teams,
AI has been a massive multiplier because it allows you to almost make every single engineer to be like a superhuman.
And the reason for that is that AI is very, very good at parsing, interpreting,
and then also evaluating and generating text-based artifacts.
And since code is all text-based, it's essentially an almost purpose-made system to be able to just understand code and then work with people who write requirements,
technical requirements, and then converting that back into code.
Which means that every developer now has in their toolkit
this kind of very, very smart copilot
that is allowing them to, you know,
squeeze more productivity out of their day
because a lot of times you no longer have to write
boilerplate code from scratch.
You no longer have to write, you know, test cases and test code
coverage cases from scratch. You can just work with AI on that. When it comes to, you know,
auditing your code for bugs or security or some other type of audits, you can use AI for that.
So AI from a perspective of day-to-day operations
of the engineering department is extremely powerful.
And then you can start zooming out
from that just kind of day-to-day nitty-gritty
delivering code artifacts
to a more broader analysis
where you want to start observing patterns
and get these patterns interpreted in a certain way.
So again, AI is very powerful in looking at your operational metrics and your DevOps metrics and, you know, deriving patterns and responding to these patterns.
patterns and responding to these patterns.
So I think it is very, very powerful to tool massive multiplier for any engineer to essentially
build with AI in collaboration with AI.
And there's no question in my mind that this is the future, this is happening.
Whether AI is going to completely replace software engineers, I think that's debatable.
There's definitely no question in my mind there's going to be huge disruption to the job market in general.
And we are already seeing that.
And we are already seeing that.
I would say that definitely we will not
need as many software engineers like we used to.
And software engineering job is going to be very different.
So software engineer is no longer going
to be writing code directly.
You're going to be essentially working with your AI co-pilot, and the AI is
going to be doing 90% of the work, and you're going to be essentially instructing it, validating
it, guiding it, and I think that a team of 10 will be able to be replaced by a team of one plus AI.
So that's happening. There's no question in my mind, the next five years we're gonna see that.
And in fact, we're already seeing that on our team
because we went AI first about 18 months ago.
So, you know, what I've done on our team,
we said, you know, we need to become AI first organization
for a couple of reasons.
Number one, I want to make sure that every person that works for us builds that muscle. They learn the skill set and they become that super, super human almost so that they can benefit our organization but in the future they're
also setting themselves up in their career for the future right so we want to care for our people in
that regard yeah um and uh and then what that um and what that meant is that uh we we gave directive to everybody that, you know, no matter what your task is,
the first question that you need to ask yourself is, can I and would I and how I would solve it
with using of AI. And we gave everyone a lot of room to experiment, play with different tools,
because initially when you start an initiative like that,
everything is going to slow down, right?
People are learning new process, new skills,
and your delivery is going to essentially drop
in terms of the performance and output
because everyone is essentially trying to adapt this new thing.
But after about three, four months, we saw a massive output increase because people figured
out how to use these new tools.
And in fact, the code quality and the speed of delivery increased on our side.
And also, we haven't had to really hire new people.
And also, you know, we haven't had to really hire new people.
And with the normal attrition, with people just leaving because they want to do something else,
we haven't had to really hire new people to replace outgoing staff
because the existing staff is able to actually do more with AI.
So we actually have a smaller team that we had, let's say, a year and a half ago,
and that team is able to deliver
probably three, four times as much,
which is kind of crazy.
It's definitely working smarter, not harder,
I think, right?
Yeah, that's right.
And it runs itself,
especially if you're a lean team building, it is definitely, I think, can play a very strong role. Absolutely. any sort of new technology adoption where you have some people
who are all about the change
and they're all about new things
and they become like these champions
driving this change.
But there's very, very few of those.
And then you've got majority of the cohort
which are kind of like cautiously optimistic, but they only do things if, you need to make sure that you set these targets
and you clearly articulate your what and why
and you put KPIs in place
so that the rest of the organization
can actually follow that.
So you make it part of the process.
So the people who are not these early adopters,
champions, they work within the framework where they have to be AI first, right? And then you've
got some people who just stick their head in the sand and they are scared of it. They don't want
to do it because whatever reasons, right? They just don't want to do it. So these people typically self-select out.
And we've seen that behavior on our team, right?
We've seen the resistance.
We've seen the friction.
We've seen also these champions to emerge.
And then some people self-selected out.
So we did observe this kind of like this normal new technology adoption curve, but I feel
like our team from like a perspective of just day-to-day operations and how each engineer
works is very, very different now.
Number one, they are very familiar with AI.
They do it day to day.
And then that sets our organization up very well for this change.
And also, I think it just kind of future-proofs each engineers on our team
from a perspective of future prospects as well.
So that's kind of one bucket, right?
Right.
I was going to add, too, what is like when it comes –
because we've been messing with it for a while,
and you mentioned for testing, boilerplate, QA, tentacle writing, super useful.
On the flip side, what have you seen that is a concern or something that is limiting that you still need that human interaction?
I heard someone recently was talking about AI as a valedictorian with ADHD.
a valedictorian with adhd so like what is my my what i say what what i say is like i i feel
a lot of times like i am i am i am interacting with someone who's like as smart as like someone
who has multiple phds but they are literally five-year-old right so it's like a five six-year-old, right? So it's like a five, six-year-old who is super, super smart, right?
But you have to constantly keep them on task. You have to constantly keep them from wandering off
and you have to constantly double check their work and make sure that the work is small and
chunked and organized into like these little things. So you as a human working with AI,
you still have to a lot of times
keep the much larger context.
You have to keep it organized
and you still have to do the work in terms of like,
you know, dividing the work that you have
into these AI chunks
and then you still have to assemble it at the end, right?
That may change in the future as these systems get better,
as the memory context get better.
Another thing is that we need to remember,
and for people who don't really understand how these systems
work, it's a probabilistic system.
So it's all based on probability of an outcome, which means that
there's always a small probability of wrong response or a response that is not true. So AI
can actually lie to you or hallucinate and invent things, and if you don't pay attention, if you don't have a certain deeper knowledge,
then you, you can assume something that's true when it's in fact not.
So you gotta, you gotta be very careful when, when working with these tools.
Yeah. You still got to keep the reins. You can't let the horse take it home yet.
Yes, that's right. But there's no question there's going to be a, and already is a massive disruption when it comes to job market.
I can tell you that, you know, I keep a close network of people in my role who work at various different engineering organizations.
I will work at various different engineering organizations.
And most of the organizations have been at the higher freeze for a while now.
So they don't replenish the stuff, outgoing stuff.
Or if they have the reduction in terms of layoffs, they don't hire new engineers.
And that's because a lot of times their existing
staff has been augmented already with AI tools. So, I mean, I would not be surprised if the next,
you know, five years we'll see that a team of 10 engineers requires only one.
And I would imagine a similar kind of shift is going to happen across the board.
There are going to be some industries that are going to be more susceptible to this than others.
But from a perspective of future-proofing your careers and future-proofing your livelihoods,
you know, I would advise everyone to get very, very friendly
with AI tools and learn.
My hope is that, you know, this new technology is going to allow us
to emerge new industries and new type of jobs
that will over time absorb people who are displaced from their
current positions. And, you know, there are various different versions of how this all end
will end at the end of the day. But, you know, I am an optimist. And if history were to be
our guide here, in the past, there were several transformative inventions that entered our societies.
And every time, the net-net was positive.
So I'm hoping that this is also going to be a net-net after the dust settles.
and net-net after the dust settles
and we've got all these robots running around
with AI-enabled cognitive abilities
and we are all augmented by these various different co-pilots
that are making our lives better.
We as humans in society actually elevate
as opposed to ending up in some sort of a dystopian version.
Yeah, that's on the same belief as well.
And then let's...
Yeah, so that's purely from operational, and I apologize if I...
When it comes to... Since this is a Web3 discussion,
let's talk about how AI is going to be helping with Web3.
I think there's a lot of,
there's this narrative of AI projects and AI chains
AI projects and AI chains and AI this and AI that in Web3.
and AI this and AI that in Web3.
You know, I honestly haven't seen anything out of these projects
aside from really speculative hype to kind of ride the narrative to pump their bags.
I haven't seen anything yet that would actually advance the technology or make
things better for Web3 space. At least we're consistent in that regards when it comes to Web3.
But, you know, there is opportunity for AI to really deeply affect Web3 space in terms of having more intelligent processing.
If this gets implemented at the protocol level,
then things like congestion pricing and
guys pricing for transactions could be much more improved.
Validator or block producer performance scoring.
This could be enhanced.
Also, any sort of analytics around detecting, you know,
risky behavior on chain.
Since all that is public, you know,
AI can greatly help here with identifying quickly any sort of
risky behaviors and then help, let's say, DeFi and on-chain SMI contracts to, let's say,
adapt and shut down certain transactions or activity, depending on that. And then similar thing translates to any sort of DAOs
where, you know, natural language processing
could be used to put proposals
and then proposals could be voted
and these AI voting agents can then interpret
the written proposals into code
and then that ends at the end with, you know,
smart contracts on chain being more
intelligent and and and be able to actually process instructions um and and uh apply the the the this
advanced heuristics uh to to the uh uh to to the smart contract logic and execution.
And finally, blockchain would be a natural place
to store certain models.
So if you have an AI model that we want to persist
that should never be deleted,
maybe there is a future where a decentralized storage blockchain
actually used to store the memories and store the data.
So if you have this virtual copilot, this copilot can never die
because the memory of that AI is stored on the blockchain
and the decentralized way
and the decentralized blockchain
cannot be shut down.
Therefore, that AI now lives forever.
So if you have like a AI girlfriend
that you want to persist forever,
you just store her on the blockchain
and she can never die.
I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but, you know,
arguable.
Yeah. I don't, I don't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't go to girlfriend first.
Okay.
There's still plenty of fish in the sea on that. All right.
That's right. Let's talk. Let's switch over.
We got about 10 minutes left, I think.
Let's switch over a little bit. Decentralization core infrastructure.
We are, you're already kind of touching on decentralization just now.
So like we were, I think we've seen progress or we were talking previously in previous
chats on projects like the ORNG cross-chain bridges eventually being coming to
decentralize more.
You mentioned earlier that Cloud Wallet eventually will have
some of the signing on the client side
to adding that core infrastructure.
So what does the
ongoing work kind of look like?
Do you want to touch more, give more
or give more about
decentralization? Thank you.
For sure, yeah. So right now
the team is wrapping up
really the version 2.0 of the RNG decentralization.
The first version that we implemented after we've done a whole bunch of security audits and third-party reviews,
we realized that the decentralization actually introduces a lot of new attack vectors when it comes to security.
Because now you have these multiple agents being run in various different places that all have to come as one in order to deliver a secure, predictable outcome.
And that's not an easy thing to solve.
So based on all those learnings,
we went back to the drawing board
and the teams actually revised the architecture,
decentralization architecture for the RNG system.
That is now done.
We're now going through final reviews, testing, and hopefully we'll be
able to apply the learnings and that architecture blueprint as a base for then our Cloud Wallet
Bridge and other systems. And then we're going to start working with OIG and our block producers to kind of figure out, you know, incentives and how would this work from a perspective of block producers actually starting to run these agents themselves.
So that's kind of where we are. I think that the architectural blueprint and learning from the RNG project is going to be very important.
I'm sure we're going to learn more things once this gets rolled out and goes to production,
and we'll just iterate and apply these learnings into the bridge and to other systems as we go along.
Yeah.
And then I think finally, Wax Labs has been an important part
of funding projects inside the ecosystem and helping maintain it as well.
How do you see Wax Labs fitting into the broader vision going forward
as more of the different technical changes with the
reduced, as the changes with the tokenomics and the other things that are being offered
through the labs can kind of go on.
Thank you for bringing that topic up.
That's very important.
I think our WAX Labs is going to be representative.
is going to be representative.
I mean, the changes in WAX Labs are going to be representative
to all the learnings that we've had over the last cycle or two.
And, you know, I think that WAX Labs is still going to be very,
very important to fund innovation and fund new things in the WAX ecosystem.
I think that the major shift is going to be essentially to keep asking some key questions before we decide on funding.
key questions before we decide on funding.
And those questions are going to be around
how is this project being funded?
How is this project helping WAC's ecosystem?
And how is it helping specifically WAC's market cap?
Because at the end of the day,
market cap is the most important metric that that is used and and unless unless the project has a clear tie to affecting market
cap in in some in some way through various different mechanics then then uh you know then we're not going to be spending money on it.
And what that means is that, yeah,
there's going to be an opportunity to build tools,
but we've been building tools for years.
We've got more than enough tools.
We are very tools-rich ecosystem.
For anybody coming into our ecosystem or people who are already here,
there's more than enough tools
to be building businesses on top of the chain.
I don't think there's anything missing.
But what's missing from a perspective of projects
is that people don't seem to be thinking
about building sustainable businesses within Web3 space
on Wax.
So we want to definitely work with people who
want to stand up new type of businesses.
Big shift is that we are open to funding, you know, for-profit projects.
In the past, we were kind of staying away from that. But, you know, if you have a business that
you want to build on top of wax, that is going to be generating money, then if you need help, if you need funding, then you can always talk to us
and we will make sure that we will try to validate the idea with you.
We'll identify how that idea, you know, we'll validate how the idea helps the market cap valuation
and then we will move forward. the idea tops the market cap valuation.
And then we will move forward.
There's going to be a portion of Wax Labs dedicated to, you know,
backfilling the parachute that is going away. So we're kind of reshuffling how we fund block producers
for running certain key infrastructure pieces.
In the past, we kind of had this scoring system that OIG was managing and tweaking
so that pretty much every block producer was required to run certain things.
We are moving away from that, so we're going to have a system where only selected few block producers will be running these heavier infrastructure pieces.
There's going to be a bidding system and kind of competition for those funds.
But that's kind of a big change with this whole realignment of block producers and parachute and everything else.
But yeah, WaxLab's very important piece.
Just, I guess, TLDR here is that the funds are available,
but we expect people asking for funds to be prepared.
We expect people asking for funds to be prepared.
And, you know, you should be thinking about it as if you are going to a venture capital firm asking for money, which means that you should have an MVP that's already working.
You should validate your business use case.
Wax Labs is not angel seed funding, right?
This is what we want to talk to serious people
who already have validated their business use case,
and then we can help you grow.
And you need to be able to provide answers
to how the business works, how, you know, how, how, how the business works,
how are you scaling,
what kind of business metrics you have in terms of adoption. And then,
and then, you know, how,
how is it going to possibly affect a wax market cap or wax ecosystem?
Those are very important things. We're not going to be funding slide where.
Perfect. All right. I've got a couple questions left.
This first one from Journeys.
When Solana NFT bridge,
what do you think about adding more?
What does it take to kind of add more chains
to a multi-NFT bridge?
I think that Solana NFT bridge is in progress. It's not a high priority. We'll definitely add it this year. But ultimately, I don't think adding more and more chains matters.
you know, we already have a fairly pretty good coverage
in terms of functionality.
And then, you know, none of that really translates
into, you know, more projects
or more functionality being built on WAX.
So the hypothesis that we had behind building these bridges
was that, you know, we wanted to give all these tools
to our developers
so they can not only build on WAX,
but also build in our ecosystems
to potentially leverage the power
of multiple blockchains for their projects.
But thinking that this would essentially help us grow
and help us attract people from developers from our ecosystems, but that's not behavior that we are observing.
So I think we'll definitely add the NFT support for Solana, but adding more bridges and adding more functions to existing bridges is not a priority.
Yeah, it makes sense.
Unless someone comes with some sort of a business use case
and they really need it and they have a business model that they want to validate.
I mean, if there's something there,
there will definitely allocate resources and lean into it more.
But, you know, blockchain bridges have been running
as an experiment on WAX for a while now.
And, you know, I don't see it making a meaningful impact
to the ecosystem.
Yeah, I was going to mention the same thing.
If there's something that's wild,
it comes through labs that would be,
that would warrant adding that kind of functionality,
it would make sense.
Yeah.
And then this one is the second,
this is the last question I'll have for you.
And then we'll wrap it up.
This one's from Dimitri.
How does the WAC CTO take a break and disconnect from blockchain world this
summer?
That's a good question,
man.
I was hoping that I can actually go see my father in Poland.
I was hoping that I can actually go see my father in Poland.
But now I think I'm just going to work through the summer
and I'm going to wait for middle of September
as the temperature cools off a little bit here in Southwest.
And I'm going to have my dad come down for probably like five, six weeks.
And we're just going to hang out then.
So it's going to be probably nothing but work for me this summer.
And then I'll try to take a breather once all these projects that we're pushing through,
namely Spin Tycoon Go Live, and I'll get some rest in September.
That's great.
I'm glad to hear that you're going to be bringing.
But I'm going to keep doing my yoga every day, my friend.
I'm going to keep doing my yoga every day.
I just started working out for the first time ever this morning,
so it was a good day to start.
Well, wait two, three days, and when you can't move
because you're so sore, then let's talk.
All right, all right. Okay, All right. Lucas, thank you. Um, all right,
everybody that's, that's our show for today. Um, Lucas, huge. Thank you.
Thank you so much for giving us your time today. Um,
walking us through everything, um, and, you know, and work with me,
helping me kind of prep. Um, so we give everyone a good show today. Um,
before we close out, um, Lucas,
is there any final thoughts you'd like to leave on with community yeah i i wanted to give everyone perspective maybe on on the overall state of the
market and again this is not a financial advice um but uh you know the the there there is just
a massive amount of uncertainty uh in the in the markets in general, and crypto seems to be extremely sensitive and volatile to everything that's going on in the world.
You know, Trump presidency have been very, very positive for crypto on one side, but also very, very negative.
side, but also very, very negative. So I think the jury is still out in terms of how it balances out
at the end of the day. You know, on the positive side, the fact that there's conversations,
that crypto is now part of the larger narrative of the government here in the US with, you know,
here in the US with Bitcoin strategic reserve discussions and just kind of
not having such adversarial SEC, it's an important change. So I think that alone would have been very, very good for the cycle.
But unfortunately, this administration also is reshaping how the United States shows up in the world.
And they're just shaking up all the agreed norms that existed for years and years
which causes a lot of realignment and uncertainty which is a very negative thing
for the general markets but also for crypto. So I think the jury is still out. Right now, what we are seeing, and you guys know all this,
really the only asset that is performing well is BTC.
We really haven't seen a meaningful altcoin season.
And jury is out whether we are going to see altcoin season this cycle.
I'm hoping that this does happen.
But this cycle is very, very different from what we've seen in the past.
And we just need to be very conscious of the fact that a lot of patterns have been broken.
And we are kind of in uncharted territories when it comes to the Web3 space in general.
So I do believe that's a good thing because at the end of the day, companies that and the platforms that are still here standing in a couple of years will prove their resilience.
We just have to be aware of all these dynamics playing out.
And be very cautious and plan for it,
while at the same time remain optimistic
that 2025 will continue being a good thing for crypto.
I mean, Bitcoin has seen higher highs
and we continue the drive up.
And hopefully this will continue through the summer
and throughout the rest of the year.
Awesome.
And then we'll see altcoin season as part of that.
But like I said, we haven't seen that yet,
which means that the only ecosystem
that is benefiting really is BTC
and the rest is just on a very, very wild ride.
Mostly down.
The only constant is change, right?
It's the only thing that doesn't change
is that everything keeps changing.
So I think the advice you give about um you know being cautious keeping your head on a swivel is is solid
for sure yeah and then we'll see what the macro liquidity situation is gonna be uh towards the
q3 and q4 of of the year uh and then we'll see what fed is going to do in terms of interest rates.
If we find ourselves here towards the end of summer,
beginning of Q3,
in a situation where Fed starts cutting interest rates and then the overall money supply starts increasing,
then that would be good for us.
But if that doesn't happen, then who knows?
Who knows where we end up in this cycle?
Well, with our heads held high,
that's right now where I'm gonna end up, Lucas.
Thank you so much for coming.
That's right, my friend.
Thank you for joining us today. It was really a pleasure to have you. I feel like I have a better insight kind of where we're going. And I was glad that I was able to share that with everyone here. So everyone here. Thank you so much. Everyone who joined us live, everyone who's listening later on the replay. We appreciate you being part of the Wax community and staying connected. thank you for hanging out with me today before we wrap up i've got a couple quick
reminders so first one brawlers community event the brawler bowl 2 is coming up this saturday
june 21st at 9 a.m pacific inside the taranto discord if you're playing or you just want to
hang out be sure to check in on discord before that and get registered for the event um i'm
currently the champion so you want to try and dethrone me? Come at me. I'm ready.
Second, I'll make
sure right now, I believe it's just started, tune in
to the Wax News and Dropspace hosted
by the NFTopia team, Breakman, Chris
Diane Waffles on the NFTopia account.
They've got news, drops, and more
coming up soon, and
a little thing called NFTopia is
right around the corner. Booths are still available
until July 7th.
Make sure you get yours in and early.
You can get those at eneptopia.weebly.com.
All right, that's it from us this week.
I will see you next time.
Until then, have a happy Wax Wednesday.
Thank you, Lucas.
Take care of yourselves, everyone.
Thank you, guys.
And I'll talk to you guys later.
Take care.
Bye. Thank you.
