Abstractors Assemble How We Achieve Chain Abstraction - Panel

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1. 0:06

   cool well I hope you're not too tired of uh abstracting blockchains I'm not yeah I was just actually thinking when when when we were getting up like I remember the first time we we had this uh and there was Peter dialo who wrapped before us yep and so we were discussing the we actually were discussing pretty much modular versus integrated that was the that was the chat uh and yeah so at the end it's all just you know some level of abstraction

2. 0:37

   away from uh user so I think like I mean we've been talking about chain abstraction for well for a while now yeah many months many months and uh I think we had already a bunch of people kind of talking through this so I think the interesting topic to dig into is let's let's imagine all of the is abstracted out like all of this is shipped you know all of this projects are shipped everybody's amazing everybody's already retired on on on on the beach somewhere uh with Margarita and so like how will the experience

3. 1:12

   change what is the like how will the users interact what the businesses will do um and you know what we'll see kind of changes in web 3 landscape but also like how will this affect web to yeah so I guess the story that we're trying to tell is a story of a couple of things which is one like so much of building like building apps in web 3 has just largely been like really hard really slow and

4. 1:44

   you have to like boil multiple oceans so like you know if you want if you build like a new new blockchain VM like you build salana well you you build salana like so you build a new distributed system but then you now have to like recruit Universe of app developers then you have to figure out liquidity Bridges then there has to be like a way of people routing their liquidity from wherever

5. 2:07

   they are or wherever they're going so like maybe they have their money in bank accounts and they need Exchange accounts um you need to have wallets you need to have exchanges you need have token listings like all of this stuff right and this is why this all every every single time we do this it takes forever um and you have really bad tools to work with um and I think the vision is basically new things get built and they

6. 2:33

   just get plugged in to some exist to like a curent framework that users are kind of have like an organic way of accessing right when you build a new app in web 2 you don't have to like you know we don't like start with reinvent the internet you know what I'll start by shipping servers everywhere to everyone yeah like first we'll make tcip tcpip like you'll have to to buy like a new moem card maybe we'll like dig new cables to everyone of the everyone's house and then we'll start from there

7. 3:07

   then you need to like well we need a new banking system to roll it out yeah so this this absurd reality is the reality that like this set of of enabling Technologies would inevitably get us to which is you know if you have built something new and compelling you know okay like we like Expos this sort of application surface area it can get consumed by everyone's existing Technologies like if people need to

8. 3:38

   Route liquidity or um like be able to buy and sell things if people need if I want to handle people's existing assets like I can go figure out what those are by just like talking to a bunch of like established infrastructure uh that's that's the that's the vision so I'll I'll ask a uh kind of uh digging question sure because that was the vision of Cosmos yes it is the it has it is the vision of Cosmos and you know well I I

9. 4:11

   think it's like sort of interesting to ask the question of like where are we relative to that Vision um so you know and I think like this has been a year where cosmosis kind of I mean Cosmos has largely been embracing the chain abstraction worldview like and you know Dean will be presenting aor which is like a bunch of new tools for like sort of Cosmos originated chain abstraction that would make all of this much easier

10. 4:36

    um but you know we finally got to like where the point where like most Cosmos interfaces are starting to not just understand what tokens you have on what one chain but like what tokens you have on all chains um which is a big which is a big goal most of the cosmos wallets will now like route your liquidity uh correct will route all of your assets somewhat correctly without you having to like know what those routes are

11. 5:00

    uh we did have to like build a bunch of new startup companies in order to do that and build a bunch of like right now fairly centralized apis um to make that possible but it is non-custodial and it is fast um and it is but it it is kind of uh it is kind of wild like what what what was what was all involved like you know we had to like I I would say probably the two companies that we had to found in the cosmos ecosystem one was Noble um which is the asset issue for

12. 5:30

    usdc in Cosmos um so like we had to start up a new chain start up a new company and having those liquidity routes um and reverse engineers cctp and then ship the first version of cctp uh not written by the circle Engineers um so we did all of that and that like had that enabled this chain abstraction such that dydx was able to migrate into Cosmos without losing their user base um

13. 5:55

    their all their users who were using an ethereum Bridge before to just move all their liquidity um um and that's you know it actually happened um and then there's this company called skip um and they have this thing called the skip API and it Powers a website called ibcf fund um and ibcf fund will basically let you trade any asset in Cosmos for any other asset um but there's a lot of things that ibcf fund can't do like it won't

14. 6:18

    stake your assets for you uh it won't uh it won't like automatically sell your staking rewards it won't split your liquidity between uh uh across one or routes or spread out your trades over time if you want to reduce slippage there's a lot of things uh that we still can't do in the cosmos ecosystem or that like doing so requires composing a large number of apps that I'm pretty sure I'm

15. 6:41

    the only person in the world doing or knowing that they exist there there there are some Cosmos apps that I look at their tvl numbers and then I like know my personal positions I'm like I am too much of this so but but I think like just like zooming out right I mean this is great for like Cosmos ecosystem as in you know people who using like tender Min based and Cosmos DEC based chain but I think

16. 7:12

    the at least like you know originally when we're talking about this right the idea was that it was connect with the rest of the rest of the internet I think rest of the web 3 uh chains I think that's kind of one of the probably fundamental problems that we should be trying to all which is there is like kind of this boundaries between ecosystems are very thick and uh even though there's like a lot of Demand on kind of connecting things and bridging

17. 7:42

    things it just like doesn't get as much love well I mean like ethereum did a bunch of you know ethereum is like rediscovering many of the challenges that we like saw in Cosmos right um so like you know when your assets are in arbitrum your assets feel very tied to arbitrum and when your assets are in optimism and when your assets are in base they feel like these feel like completely separate universes even if you have one wallet that's you still have to like um you know and you still

18. 8:14

    have to go through some sort of bridging protocol some sort of liquidity route some sort of uh you know there may be a like you may have to actually trade um because the assets are non-f funable across these uh you know every L2 is their it mints their own nonf funable version of eth um is a it prems for those who doesn't know on l2s there is a like gazillion eats minted at launch and then they just withdraw it when you bridge it yeah so yes so we every so

19. 8:45

    these are all problems um but we have the technology like we have the technology to solve these things um it's not like oh we need to engage in like another multi-decade research project to um toer modularity large monolithic chains all these things into cohesive like I think the bits and pieces are all here it's just you know there's a there's like a little bit some assembly required yeah blockchain is is in the some assembly

20. 9:16

    required it's a do it yourself yeah kind of uh experience right now yeah so I think like on my side and and a lot of it is kind of as we were you know like started working on chain signatures is was this limitation of you know everybody's kind of like in their own ecosystem kind of trying to solve their own problems and then cross ecosystem I mean I've seen like at least three

21. 9:40

    approaches that cosos took to try to bridge with etherium yep and like I mean there are bridges right but like none of them are became kind of the kind of the IBC thing yep um and now it like it's kind of pointless to just Bridge with the theorum like if you exactly to bridge was like a th001 th23 rollups yeah um and so I think like part of it is also just how do we like I mean obviously abstract all this but how do we I like the kind of the question I have is

22. 10:17

    more more philosophical and kind of people question because again I think I agree I think technology is there you know chain signatures are launching you guys have kind of IBC interchain accounts um there's like few other options liquidity is getting aggregated you know there's a bunch of stuff happening CK provs are getting there to like aggregate security so y you know we can cross like you can put da of all the

23. 10:41

    things on all da layers and prove with ZK everything people are still don't like kind of you know complaining on each other on Twitter you know dunking on each other yeah and so like as this chain obstruction actually like rolling right like will we see more of the cohesion on trying to actually solve problems for the users or we going to continue like fighting with each other

24. 11:04

    on Twitter so I do think that there's like so in in in many ways what we're seeing on like ethereum l2s right now is like the recreation of the L1 tbll Wars right where it's like okay we must attract some critical mass of usage and liquidity to our L2 and therefore like this will become an attractive place to build you know and the same thing is happening on you know uh on on the l1s of the moment like oh we've gotten we've onboarded this many users we have this

25. 11:36

    much uh uh meme coin activity Etc this will become the the the the mechanism by which we bootstrap like we bootstrap what ethereum has uh well I guess I think it's a good good question to ask the question is um what does ethereum have like what is special about ethereum and I think this has been like a real and I think it's the diversity of use cases it's the diversity of asset flows it's the diversity of of integration of the Integrations like this is the this

26. 12:08

    is the this is the amazing thing that like ethereum has has created and l2s have to are right now in this position of trying to recreate it alt l1s are in the position of trying to recreate it the move ecosystem the uh salana the sbm ecosystem are all trying to recreate that and none of them have it today I think it's a like should be relatively clear that as as well as various things

27. 12:31

    are going as well as l2s are going as well as salana is going as well as things in Cosmos are going none of these things have the diversity of Integrations users Etc that eel one has um and so but like the and the most likely outcome is I think that like apps will instead build for chain abstraction because they will be able to capture because aggre like atcap you can have something that is 10x larger than ethereum's diversity of use cases across

28. 13:04

    all of this ecosystem and that's the thing that you would want to capture economic value for that's the thing you want to generate order flow for that's like that's the place of Maximum leverage yeah and I think I mean this has kind of been our thesis for past year year and a half is some form of super apps that's going to be pretty much providing a singular gateway to all of the web 3 applications and like as a

29. 13:29

    user you wouldn't even know if you're getting routed like you don't really care how exactly a trade or you know your position or whatever your nft gets executed um if you're getting like the what you want yeah I I I think like I mean to be very concrete like at least for a spot Market of tokens do you care what chain the order like the orders actually the order book actually is do you even really care what or train it settles on like it's if you have bags you do if you have bags you do but but like in general rationally the

30. 14:04

    bag holder shouldn't care yeah right it it doesn't actually make your bags more valuable that like the order book settles on my chain in rational world yes I don't think we are living in that but uh yeah I mean I totally agree I think the kind of overall the applications will be kind of this platforms that attracting users and creating kind of viral loops I mean we have dab dab which is kind of an aggregator for a lot of dii across many chains and kind of as that you know that

31. 14:37

    abstraction progresses you can see kind of that becoming like a place where people just go and like they don't even think about oh there's a new layer 2 launched with a new you know functionality uh they just use it and uh it just showed up in the app and I I like you know similia has been researching this um similia is a defi program co-founder of it automates a bunch it creates a bunch of basically an agent that does Defi and like earns yield and trades on your behalf um for wide variety of users right now it's

32. 15:09

    still like okay we have our like arbitrum projects where we have optimism we have bass we have eel1 Etc but event like I think we're getting like pretty close from a research and development point of view towards you having one app uh or like one entry point that is you know doing defi across many chains um and so it will stop mattering as much you know uh right now we are right now

33. 15:34

    we are profiting from the L2 liquidity Wars because every L2 will incentives will give incentives to you know for every launch and it's you know it's it's it's good for our bottom line um I mean I think the other I think the other things that are fascinating right are like you know like the arbitrum ecosystem prints like an enormous amount of tokens into incentivizing yields that like are basically driving revenue for

34. 15:58

    the arbitrum sequencer um but like I think we will see that in a chain abstracted world I think you could see a to you could see tokens being emitted across you know like you know you're you're going to see apps that will incentivize people with a brc2 and erc20 a like a a salana token like simultaneously um as like one unified asset with one unified pool of liquidity but like you'll be incentivizing actions across a variety of chains because ultimately growing your incentives

35. 16:32

    aren't really tied to one chain but I think I guess the question is will then we see consolidation as well on the other side because if it doesn't matter then whoever I mean like right now this liquidity Wars is they're not like I mean we talked about this like the the differentiation between the evm layer twos is mostly in the name yeah it's just a brand war and like there's culture like yeah yeah it's a brand War it's a culture War there's a there's a culture the culture of optimism and the culture of arbitrum are

36. 17:05

    like meaningfully different and and so yeah like one of the uh kind of questions was like yeah I mean you you you use this example of there's lots of different sports teams right and everybody's voting for their own team uh and they're kind of playing all the same sports right they at the end are the same but um but the brand kind of different shape is what driving you know people interest but again like if you assume that people are accessing through a single Gateway that is like an

37. 17:37

    application maybe people just need to reskin their chain abstracted absus so that they like feel like it's Sana branded and then they like put on another skin it'll be it feels like Adam branded and people could be excited about it pumping their bags but you know ultimately they just want to like be able to like buy their meme coins sell their meme coins exit liquidity earn say like save their money earn yield stake

38. 18:02

    participate in governance yeah pretty much like dabdab should have like if you have a salana nft it just reskins your front end and then you know you get another nft you get like reskins the front end based on which NF you have and then that's your badge of like which which tribe you belong to I mean that's that's all we're doing with our pfps on Twitter all right well it's great chat

39. 18:27

    as always uh hope uh we kind of you know give give a little bit different angle uh on the discussion as well um but yeah we'll we'll let the next folks go thank you